There is a general inversion of values around the area of writing. Hill
talks about being a better person in writing than in real life, but I think
I'm a worse person in the first draft and possibly a better person by the
third. If I ever write an antiracist poem it will have been a racist poem
first.
If you think of evil as an impersonal force that infects and
instrumentalises the personal - and this is without needing it to be a
supernatural something, any more than a virus is supernatural - then the
quantum of hurt each child inherits is the vector of evil, its material
substrate, its medium of transmission. One is subclassing a bug-ridden and
poorly-documented API, and overriding the parent's methods is - along with
encapsulation, delegation and the erection of simplifying facades - a vital
technique for anyone who doesn't have the luxury of being able to jettison
all that legacy code...
Dominic
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