Haruki Murakami writes in Ha’aretz: “I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories - stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.”

I beg to differ. I fully believe it is the novelist’s job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of the System. We should prevent our souls from tangling the System in their web. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fiction with utter seriousness.

(How come a butcher would never declare that he goes on slaughtering chickens with “utter seriousness”?)