My favorite passages from Pure Colour by Sheila Heti:
Are you sad to be living in the first draft—shoddily made, rushed, exuberant, malformed? No, you are proud to be strong enough to be living here now, one of God’s expendable soldiers in the first draft of the world. There is some pride in having been created to make a better world come. There is some pride in being the ones who were made to be thrown out.
Mira would sit in the lamp store and gaze at one lamp in particular. It had green blobs and red blobs; little polished stones of coloured glass that were held together by a network of iron. The shade was a half-oval, with a beautiful iron stand. It was the most wonderful thing Mira had ever seen. She would sit and wait for the day to turn dark, when she would turn off every other lamp, and stare at her favorite, with its translucent stones illuminated from within. She would spin the shade so gently and its coloured light would fall on the walls and her.
Since the lamp she liked best was the least expensive one, it was possible that one day she might own it, if no one bought it first. Perhaps the fact that it was the least expensive one was the reason she had made it her favorite. There is no point in loving something that is not a bit within reach.
It was the essential humility of the lamp that drew her to it. It had not been made by someone with any sort of insight into how a person might want to appear to others, or who believed that people acquired things to show them off to their friends. It had not been made by someone who imagined that an object fit into a greater system of values, or could place its owner among others with similar taste. It had been made by a humble person who simply thought, Now I will make my next lamp.
People complained of being tired, exhaustion, not realizing that this was put in them so they wouldn’t do as many things. Such people railed against their fatigue—the ones who were determined to fix things. In order to stop them, the gods tired them out. The weariest people are being the most prevented. They are the most dangerous ones, who would change the world if they could. We know which people are threatening to the gods by how exhausted they feel all the time. Those who would not make as many fixes are not given as much fatigue. You know the gods consider you dangerous if you are tired all the time.