Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city—in every cranium—in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.
Transcribed by me from page 5 of my first edition hardcover of Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, © 2009, HarperCollins Publishers.
Tweet: Michael Chabon on the fan club of one.
Tweet: “Art … asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built … of solitude.”
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