"For life is short, reading is long, and literature is in the process of killing itself off through an insane proliferation. Every novelist, starting with his own work, should eliminate whatever is secondary, lay out for himself and for everyone else the ethic of the essential." So says Milan Kundera in the Oct. 9th issue of The New Yorker.

As a person who has often embraced her mediocrity I find the idea of eliminating all that is secondary not only impossible, but absurd. Sometimes I crave the "ephemeral, commonplace, conventional." I also don't believe in laying anything out for anybody else, a problem Mr. Kundera clearly has no problem with. And yet, I agree that there's a whole lot of crap out there and it's only getting crappier. I believe that most of us are hobbyists, not artists, regardless of how much love and passion is there. A little examination of what is necessary wouldn't be a bad idea.