SOMETIMES I ASK MYSELF why it’s so very hard to seek out real life. No, not just because of the ever more powerful screens that give us secondhand versions of life, like images on the walls of Plato’s Cave. And not just because fantasy is so much more fun. Not even because most of us have a surfeit of reality—those taxes, that leaking faucet, the unwanted neighbor hammering on our door. It’s more because we—or certainly I—have such a gift for putting romance in the place where realism should be.
