A lawyer quits his job to become a writer and moves to a small town called Hudson. Excerpt:

“ My real frustration was that I chose the wrong field to work in. The very fact I used the world “field” underlines my point. For years I simply did what I thought I should do rather than what I should have done. Perhaps it was a sense of duty, or a terse social conditioning grinded into my brain that demanded I be a good boy and not fall out of line.

My contributions to the world were little more than careerist representations of placing your napkin on your lap before eating dinner or saying “God bless you” when someone sneezed or “pardon me” when someone said something you couldn’t hear and needed them to repeat.  

       But artistry demands freedom. Real freedom. Bird flying over the Yangtze River on a misty jade morning kind of freedom. Leaves rustling from the wind in Central Park kind of freedom. Dolphins swimming the Arctic shelf kind of freedom. Not the selling products or concert tickets kind of freedom, or the “lifestyle” hawkers or commodities chucker’s kind of freedom. I mean freedom from control, freedom from dogma, freedom from manipulation and the exploitation of self. The freedom that goes it alone and fends off the enticing shimmer of riches, validation, fame, and status. The freedom that says, “I know the freedom you’re trying to sell me is bullshit,” the freedom that knows that none of the glitter is gold, that everything we were taught to believe operates in the furtive subtext of some other man’s Oz-ian crank turning, dream erecting, hollow hope-giving self. The freedom to give everything up and start anew.

       But we can’t do that, can we? In this globalized world of industry and self-aggrandizement. No matter how much I sought this real freedom I still whored myself to industry like all the rest. We all did. We all smiled and flashed jazz hands for whatever adoring crowd, large or small, would be willing to listen. We would play to the lowest common denominator because it helped us pay our rent. We laughed and satirized and satirized some more, all to make a quick buck at someone else’s expense. We would much rather play people off each other than do what was right. Slaves, smug slaves, in the grapple hold of ideology, money, and all the rest. No. Real freedom was unattainable when every corner of this big Earth was tilled and toiled, traded for power plants and livestock factories and equity shares. Convenience enslaved the world and its collective conscience, since the dawn of time. Trade the old for the new, the hard for the easy. Make us all believe that this is what we want: smaller, faster, more efficient.

      This was life’s refuge, under those grenades and harpoons of self-triumph and destruction. It was annihilation from one-self. How can we carry on like this? How do we defend the indefensible? For that which is efficient and that which is just are often never the same. Maybe this is inevitable, the unavoidable mass of experiences we seek cover under, all to shield ourselves from the glass walls protecting fragile hearts. Maybe it’s all we have. ”