I had some recently published novels on my Kindle, but my friend wasn’t interested in listening to any of them. She didn’t like what she called the vandalizing streak in contemporary fiction writers. She quoted John Cheever on the difference between a fascinated horror of life and a vision of life.

Nowadays it seems to be mostly fascinated horror, she said. Either that or totally unconvincing platitudinous sentiment.

All these books about the horribleness of modern life, she said, a lot of them brilliant, I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me. But I don’t want to read any more about narcissism and alienation and the futility of relationships between the sexes. I don’t want to read any more about human, in particular male, hideousness. Whatever happened to Faulkner’s idea that a writer’s job was to lift people up?

How Faulkner chastised the young writer of his day: He writes as though he stood among and watched the end of man.

He writes not of the heart but of the glands. It was out of fear that the writer wrote this way, Faulkner said. The fear he shared with every other person on earth: the fear of being blown up. But it was the writer’s duty to rise above such fear, Faulkner said. Valor was what Faulkner was calling for, that day in Stockholm, in 1950. And then: a return to the old universal truths—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Absent which, Faulkner warned, your story will last but a day.

Fine words. Really fine words. But of all the ways of looking at a writer today, as a knight in shining armor strikes me as probably the most far-fetched.

Another time, my friend said to me: You’d think it would be easier to leave life if you could convince yourself that everything was horrible and the future was totally bleak. But I can’t bear to think that I’ll be gone and the world won’t go on, infinitely rich, infinitely beautiful. Take that away and there’s no consolation.

I myself, as I told my friend now, have always been haunted by a scene from an old movie I once saw, based on the lives of the Brontë family. One of the sisters, who knows she’s dying, says that because she’s always been afraid of life, she doesn’t so much mind leaving it. But then, on a day like this, she says, when the world is so beautiful (she is sitting somewhere outdoors, I recall, no doubt somewhere in the moors), she confesses that she wouldn’t mind living just a little longer.

I’d been channel surfing, and that was the only scene I watched. It was long ago—I could be remembering it wrong. But this was how it always came back to me. And it came back to me a lot.