Last night I got in an argument with my friend, who is also a writer, about what role could be said to most properly belong to the novelist in society today, though after the argument was over, and we'd admitted that neither of us was in possession of the answer, but that we both were probably wrong, and that most likely there was no single description that could be considered true, or, if there was one, that we, being who we were, had the right to attempt to articulate...yes, after we'd gotten through all that, we began to argue with two women who till then had been strangers to us but who, because they’d been sitting near us and had overheard us, had started talking to us about the very subject we had raised, offering us their perspectives, which were nuanced and complex, though by that point in the evening my friend and I were no longer arguing because we wanted to convince anyone, or because we thought either of us was correct, or that our opinions mattered, but because we liked the women and didn’t want them to go away.