Timelessness in writing
If you shoot for timelessness in your writing, consciously orient yourself to the upper realm, the shining truths and the inexhaustible symbols etc., you will — by a kind of law — produce drivel. You will waft and drift and never get a toehold. If, on the other hand, you bet it all on the particular, really dive unreservedly into specificity, with no thought for higher things, you will find — inevitably, magnificently — that your novel about three plumbers in Milwaukee in 1987 becomes a singing blueprint of human significance.
– James Parker in Should Art Be Timeless or Should It Speak to Something More Current? (via)