11/04/2015
Marilynne Robinson and the Perception of the Ordinary
Marilynne Robinson and the Perception of the Ordinary Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson is considered one of the defining writers of our time, a treasure in contemporary American literature, in both her fiction and her non-fiction. Her novels explore mid-20th century Midwestern life and faith; her essays roam the boundaries between faith and science. She […]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison.
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We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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I have a guest with me here in the catacombs of KZSU who knows what it means to practice a persecuted religion.
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I mean the religion of deep thinking which takes many different covert forms.
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One of the forms it takes for my guest is the perception of ordinary reality,
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which is anything but ordinary when perception becomes truly attentive and thoughtful.
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Let me quote her.
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Ordinary things have always seemed newness to me.
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One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that there are two sides to your encounter with the world.
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You don't simply perceive something that is statically present.
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It means something because it is addressed to you.
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You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision.
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Now that's a thought from the catacombs.
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My guest today is the novelist and essayist Marilyn Robinson.
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One of the treasures of contemporary American literature much beloved by many of you entitled opinioners.
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Marilyn Robinson has come to Stanford from Iowa to deliver a presidential lecture titled the American Scholar now.
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And as graciously accepted an invitation to join me here on entitled opinions, I thank her for that.
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The American Scholar is a famous essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson and I will be talking with my guest about Emerson shortly.
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I hope as well as some other American writers.
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But first let me welcome her to the program.
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Marilyn thanks for joining us today.
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What's a pleasure I'm glad to be here.
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Now you once stated in an interview, I quote you, I don't think that living writers should be treated with all.
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Or the all that is sometimes reserved for dead writer.
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So let me put aside my all here and engage you as I would a long time friend of the show.
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This despite the fact that we only met just half an hour ago.
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And there are at least 10 different questions that I could start with.
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But since I aired a show last week on Albert Einstein and the astonishing developments that have taken place in cosmology and quantum physics in the 20th century, let me start there.
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You have a new book of essays which has just been published.
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I think the official publication date was October 27th.
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It's called the givenness of things.
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And in your opening piece titled humanism, you write about the dismaying reductionism that many practitioners of neuroscience engage in when it comes to the human brain and the human psyche.
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But the reason I bring up that essay is because you make some illuminating comments there about cosmology.
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Referring to quantum physics, you write quote the fundamental character of time and space is being called into question.
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Mathematics, ontology and metaphysics have become one thing.
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If Galileo shocked the world by removing the sun from its place, so to speak, then this polyglot army of mathematicians and cosmologists.
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Who offer new grounds for new conceptions of absolute reality should dazzle us all.
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Freeing us at last from the circle of old, your eyes and compass.
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But we are not free.
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End quote.
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My first question then has to do with these new conceptions of the universe.
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I'm assuming that you believe they hold a great deal of promise for a new humanism.
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Do I understand you correctly there?
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I certainly think that they do.
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One thing that humanism seems to me has to invoke and be based on is human brilliance.
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And the fact that physics and cosmology have revealed what they have made such brilliant hypotheses as they have made,
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created the possibility of a preconception of reality.
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I just think that that's a huge tribute to what human beings are.
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I think that it's a pity people are not more aware of it and more disposed to enjoy it.
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It's astonishing how much we've been able to understand about phenomena that are so alien to what would be, you would almost imagine endemic to our human psyche,
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which is a certain imperative or need for stability and waking up in a world where we orient ourselves quite naturally.
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But it seems that all this human brilliance of ours has uncovered truths about the cosmos that we live in that are utterly bewildering to our basic humanity.
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Well, our habits of order making and interpretation and so on obviously have come to their limits as far as this deeper reality is concerned.
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But I think that antiquity, mysticism, all the old cultures of abstract thought sensed that there was something more and something other about reality.
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And you find it already in Heraclitus.
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I think that science passed through a phase which was a passage it had to make of sort of reductionism, isolation of causal aspects of existence and so on.
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But that model, that moment became so authoritative for us that it precluded our having a humane understanding of all the ways in which reality had been looked at before.
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The questions about time and so on that were raised in the Middle Ages and are perfectly appropriate now.
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But went through a period of being suppressed or dismissed because they were associated with an earlier period of time.
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Well, certainly on the one hand we find ourselves on the far flung provinces of a galaxy which is so immeasurably large until you take into account that it's one of 100 billion galaxies of the same size.
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And that the visible world then that we're talking about something beyond any possible comprehension constitutes only 5% of the universe.
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The other 20% or 25% is dark matter.
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The other is presumably dark.
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And therefore it looks like you could not squeeze us out of the picture anymore than we've been squeezed out by contemporary cosmology.
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But then on the other hand it also seems that we are also at the very center of the whole thing because you subtract us out of there and there is no center.
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Exactly. I mean I think it's just spectacular. I mean this planet is disappearingly small by any model of the galaxy or anything beyond it.
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And yet at the same time it's knowledge, it's capacity for knowing passes through billions and billions of light years of void.
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There might be other consciousnesses in the universe that given account of it probably not I would say.
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But the fact that we do I think is really beautiful.
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It would be trivial to be a large planet in the middle of a small universe. It's absolutely brilliant to be a small planet in the middle of an endless universe.
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You wrote a piece on Ed Graal and Poe I think in this past year.
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Yes.
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And which I found very interesting because I'm fascinated by Poe from many points of view.
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And I have to say that Eureka, which you discussed there is a prose poem that he wrote in the last year of his life that you take very seriously in so far as it has almost this kind of intuitive foreknowledge of discoveries in physics that would not take place until the 20th century or even the late 20th century.
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Again, you know, I mean, he did call it a poem and he said that it was his thinking was all aesthetic.
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His reasoning was aesthetic which is perfectly respectable scientifically so far as I can tell.
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It raises the great mystery of what is meant by aesthetics, you know, why it should be so efficacious as it clearly can be.
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But I'm just in awe of that. I think that's an amazingly brilliant thing, an unbelievable artifact of early 19th century thought.
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Yeah. Well, for our listeners who don't know Eureka at all, he posits things that really come out of the post-Einstein kind of physics.
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First thing that the whole universe originates from one part tiny particle.
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Yes, exactly.
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And that's a matter in one kind of explosion and then depending on size and distribution and forces of gravity that the galaxies form and he even seems to suggest that there's a counterforce to gravity and that some stars will not emit light, for example.
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Just amazing.
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That there are some universe that our universe can be one universe among many have completely different laws that apply. And when you say that he conceived of this universe, how can one come to a vision like that through the aesthetic?
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I think that's a great mystery except that, you know, I mean, a word that's used often as a synonym is elegance.
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And I think that there's a sort of disciplining of, you know, how one can think, what one can imagine, that again conforms to elegance, which I think might generally be called a kind of reduction to the maximum appropriate degree of simplicity.
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Although Eureka is hardly simple, as certainly as a literary work, it seems very complex.
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Well, yes, certainly. Well, he's making an argument, you know, and he read that as a one-l lecture.
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And apparently had a thunderous reaction from his audience in Virginia.
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Negative? Positive. Positive.
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Positive.
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Well, I thought it was everyone jumped all over him for that.
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Well, he had trouble getting a published and so on. People thought he was crazy when he asked them to publish it.
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But the second reading of the lecture, I guess, was, you know, reigned out.
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But the first was, I think, highly successful.
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There's a lot I would like to ask you about, Poe, but I'm curious now to talk a little bit about Emerson.
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You're giving a lecture tomorrow here at Stanford called the American Scholar now.
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And that is an essay that, you know, beautiful essay, I think, is still very relevant in which Emerson famously tries to conceive of how you could have a declaration of independence
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for American intellectual life or American letters or some other way of being a scholar or a person of knowledge.
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Then models that come to us from Europe or elsewhere.
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And I don't want you to give away your lecture necessarily, but the American Scholar now, are we nowhere near Emerson's concept of the American Scholar?
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150 years later.
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I think that we have perhaps lost his vision to a certain extent.
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What he assumes in that lecture is that people are brilliant.
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That they are brilliant in various ways.
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That every new perceiver is a new source of revelation.
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And that, you know, using the knownness of the country, the idea that you can indeed see in your own right, think with your own mind.
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And a rival, you know, an insight that, or a vision that has the quality of revelation of very high poetry, which I think he would say is a matter of consciousness.
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And not, I mean, in other words, the object of the art is the creation of that consciousness much more than it is the writing of poetry or anything like that.
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He recommended to the American Scholar to take his first lessons from the world of nature.
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And immerse yourself in the natural world somehow.
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And through, I guess, an openness to it, sensory, perceptive, and intimate knowledge of nature in its ways of giving itself to us.
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The givenness of things, if you like, and perception. And of course, your novels are, I think, of a very powerful ways in which that world of nature comes into the inner lives of people.
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The second recommendation, though, is learning through history and learning lessons from the past that would then put the American Scholar in a position to break through into modes of originality.
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But not with, it's not a repudiation or ignoring of the past, it's actually some kind of reappropriation of legacies to a certain extent so that one can do something new, either with them or independently of them.
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Yes, I think that we've sort of given up on the past, I think. I mean, it happens that human lives fall out in a certain sequence.
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But brilliant people are brilliant people, and I think that we should be capable of seeing what is characteristic of a certain period and understanding the kernel of a thought without being disturbed by what surrounds it in terms of the language of the period in which it was
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written. I mean, you know, that's sort of early modern English or something like that.
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That's something that bothers me very much because a lot of good people have tried to do valuable things historically, and that they should be lost, I think, is something that's been disorienting for us.
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Now, are you speaking more about creative writers or scholars in the sense of academic literary historians or cultural historians?
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Anyone who did anything interesting seriously, anything valuable, you know, I read fairly broadly in, you know, Renaissance texts and so on, and the things that you come across are just stunning, and they can be kind of isolated in a text.
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It's otherwise perhaps not so interesting, but they're much too valuable to lose, and, and, above all of their things, human history is what we know about who we are.
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And I think that lots of times there's a sort of attempted false innocence that, you know, we imagine the past as primitive and ourselves as having escape from its errors.
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And I think we can safely, as soon as we have an escape from either its errors or our own.
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Well, what I find frustrating sometimes in the academic disciplines to which we belong is a kind of excess of historicism, where people feel that their job is done once they've historicized a phenomenon, whether it's a particular text or an event in history or some other kind of
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document or founding of a nation. And we actually are in a kind of overdrive when it comes to historicization, but we don't have that Emersonian leap of faith into a self, what he calls the self-reliance of the American scholar.
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And I, I'm wondering whether the past can be genuinely retrieved and reanimated without that second move that Emerson calls for, which is what he calls self-trust or self-reliance.
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I think that actually that's very necessary to reading the past appropriately. I think that frankly, I don't find much history written about periods that I know from reading primary texts that are persuasive to me as history.
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I think, you know, one of the things it's kind of fun to do is to go to the library and look through the journal of some professional discipline and see how, you know, it's like looking through an old catalog and seeing why
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neck ties turn into narrow neck ties turn into flared pants, you know, and there is so
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much deference to the people that are in any given moment considered to be the leading scholars
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that there is not nearly enough sort of, you know, research done for people for their own
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sake, I mean, to find what they find with their own intelligence, their own perceptions.
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Do you consider yourself Emersonian?
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I would like to be, you know, I don't know what he'd say about me, but I tend to think
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of myself as certainly influenced by him.
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And would that apply also to the transcendentalism of Emerson and the idea that God is inside
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of us and that, you know, the self can be, if it comes to know itself truly is exalted
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in that respect?
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You know, this is, I'm going to say something very predictable, but that is Calvinism.
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God to hear you say that because I thought that the Calvinist doctrine was really, that if
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it had an animosity towards anything, it was this kind of enthusiasm, what the Puritans
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called enthusiasm or antagonism where locating the God within the self, I remember Roger
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Williams, the early Puritan Separatists who denouncing George Fox of the Quakers, saying
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you think that God is in yourself, but there's nothing in the self but a rotten corrupt
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sinner and that you God is certainly not there, it's somewhere else.
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So can you clarify why you think that's Calvinist?
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Well, Roger Williams who know was an anabaptist and they were, that was a tradition that
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was distinct from Calvinism, I mean, and at odds with it.
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But if you read like the first couple chapters of Calvin's institutes, he says, if you
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want to discover God, descend into yourself.
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And then he lists all the, you know, the brilliance of people, they're, you know, the
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incredible resourcefulness, their imagination, capacity for learning.
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And then he says these things are undeniable proofs of the divine in man, you know.
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This is, it's amazing how he uses this.
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And when one is confronted by another person, including somebody that really wishes you
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harm, you know, you have to understand that that person is presented to you by God.
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And the question is what does God want out of this situation.
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And he, he lies that the presented other with God himself because it's an image of God,
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you know.
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And so there is a very strong sort of mysticism of the image of God that's pervasive.
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You understand yourself as being that image, you understand everyone you encounter as being
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that image.
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And then the question is, are you appropriately reverent in effect toward the image presented
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you or the image that you are?
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Where then in Calvin's vision does the legacy of original sin reside?
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Well, you know, the idea of original sin is something that runs through the whole Christian
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tradition.
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There are certain doctrines, if you want to call them, that are simply accepted by every
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tradition and interpreted differently in every tradition.
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And in Calvinism, yeah, he talks about depravity and what depravity means is being warped.
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And he uses perception, the model of the perception is a mirror or a lens, which is warped.
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So that you see things that are true, but you do not see them with reliable truth.
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You know, you don't see them in themselves.
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And so the whole contest, basically, of the Calvinist, you know, who has internalized
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the effort to see the world as it is, is to overcome this inevitable impairment of understanding
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that is the consequence of the fall.
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It's not, you know, for some traditions, it's associated with some sort of seething black
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sin, you know, but for Calvin, it's kind of an impairment that makes perception a continuous
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contest between what can be known and the limitation of any one's ability to know it.
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I think, frankly, that the scientific method goes back to Calvin, because there's always
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the assumption that, yes, you are discovering things and know you don't know everything that
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there is to know about them.
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In fact, what you think you know could be profoundly wrong.
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Right.
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And in one of your new essays, you also wish or lament the fact that you don't hear the
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words sin used in any of our current discourses, but that someone like Lincoln, when he
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would address the American people, he was speaking in a Calvinist language that almost everyone
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would have understood as a sort of shared common faith of the nation.
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And that, in that respect, a president could remind a people that God loves your enemy
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as much as he loves you, and that humility is the and suffering or lessons that come from
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the same sort of source.
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And the absence of the possibility of even saying certain things in our public discourse
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seems to have made us much more vulnerable to the effects of that depravity if I want
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to if you want to use that word.
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That's one of those words that's drifted into another set of meanings.
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But you know, I was talking there about the second inaugural address, I think.
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And that's very much in a tradition of sermons that were preached during the Civil War,
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especially when the North had suffered a defeat.
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They had days of fasting and humiliation.
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And that everybody, it was declared, you know, nationally, Abraham Lincoln declared these
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days, but they, everyone was supposed to go to his or her own church or whatever.
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And then they would be preached to about the fact that if things have gone badly for
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them, they probably deserved it.
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And so, I mean, and the thing that's wonderful about that is that it deflects hatred from
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the enemy, even the injurious enemy, which is very Calvinist, you know.
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The situation is presented to you by God to learn from.
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And what Lincoln did with that tradition was say, "Do not think that you are more virtuous
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than the South."
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You know, if you suffered, it's because your sins relative to slavery were also very great,
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which is simply true.
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But the fact that he could say that, you know, victorious in a war telling to people,
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you have no grounds for resentment of the aggression that was carried out against you
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and so on.
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You have no way to avenge what you have lost justly.
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I think that's just amazing.
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And you don't find in someone like Emerson or in Walt Whitman an absence of acknowledgement
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that deep within the self-lies the possibility of this kind of distortion of the divine
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and that it's not all that easy to straighten it out.
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And that maybe there's nothing one can do through self-help to redress it.
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Yes, well, I mean, I don't think that in so far as they were Calvinist, you don't get over
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original sin.
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It's something that is a continuous factor.
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And frankly, Miss Apprehension of a kind that leads to insensitiveity or cruelty is as
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great a sin as any of the listed sins, you know, which leads to a point of view like
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| 00:25:44.500 |
Whitman's, which is rather Christlike where he can look at the prostitute with her
|
| 00:25:51.220 |
wobbly neck and all these people with the same loving eye that he looks at anything or
|
| 00:25:56.980 |
anybody because Calvin's understanding of original sin means no one is immune from it,
|
| 00:26:05.420 |
you know, and it forbids the sort of casuous tree of saying lesser greater sins, you know.
|
| 00:26:14.220 |
I think Whitman is very much in the tradition from that point of view.
|
| 00:26:17.660 |
He does acknowledge, he acknowledges slavery, a terrible thing, you know, but it is within
|
| 00:26:26.700 |
a vision that allows everything.
|
| 00:26:30.540 |
It doesn't, God knows he was not in favor of slavery, but his vision of the world was
|
| 00:26:38.140 |
not one that assumed that he or people like him were immune from the abuses that they
|
| 00:26:44.420 |
saw around them.
|
| 00:26:47.340 |
Talking about Emily Dickinson now, we're talking about the poets.
|
| 00:26:50.260 |
Emily Dickinson also raised, I suppose, she was also Calvinist or came from the same
|
| 00:26:56.660 |
thing, but she also had a moment where she says, what poem is that where she vows that she's
|
| 00:27:09.220 |
maybe not going to have the second baptism, she doesn't belong into that or that there's
|
| 00:27:13.140 |
something there that has a moment of distancingation.
|
| 00:27:18.660 |
Is that because she was so strictly Calvinist in regard to herself that she would come to
|
| 00:27:24.580 |
this judgment?
|
| 00:27:27.700 |
I think she is always testing consciousness, you know, which is a very Calvinist project,
|
| 00:27:35.220 |
and taking it to the brink of its own sort of rebuttal or destruction.
|
| 00:27:42.140 |
I mean reading her poems, it's just, you know, your hair stands on the end, but to be
|
| 00:27:48.300 |
able to make tests like that demonstrates a robust conviction in the reality of God and
|
| 00:27:57.780 |
the meaningfulness of the incredible exercises that the mind can undertake.
|
| 00:28:05.100 |
And do you find her a hero of perception in the way that you speak about it in the quote
|
| 00:28:11.260 |
I began with in my introduction?
|
| 00:28:13.740 |
The perception of the ordinary, or the ordinary reality which becomes extraordinary?
|
| 00:28:20.020 |
She's the ultimate master of that perception without question.
|
| 00:28:25.220 |
And does one learn from a poet like that to educate, you know, that kind of perception
|
| 00:28:31.980 |
because it doesn't come necessarily naturally.
|
| 00:28:34.780 |
It's something that one has to develop a great deal of sensitivity through a learning
|
| 00:28:39.940 |
process.
|
| 00:28:40.940 |
It's the fall of man that's responsible for that.
|
| 00:28:44.940 |
It's all right.
|
| 00:28:45.940 |
So the pre-fallen state would be this kind of surplus of the ecstatic splendor of the world
|
| 00:28:56.940 |
that we perceive only dimly.
|
| 00:28:59.340 |
Is that how you see?
|
| 00:29:00.940 |
He's still on a blade, presumably.
|
| 00:29:02.860 |
Although one of the things that's true for Calvinist, for many other theologians, is that
|
| 00:29:07.660 |
he assumes that the fall was intended by God and that the contest of being that follows
|
| 00:29:15.260 |
from it is the will of God, a splendid thing, you know.
|
| 00:29:22.260 |
It's like Milton.
|
| 00:29:23.260 |
He really has no, well, Milton is like him, I should say.
|
| 00:29:27.340 |
No conception of the unfallen mind as being any ideal of the mind.
|
| 00:29:33.340 |
So Marilak, I can't let Melville escape our conversation because he's one of my favorite
|
| 00:29:38.940 |
authors and Moby Dick for he is of a completely different order than anything.
|
| 00:29:45.420 |
Stondale, the French novelist who lived in Padma for several years.
|
| 00:29:52.500 |
He said, "Elia, le frómage, eluparmezon," that there's Parmesan and then there's Jesus.
|
| 00:29:57.580 |
And for me, Melville is in a certain sense the Parmesan of American letters.
|
| 00:30:02.100 |
At least that one book.
|
| 00:30:04.900 |
Is that an author you love?
|
| 00:30:06.220 |
Oh, yes.
|
| 00:30:07.220 |
I've taught Moby Dick many times, many times.
|
| 00:30:11.700 |
And it's so interesting.
|
| 00:30:12.700 |
Sometimes I teach it beside white jacket, which is some, you know what I mean, the setting
|
| 00:30:18.020 |
is the same, but the human circumstance is entirely different.
|
| 00:30:22.620 |
And Moby Dick of course came after white jacket.
|
| 00:30:25.540 |
And the fact that he creates this little world of every sort of a human being, you know,
|
| 00:30:30.740 |
with a sort of, they're all beautiful, they're all, you know, physically, virtually all
|
| 00:30:36.020 |
of them are, they deal with each other with a great courtesy, basically, you know, over
|
| 00:30:42.860 |
against white jackets, certainly where there's vlogging and all this other horrible stuff.
|
| 00:30:49.060 |
And where, I mean, in that book he talks about how degraded sailors are assumed to be,
|
| 00:30:57.420 |
how badly they're dealt with and, you know, how they're abducted and all the rest of it.
|
| 00:31:02.820 |
And then he reimagens it again, you know, these ideal sailors in this world of loving
|
| 00:31:09.940 |
collaboration really.
|
| 00:31:13.380 |
You know, so there's a sort of a beautiful ideal, beautiful vision planted in the middle
|
| 00:31:20.500 |
of this raging question about, you know, the ultimate nature of things.
|
| 00:31:25.740 |
But very, very amazing.
|
| 00:31:28.500 |
But as a novelist yourself, when you read Moby Dick, do you find that here is a novelist
|
| 00:31:34.460 |
who was not able to control the artifact and that it just gets away from him and it takes
|
| 00:31:42.500 |
different genres, essayistic and anatomical and so forth.
|
| 00:31:49.260 |
And that maybe he could have used some oversight?
|
| 00:31:56.420 |
No.
|
| 00:31:57.420 |
No.
|
| 00:31:58.420 |
No.
|
| 00:31:59.420 |
I tell my writers a hundred times don't try to control the artifact.
|
| 00:32:03.580 |
You know, I mean, when something, I mean, there is being out of control and then there
|
| 00:32:08.060 |
is creating something that takes life in a way that gives it energy so you can't control.
|
| 00:32:14.260 |
And then when that happens, when that kind of energy emerges, thank God for it and see where
|
| 00:32:19.860 |
it goes, you know, I would, you know, I mean that the brilliance, the genius that flows
|
| 00:32:28.460 |
into these different passages in Melfield, it pull him after them, you know, they're just
|
| 00:32:36.860 |
wonderful.
|
| 00:32:37.860 |
They're the height of the art.
|
| 00:32:40.340 |
Well, I agree.
|
| 00:32:41.340 |
I mean, it's the generic strangeness of that novel which is part of its fascination for
|
| 00:32:48.220 |
me and there's hardly a sentence in there that doesn't actually have the power of transport.
|
| 00:32:55.700 |
Absolutely.
|
| 00:32:56.700 |
Beautiful, beautiful.
|
| 00:32:58.780 |
Oceanic cadences and a kind of vocabulary that's Shakespearean but never in a way that
|
| 00:33:06.180 |
seems, without those kind of false notes that you would expect from someone who doesn't
|
| 00:33:15.020 |
hesitate to borrow as much as he borrows from a kind of Shakespearean diction.
|
| 00:33:19.820 |
Would you think the Quaker presence is important to understanding the kind of search for
|
| 00:33:26.940 |
the knowledge of reality in the novel or is it just part of the background story?
|
| 00:33:34.180 |
I think it's important that they have in Starbucks or both Quakers and it's important to
|
| 00:33:40.780 |
the dishmail is not, you know, but I do think that, you know, the Quakers, they were very
|
| 00:33:49.560 |
conscious about rejecting assumptions about God that were traditional and I think that
|
| 00:33:56.900 |
this is very often true with that sort of early American writing.
|
| 00:34:01.100 |
If you reject what is traditional then where do you find what you can truly, you know,
|
| 00:34:08.140 |
believe adopt, regard and this comes with a lot of pushing aside of barriers and boundaries?
|
| 00:34:16.780 |
Would the same apply to your career as a novelist merely if you don't mind my asking?
|
| 00:34:23.460 |
I think in a sense, yes, I think it does.
|
| 00:34:25.860 |
I'm not a Quaker, but I'm not so far from them.
|
| 00:34:32.620 |
But I do proceed on the assumption that if I find myself moving toward something that seems
|
| 00:34:41.900 |
to me to locate a question or an assumption that I'm no longer convinced would stand,
|
| 00:34:51.980 |
and I feel, you know, certainly permission and also application to see where that goes.
|
| 00:34:59.180 |
And so you follow it.
|
| 00:35:00.180 |
I follow it.
|
| 00:35:02.820 |
And do you have, do you, any direct predecessor or I can use the plural processors that
|
| 00:35:10.820 |
you would point to as matrix out of which your own fiction arises?
|
| 00:35:20.540 |
Calvin, leaving him aside, talking about other novels?
|
| 00:35:24.100 |
Well, I came to him late.
|
| 00:35:26.180 |
When I was in college, I studied American literature and I had a great class, a great year
|
| 00:35:32.180 |
of American literature.
|
| 00:35:34.260 |
And it was treated as a sort of phenomenological or epistemological literature, which
|
| 00:35:41.540 |
I think is exactly right.
|
| 00:35:44.140 |
And the hypotheses that are created to attempt an approach to what is true and real are
|
| 00:35:52.060 |
metaphors typically.
|
| 00:35:53.580 |
You know, you get that in Melville all the time, Emily Dickens and all the time.
|
| 00:35:58.540 |
And so you put, you know, the metaphor conveys as much as it can convey and then collapses
|
| 00:36:05.780 |
typically, you know.
|
| 00:36:07.740 |
And then beyond that, there is another metaphor that is as if adequate to the questions
|
| 00:36:13.860 |
of the failed metaphor, the ones that did not satisfy.
|
| 00:36:20.020 |
And then that is as vulnerable as the first one really.
|
| 00:36:22.980 |
But in this, it again, it reminds me sort of of scientific method in the sense that you,
|
| 00:36:28.740 |
you create a hypothesis that is as promising as you can create and then test it against
|
| 00:36:34.060 |
what it's meant to describe.
|
| 00:36:36.380 |
And you see how it fails, you know, that this seemed to me to be because partly because
|
| 00:36:44.420 |
it made such beautiful demands on language, disciplined it and expanded it at the same time.
|
| 00:36:53.420 |
So when I started writing housekeeping, you know, with my slew of metaphors, precisely
|
| 00:36:58.660 |
what I was doing was seeing whether I could also use that method, which seemed to me in
|
| 00:37:03.740 |
a way to self-standing, to free-standing, to be something that could simply pass away like
|
| 00:37:10.820 |
a period style.
|
| 00:37:13.100 |
And I still feel that way.
|
| 00:37:14.540 |
I think it's, it sheds light in all directions, unlike, I mean, on reality and experience
|
| 00:37:23.340 |
on language and, you know, consciousness.
|
| 00:37:25.820 |
Well, yeah, for sure, especially in housekeeping and others, other of your books.
|
| 00:37:31.660 |
And you find this method at work in the writers we've been talking about, for example.
|
| 00:37:35.420 |
Yes, absolutely.
|
| 00:37:37.060 |
And that helps me understand also Emerson because it seems like Emerson, every sentence
|
| 00:37:41.860 |
is a metaphor that you wonder how can he go on multiplying and finding new figures for
|
| 00:37:49.940 |
saying essentially the same thing and he keeps doing it.
|
| 00:37:53.340 |
But you're right, it seems as at the end it collapses in on itself or it's the famous
|
| 00:37:58.980 |
image of the circles that keep expanding.
|
| 00:38:02.900 |
But I think you hold more to the collapsing at the end of it, that it has to end in, it's
|
| 00:38:10.820 |
like a musical notes that they end in silence and which is a kind of death and therefore
|
| 00:38:18.100 |
it had to be coming to being again from there.
|
| 00:38:21.860 |
Do I understand you correctly that there's a certain element of failure in each attempt?
|
| 00:38:27.660 |
Yeah, but the essence of it is that it is a tentative, it is an attempt.
|
| 00:38:34.300 |
I think about, you know, when they, not so long ago, were trying to determine whether the
|
| 00:38:41.300 |
universe was stable or was contracting.
|
| 00:38:44.860 |
And they found out that it was not only expanding but it was expanding and accelerating
|
| 00:38:51.060 |
rate and the rate of acceleration was accelerating, you know.
|
| 00:38:54.780 |
And all theories went right out the window, you know, which was not a failure of those
|
| 00:38:59.020 |
theories.
|
| 00:39:00.020 |
They were, you know, these things, these cub webs, you know, or ropes of sand as they
|
| 00:39:05.700 |
used to say, that people used to pull themselves toward an insight that might be an
|
| 00:39:11.940 |
insight of the, in our tequila bowl, the utterly mysterious.
|
| 00:39:18.580 |
But by the potency of these things, the validity of them is that they bring you to that
|
| 00:39:23.940 |
place rather than letting you be content with error, you know.
|
| 00:39:29.620 |
And that place has also something to do with grief.
|
| 00:39:35.740 |
If I can make that thematic connection and grief, not just in the most concrete sense of
|
| 00:39:46.220 |
the loss of a loved one, but also loss as part of the living out of the human condition
|
| 00:39:56.340 |
as it were and perhaps without some underlying grief, there would not be the need to
|
| 00:40:04.180 |
keep attempting the new metaphor and searching out.
|
| 00:40:09.220 |
Yes.
|
| 00:40:10.220 |
Because there's something slipping away, something is being, we're losing something.
|
| 00:40:14.340 |
The world we think we know is what we're losing, you know.
|
| 00:40:18.940 |
I mean, my characters experience grief because they love the world, you know.
|
| 00:40:28.100 |
What do you make, given how important grief is in your aesthetic as well as the thematics
|
| 00:40:34.700 |
and even the your theology, I'm stipulating.
|
| 00:40:39.860 |
What do you make then of Emerson, who in his essay experience says, "I grieve that grief cannot
|
| 00:40:45.940 |
teach me anything?"
|
| 00:40:48.420 |
And that he underwent an experience of grief with the loss of his son Waldo and he found
|
| 00:40:55.540 |
that basically it was something kadushus, it fell away from me because it wasn't really integral
|
| 00:41:02.060 |
to me.
|
| 00:41:03.060 |
And there seems to be a very daring, rather shocking repudiation of what we've been talking
|
| 00:41:10.820 |
about, which is the losing of the world the way we thought it would be or it should be or
|
| 00:41:21.300 |
even another human being.
|
| 00:41:23.300 |
Yes.
|
| 00:41:24.300 |
Well, I think that the absolute discovery we make is that in a certain sense we are radically
|
| 00:41:32.420 |
solitary and from, again, from Calvin's point of view or Calvin's point of view, it's as
|
| 00:41:39.860 |
if one were face-to-face with God that there is this relationship that is essential, indestructible,
|
| 00:41:51.340 |
primary, and that all the others are things that you learn are not essential to you.
|
| 00:41:59.140 |
But if there is this face-to-face relation with God, wouldn't that be the bulwark against
|
| 00:42:04.180 |
any genuine grief?
|
| 00:42:06.260 |
And so far it's the answer to it or it transcends it or it's the...
|
| 00:42:13.220 |
I don't think so because clearly it was not.
|
| 00:42:19.020 |
A lot of you can read a lot of grieving Puritans.
|
| 00:42:22.060 |
It's not hard to find them.
|
| 00:42:25.740 |
But I think that you learn the value of things in losing them.
|
| 00:42:33.140 |
You would never know it in the same way.
|
| 00:42:36.220 |
And it's an odd way to live life.
|
| 00:42:41.180 |
I mean, it is.
|
| 00:42:42.860 |
Sir, almost backward, you have your treasures around you and then you lose them because
|
| 00:42:47.100 |
it seems as if it got to go the other way, maybe it does.
|
| 00:42:52.940 |
But again, it's, you know, from the point of view of the assumption that you are face-to-face
|
| 00:43:00.380 |
with God, you know, for most of them, properly-framed in person too, the idea that this would
|
| 00:43:09.220 |
be restored is the answer.
|
| 00:43:13.380 |
Am I correct to assume that novel writing is the medium in which this sort of truth is
|
| 00:43:26.540 |
much more effectively communicated than, for example, essay writing because you've done a lot
|
| 00:43:31.620 |
of essay writing and its...
|
| 00:43:34.980 |
Your essays are a way of thinking the way I think your novels are also a way of thinking
|
| 00:43:39.100 |
about the same sort of fundamental issues, but that the communication and its metaphor
|
| 00:43:45.420 |
might have a lot to do with it, but it's the other way of getting inside the lived experience
|
| 00:43:52.860 |
of certain issues that might be purely in the mind and not only in sentiment.
|
| 00:44:00.460 |
Do you find that you communicate a truth in your novels that doesn't come across the
|
| 00:44:06.060 |
same way in your essays?
|
| 00:44:08.340 |
It's true.
|
| 00:44:09.340 |
I mean, the thing that's fascinating about writing novels is that you have the illusion
|
| 00:44:16.180 |
of dimensionality, you know, you can have three or four things going on and impacting
|
| 00:44:21.020 |
people at the same time.
|
| 00:44:22.780 |
You can, you know, have something seem to be asserted and then have it radically qualified
|
| 00:44:30.980 |
on the next paragraph, you know, and that makes it a much richer way of dealing with the
|
| 00:44:37.420 |
complexity of things.
|
| 00:44:40.300 |
And you do the same thing between novel and novel, not only paragraph by paragraph, but
|
| 00:44:46.420 |
you put novels which are taking place in time which, you know, chronologically speaking
|
| 00:44:51.900 |
is simultaneous, but it's a different story or it's a different declension of the same
|
| 00:44:57.340 |
story, you know?
|
| 00:44:59.020 |
Absolutely.
|
| 00:45:00.020 |
And it's that freedom, you know, that, well, dimensionality, as I said before, which
|
| 00:45:05.180 |
is reality, you know, I mean, that's how people move around themselves among themselves
|
| 00:45:13.340 |
emotionally as well as physically.
|
| 00:45:17.140 |
And will you add to the number of ways that that story has been told so far in the trilogy
|
| 00:45:25.820 |
or I probably might well, but I get myself so busy with other things.
|
| 00:45:35.140 |
Sometimes they don't have quite solitude that I need to, but, you know, I have things in
|
| 00:45:42.780 |
my mind.
|
| 00:45:43.780 |
Sure.
|
| 00:45:45.740 |
And do you enjoy also the kind of coming to Stanford giving a lecture working out a
|
| 00:45:52.100 |
problem in this other sort of medium and then publishing it in its collection of essays,
|
| 00:45:58.940 |
the new book that has just come out, the given us of things?
|
| 00:46:01.420 |
I think many of the pieces in there were originally lectures in my all of the more lectures
|
| 00:46:07.980 |
now.
|
| 00:46:10.660 |
Does that have the same satisfaction for you?
|
| 00:46:12.580 |
Well, you know, there are things that I feel strongly about or ideas that I want to try
|
| 00:46:17.700 |
out.
|
| 00:46:18.700 |
Like, you know, we can see being how Shakespeare should be approached or something like
|
| 00:46:22.100 |
that.
|
| 00:46:23.100 |
I have the luxury of talking about that.
|
| 00:46:25.620 |
And to the extent that any of these things could overlap with my fiction, I am very
|
| 00:46:33.740 |
happy to have another place to put them because I don't want to write in the interest
|
| 00:46:37.700 |
or essayistic fiction.
|
| 00:46:40.780 |
I want my characters to create the fiction.
|
| 00:46:45.780 |
But there are moments in your fiction where a certain kind of meditation is taking place.
|
| 00:46:51.300 |
A certain kind of thinking and it's actually reflective thinking often.
|
| 00:46:57.980 |
It's not essayistic in that regard.
|
| 00:46:59.820 |
But some other kind of narrow conceptions of what's appropriate for fiction and not appropriate
|
| 00:47:06.340 |
was that as Aristotle said, leave thought as little of it as possible in the story because
|
| 00:47:14.700 |
it has to move according to action and so forth.
|
| 00:47:19.700 |
But thought is so central to the world that you enter into in your novels now.
|
| 00:47:29.420 |
Yes.
|
| 00:47:30.420 |
Well, I think it's central.
|
| 00:47:31.420 |
I mean, people spend more time with thinking than doing any other thing, you know?
|
| 00:47:38.540 |
And some people I think think beautifully, you know, and there are wonderful things to
|
| 00:47:44.140 |
think about.
|
| 00:47:45.140 |
They maybe needn't yield anything beyond the thought itself.
|
| 00:47:49.820 |
You know, seeing particularly preoccupied with a very typical American issue in not only
|
| 00:47:57.980 |
fiction but maybe even reality, which is this kind of terrible aphasia that so many of
|
| 00:48:04.380 |
our fellows' citizens have when it comes to the expression of whatever that inner world
|
| 00:48:10.820 |
of thought is and the inability actually to phrase or to communicate and make that thinking
|
| 00:48:20.860 |
something more than just a solitary form of self-entrapment.
|
| 00:48:27.580 |
Well, I would, I rarely think of it as an entrapment, I suppose, however solitary it is.
|
| 00:48:34.260 |
But I think one of the things actually that's sort of intervened is that people are given
|
| 00:48:41.260 |
models of experience, you know, that, you know, the ideas like trauma, for example, so that
|
| 00:48:49.460 |
they find a place in their biography that they can identify as being the landmark on their
|
| 00:48:54.620 |
interior landscape and so on.
|
| 00:48:57.620 |
Or, you know, sort of diagnoses that float around in the culture as being descriptive of
|
| 00:49:02.300 |
everybody or most people or whatever.
|
| 00:49:05.620 |
And there's sort of a fable of consciousness which certainly comes from Freud and from
|
| 00:49:12.580 |
many other people.
|
| 00:49:14.100 |
I think people, they sort of rethink themselves in order to answer to it, you know.
|
| 00:49:22.660 |
I don't, we have untrained people because inwardness, people like Emerson would certainly
|
| 00:49:31.620 |
think of it this way.
|
| 00:49:34.340 |
It is what individualizes us inwardness.
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| 00:49:38.740 |
And there is an impulse away from that kind of individualization in these tendencies that
|
| 00:49:44.980 |
we have to type ourselves or diagnose ourselves or, you know, which is, I think, absolutely
|
| 00:49:51.140 |
ridiculous on its face because Americans aren't like anybody else particularly and
|
| 00:49:56.980 |
be. There are 330 million of us last time I checked coming from every part of the world and
|
| 00:50:03.660 |
it's absurd to think that these, you know, patterns, these diagnostic patterns can fit
|
| 00:50:09.620 |
on us all in the way that they seem to attempt to do.
|
| 00:50:13.180 |
I just, it's a robbery.
|
| 00:50:15.540 |
People ought to just go back to themselves, you know.
|
| 00:50:18.660 |
No, I hear you there, but I'm just thinking of a certain kind of Americanism where
|
| 00:50:26.740 |
the failure of language to actually bring out the inner life of the mind that certain
|
| 00:50:36.620 |
characters have in fiction.
|
| 00:50:39.260 |
It seems recurrent enough that one could maybe talk about it as something that would separate
|
| 00:50:45.220 |
a certain strain of American fiction from, let's say, British fiction or French fiction.
|
| 00:50:51.700 |
You mentioned Freud, Marilyn, I'm curious about your relationship for it because you write
|
| 00:50:57.020 |
about him also quite often and he clearly has a theory of the psyche that you find fruitful
|
| 00:51:07.260 |
for some points of view, but at the same time you can't buy into it, holy.
|
| 00:51:15.380 |
I certainly can.
|
| 00:51:20.820 |
The essay that I wrote in, well, I think it's when I was a child.
|
| 00:51:25.100 |
No, no, it's in the one on the Terry Lectures when absence of mind.
|
| 00:51:32.020 |
What I did was look at what Freud was writing in a certain period and then look what books
|
| 00:51:37.420 |
were strongly present in the culture around him so that I was reading him as if he
|
| 00:51:44.460 |
were answering back two tendencies in the culture.
|
| 00:51:50.060 |
For example, over against the idea that Jews or that alien people of whatever stigmatized
|
| 00:51:58.340 |
sort in that period were the source of corruption and human experience.
|
| 00:52:03.340 |
He creates this narrative about birth and infancy and all these things by themselves being
|
| 00:52:09.380 |
this source of corruption.
|
| 00:52:12.500 |
He takes something that is an anxiety of the culture and he recasts it into another
|
| 00:52:17.220 |
kind of anthropology and effect that if he were taken seriously would take the aspirational
|
| 00:52:23.980 |
way from the checks or the gypsies or the Jews or whoever was being pilloried at the time
|
| 00:52:31.460 |
in public opinion.
|
| 00:52:35.060 |
I think that that was a heroic thing that he was putting his prestige to the best
|
| 00:52:41.220 |
work I think he could find for it but I don't think he was describing the human psyche.
|
| 00:52:46.860 |
You don't find that there's some thinking about original sin or there's some way in which
|
| 00:52:51.500 |
there's a Freudian version of original sin that has its own dynamic but there's a deep
|
| 00:53:00.580 |
sense of the fallenness of our condition and that the most we can do is arrive at a certain
|
| 00:53:06.620 |
level of discontent where we can get through the day.
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| 00:53:11.780 |
That's very heroic.
|
| 00:53:13.780 |
No, I respect Freud.
|
| 00:53:16.180 |
I just don't agree with anything you said.
|
| 00:53:20.340 |
Since we're jumping around from one to another Shakespeare it's been usually important
|
| 00:53:24.580 |
and when you read and re-reach Shakespeare what is it that maybe gives you a sense that
|
| 00:53:35.140 |
this person comes from another planet even though he's so deeply human.
|
| 00:53:40.180 |
I mean he's so brilliant.
|
| 00:53:43.180 |
I read him, I watched DVDs and all this sort of thing and then I'll be going about other
|
| 00:53:49.900 |
business and some praise will come to my mind and I think that's brilliant.
|
| 00:53:57.460 |
He had of course, he was working with a brand new language for all purposes.
|
| 00:54:03.980 |
He had of course pre-crisis and all that sort of thing but the sense of what you could do
|
| 00:54:08.380 |
with English at that point was obviously so wonderful and the way he moves back and forth
|
| 00:54:14.900 |
it's so fluently between learned language and vernacular and so on and it's beautiful.
|
| 00:54:22.020 |
I have the same feeling sometimes when I read Wallace Stevens that this is his beautiful
|
| 00:54:26.220 |
as language can be.
|
| 00:54:27.940 |
Is that right with Wallace Stevens?
|
| 00:54:29.380 |
Yes.
|
| 00:54:30.540 |
I get it sometimes with Poe and his pen.
|
| 00:54:33.460 |
Yes, exactly and that sort of that disciplining elegance that he achieves from time to time
|
| 00:54:39.860 |
in his language.
|
| 00:54:41.900 |
Well I know that English is like two and a half times larger than the second largest language
|
| 00:54:49.580 |
in the world and I don't know if it's Chinese or some other and that the ordinary English
|
| 00:54:56.340 |
speaker speaks with 5% of the language and maybe writes with 10.
|
| 00:55:00.940 |
If you're very learned academics like us you might use 15 maybe you as a novelist you
|
| 00:55:07.700 |
get 17% and Shakespeare who use the resources of English more than any other person according
|
| 00:55:17.020 |
to the OED use maybe 28 to 30% max which means that there's 70% of our language which
|
| 00:55:24.380 |
is lying dormant or in a state of potentiality remained to be activated and he did a lot
|
| 00:55:31.180 |
to expand and to render the romance languages part of the right into the English genome
|
| 00:55:45.100 |
as it were and render romance languages part of the fabric of our English language.
|
| 00:55:53.460 |
So he's done just for English and enormous amount but also in terms of our self understanding
|
| 00:56:01.820 |
ourselves and yet he himself the author remains totally opaque.
|
| 00:56:07.460 |
Yes, totally opaque.
|
| 00:56:09.260 |
If he'd explain himself I'm sure we wouldn't have understood so that's right.
|
| 00:56:14.700 |
But you know one of the things that's such a pleasure about writing is that you find out
|
| 00:56:20.460 |
that that dormant vocabulary is actually there waiting and you come to a place where
|
| 00:56:26.140 |
that you know there's a word that you absolutely need you know take a walk around the
|
| 00:56:30.340 |
block a pops up.
|
| 00:56:32.540 |
But does it pop up for you in your mind or do you actually go and look through the OED
|
| 00:56:37.540 |
I've tried to look through the OED and see all these words that I've never heard of before
|
| 00:56:42.580 |
and somehow they don't pop up in my mind.
|
| 00:56:46.140 |
Words pop up in my mind from time to time and I'm very gratified to realize that they're
|
| 00:56:50.340 |
there.
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| 00:56:51.340 |
Right.
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| 00:56:53.340 |
And do you feel completely immersed as a native English writer or a writer of English?
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| 00:57:01.220 |
I do.
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| 00:57:02.220 |
I do.
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| 00:57:03.220 |
There's no competing.
|
| 00:57:04.220 |
I read French to a certain extent and so on but it's certainly nothing that I have
|
| 00:57:10.020 |
in my fingertips.
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| 00:57:11.620 |
Right.
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| 00:57:13.660 |
Well of course French is very different because it has a much more restricted vocabulary
|
| 00:57:19.940 |
and lexicon and it's also extremely a language of great clarity and the resources for French
|
| 00:57:28.940 |
writer are much more limited of what can be said and I have French friends who claim
|
| 00:57:34.380 |
that that is a positive rather than a negative because English is so wide open and that
|
| 00:57:39.700 |
there's a wilderness there of options and choices and possibilities that it leads to
|
| 00:57:45.700 |
of course from the point of view of French classicism forms of anarchic literature like
|
| 00:57:51.220 |
Shakespeare.
|
| 00:57:52.220 |
But you know I'm told that a lot of young French writers want to write in English.
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| 00:57:56.420 |
Yeah.
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| 00:57:57.420 |
I can understand that.
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| 00:57:58.420 |
Yes.
|
| 00:57:59.420 |
I can understand.
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| 00:58:01.460 |
Well Marilyn I know that a lot of the listeners of this show are looking forward to reading
|
| 00:58:07.060 |
not only the givenness of things which is your new book that has just come out but
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| 00:58:10.580 |
also to a new novel of yours so whatever it takes to gather that solitude around you and
|
| 00:58:20.980 |
get into that frame of mind that will enable you to give life to characters as well as
|
| 00:58:28.740 |
to this kind of mental life that takes place inside the characters and to keep those metaphors
|
| 00:58:34.140 |
coming forth that that that end up collapsing on themselves.
|
| 00:58:37.380 |
You know a lot of people that will be grateful for that.
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| 00:58:40.500 |
Well thank you very much.
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| 00:58:41.900 |
I'll try to accommodate.
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| 00:58:44.900 |
Remind us that we've been speaking with the writer and essayist Marilyn Robinson.
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| 00:58:48.780 |
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
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| 00:58:51.060 |
Thanks for tuning in.
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| 00:58:52.060 |
We'll be with you next week.
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