How does your approach to writing fiction and non-fiction vary?I write non-fiction quicker and I write it on a computer. Fiction I write longhand and that helps make it clear that it comes from a slightly different part of the brain, I think. The other distinction is that with non-fiction I’m constantly editing as I go along and with fiction I don’t. If you engage the critical part of you it makes it much harder and actually you just need to get through a first draft.
Do you keep set hours?
No. Just try to get the writing done first in the morning. I don’t answer the phone or do my email; I don’t do anything until I’ve got the day’s writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction and journalism is 1,500. That’s a level I can sustain.
If you don’t hit your word count, will you be in a bad mood?
I never fail to hit the target. Next stop: abyss. If I’ve missed the target one day, why ever again? I admit it’s not an entirely sane way of looking at it, but that’s how I feel.
Every historical period has its own presiding powers and principalities on high. Ours, for what it is worth, seem to want to make us happy, even if only in an inert sort of way. Every age passes away in time, moreover, and late modernity is only an epoch. This being so, one should never doubt the uncanny force of what Freud called die Wiederkehr des Verdrängten—“the return of the repressed.” Dominant ideologies wither away, metaphysical myths exhaust their power to hold sway over cultural imaginations, material and spiritual conditions change inexorably and irreversibly. The human longing for God, however, persists from age to age. A particular cultural dispensation may succeed for a time in lulling the soul into a forgetful sleep, but the soul will still continue to hear that timeless call that comes at once from within and from beyond all things, even if for now it seems like only a voice heard in a dream. And, sooner or later, the sleeper will awaken.
I have to admit that I have never been an admirer of Jung’s writings, even on those rare occasions when I have fleetingly spied what looked like a glimmer of insight among their caliginous fogs. The Red Book, however, makes his other works seem quite tolerable by comparison. It is an essentially silly exercise—sub-Nietzschean, sub-Blakean, sub-Swedenborgian—full of the kinds of garish symbolism and pompous antinomianism one expects from more adolescent minds. To anyone seeking fantastic journeys through strange oneiric realms, I would much more readily recommend Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which are far better written, far better illustrated, and far more profound (Humpty Dumpty’s discourse on the meanings of words puts all of Philemon’s drearily portentous maunderings to shame). The Red Book is fascinating not in itself, but as an extraordinary symptom of a uniquely late-modern spiritual paradox, which I can only call the desire for transcendence without transcendence.
Plenty of adults say racist things, revert into ungrateful brats during the holidays, and demonstrate a tenuous grasp on world history. And yet these public shaming exercises tend to focus exclusively on teenagers. That’s partly because we see teenagers as redeemable, and adults as beyond help—Jezebel undertook its expose in the hopes that school administrators would “teach” the teens “about racial sensitivity.” But we also criticize teens because we feel that we can control them, either by sending them to the principal’s office or just asserting our generational superiority over them. As one BuzzFeed commenter wrote, “Thank you Generation Y for making me grateful I have dogs and not an ungrateful brat!” When adults shame teenagers on the Internet, we feel like we can separate ourselves from American racism and consumerism by pinning the problem on this new, amoral generation. We all got out fine, but these kids? Worse than dogs.This impulse to mock and distrust teenagers is so strong that some journalists don’t even bother to investigate whether their assumptions are correct before forever branding teens as spoiled jerks. And so adults have reflexively shamed an “ungrateful brat” who actually shares our distaste for ungrateful brats. A couple of days ago, I alerted BuzzFeed to the full context of their “ungrateful” teen’s comments, but her joke still tops the list. Meanwhile, adults are still using the story as a roadmap for locating teenagers’ social media accounts, then calling them whores and sluts who deserve to die. Who should really be ashamed?
Chameau pâturant dans la plaine de Dzoungarie (près d’Ouroumchi), au pied Nord des Tian Shan - ici les glaciers du Bogda Shan (5545m). août 1986.
I do think it’s a cultural catharsis, and it’s a cinematic catharsis. Even — it can even be good for the soul, actually. I mean, not to sound like a brute, but one of the things though that I actually think can be a drag for a whole lot of people about watching a movie about, either dealing with slavery or dealing with the Holocaust, is just, it’s just going to be pain, pain and more pain. And at some point, all those Holocaust TV movies — it’s like, ‘God, I just can’t watch another one of these.’ But to actually take an action story and put it in that kind of backdrop where slavery or the pain of World War II is the backdrop of an exciting adventure story — that can be something else. And then in my adventure story, I can have the people who are historically portrayed as the victims be the victors and the avengers.
If you’re so used to evolution that you fail to see how weird it is, you’ll be in a poor position to explain why it isn’t as crazy as it at first sounds. Better to say, “Yes, evolution is crazy, but there’s overwhelming evidence that it is, indeed, the mechanism underlying the emergence of life in all its glory.” (And you should also admit that, although we have mountains of evidence that evolution is the mechanism, we are very far from understanding how exactly it does it, just as we’re sure the brain underlies our thoughts but do not comprehend how the brain works….The fact that evolution wins the prize for “non-obviousishness” should already begin to change one’s view about the supposed close-mindedness of evolution’s skeptics. Evolution is extraordinary, and extraordinary theories take extraordinary evidence. Extraordinary evidence indeed exists, but you can’t communicate the evidence in a simple one-liner. (Much less in a one-liner addressing the other as a “close-minded sap”.)
Less is not necessarily more. Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. “Just enough is more.”
There is inevitably something absurd about our priesthood, because what we stand for is so infinitely greater than our poor little selves. But there’s the same absurdity, really, about being a Christian at all. None of us can be let off being Christ in our place and our station: we are all pygmies in giants’ armor. We have to put up with it: it’s the price (how small a price!) paid for the supreme mercy of God, that he does not wait for our dignity or our perfection, but just puts himself there in our midst; in this bread and this wine: in the priest: in this Christian man, woman, or child.He who gave himself to us as an infant, crying in a cot, he who was hung up naked on the wood, does not stand on his own dignity. If Jesus is willing to be in us, and to let us show him to the world, it’s a small thing that we should endure being fools for Christ’s sake, and be shown up by the part we have to play. We must put up with such humiliation of ourselves — or better still, forget ourselves altogether. For God is here: let us adore him.
The point here is not to suggest that the NRA and its allies are a threat to American democracy itself. Rather, it’s that they’re a threat to the quality of our democracy. Democratic theorists tend to see open, rational public deliberation as a key element of a successful democratic order: it helps citizens make honest and informed choices about which policies and politicians are worth supporting, about which values they want to shape the system that’s supposed to represent them. The move to cast every gun regulation as a threat to the Second Amendment is opposed to that democratic debate. It’s a stalking horse for the specter of tyranny, a fantastical conversation-ender rather than a point of view worth taking seriously.