On Being with Krista Tippett

I have rarely discovered a book that so delighted and galvanized me at once.

The sudden passionate happiness which the natural world can occasionally trigger in us, he writes, may well be the most serious business of all.

There is a legacy deep within us, a legacy of instinct, a legacy of inherited feelings, which may lie very deep in the tissues. It may lie underneath all the parts of civilization which we are so familiar with on a daily basis, but it has not gone. That we might have left the natural world, most of us, but the natural world has not left us.

the passionate happiness the natural world can trigger in us may be the most serious business of all

the subtitle of your book, The Moss Snowstorm is Nature and Joy

I can't tell you how much I love your book and I'm telling everyone about it. It's as marked up as any book I have ever read. Including the Bible.

I feel like right at the beginning of your book, The Moss Snowstorm, Nature and Joy, you, I mean this is a book about our bond with the natural world.

when I was a skinny kid in short pants, butterflies entered my soul.

The sudden passionate happiness which the natural world can occasionally trigger in us may well be the most serious business of all

the natural world is where we first found our metaphors and similes and it is the resting place for our psyches.

Here's a line from your book, Across That Bridge. The civil rights movement above all was a work of love. Yet even 50 years later it is rare to find anyone who would use the word love to describe what we did.

The civil rights movement above all was a work of love. Yet even 50 years later, it is rare to find anyone who would use the word love to describe what we did.

And I did, you know, but I, but I, it would be a lie to say it was easy.

And I do think that to think about it, well, we do have to acknowledge that the risk is real, but also acknowledge that the rewards are real, and that the rewards are significant.

That was actually 2009.

I feel like an unknown quantity, my cousin remarked at some point during the year that we lived together. This is your mixed race cousin. She was referring to the algebraic term, the unknown quantity x, which must be solved for or defined by the numbers in the equation around it.

And Ta-Nehisi Coates has written really beautifully about this.

I didn't tell him that slaves once accounted for more wealth than all the industry in this country combined or that slaves were as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, the down payment on this country's independence, or that freed slaves became after the Civil War, this country's second mortgage.

And another place that helped me understand what that price of the ticket really looked like was Noel Ignatiev's book, How the Irish Became White.

For centuries, the Western world read the Bible as a call to dominate the earth and subdue it.

The first chapter of Genesis is, as Ellen Davis puts it, a magisterially toned liturgical poem.

God blesses the man and woman created in God's image. And here's how the King James Version translated God's command to them. Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

The Hebrew word is a strong word and I render it exercise skilled mastery amongst the creatures because I think the notion of skilled mastery suggests something like a craft, an art of being human without taking away the fact that humans do from the perspective of almost all the biblical writers, not every single one but almost all, humans occupy a very special place of power and privilege and responsibility in the world.

I think that if one reads scripture carefully, one is continually challenged to rethink maybe everything that we take for granted.

I just thought you and I might for a few minutes indulge in a little agrarian reading of Genesis 1, and look at Genesis 1, look at Genesis 2.

I wrote a book called Hope in the Dark about hope where that darkness was the future you know that we the present then past our daylight then the future is night but in that darkness is a kind of mysterious erotic enveloping sense of possibility and communion you know love is made in the dark and often is not and then to recognize that on unknowability as fertile as rich as the womb rather than the tomb in some sense

I had written a book about hope which is about exactly that kind of public life and larger loves.

And we're going to talk about hope a lot.

I wrote a book called Hope in the Dark about hope where that darkness was the future...But in that darkness is a kind of mysterious erotic enveloping sense of possibility and communion.

We're putting out a new edition of Hope in the Dark and I listened to his interview and he talked about how much hope is grounded in memory.

And there's a wonderful passage that's in the new version of Hope in the Dark coming up and about how the Russian revolution succeeded but not really in Russia.

He's the author of the global bestseller, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. This tiny book, in my mind, is the science writing equivalent of moving from prose to poetry.

So I have to tell you, I read Seven Brief Lessons on Physics this past summer, and I just found it astonishingly beautiful.

here in the vanguard, beyond the borders of knowledge, science becomes even more beautiful, incandescent in the forge of nascent ideas of intuitions of attempts, of roads taken, then abandoned of enthusiasms, in the effort to imagine what has not yet been imagined.

Today I'm with the physicist Carlo Rovelli, who's written the slim, beautiful bestseller, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.

Today we're exploring how all of reality is interaction with theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. His global bestseller, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, was originally written as a series of articles for an Italian newspaper.

I read Seven Brief Lessons on Physics this past summer and I just found it astonishingly beautiful.

I think it's remarkable.

You took these vast ideas and you condensed them into very sparse, powerful words.

Now he has a new book called The Order of Time.

Her beloved novels include Caramello and the iconic The House on Mango Street.

She was the daughter of a reboso maker, a shawmaker. I borrowed that to create my character, the awful grandmother.

In some ways, I'm finding that we're similar because now I'm friends with the nuns. I like them because they're radical women and I have a convent. They always were. I didn't know that when I was a kid but now I'm friends with a convent that's half a block from my house.

But more than anything, she had such a pride in being who she was. And her husband was a San Antonio of Mexican descent. And this couple, their house became a cultural center. Anybody who wanted to come in and learn something, it was a very tiny little house next to the HEB grocery store. And everybody would come in. And they were just people of great spirit.

Sandra Cisneros' books include The House on Mango Street, Caramello and a memoir, A House of My Own.

So you wrote for the 25th anniversary edition, you wrote this house, A House of My Own essay, which appears in other places. But this is the kind of preface to the book.

I think a writer has to come into her voice. I think a woman has to come into her voice because everyone speaks for us.

And I just, well I had to make all those stupid mistakes otherwise I wouldn't be who I am now. But it breaks my heart when I look at her and I think how she was used and things that she allowed to happen to her.

Well, if you've had to share a house with eight other people who make a lot of noise and make a big mess, you want your own house. You don't want to share it and you don't want to clean someone else's mess. So you know, it's different if it's your mess.

And also, if you're a writer, you need silence and most people can't understand that. Like my brother will come to visit and say, why don't you turn the radio on or why isn't this on? Why don't you turn the television on? You know, that has its time and its place.

I think a writer has to come into her voice. I think a woman has to come into her voice because everyone speaks for us. And we lose our public voice, and sometimes we don't even have a genuine private voice.

And for me, when I was asked to write the introduction, I was studying that photograph. And I knew- And you were studying your younger self. Yeah, I said that's not who I am now. But that's who I was when I was working on these pieces.

The author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home and Absence of Mind, which is the book that we're going to focus on especially tonight.

In Absence of Mind, you're saying many things but I think to simplify one thing you're saying is that modern people don't understand how thrilling and rich science is now. And that culture has an antiquated view of science's place.