On Being with Krista Tippett

You had this epigraph from Thomas Merton to The Art of Memoir, which is just a very poetic way of saying, he said, 'every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person, a false self'

So when you say in The Art of Memoirs, in some ways writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist if it's done right. Is that what you're talking about? That hard place you have to go to?

every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person, a false self.

The loony bin is where I learned that as deep as a wound is, that's how deep the healing can be.

Actually the kind of subtitle is And Get Curious which was a graduation speech right? Graduation taken from his commencement address.

in this and Now Go Out There said the opposite of love is fear and you told these graduates that fear can take that expensively educated brain of yours and reduce it to the state of a dog growling over a bone.

But you did say ask yourself who's noticing how scared you are and that that's where your soul is and if you can get curious about it you get less scared which is.

And in this graduation speech which is now this book, Now Go Out There you wrote, 'The loony bin is where I learned that as deep as a wound is, that's how deep the healing can be.'

The opposite of love is fear.

ask yourself who's noticing how scared you are and that that's where your soul is.

And I heard your interview with Terry Gross and I was so intrigued as you talked about your religious life now. And then when I started rereading you and reading the art of memoir, reading, you know, some of your newer works and LIT, I just found myself tracing kind of, you know, spiritual life as it has unfolded.

I want to read this from St. Augustine's City of God, which you put at the at the top of the chapter of one of the chapters in LIT, which talks about where you're talking about becoming religious.

I'm going to read this. Late have I loved you, oh beauty, so ancient and so new. Late have I loved you, for behold, you were within me and I outside. And I sought you outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things which you have made. You were with me and I was not with you. I was kept from you by those things. Yet had they not been in you, they would not have been at all. You called and cried to me to break open my deafness, and you sent forth your beams and you shone upon me and chased away my blindness. You breathed fragrance upon me and I drew in my breath and now do pant for you.

give me chastity Lord but not yet.

Let me read this other poem from the same book, Every Riven Thing.

God goes, belonging to Every Riven Thing he's made, sing his being simply by being the thing it is. Stone and tree and sky, man who sees and sings and wonders why. God goes, belonging to Every Riven Thing he's made means a storm of peace. Think of the atoms inside the stone. Think of the man who sits alone, trying to will himself into a stillness where God goes, belonging to Every Riven Thing he's made. There is given one shade, shaped exactly to the thing itself. Under the tree, a darker tree. Under the man, the only man to see. God goes, belonging to Every Riven Thing. He's made the things that bring him near, made the mind that makes him go. Apart of what man knows, apart from what man knows, God goes belonging to Every Riven Thing he's made.

Incurable and unbelieving in any truth but the truth of grieving.

I saw a tree inside a tree rise kaleidoscopically as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.

I pressed my face as close to the pain as I could get to watch that fitful, fluent spirit that seemed a single being undefined or countless beings of one mind haul its strange cohesion beyond the limits of my vision over the house heavenwards.

Of course I knew those leaves were birds. Of course that old tree stood exactly as it had and would. But why should it seem fuller now?

And though a man's mind might endow even a tree with some excess of life to which a man seems witness, that life is not the life of men. And that is where the joy came in.

Darwin, as I explained in my book, Angels and Ages, is a hugely important figure to me.

"When it comes to the world around us," Lisa Randall has written, "is there any choice but to explore?"

"got to be good luck because he's so hard to see."

I think a lot about this great book by an anthropologist named Jean Briggs, who wrote a book called In a What Morality Play.

Her books include its complicated, the social lives of networked teens and Participatory Culture in a Networked Era.

Her books include its complicated, the social lives of networked teens and Participatory Culture in a Networked Era.

She chose a skirt and a tube top, but it was hard work making suggestions and not blatant declarations with her ever-changing Puerto Rican body.

she chose a skirt and a tube top. But it was hard work making suggestions and not blatant declarations with her ever-changing Puerto Rican body.

I've always fantasized about what life would be like when I got married and had kids. I imagine it would be beautiful. I imagine it would be just like it was in the movies. We'd fall hopelessly in love and our wedding picture would get in Jet magazine. We would have a house full of kids because I hated being an only child. I would be a model mother. We would have an occasional fight, when we would always make up and instead of drying up our love would grow, we would be 100% faithful to each other. People would enviously wish they had what we had and it asked us 40 years later how you managed to beat the odds and still be so happy. I was this stupid for a long time.

I've always fantasized about what life would be like when I got married and had kids. I imagine it would be beautiful. I imagine it would be just like it was in the movies. We'd fall hopelessly in love and our wedding picture would get in jet magazine.

Oh, remember that book? Yeah. Black Like Me.

He was a white man who died at the skin.

Yes, he was here and went through the south as a black man and wrote about it.

Oh, remember that book? Yeah. Black Like Me.

He was a white man who died his skin.

Yes, he was here and went through the south as a black man and wrote about it.