Tell me about participating in your church through streaming. You know, there’s a good choir; there’s a good sermon. The environment is familiar and reassuring. But there’s something about actually going to a church, the bother involved, that by itself is a huge concession that you make to the meaningfulness of what will happen there. It’s a very modest discipline, really. It’s too easy to see the service on my computer.
You’re 80? I’m 80. The clock is ticking.
Has what you get out of church changed as you’ve gotten older? People often comment that a lot of older people are in congregations, and I think it’s just partly a fact that the mysteries of existence compound themselves. You always have another question.
You mean you’re not getting closer to answers?! [Laughs.] No.
That’s what I’m banking on! No, my answer is that questions are beautiful. You just think more about life, the brevity of it, the complexity of it, the incredible richness that enters into it accidentally or intentionally. There’s something about youth that is wonderful: You really do think you’re immortal. Then you find out that there is a shelf life. The date approaches. That shapes your conception of life. It gives it a dramatic arc that is hard to anticipate so long as your body is not telling you that this is true.
Can you tell me more about that arc? One thing I think about is what have you done that actually outlives you? One of the things that you could do would be to enable other people. That’s probably the immortality that anyone can hope for. Also, frankly, sometimes I think about what I’ve missed. I’m a very reclusive person by temperament and choice, but there are lots of interesting people I could have known.
People you actually had the opportunity to have known? Or are you talking in a more abstract sense? I’m talking quite specifically.about:
Can you tell me — No. I won’t tell you. I will not name names.about:blank
Do you think of your novels as something that might enable their readers? I hope so. I think that my career has been against the grain. I have not chosen subjects or styles or anything that are characteristic of my generation of writers, and whatever else that does, it makes the point that you don’t have to go with the grain. People are much freer than they imagine. They will find much more latitude if they just use it. Talking to young writers, often they would come to the workshop2
2
In 2016, Robinson retired after 25 years of teaching creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she remains a professor emeritus.with the idea that you have to learn one specific style or subject. For them to develop as a writer, what they have to realize is that they have a perspective that is theirs and need not be in some coercive relationship with what they take to be cultural expectations.
I don’t mean to — well, no, I do mean to challenge you a little. Have at it.
The idea that we’re freer than we’re led to believe — I’m thinking of that in the light of much more scrutiny about the choices artists make and what they represent and the language they use and their stance toward their subjects. You think we have more leeway than we might believe? A lot of freedom is curtailed by people assuming that their freedom is curtailed. I hear people saying: “I wouldn’t dare say that. Someone might object.” That’s how tyrannies operate. Artists and writers have, during my whole life, presented themselves as if they were flying in the face of bourgeois expectation. That’s the black turtleneck of the whole thing. And here they are, perhaps flying in the face of somebody’s expectations, and they act as if they have to be intimidated by that, as if they have to mold their behavior around it. If, for the first time in my life, it’s actually true that there is some risk involved in being contrarian, well, take the risk! That’s the point!
It does require a degree of courage. So? Who decided we shouldn’t have courage? That kind of appalls me to think that people need not expect that of themselves.
You referred to moral deficits in the country. At the same time, in our day-to-day lives, we encounter so much goodness. Why does that seem absent from how we think about our social life together? That’s a very profound question. I worry about the country at the same time that I’m aware, day to day, of how much I have benefited from kindness and honesty and consideration. You so rarely have a really bad experience, and you hope other people have a good experience of you, but some idea has swept the country that to say that people are good is naïve. It’s as if we’re all supposed to be cynical, even though, as you say, many of us have excellent grounds not to be cynical at all. It’s a mannerism; it’s a pose. It’s perhaps more characteristic of privileged people than of people who really might wonder about justice and mercy. It’s terrible to say that a great civilization could collapse from the force of a fad, but sometimes I feel as if that’s what’s happening.
That cynicism is not totally unfounded. The distinction has to be made between skepticism and cynicism. Cynicism is a dead end. Skepticism is always justified.
I know that during Obama’s presidency, you became friendly acquaintances with him and discussed some of these issues.3
3
In a lengthy interview, for example, that Obama conducted with Robinson for The New York Review of Books in 2015.Have you continued that discussion with him since he left office? No, I haven’t, and it’s my fault. That’s one of those things I regret. For years, I wrote letters to him quite consistently, and he wrote back to me, and it was wonderful. I don’t know what it is. I stopped writing the letters. I apologize to him a million times over. He’s done me every kindness that he could possibly do.
What might you put in a letter to him today? “Say something to cheer me up.” He has this wonderful optimism about the American people. We’ve had years of bad experiences, and I would like to know what he sees now. I know he would say that the people ultimately are wise, that the people ultimately are good.
Obama has been making podcasts and films.4
4
Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground production company has produced films like the apocalyptic thriller “Leave the World Behind” and the biopic “Rustin,” as well as podcasts like “The Michelle Obama Podcast” and “Renegades: Born in the U.S.A.,” which was hosted by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen.I wonder if that says something about America and aspirations. This man who has exceedingly rare political gifts and exceedingly rare symbolic power — even this guy wanted to go to Hollywood and make content. I find that a little dispiriting. Well, I think that’s partly why I didn’t know how to speak to him anymore. It was like he chose to step into another kind of life that’s very remote to mine. Myself, I like books. But probably film is the quintessential art of this period of time, and I don’t want to be dismissive about it. It’s just not my world.
What’s the last movie you saw? Gee, I don’t know. Oh, ha! I tried to watch “Barbie,” but it stopped in the middle. I didn’t deal with the problem.
What did you think of the parts you saw? It was not addressed to me, let’s say that. If pink by itself is a toxin, I think that was the effect that it had on me.
I mentioned your age earlier. Do you find yourself thinking about heaven more as you get older? Well, I belong to a particular branch of Protestantism5
5
Robinson is strongly influenced by Calvinism.that sort of discourages reflections on heaven in the sense that we can’t know what it is and we can’t know on what grounds we might or might not end up there. I find that very satisfying. What it does is entirely refocus attention to the world. When I die, I expect to be very impressed with what follows.
Are there still fundamental theological questions that you have? Or maybe more simply, what doubt do you have? My theological question is how to reconcile the cruelty of the world with the idea of God’s omnipotence, and I simply assume that’s something I will not understand in this life.
Hearing you say that — I’m embarrassing myself, but it’s going to compel a confession from me. One real motivation for why I wanted to talk to you is that there are experiences of transcendence that you write about in your books that connect people to God or the divine. I feel as if I have transcendent experiences: being on my train ride into Midtown Manhattan and seeing an egret6
6
I’m guessing that’s what it was. I don’t know anything about birds.in the water of industrial New Jersey; listening to a song and being blown away that people can create that beauty;7
7
I was specifically thinking of “On the Nickel,” by Tom Waits.experiencing the goodness of my family — any number of things. And I was raised with some religious instruction: I had a bar mitzvah; half of my family is Catholic.8
8
My father converted to Judaism, if you’re wondering.But for whatever reason, my heart cannot osmosize religious feeling. What am I missing? Maybe nothing. Perhaps when you say the word “God” for yourself, the conception that you have is something that’s foreign to your own higher experience. So trust your experience. There’s a holiness in the fact that people are living in the world in a way that makes them feel that the world is addressed to them, and I think that’s much closer to the divine, much closer to religion, than the idea of trying to bring the idea of God, which has been abused historically, into the frame that your expectations may create for that figure.
Well, there’s a couple of lines from your novel “Gilead”9
9
An epistolary novel written from the perspective of a preacher named John Ames. Published in 2004, it’s my favorite of Robinson’s four novels set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa. The others are “Home” (2008), “Lila” (2014) and “Jack.”that, if people were to take them seriously, would go a long way toward what you’re talking about: “Wherever you turn your eyes, the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only who could have the courage to see it?” How might people find that courage? I wish that people would do things of beauty and benevolence. When I was teaching at the workshop, we would get a good variety of students, a lot of whom came from difficult backgrounds. And in order to make it through all the hurdles to graduate school, they were probably assisted by individuals or by mechanisms at various points, and then they come and they’re brilliant. I hate to use economic language, but in a sense, we’re creating value for the culture in other human beings — in the degree that we’re generous toward them, in the degree that we are made hopeful by their gifts, to the extent that we step out of these stupid competitive models that we set for ourselves and realize that our well being is something that is achieved collectively by encouraging other people to do beautiful things. Not putting them in situations of grinding lack and resentment that then becomes the argument against the social order and against democracy.
I realize I’ve been talking to you as if you’re the Oracle from “The Matrix.”10
10
The Oracle, originally played by Gloria Foster, was a kindly older woman who helped Keanu Reeves’s Neo navigate some riddles of his existence.I wonder if I can ask you something a little earthier. What do you do that’s bad? Do you steal ketchup packets? How do you get into trouble? It’s not a fair question, because I don’t like ketchup! To get into trouble? I procrastinate like crazy. Almost in proportion to the seriousness of the demand that is being made of me. This is a terrible thing. I hate to think what all I might have neglected in the course of my life. I live by myself surrounded by books, and I don’t even have a cat anymore. So there’s very little harm I can do. In other words, I consider myself to be untested in many ways. Fine by me. That’s a pleasant life.
I have no remotely smooth segue to the next question: I have a theory about the lapsing of your relationship with Obama. You said that you felt as though you didn’t know how to speak to him anymore. It suggested to me that you saw him as a kind of avatar of American democracy. Then when he left office and was in the world of multimillion-dollar book deals11
11
In a package deal, Penguin Random House was reported to have acquired the rights to memoirs by Barack and Michelle Obama for $65 million.and Hollywood deals, that wasn’t something that you could connect with symbolically, and that’s why you felt like you couldn’t talk to him. Does that seem plausible as a theory of a relationship between two people I know nothing about? I think it’s pretty descriptive actually. My admiration for him is very great, and I’m sure that he’s doing things of real value. And my not finding an imaginative way into that — it’s certainly no less-than-positive judgment. I think he has stepped back because he does not want to be seen as a competitor with President Biden. Because Obama’s signature quality was youth, and Biden’s is age. Frankly, I’m less than a year younger than Joe Biden, so I believe utterly in his competence, his brilliance, his worldview. I really do. You have to live to be 80 to find this out: Anybody under 50 feels they’re in a position to condescend to you. You get boxed into this position where people who deal with you are making assumptions about your intellect. It’s very disturbing. Most people my age are just fine. What can I say? It’s a kind of good fortune that America is categorically incapable of accepting: that someone with a strong institutional memory, who knows how things are supposed to work, who was habituated to their appropriate functioning is president. I consider him a gift of God. All 81 years of him.
I think you should write a letter to Obama tomorrow. I should. I should. He’s gone gray, you know.
Don’t condescend. I don’t think I’ve ever been guilty of that where he was concerned.
Can you leave me with a line of scripture? God is faithful.12
12
From Corinthians 1:10 in the King James Bible: “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” That’s my favorite.