More Quotes

Yesterday I transcribed an interview with Salman Rushdie from the opening ceremonies of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (where I have my workstudy job). It reaffirmed my appreciation of Rushdie's genius, which I forget about sometimes because I get so annoyed with the way he courts celebrity. I also didn't appreciate Midnight's Children (the one book of his I have read) as much as I probably should have because of its seeming heartless tendency to throw over the fate of individuals for the sake of the narrative's impact. Nevertheless, he has an understanding of the imagination, and of the power of images and myths, that I can only admire.

This is from the interview:

"...And for me the great most useful thing has been the power of religion to create very strong metaphors and I’ve gone back often to what I call dead religions, what’s more commonly called mythology. But remember that the great Greek myths were once the religion of Greece and Roman mythology was once the religion of Rome and it had all the apparatus of priests and anathemas and so on to defend it. Now that it doesn’t have that we can simply look at it as text and of course you find in these stories astonishing amounts of meaning compressed into very, very small amounts of words.

17:10

When I was writing The Ground Beneath her Feet, for example, and I was studying the Orpheus myth--Now you can express, you could tell the whole story of Orpheus and Eurydice in less then 100 words it doesn’t really require more than 5 or 6, what, 10 sentences maybe…and yet the amount of complexity, you know, pushed into that very small story is almost inexhaustible. You have this very complex examination of the relationship between love, art, and death and you can turn it this way and that way. You can say that what this story tells us, shows us is the power of art inspired by love to overcome death. Or it can tell us--if you are feeling more pessimistic--it can show us the power of death to destroy love, even when guided by art.

18:17

There isn’t a single reading there are many readings and that’s something that living religions also have in common that there is not a single way of reading the text. There are very rich and complex ways of reading these texts. So if your in the text business, you're very interested to see how much power can be concentrated in how little in these ancient works. So its been very important for me to examine that."

I strongly recommend listening to the rest