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| |  Kate Grenville Interviewed by Ray Willbanks This interview was published in Australian Voices - Australian Writers and Their Work, by Ray Willbanks, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1991, ISBN 0292704291. It is about sixteen printed pages long. It is copyright and is used here with permission. Here is a live link to the University of Texas Press internet site. | |
| | Ray Willbanks: On finishing a degree at Sydney University, you lived five years in London and Paris. Afterwards you did something I find unusual; you went to the University of Colorado to study fiction writing. How did this come about? Kate Grenville: Like everything I do, it happened by accident. When I lived in Paris I met a lot of sophisticated, intellectual Americans who had a quality I liked - curiosity, interest about the world. They kept lending me books which I responded to very badly. They were innovative modern American novels by people like John Hawkes and Robert Coover, people I'd never heard of. And I thought, I want to go to the place where these extremely interesting people are coming from and where this extraordinarily challenging writing is coming from, where people are writing the way people speak without worrying too much about grammar. Because I had no money, one of the few ways I could go was as a student. So I applied for and got financial assistance from the University of Colorado. Then I found myself in the middle of the Rockies with the raccoons coming in my window, wondering what a nice girl from Sydney was doing there. How did taking the fiction-writing courses affect your work? I learned more in those two years than I probably would ever have learned on my own. It accelerated the process a hundredfold. I had no idea that you could approach the great classics in any other than the way that I had been taught to approach them, that is, as a critic. To approach Wordsworth and Shakespeare as a writer, rather than as a critic, was for me an amazing, liberating process. Writing is by nature linear. How do you get around that? To see Wordsworth trying a dozen ways to get around the problem of everything happening simultaneously was fantastic. Not only did I see that I could ransack the whole of English literature for things that I might be able to use, but that I could also enjoy the process as a reader. The other thing of value was being a graduate student with twenty other serious and knowledgeable graduate students who had all done a bit of writing but not a great deal. I had had no experience of that kind of group of peers unselfconsciously criticizing each other's works without it being personal, and within that very healthy context of a classroom. The only experience of feedback I'd had before was showing my work to friends or agents. If they said it was terrific, I didn't believe them; if they said it was terrible, I didn't believe them. Another thing was that the writing program at Colorado had several innovative writers in it and I was exposed to ideas that in my Australian Anglo-Saxon education I had never been exposed to. The idea of going to a poetry workshop the first week and, instead of being told about meter and rhyme, being invited to chant in order to free up the mind was a startling idea for someone who had gone through Sydney University. Working through the writing program was the best thing I ever did. | |
| | You wrote a collection of stories called Bearded Ladies. Were these stories written while you were in class or were they written in Europe? Most of them had been written in Europe. But what I did, under the impulse of the workshop, was to rewrite a lot of them. By the time I left Colorado the stories had the shape that they now have. Why the title Bearded Ladies? It cost me such agony, that title. I went through so many disastrous titles. I obviously wanted to get in the paradox of someone who is a woman and yet who doesn't fit the stereotype of a woman. A slightly freaky thing happened. I don't know if we have epiphanies, but I think this was one of those epiphanies that you hope will happen. I had always thought real writers had epiphanies all the time, so it was a great relief to finally have one. I had a deadline. I had been dithering around with the title and the publishers had said firmly, "At five o'clock this afternoon - and that's going to be it, whatever you've said, that's going to be it." I was walking home from work and my finger reached out to press the Walk button on the pedestrian thing and it was as if some electrical contact came to me in that moment through the stalk of the traffic light. I knew the title - Bearded Ladies, as if it were written in neon in the sky. Your form changes quite drastically from Bearded Ladies to Dreamhouse. What was going on with you? Did you write through something in that first book of stories? I think I wrote out a lot of great anger. That's not very hard to guess in Bearded Ladies. By the time I came to write Dreamhouse I could see that pointing the finger at the other, at men, was not quite enough to deal with that anger. I myself was happier when I was writing Dreamhouse, slightly happier, so I didn't quite have that fury, that rage that I had to express. The other thing was that I wrote Dreamhouse while I was at the University of Colorado. I was heavily under the influence of writers like Hawkes and Flannery O'Connor and I think that there is a lot of those writers in Dreamhouse, not that I would put myself in their category at all. I think I was still trying to find the voice that was my own fictional voice. I was still allowing myself to be influenced by others because I thought that was probably one of the things you did when you learned to write. How about Carson McCullers? The Ballad of the Sad Café, had you read that? I'm not sure, actually; I had certainly read A Member of the Wedding and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. The sexual ménage in The Ballad of the Sad Café is similar to what you create in Dreamhouse. I might easily have read it, though Carson McCullers is not someone that I've been particularly drawn to as a writer. The Hawkes books sort of follow that misalliance, too.  Dreamhouse is a very strange novel. What were you doing? Well, it began with a photograph that I had of a couple who spent all day saying to each other, "I love you, darling"; "Oh, yes, I love you, too, darling." But when they went to bed at night, they dreamed about killing each other, cutting each other in little bits with axes. That seemed to me to be a very fertile starting point with a lot of friction. But as I wrote, I realized I wanted to explore another idea, which was the idea of how we arrive at knowledge. In this situation you have two people who are misreading the signs. Instead of listening when the other person says, "I love you, darling," one ought to be listening to the other kind of information which that person is giving through behavior. I wanted to write a book that didn't explain anything. I wanted to write a book that was more like a film script. In a film script all one has to go on is what people do and say. And from that, one has to try to deduce correctly what is actually going on. And, of course, none of the people in that book did deduce correctly. They all got it wrong. That seemed to me like the human condition and worth exploring, that whole thing of not what we know, but how we know it or how we think we know it. And that's why the novel has that strange distance, a kind of non-analytical quality. It has surprised me that nobody has wanted to make the novel into a film. It was written almost with that in mind. Dreamhouse seems to me a bold novel for a beginning writer in that it has an unsympathetic narrator. In fact all the characters are pretty unsympathetic. Was this hard for you to do? Were you aware that you were setting up such a difficult way of engaging the reader? I suppose I wasn't experienced enough as a writer to know. No, that's not true because in Bearded Ladies I made sympathetic, very awful women. I look back now at the Bearded Ladies women; they don't deserve the kind treatment the author gave them, so I think perhaps in Dreamhouse I had worked that out in some unconscious way and wanted to come in a different way at those problems, not taking sides. The other thing was that, and I think I'm doing it with the book I'm writing now, I wanted to force myself as the writer and also the reader into the uncomfortable partnership of having to identify with the characters as one does in a novel, especially a first-person character, and yet knowing that the character or characters are not people one likes. That's a really interesting, uncomfortable stance for writing. I think it's interesting reading, although it is a bit of a strain for a reader. Why do you want to write in this way? One of the things writing is about is expanding one's own notion of what it is to be human and to explain or explore without judging. Then at some point one has to ask, "What do I do with these reprehensible people? Do I just consign them to the outer darkness, or do I somehow say they, too, are human?" So if I'm going to do anything useful here, I have to understand what it feels like to be their kind of human. If they are human beings, what do they feel like? That seems to be worth doing. With Dreamhouse I hadn't worked that out consciously. With the book I'm writing now, which is about a much worse character than any of those, I'm very conscious of wanting to say, "It's too easy to divide the world into the goodies and the baddies." The hard thing is to recognize that there is the "baddie" in all of us. There is also the other thing. There is some deep rapport with those unpleasant characters as well as a deep repugnance. And that keeps us turning the page? Well, I hope so, yes. Would you talk about the black humor in Dreamhouse, the bird imagery, the excrement imagery - what were you doing here? The use of this sort of thing is partly a hangover from Bearded Ladies. When I started writing I felt an incredible rage and frustration, not only with the world, but also with the books that had been written about the world, because they seemed to draw a veil over so much human experience, like the pissing and shitting part of human experience, the plumbing, the squalid physicality of it. Books recognized our spirituality but not the fact that we are also bodies and that those two things are connected, especially for women. Women are constantly being told that we are all goddesses. On the other hand, women are told that their bodies are revolting and a lot of things have to be done to them before they are acceptable. So for a woman, having a physical body, especially the unacceptable things that happen about it, is a really important political and philosophical thing, as well as just an accident of physicality. Part of the Dreamhouse stuff is a hangover from that. Also, I wanted to write very confronting fiction. I wanted to shock people, I suppose, which I did. I was angry that too much fiction was soothing and just entertaining. I certainly have always wanted to do more than entertain. All the animal imagery - I was terribly conscious of the snake, for example, what a corny Freudian image it was. But Freud wasn't wrong about a lot of things. | |
| | What about the bird in the refrigerator? Again, I suppose it was the idea of what's hidden beneath bland surfaces, which is what the book is about. There is the bland social surface, where people have refrigerators full of bottles of milk, and there is another reality when one opens the refrigerator and confronts dead birds. What is the significance of the dissertation the husband is writing concerning Malthus and "The Doctrine of Necessary Catastrophe"? I wanted to make the dissertation sound ludicrously pompous. I also wanted it to be a clue to what the book might be about, which was in a way tumbling toward catastrophe. I read about Malthus' belief that because of the way we kept populating, we were doomed to a cycle of famine which would reduce our numbers. This seemed to fit with the brutality of my book. And the character who's writing the dissertation can talk about catastrophe in a cool manner like that, as if it's not human beings that it's happening to. This sort of callousness that I always attributed to Malthus I wanted to give to my callous and self-obsessed character, Rennie. What about Louise, your female lead? Are we supposed to be sympathetic towards Louise when she returns to Viola, or is this just another dead end? I don't think I was really thinking about sympathy. I did want it to look as if for the first time she makes a choice of her own that has to do with her own destiny. So, I wanted it to be like a door that has opened. I actually wrote a long sequence that comes after that, where Viola and Louise have set up house in London. But it seemed to be much better, later, to leave it there where in fact she might not have ever gone back to Viola. But she had got herself out of that terrible death trap with Rennie and that was all that mattered, and if the mechanism for that was this probably equally doomed relationship with this peculiar woman, at least it was an escape. Why did Rennie suddenly flee from Daniel? Daniel makes sure that he and Rennie share a room. I imagined at some point in the night that Daniel makes an overt, physical pass at Rennie. Although Rennie likes to flirt at the idea of being seduced, and although it is wonderfully attractive to have somebody hovering over you in that seductive way, when it actually comes down to it, particularly since men are very ambivalent about their homosexual inclinations, because culturally it has that awful load which women's homosexuality doesn't have, women can be much more exploratory without it threatening our - whatever the equivalent of our manhood is - when it finally comes down to it, Rennie can't do it. So at some point in the night they have that confrontation and Rennie has to see, even with his blindness and self-delusion, that Daniel wants to screw him. Rennie leaves. He is a bit of a prick tease, really. You moved from a very passive female lead in Dreamhouse to a very aggressive female protagonist in Lilian's Story. How did this novel come about? After writing Dreamhouse I was sick of those characters. I loathed them so much and I was very sick of writing about people I hated. I had a great repugnance for all those people and for their passivity. I wanted to take them all out of the book one by one, grab them by the shoulders and shake them. So I thought, all right, next time I can allow myself a character that I really like, and I think also in the process of the evolution of my own thought I'd come around to thinking, well, okay, Bearded Ladies, that's all that anger; Dreamhouse is an exploration of suppressed/repressed passive resistance. So the next logical step is to have somebody who is fully her own person, what Louise might have conceivably become ten years down the track, a woman who is not a victim in any of those ways, although she had all the disadvantages that might make someone a victim. And for some reason, the image of a Sydney eccentric named Bea Miles came to my mind. I was still in America, but was about to come back to Sydney and I was obviously starting to think about Australia. I knew very little about Bea Miles, but I had seen photographs of this enormously fat, ugly woman radiating a sort of satisfaction with her life. She had made a life that she quite liked. And so I named her Lilian and started to write about her. It was time in my own life, as well as fictionally, to write about a woman who had come out from under the shadow of all that oppression and dishonesty. Would you call Lilian a grotesque in the sense that Flannery O'Connor or Elizabeth Jolley create characters who are grotesques? I think the characters in Dreamhouse are grotesques in that way, but I think Lilian is right on the edge, if I'm right about it, because the reader is forced into a very close rapport with her and he has to submerge into her way of seeing the world. I think it would seem part of the nature of the grotesque that the reader has a bit of distance. Although that's not entirely true, because you think of that wonderful novel of O'Connor's where you actually live with Hazel Moats. I'm thinking of the word "grotesque" in terms of being over-sized, overly emotional, larger than life. Perhaps Lilian has two identities, in fact. Perhaps she has the identity that she projects, which is deliberately a bit larger than life, especially in her maturity, when she is almost self-consciously parodying herself; she's playing up to the role she has written herself. Then there is the other person within that act, who is just an ordinary size person, who doesn't want to die and who misses out on things. Did you ever meet Lilian? I saw her from a distance when I was a student a few times, but I never met her. The style in Lilian's Story is radically different from that in Dreamhouse. Lilian's Story is a series of snapshots tightly organized and named, or would you describe the style another way? No, that's a very good image. I've never read a novel structured in quite the same way. The stories are very tight and they move forward in a smart cadence. How did you arrive at this narrative method? Partly it was a revulsion against Dreamhouse because I had worked from notes. I had a great stack of notes, because I had been told it was good to keep a notebook. So I had a sense of methodically working through. I got very worried in Dreamhouse about things like motivation and what the book was about and what was going to happen, the big picture. With Lilian I thought, look, let's do it another way. This was one of the many things I learned in the writing program. I wrote Dreamhouse while I was studying; Lilian's Story is the flowering of everything I learned. One of the things I had learned was not to worry too early about what the book is about, or where it's going, or what it means, or why people are doing things. Just get them to do it and worry about those things later, that was one thing. The other thing which was a result of being a student was that I re-read Moby-Dick. I think that is the model for the structure of Lilian's Story. My snapshots are very much shorter than Melville's, but it has that same idea, that a book does not have to progress along a line like a string of beads, because life doesn't actually progress like that. At least our grasping of life works in vignettes, more like a film. I was also allowing myself to use the bit of film background that I had, because film doesn't have to show people coming in the door, opening the door, closing the door, walking through the room, sitting down. You just cut from one thing to the other. And because of film, people are used to that grammar, so you can now use it in books. I don't think it was terribly original. In the beginning I thought all those short bits would be a first draft; then I tried to combine them into a seamless narrative, because I sort of still thought that's really how a novel should look. You had big chunks of narrative. And when I did that, something very peculiar happened; it was the same material but the whole thing went flat like a souffle' you take out of the oven too soon. It just died when I tried to string it all together into a conventional narrative, so I hastily cut it up again and put the title on each section. And that seemed to be the right form for that content. For the first time, I allowed myself to be led by the material rather than the other way around. One thing that is dazzling to me is the number of facts that Lilian's father, Albion, quotes. How did you collect all those facts? Actually, I made most of them up. The new novel I'm working on has Albion as the main character, and now that I'm writing his book I'm actually trying to find some real facts. I've gotten some wonderful ones today about how many square yards of skin the human body is covered with. How much the average liver weighs. But I think I made most of the ones up in Lilian's Story. Albion has an incestuous relationship with his daughter, so we think. Are you doing here, as well as elsewhere, an England/ Australia parallel? You bet. I think the British shadow lies over Australia and has since the beginning. It's a powerful thing that an Australian artist has to come to terms with. It's also a very powerful image for other kinds of colonial oppression. Obviously the male/female colonial analogy is another version of the same thing. That's why when it occurred to me to call the father Albion, it seemed like a neat sort of parallel. I suppose most cultures have some version of an Albion figure that they have to come to terms with. I was interested in both of them, the British oppression, and my oppression as an Australian woman writer. You have Lilian say, "Books should have toilets in them." What does Lilian mean? It's what I was saying earlier. I think that if you are hiding, if you are drawing a veil over some part of your human experiences then that infects the other part of your human experience. If you are being dishonest about one thing in your life, you can't possibly be honest about everything else. It's very contagious. So if you want to try to be honest or honestly exploratory about what I think of as the big issues, with capital letters, of Good and Evil, what it means to be human, what it ought to mean in moral terms, what we ought to be trying to do, then you have to clear away that undergrowth, those great shreds of concealment that we hang over so much of our existence. It's only when you come to terms with physical grossness that you can move on to the spiritual. I suppose it's a bit like the Catholic paradox, where you mortify the flesh in order to transcend it, so you notice the body a lot more and in some paradoxical way that enables you to transcend and to think about the nonphysical. Are you as an individual transcending through the writing? Or is the reader to transcend through the reading? As a writer, I often feel that it's not that different from being a reader. I write the thing with the same sense of discovery as I hope the reader reads it. In a way, I feel we're all in there together, being explorers. And certainly I think there's not much point in writing books that are just entertainment. Not that I want to be some didactic moral preacher because I don't know what I'd preach, but I think the thing about trying to make everybody, including myself, keep on thinking about human dilemmas, insolvable though they are, is one of the things that, if there is any point in writing, seems to be one of the points. The women in your fiction which you persuade the reader to dislike are passive, are pawns of men, conventional; those you like, such as Lilian; Lilian's friend, Joan; the pipe-smoking Miss Gash; all the Joans in your recent novel, are unconventional. What does this consistency of characterization say about Kate Grenville? I think it reveals a profound longing to be less conventional than I think I am and a profound longing to be braver and bolder and more independent than I really am. It is an extended wish fulfilment, I think. I have just enough of those qualities in me to wish I had a lot more. It's a very great pleasure to write about those women and to imagine myself for a moment in their enormous skins and walk around with their confidence. With Lilian's Story, you won the ten-thousand-dollar Vogel/Australian Award. Did this convince you of your arrival as a writer? It could not have come at a better time. I had just written a book which was absolutely my own book written without influence. I didn't think anyone would even publish it and here judges were saying, yes, this is the book that has come straight out of your sensibility and we like it enough to give it a big prize. This was fantastic, because if one of the others had won, I would have thought I should have continued doing the same sort of thing. The prize also came at just the right time in my career; I had written two books. I had decided that a writer was what I wanted to be. It was terrific, although a bit of a shock, to be asked in the first interview to explain what I was doing. It was quite a challenge, but a good one. So you had a new way of looking at yourself? It made me very self-conscious. I had a hard time getting going writing again after that without sort of imagining the questions I would be asked. Your most recent novel is Joan Makes History, commissioned by the Bicentennial Commission. What was your concern in this novel? The hidden underbelly of Australian history, that is the underbelly that consists of half of the human race that was here, the women, and their experience which has not made it into any of the Australian history books. That, at least, was the initial impulse. I wanted to put the women in, and I also wanted to explore the whole notion of what history is and what it ought to be and what we ought to do with it. Is it more than facts and dates, and ought historians to take a moral stance, as some of them do? What use is history? Is it just to tell us what happened? or should it tell us something about what we should be doing today? So the novel expanded from that initial desire to have a bit of a poke at men to trying to engage with fairly serious ideas about history. Are you playing off all of the various Joans that you set up from chapter to chapter, which are a kind of expanded allegorical type, against the one Joan that we follow through a lifetime? Or are you making some statement against public history and private history, or stereotypical history and individual history? Yes, all of the above. And the other thing I was trying to say was that history is not something that happens to other people. The Joan that we follow consistently throughout the book is also the same person as all the Joans that were born in 1700. In other words, history is what makes all of us what we are. We can't say that it happened to other people in another place. We have to acknowledge that history is our history, even if it's not our personal history. It's what makes us what we are. I think the novel isn't technically a huge success. But I wanted somehow to say simultaneously that Joan is a woman in the middle twentieth century and she is also simultaneously all these historical women in a sort of Everywoman way. You bring a character over from one work to another. The central Joan in Joan Makes History is the same Joan from Lilian's Story. Would you comment on this moving of character from work to work? Partly it's my self-esteem, the desire to recycle when I've got something good, to recycle it endlessly. But more than that, again when I was in America, I read most of Faulkner's "Yoknapatawpha" series. Reading him for the first time as one who was trying to write, I was struck with what a terrific freedom it is not to be bound by a novel, but to expand, and if you believe as I do, that there isn't any such thing as objective reality or only one interpretation, then to have a series of novels that circle around the same set of incidents is probably the ideal way to get closest to the actual truth of the matter. It is like one's having to read a dozen newspapers to get any version of the truth. I enjoy doing that leaping from head to head, and I think within the confines of a single novel it's pretty hard to do that. You want the reader to be completely seduced by each version as it happens, then right at the end perhaps to be able to say, well, I was seduced in turn by each of those realities, so what does that mean? At one point Lilian yells on the street, "Do not worry about getting old gracefully, girlie; be foolish and loud if you feel like it." Joan certainly follows that advice, but by the end of the novel, after changing in appearance into a man and then back to a woman and mother, Joan moves into contentment, being a wiser but ordinary woman. Is this a kind of rite of passage, perhaps a feminist's rite of passage? You've picked up what a lot of feminists haven't. I've had flak from feminist critics in this country who think I've betrayed the cause by making Joan in the end a mere housewife. But one of the things I wanted to say was that the reason why women have been written out of history is that certain things have been defined as important and worth doing and other things have been defined as being unimportant and not worth doing. It just happens that the things that women usually and have always done, and a lot of us want to keep doing, like having babies and so on, have been relegated to the not important part. What I wanted to say was that too is glory, and that too is achievement, and that too is history. So, you don't have to become the Prime Minister to make history. You can make history just as much by being a good human being, by doing terribly humble things like washing the socks and bringing up the children. You can make history as do a lot of men, by doing meaningless jobs that are never going to make them famous. That's a version of history, too. That's a very Zen idea, isn't it? Chop wood, carry water? Well, it's an idea that I suppose is a logical extension of a lot of philosophies. History has changed. Social historians look at what ordinary people were doing as opposed to the sort of "great man" theory of history. So it's a sort of inevitable evolution in thinking, I suppose, and it seems to me much more useful since most of us are going to lead pretty ordinary lives and much more hopeful in a way because it says that the destiny of humanity may not be carried by one or two people, who carry a torch on behalf of all of us. We're all doing it. We all have a tiny input. That's pretty idealistic but it seems to me not a bad image. You are writing about a gender rite of passage and at the same time it has to be an individual rite of passage, where each person goes through the stages of consciousness. Perhaps one ends up where he started, but at the same time the journey is part of that wholeness that has always been there but has to be returned to. And that's what I see you doing in Joan's history. Yes. You do have to acknowledge all of the alternatives. I think you're right; you do have to take that big trip through all the things you could have done, all the paths not taken, before you realize that actually the path that you are on is okay. But it is only okay if you acknowledge the other paths. Exactly, if you have an awareness that the other paths are there. The novel ends with a kind of Eastern mysticism, the many and one, each and all are important, the unimportance of the individual ego. You create a holographic paradigm with Joan's realization, "I'm the entire history of the globe walking down the street." Is this how you see it? I suppose so; it is deliberately overly grandiose because I want it to be a bit funny and to be slightly self-mocking as well as what I really believe. I suppose it is possible to consider those things at once. But while I came to history rather skeptically when I started writing Joan Makes History, the more history I read, the more convinced I was that the one subject that ought to be compulsory at school is history. It does tell us what it has meant to be a human being, and there can't be any thing more important than that, how communities of people have tried living together. We ought to be able to get clues from some of the things that have gone before. The other thing is that awful individual search for fulfilment which is incredibly destructive. Most of the worst things that have happened in our culture have come out of that belief in the individual's right to grab for self-fulfilment at any cost. I would once have defended this. Since becoming a mother I've had no question about feeling myself connected. Suddenly you're connected back with all those people. And forward. And you become very insignificant. That's probably a healthy thing, given the fact that most people have plenty of ego and feel that they are the center of the universe. It's almost a koan. In fact, I wrote out what I was thinking when I finished reading your book, which was that another way of perceiving this is to say that the ego is a lie, and if the ego is a lie, then history is a lie. The phrase that Joan often repeats, "I am to be a woman of destiny," must be seen as self-delusion. It's self-delusion in the way she means in the beginning, but by the time she gets to the end of the book, she realizes that it means something different. It depends on how you look at it, or the position on the path from which you're looking. Implicit in Lilian's Story and Joan Makes History is the notion of parallel universes. In your interview with Candida Baker you say about your writing, "I'm always conscious that I'm choosing one version from an infinite number and any version can be just as convincing as another." Is this the way you feel about yourself or all "selves"? Yes, I think we are absolutely contingent; some of us are more chameleon than others. We are only a sum of the information and data that is coming to us. People can be blamed for not searching out better data, better information, and I suppose that is what I'm trying to say in the book: "Look, it isn't just one line of information, there is this whole spray and it's all rough in a way." It's like we're vessels filling up with stuff; it just depends what gets poured in. And one of the things books can do is to pour in another set of stuff and if it's done sneakily enough, it might even be stuff that would be normally rejected by the filter system. But if you can sneak it in past the filter, you can actually get another kind of input in there which will then affect the mixing in the vessel. The current theory in physics of parallel universes is that all one's choices are happening simultaneously, that one is living them out. Whatever "yes" you've said is going on at the same time with whatever "no" you've said. You are simply in tune with only one choice at a time, but they're all going on. All the choices and all the decisions of everyone are going on on various planes. Intuitively, I think that's how we feel. At the end of Lilian's Story, Lilian tells her taxi driver, "Drive on, George, I'm ready for whatever comes next." Do you feel this positive? That's a hard question to answer. I do feel fairly confident, except that I am conscious that I'm very weak and easily seduced by the alternative, by laziness and taking the easy way. That makes me feel not positive, but I have a lot to be positive about; I've been extremely fortunate in my life and my work. In a way, I suppose that should make me feel less than optimistic in the sense that it's time for the pendulum to swing the other way. Gee, I hope that doesn't happen. It won't happen; you won't make that choice in this parallel universe. Right. I won't. | |
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