These little interview snips are quite possibly corny and very probably meaningless. I found them entertaining to think about.
It’s a Robert Stone (RS) interview (Apr 20, 2009) in Identity Theory. The interviewer is Robert Birnbaum (RB). (I have never read anything by Stone, and know nothing about him.)
RB: I thought that you might have used the quote from the Kabbalah that “to tell the truth without sorrow is the greatest gift” as an epigraph to begin the book.
RS: There are so many great epigraphs I could have used and didn’t. And I’m not sure about the one I did use, which is from Melville ["Enigma and evasion grow; And shall we never find Thee out?"]. But yes, God, there are so many, so many statements in the Kabala and Zohar, and so forth. But I resisted, in a way. I thought I wouldn’t invoke these words.
RB: There is a quote by a painter very late in the book, the unnamed painter.
RS: Gosh, he’s unnamed because I can’t remember his name.
RB: “Losing it is as good as having it.”
RS: That absolutely wiped me out. He had a show in the Whitney together with Hopper, and I never forgot that.
RB: The quote was printed on the wall?
RS: Yeah. I thought that it was extremely wise.
RB: Tell me why you think it is true.
RS: That which we have, we invariably somehow lose. And at the same time, it can’t be taken away. That is what I take it to mean, and I take it as true.
[ ... ]
RB: In the context of something that is so fraught with the weight of the centuries and the really big questions, and people who are really in trouble, I think that that can overshadow the light things, the funny things.
RS: I think it does, but there is no life without humor. There was never anywhere, I don’t think, that people found themselves without a degree of humor. I think even in the lowest circle of hell.
[ ... ]
RB: Right. Guys just show up. They’ve got a long, sad story; they have skill and survival.
RS: And they’re mean.
RB: And they’re mean, right. They’ll go on surviving. Indestructible. And they are employed by everybody: good guys, bad guys. You also quoted something that was from Cuba — “Have to not die”…
RS: You have to not die, yeah.
RB: The translation was, “You have to not die.”
The full interview is interesting — probably more so if you know something about and are interested in Robert Stone. [ link ]
-Julie
