A few weeks ago now, the Ezra Klein Show interviewed Marilynne Robinson for the release of her latest book. I want to hold on to three things she said, one about beauty:

I’m influenced, I know, by traditional theology that has seen beauty as, in many instances, God’s signature in effect. I think that we have desensitized ourselves to beauty quite considerably, the idea that beauty is a harmonizing, interpretive presence in being and that we very seldom refer to in anything like that light. Beauty as, for example, a physicist might use the word, a beautiful formula, a beautiful theory — that’s only used in those special quarters. The idea that God created things from — out of an aesthetic delight in them means that our consciousness and also the perspicacity that’s given to us through beauty as a mode of understanding, that’s something that needs to be recovered.

And the idea of a “mind schooled to good attention”:

When I was in high school, I had a teacher who said to our class, you will have to live with your mind every day of your life. So make sure you have a mind that you want to live with. And she was an English teacher. That was exactly what she was talking about. Find things that are beautiful. Expose yourself to them at length. Give them preferential attention. I don’t think anybody ever told me anything that had a bigger impact on my life.
But anybody who understands the aesthetics of anything, music, visual art, so on, it becomes a sensitivity that spreads through experience in general. I think that people that do science or engineering, they are schooled to see what is elegant in a design, whether it’s a design in nature or a design in a laboratory and so on.
We are creatures of education, basically. We educate ourselves continuously, badly or well.

And her thoughts on God as she’s studied his portrayal in the book of Genesis:

[About the Ten Commandments] The fact of law actually frees people or respects their freedom because God does not impose the necessity of behaving in a certain way. He gives the information that this is what you ought to do. And then you react to it freely by accepting or rejecting it.
[About the ways in which the ‘chosen people’ in Genesis fail] In a certain sense, the freer human beings are, the greater God is because he’s able to make creatures that actually oppose him.
I think that’s one of the things that the whole text, beginning and end, tries to impose on our thinking, is that God loves people. And he does so faithfully. And he does so through all kinds of turmoil and shock and disappointment, all of which are, in their very outrageous ways, proof of the fact that he loves us so well that he even allows us our autonomy.

And then Robinson, in the interview, goes on to talk about how forgiveness is demonstrated in Genesis, with the story of Joseph, and how it contrasts to previous literature, like The Odyssey, in which the hero comes home and kills the strangers who’ve taken over his house. I love her concluding remarks on this:

It’s a very, very beautiful image of grace that I think of having no parallel in ancient literature. To be able to look beyond the offense rather than to forgive the offense, I think, is the difference between grace and simple forgiveness.

I find Robinson’s voice and thoughts very calming to listen to. The episode can be found here.

Because I'm in the middle of a lengthy draft, I'm extremely attentive to what people say about writing. For example, on the Ezra Klein podcast, the host and guest were discussing the use of A.I. in writing, Ezra explaining:

But almost always when I am stuck, the problem is I don’t know what I need to say. Oftentimes, I have structured the chapter wrong. Oftentimes, I’ve simply not done enough work. And one of the difficulties for me about using A.I. is that A.I. never gives me the answer, which is often the true answer — this whole chapter is wrong. It is poorly structured. You have to delete it and start over. It’s not feeling right to you because it is not right.

Maybe, taken out of context, this quote doesn't mean much, but I like how it exposes the kind of things I struggle with.

The guest (Ethan Mollick) in his answer said:

And I think a lot of us think about writing as thinking. We don’t know if that’s true for everybody, but for writers, that’s how they think.

It was a fascinating episode on A.I.

It reminds me of this part in Virginia Valian’s essay “Learning to Work” wherein she explains how she taught herself to tackle her thesis writing by committing herself to work on it for 15 minutes a day.

The first rule was that the fifteen-minute period had to be spent solely in working. My feeling of accomplishment depended on having a chunk of time that I did not fritter away in any way. I also had to learn that losing myself in my work was not dangerous. Most important, I noticed that I tended to stop working the minute I hit a difficult problem. Working in fifteen-minute chunks meant that occasionally I hit such a difficult problem in the middle of the required fifteen minutes and had to learn how to deal with it. Sometimes it simply required a little more thinking; sometimes it meant I would have to read something or talk to someone; sometimes it meant a lot more thinking. What I learned, though, was that I could deal with problems and didn't have to give up whenever I encountered them.

To me, it’s not the 15 minutes that matters so much (although I do find it very helpful to think about). It’s that encountering a “problem” and learning how to fix it, is just as valid a use of time as writing 250 words unimpeded. It has helped me dispel the idea that I was failing my productivity goals if I hadn’t set an impressive word count at the end of the day. Writing is dealing with problems. Dealing with problems is the hard work of thinking.