John Gray: preference

Transcript context

…Last question. What will you do next? Very good question, too. Well, having written this book, I have this column I referred to, and I do some reviewing. I’ve done a lot of reviewing of both Pinker and Fukuyama and other writers like that. I also review quite a bit of fiction. I’m reviewing at the moment a memoir by the film producer Werner Herzog, and a novel by him. I try to review a wide variety of books. I’ll continue doing that, and I may collect them, but I might start trying to write something. I might think of writing a book purely of aphorisms. I like aphorisms because, as I say, they’re short and uncluttered and can be beautiful. A lot of people don’t like aphorisms because if you write an aphorism, you can’t have 10 pages before it explaining what you mean by it, [laughs] like an academic work. A lot of academic works — they say, “I’m not saying this, I’m not saying that. I don’t think this. I don’t think that. I’m not criticizing professor so and so. I am criticizing the other.” Three-quarters of the book is a set of digressions about what they’re not doing. An aphorism just says something. You don’t have to accept it, but it sounds sometimes dogmatic for that reason. It sounds as if you are trying to impose it on someone. I might produce that, or I might do some more essays. I’m more and more interested in theology as a root of many of our present intellectual and other perplexities and dilemmas. If you think in what are called secular terms, you can’t really understand the world that we now live in, not just because religions come back in as a force in war and a force in politics, but because many of the things that don’t seem religious are actually inspired by, not just religious needs and impulses, but even by religious categories or symbols or myths. The singularity, for example, is obviously something connected with ideas of revelation and of rapture. It’s obviously not an idea that it would be easy to have if you knew nothing about those Christian and Jewish and other traditions in which these ideas of apocalypse and revelations — so, I think I might write something more about that. I’m happy to recommend all of John’s books, including the new one, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. That’s John Gray, G-R-A-Y. John, thank you very much.…

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