Mary Gaitskill: belief

Transcript context

…Here’s a question from a reader, and I quote. “She has an amazing attention to the physical, you might say to sensual detail. The smoothness of a seashell, the hairiness of a horse’s leg, the inherent virtue of a beautiful pair of flip-flops. How did she develop this quality?” Thank you for the observation. It comes naturally to me. It’s the way I do understand the world. I understand people that way too, by looking at them that way. Not entirely — I understand them by their words and actions as well, but I think people tell the truth with their face much more than they do with their words — and their tone of voice, and the way they move their body. Also, to me, that’s a bigger world than the social world, in a sense. It’s a very mysterious world that we come from, this raw matter. The social world’s certainly important, but it exists in that bigger world. To me, that’s where I’m more naturally attuned. The social world comes out of that, in my opinion. I feel like I can’t claim to understand that natural world. I don’t understand it like a biologist would, certainly, but it’s very natural for me to go there, though I have developed it as well. I have consciously developed it as well. How do you practice that?…

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