David Marchese

I think people who are interested in ideas of kindness and togetherness, I think that's basically a self-selecting group of people.

But for this other group of people who maybe aren't thinking about or don't care about questions of kindness or what it means to degrade our shared world, is there anything you would suggest that they read to maybe just open up the door just a little bit?

Yeah, I guess I shouldn't have expected you had the answer.

I'm sure you've been asked a version of this a million times, but I'm curious, in this moment here with you, what are sort of the links between Buddhism, which you practice, and kindness and your art?

I also do meditation, and I think the most beneficial aspect of it for me by far –

life-changingly beneficial and still something I, it's not something I've solved, but it's gotten better, is just what you described, the awareness that the thoughts are coming in and you don't have to act on the thought.

You don't have to treat the thought as correct or more important than any other thought.

You can just have that one little split second of like, no, that's a thought.

I can make a different choice to have a different thought or to respond differently to that choice.

Tell me more about that.

Just because you mentioned Lincoln and the Bardo, which is about figures in the afterlife.

You know, when I started reading Vigil, a new novel, and there were more figures from the afterlife sort of shepherding someone along, I thought, oh, he's doing angels again?

Are you thinking about something or trying to work through something about

But maybe relatedly, I think you write about salvation so often, including in the circumstance of someone either –

Near death or approaching death and how they might be saved in some way.

Yeah.

Which I know people think of you sometimes as a Buddhist writer, but I'm like, no, that's the Catholic writer and him is writing about that.

But I just want to know what you think about salvation.

What is salvation?

Yeah.