George Saunders

One of the reasons I'm a big advocate of meditation is because I've really slacked off in the last two or three years.

And that's interesting to see the old neurosis come back.

How does that show up?

Just because of certain life things and...

I went from meditating quite a lot to not very much at all.

I'm going to get back to that.

And I can just notice a lot of feelings and thought patterns, actually from adolescence even, just kind of the monkey-mindedness of it all.

And coming back, just like the forest encroaching a little bit.

I suppose mostly when we say we understand meditation, it's because we push the trees back a little bit.

Ah, clarity.

And then I think also...

Well, when I was writing Lincoln and Bartle, we were doing a lot of meditation, and I could feel that there was a certain kind of thinking that I really had associated with my personality, which had to do with kind of snark, you know, or sarcasm, or kind of going into a situation and instantly wanting to kind of make a little light fun of it, you know.

Well...

under this meditation, that kind of just, it receded enough that I could go, oh, that's a habit.

And then suddenly that book came in actually, you know, which that book took a lot of, I had to increase my tolerance for earnestness in that book and for letting people just tell their stories without trying to fancy it up with my wit, you know.

That wouldn't have been possible except for that force got pushed back a little bit.

So it's interesting, you know, to see, have it come back in.

Yeah.

That was my subtitle, doing angels again.

Angels again.