George Saunders

then you come back and you try to revise it and you start getting some interesting overtones and it's just a better story.

Essentially, by paying attention to somebody, that seems to me very close to love.

Or even see the fullness.

So, for example, in researching this book,

A lot of the real life correlators of this guy, they had pretty healthy family lives.

They loved their parents.

They were not dysfunctional members of their communities.

So to me, that's interesting to say, yes, this guy literally delayed action on climate change by 20 years.

Yes, he created the rhetoric that the Trump administration is using now to dismiss it totally.

But also he loves his wife.

He probably gives to charities.

So I think part of my mission is to try to develop the most sophisticated idea of what good and evil is that I can bear.

Then you can't make a cartoon of him, which is good for the mind, I think.

To hold those two contradictions is very interesting to me.

Yeah, I think I still believe all the Catholic ideas, but somehow put through the Buddhist filter, they're a little different.

So, for example, sin, which when I was a kid, that just meant you did something wrong and you're going to pay for it.

That's it.

And there's no negotiation.

Now I see sin is more like...

existing in a state of dishonesty or denial and the stress that puts on a person when you part of your mind knows that this is true and you're denying it and therefore you're in sort of an inauthentic relationship to reality which causes suffering so it's still it's still sin and I think he's throughout the book he's part of him knows that he isn't right with the world but