Isaac Butler

This all happened while I was in high school.

We cannot escape our youth.

We can't escape our youth.

I mean, all writing is autobiography, right, Gilbert?

And so there's that aspect of it.

Yes, but yes, I am someone who is deeply political and deeply loves art and makes art.

And, you know, those are the two passions in my life.

And I don't think we will ever know exactly how those things truly interrelate and how they shape themselves.

The thing I'm always trying to figure out as a cultural historian is that relationship between the works of art and the context in which they are made.

How do those two things really shape each other?

What are the different contexts that artists are responding to?

That's very much my research and work in Shakespeare is about that too.

So I think that's a sort of never-ending question that I'm always going to be asking because, as you know, there's no solution to it.

You know, if we knew the solution to that, you know, we'd probably, I don't know, would we be in a better place?

I actually think having unanswerable questions is actually probably better for the human spirit.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And so I don't know that every one of my books is going to be doing that for the rest of my life.

I do know that the couple of book ideas that I'm going to start exploring this summer to try to figure out what the next book is are still somewhat in that vein.

Yeah.

I've got my buzzer.