At the time of this conversation, I was just as agnostic as ever, but I was also deep into the writing of this book, and something was opening up in me. I was starting to understand—not only intellectually, but also viscerally—what the religious impulse was. I was losing my lifelong dismissiveness of it. The intense and transformative reaction that I had to minor-key music was apprehension of the transcendent, I was realizing; it was transformation of the consciousness. It wasn’t belief in God, exactly, or at least not the specific God of the ancient books. But it was the spiritual instinct
...more
