Read Online On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon - Free Book Online Page B

accomplish and from where they fail. Why not assume that, with all else, we are also part of an enormous spiritual laboratory?
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    I’m still having trouble understanding how evolution and reincarnation—which are both part of your scheme—mesh. Did they begin simultaneously? Evolution, with its attempts to make species stronger, better, more durable, fits your scheme well. And reincarnation is often seen as an upward ladder, although souls can often go down as well as up. The idea of reincarnation, after all, is improvement, moral progress. Are both reincarnation and evolution completely controlled by God? Are their purposes intertwined?
    I’ve been saying all along, God does not control our destiny.
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    No, I understand, but—
    God can move in and control our destiny in special cases. But it may not be economic of His energy for a divinity to look to direct every one of us. God may just not be master of such resources. Rather, God learns from us. We learn from God, and God learns from us. This is a family relationship of the deepest sort. The parent can be enriched by the child; the child acquires strength and wit from the parent.
    We can’t think of God in terms of age, but we can certainly see ourselves in that manner. There are periods where we may get more from God—when we’re young, for example. When we’re old, we may be obliged to give back more, not necessarily to God but to the way we influence other people, the way we amplify His or Her vision or worsen it. Indeed, there are some things God can learn only from contemplating our direct experience. So God may be with us a good deal of the time. With certain people, I think God and the Devil are there most often. Certain kinds of highly dynamic people, certain kinds—just to take a flier on this—certain kinds of entertainers. They may be full of God and the Devil every moment they are onstage because there’s such charisma in them and such lightning changeability. It’s so difficult to know if you’re dealing then with someone who’s good, evil, or exceptional.
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    You still haven’t told me how reincarnation interacts with evolution. What is their relation?
    What would it be? We’re talking about the macroeconomic and the microeconomic. Reincarnation is micro. My point is, that to the degree that careful attention is given to one particular reincarnation, finally, it’s not perfect. There are times when God is better at it than at other times.
    It may be that after the double blow of the Holocaust and the atom bomb, reincarnation was mucked up badly. There was just too much to do. One example would be the ugliness of cities that were flattened by the war. The way they were rebuilt may have been necessary, but it certainly was dreadful—by-the-numbers architecture. It may be that people are finally much less interesting today than they were one hundred and two hundred years ago, when they didn’t have flush toilets but did live with interesting windows and doors.
    Do we have anyone around today who’s as wonderful and marvelous and godawful as Baudelaire? No. The modern equivalent would probably be Andy Warhol.

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    On the Authority of the Senses
    MICHAEL LENNON:
You’ve spoken of the authority of the senses many times, quoting St. Thomas Aquinas or quoting Hemingway. What exactly is this authority based on? What empowers it? If God is your answer, then to complicate the question, can’t we say that evil in all cultures has almost always been associated with the flesh and the senses?
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    NORMAN MAILER: My basic premise proposes that there’s a different mixture of God and the Devil in every one of us. Some of that variety creates the shape of our character. You’ll hear one person say about another, “He’s a good guy,