Mystery.

Krista Tippett interviews author and poet John O'Donohue on "The Inner Landscape of Beauty" ...

TIPPETT: You know, I've been looking back at the thought of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and he has this statement at the beginning of his book The Nature and Destiny of Man, you know, the first line, "Man is his own most vexing problem." Or I think of a great kind of pivotal work in this culture of modern psychology, M. Scott Peck's book, which begins, "Life is difficult." And then I read this line, which begins your book, Anam Ċara, which is also a different way of kind of analyzing the human condition: "It's strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you." Talk to me about that as a way of thinking about what it means to be human and how you come to that and what you mean when you write those words.

O'DONOHUE: OK. I mean, when you think about language and you think about consciousness, it's just incredible to think that we can make any sounds that can reach over across to each other at all. Because I mean, I think we're — I think the beauty of being human is that we're incredibly, intimately near each other. We know about each other, but yet we do not know or never can know what it's like inside another person. And it's amazing, you know, here am I sitting in front of you now, looking at your face, you're looking at mine and yet neither of us have ever seen our own faces. And that in some way, thought is the face that we put on the meaning that we feel and that we struggle with and that the world is always larger and more intense and stranger than our best thought will ever reach. And that's the mystery of poetry, you know, is poetry tries to draw alongside the mystery as it's emerging and somehow bring it into presence and into birth.

Read the rest at On Being.

Here is the conversation ...



Thank you very much, Veerle.