We have books that contain collected essays, verse, and humor. What we
see less often are books that contain collected interviews on various
topics. Interviews have a certain outside discipline about them. The one
interviewed responds to a question someone else asks of him. Often the
questions are unexpected, sometimes annoying. Answers have a freshness
to them. They can be more personal, frank.
The responses in At a Breezy Time of Day are occasioned when someone
writes or phones with a request for an interview. There may be a common
theme but often side questions come up. We are curious about what
someone has to say - about sports, about God, about Plato, about
education, about books, about just about anything. Usually central
questions occur. The same question can be answered in different ways. We
often have more to say on a given topic than we do say on our first
being asked about it.
These interviews appeared in various on-line and printed sources. Having
them collected in one text makes the interview form itself seem more
substantial. Interviews too often seem to be passing, ephemeral things,
but often we want to hold on to them. There is something more
existential about them. Yet there is also something more lightsome about
them also. The truth of things seems more bearable when it is spoken,
when it has a human voice.
So, as the title of this collection intimates, we begin with the very
first interview in the Garden of Eden. We touch many places and issues.
The interview always has somewhere even in its written form the touch of
the human voice. The one who interviews invites us to speak, to tell us
what we hold, why we hold it. Interviews are themselves part of that
engagement in conversation that defines our kind in its search for a
full knowledge of what is.
We know that when we have said the last word, much remains to be said.
We can rejoice both in what we know, and in what we know that we do not
know. I believe it was Socrates who, in an earlier form of interview at
the end of The Apology, alerted us to be aware of what we know and to
await the many other interviews that we hope to carry on with so many
others of our kind in the Isles of the Blessed.
