"I've always been inspired by the simplicity and the endless baroque complexity that Bach manages to fit into the same vessel," he says. "To feel in my fingers this absolutely simple pattern of two lines imitating each other at the interval of a sixth while the left hand traces out this tiny little bass is to be very, very small and very, very large at the same time."
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers joins Nihal Arthanayake to discuss his thirteenth novel, ‘Bewilderment’.
Using objects like Bach’s Goldberg Variation 18, an unsmoked hickory nut, and a petrified piece of redwood, Powers transport us to his home in the Great Smoky Mountains, musing on the importance of sense as an entranceway to curiosity, writing as a resistance of habituation, and the centrifugal feeling that connects the work of the artist and the scientist; that of bewilderment.
‘Bewilderment’ is available to order on audiobook now: https://apple.co/3cFCDYf
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