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“The
paradox of the border right now is that you see young people coming to the
American border for the opportunity of America, at exactly the time when
Americans are importing drugs from Latin America because of the despair of our
unhappiness. The paradox of that movement in both directions is so interesting
to me and so little noted.” —Public intellectual Richard Rodriguez quoted in Kelsey
Husnick, “Tippett, Rodriguez: ‘Brown is the New Color of American Identity,’” The
Chautauquan Daily, August 8, 2014
“Books should confuse. Literature abhors the
typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of
paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line:
'Ports have names they call the sea.' Just so will literature
describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use --
high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur
of its subject -- there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive.
Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.”—Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2003)
I saw essayist-memoirist Richard Rodriguez (Hunger of Memory) yesterday, as part of
the afternoon Interfaith Lecture Series at Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. The capacity crowd at the Hall of
Philosophy, where it was being taped for later broadcast on Krista Tippett’s NPR “On Being” show
and podcast, was treated to an hour of incisive, witty,
impossible-to-pigeonhole remarks by the author. Afterward, I made sure to get
toward the front of a very long line forming at the adjacent Hall of Missions
as he signed copies of his various books.
“The
power of religion to make us reflective of the lives we are leading seems to me
to encourage an inwardness which I would call intellectual.” —Public
intellectual Richard Rodriguez quoted in Kelsey Husnick, “Tippett, Rodriguez: ‘Brown is the New Color of American Identity,’”
The Chautauquan Daily, August 8, 2014
