Here are some highlights from the article:
In their conversation Sunday night at a private Netflix event honoring “Springsteen on Broadway,” Bruce Springsteen and Martin Scorsese spent close to a third of the 45-minute chat discussing their mutual roots in east coast Catholicism and how they’ve both come to terms with a kind of faith. “I think as you get older, what you grow comfortable with is that faith is faith,” Springsteen said. “It’s about all of the mysteries and the answers that you’re never gonna come up with. And I think trying to build it around these concrete answers is vain and humanistic. But if you let it be, that’s where you find a little bit of peace in it. That’s what I’ve found, anyway.” ....
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They bonded over their shared love for Catholic literary great Flannery O’Connor, with Springsteen saying that his 1982 album “Nebraska” “was very influenced by Flannery O’Connor stories, and her stories were always filled with the unknowability of God.” Scorsese seemed surprised that Springsteen had not read her collected letters, and urged Springsteen, “Oh, just a few pages a night, every few nights. … I have a quote here from [a letter]… She said, ‘You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It’s trust, not certainty.’”
“If you’re an artist,” responded Springsteen, “that darkness is always more interesting than the light. It’s nice when you let the light in at the end of something. But I was always interested in, what were the things that didn’t go right? I had a habit: I would drive back through my hometown, and I would do this over and over and over again. And I used to ask myself, why am I coming back here? And I still do. Seventy years old, I still do it. I don’t know if you’re going back to fix things, but there’s so much there that informed your work and your life that it still remains just a rich location. But I always wanted to base the heart of my work in the dark side of things and then find my way. Then you had to earn the light.”
(I looked up the Nebraska reference - He lifts a line from O'Connor's story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" in the song, which is about a mass murderer. You can read "A Good Man' here: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/goodman.html)
Interesting that they call out "east coast Catholicism." It would be intriguing to see a study illuminating the differences, which I intuit but don't have time to tease out right now. We have had a busy few weeks. I've been grading papers (Oh but I am an easy grader!), trying to write a paper for a presentation (Oh, but I can't get this thing written!), and reviewing my daughter's college application essays (Oh, I would like to be done with this - what I realize after working with my fourth child in this predicament is that they don't really know how to articulate why they want to go to college nor what they want out of a college education, They don't give it any thought until this point in their lives. This is perhaps primarily a failure on my part and largely a fault of their school that doesn't encourage this kind of thinking, but also a maturity issue. We should be talking about the meaning and purpose of education all along - and I know I've said a thing or two to try to motivate them to do their homework or appreciate their teachers - or deal with mediocre teachers - but it doesn't really stick until they are actually in the process of trying to discern "what next?" So it is a painful process of having to think hard for a few days.
https://variety.com/2019/music/news/bruce-springsteen-martin-scorsese-talk-netflix-1203206046/
2 comments:
I would think that very few children these days, or young people as they are called at that point ;-) have reason to think about "why they want to go to college" etc., because it has become such a given in our society.
Unless you are in a family like my older son's, for example, where neither parent, though quite intelligent and self-educated, has a degree, and there is no promise of the parents providing funds for college. Then the child really has to think over whether it's something they want to work toward and find the money or scholarship for.
My two oldest grandsons (different parents) were not interested. One is a journeyman electrician and one is an Army Ranger. The Ranger has a family and is now thinking about what he wants to study when he goes to college! But he has a family and will not likely be getting help from his parents at this time.
My three younger children did all get advanced degrees eventually. I remember when one of them was crafting her application essay, the competition was stiff, and one had a better chance if your essay showed how you had overcome some "hardship" to get to this point. She couldn't just say something politically incorrect like, "I would rather be a homemaker but I love animals and if I have to work I want to be a vet and I need training for that." It sounds like at least your children aren't aiming for colleges that are competitive that way!
Two of the grandsons down the line are very well trained in working with their hands in more than one way, construction and/or welding, though one also just graduated from college. Another will soon have a degree in engineering. I'm concerned about one who is a high school senior and wants to be a teacher, and doesn't know how to DO anything except play football.
In this era when the educational system is caving in to the anti-Christian groupthink, I like to think that my grandchildren will be able to make a living without having to toe that line. When people want their toilet fixed or their house repaired, they don't usually inquire about the politics of the people they hire.
I know, I veered way off your topic. I'm encouraged when I read about your children growing up because I have hope in them. They are so blessed to have the parents they do, and I bet they know it more and more, the older they get!
I am in the thick of essay review with my seniors, who is shooting for colleges far from our family's orbit like ND. I have spent late nights analyzing where I might have gone wrong in the writing/advising mama department. Reading this consoles me. I think very few high school seniors can articulate with the depth and specificity that colleges are asking them to do these days.
Meredith
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