From "Tree Language" to "Confusion," Richard Powers has been writing fiction for 40 years, but he rarely gives interviews. He doesn't like people to disturb his life. Currently, he lives in the forests of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the United States, just like the characters in his novels. Here, he can walk through the forest area of six different tree species every day, as if wandering through six different universes, while Bowers grows plants in the soil of the forest and swims in the mountain streams, so deeply fascinated by the diversity of life on Earth and humbly aware of their mysteries. Today, he is one of the world's finest writers of ecological and de-anthropocentric fiction, and this peculiar writing career began entirely on an unexpected Saturday.
The end of our quest is where we begin
Beijing News: It's been more than a year since the publication of the novel "Confusion", and the Webb telescope has been working for a year, and a while ago it released a lot of new cosmic observations (such as the discovery of water vapor in the PDS70 planetary region) - I wonder if you will continue to follow the progress of these disciplines now?
Powers: Aren't these findings shocking and unbelievable? When I wrote this book, I didn't realize that astronomy, cosmology, and astrobiology were changing dramatically almost every day shortly after publication. As a layman, I've struggled to keep up with these vast and complex new discoveries. As an artist, I'm also excited about all the new worldviews that the scientific community has come up with and the many ideas they have come up with. These discoveries are surprising to both scientists and artists, because science has changed the way we perceive ourselves.
August Sander's classic photograph, "The Three Peasants".
Beijing News: But the reason why many people pay attention to science and space exploration is not for themselves, but more for pragmatic purposes, such as - in another 4 billion years, the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy, and whether we can find habitable immigrant planets at that time. There is a lot of hope that technology will help humanity escape all this in the future.
Powers: I don't think we're going to live anywhere other than Earth! If we become smart enough, we understand that humanity neither needs nor wants to do that. There is enough magic and working space on earth for us to participate in it forever as a species. That is, since the dawn of human civilization, space speculation and exploration have greatly expanded the human soul and taught us a great deal about where we are and who we are, not to mention a lot about how this universe might develop and how it works. Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of space exploration is our growing understanding of how rare, extraordinary, and precious this bizarre planet is. To put it in the right words, the chances of us enjoying such a place with endless talent are astronomical. There is a famous quote in Eliot's great poem "The Four Quartets" that perfectly describes what we have done for thousands of years and our long exploration of space: "We will not stop exploring / And the terminal of our exploration / will be the place where we set off / Where we know for the first time in our lives." ”
Walk and create in the forest
Beijing News: Then let's go back to where we live. I heard that you live in an apartment very close to the forest, what does it look like?
Powers: I think you must be talking about where I live now! It's a treehouse on the side of a forest hill. My bedroom is at the height of the forest canopy, so I can see just the top of the trees and see all the wildlife that makes their home next to my bedroom. In the spring and autumn of each year, many of the distinctive birds come in, many of which inhabit the area all year round. I often see large mammals passing by: deer, foxes, bobcats, skunks, and more. Bears also visit this place frequently. One time I was writing, and I looked up and saw a bear peeking at me from a window less than four feet from where I worked, and a bear even stepped into the porch behind my house. The most important value of all of this is a constant reminder that we share this world with countless other creatures, and the stories we tell about ourselves should reflect that as well.
Beijing News: Sounds like a very wonderful environment. What do you do here when you're not writing?
Bowers: When I'm not writing, I often think of the 500,000-acre national park as my backyard, walking on the trails. I love all kinds of hikes, from short two-mile hikes to grueling 19 or 20-mile treks throughout the day. I like to pack my tent and spend the night outside. One of my favorite things to do is also go into the river with a mask and snorkel to watch the fish, which will gather around you and explore you when you are still in the water. There are more than 80 species of fish in our mountains and rivers, and I am slowly learning how to identify them Xi.
Beijing News: "Tree Language" is a very large novel that you have written, and there are many characters in it - the Hall family, Mimi Ma, Patricia Westford...... Everyone has a different personality and identity. How did you choose to assign their personalities and identities to them? After writing "Tree Language", you said that you were very tired and almost unsure if you would be able to continue writing. How did you get through this sense of crisis, and does it still pop back in your mind once in a while?
Powers: It's really tiring to write such a long novel with so many characters. The act of studying is exhausting in itself. I've read over 120 different books on trees, and that's not counting what could be richer than that. It's really emotionally exhausting to recount the brutal logging wars in Tree Whisper and try to fit into the lives of characters who have been traumatized by a variety of personal experiences. At the same time, I feel like I've created the best work of my life, and I've been aiming for 11 novels I've been accumulating before, but it's something I'll probably never be able to achieve. After all, as an artist who needs to be creative, I'm quite old now, and after writing Tree Language, I'm happy with what I've created in my life. I thought maybe now would be a good time to leave and stop my creative activities altogether. I remember telling the great novelist Barbara Kingsolver that I felt like my literary career was over. And she said to me, "It will bring good luck!"
In April 1973, the Tree Hugging Movement was launched in the Himalayas in India, in which local women followed Gandhi's policy of non-violent resistance and stopped the felling of trees by hugging large trees.
Beijing News: Did you finally find the "good luck" that Kim Sowo said?
Powers: It turns out she's right. After a few weeks of hiking, meditating, swimming, and enjoying the forest, I started to have some new ideas that I wasn't looking for, some spontaneous narrative inspiration, and then it became the beginning of a new novel, Confused. That novel turned out to be very different from its predecessor, in fact, very different from any novel I've ever written, perhaps in part because I didn't actively try to write it! I recently handed in the final draft of that novel, and almost before I knew it, the essence, structure, and atmosphere of a new story were beginning to take shape in my mind. I think I'm destined to continue writing fiction for the rest of my life. That's a terrible fate.
Think back to the surprise of a photo
Beijing News: But there is a question that puzzles me – while reading Jonathan Franzen's book, he was protecting a rare bird and met a black African man, who said to him, "Animal protection is something that only you developed countries care about." I don't know what you think about this issue.
Powers: I guess that's probably true just in the case of very wealthy and privileged groups of people trying to protect individual species for emotional reasons. But in terms of environmental activism and, more broadly, the protection of the world beyond human society, this is not only a problem in every socio-economic field in the world, but also the most essential problem of human existence. Environmentalism and social justice are inextricably linked. Indigenous peoples and the world's poorest people are always hit the hardest by the economic exploitation and environmental damage caused by unbridled human development. Of course, global warming and species extinction pose an existential threat to everyone alive. All of us other beings share and live together on this planet. And humanity's loss of control and its endless extraction, and its view of the planet as merely a repository of resources that we have unscrupulously tapped, have paid immeasurable costs that have only become apparent in modern times. Unless we return to a state of sharing nature with other living species, we won't continue to live in this place for long.
Beijing News: Now let's talk about the photo "Three Peasants". It has had a big impact on you, can you tell us about the specific feeling you felt when you saw this photo? Was that the first time you saw this picture, and what did you feel about it?
Powers: I was 23 years old. My father had just died. I moved to a strange and difficult city and was trying to find my way out. I had just dropped out of graduate school and I didn't know what I was supposed to do in life. In a word, I'm lost. However, I read a lot of books, and even the challenges of living in this strange city seemed strange and exciting. Everything is a surprise, everything is a discovery. When I saw this picture, I had an incredible sense of identity, a strange feeling, like I was home. It was one of the most exciting moments of my life. I immediately had the idea to write a novel, and I could clearly see how the story unfolded.
Beijing News: Did all these changes happen on the same day?
Powers: It happened on a Saturday. The following Monday, I walked into my office and sent out a leave request that required two weeks' notice. When I left that job, I started writing my first novel. Now, 43 years later, it's still interesting to think back to how it all began.
Photo/Oriental IC.
Beijing News: After switching from physics to English, I saw you talk about giving up your Ph.D. in literature and saying that in that professional system, people have lost interest in reading. I'm curious to see what kind of scene you're seeing—people who have lost interest in reading are engaged in literary research, and it sounds ironic.
Bowers: I'm referring to a phase that was just beginning when I was in graduate school, but that went on for the next few years and is still playing out for a large part. In the process, the study of literary fiction has gradually been replaced by the criticism of various modes of cultural criticism and social science theorization. Of course, this trend has given rise to all sorts of important works that are instructive, but it does so by treating fiction as a cultural commodity, a cultural commodity that requires you to first look at it with a bewildered perspective before you can understand what subject they are really writing about through those literary criticisms.
I grew up in a very different kind of literary environment, and I was primarily interested in the kind of criticism that helped me extract the meaning hidden in the narrative. While I was very happy about the time I spent studying literature as a major, I eventually realized that what I wanted to do was to read deeply without criticism or bias, and Xi how to create stories that deeply move people, as a way to bring stories into the real world and give them greater meaning.
Beijing News: These experiences as a physics and advanced programmer must have had a great impact on your writing.
Powers: Of course, pursuing these disciplines and being proficient in something other than writing has allowed me to explore a lot of themes in my fiction, so I would highly recommend any novice writer to pursue other careers for a while so that they have a framework for understanding how people define themselves through their work, and can have a solid experience to use as a scaffolding to hang their literary narratives.
But more importantly, the most important thing that my training in science and working as a programmer has given me is a bigger picture of the scale of human story development. We find greater meaning in understanding how the processes of our individual lives and individual efforts are subordinate to a system, process, and cause that is larger than our individual selves. Scientists have made us feel that living beings have gone through a grand journey in the process of evolution, and that we humans are only a small stage in this journey. I try to find appropriate ways to tell these stories, to give individuals a taste of the grandiose and amazing truths that human scientific inquiry has revealed to us.
Written by Miyako
Editor/Zhang Jin, Liu Yaguang
Proofreading/Xue Jingning, Fu Chunxuan