Solomon Enos: You may not put something in it, but just because you haven’t put any water in this cup, it doesn’t mean that it’s empty, right?
Jill Lepore: Yeah. The whole metaphor of bringing lightness into darkness was a big piece of it.
Enos: This is something beyond that.
Lepore: Politically useful. Have you been to Paris lately?
Enos: My own shadow doesn’t need to enter into the frame at all.
•••
Lepore: But on some level it doesn’t matter. The whole thing is both fascinating and scandalous all at once.
Enos: Okay, great. I mean, I get bored, too.
Lepore: Narratively, it was really hard to contend with.
Enos: Because we can’t.
Lepore: I recently was giving a lecture at Stanford and went out to dinner with a bunch of people from the Humanities Center and a few literary critics as well.
•••
Enos: It seems more likely that we’d be able to shoot lasers out of our eyes or conjure fireballs than it is for us to create a world where everybody feels safe.
Lepore: This was a serviceable sham in a way.
Enos: So, it’s hard to pick up that signal, and we lose our way a little bit.
Lepore: I don’t like, for instance, when newspapers put the author’s face next to the book review. I think readers make assumptions. You know?
Enos: I work in a series of layers, and so I’ll put in a series of yellow ochre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, umber, Payne’s gray.