{"id":73977,"date":"2014-07-15T19:30:24","date_gmt":"2014-07-15T23:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=73977"},"modified":"2014-07-15T19:35:58","modified_gmt":"2014-07-15T23:35:58","slug":"to-be-enjoyed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/15\/to-be-enjoyed\/","title":{"rendered":"To Be Enjoyed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Vl4SlVyGC5o?rel=0\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Happy birthday to Iris Murdoch, who would be ninety-five today. \u201cA readable novel is a gift to humanity,\u201d she said in her 1990 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/interviews\/2313\/the-art-of-fiction-no-117-iris-murdoch\">Art of Fiction interview<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>It provides an innocent occupation. Any novel takes people away from their troubles and the television set; it may even stir them to reflect about human life, characters, morals. So I would like people to be able to read the stuff. I\u2019d like it to be understood too; though some of the novels are not all that easy, I\u2019d like them to be understood, and not grossly misunderstood. But literature is to be enjoyed, to be grasped by enjoyment.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>That interview with Murdoch was conducted by James Atlas as part of a collaboration between <a href=\"http:\/\/92yondemand.org\/Topic\/paris-review-series\/\">92Y\u2019s Unterberg Poetry Center<\/a> and <em>The Paris Review<\/em>\u2014it was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/audio\/6015\/92y-emthe-paris-review-em-interview-series-iris-murdoch-iris-murdoch\">recorded live at 92Y<\/a> on February 22, 1990, and you can listen to an audio recording of it above.<\/p>\n<p>As <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/12\/13\/interviewing-dame-iris\/\">Atlas later remembered their encounter<\/a>,<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>She was anything but forbidding. She was modest. When I asked her what she thought she had achieved\u2014remember, she was over seventy at this point and had long been considered one of the most important writers in England\u2014she answered, with complete sincerity, \u201cI haven\u2019t achieved anything yet.\u201d She was profound without sounding that way, or, I suspect, even knowing that she was: \u201cLive in the present. It\u2019s what you think you can do next that matters.\u201d And she was funny: \u201cThe thing about the theater is, why do people stay there? Why don\u2019t they just get up and go?\u201d But the most valuable thing I learned from Dame Iris Murdoch that evening was about the relationship between art and humility. \u201cOne is always discontented with what one has done,\u201d she said. \u201cOne always hopes to do better.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Happy birthday to Iris Murdoch, who would be ninety-five today. \u201cA readable novel is a gift to humanity,\u201d she said in her 1990 Art of Fiction interview: It provides an innocent occupation. Any novel takes people away from their troubles and the television set; it may even stir them to reflect about human life, characters, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7646],"tags":[11557,9158,1132,7514,1779,747,14627,7782,14628],"class_list":["post-73977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-look-2","tag-92y","tag-birthdays","tag-interviews","tag-iris-murdoch","tag-james-atlas","tag-novels","tag-recordings","tag-the-art-of-fiction","tag-unterberg-poetry-center"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>To Be Enjoyed by Dan Piepenbring<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"July 15, 2014 \u2013 Happy birthday to Iris Murdoch, who 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