“We‘re really called not to dispel mystery but to abide it, to engage it. And that doesn’t mean necessarily making sense out of it. It's just understanding that there's a big part of this that is inherently and beautifully and romantically mysterious—has to be and always shall be. I write to discover. And if I'm engaged by what that writing has become, then I try to think about what—might it engage anybody else? It's to just try to put my finger on it and hear it. ...

”Even as you‘re writing, you’re not trying to rearticulate a finished thought that stands fully formed in your mind. I assume that maybe you know the poet Jane Hirshfield. You know her work at all? I'm a great admirer of hers. And we‘ve never met face to face, but we’ve become great pen pals. But she was writing to me recently about that very real notion that ‘the poem has an intelligence that the poet does not have.’“

— Joe Henry, on the radio show/podcast, ”On Being,“ with Krista Tippett

I think of several things here: Kundera's theory of the wisdom of the novel—the novel being smarter than the novelist—as well as Rilke's advice (to a young poet) to learn to love the questions themselves; to live the questions themselves, in the hopes that you may live them into an answer. I also flashed back to a moment in the early ‘90s, a party or something, a bunch of white people talking about Spike Lee’s ”Do the Right Thing." I said I'd heard Lee defend the movie before and it always flattened it for me before; the movie, I said, seemed more intelligent than he was. I got slammed for that. I think I got called a racist, and I didn't have the vocabulary, or the presence of mind, to defend myself. Later I remember thinking that they thought I was insulting Lee when I thought I was giving him a compliment.