“The function of all the granular details in background and in setting is to suggest this corruption at the root of the world, this poisoned garden. And what it suggests is that the world itself is poison and there’s something ruinous at work here. And the poison at the root of the world is humanity, which is also its only vehicle for meaning. It’s a chicken-and-the-egg type thing. The world is a reflection of who we are, and our values, and our concerns. However we’re all born into situations we didn’t create, inheritors of situations we didn’t create, we’re also subject to these things. In some ways I go back to the first story I ever heard, [which was] a noir story called The Book of Genesis. If you think about it, there’s sex, there’s palace intrigue, there’s sexual betrayal, there’s vengeance, and then there’s two brothers, and one of them kills the other one, and this is in the first two pages. So it’s always been suggested in our oldest literature that we’re living after some kind of spiritual or metaphysical fall.”

(Excerpted from “To The Best of Our Knowledge” radio interview.)