She, the people

And why do you think you can enjoy it?

Because I'm there for a different reason.

To empathize?

Yeah. And I understand that I have to do that in order to make the bigger picture; I can't have anybody in my picture who I don't understand. And I only know how to understand people through a certain amount of empathy.

The culture that we live in right now, especially in the last few years, has become very talky. Everybody's always talking, everybody's revealing stuff all the time about their personal lives. Why do you think that's going on and why do you think we don't, at the end of that, know each other better?

Yeah, that's a very good question, and a lot of things came through my head as you said it. For one thing, do you know of the chef Alice Waters? She has a beautiful restaurant in Berkeley [Calif.] called Chez Panisse. And she is probably the grandmother -- the grand master -- of fine dining with organic food as we know it. When I interviewed her for "House Arrest," she talked about eating. She said we have a lot of overweight people in this country because people are eating and eating and eating to be satisfied.

And so, I think, with talking too. I happened to be seeing some daytime television today, I don't usually see it, but you're quite right. What are these people talking about? And why are they coming in public to talk about it?

Probably it gives us an indication of an extraordinary loneliness or alienation that people have, or dissatisfaction they have, with the people closest to them. They must not believe that the people closest to them are hearing them. I mean, just imagine a time when you were a little girl, when you told your grandma or your best friend something that you didn't want anybody to know. And it was particularly satisfying to say it to that one person and that one person only. Why doesn't that have its magic anymore?

What do you think?

I don't know the answer, I just think it tells us that something is awry in terms of the extent to which any of us feel we are prepared for the value of intimacy.

In a way we strip people naked when they come in public. You can't even stand in public space without being stripped naked and disgraced. So it's hard to have dignity. We don't even value dignity, which makes public space a very unhealthy place that most sane people don't even want to be in anymore.

Let's face it, the question that I asked the president of the United States in the Oval Office -- I asked him one question that kept him talking for 35 minutes nonstop -- was, "Mr. President, do you feel you are being treated like a common criminal?" And this was in '97, before Monica Lewinsky broke.

So we're going to have a lack of talent in public space, and then we begin to fill public space with this blah-blah-blah that you're talking about.

Do you think those two things are related?

I think they are. I think public space is so unhealthy, and many people think twice before speaking in public and certainly before giving over their lives to public service. That's going to mean that we still want to have a space, which is filled in public, but it's not going to be filled by greatness anymore for a while. It'll be filled by all this penny-candy conversation rather than a big conversation or several big conversations.

And -- I sort of touch on this in the book -- I think another reason it could be happening is that in the '60s, for good reason, many people began to try to dismantle the throne that the white patrician Protestant man had as Great Explainer. [People said,] "You know what, since you had the nerve to lie about Vietnam, we don't trust you. And then there was Watergate! And not only that -- you lied throughout history! You didn't say enough about white women, and you didn't say enough about black people, and what happened to the Native Americans? So you just move over [laughs] and let us talk for a while."

And I think part of the reason public space is so vulnerable is that we just haven't figured out how to occupy it properly with a bigger "We the People."

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