In my files, Barry, I have kept an account of remarks you made some twenty-five years ago when you received the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams. And you mentioned then a word you came upon when you were once visiting in Japan.

"I was with a novelist named Kazumasa Hirai, a wonderful storyteller. And I asked him, 'What do you mean when you say you're a storyteller?' And Kazumasa-san told me the Japanese use the word kotodama to carry the sense of something ineffable. He said your job as a storyteller is to be the caretaker for that ineffable part of the world, the spiritual interior of the world. Storytelling is the best protection we have, I think, against forgetting the spiritual interior of our lives, of all lives."

I was talking to a mutual friend of ours one night, someone who's always been an affirmative and optimistic fellow, and he said, "Moyers, for the first time in my life" — and he's in his fifties — "I'm beginning to think this America I believed in won't work. That the forces arrayed against justice and fairness are so great that we're going to go down."

Later that very night, I came across something you wrote some time ago: "There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light." What a good phrase: "leaning into the light." Where are you today on the path between confusion and conviction?

"Bill, people think that if you've written a book and somebody's given you a pat on the back for it, you're all settled, you know — everything's fine. But the truth is, I am frightened all the time. An old question from my childhood comes back: 'Who cares what you have to say?' So, my path is the same path it's always been. It's a path through confusion and a lack of self-confidence, through embarrassment with my imperfection. But at the same time, I know I have seen things that have dropped me to my knees in a state of awe. Knowing that those things are there, I do my best to be a witness to them, to write carefully about them, to break through.

"In recent years I've come to a better understanding of the virtue of reverence than I have ever had before, and here I'm borrowing from an American philosopher named Paul Woodruff. I read his book Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. He says that reverence is rooted in the understanding that there is a world beyond human control, human invention, and human understanding, and that no matter how sophisticated our technologies for probing reality become, the Great Mystery will be there forever. It's not ours to solve. When you come upon something incomprehensible, some dimension of this Great Mystery, reverence brings you to your knees. You can open up to it and come out of your own little small tiny place in the world and realize what it is to be fully alive, a part of all life evolving."

But I'll tell you something about Paul Woodruff. He was in Vietnam at its worst. And I wonder if he would ever have understood this sense of reverence if he hadn't seen the savagery.

"Absolutely. Back to what we were saying earlier. How do you introduce yourself to the darkness in the world? And how do you walk away from it and have something to offer besides reasons for despair and grief? He did just that when he wrote that wonderful book.

"You know, I have seen truly horrible things. Truly horrible things in the world. And in those moments I broke down and was given to despair. Despair is the great temptation, but I thought, 'If I have any kind of self-respect, I cannot allow myself to fall apart. I must find a way to put myself back together. If I can discover a language that will help someone else who is broken in half, if I can tell them a story that sticks, that helps them heal, well, then I'm okay.' "

One of the characters in your book Resistance is a woman dying of Parkinson's disease, who hands her daughter Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning and says to her, "Now's the time for you to read this book."

"She thinks her daughter is grown-up enough to understand. It's the same thing that you just described with Paul Woodruff, don't you think? That the parent sees in the child the moment in which the child can appreciate that there is another response to the horror besides self-destruction and despair. That we can enter the bleakness that human beings are capable of creating, and not allow it alone to define what it means to be human.

"There's a story, Bill — I don't remember the philosopher, the Greek philosopher — about Zeus and Prometheus. In this account, Zeus says to Prometheus, 'Okay, you stole fire. That's great for you. Now your people have technology. Wonderful. But two things are missing here, if you wish your people to thrive. I am offering you justice and reverence. If you don't take these two things to heart, your fire — your technology — will fail you. It will be your undoing.' "

So lean into the light.

"Yes, lean into the light."