Marguerite Yourcenar: Of course, reincarnation here is only a word, one of the many possible words to stress a certain continuity.
Todd Rundgren: Usually you get four, maybe five options at most.
Yourcenar: The question is: How far can one go without accepting any culture?
Rundgren: At a certain point, I just couldn’t handle it anymore.
Yourcenar: But there are spiritual affinities.
•••
Rundgren: You can’t travel into the future, so you go to the past.
Yourcenar: Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
Rundgren: Hell, the cocktail-music phase.
Yourcenar: I mean this glass has a form, which is very beautiful, and which evokes the great mystery of void and plenitude that has haunted the Chinese for centuries.
Rundgren: They had to suddenly invent a whole new sort of musical history that wasn’t there before.
•••
Yourcenar: Of course one never knows how close fictional characters are to real people.
Rundgren: They never go away. They’ve been my lifelong partners.
Yourcenar: At first only for a few months.
Rundgren: There’s an advantage to that—you’re not being distracted by other people or by the demands of objectivizing what you’re thinking.
Yourcenar: I know at least five or six Americans like that.