Close Encounters of the mystical kind

It was Churchill who said that when the present sits in judgment of the past, we loose the future.  Obviously not the attitude of memoirists.

But also not the attitude of someone who looks back on the totality of one's life and tries to understand who they are and where they came from.  

Barbara Ehrenreich discovered, late in life, a journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence. She writes about a mystical experience, that to her rational and atheist self today, was nothing less than shattering.  In Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything, she reconstructs her childhood, beginning with the perspective of a young girls obsession with important questions.

My conversation with Barbara Ehrenreich: