(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, NY, 2019, ISBN: 9780374279493)
p. 211 (from the essay "The Master Writer of the City")
The novel, conceived "under the spell of Joyce's Ulysses, ... was to be 'about' New York City" and to chronicle a day and a night in the life of a young reporter from the South who was no longer a believing Baptist but is "still inclined to see things in religious terms" and whose early exposure to fundamentalist evangelists has "left him with a lasting liking for the cryptic and the ambiguous and the incanatory and the disconnected and the extravagant and the oracular and the apocalyptic ...."
Perhaps our early first-order learnings about religion and spirituality do not fade completely in our minds. And the residue of these learnings can draw our interests to, and nourish our beliefs in, conspiracy theories and apocalyptic narratives about the future.