Speaker 1: 0:15

Hi, this is Omid Ashtari and Natasha McElhone.

Speaker 2: 0:19

Our guest today is Maria Popova, who thinks and writes about our search for meaning, sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children's books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of the Marginalian, born in 2006 under the name of Brain Pickings, an online publication which she has fought to keep free and advert-free. It features her writing on books, art, science, philosophy and poetry.

Speaker 1: 0:54

It is included in the Library of Congress Permanent Digital Archive of Culturally Valuable Materials. She's also the author of Figuring and maker of the live show the Universe in Verse, a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, which is now also a book, as the Editorial Director at the Higher Education Social Network, LORE, and has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Wired UK and other publications.

Speaker 2: 1:32

Today we will talk about dissatisfaction as a propulsive force.

Speaker 1: 1:38

Productivity as a band-aid.

Speaker 2: 1:40

Performative identity versus soul.

Speaker 1: 1:43

Instagram wisdom.

Speaker 2: 1:45

Everyone is a living question. The question is what is the question?

Speaker 1: 1:50

Poetry as a side door to consciousness.

Speaker 2: 1:52

Writing as a clarifying force.

Speaker 1: 1:55

Resisting dinner parties.

Speaker 2: 1:57

The price of consciousness is awareness of mortality.

Speaker 1: 2:01

And the republic of letters.

Speaker 2: 2:04

So now let's go and search for some meaning.

Speaker 1: 2:11

Hi, this is Omid Ashtari.

Speaker 2: 2:12

And Natasha McElhone and with us today we have Maria Popova.

Speaker 1: 2:18

Maria, so great to meet you.

Speaker 3: 2:20

What a joy to be here.

Speaker 1: 2:23

We are talking about many things today, but I wanted to start anchoring us with a little letter that I found. I'm going to read an abstract from it. From year to year, the clothes of the young gentleman here become better, but you let my clothes get worse. The son of an assistant to my father has better clothes. The son of an assistant to my father has better clothes. His mother loves him, while you don't love me.

Speaker 1: 2:49

This is a letter of Eden Sin to his mother, zinu, which is dated 18th century before Christ. They lived in the city of Larsa, which was part of the old Babylonian empire under Hammurabi, and what this makes me think of is a Simpsons episode which I saw recently, which is four millennia later, where Bart talks to Marge and says even Milhouse has a cell phone. Marge, what does that say about you, if Milhouse has a cell phone and your son doesn't, and your son doesn't? What that leads to for me as a question is why is this human condition still the same after four millennia, even though our wisdom and our knowledge has advanced so drastically.

Speaker 3: 3:41

It's interesting because there are many levels to that letter and to that mischievous malcontentment of this teenager, I assume.

Speaker 1: 3:48

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 3:50

I mean, on the one hand, what a lovely reminder that we're all living one life that has just a handful of yearnings and wishes and fears that we give different guises to, but they're all kind of fundamentally the same. For me, what's interesting about it is that it is essentially a complaint about not enough, and in a sense that is the creative impulse right that we create out of the feeling that something needs to exist that doesn't yet. So it's the positive side of that kind of, you know, sulky discontentment of the world. But without that sense of things could be different, and I need something that I don't yet have. Nobody would make anything. And what is that, martha Graham? She calls it divine discontentment.

Speaker 3: 4:43

She calls it divine discontentment, divine fury, that is the artist's animating impulse. So two sides of the same coin, right and fundamentally the same across the history of our species.

Speaker 1: 4:58

I love how you took that in a positive direction Because you know one could look at it and obviously say this is jealousy and emotional blackmail.

Speaker 3: 5:10

Oh, it's passive, aggressive, the passive aggressive move. But you know, the positive side and the negative side are kind of the twin poles of all of what you call the human condition, because the negative side is the not enoughness right which is most of our suffering, is some version of not enough, and most of our constructive activity, the joy, the creativity, the bewilderment, is a sense of let me make more, let me contribute, let me give over to the world something that hasn't been before, and I don't think you can have one without the other.

Speaker 1: 5:48

In a way, you're saying this is a core part of the human condition which has been driving us forward. So we're creating all this wisdom and knowledge because this not enoughness that this kid is expressing in this very passive, aggressive.

Speaker 3: 6:05

Well, I mean, mean, what is wisdom? It's just um, the name we give to the coping mechanisms for our discontentment, right, that we try to live more fulfilled lives by different means, and we call the learning process wisdom, but it's always some kind of route to serenity and to enoughness, to feeling contented. I mean, that is is there, I guess, what is the end of life? What is the aim? The aim and the end, if not the feeling that you have enough?

Speaker 2: 6:41

that's a terrifying question.

Speaker 2: 6:43

What is the aim or the end of life? Oh my god, um, I keep coming back to this idea of yearning being propulsive and leading us to putting pen to paper. When you show us through philosophers or through the writers that you love and accompany you in your life whether it's Seneca, thoreau, marcus Aurelius, virginia Woolf, just to name a few, there's so many that you quote from and you do this beautiful thing of finding relevance in all of their workings and sort of weaving it together to make it digestible and relevant, and you bring them all back to life for us, because so many won't delve in, they will not start that book. I know, you know, my kids are a good example and it's just something that if you can get I mean I'm being unfair, but if you can get some wisdom on TikTok, that is a lot easier and what you managed to do is just show us that, to your point, nothing's changed. The human condition persists, even though we're all subject to fashion and moral fashion, and political systems, right, I mean, so interesting, that's so true.

Speaker 3: 7:59

There is such a thing Morality is dictated by the normative, the social construct of the time. Skeleton, exoskeleton of society, yeah.

Speaker 2: 8:09

And all the writers that you choose to quote. They seem not immune to that, but they seem so sturdy in their own sense of whether it's vision, whether it's calling, I don't. I don't know what it is, I don't know if they're just vessels or you talk a lot about system versus agent agent history, and I wonder if someone would have been there in their place were it not, were it not them. Um, but there's something that I don't understand. As our lives get longer and longer, we have much, much more time on this earth. We're speeding up. Everything's quicker, faster. We talk about productivity all the time, and yet in the time of the ancient, life was 35 years long on average. We'd all be dead, yeah, right For sure. And there was so much time for rumination. The more time we have, the more we squander it. Can you help?

Speaker 3: 9:14

I am trying to help myself, which is why I read those people who help me. I do think the most terrifying dimension of life is a kind of existential boredom, and we go to great lengths to avoid that. Productivity is just a band-aid we put on that fear. Art is another. I mean art is a way to make a more meaningful path through the just leaden stillness of existential boredom.

Speaker 1: 9:47

Drugs, sex, rock and roll.

Speaker 3: 9:49

All of it. I mean everything human beings do is a coping mechanism for both the transients of our lives and the interminable boredom that they could be if we don't fill them with something right. I don't, I mean, it's interesting that people need a foothold. You mentioned these writers and writing about them in kind of smaller form, getting a foothold into the body of work. The thing to keep in mind is that I'm just one person moving through one life and I just pick what helps me do that.

Speaker 1: 10:24

I want to pick up on the point that you made around the normative exoskeleton, as you called it. You see, every human being needs to catch up with society for about 30 years, because they need to learn the norms, the processes, the reality of what's going on, just learning how to deal with themselves, with other people. Some people never figure any of that out, frankly. And once we catch up, we have the hope of, in some shape or form, pushing this normative exoskeleton in some sort of direction, if we ever manage to. I mean, most people in history haven't really made a big dent on it, only a few have.

Speaker 3: 11:04

I mean, I think part of it is. We're all products of our time and place and even the greatest visionaries can't quite bend their gaze past the horizon of the givens of their time right, this cult of productivity we live in. That is a real normative tyranny that we're in. A lot of the people I read and write about and think about have been people in the margins of their society and I think when you are that way, for whatever reason, when you're other, by any variable, then there is this paradoxical self-permission that you don't actually have to spend 30 years learning the operating instructions of a system you don't want to. You're just not even in. You know. And a lot of the people who have changed the way we look at things have been definitionally outside and therefore they have had more freedom to break the exoskeleton.

Speaker 1: 12:04

So it is actually in breaking it that you move it forward in some shape or form.

Speaker 3: 12:09

Or by just ignoring it. You know, because a lot of the creative people, in any field science, art, whatever, you know are people who just have refused to take the rules handed down to them by the world as we know it. They have just refused or have been unable and therefore have had to just find another path. But I'm always interested in the marginal, marginal people, marginal ideas, because that is what pivots the center to a different center of gravity right.

Speaker 2: 12:40

But because that has been recognized as something that defines trailblazers or changemakers. Everyone now wants to be marginal. Performative marginality, though that is a different thing, right?

Speaker 3: 12:54

I've never heard an interview with anyone where it doesn't begin with that I was always an outsider to qualify, if I had to qualify every statement by saying as an immigrant, as a woman, as a gay person, as a you know and therefore that validates my you know vantage point more. But, that's a different, that's a kind of performative identity. I'm talking about the soul. Identity and soul have nothing to do with each other. Identity is a costume that covers up the soul, and to me, identities and opinions are the least interesting things about people.

Speaker 2: 13:29

And I was just going to use an example of De Profundis, oscar Wilde's book to Bozzi when he was in Reading Jail. And you'd think, oh, he wrote a letter cursing and blaming the person who got him in prison for gross acts of indecency or whatever it was called at the time. And he was put in jail and served his sentence and wrote this incredible letter, which was towards the end of his sentence, I think. Instead of hard labor, some kindly prison officer took a page off of him, or several pages off him. He wasn't allowed to keep hold of it until he left jail and then he could edit and and send it off to Bozy. There was nothing about that that felt self-indulgent, navel-gazing, victimized. And of course he's used the word genius very rarely, but I do think he was in that category, so that already separates him.

Speaker 3: 14:22

But what is it about, genius?

Speaker 2: 14:24

Insights that resonate for everyone and yet are eminently quotable, and you cleave to those as the definition of the thing that you're all experiencing.

Speaker 3: 14:37

But you can't really find words for that's also the definition of a poet. A poet gives names to things we cannot name that feel eminently original yet fundamentally recognizable.

Speaker 2: 14:49

Yeah, I find that. What is it that's changed? I know what you're saying and I'm going to go back to the normative exoskeleton, and that is for the last hundreds of years.

Speaker 1: 15:00

The normative exoskeleton couldn't evolve as quickly because the metabolic rate of society idea generation, dissemination of information was a lot slower. So you couldn't get tipping points where a lot of people could corral around different ideas. I mean you'd print a book and then you could get like 100,000 books out and then people would have to read and they have to go pick up the book and now you get one TikTok. It gets a million likes in 20 minutes if it goes viral, right. So ideas can spread a lot faster. So this normative exoskeleton is being pushed and pulled into various different directions very quickly.

Speaker 3: 15:39

But remember that I extemporaneously used that phrase in response to what Natasha was saying about the moral fashions.

Speaker 1: 15:46

Right.

Speaker 3: 15:47

And we're living in a different time now, in the sense that we are compulsively mistaking self-righteousness for morality. Yeah, that's a very different category of being, and a lot of that is shaping what people think they are permitted to do and be.

Speaker 1: 16:04

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 16:05

And that's no longer that, what we were talking about earlier. That's a different kind of fear-based self-modulation, self-censoring. That is, the ceiling of courage is lowering and lowering because people think they don't have social permission to give themselves permission for certain things that are fundamental rights of freedom of thought and freedom of expression. But because we live in this atmosphere of punitive self-righteousness with an edge of bullying, it's just so dangerous.

Speaker 1: 16:34

The life of the mind but it's not whether we like it or not, whether this norm is around or not. I mean, objectively, we see this norm has emerged, right, and I don't like it, you don't like it, you don't like it, but it has emerged somehow. So I want to talk a little bit about, maybe, how this zeitgeist evolves and how do these things emerge? How do ideas go viral like that? Is it again the human condition that is at fault here?

Speaker 1: 17:00

To an extent Because, from an evolutionary psychology perspective, we are lazy inherently because we wanted. To an extent because, from an evolutionary psychology perspective, we are lazy inherently because we wanted to save calories, because we were hunter-gatherers in the calorie-scarce environment. So if we can get the dopaminergic effect for the least amount of calories, then we will tend to do that. And actually being able to make everybody else look bad, and actually being able to make everybody else look bad, to elevate yourself or to very easily make everything about your identity, which doesn't require you to get out of bed you can just stay in bed and just declare, declare, declare, right, and you immediately got a dopaminergic effect from that right. That is basically the lowest common denominator in a human condition nonsense but actually first of all the the dopamine here I disagree with.

Speaker 2: 17:48

I mean, there has now been science and enough brain scans to suggest that dopamine gets emitted when effort and expenditure. It's a reward system that, unless you and they're discovering that, the people who are really good with deferred graphification.

Speaker 1: 18:08

They are actually putting their um hedonic yeah, I know the study, yeah, the point at which the dopamine is exerted during the uh effort phase of whatever they're doing, they're actually already like high on the treadmill not after after right. If you can train yourself to feel high on the treadmill, then you're okay with the journey, not with the results. But many people are just. You know it is still. The payoff is at the result stage, and so it depends on how you hack your brain basically.

Speaker 2: 18:39

Right. But if the payoff is no longer special and it's no longer after an enormous investment of effort, then, like anything else, one, it gets abused and two, it becomes slightly meaningless.

Speaker 1: 18:52

Yeah absolutely, and I'm not saying those are good dopamine hits. It may be the McDonald's equivalent of dopamine hits that people are experiencing by making everything about identity and basically trying to therefore elevate somehow their mood, right. It's the same with making your life about farming the present for future likes on Instagram, right? These are not good behaviors. They're good in the moment, but they're not leading to a well-rounded life, to a satisfied life, to what you were calling finding contentment somehow in life.

Speaker 2: 19:25

Because there's no searching in that and really what we started this conversation with was this search for meaning, this yearning, wanting to fix, find or change.

Speaker 1: 19:35

You have to overcome something and there's real friction by putting other people down, or like inconveniencing other people to elevate yourself. That's just not.

Speaker 2: 19:58

There's empty calories I think we've deviated. Yes, a little bit but we were talking about metabolic rates of different. Let's, let's rewind.

Speaker 1: 20:07

So my question is the normative exoskeletons shifted to this weird norms around identity politics and virtue signaling. How does such a thing emerge when we look at the way other people have created ideas that went viral prior to the internet? Right?

Speaker 3: 20:34

I have to say I'm not particularly interested in ideas as such, and a lot of the conversation around ideas is a commodification of the search for meaning. I'm interested in the undertow beneath, you know, which is our search for meaning? That's all there is. That's all there is. That's why we're alive. What is all this? What are we? Why are we here? Ideas are these floating morsels of miniatures of the big question that are easily dispensable and passable along. But the zeitgeist is just a little cluster of these little morsels that comes and goes and every time, every era, every culture has a certain constellation of these ideas that comes and then fades, and comes and then fades, but it has very little actually to do with the search for meaning.

Speaker 1: 21:20

But don't you think that there's a dialectic here at play that requires these opposing ideas that lead to more perfect zeitgeist and therefore some discovery of meaning in the process?

Speaker 3: 21:32

I suppose we can't do without that right, but it doesn't not. Every zeitgeist takes us to a new level of the search for meaning. Things come and go and don't leave much of a mark. I mean, that is the history of the world. How many things you can count on the fingers of two hands? Maybe the things that have really shifted the evolution of our consciousness? I'm not particularly interested in the life and death of ideas because they are so disposable.

Speaker 1: 22:06

Although you know they can shape their amount of exoskeleton quite drastically. That's the problem, and if we're not careful they can destroy. They are very seductive of course, because they're very sellable.

Speaker 3: 22:21

It's much easier to attach yourself to an idea that's easily packaged than to deal with the amorphousness and the bottomlessness of these largest questions. There is no foothold in the search for meaning. It's so hard.

Speaker 2: 22:37

We need ideas to kind of give us a little bit of a container, but, like I said, they come and go, but so many of the writers and, as you said, you're drawn to these specific people because they have helped you acquire a deeper understanding, even if it's only momentary and that's transient through your search for meaning. So many of the books that are published now are reworkings or repackaging of things that have existed for a very long period of time. I don't actually want to quote direct books, but there'll be a book about, you know I'll use a different expression. You know micro habits and everyone goes out to buy this book because it's.

Speaker 1: 23:14

Modern stoicism.

Speaker 2: 23:16

Yeah, we didn't used to have a self-help department in a bookstore 20 years ago. There was no such thing. You had religion and philosophy, I guess, and then maybe psychiatry that's just packaging.

Speaker 3: 23:27

Marcus Aurelius was straight up. Self-help One time straight up self-help.

Speaker 2: 23:32

But what we're so beguiled by is the package, is the box, that something comes in and I'm putting myself in this mix as well. I don't know if it's an idea so much, but it's something that lands that you read, that you absorb, and it makes sense, it helps you, it galvanizes you to move again out of your fog. That that holds less value today than you know. A shiny embossed cover of a book. I don't know where the progress is.

Speaker 3: 24:04

Well, I mean the former that you described requires a willingness to feel, to feel life more deeply, and that's terrifying. You know that cuts into your productivity.

Speaker 2: 24:18

So have we become pain averse.

Speaker 3: 24:20

While we're trauma mongering for attention, we have become pain averse.

Speaker 2: 24:24

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 24:25

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 24:26

So we talk about pain a lot more and maybe not pain.

Speaker 3: 24:28

Maybe it's not pain, maybe a surface layer, but some kind of depth of feeling that is harder to reach somehow.

Speaker 2: 24:39

But we seem to feel now to gain attention. Right, we'll talk about our feelings in order to feel more deeply than the next person. So therefore, we garner more attention because of the depth of our trauma. This is very, very prevalent, and yet the reading or the experiencing that could actually alleviate some of our suffering we're less and less willing to engage in, although we'll go to a therapist and talk about our own problems but?

Speaker 3: 25:08

but that's because we're living on the level of the self and all the trauma and trauma talking is happening to the self. But where is the soul beneath the self? Because what you're describing is things that hit the soul, these things that hit so deeply, and we have become very divided. The soul has become separated from the self and we're moving through the world as selves, but what happened to the soul? I mean it's embarrassing now to talk about the soul. Religion kind of botched that one. I mean it was really co-opted by religious language and now people who, like me, don't care for religion, are kind of averse to talking about the soul. But ultimately, that's what we live with. That is what we live with.

Speaker 1: 25:51

How do you feel about the Instagram wisdom and Twitter-length wisdom there's? A lot of this stuff because for a long time I looked down upon it. But there are a lot of people who find this older text inaccessible intellectually speaking, and you know you, with your blog, are doing a great job in getting that out. But some people are also doing a job with millions of likes and Instagram-like account where they just put one phrase of something there.

Speaker 3: 26:21

Yeah, I know, I mean it's such a complicated question because you know, I've been doing this for now 18 years, almost two decades.

Speaker 3: 26:30

So the primordial internet remember yes, and I see something happen over and over, which is I would do a, you know, 3000 word essay on something that would have some quotes from other people and a lot of my own writing and offer a foothold, an entryway into it with just one short quote with a link to the remainder, fully aware that 90% of people will just read the short quote and like it and whatever, but have also been around long enough on the internet to know that there's no correlation between those likes and the people who go deep.

Speaker 3: 27:06

And to me, I have been very mixed on it over the years. But where I've netted out is that if 10 people go and read about Rachel Carson or my thoughts on the evolution of music or whatever some deeper thing is, if 10 people out of the 20,000 do it, it's worth it because there are 10 people like me whom that will help in some way, because it's helped me, you know. And there's no, there's no way around it. I mean, to your point, we are lazy, people will go for the easy and the easiest part of the easy, but not everyone. And if it shifts just a tiny bit, just the tiny, tiny, tiny bit, our collective consciousness, it's still worth it.

Speaker 2: 27:53

And to that point I don't think any of us are anti the fridge magnet version per se if it gave people a sense of agency and a clarion call, a guiding light that helped them live their lives. The point is, it seems to deplete and leave people feeling more and more dissatisfied and more and more unfulfilled, and that's the conundrum, isn't it so, um?

Speaker 3: 28:17

well, that's back to the commodification of wisdom, right? Yeah?

Speaker 1: 28:21

I. I wonder it sometimes because you know there's millions of people who follow these accounts, right, and they look at these quotes. And instagram is not the place I'm looking for wisdom, but some people seem to, at least in that Instagram world, also follow these quote unquote wisdom accounts. And who am I to judge? But I like your thinking about conversion rates and you know, even if a few of those people see a quote and maybe see, like Marcus Aurelius or I don't care Ggaard or whatever, as the author, and they actually go look the thing up on the internet.

Speaker 3: 28:54

But even if it's not that direct, even if it just interrupts the momentum of their lives in some way and they go elsewhere from the path they would have gone otherwise, it's still worth it.

Speaker 2: 29:05

I have my cynical moments, your site is for people who who struggle to find things online that appeal to them, and that they can stay in for a period of time without becoming restless and dissatisfied and angry. Um, I can sink into reading on a Sunday and click on all the links if I have the time, and I feel so nourished by the end of it, in the same way that I do listening to some of the podcasts I listen to being privy to a conversation between two people who are bothering to listen to one another.

Speaker 2: 29:43

It's amazing and it's so simple. I know yours is not simple. I know how much endeavor and how many hours you put into that to make that live, how much you have cared about your curation and you know the reason why we wanted to talk to you today is so many people I speak to from all walks of life. There isn't a type and maybe you have recognized the type, maybe Maybe there's tons of research done on who subscribes.

Speaker 3: 30:11

But I keep no data, I keep no analytics. So it's very funny, it's very anecdotal and so far in 18 years I've deduced it's people's parents and people's therapists. So people would walk up to me and say, oh, my dad's a big reader, my shrink. No, I'm kidding, it is all kinds of people. And like this morning I heard from an 18-year-old boy in Afghanistan, I mean. And then I would hear from like a 93-year-old last night.

Speaker 3: 30:39

But anyway, the point to go back to the bigger point here, which is why is it that we yearn for these different layers of presence? Right, because I think so much of what's exhausting is the reactionary nature of the information coming at us, the swirl of the present. We get caught in it and get spun up and it feels like there's no escape. But ultimately what we wake up to and go to sleep to is those deeper questions that end up unresolved by politics and news and identity politics and all those layers. And I think there is a certain comfort when you find yourself in a place where people take the time to consider each other, to regard each other, whether it's in a conversation which goes so much deeper than an opinion piece. I mean, actually, most of the internet right now is opinion. When you think about it, you know, and that's not very interesting and not at all nourishing, because opinions are the most fungible parts of people and the least timeless.

Speaker 2: 31:48

With the ancients and with writers who have a legacy that's been visited by a few generations and it still has meaning and relevance and isn't disposable. Is there something that you find very anchoring about that, as opposed to current books that seem mutable and more? There's an op-ed and it was brilliantly written, but it's no longer relevant this week and it was last week, whereas some of these things that you go back to year in, year out, it's because they're not going to change. They're reliable, they're like grandfather clocks.

Speaker 3: 32:28

That's a beautiful question. I think there's multiple sides to it. One is it is so hard to live with the uncertainty of our lives, the ongoing uncertainty. And when you look to lives that are finished, there is no uncertainty there. Right, it's foreclosed, the conclusion is foreclosed and there's comfort in knowing how things ended up for that person, right.

Speaker 3: 32:51

But for me, you know, every few years I would do something very long form like a five, 600 page book that involves the lives of people that I spend years with, beginning to end.

Speaker 3: 33:03

And spending, for example, four years with Mary Shelley, ending, for example, four years with Mary Shelley, who did not live very long, seeing how her opinions changed, her ideas about the world and everything in it love, purpose, work, how those things evolve and change.

Speaker 3: 33:26

But when you look at the full sweep, there's something underneath that last, that is, for lack of a better word, this person's soul, the soul orientation to the world. I like that, I really enjoy taking the full sweep of someone's finished life, seeing how the landscape changes, but the geologic strata underneath, discovering what that is and what is constant, that carries us, because that reflects back, it makes you ask yourself what is my constant? Because you know I am mortified reading things I've written 10 years ago or worse, listening to things I've said, not because I don't stand by them, but because my vantage point was so much narrower, the pinhole was so much smaller, just by virtue of having lived so much less. And the incompleteness of us is actually one of the most beautiful things. Seeing another life that is complete and seeing that person live with their incompleteness across it, with some kind of constant underneath, I find that so beautiful and so assuring.

Speaker 2: 34:29

So there's an answer rather than just a series of questions.

Speaker 3: 34:33

I personally don't believe anyone reaches an answer and I mistrust people who think they have an answer. But I think the questions we live with make us who we are and over time, for me at least, I have discovered that actually there are maybe two or three basic questions I live with that give shape to every answer, meaning anything I make, anything that manifests is coming from one or two or three basic things. And seven biographies, all of her surviving letters, whatever survives of her journals, like the whole surviving record of the person. You can identify the handful of questions. I mean, everyone is a living question and the question is what is the question? And that's what's interesting to me.

Speaker 1: 35:23

I'm reminded of the Feynman quote that I think says you don't have any obligation to be who you were last year, last week you know, or yesterday. You're here to invent yourself continuous. So, of course you're not going to be happy with what you read or sound like 10 years ago or something.

Speaker 3: 35:41

Well, the Harvard psychologist, dan Gilbert, has this lovely line. That's also terrifying, and just everybody should have it emblazoned on their bathroom mirror in the morning. Human beings are works in progress that constantly think they're finished. I love it.

Speaker 1: 35:55

I'm going to definitely put that up on my mirror too. So, in this overabundance of the present that is so loud or louder than it's ever been, when we do get a break and actually create some space where we have some time to connect with the past, which can ground us, how do we decide what are the things that are relevant that we should be looking at? You have a great way of trawling through a lot of the past and finding things that are relevant. Do you have a guide for other people who I don't.

Speaker 3: 36:29

I absolutely do not. I am one person, and the accident of there being other people who read what I write is an accident, but I would be very wary to. I don't love the self-appointed gurus that are scattered throughout our culture. I think everyone answers for themselves and you take what works for you from what you encounter. But I really mistrust prescriptive types of I'm not surprised by that answer.

Speaker 1: 36:58

Give me maybe a process of how you go about. It would be interesting. Where does one start?

Speaker 3: 37:04

The restlessness. We're back to that. So whatever quickening is in me on any given day that makes it difficult to bear my life, I try to find some consolation, some guidance, some comfort, and that ends up with the writing and I have found over the years you know Natasha asked me about being a writer because I didn't always think of myself as a writer and I don't know when that changed A lot of people, a lot of writers, say oh when I was a little girl, or a little boy, I always knew I was going to be a writer Not me I just, somewhere along the way, I recognized that it is in writing that I best comprehend reality that.

Speaker 3: 37:47

I best process my own mind and also what I don't understand outside of it. Writing is a clarifying force for me and, uh, those are the two things that make anything that I publish.

Speaker 2: 38:02

You know when you say clarifying force. So we started with this idea of thank God. No one's used the word happiness in this whole conversation so I'm not going to start, but contentment or equilibrium.

Speaker 1: 38:13

I think Omid used it once. Oh, he did. I think he did. Uh-oh, I did use contentment.

Speaker 3: 38:18

But I think you were projected first. No, you said the secret of happiness. You did the whole phrase. I slipped up. I slipped up there.

Speaker 2: 38:29

So let's say equilibrium, let's say serenity, serenity, and lots of people, by the way, don't want those things. It shouldn't be assumed that everyone wants to find balance. We've been fed that that's what we should be seeking and actually all the evidence suggests that that's not the case.

Speaker 3: 38:49

A lot of people thrive on disequilibrium, and it's what keeps them vitalized.

Speaker 2: 38:53

But would you say that, even though the writing has given you clarity around what you think, has it created? What's her name? Marie the Organizer.

Speaker 3: 39:04

Oh, Kondo, Kondo yeah.

Speaker 2: 39:06

Does it spark?

Speaker 3: 39:07

joy I mean writing always does for me when I am in it. Just the nature of the writing has changed a great deal, Thank God. I mean imagine not changing your mode of being for two decades. I write much longer form. Now I go on much deeper rabbit holes, and then I also do much longer form. Now I go on much deeper rabbit holes and then I also do much shorter form. I have started writing poetry in the last few years, which is another side door to consciousness. That's very illuminating For me. The capacity for self-knowledge and self-surprise are kind of the twin animating forces of everything. You have to know yourself enough to go in the direction of your own inner wisdom, in a way. But you have to also concede that you are incomplete and allow yourself to be surprised by your own sides that you haven't yet encountered. And I'm always looking for those two doors.

Speaker 2: 40:09

In the past when you resisted poetry or you weren't interested in it? Was that some kind of avoidance of self-knowledge?

Speaker 3: 40:20

It was an avoidance of what you were talking about earlier, this depth of feeling. I think all forms of resistance are fear-based. We only ever resist out of fear. Sometimes it's positive fear. Sometimes you resist out of self-knowledge, fearing that the thing won't be right for you and then it's not right for you, like dinner parties for me, I have resisted a long time, thinking, oh, I should just override the resistance because that's what normal people do.

Speaker 3: 40:45

Nope, just not for me, you know. But poetry it's two things. First of all, it's another language of relating to reality and, like any language, if you don't have literacy, of course you're going to resist it, which is kind of the hubris of you know, not knowing something and therefore dismissing it because you don't have the language of understanding it and I was very lucky to have someone come into my life who educated me in poetry and gave me the language and then the feeling-based fear.

Speaker 3: 41:18

I mean it does challenge you to feel things more deeply or more completely, including the stuff that lives in your own blind spots, in a way.

Speaker 2: 41:30

Yeah, you mentioned the word consolation earlier on. I know you're also a David White appreciator and I remember his book Consolation yeah, reading that I wrote the foreword to the.

Speaker 3: 41:40

UKator and I remember his book Continuation. Yeah, reading that I wrote the foreword to the UK edition. Oh nice, I love that book there's a second one coming out in two months.

Speaker 1: 41:49

Nice.

Speaker 2: 41:50

But I felt as I was reading, that that question why does this resonate so much? And for so many people I've given it to it was some sort of handrail that he needed to erect for himself, I imagine I mean, I'm positing, I don't know the man, but when you are working through or processing, as you said when you came to writing, because that was how you were going to find clarity. That's why it translates so beautifully, because you didn't start with some and being facetious, but some ip and think, oh, I'll make some money from that. Let me work backwards and see where the story could be, which is well, you know.

Speaker 1: 42:29

but we all start with some ip through nurture and nature are picking up things all your life and you start writing and you don't even know what has stimulated you to write the things that you write, in a way. But what I like about him, and what I also realize in a lot of things that you write, is that you don't shy away from staring into the abyss, because I think it is in staring into the abyss and dealing with the existential acts of impermanence that you go looking for answers and go seeking out making sense of all this in some shape or form.

Speaker 3: 43:10

Well, I think we all do it fundamentally. The question is, how many Band-Aids have we put on it to blunt the? Because it is the price we paid for consciousness. The price of consciousness is awareness of our own mortality. We could not be living under this overstory of 100 trillion synapses as these frightened creatures that we are in the underbush there. You know that we have to pay the price. And you can do it willingly and face the abyss, as you say, and try to find some meaning, find some beauty, find some bewilderment and exhilaration in it, or you can put the band-aid of productivity and distract yourself from, you know, the onslaught of the hours until there are no more. But I don't think anyone escapes the actual question pulsating underneath it all, the actual question pulsating underneath it all.

Speaker 1: 44:00

Well, it depends how well you can convince yourself in the capitalism game or in the religion game. They're all sort of ways to deal with the abyss as well, I guess, but probably less meaningful for some people and more meaningful for others.

Speaker 3: 44:17

Well, maybe they're just different kinds of meaning. I mean, I am probably enough as an atheist. I went to church yesterday, this 900-year-old church and this sacred music, that's who knows how many centuries old People singing. And I looked around at the congregation and all these people, all ages, all they looked so different from each other and they're all singing and they're all saying a prayer from a book, the same prayer, and I thought about what they've all lived through, the losses, the loves, the joys, the disappointments, and they're all in there together saying a prayer for the same thing. And afterwards I was talking to my friend who took me there, who goes every Sunday, and I said it is a yearning for meaning. That's what religion does and I don't think it's actually that different from. I find a lot of meaning in understanding, or at least questioning, how a galaxy holds together or how a cell works and the wonder that is in there.

Speaker 3: 45:26

it is its own kind of prayerful thing, right? And I guess my point is it doesn't make much of a difference how we go about giving ourselves that portal to meaning. It's all the same. We're all living the same lives, the same heartbreaks, the same passions. It's not that unique and I don't have a value judgment on the people who do it in church.

Speaker 1: 45:49

Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, who are we to judge? Whoever finds a way to deal with the situation is fine by me. Why atheist and not agnostic?

Speaker 3: 46:02

Well, I mean, these are all just categories. I guess that is the shorthand people use for not subscribing to religion.

Speaker 1: 46:10

Mainstream religion. Yeah, but you know so I was saying atheist most of my life as well. Well, doesn't?

Speaker 3: 46:17

agnostic mean that you don't believe in a specific God, but you believe in God.

Speaker 2: 46:22

I don't believe in.

Speaker 3: 46:23

God, I guess that's where I go to atheist.

Speaker 1: 46:26

I think an agnostic, if I'm not mistaken, means that you don't know whether God exists or not. You just can't. There's no way you can know.

Speaker 1: 46:36

It's the they of theology know, right, and it's the day of theology, it's just no, I just you know the yeah. So let's put it this way you, you cannot deny whether a prime mover exists or not. Whatever that prime mover may be, it doesn't matter. It could be something that has nothing to do with us, as in doesn't interact with us, doesn't care about us, or whatever, but there that may be a prime mover, wow, but that goes to Laplace's demon and that whole thought experiment proving and disproving, yeah, anyway, I'm not super interested in labels.

Speaker 3: 47:07

You can call me whatever.

Speaker 2: 47:08

The point is, I don't go to church and I don't believe in.

Speaker 3: 47:11

God, but I loved the music and I loved people's feelings. Well, the congregation.

Speaker 1: 47:17

Yeah that's exactly it. I think that's what we've lost.

Speaker 2: 47:20

All we talk about at the moment is the importance of community the importance of connection, the fact that we're social animals and the whole conversation post-COVID was. The biggest killer is loneliness. All these statistics came out around this. I was thinking earlier on about the writers that have lasted and what was their community? How connected were they to other people? I think we've really romanticized the past into being this place where everyone did everything together, with the exception of church. Maybe People live miles away from one another and transport was so much less accessible.

Speaker 2: 48:00

And you might just stay in the same.

Speaker 1: 48:02

Well, but the Viennese coffee houses of the 19th century are pretty cool places. Let's say there are a lot of interesting people in those coffee shops and cross-pollinating ideas. So I don't know. Yeah, they were far away but they're also what's the current version of that? I guess internet forums that's so 90s?

Speaker 3: 48:23

are there forums anymore? You're so cute that was the most 90s phrase I've heard in a long time whatever the forum is.

Speaker 1: 48:33

I didn't specifically talk about the forum but you know whatever the group, whatever the website, whatever the chat, whatever the site or page. On that note, you've been looking at history from various different angles. When I learned history in school, I learned it in a very siloed manner. You know, you learned about Rome and you're learning about Roman history. Then you would learn about philosophy there and you'd never interpolate the different strands in a way. And it's really interesting to find out who were contemporaries and how people were influencing each other, and sometimes I didn't even clock that people were contemporaries and influenced each other how you.

Speaker 3: 49:14

I'm obsessed with that.

Speaker 1: 49:16

Yes, exactly so give me some of your favorite things that you've uncovered here in terms of who? Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 3: 49:22

Where to start.

Speaker 3: 49:24

Well, just because I mean so also, these are questions that I like taking years exploring, because you discover the connections the deeper you dive into the lives of people. And just because I had already mentioned Mary Shelley, she was taken so. Her parents were very famous philosophers, very progressive Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Her mother died giving birth to her or a few days later from infection. Her father raised her and he used to take her to science lectures here in London, including this was the kind of dawn of animal electricity, the Galvani and Aldini and all these pioneers of science. And she absorbed that into her teenage brain and then went on to write Frankenstein, exploring how these ideas fit together. And then went on to write Frankenstein exploring how these ideas fit together.

Speaker 3: 50:26

Fast forward two centuries and we're getting a lot of AI raising the exact same questions that she raised 200 years ago. But in her time her brain absorbed so much that we weren't aware of. I mean, there's a part of her life where she gets very interested in the anti-slavery movement and it happens that Frederick Douglass is traveling through Europe while Mary Shelley's alive and doing all this work, and anyway, people cross paths and that's the thing that amazes me. How did they find each other? They never met, but she became aware. But they knew of one another's work.

Speaker 3: 51:00

Yeah, we think the internet is all that jazz, but the the Republic of Letters is, you know this is Voltaire's term. But but but the, the correspondence, you know people would get letters of introduction. I'm reading John James Audubon's biography now, the great ornithologist and artist, and he was trying to get introductions to some of the top scientists in Europe at the time, including Humphrey Davy, whose chemistry experiments are part of what ended up influencing Mary Shelley and actually raising some of the first questions about the nature of consciousness. Because he was experimenting with laughing gas, which is the first true, empirically assessed psychedelic, essentially psychoactive substance. And anyway, audubon and Humphrey Davy I mean.

Speaker 3: 51:50

And asking for these letters of introduction, then you have to go through some other person who was influential of their time in order to connect you to this other person. We talk about a zeitgeist. It's just this ecosystem of human relations that gives rise to these abstract ideas that we live with, that have shaped our world. But actually it was a contact point between two human beings who are now buried somewhere here behind the house, you know, in a cemetery, somewhere.

Speaker 2: 52:16

And yet she didn't have the luxury of time. Her life was so short. Her life was so short, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna ask you a last question. Yes, where are the? A three-quarter sort of like poker style table with a bench around it? If you could fill this seat, so I would say you could probably fit four to eight people from the past who would you gather?

Speaker 3: 52:41

Oh, that's tricky, because then I have to worry about like their dynamics between them, that's what I'm interested in. Oh no, I can't do that.

Speaker 1: 52:48

Forget the dynamics.

Speaker 3: 52:50

No, they don't have to interact with each other, that's easier to answer Just to you then, just to me.

Speaker 2: 52:54

And would you rather be drinking absinthe or be taking what was the plant medicine that you just mentioned, or would you rather just be clean and have nothing amplifying you?

Speaker 3: 53:05

I think everybody needs to have fasted. Okay, so they're the right amount of lucid, but like angry a little angry but clear headed.

Speaker 1: 53:14

Hangry.

Speaker 3: 53:15

Hangry, yeah, oh my God, hangry. Rachel Carson, I'd pay good money to see that god, that is so difficult. Um, and I would give a totally different answer tomorrow, hours of every day okay, right now, right now, I would love to see you said how many eight, four to eight let's see how many.

Speaker 2: 53:39

Eight. Four to eight. Okay, let's see how many people could fit here. Four to eight.

Speaker 3: 53:42

Okay, let's just sardine them up and do eight. Rachel Carson, Virginia Woolf they will not like each other, so again they are not in contact.

Speaker 3: 53:53

Dorothy Crawford Hodgkin for listeners who haven't heard of her is the first and so far only British woman to have won the Nobel Prize in science. She decoded the structure of insulin, penicillin and B12, the building blocks of life. But she was the scientist in the 20th century who most used her celebrity as a kind of peacemaker, traveled around the world, got arrested multiple times, got denied an American visa, you know, but she really really saw science as this common language that bridged political divides, and she's one of the people in this new book that Mary Shelley is also part of. What date she was? So she solved insulin in 1934. I think she was born in 1907.

Speaker 2: 54:41

Okay.

Speaker 3: 54:42

And she died in 1994, I want to say yeah, Around around.

Speaker 2: 54:50

I'm pretty sure those are the dates?

Speaker 3: 54:53

Okay, we got three Whitman for sure. He would be in his own corner, though it would be in his own corner, though. It would be interesting to see Isaac Newton as a teenager. Do I get an?

Speaker 1: 55:08

age range too. Yeah, a period of time Okay teenage Isaac Newton. He'd definitely be at my table too.

Speaker 3: 55:15

Well, mary Shelley I can't not.

Speaker 1: 55:18

At what age? At this point?

Speaker 3: 55:23

God, her life. I mean, you know she lost four children, a sister and a husband by the time she was 25, so let's say like 20. Yeah, I know. What about Lovelace? Yeah, if she doesn't have to interact, you know no inception, please sorry let's bring her, that would be fantastic, me think.

Speaker 1: 55:39

Let's bring her, let's bring her.

Speaker 3: 55:40

Yeah, that'll be fantastic um, I think that, I think that let's just that's enough, okay that's great, thank you.

Speaker 2: 55:47

That's a multi crew that you put together there.

Speaker 1: 55:52

Thanks so much for taking the time, maria, it was a pleasure thank you for thinking deeply.