A Poetic Prelude On Mortality

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Welcome to the Where Show We Meet Podcast. This is the first time we have a returning guest. We are here to talk about Maria Popova's new book Traversal, which, to be honest, defies summary. Therefore, we'll treat you to a prelude instead.

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Bigger than Manhattan. Earth's largest living organism sways in the surf south of Australia. Posidonia Australis. A species of seagrass that unable to flower clones itself. Older than mathematics and the written word, it's been cloning itself since before the pyramids were built. A kind of immortality. And while I kiss my lover on the fresh cut grass under the Manhattan Bridge, it goes on cloning itself as we go on dying and passing between our lips the heat of our mortality. Between the scale of atoms and the scale of stars, between the time of Mayflies and the time of mountains, we exist as proteins lit up with purpose, matter, yearning for meaning on a planet capable of trees and tenderness. A world on which every living thing abides by the same dumb resilience through which we rose from the oceans to compose the Benedictus and to build the bomb. All of our models and our maps, all of our poems and our love songs, all the conjectures chalked on the blackboard of the mind in theorems and scriptures spring from the same elemental restlessness to locate ourselves in the cosmos of being to know reality and to know ourselves. Across the abyss between one consciousness and another, between one frame of reference and another, we go on searching for an organizing principle to fathom the ultimate questions.

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What is life? What is death? What makes a body a person?

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What makes a planet a world? Over and over we discover that it is all one question that there might just be a single answer love. Our love of knowledge, our love of mystery, our love of beauty transcending the vanity of ambition, our love of truth prevailing over the howling hunger for power, our love for each other, each of us a festival of particles and probabilities, a living question, a perishable miracle composed of chemistry and culture, of passion and chance.

Writing The Margins Back Into Life

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Hi, this is Omida Shdari.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

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

SPEAKER_06 2:58

I don't know why my name with a question mark. That is my name, Maria Popova.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

It may not be. And without focusing on marginal, I I just it just struck me today, in fact, when I was preparing for this interview, that you reanimate all of these people that you write about and you re-vivify them, you make them relevant for us today. It's like a sort of composting. They've become fertile, they like feed, they feed us again and renew our interest in them. I didn't even know half of these people before. So anyway, I just wanted to start with full transparency that I've I was for a period of time completely immersed in your words.

SPEAKER_06 4:38

Um thank you for that. Thank you for being uh first of all my first reader of the manuscript and the the voice, the public voice of it that um what a gift. Thank you. Um I do want to say, I mean, it's interesting at some point, maybe 15 years into doing what I do, I looked back and I realized something that certainly wasn't a conscious choice, but was very clear recognition, which is that the people whose work has most inspired me, comforted me, motivated me, enchanted me, all seem to be people who lived in the margins of their time and place and who were by some variable usually unchosen or other in their culture. And but use that as a self-permission to then think in radically different ways. They I guess they had less to lose by already being so far outside the mainstream that they could look at what others didn't want to look at and and see how others couldn't see, and in consequence, gave us inventions, creations, ideas that are that have moved this world forward that we live with today, even if we have forgotten who they were.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Yeah. Yeah. And I think they're good examples in the book. Um uh Mary Tharp maps the ocean floor for years, and you know, I guess it's a little bit different because the credit was given, but to men at the time, or uh Wegener was a mock for the continental drift theory. Wegener was his name, right? Or Wegener.

SPEAKER_06 6:16

Uh Wagener, depending on how you want to pronounce it.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

Wegener, the German, the German pronunciation would be Wegener. Uh Wegener dies, you know, mocked um for continental drift, which is then vindicated 50 years later. Why does the center seem structurally unable to see what the edges find?

SPEAKER_06 6:34

All of us are much more a product of our time and place than we realize. We absorb ideas that are um handed down to us that we mistake for givens, meaning we mistake for functions of reality as opposed to functions of our cultural conditioning. And I am very drawn to people who, when told uh these are the options on the table, not only do they find another option, they build another table.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

Well, all of them. Uh when I looked at them, I made a list today. And even though you do it brilliantly in the book and you draw the commonality, but they're people who seem not to be legible in their own time. Um and I was wondering also, because you love telescopes and microscopes, I was saying to Omid earlier on, I think marginality becomes its own kind of telescope in a strange way. Because as an outsider, if you aren't being understood, or if you're not part of the main culture, what choice do you have but to find relevance somehow? And that must mean you study it even more deeply because you're not imbibing it, it's not part of you, you're not part of it. You've been rejected on some level, right? You're not mirroring in the same way as everyone else. So I was just sort of struck by this kind of this telescope idea. I don't know.

SPEAKER_06 8:01

But I mean, I love your idea of the instrument being the metaphor, but I would say to me, they are more of a periscope. The people who

Why Outsiders See What Centers Miss

SPEAKER_06 8:11

rise over the surface of the mainstream and then have this way of seeing that see something that the others just cannot.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Way beyond, which is what you said. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

You're influenced by these people. Is influence linear, or is it more like weather? When you kind of look at how the mind reaches another 200 years later, what's the mechanism of this happening?

SPEAKER_06 8:36

I I can't even fully comprehend how a linear model of influence would manifest. What would that be? Uh I I think I mean Natasha's metaphor of the compost is very true. We take ideas, lives, inspirations, and the kind of metabolism of time turns them into fertile soil for our own growth in a way. And uh I think influence is a kind of treacherous term because it it presumes conscious intellectual and creative dependence or heritage, uh, but we absorb so much that we're not conscious of. So it we are influenced by every single experience we've ever had from the moment we were born until now. The question is how much of it can we recognize and call influence? Uh, but I do think there's something valuable in consciously seeking out models for ways of being that mirror or magnify your own, that choosing your own creative ancestors, spiritual ancestors, whatever you want to call them.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Yeah, it makes sense. And I guess the word influence or connection would be apt, certainly, to talk a little bit about your project here, but you picked traversal. What does traversal do that these other words don't do in this um regard?

SPEAKER_06 10:02

I mean, it's a 600-page book as opposed to, you know, 500 to 5,000-word essay that I would publish on my site. You know, it's interesting. In a way, these are people that it took me seven years, this book. And it these were people that I had encountered in my ordinary writing life with the Marginalian. And for some reason, something about their life, it was always one small detail about each of them that began the whole thing, wouldn't let me go. And I would think about it, I would think about it. And eventually I became kind of too fixated on trying to understand who this person was. I mean, Natasha, I love what you said about why the word literacy, right? It in terms of how these people are not legible to their time and place. There's something about reading a person that is so difficult. It's so difficult, even with your most intimate living persons, let alone someone who lived 200 years ago and trying to read who they were, really, as a total person from the scraps that survive. Uh, but anyway, these were people who stayed with me long enough that I really wanted to get to know them in the deepest possible way.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Yeah. Um, the thing that you do in the book that uh strikes me and I thought a lot about, and I think we may have touched upon this before, is horizontal and vertical history in many ways. And the thing that I really find atrocious is that in the history class, we learn history and silos. We hear scientific history, we learn political history, we learn art history. These are all silos. Um, what do you think a society loses that approaches the discipline of history this way?

SPEAKER_06 11:53

I mean, the same thing we lose in approaching the present in this way, when all of our fields of inquiry, I mean, isn't the end goal truth and meaning? That's it. That's what all these things are there for. Science, the arts. We're here to find truth and to make meaning. But the more we divide these disciplines into the sciences, the arts, and then subdivide those into painting and theoretical physics, reality is a tapestry. You can't just, you know, pull one thread thread by thread, try to reconstitute reality in this way. And I think with what we call history, which is really the uh collective, selective memory of humanity, it's even more deceptive because the it exposes the selectivity bias of how we look at events which are total and integrated, and have any given event has so many components that can be looked at with so many lenses, and how we choose to tell the story is just the telling, not the story.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

One of the things I particularly loved, and I'm focusing on the women, and this is unfair, I'll I'll come to the men as well. But at least for me, the women, because they were so revolutionary for their time, all of them, whether it's Dorothy um and Molecules or whether it was Fanny Wright and um social reform and on and on and Mary Shelley and all I you know we'll we'll discuss all of them at some point, no doubt. But they were like the thresholds between those subjects somehow. And that's what made them changers, reformers. They they made one category of knowledge into another, or they stood in a place where you could value both at the same time. Whereas I felt the men, because of tradition, because

Influence As Compost And Creative Ancestors

SPEAKER_01 13:40

of certain kinds of education, because of being declarative about what your strengths were, they couldn't do that as effectively as the women. Um and and that struck me that that was the only advantage perhaps of being born at that time. You you know, you you had to be really rather exceptional and extraordinary.

SPEAKER_06 14:00

I, you know, I I had never consciously sought people for any of their biometric variables. I certainly didn't include the women because they were women. That's a very interesting insight, though. That that's true in a way. I think looking back, what um I find more fascinating, and probably more of the reason I chose them, is the tremendous odds against and events against they were able to accomplish what they accomplished. I mean, taking Mary Shelley, for example, I think none of us can imagine, none of us living today can imagine what it's like to be 26 and by 26 to have lost your mother at birth, three children, the love of your life, your only biological sibling. I mean, that's a level of loss that in our age of competitive suffering, you know, i it is, and she was so uncomplaining about it. She just kept making art in order to survive. And I find that astonishing.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

And I personally felt very spiked by anger sometimes when the women paid the sort of emotional cost of male greatness. Um, and one of the things I love is that you you neither prosecute nor sort of acquit uh the the Percy Shelleys or or the Frederick Douglasses um for their treatment of women in their lives. You you allow us as the reader to feel that fury. Um and I was very impressed at your restraint.

SPEAKER_06 15:27

Um I I am uh very pleased and surprised again to hear you perceive it that way because the as a writer, you know, you want to eliminate judgment as much as possible, but as a human being, you have it. And my biggest struggle with this book is not tearing down Percy Shelley ferociously. I mean, I really edited out so much of my own outrage and and judgment, uh, and I still think too much of it is left. I I still pretty come down pretty hard on him.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

What did you I didn't think she flattened anyway? I don't I don't think so either.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

I think what what we could uh detect was uh her growing frustration over time. I don't think that you added yours, even though I've I felt it as well.

SPEAKER_06 16:14

Well, this was a 900-page manuscript that ended up 600 pages, so I bet you it was 300 pages of ranting again that came off.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

Yeah, I can imagine. I go back to my concept of vertical and horizontal history. A good example of the vertical one, which I thought was so funny, and I just wasn't aware of this again. Something that you uncovered for me was you know, a lab assistant in Galvani's lab knocks something over, and 200 years later, Mary Shelley writes a book that de facto describes how we feel 200 years later, yet again about AI to an extent. You know, um, how how these things progress. It feels much more like um by accident, dressed up as design in many ways.

SPEAKER_06 17:00

Yes, I mean I think that's also part of the biases of history and also personal history, how we look back on our lives and take credit, paint as choice, many things that were very much chance events that worked out in our favor.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

But we should should we say what Galvani does? Because that's so extraordinary. And sure. I feel unfair being on the inside and not describing this crazy system of events.

SPEAKER_06 17:26

Uh I I am culpable also for not uh contextualizing it. I don't like uh exclusionary conversations where all the inside knowledge externalizes.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

I set you up. I set you up.

SPEAKER_06 17:38

No, no, it's it's on me. So Govani, uh, this is in the era of the great vitalism debate when people were wondering what differentiates inorganic matter from living beings. Because at that point we already knew that pretty much the same compounds make rocks and people, but what it what is it that makes us alive? And Galvani was experimenting with what was then termed animal electricity, this idea that there are electric currents coursing through animal flesh that do not through inorganic matter. And the story that he tells, I mean, what do we know? There's no other account, but we have to believe it, is that at some point a lab assistant they had some frog legs sort of on little hooks in the lab. Uh, and he knocked something over that caused a current essentially to touch the frog leg, which convulsed with obviously without a body, without a brain, it it had a muscle contraction that seemed like life. And that sort of launched the whole vitalism debate. Uh yes. I won't spoil it by by telling how science actually uncovered what was actually going on and it wasn't some mysterious godlike force. Uh, but that's part of part of the inquiry. How did we get to our understanding of life and death, which is still incomplete?

SPEAKER_00 19:10

And we have the battery also because of that debate. Well, that's Volta, yeah. Gulvani and Volta. And then you go on to Volta, and then you go on to Mary Shelley using this as a Yeah, again, I don't want to give too much away, but I think it's exciting to think that somebody knocking something over got us the battery. Um, and Mary Shelley and so much more.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

It's difficult because it's so rammed with so much. Before we were interviewing, we were like, where did we begin with this? Because it's just about everything. Um, but that sounds so trite.

SPEAKER_06 19:44

Um but every book that's worth reading is about everything, no matter what it says it's about.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

Let me let me mount uh mount a little bit of uh defense. I I want to ask you, obviously, specialism has its place. Um and uh I would agree that we probably celebrate specialists too much in the era that we live in, um, which is why your work stands out and uh stimulates. But what does the polymath stance lose that say maybe a specialist stance wins?

SPEAKER_06 20:15

I mean, depends on where we draw the line. So, for example, unless the polymath go down a very deep rabbit hole, they will never know about the geometry of the eye of the scallop, which is one of the most fascinating things on earth, right? Big the way that a marine biologist would. Uh but uh I just want to say, first of all, this uh predicament is why I don't do book interviews. So we we we're doing now something that is very new for me. I don't talk about the books that I write generally. And it's kind of exciting and kind of daunting and maybe a public service for other people who read or write this exercise to try to tell what a book that's meaningful to you, whether you read it or wrote it, what it's about. And I was thinking in thinking about what we're gonna do today, there are books that are about something. For example, I just read a fantastic biography of George B. Scheller, the great conservationist. That's about him and about the story of 20th century conservation. It's also about everything because it's a very good book, and every biography that's worth its salt is really about the history of the world and the story of life. But it is about something. So there are the books that are about, and then there are the books that are for. So I don't write about books, I write for books, and it's to the reader to discover what it's for for them. For me in writing it, it is to for understanding more deeply, feeling more deeply, thinking more laterally. But there I there's no aboutness on this one.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Nah, totally true. I would say that a few of the characters that you certainly pick are are about people, you know, rather than.

SPEAKER_06 22:00

But that's why I don't write biography. Because I use fragments of their lives and use them to weave together into, again, a tapestry that that shows a different, larger picture that's not about them.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

And that appeals to you. Right. Very subjective. And and the elements that are yeah. But there is an aboutness in that and it's subconscious, unconscious, whatever. Some of the brilliance of your book is that you work against the old romance associated with genius, that brilliance doesn't make anyone innocent. These people are so deeply flawed, as well as you shining a light on their utter brilliance. You know, I never heard of Davy

Tapestry History Versus Academic Silos

SPEAKER_01 22:40

before. I'm so happy that I know that story. I'm I'm so happy that I know the Galvani story. I'm I'm, you know, Douglas, yes, of course, heard of him, but again, there was so much filled in. Um, you just hear about his brilliance. And instead, we got a 360, very flawed, you know, deeply talented, amazing orator, ideas got, you know, all of the things that he is, and Shelley's imagination. It liberated, but it also imprisoned in real life in his relationship. So there's this just this constant opposites all the time, always holding two things at once.

SPEAKER_06 23:18

And yes, and I mean, obviously, uh one of the two, I would say, main figures in the book is Walt Whitman, who is so often quoted for the, you know, do I contradict myself? I contain multitudes, you know, the whole thing it's become a cliche. But he was someone who really owned this long before most people had an awareness of this. And also bear in mind, in the middle of writing this was the peak of cancel culture. This extremely unnuanced, unitary way of categorizing people that is just so damaging.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

Address that so brilliantly. That's one in one of my in one of my thoughts was you don't cancel people.

SPEAKER_06 23:55

Thank you. Well, I mean, the thing is, even the more concerning one to me is retroactively trying to cancel people in history whose, you know, judging by the presence of the standard, people of the past on whose backs we built those standards, right? And I would hope that uh posterity will look on us and think, what brutes.

SPEAKER_05 24:17

You know, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_06 24:18

I hope, you know, in a hundred years people are gonna have a serious moral problem with the fact that we eat other animals. Animals, yeah. Yeah, I agree. The lowest hanging fruit of the moral tree that that we're gonna be judged for. But the the point though is that I think we need constant reminders that even the farthest seers in any time cannot bend their gaze fully past the horizon of their culture's givens. And and this is equally true of the people that we live with today who do great things and do terrible things, and uh it's just part of being human and being a creature of time and a creature of culture.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

Uh what you achieve so well is this study of of genius and frailty. Uh whereas when we tend to report it through history, the genius and the achievements, we rarely are exposed to the frailty. It made me think so much about how we respond to things at the moment that uh it's so absolutist and your way of dealing with these figures wasn't. And it teaches tolerance and understanding and you're very t you know, it's tenderness and and kindness. Yeah. Well, I think it's a good idea. With great intelligence.

SPEAKER_06 25:33

Thank you. That's very generous. I think for me it's much more of a I I write what I need to hear. It's a form of self-help to be reminded that absolutism is a losing game. There are no absolutes in nature that we know of, first of all. And so to be constantly longing for absolutes in a relativistic universe is self-defeating. I think we have become addicted to disappointment, disdain, and blame because the moment you expect someone to be wholly good with no flaws, you will be disappointed, you will be outraged, you will blame them for your own expectation and then suffer for it.

SPEAKER_01 26:12

Yeah, that's very well put. I was just thinking, though, also the character's tenderness, Mary Shelley's tenderness to her creature, Dorothy's tenderness to her molecules, that there's the patience. I mean, as you said, what she lost by the age of 26, the fact that she wrote this book as a teenager, it it's just extraordinary how diligent and how hardworking and how through so much suffering for for both of them actually. Um, you know, Dorothy was working on her own and almost sort of monastic and wasn't looking for any appropriation from the other. Three children.

SPEAKER_06 26:52

Well raising three children, yes.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

Not looking for any approbation from anyone else, just and I and I feel we don't do things quietly right now. If you're gonna make an effort, you want everyone to know about that effort.

SPEAKER_06 27:08

Uh I will say to me, science remains the exception.

SPEAKER_01 27:12

Still does, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 27:14

I mean, obviously there are a handful of performative public scientists, but most people who do science want truth, not visibility. Uh, and I do think a large reason I explored the themes I explored in Traversal is this relationship between truth and power. And, you know, some of it has been political power in the past, hijacking the fruits of science for military and colonialist purposes. But in our day-to-day culture, power, personal power, is very much linked to visibility. So again, the exploitation of the search for truth, for personal gain, for ego, for glory, and the danger that comes from that.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

I'm thinking about the notion that the rails through which the traversals happened were letters and meeting in cities or certain places. We have orders of magnitude more uh rails now where people can traverse and connect and influence each other. I wonder how it would look like to write a book like yours and 200 years from now about our era, and if the quality of that would be very different, and how it would be different.

SPEAKER_06 28:36

I mean it's an interesting question. How solitary can someone's work be in a much more connected uh era? Because, you know, in traversal it's not really about connections between people or it's more about the interior life and the crossings they had to make to what they did. But it's true, if uh the world were intruding at every moment of the day. I mean, I I hope uh part of what will come through with Whitman and his personality contrast is how someone who was so genuinely believed that he was just an atom in the universe, he couldn't wait to become the uncombed grass of graves, you know, come go back to the earth. And he was also the most extraordinary self-mythologizer and self-aggrandizer. So I kept wondering who would Whitman be in the ABC. Because he, you know, Frederick Douglass was the most photographed person of the 19th century. I mean, if I you know what, if I look like Frederick Douglass, I might also want to see my own likeness all the time, you know. But he more than Queen Victoria, more than Charles Darwin. I didn't know that. He he was just out there, you know, and Whitman was this the second most photographed American after Douglas, more than Lincoln. And I mean, imagine a photograph in their time was a daguerreotype. They had to sit still for 15 minutes, find someone with all the heavy equipment. They would be selfie masters, you know, Instagramming the world away, and how much work would they have actually done? And this is what I mean about being product of our time and place for good and for ill.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

You you read about uh progress as uh the act of gene editing of the cultural genome.

SPEAKER_06 30:26

Oh, really? I don't remember that, but that's yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

I read it, I think in the marginal I I think I've read it in the marginalian at some point in one of uh your um blogs. Um what do you think uh that metaphor refuses uh that the word progress assumes?

SPEAKER_06 30:43

But the metaphor refuses. Yeah, so I can see the opposite. I can see what I I mean I can see I I can I don't remember writing this. I can see how I would have written it, but I also am now seeing the holes through it. Uh the thing, well, two things. First of all, gene editing or or the evolution of genes tends to be linear and irreversible, right? Progress is not like that. It's cyclical, it goes backwards and forwards and sideways, and over time you can plot the line somewhat for forward, but it's not a vector. And the other thing with gene editing, which is different from genetic evolution, is that it is quite dangerous because you're changing one gene expression and not knowing how it's going to influence another. And so you might want to control for, I don't know, height and not realize that you're also altering susceptibility to diabetes or, you know, whatever it may be. Uh and I do think that is actually kind of how we approach progress, that we make changes on some level that we think is universally good and don't really understand how it impacts the intricately interlaced nature of life.

SPEAKER_00 32:01

Yeah. Yeah, yet all the all of it somehow chaotically plays out the way it plays out. I mean, these decisions were made before as well, right? Uh it's not that this is a new thing. I wanted to ask you this AI can do a lot of connecting and pattern recognition and figuring out how certain people have somehow influenced each other over a whole corpus of information. It's obviously not the artisanal way, and it's not the handcrafted way and the effortful way that you traverse the reality that has been documented through the corpus of writing. How do you feel about those insights? Do you feel that the qualitatively would be void?

SPEAKER_06 32:40

That's a huge question. I don't think it would be void. I think it would be very informative. I, as a writer, am interested not in information, but in illumination. And I do not think illumination is an emergent property of information. That past a certain volume of information, you achieve illumination.

Genius Without Innocence And Cancel Culture

SPEAKER_06 33:00

I think illumination comes from something that is done with feeling. And feeling comes from a lived experience in an animal body that has suffered, that has smelt the mountain air, that has swum through the ocean on a hot summer day. And AI will never have those experiences. AI will never have the quality of feeling that allows us to tap into the feeling substrate of the lives of people that can be reduced to information, but it will be completely productionist, right? And I think uh obviously, no, maybe not obviously, I wrote traversal while I suffered about people who had suffered. Suffering is why we make art. I think every artist's art is their coping mechanism for suffering. And an AI will never suffer because an AI can never know what it is to fail its own expectation, to fail. You can you know, you can't program an algorithm to fail because if you program it to fail, then it has succeeded at failing, then it has not failed. So without suffering, it it is there's a real limit to how much truth and meaning it can give us, no matter the amount of information.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

Yeah, I like the difference. I like the difference between illumination and information.

SPEAKER_01 34:20

And and also in all of your work, you're always trying to make the invisible visible. I'm I mean, to some degree, it's not entirely invisible, but I just mean it's not you know mainstream maybe or popular. You're you're bringing to light or unearthing, you know, these geniuses that that we know much less about, certainly the female ones. Something struck me that the the people's minds that you write about were actually living ahead of where their bodies were. So I do think there was a sort of a strangely disembodied thing about quite a lot of them. That they were living in two places at once. And to me, some of the traversal was around that that and and such short lives as well. How, with all the limitations of living in that period of time, and maybe you're right, maybe it's radical attention, maybe it's the fact that they weren't distracted in the way that we are now, I don't know. But how did Mary Shelley manage to achieve so much?

SPEAKER_06 35:16

And how did how did Because she suffered, she couldn't have gone on living without writing. I mean, her diary, in the pit of her despair, it says work, period. Work, period. That that's how she coped. That's how she coped. But it's interesting. I I uh this something you just said made me think of Omid's question about the fragmentation of disciplines, right? And and AI. So, for example, Dorothy Crawford-Hodgkin, to this day, the only British woman to have won the Nobel Prize in Science. She decoded the molecular structure of insulin, penicillin, and B12. She worked for 30 years on insulin. 30 years. And the reason she was able to do it, I mean, proteins are these incredibly delicate, intricate cathedrals of complexity. The folding of a protein is one of the most complex things in nature. And she was able to do it because she was interested in Islamic mosaics, and she drew tessellations of mosaics. So she had this completely different mental library, and it was something about looking at the molecules through the X-ray crystallography, you know, the apparatus, and she saw the connection between the two, and she used that knowledge to map the protein. So now we use AI to do protein folding. You could press a button and an AI will run infinite numbers of scripts and tell you the most likely, the most likely folding pattern of a protein. But with something like insulin, I bet you AI, if it in time, if we had AI at that time with the information available, AI would never have gotten to the structure of insulin because it wouldn't have had this completely other repertoire of interpretation that she had just because she was a human being with feelings about art.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

Well, so she was working outside of probability, she's working with patterns, right? Absolutely and that's another thing I think the book is all about is patterns. And you having the ability to recognize these extraordinary patterns across all of these people's lives, these movements, these themes. Um Yeah. It's very hard to talk about a book. You're right. And particularly one that you love and that you've lived inside of. So I can't imagine what it's like for you because um you really you you created it.

SPEAKER_06 37:40

I do miss those people that I lived with for seven years. I missed them dearly.

SPEAKER_00 37:45

I remember when we spoke last time, Mary Shelley was basically on the chopping block of your previous book. Is is was there anybody on the chopping block this time around? Did you that I left out that might uh yes.

SPEAKER_06 37:59

Ida Tarbell. She was the woman who exposed the first big monopoly. She she wrote a huge expose on the oil trusts, but also her life was so interesting, and she foresaw what capitalism would do in the future. And she was the only person Rockefeller was afraid of. She she just came down hard on all the oil magnets and helped put in some laws that actually we might be in a much worse place uh if she hadn't done that work.

SPEAKER_01 38:28

Say her name again.

SPEAKER_06 38:29

Ida Tarbell.

SPEAKER_00 38:31

And we're talking 19th century.

SPEAKER_06 38:34

Yes, 1910s. Yeah. Early 20th century.

SPEAKER_00 38:39

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

So in a similar vein to Rachel Carson or completely different?

SPEAKER_06 38:44

Who's a precursor to that sort of Well, so she this this is so such a non-sequitur, and and I will one day maybe write about her. She was born in an oil town, and uh in the early days of oil, there were a lot of very gruesome deaths because uh things would explode and people would get charred. And as a little girl, she had seen like horrific things happening, and was wondering basically why. Like, what is so priceless to people that they would inflict this kind of satanic deaths on minors? And then she studied science, she came to understand about benzene, and you know, she could foresee the the exploitation of earth that was gonna happen, and and could see that there were just a few companies who were running this whole show and thought this is a very bad idea for everyone involved. Uh, and so she ended up writing uh a series of exposes that made a real difference. And the antitrust laws actually that a few years ago what was happening with the big companies in Silicon Valley, all that law was the precedent was her work uh on the on big oil.

SPEAKER_01 39:58

That sounds really interesting, yeah. The the other thing, I should just go back a step, when you were talking about suffering, that's another thing I think that the book really rewards us with is the way, even though it is a lot about history, when we read history, and even if it's incredibly well written, it it sort of over-rewards brilliance and uh big events and under-records the kind of emotional labour that that made that brilliance possible. And I think that's something that you

AI Can Inform But Cannot Illuminate

SPEAKER_01 40:30

do so beautifully and so viscerally. I mean, I was suffering as I I read it um on behalf of Mary Shelley, on behalf of the endeavors of these people who are burning oil um through the night.

SPEAKER_06 40:45

I I think that's a very good point. And you know, I am a fiery anti-Courtian. I think Rene Descartes is the most dangerous person in the history of humankind, has done more damage than any other single person, and we're still paying penance 400 years later. And this notion that genius is a thing of the mind and that the mind is separate from the body, the animal sensorium, the life of the nervous system, feelings which are an instrument of thought, you know, it is such a dangerous thing. And the fetishism of genius as being this kind of mental achievement is just so misguided. It's it is so 17th century, and we're still with it, or it's still with us. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:28

No, but you burst that, I think. Yeah. Um, you burst that bubble um really effectively. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:35

You use this term selfing recently. Um deselfing. Well, unselfing.

SPEAKER_06 41:42

This is Iris Murdoch's term. She used it as a as an aside and an example. It's wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

How ahead of her time. Yeah, I love that.

SPEAKER_00 41:50

Oh, she was just uh selfing is obviously the opposite of it, and I think society is doing a lot of that. And uh, I guess to explain selfing is the a rumination that is self-centered, is I guess the way I would put it. And unselfing would be the way to get out of your own head and actually occupy other spaces that get you out of your own head and your own story. Um, do you think that civilization can unself itself? Or is it just an individual that that needs to do the unselfing?

SPEAKER_01 42:18

But I mean there's something else. I I think the important part for me about the unselfing was that focusing on other things or outside of yourself is is moral training. It's almost sounded like an obligation, right? Yes. That's yes, yeah. Yes, it's exercise, it's something you have to do quite consciously in order to change.

SPEAKER_06 42:38

Because we are self-referential creatures, even if we didn't live in the uh century of the self, which is what we live in. I I think the one thing that helped Mary Shelley was work. The other thing that is all throughout her journals was time and nature and looking outward, looking at the lives of birds and and the changes of the weather and the way that the water shimmered on the Rhine, these kinds of things that make you aware there is a world out there that is the world in here. It's one, it's continuous. And to feel yourself part of the continuum as opposed to this focal point, right, actually undermines most suffering because most suffering is a problem of selfing.

SPEAKER_00 43:26

Yeah, and also a mind problem very often, right? Like I that's why I brought this point up. Uh, I I feel obviously suffering is generated in the mind, I would say, but the exercise that uh that you embark upon when you're in nature is getting out of your own head and trying to be part of something else.

SPEAKER_06 43:43

This is a Cartesian way of putting it. Right. Because what's happening when you're in nature, you're having a full body experience of an environment, of an ecosystem, your whole nervous system, which is distributed throughout your body, not just in your brain, is having a response to the touch of the wind and Smell of the air and the humidity and all these things that you're perceiving would more than the mind. And I think having an unselfing experience in the natural world is the antidote to this, you know, prison of mental rumination.

SPEAKER_00 44:16

The way it works for me when I think about this is more about experiencing reality through words versus not through words. Because as soon as I no longer mitigate reality through words, i.e., play tennis, dance, or do music or things that do no longer use words to mediate me and reality. There's no distance between me and reality. I experience it fully without using words as the a conduit, then I feel I'm unselfing.

SPEAKER_06 44:44

Interesting. I have to think about that. I'm not convinced that is the case for writers. Uh I think part of how Mary Shelley contacted the world was through writing her journals about the natural world or some of her most beautiful writing. And I don't think it imprisoned her because she was rendering it in words. I mean, obviously, I don't know what it's like to be her, but it it seemed to do the opposite almost. I don't know. I have to think about when I am in the natural world. I am having thoughts in words about what I'm perceiving, but they're not thoughts about myself.

SPEAKER_01 45:25

And how does someone like Emily Dickinson, who didn't go outside, possibly perceive all of these things without experiencing them in an embodied way? It was entirely through her words, right?

SPEAKER_06 45:37

Yeah, and her imagination. She would go look at a violet for three hours, like a person on mushrooms, you know.

SPEAKER_00 45:48

No, I I get what you're saying. I do agree with you that uh obviously you can write about other things that distract you from self-centered thoughts, and that may be also very it is clearly also a way to unself. I do think there's a different quality. As in, I think there's a quality of living without the rational brain turned on, and one that requires

Unselfing Through Nature And Attention

SPEAKER_00 46:10

the rational brain also for the unselfing. But I I do think it's more effective for me when I don't even use words. Uh, it has a different quality.

SPEAKER_06 46:17

I hear you, I can see that, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:20

But so much of the suffering uh that these people experienced, or most of them, was put upon them from their environment or the people who were close to them, or circumstance and misfortune and grief and tragedy. Um and I suppose what we've just been talking about is is the self-inflicted kinds of suffering where you just maybe have too much time relatively um to think and to self-destruct and to yeah, ruminate. You're you're not outward looking enough just by definition of you don't have all of those chores and tasks and um things to do in a day.

SPEAKER_06 47:03

I mean, and this is what I find so extraordinary about Whitman that he was the master ruminator. I mean, leaves of grass is one lifelong rumination, right? But it's also so much about the outside world and the life of the earth and the life of other people who were literally not himself. He was so good at stepping into lives that were very unlike his own. And yet all of it was in the service of bearing his suffering and processing what he was feeling. I mean, it it is very much a kind of poetic rumination on the scale of a lifelong book. And and more than Leaves of Grass being rumination, Whitman's entire life is this kind of fascinating duality of selfing and unselfing, because he very much, and I think genuinely believed again about dissolution of self into the life of the universe, into the earth. However, as he approached the edge of his own mortality, he became obsessed with immortalizing himself and he spent thousands of dollars he didn't have that he borrowed from a friend and never repaid on literally tons of granite to build a tomb for himself, which is the opposite of becoming the uncombed haired graves, right? And it's so interesting because it really challenges our notion of the continuity of personhood. I mean, he was the same person, and I don't think either belief was false for him, but they coexisted in this incompatible way that he had to somehow live with and it eventually died with.

SPEAKER_01 48:46

So the opposite of composting. Um so maybe that's a nice place to end, in fact, is the last paragraph of your book.

SPEAKER_02 48:56

Um if I may re read that out loud.

Whitman On Death And Enough

SPEAKER_02 49:02

To die is different from what anyone supposed, Whitman wrote. And luckier.

SPEAKER_01 49:09

The poet who knew the amplitude of time, knew too that death betokens the luckiness of having lived, the roll of the dice on the granite floor of eternity that configures each improbable existence, each I drawn from the myriad of possible not eyes that were never born and will never get to die. Everything we know of mathematics tells us that this infinite set of possible unconstellated atoms contains poets greater than Walt Whitman, chemists greater than Dorothy Crowford Hodgkin, versions of you and me kinder and crueler than we will ever be.

SPEAKER_02 49:54

And yet here we are between the dice, between the trees, probable impossibilities each of us a brief traversal between not yet and never again. Having only these arms to hold the borrowed atoms that we love. That is enough.

SPEAKER_03 50:20

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 50:22

Well, thank you. That is enough.

SPEAKER_01 50:24

We can never get enough. That is enough.

SPEAKER_00 50:28

Thanks so much for traversing with us, Maria, and for writing this beautiful.

SPEAKER_06 50:32

Thank you for the honor of having me back. And thank you, Natasha, for just giving this book a life in the world.

SPEAKER_01 50:40

Well, a vocal one. Uh only.