https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9glo5Io_HOQ
I’ve never stopped liking English literature. It wasn’t the door to close when you walked into the university. I’m reading Sir Thomas Brown right now. I read him 45 years ago, I suppose. I never… the enthusiasm and energy that comes from the best writers, you’ve adverted to the best, Matthew Arnold, the best that has been thought and said, is still there. And that’s an almost a surprising thing that even hit at this very nocturnal hour, the kind of exuberance that you had at 20, still lingers in the chambers of music and literature. Well, that’s something… Yes, I would say so. Obviously something indicating the lasting benefit of a genuine education in the humanities. It’s an inexhaustible source of what exactly? Well, we said mimicry of the great spirit that animates the ages. Right? How could that possibly get old? No, I like your description because it’s not often presented as that. And now of course the idea that education is for the job. I do know how important jobs are. I come from Newfoundland. But there’s a whole set of spirits, as you know, you’ve met them, that also say that there’s another target in education and that’s… you just spoke of it. You remember always, John, the better to enjoy life or the better to endure it. I don’t think there’s a better short description of what education is. No, I had a vision at one point of the people, many people who were influential to me in my life. These were… this particular vision mostly involved men. And so it was like a review in my mind of men that I had seen that had been influential to me. And then it was like there was something behind that. There was the greater men that I had been exposed to as a student, the people I had read and identified with. I mean, when I found someone, a thinker that captured me, I tended to read everything I could that they had produced. And I would fall into their mode of thinking. It would take me over completely. And then I’d reemerge somewhat on the other side, changed. But then I could see behind those great thinkers, there was something else. And I think that’s something that, you know, people think about that as the ancestral God, the ancestral father. And that was the spirit that was shining through the great men I had read. And then all the people that had influenced me, it shone through what was great, good and great about them. By the way, good and great, you’re committing terrible sins here. These adjectives are now off limits. The idea of good and great mathematics. This is where… Well, it’s the association with power. As soon as you buy the doctrine that any hierarchical organization is predicated on power, then obviously, the higher up you are in that hierarchy, the more corrupt you are. So you might say, well, so what? What do you lose from that? Because you lose your sense of inferiority in relationship to the better. Well, what you lose is the better. That’s fine if you’re good enough the way you are. But I’ve never met anyone who felt that they were good enough the way they were. There’s always clamor inside your soul for the more that you could be. And where else are you going to find it? Except among those who have deemed being deemed to be the best. And it isn’t arbitrary, right? You said when you went to university, you’d hear these words and they would hit you. You call them benign explosions. That’s not indoctrination by your by your educators. That’s introduction to the benign explosions. Well, that particular professor, all he did, I could still hear it. It’s about it. I’m making a guess. There’s about a 42 line simile. He just read it. And I mean, it was like Beethoven’s fifth, because it does have a certain power of expression. And you’re right. There was no message attached. He didn’t say even, by the way, no message saying that you must like this. It was just done. And let the spirit respond as the spirit will. But this is this is this fashioned education, this fashion. You go to university now to to be to be injected with attitude, not thought. And some of these these white programs and the new anti-racism, which is all identity and and you only read things from the tribe to which you belong. I know enough about Newfoundland. I want to read about the Trojan War, not the war on the southern shore. I mean, really, they’re canceling Homer, they’re canceling Shakespeare. They’re making fun of mathematics. They’re talking about white physics. I do not know how we wandered so easily into this terrible and dominating lunacy. Have you seen the latest statement by the president of the CDC, Catherine Tate, following the the George the George trial down in the States? I mean, it’s like it’s like a parody. I’ve heard you thinking in how CDC is going to take notice of this and systemic racism in the CDC and all that. Dear God, I spine is requires calcium and there’s no milk in CDC. None. How did I get under that? Sure. All right. So you’re eight years in Newfoundland. You’re traveling all over the province. You’re you’re listening to people. You’re watching the reactions to your shows. You’re you’re reading. How much how much do you read? And habitually? Oh, two, three, four hours a day. There was periods when I I was out for a while. I go for eight or nine. But I have books in the morning and I have books in the evening. And of course, this stuff here, the Internet has diluted some of that traffic. But I do have a fair store. I also, by the way, this is a good point to make for people who are going to rereading as an avocados point that you can’t read enough and you can only reread it. I find great pleasure. I read read Johnson’s letters, for example, recently, even the Anatomy of Melancholy, which is a bit of a task. Proust reread. So I do that a lot. I find that it’s a refreshing that you borrow power, not power in any militaristic or or status sense. How about authority? Well, it teases your brain. And I you get thrown into a mood in which the actions of the mind are more prompt and more precise. It’s mood. You can’t you can’t claim. I will now say this. You have to wait for the damn word to come to you. And what this puts you in that that fertile. Oh, see, that’s a mystery, too, right? That’s a mystery. Yeah, it is that element of thought. And, you know, people people are easily cynical about prayer. But it seems to me that there isn’t much difference in posing a question to yourself and waiting for an answer. Then there is I don’t distinguish between that in some sense in prayer and prayer, because the act of receiving revelatory thought, which is the thought that bubbles up is it seems to me that you pose yourself a question and if your intent is genuine, you want the answer. You don’t want something comfortable, which is uncomfortable in itself. Mysteriously, the something will arise. And the less you put that persona that you describe between you and the source upon which you call, the more likely you are to be rewarded with the words that are correct. But you that being you is a very strange idea because it it happens of its own accord in some sense. The book I was referring to way back and I said I wouldn’t call it the title like Custer. Call the act of creation. And it was an analysis of literary insight or literary inspiration, humor, the discovery of a punch line and mathematical, the eureka moment. I think I’ve read that. I think I read that as an undergraduate. It’s a long while ago, but it is precisely your point. I have I have a puzzle in my mind. I’m trying to find a phrase or a mathematician. I have a real puzzle. And at a whole series of time, I have no answer. I can’t get it. I go out and sloppily make a cup of tea. And as I’m stirring the first cube of sugar, oh, I got the answer. What was the difference between the two minutes before and the time that this thought exploded in your you had to have your mind prepared for the thought to have a place to pop out? So you just used that phrase explosion again. You talked about the benign explosions that introduction to literature set off. OK, so there’s a thematic relationship between those two ideas. And we already talked about the idea of mimicry. And so, you know, what you do in part when you’re educating yourself by pursuing what’s what appears to you to be meaningfully and true is you build that spirit inside of you. That’s it. And then that’s the thing that’s informing you when you ask questions. And you should build that spirit out of you, build that spirit out of what the best out of the best the past has to offer you. And there’s markers for that. And the markers are that aesthetic, that aesthetic grip. Right. It’s not something that someone can impose on you. It doesn’t work. It has to be. You meet it halfway. And so, when you know, when we have a conversation like this, that that’s spontaneous, what I’m trying to do when I have a conversation like this is to become transparent. In some sense, I don’t want my concerns about the podcast, let’s say the quality of the podcast, the audience, any of that. I don’t want those proximal concerns to interfere with my emersion in the conversation. And if I do that correctly and open myself up, then there’s a spontaneity about the dialogue. And that seems to be associated with the search for and the discovery of some additional truth. We have to, persona was one of the words that that classic phrase of prepare the face to meet the faces that you meet. Any time we artificially or self-consciously construct ahead of time some personal interaction, which is what a conversation really is. If we go in with the scaffolding already prepared in there, it’s kind of an armor. Nothing can happen. You have you have put yourself in in in the closed container and you’ve done the right ritual moves. Your other point is also very interesting. You don’t care about the damn podcast and the quality. No, don’t. Don’t. These are not only these are secondary or collateral or adventitious. But if you want to have a chat, make the chat, the thing. And even there, you don’t you don’t make it too deliberate. You just you sit, you speak and back and forth. I don’t know, by the way, how I’m doing on this. But that’s not the point. Excuse me. The point on this one is very simple. That we have to allow some channel for the impulses that we don’t understand, call them the unconscious, call them sensibility. The impulses that we don’t command, but they are there. And occasionally they emerge and solving the problem, having a conversation, making a quick joke in the middle of a live conversation. It’s a great mysterious thing. We’re not nearly as metaphysical as we should be. People should pay more attention to the spirit, even if they’re not religious.