https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BeCFnlN_FKA
we have a nature as human beings we’re not infinitely malleable by culture which is a post-modernist claim and a dangerous one it’s dangerous if we have a nature Paglia has this idea that the reason that you come to university and you study the humanities, or the proper reason if you do that is not to engage in premature and destructive criticism of something that you don’t even yet understand but to learn as much as you can about art and literature and poetry and drama and fiction and religious thinking and this is all a kind of a, you think about it as a what is that? what is all that? it’s art it’s culture music belongs in that category like what the hell, what about music? it’s like everyone loves it, or almost everyone it’s a mystery you listen to music and it’s very meaningful I mean music gets people through some pretty dark times why? it’s not obvious, that’s for sure you know, and in most cultures music plays a very central role in identity formation you guys, I think you’ll probably find as you age that your favorite music will be the music that you listen to between the ages of 16 and 20 it’s kind of like an imprint on you and it defines a, maybe that defines a generation and maybe, you know, in our tribal past, and this is highly likely when you were being inculcated into the tribal culture that was inculcated with dance and with masks and with music all at the same time so you’re invited to participate in this drama and to take your place in this drama and to think of that as a representation of the objective world is just not right that isn’t what it is it’s an invitation to a drama now then the question might be, well, is the drama real? and the answer to that is it depends on what you mean by real I think that great dramas are more real than real they’re hyper real they’re they’re hyper real because they provide guidelines about how to act that are abstract and even perhaps generic but applicable across an extraordinary broad range of situations so imagine this you know, you get up in the morning you do a bunch of things and someone asks you what you’re doing what you did and you you know, you tell them, well, the first thing I did this morning was open my eyes and the second thing was think about whether I wanted to go back to sleep and then, you know, I took off my blankets and then I put my feet on the floor and then I stood up and I was blinking while I was doing all this and I was also breathing and then, you know, I looked for my clothes and you really want to listen to that guy? you don’t want to listen to that guy? it’s like, why are you telling me that? I want you to tell me something interesting well, what is it that’s interesting? and why isn’t that interesting? it’s not obvious so then imagine the guy actually tells you a pretty good story a little adventure probably he was doing something normal, something unexpected happened he had to conjure up some new responses and he either settled the problem or didn’t settle the problem yeah, you’re interested in that especially if he settled the problem because if he can tell you how when he encountered some unexplored territory he was able to sew it back together then maybe you can do that when that thing happens and that’s pretty cheap wisdom for you he had to go through all the aggravation of figuring it out and all you have to do is listen you know, and that’s kind of a classic story a classic story, roughly speaking, is there’s a guy, woman, doesn’t matter going about their life relatively normally something blindsides them and they’re in a state of chaos chaos is a place chaos is the place that you end up when what you’re doing and the world stop matching and the chaos can be of different degrees you know, you could wake up and find that your house was burgled you could wake up and find that your parent has Alzheimer’s or some fatal disease or that you do or that your whole family was murdered or that there’s a war starting there’s different degrees of chaos I think you can quantify the chaos by calculating how much of what you do and expect is likely to be disrupted by the event now, because that the more disruption the more destabilized you’re going to be which is why if someone tells you that you’re going to perish painfully in three months it’s like that’s a bad one you’re really in an unexpected territory there’s nothing that you assumed that was real roughly speaking in the world is real anymore we like to watch people in their normal life blindsided by something experiencing this interregnum of chaos where they explore and gather new information and retool their character or retool the world because either of those would work as a solution and then come out the other side and things are better than they were to begin with or at least as good, but better is better that’s a happy ending that’s a comedy, technically speaking and so what you want, you want your life to be a comedy not that it’s supposed to be funny because comedy doesn’t have to be funny technically speaking it’s just the opposite of tragedy tragedy is when you’re going along pretty well and you get blindsided and that’s that and you know, that can certainly happen it happens to people all the time but it’s a comedy you want now what I hope to provide you with is a magic code you know there was a book published a while back Tom Hanks was in the movie he was a Harvard professor who went around solving symbolic mysteries do you remember? what was it called? the Da Vinci Code, everyone liked that it sold a lot and you know, it was full of little mysteries and it was full of hints that there was more to the world than you think which is definitely true and that you know, there was a way of getting access to that knowledge and that it would really be worthwhile and people like that they like that idea and the reason for that is because it’s actually it’s true it’s true it’s true like fiction is true so okay, let’s go back to the guy who’s telling you about his morning well, he tells you something exciting well then imagine that 10 people tell you something exciting and then you extract out the pattern of them dealing with this problem from that and so then you have a that’s what you do if you’re an author right, because in a book you don’t want the book exactly to be about what ordinary people do in ordinary times in their life it’s like you already know how to be ordinary during ordinary times of your life that’s not useful you know, you’re not going to be able to do that in ordinary times of your life, that’s not useful you know, you wouldn’t watch a videotape of yourself imagine you videotaped yourself during a day and then the next day you watched that it’s like, god, who would want to do that so what seems to happen in stories is that they distill they distill so they watch people, people watch people and then they tell stories about what they see but they leave a lot out of those stories everything that’s boring, hopefully and then more and more stories about exciting things get sort of aggregated and then maybe a great writer comes along and writes something really, really interesting profound character transformations and then you say, well that’s fiction and then you say, well that’s not true because it’s fiction but then then maybe that’s not right maybe it’s more than true because who wants the truth the truth is mundane reality and you’ve already got that mastered what you want is the distillation of interesting experience