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- [00:01]
A
You've written so many books. And then also with the School of Life, I mean, geez, almost 10 million YouTube subscribers. And as I was thinking about, what is it that you're doing? What is it that gives you joy as a writer for yourself, but also kind of a sense of relief for us as the viewer on a School of Life video or as a reader? It's this joy of capturing sensations and emotions and words. You know, so much of the world is. It's not concrete, and writing makes it concrete. And by doing that gives us clarity, gives us peace, whatever it is.
- [00:38]
B
That's beautiful. I think you've got it there. Let's end it there.
- [00:40]
A
End of the podcast.
- [00:42]
B
I mean, yes, it is all about. I mean, I think two things interest me in particular, pain and pleasure. So anything that is painful, I want to put words to it. Anything that's very beautiful, I want to put words to it. It is about capturing and to use a slightly strange word, controlling the experience. Controlling pain in order to lessen it, Controlling beauty in order to keep a hold on something that is fugitive. And the idea is that, you know, the more I can do, I mean, it's that broadly therapeutic. It's why people journal. I mean, I began as a writer, as a teenager, trying to master emotions that felt bigger than me. I felt a basic sense of relief, which has not changed to this day, at turning an emotion into an idea, at putting words to feelings, and they just lessen. And that brings enormous relief. So I think you can divide humanity into what people do with their pain. Some people drink their pain away. Some people talk their pain away. Some people exercise their pain away. Some people achieve their pain away. And some people want to write it away. And I'm one of those. And it is all about processing, you might say, difficult feelings. So I wrote my first book, which in the United States was called On Love, and in the many other parts of the world was called Essays in Love. And that was an attempt to understand sensations around love that had basically been very painful and mysterious. And I gained relief, and in a rather sort of magical process, you know, it ended up in the hands of other people who would say things like, how did you know that about me? Wow. And, of course, I would say, I have no idea about you, but I'm just keeping a track of me. And, you know, if I'm doing that faithfully, then it may have an echo in somebody else. And, you know, it is. It's very strange how that happens. You know, sometimes people say to me, what research have you done? You know, what's your authority base like? What are you claiming this on? And I go, you know, just empirical observation of me. And I think that all of us are this incredible library of sensations, this incredible data source. And so often, particularly in the academic world, the feeling is, let's ignore ourselves as a source of data. Let's go and find out what Cicero said, what Socrates said, or what Michel Foucault said. And while, you know, that could be helpful, far better to mine your own mind. But there's not much encouragement for that. The whole school system is based on trying to get you to find out what other people thought rather than going into what you might think.
- [03:40]
A
Yeah. So what do you do when you. There's like a sort of pain or a emotion that you're just grappling with and you can't quite quite, quite name it. You know, that there's something there. Because I've always struggled to feel my emotions. This has been a lot of what I've learned over the last five years. In particular, I've really struggled with it. And so a lot of writing for me, and actually, the pain of writing is to almost force myself to feel the thing, and to really feel the thing and to stop the resistance and then to somehow name the thing is to constrain the thing. And once you've constrained it now you can look at it as almost an object that's separate from you, but it's remarkably painful. So how do you. How do you do that?
- [04:26]
B
I mean, partly, you know, there's definitely a moment when certain feelings are not ready to be turned into literature, into words. It's not ready, it's not cooked. And partly that has to do with one not understanding what it is sufficiently. And after all, you know, a piece of prose has to obey certain rules of coherence. You have to be able to understand it well enough to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who doesn't know it. You know, you have to be able to introduce a stranger to a feeling, and in order to do that, you have to know it a little bit, you know, yourself. So let me give you an example.
- [05:04]
A
Yeah.
- [05:04]
B
So I. So I'm writing again about love at the moment, and for maybe three weeks or so, I was toying around with it. I saw a couple in a restaurant and they were having a lovely meal and it was summertime in London, and they look really happy. And I had a thought, and the thought was, if their relationship breaks down, it's an evening like this that will cost Them both dear, or one of them dear. This will be a locus of pain. Let's say the man is abandoned or the woman's abandoned. They will return to that. Oh, that lovely meal when the future looked beautiful, et cetera. So I became interested in how does a pleasurable experience later turn into a nightmare? And observing my own life, I've seen how much when a relationship breaks down, you don't really sit around lamenting the argument that you had or the, you know, the bad times about their sibling or whatever it is you really. Your mind turns towards the beautiful times. That holiday you took, that. That amazing walk you took, you know, one evening, whatever the. These are the moments of pain when it's beautiful. And I thought, isn't it? It's a sort of dark thought. It's the beautiful things that are storing up cost that the pleasurable participant isn't yet fully aware of. I mean, it's really the psychology of mourning and loss. You only lose what's beautiful and good. Therefore, while achieving anything beautiful and good, if you're a wiser, older person, you're thinking, wow, this is what I'm going to need to maybe have to pay for later on. So, anyway, these thoughts were in my head, but for a while they were tangled and couldn't really, whatever. And then yesterday it all came to me. And often it does come in a sort of moment of like, right, this is cooked, this is bubbling, this is a boiling point. And I was looking through my notes and thought, okay, I know this is like a little essay on the debt that we may have to pay for our pleasures. So it emerges a little piece. But as I say, that's a journey from fragments to something more complete. You have to be able to name it and see it, because as you were hinting, sometimes you don't know what it is. You don't know what a feeling is. You don't know where it belongs. Wherein, if you imagine a giant library, our minds are giant libraries, and they've got an index system and a stack system. But sometimes you get some words and you think, I don't know what the book is. I don't know where it would go on the stacks. I don't know. You know, and it takes a while, and then eventually you find a location for it in your. In your intellectual worldview.
- [08:00]
A
You gotta tell me about that word. Fragments. Fragments. Fragments. Because I think that that's where so, so much of writing starts, as fragments.
- [08:07]
B
Absolutely. And I think it should start. I think that novice writers often get this wrong they say things like, I just don't know where to start with my book, I don't know what the story, etc. And I always say, look, I compare it to archeology in archaeology, you come across a little broken bit of a pot and you know that there's other bits of the pot. They're going to be somewhere in the area and you have to dig through the dirt to assemble them and find them and then assemble them into a plausible pattern. You have to go, right, my first thought is this, what's the next bit that it could fit into? And it takes a long while, like archaeology, like archaeological sort of reconstitution. It takes a while and one can panic and think, I'd never get this, but. But I think that many books start with an image of thought, a fragmented idea. You know, if I think of certain books, they literally began with half a scene. And I thought, right, what's. You know, I'm working on a book now and I just have an image of a man emerging from a visit to a dental hygienist in Wimpole street in London. He's gone there in a moment of some despair and inner turmoil, and he's had his teeth cleaned and he's emerging into the street. Anyway, I'm slowly assembling bits and bits will come from all over and be marshaled by that scene. But it's like a powerful magnet that draws in filaments from elsewhere, but for a long time the magnet is not switched on and so the filaments are just lying around. So no one thinks in book terms. I mean, a book is an arbitrary construction dictated by the book industry. It's, you know, a certain number of words, it's glued together, blah, blah. No one thinks in terms of books. We think in sentences, images, fragments, et cetera. And gradually we may end up with this thing called a book. But it's always a slightly artificial construction, which is why I've also. I began by being interested in aphorisms, maxims, you know, the tradition of like, you know, the short, pithy.
- [10:26]
A
The original tweets.
- [10:27]
B
Right, the original tweets. And I remember this 17th century character, French character, La Rochefoucauld, do you know him?
- [10:34]
A
No.
- [10:34]
B
La Rochefoucault, he wrote this book called the maxims in the 17th century. And this beautiful book, it must be. It's about 200 fragments. Let me give you an example. To say one never flirts is itself a form of flirtation. Another one is, there are some people who would never have fallen in love if they hadn't heard there was such a thing. Another one is, we all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others. And I remember reading this book thinking, I love this. It's not a novel, it's not a biography, it's not a poem. It's like a psychological, as the French would say, aper sus. A little glimpse of a truth. And it's two lines long. Great. Yeah. And that's how I began writing. I wrote a whole selection of aphorisms for friends at university and we would sort of laugh and you know, some of them, some of them were about people that we'd know.
- [11:25]
A
They are funny.
- [11:26]
B
Right.
- [11:26]
A
I mean, Shakespeare said brevity is the soul of wit.
- [11:28]
B
Right.
- [11:28]
A
And like there's kind of a wit and a humor and an aphorism of Maxim.
- [11:33]
B
Yeah. So that's what I like. But I've always found, as a writer, I've always found it really hard to fit into a pre existing form. So my books tend to be quite odd. I mean, I read a book called the Course of Love.
- [11:47]
A
Well, real quick, before you get there, I think you're saying something really profound, which is, you know, there's that stupid line, it's like, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? How do you write a book one sentence at a time? Like, it's fine to just think in sentences and paragraphs and stories. You don't. You've got the big giant thing. I mean, let alone like, I want to be a writer, you know, so, so often you get blocked by the identity of that giant thing.
- [12:08]
B
And also, you know, the fact that most nowadays, you know, I mean, for a long time, if to be a writer is to write a certain kind of genre, the novel has hugely dominated our sense of what it means to be a writer.
- [12:20]
A
Yes.
- [12:20]
B
And also not just the novel, but a certain kind of novel, a certain still Based on the 19th century narrative structure of characters in a realistic setting where the narrator, the narrative voice is essentially offstage. It's a kind of disembodied voice telling you what. What everybody's thinking. But you don't really know who this person is or who this voice is, but it's kind of taking you through a story, action over reflection, et cetera. And I remember thinking, this is not for me. I don't like this kind of book. I mean, I kind of like it, but I don't love it. It's not dead on course and it took me a while to discover certain kinds of Books that I really liked. So the Czech writer Milan Kundera was extremely important for me. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and the Unbearable Lightness of Being. And also his book, the Art of the Novel. Immensely significant texts that seem to have an incredible freedom. They were messing around with the rules. He would tell a bit of a story, Kundera, and then stop and give you, like, a reflection on, you know, tonal music and Beethoven. And then there'd be another bit of narrative and then there'd be a kind of reflection on three words from a dictionary. And you're thinking, wow, why not? And this opened up a whole horizon.
- [13:42]
A
It's like a collage.
- [13:44]
B
Yeah, yeah. In this I was also really inspired by paintings and certain kind of modern artists. And I thought, you know, people like Joseph Cornell, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin Christo, these are all people who, in different ways, in different media, were messing it about and just, I don't know, it seemed to have a certain kind of sensibility and. Yeah, so that was important. And, you know, I ended up writing. I've ended up writing books that don't really quite fit. So I've written a couple of novels, as I said, Essays in Love and the Course of Love, which are picking up from where, you know, very inspired by Kundera in the sense of a mixture of narrative and psychological analysis. And then I've written, I don't know, collages of things. I've written books that rely heavily on images. I'm very interested in using pictures in intriguing ways so that the text and the picture are bouncing off each other.
- [14:57]
A
How do you think about what it means to live like a writer? You know, when you are a writer, so little of the work actually happens with your fingers pecking at a keyboard. So much of the work happens when you're thinking, whether you're in the shower, whether you're on a walk, whether you're traveling. How do you think about that? Which is actually the majority of the work in terms of time?
- [15:23]
B
I think it's paradoxical. It takes writers. It took me a long time to realize if I'm not doing anything at nine o'clock in the morning on a Monday, when most sensible people are gearing up for really intense stuff, it doesn't matter. The really good work could be happening on a Sunday night at 4:00am and, you know, real work, as you say, is feeling, thinking. And it may not happen in the standard places. So I was always like a good boy who wanted to be, you know, a Dutiful member of society. And I think, I've got to sit at my desk. I can't go to the park. But now I think, well, if the park is where you might think, go for it. If going on holiday is the place where you might think. Proust has this. Proust, by the way, who I love. Marcel Proust, the great French novelist, wrote this really weird book called In Search of Lost Time, which is, again, a mixture of essay, novel, and, I don't know, disquisition on the meaning of life. It's a philosophy book, really. He mixed it all up. When he was talking about creativity. He said, if you want to recommend somebody to have insights into life and you could give them a magical choice between meeting a great mind like Plato or Descartes for an evening or going out. He's having sexist, heterosexual assumptions with a woman who will make him suffer. We know who that person should spend the evening with, the woman who will make him suffer. He had this particular view that suffering. Come back to what we talk about pain. He had the view that suffering is the great catalyst of insight. And therefore, if you want to get some material, suffer. And we know this from music, right? Think of the great breakup albums. Think of, I don't know, Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks. That's a breakup album. Think of Phil Collins. Face value, breakup albums, great bits of music that emerging out of pop music, but also classical music. It's always breakup. There's something about being torn apart that good writing is partly on the side of madness, death, dislocation, chaos and just otherness. If things are going well for you, you unite with the world. You feel kinship with the way things are. You're not a rebel or a revolutionary or a tragic figure. You. You quite like the way the world is because it's doing good things for you, right? When you're desperate, you want to kill yourself. You want to jump out of the window, you want to. I'm just being autobiographical. You're not on the side of. You're reading life against the grain. And in those moods, you're more likely to kind of find the great truths that are outside of the normal, satisfied, smug perfume.
- [18:27]
A
Well, let me add one thing to that. I also think that there are the places where reason disappears and when reason disappears and sort of the. The. The emotion, or almost the animal within us take over. We often. I mean, we escaped preconceived language, right? Like, if you get really mad at someone, like you're just freaking angry and you're yelling at them, you will say things that you've never said before, that you've been feeling that have been deep, deep, deep, deep, deep down that all of a sudden have come out. And a lot of when writing feels trite or contrived, it's because you're kind of rearranging other words and thoughts that other people have given you or that you've kind of had in the past. And in suffering and in anger and in sadness and grief. It's the times when the way that we've always done things, or conventional wisdom, whatever it is, just disappears and breaks down. Boom. The animal within us comes out.
- [19:21]
B
That's right. In a way, you kind of have to have nothing left to lose. You don't give a shit anymore. You say, fuck this. And you just. And you're just there. You're there with certain truths because you've given up lying, deceiving or sentimental reassurance, et cetera. And so there is. You know, the great works of literature do often have a relationship to desperation in some way that could be driven by death. You know, the. Again, the sense of, like, your time's coming up now, you know, you've got anything left to say. You know, is there something you still want to tell us? Something that you didn't dare before? You know, it's. Yeah, good thinking is. Someone says, right, good thinking is good feeling. But what good feeling is, is. Is not caring to subscribe to the kind of normal bromides that. That we live by.
- [20:17]
A
Well, it hit me the other day, actually, as I was preparing for this, that, you know, sometimes you'll read somebody's writing and be like, wow, I really want to write like that. And then you realize that actually you can't just write like that. In order to write like that, you have to think like that. In order to think like that, you have to live like that.
- [20:32]
B
Live like that.
- [20:33]
A
And actually, that's where it begins.
- [20:35]
B
Yeah, that's right. That's right. And, you know, look, there are certain kind of cliched images of the writer in a black cape escaping bourgeois society, et cetera. We're not talking necessarily these kind of cliches. You could be wearing a T shirt from wherever. It's not the outward signs. It's where your soul is. I also think writing is an act of communication between people. And if your communication is just brilliant with the people around you and in your life, what's the point of writing? Loneliness. Loneliness of experience is also absolutely key. A sense that no one understands a lot of writing. Begins with a sense no one around me understands. I mean, if we think about it, what is writing? It's, you know, Socrates was quite good on this Socrates view was, you know, we shouldn't write books because books are. Books were born out of a despair and at intra human communication. And he optimistically thought that the way to do philosophy was not to write it down, but to get a group of people in a dialogue. That's what you should do. And he was perhaps living at a time when living in a small, amazing city at a golden age, you could have those conversations. But for many of us, we can't have conversations, so we become writers because no one's listening and no one's speaking properly. And so there's that basic kind of, you know, Freud has this word sublimation to describe the origins of artistic activity. It's like the artist sublimates. The artist is faced with a particularly acute version of all the dilemmas that afflict people. The conflict between duty and pleasure, the conflict between life and death, between money and creativity. You know, all these conflicts. But Freud saw the artist as especially disturbed and compromised by them. And the artistic work arising as a. As a way of reconciling fantasy and reality. It's like the world can't be as you'd wish it to be. One option is to kill yourself or go mad, and the other option is to create a work of art. So the work of art is like the best thing you can do with your dislocation and distress. It is an alternative to, as it were, in a broad sense, losing your mind. You're focusing your mind when its complete loss and disintegration is in the air.
- [23:04]
A
Yeah. You have me think about pleasure and pain and how sometimes in a moment when things. When I'm riding high, it's like, wow, we get to live in this world and there's so many different things that we can explore and people we get to meet and places we get to go. It's all so vast and infinite and magical and. And then in the moments of pain, and there's just a tragedy of it all. It's like you get this one life and you're stuck on this dang thing.
- [23:29]
B
And.
- [23:32]
A
How am I gonna cope with this?
- [23:34]
B
Right, right, sure. And I mean, you know, almost every life, let's just say every life has moments of severe distress. I mean, you'd have to be extremely unimaginative not to quite regularly run into, or just very lucky to not to regularly run into quite a lot of distress. I mean, if you think about, you know, here we are living in a privileged west, so we're not even talking about, you know, some of the more egregious events that can come from the outside. If we're just talking about, you know, life in a relatively peaceful, relatively prosperous, well ordered society, which already is an amazing achievement. You're going to hit so many problems. Someone you love will not love you. First big problem you're going to hit, or someone's going to love you, but not in the way that feels right, or there's going to be a conflict between betray you two people, or someone's going to betray you, et cetera. So you know already welcome to eons of suffering. Then there's going to be a difficulty somewhere along the line between your sense of who you are, how you want to be seen and how others see you. You will be misheard, misrepresented, etc. There's going to be, then there's going to be conflict around money and status and achievement. There's going to be something about a pool between. Money's here, but fame is there, happiness, is there, respectability, whatever, some kind of conflict. So already before knowing anything about someone, you can look at a baby in their cradle and you think the person's going to hit these walls and that's before anything major has gone wrong. And, you know, talk to anyone over, well, say anyone over 30, anyone over 40, definitely anyone over 50, you know, you're going to find evidence of these incredible scars. And it's from this that I think is born our receptivity to the arts. I mean, if you look at Van Gogh's irises, the man was in pieces. The man was suffering like, you know, a religious saint. He was a very, very unhappy man, poor thing. He was lonely, he was desperate, he was misunderstood, he ached for love. He was, he was just so alone. And, you know, it sounds crazy. Vincent van Gogh, one of the most famous people of the 19th century, was absolutely abject and desperate. And when he looks at flowers, he's not just telling you about a flower, he's telling you about a flower seen through the lens of agony. And when you look at beauty through the lens of agony, it becomes something slightly different. It becomes a life raft. The guy's not just painting a flower, he's painting a last reason to live. And in the end, he didn't make it. But, you know, and that's what lends the kind of poignancy. So some of the most beautiful things that humans have created have been born out of a kind of negotiation with something appalling.
- [26:35]
A
Yeah, it's really, you know, it's easy to think, wow, I want to produce something beautiful. But the image that came to mind as you were talking is like two sides of a rubber band. It's like as you stretch the pain on one side, you almost get the beauty on the other side. And it's quite hard to create something that's truly beautiful and astonishing. It's almost as if it requires a kind of sacrifice. Not just a sacrifice in work ethic, but a sacrifice in terms of what we've been through in order to get there.
- [27:04]
B
Sure. But, you know, again, let's not go and hunt out that stuff. It'll come to you.
- [27:08]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [27:09]
B
It'll come to you. Just sit still. Anyone who's sitting there going, oh, when's that great suffering? Just like, you know, don't worry. Life's cooking out.
- [27:16]
A
That's a good catch.
- [27:17]
B
You know Agnes Martin. Do you know the painter Agnes Martin, Abstract artist? Amazing. She just does lines across abstract things. And I read about her life. Her life is so full of pain. She had a kind of psychiatric disorder. She lived in New Mexico on her own. And she just makes these beautiful, regular canvases that are just trying to hold on to basic order and stability in a chaotic way. And they're so moving again, because you sense the opposite of what the painting is. Just like those beautiful flowers of Van Gogh. You know, that there's something opposed to that, as you say, the rubber band, the other side of it.
- [27:54]
A
Tell me about things that you love and hate. Because what you said that I thought was so beautiful is that you're not just inspired by beauty and wisdom, but also inspired by ugliness and cruelty. Yeah, I'd never heard somebody say that before.
- [28:10]
B
I mean, let's just think of the visual. London, a city where we're in has got some really ugly parts, like all big cities, like all modern cities. And why are they so ugly? What on earth's gone wrong? Like, how can humans build beautifully in one place and time? And then when the world's even richer and more resources, they suddenly build in a really ugly way. What is going on? It's in a visual form, a translation of the kind of dumbness of the human animal. And it enraged me. And I wrote a book called the Architecture of Happiness, which was an attempt to think about buildings. But it was born of living in a horrible part of London. Not a beautiful part of London, if I lived in a beautiful city. I mean, London is beautiful. In parts, but small parts as well. An ugly part of London. And I wrote it because I couldn't bear the circumstances in which I was living. And I just thought this is so unnecessary. So that kind of got me going. But that's a visual example and there are psychological examples too. So, you know, mean mindedness, sentimentality, cruelty, humiliation, these things I want to protest against, I want to make a stand against, I want to get revenge. Revenge against. A lot of writing's about revenge. Let's face it, it's about revenge. What do I mean by revenge? You know, the silenced person who gets to have their say on the page. I mean, you know, a lot of writers are quite meek in person. You meet them and you think, it wouldn't hurt a fly. And you pick up the text, wow. You know, they're doing it because they're not so good at hitting back on in life, but they're very, you know, it all comes out on the page. So there are people who don't believe in you, there are people who don't understand you, there are people who trample on you, et cetera. And to say, here's a book, you know, look. Look at how, who books are dedicated to. They're fascinating. It's not just the loved ones, it's often the hated ones, the ones who didn't believe, etc. So, yeah, writing as revenge, writing as cure, writing as memorial, you know, all these under lots of different headings. We could, we could write about what writing is.
- [30:30]
A
What's so cool about the written word is that it is, I think, the closest. The way that we can best translate our consciousness state of sort of what's going on. And one of the things that I found particularly interesting about your process is that sometimes at the end of the day, you'll kind of come home and you'll download thoughts and ideas. And I had this image of like the different levels of consciousness. There's like, hey, what do you think about right now? Hey, what did you think about today? But over time, as you kind of just sit there in stillness and you just jot down ideas, you realize there's all these layers and the first thoughts that we have. When somebody asks, what are we thinking about? Actually often doesn't even capture the core thing that we are thinking about.
- [31:17]
B
I mean, you know, it's not just words that do this. Music, obviously, musical notes absolutely do it. Arguably, if you said to people, you know, would you rather have an amazing facility at music or at words? I want to say that most of us would choose music. There is something extraordinarily direct. You know, music is the. The motions of the soul with the minimal intervention, which is why music speaks across the ages, speaks across cultures, et cetera. It is the language of the soul and therefore has this extraordinary power. Would you rather have written hey Jude or War and Peace? You want hey Jude? Of course you want hey Jude. In a way. Don't you think? I don't know. We're trying this out. We're trying this out.
- [32:08]
A
Yeah. I don't know. That's an interesting conversation.
- [32:11]
B
And you know, to some extent, also the visual language, the language of painting, again, to translate the movements of the soul into a visual.
- [32:20]
A
Wow. Would you have rather painted the Sistine Chapel written hey Jude or written War and Peace? I don't know. That'd be a fun bar conversation.
- [32:26]
B
Yeah, that would be, wouldn't it? That would be. I mean, Sistine Chapel doesn't do it for me, but. But there are other paintings. Van Gogh's Irises.
- [32:35]
A
Yeah.
- [32:36]
B
I mean, because I can do writing, I naturally attracted to doing something I can't do. So I do envy the song makers and. And the artists. But maybe if I was a songmaker or an artist, I admire the writers.
- [32:52]
A
Yeah.
- [32:53]
B
So, I don't know.
- [32:53]
A
I guess when it comes to writing, the reason I say that point about consciousness is like, when I read David Foster Wallace, I feel like I'm putting on his glasses and stepping into his brain in a way that no other medium can quite do. Now, a painting can show me how somebody is seeing something. Music can make me feel something deeply. And you're right, I can feel what. The contents of their soul. But writing is unique for the contents of the mind.
- [33:16]
B
Look, we need all of these things. We need all these things. I mean, you know, remember this line in Flaubert where he says we're all mute bears banging desperately on a drum as we look at the beauty of the stars? In other words, we're this kind of trapped, caged animal that's just, like, aware of living in the universe. And we don't know what to do other than mutely, like, bang our fists against this drum. And it's this image of inarticulacy. I mean, all of us go to our graves with most of our experience still locked inside us. You know, when somebody dies, it's not just their physical form that dies. It's millions and billions of impressions of thoughts, of sensations, et cetera, that have evaporated. You know, as every brain switches off, an enormous memory is just deleted and every now and then, it's what we call the history of culture. A few things are rescued from this burning library. Think of every person as like a library containing millions of books that are tipped into the ocean. And every now and then, just as these books are cascading down into the sea, someone rescues one book or two or three or four, and we get a little fragmentary impression of what it was like for that person to think. But this is a fraction. I mean, just think of the history of culture not just as. Think of all the books in the world and think that those books are a fragment of what humans have actually thought and felt. Then you're starting to get a sense of the scale of mental activity of which these people we call artists are only just. You know, it's just a few extracts from that unwritten story. So writers are writing the story that most humans have no time or inclination to write for themselves. You know, they're just. They're the scribes of humanity's thoughts. Not just their own thoughts, but humanity's thoughts more generally. Which is. Come back to that other thing I was saying. You know, why people will say to me or other writers, that was my life you were describing. That was my thought that, you know, that you had for me or with me. And that's just because we bathe in this much wider community of thoughts that's wider than the common sense thoughts. There's a lovely quote from Emerson where he says, in the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. In other words, geniuses do not have thoughts that are fundamentally different from other people. What they do have is a kind of fidelity to the more neglected thoughts, the thoughts that are not mentioned in the parlor, as it were, that are not brought up at the dinner table, but that are inside everybody and that are neglected through habit, embarrassment, shame, status seeking, whatever it is that gets in the way of a more honest dialogue. Dialogue.
- [36:30]
A
How much of your experience as a writer has been about a kind of discipline where you sit down, you do the work, you show up. I sit down at 9am the inspiration comes and finds me versus something where you're channeling something from beyond you.
- [36:51]
B
It's like the proverbial example of sailing, isn't it? You've got to be with your ship and you've got to have the sail and you've got to have the sail out, and you're hoping for a prevailing wind, right? Yes, but you need that wind. That's A good point. You need to be out. You need to be out on the lake with your boat, you know, or you're there with your butterfly net. You've got to be there. Butterfly, occasionally butterfly may fly into it. You've got to be there with the net, otherwise you're not going to catch it. But what does that actually mean? What does it mean to be out on the lake or to be with the butterfly net? Does it mean you need to be at your desk at 9:00'? Clock? You know, I don't know. I mean, you've got to have your brain switched on. You've got to be attentive to your own sensations and thoughts. That's the real work.
- [37:36]
A
Attentive to your own sensations and thoughts.
- [37:39]
B
Sure. So you know, if you're scrolling endlessly on your phone, you're lost, your mind is not with you.
- [37:46]
A
I love that. So I've been doing this thing where at the end of the day, I'll just sit down for 20, 30 minutes and I just use this index card. I'll just try to fill the index card with. Just attentive to my own sensations and thoughts. I love that turn of phrase. And I am just mystified and blown away by how many sensations and thoughts there are that I just do not realize. Most of which have no substance, but some of which really do, but I do not realize in the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
- [38:17]
B
That's right. So we would need all of us hours to process, minutes to really pay attention to what's going on in a minute. And of course, the human kind of perceptual mechanism is purposefully dampened down. There's a quote from George Eliot where she says something like, if we were truly attentive to the mystery and complexity of things, we would hear the squirrel's heartbeat and would hear the grass grow. And we would, paraphrasing it badly, something like, we go mad from the multiplicity of things, we would lose our minds, but the key thing is we would hear the squirrel's heartbeat and we would hear the grass grow. In other words, what she's saying there is. You're hearing it anyway, but you repress it. To use Freudian language, you repress it. These things are in you, but you haven't paid them attention because to. To be alive, to their resonance would be to kind of lose yourself. And so in order to speak to you now, I'm having to push away so many thoughts, every time I create a sentence, I'm sacrificing other Sentences in the name of trying to sound logical. But I'm dimly aware as we sit here and speak that I'm thinking also of other things, things I'm going to do later, things that have happened, things that. Whatever. And they're just like. But. But I'm. Because I'm not yet mad or senile. I will go. Man will go senile, probably at some point, but not yet. I'm still able to maintain a kind of coherent, more or less coherent narrative so that we're speaking. But, you know, as I'm sure. Is it going on in your mind? There's. There's things going on, many things going on in the mind.
- [39:57]
A
I'm mystified by the history of this room and all the things that have happened.
- [40:00]
B
Right, right. All of these things. And our minds are such rich instruments. I can look at you. And I'm also partly looking at those books and thinking about those books and the shape of their spines, et cetera. But it's almost as though there's some kind of triage system in our minds which has evolved, obviously, over thousands of years of evolution of, like, what's important now. And our minds are very good at going, right, this is what's important now. So I'm going to sacrifice other things. I'm not going to look at that. You know, this is what makes, you know, very old people or mad people or small children. This is what makes them fascinating but also maddening to talk to, is that they can't keep a coherent thread. So you'll say to the child, you know, what have you been doing in the garden? And it'll say, I've been playing. And then it'll go, table. And you think, oh, hang on, what did you do in the garden? But they'll forget because they'll be suddenly sees. But so they can't triage their thoughts. Now, good art, a good artist, a good writer, is someone who's borrowing from the art of triaging. I'm putting inverted commas badly. In other words, they are triaging not according to the standard sense of, like, what's important, but according to a more diffuse reassociative sense. They're going outside the normal bounds. You know, you mentioned David Foster Wallace. If you said, David Foster Wallace, go on a cruise ship, what are you noticing? He wouldn't go. I'm noticing that the bar's here. He's like, no, I'm alive. To other resonances that are outside the normal purview. And that's what all writers do.
- [41:34]
A
Yeah. I think that. So I had this experience. I've been in London working on this documentary, and the first day we were on the Embankment on Waterloo Bridge for five hours. And you have this really interesting sensation. I was sort of responsible for holding this caution tape and making sure that all the walkers, by I mean a few thousand over the course of however many hours, would see and then wouldn't disrupt what's going on. And if you look at these people, no one is looking at the Embankment. No one is looking at the buildings around them. Everyone's just going from point A to point B. But then you sit there and you just look and you just stare at the same thing for six hours. And all these things come alive. You realize all these subtleties in the architecture, in how the sun changes the buildings, and you just realize, oh, my goodness, I've never actually looked at what's going on. And I think that that's a lot of what writing is, is you're almost like taking handcuffs to an idea and you're just tethering yourself to that idea and you're just forcing yourself to look. Painting is the same way. And I'm continually mesmerized by all the things that I didn't see in hour one, hour two, hour three, that begin to reveal themselves. And then you share that with other people. They're like, how do you see so deeply? You're like, no, no, no, I just looked at it for longer than you did.
- [42:55]
B
That's right, that's right. And again, small children are a guide to this. I mean, anyone who's taken a small child to the park will know how this works. So you, as the adult, they're like, right, we're going to the park. And the child's like, hang on, I don't care about the park. I'm just, like, waking up to the mysteries of existence. So I've just seen a brick wall, and I want to run my hand along the mortar of that wall, or there's a bit of moss, and I just want to, like, stroke my cheek against it. And you're thinking, okay, well, that's their priority. And the artist is a little bit like that. The artist is. Is somebody who. Everybody's going to go to the park and they're going, actually, I've just been detained by something a little unusual. And to turn that into a. Something we call a work of art is great achievement.
- [43:36]
A
What's been the role of poetry in your life? Both. Both as a consumer, but especially as. As a writer.
- [43:43]
B
So from. From an early age, I felt. I felt on the back foot in relation to poetry. There was some early class in poetry that I should have gone to that I somehow didn't. I felt I didn't get. And so. So I remember always reading poetry, thinking, what's going on here? Like, what. What are we supposed to do here? It's slightly weird language and I don't know. I don't know what's going on. At the same time, I started to notice that I sometimes had a poetic turn of phrase, by which I really mean that I wasn't. You know, there's that distinction between prose and poetry. And prose is like, summarized broadly. You know, you're trying to get to a destination and you don't care so much the words that are being used. You're just trying to say it. That's why Safety Instruction Manual is written in prose, not this thing called poetry. Poetry takes a more meandering route. It's interested in the associations around words, interested in making things more resonant, prettier, whatever it is, more thoughtful. It's taking a serendipitous route to a destination. And I remember thinking, oh, I'm interested in that. I'm interested in that as a writer. But I haven't gone to poetry school and I don't know what these poets do. And there's this sort of idea that the thing that really makes poetry is the length of the lines, you know, the meter, the, you know, and iambic, this thing and that. And, you know, all of those. All of that stuff that I don't know about. And I'm not sure whether that is the case. I think that poetry exists within. You can put it in prose sentences. There is this odd hybrid called the prose poem. Baudelaire, great French writer, wrote prose poems. Lots of people written prose poems, which is really, you know, you're abandoning some of the formal structure of poetry, but retaining some of what I want to call the resonance of poetry within a prose structure. And I'm interested in that. The poets that I favor are what you might call easy to read poets. Poets that are not necessarily always talking about Achilles and Ajax and all those mythological figures that slightly fry your mind, but they're speaking in. In. They're using ordinary words and ordinary situations, but putting them in slightly, you know, new ways. So the English poet Philip Larkin has been incredibly important. Like many people who get confused with poetry, he's like, he's a poet for people who don't understand poetry. Very easy to understand. Someone like wh. Auden, again, very easy to read poet, from which. From whom you can get an awful lot, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm really easy to read guys.
- [46:38]
A
Yeah.
- [46:39]
B
And girls.
- [46:41]
A
For me, with poetry, the rules don't help me. The only thing, the only way that I get anything out of poetry is to try to memorize it, and then somehow it comes alive.
- [46:50]
B
Yeah, interesting. That's really interesting. That's really interesting.
- [46:53]
A
I can't read poetry. I have to just read it and read it and say, oh, wow, that struck me. I don't know why. And then I memorize it.
- [47:01]
B
And, you know, that suggests also that it might be fun to do it with someone that, you know, if you were reading it to someone speaking poetry, which, of course, is how poetry began.
- [47:10]
A
Yes, of course.
- [47:11]
B
Of course. You know, that's kind of fun. So, yeah, so memorizing it, speaking it, socializing it might be a really good way in.
- [47:23]
A
What moved you to spend so much time distilling other writers? Right. A lot of the School of Life videos early on was, hey, Guide to Nietzsche, guide to Sartre. What moved you to summarize their work as a writer?
- [47:37]
B
I'd written a book called the Consolations of Philosophy, which is look at a Number of Six Philosophers. And I'd written a book on Proust called How Proust Can Change youe Life and Et cetera, et cetera. So I'd always been interested in how you. How you talk about other writers or other thinkers. And I was never interested in being an academic. Academics are always claiming to be very faithful to the ideas of the people they talk about. I was less interested in being absolutely faithful, as interested in charting what a writer made me think about where they took me. And so it no longer becomes just the writer. It's the interaction between me and that writer, which could go to a slightly different place. Not necessarily. What did Nietzsche actually say, but what can he say to us now, given the things that he did say? What resonances exist between what he said and our own times, or just my reading of it? So I'm interested in a more flavored, more personal response to things. I often imagine thinking, someone saying, okay, you've read this thinker. What's really stayed with you? What. You know, let's be really honest here. What. What is sticking with you? And, you know, that's different from trying to write a Wikipedia page on somebody. It's a very different exercise. It's trying to. You know, you were describing a typical day when you might ask yourself, what really happened today? Imagine doing that similar exercise. You shut somebody else's book, you've been reading Nietzsche and shut somebody else book, and you think, okay, what's really stayed here? And the answer could be quite different. So it's not an academic exercise. And I think insofar as my books on other thinkers have resonated, they've sold extremely well. YouTube videos have gone extremely well. I think the reason is that we're doing something, I'm doing something there that's different from the standard, you know, what ChatGPT would do for you, what Wikipedia page entry, what an academic would do for you. I'm not doing it academically.
- [49:54]
A
The thing that's coming to mind for me is how much of writing, how much people are bogged down by what they feel like they're supposed to do. You keep saying, ah, you know, not an academic, you know, and even in school it sort of pushes us in a certain direction. I was going to pop in, but it didn't feel right. When you were talking about poetry, I was like, it's probably a good thing that you didn't take that poetry class because so much of the way that we talk about poetry is super left brained and analytical. And you were talking about the iambic pentameter, this and whatnot. Like, what about just appreciating poetry? Like someone comes in like, hey, appreciate poetry, but so often you're just bogged down by, oh, you're just not supposed to do that.
- [50:33]
B
I mean, look, it's one of the great problems of life, this rule of what you're supposed to do. Let's stop talking about writing and talk about business for a minute just because it's a nice place to go, unexpected place to go. So businesses are creative enterprises, structures, consumer businesses that get this wrong all the time. Because a consumer business is an attempt to try and work out what will please somebody else. And very often people are guided by what you're supposed to do rather than what you think really might be nice for you. And so the same fakeness, sentimentality, plastic quality enters as enters into creative works. So imagine the sort of the bad restaurant. The bad restaurant, let's say a restaurant wants to be really elegant and lovely, but it doesn't think about what elegance and loveliness really, it doesn't really go like, do you really need flowers on the table? Do you really need, do you really want to start with a melon? Do you really like melon? Or you know, whatever it is, right? And it might not be that. And think about people hosting Dinner parties. So, you know, imagine that first time when you invite a friend around for dinner and you're like, please come round. And like, you know, people reach a certain stage in kind of bourgeois urban life where they're like. They'll invite, you know, the colleague from work to their home to, like, let's break bread together. And, you know, whatever. And suddenly it's like, wow, I've got to give a dinner party, so I've got to. I don't know, I've got to buy some chicken or something, because that's what you do. And then we got to have, like, the first course and then the second course, and then we got to sit down and people get terribly hampered rather than thinking, okay, what I really want to do here. And it might be totally different. I mean, imagine saying, okay, let's just have some. Let's just have some crisps and a can of tuna, and then just, like, lie on the sofa and just chat. Because that's actually who we are and what we want to do. Let's turn out the light and look at the stars. Let's go for a walk between courses. Let's cry together. Let's do the washing up. Let's just be weird, because we are weird. And, you know, there's this. There's what you're supposed to do and be and feel, and then there's the truth, which is the weirdness of life. I mean, this happens also in relationships. I mean, this is a fun thing about a good relationship, right? You meet someone and you're like, you're dating them, and you're like, how are you? I'm having fun. How are you? Et cetera. And then, you know, three months down the line, you're like, did you mean any of those things? Oh, no, you know, do you really like ice skating? Oh, God, no. You know, I just. I thought it would impress you or whatever it is, and you suddenly emerge as a much more complicated, ultimately more lovable, more weird kind of person, and.
- [53:17]
A
It'S okay, well, isn't this so weird when it comes to writing, how all the people that you like, you like for their idiosyncrasies and whatever it is, they've leaned into something to a degree that you've kind of never seen before. Sometimes they just bend grammar in all sorts of weird ways. But, like, whatever they're doing, it feels true to who they are. And then yet once you sit down to write, you're like, oh, I'm not supposed to do that. I'm not supposed to do that. And then you kind of get boxed in. Especially when you start off as a.
- [53:44]
B
Writer, which is why, you know, those exercises are rather good. To think, okay, if there were no rules, if you couldn't fail, if no one was going to laugh, if you were gonna be dead tomorrow, what would you actually do and say? And how would you write? Let's say. And that's the thing. You should write. So for me in my writing career, I thought, I wanna be a novelist. So I gotta write these things called novels based on the 19th century novel. And then gradually I just thought, fuck it, to all those rules, and ended up producing a book which was much weirder, more original, and some people like it.
- [54:17]
A
Which one was that?
- [54:18]
B
That was my first book called On Essays in Love. But as I say now I'm a spoiled boy now I just only do what I want. And I kind of think if I'm getting bored, the reader will be getting bored, totally. So I just want to write. That doesn't mean the opposite is not true. Just because I'm interested doesn't mean the reader's interested. But it's got a much higher chance of interesting someone. And so I am now. I wake up every morning and I just think, right, what do I feel like writing about? I'm no longer thinking about books, weirdly, I'm thinking about pieces of prose that are around 800 words long. And I don't care what it's about. And I just want it to feel like the thing that I most want to write that day. And I write in the early morning when I'm feeling like other people's agendas, et cetera, are not really on the horizon. So I'm coming from sleep as protected personal space. And I just write what pleases me. And then I think I'll find a place for it. I'll find somewhere to slot it in, because I've got about 22 books on the go now. And I just think, oh, I'll put it there, or I'll put it there. One day it will belong to somewhere. But it's written, as it were, from the heart. And I have totally given up the old way of working whereby I'm working on a book. And that means I just need to knit the next bit of the tapestry. I'm like. I'm just going by feeling, I mean, sometimes, okay, I'm slightly exaggerating. Sometimes I have a sense of, like, it would be good to be good to try and fill this bucket of, like, if you're having a bucket of, like, thoughts around pictures. Like, okay, maybe drop them in that bucket. But on the whole, I'm trying to keep things fluid and feeling very authentic.
- [56:03]
A
Yeah. My friend Jeremy Giffon once said to me, if you're ever struggling with writer's block, three words. Be more honest. Be more honest.
- [56:12]
B
Yeah. That's what writer's block is. Writer's block is a conflict between sort of the shame and the desire for honesty. It's like a sense of what you're supposed to do and feel and what you're actually feeling and do, which has gone numb. And so again, I mean, it's. Look, it's a very useful exercise to say to yourself, what am I actually actually feeling? What do I actually want? Where am I actually. And seeing. And, I mean, it's a very good rule of thumb with people as well. You know, if you've got a blocked relationship with someone to say, you know, sometimes we get stuck in sort of games playing and double guessing and, you know, all the rest of it, and just go, what would I really want to tell this person? What do I really. You know. And sometimes it's not always possible to say it, but at least if you've got it in view, that's very helpful.
- [57:01]
A
Yeah. So I gotta credit you with changing my mind on one thing more than there's one thing you really changed my mind on. And it's the news. And there's a. I still remember exactly where it was. There's a part early in the book where you talk about Hegel, and he says that a society becomes modern when it elevates the news to the level of what religious faiths used to be in society. And I was like, whoa. And it made me realize. You sort of step away from this book and you just realize everyone is in this constant consumption of the news. And it's a weird head scratcher about the modern world of this obsession with people we'll never meet, places we'll never go.
- [57:48]
B
And of course, it shapes the horizon, the mental horizon, in unbelievable way. The news media. It gives us a sense of what you're supposed to be thinking about. You know, back to supposed to, back to supposed to. And it's so powerful. So people will say. People will routinely say things like, well, of course we're living in this very sad age. And sometimes I think, okay, let's just take a step back here. Like, says who? Like, when does age get anointed? And like, compared to what? Like, you know, the 4th century in Abyssinia, or, you know, the 12th century? In Syria. And they're like, well, because of certain things that have happened in place X that CNN has alerted them to. And I mean, look, you can see how it happens and we're all prey to that. But any artist worth their salt does not think this way. I mean, this is a very programmatic, industrial way of thinking. Our inner lives have been industrialized and commercialized and that's no good for the free thinker and the honest thinker, the authentic thinker. So yeah, we gotta take care around this thing called the news. And I think you're not really a responsible adult until you don't know certain significant things that people around you think of as very important. You know, if there's a singer that you don't know about at all, if there's a movie that you just, you know, that people know about it, but you, you just don't know about it. You just, you just haven't crossed that threshold. Congratulate yourself, you're doing well, you're, you're keeping a bit of your mental experience for yourself. We don't need to know everything that everybody else knows. We need to know the interesting bits of our own experience.
- [59:47]
A
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if this is actually the etymology of it, but we'll run with the bit and pretend it's true. But like, you could almost think of the news, the new, all the new things, like the news, the new is in news. And like I would almost say that knowing all the new things is almost the antithesis of the pursuit of wisdom, which is actually about cultivating the small percentage of old things that have stood the test of time or spotting the.
- [60:13]
B
Archetypes, spotting that the so called new is a repetition of something old. And what is it? What's the story that keeps getting repeated? It's the story of a tyrant who, you know, forgave their enemy. It's the story of a society that became decadent. It's the story of greed that got in the way of goodness or whatever it is. And you know, the news doesn't want us to think that way. It wants us to think that anomalous things have always happened. You know, Whereas again, art pulls in another direction. It's like here again, you know, think of Jericho's raft of the Medusa. Do you know that painting in the Louvre in Paris? There was a ship called the Medusa in 19th century France and it went, it ran aground and the passengers ended up on a raft. They ended up eating each other. There was cannibalism and they're waving. It shows them waving in hope of rescue. Various people have said various things about this wrath of the Medusa. I think it was Victor Hugo. Someone said, the people on the raft of the Medusa, that's France. France is on the raft of the Medusa. It's a painting about the whole of France, which is a way of saying, okay, so it was a news item, it was an accident of like, it was like a plane crash, like one of our, you know, but it was mined for its metaphoric association. And so suddenly it could be like a metaphor for how the nation has run aground and how, you know, people are eating one another, as it were. But all large scale events have that potentially metaphoric quality. I mean, if you think of all the ancient Greek myths, Troy or stories, you know, Troy and, you know, odysseus and Penelope, etc. You know, let's imagine they were news items, but they're also myths. And what we mean by a myth is something with an application way beyond itself. It's speaking about something eternal in ourselves, which is why they work, you know, which is why the story of Odysseus returning to his beloved Penelope and going through all these adventures is something that, you know, is part of your story and my story and everybody's story right now. But again, the news doesn't want to think that way. You know, news wants to direct us towards only the very surface novelty. So it's thinking in a media way and thinking in a mythic way. And I think it's very good to try and think in a mythic way.
- [62:40]
A
Yeah, and also in the tapestry of the news, the thread of politics is so bound within and politics is the mind killer. Say we're having a conversation about, about Van. Van Gogh's water lilies. Okay, so pretend I don't like the water lilies. You like the water lilies. Like we'll look at them and we can just look at this thing and we can come to the thing fresh and we can say, hey, I like this painting. I, I don't know, something about the way that the blues and the greens are interacting kind of bothers me actually. Wow, I really don't like that. Whereas when we have a conversation about a politician, what now has happened is we're coming to that topic with a bunch of preconceived notions. And because of that we're in these word traps of. Just as you were talking about earlier, this age of sadness. It's the right and the left and stuff like that. And because of that we're in these sort of boxed in and already the fault lines of divisiveness and separation and this team versus that team are kind of rooted inside of it. Whereas when we read about events that happened, say, in ancient Greece, we don't have those notions, so we can approach.
- [63:54]
B
Them more freshly again, it's where we're back to what you're supposed to think. And what we want to say is political structures give you a map of what you're supposed to think if you are a certain sort of person. So if you're from the left, you should have certain kinds of antipathies and certain kinds of loves. If you're from the right, you know, ditto. But what's really interesting, once you go beyond politics and once you get to know people really well, this is the fun stuff of life. So I remember being with a group of friends and we started playing a game. So it was trying to reduce the shame around the idea of which politicians you found kind of sexually attractive, despite maybe not agreeing with their politics. Was there any kind of sexual feeling around? Certain. And of course, we all ended up giggling a lot because there was such striking dissonances or discrepancies between what you were supposed to feel and what people actually felt around certain politicians and ideas, et cetera. So. So no one actually thinks in a purely left or right way. They just think they're supposed to. The reality is much more nuanced and complicated. Just like, you know, think of ideas of masculinity and femininity, which we know that, you know, an archetypal man really, in many points, does not think like an archetypal man and feel like an archetypal.
- [65:24]
A
And Napoleon's Letters to Josephine.
- [65:27]
B
Right.
- [65:27]
A
I'm just amazed every time I read those. You think of Napoleon's military conqueror like the sweetest, most desperate love.
- [65:35]
B
Right, right. And, yeah, I mean, it's a good example. Millions of other examples. Exactly. That, you know, a true picture of human nature is so much more nuanced. And politics is a massive abbreviation. And when people argue about politics, that half the time also arguing with themselves of trying to make the world simpler than it is. And, you know, inside every right winger, there's a left winger inside. And vice versa, blah, blah, you know, it's every side. Every man, there's a woman. Inside every woman there's a man. You know, inside every adult there's a child. These things are multiple. And whenever you come across a more a simplified version, you know we know it's not true. We Know it's not true.
- [66:27]
A
The thing that surprised me the most from this conversation so far is how much you've referenced painting. That's not something I expected coming in the conversation. And I want to hear more about how you look at paintings and how you pull from paintings to bring them into your own creative expression.
- [66:44]
B
So, you know, I think in. In many ways, one could point to various paintings and go, that's a bit of me, if you want to understand me. Like, look at these paintings. So the work of Cy Twombly, for example, is really important to me. Take some of those chalk writing images of Twombly, where essentially it looks like someone's writing on a chalkboard in a crazy script, meaning something profound and archaic and strange. That, to me is like a portrait of what thinking looks like. He's like making mental maps of what thinking looks like. And I think you could apply that metaphor to lots of things. Like a certain artist is giving you a picture of what X looks like, and it could be an inner state. I mean, abstract artists are obviously very good at this. You can look at a Rothko and go, this is what melancholy looks like. This is what dejection looks like. It's what humiliation looks like. But you could also look at a realistic representation and go, this is what hope looks like. This is what courage looks like. Serenity, serenity, et cetera. But yes, paintings matter a lot, as does indeed, architecture, design. The visual environment is constantly communicating values to us. There's a lovely quote from the French writer Stendhal, beauty is the promise of happiness. So in other words, when we find something beautiful, it's really promising. It's not just an isolated aesthetic experience. It's promising us a happy way of living. And that's a much richer kind of complicated thing. So it's always good to ask somebody who says, I find Greece beautiful or I find this house beautiful. You might go, okay, well, what's the way of life that you imagine? What are the values that you associate with this? How would an average day look like? How would you want to live? You know, there's a Rilke poem where the poet sees the bust of Apollo in a museum. And the challenge is the bust of Apollo is beaming to Rilke, a vision of life. It's like it's saying, imagine what it would be like to live. As this bust is suggesting that I live. And these are sort of archaic, you know, mythic Greek, ancient Greek values. But every object is essentially beaming out to you, like how to live this chair, which I don't particularly like is suggesting, you know, how to be, how to be a person. It's got a vision of life. I mean, advertisers sometimes do this, but it's quite helpful. It's like, if your car turned into a person, what kind of a person would it be? If your chair turned into a person, what kind of person would it be? If your font, if your font on your book turned into a person, what kind of font? You know, what's its character? So things have character much more than we normally. So if this cloud in the sky was a person, what would it want to tell you? We're very good at that kind of synesthesic connection. Once we allow ourselves to.
- [69:53]
A
As writers, how should we think about our readers? Like, in what way should we serve our readers and write for them? And in what ways should we say, ah, no, I'm writing for myself here, and I'm focused right now. Maybe I'll worry about the reader later. But how do you navigate that relationship?
- [70:09]
B
I think you've got to have a reader inside you. So it's not like me. I'm the speaker and the reader is out there and they're the reader. We all of us have reader inside us. And what I mean by that is, you know, we are all readers as well as writers, and we, you know, we host as well as, you know, perform. And so you just have to appeal to the inner reader. And by which I really mean. I mean, what makes people very boring as conversational partners is they've stopped wondering how their words might sound to somebody else, right? I mean, we all know those people who have just lost their. They're not asking themselves a cruel but necessary question, which is, how is what I'm saying. How might what I'm saying or want to say fit into somebody else's life? Where could this go? Totally oblivious. So we all know people who tell you very boring stories, and they're like, you say, how was your trip? And they go, well, it was great. But the thing is that when you get to the airport, the four form has to be. And you're thinking, okay, I understand that this was very, very impactful for you. But, like, I can't use this. I can't use this. So, like, where somebody else might be using the same material but just have prepared it a bit differently, they'll go, they'll go. You know how bureaucracy, like, gets in the way of things and the bureaucratic mindset is. Got a certain sadism. So you know when they say, like, get to the Back of the line. Do you ever wonder, though, you know, and suddenly you're like, okay, they're telling you about their holiday, but they're also. They've given you something that you can eat and absorb and metabolize. Something's nicely being prepared. So I think a good writer is thinking, where could this go inside the reader's mind? But they're also really faithful to a bit of themselves. And they're saying, okay, do I. You know, it has to stop. It has to. I think the order of kind of priority is it has to start with you and what you want to say, and. And then you've got to find a way of bridging that to what a reader could possibly absorb. So a very perceptive friend of mine once looked at my writing style and let me tell you a bit about my history as a person. I had a very academic father, very erudite and very. Yeah, very academic. A person of not great originality of thought, but very, you know, had read many, many books and spoke in a solemn and potentic way like a proverbial professor. And then I had a nanny who brought me up. Essentially, my parents were off the scene for long periods, and I was left in the charge of a woman who was very uneducated, very clever, but not an academic. All someone who loved nature. Been brought up in a rural village in Switzerland and was, you know, didn't think in academic terms and always wanted to think about nature and quite religious, et cetera. And this friend of mine said, you're basically trying to write a book that could be understood and liked by your father and your nanny. And I thought, oh, wow, that's true. That's exactly what I'm doing. Trying to speak to two different audiences. So to answer your question, one of the things about people and their readers, it's not just like, are you thinking of the reader? But what sort of reader are you. Like, are you picturing? Are you kind of imagining. Are you honoring. Let me tell you the other origins of my writing. So I had a teddy bear when I was little. So I had all sorts of problems as a kid, as a little kid. And I invented this bear. And this bear had a life that was quite similar to mine, and I was its father. So I would speak to the bear in my mind, and I would say, okay, I know this thing. So I went to boarding school. When I was eight years old, I was shipped to England from my native Switzerland. And in my mind, my way of processing and dealing with that is my bear also went to boarding school. And I was its father, and I was a really sweet and kind father. And I would basically tell it nice things every evening. And I'd say, look, I'm really sorry that those, like, boys, you know, threatened you today, but it's okay because, you know, it's okay. You've got to go to school and, you know, the holidays will come, etc. And I was the father to this bear. And someone said to me, the school of life is just your continuation of your bear. You're just like. You're just. You're doing for people what you did for that bear, which is kind of translate your own experience into something digestible for an imaginary audience that's cheering you up and be cheering them up too. So I thought that was perceptive too, and that could be something of that. So, you know, if we think about religions, because religions are very onto this, you know, a religion. I'm not a believer, and I'm sorry if members of your audience are. I have huge respect for religious belief. I think religion is a fantastic way of externalizing, metaphorizing our inner lives, ascribing to a supernatural figure an authority, a wisdom, a kindness that actually exists within all of us, but it's refracted in this theological, beautiful theological system. I would say I don't want to be impious. I mean, I am impious, but I say it with respect because I don't think, by the way, that this is a. A Richard Dawkins editor would go. And that's very immature, and that's a silly thing. No, this is an amazingly beautiful and complex things that humans can do. We reify some of our own mental processes, and this helps us to cope with the agonies of being alive. And that's an amazing thing that we humans do. And I think there's a link between, as I say, how children play, when they'll say that that table's watching me, or that's a good table. That table's kind. It's got my interest in mind. You're like, okay, wow, you've lodged something from in you in there, and it's helping you to cope and to live. And, you know, artists are doing elements of this too. So I just want to kind of get on the table. These different elements, children playing, imaginative play, the thing, art, the creation of art and the creation of religions. I think we're dealing with quite common elements. Common maneuvers are taking place in those three arenas, I would say.
- [76:33]
A
What else do you think that we can take from the faiths that You've studied. One of the things that you've spoken about that I definitely see in your writing is the difference between a lecture and a sermon. That a lecture is there to give you information, a sermon is there to give you information and maybe a story so that it yields a change in behavior.
- [76:58]
B
That's right. That's right. That's right. And I'm obviously much more on the sermon side.
- [77:02]
A
Exactly.
- [77:03]
B
I mean, look, religions have been, you know, I know there are a lot of people who've been traumatized by religion.
- [77:09]
A
Yeah.
- [77:09]
B
Hurt by religion.
- [77:10]
A
Yeah.
- [77:11]
B
You know, we want to honor those people and hear them too. And then the people who've been very helped and are religious, and then there are people who might be atheists and quite totally indifferent. And I would want to say to that constituency, look at these structures because they're really rather interesting. Like you thought they had nothing to say to you because you don't believe, but oh, my goodness, there's a lot going on here that you need to find out about. I mean, and we're not just talking, but we are also talking about the cultural aspect, the paintings, the whatever. But it's really what's animating, you know, these. These structures. I look at religions and think of religions as the most sophisticated attempts to persuade and change the inner life of humans. Art. Art also tries to do this, but it has. It's so much weaker, largely because in post kind of romantic art that the artist is a lone creator. They. They don't. They're not trying to build a church, they're not trying to build a movement. It's just them. And they have their own utterances, and that's fine, but it's going to be weak in the world, in a noisy world. So what we really have nowadays are corporations who know how to amplify their messages and lone creators who are tiny next to the messages of these corporations. In the olden world, we had religions. I mean, of course we still have religions, but, you know, we're not creating new religions. Sometimes we are. But at the height of the creative potential of many religions, there was this idea of using art, architecture, poetry, fashion, smells, locations, et cetera, to amplify a message. And I'm very interested in that.
- [78:50]
A
Well, one of the through lines of this conversation, of your work and of this particular topic, the word that's coming to mind is enchantedness. And we live in an age of disenchantment. And part of an age of disenchantment is a time when logic and reason and things that we can point a cause and effect to. Those are the things that we value and trust. And what I see you doing talking about here, but also doing just in the way that you speak, is, I'm sorry for this word mining, because you're doing something far richer than that. But mining is what came to mind, like mining these more ancient philosophy sort of bathing in. In. In how they think. And then I think that a lot of the reason why your work resonates with actually non believers, people who are atheists, is because they're feeling that enchantment. So that when I say, hey, I'm interviewing Alain de Botton, you know, usually people are like, cool. And you're one of the people where people are like, wow, you know, that person had an impact on me. They spoke to my heart. Because the tools of enchantment are the things that sort of seep past the gates of the rational mind.
- [79:58]
B
Yeah. I mean, you know, and that's the most wonderful thing about religions. They're alive to what gets called the numinous or mystery mysterium tremendum. You know, this German theologian invented this term to capture the idea of the religious mindset being open to things that transcend the understanding, the ordinary understanding, the thing you're supposed to understand. And we all have intimations of this. I mean, look, the night sky is the. You know, and the great thing about the night sky is it's there every night. But. But my goodness, we're not picking up on the resonances of the night sky. I mean, the night sky has got all sorts of things to tell us. You know, a clear night sky is a challenge to everything. I mean, if we really took on board what that night sky is telling us, we'd have to lie down and just question absolutely everything.
- [80:46]
A
Because twinkle, twinkle little star How I wonder what you are up above the world so high Like a diamond in the sky that is. Kids can feel that How I wonder what you are. Wow.
- [81:01]
B
But, yeah, it's wonder. And I mean, we've let the scientists take over that area, and scientists build planetariums, and they want to tell us exactly how many moons Saturn has and exactly the distance between Pluto and some next galaxy. Fair enough. These guys are sometimes doing great work, but most of us don't care about the stars from that point of view. We care about the night sky in terms of reorienting us as human beings and reminding us that the earthly priorities and the priorities of the thing that's a meter ahead of you is only one part of existence. And that it's just a permanent reminder of otherness. And I think this is what we always forget, that our own minds and thoughts are only one part of this giant, you know, thing that we could be thinking about. Every time we travel, every time we land in a foreign destination, we're like, oh, my God, the world's so strange. I was in one place at one time, and now we're in another place. And here's a guy reading a newspaper by a palm tree, and I didn't know that they existed, that palm tree existed, that newspaper existed, that font existed. What's going on? The world is so amazing, beautiful, strange, etc. And suddenly we're jolted out of habit. But most of the time, habit. We're living under the habit. So art is the most. It's a stabilized form of dislocation. It's a way of seeing beyond habit at the true mystery and strangeness and beauty and pain of everything.
- [82:32]
A
Yeah. How does AI factor into your writing reading process? You're like, I hate that. Or you're like, wow, it's. I use it all the time. Where are you at?
- [82:46]
B
I don't really use it in my writing, but I use it as therapist. As a therapist, which is quite strange because I'm actually a trained psychotherapist. I am a psychotherapist and I didn't know that. Yeah, I practice one day a week. I did a training a few years ago. And so it's quite strange that I would say, I think it's pretty good at taking fragments of interpersonal psychology, and especially if you prompt it right at teasing out certain resonances that are pretty good. So I think it's good at that. I think it's, look, it has awesome powers. Any creative person will be asking themselves, okay, is the game up? Or do I have anything to contribute? And the good news is, I mean, the good news is that it really forces you to do that thing that you should always have been doing as an artist, which is stop doing what you're supposed to do. Do what you really want to do. Be really honest. Explore your own experience with renewed honesty. Because the AI only provides a summation of what has already been thought and said. Yes, it can be recombined, et cetera, but essentially it is giving you standardized answers. Sometimes very good standardized answers, sometimes standard answers are great and way in advance of what you would know yourself. But sometimes there are still bits of our own minds that remain distinctive. But the pressure is on creatives to further up their level of self exploration, to get ahead of this machine. Mm.
- [84:26]
A
Why don't you use it in your writing?
- [84:29]
B
I use it sometimes for, you know, bits of research, you know, provide me with, you know, where is there a cafe that looks like this? Or is there a painting that was, you know, blah, blah, blah. But if I said to it if. Let's say I was gonna write an essay on nostalgia, and I said, okay. So I said to AI, right. Structure me an essay on nostalgia in the style of nostalgia, right? It would do a perfectly decent job, but it wouldn't be picking up on why I'm a writer, why I want to be a writer. I mean, I don't just want to be a writer to produce that number of words. I want to be a writer in order to honor certain feelings. And AI can't know those feelings because it's not me. So it doesn't know what I really want to say. And if I simply give it over to AI, it will crush my nascent sense, my intuition about what it is that I want to say. So, I mean, sometimes, you know, I actually don't tend to do this, but one could, you know, I'd rather write the essay and then go. Right. Now I'm going to ask a. See if I've missed out anything. Oh, yes, I've missed out something. Let me go back and add something that, you know, that the generic had some insight that I wasn't picking up on. But normally I can't be bothered to change it anymore. It's like it was what it was. It was what I thought. I'm not trying to, again, write a Wikipedia article on a topic. I'm trying to honor my own state of mind. So I've got a more selfish project. I don't want to know what everybody thinks or what the last word is. I want to try and do justice to what I happen to be feeling.
- [86:01]
A
If I invited you to a university and I were to say, all right, this is your class of writers, you're going to do a semester to teach writing. How would you structure that curriculum? What would you tell them? This is what I've learned. This is what you need to know from my experience about how to be a writer.
- [86:19]
B
First, I'd really want to play around with the notion of what it means to be a writer. What's the kind of book that a writer writes? And I'd really want to see whether they are being oppressed by a notion of a kind of literature that they're supposed to write. I'd also explore whether they, you know, what it is that made them want to be a writer, you know, because maybe they. Maybe they shouldn't be a writer. Maybe they should be a something else or could be a something else, something easier, something more fun. It's not great fun to be a writer, you know, so just to explore where that career ambition kind of came from. I think I want to look at that. We might want to have fun with, you know, introspection, introspective exercises, trying to, you know, you talked about sort of downloading the brain after every. After every day. You know, I think those exercises are very fascinating. You know, let's all go to have an experience. Let's all go to the park, let's see the same thing. And then let's all. Let's all reflect on it in our own way. Maybe do an exercise where we try and describe what we think we're supposed to say about a visit to the park. Let's do the objective visit to the park. And then we say what was really going on in your mind and which might have absolutely nothing to do with the part. Maybe think about something completely different just to show that contrast between the supposed and the. The inner thing to flex that sort of inner muscle. I'd essentially want to try and awaken or further develop students relationship to their. What you might call inner voice or fragments of authentic feeling. What Emerson was calling neglected thought thoughts. They become more attentive to the neglected thought.
- [88:05]
A
Really striking even in that answer. You didn't mention any of the things that we learned in school. You didn't mention grammar. You didn't mention syntax. You mentioned the authenticity of feeling. The difference between what you're supposed to feel and what you actually feel. And then you start off with like, why do you want to do this in the first place? That's not how most people talk about teaching writing.
- [88:27]
B
Yeah, no surprise that I've never been asked to teach.
- [88:31]
A
Thanks, man. Such a cool person to talk to. Thank you so much.
- [88:34]
B
Thank you.
- [88:35]
A
That was. What a joy. What a joy. Thank you for coming on.
- [88:39]
B
Thank you. What a pleasure.