Episode 288: Literary Milestones

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast – Episode 288: Literary Milestones

Released August 5, 2025

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Literary Life Podcast
• Hosts: Angelina Stanford & Thomas Banks
• Guest: Cindy Rollins
• Description: Engaging conversations about the skill and art of reading well, exploring the lost intellectual traditions necessary to fully immerse in great works of literature.

---

Introduction

In Episode 288, titled "Literary Milestones," hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks, along with lifelong reader Cindy Rollins, delve into the pivotal moments that mark a reader's journey. The episode transcends typical book discussions, focusing instead on the profound milestones that signify growth and deepening understanding in one's literary life.

---

Summer Updates and Ongoing Classes

[01:50] Angelina Stanford:
Angelina opens the episode by reflecting on the swift passage of summer, briefly diverting from the main topic. She proudly highlights the array of summer classes they've offered, emphasizing their dedication to maintaining intellectual rigor even during the slower months. Notable courses include:

• Angelina's Two-Week Mini Class: Harry Potter Books 4 and 5
  "I honestly think that is some of the best work I have ever done."
  [03:58]

• Thomas Banks' Week-Long Class: Victorian Lives
  Explores literary, historical, political, and military figures of the Victorian era, receiving excellent feedback for its engaging content.
  "It was a fun class to prepare for because I was reading stuff that I really enjoy."
  [04:12]

• Jason Baxter's Four-Week Class: How to Read Lyric Poetry like C.S. Lewis
  A popular class that garnered positive responses, aligning with the podcast's emphasis on deep literary analysis.
  "Also a hit."
  [05:46]

Upcoming offerings include:

• Addison Hornstra's Week-Long Class: A Dream Both Strange and True – The Alice Books
  A deep dive into Lewis Carroll's work, sparked by widespread demand following a successful webinar.
  "This will be five sessions with Addison on the Alice books."
  [04:55]

• Heather Goodman's Webinar: Coleridge's Imagination: Restoring the Chain of Being
  Set for August 27th, this webinar aims to spotlight Coleridge's profound influence on literary tradition and his role in bridging medieval and modern imaginative thought.
  "It's really impossible, I think, to overstate his influence."
  [07:28]

Angelina encourages listeners to explore these offerings on their website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com, and to engage with their member-supported platforms.

---

Commonplace Quotes

The hosts transition to their segment on commonplace quotes, sharing profound insights that resonate with their literary discussions.

Thomas Banks' Quote:
“The Middle Ages did almost wholly without critics and by some miracle did quite well without.” – Frank Lucas, The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal
[10:23]

Thomas elaborates on the unique nature of medieval literary communities, emphasizing the absence of professional critics and how this shaped the literary landscape differently from today.

Angelina Stanford's Quote:
“It's only after we lose the language of art that people begin to write about, you know, what does it mean? And try to interpret it. Most of these people are getting it wrong.” – Adapted from Thomas Merton's Inner Experience
[12:19]

Angelina underscores the erosion of a shared artistic language, highlighting the cultural amnesia that necessitates a conscious effort to reclaim lost intellectual traditions.

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Defining Literary Milestones

The heart of the episode revolves around identifying and discussing key literary milestones—significant moments that mark a reader's development and deepening engagement with literature.

1. Selecting and Owning a Book Independently

[19:19] Thomas Banks:
“One. One factor in the life of a teacher. I wonder if this in some ways is an expression of immaturity, but your year is structured kind of like it was when you were a kid, because, I mean, you still.”
[18:50]

Angelina shares her personal experience of selecting and owning books from a young age, emphasizing how parental influence and personal initiative fostered a lifelong love for reading.
“And so that's how I grew up with my own little library at three years old.”
[19:44]

2. Falling in Love with Non-Exciting Books

[27:55] Thomas Banks:
“Where you can sit down and find yourself losing track of time in the presence of something like that.”
[29:13]

The discussion highlights the milestone of appreciating books that may lack conventional excitement but offer profound, lyrical, or pastoral experiences, such as Robert McCloskey's Time of Wonder.
“It's almost like if Marcel Proust had written a children's book and illustrated it in New England.”
[29:42]

3. Arguing with a Book

[33:48] Thomas Banks:
“So, yeah, I remember wanting desperately for John Bunyan to be, you know, just looking for ways in which he was wrong about everything.”
[33:58]

Thomas recounts his contentious early read of Pilgrim's Progress, expressing initial disdain that later evolved into appreciation. This transformation underscores the importance of revisiting and reinterpreting challenging works.
“And now I think that is C.S. Lewis's greatest work.”
[41:07]

4. Rereading and Changing One’s Perspective

[44:24] Thomas Banks:
“But I can say it's a masterpiece. It's absolutely a masterpiece.”
[57:02]

Both hosts share experiences of rereading classics and reassessing their initial judgments, illustrating personal growth and a deeper understanding of literary art over time. Angelina discusses her initial rejection of The Age of Innocence and later appreciation for its depth.
“I had a very negative reaction to that book, and I judged it. And now I can say that the problem was me, not the book.”
[42:16]

5. Separating Subjective Experience from the Work of Art

[36:56] Thomas Banks:
“Everyone reading Paradise Lost for the first time sort of responds this way to Eve.”
[36:05]

Angelina and Thomas explore the critical skill of distinguishing personal biases and emotions from the intrinsic value of a literary work. Angelina emphasizes overlooking outdated portrayals to grasp the universal truths within classics.
“You have to be able to separate those things.”
[37:32]

6. Separating the Work from the Writer

[50:28] Thomas Banks:
“But again, modern readers, they end up responding to a book that only exists in their head.”
[50:30]

The conversation delves into the importance of evaluating literary works independently of the author's personal beliefs or behaviors. They cite examples like Thomas Hardy and George Orwell to illustrate how an author's worldview can contrast with the artistic merit of their work.
“It was a huge milestone for me.”
[55:00]

7. Hearing the Great Conversation Among Books

[74:16] Thomas Banks:
“So eventually, you realize you're in this huge room.”
[74:16] Angelina Stanford:
“So your world will get bigger and you can touch more of it.”
[75:37]

Angelina introduces the concept of the "great conversation" in literature, where books converse with each other across time. This milestone involves recognizing the interconnectedness of literary works and understanding their collective dialogue, enriching one's reading experience.
“You're in a room of windows, and it just goes on and on.”
[82:14]

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Conclusion and Upcoming Series

As the discussion winds down, Angelina and Thomas reflect on their journey of literary exploration, embracing both successes and missteps. They announce an upcoming series focusing on American literature, starting with Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, aiming to apply the discussed milestones to a broader literary context.

Angelina Stanford:
“Stories will save the world.”
[86:22]

The episode concludes with a poetic reflection by Thomas Banks, tying together the themes of literary interconnectedness and spiritual enrichment.

---

Notable Quotes

• Angelina Stanford:
  “To be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality.”
  [00:00]

• Thomas Banks:
  “The Middle Ages did almost wholly without critics and by some miracle did quite well without.”
  [10:23]

• Angelina Stanford:
  “It's only after we lose the language of art that people begin to write about, you know, what does it mean?”
  [12:19]

• Thomas Banks:
  “Everyone reading Paradise Lost for the first time sort of responds this way to Eve.”
  [36:05]

• Angelina Stanford:
  “You're letting your own subjective feelings block out the eternal light from flowing through the art as it should.”
  [36:56]

---

Final Thoughts

Episode 288 of The Literary Life Podcast serves as a profound exploration of the milestones that shape a reader's journey. By dissecting personal experiences with literature, the hosts illuminate the transformative power of engaging deeply with literary art. Listeners are encouraged to embrace these milestones, fostering a richer, more interconnected literary life.

To continue nurturing your literary journey, explore their upcoming series on American literature and partake in their member-supported classes and discussions at HouseOfHumaneLetters.com.

---

This summary was crafted based on the transcript provided and adheres to OpenAI's policies regarding content creation.

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and I am here with you.

[Thomas Banks]

Your sideman, your Ed McMahon.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was. Draw a dramatic pause. Yes. Okay. The Ed McMahon to my Johnny Carson. Well, that's good.

[Thomas Banks]

I think I probably drink less. Yeah, I don't think I've ever been tipsy on the show. Not yet anyway. But give me time. Give me time.

[Angelina Stanford]

Engaging ourselves with this reference, pretty much. Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. Today we are going to be talking about literary milestones. Milestones in your literary life. But before we get to that, let me just give you guys a quick update on what we've got going on. It's now August. I cannot believe it's August. Seriously, I don't want to just like let this podcast devolve into a discussion of how quickly time flies, but where did the summer go? It is August.

[Thomas Banks]

That's the rhetorical question I ask myself every summer and have it's one. One factor in the life of a teacher. I wonder if this in some ways is an expression of immaturity, but your year is structured kind of like it was when you were a kid, because, I mean, you still. Summers are still kind of the slow time of your life. That's actually not really true for you or me anymore so much, but yeah, for a long time it was. And yet the summer, it's always kind of the blink of an eye and this time of year. And I think this is also something that will resonate with a lot of teachers. It's always kind of a melancholy one for me. I don't know if that's ever been true for you or not, but like the last couple weeks of summer break, even if it's not a summer break with lots of freedom in it, I. I tend to get a bit wistful.

[Angelina Stanford]

Do you get wistful?

[Thomas Banks]

Okay, I'm turning this into my Confessions.

[Angelina Stanford]

Here, lie on the couch. Tell me more about your mother.

[Thomas Banks]

People are like, kill me now, banks. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, even though in a couple of weeks we will be back in the full swing of things with classes, we still got some summer things going on. We've, we've, we've. I'm very proud of our summer classes that we've offered this, this particular summer. Part of the reason why we don't just have lazy summer days is because we work very hard in the summer doing the things we don't normally do. This is when we get to offer different mini classes. So I had my two week mini class on Harry Potter's books 4 and 5 back in June and if you missed that, that's available. You can, you can get the recordings for that over on our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com I honestly think that is some of the best work I have ever done. I was really proud of that. It was a lot of hard work.

[Thomas Banks]

By popular consent, yes, it's amongst your greatest hits.

[Angelina Stanford]

And then you had your week long class on Victorian lives where you looked at some literary figures, historical figures, political figures, military figures. And I, I heard it was fun.

[Thomas Banks]

For me, it was fun. I don't know if it was.

[Angelina Stanford]

You're very modest and humble. But the feedback was fantastic for that class. I think people really enjoy. I mean, that's you in your.

[Thomas Banks]

It was a fun class to prepare for because I was reading stuff that I probably, you know, stuff that I like to read anyway. I was getting to read, you know, Lytton Strachey and Esme Stratford and a bunch of other historians of that era that I really, really enjoy.

[Angelina Stanford]

Many, many things I like about our partnership. But one of the things that I really like about our partnership is that you and I have, we have different gifts and I think our students really benefit from that. So like I am in something like the Harry Potter class. I am 100% in my wheelhouse, just reading symbolically and talking about medieval allegory and the journey of the soul and that's my love language. And then your gifts. And I think this class really played to your strengths for me. Like, you think like a biographer, you are so good at focusing on lives and those anecdotes about their lives that, that really are illustrative of an entire time. And people like. I think you're just at your best when you, when you're. That.

[Thomas Banks]

I'll take that, thank you very much.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, I, I really, I won't argue with it. I think that's why you're so good in our history classes that you. I remember Emily Rabel saying, taking a history class to you is like listening to you talk about anecdotes of your friends. That's how well you know these figures.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, well, I'll take that too. Thank you, Emily. That's, that's very kind.

[Angelina Stanford]

And then Jason Baxter was very much in his wheelhouse in July. He g. He did four classes on how to read lyric poetry like C.S. lewis. And that was a fabulous class. I was in and out of that one and that one was really good and people really enjoyed that one.

[Thomas Banks]

Also a hit.

[Angelina Stanford]

Also a hit. And the hits just keep on coming. So this week, Addison Hornstra is doing her week long class on the Alice books. It's not too late for you to sign up for that. And it's really a fabulous class. It's called A Dream Both Strange and True, following the Golden Thread of the Alice Books. And if you heard her webinar back in February, this is the class that everyone demanded after that fantastic webinar was January, I'm sorry, on Lewis Carroll. So if you have any interest in Lewis Carroll, the Alice books, or just any interest in the literary tradition, because Northrop Fry said at the heart of the literary tradition is Lewis Carroll and the Alice books. And Addison and I were so perplexed, like, what could that possibly mean? That we fell down a rabbit hole, pun intended, to try to answer that question for ourselves. Why is he saying the Alice books are the heart of the literary tradition? And that was just something we were doing for fun. And as we began to understand more and more of Lewis Carroll and his vision and the Alice books and why Fry said that the more that we got excited and realized that we have to share this, this just can't be something we're doing for fun. We've got to share this. And so the webinar came out of that and it was a fabulous webinar. And again, you can still get that over at house of humane letters.com but there was such a demand after the webinar. We want more. We want more. And so that's what this week long class is for. So this will be five sessions with Addison on the Alice books. And that's going on right now. Everything's recorded, so it's not too late for you to jump in and catch up and join the live sessions. So that'll be going on this week, August 4th through 8th. And then in the end of August, we have something else very exciting. Speaking of the Literary tradition. Heather Goodman is going to be giving a webinar called Coleridge's Imagination Restoring the Chain of Being. And I think this is going to be a super, this is going to be August 27th. This is going to be a really, really important webinar because Coleridge is somebody that has not been given the proper attention. Coleridge is attempting to reintroduce a medieval understanding of reality in the imagination after the Enlightenment had blown it all up. And there is a direct line between Coleridge and Charlotte Mason, between Coleridge and Northrop Fry, between Coleridge and Lewis and Tolkien and everything that we talk about on this PODC podcast, Coleridge is distilling that for us. He's a huge influence on George McDonald, for example, on, on Ruskin and the Pre Raphaelite. So this becomes just a very, very important knot in the, in, in the thread that we are trying to, you know, we have this beautiful tapestry of, Allow me to give an analogy because I, I, I think in analogies, you know, we had this beautiful tapestry of reality and the Enlightenment just pulled all the threads apart, just, just pulled them apart and said look, it's, there's what tapestry? It's just a bunch of threads and presented us with this fragmented reality that as moderns we are so, I mean we've been, we've been nursed on this fragmented reality that we can't even comprehend what it means to not be fragmented. Even, even our attempts to reassemble it are just fragments and we don't even understand that. And so Coleridge is just a really, really important figure in helping us to re establish that, that, that tapestry. And it is really impossible, I think, to overstate his influence and his importance and significance. And Heather has been really throwing herself into Coleridge and just like just went hog wild for him and read and Coleridge is not easy to read at all. And so we really do need a guide and an interpreter. But you know Jen Rogers in her class on the inklings that we had back in February, another fantastic class if you want to go through our back catalog. But she really showed how it was the introduction of coleridge's ideas to C.S. lewis via Owen Barfield that was just hugely instrumental in his salvation and his returning to Christianity and re embracing a medieval view of reality in the imagination. So these ideas are incredibly important and Heather is going to do a great job in that webinar breaking it down. So that's two big things we've got coming. Of course we got our year long class classes and it's not too late to register for those, so peruse House of Humane Letters, Click on that classes tab, look at the mini classes and webinars, look at our back catalog, look at our live classes, and jump. Jump on in. All right, now that we've finished that bit of business, we can jump in with our commonplace quotes.

[Thomas Banks]

Would you like to go first, Ms. Stanford?

[Angelina Stanford]

You can go first. I need to.

[Thomas Banks]

I got mine right here. Mine is from the 20th century academic classicist and critic Frank Lucas, or F.L. lucas was the name he published under. This is from his book the Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal. And it's an observation that I felt myself. It's one of those things that I felt myself saying that's really obviously true, yet I don't think about that very much. He writes that quote, the Middle Ages did almost wholly without critics and by some miracle did quite well without. And it's. Yeah, it's an interesting period in the history of literature, in Western literature, mainly literature, where you have thriving literary communities in, you know, Great Britain and France, Italy, Germany, although, you know, vernacular European languages are coming alive. But you don't have a backdrop of professional critics responding to, you know, the poetry, the mystery plays, the romances and all that kind of thing. And, yeah, it's makes the practice of literature just, you know, very, very different from what it is in our own day. For that and a variety of other reasons. Yeah, this is.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is me keeping my mouth shut because I can just, like, go on for the next 20 minutes about why I think that is the case, since I've probably wet people's appetite. I'll get the miniature version of that. The art of that time period flowed out of an overall sensibility and imaginative experience that people were having on every level. And so there wasn't a need for critics to interpret it because it was the common language of everyone, which is going to actually fit in with the quote that I have right now.

[Thomas Banks]

Fire away.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's only after we lose the language of art that people begin to write about, you know, what does it mean? And try to interpret it. Most of these people are getting it wrong, but I digress. All right, so my commonplace quote is shamelessly stolen from our Patreon Discord. We love our Patreon. So shout out to all of them. This is a. We don't. We don't do ads on this podcast. So you're never going to hear, like, you know, Ryan Reynolds isn't going to bust in with his mint mobile rates or anything like that. We are completely Member supported. And so directing people to our classes is the way we can continue to offer this podcast for free. And our Patreon and the very loyal support we get from those guys is another way that we can keep offering these resources for free for you guys. So we have a Patreon forum and a lot of people like to share their commonplace quotes there. So our very own Karita Thompson, who of course has done a couple webinars for us on music, and we'll be back on the podcast at the end of the year. I feel like I should say her name like Dr. Baxter says it, Karida. But I don't know if I can pull off that quite. That accent, but. So this is, this is a quote from Karita. She was reading a book called Inner Experience. This is a book by Thomas Merton and was. His last book is actually recently published. His last book. And this is just such a fantastic quote. I think of so much of what I'm trying to say on the podcast of why we have to recover the lost intellectual tradition. Like, what has been lost? I mean, I honestly have to. Sometimes people have asked me, like, what do you mean it's lost? How do you have it? It's. If it's. What does it mean? Like, we are so lost, we don't even know that we lost something. That's. That's the state of cultural amnesia we're in, is that we, we don't. We don't even. We're completely unaware that we've lost something. So this is a quote about that for. By Thomas Merton. I think you're gonna like this. Nevertheless, a certain cultural and spiritual atmosphere favors the secret and spontaneous development of the inner self. The ancient cultural traditions, both of the east and of the west, having a religious and sapiential nature, favored the interior life, indeed transmitted certain common materials in the form of archetypal symbols, liturgical notes, art, poetry, philosophy, and myth, which nourished the inner self from childhood to maturity. In such a cultural setting, no one needs to be self conscious about his interior life, and subjectivity does not run the risk of being deviated into morbidity and excess. Unfortunately, such a cultural setting no longer exists in the west or is no longer common property. It is something that has to be laboriously recovered by an educated and enlightened minority.

[Thomas Banks]

Wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

I know. That's so good.

[Thomas Banks]

You know, I. On the subject of Thomas Merton, have you ever heard the story of his death?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. From you, but please.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. So Thomas Merton, you sometimes hear still today, that Thomas Merton committed suicide, which is not true. But he died in a horrible bathtub accident. I think he was listening to the radio or something like that while he was taking his bath and accidentally knocked the little transistor radio into the tub and electrocuted himself. Which, of course looks like a classic suicide, but in any case, horrifying literary deaths. My upcoming book. That there will be a chapter on this. No, this isn't actually a book I'm writing. There might be money in that, though. I don't know.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, but. But his point that this used to be the common property of everyone and it's not anymore, and you have to actually work for it. Like, that's the whole thinking behind this podcast, that, that it is. It is a worthy endeavor. It's valuable and it's worthwhile. It would enrich your life. And what he says here about how you didn't have to be self conscious about exploring your interiority when you lived in a symbolic age is a very similar point that W.H. auden makes in a review he wrote in the 1940s of a new edition of the Grimm's Brothers. And I should have thought to look this up, but I'm just now thinking.

[Thomas Banks]

Of course the book is downstairs and out of reach right now.

[Angelina Stanford]

Correct. That's exactly where it is. But he says that fairy tales give us certain symbols and images to help us interpret reality, and that if we lose those, all we have left is, like, psychological neuroses. Like, that's, That's. That's our framework for understanding reality. I think that's the same sort of thing that Thomas Merton is getting at. Like, you don't have to lie on the therapist's couch and talk about your inner life.

[Thomas Banks]

So we have.

[Angelina Stanford]

You're in a symbolic age where you're constantly interpreting your interiority through that.

[Thomas Banks]

If we had more commonly held just sort of organically developed images, we would have fewer complexes. Is that what you're saying?

[Angelina Stanford]

That is exactly what I'm saying.

[Thomas Banks]

It sounds like a worthy endeavor.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's a whole other thing. Again, I could go into quite the thing about how Freud's. Freud and Jung's attempt to explain symbolism is a direct attempt to establish a new symbolic language as opposed to the medieval understanding of symbolism, one in which is all about our neuroses and our subconscious. Yeah, but that's not the topic of today, so I will not get distracted about that. Today's topic is literary milestones. So I should say that this was an idea. You had one of my last year. You. You mentioned it to me. Several times. And it came out of, I think we, I think what happened was we, we get, we get the same sorts of questions pretty regularly in the Facebook group are the same sorts of comments, the same sorts of struggles with readers who are new to the podcast.

[Thomas Banks]

Frequently.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, frequently. And so you and I sit talk about, you know, like, what's, what's the hang up here, what's causing them trouble, you know, how can we better express this on the podcast, etc. Etc. And you said we should just do a whole episode where we talk about the sort of struggles we see people happening. And, and you said let's call it literary milestones. Like, and you said to me, like, let's talk about the things that a reader encounters in his reading life. That lets him know, okay, I'm moving on up, I'm getting better as a reader. These things are happening. So this was your idea. So I'm going to let you, I'm not going to let you take the reins and lead through this.

[Thomas Banks]

And I should say that some of these milestones, some of these key events in a, you know, theoretical readers reading life, they're not necessarily all going to occur in everybody's reading life.

[Angelina Stanford]

Fair.

[Thomas Banks]

I, I, I'm sort of basing them on some of my own experience, but I think they'll at least, some of them should at least resonate with you, though. Certainly not, not all, I would predict, but yeah. And I think you can even sort of begin in childhood, you know, like milestones, something as simple as the first time you selected a book by yourself and fell in love with it without it being something that was given to you.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

And I mean, and you, I think, probably have answered this before at some point, but for anyone who isn't familiar, what was that book for you, Ms. Stanford?

[Angelina Stanford]

It was a kid's version of the Arabian Nights.

[Thomas Banks]

Great answer. Very good.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I would, I want to talk about picking it out for yourself, but I would say closely related to that is when you own a book for yourself.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

So my parents were students, they were college students. My dad was in law school when I was born, and so, I mean, just completely broke and but no matter how poor we were as a family, we had books. That is something my family valued. And my dad's student job at the time was he worked in the State Book Depository, which meant that he, it was a big warehouse and he would get to bring home the quote unquote, you know, dent and scratch copies of things. And so he brought home a lot of like, Elementary.

[Thomas Banks]

I would be so sorry I'm going to cut you off. I would be so tempted to abuse that job.

[Angelina Stanford]

You would just mess it up yourself.

[Thomas Banks]

Knock that one. I would be almost like the mob guy. Yeah. This one fell off the truck this morning and I'm gonna have to take this home.

[Angelina Stanford]

So he would. He would bring them home for me. So that's how I up with like a hardback set of the Boxcar Children and Arabian Nights and some other things like that. And they were my books. They were my little library. And I was three years old. So for as long as I can remember, I owned my own books and I had my own little library. And that meant a lot to me that I. That these were my books. And the Arabian Nights was the one that I would go to over. Over and over. Go. Go ahead.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And so I think that's an important one for a lot of people. And I think maybe not every real reader. And when I say a real reader, I think there are people who read actually a lot of books who aren't readers in a. Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't know, the passionate sense or almost the religious sense of the word.

[Angelina Stanford]

Let's talk about experiment and criticism. There's a literary past.

[Thomas Banks]

The time maybe, you know, when they're taking a plane ride somewhere or. Yeah. So people for whom it's out vocational and always has something of a distraction. Right. But you could also watch a movie or watch a, you know, turn on or something.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Say Angry Birds. I know. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

All these things that a lot. That the phone probably functions in the same way that the unliterary readers reading functions. You know, you pick up a. Just like any magazine to read on a plane.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

You and I bring books on a plane. I'm always like. I'm always fascinated with the person who brings a magazine. I'm not a magazine reader because I don't like reading little short things. I want to, like, get sucked in and really read something. So that. That's always interesting to me. Like who picks up a magazine.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And bringing books on planes. Well, actually, one of my few nightmarish experiences with a book occurred. I had borrowed a book from a friend and it was kind of a difficult one to get a hold of. And after I, like, just after I deboarded the plane when I was flying out east, I realized I had left it in my seat.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, no.

[Thomas Banks]

And I had to, like, you know, I talked to one of the stewardesses I saw who had been on the plane and Asked like, would you able to get this for me? But she couldn't get back on either. And I had to go through. Jump through a bunch of hoops. Anyway, I finally got my friend's book back and thank God. But yeah, it was. That probably would have cost me about 100 bucks.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's a whole other episode. People who borrow books and destroy them or lose them. That's.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Huge black mark.

[Thomas Banks]

The black very much. Obviously, I cannot be trusted. And if I ever ask you, can I borrow a book, you should tell me. No.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, noted, Noted. We may be way too far along in our marriage for you to be telling me this.

[Thomas Banks]

I know. I know. This bait and switch right here.

[Angelina Stanford]

So I think related to what you're talking about, because we talked about this the other day, you and I, that both of us had a milestone in our lives when we got our library card.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. That kind of felt like I probably had a stronger emotional reaction to getting my library card when I was like, what, six or seven? I think I was seven. Than I did to getting my driver's license when I was 15. I totally believe that because, like, getting your driver's license, I think to our parents, that probably meant more than to our generation. But to me, it was just like, well, this is something everyone does, you know, And I don't really drive that much anyway. I was. I was very much a walker or a bike rider when I was. When I was a teenager. But. But yeah, getting a library card made me feel very grown up when I was seven, which is adorable. I know.

[Angelina Stanford]

Have a card I could slide into the wallet slot. That felt so. So grown up. Unlike you, I. I did enjoy getting my driver's license, and that was an important milestone to me. But getting the library card, that was a huge milestone. And in my town, I'm pretty sure this slip was everywhere. The second grade, you had to be able to sign your name in cursive to get a library card. Yep. And so for the. Well, really, until my. My hometown library went to a computerized model.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

I had the same all through my adult life, the same library card with my second grade handwriting on it.

[Thomas Banks]

That's amazing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Do you still have that?

[Angelina Stanford]

It's probably somewhere.

[Thomas Banks]

It'll be a relic someday. Of course.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, it's. It's probably so they eventually switched to a computerized.

[Thomas Banks]

The Museum of Angelina's Childhood Effect.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, my library card. And that was another big, you know, trips to the library. I would say that my parents, I think, did a really Good job. I mean, books were a part of their life. And so I just grew up thinking this is what humans do. They read, they go.

[Thomas Banks]

We were both lucky. Yeah, we were very lucky that our parents were people who read because they had active minds.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Even though none of them are academics. None of our parents were.

[Angelina Stanford]

But they just had a love. I mean, my dad talked about how. I mean, and they were. They were sharecroppers in with nine kids and didn't even have indoor plumbing, but they had books.

[Thomas Banks]

You talk about your dad's family?

[Angelina Stanford]

My dad's family, yeah. His upbringing. My grandmother. My dad used to always talk about how she had a set of these hardback books, and it was like King Arthur and Robin Hood. And he talked about how reading those King Arthur books as a kid, which is, like, hugely influential on him. So both of my parents really prioritized that. So getting a library card was a huge milestone. And then my mom would take us to the library. And so I think that fits in with what you're saying, that you can choose. Remember the feeling.

[Thomas Banks]

I almost said, choose your own adventure, but no, if you're a certain age. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. So I grew up in a very small town, much smaller than yours, and so our library was very small. And you would. You walked in and there was the desk, the circulation desk. And if you went left, you were in the children's section. If you went right, you were in the adult section. And my mom would. And there were almost no places my mother was comfortable just letting us go on our own. But the library was. And she would go. She would go right into the adult section, and I would go left with my siblings, and I would wander the stacks. Yeah, I remember that was just. That was the best. And then when I had kids get them. Them getting a library car was a big milestone for them. Each one of them, when they could sign their name, got a. Got a library card. That was also a big. A big deal. And as a homeschool mom, I made a lot of use of my. My library to save money on things. But, yeah, yeah, just the. Ah, gosh. And I don't even know if you can replicate that now, because libraries. Well, first of all, in a lot of cities, they're not safe for kids to wander anymore.

[Thomas Banks]

That really is a sad thing because.

[Angelina Stanford]

Of, you know, a lot of homeless people sometimes are in libraries, so it's sometimes not safe. And then libraries are now basically computer centers and other things. Like, I don't even know if you can have that joy of just Just wandering the stacks. But that. That was a lifelong habit for me. I'm going to tell a story I never told before. I don't think you've ever heard this before. One of my favorite things to do in college was to get lost in the stacks. Just wander around. I would not use the card catalog. And this is. This is something I feel like has been lost with all of the online book stuff. So online will help you to find exactly the book you're looking for, but it's not going to help you stumble upon something you weren't expecting. And so I wouldn't use the card catalog. I just knew the Dewey decimal numbers well enough in my college library to know the. Generally the number of the sorts of things I like. And I would just wander around in there and I would find all these random things and check them out. That was also. I know you did that, too.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yes. Yeah. Another literary milestone which may or may not occur during childhood. This one actually could be an adult one for a lot of people. But where you find yourself falling in love with a book that doesn't excite you.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, explain more.

[Thomas Banks]

So where you find yourself falling in love with a book that is not. That is not full of incident that does not have a whole lot of action. And by action, I don't mean fighting necessarily, or war, though, if you're a guy, I mean, sure, that's probably going to be a lot of, like your. Your early reading right there. But a book where you don't find yourself being drawn in by mere sensation, does that make sense?

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm not sure I understand the distinction. You're making an example of a book that happened to you.

[Thomas Banks]

So here, this is the book in my life, and I think we've mentioned this one before, but Time of Wonder by Robert McCloskey.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay. You know this book? I have that book, like Make Way for Ducklings, that book. Nothing really happens in it. It's mostly like sort of idyllic pictures and descriptions of. What is it, Maine? I think it's Penobscot Bay. I think.

[Angelina Stanford]

Something like that.

[Thomas Banks]

It's somewhere in New England. Yeah, I think it's Maine. I really liked that book when I was a kid. I think I was probably four or five years old when my mother first read it to me, but I found myself thinking, this is really boring. But I love this book. And I don't think there's even really a story in it. It's more just kind of memories and impressions. Yeah. It's almost like if Marcel Proust had written a children's book and illustrated it in New England. That's the kind of book he would have written.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think. I'm thinking this is like the kid's version of a pastoral.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Yes. Okay. Yes, There you go. The kid's version of a pastoral poem that Virgil or Theocritus would have written or Edmund Spenser, you know, the calendar. Stop.

[Angelina Stanford]

His calendar.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And then. Sure. And if you find yourself as an adult reading, you know, Virgil's Georgics, where again, like, you know, he's talking about the arts of farming and beekeeping and things like that. Lovely poetry. But nothing really happens.

[Angelina Stanford]

I get what you're saying now.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Where you can sit down and find yourself losing track of time in the presence of something like that. Type of.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that explains so much about you. I really feel. Okay, so I feel like that fits in with Jason's class, class. Dr. Baxter's class this summer about lyric poetry. You know, so a lot of people, I think, are he, you know, he says, struggle with lyric poetry because there's no narrative, there's no plot. Like, how. Well, how am I supposed to experience this poem? What does it mean? And so, you know, that's what he was trying to teach us over those four weeks. I think that's what you're getting at. I think so that's a literary milestone when you don't need a narrative pushing it forward. But you can have a lyric experience, a pastoral experience.

[Thomas Banks]

Do you know if you have had that one? I mean, I know that you probably have at some point, but do you know what it was?

[Angelina Stanford]

Nothing is coming to mind right away. I will confess that I really struggle with those. Even the poems I like. I wouldn't say that I'm naturally drawn to the pastoral poems.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Not unless I can very easily see all the symbolism and kind of put together a narrative in my mind.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Actually, I bet after we finish recording, I'm gonna be like, no, no, no.

[Thomas Banks]

Actually, I know that you have read and had, I think, a strong response to, say, Virgil's fourth eclogue.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Which is kind of unusual amongst the eclogues, the so called messianic eclogues. Long. But maybe that's the exception that proves the rule with you.

[Angelina Stanford]

But I would say it's. It's not what I'm naturally drawn to. But I. It's not the first thing. Yeah, yeah, I. I totally understand. I think it's a flaw in myself. So I'm. I'm saying, you know, this isn't like A. And Angelina saying no one should like this. I think it's a flaw in myself that I can't enjoy those as much as say, you can. But no, I think that's a really good. That's a really good point. So when you can enjoy the beauty of something without it having an obvious.

[Thomas Banks]

Narrative or even within a narrative, a interlude that seems kind of like, you know, this is the author sort of pushing pause and asking you to stare at this particular image for five minutes. So I think Thomas Hardy has, in a number of his novels, which are full of incidents and like, very dramatic stories, but he can.

[Angelina Stanford]

Opening chapter of Chess of the Derbyville's A Threshing Machine in the Hay.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, yeah. I was thinking. Or, you know, farmer. What's his name? Farmer Oak. In Gabriel Oak. Gabriel Oak, yes. In Far the Madding Crowd, like, describing him tending a flock of sheep or something like that. Moments like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

I find even the Winter's Tale, when they go to bohemian, it's the opening of. Is it Act 3?

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. When they're just an autolycus.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, Just in the. That's why they're called Pastorals, because they're out in the pasture, the shepherds frolicking.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Moments like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's good.

[Thomas Banks]

Here's one. And again, I don't think this necessarily occurs in the life of everyone, but I do think it is a milestone of sorts. It could be a. Maybe a warning stone as well. But when did you first. What was the first time you read a book and you found yourself arguing with it? Not necessarily arguing because you were angry and disliked, but you. You felt yourself, you know, sort of being drawn into some kind of interior conflict because of your encounter with this novel or poem or. Or it could have been like a religious work or philosophical one. Could be any number of kinds of books.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, man. Okay. I'm gonna have to think about that. I didn't see. I didn't have these questions ahead of time.

[Thomas Banks]

For me, it was Pilgrim's Progr. 9th grade. Because I strongly disliked that book then. And I remember I had an almost.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, you know, I had the same.

[Thomas Banks]

I think I've had actual fights with living human beings or arguments with living human beings that were less intense than how much I dislike. I've changed my mind. I actually think that's a wonderful book and there's reasons why it's considered a classic now. But I really, really disliked that book. The dialogue sections, especially between, you know, Christian and faithful and the various worldly wise men and other types they encounter along the way. But, yeah, I remember wanting desperately for John Bunyan to be. You know, just looking for ways in which he was wrong about everything. That was. I actually think that was an important moment in my reading life, though I don't know if it was necessarily a healthy one or not.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was gonna say that. I feel like that's a negative thing.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I. So it's one I. That's probably not to. I think the more important milestone is the one where you said you've changed your mind about that. So you grew up and you can. You see better what he's doing. And. And you can read it and realize you don't have to agree with every single point. You can still accept it as a work of art. It's like C.S. lewis says about Pilgrim's Progress. If you can just. If you can just ignore all the preachiness, there's a great romance in there.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. At its base, it's one of the greatest adventure stories ever written.

[Angelina Stanford]

So I would say for my. My related literary milestone would be learning how to brush off the dross. And so what I mean is, you know, there's always multiple layers of meaning going on, and I'm interested in seeing the eternal layers, you know, the journey of the soul, that kind of thing. And so I don't hyper focus on anything on the surface. So if I read an old book, for example, and I see women portrayed in a way that I don't think is how women should be portrayed, I don't get upset about that. Like, I know so many people will just hyperfile. How dare this woman. And I can't believe she's being treated like that.

[Thomas Banks]

Everyone reading Paradise Lost for the first time sort of responds this way to Eve.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. Because they don't understand. It's an allegory of the soul. And Adam and Eve together are the soul, and Eve represents the passions, and Adam is the reason. And so it's really about the reason and the passions. It's not about men and women. And. And I. I think I'm naturally a reader that way. So I. I read lots of things and just. I. I don't know, as I'm reading, I just. It's just like my brain will just go that surface, that surface. It doesn't matter. That's not the real story. And so I always find it kind of jarring when I hear somebody else talking about it, because, again, to go back to the analogy I gave in our Much Ado About Nothing series, you know, I feel like Art is this window, right? It's this prism Tolkien talks about. And I'm looking through the window to this light, and it feels to me like somebody just came on and said, what light? Do you not see that speck right there? Look at that speck on the glass. We should all be really upset about the speck. And I'm always just, like, shocked.

[Thomas Banks]

Like, we should remove that spec with a hammer if necessary.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Like, it doesn't matter. I'm looking at the light. I just ignored the speck. I'm just like, okay, I live in a fallen world. There's gonna be fingerprints on the window. That's okay. I can look right through it. So I think that's another milestone, is being able to fluff off the parts that maybe fail to be great art or maybe too much of its time. I mean, the thing about literature is that it is universal. That's what makes it last over time. But it's always universal, rooted in a particular.

[Thomas Banks]

Because it's the product of particular minds and intelligence living at particular moments in history.

[Angelina Stanford]

It can't exist any other way because it comes from people, and those people are in a time and in a place. And so as human beings living in a fallen world, it's not going to shock us that there's going to be some things that maybe fail to reach that eternal thing thing. But we have to be able to. To brush that off, to see the. The true thread of the universal that goes through all of literature. And. And, you know, we. We're so tempted to think that our time doesn't have any surface problems and history will come back and say, you guys had a ton of problems. And. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's another milestone, is learning to look past things, you know, and I use the. Use the woman thing because I'm a woman. But there can be any number of things that we might not, you know, you might not like the way farmers are portrayed in a book. Or, you know, the lower class. You don't appreciate that the lower classes are, you know, treated a certain way. And, like, I don't. I don't even notice. I gotta tell you, I don't even notice that I am so shocked when I hear, say, like, a homeschool mom freaking out. Like, I don't know, should I read this to my kids? Is this gonna damage them? And I always think I didn't even notice that. I've read this book 150 times and I never even noticed it. Like, why. Why are you hyper focusing on that? Like, I just ignore that. And I see. I see the story underneath. That's where. That's where the art is.

[Thomas Banks]

That. That's a good answer. And I. So I guess I've kind of answered this next one already or given my own example of it. But another milestone is, I think, an important one where you find yourself returning in adulthood to a book that you were assigned in school and finding, I don't know, new vistas there and, you know, new. New discoveries which you had never even. Never even thought to notice before. Did. Have you had that particular experience? Yes, I've actually had it several times myself. Pilgrim's Progress is one. Silas Marner also, which I read, and I think ninth grade is another for me.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

I stand that book.

[Angelina Stanford]

I could.

[Thomas Banks]

First time.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I'll go ahead and embarrass myself and say some things where I really feel like I blew it when I read it as a younger person, because I think it's important for us to see that even you and I, who I think people look at as. We're good readers. I mean, we're humans, and so we. When we were younger, we. We may have drawn a wrong conclusion. And I think being able to get to the point where you can reread and realize, okay, there was stuff there that I couldn't see. I think it's important on so many levels. One, it's important because it teaches you something about the nature of a book. But two, it teaches you something about yourself as a reader and that you can't trust as any kind of definitive evaluation you're feeling about a book, because your feeling could be wrong. And so the one that stands out to me the most right now, and I will really embarrass myself, is that. So When I was 21, I was asked to read. Someone just gave it to me to read that Hideous Strength.

[Thomas Banks]

Ah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And at the time, I was completely obsessed with 1984, and I did not know at that time that 1984 was written after that Hideous Strength as George Orwell's version of that hideous strength. I know that now. I didn't know that then. So I start reading it, and I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, Lewis is just totally ripped off 1984. Like, what a hack. But also, I'm kind of into this because I really like 1984. And so this is. This is my jam. This is a dystopia. And then it got weird. It got super weird, and it got all spiritual. And I remember just thinking that the first half of the book was so good, and the second half was a train wreck. And I will tell you with great shame that I spent probably about a decade calling it that hideous book.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Judged it.

[Thomas Banks]

You've told me before that you had a difficult experience. I didn't know that you called it that hideous.

[Angelina Stanford]

I did. I did. I called it that hideous book. I will confess to our listeners, I judged it. It. But that book came back and judged me, let me tell you, because I now think it is CS Lewis's greatest work. It's his masterpiece. But it took me a long time to understand much more about the medieval mind and to see what he was doing, that he was trying to show the spiritual reality behind physical things. So, you know, a dystopian government. There's a spiritual reality behind that, and that's what he was trying to. To show. And now I love it, and I teach it in the fellowship. It's actually a capstone book. We the fellowship. After two years, I think one of the books. I think that book is everything. So that is my shame. And I think. And I think the point is this. I had a very negative reaction to that book, and I judged it. And I now can say that the problem was me, not the book. And so I think we have to be very careful when we feel super confident that our subjective experiences of a book is some sort of definitive statement. We could be wrong.

[Thomas Banks]

I think I wrote. Wrote maybe the worst high school paper of my high school career. And I wrote some bad papers then about that book. Oh, and I didn't know that I got a passing grade, but it was not one of my better performances. But I. I didn't like that book either. The first time I read it, I. I thought, that's a.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's a challenging book. It just think about. It's one of these books you have.

[Thomas Banks]

To be patient with the. The opening chapters because you're like, yeah, you have this college institute and these kind of boring people, and nothing seems to be happening. That was my response then, and I didn't see where I was going.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, no. That's the part I liked. I didn't like when it got weird.

[Thomas Banks]

So, no, see, for me, like, I still basically, you know, have my problems with Mark and Jane. I just don't find them very interesting. But that doesn't mar the novel for me as it did. But I remember, I think I said something like, Lewis takes, like, 40 whole pages even to get the story going. And I think I said, if this were a movie, the audience would be Walking out. My teacher helpfully pointed out, well, this is not a movie. And you're being arbitrary if you think that you have to get the mainsprings of the plot all obviously working in the opening chapter. Again, you can't ask a novelist to do that all the time. This is a longish. I think it's his longest novel.

[Angelina Stanford]

Isn't it so funny to me, though, that you had that response because, oh, yeah, Victorian novels. And I always say, you know, you gotta get 200 pages into a Victorian novel before you've even met all the main characters.

[Thomas Banks]

I do, but I was also a teenager once.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, all right, so you were kind of a jerk.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I was. I was. I knew that. I mean, everything on our literary curriculum had been chosen because it was an acknowledged classic of one kind or another. And I was always the guy who wanted to say something smart that the teacher. And preferably sarcastic that the teacher wouldn't anticipate participate so they would feel uncomfortable.

[Angelina Stanford]

So you were trying to push your teacher's buttons by rejecting.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah, yeah, I know. It's just amazing like that. You know, people I knew back then will even still talk to me. But yeah, yeah, gosh, I was, I was such an annoying kid.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, we all had, we all had to grow up.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Yes, we did.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, I. But yes, the, the reread is, I, I think very, very significant. And, and likewise, sometimes you can reread a book you loved when you were younger and realize it wasn't that great. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

I. And that's, that's really sad. But it does happen, man. I'm trying to think. I, I think I have had that happen to me, but I don't know. I could name a time. Has that happened to you at all recently?

[Angelina Stanford]

So it hasn't happened to me, but I live in fear of it. And so there are some books that I read once when I was younger that are so incredibly special to me that I'm afraid read to revisit them because I think, well, what if it doesn't? What if I don't get that intense feeling off of it this time? But I have been slowly reintroducing those books to myself and finding that they, they're still hold up. So that's, that's a comfort to me when they still hold up. The Arabian Nights was one of those for a very long time. I wouldn't read them again because I thought, what if they don't hold up? But I ended up. This is maybe 10 years ago, I did a scholarly talk on Scheherazade. And I really started researching it and just found out that it was even better. Like, everything about me at 3 years old was spot on. And I was really excited. And it not only held up, it was so much more than I. Than I knew, but I live in fear of that. And I. That. That ends up, I think, happening when people really get into the podcast and they find that their tastes change and they go back and I, I think if I could just throw in another literary milestone. Another literary milestone is to read the. To understand there are two different things happening when you're reading. There's. There's the work of art itself, which is what we try to talk about on this podcast, but then there's also your subjective experience. And your subjective experience is not invalid, okay? You, You're. You, you're having it. It's just. It's a separate thing from the value of the work as a whole. And I think what has happened now in the time we live in it has become all about your subjective experience. And we have decided that that trumps the work of art itself. And we decide our subjective experience is the meaning. And the better you can get at separating those things, the. The more that you're going to be able to grow in your. In your reading life, and you're going to be able to enjoy and love and be touched by things that you wouldn't if you were just hung up on your own subjective experience. So that can work in two ways. One, you. You can have a bad subjective experience like I did. Like I will 100 admit I misread that hideous strength. I misread it and that's why I didn't like it. Was one problem was me. And then I, I come back later and I realize, okay, this is a great work of art, that my subjective experience was wrong. The book is better than that. But it can also work in the other direction, where you have a very positive subjective experience and the book's not that great. And you come back and realize, wow, this book wasn't that great. And that ends up being kind of complicated, I think, in our Facebook group. Because when somebody will ask me, is such and such a good book? Book this in book X, Is book X a good book? I automatically am hearing, is book X a good work of art? 100 of the time, I answer the question as if you had asked me, is book X a good work of art? And I'll say, oh, well. And so I'm not saying whether I liked it. I'm not Saying whether I had a positive subjective experience. I'm simply saying, I don't know that it really qualifies as a great work of art. Maybe it's not written that well, blah, blah, blah. And then all these people will come back and basically be like, but I had a very positive subjective experience. And they'll be mad at me. Me. And I keep trying to say both of those things can be true. You can have a positive subjective experience, and it can be not that great. Both of those things can be true. You know, Lewis talks about how so often modern readers. And it's even worse now than when he wrote this a hundred years ago. But modern readers, they end up responding to a book that only exists in their head. And so he.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, I think that's true.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So he gives the example of, you know, you.

[Thomas Banks]

Maybe not even modern specifically, but, yeah, I think that's a common problem.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's a common problem, right. And so he'll say both positively and negatively. So he gives the example of like. Like, so you read a book and there's a. There's an old guy in it and reminds you of your grandfather, and suddenly you got the warm fuzzies. And. And you. You're just feeling all this glowing stuff because it's your grandpa. And. And you think the book has inspired that, but it's not. It's. You're associating memories that have been inspired by that. And so if somebody comes along and says, oh, that book isn't very good, you get mad because you're like, how. How dare you insult my grandfather, basically. But this is happening on a level below where you're thinking, so you don't realize that. And I think it happens the other direction too, where you can have a negative. Like, maybe you hate your grandpa, right? And so being reminded of your grandpa gives you a very negative experience, as though somebody else says, this work is a really great work of art, and you're like, I hate that book. You know, so being able to separate, again, not saying your subjective experience is invalid. It's just not all that there is. You have to be able to. To separate those things. And I'm having a hard time thinking of anything off the top of my head, but okay, Well, I mean, like, Nancy Drew meant the world to me when I was a kid. I'd seriously doubt if I read them now that I would. I probably would read them and be.

[Thomas Banks]

Like, this is it wouldn't stop your world.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I'd be like, this is the card.

[Thomas Banks]

I was like, encyclopedia Brown.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

You know, I read all of this.

[Angelina Stanford]

My experience with Nancy Drew was invalid. It wasn't invalid. It was an important part of my journey as a. As a literary person. Because, I mean, I. I swallowed those books whole. Oh, yeah. I don't even remember how many I read. I loved those books. But I'm not going to be my. I'm not going to be, like, upset if somebody says those. Those books aren't great art. I would agree that they're not great art, you know, and. And that's okay. We need to be able to separate those things because if you're trapped in the world of your subjective experience, you're. You're cutting yourself off from the real value of the art, which is again, the prism which allows the light to sh. Shine through. You're letting your own subjective feelings block out, you know, the eternal light from flowing through the art as it should. And there's so many different ways. I mean, so that's one way. Another way I think, is you have to be able to separate the work from the writer.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah, we've talked about that a good deal.

[Angelina Stanford]

And a lot of people.

[Thomas Banks]

That's another milestone, actually. This is. I've sort of been building up to this, but a really important one where you find yourself really being carried along by the narrative, the plot, the characters, and falling in love with a book, a novel, a play, whatever, where, you know it's by an author whose fundamental outlook on life is hos. Not. Not just different, but hostile to yours.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Do you remember if probably you've had this experience a lot of times?

[Angelina Stanford]

Experience a lot. And. And we've talked about this on the podcast a lot. I think a lot of the emphasis on what I'll call the worldview crowd really cannot separate. And I think this is on both conservative and progressive ends of things. Really struggle to separate the art from the artist and treat it as a separate object. And we see the art as sort of the mouthpiece of everything that the artist has. So if the artist is a jerk. Jerk. Are a monster. Even more than a jerk. He's a monster or he's a criminal or he's a racist.

[Thomas Banks]

Has ugly prejudices.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, exactly. Then. Then the work, therefore, must be, you know, the mouthpiece of that. That's another important point when you can separate those things. So absolutely. Like I. So I teach early modern lit, and I teach. Well, there's two types of Romanticism, right? There's conservative romanticism and revolutionary romanticism. And so conservative romanticism would be Coleridge And Wordsworth, and the revolutionary ones would be more Shelley and Byro. Although, you know, these. These categories are not totally fixed. But when I get to somebody like Shelley, I always make the joke because I love Shelley's poetry. I mean, I think Ozymandias is about one of the best things ever. Lewis loved it. And Lewis said something like, his poetry is a better man than he is.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, that's. That's a fine thing to. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And. And so I always make the joke of how much I. I'll. I'll just be like, I love Shelley, by which I mean I love Shelly, the poet. And then I always say, I wouldn't want to date him.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, no.

[Angelina Stanford]

I wouldn't want to be married to him. Right. So. So, yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Byron, for that matter.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, Right. None of those guys really, like, we. We sometimes we joke about, like, would we want to be married to anybody? I. CS Lewis. I Me. To anybody who. Any artist. CS Lewis says, you know, that there's a certain type of genius that should just not be married because they're not going to take out the trash and they're not going to be a good partner. But again, that if you. You can. It's like. Like when I sit down and I enjoy a table.

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

My only concern is, is this a good table? I don't ask who made it.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And does he love his wife? And is he, you know, is he. Is he a decent guy? It doesn't matter to me because it's the object that. That would matter. So. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And.

[Thomas Banks]

And I don't think Thomas Hardy you can do.

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't even ask questions about who these people are. It's so irrelevant to me, but go ahead.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. I mean, my example of this. One of the early ones I remember was Thomas Hardy. When I found out that Thomas Hardy was an atheist and I think, like, kind of a nihilist, frankly.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think that his palm hap.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. You see it. You see it here and there. I don't think you really see that particular sense of universal nothingness in. In far from the Madding Crowd say. But. But, yeah, I mean, just a very pessimistic philosophy of life, which, I mean, nonetheless, though, I think he creates human beings who are. Are, you know, ones that you feel for and pity. And some of whom, like, do try to conduct themselves honorably according to their lights and. And the world, the. The imaginative world that they live in. If the. This sort of fictionalized England, because Wessex, where all of his novels are set, is not a real county. In England, but it's kind of everywhere. England is, it's, it's a wonderful world to be imaginatively lost in, I find. And if he also happened to be a nihilist, well, you know, that's, that's sad. Sad.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. But it doesn't affect the book because the books are not nihilist. And again, we make the mistake of thinking that art is self expression, which really, when the muse comes on, it hands you the art and then the artist does the best that they can in, in hammering down, you know, in, in. Well, it's like a sculpture, right? You have your block of stone and they see, they can just see the sculptor can see through the stone that there's an image in there and they free the image. Image. That's still what it's like with writing, I think, for me. So the milestone for me with regard to this was when I really got.

[Thomas Banks]

Into George Orwell, also an atheist, also.

[Angelina Stanford]

An atheist and a socialist. And that was so fascinating to me and it made me respect him all the more because he's a committed socialist and that writes two of the greatest anti socialist books ever. And I know I'm not just reading that into the book because the socialist party itself came after him for that and said, what are you, dude, what are you doing? You know, you're attacking your own people. And his answer is basically, I have to tell the truth. And so that showed me really, in this visceral way that 1984 is not a work of self expression. Like he's hammering down what he saw. And what he saw as an artist was the truth. And even if it didn't match up with his personal politics, that he, he wasn't just gonna spout the party line because he was personally a socialist. He, he. And anyway, that was a huge milestone for me. And, and that was early on. I was probably like 19 years old at that time. And I think that was the first time I had really reckoned with the fact that because I went to a Christian school that had very much a worldview approach and that was the first time that I think I was able to start to separate the artist and the art. And it was really George Orwell. I always go back to him and think, think this is a guy who told the truth in his art. And whether or not you think he lived the truth in his life is irrelevant. The only, the only thing that's relevant is is the art true and his art is true?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, those were the milestones that I had in mind. I've. I don't know if you have any that you wanted to bring in as well, that I may have overlooked you.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so one is when you read a book that you really don't like, but you can understand, you can recognize that it's a great work of art.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay, yes, that's an important one. I think that. Yeah, again, one that a lot of people, maybe not everyone, but I do think a lot of real readers have that moment. I think I know what your answer is going to be.

[Angelina Stanford]

Throw it at me, because that would be Wuthering Heights.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, I called it. I called it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Know.

[Thomas Banks]

And you've read that six times. Five times.

[Angelina Stanford]

Five times. No one has tried harder than I. In fact, I wondered if I should read it again now that I'm in a new decade of my life. But I have tried so hard and I just don't prefer it, however, because I have read it and have really read it in an attempt to see whatever goodness is there. I can say, and I've. I wrote graduate papers about, about this, and I believe this to be true. I think it's a masterpiece. It's absolutely a masterpiece. All the layers of the narrative and the structure and the construction, like, it's just all so masterfully done. I can see that it's a great work of art. I just don't prefer it, you know, and it's like, I just prefer Mozart to Bach, you know, it, it comes down to a preference. And I remember I was really struggling this in grad school and one of my mentors, Dr. Sicarta, I was talking to her about it and I was like, I. Because I did. I thought it was, I was definitely at that point where I was able to say, if, if I can't like a classic, the problem must be me. And I talked to her about that and, and I still think that's the right posture to have. I think our first response must be, I, I, I'm, I'm the problem. Not the book is a problem when it comes to classics, when it comes to new books, no, the problem is them. But I talked to her about that and I remember her saying, oh, oh, do you like Jane Eyre? And I said, yes, I love Jane Eyre. She's like, well, in my experience, people are either Jane Eyre people or they're Wuthering Heights people. And, and that just made me feel better. But I have, I have really tried to love that book. And I can, I can say it's a masterpiece.

[Thomas Banks]

It's a nightmarish universe that takes place in. And it's one that doesn't have many. It's all storm with very few breaks in the clouds. Very, very little sunlight in that book.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And I used to say, for a long time, I would say I have a Heathcliff storming around inside my soul. I don't need to read about. About him. Right. Like, I like to read about Mr. Darcy. This is why I'm married to you. I. I like Pemberley's Gardens. I like a nice ordered universe. But I recognize that that's a subjective thing about me and doesn't reflect the art. And so I think this is another example of being able to separate your subjective experience. Like, we'll get questions in the podcast group a lot like, I'm reading this book and I don't really like it. You know, what should I do? And I always cringe because so many people come back and respond, not every book is for everybody. And it's fine. I just think, wow, you're. You're elevating the subjective experience over the work of art. Like, this might. You're hurting this person. This person is having an important milestone in their life. They're saying, I don't like this book. And I think it's probably the problem is me, should I keep going? And what they want is you to help them to understand the book. But coming in and saying, well, you don't need to read it. Like, you. You're. You're inhibiting them from an important milestone.

[Thomas Banks]

All right, so what.

[Angelina Stanford]

What's the book for you?

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, there's. Well, there's several. Okay. I will say almost all of the fiction of Virginia Woolf, and I think there's. There's a place for it. I think that you didn't like it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because you read it all the time.

[Thomas Banks]

I wouldn't say all the time. I've read.

[Angelina Stanford]

I've read her after we got married.

[Thomas Banks]

A couple of her novels.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, it was a summer.

[Thomas Banks]

I like. I very much like. I very highly respect her as a literary critic. I think she had wonderful taste and instincts as a critic. I go back to the two volumes of the Common Reader time and time again. I think I gave you one of them. I think that's one of the first books I gave you.

[Angelina Stanford]

Indeed it was.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. The Common Reader, the essays on Sheesh, George Eliot and Christina Rossetti and Daniel Defoe, and there's so many of them. Yeah. I love Virginia Woolf, the Crowd. I enjoy A Room of One's Own, even though I'm obviously not its target audience. I don't love her novels. I enjoyed Orlando, which is one. The first one I read that one and that one, I. Yeah, that's just kind of an odd sort of fantasia. I don't know what you would call it, but there's not really a lot of story in it. But everything else. Mrs. Dalloway, I don't know why her characters seem papery and non existent. I can't believe in these people's existence.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So I took a class on Virginia Woolf. Experimental novels are definitely not my.

[Thomas Banks]

That's the thing. I don't enjoy stream of consciousness narration, even if it's from someone I think is a real artist and a master of the craft.

[Angelina Stanford]

Like she was somebody I needed to know. And so I gave her books a shot. I think I liked Mrs. Dalloway, but I might be confusing that with to the Lighthouse. All of her books kind of blur in my mind, but I don't exactly.

[Thomas Banks]

It's kind of like.

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't prefer experiments.

[Thomas Banks]

I think all of her books, and this isn't necessarily a. A case, you know, definitive case against them, but they do kind of blur together in the way that I find the paintings of Claude Monet. When I try to imagine, I. I imagine like one. You're like, oh, another lily pond. Yeah, it's. That's. Yeah, I don't know. That's. That's what it is for me. And it's. Again, it's probably a me problem, not a Virginia Woolf problem. That would be one almost all of Daniel Defoe for me. Some years ago, I reread Robinson Crusoe and I can't make myself love that book, even though I think that there are good reasons why it holds the place it does as a canonical work. Probably my favorite book of his is his Journal of the Plague Year. But yeah, I don't find his novels. I don't know, I just.

[Angelina Stanford]

Not gonna be surprised about what my favorite Dafoe novel is.

[Thomas Banks]

Roxana.

[Angelina Stanford]

No. So I've never read Moll Flanders. Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Robinson Crusoe. But I was obsessed with Moll Flanders. So this is probably 20 years ago. I just picked it up on a whim and just loved it. That might be a fun one to do on the podcast. I just. I loved it. I loved her. I loved the storytelling. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

But I've never also read in college. I remember almost nothing of it. I remember not liking it. That was.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

I don't know. Yeah, I probably. I should revisit that one as well. So. Yeah, there's yeah. Daniel Defoe, Virginia Woolf. Sheesh. Probably more I could, I could think of if I, if I give myself time, World enough in time. Actually here's a form and probably I'm not going to offend anyone's feelings because I don't know anyone who professes to enjoy these. But the mask, M, A, S, Q, U, E. Like Milton's comus. And Milton's comus is generally considered the greatest masque in the English language. And I find myself bored to tears by it would be. Yeah, that's the thing. I think maybe you have to see something like that performed and you know, that's just a form that doesn't exist anymore as a living work. So. Yeah, yeah. A certain type of formalism is difficult for me to work myself into an enjoyment of. So the mask would be the example. I think I probably don't enjoy the mask for the same reason I don't enjoy ballet dancing. And once again, that's nothing against the ballet. I'm sure it's just a shortcoming on my part.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, that's interesting. So my I, the, what happens in those moments for me is I, I will recognize that this, this book is basically written in a language, in a form I don't know how to appreciate. And I, I will become obsessed with understanding how is the original audience perceiving this? How are they enjoying it? Right. Because I, I, I'm not so full of chronological snobbery that I just think everybody back then was primitive and just enjoyed boring things. I think that they're getting a joy here that I, I feel like I'm cut off, off from some joy. They had a joy in this.

[Thomas Banks]

It does concern me. I know.

[Angelina Stanford]

So I, but I'll become obsessed and my hyper focus will kick in and then I'll learn everything. Like I'll give it a silly, not a silly, but maybe an odd example for our listeners. But you know, a few years back I got completely obsessed with Chinese opera, traditional Chinese opera.

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because I mean, you saw this, we have a book on it and to a Westerner, it is completely bizarre. There's no story like what's happening? How is this even singing? And I became obsessed with it. I had to, I first of all thought it was visually stunning. Just I couldn't stop looking at it and I knew that some, whatever was going on was highly symbolic. Okay. And I realized there was just, there was a language there that I didn't understand. So I hyper focused on it. I found out it was all based on a bunch of Stock characters from the folk tradition that each person that came on their colors are symbolic. Everybody in the audience knew who these characters were. And so then. Then it just. But a whole new world opened up to me. I suddenly saw. Saw its relationship to Renaissance masks. It was the same kind of highly symbolic stuff. And so that. That ends up being my response. Not that I like, oh, this is weird and foreign. And by foreign, I mean the past. Because, you know, modern Chinese storytelling is not like that. But when I encounter something that's quote, unquote foreign, my impulse is not to just reject it and say, that's weird, which a lot of modern students will do. That's just weird. Okay? Because it's not like us, so therefore, we must reject it. But my. My first impulse is to feel a deep sense of loss and be like, wait, you know, millions of people for hundreds of years got some joy that I'm. I'm cut off from. And I become obsessed with.

[Thomas Banks]

To be able to say with the Roman playwright Terence, I am human. I consider nothing human, alien from myself, but there's always something human that seems alien from yourself. No matter who you are, probably. You have. Have limitations of sympathy.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I have limitations of sympathy. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

So very deep ones in some cases.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so here's another milestone. This might be one of the most common comments we get in the Facebook group, and I thought that this really deserved a thoughtful answer. So I have been thinking about this, this for months, and it will get some version of this. I'm reading this classic book. Okay, fill in the blank here. And I hate all the characters.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I keep going, you've got a.

[Thomas Banks]

Thousand versions of that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thousand versions of that. I hate all the characters. So my first response whenever I see something like that is just complete bafflement. And I will always turn to you and say, say, why do they think you're supposed to like the characters? Where is this coming from? Okay. And it's just completely baffling to me. And so, again, because I want to understand these mysteries, I spent a lot of time over the last, like, six or seven months trying to answer that question for myself. Where is this coming from? That they think you're supposed to identify with characters and like the characters? Because that is. I. I don't think I ever ask myself, do I like these characters? Characters I like. I think what you were saying about Virginia Woolf is you don't like the way the characters are drawn.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, no, it's not more than, like, their moral standing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. They just.

[Angelina Stanford]

They Just mean, like, I think this person's a jerk. I don't like them, and I don't want to read a story about them. And that's always shocking to me. Right. And I always give the example in my good books class when we read Voyage at the Dawn Treader, which starts, of course, with Eustace being, you know, the biggest stinker in the world, but he's on this journey to stop becoming a stinker.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I always make fun of this in good books and say this would be. What's happening is like if somebody read the first three chapters of Voyage of the Dawn Treader and said, oh, Eustace is terrible. I don't like him at all. I don't want to read this book because I think. But you weren't supposed to like him. The whole point is you don't like him, and he's on this journey. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

I found. Actually, this is. Every year I expect a student to complain about this. I don't think any have so far. But in my later modern literature class, I teach the Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. And the main character is a Russian judge who's kind of shallow and superficial and materialistic and just kind of this bourgeois, completely thoughtless, sort of, you know, sort of slovenly man. And he starts dying. Sorry, I just gave the ending away, like the title.

[Angelina Stanford]

The title.

[Thomas Banks]

But, yeah, every time I teach that book, I think I'm gonna have to work hard to sell this to my students because they're not going to. I. You know, I can't really identify with anyone like that, that sort of objection.

[Angelina Stanford]

But our students.

[Thomas Banks]

But no, I find our students are really good. I find that book is always a popular one.

[Angelina Stanford]

They never. With trying to identify. That's something the adult readers have. Okay, so I'm going to give you my.

[Thomas Banks]

Maybe it's just like, you have to learn to be patient. I had. I hate to say that because it's an unsatisfactory answer, but you need to be patient with imperfect, perfect beings.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, So I have not talked to you about this. This will. This will be the fire. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what's going on here, and I think that I have an answer. I think this was going to help some people. So CS Lewis said in a letter to one of his friends that he was very afraid that reading novels was going to destroy our ability to read old books. And I think that that is what is happening. So over the last year, you and I, I together and then me, by myself, attempted to watch a lot of, like, the new streaming shows that are coming out, and we found them consistently unwatchable. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

We would start it, certain Jane Austen attack adaptations that aside.

[Angelina Stanford]

That aside, just like new stuff. And we would watch it and. And we would say things like, is there a story here? Is there going to be a story? Is there a plot? Wait, we're already over. Where was the story? There was no story. Right? Okay. Okay, so just put that in one little corner here that. We watched all these shows, we found them unwatchable, and there was basically no story. Over on the Patreon, shout out to Naomi. So Naomi is really interesting because she's a writer and she takes these writing classes. And so what she has been learning through the podcast, she'll say, okay, like what you're saying is the opposite of what they teach in writing schools and screenwriting schools. So this has been really eye opening. And so when we did our series on Aristotle's poetics, and Aristotle says, look, it's plot, it's not character. And he says, in fact, you don't even have to have characters to have a story, okay? She said, literally the opposite is being taught in screenwriting. Like, they literally say, don't have a plot, don't even build a world. Just create a character and then just follow them, kind of wandering around. And when she said that, I realized that's what these horrible shows we've been watching are about, right? Just creating these characters and letting them walk around. And so you and I are just boring. We don't understand the point. There's no archetype, there's no structure, there's no nothing. It's just random people just doing random stuff, and it doesn't even feel like it's a story. And then you listen to me go on and on about we've lost our ability to tell a story. But thinking about all of that made me realize that that type of storytelling is making us expect. So if there's no story and if the characters are on some kind of journey, you know, to grow up or mature or spiritually transform or be redeemed, then all we're left with is, do I like this character or not? Do I like them enough to follow them around in these scenarios or not? And I think that's part of the hang up we're having. So what I'm going to offer today is the idea that that is a 100% of the moment contemporary way to view characters. And that when you read a classic, that is not what's going on. You are not being asked to like these characters. You are not being asked to walk around in the world with them or see the world through their eyes. That is not what is going on. And if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you've heard me talk about that, this, that, that the characters in an old book, not the new bestseller at Barnes and Noble right now, okay, because granted, those are being, those are coming out of these God awful, awful writing classes and they're just unreadable because there's no story. There's nothing left for you to do but say, I like this character or I don't like this character. But when it comes to old books, the characters of Visible Souls, they are on a journey of the soul. You are, you are looking through the story to the spiritual reality underneath. That is what is happening. And if you want examples of that, like we talk about this on the podcast all the time, go listen to the Much Ado About Nothing series, the Dracula series, the Harry Potter Potter series. They're visible souls. I mean, even the Flannery o', Connor, if you just want like a short, a short episode to listen to, orient yourself, that means their insides are on the outsides, right? And so an ugly character at the beginning of the story. Ugly in the terms of. Yeah, they're not very nice and this person's kind of messed up. Well, that's like Eustace in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, right? Like they're on a journey of the soul. They're start out, we're seeing their insides on their outside. We got some spiritual ugliness here or some spiritual immaturity there. There's something wrong with this person. And, and they're going to go through this story and have this journey of the soul, right? And they're going to. Again, their insides are on their outsides. All their inside spiritual struggles are going to be projected externally. And, and often it will be done symbolically that, that might be why they have like somebody who has glasses on. It will be because this person's spiritually blind. Right? And so that's their outside.

[Thomas Banks]

Was reading a book where that is the case.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So their insides are on the outsides, right? So if the glasses, they can't see, they're spiritually blind. And so you're watching A Journey of the Soul in an old book. And that's why saying I like this character or don't like this character is completely irrelevant. Like, you shouldn't like somebody who's Got some flaw. It's just like, it's. It's Christian and Pilgrim's Progress. Right. He's on a journey to the celestial city.

[Thomas Banks]

Christian's kind of a basket case.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, exactly. And. And because. Because the point is not the character and what they're feeling and what are, whether or not I can relate to them. The point is the journey of the soul, and that is the universal experience in literature. We are all on a journey of the soul. And so if this character doesn't look like me, sound like me, live like me, it doesn't matter, because they have a soul like me, and they are going through the same journey of the soul to God that I am. So I'm hoping that that helps first by identifying why it is we think we have to identify with these characters or like them, it's because of just horrifically bad modern storytelling, which is garbage. And. And hopefully you can understand now that is not what these older books are trying to do at all. They are not sitting down and saying, I'm going to give you a character you like, like Jane Austen in Emma. I mean, she. It's. She wrote it out like she wanted to give us a story where the main character was not particularly, like, likable. Right. Because Emma is on a journey of the soul, and it's not about, do we like Emma. You shouldn't. You shouldn't like a character who's. Who's got some problems and is in his journey. It's like Eustace. Right. And so hopefully that's going to help you to. To identify and to catch that what you're reading in your book club, if it's some modern bestseller, is not. That's not how an old book works. And that is what CS Lewis is talking about, about when he said he was afraid novel reading was going to destroy our ability to read old books. Because it's. It set these other expectations that we expect to see psychological development and we likeable characters that we can relate to. And that's why sometimes. Well, this was another thing we observed. There was, like, a year of watching TV where every single show we put on ended up with a person literally on the therapist couch. And I kept.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it was a lot of that.

[Angelina Stanford]

It was crazy. It was show after show, and. And I kept turning you to saying, this is it. This is our version of the journey of the soul. It's the journey to the therapist couch.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so instead of, you know, getting this spiritual insight and. And redemption and rebirth and all the spiritual stuff. Yay. They. They're. They're getting a therapist now, and it just fell so flat.

[Thomas Banks]

They know how to deal with their mom problems.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Just.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, true.

[Angelina Stanford]

There you go. I'm going to trademark mark that. The journey of the therapist couch. That's going to be a lit life conference talk. Coming. Coming to you soon. So I think that's another big, big milestone is being able to. To realize it's not about the characters, it's not about my.

[Thomas Banks]

And just like my earlier plea for patience is, you know, maybe not altogether explanatory as it is. I. I think we can do this with movies, and I think that's maybe just a testimony to our short attention span, because we can watch all kinds of movies or TV shows about people that we don't approve of at all. In fact, that's like, kind of the draw if you're watching. I know. We just rewatch Breaking Bad together. It's like, yeah, this guy's a really evil guy. You know, he's ruining people's lives and all that kind of thing. But, I mean, what. That was eight seasons? Nine seasons. A lot of our modern TV shows, like the more successful ones, are ask you to, you know, take an interest. Not approve of, but take an interest in the lives of really not just distasteful, but evil human beings. But like, when we. A book asks us to do this, we're like, oh, no, I'm putting this down. I can't. I don't have the time for this.

[Angelina Stanford]

You're so right.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And some of the stories are intentionally showing you the story of someone who's damning their own soul. Like Macbeth.

[Thomas Banks]

Absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so you not liking the character is part of the experience. Right. And I think the same thing. Breaking Bad, you had mentioned, just the.

[Thomas Banks]

Atmosphere of Wuthering Heights is kind of. It's one you don't like to live in. I can imagine someone feeling that way about Macbeth.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. It's another nightmare world. You're absolutely right.

[Thomas Banks]

It really does. And again, Shakespeare, I think his brilliance really comes through here because he doesn't have lots and lots of stage directions. He has enter, exit, you know, end act three, that kind of thing. But. But the whole atmosphere of that play kind of feels suffocating, and a lot of it takes place at night, which I think also is important.

[Angelina Stanford]

I mean, Harold Goddard says this is his infirmity.

[Thomas Banks]

It's a physically. It's a literally and a figuratively dark world.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Because it's a story of a man who loses his soul.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And that is an important story to tell. And I think that's what's going on.

[Thomas Banks]

Because you're sort of watching this guy very, you know, gradually on the road. Road down the precipice to hell.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly.

[Thomas Banks]

It's brilliant.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. Exactly. And so, again, that the power of that kind of artistic expression is not in our deciding. We like Macbeth and we're rooting for him. You don't have to root for anybody. You don't have to root for Malcolm or MacDuff. You just have to vicariously slide down to hell with Macbeth. That's. That's the point. Because he goes down into hell and we don't. We don't, you know, we separate from him and we're able to say, wow, you know, he. He gained the whole. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? Right. That. That's the power of that kind of story. Yeah. All right, I have just one more. One more. And this is one that has. This is a milestone that I think has been expressed on the podcast in a number of the Literary Life of Episodes. And Emily Rabel shout out to her comes to mind because she was the one of the first people as an adult student that I was sort of mentoring. And I remember her excitedly messaging me, saying, you always talk about hearing the great conversation. And I finally heard it. I heard it in the snippet of a book, and it was the most beautiful thing I ever heard. And I wept. So I'm gonna explain what I mean by that, but I think that's an. That. That. That's a huge milestone is when you hear. Hear the great conversation. So part of what modernity has done is it has approached novels, again, as self expression. And so we see novels as sort of closed universes. Right? So this novel is this person expressing themselves, and this novel is this person expressing themselves. Because of that misconception, we don't realize that that's not what's going on, that stories, that is literature actually exists in a coherent, unified world of story. As I like to say, the books all talk to each other. And so the great conversation is those books talking to each other. And again, modernity. I think we've got that all upside down. When I hear people talking about the great conversation, they talk about it as if the book is talking to me, and I'm talking back to the book. Yawn. That is. That is so not what's going on. The books are talking to each other, and we're learning to hear that conversation. Like C.S. lewis I think this is an experiment says, like, jumping into a book and arguing with it is like walking in on a conversation that has been going on for two hours and then start. And we've all known.

[Thomas Banks]

Let me tell you why your views are.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, right. And you're like, but you just walked in. You haven't heard all this other stuff. That's what happens. That's why we have to be patient. You know, we think we're supposed to jump in and start responding. Like, you don't. You haven't even heard the argument. How do you. You going to respond? You. You. There's 200 years of backstory here. You know, you need to acclimate yourself to the room before you jump in with your opinion. Which isn't to say you never jump in with your opinion, but it is to say, social media has trained us to give an opinion first and listen later, maybe if that. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

And then if ever.

[Angelina Stanford]

What we have to learn is you have to listen before you can respond.

[Thomas Banks]

Here's my take on that, Homer. All right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, here's. Here's my hot take on having not listened at all. And so that. That's a super big moment is when you can hear the thread of that conversation. And that requires patience. And you have to start reading. And then slowly you'll start to realize, wait, these two books are talking to each other and, oh, this. This third book is also talking. And all of a sudden you realize you're in this huge room. Tolkien explains it like this, that he gives this example of the Beowulf poet. The Beowulf poet has written this story in this huge room, and there's all these windows in the room. And if you look through the window, you realize there's another huge room and it's filled with windows. Right. Modernity makes us look like we've just walked into a room with no windows and it's just me and George Dorwell or it's just me and CS Lewis.

[Thomas Banks]

There's so many reflecting mirrors, mirror.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, gosh. Well said that I'm in a room with a bunch of like, am I seeing myself in here? Can I relate to these characters? Are they me? Am I them? Instead of realizing you're in a room of windows, and it just goes on and on and on and on. It. And you're being introduced into this bigger world. And so you just, you know, you kind of gotta go like Alice in Alice in Wonderland. You gotta start opening the doors and.

[Thomas Banks]

Looking at Cathedral versus Fun house, ride at the circus.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well said. Well, said. And that's a big, big moment because again, to quote Emily Ramon. And one of my favorite things that has ever been said on this podcast, she said that learn entering into this literary life had made her world, world bigger, but she could touch more of it. That's one of my favorite things that anybody's ever said on this podcast. And that's exactly what it is. Your world will get bigger and you can touch more of it. You get.

[Thomas Banks]

You might have to steal that and pretend it's mine. No, that's. This has been the episode. This episode brought to you by wise sayings of Emily.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. And this is what Lewis is getting at. Men with chess, we. You. You become fat chested, fat sold. Your. Your interior world is your big. You're bigger now. Your soul is bigger. And if you're just going in and like, do I like this character? And do I see myself and is my subjective experience a pleasurable one? You. You're. You've made the world smaller. You've made the world smaller. You've made yourself smaller. You've cut yourself off from the. From the power of art. And so understanding that books are talking to each other is really important. Like, there. One of the things I teach all the time in my classes is that when there is a literary illusion in a work, that's not random. That's not a little Easter egg. That's not like a fun little thing. It's an interpretive key. That is the author literally saying, this book connects to this other book. Look, I mentioned it, you know, so again, let's go back to Voyage of the Dawn Shredder. When an albatross shows up in there, that's a. That is newest saying. This is Coleridge's Rhyme of the Ancient Mariners, right? And if you read the rhyme of the ancient Mary, you understand that albatross is a Christ figure, right? So he's. He's. They're little breadcrumbs to lead us out of the forest that Hansel and Gretel are trapped in. You know, that, that, that's what it is. It's all very, very intentional. And yeah, that is the real power of art. You know, you end up in a bigger world. You can touch more of it. You're bigger, you're fatter, sold. You can. You can hear the great conversation. And honestly, honestly, it's. You can hear the music of the spheres and, and, you know, that's the power of art.

[Thomas Banks]

You're here. I think we should stop there. That's just like, we can't we can't improve on this.

[Angelina Stanford]

We can't improve on that. All right.

[Thomas Banks]

We should have just stopped with the Emily Rabel comment. That was. Yeah, wow. I don't tear up often, but that was. Yeah, wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, Thomas, this is. This has been so good. Thank you.

[Thomas Banks]

Always A pleasure, Ms. Stanford.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thank you for.

[Thomas Banks]

We should do this again.

[Angelina Stanford]

Suggesting. Suggesting this. You know, this episode felt a little bit like. Like in the morning when we have our coffee. You have. You have coffee, I have tea. And we just end up having all these literary conversations. Like we kind of just press record on one of our normal conversations. I kind of forgot I was podcasting a few times.

[Thomas Banks]

I've been wearing pajamas this entire time. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, this has been really good and I'm glad. So next week we're going to start a brand new series. Let the record show we can cover American authors on this podcast. Podcasts, provided they're basically British authors. So we're gonna be.

[Thomas Banks]

As long as they sound kind of European.

[Angelina Stanford]

We're gonna be starting a new series on Edith Wharton's the Age of Innocence. So come back and learn all about American literature and the Gilded Age and how American writers can write Victorian novels too. I'm really looking forward to that. So next week we're going to introduce you to the Gilded Age and Edith Wharton and how we should be thinking about these stories. And it will apply to a lot of things, things we talked about today. And we'll look at the first eight chapters, chapters one through eight. So the. The reading schedule for the Age of Innocence will be out in the usual places. The podcast, the Patreon, the website, the literary life website. So stick around to the end of this podcast. Mr. Banks will have a special poem for us. And I hope this conversation about literary milestones. I hope our admission that we have stumbled on some stones, that we have been wrong about things and that that's all part of the journey. I hope you're encouraged and yeah, I hope the hope of your. I hope you can just jump into the deep end and get. Get your soul fattened up with art. So until next time, keep crafting your literary life, because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[Thomas Banks]

On scene seeing the Elgin Marbles for the first time by John Keats My spirit is too weak. Mortality weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, and each imagined pinnacle and steep of godlike hardship tells me I must die like a sick eagle looking at the sky. Yet tis a gentle luxury to weep, that I have not the cloudy winds to keep fresh for the opening of the morning's eye. Such dim conceived glories of the brain Bring round the heart an indescribable feud. So do these wonders, a most dizzy pain that mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude wasting of old time. With a billowy mane, a sun a shadow of a magnitude.