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The Literary Life Podcast
Episode 293: The Literary Tradition
01:43:23
On today's episode of The Literary Life podcast, our hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks attempt to get us closer to an answer to the question "What is the literary tradition?" After acknowledging the difficulty of approaching this question,...
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- [00:19]
A
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 science, skill and art of reading. Well, 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 your host, Angelina Stanford, and with with me, as always, is the man who needs no introduction but insists on having one anyway, my husband, the mysterious Mr. Banks.
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B
Hello. Hello.
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A
Hello. Hello. Today we are going to have a somewhat different episode. Today we are going to attempt to. I'm not going to say answer that feels like hubris. We'll answer the question. We're going to try to come to an answer to the question that we get a lot from you guys. What is the literary tradition? You hear us talk about it all the time. You know, in our business that we own, House of Humane Letters, that we are a business dedicated to the recovering of the lost intellectual tradition, and you guys are like, what is it? Can you define it? And so that is what this episode is, our attempt to answer this question, or at least to get us oriented in how we can answer this question. How's that for a cryptic answer? Because this is an episode that I suspect will be many people's first episode. I have a feeling this is the kind of episode that will be shared and it might in fact just be somebody stumbles on us and thinks, okay, this looks like a good place to start. So why don't we start off just by introducing ourselves since you might be new to us. The Literary Life podcast is owned by the House of Humane Letters, which is a business that Mr. Banks and I own, devoted, as I said, to recovering the lost intellectual tradition. And we teach classes there in the Humane Letters. As you would expect, we also have a full language department. We also own a publishing house, Casadoris Press, where we are publishing books in an attempt to recover the lost intellectual tradition. And we have been teaching for a long time. I have a master's degree in English literature and Mr. Banks has double degrees in classics and English literature, though neither.
- [03:18]
B
Of them are masters.
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A
And don't be cute over there. You get me distracted already. Together, we have been teaching literature for 50 years. Half a century.
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B
Our teaching career is old. It probably goes out to Denny's and complains about young people with its friends.
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A
On weekends, we get the early bird special. Yeah, yeah.
- [03:38]
B
It was Fox News.
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A
From an R, from a. From a recliner. No doubt.
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B
No doubt.
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A
So that's who we are. And this podcast started way back in 2019 with a Dear friend of ours, Cindy Rollins, who has taken a sabbatical because she's off doing many, many other things, visiting grandkids and caring for her family, as well as taking care of her business, which has quite boomed over@morningtimeforms.com she's also got a podcast, which we will be referencing in this episode.
- [04:09]
B
You could have just said. You could have just said she's too successful to hang out with.
- [04:12]
A
She is. She's too big and she forgot the little people. And we're the little people. That's. You nailed it. That's exactly. That's exactly what it is.
- [04:20]
B
We're just not cool enough.
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A
So if you are new to this podcast, we are 100% member supported. We do not accept ads. And so if you are listening on YouTube and you're hearing ads, that's not from us. That's the man. The man has done that. We get zero money from that. This you can listen for free on any podcast app with. With no ads. But.
- [04:40]
B
But I have this pillow that I need to endorse because I've been sleeping really well with it recently. Oh, sorry.
- [04:48]
A
I mean, my offer is always good. If Mercedes would like to send me a car, I would happy to be the celebrity endorser. The pseudo celebrity endorser of Mercedes Benz. I'm right here. Yeah, I mean, I could just see the ad already listen to this sound system. The audio books sound amazing here, but. Okay, maybe not. They haven't called me yet. I keep trying.
- [05:09]
B
Yeah, you talk about very specific aspects of the vehicle being endorsed. It would be exactly that kind of thing. Speakers.
- [05:15]
A
The seats are comfortable. And this sound system is so good. Jane Austen has never sounded better. See? See? I'm doing my best, guys. So one of the things we do, of course the podcast is free for anyone who listens, but we like to tell you guys what's going on at the House of Humane Letters for anyone who wants to go deeper. And we have got some very exciting things happening right now. And I'll tell you about those. But again, because I suspect this will be a podcast that gets shared around. And maybe you guys are listening to it six months a year, 10 years after it broadcasts. I'll give you the general go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and see what we've got going on because we've always got year long classes, we've got webinars, we've got mini classes, all kinds of things to go deeper into the literary tradition. But if you're listening in September, we've got some awesome stuff going on right now. So Heather Goodman just finished up her really fantastic webinar on Coleridge. And Coleridge is a name you'll hear us talk about today. And Ella Hornstra, you'll. You'll hear me talk about this class as well. Ella Hornstra is. She is doing a five session mini class in September called the Grammar of the Natural World, Deciphering the Discarded Image. And it is fantastic. If you've ever wanted to know how to pre moderns view nature, how nature is a book, how you can learn to read nature and the story that it's telling you, things that we'll talk about a little bit today, that's going to be a fantastic place to go. And then of course, a webinar that I'm, I just feel like is a total coup. We've got the Dr. Michael drought. You guys have heard me rave about him in the various classes I teach. Just an absolutely fantastic medievalist and Anglo, Saxon and Norse scholar. He is joining us this month, September 17th, and going to be giving us a webinar called the Viking World Old Norse Literature Culture and Influence. And I'm very pumped about that. That's going to be amazing. Now everything we do is live or later. So if you are finding this podcast later rather than live and saying, man, I really wish I could have listened to that class, you still can. You can go to the website and pick up the previously recorded webinars and classes as well. Okay. Whew. I tried to get that out of the way as fast as possible so we can get into.
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B
That was impressive.
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A
Nitty gritty.
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B
That was impressive.
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A
As far as Cassiodorus Press, we've got some exciting news there. So Dr. Jason Baxter again, another pinch me medievalist who we get to work with, the author of the best selling book the medieval mind of C.S. lewis. We've had him on this podcast many times. He wrote a book for us called why Literature Still Matters, which is just phenomenal and continues to gain new ground and new audience and has become very popular. Well, we worked really hard behind the scenes and we launched the audiobook of that. And it's an audiobook read by the author. And if any of you guys have ever had the experience or even just listening on the podcast, and Dr. Jason Baxter, you could listen to that man read the phone book. It is fantastic. It is so awesome to hear him read this book in his own voice. He's the perfect narrator. So we're really thrilled about that. If you do not have an Audible subscription and would like to get this book, go to cassiodorespress.com because we have a special link for you. There's a link there. And if you use that link and sign up For a free 30 day trial on Audible, you will get Dr. Jason Baxter's book for free, no strings attached. And you will throw a few little shekels our way. The small guy, the little guy. The little guy who cannot get the Mercedes endorsement, who is publishing books in a very difficult climate. Yeah, we are very excited about that. So if you already have an Audible membership, use your credit and. And grab Dr. Baxter's book. One last thing. If you're a regular listener to the podcast, you probably already know this, but I'll remind you, you have another couple of weeks to get your order in for your hand Throne Literary Life podcast ceramic mug. It's absolutely gorgeous. You can go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and click on the mug banner, or you can go straight to Casiodorus press.com because we're actually selling them through there. And you can order your own mug. Okay. Phew. I like talking about literature. I don't like doing infomercials. I think I got everything out that I was supposed to get out.
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B
No, that was good. That was good. Sounded very sincere, too. It wasn't one of those, like, overly tidy home Shopping Network voices. You're good at this kind of thing, Ms. Stanford.
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A
Well, you know, I joke that people probably say she's so excited about everything she's promoting. Yeah, there's a reason for that. I only promote things I'm excited about. I mean, as the boss.
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B
And we only promote our stuff, basically.
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A
Well, I mean, I'm not gonna let you do a webinar if I don't think it's an awesome topic. I'm not gonna publish your book if I don't think it's great. So, yes, I am excited about everything I promote. I just am very selective about what I promote. You guys never hear the things I'm not excited about. All right, again, if you're new to this Podcast we like to start off each episode. This was an idea by our founder, Cindy Rollins, that we should always start off each episode sharing a quote from our commonplace books. And commonplacing is a very old tradition. Speaking of traditions in which you write down quotes of interesting things that you've read. So quotes. Mr. Banks, do you have a commonplace quote? I do.
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B
I have one from the Scottish translator, poet, lecturer and classicist J.W. mcHale. His short history of Latin literature, in which he writes. Great poets naturally draw small poets after them.
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A
Oh, that's good. Yeah, that's good. That fits very nicely into what we're going to talk about today.
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B
It does.
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A
I think my quote comes from the preface of St. Augustine's on Christian teaching, or sometimes translated on Christian Doctrine. This is a book that I'm reading with my fellows this year, and this was an incredibly influential book in the Middle Ages in terms of understanding how to read. And so you'll see why I chose it for today. It's very connected to the literary tradition. Even though the book that he's writing is really about how to read and understand the Scriptures, what he says applies to all literature. And in the preface, in his inimitable way with his stark. He's sort of. It's. It's almost like he's. He's. He's aware that Twitter exists well before it exists. He's like, I'm. I'm prepared. I've written this book and I think it's really good. And I think I've laid out the steps on how to learn how to read, but I'm already anticipating the negative reviews. And so he addresses those people directly. And what he says here has a lot to do with what we're going to talk about today. That he's pointing out that learning how to read is essentially learning how to see. So here's what he says to anybody who is confused by what he writes. To all these critics, I have a brief reply. I say to those who fail to understand what I write that it is not my fault that they do not understand. Suppose they wanted to see the new moon, or the old one, or a star that was very faint and I pointed it out with my finger, but their eyesight was too weak to see even my finger. Surely it would be wrong for them to be annoyed with me for that reason. As for those who manage to learn and assimilate these rules, but are still unable to see into the obscure passages of the divine scriptures, they should consider themselves as capable of seeing my fingers, but not the Stars to which it points. Both types of objectors should stop blaming me and pray for insight to be given them by God. Although I can move a part of my body so as to point to something, I cannot improve their eyesight to make them see even my pointing finger, let alone what I want to point out.
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B
That's really good. Samuel Johnson, in conversation with someone, had a wonderfully pithy statement that reminds me of that. He, after explaining some point three or four times over and not making any headway, he simply said to the man, sir, I have provided you with an explanation. It is beyond my powers to supply you with an understanding.
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A
Samuel Johnson's got the. He's got the snark. He's got the snark. Well, you'll see that this episode is very connected to the pod, to the podcast. Wow. You'll see that this episode is very connected to the passage I just read from Augustine. We have, as I said, gotten so many requests over the years for this. We talk about the literary tradition, we talk about reading in the tradition, we talk about writing in the tradition. And people ask us all the time, could you define it? Give me a definition. What is the literary tradition? So here's my disclaimer. That is not an easy thing to do. In fact, it might be not easy because it's impossible. The literary tradition, it's too huge. It's multifaceted. The literary tradition is like stepping into a room and you look around, you think, okay, I see it. Four walls, a roof, a floor, doorknobs. I got it. And then you open the door and realize that that door leads to a much bigger room. And you go in that room and you see a door and you open it, it leads to a bigger room, and on and on and on. Infinitely. You're in a multi roomed cathedral. When you're in the world of literary tradition. People who have taken my classes for years, they keep learning new things. They keep learning new branches on the tree of stories, to use Tolkien's metaphor. So this episode will not be your one stop shop. That's not possible. And anyone claiming such a thing would be hopelessly reductionist. And if you guys know me at all, you know I am not a reductionist. I am the person who gives the backstory to the backstory. My brain sees all the branches of the tree of stories. And so it's literally painful for me to be asked for an elevator speech. Ultimately, the literary tradition we are talking about is a way of seeing, just as Augustine points out, so what ends up happening. Is when you ask me, can you define the literary tradition? What you're asking me is define sight to someone who's blind. You can't. Now I'm reminded of a story. This really happened years and years ago. My kids were, I guess maybe my oldest was maybe 14 or 15 at the time. We were close friends with the family from church. Their kids are about the same age as mine. And they had bought a house in a neighborhood that had a lake. They were very excited about this. It was a beautiful lake. Their house was not right up on the lake. They couldn't afford that one. So they had, like, the house way, way, way back from the lake. But if you went on their back deck and you positioned your chair just so between the trees, you could see a glimpse of the lake. And it was very pretty. And she was very, very excited, my friend was, about her lakeside view. So she would sit out there with her kids and say, oh, look at that view. Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it beautiful? And her son would just be like, yeah, mom, whatever. Okay. She thought, well, I guess he's just being a sullen teenager. Years go by. One day he goes to the optometrist and discovers not only does he need glasses, he's basically blind and doesn't know it. Didn't know it. It was when he failed his driver's license test. Cause he couldn't see that. Sent to the optometrist, he did not know he couldn't see. So he gets these glasses, and he just keeps walking around saying, oh, my God. Oh, my gosh. Is this what the world looks like? I had no idea. He spent his whole life thinking everything was just fuzzy. He had no idea. And he was just, like, walking around like a magical enchantment had been released, right? He can see for the first time. So of course, he goes in the backyard, he sits on the porch, and he looks in the direction of where his mom used to always point. And he said, the lake. That's beautiful. And she says, you mean you couldn't see it all this time? He said, no. And she said, what did you think we were looking at? And he said, I thought you were looking at that fuzzy gray patch. And I didn't understand why you thought that was so cool. That is the perfect analogy for what we're talking about. That is exactly what Augustine is talking about. Some of you can see the finger that I'm pointing to, and some of you can't even see the finger. And some of you can't see what I'M pointing at. This is a matter of degrees of being able to see. Now, the good news is the blurry vision of literature, it's not a permanent state. Okay, this isn't. This isn't me saying, too bad you're blind, you know, Never going to be better. No, no. It's just like, my friend, this is. This is the starting point to learn how to get some glasses. And now you can see the world. New this podcast and the classes we teach are exercises in how to see, and our students are very much learning to see. Many of you who listen to this podcast have had the experience. You have written to me, you say, I couldn't see, and now I can see. And you're excited and you're enriched by this new site, but it's something that you experienced. It was not something that I could define for you because it's not a formula or a system. It's a way of being. But I understand the desire for a definition. I really do. So here we are. We won't be giving you a simple reductionist definition, because that would be misleading. But what we can do is have a conversation where we try to describe it. So we're going to talk about. And this is me. I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking about this, guys, because, trust me, the literary tradition is vast. It is infinite, essentially. And I kept thinking, how can I talk about this in a way that will orient you without overwhelming you? So I've come up with two fundamentals for us to talk about today, Two fundamentals of the literary tradition that I think will orient you. And as we go, I'll be recommending podcast episodes we've done that will help to flesh out each of these fundamentals. So, first, let's start off and talk about what do even we mean by that phrase, the literary tradition? Mr. Banks, you pointed out to me one time when we were talking about this, that at this point, 2025, we have been reading badly for so long that we could point to bad ways of reading that are traditions at this point.
- [20:24]
B
Oh, yes, certainly.
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A
Yeah. So while we talk about the literary tradition, it's probably more correct to say, at this point, there are literary traditions plural. And so we're going to try to differentiate between the one that we think is the real one and the bad traditions. To give you an example of what I'm talking about, almost a century ago, I mean, 100 years ago, C.S. lewis feared that reading modern novels would destroy our ability to read old books. And he complains that his students now Keep in mind this is a hundred years ago, that his students can't read. His students at Oxford in the 1930s can't read. And he makes the point of, well, that's not to be surprised, because their parents can't read either. Now, I want us to think about this because we tend to look at the bad ways of reading going on and think, this is new. This happened five years ago. This happened 10 years ago. You have to realize that CS Lewis is talking about a bad way of reading that we've been suffering with for 150 to 200 years.
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B
In one of his more famous lectures, he remarks that a lot of his students, and even he's not talking about dullards here, he's talking about the bright students, will come to his classes with this kind of veil of critical commentary and interpretation and sometimes obfuscation that exists between them and whatever play or poem it is that they're reading. And sometimes that'll prevent them from even noticing elementary things about whatever book they have under review that, you know, it's a comedy, for instance, and we should be laughing or things of that kind.
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A
Yeah. He talks about how they can. Students can come in and quote critics.
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B
But they can't more than they can go at Shakespeare or they can't engage.
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A
With the text themselves. He talks about how he keeps getting freshman papers that say something like, sophocles teaches us the tragic view of life. And he wants to pull his hair out and says, no, that's not what. That's not what's going on.
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B
Magic view of life, right?
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A
He says, no, you just have to look out the window to know life is a tragedy. That's not what Sophocles is doing. So that's the first thing. Right. We need to understand that this. These things we're struggling with right now are the fruit of seeds that were planted a couple of centuries ago. So we're going to try to unravel that for you today. But you've got to look way past 10 years ago. You got to look way past 50 years ago. In fact, one of the things I've noticed when I hear people talking about, oh, look at all these bad ways of reading, we need to recover an older, more sane way to read is that they will end up grasping onto to different literary theories from the early 20th century. And, yeah, I mean, they seem more sensible compared to some of the more radical ways of reading today. But the early 20th century is where things started to go wrong. The early 20th century is where C.S. lewis is saying, my Students can't read, and we're treating that like some kind of golden age to return to. So we need to think much longer than that. In fact, Lewis and Tolkien, both, we. We tend to think of them primarily as the authors of fiction, which is. I mean, of course they are, but that wasn't their day job. Like, that wasn't their profession. That's not what they spent their life every single day doing. What they were, were academics and scholars and literature teachers, and they spent a lot of time and energy and ink battling those new 20th century ways of reading. Lewis and Tolkien considered that the great battle of their professional lives. And Tolkien considered those guys his greatest personal enemy. And Lewis, professional, personal. Sorry, the greatest professional enemies. And Lewis.
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B
So you can imagine them hating him on a, you know, personal level as well. Tolkien, maybe. I don't think Lewis was much of a hater, but he wasn't.
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A
Although his critics hated him.
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B
That's true. That's true.
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A
So this battle that they're fighting in the 1930s at Oxford is one that they essentially lost. Thus we find ourselves in the state that we are. Thus. Thus we find ourselves with. With House of Humane saying we are trying to recover the lost intellectual tradition because it. Because they did lose it. They lost the battle. The academy did not follow the Lewis and Tolkien thread. They abandoned it and went in a very different direction. But the good news is that thread was never entirely lost. Now, my experiences in grad school in the early 90s is very interesting to me when I look back, because it seemed like that was a real turning point. You still had professors who were old. Like, all of my favorite professors were, like, about to retire. They were still very old school. They were still giving me. They were still passing down to me very deliberately, a literary tradition. In some cases, if you've taken my classes, you've seen me with my chart where I showed you this. But in some cases, the professors even trace their own lineage, like all the way back to, you know, the 1800s. Like, this is the line of tradition that we're in. They were very deliberate about it. But the new guys, they were, you know, they were radical language deconstructionists. They were, you know, Marxist feminist critics. They were. They were. They. They are deliberately abandoning the tradition. They didn't want anything to do with that. They wanted to go in these other directions. And I could see the writing on the wall. And that's why I left and did not pursue my Ph.D. like I had originally intended. And, you know, 30 years later, I'm just thrilled that, that was the decision I made because it has gotten so, so much worse. Okay, so what then is this literary tradition we're talking about? And if we were going to separate this tradition from these other bad traditions, what, what's the line? What's the thread? So we are talking about a line that runs through Aristotle's Poetics to the medieval Neoplatonists, through Edmund Spenser to Shakespeare to the Grimms, to coleridge, to George MacDonald to Charles Dickens to Charlotte Mason to the Inklings, to Northrop Fry to Flannery O' Connor to J.K. rowling to the Lit Life podcast. That's the line. And that line, when we say a writer is writing in the literary tradition, these are writers and thinkers and teachers and scholars who cling to two fundamental principles regarding literature and art. Those are the two fundamentals we're going to try to talk about today. The first should not be a revolutionary idea, but probably will be. It's the idea that literature is not a closed system. I'm just going to pause right there. I'm not going to finish the second half of that sentence. Literature is not a closed system. What does that mean? Okay, so typically when a modern person reads a literature book, it's them and this book, almost as if the book exists in a vacuum and they're not concerned with it with other books, it's just me. In this book, there is a whole lot of argument that you should not give literary background on things. It's just you in the text. I've. I've heard people say things to me like, I don't read what anybody else says about a book. It's just me and the words on the page. Right? There's schools of literary criticism which say it's just you and the words on the page. So they treat it like a closed system system. They close it off and they think that that gives the work of art more value. I hope to be able to show you that it actually gives it less value. So if literature is not a closed system, what is it? Well, it is a coherent, consistent world of literature. One that is self referential. And when we talk about the effect of literature on people, it's not one book, but it's your entrance into the entire world of literature. Literature. So here's an Arthur Fry quote for you. Literature does not relate to life or to ourselves. It relates to other literature. Now, I get that somebody who's completely new to this way of thinking is probably thinking to themselves right now. But that makes literature smaller. That makes it less important. If I can't make it about life, if I can't make it about me and my experiences, then, then what's the point? I hope when we get to point two of today's episode, you'll see that actually this makes literature, and by extension the whole cosmos not only bigger, but unified.
- [29:21]
B
To clarify a point, when he says that literature does not relate to life, does he mean like any individual, private, lived experience? He's not talking about life as in existence, obviously. I would think.
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A
Right. I think that'll become more clear when I get to the second point. He means.
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B
I was going to say we wouldn't have much to write about if that were the case.
- [29:43]
A
Well, no, he just means like you don't read literature to say, what does Homer have to say about my life? I'm not a Greek, I'm a modern New Yorker and I like to buy shoes and go to lunch with my friends. And Homer doesn't have anything to say about that. So why would we read that? Right. Or why would I read Shakespeare? He has nothing to say about our modern, modern issues.
- [30:03]
B
Yeah. So in other words, like, the value of a particular book is not founded on how well or perhaps how relevantly it might seem to speak to the particular moment in which we find ourselves.
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A
Exactly. Now that isn't to say that it doesn't have something to say about our lives and it doesn't have something to say about the universal human experience. But let me get to point two and hopefully you'll see that. So we're just going to start off saying what you see in this consistent, coherent world of literature is a vast unity. All right? So one of the ways that it works like this is through what I like to call the building blocks of stories. But this is a concept you see in Northrop Fry. This is a concept you see in Tolkien's essay on fairy stories. That is. And again, this flies in the face of a lot of what we think about art and literature. We think art is supposed to be original. That's like a, a self evident aphorism for us these days. Right? Supposed to be original. And I always like to make this joke in my, in my classes, I'll say, and clearly the quest for original art has made our, our time have the best art in the history of the world. Right. Our movies are the best right now. Our music and all the kids start laughing because it's so obviously not right. The Hollywood is falling apart in its inability to tell a coherent story at the moment. And that is directly Related not to a bunch of progressive politics, but because they don't understand how art works. They have actually cut the tree of story off at the roots, and then they're shocked that the tree is dying. So what are the roots then? If it's not original, what is it? Well, Tolkien gives this example. Stories work as art. Aristotle tells us that in Poetics, and like any art, it's going to have a set of fundamentals. So, for example, in music, you have the musical notes, right? Every musician has the same musical notes. Notes. Every piece of music from Mozart to Motown is made with the same notes. So it's not original. No one's making up new notes. But through human creativity and human innovation, you can arrange those notes in an infinite way, right? In an infinite number of ways, and you can create all the entire musical, you know, landscape. Same thing with art, with visual arts. You have primary colors, right? No one's making up original primary colors. I. You know, I made up Zurlon. Look at my. Look at this gorgeous color Zurlon. No, now you can take primary colors that already exist and make new shades, right? And that's. Now we're back to the innovation and the creativity. But you all have your basic notes, your basic primary colors. Literature works the same way. Now, Aristotle points out, C.S. lewis echoes it, and Arthur Fry echoes it, that it can be confusion, because literature is an art of the written word. And so it's easy to confuse it with other things of the written word, like history books or philosophy or sermons or works of theology, but they're not. Literature is an art, and it has much more in common with music and painting and dance than it does with philosophy. This is. This is a huge difference in these new ways of reading that treat literature basically as philosophical containers. You know, so literature also has its musical notes, and those musical notes are the building blocks of stories. And that's Bible stories, myths, fairy tales, fables, legends, nursery rhymes, folk songs, poetry, Right? All of those things. Nature. George McDonald would also say nature. All of those things give us the basic musical notes that all these authors are rearranging in ever new ways to create new stories. And it doesn't make them less valuable any more than it makes it less valuable when you hear your favorite song and you're like, a C note again. Yawn. Like, no, of course. Of course not. You need the C note. So, yeah. So literature scale.
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B
Really?
- [34:11]
A
Yeah. Again, another octave. Yawn. I really wish somebody would just ditch chords all together, that we could be liberated. But that's how moderns think we Think originality liberates us when really what has happened in our quest of originality means we don't read the building blocks anymore. It's like trying to write music with no musical notes. Okay? That's. That's essentially what we have. People have tried and they have. And Correct. And they have failed. But this is what's happened. And now. And the tree didn't die overnight, right? So we. We cut ourselves off from the roots. We cut ourselves off from those building blocks of stories a long time ago. And the tree limped along. Now it's pretty much withered. There's barely any green left.
- [34:53]
B
I. I think, yeah, it's hard. Yeah. Like you say, it's very hard to pinpoint a date. But something I do notice in the history of. In literary interpretation, criticism, different artistic movements. Almost always before about 1900, when there's a new movement, you know, a new school of critics, a new fashion and literary or other artistic taste, the people will say that we're returning to nature. Whether they're romantics, whether the neoclassical, whether, you know, they're Renaissance humanists. We're returning to nature. And usually it's. We're returning to some part of nature that might have been overlooked before. But, you know, but.
- [35:39]
A
But everyone.
- [35:39]
B
Everyone is claiming. Everyone is claiming, however, that we are returning to a greater sense of breadth and balance founded upon principles which can somehow be located in nature outside of us. But by the time you get to about 1900 and you start seeing, I don't know, say, and again, 1900s, a long time ago. But things like Rites of Spring and music and. Who is the. Who is the urinal sculpture? Duchamp?
- [36:16]
A
Oh, I don't know.
- [36:17]
B
I think it was Maurice Duchamp. It's called Fountain. That's the name of the sculpture, but it was a urinal. Sorry, that's a gross example. But, you know, Picasso and Cubism and, you know, some of the more, I guess, fragmentary types of poetry, experimental novels. And that's not to say that all of those things are bad. I mean, I enjoy some Stravinsky, I enjoy some TS Eliot, I can enjoy some James Joyce, and I take my hat off to those things. But at the same time, though, I don't think you can say that stream of consciousness narration in the novel is really something founded in nature. And atonal music, I don't see how you can say that atonal music is as natural a form of composition as had prevailed before. So I think that's kind of a key moment there.
- [37:05]
A
Yeah, this is outside the bounds of this particular episode. But I will throw this out there. You cannot overestimate the role that World War I plays in this.
- [37:16]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [37:19]
A
In terms of thinking that it's a virtue to cut yourself off from the past, because the past is what led us to this mess. And so we need to break free of it. That's just an aside. That's bonus content. Okay. So when you understand that works of literature are built on other works of literature and connect to other literature, and the way that you know what literature means is by seeing those connections, it changes the way you read. For example, literature is self referential. So when you see an illusion, a direct reference, an indirect reference, an echo, a resonance of a different literary work in the. The one you're reading, you stop and you realize this is intentional, this is not random. And it's not only is an interpretive framework that the author is, Is providing for you. Like, you know, when we did Mansfield park and we showed that Cinderella, the. The echo of Cinderella runs through the whole thing in Mansfield park, it's not just like she's like, oh, cool, here's a little. Here's a little Cinderella frosted rose on the top of my cake. No, Cinderella was the framework. Was the framework for the whole thing. She's giving you an interpretive clue. But the second thing it does is that before the modern age, those resonances had with them a web of associated meanings in the minds of the original audience. So when they're reading. I'm not. Okay, how do I say this without spoiling some stuff I'm going to say later in the episode, when they're reading Mansfield park and they see the echo of Cinderella, they understand a whole web of associated meanings because they know what Cinderella means in a way that we no longer do. So there's that, there's that resonance there. And I have heard modern people talk about books and when they get to illusions, they don't know what to do with them. And so they'll say things like, oh, that's kind of neat. Look, it's just. It's a nod to someone or, or it's a neat little Easter egg. And. But they don't stop and say, how is the author using this? How is this an interpretive?
- [39:24]
B
Harold Loom would say it. Because they mean to both reinterpret and destroy their predecessors.
- [39:29]
A
Exactly, exactly.
- [39:30]
B
Because we all obviously want to destroy the people who inspire us the most.
- [39:34]
A
Right. That was Harold Bloom's crazy idea that books refer to other books. Yeah. So that they could debunk them. Because the last thing you want to do is be beholden to your father. You need to break free. You see, that's exactly what we're talking about. Is that bad literary tradition, weird combination.
- [39:48]
B
Of Prometheus and Freud.
- [39:50]
A
And honestly, you bring up Harold Bloom, but. But Harold Bloom is a great example because he was C.S. lewis's student and he deliberately rejected the tradition Lewis was teaching him and went a different way.
- [40:01]
B
Yeah. Wasn't he Northrop Fry's. Was he student or colleague or something like that? He had some connection with Fry.
- [40:06]
A
He was a great. He may have been a. I don't think he was a student. He was an admirer of Fry and had initially written some very, very good reviews of Fry's work, like Anatomy of Criticism, and said how brilliant it was. And I know this story because Harold Bloom wrote it himself that he said, I used to love Fry and I used to have such a high view of him. But then I sent him a manuscript copy of the book I wrote, which is the one you were just describing, the one about killing your fathers. He sent it to his teacher, and Northrop Fry wasn't impressed with it. At which point Harold Bloom decided, well, I used to think Northrop Fry had a clue, but now I think he's an idiot.
- [40:41]
B
Well, that's like. Yeah, my father and I got along really well until I wrote a novel about parricide. And for some reason, he didn't find it very inspiring.
- [40:52]
A
Well, it wasn't just that. I mean, Fry thought it was wrong.
- [40:55]
B
Here's something that I. You can help me, I think, probably tease this thought out. I think you can talk, speak intelligently and coherently of a tradition existing even when all the constituent elements within it, all the books and authors within it, don't have necessarily any conscious connection or even knowledge of each other. Here's an example. The tradition of heroic poetry, epic saga, things like that includes Homer. It includes Beowulf, the Beowulf poet, though, even though he's writing within a tradition of which Homer is also a part and kind of the first example of. Certainly the Beowulf poet never read Homer. I mean, you just wouldn't have any. You know, no one in Western Europe was reading Homer in, you know, 700 A.D. or whenever. So to talk of a literary tradition, we don't have to establish that all the members within it necessarily had any conscious influence or were influenced by each other directly.
- [42:00]
A
Absolutely. No, That's a great point. I'm glad you bring that up. So modern scholars will get very obsessed about something like that. So let's say I'm reading Beowulf and I. I pick up a resonance of Homer. They would come back and say, there is no evidence this Beowulf poet ever read Homer. Okay, well, I'd be like, well, that's adorable, since we don't know who he is. But okay. But okay, let's say I grant that that misses the point of how literature works. Literature does not work, as you say, where I went and read this book, and now I'm copying this book in my writing. Tolkien explains it this way. That story is a giant cauldron, and all of the stories of the world keeps going into the cauldron and making the soup of stories. It's having this amazing stock, and every writer that writes something is dipping from the stock. And so even if you can't taste the stock and be like, do I taste carrot? Is that a carrot? You're still getting. You're getting the benefit of the. The carrot in the stock. Right. I feel like my food metaphor is breaking down here.
- [42:58]
B
No, that was a good one. That was a good one.
- [42:59]
A
Yeah. So. So, yeah, so. So Tolkien addresses that in On Fairy Stories. It does. It doesn't have anything to do with. With tracing a line between this book and that book. And I can prove that. You know, here's the library card where he checked it out in 1942. It doesn't. It doesn't work like that. These resonances and echoes, you can pick it up by reading other books that have the echo. You know, you can get it 14th hand Tolkien calls it the Great Chain of Literature. Right. So, no, that's a good point. It doesn't have to be intentional. It's just. It's. It's in the air. It's in this. In the stock. So when you understand that all of the books are echoing each other, all of them have this resonance that goes through. They're all alluding to each other intentionally, indirectly, even sometimes accidentally. And that's fine. I'll give you an example. There's a part of the hobbit which is 100% lifted from Beowulf. And someone asked Tolkien, because Tolkien was the world's foremost scholar of Beowulf, they're like, well, you obviously, you know, put that Beowulf part in the Hobbit. And he said, oh, actually, I didn't. And then he said, but now that you pointed out, yeah, there it is. And he said, I didn't know that I did it. It wasn't even Conscious of me. And then he said, I think what I did when I wrote that scene is exactly the same thing that the Beowulf poet did when he wrote Beowulf. I just have lived and breathed and devoured all of these stories. They're in me. And so they just came out. You know, they were part of my soup of stories. And it just came out. So. So that's a great point. It's not this very deliberate one to one thing. And this is why I know that everybody loves to find a quote from an author who, you know, who's like, oh, symbols. I didn't put any symbols in there. And they're like, see, there's no symbols. The authors are literally the worst people to ask about that because the author has received the muse. The muse of interpretation is entirely different of the muse of creation.
- [44:54]
B
And yet, like. And I mean, you know, give the psychologist their due. I mean, our subconscious and the things that gather in it are, you know, unbeknownst even to us so much of the time. And that includes, you know, literary influences. And here's an example, I guess maybe this would complement the one that you just brought up. Tolkien in. Not Tolkien, Tennyson. Alfred Lord Tennyson in his In Memoriam, his great elegy to his deceased friend Arthur Hallam. There's a passage where. Famous passage where he talks about. He writes of how we make ladders of our vices and ascend on, you know, stages of our dead selves to higher things. That's a bad hash of what he actually writes. But anyway, someone asked him, a friend asked him where he took that image, and he says, oh, from Goethe. And that was probably true there. You know, he had read Goethe like every Englishman of his generation, every well educated man. Goethe, however, took it from St. Augustine. So sometimes the genesis of a particular image might go back even farther than we had understood ourselves.
- [46:02]
A
And Augustine might have gotten it from.
- [46:03]
B
Plato or something like that. Yeah.
- [46:05]
A
So that's how you can say.
- [46:06]
B
And you can chase down lots of people.
- [46:08]
A
There's that echo of Plato in Tennyson. And then somebody else say, tennyson never read Plato. Well, he doesn't have to, because Plato's in the water now and he drank the water, and there it is, there it is, there it is. So this is what it means when you hear us say that the books are talking to each other. Right? There's that echo, there's that resonance.
- [46:26]
B
It's kind of like, I don't know, signaling by means of beacons, you know, where you light a beacon, and then 100 miles away, sees it on a mountaintop and lights another. And, you know, then the next one in this series, like the first beacon, certainly can't see the last. But, yeah, there is a kind of a passing on of a signal over long distance.
- [46:45]
A
Exactly.
- [46:46]
B
With great intervals of darkness in between.
- [46:48]
A
And so that's how it builds up this coherent world of this universe of literature. And it's when we enter the whole world that we're transformed by literature. It's not. People make this mistake all the time. It's not this one to one, I read this book, and now, you know, I've been made good or I've read this book and I've been made bad. It's a whole world. It's the world. You know, Fry talks about how when you read one book, it's every other book shining through that book. Like, that's. That's how you pick up that resonance, and it's how you make meaning. Okay, so we're in this time period that's just a complete crisis of how to make meaning. Is there meaning? We don't know how to make meaning. This is how you make the meaning by picking up the resonances. This is how you know what the symbols mean. This is how you know what anything means. And because we've lost that, that's why we have ended up in the world of absolute insane readings of literature, right? Because we don't hear the resonance. We don't even know that we're supposed to be looking for it. We're deaf. We're dumb and deaf as well as blind. And. And then. So. So then we come up with all these crazy, wonky interpretations because we don't get all the things that are being. Being referenced. It's kind of like, on a real small level, if you have an inside family joke and all you have to say is, you know, red shoe. And the whole family starts laughing because they know the whole story of the red shoe. But then you say red shoe in front of somebody who's not in your family. And they're like, that family has the weirdest sense of humor. That's just weird. They have some kind of obsession with red shoe. Maybe when they were a kid, they got beat with a red shoe, right? They go off and running because they don't know. They don't know the inside joke.
- [48:25]
B
I think that's absolutely true. And I think you can listen to. I think anyone who's, like, ever had the pleasure of having a sibling fairly close in age to them will know that, like, you have your own private language. And if anyone overhears a conversation between just the two of you, it sounds like you're speaking, I don't know, Chinese or something like that.
- [48:44]
A
Yep. That game Taboo, you'd be in the teams and you have a little card and you have to get your partner to guess. Okay, so my sister and I had such a shared private language of built up associations that we would just, we would get insanely high scores in record time and nobody would play with us. They accused us of cheating. They accused us of memorizing the answers. They're like, there's no way. You said Sunday. And your sister yelled lasagna. I was like, if you grew up with us, you would know that we always had a lasagna on Sunday. And it totally makes sense, right? But yes, brilliant. We had all of those built up associations.
- [49:19]
B
By the way, I think that Taboo. I don't believe in conspiracy theories, but I think that game was just invented to make men feel stupid, because women are much better at Taboo than men are. I've played Taboo, and it's always like, if there's two women on a team together, I think they have an advantage in Taboo.
- [49:36]
A
So should I say this on the air that you don't know? We've been married all these years and you don't know. I still have that Taboo game. It's in the closet.
- [49:44]
B
So we have to get some friends over and get your sister over maybe sometime.
- [49:48]
A
Oh, you don't want to be my partner?
- [49:49]
B
Okay, well, I mean, I worry that I'd hold you back, Ms. Stanford, and then that would be the end of our marriage. I would be found, you know, dead, you know, in my bedroom the next morning.
- [49:59]
A
Cause of death of this marriage.
- [50:01]
B
Taboo disgraced his wife in a public performance of Taboo.
- [50:05]
A
I can already hear the Patreon saying, we want, we want a Patreon event of you guys playing Taboo. Okay, so the next thing we're going to add to this idea that we have this coherent, universal world of literature. It has a resonance of meaning that goes across all the stories, and it doesn't even have to be intentional. The next thing we're going to add to that is it is universal. It is not limited to the west or to English literature. It is completely universal. China, Persia, Africa, South America. It's all there. It's all the ripple is going through. And when you start to study this stuff deeply, you'll. You'll see it. You'll see it for yourself. And it'll blow your mind. You'll say how, how is it here? Well we're going to get to that. We're going to get to that. But it's basically, it's here because in the pre modern world every pre modern man had the same way of seeing reality and so they shared this.
- [51:04]
B
But in some respects anyway. And again like you have to allow for different religious cultures and past differences as well.
- [51:12]
A
That's not to say they're all exactly the same, but you do still find the same universal resonance. Well, sure.
- [51:17]
B
And like again, example, and I wish I can think of the name of it, but there's a medieval Persian romance which is the story of a warrior who is sent to retrieve a bride who is the fiance of his king. And of course, you know, he goes, he seeks out this woman, this princess, travels back with her to present her to the king who is to be her husband and they fall in love. Along the way they have this star crossed passion. Of course it ends in disaster. So it's the Tristan and Isolde story, but it's in medieval Persia. And like how there's like, it's uncanny the resemblance.
- [51:58]
A
Exactly.
- [51:58]
B
And I don't know if anyone has established how these stories cross pollinated or whatever you want to call it, but they seem to have done. And like sometimes a story type will show up in a really mysterious place.
- [52:11]
A
The same thing happens in the study of fairy tales. No one scholar can figure out why they, why is there Cinderella have that.
- [52:17]
B
Classification system for this is story type B6.
- [52:20]
A
Yeah. And it's literally everywhere. It's everywhere.
- [52:24]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [52:26]
A
So we have a couple of students of ours, some, some HHL graduates who are off, you know, pursuing their degrees and they've been studying comparative literature. And so just like hearing the work they're doing is so amazing and energizing. They are seeing they're studying the Persian tradition, they're studying the Chinese tradition and like the stuff they're saying is just, it's just blowing my mind. And that's not to say there aren't some differences, but I would say that the similarities and the echoes are much stronger than you would think. There they are there. And that is because all literature is a variation of the one story, the monomyth. Right. So there. And again this is a reductionist version. That's not to say all stories are the same story. All stories are variations of the same story. And when you, when you really get into this, when you get into the podcast, when you take the classes, you will see there's an infinite number of variations. But when you're good at identifying the parts, you realize, oh, wait, this is also. This is the same story like you said, you know, you're seeing the Isolde a story again and again. And so to understand how all literature is, is an artist doing his variation of the one story. It means we have to have another moment where we say, wait, this thing I thought about art is not true. So not only in the modern world do we think that all literature has to be. Art has to be original. We also think, I mean, this is again an aphorism, right? Artist, self expression. You hear this all the time. Artists. I just like expressing myself. Okay, guys, hold on to your hats. Art is not self expression. It has never been self expression. It's not a philosophic treatise, it's not a sermon, and it's not self expression. Now, yes, having said that, I can already hear you, but I went to Barnes and Noble and everything on the shelf is just a bunch of self expression. Correct? Correct. That does describe much if not all of the fiction on the bookstore shelves right now. But just because it's a work of fiction doesn't mean it's a work of literature. And just because it's printed and then book and it's on the shelves of Barnes and Noble doesn't make it art. Right? Those books, yes, we live in the age of message fiction 100 we do. But those books are not in the literary tradition, nor are they literature. They will not stand the test of time. They are a momentary fad. That is not what we're talking about. All right, moving on. Let's see. We did okay, whatever the time. Moving on to fundamental principle number two. The literary tradition we're talking about upholds the tradition of the imagination. All right, buckle up. If you thought the first one was like, wait, what? Art's not original. Art's not expression. You're probably saying, what are you talking about? Oppose the tradition of the imagination There. Every school of literature talks about the imagination. Not so fast. We as moderns don't even know what the imagination is anymore. We think. Well, I read a book and I thought about what it would be like to be a pioneer like the people in the book. Or what it would be like to be a Roman soldier. Or maybe I read a book and I thought about what it would be like to be like the family across town. We think, that's the imagination. Coleridge says, no, no, that's not the imagination. That's fancy. Okay, to close your eyes and I say, Dog. And you picture a dog. Coleridge says, that's the fancy, that's not the imagination.
- [56:11]
B
And he doesn't say that in a demeaning sense exactly, does he?
- [56:14]
A
No. The fancy has its role. It has its role.
- [56:18]
B
It gets a bad name, though.
- [56:19]
A
Well, it gets a bad name, but it has actually an important role. But it's a subset of the imagination. Again, what I, what I hope to show is we have limited and reduced what the imagination does. We think the imagination allows us to read a book and imagine what, you know, I can. I can close my eyes and I could think, what if I was milking a cow in Minnesota in 1842. Right. Or what if, you know, what if I was? Whatever. And then we say, using your imagination that way, it creates empathy. I just want to, like, stab my eyes out when I hear people talking like that. I mean, talk about reductionists. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. It's like standing in the middle of a rainforest and being, you know, finding a plastic rock and getting excited about it. So that's not what imagining is. That's a subset of the imagination. The imagination is much greater than that. Okay, so here's our, here's our definition of the imagination from Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And again, go listen to Heather's webinar on Coleridge is money well spent. She did a fantastic job breaking this stuff down. The imagination is a meaning making faculty. Okay? So the imagination is the thing God gave us to help us make meaning, and it makes meaning via symbols. This is what we mean when we say we're talking about a way of seeing. The imagination is what gives us eyes to see the symbols and to make the meaning out of that. Okay. And it's very interesting that Coleridge makes the point, this is echoed by Tolkien and Lewis makes the point that that kind of thing, when you read. When you make meaning, when you read that, that is happening in the imagination, not in the reason.
- [58:10]
B
Does Coleridge say meaning making or meaning apprehending?
- [58:14]
A
Well, I think I got meaning making from Lewis's quote about reason perceives truth, but the imagination perceives meaning.
- [58:22]
B
Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's not a challenge in any case.
- [58:24]
A
Well, meaning, okay, Making me have to go through too many subsets here. Again, I'm just trying to hit the. Like your life difficult. You are. It is meaning apprehending if you are the reader. It's meaning making if you're the art first.
- [58:38]
B
All right, so, yes, proceed.
- [58:40]
A
Okay, so that is happening in the imagination, not in the reason. Okay. Now deep breath, here we go. Let me try to explain what I'm talking about. So let's go back to St. Augustine. So St. Augustine says when St. Paul talks about the letter kills, but the spirit quickens. He said, here's what he means when you read. There's that surface layer, the letter of the sentence, and underneath that letter is the spirit of the meaning. And he gives a bunch of examples. So let's take something like the passage in the Bible where Moses is taking the Egyptians out of Egypt. I'm sorry, the Israelites out of Egypt. Okay? The letter of that passage is there is really a place on the map called Egypt. There's this really guy named Moses, there's really this guy named Pharaoh. And the Israelites are a real nation of people and they were really enslaved and they really went across the desert and they really crossed the Red Sea. That's the letter. And Augustine says, if that's all you're reading, that's the reading that kills. In fact, to the medievals, that was illiteracy. Okay? To read the letter means you're not reading at all. Now fast forward to now. We think that's what it means to read. To read the letter. To read the literal sense. That's reading, right? Nope, that's illiteracy.
- [60:18]
B
I think it's worth mentioning that the, whatever you want to call the historical grammatical mode of, or prioritizing the historical grammatical mode of reading Scripture is fairly new. Not that, you know, in the literal sense was something that St. Jerome or St. Augustine or someone like that was unaware of. Obviously they were aware of it. But the idea that that particular sense of scripture was more important than the others, or that the others were really just kind of, of trivial importance, that would have been a very strange notion.
- [60:53]
A
Well, like I said, it would have been considered illiterate. So somebody who says the full meaning of that passage in the Bible is Moses took the Israelites somewhere. The medievals would say, well, you don't even know how to read if you think that's the full meaning. Now hang on before you get excited, let me finish my full thought. So if that's reading the letter, what does it mean then to read through the letter? Augustine would say, you read through the letter, through the surface to the spiritual meaning underneath. And the spiritual meaning is the symbolic meaning. Hang on, I already hear your objections. Let me fully finish because you're going to see this is more sophisticated than you might think. So you read through the letter, through the surface of that story of Moses and what's the spiritual meaning. Well, actually, Christ himself in the New Testament tells us what the spiritual symbolic meaning is. He says, the Moses story, that's me. I'm Moses, and you're the Israelites and I took you out of the land of Egypt, right? Well, no, I've never been to Egypt, so I know he did not deliver me from the land of Egypt, but he means symbolically, spiritually. I have been enslaved in the land of Egypt by my own sinful heart, and he's delivered me from that, and he is taking us all into the promised land. So that's the spiritual meaning. Now, the first thing that moderns do will misunderstand Augustine and think that he's saying letter versus spirit. Letter bad, spirit good. That is not what he's saying. That's what moderns do. Moderns say letter versus spirit, letter good, spirit bad. Augustine is not saying the opposite of that. I am not saying the opposite of that. In fact, Augustine says, you cannot disregard the letter. You can't disregard the literal meaning because it is through that letter that you know what the symbols are. They work together. It is both. It's not either or.
- [62:40]
B
It's almost like the act of reading is kind of like reading a compass. And, you know, the letter might be the one particular point on the compass that you need to orient yourself.
- [62:53]
A
Yes.
- [62:54]
B
But it's not the whole of the device itself.
- [62:56]
A
Right, Right. If you think the point of the compass is to point north and you just stand there going north is out there somewhere, then you don't know what a compass is. You're supposed to now take the steps and follow it. So that's a. That's a great example. Example. So it is both. And so for Augustine and for the medievals, and this is a tradition that continues to this day through Lewis, through Tolkien, through us, through that line we traced. You look at the letter, the letter is real, but you see through it to the spiritual significance underneath. And that's the real spiritual significance. Right. Christ himself tells you the real spiritual significance of Jonah in the belly of the fish is that it points to Christ. The spiritual significance of Moses and the Israelites is that it points to Christ. Right. Again, that's not to disregard the literal story. It's not. Okay. But it's to say that if all you do is be like, there's a lot of weird old stories about dead dudes. And I don't. But what is that about then? You know, as St. Paul says, that's the letter that kills, but it's the spirit. It's the symbolic spirit of the meaning. That's what brings us to life. And so a whole way of not just reading but seeing pops up. And I'll give some examples of this in just a bit. But I just want to point out that with this letter and spirit thing that we're talking about, and as Mr. Banks rightly pointed out, modernity separates those two things and sides with the letter. Okay, so.
- [64:23]
B
Or it dissolves the letter itself. Well, I think it gets tired of playing with it.
- [64:27]
A
Well, okay, stealing my next point, but correct. That's ultimately what happens. You divorce the letter in the spirit and then you can't even read the letter anymore. That's 100 true. So all the bad ways of reading out there, all of them, okay, your Marxist reading, your feminist readings, your race concerns, your psychological readings, all of those bad ways of reading, even, yes, I'm going to say it. Even the so called Christian ways of reading that I say are bad ways of reading and are out of the literary tradition, all of those are stuck on the letter. All of those are stuck on the surface. They don't even think to look. They don't believe that there is anything under the letter. The letter for them is the whole thing. And again, as Augustine points out, as everyone in the Middle Ages believed, as everyone before World War II one believed, that's not reading, that's being illiterate. If all you can do is read the literate, that's illiterate. So if you want to know why we can't read anymore, this is why. This is why we're illiterate. It so all of the kind of ideological readings, they're all surface level, even Christian readings that want to talk about virtue. You want to know why they drive me so crazy? Because they're surface level. They are stuck on the letter. I once read a book that, that was trying to show the gospel in Lord of the Rings. Now let me just tell you, if you don't see the gospel in the Lord of the Rings like Augustine says, you need to just pray to God to help you see, because it's right there, right? The defeat of evil, the death of death is right there. You got to Christ figure, you got death and resurrection, like it's all over. It's on every page, right? And this book, this book's idea of finding the gospel in Lord of the Rings was, I kid you not, Sam and Frodo are friends. They have a really good friendship. And friendship is biblical. The disciples were friends, I guess, not Judas. But you see, okay, that's surface level. That's surface level you're missing. You're literally missing the forest for the trees. You're, you're stuck looking at that surface and you cannot see through it to the real meaning underneath. Breathe. Now, the other thing that's happening is that these surface level readings are also primarily engaging the reason that is the rational mind and not the imagination. Right. You're not engaging the imagination to say Frodo and Sam are friends. That's the rational mind. And especially if you follow it up in your class and you say things like, what do you guys think about friendship? And then they talk about what they think about friendship, that's all happening in the rational mind. You have bypassed the imagination altogether.
- [66:53]
B
Do you think that readings like that, whether, whether we're talking about, you know, Christian of one kind or another readings or whatever, they tend to engage the moral sense and treat every other faculty, imaginative or whatever as really just kind of ancillary to that. I mean, you said they engage the reason, but I'm thinking they mainly engage them our, you know, moral conscience and try to engage.
- [67:23]
A
They do try to engage the moral conscious, but I think that they do it primarily through the reason. And that's why you see that seminar table where we're going to talk about the virtue of freedom.
- [67:31]
B
Oh, sure.
- [67:31]
A
And we're going to discuss.
- [67:34]
B
Becomes mainly an analytical exercise.
- [67:36]
A
Exactly. And guys, if you've heard us say this once, you've heard us say it a thousand times, no one becomes virtuous through analysis and through discussing virtue. You know, you know how the disciples just sat around talking about virtue all the time?
- [67:47]
B
They carried a round table with them for just that purpose. Always on the fishing boats on the Sea of Galilee.
- [67:53]
A
The Last Supper was around a harkness table. You didn't know that? Okay, so here's another place I want you to make sure that you avoid that modern false dichotomy. So remember, it's not letter versus spirit. Neither is it reason versus the imagination. Okay? You will hear people say, like for example, Coleridge. Coleridge is so misunderstood. So misunderstood. Coleridge is arguing for the imagination rather than the reason as the meaning apprehending faculty, as you so correctly corrected me. And people. You will hear people all the time say, well, Coleridge was against reason and was for irrationality. You'll hear that all the time. No, he was not. No, I am not. I am not irrational. I scored a perfect score in logic on the gre. And yes, I will keep saying that till the day I die. On the graduate exam, I scored a perfect score in logic. I am logical. I'm the most logical person you will ever meet. Okay, I'm one of these weird, autistic, logical people, right? My brother, who has the same brain I do as a PhD in math. Okay? Like, we. We like the logic. We're not talking about irrationality, we're not talking about illogic. When we're talking about the imagination versus the reason. We're talking about the imagination is supra rational. That is, it is above the rational mind. It's not below it. It's not the opposite of it, it's above it. So through the rational mind, via the imagination, you can see above. You can see to the divine. That's what we're getting at here. Now, if you have been listening to if you're totally new, well, I don't know what you're thinking right now, but if you've been listening to the podcast, you're probably thinking, okay, this articulates what I've seen you do for years in the books, right? Teaching you how to see underneath the surface, teaching you how to see the. The divine underneath the spiritual symbolic meaning. But I want to point out, because we've given a lot of examples that are fantasy. Well, not all of them. We gave Jane Austen as an example. It's not just in fantasy books. I think a lot of people are kind of open to the idea that fantasy works on a symbolic level, but it's not just fantasy. It also works in realistic stories too. Okay, if you take my early modern lit class, I will show you how to read through the surface of Pride and Prejudice. And there's not much that's going to be more realistic than that, Right? It's in all the books. You just have to learn how to see it. And like I said, most ways of reading are not even trying. Well, they don't believe there's anything under the surface, so they think the surface is all there is. Basically, when it comes to ways of reading, it's like the scene in this silver chair when the green lady is there with Puddleglum and Jill and Eustace, and they say, we want to get out of here. We want to go to the Overworld. And she's like, what Overworld? There's nothing up there. There's just here. There's just here right now where you see. And Puddle Glum says, no, there's a world up there, and there's a sun that's shining, and I want to go get to that sun. And she's like, like, son, what's the sun? And he said, well, he looks around, he's like, it's like that lamp right there. You see that lamp? It's like that, only it's really big. And she's like, oh, that's adorable. You see a lamp and so you imagine there's a sun somewhere. That was Leah C.S. lewis totally intentionally throwing snark at bad ways of reading. Because of course in the book, you know, she's lying. There is a world beyond what they can see. There is a sun. And it's not that we invented the sun in our make believe because we saw a lamp, it's that we have lamps because we see the sun. And the lamp is a small version of that.
- [71:37]
B
A contemporary of Lewis, have you ever heard of the Belgian literary theorist Paul de Man?
- [71:43]
A
That name rings a bell.
- [71:44]
B
Yeah, one of the, one of the fathers, along with Derrida, of deconstructionism. And he said fundamental to his approach to, well, unraveling texts, really almost literally unraveling them, was a desire to expose how more traditional minded literary interpreters had attempted to discover meaning in poetry, in plays, in romances, because they couldn't bear the idea of the nothingness that is at the bottom of all of it. And he was sort of forcing us to look at the nothing that was his, actually. And it's okay. And again, I don't want to go all ad hominem here, but I'm going to anyway. It was later discovered after just after his death that during the war years in Belgium, he had written anti Semitic journalism for one of the occupation papers under the Nazis in Belgium. So there you go, there you go.
- [72:49]
A
Actually, most of the guys behind these really, really destructive ways of reading usually.
- [72:53]
B
Have like some really creepy story like that.
- [72:55]
A
And we don't need to get into that. His kids might be. We don't.
- [72:57]
B
This is not the Michel Foucault.
- [72:59]
A
Yeah, I was going to say stay away from the French deconstruction, but you're right, this is exactly what happens. Right? So they, they do not believe in the overland, they do not believe there is a sun. They do not believe there is anything. But the surface level of everything, the book, the natural world, reality, everything just exists on the surface for them. And so inevitably they have to make meaning somehow. And so they come up with crazy things. Like literature is just works, it's just power. It's just constructs of power. It's authors trying to have power over us or, you know, or we can see certain ideologies or certain political thoughts or certain economic thoughts, you know, on and on and on as ad nauseam. Right? But they're all making the same kind of mistake. Another realistic story that we did on the podcast, and I. And I will recommend this to you to. To listen to after this, if you really want to know. Like, what is she talking about? The series we did on Much Ado About Nothing. That's a realistic story. There's nothing fantastical about it. And yet, if you have eyes to see, there is. There is the whole transcendent reality of the cosmos under the surface of that play. So what happens? Okay, and this is why I get frustrated. And I know sometimes it seems to you guys, like, why does she make such a big deal about. About this? Why is she mad about, you know, school X's, you know, critical school X's bad way of reading, like, who cares? Or I hear this. Well, can't. Can't that be a valid way, too? Aren't these all valid? There's only one valid thing about does the Overworld exist or not? The answer is yes or no. It's not like, look at the green lady. Like, doesn't she have a place to pretend reality is not reality? No. Right? There's truth and there's. And there's lies. But here's why I get so mad. All of those other ways of reading that are stuck on the surface stand in the way of you being able to apprehend the meaning. They're cutting you off from the meaning. They are blocking it. Now, in the Much Ado About Nothing series, I gave this example, and I'm going to give it again. Literature is a window, and it is not a window into your neighbor's backyard so you can see what it's like to, you know, milk a cow in Minnesota. It is a window into the divine. It is an icon. This is the iconographic view of literature. And that means Tolkien does a good job of explaining this, that you don't look at literature. You look through literature. Literature is a prism, right? And the divine light, capital L, is shining through that prism. And it's, of course, refracted light and a million different, different directions. That's all the variations we were talking about, but they're all giving you that reflected light. And so you learn to look through it to see the light itself. And this is just like the Lewis essay that says, you don't look at the beam, you look along the beam, right? This is. This is Augustine saying, don't look at my finger look at what my finger is pointing at. And so if literature is this window into the divine, what we try to do on this podcast is to get you to look through the window. And every bad way of reading is making you look at fingerprints on the windows or look at that fixture, the, the latch on the window. I wonder if it was a fair trade latch. I wonder if we had, you know, a good, a good power dynamic when that was made or why was it window painted this color? Would you paint it that color? I wonder what other kind of colors people would paint it. And the whole time I'm screaming, look through the window. Look through the window. Right. All these bad ways of feeding. They're like smudging it up so that you can't look through the window.
- [76:45]
B
There's a certain type of literary critic, I think, the type of person that you're caricaturing there, who wants you to think about the working conditions of the worker who built the cathedral or the stained glass window in the cathedral or something, which is actually an entirely honorable, you know, instinct by itself. But you sometimes think they would have made better social historians than aesthetic theorists or critics. The. One of my favorite writers, honestly, George Orwell, I think had something of that in him. The. He'll begin an essay on Swift or Dickens and you'll be carrying along with this. And then he might start writing about up, you know, factory conditions in Birmingham. Four or five paragraphs or something like that in the midst of this essay that's putatively on Dickens, which is I. And I really like his essays on Dickens and Tolstoy and others. But yeah, he has something of that in his nature. And his friend, his friend Cyril Connolly remarked that Orwell was the kind of man who couldn't blow his nose with without talking about workers conditions in the cotton trade.
- [77:59]
A
Right. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And as I'm going to make this point again in just a few minutes, that isn't to say that you never are going to think about things like the latch on the window and whether it's.
- [78:12]
B
Or historical context, largely. I think about that a lot.
- [78:14]
A
Right.
- [78:15]
B
So do you.
- [78:15]
A
I think actually if it, if it's well done, it actually aids you in being able to look through the window. It just means it's not the primary thing. Thing. It's not. It's not the primary thing. Again, loads of examples of this on, on the podcast. It's like one of the things C.S. lewis says. He says most of the responses that people are having to literature are not responses to the literature. They're responses to things that are secondarily brought up in their minds. And he gives the example of, you read a book and there's an old man in it, and you end up having this intense emotional response, either positively or negatively, because the guy reminds you of your grandpa and he says, look, that's valid. It's totally valid to sit around and think about your grandpa. But don't think that you just experienced literature, because you didn't. What you did is you had a long extended memory and maybe even a therapy session to work through whatever your issues with your grandpa are. But what you didn't do is interact with the literature. Right? That's, that's, that's the point. So I've been hinting at what is this under the surface meaning? I want to say, though, that there's lots and lots of layers to it. There's lots of variations, infinite variations. Okay, you know how much I do not want to reduce things, but this whole episode is trying to break things down to fundamentals. So don't hear me say this and think, okay, so check. Now, I understand that. No, I'm just trying to give you the basics here. If I had to break it down in its most simplified form, to use C.S. lewis's phrase, the characters and stories are visible souls. So what you're seeing is visible soul on a journey to God. And that is the universal human story. That is what literature unites us to, that universal story that every single person, no matter where you are, no matter what, what your economic background is, no matter what your racial makeup is, every one of us is born and we are on a journey to death. It's coming for us all. And that's what these stories are about. And because the basic spiritual story is that man finds himself alive in a feeling of exile, right? I mean, even psychologists recognize this and spill a lot of ink over trying to figure out why we're all born feeling exiled. We feel exiled from home.
- [80:38]
B
Alienated.
- [80:38]
A
They would, they would say alienated. That's a nice clinical term for what literature would say is the exile from home. And of course, in the spiritual sense, the exile from home is a spiritual reality, right? That we have fallen from the garden of Eden. And even non Christian works all have the same sense. We were in a golden age, in a perfected state, and we fell from it, we lost it. That is a unit. It doesn't even matter what the religion is. That is a universal story. It's everywhere. We came from a golden state and we fell from it. And so this is why you have orphan stories. I mean, this is why you have Charles Dickens. Why is every. Some guy. Somebody posted something in the Lit Life Facebook group about some film critic who I think, poor thing, bless his heart, that's all I could say. He thought he was making some profound statement. And so he shows all these clips from movies and about how all of them are orphans, and he's like, what's the deal with that? Why do filmmakers hate parents? And rightfully, the people in our group were saying it's because this is the mythic thing. This is the. This is the exiled hero. This is the hero of mysterious origin. Like every story is an orphan story.
- [81:44]
B
You're holding a pen, and a sharp one at that. And so I'll only say this as a joke, but I'm basically hearing you say, Ms. Stanford, that every story is the Pilgrim's Progress and this is where Mr. Banks got stabbed.
- [81:58]
A
R.I.P.
- [81:59]
B
But I mean, that is one of those stories, though, that does seem kind of elemental, like in. In the way that the Book of Job or the Odyssey or. Or the Iliad is element.
- [82:08]
A
When the Odyssey. Great example. Exile from home, trying to get home.
- [82:11]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [82:13]
A
All of these orphan stories. Harry Potter, Oliver Twist, David Copper.
- [82:16]
B
I know I get home. I know I've quoted it before, but GK Chesterton, in an essay on the Book of Job, said that the Book of Job speaks to all of us in spite of its mysteriousness, because life is a riddle and the sufferings in life are a riddle. Just as, you know, the Iliad speaks to something elemental, and it's because life is a battle, and the Odyssey, because life is a journey and all that kind of thing.
- [82:39]
A
Yep, yeah, yep. So this is where the real value comes, getting past the surface to that universal human experience. So literature, the book of nature, architecture, even the human body are all icons that you can learn to see through to the spiritual meaning underneath. Let's just take something very basic. The moon. The moon is something we're very good at looking up close at, but ironically, the closer we look at it, George McDonald says, is the closer we look at it, the less we are able to see it, because we're no longer seeing through it. So there are three phases of the moon, right? The moon is fully lit up, then the moon becomes fully dark, so it gets swallowed up into the dark, and then it comes out the other side and becomes light again. That is a picture of the journey to death and the resurrection right there in nature. Right. The moon is fully alive and light. It goes into the Dark. It comes out the other side. There it is, the resurrection. The three day pattern of death and resurrection. It's right there in the star. Every year we watch nature journey to death and be reborn. The year itself journeys to death and is reborn with our New Year's, right, we have the old man, December 31, and the baby for the New Year's baby, right? It's everywhere. Snow White dies and is resurrected. Hercules goes into Hades and rescues someone from Hades and takes them out and on and on and on and on. But we're reducing it here, and we don't want to do that as much more than this. I'm just trying to give you some fundamentals here. This is what stories will save the world means. That's our tagline. And I'm very intentional about not defining it, because one of the things that happens is when your eyes are open, when you start to see it, it takes your breath away. And you're like, this is what stories will save the world is. I've seen it for myself, right? I don't. I've had people ask me, what do you mean by that? Do you mean little women will save the world? Like, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna answer that. This is. You're on a journey to understand what that means, but this is what it means. Stories will save the world because stories help to give us eyes to see the reality of the cosmos. Like Lewis and Tolkien say, the great enchantment of modernity is that. No, the great myth of modernity is we don't think. We believe in myths. And they say we are under an evil enchantment, we are blinded, we cannot see the reality of the cosmos. And literature and art helps us restore our sight. Understanding all of this then gives us the context to understand Aristotle's poetics. So Aristotle says in these works of literature, it's. It's the plot that's primary and the characters are secondary. He says, you don't even have to have characters. Now. We moderns, we get that completely upside down. We think stories exist to give us characters to relate to, to learn from, to empathize with, to evaluate, to judge. But no, Aristotle's right. Stories give us plot. That is the total action, the shape, the movement of the story, the journey of the soul. I know it's popular to say things like Aristotle says, art imitates life. That's not what Aristotle says. He says art imitates nature. And what he means by that is the pattern of reality imprinted in nature. That is what Art imitates. Coleridge has a. Coleridge gets into this too. That imitation doesn't mean copying. Imitation means like an imprinting on you. Anyway, I digress. We talked. I've talked about that in numerous conference talks and our series on Aristotle's poetics. We really get into mimesis. But I hope you're starting to get the sense that we as moderns just keep reducing everything. Now, the bad ways of reading this, these bad ways of reading traditions that we've been referencing, these were all conscious, deliberate rejections of symbolic mythic readings. Okay. It was a deliberate attempt to cut themselves off from the past, to cut themselves off from any transcendent understanding and to deliberately. We're just going to look at the surface. Like you said about the guy who, you know, he doesn't want to face the nothingness.
- [87:05]
B
Yeah, I was going to say also not just an anti symbolic, but I guess you could say a new kind of symbolic reading which contrives a whole different set of symbols as substitutes for the older ones, which.
- [87:21]
A
Well, yes. Okay. So they're. They're. Okay, I'm glad you brought that up because we get a lot of questions about that. So two things happen. One.
- [87:27]
B
So, okay, it's not like Freudianism is immune to symbols.
- [87:30]
A
Oh, I'm getting there. So they deliberately cut themselves off from this older symbolic meaning. And so two things happen. One, you get books that have no symbols at all and it's just an ordinary guy doing ordinary things. And there you go, it's all on the surface. Surface. The other thing that happens is Sigmund Freud, who gives us an alternative set of symbols. Freudian symbolism is a deliberate attempt to reject an older view of symbols with a new view of symbols. And here's the difference. The older view of symbols is symbols at icons, right? You look through them and you see the divine. Freud sets up a system of a symbolic language. So the older way of symbols, that was a symbolic language that everybody knew how to speak. It's why we are so confused when we read old books, because we don't know how to speak the language. Freud replaces it with a new symbolic language. And Freud's symbols are all to explain not. You look through them and see the divine, but you look so. So older symbols, you look up and out. Okay? You're looking up and out to the divine. Freudian symbols teach you to look down and in into yourself. And so Freudian symbols just tell us something about ourselves. If. If you believe they're right, if you don't believe they're right, then they just confuse us. But if you take him at his word, he. He is turning the iconic view of symbols upside down. He's redirecting it to be more to ourselves. So, you know, instead of where Lewis says, don't look at the beam, look along the beam, you know, Freud would say, look at the navel, and along the navel, you're deeper, your deeper psychic navel. And so that's why you hear us rejecting Freudian symbolism all the time. It's literally the opposite of what we want to do. Again, as I said before, look, it's not that you can't have an interest in the characters. I love Lizzie Bennet, right? I love her. I love, to quote her, she's my hero. She's not the point of Pride and Prejudice. She's not the point. She's secondary. Right. Again, as moderns, I think that moderns ends up thinking, like, computers, ones and zeros, right? Binary code. And sometimes I think we get stuck on, like, zero, and I say, not zero. And then everybody in the audience goes, oh, so she's saying one. Nope, that's not what I'm saying. There's a third option. We're not computers. We are capable of having more choices than zeros and ones. So it's not letter versus spirit, and it's not plot versus character. It's plot is primary, character is secondary. So, yes, you can enjoy characters. Sometimes people who really get into the podcast will say something like, I read Pride and Prejudice and I really related to Lizzie Bennet. And now I'm wondering, did I read it wrong? Is it wrong of me to like. No, it's not wrong of you to like Lizzie Bennet. It would be wrong if you think the whole point of the book is to just think about Lizzie Bennet and whether I'm like her or not like her or whether she was. She's good or bad.
- [90:30]
B
There's a. There was a hilarious thing on some satirical website years ago, the title of which was Stop asking yourself which Bennett sister you are. Jane Austen would not like you.
- [90:41]
A
Oh, yes, I live for this. Yeah, It's. It's all of that nonsense. What would you do? You know, what would you do if you were Hansel and Gretel? And I always think you're asking me what I would do if I woke up in the middle of the night and hurting my parents plotting my death. I wouldn't put breadcrumbs in my pocket.
- [90:58]
B
Like, you know, or if you lived in Middle Earth, would you be a dwarf an elf or a hobbit.
- [91:02]
A
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
- [91:03]
B
I mean, it's like. I mean, if you're in middle school and you ask questions like that, fine. But if you're still asking that in your adulthood, I think that's literature teacher, quit your job.
- [91:12]
A
Because, yes, I'm about to get fired up here. But it's not that you can't talk about those secondary things. You just always have to keep them in the appropriate place. So if you think Snow White is an interesting comment on child labor and exploitation because, you know, the dwarfs put her to. To work, and she's a child. They put her to work the second they. They meet her. If you think that is more important than the image of death and resurrection, then you have problems that go beyond an inability to raise read. You're trapped on the surface of reality and you are deceived. Augustine says you should pray for sight. Ultimately, how you read is connected to how you view the cosmos. The literary tradition that we're trying to recover here on this podcast, in the classes we teach at House of Humane Letters, in the books we publish at Cassiodorus Press, are all attempts to help us recover the ability to see the reality of the cosmos that lurks under the surface via the imagination. Okay, again, this is just the fundamentals. If you want examples of what we're talking about. And I. And I. I decided to be very deliberate about not taking you through a story to show the point, because I wanted this just to be the episode you could go where we're just trying to clarify our terms and lay down some principles. But we have, what, six years of podcasts for free, that you can see examples of this. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna point you to some specific episodes where you can see this in action. Okay, so how about some. Okay, some of that we didn't do on this one. I did two episodes on Cindy's podcast, the New Mason Jar, on the building blocks of stories. Okay? And so I talk a whole lot about how that works and how you're supposed to think of the building blocks of stories and what. What that looks like in terms of the education you're giving children or even your own reading, because it's really important to nurture the soil from which stories grow. Right? If you want to understand stories, you have to understand the imagination of the person who wrote them. And the way to do that is to read all the building blocks of stories. So I talk about that there in the Pints with Jack podcast, I did an episode on C.S. lewis's literature theory. And I start going through the different schools of thought and you know, what they represent and what he's responding to. So I go into that. A lot more detail there here on our podcast. I would recommend a few one off episodes. So we did one called why Read Pagan Myths? So on that one I'll take you through a few myths and show you how to see the divine reality of the cosmos through the letter of those myths. Why Read Fairy Tales is another one. Even the importance of the detective novel. So you can see that even in a realistic book, even in a, maybe even a kind of light book, if you know how to see through the surface, you will see the divine cosmos shining through. Longer series I already recommended to you Much Ado About Nothing. That's, I think that will really serve you well. We're about to rebroadcast our Dracula series in October. I would highly recommend that. That was an episode, a series that we did that a lot of people said finally everything I've been saying clicked for them. They finally, because it was such an example of how if you read Dracula through modern ways of reading, you're going to get it completely upside down, but if you read it in a more traditional way, you'll have a completely different experience. And a lot of people say like this was the most profound book they ever read and their spiritual lives were changed and like they finally had that moment of I can, can see because I read it with a book group and they got all Freudian about it and we thought it was gross. And then I read it with you and realized, oh my goodness, this is the gospel. So that's another one. I would also highly recommend the Harry Potter series because I, I really spent a lot of time talking about the journey of the soul there and, and, and what J.K. rowling is, is getting up to in terms of the how to the House of Humane Letters if you want to, you know, if you listen to all those episodes and you're like, I would like to level up, go to the classes. So again we have everything from year long classes to 90 minute webinars and every price range in between. So yes, we have high end year long classes, but we have, you know, 15 webinars in the store. There's, there's a, there's an entry point for any, any budget. So webinars. Heather's Coleridge webinar that she just did is a great one to listen to. Ella Hornstra's the Living Page where she takes us through how to Read nature. This blew people's minds. It was an experience that really showed us how much modernity is blind, that we literally look out the window and cannot see, that nature is an icon to God. Now, she. That webinar was so successful, people demanded more. She's actually right now, and I talked about it at the beginning of this episode, doing a mini class called the Grammar of the Natural World. And she is really getting into some amazing stuff. And that is on Monday in September. So if you missed the first class, you can still jump in. Everything's recorded. This is. This is a really, really amazing class. I would also recommend to you the how to Read Fairy Tales mini class that I taught that one. It's a primer in how to read symbolically. A lot of people have said that that class completely changed their life because they gave them eyes to see, and now they see everywhere. It's not just because we don't believe literature is a closed system. It's not just about how to read this one thing. It's about how to see everything. Everything we do is about how to read every book and how to see everything. My how to Read Beowulf class is another one I would recommend to you. I would recommend both Harry Potter mini classes I did, especially the one I just finished over the summer for books four and five, I think is some of the best work I have ever done. And I really, really got deep into what the literary tradition is. And students and adults who have been listening to me for, in some cases, decades heard stuff they had never heard from me before, and things clicked for them in a whole new way. I would also recommend Jen Rogers mini class on the Inklings literary theory that she did back in the spring, Words of Power. So you can see, you know, what is this? How. How Lewis and Tolkien and Barfil are wrestling with this, how we make meaning. How does language work? How does literally literature work? And not surprisingly, because this has been on my mind for the last year, this is also the theme of the 2026 Literary Life Online conference. We moved the date this year because we heard, you guys, please stop putting this during Lent. And I hear you. Yes, I. I could. I don't ever want to do it during Lent again. We moved it to January. And the theme this year is the letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth reading like a human. And our keynote speaker is going to be Dr. Jason Baxter. I know he's going to be amazing. Mr. Banks will be speaking. Our own Dr. Phillips will be speaking. Jim Rogers will be Speaking. I will be giving a talk called the Great Divide, Recovering from Modern Illiteracy. I hope that today's episode helped. It is when I say it's hard, like, I'm not expressed to you. I'm in physical pain trying to wrestle this huge, vast, unified vision into two fundamental principles. And I tried really hard not to follow too many rabbit trails so that you wouldn't get overwhelmed. But hopefully, hopefully, even if you're brand new, you'll be intrigued enough by this to say, okay, what does that look like when I'm reading? And then you can just follow any of the number of podcast episodes we've done to see what that looks like, to have that experience with us of going from blindness to sight in the story. And. And it's like, you know, St. Paul on the road to Damascus. You are not who you were before. The lights are on and everything looks different. And I'm going to go back to one of my favorite quotes that has ever been said on this podcast. Emily Rabel, who said in her literary life of Emily Rabel episode, who. She's been my student for a long time, and she described her experience learning to read and learning to see with us. She said, my world got so much bigger and I could touch more of it. And that's it. You will be enlivened. You'll be awakened. The cosmos will be bigger. There'll be meaning. It's really, really worth the effort. And the first step is realizing, okay, yeah, I'm kind of blind. I'm blind to being able to read past the surface. And don't be discouraged about that. That's an important step. There's nothing to feel bad about. We have all been robbed of this tradition. We have been miseducated, and it's not our fault. But we don't have to stay there. You can do this. We give you free tools every week right here on the podcast. You can do this. Mr. Banks, any final words?
- [100:19]
B
None whatsoever.
- [100:21]
A
All right, well, thank you so much for joining us. Please stick around to the end of this episode. Mr. Banks will have a special poem. And next time, we are going to start something I've never read before. This. This is Mr. Banks pick. We're going to spend two episodes on Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market. So the first episode read roughly the first half, and I'm going to put myself at the feet of my very able comrade here who will teach me about Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market. Thank you so much for joining us today, and thank you to our Patreon members who support this, this podcast. You guys are an amazing community. If you're interested in joining that community, go to patreon.com backslash the literary life. We have a forum, we have Zoom meetings, we have retreats, we have all kinds of things. And come and be a part of that amazing community who. You guys just take my breath away. Honestly, you guys are so. It's like, I think about this a lot. It's like you're starving people and you finally got real food and y' all can't, cannot get enough and that can discord. Community is amazing. And you guys just, y', all, y' all just keep reading all these hard books together and learning together and growing and taking classes, and it is truly an amazing thing to watch and to see. You guys. So many of you have written us to say that you felt like you've been asleep and now you're awake. And that is the power of Stories will save the world. So until next time, keep crafting your literary life, because now you know what this means. Stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast, brought to you by our loyal Patreon sponsors. Visit house of human humaneletters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with Cindy@morningtimeformoms.com 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.
- [102:53]
B
A Minor Bird by Robert Frost. I have wished a bird would fly away and not sing by my house all day have clapped my hands at him from the door when it seemed as if I could bear no more. The fault must partly have been in me. The bird was not to blame for his key. And of course there must be something wrong in wanting to silence any song.