Episode 311: "Falling Inward" with Dr. Jason Baxter

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast

Episode 311: "Falling Inward" with Dr. Jason Baxter
January 13, 2026
Hosts: Angelina Stanford (A), Thomas Banks (C), Cindy Rollins (B)
Guest: Dr. Jason Baxter

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Episode Overview

This episode welcomes back Dr. Jason Baxter to discuss the new (second) edition of his book Falling Inward. The conversation explores how deep reading of great literature nurtures the soul, especially in our hyper-distracted age. The hosts and Dr. Baxter address the loss of inwardness in modern life, the difference between genuine inward reflection and “navel-gazing,” the medicinal power of art, and the continuing relevance of pre-modern cosmology through the lens of the humanities and literary greats. The episode weaves personal anecdotes, philosophical depth, literary references, and a passionate defense of the humanities.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Introduction & Conference Announcement ([00:18]–[08:08])

• Housekeeping and upcoming conference: The team introduces Dr. Jason Baxter, who will be keynote at the House of Humane Letters’ upcoming conference on “Deep Reading in the Age of Hypertexts.”

  • Baxter previews his talk: "I want to... propose exactly what it is about literature that is medicinal and therapeutic in our age." ([03:55], B)
  • Reference to Byung-Chul Han’s The Crisis of Narration, and the paradox of our word-saturated but meaning-impoverished world.

• Commonplace Quotes:

  • Thomas Banks selects Flaubert: “Never touch your idols. The gilding will stick to your fingers.” ([08:08], C)
  • Dr. Baxter shares from Wendell Berry: “There are no unsacred places. There are only sacred places and desecrated places.” ([09:20], B)

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2. Falling Inward: The Book, Its Journey & Purpose ([15:00]–[21:47])

• Second Edition—Why Now? ([15:00], B)
  • The original edition had reach despite publishing flaws; Dr. Baxter felt compelled to refine it as its theme—technological distraction and loss of inwardness—had become even more urgent.
  • "Now we know a lot more about these, about our habits and our devices... There's kind of an evacuation of our interiority, an evacuation of our inwardness." ([16:51], B)
  • The book seeks to translate moments of literary wonder from the classroom into words—a process Baxter describes as “falling inward moments.”

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3. The Power of Deep Reading & The Metaphor of “Falling Inward” ([22:33]–[33:39])

• Experiencing Depth vs. Flatness ([22:33], A/B)
  • Modern life is described as “flat”; great art reintroduces us to depth. The metaphor of “falling inward” is drawn (as in Augustine and Dante) to illustrate spiritual, intellectual, and psychological awakening.
  • “The falling inward moment is when I recover for a brief moment the capacity to hear eternity whispering.” ([27:13], B)
  • Difference from “navel-gazing”: Genuine inwardness leads to expansion and transformation—"It draws me outside of myself and it puts me in front of something which is so big and so beautiful that I think to myself, I can change. Indeed, I must." ([29:16], B)
  • The eucatastrophe (Tolkien’s “good catastrophe”) is invoked to describe the upward turn revealed at the nadir, as exemplified by Dante in Inferno and scenes in literature and film like Inception.

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4. The One and the Many; Expanding Tastes and Beauty ([29:37]–[32:04])

• Thomas Banks compliments the book for helping readers see the “multifariousness of beauty”—appreciating diverse forms in landscape, painting, or prose.
  • “Beauty speaks a thousand languages and encountering these different types of moments of beauty... helps us see the multifaceted nature of beauty calling us in all kinds of different ways.” ([31:24], B)
• Literature as an expander of taste and a reminder of our limited perspectives.

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5. On the Educational Purpose of Literature ([33:39]–[49:54])

• Academic approaches often reduce literature to “collecting literary facts”—but true education is about discovering unity and pattern, not just data.
  • Baxter’s teaching approach: always ask “so what?” to connect facts, patterns, and deep meaning; giving students the experience of “eureka” moments in literature.
  • “That eureka moment... in which all of a sudden these things are not just isolated objects, but connected and form a pattern, I think is an extraordinary experience. And I think that’s what gets people hooked on literature.” ([43:37], B)
• Recognizing and cultivating readers’ intuition; the joy of guiding students to discovery rather than merely lecturing.
• Anecdotes on overcoming the effects of poor schooling or reductive methods that discourage true engagement with art.

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6. On Pre-Modern Cosmology, The Liberal Arts, and Non-Utilitarian Defenses ([50:15]–[64:15])

• Why study the pre-modern cosmos?
  • "They [the pre-moderns] were as good at inwardness... as we are good at tools and technology." ([54:27], B)
  • The humanities offer more than 'critical thinking skills' or SAT scores—they help us partake in a worldview which prioritized wholeness and inwardness.
  • The value in recovering ancient symbols and cosmology: not nostalgia, but supplementing our lopsided modern worldview.
• Lewis and the Narnia Planets; Dorothy Sayers’ lost tools of learning
  • The challenge and gift of learning from a “strange” and idiosyncratic past.
  • “We have to have just enough boldness that once we've done that, we don't just say, oh, well, and then that's how it is, but we actually enter into a dialogue...” ([56:12], B)
• Reconciling the humanities and sciences (Quadrivium/Trivium)
  • Baxter’s epilogue “The 9 Billion Names of God” proposes how this reconciliation could look in the modern age.

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7. Reflections on Writing; The Pain and Joy of Revisiting Old Work ([62:03]–[64:45])

• Baxter discusses the challenge of revisiting 10-year-old thoughts with humility—honoring the past self, updating as needed, but resisting the urge to rewrite everything.
• “I think that's why I was most happy to add some new material and to add the piece of the 9 billion names of God in particular. . . a contemporary vision of what trivium and quadrivium... could be reconciled.” ([62:56], B)

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8. Final Thoughts: The Value of Dialogue Across Eras and Communities ([64:45]–[68:10])

• Baxter and Angelina underscore that true education is never rejecting what we have, but “supplementing ourselves with the wisdom of the past.” ([66:19], B)
• “It’s the task... of re-membering all of those things which are necessary to make us human. And I cannot do it entirely by myself. Hence, this is where... communities of friendship enter in.” ([67:10], B)
• Literary life is a communal, intergenerational journey—echoing Andre Gide: “Everything worth saying has already been said, but because nobody was listening, we shall have to say it all over again.” ([68:05], C)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Our technology is not going to replace traditional literacy... but rather, I think it’s going to be a direct proportion... we’re going to need that many more hours... with the old books.” ([16:51], B)
• “The falling inward moment is when I recover for a brief moment, the capacity to hear eternity whispering...” ([27:13], B)
• “Beauty speaks a thousand languages and... the longing for eternity just beneath the surface.” ([31:24], B)
• “Good teachers don’t just lecture—they set the table and let students look out at the waterfall.” ([46:31], A; paraphrase)
• On utilitarian defenses: “Utilitarianism is useless. That's the irony of it.” ([64:45], A)

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• Introduction/Conference teaser: [00:18]–[08:08]
• Purpose of the Second Edition: [15:00]–[21:47]
• Falling Inward vs. Navel-Gazing: [22:33]–[33:39]
• Defining Beauty: One and the Many: [29:37]–[32:04]
• On Literary Education and “So What”: [33:39]–[49:54]
• Pre-Modern Cosmology & Non-Utilitarian Humanities: [50:15]–[64:15]
• Writing and Revising Old Thoughts: [62:03]–[64:45]
• The Communal, Enduring Task of the Humanities: [66:19]–[68:10]

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Tone & Language

The conversation is lively, intellectual, and infused with mutual admiration and shared enthusiasm for “the deep joys of reading.” Wry humor, personal anecdotes, and literary references abound. The mood is one of hope—art and stories are not just “useful” but essential to human flourishing.

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Conclusion

Dr. Jason Baxter’s Falling Inward is celebrated as a timely and profound invitation to rediscover interiority and the medicinal power of literature. The episode demystifies “deep reading,” valorizes expanding one’s taste and experience of beauty, and calls listeners to join in the ongoing conversation that sustains culture across generations.

For more:

• Falling Inward (preorder or purchase): cassiodorespress.com
• Conference info: houseofhumaneletters.com
• Repeat listen? [Eucatastrophe and Literary Wonder: 33:08]
• Poem by Trumbull Stickney read by Thomas Banks: [72:12]

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Memorable Closing
“Keep crafting your literary life, because stories will save the world.” ([71:09], A)

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Transcript

[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 welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and with me is the mysterious man of mystery. Look how smooth that was.

[B]

Uhhuh.

[C]

Nice alliteration.

[A]

The mysterious Mr. Banks. And today we have back on the podcast one of our favorite people to talk about. Not talk. Oh wow, Freudian slip. Not talk about. I did not say that. To talk to Dr. Jason Baxter. Welcome back, Jason.

[B]

Thanks, thanks. It's great to be back. Great to be talk. To talk.

[A]

We do. We talk about you and we talk to always favorably. Always favorably.

[B]

That's good.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. I don't believe it's safe to talk about you though. We both been reading your book this past week, so we've been talking about you. I think that's good. Oh yeah, that's fair. Without any of the negative connotation. So today we are going to be talking with Jason Baxter about his brand new, not even yet hot off the presses. This is how brand new book from Cassidor's press falling inward. And we are very excited to talk about that. But first a word from our sponsor who is us. This is a 100% member supported podcast. And so one of the things we've got going on at our business end of things, the House of Humane Letters, is our annual literary life conference. I cannot believe this is the eighth one already. Where has the time gone? And this year we've moved the conference to January. Everyone's very excited about that. We can kind of kick off the year, get inspired, get fired up in the, in the doldrums of the dark days of January. And our theme this year is one I'm very excited about. And no doubt we will talk about this in support of our conversation because it was inspired by my reading of St. Augustine's on Christian teaching. And if you listen to our end of the year reading episode, you heard me excitedly talking about that and my husband expressing surprise that that was the book that got me fired up because apparently I'm strange in my reading habits. But there you go. I loved it and loved his mind and thought, oh, I need to have an entire conference devoted to the things that he is talking about. So the theme is the letter killeth and the spirit quickeneth Reading like a Human. And our keynote speaker this year is none other than Dr. Jason Baxter himself, who's going to be giving a talk called Deep Reading in the Age of Hypertexts. Jason, I'm so excited about this talk. Could you give us a little tease about what you're going to talk about?

[B]

No. I'm really grateful for this invitation and honestly, I've probably, at least by my wife's standards, I've probably been a little neurotic about this talk. I think I've already spent too much. I'm just excited about it. I've been working on it for several months. And I mean, for me, writing and reading kind of go together. And a chance to write, a chance to talk to, gosh, what are now become friends on the Literary Life podcast and House of Humane Letters, knowing some familiar faces will show up anyway, so it's inspiring to me to get to write about these things and talk about these things. And thus I've read a lot, which makes me write more. But in any case, the talk will be. Will begin with a description of our diseased discourse. And I'll begin with a phrase from none other than Byung Chul Han, the Korean philosopher who one of the members of the House of Humane Letters, Bethany, has asked me, you quote him so often. Do you think you have Korean blood in you? The answer is, I don't think so. But Byung Cho Han has this fascinating book that came out last year called the Crisis of Narration. And so I just want to. I want to think about that and exactly, because it seems a little paradoxical at first that in some sense we have more words than ever. How could we talk about a crisis of narration? And so I sort of do some analysis of the. Of text in the world of hypertext. And then based on that, based on that assessment, then propose exactly what it is about literature that is medicinal and therapeutic in our age. And I realized that, yeah, I think what I want to say is almost kind of a summary of what I've said in why Literature Still Matters, but also the courses that I've taught through House of Humane Letters over the past couple of years. And I was hoping that hopefully it won't just be a medley of best hits, but hopefully it'll be more like one of those kind of summative statements in the last movement of a symphony in which all these kinds of, you know, these arguments, these bits and pieces, these hot takes, these, you know, these suggestive remarks, which were still oblique, are now sort of gathered together into this kind of, you know, hopefully, you know, definitive statement about exactly wherein lies the value of this deep reading. So that's. There's the two minute version of it.

[A]

I love it. I'm so excited and it's, it's so funny that you mentioned, and I'm not even going to try to say his name, but the. Yes. The German Korean philosopher.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Who very. Has a very Germanic mind. And so I was very confused about his name, but I finally got to the bottom of that. Anyway, you quote from him a lot in why Literature Still Matters. And I. So I read my first book by him, actually, just finished a couple days ago. I read the Burnout Society and loved it. I almost chose that as my commonplace quote today. I kind of wanted to commonplace the whole thing. So several of us have really gotten into him because you quote him so much. But. All right, so that conference and that talk, of course I'll be speaking, Mr. Banks will be speaking, Dr. Ann Phillips will be speaking, Jen Rogers will be speaking. And we're going to have, for the first time ever, a student panel, which I'm very excited about. And I've asked them, I've given them no other instructions in this, but come on and talk about what it has meant to you to learn how to read like a human. And I'm very excited about what they're going to come up with. So that is going to be January 23rd through 30th, and you can register for [e-mail] as well as read the description and look at the conference titles, the talk titles. And of course, it, like everything we do, it's live or later. So if you can't make the live sessions, you've got the videos. Even if you can make the live sessions, you've got the videos. You can watch these again and again. So I'm really looking forward to that. All right, speaking of commonplace quotes, Mr. Banks, what's something from something you've been reading?

[C]

So just for my own pleasure this last week I reread Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which I don't think I'd read in about 10 years or so. I enjoyed it Much more than I had remembered. And this line sort of stuck with me. Never touch your idols. The gilding will stick to your fingers.

[A]

Oh, wow. Ouch. Ouch.

[C]

It seems like that has many real life applications.

[A]

It does. I don't know why I feel weirdly convicted. All of my idols are dead, though, so there's no chance I'm gonna touch them. We're good.

[C]

Yeah. It does seem kind of related to the. Oh, the cliched notion that you never want to meet your heroes, kind of. That would be maybe one sort of cousin application or proverb.

[A]

I stay safe. I just don't leave my house. That way no one can eat.

[C]

And as you said, most of your heroes are dead. So barring the invention of time travel or something like that, you don't have to worry about it.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't. Time travel.

[C]

Always a mistake.

[A]

All right, Jason, what's a commonplace quote you've got to share?

[B]

It comes from Wendell Berry's poem, How to Be a Poet.

[A]

Oh, okay.

[B]

Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places. There are only sacred places and desecrated places.

[A]

That's good. That's very Mursha Eliade, right?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Also, I got so excited when you quoted him in Falling Inward, because we. My. I have a group of fellows, kind of my teacher training group, that I mentor, and we read the Sacred and Profane together this year, and we read Augustine's On Christian Teaching because Murcia Eliade and Northrop Fry were actually very good friends and wrote back and forth for years and years and years, and you can see their thought process and influence on each other, and it's really interesting to see the ideas develop. So in one of the chapters, I can't remember which one it is now, but in one of the chapters in your book, I kept thinking, man, this is very Mursha Eliade. He's really tracking. And then you quoted him. So I got.

[B]

And then, yeah, great, great. I didn't know about the connection between Eliade and Northrop Fry. That's cool.

[A]

Yes. I thought. I thought you would find that school. In fact, one of our listeners in Toronto went to the University of Toronto and checked out from the library the. The letters between them and scanned them and sent them to me. But they're in French, so we have to translate them. But, yeah, no, that. No, that was a really cool thing that we found out that they. They knew each other.

[B]

That's Great. Yeah. Casador's press boy, I'm telling you.

[A]

Right, Exactly. You. You speak French. Get on there. Mr. Banks.

[C]

Yeah, I read it. I. Yeah, we're going to Montreal this summer. You can see how badly I speak it then.

[A]

I just want to say, though, you have the most esoteric and interesting honeydew list from your wife. Though I'm always. Your honeydew list for me is always things like, you need to translate this medieval Latin commentary on a book that I want to read. Translate that.

[B]

Translate the correspondence between Elada and Fry.

[A]

Yeah, you know, it's a very. Tell me you don't love it.

[C]

No, I'm preferred to like, could you fix the porch?

[A]

Yeah, exactly. All right. I might have cheated. I chose as my commonplace quote something from Falling Inward, a brand new book that you're going to hear about today because of course, you. You talked about Augustine. And I'm very much on an Augustine kick right now. And this is from chapter four, Falling, Falling Upward. The Gothic Cathedral as architecture of contemplation. And before I read the quote, I have to tell you that our Patreon this week, we met with them and we all watched the movie Inception, which is very Dante, if you know the film. And then I did a two hour thing where I broke down all the images and explained them. And at the same time that I was watching the movie and taking notes, I was reading your book and I got so excited when you started explaining falling upward, because that is exactly what is going on in Inception. And I actually quoted your book during the Patreon thing as we watched the scene of the van going off the bridge and they're falling down and falling upward at the same time. And I said, this is what his book is all about. Anyway, it was very exciting. So I've got a quote from that section here. Augustine then uses this thought experiment of the flight of the soul to higher and higher levels of the world, from caterpillars to supernovas, as a way to exemplify his meditation on the world's beauty. Later, he quotes Romans 1:20, the invisible things of God understood by things which are made just as sugar, sugar, sugar. Oh, I blew that sujet. Oh, man. My ignorance exposed for the masses. This is. This is one of the mistakes you make when you're just a reader and you never hear things out loud and your eyes just scan them. And it wasn't until this exact moment that my brain went way. Wait, you don't actually know how to say that.

[B]

Yeah, you can wreck it.

[A]

Yeah, I'm not going to edit it out, though. Let my shame be shown. Okay. Just as Suger and Hugh of St. Victor would do later. And yet Augustine's search is different. It is not concerned with how the plurality of the world gives us a picture of the generosity of the maker, but rather with the vertical element of the search, by which the soul, as it climbs higher, paradoxically, moves deeper into the core of the soul. Who is he? Augustine asks later. That is above the topmost point of my soul. By that same soul, I shall ascend to him. After Augustine climbs all the way up to the vault of heaven, he then realizes that to find God, he has to turn within and look for him within. His flight upward is a metaphor for plunging into the depths of the human heart. I love that. I got very excited about that, and I just loved the idea that. That you explore in the book, that there's almost like a double vision going on. Right. That at the same time that we are climbing the ladder of divine ascent, you know, to use St. John of Damascus as image, we're also going down into our own soul. And it's both of those things. It's a great book, Jason. We both really, really liked it.

[C]

No, it was very impressive. And I found myself thinking as I was reading it that it would in some ways be a kind of profitable introduction for a lot of people to the problem of the many. And the one which is so central a part of classical philosophy, in which, you know, you kind of. You do touch on here and there and did. Was that. How much did that guide your thinking? I guess would be one question I had.

[B]

Not at all consciously, but I'm looking forward to your suggestion because maybe we'll discover subconsciously. It's what I really wanted to answer.

[A]

The Muse. The muse handed it. Now, I should start off by pointing out this is actually the second edition of Falling Inward. This one is going to be published, is being published by Cassiodorus Press, our. Our imprint. So we're excited about that. And this is a book that you actually wrote 10 years ago. Right. And this one's newly edited, expanded, New Prologue, new Epilogue. But let me start off by asking you, why a second edition? Why were you wanting to revisit this one?

[B]

Yeah, I think. I think the previous press specializes in historical reprints, and it was excited that here was a book that also touched on those things. I think it wasn't as clean as it should have been. I remember people texting me like, I found another one. I found one on page 27. At some point I was like, please just stop telling me about this. And so I think. But I think what was cool about it was that nevertheless, sort of, despite the inadequacies in terms of the publishing, that people really loved it and people kept reading it and people were sort of like forgiving of the appearance of it. And I think the other cool thing, I think the reason it was so timely when I wrote it, I think like you said 10 years ago, it wasn't entirely obvious that our technology would be as pervasive as it has become. And it wasn't entirely obvious what kinds of long term effects it would have on how we think and how we feel, how we read and all these types of things. And so the book was, I mean, the book was written with, you know, a little bit of help from people like Nicholas Carr, but it was also is also just kind of closing my eyes and say, okay, what does it feel like to use a smartphone? What does it feel like to, you know, to be, to be reading on a screen, right? And what, and how does that compare with the type of reading that I did as a kid and I did in university and I did in grad school? So it was kind of a fun way to kind of describe things from the inside out. And now we, obviously now we know a lot more about these, about our habits and our devices and how the kind of, you know, as we've said more than once in different conversations and in our collaborations together, that it's not that our technology is going to replace traditional literacy, traditional literature, traditional learning of languages, but rather, I think it's going to be a direct proportion that the more of our lives spend around technology, it's going to be almost a sort of like one for one need, that many more hours, that many more minutes we're going to need spending with the old books. Because I think there's kind of an evacuation of our interiority, an evacuation of our inwardness. And through these habits, our sort of being moves to the periphery of ourselves. And thus, as we've argued in why Literature Still Matters, but also in a kind of more youthful way in which I was a sort of young teacher excitedly trying to translate into words some of the most exciting experiences I had had with students. And they were fresh and they were new and people were going, oh my goodness, this Iliad, right, this odyssey, the same experiences that I know that you have all the time, right? This Dante, this matters. This is an extraordinary experience. And my students used to call them humanities experiences, humanities moments in which we, you know, have a conversation about 60 minutes long about a text, about a great book, about Eliot, Odyssey, Dante, whatever, right? Shakespeare. And then it would get to a point where everyone sort of moved from kind of mere sort of collecting effects and looking for patterns, and then moved into a sort of state of admiration into a state of wonder. I mean, Keats describes it right in that famous line on first looking into Chapman's Homer, right? That the explorers looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak. They sort of look at each other, unwilling to too quickly reduce the experience of wonder that they were having to cheap cliches and easy formulas. And so my students were having those types of moments, but because they were, as 18, 19, 20 year olds were encountering Homer or they were encountering Dante, and they had these sort of moments of stupefied awe and wonder. So this was the fun sort of attempt to kind of translate, okay, what is happening? What is this like, quickly into words. And so some of my kind of favorite moments from my. From my early days of teaching of characters like Achilles. And exactly why is he suffering this menus, right. Which is not just right. And the Greeks have a word for anger. They call it kolos, right? That's when you get angry. Sort of your adrenal system is fired up and you want to go slap someone who just slapped you, right? But then there's this other thing which is darker and more frightening, and it's manuscript. Why is Achilles suffering from that? What is. And the cool thing is he doesn't seem to entirely know himself until he sort of discovers it in the course of the poem, right? And when you see that, you go, oh. And have that kind of falling inward moment anyway. So I think. So I think those. It's not just that those things are still relevant from the first edition, but I think they're more relevant, they're more urgent, and that we need this stuff like the sick need medicine, right? It's medicinal, it's therapeutic. So I think it's more relevant today than when I wrote it. So it was fun to find a fresh audience, to get some new cover art, to add some fresh thoughts, and then to give it. To make it comb its hair, wash and comb its hair particularly well so that it's on its best behavior, so that we can really find an appreciative audience. Now, apart from just the former readers, all four dozen of them who read it as a sort of cult classic, which I suppose was kind of cool, but I think hopefully it'll find a Bigger readership. And it'll be a neat kind of companion piece to go with why Literature Still Matters.

[A]

Oh, I agree completely. I hope it does find its audience. It's a beautiful book. And I agree with you that it is more poignant now than even 10 years ago. I mean, we talk about this all the time that. I mean, we're English majors, all three of us. Like, no, you know, like, I never thought there would be a popular audience of just regular people who were desperate for literature. And I think it's a very exciting time for English teachers. Weird things to say.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

[A]

But I think that. What?

[B]

Even while English departments are collapsing at traditional universities.

[A]

Yes, exactly. So. Because. Because they're continuing to double down on the problem instead of embracing the heart of what literature can do.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Of why literature still matters. But, you know, I think that our audience is an indication that on some level, everybody knows we're missing something huge in our life right now, and literature and the humanities can. Can give it back to us. And, you know, one of the things that was so interesting to me reading the book was you talking about how, look, I'm struggling to have a metaphor for this. I'm struggling to put into words something that is ultimately inexpressible. And you landed on the metaphor of falling inward. And you talk about how our modern experience is one of flatness. But when we encounter great art, when we have that great experience of art, we get a sense of the depth of the art and the depth of our own souls, and so use the metaphor of falling inward. And I'd like you to talk a little bit more about this metaphor. And then I'm throwing this curveball question, question at you. How is what you're saying falling inward different from modern naval gazing? That we just. We just want to look in our. In ourselves and find the truth inside of us and lie on the therapist couch and, you know, explore the inner recesses of our psyche. How. How is your falling inward different from that?

[B]

Yeah, okay. Questions yet? I think, yeah, the falling inward experience is. It's like a spiritual or intellectual or psychological, depending on your term. Right. But let's just call it spiritual. It's like a spiritual perfection of an experience that we've felt in our bodies just naturally. We've felt the experience of falling.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Allegedly. It's one of those sort of primal fears, along with loud noises that even infants have built into them. And so it's extremely sort of like, close to the kind of core of our being. Is this sense of falling. And thus it's a very potent metaphor. But the sense of falling inward, I play around with it, obviously, in the sense of falling upward in the cathedrals, I think can be communicated in a great experience of literature. And it's awe and it's wonder, and it's associated with a kind of. Almost a kind of giddiness in which I feel sort of like a breaking free from all of my old habits and all of the things. Hey, we can also talk about being on the couch with a therapist, right? I mean, I feel all of a sudden sort of suddenly liberated for the moment from all of my old habits, those things that I didn't myself. I didn't even think I could slough off. And so thus it comes with a sense of freedom. Dante has a falling inward moment right at the middle of the earth, you know, in Pharaoh 34, where he climbs over Satan's furry back. But when he passes the midpoint of the universe, he feels the sort of, like, flip of gravity. And Dante describes it in a poetry which is topsy, turvy, upside down, giddy, you know, bubbly, giggly, which I tried to capture in my translation of that. But it's this sort of extraordinary moment where Dante's world turns upside down. And he thinks, well, now then, what? What should I do? And I know that all of us have these types of moments, right? Sometimes they sneak up on us, right? A lot of times they come at the beginning of a new year in which we think, who am I? And who are you? And what do I want to be? And I think the power of literature is that it captures those. Those kind of psychological moments, but also those physical moments and puts them in characters and puts them in worlds. And we have these encounters which inspire great capacity of wonder. Now, it doesn't necessarily tell us what we should do, but it does sort of awaken us to these type of deeper longings, right? These deeper longings. Well, ultimately, I would say these deeper longings for eternity. And I suppose right now I have passing through my mind the great painting by Caspar David Friedrich, right, of the wanderer in the mist of. Sort of standing on the mountains, looking out over this kind of oceanic space that it seems that for human beings, we're discontent with the small, then we're discontent with the little, and we're discontent with the quotidian, right? Although we do want order and discipline and daily lives, but nevertheless, we need more than all of that. And thus our kind of inner infinity finds the sort of resonance with an outer infinity. And that by some kind of small literary miracle, is what the masters are able to do. And those are falling inward moments. So part two, how is that not navel gazing? I feel like the seeds of the answer are already in that. I mean, I suppose. I mean, it seems like the whole sort of psychological process is a process of self discovery. What wounds do I carry with me? What limitations do I have? What types of things am I still afraid of? And I think that whole process of sort of like therapeutic, or actually not therapeutic, but just sort of diagnostic reasoning is a valuable first step. But I think you're right. I think when it does, it does become navel gazing. If it's just me fixated on my limitations and my own fragmented being. The falling inward moment is. And this is going to sound awfully Platonic to your listeners, right? But the falling inward moment is when I recover for a brief moment, the capacity to hear eternity whispering. And that is a liberating experience in which I feel I can break through all of those things that I have diagnosed. Now, you will need, you know, to practice this kind of, you know, a course of virtue, a course of kind of therapeutic intellectual reading and recovery. But I think the. But in. In this schema, as Plato would say, it's all in Plato, right? What do they teach kids these days?

[C]

Right? That the.

[B]

The experience of beauty comes first. Right? The experience of beauty is when you see eternity trying to express itself in a language which is lower than what it needs. And thus it's a saturated moment. Right? And thus, as Plato says, the soul begins to grow wings and it feels that it can soar. So I think that would be the difference, is that it doesn't make me fixated on myself. It draws me outside of myself and it puts me in front of something which is so big and so beautiful that I think to myself, I can change. Indeed, I must.

[C]

It seems the one thing you're trying to do in this book, and I guess this is sort of what I meant when I said that it's in some ways kind of an introduction to the problem of the many and the one. You're not trying to give an account of exhaustively, but open the mind of the reader to the fact of the multifariousness of beauty. The fact that, well, you brought up the example of Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer in the Sea of Fog. How a painting like that, you know, a person with, like, rudimentary taste looks at that and responds to it and says, yeah, that is sublimely Beautiful. The same person, you know, can look, you know, wandering around in the same art gallery, say at a domestic scene of one of the Dutch or Flemish masters, and say that that also is beautiful. Maybe not sublimely. You probably wouldn't say sublimely beautiful of a Vermeer, but that's no less strikingly beautiful. And it seemed that reading this book is a good way. I think at least it had this effect with me, reminding me of the limitations of my own taste and the necessity of hopefully expanding them. Hopefully, you know, never, never fully. I don't pretend that I'll ever fully, you know, embrace a full catholicity of, you know, being able to appreciate and admire every instance of beauty as I can. But as I grow older, moving in that direction means more to me. And I think reading, reading this book for me anyway was encouraging in that regard.

[B]

That's an incredible compliment coming from you being one of the best read people I know. It helps me expand my taste of reading. I really appreciate that. But I think that's super beautiful. I think, yeah, just beauty speaks a thousand languages and that encountering these different types of moments of beauty, whether it's ancient Greek or medieval Italian or 19th century. Lovely, elegant prose. Yeah, it does help us see, like I think you said it really, really lovely the multi faced nature of, of, of beauty calling us in all kinds of different ways, under all kinds of different guises. But yeah, the longing for eternity just beneath the surface.

[C]

Yeah, truly.

[A]

I think you put your finger on it when you said expansiveness and that, that comes through in every chapter in this book. Expansiveness, depth. And I, and I think for me that's where I would put my finger on what is the difference between your description of falling inward and say, just like modern self obsession, you know, modern self obsession sort of gets you trapped in your own little world. Whereas you're seeing this as, this is a way to expand. This is a way to put yourself into a much larger framework, a framework of eternity. And I just, I loved the idea that you're, you're going down to go up the, the end here is not just to go down and stay down. And woe is me, and I'm a miserable wretch. But you go down to go up. And I love that you just now said the thing about, you know, Dante's moment when he gets down to the bottom of Inferno and, and Satan is both the bottom and the ladder by which you can climb up. I used that image when we were talking about Inception. Like that's the EU catastrophe moment. You have a chapter devoted to the EU catastrophe, but that's it.

[B]

That's an important term.

[A]

Yes, Tolkien's term about the EU catastrophe. So the catastrophe is the tragic fall, and we're all going down there, and the EU catastrophe is the good fall. It's the turn, to use Northrop Fry's language, the turn that brings you back up. So I, for myself, always look at that image in Dante as that is what the eucatastrophe is. You are a fool falling down. You're having your catastrophic fall. You hit the bottom. But that's when you could discover that you can be turned upside down and the bottom can be the ladder to carry you back up. And that was all beautifully expressed.

[B]

Yeah. And I think. I think another thing that Thomas was sort of suggesting at this idea of the sort of the one and the many, it seems like one way. And maybe part of the reason that a lot of people think that they don't like literature is that the instruction that they've received is they're sort of made to hunt down literary facts, right? And so they sort of collect these kind of clouds of observations. But then that's the end of it. I think. Of course, what's interesting is the deep pattern that emerges because you have observed these literary facts. I think as soon as you have your pulse on the authority and you realize, wait a minute, this is going somewhere, the literary facts become interesting. But I think they're only interesting because of this unity of this kind of this pattern that's deeper than the mere facts. For instance, to take one example from the book, I love the scene in Homer of the Shield of Achilles and this incredible thing. And it's really fun to kind of have the students go up to the dry erase board, the chalkboard, whatever you have, and try to draw it. Because at first they think, oh, okay, it must be in these types of layers. But then it dawns on everyone that this thing is actually moving, right? These characters are plowing their little corners of the bronze field, and as that goes by, it's turning into a sort of a darker metal before it turns around and comes back. And there are dances, and there are all the seasons, and there's war and there's peace and there's marriage and there's the sort of complete cycles of life, right? So this thing is, like, literally moving in a way. Homer's description is sort of greater than our very capacity to imagine it in our brains. Okay, that's interesting enough. Okay. But then all of a sudden, when it's given to Achilles. The response is, Homer says, is that it made Achilles grow angry, and it also made his fierce men, who were compared to wasp and other places, run away in terror.

[C]

Yeah. This beautiful thing gives greater potency to his capacity for killing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's also. And I don't know if this is something you dwell on when you're teaching that particular part of the Iliad, but it's also, though, I mean, the shield is not an Edenic sort of scene. I mean, but it's natural in the best sense of natural. It's all human activity. The arts of war, the arts of peace. All of it is on this shield. And all those arts of peace that Achilles himself will never be able to partake of.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And there's no indication that he feels anything about that one way or the other.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's. I think you and I are tracking on this. Absolutely. And my read is that what Achilles really wants is he wants the fullness of life. He wants the wholeness of life. He wants the simultaneous possession of the wholeness of life. Boethi is the definition of eternity. He wants peaceful old age in which he can be surrounded by his children's children, but he also wants the glory that comes from war. In some sense. He wants both the sort of glories of youth and the consolation of age. In other words, what Achilles finds himself almost sort of accidentally discovering. And, you know, there's background mythological information that explains why this is in his DNA, but what he discovers is that he. He's frustrated and broken and hurt at the very idea of mortality. He doesn't want to have to make a choice. He wants it all. He doesn't want to have to be human and sort of divided up into bits and pieces. He wants fullness and wholeness. And my read is that for a man who doesn't yet have access to philosophy or theology, Homer, this is how the poet does both philosophy and theology. But in the meantime, I'm sort of giving us this Achilles who finally sees. Yes, that's it. That's what I wanted. Right. And yet is denied it. It's an incredibly, I think, incredibly powerful moment. But we can only observe it going back to Thomas, sort of, you know, one of the many. We can only observe it if we're attentive to the individual literary facts, that we also can ask her this wonderful question, which the poet sort of prods us into asking. Wait a minute. Why such a strange reaction to such a beautiful thing? Anyway, so the book is a collection of those types of wonderful literary moments in which there's something curious happening, and then all of a sudden, the author, the poet, pokes us and says, why such an unusual reaction? And if we can begin to sort of formulate an answer to that, it sort of inspires these eu. Catastrophic moments or these falling inward moments, as I like to put it.

[A]

Mm. Mm. Yeah. When. When. When you talk about how most academic ways of approaching literature is sort of collecting literary facts, honestly, I would say that's. That's kind of the best of the worst. There's. There's worse things they do to the books too, but that's kind of the best of the bad things.

[B]

That's the best. Yeah, that's right.

[A]

The best. The literary facts. And, you know, I'm reminded of my own journey in the study of literature. And I was a. I was a strange student. This will surprise no one. And teachers either really loved me and loved my mind and the questions I asked, or they really, really found me annoying because I was the kid who was always asking, why does this matter? And I genuinely was not trying to be an annoying kid. I really wanted to know the answer, why did this matter? And I was always just so discouraged when they couldn't answer that. And I remember thinking, but you've devoted your life to this, and you can't articulate to me why it matters. And it was because I sensed it mattered and I couldn't articulate it. And even in the university, I would ask scholars, but, why does this matter? Why does this matter? And to their credit, they were not annoyed with me. I was a very, very good student, and they knew that I loved this, but they also could not answer the question, why does this matter? And I remember at one point saying, a professor. Because I was trying to decide if I was going to become an English professor. And I said, there's got to be more to this than just I like it. So I teach it and make other people listen to me because I like it. There has to be something more. And, you know, to answer that question was a lifelong journey, and I had to leave the academy. But, you know, that's. That's what this book is about, too. Why does it really matter? And it really matters because it's not just separate literary facts that are kind of interesting on their own, but there's an essential unity here that the world of literature, the universe of literature is tapping into. And you have these. You know, you describe it in the book as these. These flashes of lightning you know, these. And I always think of it as these moments when the veil is being pulled back and I just. I can have that flash of eternity. And I feel like literature and art just is such a window into those moments in a way that nothing else is.

[B]

Yeah, I. In a very similar terms to you, you say, why does this matter? And I always felt that my chief responsibility as a teacher was to answer the so what question. So you could say, like, hey, did you know that there's a technique in archaic poetry called the Ring composition? And in fact, it's present in book one of the Iliad? And, you know, and my students would also go, okay, so what? Why would I be interested? And so I think I sort of discovered early on that if I was going to be a good teacher, I'd have to always be prepared for the so what question. But that as I built up a rapport with my students and they knew I was going to get to the so what, they would listen to a couple more literary facts because they knew. Well, and then I also tried to do the service for them. Hey, I'm going to show you three facts. One, two, three. What do you think's going on there? And then all of a sudden, that was to try to try to give them. To try to bring them to that we mentioned our Casper, David Friedrich. But to bring them to that sort of precipice, lead them there and let them look out at it and let them sort of take a shot of sort of describing it, was, I think, an exhilarating and thrilling experience for them. I think a lot of people are better at literature than they know, but they just haven't had a master guide confirm their intuitions. Right. And so I think a good teacher in some sense goes along and says, exactly. And they go, really? I got there, like, absolutely. You know, you might want to, you know, explore that a bit more as you're articulating it, but your instincts are good. So I think a lot of people do this really well and just need a kind of inexperienced craftsman. Right. Kind of in an apprenticeship process to go you're on the right track, continue to develop those types of. Those types of intuitions.

[A]

Yep.

[C]

As you have, since you bring it up, you have been teaching now for a couple of decades, and as you've matured as a teacher, do you find you're better at anticipating the so what question before it arises, whether from, you know, the experience of teaching the same books several times or your knowledge of your students?

[B]

Yeah, I think so. I think at Some point, it's almost like brushing your teeth, right? If you ever notice it, you actually brush it in the exact same pattern every single day. Right, Good point. Yeah, but there are some sort of, like, habits which become so deeply internalized and habitualized. But I do think I have internalized the so what? The so what mentality. So that even when I'm articulating facts, I myself know exactly where we're going. Or sometimes I'll even just sort of, you know, begin with a, with a curiosity, right? Begin with a puzzle, and then I'll back up, give a couple of literary, you know, quote unquote, literary facts. But increasingly, what I try to do is allow my students to articulate the conclusion. You know, I've set all the objects on the table, right? I've told you why this matters. I've given you the puzzle. How do you think these patterns make sense? Because that eureka moment, eu catastrophic moment in which all of a sudden these things are not just isolated objects, but connected and form a pattern, I think is an extraordinary experience. And I think that's what gets people hooked on literature, right? That's what makes people feel empowered that, okay, this is something that is, A, worth doing and B, something that I actually have an innate capacity to do. I just, no one had ever told.

[A]

Me no, that's exactly right. And then, of course, you have to throw in too, for anybody who's been through the school system, they have to overcome a lot of bad, bad ways of reading and also even kind of a lack of confidence. Like, a lot of people will come out of school and think that literary interpretations are very arbitrary. And I guess I just don't have the thing right. It's just not for me. And of course I'm a, you know, I'm, I'm a disciple of Lewis and Tolkien and Northrop Fryne. So I believe very strongly it's the job of the teacher to teach you the language of literature. You know, to set that imaginative back cloth, to use Lewis's term, from the discarded image, you know, to help them then be able to have the eureka moment on their own. I completely agree with you. I, I, I, I'm always very careful to sort of be the tour guide that leads them all the way up, and I'm telling them everything they need to know. And then when we get to the precipice to look at the waterfall, I'm quiet. And then they have their moment. When you were teaching your Dostoevsky class for us a couple summers ago, I, I loved the metaphor you gave. And I've stolen it since then, shamelessly stolen it from you. But in a six week class on Dostoevsky, you spent five weeks on the background, which just sang to my heart like you cannot believe. Because I was like, yes, yes, this is how you do it. Correct. And then on the sixth day, you started off the class, you said, I've set up all the pieces, now we can play the game.

[B]

Yeah, some weird futuristic game of chess. Right? Okay. These are the pieces. These are. Yeah, yeah, I love it.

[A]

But, but it's a great metaphor because I think sometimes when a new reader approaches this old book, it's like trying to play chess and I don't even know how the pieces move. I don't, I don't have anything. And then you're kind of like, why does anybody find this fun? But, you know, it just, it just takes. I agree with you, absolutely. You need a guide. But people don't need to be discouraged by that. It just, it doesn't take that long for somebody who's knowledgeable to say, look, this is how this piece moved. This is how this piece moves. This is the end game. This is what they're trying to do now. Go have fun.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

You know, and dealing with some of these things myself in my own teaching. I, I don't have a perfect memory by any means, but I, I think I'm fairly good at remembering my own sort of sophomoric teenage reactions to certain books I was assigned and maybe using that memory to make a sort of devil's advocate case that I imagine, you know, my students might be approaching a book with. And my students are, I think most of them probably have a better attitude to their assigned reading than I do. But say, since I brought up the example of Madame Bovary earlier, there's so much in that book that should be boring. I was, you know, I was. Gore Vidal remarked on it. He admired the novel deeply and he said somewhere that I have no interest in adultery in small French towns in the 1840s or 50s as a, you know, theoretic subject of study. Nonetheless, though, Flaubert makes so much, so much of tedium, so much of ennui, boredom. All of these become humanly visible and almost, you know, make us experience them at secondhand ourselves in a way that, yeah, you actually can take an interest in not just Emma and her long suffering husband, but all of these other kind of petty, provincial, French, middle class bourgeois characters. And, yeah, anyway, I find observations like that kind of encouraging because, you know, or, but if we're just going to build our reading or the reading we assign over what I think interests me and my students, we're going to have a very small number of books to appeal to then. And it's kind of. Kind of sad.

[B]

That's right. Yeah. But the literary master makes us more interested in things that we had even known we could be interested in before.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

But then just that. Yeah. I mean, I think Flaubert's a great example. He just cast this magical spell and, you know, he could describe sort of, you know, like a ball of fruit, as if he's sort of like Cezanne, sort of like, you know, doing a still life painting, actually.

[C]

Yeah. I kind of do imagine, you know, the scenery he describes in kind of Cezanne terms. Yeah. That novel is kind of one, you know, 350 page still life in a lot of ways.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Maybe a whole gallery of still lifes. Right. And then. But then just that. I think that's exactly what we're trying to inculcate in and future lovers of literature is that kind of. That first of all, you have to have enough attentiveness and alertness of mind to notice that kind of stuff. Like, huh, wait a minute, he just described eating a bowl of apricots. And it was honestly kind of magical. So good. I wanted to reread that passage. What just happened? How did he do that? As soon as you ask that question, what just happened? How did he do that? You have sort of like set one foot into the world of literary criticism. Right. You are becoming. You are becoming a good reader because you're being sort. You're allowing yourself to be sensitive to those types of, you know, potent questions.

[A]

Absolutely. And, you know, that connects actually to Tolkien's idea of recovery. Right. Like being alive dulls our senses. We. We look at everything all the time. We can't see anymore. Right. And it takes art to help us to see things again that have been right under our nose the entire time.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

[A]

So something else you talk about a lot in this book is a favorite topic of mine. And I know a favorite topic of yours because you wrote an entire book on it, the medieval mind of C.S. lewis. But you pointed out that the liberal arts give us a pre modern cosmology. And that excited me for a number of different reasons. One was, I think I'm the kind of ornery person who thinks the way that you defend good things matters. And if you defend good things in the wrong way, you end up undermining the good thing. And so I get very annoyed at any kind of like utilitarian argument for the humanities. Right.

[B]

And we study Latin because it helps with SAT scores.

[A]

Precisely. You'll never see that on our website anywhere, ever. Ever. That's, that's, yeah, exactly. That's a nice aside. But that can't be the reason why, because there's lots of things that can help you with the sat, right? Why, why, why Latin? Why study a, you know, a 2000 year old dead language if that's all you want is an SAT score? And so I appreciated that there was no utilitarian argument here for the value of the liberal arts. And so many of the defenders of them end up being utilitarian, right. And thinking about, well, no, you read these books not so much of what's in the book, but because the book is good fodder for these other things, right? We can have critical thinking skills or we can learn how to write a good essay and argue our point and defend our point and, you know, or are we going to go into this old book and use it to make comments on our modern world or something? But you, you don't say any of that, which pleased me greatly. And instead you say that it shows us a pre modern cosmology. And so at the same time that you don't take a utilitarian approach, you also don't say that we're trying to get back to some imaginary golden age, right? So, so where, where do you land? Even though I know you have an entire chapter devoted to this. But yeah, why, why should I want a pre modern cosmology?

[B]

Well, I, I suppose, I mean, it's kind of like Lewis, you know, as Michael Ward's book Planet Narnia, Right, points out, is that it's seeming that Lewis sort of coded these Narnia books with a certain type of astrological atmosphere. Right. That the line in which in the wardrobe is jovial, it's kind of Jupiterian and Prince Caspian has sort of lots of sunlight in it. And you know, Planet Narnia tries to make the case obviously that there are these sort of, these different planetary flavors for the books. And you can ask, what are you doing, Louis?

[A]

Right.

[B]

Using medieval astrology to secretly guide your Christian readers. And his thought was that the medieval astrology, though perhaps broken, surpassed in some of its details, still possess within it certain kind of spiritual symbols which are too beautiful to be neglected. And thus they had to be recovered and they had to be recycled, they had to be reworked and they had to be represented, but that there are these spiritual symbols that the planets represented of, you could say, human psychological qualities which were elicited from their study of the natural world. And although the details of the natural world might have changed, those same sort of spiritual impulses are there. And thus Lewis felt the sort of the guardian of those things. So I think if you're asking the question why bother with the pre modern cosmos, why bother? I think it's because they knew something. They knew something really well. And I think, as I love to say that I think they were as good at inwardness, they're as good at interiority as we are good at tools and technology. We spend most of our time thinking about how to extend our power over objects, whereas I think they spent most of their time trying to think about how to become a holistic and whole person. And I think both of those things done properly are good pursuits. I think it's good to be a modern, and I think it's good to have scientific knowledge which has led to some technological power. I think what's bad about it? And when we begin to critique modernity, as I do in why Literature Still Matters, what's bad about it is when you pick one to the exclusion of the other. And so I suppose in that way trying to recover a world that might have got some of the details wrong in terms of the external environment or the natural environment, but pursued it in the sort of way which is still exemplary, right? I mean, it's like, you know, maybe you have your own kids now, right? And you disagree, or you're a teacher now, right? And you don't exactly model your 9th grade Latin teacher when you teach, but the very fact that you have something to begin with that then you can kind of, you know, refine and means that you've had the sort of gift of receiving a paradigm or an exemplar. And so I think in that way, I think the literature of a world, even with outdated quote, unquote, outdated science, is valuable, I think, especially because we've sort of abandoned a crucial element of being a human being which they were particularly good at, even if they didn't have the fullness of the picture. So I think it's this kind of exciting to be modern in that we have to be a little bold and very reverent at the same time. But we have to be reverent enough to recover the past in its strangeness, in its idiosyncratic nature. We have to work through the difficulty of its foreignness and its difference and not try to gloss it over, to make it into a kind of mirror of Narcissus in which we only see ourselves. And that's where the historical scholars, the guides, as you put it, Angelina, is crucial. But then we have to have just enough sort of boldness that once we've done that, we don't just say, oh, well, and then that's how it is, but we actually enter into a dialogue in which we have enough daring to raise our own little puny voices and suggest that we might be able to add a single melodic line to the. You know, to the. To this kind of like polyphony of history.

[C]

Yeah, I was going to say it would have been more relevant maybe a minute ago, but Lewis, I think, in the last chapter of the Discarded Image, comments that though we can never really enjoy the model of the universe that was commonly held by educated men and women in the Middle. Middle Ages the way that they did, he says that it might even be hard for us to sympathize with it because it seems to us, who are heirs of Romanticism, almost too elegant. But you can think of other things, not even things so vast as the cosmological system of a given period, but other instances of an almost kind of artificial elegance, which are still worth studying and still worth partaking, because for many reasons, perhaps, but they might have a civilizing influence on us. They might teach us greater patience in the use of our minds or other faculties. And maybe this is a really awkward comparison, but like the Japanese tea ceremony, it might not be something that you or I would want to sit in attendance in every day, nonetheless, to do so once, if we had the opportunity, we might profitably jump at that opportunity and emerge from it fuller, slightly fuller individuals in some surprising way. I don't know if that comparison made any sense at all, but I'm going to stick by it.

[B]

Well, it's something I desperately want to do. All of a sudden, writing it down. I know, right?

[A]

I'm like, oh, I don't know. I think that sounds amazing. I want to do a Japanese deserve this, you know. So when why Literature Still Matters came out, one of the early reviews called it the Abolition of Man for Our Time, which I think is spot on and exactly so. And this book is sort of getting a comparison to the Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers. How do you feel about that? How does. How does that fit? Do you think.

[B]

That. Well, that is definitely the sort of compliment that, you know, that you love to hear, right? That. The sort of comparison. Yeah, but I. I do Love it. And it seems like in the effort to make sort of two demands, right. A demand of the mind to analyze, to see, to label and then to put together. But then the sort of the effort of the heart as well, that we don't do these things sort of like merely as. We don't do these things merely as. It's not a Sudoku puzzle. Right. As you said, the utilitarian. Right. It's not something I do merely for utilitarian purposes. To keep myself sharp and to exercise my memory. Right. But there's also this aspect of trying to absorb it into myself. And that for Dorothy Serres, of course, that sort of dual. Dual movement that there are patterns that we can learn, you know, grammar, dialectic, rhetoric. But they're also particularly well favored for nourishing and for healing those particular sort of stages of life that we go through. So I think as sort of if literature as the exercise of both sort of use of the mind to discover. Right. To know, but also use of the heart to. To absorb and to grow. That I think is kind of a similar insight there.

[A]

Yeah, I think this book is really, really important. I'm very honored that we got to publish this book. I just, you know, one of the members of our Patreon, who is one of the cult classic readers of the first edition, she said he had me from the first paragraph. And. And it's true. Like, the way you talk about these things is the way that we talk about these things. And I'm. I'm glad this book has found a home with us. I would you, Mr. Banks, and your great announcer voice that you have, I would like you to read the table of contents. Let's really Wet people's appetite to get this book so.

[C]

Contents Preface to the Second Edition. What Is the World For? Or the Problem of Beauty. Introduction Deep Knowledge in a flat world. Chapter one. Eucatastrophe in Ithaca reading the Odyssey with Plato, C.S. lewis and J.R.R. tolkien. Chapter two. Why read old books? Recovering the buried past. Chapter three globalism, technology and Poetry. Can the Humanities Contribute Anything to the Modern World? Chapter four, Falling Upward Gothic Cathedral as Architecture of Contemplation. Chapter five Nostalgia for the Antiquity and Eternity and Oxford Authors Chapter 6 How to look at the World Like a Painter. The Purpose of art history. Chapter 7 Chatter and intellectual Fasting Dante on the Contemplative Life epilogue the 9 billion names of God.

[A]

I just got to say, on a practical note, how insanely difficult was it to revisit thoughts from 10 years ago?

[B]

Yeah, I think it's just one of those things where you think, well, that was, that was. That was me at that stage. And I'm going to respect the. The joy and the authenticity of that.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

But, yeah, otherwise I would just have to rewrite absolutely everything. Just click delete and start.

[A]

I don't think people realize what an intense struggle that is. I mean, I feel that way, even just about the podcast or the classes I do, that I could easily spend the rest of my life just redoing everything I've ever done. Because, yeah, I'm getting better at, you know, reading and explaining it and all of it. And yeah, I mean, I've had to make my peace with it by just treating everything I do as a work in progress. There it is. That's where I was at this moment.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's why, that's what I think. That's why I was most happy to add some new material and to add the piece of the 9 billion names of God in particular, because I think, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, being modern, being having a pre modern sensibility. Right. While also being modern. I think in that essay that's where I do the best of trying to actually bring together a vision of what humanities and the sciences united could look like. Right. That the sciences could complement the humanities and the humanities could guide the inquiry of sciences and we could reconstruct something like what our medieval and ancient ancestors had hoped to do with their learning, even with our modern tools. And in that way, I think that that epilogue might be the closest thing that we get to. So if you read Dorothy Sayers Lost Tools of Learning and got inspired by the idea of these, you know, not just a trivium, but that somehow the trivium could also be mapped onto the quadrivium. That mathematics, sciences and music could also be married in an interesting way. Such our ancestors thought.

[C]

Right.

[B]

With our linguistic and poetic skills. I think I'm most pleased with that essay as sort of presenting a contemporary vision of what trivium and quadrivium, of course, in our world, fatally divorced. Right. Could be reconciled if those things could be healed and the trivium and quadrivium could return to harmony after 200 years of being alienated from one another.

[A]

Absolutely. No, I loved the epilogue. And as you said, it really gets into the question of does the pre modern cosmology have any value for modernity? And I love that you wrestled with that question and answered it in a non utilitarian way, because utilitarian, ironically doesn't doesn't work. It's useless. Utilitarianism is useless. That's. That's the irony of it. It doesn't work. One of the things that strikes me all the time about conversations in the modern world is how much, not just the machine model we are, but how much of a computer model we are, that our minds default to thinking everything either has to be a 0 or a 1. We're in binary code, right? And so we put all these things in opposition that shouldn't be in opposition. And so even when it comes to something like pre modern cosmology or modernity, we think have a box that has room for one number. It's either a 0 or 1. And the answer is neither the 0 or the 1. You know what, Like Sir William Temple, right? We're standing on the shoulders of giants. And you know, if modernity has any value at all, it comes from the fact that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. And the modern impulse is to pretend there is no giant, to hate the giant, to beat up the giant, to kill the giant, you know, all the things. Instead of seeing that we're part of a long line here of people who've gotten some things really right and gotten some things really wrong. And we are in this very delusional state where we think we're the first civilization in the history of the world to get everything right. And the past has nothing to teach us.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I think the more you read old books sympathetically, then the more you think, wait a minute, I think they might have been better at this than we were. But again, I think you're smart in that it doesn't necessarily inspire a sense of abandoning those things that we've done so well, but of sort of supplementing ourselves with the wisdom of the past. And I think that's what. Yeah, I think that's how I see the very process of education. That it's the task perhaps ultimately impossible for any one human being in any age. Right. But it's the task of re remembering all of those things which are necessary to make us human. And I cannot do it entirely by myself. Hence, this is where sort of communities of friendship enter in. Thus I'm glad that other people have done a particularly good job of recovering other aspects of what it means to be human. And in this kind of community of learning, which is what college is supposed to be.

[A]

Right.

[B]

On a sort of like most etymological level, then we can kind of reconstruct this fullness of the beautiful and depth of the human experience. But in that case, we don't have to reject that which we're good at. We just have to supplement those things that our sleepy world has forgotten.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

What you said just reminds me of. There's that line from. I think it's from his letters. Andre Gide. Everything worth saying has already been said, but because nobody was listening, we shall have to say it all over again. Brilliant.

[A]

And that is why we publish books.

[B]

As a one sentence summary of what I'm trying to do.

[A]

Yes, we are very excited about this book, Jason, and thank you for coming on the podcast today to talk about it with our listeners. And so if you're wondering at home, where can you get this, you can go to our website, cassiodorespress.com and pre orders for Falling Inward will be open this week. And while you're there, you can pick up a copy of why Literature Still Matters. You can pick it up in print or ebook or audiobook, which was read by you. You did a fabulous job.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

How was that bizarre experience of reading your own book?

[B]

You know what? There had been enough time between when I had written it and when I read it that it was just going to sound ultra narcissistic, that I actually really enjoyed it.

[A]

No, it doesn't sound narcissistic. I know exactly what you're talking about.

[B]

I kept finding myself going, whoa, nice point.

[A]

Yeah, no, exactly. It's so strange because in all fairness.

[B]

To myself, though, I had forgotten that I had written it.

[A]

It's so true, though. And I think anybody who writes know this is true, that it becomes separate from you after a while. Not at first. At first, when anything I finish that I've been working on a really long time. I hate it and never want to see it again, ever. I want to forget I ever wrote it. And then. That's right enough time goes by and you pick it up and you're like, oh, wait, hey, hey.

[B]

Yeah, this guy wasn't as dumb as I thought he was.

[A]

Yeah, right. No, that doesn't sound narcissistic at all. That's the full circle journey of the writer. Right? Thank God. Thank God that's what you thought. And not. Holy cow, cow. Can I just.

[B]

Why am I doing this? Yeah, no, so, I mean, maybe some of that enjoyment actually comes through, right? Like. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember this argument. Yeah, this is a good.

[A]

Yeah, you're applauding yourself while you're reading it. Yeah. Go you.

[B]

I don't know if this is helping anything.

[A]

Yeah. All right, you guys can pick all of that [e-mail] you can also go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to get your ticket for the conference and hear Dr. Baxter talking there as well. And as well as us. Stick around. At the end of this podcast, Mr. Banks is going to have a special poem to read for us. And next week we'll be back with a best of episode. It'll be Dr. Vegan Garoiren to talk about fairy tales and children's literature and also reminder that we're going to be doing a Q and A and Ask Us Almost Anything episode this summer. And so you can start submitting your questions for us. You know, email Atley or post it on Facebook or Discord and we'll see your questions there. So thanks again, Jason. This has been fun as always. We love talking to you and thank you for making time before you flee the country for yet another European adventure.

[B]

That's right, stuck in Florence for the whole spring.

[A]

Don't die this time. For anybody who's don't die this time. That's a tease. Don't almost die this time. For anybody who's read why Literature Still Matters, you'll get that joke about it's very dangerous when Jason goes exploring and wandering.

[B]

Yeah, hopefully this will just be. This would be a nice, safe, boring trip of lots of museums and paintings.

[A]

Lots of water, you know, keep you hydrated.

[B]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Lots of wine.

[A]

All right, well, thanks so much. And guys, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[C]

The passions that we've fought with Death by Trumbull Stickney the passions that we fought with and subdued never quite die in some maimed serpent's coil they lurk, ready to spring and vindicate that power was once our torture and our Lord.