Chapter 138: Maria Popova mines meaning in marginalia

Listen to the chapter here!

Maria:

Right now, what I'm very troubled by is this whole thing about cultural appropriation. Without appropriation, there could be no learning. I find identity the least interesting thing about people.

I don't think fear is the litmus test that is bad for you because we fear change.

Maria:

The question is accessing yourself on the other side of the fear, and then telling, is this a way to grow or is this a way to suffer now? Hope is the antidote to fear in bearing our future.

Neil:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 138 of 3 Books.

Neil:

Happy Buck Moon everybody. Did you know every single full moon has a name? This one's called the Buck Moon because it's when deer start...

I was gonna say horns. No, they aren't growing horns. They're growing antlers.

They're growing antlers, so they have named the moon the Buck Moon. Apparently in Cree, it's also called the Feather Molting Moon, or you can also refer to as the Summer Moon if you want, or the Thunder Moon, or the Halfway Summer Moon from the Anishinaabe tribe. Okay, different tribes with different names.

Raspberry Moon, say the Algonquins. Month of the ripe corn moons, says the Cherokee. I love getting deep into all these full moon names, but I just love the fact that, you know, whenever that moon is perfectly ripe and full.

For 22 straight years, from 2018, six years ago, we started the show, all the up to 2040 when we're done. When I'm in my 60s, it's hard to believe, but I will be in my 60s then, we are gonna have an ad-free, commercial-free, interruption-free conversation about books that changed people's lives. And I want to just say, you know, I don't say it often enough, I think maybe one or two chapters a year, I kind of make a point in saying I'm gonna do it now, I just want to say, thank you, thank you.

You know, when you start to focus your passions and interests on areas that not many people share, you know, like just reading books, long conversations with inspiring people about literature, you're gonna lose most of the world there. But that's partly why I find it so incredulous and heartwarming to have found this sacred three-books community. If you're listening right now, you are part of it, you are a three-booker, I am a three-booker, we are hanging out together talking about books, and I know the show is doing well, because I get all the spam.

You know, one way you know you're doing well is when you get lots and lots of spam. I get spam saying, you are one of the top 0.5% of all podcasts in the world. There must be some site that ranks all shows so they can see the downloads.

So, you know, on one hand, that's wonderful, we're a busier, bigger podcast than 99.5% of podcasts in the world, right? On the other hand, there's five million podcasts, there's a lot of pockets. There were two million when I started in 2018, and now there are over five million today, which means if you're in the top 0.5%, you're one of 250,000 podcasts. But I also just generally love the increasing splintering of interests in the world. Don't you love the super, super, super, super niche? The super, super, super, super, super detailed?

That is definitely, those are definitely the pathways that our guest today, Maria Popova, has in spades. I love Maria. I can't wait to introduce you to her if you don't know her already.

But before I do, let's do a letter of the chapter. You know, I like to read a letter of the chapter, and if I read your letter on the air, you get a free book. Just email me your address.

I don't know, I'll mail you a book. The way to send us letters is, of course, through leaving a review anywhere, you know, anywhere, all the giant digital platforms, Apple, Spotify, wherever. Comment on YouTube is good, or sending us an actual letter.

Mailing us an actual letter. My address is on 3books.co. My email address is also on 3books.co. I don't care if it's painted out front, you know, for everybody seeing out. I don't care that much about that stuff.

It's just getting letters. Sharing the love of the community. This one starts with an all caps, Neil, N-E-I-L, with five exclamation marks underneath it.

Part of it reads. It's a beautiful, long three pages. I'm just going to read part of it.

Okay, Leah from Huntsville, Alabama. I hope that's okay right now. It says, thank you.

3 Books has made me a better version of myself. I have learned so much about who I am through the conversations that I'm part of because of you, the person I have kept stifled for so many years. I tell everyone about 3 Books, friends, colleagues, strangers.

I struck up a conversation with, I even had a dream once that I saw someone in a coffee shop with a 3 Books tattoo and I struck up a conversation with them. There are so many things I love about 3 Books. It's impossible for me to list them all.

One thing is certain. I have read more now and my selections are much more diverse. I have even gotten my 19 year old son to start reading again.

I have always been fascinated by the moon. So the fact that 3 Books falls, the lunar calendar, it gives me just one more reason to look up and be delighted by its glow. Many of my formative books are already on the top 1000, but I will leave you with a series that I enjoyed as a child.

And I purchased for my child when he was little. It is called Mrs. Piggle Wiggle by Betty McDonald. Okay, Leah, consider an order.

I'm going to order Mrs. Piggle Wiggle right now. The letter continues. I was introduced to the series by my third grade teacher, Ms. Keith, she would read these stories aloud on Friday afternoons using student names in place of the characters, a delightful teacher that made learning exciting and fun keeping awesome. Neil farewell until the next chapter. Leah Leah from Huntsville, Alabama. Thank you so much for the letter.

Leah dropped me a line so I can mail you a signed book and I just love the shadow also to third grade teachers who read, you know, education, uh, needs more reading time and needs more quiet reading time. Everyone brings a book and reads and the teacher teaches you how to do that because everyone just kind of lies on the carpet. They kind of fall asleep.

And I love the teachers that tell you it's okay to fall asleep while you're reading, you know, shout out to those teachers. Anyway, if we, if you like hanging out as we do at the front of the show a little bit, then stick all the way to the end. We have the end of the podcast club.

I play your voicemails to 1-833-READALOT, read letters, talk about the etymology of an interesting word said by the guests of the show. We geek out, we have fun together. So I'll talk to you at the end of the show too.

What's going to happen in the middle is we are going to hang out with the one and only Maria Popova. I am so excited to have Maria on the show. Maria doesn't really do interviews.

Like if you go to her site, you click on interviews, you type Maria Popova podcast interview, there aren't any, like she just doesn't do interviews. She, she, she, she really is wonderfully available on her epic one woman labor of love that is themarginalian.org. Oh, let me tell you a little bit about Maria.

So Maria Popova was born in communist Bulgaria and emigrated to the U S six days after her 19th birthday back in 2003, she studied at the university of Pennsylvania after quote, being sold on the liberal arts promise of being taught how to live. end quote, did it work? Well, yes and no, she spent her family's life savings in the first few weeks on textbooks and despite attending an American high school in Bulgaria, found herself in a state of culture shock.

Quote again, I mean, fitted sheets brunch. That's a quote from her from the Brooklyn magazine podcast where she was interviewed. Now Maria worked hard, a very defining Popova characteristic, sometimes eating store brand canned tuna and oatmeal three times a day to get by.

I figured it was the most nutritious combo for the cheapest amount. She said at one of her jobs in 2006, a senior leader started sending out a Friday email of assorted miscellany to provoke innovation and I don't know how well they did, but I do know Maria took the project over and did it much better, weaving together writeups and seemingly unrelated topics like Danish pod homes, the evolution of the Pepsi logo and the nonprofit ad campaign, uh, fighting malaria, a nonprofit ad campaign, fighting malaria. These are, these are three of like the earliest posts I could find. Maria's emails got popular, got really popular.

So instead of just sending it to more and more people, like send it to my dad, send it to my cousin, send it to my friend. She actually taught herself programming in one of those kind of oatmeal and tuna can days, save up the $400 to do the night course in programming. And then she put it online on a website called brain pickings.org.

You have probably heard of brainpickings.org. It is one of the most popular sites on the entire internet. Now dubbed The Marginalian. Let's not call it brain pickings anymore. Let's call it The Marginalian. I was personally blogging every night, uh, from 2008, 2012 on my website.

1000 awesome things. I only lasted four years doing that. But so many times I remember I'd be researching some arcane bit of trivia and Google would toss me over to Maria say, I came to love the site, which at the time had a top of the page tagline.

I don't want Maria to grimace, but you know, if your past self doesn't make you grimace, you know, I guess you aren't growing, right? But the tagline resonate with me and it resonates with me still now. It said a scan of the mind boggling, the revolutionary and the idiosyncratic.

I love that. And sort of like my own blogs about page. This one on her site did not reveal.

I don't know. It was a hurry even the author's name, face, or identity. And like, again, if you click the thousand things about what you said, thousand things is a time ticking countdown of a thousand things.

That's it. It's like, was it just because the internet was more chat room anonymous or was it before, you know, Twitter and all these social media sites forced us to plug in our real names because you know, you can't advertise to non-entities, right? They realize that you get more ad revenue when you have a real name.

I remember the day Twitter sent me a note saying, you cannot be called a thousand awesome things anymore on Twitter. We have to know your real name and your birthday. We don't, we, if we don't know what target market you slip into, we can't feed you the right ads.

Well, that's why probably me and Maria never met back then, even though we were both kind of big bloggers back in the blogger heyday. However, despite the fact that I tapped out doing daily blogging four years later, Maria is still going a full 18 years later, 18 years later, still blogging almost every day. George Saunders, our guest in chapter 75 calls Maria Popova and says Maria Popova manifests abundant wit, intelligence and compassion in all of her writings.

Krista Tippett, host of On Being, calls Maria a cartographer of meaning in a digital age and the library of Congress has even included The Marginalian.org in their permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials. I agree with the accolades. And I find Maria her blog, The Marginalian.org and her wonderful books, Figuring, which I read and love the snail with the right heart picture book, which is wonderful and a velocity of being an eight year project to kind of galvanize these interesting artists from around the world on like writing the letter to the 12 year old child that like wants to know more about books and she's just pulling out exquisite beauty that reflects everything that makes life great.

And like this show, like 3 Books, her site, The Marginalian. has remained free and ad free. She's got no staff, no interns, no assistant, and it has remained in her words, a thoroughly solitary labor of love. That is also my life and my livelihood.

You don't need me to tell you that the world can feel heavy. It can feel intense. It can feel overwhelming.

Think about what media politics and the news kind of does to us. It pulls us away from those harder to measure things that make life wondrous and that is where Maria comes in. She comes to rescue us, to point our attention towards the turn of phrase in a poem, a forgotten piece of advice from Ralph Waldo Emerson on trusting ourselves or to provide a close reading with some stunning artwork of a hundred year old picture book that illuminates one of those impossible to articulate emotions that we all know and feel.

I absolutely loved this conversation with the much requested Maria Popova on a wonderfully wide ranging set of topics, including of course, her three most formative books. Are you ready, everybody? Let's flip the page into chapter 138 now.

Hi, Maria.

Maria:

Hi, Neil.

Neil:

Oh, it is such a pleasure to have you on 3 Books. You are a joy. You are them.

You are maybe the most bookish person we've ever had on the show. I'm so thrilled to have you.

Maria:

Oh, my goodness. I love your project. I love the spirit of it.

I love the seriousness with which you take it. And it is a joy to be here.

Neil:

Oh, thank you so much. Well, we were introduced, of course, by Debbie Millman, our guest back in chapter 97 of 3 Books, who you have written so lovingly about in many places I actually really I pulled out to kind of kick off our conversation, your wonderful afterward that you wrote in her 2021 book, Why Design Matters. There are I want to ask you kind of what makes a good conversation or a good interview.

Neil:

And I thought I might read back to you a couple of phrases you included in that afterward you say

Maria:

Please do because I confess I have no recollection of writing this and Debbie has been a part of my life for more than a decade. And God knows how many things I have no memory of this particular one.

Neil:

Well, it's too bad because it's just a brilliant piece of writing. You say the interview is a curious cultural artifact by design, a consensual humbly of future abashment, etching into the common record who we were at a particular state of being with particular enthusiasms animating our minds and particular sorrows gnawing at our hearts. You continue an interview petrifies us in time then lives on forever.

The thoughts of bygone selves quoted back to us across the eons of a personal evolution, a strange and discomposing taxidermy diorama of life that is no longer living. And finally, the phrase that I want to use as a baton to pass it back to you. You say a great interview is a fixity that hints at a fluidity and contours a continuity.

Maria:

So, well, I mean, I agree with all of that. I, you know, the reason I personally don't really do many interviews is precisely this awful straitjacket feeling of being trapped in a version of yourself that you once were that somehow becomes this fossil in the museum of culture that is, you know, continually revisited even though you've outgrown it. It's interesting, though, because in a way, I mean, we're going to be talking about books.

And in a way, the self is a kind of book that is constantly being reread and rewritten by the person living with it, you know. And I think a great book you reread is rereadable. You revisit many times and each time you bring a different self to it.

And so it's a different book. And with the self, too, I just. I don't know.

I am such a fan of not a fan. I'm such a believer in the fact that the self is this narrative structure that we create as we live in order to feel coherent to ourselves. But it's so important to to keep outgrowing those past self.

Right.

Neil:

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I love that the interview being a fossil in the museum of culture.

The self being a kind of book. And then since we're starting the conversation, we're starting an interview, one that you and I really appreciate you doing this because I know you don't do many because I went and searched for you on podcasts. And of course, what comes up are the 10 year old conversations you've had with Tim Ferriss.

But, you know, you say a great interview is a fixity that hints at a fluidity and contours a continuity. And so you I know you consume a lot of interviews. I know you listen to a lot of them.

What makes a great one?

Maria:

Hmm. Honestly, I used to. I don't right now.

My life has become much more introverted over the years, much more kind of. I don't consume much contemporary stuff, to put it that way, including podcasts and interviews. But the ones that have always spoken to me, whether they were conducted, you know, this month or a century ago, have an element of a conversation with a person who is a self, but is able to touch on things that reach beyond the self that are universal, that endure, that will survive them.

Which is, of course, what a great book does, too.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah, I like that. I appreciate that.

And thank you. I guess I was I'm quoting probably an old interview of you where I heard you talking about the podcast you listen to. But I love that you don't listen to a lot of contemporary stuff.

And, you know, before we jump into your three most formative books, I did pull out a number of quotes that you have said or written about writing or reading. And so, I mean, I have two pages of them, but I thought I could maybe use three of them to kick off the conversation. I'm going to present them to you.

You can expand, explain, elucidate them as you see fit or our guest in Chapter 75, George Sonder says you could also deny them. I know you're a George Saunders fan, so I thought I'd mentioned that funny phrase.

Maria:

I love George Saunders. Oh, my God. The living are not my forte, but of the living writers, I just what a creature.

Maria:

What an incredible writer. What a beautiful human being.

Neil:

Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, we're speaking the same language.

Yeah, he is just an incredible heart and mind. So a few quotes that you have said about reading. First off, I'm going to start with your one that you've said many times.

So I know it's a repeat for you. But just to give our listeners a little context, you say literature is the original Internet.

Maria:

Yes. Yes, of course. Every every allusion in a piece of writing is a kind of hyperlink to some other thing outside it. Right. Some idea or prior book. Every footnote is a hyperlink.

But it's really, you know, if if the Internet is the original or literature is the original Internet. The mind is the original literature, because that's just how our minds work. There are these meshes of association, and it's impossible to tell any story without those fractal branches that touch on other stories.

Neil:

Yes, yes, the mind is the original literature. Yes, I love that.

Maria:

Well, of course, in our technologies of thought will always mirror the structure of the mind. I mean, literature is just the technology of thought and feeling. It's supposed to be an analog.

Neil:

Oh, that's beautiful. And so obvious once I hear you say it. But yes, yes, yes.

Unbelievable. Here's another quote that you said if I quoted you properly. The very notion of intellectual property is so bizarre.

The law is taxing our cultural understanding of authorship. Semicolon, it is not conducive to evolving it.

Maria:

Oh, I see what I was trying to say, I think.

Maria:

Which is basically this notion of originality, right? That that we are constantly borrowing consciously or unconsciously ideas, impressions from other sources, combining them, recombining them into what we call our own creations. But of course, creativity is just this combinatorial thing.

It's a mosaic of pieces that we pick up because nobody born with knowledge. And in fact, in recent years, so I must have said this some years ago and all the kind of commons, creative commons and all that stuff was happening. But right now, what I'm very troubled by is this whole thing about cultural appropriation.

Because when you think about, I mean, education, right? Learning, that is appropriation. You are literally taking in somebody else's knowledge and incorporating it into your corpus of knowledge and calling it your own.

That is what it means to learn anything, right? And so without appropriation, there could be no learning. Right.

And out of that comes everything we create. Everything we create comes out of the library and the mind that we hold. And that library comes from somewhere.

I mean, nobody's born with it, right? So we have become ourselves by appropriating pieces of knowledge, experience, impression, influence.

Neil:

And anyway, I just think it's the fundamental like behavior of the mirror neurons in our brain.

Maria:

Exactly.

Neil:

And I, yeah, and there was a dot, dot, dot. And that quote was just to fill it in for people listening. You had said property ownership is a very antiquated way to think about our sharing culture, which is how we actually interact with ideas.

So exactly as you had expanded on it. And then one last quote, well, I got two more, but here's one. You said, I have a tattoo on my right arm that I see every day that reminds me what to focus on.

And I thought this was interesting because I, of course, looked up a photo of you, tried to find the tattoo, found this one with a series of 20 to 30 dark concentric circles around a word I couldn't read and the phrase what to focus on on top.

Maria:

So here's a little instruction for you to not read decade old interviews because that has since been covered up.

Maria:

And in fact, in fact, I mean, I think it's funny, but it's also poignant because tattoos are such an emblem of this tension. We're always living with the illusion of continuity of self, this ridiculous idea that what you like and want at a point in time will endure until the day you die. And we are so internally persuaded at the time.

Of course, that's why people make marriage vows. I mean, they believe them, you know? But the fact that most tattoos and that is a statistic, most tattoos people get either removed or covered up is just the ultimate concrete embodied testament to how inconstant the self is, how much it evolves.

And in fact, I think if we're not, I see this often to younger friends, if we're not a little bit embarrassed of the people we used to be, we're kind of not doing it right.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, I can't even listen to the first five years of this podcast, but I'm sure I can't, won't be able to listen to this in a few years.

And I've never got a tattoo. And when people ask me why, I say, I don't know what I would, I don't know what I would like forever. I always say that, you know, so it's just to that exact point.

Maria:

Well, you're ahead of the common curve of enlightenment there.

Neil:

Well, I don't know. I know you're making me feel that way now. And then the story, the only last phrase on reading that I wanted to pull up because it is also the title of a book you put together that took you eight years where you collected essays from people like Neil Gaiman and Jane Goodall and Yo-Yo Ma.

And you paired them with art created by people like Debbie Milliman and Oliver Jeffers is the title of the book you put out was called A Velocity of Being. And I would just ask you to expand on that phrase for us in regards to reading.

Maria:

So these are not essays, they're letters. They're letters to children. So I asked, I think it's 121 people, interesting, original people from all walks of life, musicians, writers, artists, philosophers, to write to children about why we read, what it does for us and how it shapes the life and so forth.

And the title comes from just phrases from two of the letters. One was by Pamela Paul, who was at the time the editor of New York Times Book Review talking about literature and reading as a state of being. And the other one is from Jan 11, who's an astrophysicist and a writer writing about reading where the wild things are to her young son and the velocity of the story.

And the velocity of the boy's attention. And so I combined the two and I thought that was a perfect phrase for what reading at its best, literature at its best feels like. It is a velocity of being.

Neil:

I just loved that phrase so much, A Velocity of Being. A wonderful way for us to begin with a little series of appetizers of Maria Popova's quotes on reading. Before we jump into her three slash four, most formative books.

For each book, Maria, that you've given us, I will take a few seconds to try to describe the book to our listeners as if they're holding it in a bookstore. And then I'm going to ask you to tell us about your relationship with it. And then I have a few follow-up questions for each one.

Maria:

Okay, but let me say something first because you said to pick books that feel important to my life right now.

Maria:

Formative is a different matter because the books that formed me when I was 20 were very different. So I picked things that are very meaningful to me as I am living my life right now. But I would be wary of calling them formative.

Neil:

Okay, that's fine. I appreciate that context. And it kind of relates to the tattoo conversation, right?

As I dug up and unearthed many places where you talk about books, I came across these titles occasionally and many others in many different ways. And I'm sure if we had a reconnection down the road, there would be other titles. And that is the sort of way of the world and the way of the show.

So yeah, it's a bit of a gimmicky premise, but I was modeling it a bit after Desert Island Discs, right? But for books. And so in a sense, it was kind of like, I just didn't want to ask people, what are your three favorite books?

I just wanted to ask them, in some sense, what has stuck with you, right? And people can interpret that as they will. Should be noted by the way that when I emailed Edward Packard, the creator of Choose Your Own Adventure, this question, what are your three most formative?

He wrote back a list of about 20 questions asking to me to clarify that question.

Maria:

Yes, of course. I appreciate it. It implies a chronology, right?

Because when you actually think about what's most formative to a person's mind and imagination, everyone has to say children's books, whatever was read to them early in life, those are the first impressions we received. So technically, those are the most formative.

Neil:

Right, right, right. Just by definition of being, yeah, kind of enabling a worldview that you don't even can, you might not even be able to perceive anymore. Right.

Okay. Well, we'll go with the ones that have stuck with you today and the ones that you carry with you now.

Maria:

One of which is a children's book.

Neil:

One of which is a children's book. But let us begin with, if we don't mind, let's begin with Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. So this book was originally published in 1855, but continued to be expanded.

Maybe hinting at our conversation so far until a ninth edition was published on his deathbed in 1892. Many covers on this one, the original one had no author name or publisher name, just to steal engraving of Whitman himself as the frontispiece, if I'm saying that phrase, right? My 1994 used everyman edition is a painting of Whitman with a long white beard and a straw hat with crisscross suspenders and a rowboat.

So there's many different covers of Leaves of Grass, but you can picture whichever one you want. Walt Whitman is an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist who lived from 1819 to 1892, often considered the most influential American poet and the father of free verse. After working as a clerk, teacher, journalist, and laborer, he wrote his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, pioneering free verse poetry and a humanistic celebration of humanity.

So it focuses on his philosophy of life and humanity and praises nature and the individual human's role on it. Rather than focusing on religious or spiritual matters, Leaves of Grass focuses primarily on the body and the material world. The poems do not rhyme or follow standard rules for meter and line length.

He chose his idealized self as the subject of the book. For Dewey Decimalhead's out there, you can file this one to 811.3 for literature slash American poetry slash middle 19th century. Maria, please tell us about your relationship with Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

Neil:

Yes, wonderful. Just one little footnote. Elizabeth Barrett Browning kind of pioneered free verse a decade before Whitman was born.

Maria:

So I would be wary of giving him credit for that one. But he was a pioneer in so many other ways. And even the Francis Beast you mentioned in the original edition up to that point, poets were pictured, you know, buttoned up under starched shirts and looking all serious.

And there he is with his unbuttoned peasant-like sexy stance, his hipscocked, his straw hat. I mean, nobody had done that before in poetry. And it's very consonant with the spirit of the book, which is the challenge what a poet is and what a poet is tasked with being.

I am a latecomer to poetry. I dismissed it for the reasons that people dismiss anything, which is that they are not literate in it. They don't understand it.

We are wired to discount what we do not understand. And I was very lucky to meet a wonderful woman named Emily Levine, who is a philosopher of science, comedian, incredible poetry lover who had gone to school for poetry. And we met across the aisle on the transatlantic flight.

And we became great friends. She was in her 70s. I was in my 20s.

And she opened my world to poetry. She educated me, essentially. And eventually, after she died, I made my way to Leaves of Grass.

In part because, I mean, it is very consonant with my orientation to the world. It's very much about the exuberance of life and meeting reality on its own terms, and decentralizing the human from the natural world. But I also loved the kind of meta-layered that the fact that Whitman basically spent his entire life rewriting Leaves of Grass.

So by the deathbed edition, it had quadrupled in size. He had expanded many of the poems. He had purified them in a way, making them more authentically himself.

For example, in the early edition, he had some female pronouns in the love poems, then to change them to male pronouns, which is also what Emily Dickinson did, by the way. And I just love the idea that Leaves of Grass is essentially a field guide to how to be a living poem in your life.

Neil:

Oh, that's interesting. A field guide to how to be a living poem.

Maria:

I mean, he was one, right? Whitman was a living poem. And the book was just the byproduct of his personhood.

I do this little ritual that I learned from someone. So I started as a side project when I was become a very big part of my life. I do this show called The Universe Inverse, which is now actually a book, where I trojan hoarse some serious science into people's lives through poetry.

So I tell stories from the history of science, about different discoveries, and phenomena, and then I invite different people to read a poem that somehow illustrates whatever I'm talking about scientifically. So one year, I had invited a lovely man named John Cameron Mitchell, who's a musician and kind of musical guy. He created Hedwick and the Angry Inch, the musical.

And I had asked him to read a Whitman poem. And so he gets up on stage and he says, I'm going to do a Whitman divination. And he calls out to the audience to ask a question, any question.

And from the side, one of the other performers, the poet Marie Howe, was kind of the Whitman of her time. She had just lost a friend and she calls out, how do you live brokenhearted? So John takes leaves of grass and kind of rolls the pages like a card deck and opens to random pages with his eyes closed, lets his finger fall in a random verse.

So that's apparently what a Whitman divination is and reads that verse. And it was the most perfect, succinct, timeless consolation for Marie's question. So every year on my birthday, I perform a Whitman divination for myself where I ask the most urgent, restless question that is on my mind.

And I do that kind of shuffle the pages with my eyes closed and open to random page and my finger falls in a verse. And Neil, every time, whatever Whitman has to say is the perfect answer. And there's nothing mystical about this.

This is really just a testament to what a great poem does, which is that it comes from a very personal place. If you wrote those poems from some extremely personal region of experience, then it zooms way out to the universal so that it's broad enough to be a perfect answer to pretty much any question. But then somehow, it gives you back, you the reader back something deeply precise and personal out of the universal.

And that's so hard to do. That is what a great poem does.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. That's unbelievable. I had that feeling, I will say, like the way I read Leaves of Grass was I've kept flipping it.

I mean, I kept flipping it open. I kept flipping it open and finding random poems, finding random lines and reading them and feeling the resonance. And then I wouldn't read the next one.

I would just flip it open again, you know, and kind of jump in and out that way.

Maria:

This is to this notion of being a living poem. Maybe I would love to read to the little fragment of the long preface, prose preface, to the original edition, which is one of my favorite pieces of writing of all time. There's a little paragraph where he talks about what this will give you.

May I read it?

Neil:

Oh my gosh, please. Anytime you want to read to us, we will say yes.

Maria:

Great. So he writes, This is what you shall do. Love the earth and the sun and the animals.

Despise riches. Give alms to everyone that asks. Stand up for the stupid and crazy.

Devote your income and labor to others. Hate tyrants. Argue not concerning God.

Have patience and indulgence toward the people. Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men. Go freely with powerful, uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families.

Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life. Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book. Dismiss whatever insults your own soul and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Neil:

Wow. There's so much there to take in and to feel.

Maria:

Probably the best instruction on life that I know. This little fragment of the 1855 preface.

Neil:

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I love the way you call and piece together lines and people from all over the place. I saw a gift you have that you do so well on The Marginalian. I thought I might bring a question in here from Seth Godin for you specifically. I heard you call. And yeah, I heard you say in the 2015 interview to almost 10 years old again on on being where you said you love his mind.

And so I reached out to him and I said, you know, this Maria picked leaves of grass by Walt Whitman. Do you have a question for her? And he writes to you, Maria is one of the smartest, coolest, most erudite people I know.

She's indefatigable if I said that right in her pursuits of knowledge and dignity and she does streb. Streb, that's nuts. She does her work without ever dumbing down the work.

I guess if I have a question, it is, is a passion for art projects a skill? Or is it something we're born with? If it is a skill, how do we teach it to others?

And side note, I'd also like to know what's streb is.

Maria:

Streb is Elizabeth Streb, who's a kind of hardcore choreographer, has a studio. In Brooklyn, that half of it is her dance studio and the other half, which is the half I do is trapeze, flying trapeze. So I have taken off flying trapeze.

Yeah, that is a wild card for me too. But it is one of the most profound, joyful, existential things I have ever done. Anyway, this side, well, nothing's to the side of anything.

Everything's one thing. Okay, the question is a passion is passion for our skill. Yeah, it's interesting that he says the passion for art is that the skill?

So the he's not saying the making of art because there's a whole region of reality between having the passion for something and putting it into the world, right? I think the passion to create this drive, this life force is hardwired in us. It is part of our drive for connection.

And we create as a kind of hand outstretched in the dark for another hand. And that's why anyone makes anything, I think. So I think the passion is completely there.

It might get covered up by conditioning, by fear, by people telling you you're not allowed or you're not worthy or no one wants to hear from you. Those are superimposed over the thing that's already there. I think the teachable part is how to own your passions, in a practical sense, make them a priority, which is the prerequisite for making them a reality.

And in a psychological sense, how to give yourself the self-permission to pursue them. And those things can be teachable.

Neil:

How to give yourself permission, how to make space for them, how to see that you have that internal artist inside you. You said it matter of factly, but a lot of people, of course, would not see themselves as someone who is passionate or connected to the arts, although I agree with you in the statement.

Maria:

Well, I mean, I use art and the broadest, broadest, broadest definition there is, which is leaving something of sweetness and substance in the world.

Neil:

Oh, I like that. Art is leaving something of sweetness and substance in the world.

Maria:

And my mind seems to the point about appropriation. As I was saying this, I was like, this sounds like a poem. I think this might be, it might have imprinted me from a line from an Annabelle Kaufman poem.

Maybe called Cold Solace. I might be paraphrasing, but anyway, it's just such an interesting meta-observation of the mind, literally doing the thing I was talking about.

Neil:

Oh, yeah, that's beautiful.

Maria:

It took something and appropriated in the context of my own experience and understanding.

Neil:

I also just want to point out for people that have not visited The Marginalian, which was of course called Brain Pickings for the first 15 years now. I believe that you're in your 17th year as a marginalian. You know, it has, oh, 18th now, and it has pop-ups.

But of course, the pop-ups on your site are poems. I thought you could use a poem today. It's a beautiful way to kind of interject and go against the grain of what is so normal on internet behavior, which is like getting pummeled with ads and skipping and waiting for the countdown to get to two seconds.

It's nice to just be interjected with a poem. I thought I'd also ask you on Whitman about queer culture. Walt Whitman was called by the advocate, a queer pioneer, and there are a lot of popular blog posts online with titles like Leaves of Grass, Just the Gay Parts.

Around Lit Hub, there's this really wonderful, thoughtful post written by Mark Doty, D-O-T-Y, the Booker Award-winning- He has a great book about Whitman and desire and queerness. Well, this is why I was gonna, I thought you'd be the perfect person to ask because he wrote the question of homoeroticism in Leaves of Grass, but also you wrote on The Marginalian. Walt Whitman, Bohemian Dandy, the story of America's first gay bar and its creative coterie. And I thought you might help us color in this connection to queer culture, which, you know, wasn't well established in print in any form back when in 1855 Leaves of Grass was first published.

Maria:

Well, okay, a few things about that. First of all, since whenever that was written, I have spent the last four years deeply immersed in Whitman's world. I have a very large book coming out next year, of which he's a big part.

I would say he takes up maybe 200 pages. And in the course of that, I read every biography that exists of him, which there are seven good ones. Every one of his surviving notebooks, every single word he ever published.

And it was a joy and a real sense of intimacy with this long ago person, you know, I will say about the queer question. First of all, oh, God, I am so wary of using ahistorical terms to talk about people in history because of course that whole notion didn't even exist at the time.

Neil:

Right, right.

Maria:

And when we do that, we're kind of flattening how difficult it was to live without certain permissions and containers that we now have and take for granted. But on the other hand, I will say, I find as a, you know, quote unquote, queer person myself, I find identity the least interesting thing about people, actually identity and opinion. Those are the two least interesting things about people.

And unfortunately, we live now at a time in an era of identities and opinions being kind of the frontline of personhood. And that's like not interesting to me. But what is true of Whitman and his, the life of his heart is that, I mean, people have always struggled to love whom they want it to love.

Whether it's same sex or not, I mean, this is the history of humanity, the difficulty of loving, you know, and it happens that he loved outside the conventional forms of his time and place, which made it harder. But the reason his poems endure, you know, a lot of his poems are actually love poems. The reason they endure is that that is the universal struggle.

Whatever your identity, this core thing, whether we call it spirit or soul that is so much deeper than identity, which is a costume for the soul, right? For him, that was the epicenter and that is what he struggled with. And he, so he did write a sequence of poems in Leaves of Grass.

This was in the, it appears for the first time in the second edition called the Calamus poems. Calamus is the, this very like, phallic blossom of a plan that's native to Long Island, which is where he was born. And they, it's the first time where he addresses his love poems to men and he writes pretty clearly about same-sex desire and eros.

But the wonderful thing about Whitman, which is so counter-cultural even today, is that he just didn't let any one of his desires or qualities or aspects define him. He was just so vast and he didn't, I just, I say all this because I think he would have so bristled to be called queer, to be called anything that is a kind of container, you know, that is a classification because he tried his whole life to live as wide as the sky.

Neil:

Yeah, and it's the antithesis of his famous I Contain Multitudes line. Do I contradict myself very well? I contradict myself.

I am vast. I contain multitudes. By the way, you said identity and opinion are the least interesting things about people.

May I ask what's on the opposite ends of the seesaw then for you?

Maria:

I think the most interesting things are the things that light us up, the things that are portals to wonder for us. And the thing about opinion is that it's based on certainty. To have an opinion is to have a certainty about something and wonder is the opposite of certainty.

Wonder is this openness to reality, whatever it may bring and without fear, right? And a lot of opinion is based on fear. A lot of identity is based on fear.

And I'm cutting out other things, defining yourself by what you are not. So for example, I don't subscribe to religion as such, but the term atheist literally defines me by what I am not, not a theist. And I find those things very limiting.

I think ultimately it is what we love that shapes us. And there is so much to love in this world and about this world.

Neil:

What we love shapes us and there's so much there is to love about the world. I love that. I love that.

Thank you for opening that up. I just love listening to you speak. You have such a...

You speak like you write. It's just wonderful to listen to. I wanted to ask you about anonymity and privacy.

It maybe relates a little bit to what your thoughts are on beauty, but you know, obviously we mentioned that he originally self-published this and it was anonymous. I know there was a stealing agreement, but there was no name. He paid for it himself.

It should be noted. He self-published I think 735 copies. It failed, you know.

And then he got this five page letter of congratulations from Ralph Waldo Emerson. He's famously considered the inventor of the book Blurb after printing an excerpt from that letter on the book Spine. And maybe think two questions.

Number one, on anonymity, you're also pretty anonymous. We are doing this podcast audio only. Both of us prefer that envelope of intimacy, but also we're not going to be posting a video of us talking for two hours on YouTube.

You don't share photos of yourself. I don't think on your blog at all or on social media and you don't refer. I didn't find, you know, to your partner's name or your relationship, you know, your relationships, etc.

I just wondered how you think about anonymity in the world today versus being public. Do you have views on what's happening with privacy? I was really curious to ask you this because, you know, high level we are eroding privacy rapidly.

Um, many people I talk to don't care about this. They don't have nothing to hide. You know, that sort of kind of quick come back to the erosion of privacy.

Whereas I feel like this, I feel like it's breaking my heart to like see privacy going away. I mean, this just ruins the ability of us to just navigate freely and openly without surveillance. That's how I feel.

But I wondered how you feel as someone who like Whitman remains fairly anonymous, despite being pretty public.

Maria:

Hmm, what a beautiful question that's so layered now. First of all, Whitman had a huge, huge ego. He took that line from Emerson's letter without Emerson's consent, put it on the spine of the next edition.

Emerson was furious, did not talk to him for two years. It was like a real act of self-promotion. And he was the second most photographed person in America in the 19th century after Frederick Douglass.

So he really wanted to put himself out there. But he did contain multitudes. He was also himself.

He was also entirely himself in every aspect of his being, including this kind of grandiose public-facing thing that seems so at odds with the humility of his poems. For me, well, I think we're talking about slightly different things. Anonymity is not the same thing as privacy, is not the same thing as secrecy, which is what people talk about when they say I have nothing to hide.

I am definitely not anonymous. I mean, my work has been out there for two decades, you know, and I have shared so much with the world as me. The privacy part, I guess I'm just not, I have always made what I want to read.

You know, the reason my side doesn't have ads, never has, is that I don't enjoy ads on the internet. And why would I make something with something that repulses me? And similarly, I don't enjoy this part of why I don't do interviews.

I'm not that interested in talking about myself, which is I'm interested now for us to talk about the books. And I do find it interesting to have people's selfies up there. I've posted, I think, one selfie ever, which was a public service other people with curly hair, how to make a shower cap out of a hotel trash bag when you are, right.

Maria:

I felt the urgency, it felt urgently important to share this demo with the world.

Maria:

But anyway, the premise, I think it's interesting because I write from a deeply personal place, even if it seems like it's about abstract ideas and kind of more in the essay form, which deals with more universal things or more kind of external things. But I have very close relationships in my life, people who have, with whom I have a great deal of emotional and psychological intimacy. And they read what I write and know exactly what I'm talking about from my private life through these kind of degrees of abstraction removed.

And so in that way, I'm just an open, I can be read like an open book by people who have the context, right, because knowledge is always contextual. So I find it interesting. I mean, the conversation on the internet about privacy has to do with data and reducing human beings to data.

I think you can have all the data on someone, their geolocation, their biometric and have no clue about their soul.

Neil:

Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, we're constantly quantifying something that is hard, is impossible to quantify, right? That the sort of the human heart and the human spirit and the human soul and then we reduce it down to data.

And that's what we measure and we think that we know somebody or we try to cajole or push behavior. And this is the part I am more sensitive to after reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. I'm sensitive to how much of our day by day behaviors are controlled without our awareness of them.

That's the part I get worried about. But she calls it the right to the future tense, to think is a great way to put it.

Maria:

Right to the future tense?

Neil:

Yeah, the right to the future tense. Who has the right to your future tense? I'll send you a wonderful essay afterwards.

I can link to it afterwards. I have it on my blog.

Neil:

I would love to read and it's also relevant to the Hannah Arendt that we're going to be talking about.

Neil:

That's what I have up next. Yeah, the right to the future tense. Yeah, I'm going to send that to you after by Shoshana Zuboff.

It's the opening of I believe chapter eight or chapter 10 for a wonderful book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. But I love that idea that we don't know the soul. And I had a couple of questions about ads on the marginalian. But I'm going to pocket those for now. I was just going to ask you in 18 years if your reasons for doing no ads and donation based support have changed at all. You know, we're tying that to Whitman being self promotional.

Is it still because you don't enjoy ads on the internet? But now, you know, arguably you have this gigantic multi-million person international platform for you to say no to ads today. Obviously, it has a different opportunity cost than it used to when you started.

Maria:

Honestly, I haven't even thought about it. I haven't even thought about it. I'm so profoundly not interested that there's nothing.

There's nothing it can give me. I mean, I, you know, I'm so lucky that I received directly from my readers everything I need, roofs over my head, books in my bookshelf, food on my table. I'm not lacking for anything.

And I just don't see the point of doing something that I find repugnant. The other thing too is I have watched. I mean, one of the things that happens when you're on the internet since, you know, the dawn of social media.

I mean, when I started, there were no blogs as such. There was a very rudimentary platform called Blogger. But anyway, when I started, what was that called?

Neil:

Yeah, 2006, right?

Maria:

Right. I was hard coding every issue, literally putting it up and removing the old one manually every Friday for the first couple of years. And then, you know, things started happening slowly.

I migrated to a publishing platform, but I watched all around. Things emerged. MySpace, YouTube, Tumblr, and the commodification of cultural material, which we now call content.

I mean, if we step back for a second to consider that, that is heartbreaking. Calling someone's labor of thought and love content. And the reason is that it fills the containers that we sell, which are ads.

I mean, everything is a commodity. And look at what we've done to music. We really, really fucked up with music.

Musicians are now commercial vehicles for selling apps and subscription services. And, you know, the actors now with the strike are crying, crying, trying to turn it around and save themselves from that fate. I hope they manage.

I hope they manage. I think writers are next. And for me, it's never been worth it being reduced to content because in watching what happened over those two decades, I saw publications of substance become more and more diluted into no longer creating, you know, thought, sensibility standards, but catering to kind of lowest common denominator in order to be popular and to sell and clickbait.

And, you know, legitimate magazines that have been around for a century watching their titles become more and more clickbait in order to do well on the internet. You know, conferences that were the kind of front line of really daring ideas become self-help and trailers for, you know, uncompelling books. And it's just heartbreaking to me.

And it's never been interesting to me going that route.

Neil:

I love that. I relate to you. My spirit was so in line with yours in 2008 when I started my first kind of big public blog called A Thousand Awesome Things.

Over the four years I ran that website, I had 100 million hits. I never put ads on it. This show, 3 Books, has no ads, no commercials, no sponsors, no interruptions.

Maria:

Well, this is a big reason I agreed to do this foundation by the way, because Debbie told me.

Neil:

Yeah, you can see out no ads. Well, I be unlike you. I wrestle.

I guess the difference between me and you is I wrestle with it. I'm like, you know, I have the pangs of it occasionally, but I like the deep kind of place your your clarity of thought comes from. And I'm going to keep channeling that because from 2008 into now, you know, we're talking in 2024, a lot has changed, including the pressures on writers and interviewers and, you know, people like us who are feel the music what's happened to the music industry is so true.

And I don't know if anyone could have stopped it. You know, the forces were very strong to change the way people bought albums. Now nobody buys the album, but people pay seven hundred dollars for a concert.

It's like totally weirdly out of whack.

Maria:

I mean, it's interesting. I mean, I do want to say two things. One is that part of part of I do it the way I do it primarily for me, but I'm also looking back on the history of culture.

I see how important the power of modeling is modeling possibility, you know, seeing someone do something you didn't think was possible makes you feel like it's more possible. And I do want to be the kind of test case for it working when it's a kind of cultural commons and not a consumerist thing when young people are thinking about how to support their work. Maybe turn to the community, you know, maybe don't turn to the overlords of Silicon Valley and whatnot.

But the other thing I should say is that I have some enormous privilege in being able to do that, which is that I have no dependence. I grew up poor, which means I'm not afraid of being poor. I mean, I'm not poor.

I'm so lucky to have made a life for myself when I'm financially really well off compared to, you know, how I got to America, which is having nothing, you know. But I think that gave me a real edge that many of my peers, even back in college when I started didn't have, which is that when you're accustomed to having very little, that's just your life, you know, like it's not scary if something fails because you're used to doing well with not much. And so I think that's an enormous privilege to just have that edge of fear taken off by experience to see that you're okay, you know, generally speaking.

I mean, obviously, there are extremes of lack, which I'm very lucky never could have had. But in this kind of middle ground, it's a real privilege to be unafraid of flopping, basically.

Neil:

Yeah, well, I think that's a beautiful call. But, you know, so you did an interview in 2024 this year, a recent one with Brooklyn Magazine, the podcast, and you said, I quote, I ate store brand canned tuna, low sodium, and oatmeal three times a day, which I figured was the most nutritious combo for the cheapest amount. And I said that was one of four jobs you're working at the time.

And together by doing that, you saved $400 for a night class to teach yourself programming, just so people know, you know, the origins of which you speak.

Maria:

Let's not get over-inflating the personal myth. It wasn't programming. It was basic HTML and CSS coding just so I could make a website.

This is before blogging. I cannot program. I wish I could.

Neil:

I love that background and that thoughtfulness. Just so, you know, so people that don't know, if you go to visit The Marginalian., you are never bombarded with ads. You're given poetry.

You're given, you know, these wonderful, thoughtful, and I won't call them book reviews, but like annotated readings, so many reflections and so many kind of mixing pieces of art. And on the side, it says, you know, donating equals loving. And people can donate, you know, I think there's $3 a month or $5 a month or $7 a month in different ways.

You have to make it very easy for people to sign up, very easy for people to sign off. Are there any principles you might share for those who are looking for a non-ad-based way of putting their stuff out into the world? Any principles that you have learned over the 18 years that make that type of request more comfortable or easier for people to do?

I just, I'm asking, obviously, partly for me, I just don't know how to do that to the community in a way that feels good for everybody, you know?

Maria:

Well, I think it's two parts. The first part is, make the thing you love that you want to see exist. Don't worry about who's going to like it.

And be prepared to keep making it for a while without any kind of support, you know? I think this kind of crowdfunding stuff is very helpful to people, but it does run the risk of making you try to make something fundable before you've actually made it and before you know who you are and what you want to do, you know?

Neil:

Right, right. Creation should precede the funding not the other way around.

Maria:

That if it's substantive enough, people will love it. People will connect with it, you know? And the thing is, so this part one is do that and be prepared to take time.

I mean, Debbie says anything worthwhile takes a long time. And it's actually true. I mean, for the first maybe seven years of my project, it didn't pay for itself.

I had to work jobs. I had to do other things, you know? And then nothing changed.

I just kept showing up every day, every single day. I did what I loved and believed in and somehow it tipped over. It was incremental.

There was no great, you know, nobody like discovered me or, you know, wasn't like that. It was just very incremental. So that's part one.

And then part two is, once you're kind of in the flow of what you're doing, just say honestly, see, this takes time. This takes thought. This takes technical, financial, spatial resources.

If you find joy in it and want to see it exist, consider helping. I don't think people understand. This is part of combating this notion of content, which, you know, Silicon Valley has trained the world to expect it to come for free.

And I don't think people realize what things take. Like, even my site at this point, just having it stay up, the server cost for me, because there's so many visitors, the server cost is like, probably the biggest expense of my life. Second to books.

I mean, books are also a huge expense. And I don't think people kind of necessarily get that.

Neil:

No, exactly. I share that. I share the cost of books.

Maria:

In audio and video, it's probably been more technically demanding to keep it up resource intensive.

Neil:

Yeah, and it's funny because my brain goes to the opposite place. I'm like, how do I maybe, you know, when we decided not to videotape this and just do audio, I was kind of relieved because I was like, I'm trying to because you know what? You know, I thought Maria, I was like, oh, good, I won't have to pay the video to edit video now for this.

Like, this is an extra cost and extra time and extra thing to review, right? So there's two ways. By the way, your first thing on the seven years, it just reminded me of Todd Hansen, our first editor ever of The Onion, America's Finest newspaper originally started in Wisconsin.

He was interviewed by Mike Sacks and asked how do you become a famous, you know, comedy writer and he said, do it for free for 10 years. That was his advice.

Maria:

I mean, that's the key to anything is how to be a poet does how to be anything.

Neil:

Do it for free for 10 years. Well, somebody who did a lot of work for free for a lot of years was Hannah Arendt. So let's transition now if we if we don't mind to your second book, which is Love and St. Augustine by Hannah Arendt. If I said that right, her last name is A-R-E-N-D-T. This book was originally published as a dissertation in German in 1929. And then in English, if I have right in 1996, it is a deep teal infused forest green background with a formal all capseriff white text reading Love and St. Augustine and can all capital letters with a design of some kind. You might you probably know what this is above and in the middle of it, like almost like a Roman drawing.

Maria:

I don't remember.

Neil:

Yeah, it's okay.

Maria:

It's touching that you give the cover design space because it is somebody thought of this. Somebody put work into this. Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah, and I want to feel like we're holding this book. Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century, born to a Jewish family in 1906 in Prussia, now part of Germany. She died in 1975 in New York City.

She was raised in a politically progressive secular family in after high school. It's funny. I have that Jewish family and secular family both come up in the research here.

After high school, she studied and had a four year affair with Renan philosopher Martin Heidegger. H-E-I-D-E-G-G-E-R. All before getting her doctorate in philosophy in 1929 and writing her dissertation, this book, under another Renan philosopher, Karl Jaspers.

Her writing covers power, evil, politics, democracy, authority and totalitarianism. Maria, tell us about your relationship with Love in St. Augustine by Hannah Arendt.

Maria:

So, first of all, Hannah Arendt was kind of rediscovered, so to speak, by lay people who were outside the philosophy realm around the kind of Trump election because her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, suddenly read like this prophetic work. And so a lot of people got to know who she is, who had never heard of her before. But throughout the 20th century, she was one of the most renowned and influential, many of the term that I don't like, but it's correct, public intellectual.

And the astonishing thing about this book, so this was, as you said, I think you said that, it was her dissertation. It was amongst her papers, dormant for more than half a century, and it was posthumously rediscovered by these two American women. One was a philosopher and one was a political theorist.

And they essentially published Love and St. Augustine in English for the first time in the 90s, I want to say. She died in 1975. Yeah, so it's been dead for a while.

The extraordinary thing about it is that she was 23 years old when she wrote it, but it has such intellectual rigor and such passion. And it's also a book about love by a person who went on to be the most analytical, kind of coolly intellectual mind, you know, and she wrote it while she was in love with Heidegger, who, by the way, such an interesting character. One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century joined the Nazi party.

She was Jewish. And then this is kind of why now he's sidelined and dismissed. But I think what most people under appreciate is that he performed one of the hardest things in culture, especially today, which is to change your mind in public.

So he eventually left the Nazi party and was like, I don't know what I was thinking. This is the worst mistake of my life. And that part is not, I mean, he could have been more public about it.

He was, he did it. And he, you know, anyway, it doesn't matter. The point is, it's very complicated.

And the relationship between the two was therefore very complicated, but very, very formative for her ideas and informed this book on St. Augustine, which is really, I mean, it's about love, but it's really about time. It's about presence. It's about how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, which is, of course, something that makes you vacate the present in favor of the future.

I mean, all fear is future based. And like about what will happen, even if it's in the immediate future and like the next second, but it's still not present. And she just writes so beautifully.

She, at one point she writes, fearlessness is what love seeks. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by expected events in the future. Hence, the only valid tense is the present, the now.

I mean, how countercultural is that?

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. And so hard to do with the brains we have, but that's where happiness resides, right?

Maria:

And she draws, I mean, it is called Love in St. Augustine because it's really a conversation with St. Augustine's confession. So she does with his book what I do with every book I write about, which is essentially the extended marginalia on the book. It's her writing.

Her writing is the dialogue with Augustine across the centuries in the margins of his books.

Neil:

And Augustine, for those that don't know, is a Roman African 4th century philosopher who is, I think was ruling in what is kind of present day Morocco at the time, but the far outskirts of the Roman Empire in the 4th century. There's a phrase, Amor Mundi. Have you heard this phrase?

A phrase used by Augustine, Yes, the love of the world. Borrows, which means love of the world. I wanted to ask what that phrase maybe means to you.

Maria:

I mean, in an interesting way, that's entirely what Whitman wrote about, right? Leaves of grass is one great chorus of Amor Mundi. It is, I think, our highest calling is to love the world.

To love the world as it is and as we are.

Neil:

I like that. Our highest calling is to love the world as it is and as we are.

Maria:

And I don't mean that in the sense of resignation because so much of the creative force in us is to keep bridging the world as it is and the world as we think it should be, right? This is kind of what idealism is and optimism and the idea that things can always be better. And I don't mean it in the way of, oh, we should just sort of accept things as they are, but I mean, really love the world, meet reality on its own terms because only then can we figure out where to go next and how to do it with compassion and integrity and humility and all those things.

Neil:

Yeah, you have such a beautifully broad way of perceiving reality and life. It's so counter-cultural and to how I, you know, how most of us are, I feel constricted by the world as presented to me. And so it's such a, it's a nice place to live to be in these bigger and vaster feelings that of course, you are partly drawing from from these wonderful works.

Hunter Arendt, by the way, died in 1975, as you mentioned. So 49 years ago, making her the youngest of your three most formative authors. And of course, I will also include Antoine the Saint Experean here for The Little Prince, which is the book that has been repeated on our list, but he died in 1944.

My point is, you studied dead people like very closely. You've read more letters and diaries and memoirs than anybody I know. Certainly, almost perhaps anybody, you know, everybody you study was alive at that time, but I'm curious from your perspective of studying things that are long gone, what we can learn from the dead or said another way.

What are those who are now long gone trying to tell us most of all today?

Maria:

Most of all, that we too will one day be dead, and we might as well make something beautiful and meaningful in this sliver of space climb that we've been allotted. The strangest thing about the human experience, the strangest thing is that we know, we know cerebrally that we are finite and we're transient. But how we live our days, how we spend our time, there's this real denial of death and of our own mortality.

I mean, imagine that every day you woke up with the acute awareness in every cell of your body that this is it. What are the decisions you would make? And it's not so much that I'm called to the dead as such.

It's that, well, it's two separate things. One is that I do think prior times have things to teach us about what we have relinquished that may still be recoverable. So other ways of being present, other ways of relating to one another, you know, the extraordinary loss of nuance that we're experiencing now in this culture, maybe there are ways to remind ourselves that actually there are other ways of being and other ways of seeing that are worth recovering.

The other thing is very basic kind of psycho-emotional self-help, which is that there is real consolation in knowing that others, especially others you admire, have lived through what you lived through. And there's this wonderful, how does it go? It's wonderful James Baldwin's passage from one of his essays where he says, you think your pain and suffering are unique in the history of the world and then you read.

And it's so true. I mean, all these books that I read and write about I have reached for in order to find consolation for something I'm going through, to find perspective or a different angle or sympathy or consonants or whatever, an antidote to the loneliness of a lot of these experiences. I mean, even the basic, the most fundamental human yearning love is an incredibly lonely experience actually from the inside.

And it has helped me greatly to turn to these time-tested, almost foreclosed, because the thing with the dead is that you know how their lives turned out. There's not going to be the open-endedness and uncertainty and fear that we carry in our own lives, not knowing how it's all going to end up. You know how it ended up for them.

And so there's consolation in that.

Neil:

Yeah, I love that. I travel with the Old Penguin Classics edition of On the Shortness of Life by Seneca in my suitcase at all times, partly because when I end up at a random hotel or motel with the anxious, riddled body of someone who's been traveling through airports and airplanes, I look at that book or flip it open and I just ground myself with it. Often while putting a lacrosse ball behind my back or my butt against the wall and the combination of both triggering my parasympathetic nervous system and getting my mind into a 2000-year-old book just relaxes me almost always.

Neil:

I have done that with Thoreau's journals over the years.

Maria:

This is one of the ones that was really formative for me maybe a decade ago, but I have carried it many places with me and done the exact same thing in airports and hotels and whatnot.

Neil:

By the way, Thoreau's journals were one of the three most formative books of a friend of yours, Austin Cleon. He named that as he flip-flopped between a few different kind of commentaries on Thoreau and he finally settled. He's like, I think it's actually the journal that I turn to most often.

Neil:

I'm not surprised.

Neil:

Yeah, and I found a lot of great blog posts that you'd written about him over the years. I wanted to ask you how we read hard books. I have to confess, partly nervous and intimidated for this conversation for many reasons, but one of which is that you're so erudite.

You have a wide expanse of intellect that is somewhat unnerving to touch up against because I'm worried about looking like an idiot. You know, so I found this book. Well, it's not a bad way.

Maria:

Well, thank you for saying that, but I will say first of all, I'm like the least educated person who's been on your show probably in terms of formal education.

Neil:

I don't think so.

Maria:

My only real gift is stubbornness. I think because I came to the U.S. with zero foundational knowledge of what my peers considered the classics, I didn't know where the range was, right? So, for example, I discovered a ridiculous term in the history of the world to begin with, but especially in this context, I discovered Susan Sontag at some point in my 20s, and I was convinced that every single American knew who she was and read every single word she had written.

I just assumed that. So I went on the Sontag binge, and apparently at some point I tipped over to the edge to the end of the spectrum where my peers were like, I've never heard of that. I've never read that, but I assumed they all knew that.

And so coming at it from this place of total beginner's mind, not even knowing what the parameters of erudition are, I think I kind of went so far out on some vectors. So I've read a lot about certain things and so little, so total ignorance of entire regions of culture, like I have zero pop culture knowledge, close to zero political knowledge. Which is all to say we have these minds that work in different ways that have enormous blind spots and thanks start us that we have each other to broaden each other's horizons.

Because even in this conversation, I've learned a number of things from you that I never would have before.

Neil:

Aw, well, that's the beauty of conversation, and it's true that everything we read is in exchange for reading everything else we could be reading at the same time.

Maria:

Exactly, back to the minitude.

Neil:

Exactly, well, that's kind of where I want to just poke at this a tiny bit because one thing I hear from 3 Books listeners, I call them three bookers, and they are book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians spread globally around the world. And one thing I hear from people is thanks to 3 Books, I picked up say Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, I would never have heard of it if it was not for the conversation. And so I'm often finding that I bump up against books that are hard, challenging for me to read.

And other than sort of be smarter, I wondered what advice you might have for readers to read challenging books or books outside of their comfort zone. How do we intentionally curate and consume a nutritious reading diet?

Maria:

Well, that's a larger question about the very notion of comfort zones. So I am always curious about the tension between, am I resisting something because it is outside of my comfort zone, but it's in a direction of growth I would like to pursue and therefore I should push through the resistance and go there. Or am I resisting it out of self-knowledge and knowing that this is just not my kind of thing?

Neil:

Yeah, I'm not interested.

Maria:

Right, exactly. Like I have had this recently and I think part of growth is the self-acceptance of your parameters. I wouldn't call them limitations, but the things about you that are just part of who you are.

So I've had to accept this with dinner parties where for years I've pushed myself thinking this is what normal people do. I should enjoy it. I should grow in this way.

And finally last year I was like, you know what? Not for me. Just not interested.

Don't like it. Not going to do it anymore. And I think it takes experience to know what your limits are.

It takes a great sobriety of mind to know both your depths and your limits. And part of self-knowledge is finding that. So with reading, it's the same thing.

Let's say you start something that is feels cumbersome, feels heavy, feels just like an uphill, kind of Sisyphean experience. And in my experience, if you stick with it for a decent while and the feeling doesn't change, you should absolutely walk away from it. It's just not your thing.

Neil:

The five pages test or the 10 pages test or the 50 pages test I would say a little more than five.

Maria:

But it takes a while. But things that are difficult. Here's the rule of thumb.

And this is also true, for example, for relationships. Things that are difficult and get easier with time as you kind of harmonize and kind of learn the language and become immersed in this new world you're entering, which is when you read a book, you enter a world. When you enter a relationship with a person, you enter a world.

If the difficulty subsides and the joy increases as time goes by, that is a good signal that just stick with it and push through the remaining discomforts and there will be a reward on the other side. If the difficulty increases and the heaviness and the friction increase, get out. Close the book, lead the relationship, just get out.

Neil:

Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot because I do find in our culture we have this bias, partly the Steven Pressfield war of art type of thinking, which I did and do subscribe to in some sense, but that it's fear if I don't do it. And what you're sort of saying is it might be or it might be a self-aware boundary that you might have.

Not everything like the dinner party is fear-based. It might just be that you don't like dinner parties. And so you have to figure, you have to know yourself well enough to know whether it's fear-based or if it's just something you just don't like.

Maria:

But wait, fear is good. Fear, I don't think fear is the litmus test that is bad for you because we fear change. We are machines for homeostasis.

We want to maintain the status quo, the comfort zone, and fear is a natural response to change. So in both cases, you can feel fear. The question is accessing yourself on the other side of the fear.

And then telling, is this a way to grow or is this a way to suffer?

Neil:

I like that. Is this a way to grow or is this a way to suffer?

Maria:

And again, there's nuance. Of course, there's some level of suffering with all kinds of growth. But you know what I'm saying, more kind of broadly.

Neil:

Yeah, no, absolutely. I want to, you know, this book was translated in 1996, right? So it came out in 1929.

There was a dissertation. And it made me think, I will never be able to, like, I only read English. So there's just so much that's ever been written that I will never be able to read.

To read, you know? How do you navigate that? I mean, how do you?

Maria:

Oh, it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. And also because so much beautiful stuff gets written in other languages and to read in translation is you already know that it's a lesser version.

Neil:

Yeah. What it was.

Maria:

And I mean, English is not my native language. All the reading I do is in English. So even that has given me a kind of starting point sense of how much of the life of the mind takes place in language.

I mean, language is not the container for thoughts and feelings. Language oftentimes is the thoughts and feelings. And I wish I spoke nine languages and I could read all of them.

Unfortunately, I only got two and a half and not great, you know? And it's interesting too because I do for my longer form things my book shaped projects that are very much based on very research heavy around the lives of the people I choose to write about. Not all of them are American and God, going through.

I mean, for my book figuring one of the people was Kepler, you know, he wrote in medieval German. So going to the archives and the libraries and trying. I mean, because he's Kepler, obviously most of his stuff is translated into English.

But there's something about finding original documents in the original language and getting them translated for yourself with me. My dad speaks Germans so you know he's been helpful with a lot of the German people that I write about. But there's something about the immediacy of the writing as it was written by the person who lived in that language.

Neil:

Yes, exactly.

Maria:

And having access to that, that's lost. I love this sound. So Wisława Szymborska, the Nobel winning Polish poet who is one of my favorite poets. And she was part of my introduction to poetry in general. She, her whole life, these two Americans translated her work into English. And at the end of her life, in one of the collected poems, I think it was in the introduction, she thanks them and she writes about, she says that rare miracle when a translation ceases to be a translation and becomes the second original.

Which is, of course, the gold standard in a translation is the most thankless of all the creative art. Because it is a deeply creative art and it's just nobody remembers or honors the translators and it's heartbreaking.

Neil:

Yeah, that's right. You hardly even see it. I was thinking this the other day, there's a book about translation of Murakami that's like all about the translator of Murakami.

There's a book about the translator of Murakami into English. I think it's called What We're Reading When We Read Murakami or something similar to that.

Maria:

Oh, how wonderful.

Neil:

Yeah, and I bought the book, I haven't read it yet, but it's about the person in between Japanese Murakami and English Murakami. I think what we're reading when we read Murakami, I have it, I will send it to you as a follow-up together with The Right to the Future Tense by Shoshana Zuboff afterwards.

Neil:

Yes, please do.

Neil:

Yeah, and this will all be in our show notes for people listening that are like, oh, I want to get a copy of that. We'll make sure everything we reference on here is always at 3books.co underneath the list for the show. So, I'll link to everything.

Yeah, the Murakami book will be on there as well. So, your third book is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which is filed for Dewey Decimal Hands under 843.912 under French fiction. Of course, showing the limitations of the Dewey Decimal System that almost every language besides French to an earlier point is like squeezed into the 900s.

My cover is, I believe, the original cover showing a small boy with spiky orange yellowish hair and a green one-piece standing on a planet in outer space with stars and yellow stars and yellow circles around him with just the little prince across the top. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince is an endearing tale of equal appeal to young and grown-up. It blends a simple story of an aviator forced to land in a remote desert in his meeting a small boy, the little prince from another planet with an allegory of human condition, entertaining, thought-provoking, mind-triggering and process.

The beautiful illustrations drawn by the author are as expressive as a simple language that conveys deeper shades of the philosophy. And I will say that that back copy that I'm reading is the 2019 edition by VIVI Books or maybe it's 6-6 books in London, England. Let's go into telling us about your relationship with The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Maria:

So The Little Prince, I grew up in Bulgaria where a lot of the American, none of the actually American children's book classics made it. I was born still during communism so the Iron Curtain was in full effect. And a lot of the children's books we had were European.

And this one is the only one I have a memory of my mother reading to me. And I loved it as a child as a story. And of course, you don't understand The Little Prince.

I mean, The Little Prince is a work of philosophy that's sized as a children's book, which is what all great children's books are in a way. They are field guides to living told in the language of children, which is a language of exquisite simplicity and sincerity, which is of course the most open channel to reality, right? That the simpler and the most sincere the language, the truer it is.

And in any case, I have been reconnected with The Little Prince in my adult life. And each time I read it, which is about once every couple of years, it gives me something different. Back, it gives me something back that I can take to my life.

It is an allegory. You know, the Little Prince, the pilots and the Little Prince, they talk about these different planets each inhabited by a person who embodies some kind of human vice or internal struggle, greed, all kinds of things. There's a dictator.

There's consumerism. There's all the things that keep us small in a way. And but it's really a story about love and mortality.

You know, it's the story of The Little Prince and the rose that he's in love with, the selfish plans that he devotes his life to. And in the end, it's a kind of, it's a prayer for aliveness, but it has to do with death in the end. I want to read you something that I have here with me, the original 1943 edition.

No way. Oh, wow. I do.

It was one of my, wow, that's amazing in life was getting this edition. And this is the dedication. So bear in mind, this is the Second World War.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a pilot, commercial pilot, but nonetheless a pilot flying over the war in the world. And France is under Nazi occupation where people have rations or food. Just really kind of grim circumstances.

So this is the dedication of the book. It says, to Léon Werth, I ask the indulgence of the children who may read this book for dedicating it to a grown-up. I have a serious reason.

He is the best friend I have in the world. I have another reason. This grown-up understands everything, even books about children.

I have a third reason. He lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs cheering up.

If all these reasons are not enough, I will dedicate the book to the child from whom this grown-up grew. All grown-ups were once children. Although feels them, remember it.

And so I correct my dedication to Léon Werth when he was a little boy. I crawl every time I read this.

Neil:

Yeah, that is so beautiful.

Maria:

It's everything. It's everything about life, about love, about friendship.

Neil:

Did you read this? You were, this was read to you when you were a child?

Maria:

Yes, in Bulgarian translation from the French. And what I read too is in English translation from the French. So both in French.

I've only ever read it in translation. I do not speak or read French, which is a pity because a lot of the world's great literature was written in French.

Neil:

And so what are your memories of being a child, being read this?

Maria:

I, you know, I don't have very, I don't have many early childhood memories. I did not have a very easy childhood. And so I think this is very common for kids who grow up in difficult circumstances.

You don't really have many early childhood memories. I just remember liking it. I just remember it felt like an oasis of safety and relief and joy.

But I also liked the undercurrent of sadness. I've always had an undercurrent of sadness in my life. And I think this exuberance, this joy and wonder in the world does, if you really inhabit, it does come with this bittersweet melancholy streak because you cannot celebrate life without accepting that it is finite.

Neil:

Yes, exactly.

Maria:

And Whitman too had such a dark streak. So much sadness, so much melancholy. And he believed that those who reach the greatest heights are also capable of plummeting to the greatest depths.

And I think that's pretty kind of universally true. You have, if you have access to the full spectrum of life, if you're fully alive, you contact both. You can't not.

And the little prince is, you know, what I love about the best children's books are unafraid of going to those darker places because they are part of the light. And what I don't like about a lot of contemporary American children's literature is the saccharine nature of it. There's this total exclusion of complexity and darkness and sadness and this artificial sweetener of life.

And I feel like that is such a disservice to growing minds and hearts and spirits.

Neil:

Oh, I totally agree with that. So really wonderful and poetic way to say it. It makes me think of the children's book, Tough Boris.

If you don't know, no, I need to send that to you. Oh my gosh, I have to send you Tough Boris. Tough Boris is, I want to say from the mid 90s, but it's about a pirate who's very tough.

But then when his parrot dies, he cries and cries. And at the end of the book, it twists this tough, strong, fierce pirate in the last couple of pages of the book until like somebody who experiences to your point, you know, the vastness of emotional depth and he's crying. He's putting this parrot into like the little box that he was playing his fiddle and he's throwing it overboard.

And it's like, whoa, it's a beautiful finish to this wonderful picture book. But I know what you mean. A lot of great picture books touch on that vastness of emotion.

And certainly this was not a picture book, but Little Prince does that for sure.

Maria:

And there is this wonderful line in it where it says, it is such a secret place, the land of tears.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. How do you interpret that?

Maria:

Well, it is the most private. It is the most private. How we love and how we suffer are the most private things in life.

And I don't mean like hiding. I mean, they're the most interior experiences that are most difficult to articulate or share, even if you want to. They are just so deep and visiting the place of tears, that secret place.

I mean, crying with someone is one of the greatest acts of intimacy.

Neil:

Yeah. Oh, wow. That's a beautiful phrase.

Crying with someone is one of the greatest acts of intimacy. Yeah, that's very true. And crying is, I've always thought or more recently thought that it's the body's way of processing something it can't articulate.

I interviewed Daniels, the directors of Everything Everywhere All At Once. And when I asked them how it's been, because I talked to them just before Everything Everywhere All At Once came out in mass release, they said, we've just been crying all day. We've just been crying and we don't know why.

And it was a beautiful way to start the conversation. You gave us the log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck, which was written in 1940, but not published until 1951 by the Viking press. The cover is a painting of massive green and black waves with a white fishing boat cresting a wave in the background against a mustard yellow sky with white gulls circling above.

There is the white penguin classics ribbon across the front with an iconic penguin portrait in the middle. The bottom is black with simply John Steinbeck in an all cap sans serif white. And all caps fought underneath, saying the log from the Sea of Cortez.

Steinbeck, of course, the Pulitzer Prize winning American writer who lived from 1902 to 1968. He wrote 33 books, including 16 novels, six nonfiction books, two collections of short stories, including The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden and of Mice and Men. What is this book about?

Well, 1940 Steinbeck, basically, he was under stress and pressure as I understand it after The Grapes of Wrath came out, accused of being a communist and a labor sympathizer, et cetera. So he just took off with biologist and good friend Edward Ricketts, went aboard the Western Flyer, a sardine boat out of Monterey, California on a 4000 mile voyage around the Baja Peninsula, sort of left pinky finger down the side of Mexico into the Sea of Cortez, also called the Gulf of California. This exciting day by day account of their expedition wonderfully combines science, philosophy and high spirited adventure and provides a much fuller picture of Steinbeck and his beliefs about man and world.

Dewey Decimal-heads can file this under 508.31 for natural sciences and mathematics slash general science slash natural history slash environment slash habitats. Maria, tell us about your relationship with The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck.

Maria:

So it's a very unusual book in the history of the literature. I mean, obviously, this is a writer who won the Nobel Prize two decades later who had two Pulitzer Prizes all for his fiction, beautiful, beautiful fiction writer, beautiful letter writer and diarist. And yet this little known tiny improbable book, I find his finest by far.

This too was written in the middle of the World War. And as the human world was coming undone, he goes with his friend Ed on this marine biology expedition to, I think, to be reminded of the interconnectedness and interdependence of life in nature of which we are apart. And of course, war is the greatest denial of that, our self-denial of ourselves being connected, being part of nature.

It's the ugliest assault on life, the life force. And so there he is on this boat and he really does it all. He's wading through the tide pools.

He's getting stung by these poisonous worms.

Neil:

Anemones and stuff.

Maria:

He's getting sea urchins in his foot. And all the while, he's thinking about thinking. So really the book is a kind of refutation of our western compulsion for teleological thinking.

This idea that everything can be explained by the purpose that it serves. Which is antithetical both to science and to more eastern notions of being, right? That actually everything just is.

And any fragment of it, any one thing examined by itself is just it. And science, what's interesting too is that bear in mind, this is because it's the middle of the war. This is back to our conversation about opinions and the danger of opinions.

A war is essentially a combat of opinions gone to the extreme on the scale of nations, right? These certitudes that are tightly held combating each other. And science, on the other hand, is this supreme act of observation without interpretation.

No opinion. There's no room for opinion in science. There's just meeting reality on its own acausal and impartial terms free from the tyranny of why.

And it's tendrils of blame, right? Because the moment we start asking, why is this happening? Why is this hurricane, you know, who's to blame?

And this is a purely human conference, blame, there's no such thing in the natural world. And he all the while, his thinking, and he, by the way, was the exact age I am now when he wrote this book. He was 39.

He had no idea how this war was going to end. He had no idea what his future held, that he was going to write these Nobel Pulitzer winning novels. He just wanted to understand how we think and what the world is.

And it's so beautifully written. It's also a book about wonder, about the meaning of hope.

Neil:

Yes. Yes, totally. I have so many quotes from the book on hope.

Hope, specifically, probably when our species developed the trick of memory and with it the counterbalancing projection called the future. This shock absorber hope had to be included in the series, else the species would have destroyed itself in despair. For if ever any man were deeply and unconsciously sure that his future would be no better than his past, he might deeply wish to cease to live.

Maria:

He says, hope is a diagnostic human trait and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe. For hope implies a change from a present bad condition to a future better one. And it's so interesting, the kind of mirror image between this and the RN piece on love and presence, living in the now, that fear is the thing that's aimed at the future.

But hope is also the thing that's aimed at the future. And I think hope is the antidote to fear in bearing our future.

Neil:

Hope is the antidote to fear in bearing our future. Right. Because otherwise we would, if we didn't have hope, then we would think things, if we were in a bad condition, we would think it would continue to Steinbeck's point.

Maria:

Exactly, exactly.

Neil:

And then too, I love that interconnectedness of all things. You know, he says this many times, like there's a really memorable scene when some indigenous people kind of come up to the boat in a canoe with their, with their faces covered. Because as he says, you know, they've learned for 400 years, if you kind of go near white people, like you get germs that you know, you can't explain and then they kill your people.

But he says, they seem to live and remember things to be so related to the seashore and the Rocky Hills and the loneliness that they are these things to ask about the country is like asking them about themselves. How many toes have you? What toes?

Let's see. Of course, 10. I have known them all my life.

I never thought to count them. Of course it will rain tonight. I don't know why.

Something in me tells me I will rain tonight. Of course I am the whole thing now that I think about it. I ought to know when I will rain.

Maria:

That's so beautiful.

Neil:

I ought to know when I will rain.

Maria:

Well, talk about the people of the past reminding us of what we've relinquished, right? Ways of seeing, ways of being that we have cut ourselves off from. Because that is our natural condition actually.

To feel that it is all one. And everything else has been the function of opinions, basically, that we have devised in order to parse reality into fragments that we can then take and possess or feel like we control.

Neil:

Kind of to your earliest point about intellectual property rights, you know, and you know, there's the apocryphal stories about the white man landing in North America and claiming, you know, property rights from the then called Indians. And of course, the indigenous, I should say, they didn't think anybody could own property. You know, the concept of- Oh, it's a ridiculous notion.

Maria:

That they're going to property.

Maria:

I mean, I spend a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest in an old growth forest where people have houses and there are so many signs that say no trespassing, private property. It's literally the middle of the forest. And I keep thinking, no, you are the property.

You know, this forest will outlive you and it predates you so much you are the property of the forest. You can call yourself a steward, if you like, but you are not owning this land. It's like this idea that we've built an entire culture on ownership.

And of course, capitalism, we've gone to higher and higher degrees of abstraction. We now have like digital goods and this and that, but it all began with the land with privatizing the land. And that was the real kind of wrong turn in the history of humanity where we really divided ourselves from this totality of interbeing.

Neil:

It's so hard to pull it back. I remember visiting New Zealand in 2006 and hearing that they had a law down there that nobody could own the coastline just anywhere in the whole country. I'm thinking of that was a beautiful idea.

So even if you own like an expensive property on the edge of the water, anybody can walk past your front. You know, I mean, it's just because I think when, you know, 500 years ago when the white man settled there and the Maori were already there, they were like, we can either fight about this forever or just decide that nobody owns it, you know, that everybody owns it.

Maria:

And so you've gotten a lot of things right.

Neil:

They've got some things right. Absolutely. Well, I have, you know, I have pages and pages of questions still left from the Sea of Cortez, but I think in the interest of moving this conversation into a closing thought around the love of books, I have a series of fast money questions to close out with.

If you don't mind me jumping into them now and we can kind of close things off from there.

Maria:

Let's do it.

Neil:

Here we go. Number one, hardcover, paperback, audio or E.

Maria:

Oh, I loathe paperbacks, loathe them to the point where I almost evicted from my house the paperback copies of figuring that were sent to me from the publisher.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Maria:

I hate them, hate them. I mean, part of it is very practical. I often read in the back and like when you dip the bottom of a book, you know, if it's a paperback, forget it, it's done.

But part of it is something about the flimsiness of, you know, somebody puts mirrors into something and then it's just like, feels like a stack of news magazines or something.

Maria:

Okay, these are very strong opinions.

Neil:

No, I love it. I love it. I love it.

But so is that me? Because I know you also read a lot of ebooks because you I think also read while you're at the gym on the.

Maria:

I do.

Neil:

Right, right.

Maria:

And that's part of it. I don't like ebooks, but they serve my life. And also, you know, I don't live in an infinite home and I've run out of bookshelf space.

So I'm conserving my bookshelf space for things that are pretty irreplaceable. Like this first edition of The Little Prince and books that are no longer in print that I have a lot of notes in and things like that. I literally have no more room to put physical books.

So the ebooks help with that. But of course, the challenge for me is that a lot of my reading is of bygone things that are not in print. We're definitely not in ebooks for me.

Neil:

Right. So you have to get the hardcovers probably.

Maria:

I do. They're from antiquarian booksellers and they're like falling apart because they're 200 years old. But I love that.

I mean, I understand the necessity of paperbacks, the invention of paperbacks to make books more affordable. Like I get that. One of my closest friends, Sarah McNally, she runs McNally Jackson, which is the most beloved independent bookstores here in New York.

And she is the most thoughtful, compassionate person in terms of what serves readers best. And she always reminds me that paperbacks have a lot of advantages in getting more people to read books, basically. I get it.

Props to them. No judgment. I loathe them.

Neil:

I love your passion. So it sounds like you're not an audiobook consumer either.

Maria:

It really depends on the narrator. I mean, I don't pay as much attention to an audiobook. This is a piece of self-knowledge that I've had to accept even when I'm trying to focus on it.

Something about it going through the ears for me is not as rich and effective. But a really compelling narrator makes a real difference.

Neil:

Interesting.

Maria:

Then you become taken in a story which is why I'm very deliberate about the narrators for my books.

Neil:

Oh, right. Oh, so, oh, interesting. So you have been careful to, so you don't narrate your own books, but you're careful in choosing the narrator of your books.

Maria:

Well, in this universe and verse book, it'll be interesting because it's a funny collaboration. So it's 15 essays about different aspects of science, each paired with a poem by somebody else. So I write the essays and then I choose poems.

I mean, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Maya Angelou and so forth. And so for this one, what we decided to do, I always do it with friends. My friend Lily Taylor is doing the narration, but what we decided to do is that she's an incredible actor and she has my favorite voice in the universe.

Very unique, very unique, raspy voice. We decided she's going to read the prose, the essays, and I'm going to read the poems because I'm much more comfortable reading somebody else's writing than my own. I think a lot of writers who read their own books get in their head because they wrote it and they read in this kind of weird stilted way because they're reading with their writing mind and not a performance mind.

So it's very rare for me to hear an author read their own work and like it. I think authors really, really kind of need to have some humility and understand that's a different art form. Narration and performance, they are a different art.

And if you're a great writer, that's amazing. It doesn't guarantee they're a great reader.

Neil:

Oh, I love this. This is such a fun conversation. Yeah, it's interesting.

I don't know if you've ever listened to Lincoln in the Bardo, the audiobook.

Maria:

I did. Right. That was a performance cast.

And in fact, I started reading it. So I am in a book club. I'm in my first ever book club.

That my friend Sarah McNally wrote me into. And Lincoln in the Bardo the first book we read. And I started reading it on paper and then a friend who's a poet, who's very old school, who I never would have thought as an audio person, she said, get the audiobook.

Just trust me. And we all did it in both physical and audio. It's extraordinary.

But it's very unique.

Neil:

That's a very unique one. But there are some other like I think Lin-Manuel Miranda has read, you know, who's the author? I'm thinking of Puerto Rican author A Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and those books.

I think Lin-Manuel Miranda reads. And I have heard that Audible is the number one hirer of actors in the world now because, you know, just because of how many books there. Yeah, there's more actors in, I guess, New Jersey or wherever it is than in Hollywood because they're reading e-books.

But that's interesting. Okay. Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?

Now you've mentioned McNally Jackson.

Neil:

Oh, yeah.

Maria:

McNally Jackson, the South Seaport location is my favorite. Partly because it's easier for me to get to on the bike and ferry. And partly because they have a cafe that makes the best matcha latte in New York.

Neil:

So where is South Seaport? What is that? Is that in Brooklyn, Manhattan?

I'm just don't know my New York geography.

Maria:

I'm so sorry. Yes, I'm being such a New Yorker.

Neil:

No, no.

Maria:

Seaport is the kind of, I guess lower in Manhattan area on the other side, south on where the two bridges, the Brooklyn and the Manhattan Bridge land on the Manhattan side, then you go south toward the tip of the island. So it's almost the very typical tip, but it's on the edge of the water. It's the area in Manhattan that got most damaged by Sandy.

And I will also mention random fact. And it's right now, they restored it after standing. There's a lot of like shopping and fancy stores and cafes and kind of bougie little places.

McNally Jackson, the bookstore is the only business in South Seaport that survived COVID. Oh, wow. Which tells you something about the bookstore itself and New Yorkers love a book.

Neil:

Yeah, in the community.

Maria:

In the community. But McNally Jackson is, I mean, Sarah's so thoughtful about how she builds bookstores. She would take the train in the middle of the night to her Rockefeller Center store because she wants to make sure the new paint color looks good in the dark.

You know, this is a level of passion and devotion to the experience of book selling book reverence that she puts in and that makes for a great bookstore.

Neil:

I think absolutely. And by the way, interesting New York bookstore fact is that way back in Chapter 107 of 3 Books, I interviewed Latanya and Jerry of the Bronx Bound Books Bus, which is bookstore number two in the entire Bronx. So there is one bookstore in the Bronx, but this one is Books on Wheels.

It's a bus that's been painted and turned into a bookstore. Do you know about this?

Maria:

Oh, wonderful. No, but I love a library mobile. I did a little library mobile project during Occupy Wall Street, but because I love those mobile things.

Neil:

Oh, exactly. Well, the interesting note that they share with me, which I think is probably obvious to you, but maybe not to other people is that Manhattan and the Bronx have a very similar population, but Manhattan is 82 bookstores now, formerly 300, but 82 is still a lot. And the Bronx has two, you know, including the bus.

Right.

Maria:

So it's just partly, unfortunately, So that book that you mentioned that I did the Velocity of Being, the letters book, that was all the proceeds were donated to the New York Public Library system from that book. And my friend Claudia and I, who made it together, she's a publisher. She runs Enchanted Lion Books.

And this was our project for eight years. We decided deliberately to divide equally amongst all the branches of the library, even though there are so many fewer branches than the Bronx than in Manhattan and Brooklyn. And which is anyway, just a tiny little way of addressing that inequality.

But yes, I'm aware of it. And I'm so glad they have this wheeled antidote.

Neil:

Wheeled antidote is a great word for it. What is your book lending policy?

Maria:

Book lending.

Neil:

Yeah, do you lend people your books?

Maria:

My book lending policy is zero. I buy people new copies. I have notes in there.

I don't know.

Neil:

Yeah, you don't.

Maria:

I have lent maybe two books ever only to Sarah because she's the most responsible book reader in the universe. But I have doggedly, you know, claim them back.

Neil:

Well, this is the thing I lend and then and then add regret later. So this is great. This is more challenging.

Is there one book you wish you could read again for the first time?

Maria:

Oh, oh my God.

Maria:

What a great question. I mean, that's like asking which of your past selves do you want to be again for the first time? With the caveat that I have now on my fourth rereading of it.

But I wish I could read it from scratch from zero is Einstein's dreams by Alan Lightman.

Neil:

I've never read it. Oh, oh, that's partly why I asked the question. This is Einstein's dreams.

Okay, got it. This is harkening back to your point on number one, which is that you have no more space in your place for books. But I have a question.

How do you organize your books on your bookshelf at home?

Maria:

I had a very good system which was to Matt. Well, it's by sections that are thematic. So, you know, biographies and autobiographies, letters and diaries, science, philosophy, and so forth within each section I do organize by color because I just like it.

But the problem with that is that geometry is a problem. You know, a bookshelf has a finite length and your mind does not. So you acquire more books as you age and time goes on and each section expands in mental space, but you can no longer expand it in space because the walls are the wall, you know.

And so my system kind of broke down after a few years because then I ran out of space into the respective sections. I started putting them in random places. But I know exactly where each book in my house is.

So I can find it right away just have a mental map of it. It just doesn't look very, you know, handsome.

Neil:

That's amazing that you have like it sounds like a photographic memory though and where every book is. That's hard. Do you have a white whale book or any book that you have been chasing the longest whoever you want to interpret that?

Maria:

Well, not that I can think of. I'm pretty good with finding what I look for.

Neil:

Yeah. And there's not a book that you like want to read for years and years and years that you don't. If you want to read it, you tackle it immediately.

Maria:

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, I will say I have a total blind spot about the so-called classics. I haven't read most of the canon of the classics, but I'm also not super keen on it.

I mean, I do want to read the Brothers Karamozov, which I've started a couple of times and I want to do it and some kind of mental block prohibits me. So I guess that will be the closest. George Saunders actually the swim in the pond in the rain pushed me much closer to actually doing it.

His great book on the Russian masters.

Neil:

Yes, yes. I've read and loved that book. It's my favorite book on writing, even though I don't write fiction.

It's just a wonderful. Yeah, it's a wonderful book. What are one or two principles you follow about marking up or annotating your books while reading them?

Maria:

Well, I'm not sure that I have principles. It has to be spontaneous. It has to be like conversation.

I mean, the purpose of having marginalia or writing or highlighting anything is that it sparks a response to you and that has to be spontaneous and premeditated.

Neil:

I love it. Maria Popova, you are a gift. You have given the world so much through then brain pickings.

Now The Marginalian with your wonderful Sunday newsletter, which I get every Sunday with the amount of stuff you post on social media. So kindly, so generously and always ad free. I know you don't do many interviews.

That's partly why it was such a gift for you to come on the show. Thank you for sharing your formative books with us, letting me read them, ask you questions and go everywhere with your wonderful mind to explore these books. It's a real, real gift and I'm deeply grateful to you for coming on the show.

Thank you so much.

Maria:

Thank you, Neil, for having me and thank you for your wonderful counter-cultural project and your stewardship of books that will outlive us.

Neil:

Hey, everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, hanging up my basement with my backpack full of wires again. You know, I, you know, just before Maria and I hit record, maybe 10 minutes before she wrote an email because we sent her this invitation for a service called riverside.fm, which Allie Ward from Ologies told me to use. It's been great for us.

I recommend it if you're in the podcasting world and she wrote a very nice email that I'll paraphrase it. She was kind of like, oh, I didn't realize that this was videotaped. If it was, if it's videotaped, I don't do video.

I don't do videos. And so I will gracefully bow if the video is mandatory, you know, and I wrote back right away saying like, oh, no, no, no, no, it's not mandatory. We could turn it off.

Honestly, every time I have to videotape a podcast, I kind of feel this internal off and she wrote back the internal off. It's one of the best guideposts to the creative life that I know. And I've been thinking a lot about whether I want to do these podcasts on video.

You know, the number one most listened to podcast I've ever done is David Sedaris. There's no video, right? Like there's just no video.

Tarantino is up there. There's no video. We just have the sound on YouTube and a static image.

I could change that static image to a moving image. Maybe my hand flipping a book over and over again or something. Or the constellations or flying through outer space or whatever.

Something to make it visually appealing. But I find that when I videotape them, I feel like I need to get dressed up for my, like I'm wearing rags right now. For lack of better words, I'm wearing rags.

I wear rags a lot. My goal is comfort, right? I didn't shave before talking to you right now.

I didn't comb my hair. But if I record on video, I feel like I have to do all that stuff. And because it's just a more...

We talked about this with Cal Newport. It's like you have to kind of put on your front all the time. But I don't want to go through life wearing fancy clothes and combing my hair all the time.

Neither do you. Neither does anybody. And something about the video-fication of the world kind of pushes us into that professional presentation orientation a little more.

And so I'm thinking about that. But it's not just that. It's also, it just takes a lot more time.

I feel like it damages in some way the sacrosanct bubble that you can create with somebody that maybe is kind of like, you know, like late at night at a sleepover when the lights are out and you get into like the juicier conversations. But you can't see each other. Or the way that you might be facing out the front windshield of your car driving and your child might be in the backseat and you get into the juicier conversations.

Or both people are facing at the front. Like what is it about not looking at someone's face that makes the conversation more intimate? I don't know why.

But I think it's true. I certainly feel that. Terrible Thanks for Asking is a wonderful podcast by Nora McInerney, former guest in 3 Books.

She and I have talked about this because she also has been loathe to kind of videotape everything. However, other podcasts I like, like the ritual podcast, videotape everything. So something I'm certainly wrestling with.

For now, it does feel relaxing, relieving to just be audio only here. So that is my temptation, I will say. And even when I interviewed Jonathan Franzen on 137, you know, the last chapter, I kind of felt not stiffening, but there is some sort of formalification by him and by me because we were videotaping it. Maybe if we hadn't have videotaped it, we would have got even juicier. I don't know. Anyway.

Wow is the kind of emotional response to listening to Maria Popova wax prophetic on so many things. So many quotes jumped out to me out of this conversation. Here are six.

The self is a kind of book that is constantly being reread and rewritten by the person living with it. I love that. The self is a kind of book that is constantly being reread and rewritten by the person living with it.

Another quote, right now I'm very troubled by this whole thing about cultural appropriation because when you think about education, learning, that is appropriation. You are literally taking in somebody else's knowledge and incorporating it into your own corpus of knowledge and calling it your own. That is what it means to learn anything.

And so without appropriation, there could be no learning. Amen to Maria on that one. Number three, if we're not a little bit embarrassed of the people we used to be, we're kind of not doing it right.

I love that. I relate to that. I kind of mentioned it in the intro and I was reading the byline on her on her blog.

Not byline, the sub headline. I find identity the least interesting thing about people. Actually, identity and opinion.

Unfortunately, we live now at a time and an era of identities and opinions being the kind of front line to personhood. Wow, that is such an interesting thought. As we go deeper, she says, we'll call this the fifth quote, I think the most interesting things are the things that light us up, the things that are portals to wonder for us.

Oh, yeah, that is so true. You know, when you go to a party or something, instead of saying, how are you? I think the better question is, what do you find interesting lately or what are you thinking about lately?

And then you get this gut reaction of something the person likes. When I started my Quizno sub franchise in 2003, I wrote about this in You Are Awesome or The Resilience Equation as I'm trying to call it in my mind now, the Orange book that I put out in 2019 the head office told me to hire pretty girls. I'm not kidding.

When I say that, they're not there anymore. It's a terrible thing to say. I was like, what do you mean hire pretty girls?

They're like hire pretty girls. That's how you hire. I'm like, wow, like this is a professional company purportedly.

This is terrible. So I come up with a hiring process and my first question is just a one sentence phone interview first interview and I just say, spend 10 minutes, I think say five minutes, spend five minutes telling me about something you love. That's it.

That was the entire interview. And so I got this guy named Richard who went on for five minutes about skateboarding and all these different skateboarding wheels. I was like, I can make this guy excited about sandwiches if he's excited about skateboarding.

And so I was just gauging their kind of, you know, wonder potential to put Maria's word of wonder in there. Yeah, like wonder potential. What do you find interesting?

Side note. I also love the title of the ritual pockets with Casey Neistat where he calls it Casey Neistat's relentless pursuit of interestingness. Same kind of idea.

So many more quotes. How about this one? We really fucked up music.

Musicians are now commercial vehicles for selling apps and subscription services. Amen. Because she's talking about the commodification of cultural material calling it content.

I think that was like a we'll call that five B and here's quote number six. I think our highest calling is to love the world, to love the world as it is and as we are. Wow.

I think our highest calling is to love the world, to love the world as it is and as we are. Those quotes together with a whole bunch of others will be over at 3books.co where you can always find ad free, sponsor free, not content. The creative output of the show is the show notes.

It is the quotes that we said. It is the images of me and the guests if we were live and together. There is the top 1000 page.

So you can click the top corner. It says the top 1000 and then you can scroll down and it's a list of every single formative book ever mentioned on the show including three more books that we're adding to the top 1000 today, including number 598 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Number 597 Love and Saint Augustine by Hannah Arendt, A-R-E-N-D-T.

Number 596 Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck and we of course will add an asterisk to number 715 The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I don't say his last name nearly as well as Maria does. That was added to our list originally in chapter 96 with Dave Cheesewright. Dave, the CEO of Walmart International who was my former boss. Interesting that they both picked the same book. Now, I just want to say a big thank you to you for listening and to Maria for coming on 3 Books. Are you still here? Did you make a pass of three second pause? If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.

This is the club where I talk directly to you. You talk directly to me. We hang out.

We share your voicemails. We go deep on a word nerd quest to find the etymology of an interesting word. We're going to have a word cloud to a far shore with Maria and we just hang out.

It's like the after party of the show. I'm so glad you are here. This is one of three clubs that we have for 3 Books listeners.

Three bookers, including The Secret Club, which I just mailed out something for. So if you don't know what The Secret Club is and you want to join, just call us. Call 1-833-READ-ALOT.

It is a real phone number. If it doesn't work. So I got one from New Zealand the other time that said it didn't work.

Well, just send me like just make a recording on your phone and just email it to me. You know, you can just email me a voicemail. It should work everywhere though.

We are playing grasshopper. This phone subscription company like $29 a month to have a global phone number. Sometimes there's different zeros and ones and country codes and all that stuff though.

So 1-833-READ-ALOT. Anyway, let's start off the end of the podcast up as we always do by going to the phones.

Max:

Hi, my name is Max. I'm calling from Montreal, Canada. And it looks like my finger was having a lot of fun pressing the button three.

I was nervous to call but excitement got better of me and it was after rereading the introduction to this book, Poets Choice by Edward Hirsch. It says, quote, the poems featured in Poets Choice consistently grapple with death, suffering, and loss. They defend the importance of individual lives and rebel at the way individuals are dwarfed by mass culture.

They're unaccommodating. They portray and communicate on behalf of people at the margins of society, exiles, transplants, refugees, nomads, people with no country, people split between two different countries, split between the past and the present. They search for meaning and language and forms, particular only the poetry in the realm of emptiness for company and the face of isolation.

Poems are always in dialogue with other poems and in conversation with history and they invite readers into that conversation which offers a particular form of communication with community and fusion. And wow, does that top make you want to read poetry? Much like your podcast makes me want to read more books and discuss art forms.

Anyways, keep on keeping on and thank you for this podcast.

Neil:

Wow, I listened to that voicemail three times just now. I went back and listened to it because Max, you speak fast, a person after my own heart, a fast talker. Fast talkers unite.

Max is so wonderful to have you in the 3 Books community. Max from Montreal, alliterative of course, and you just read us a part of the introduction to a book called Poets Choice by Edward Hirsch, H-R, sorry, H-I-R-S-C-H. So many phrases jump out for that grappling with death, suffering a loss, rebelling at the way individuals are dwarfed by mass culture.

Yes, poems are always in dialogue with other poems. You asked us, does that not make you want to read poetry? Much like 3 Books makes me want to read more books.

It does make me want to read more poetry and I felt like this is a perfect voicemail to attach to Maria Popova as our queen poet herself. I mean, she kind of feels like a being of light and energy, just channeling like all the voices of the past. And she had that funny line at the beginning like I, most of my friends are dead or like I get along well with people that are gone kind of thing.

David Mitchell says that too back in chapter 58. You know, most of my friends or most of my favorite authors are good and dead. I think he says my paraphrases are not as good as the real quotes I know, but I'm trying to say the same thing.

So thank you Max for your voicemail for your phone call. If anyone else listening is like, I want to leave a note. I'm feeling a bit nervous about it.

Please don't feel nervous. I hear that all the time. Couple ways to get over nerves.

Just think of one book that changed your life and leave us with that book. Say, hey, love the show or hate the show, whatever. Here's one book that changed your life or changed my life and get my tense as well.

And then we'll look it up. I'll talk a bit about it. One reflection, a dream guest you have.

One reflection from one guest. Something you disagreed with. You know, Gina De Buoniguero, who was our guest with AJ Eggerwall last year.

She called in and disagreed with a guest. Well, I love that. This is just one view on one day of everything.

So it's nice to have disagreements. We won't do a letter of the chapter I think because I threw one in the front of the show this time as I want to start doing more and more and I keep saying that. But we're going to put that in the front.

And then we will, I guess it's time. It is. It must be time.

It is time for the word of the chapter and for this chapter's word. Let's of course go back to the ever loquacious Maria Popova. Here we go.

Maria:

Illusion creativity just this combinatorial thing and it's very confident with the spirit of the book. He would have still bristled repugnance. We know cerebrally that we are finite and we're transient.

The self-acceptance of your parameters uphill kind of Sysyphean experience. It is an allegory. It's the saccharin nature of it.

Neil:

A treat of words there for us to choose from. But I think this time we are going to go with saccharin.

Neil:

Yes, we are going to go with saccharin.

Neil:

Also known as excessively sweet or sentimental S-A-C-C-H-A-R-I-N-E. That E at the end is actually kind of interesting. We're going to talk about that in just a second.

First of all, saccharine the adjective. Miriam Webster, do you have a different voice?

Neil:

Saccharin.

Neil:

Okay, just a little bit more professional. One is of relating to or resembling that of sugar, like a saccharin taste. One B is yielding or containing sugar like saccharin vegetables.

Then there's the word that we were talking about, which I think it's most commonly used and that I know of overly or sickishly sweet. And another one a little bit more ingratiatingly or effectively agreeable or friendly. I have been called saccharin before.

I will say I will add that. Ingratiatingly or effectively agreeable or friendly. Okay, fourth is also called overly sentimental like a saccharin love story.

Another word for that is mawkish. M-A-W-K-I-S-H. Exaggeratedly or childless childlessly emotional.

I'm childlessly emotional sometimes, I guess. But why did I say that E was important? Well, because saccharin without the S-A-C-C-H-A-R-I-N is also called benzo-sulfamide or E-9-5-4.

You may know it as a non-nutritive artificial sweetener, most commonly branded as sweet and low. Over the 150-year-old history of saccharin, which by the way, the etymology of the word comes from the Greek word both the saccharin without the E, which is the chemical one, and saccharin with the E, which means the figuratively derogatory, unpleasantly over polite, overly sweet sense. Both come from the Greek word saccharin, which means gravel.

Gravel. Yes, a surprise. We were not expecting it to mean gravel.

However, that's where it comes from. It's also an obsolete name for sucrose. It was discovered 150 years ago by the chemists.

Well, there's kind of a fight over it. Konstantin Fallberg, a chemist working on coal tar derivatives. Isn't that interesting how these things are discovered?

On coal tar. He's working on coal tar at Johns Hopkins in 1879. Notice a sweet taste on his hand one night, and he realized this is probably the benzoic sulfamide, which he'd been working on that day.

He published some studies in 1879 and 1880, and then he was starting to work in New York City, and he applied for patents in countries talking about how you produce this sweet substance that he named saccharin without the E. Okay, so two years later, he began production of the substance in a factory in the suburbs of Germany, and he got rich off of it. Well, the other guy, femson.

Who's femson? Femson, who are you? Remson.

Ah, Remson was his fellow chemist who grew irritated, believing he deserved the credit for the substance produced because they were made in his factory. Remson commented, Fallenberg is a scoundrel, and nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath as him. Okay, okay.

Chemists fighting, not a new story. One guy's factory, the other guy's invention. Yeah, who owns it?

It's kind of a debate. Well, saccharin's gone in and out of legalization and popularity throughout the 20th century. For a while, people thought it was like the savior for dieting in the 60s and 70s because it's a calorie-free sweetener, right?

But then, over time, they started saying, oh no, this causes cancer in rats in the 60s. And they're like, no, no, this doesn't cause cancer in rats. Those rats already had cancer, wasn't these?

Well, this thing. Over and over, back and forth, all the way up to the year 2010, that's the most recent ruling about saccharin, where the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has now officially removed saccharin from their list of hazardous constituents and commercial chemical products. Now, here we are in 2024, 14 years later, because the EPA has taken off their list of hazardous substances, do we just now plow saccharin?

Or are we somewhat suspicious of the EPA? Are we somewhat suspicious of our trust in these bodies that are determining what we should put in there? I don't know, guys.

A chemical that some guy in the 1800s was, kind of came up with when he was working with coal tar. I don't know. I'm sticking with a peach over here.

That's what I'm sticking with. You keep your saccharin, and it's fascinating history over there. Saccharin without the E, saccharin with the two versions of the same thing, overly or sickishly sweet.

Well, I hope you didn't find today's chapter overly or sickishly sweet, but you still found it sweet. I did too. It was wonderful hanging out with you on this buck moon in July with Maria Popova on chapter 138 of 3 Books I cannot wait. We're going to put out a few more pages. Okay, I'm still wondering if we should do pages in the fall.

I'm kind of thinking maybe we get rid of pages completely. They're gumming up the RSS feed. We just want to have chapters.

Maybe we just do chapters and then we put greatest hits on the new moon. That's what I'm thinking. What if we threw David Sedaris and Quentin Tarantino and Judy Bloom on the new moons people I'd be kind of fun.

And now we've got six years of stuff to kind of go back to kind of like Maria Popova's surprise me button on the left side of The Marginalian. where you can just get a taste from the past. If the shows are as timeless as we have designed them to be. I mean, we are talking about formative books after all, then maybe that works.

Yes, I am spit balling with you. Let me know 1-833-READ-A-LOT or via email or via review. If you have a view on the matter and until next time, Chapter 139.

Well, we are going to be talking with a walking duck. Like a human who dresses up as a duck. His name is Lewis Mallard.

Well, I say his. I don't even know if it's his. You'll you'll you will determine he is an interdimensional psychedelic folk artist.

Yes, we are going to hang out with Lewis Mallard over in August of 2024. But until then, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning the page, everybody.

I'll talk to you soon.

Listen to the chapter here!