(gentle upbeat music) - I'm here today with Mary Elizabeth Halper, my friend and colleague.

Mary Elizabeth and I, sometimes ask each other what we've been thinking about, so this is an authentic conversation.

Mary Elizabeth, what have you been thinking about?

What question that's on your mind?

- I've been thinking a lot lately about the way in which, or whether reading is an act of friendship.

There's this sense of, and especially in our seminars, this sense of the, as it's sometimes said that the book is the only authority in the room.

But I don't think I've related to books as authorities so much as, I don't know, maybe treasure troves.

But then more recently, the more I read them as friends, someone I can learn from.

So I've been trying to think about what, what is reading such that maybe it can be a way of being friends with a book.

- Is it the book that we're friends with or is it the author that we're friends with?

- Yeah.

So, I think I really wanna say, suggest or at least explore the plausibility that it's the book that's the, that you're trying to be friends with.

- Right.

- There's a sort of bit of the soul of the person who wrote it, sort of frozen or, frozen doesn't seem right 'cause it's, I want it to be alive, but it's sort of, that's what it is, right?

That's what is written.

And I don't, I think I wanna see what I can learn from the book as if it's the only thing that can talk to me and not have to worry about, well, what would, I dunno, what would Plato say about any one of his dialogues?

I wanna say Plato said everything that he wants to say, and now it's my, now I wanna figure out what's in these, what's in these books.

- Right, so we're not talking about like resurrecting the author to talk to, to relate to him about his own book or her own book.

It's something different, it's a relationship that we have with a book itself.

Do you have an example of a kind of friendship with a book that you've had that might be helpful?

Like, how does it change over time?

How does it start?

How does it change?

Like, how is it like a real friendship?

- Well, I think going back to the books over and over again is maybe a crucial part of thinking about reading as an act of friendship.

And so in that respect, I think Plato has to be the one that I've, that I would go back to, maybe Shakespeare is another one.

Yeah, it's complicated 'cause they have characters in the books.

And so, in some ways I'm friends with the dialogue of Meno, but in other ways I'm like getting to know Meno in a different way this time that I read it or getting to see a different side of Socrates.

So, but maybe Aristotle, with whom I've also spent a lot of time, there's a, yeah... Maybe this is too flighty, there are ways in which, like in response to my moods like a friend would, different things hit me in different ways when I read them.

- So I can, so part of it seems to be that we were in a conversation with a book.

So, it's not something that's, where we're just passively receiving the book and, you know, being poured into our ears or whatever it's, or poured into our eyes.

We're asking it questions, we come to it with certain questions and it talks back to us, and then that might change how we respond the next time or the next thing that we ask.

Is that part of it?

The sense of it's part of the friendship that we have a conversation with a book of some kind, or that we're not, we're not passive as far as it's concerned.

- Yeah, I think I definitely, that's one of the appealing things about thinking about reading as an act of friendship, is that it involves the reader in a very active way, even more active than just sort of being actively receptive.

Like the conversation, there's converse, you're taking turns with bringing something to, and so this is another question about, if it's a friendship, is it one of these, sometimes called triadic friendships where you are looking to the good of the friend and the friend is looking to your good, but that means that there's this third thing.

It's not just between you and your friend.

And so, I wonder if the taking turns with the book is to try to get closer to something that you're both trying to get closer to, maybe some like truth or insight, or something like that.

The thing that the book's talking about, the thing that you're asking questions about.

- And that seems like a human friend too, in that you, we do things with friends.

Like we go to a, we watch a film with a friend, we have a dinner with friends.

There's some third thing, or we're involved in, we teach at the same college.

There's a third thing that is involved with us.

And I can think of an example in my, I remember it's one of the only times, honestly, which is a bit embarrassing given I have a degree in philosophy, that I read philosophy out of a personal burning desire.

And it was, I was in the middle of becoming Catholic and they read in church the Abraham Sacrifice of Isaac, and I was just like struck and horrified.

And I remember going home and pulling out Kierkegaard, "Fear and Trembling" for myself, because I was like, he talk, like, talk to me, Kierkegaard, you tell me what, tell me how to understand this.

And that was definitely a case where a friendship of a kind was opened up between me and a book because of our common interest in some other thing.

And I think it's a book that when I go back to, like, I don't go back to it now with that same question, and I see something different each time.

That feels like another way that friendships with people and friendships with book are similar.

Like you, things emerge over months or years that you hadn't seen before.

It's not always, well, I don't know, now, sorry, I've been talking for a while.

But, there are friendships with people that are nostalgic, right?

You have like one set of core experiences and when you get together, all you do is like revisit the magic, you know?

Revisit.

It's, "Remember that spring break road trip to New Orleans?"

But then there's friendships which are real lifelong friendships where there's something different each time and you grow and change and the person grows and change and the friendship changes with that.

Is there something analogous with books?

- I think so.

I think there's this strange interplay of sameness and surprise that can happen that seems to be there with especially the friends that you can, you can be friends with over many, many years that you, in some ways, yes, there's always something different, but in another way they're not different.

And the fact that there's some sort of like stability to them and maybe even to the friendship, is that you also can sort of be surprised by them in a way that doesn't fundamentally alter the friendship.

But they can still surprise you after however how many years.

Yeah, I like the contrast with the nostalgic friendship.

I mean, I have books that are like that, right?

Like, you go back and you read an old, my particular guilty pleasure is sci-fi.

Read old sci-fi books that you remember reading when you were like 10 years old, you've got the flashlight and you're trying not to.

There are nostalgic books like that and you're like, oh, I remember thinking that this was gonna remember what, like, what gripped me about this.

But it's different than the books that in some way they're, you know sort of what's in them, you know, "Fear and Trembling" about Abraham and Isaac.

But it's gonna be, yeah, a little bit different each time, but in a way that is still like, yeah, about the same things.

It changes, maybe it changes with you in a way.

But yeah, I kind of like this, I don't know, can we stick on this idea of like stability and surprise or sameness and surprise and how those things can go?

Is that something that, does that seem right about human beings as well as about books?

- Well, I think it's definitely true about, like even people you've known your whole life can surprise you.

And it's not even just that there's some new development, but there's something that's been there all along that you never saw before.

So it seems like part of why it's a rich question about how you could be friends with a book is because there's enough, there's something really hidden about another person, otherwise you could never, you wouldn't be surprised.

I mean, at least in a real friendship or in a really, a deep relationship of any kind, it's going to be basically mysterious.

You're not gonna ever really know who that person is.

You might have various ideas that you toss out about who they are.

They might have little stereotypes that you put them in over the years, but they're always busting out of them.

So what, yeah, help me think about what that would look like for books?

- Yeah, because it seems strange.

Maybe I should have put it the other way around.

Is it as true about books as it seems to be about human beings?

'Cause it seems strange.

Books are there, there's not gonna be another book added to the "Republic."

There's no book 11 of the "Republic" out there, right?

So, they're written, they're done, and that's where we started out with it.

- We could write it as fan fiction, I think we could do that.

We could write the 11th and 12th books of the "Republic."

- That seems particularly creepy if you go back to the way the books maybe are like human beings, that seems maybe a little (indistinct) or something.

But yeah, in some ways the books are done, they're done, they're written and they're not going to change in a certain respect.

Socrates will always go down to the Piraeus, and Socrates will always, in the "Republic," and he'll always be the last one awake at the symposium, at the end of the symposium.

And he's always, always, always gonna die at the end of the Phaedo.

So in some ways they will just never change, they're done.

But in other ways, right, there's the, I don't know, maybe something like the meaning changes, or it can change, the significance of it can be this unplumbable mystery like other human beings are.

- Well, so, I don't know.

We could think about the different possibilities for change.

Something might have changed about me in the meantime.

So, when I read "King Lear," when I was a student, I was, you know, the daughters are just totally unsympathetic, they're just evil.

You just hate them with every fiber for your being.

But I saw the play not that long ago, and I realized, oh wait, there's a difficulty here.

There's someone with power who's aging, and there's a question about when and how that power gets handed on.

And that's something I only see as an older person, you know, having seen say, transitions in power or thinking about aging parents and what can go wrong?

Or aging relatives or aging grandparents.

So, I think that's a case where I just see things differently because I'm different.

But I also think that there must be other ways that you can find a depth that was always there that you just didn't see it.

And it's not because you changed, it's because the book was, the book is... Unplumbable.

It's inexhaustible, it has this inexhaustible quality, which is like the mystery of a human being in a certain way.

Maybe, it's even the same in some way as a mystery of a human being, I don't know how to think about it.

- Yeah, I think I really, when you were talking about how the book changes, maybe because I'm changing, although I certainly don't wanna deny that.

And your example was beautiful, and I think, I mean, I'm sure I, we could come up between us with many, many, many more examples of how a book changes because we've changed.

But I wanna, I guess I'm wanting to resist, not to say that you were doing this, but reducing the book to a kind of mirror of myself.

Like I... - Exactly, I agree.

- Perhaps very vainly don't want reading to be an act of vanity.

Just like holding it up to myself, ooh, what new thing can I learn about my life now?

Although there, I mean, I think there can be something useful, maybe even something beautiful in that, but I, yeah, that it doesn't seem true to the, at least the describing the experience that I've had in reading some books.

Like I really, I would be very disappointed in myself and probably in the book, if the experience ends up being actually this kind of act of vanity.

- Yeah, or if somehow in reading a book, the only thing you ever find out about is yourself, that doesn't seem quite right.

I mean, there's something called self knowledge, which is crucial and important, but it doesn't seem quite right.

So, can we think of an example of that kind of inexhaustibility feature so that it's not something that's changing in me, but something that just emerged out of the shadows in the book?

Do you have an example like that?

I might be able to come up with one if you don't, but.

- Yeah, let me hear, can I hear yours?

- Sure, and then- - Yeah, to have a better sense of sort of what you're looking at.

- So the, I remember, so I think this feature that we're talking about, the inexhaustibility and the possibility of something like a friendship is part of what it means to, for there to be a great book, right?

What's the kind of books that we read at St. John's.

But sometimes we know these books really well.

So, I remember when I was a first year tutor and it's freshman seminar, which is mostly ancient Greek stuff, which is what my specialty was.

And a lot of it is Greek philosophy, which is what my specialty was.

And we were reading Plato's "Republic," which is a book that I had read at that point about a dozen times.

Very, you know, I'd worked on different parts of it, I had written about it, I'd spent years on this book.

And I was nervous going in, I thought...

This book isn't gonna have anything else to say to me.

Like I'm, I don't have, I might be done with this book.

And I was able to maintain that, through I think the first two seminars I was able to maintain the sense that somehow the book was no longer speaking to me, like it had said to me everything it was going to say.

And then we get to the cave, which is the most hackneyed, everyone reads it, every school child knows it.

And all of a sudden, I don't, I wish I could remember exactly what I saw, but I saw something about it that I had not seen before, some way that it meant something, some way that it might even be an account of the kind of thing a human being is, like the cave is somehow like the body in some way.

I can't recover it clearly enough to articulate it.

But anyway, and I was like, okay, like that's fine.

This is gonna work, this is, you can be, you can have spent 10 years, 15 years studying a book and it can still surprise you, it can still teach you something.

And that wasn't something I was looking for, that was something that came out of the conversation with others.

- Yeah, yeah.

- With the students.

- Well, how important do you think that last element is about something that came out of the conversations with the students?

Because as you were speaking, I was thinking, I too studied Greek, ancient Greek philosophy, and this was, and I was nervous about sort of how much I could put distance between myself and the books and be able to see them afresh.

But I found I didn't actually have to work all that hard at it, thankfully, because I came in and everyone's talking about this new book they just read, right?

Like they, "What about this?"

And I got to see it almost immediately as something new, something that surprised me because I was seeing what they were seeing and they didn't have, they hadn't long forgotten the first time that they read it or whatever.

So I wondered how much is that, yeah, how much is the inexhaustibility of it related to, or is it, so maybe where the question is, do you need the others to get access to it?

Or is it just like a helpful addition?

- Well, I think that the other people in the group matter, but I don't know whether they always solve that particular difficulty, because sometimes students have similar reactions, similar first reactions to books.

So it's pretty normal for people reading Aristotle's "Politics" for the first time, they find this thing about the natural slave and they just have this horror, you know?

And so, that horror, which is fair and good and reasonable and appropriate reaction in many ways, it's no longer, it's not interesting to me after a certain point, because I know that it's there, I know what's causing it.

And so, it too can, in a bit, it was more, I taught for a long time at other universities and we would, when you pose the same question to a group of students, they'll respond often in the same way year after year.

So I think it has to do with the book.

- Hmm, okay.

- And the other people, because one thing I've noticed too is the book, the books are complicated and there's a lot in them, and the readings are big.

And I think that's something that people wonder, who love books like us, they wonder about how we could read these books so fast.

But for me, it's a way of noticing things that I otherwise wouldn't notice, you know?

So some student will say, "What does this line mean?"

And I'll just suddenly realize, I'd never really read that, that'd been a part I'd kind of gone over quickly.

So I think it's complexity, complexity is part of the inexhaustibility and richness, I don't know what complexity and richness are, they feel a little buzzwordy, but.

- Yeah.

Yeah, so Shakespeare's sonnets can you be friends with Shakespeare, with one of Shakespeare's sonnets?

I mean it's, oh gosh, 14 lines, because that's how many lines we're in a sonnet, I'm pretty sure.

It's 14 lines, but I don't know, I feel like I can keep thinking about at several of the sonnets.

Like, so I'm not sure, maybe that still meets this criteria of complexity, but it's not just 'cause it's big, right?

Maybe what it's trying to talk about is really complex and that's where the complexity lies?

Not so much in the arrangement of the words, but the... - So that goes back to the third, the triad, what you're calling the triad, the third thing.

So it's the third thing that's complicated.

And the words help you to see some, words hit you in a different way.

And then, the aspect of the thing that we're thinking about comes out.

I mean, love and death in the sonnets, but maybe.

- Right, yeah.

But then, now I'm thinking about like, books that I've read on Shakespeare, like, you're not saying nearly as much about what he's talking about in 14 lines, and yet here is this sort of 40-page article.

So I, yeah, I think this goes back to this idea of sort of, there is a kind of writing that one can really be friends with that maybe isn't, not so much because of its size, but because of what it's trying to do.

Whereas like, I couldn't be friends with a, I don't know what, an book of essays on, a book of scholarly essays on Shakespeare sonnets or something.

- Well, I guess you couldn't also, you wouldn't record one of our seminars and listen to it later, would you?

- Yeah.

Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah, there's something about like the, can I use a Greek word, kairos?

The, like the opportune moment.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- But why is that?

So, I mean, I'd almost rather read, I think I'd definitely rather read a piece of secondary literature, even if it's not as rich as the primary over listening to a seminar on it, even though I'd much rather be in the seminar than reading the secondary literature.

What's going on there?

- Yeah, there's like an unrepeatability to these conversations about the book, even though the book itself seems to be imminently repeatable, you can read them over and over again, although you're not quite repeating the, you know, the experience of reading it for the seventh time, reading it for the eighth time, et cetera, et cetera.

But then again, you never have the same conversation more than once, right?

- Yeah.

I don't know, I think I want to resist.

I think the author has to matter.

I think the author must be part of what's making it such a rich experience.

And so, it's not just that there are words and images on the page, it's that someone was using those to communicate.

And I feel like the reason why, I mean, the reason why it doesn't feel silly to say you can be friends with a book the way that it does to say, like, you can be friends with particular type of wine or something, or friends with, yeah, a box of chocolates.

Like, you can't be friends with those things, you're just consuming them.

You might consume them in different ways, in different times.

You might have a continuous set of memories about them.

But there's something about the human being on the other end of the book who's trying to communicate with you, that seems to really matter as far as the sense of it being something deep and exhaustible mysterious.

'Cause that person is a real human being, they're not just a word generator or a- - Yeah.

- A compiler.

- So I wonder, should we think about the book then, not as sort of the product of the activity of the author, but the sustained activity itself.

So I wonder if this is a way to maybe find a mean between us.

So the reason I resisted about being, you're trying to be friends with the author is that I kind of, I feel very strongly that if Aristotle walked into the room and said, "This is what I really believe."

I would say, well, but this is what you wrote and this is what we're talking about, and this is what I wanna talk about, right?

This is, you can't just like override, pull off the author card and override this.

- I can definitely say I don't, but I can just definitely picture a St. John's seminar going on.

The author walks in and it's like, "What?"

"Let me explain what," and everyone ignores him, you know?

Just complete, that would be very St. John's, about the most St. John's thing that's ever happened, I think.

Anyway, go ahead about that.

- Yeah, so I think that's why I was, but I like this idea.

I think the other, the way that you could go too far away from the author is to make the book a kind of product, static product.

Then it fits, then it seems like maybe it's more like the wine or the box, something consumable.

- Right.

- But if it's the sustained activity of the author's soul, then the author matters not because he should have the, or she should have the final word on what it means, but because it's the thinking, not the thought, of the author that you're trying to think along with.

- That seems right, and it fits neatly with something I know I end up saying to students a lot who are writing papers, I say, a paper is a piece of thinking.

(gentle upbeat music)