(bright uplifting music) - Paola, thank you so much for sitting down to talk to me today.

I thought we would start with a very straightforward question, which is, what does home mean to you?

- Yeah, being a foreigner, living in America, I get asked that question quite often.

And so since I've been living here, I've been thinking about home more often than I would've liked, sometimes.

(sighs) One would give you this straightforward answer to this question, which is, you know, as Elvis Presley says, "Home is where the heart is."

And I might take it from Elvis, and push it a little, anatomically speaking, because for me, the heart stands at the crossroad between my stomach and my brain.

And so I think that that sort of approaches my idea of what home means.

I think I'm sort of...

I see home as living in that strange space between the gastropod or the gastronome, which are very close to each other in my view, and the poet, on the other side.

So for me, home is something that has a strong connection with language and something that has a strong connection with my stomach.

In a sense, I think if I can quote, there's a wonderful passage by Francis Ponge.

He's a French poet.

He wrote this portable little book.

It's called "The Nature of Things" or (speaking French).

So technically, on the side of things.

It's a book that has been written in a tragic period of the history of Europe.

It was written in 1942.

And strangely enough, Francis Ponge starts thinking about objects and about how objects define our relationship with the world.

And so I'm going back to the gastropod.

I would like to quote from one of his prose poem.

It's called "The Snail."

Actually "Snails."

And he says, "Unlike the gastronome, that dry land breed, which also follows its stomach, this gastropodae, snails, are fond of humid earth.

Go on, they advance at full length, adhering to it all the way.

They lug some along, they eat some, excrete some, they traverse it, it traverses them.

This is interpenetration in the best of taste.

Tone on tone, you might say, with one passive element, one active, the passive nourishing as it baits the active, which moves from place to place while eating."

I always thought about snails in relationship with home and language, because they're this fascinating creature who had no choice.

They carry their home on their back.

Paradoxically, the only time they're not at home is when they move.

But I find fascinating the way they move.

So they eat their way almost across the world.

They have a strong connection with the land.

And that's sometimes how I feel.

I eat my way through my...

I mean, I eat my way in a sense as a way of relating to the world outside.

- So that's beautiful and really interesting.

I want to ask about the eating your way, if we can break it down a little.

So the idea of taking your environment and ingesting it, and incorporating it into, when we go to eating, it feels almost like your physical constitution, a melding with an environment.

Can you say more about what speaks to you about that?

- Yes, I am a very voracious being.

(laughing) I eat food, I eat poetry, I eat books.

But eating for me, is a very, very interesting sort of process, because it is never just active, as for the snail, right?

They traverse the land, right?

So they eat their way to the land, but the land traverses them.

And so in a sense, since I've been living abroad, I felt that my identity has been negotiated in this sort of process between eating and being eaten.

So, and it's fine.

It's not anything cannibalistic.

(laughing) But it's a process where you have to be vulnerable enough.

In order to encounter the other, you have to be vulnerable enough to offer yourself up to be eaten.

There's a wonderful quote from a movie.

It's called "Big Night," sort of Italian-American movie about the culture of eating.

And the main character, Primo, of course, like, first course, at a certain point is desperate.

He feels he's losing his identity.

And he says something that touched me profoundly.

He says, "This country is eating me alive."

And in a sense, that can be interpreted in the most negative sense as a complete loss of identity.

But I learned in my time here, that being eaten alive is a great way to learn about other cultures.

- Do you have particular ways in which you think about the way in which American culture has eaten you?

I mean, are there specific things that strike you as from the outside in?

- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

It's very puzzling.

To me, America is a great mystery, especially the American supermarket.

(both chuckling) But because you name things in the same way, but names lose their sense, especially when it comes to food.

You know, typical example, pizza.

Right?

Pizza here for me, does not correspond to what I, to the usual meaning I ascribe to that word.

And so in that sense, you know, is a sort of shocking relationship with something that you think so familiar that you think you ought to be so familiar.

And then it presents itself as something completely different.

And at the beginning it hurts a little, right?

You struggle to find that familiarity.

You want it, you wanna feel comfortable.

But then you learn that this discomfort actually keeps you alive.

This constantly being on the edge of having to interpret reality in a continuously renewed form is what keeps you intellectually challenged, is what keeps you, is also what keeps your identity together, paradoxically.

- It's interesting that it just went from the stomach to the head in a certain way.

So the idea of it keeps you constantly alive, 'cause you have to interpret reality.

That feels like intellectual activity might be too strong.

You know, I think that there's sentimental activity, there's just perceptual activity, all kinds of things.

But it does pull it a little bit simply from the shock of, like, your stomach saying, "I thought it was gonna be pizza, and this is not pizza," (both chuckling) to a set of interpretive processes.

Can you talk a little bit about that relationship between the stomach and the head?

- Yes, I mean, for an Italian, I think the connection is very straightforward, because (speaking foreign language), to know and to taste are the same word, right?

They have the same root.

And so for us, food is always culture.

This is always mediated by our intellectual experience, which includes the emotional sphere, but is always mediated through the common feature, which is the tongue.

So the language and the flavor are always somehow intertwined.

It's hard to separate them.

- Yeah, I wanna think about that more, because I think even the image of the snail for me, makes me ask about that.

Something like, is there a difference between my ingestion of the world?

And even that, the kind of veracity of appetite.

Like, on the one hand, I love connecting that to the intellectual appetite to know.

On the other hand, part of me, it's not exactly resists, but I have a question there of, isn't it different, the kind of diving into a plate of food and the kind of satisfaction one gets, and whatever happens when you have a moment of insight.

And I just wanna sort of frame that by saying, I anticipate you telling me they're closer than I think.

And it may be a very American attitude that says, "The food is sort of satisfying my belly, but what I do when I'm thinking about a book that's very different."

So I'm open to that, but I would be interested in hearing you talk about it.

- Yes, I think maybe we can take it a step back.

Because one of the first thing I noticed when I came to America, (laughs) and that my mother is still mad about, is the lack of tablecloths.

(laughs) So, and I've been, I mean, I'm not particularly attached to a tablecloth.

I never stopped and thought about the significance of a tablecloth.

But now more and more, I start to think that the tablecloth is the beginning of this sort of transformative relationship that is this process of eating and is sort of the mediator between stomach and brain.

If you think about it, the tablecloth in Italian, transform a word that is masculine, tablo, table.

You have it too.

But when we prepare the table in order to eat, and we put a tablecloth on, the table become feminine, tabla.

And it's almost like the beginning of a ritual, the beginning of an act of contemplation in the sense that the tablecloth cuts out a piece of reality from the rest of the world and forces you into a dimension that for a time, is alien from earthly preoccupations.

And so you sit down, you have this transformed table that invites you, and you cannot help in a sense, like, I think in a sense, the tablecloth forces you to see food as a sort of sacred cultural event, rather than just something that satisfies your appetite or your lower appetites.

Let's call them like that.

- Yeah, no, that's really interesting.

I wonder about...

So when we think about thinking, and the kind of pulling apart and putting together discernment, a kind of, the different, you know, sort of features of thinking that we work on here at St. John's, sort of honing, what is the parallel with eating and is it connected?

I mean, I think that the earlier thought about tasting and knowing the world being so close.

So as it speaks to knowing the world, what happens at the table with the tablecloth?

- Right, I think it transform.

It needs to transform your strict idea of knowing.

I think when you know through the process of eating, you are conscious of a process that is the process of establishing or finding a way to relate yourself to the world outside you.

It's a process that calls to sort of your basic biology.

So an instinct of survival.

But also, at least for me, it elevates that simple instinct of survival to a way of understanding yourself in a network of relationship with your land.

So the food has a strict relationship with the land you come from.

But also with the people that are around you.

I mean, for us, the very concept of family means people that sit at the same table together.

So in a sense, you could say that it's probably stretching the idea of knowledge.

- Is there an equivalent of a kind of a-ha moment?

So at a seminar table, if you have a very good conversation, you might have a collective sort of experience or sort of sigh of, "Wow, we're really getting somewhere."

Is there something like that?

- Yeah, and more than getting somewhere, is getting somewhere together.

Like, this feeling of togetherness.

That to me, is so important.

I mean, I cannot conceive of knowledge as a private act.

To me, knowledge has to be something that is related to a community, to the idea of working together.

So that's a good example.

I mean, Dante writes a whole treatise about eating together and philosophizing, right?

So, which is the "Convivio", "The Banquet," I think is translated in English.

And to me, this idea is very powerful, and I think it reflects our mode of learning around the table.

I think it's not by chance that we convene at seminar together, and we explore a topic in a way that is very similar to a convivial act, to sort of sharing food.

- Yeah, so earlier that connection between taste and language, can we talk about language specifically and your experience, you know, speaking English rather than Italian, and- - [Paola] Yeah.

- Yeah.

Can we connect that to this conversation about food?

- Yeah, it's painful.

(laughing) Yes.

I have a very, very conflictual relationship with English.

Partly because of that lack of familiarity that sometimes stifles me.

You know, I am convinced that language is one of the best heuristic tools that we have.

You know the world through language, and the richer and the more complex is your language, the more complex is your idea of the reality outside and inside you.

So for me, sometimes using English is always a very interesting, but also painful process.

(laughing) I lived in Italy until I was 28, I think.

And I was one of those people that tried to really hone their language skill, tried to... Refine their relationship with language, because I thought that language is such a powerful tool.

It makes people change their mind, it makes people feel things.

And so now I'm trying to find my way through this different language as an adult.

So it's an interesting process, because technically I am 14 (laughing) in English.

14, but with an adult brain, right?

Or with a more adult brain.

I don't wanna say that.

14 years old are not adults.

So it's... That's why I started with the gastropod.

I feel very close to those creatures.

I mean, I like to adhere to language, and I like language to pass through me, and I see language as a very transformative experience.

But sometimes with English, it's a challenge.

- I mean, it's interesting, because I think one of the things that we say to our students is something like, we come into the classroom often with preconceived notions, even preconceived ways of talking about important things that we may disrupt in the classroom, and that might call on them to use words about familiar topics that are new to them.

I had a seminar partner early on in my time at St. John's, who would call students out, who used words, things like, I don't know, psychology, or totalizing words to encapsulate a whole set of things.

And he would slow them down and say, "Well, what do you actually mean by that?"

And suddenly they were in a position to sort that out in language that they wouldn't normally use, you know, and often simpler terms.

So I feel like one of the things that we tend to think is that a disruption of the natural flow might be a good thing.

And if you think about the music of language, it might not be as elegant actually at the beginning, but there might be something useful to that.

So I wonder what you, on the one hand, not being at home in the language, it absolutely makes sense to me that that could feel painful, and as though maybe you couldn't quite get to the heart of your thought.

On the other hand, one of the tools we use, teaching tools we use is to try to disrupt the flow of language, the ordinary music of language to say, you know, "Did you make that song?

Or are you just singing what everybody else is singing?"

So how do you think about that kind of disruptive character?

Has that led to insight for you?

- Yes, yes.

No, absolutely, absolutely.

And that's what I was trying to say in the sense of eat and being devoured, right?

My relationship with English is always one of wonder or wonderment.

I don't know, wonder, I guess.

Because it's something that, that I always, that I don't take for granted.

So it's a tool that I have to keep shaping, honing, and that allows me, in a sense, an interesting, different perspective on the language as a tool for knowledge.

In a sense, I think the hardest and the most helpful thing for me with English is trying to be ironical with the language.

Irony, comedy are absolutely, like, cultural phenomenon.

They are imbued in the place, in the culture you come from.

Italian humor is very dark.

(laughing) But comedy and irony have an interesting mechanism that always helps me when I need to try to understand my relationship with English, because they always force you out of the word, of the meaning, right?

They force you, they force in a sense, a foreign perspective on reality and on what you wanna signify or denote with your speech.

So in a sense, irony for me is the most difficult thing, but also the most helpful thing.

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