I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

A cage, forty women, and guards who never explain themselves. Then one mistake changes everything, and the real terror begins: freedom with no map, no society, and no reason built into the sky. We’re diving into Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, a philosophical dystopia that feels less like world-building and more like an experiment in what identity becomes when memory, culture, and relationship fall away.

We walk through the novel’s stark setup and why the unnamed narrator “the child” is so unsettling and so believable. We talk about the book’s deliberate refusal to deliver satisfying answers, why it earns five stars without being “enjoyable,” and how the atmosphere of repetition turns existence itself into the plot. Along the way, we trace the characters’ different responses to isolation: longing and collapse for those who remember, resilience and creation for someone who has never known anything else.

From there, we dig into the episode’s biggest themes: witnessing as a form of legacy, dignity in death, and the ethics of being the one person left to see. We also bring in a Buddhist lens on attachment and suffering, plus the book’s surprising ideas about sexuality, secrecy, and self-agency. If you like existential literature, Beckett-style bleakness, or literary analysis that doesn’t flinch, this conversation will stick with you.

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Transcript

Synopsis Of The Cage

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Welcome back. There are books that tell stories, and then there are books that strip a story down to its barest bones, leaving you alone with questions. Today we're diving into I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, a novel that feels less like a narrative and more like an existential journey. No clear world building, no satisfying answers, just a girl, unnamed, unmoored, raised in a cage with women who remember a world that she has never known, and may never understand. This is not dystopia as spectacle. There are no rebellions, no chosen ones, no systems to overthrow. Instead, Harpman asks something far more unsettling. If you were stripped of society, memory, language as we know it, what remains of you? What happens when identity isn't shaped by culture, relationships, or history? But by absence, by silence, by isolation so complete that even the concept of normal disappears. And maybe the most disturbing question of all, do we need other people to be human or just to remember that we are? This is a novel about confinement without explanation, freedom without meaning, and survival without purpose. It's quiet, it's eerie, it's relentlessly philosophical, and it forces us to confront whether humanity is something we are or something we learn. So tonight we're putting I Who Have Never Known Men on trial, not for what it tells us, but for what it refuses to explain. Let's light it up. Okay, Peter, I'm gonna let you give a synopsis before we really get into what we think of this text.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

So the basic synopsis of the book that I can give is that this story is about 40 women for reasons unknown who one day find themselves waking up in a cage. They have very little memory at all of their previous life, and they have no memory of how they got there. And our main narrator is the youngest of all the women. She is 14 at the time that this story begins, although at the time this story begins, she doesn't even know her real age. She has been there as far as she can remember her entire life and has no memories of a previous life before the cage. It's all she's ever known. And no one has even bothered to give her a name. She just simply goes by the name the child. And there are also several unusual things about her, but we'll get into that later. These women live in this cage, and there are strict rules. They cannot touch one another, they cannot show any kind of emotion towards each other. Suicide is prohibited. They're not even allowed to cry. They have guards outside of the cage that just pace back and forth in silence all day long. They won't speak to them, they won't answer any of their questions and tell them why they are there. They just simply provide them with food. And anytime they break any of the rules, the guards crack a whip. And though they can never remember this whip being used against them in any kind of physical way, just the sound is enough to make them obey. One day, in the middle of the guards beginning to feed them, a siren goes off, and all the guards drop everything they're doing and they run out. And one guard drops the keys inside the food slot, which allows them to open their cage and finally go out into the real world once again after over a decade in captivity. And the rest of the book is their journey to try to find out what this strange new world that they do not recognize, what it is that they're supposed to do, and where they're supposed to go and how they're supposed to exist.

The Child And The Women

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Okay, so that's the basic kind of skeletal outline because the book gives us a very basic outline to work with, and we're gonna talk about that more as we go along. So we're gonna go ahead and copile this book and talk a little bit about the characters. And clearly we start with the character of the child, which is our main narrator. She's the one that we're seeing through the entire time. She is that youngest person that was in this cage. Then we have these other women, but they remain very two-dimensional from my point of view. It is the child that we get her inner thoughts and we get all of her conflicts and all of her frustrations. And she is a very well-developed character as far as she can be developed because she's known nothing but captivity her entire life.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

Yeah, there's this interesting junction position of these women that had a life before the cage and have spent the last 10 years despairing, essentially, and trying to forget that life and just sinking into the meaninglessness of their existence in that cage. All of their conversations are very shallow and vapid. And then there's this our main character, the child, who has grown up in this cage. And like any child growing up, she is naturally curious of her environment and she's full of all sorts of questions, and she wants to know things and she wants to discover things. And she still wants to live because this is the only life that she's ever known. But she constantly comes up with frustration with these women because they refuse to satiate her desire to live.

Stark Atmosphere And Style

SPEAKER_00 5:58

And as such, through her eyes, they are very blank because every time she wants to know something, they don't offer her anything. There is one woman, Anthea, who becomes kind of an older sister, quasi-mother figure to her, who offers her more information than anyone else over time. But initially, all these women are so closed about their prior experiences. And their response to her constantly is: it doesn't matter. You're in this cage, you're never going to be able to do this. You don't need to know about that because it's never going to impact you. And then they don't want to talk about their prior lives with husbands or children because of the traumatic things that have happened to them. So it really breaks down any ability to develop those characters, and then it causes this conflict, and we continue to hear her thoughts, and then we hear the narrative of someone who has very little memory, and that causes this blank slate and this development of this blank character. As far as atmosphere.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Well, we've already really touched on that. It's very sparse.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

It's very stark. They literally have two existences in this book. One is the bunker, and the other is the plains. Bunker planes, bunker planes. It's either their cage, their literal cage, or their figurative cage.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

Right. And the planes have very little variation to them. There are some points in the novel where she arrives or they arrive at a new place that has a little bit of geographical difference, and you're like, oh, something you new and unique. But for the most part, it becomes very repetitive because this is not world building.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

This is existence as drudgery.

SPEAKER_00 7:47

Right. And what is the point? This isn't like they got out of their cage and they're now in the Garden of Eden.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Yeah, it's it's kind of like the answer of those ladies. What's the point of describing the atmosphere? Writing style, it's very well written.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Oh, it's beautifully written.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

I mean, I I would struggle to tell a story this sparse in such an interesting way.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Right. It's beautiful. It is a beautiful narrative. It's almost poetic in sections. The point of view of this child is beautifully developed, and it's extraordinary in that way because Jacqueline Hartman is able to really grasp what it would be like to hear and experience life only through the eyes of someone who has no experience with life, who is like a newborn babe in a grown body or a partially developed body that is stumbling around and experiencing everything for the first time when they should have memories, they should have experiences that they don't have. And so we are really getting a really fascinating writing and character development through the quote unquote child. And I think the writing style is just one of a kind.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

The plot is already what we've hinted at. This is an existential journey through life by these women in a world that is devoid of everything that gives your existence reason or purpose.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Right. So that is the plot. And it is a journey in a very well, you have to decide if it's in a very linear way or if it's in a very cyclical way. And we'll kind of talk about that.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

If they ever really go anywhere at all.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Yeah. Or if they're on like a treadmill that's not really moving anywhere. So we'll we'll talk about that more when we get to the flip side of the episode. So intrigue? No.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

We don't we wonder what's happened, why. We have all the questions they have, and I don't want to spoil anything, but that's the intrigue. Yes. All the questions that they have as to what, why, how, who.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Right. What is happening? How did they get here?

SPEAKER_01 9:45

The intrigue is what am I gonna do next? Right. And why am I gonna do it?

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Right. So all those questions are there, and you will have those questions as you're reading. So that is the intrigue. You were in the same position as the women are.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

Logic. I thought that uh the child's questioning and her own explanations of things that she has to guess at and her experiences with them, and then the choices that she made, I thought made a lot of sense. I believed her as a character in this world.

Five Stars Without Enjoyment

SPEAKER_00 10:11

I did too. I thought that she worked through things in a very logical way. She tried to figure things out on whatever semi-formed basis or foundation she had to figure them out in. And I believed her. I believed in her persona. I believed in what Jacqueline Hartman created with her. And I think that is where the logic really was. Enjoyment.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

No. No. And that's this is a five-star read for me. I because I think it accomplished everything it sets out to accomplish, but you're not supposed to enjoy this book. If you can use the word I enjoyed this book, I question why.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

I I'm not sure you really read it. So I would say this is an important book.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

Exactly. This is a thought-provoking.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

It's thought-provoking, it's important. It would also be a five-star read for me, but it was not enjoyable. It's not enjoyable.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

So And the reason for that is because when you have stripped all the joy out of life, you can't help strip all the joy out of the reading experience for the reader, you know? And that way we on a small scale, we experience the the tediousness of their existence.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

I can't quite explain how I was driven forward to continue reading. And I felt like I was on the journey with the child, and I wanted to continue the journey with the child.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

It's not joy, it's curiosity.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Yes, it's curiosity, and I felt a responsibility to the child as I was reading to continue this journey. And for myself, as I was experiencing kind of the philosophical nature of the story and the questions that were being posed. But it's not enjoyment. This isn't, yay, I'm gonna go buy the t-shirt that goes with this story. This is, uh, wow. Now I've got to sit and ponder this one for a while and consider what's going on. But I definitely, for those people that are intellectual and willing to read something that's intended to make you think and leave you with some questions, yes, this is a good book.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Yeah, I will say that she will keep you curious as to what a life under these circumstances is going to end up looking like. And that's why you keep reading, because you want to see the whole picture, the whole journey in these environments, what that life is gonna end up looking like. And I thought that part was fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

And I think philosophically, we are bringing meaning to the life of the child by reading her story.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

We're her only witness in the we are the witness.

Spoiler Section Begins

Lit On Fire Merch Break

SPEAKER_00 12:33

She is the witness, and we are the witness. And so that that is the meaning of a life, is the story that's being written. So we'll talk about more of that as we get to the flip side. So now is the moment where we are going to transition from copile into our spoiler portion. Okay, quick pause. Because if you're still listening, you clearly have excellent taste or questionable judgment. Either way, we've got something for you.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

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SPEAKER_00 13:19

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SPEAKER_01 13:26

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SPEAKER_00 13:31

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A Goodreads Review As Thesis

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Welcome back. This is one of those few books that I really felt like I needed to immediately write a review down for it because I had to compile all of my thoughts and feelings about it into one place. So I wrote this review for it on Goodreads, and I'm going to just read it for you in order to give you a summary of my takeaway from the book. And so forgive me if any of this feels a little bit repetitive, but this is what I felt after reading the book. Not by any means a feel-good story. This novel will not appeal to everyone because it sets out to accomplish something that most readers aren't looking for when they sit down to read a book. What the writer is attempting to do is use a narrative device to render a world that is devoid of all the trappings that help us define concepts of faith, gender, sexuality, masculinity and femininity, self, self-agency, purpose, empathy, relationships, determination, a will to live, and ultimately, what is legacy? Our main character known only as the child knows nothing of herself or the world before the cage that has been her only existence. Like an animal born in captivity, she finds herself released once more into a world where the gods that plucked her out of her previous existence and thrust her into this new reality have abandoned her or died, leaving no answers behind. You don't have to like this story or have enjoyed the book to have respect for the execution and the philosophical questions that the author poses. I haven't read any of other reviews of this book, but without even looking, I already know that there are probably many people that have reviewed this book that were left feeling confused, disappointed, frustrated, angry, and deeply insecure about their experience. They will accuse this novel of being many things that it isn't simply because they did not want to stop and think about what the story is really about and what the author was trying to accomplish and whether or not she actually accomplished it. And I would argue that those feelings suggest that she did exactly what she intended to do. By removing all the elements from the world by which we derive our joy, our happiness, our purpose, etc., she effectively removes those experiences from the act of reading as well. If you asked yourself, what was the point of reading this book, then you are so close to understanding the fundamental questions of the characters. What is it to be alive and what's the point of living in a world where this is all there is?

Lenses For Reading The Book

SPEAKER_00 16:02

I think that kind of sums it up. When I was going through this book, and when I made my little video on TikTok, I likened it to an escape room, and you kind of qualified my statement when we were talking, but an escape room where you find a bunch of clues and then you never find your way out. And you had said, and none of the clues actually relate to getting out in the first place. And that is so very true in this book because that's not the point. Getting out is not the point. It's the record of the journey and the experiences and the questions that are left behind. And I think it is important to really highlight the fact that Jacqueline Hartman escaped Belgium with her family during World War II at the beginning of World War II. And she lived in exile. She was also a psychoanalyst, and I think that she really delves into a lot of psychoanalysis. So if I were working with my students, I would say lenses you use for this book, psychoanalysis, a psychoanalytic lens for sure, a feminist lens, you might be able to leverage an eco-critical lens and a Marxist lens. There are a lot of ways to look at this book, to the women's relationship to the land that is so foreign to them, to the women's relationship to one another, to the development of the mind and what it means to be human and the nature of memory and its relationship to identity. There is so much going on in this book that makes us ponder our own experience. And for me, I wasn't depressed when I finished this book. So it was not depressing, although I can see it doing that to some people. Like some people reading it and being left with so many questions and that leading to a bad review because they just became frustrated and didn't want to deal with the questions that were being asked.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

And I would argue that touched on something within them.

God Silence And Loneliness

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Right, correct. I would argue that as well. So I wasn't depressed with it because I'm okay with approaching those questions and kind of posing them to myself as I'm reading a book like this, because that doesn't scare me. But it asks some questions that tend to make you uncomfortable. And I think that that is something a lot of people don't want to face. This is an existential book. This is, you know, this is either going to lead you down a road of existential journey and questioning, or it's going to cause you to have an existential crisis. But it is a book that really leads you down those ways. I, as an example of a quote that I thought was very telling here at the end, and this is at the end of the journey, when the child is alone, and we will get into some of the other things that get her here. She is living by herself. And she says Anthea, who is one of the only women that she ever connected with, had tried to explain to me what the Christians meant by God and the soul. Apparently, people believed firmly in it. It's even mentioned in the preface to one of the books on astronautics. Sometimes I used to sit under the sky on a clear night and gaze at the stars, saying in my croaky voice, Lord, if you're up there somewhere and you aren't too busy, come and say a few words to me because I'm very lonely and it would make me so happy. Nothing happened. So I reckon that humanity, which I wonder whether I belong to or not, had a really very vivid imagination. She comes to this place and really makes us question the things we believe in, the things that we believe in to make ourselves comfortable, and the things we avoid considering, as she sits there all by herself in her final days, really questioning the social construct.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

She says several interesting things in the book that really help you understand her way of thinking. One of the things that she says is, How can I possibly miss something that I've never known and don't understand? Sh in a way, she is perfect for this world. And she even says, When I am all alone, this world will belong to me and I will rule over it. She one of the reasons this isn't really depressing is because her journey is peace with herself. In the end, she accepts reality alone, the way she is. She has nothing to miss, she has no past to hang on to. She only has this one life to live, given what she's been given to live it. This book does not try to answer any of your questions. This book raises questions and, like a good psychoanalyst, asks you what you think and how you feel about that and what that means to you.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Right.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

And I think that's very clever. That's a very clever approach. But like I said, I don't think our main character is sad or to be pitied or tragic, even.

SPEAKER_00 20:49

No.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

This is just her journey.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

And she wants you to recognize her journey.

Witnessing Death With Dignity

SPEAKER_01 20:53

And there's this interesting thing that she does before to a degree, but after she's alone, they keep finding bunkers just like the one that they escaped. But unlike the one they escaped, where they had a chance to get out because the keys were dropped at just the right moment. Every other bunker that they find is full of almost exactly 40 every time corpses. They go on this journey and eventually at first she's with the women and it's, you know, really depressing, and they don't want to go on. They want to stop and settle and live their lives and die out. But when they're all gone and she's left alone, she wants to continue the journey and she keeps going to the bunkers one by one. And one of the things she determines to do is to go down and be the final witness to these people and their death. And at one point she sees most of the time the corpses look like they died panicked, struggling, struggling, you know, in pain, etc. But one bunker she comes across, there's a man sitting in the corner, and he's propped himself up behind and to the left and the right with pillows, and he just seems to have sat down and waited for his death and died with dignity. And she observes that and she says, I promise to witness you right now and this act of dignity. I I see you. And in the end, that's what we do for her. That's what she does. She props herself up just like he does, sits down, and dies with dignity and peace in her heart, which is why I'm okay with this story. Right. But I thought that was a good parallel. Because, like you say, I think we're meant to be witnesses of a life well-lived as it is defined in this existence. Right. And it's stripped of all the other things that make us feel like are so important with life. That's we miss those elements because how could a life be well lived without them? How could a life be well lived without a marriage or a child or a job or a craft or dog? You know, you should we don't even get a dog in this in this you don't even get animal or a cat or anything. Yeah, exactly. And how can you find joy and happiness without all that external stuff? And she's left just with what's inside. Of her.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

Right. In the end, only her. After all the women die. And they do. They die one by one. She is the youngest. And one of the things that ends up happening as the women gradually die and they bury them along the way, or when they settle in a place and they build huts, which our child becomes the most skilled person that does a lot of the building, and she loves that. That is that is a purpose in her life to do the building.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

Because it's her world to build, it belongs to her. So she finds more enjoyment in it than anybody else.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

Correct. And so she's the most excited to be out of the cage, to be out of the bunker. She is the most excited to build and to create and to explore. And she builds the houses for them. And then she builds more houses and she goes on explorations to other bunkers. She's always the one that wants to go and do and be always on this journey and this quest and this activity. And the women die gradually. And then it becomes clear that they have no hospitals, they have no medicine. And she also becomes the executioner, a merciful executioner. Because Anthea was a nurse at one point. And while she doesn't have the will to do it herself, because the child, even though she ceases to be a child, she is an adult, the child was not raised with the same sensibilities because she was raised within this captive environment. She is able to detach herself enough that when Anthea tells her exactly where the heart is, exactly how to aim for the heart, she is able to use a knife to put people out of their misery quickly and pain relatively painlessly when they're suffering from cancer, anything else that is not going to be able to be cured. When they are ready to go, she is able to provide them with that. And it becomes this act of mercy. And she is their angel of death that acts as they all face these moments. And they all leave the room when she has to do that and leave her alone with whichever woman it is. No one else wants to witness that death, but she is once again the witness. As she witnesses the man sitting there with dignity, she witnesses every woman's death and she internalizes every single one of those deaths along the way. And I think that as she witnesses that, she is ultimately the one to write down the story that we can then witness. And so this theme of witness runs through the whole thing in several different ways.

Buddhism Attachment And Suffering

SPEAKER_01 25:23

One of the things that I found fascinating about this, and as I've said before, I practice Buddhism. And one of the key concepts that come up in Buddhism all the time is the idea of suffering, and that what holds us back from the path of enlightenment is suffering in one way or another. But the word suffering isn't really perfectly translated that way. It's really more like dissatisfaction. Suffering comes from a longing of what is not, or longing for what is not, or what you do not have. And so what I saw in these women, representative to our main character, the child, was they were a longing for what they used to have. They were, they were kind of holding her back in her journey because they were missing something that they didn't have. They had a, they carried this dissatisfaction with everything. And as long as they were with her, they held her back to the point where she was relieved to be alone at the end. Because, like she said, how can I miss something that I never had? And so, in a way, she is devoid of that kind of unnecessary suffering.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

Right.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

Which is to constantly long for things that aren't there. Aren't there? And I thought that was an interesting journey.

SPEAKER_00 26:28

And she experiences some grief when it comes to Anthea dying. And she she feels what it is to love. At least she thinks this must be what love is like when Anthea dies and she feels some amount of that emotion.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

But even that, she's grateful that she feels that emotion. That's great. And that's the idea behind Buddhism, too. It's not that you don't feel those things, it's that you understand that it's okay. That's it.

SPEAKER_00 26:51

It's okay to feel this. And then she's still okay with getting up and then moving on. And the last woman to die, Laura, has literally lost her soul to a certain extent, lost her ability to even recognize what's going on around her and just gives up because she is completely incapable of separating herself from that longing she cannot get away from. The fact that she simply does not have what she so longs for, what she misses, what she's been deprived of with the other women, with the relationships, with what she had in the before world that has been gone for so long. So our child is left alone and able to then pack up her stuff and go. And she does right away, as soon as she, you know, gives Laura her moment to witness Laura's death, then she packs her stuff up and she goes and she continues for more than 20 years post all the other women dying.

SPEAKER_01 27:46

It takes about 20 years for them to die, and then and then I think another 20 years for her. Uh so she's about in her 60s, she believes, when her health is failing.

SPEAKER_00 27:53

Right.

SPEAKER_01 27:53

Another great thing about this character is that she's an excellent observer of herself.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

Right. She is.

Sexuality Secrets And Agency

SPEAKER_01 27:59

Because people in general, terrible observers of themselves. We're often led by the nose, in a way, by our emotions and our desires. And because she has had very little to observe for the majority of her life, she's become a student of herself and her own thoughts and her own feelings and her own emotions. And I thought that was very interesting. And the very first thing that we start out with in the beginning of the book is this observing a strange kind of sexual awakening that she has. She is described as a young girl who has barely been developed, who's very developed, who has barely developed physically. Right. She is mentally, emotionally, and physically stunted. And not mentally stunted because she's not smart, mentally stunted because she doesn't have the knowledge. Correct. And no one will give her the knowledge. Right. And so sexual education, she has no clue what's happening to her. And the very first time that she describes essentially having an orgasm, it doesn't come from any kind of sexual fantasy. It comes from her fantasizing about something happening that is new and exciting. She just tells herself a story that brings some kind of adventure into her day. And that's what she finds arousing. I thought that was interesting that that that, devoid of any of that sexual knowledge, that her fantasies, her sexual fantasies became very asexual in a way.

SPEAKER_00 29:20

Right. And she is described as very asexual because she has developed to a certain extent physically, but she never has a period. Never. And so, you know, they view her as you're never going to be able to have children. She has no memory. And so, at no memory of her parents or anything that happened to her prior to the bunker. And so her method of arousal, when that becomes a thing, is creating stories for herself, creating memory for herself, creating something she alone owns. The women won't share their memories with her. They think it's either useless, pointless, or they don't want to because it's too painful. And so she has to create her own secrets, her own sense of ownership, her own sense of memory. And that gives her that sense of arousal and excitement and purpose.

SPEAKER_01 30:14

And her first taste of power and agency. Because these women who often just kind of cluster in groups and sort of leave her out because she's the youngest, they look over her and they see her kind of smiling to herself, and they they can just know that she's thinking about something, and then they just can't stand it.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

They get so upset.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

They want to know what she's thinking about, and she says, It's my secret.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

And then they want to know the secret, and then they're like, Wait, what why do you have a secret? Like, what do you have? You gotta tell us what your secret is.

SPEAKER_01 30:40

I love the moment where they send the matriarch of the cage over there Dorothy, Dorothy, to bully it out of her, you know?

SPEAKER_00 30:46

Right, and she refuses.

SPEAKER_01 30:47

And Dorothy is so shocked by that. She's like, doesn't know what do you mean you won't tell me?

SPEAKER_00 30:52

Right.

SPEAKER_01 30:52

And she's like, Because I don't have to, because you don't have any power over me. Right. There's nothing you can do to make me give away my secret. This belongs to me, and your power is made up.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

Right. And they're and they're shocked by that, but it is her realization that I am not part of this social construct. There is no, there is nothing here. We are in all in this cage. We are all, we are now all equals. You have your secrets, I have mine. I have created my own sense of memory and story. You have your own memories and stories running around in your head. I will stay here and do my thing. You will do yours. Now I am on equal footing. We're done here.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

And I think it's the first time that she realizes she's a creator. Right. That this is her, it's their world to lose and mourn, but it's her world to create. And so when she starts with creating stories for herself, and then that leads to power, and then it grows from there. But I think that's her first sense of self-awareness in a way.

SPEAKER_00 31:52

Right. And that equips her with resilience that they do not have. When they get out of that bunker and they go up top, she has the resilience, the power, the will to do something. And all of those other women are as forlorn to a certain extent when they're above ground as they were below ground. They want to get above ground and see other people and find people and find answers. They're not able to find answers, and one by one, they give up. And the child is like, I will continue to explore. I will continue to create things. I will continue to move and go someplace else. We built houses here, we can move to someplace else and build houses there. We can change our lives however we want to. Let's go do that. We can create the world we want to create, and the women see no point and then they die.

SPEAKER_01 32:44

Everybody else in the story is a survivor. She's just living.

SPEAKER_00 32:47

Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Another thing that I found interesting is when she sees the women, some of the women develop this sexual relationship because there are no men. And then she's very confused by that, first of all, because she seems to be, like we said, a asexual in a way. But then she hears them having these emotional arguments and yelling and screaming at one another, and she just doesn't understand that because she's very emotionally tempered. She even goes so far as to say that she might be cold or even numb. And I started to wonder why that would be, and that's because she has no attachment to anything.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

Right.

SPEAKER_01 33:18

Because a lot of our pain comes from our attachments, and she has none.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Right. Like I often think when I'm reading about her at the end, how would I cope with the idea of being completely alone? That I'm the only one that exists on that planet wherever it is, that I have not run into another human being in my entire 20 years plus of wandering, and that there's no reason to speak because no one's listening to me. That I can read, I've read the books that are exist over and over again a hundred times, that I can write, but I have no faith that anyone's ever going to read what I've written. And I'm thinking as me thinking, how would I exist that way? Would I be scared? Well, there's nothing to be scared of because there's nothing there. But would those fears exist due to memory? Because the dark comes and I'm afraid of the dark? What if something came down the stairs toward me? Join me in the underground, you know, place I found to live, which is what she finds towards the end. What if I go crazy because I need someone or something else to live for? But she seems not to struggle with any of that. We hear the quote at the end where she says, I'm lonely because she did know for a time what it was like to have other human beings to talk to, but she doesn't go crazy. And she doesn't lose her will to continue looking around or writing or reading or any of those things. She keeps her space tidy exactly the way it was when she found it.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

And she simply observes and accepts everything that happens to her.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

So is that the better way to live? Have we overcomplicated it?

SPEAKER_01 34:57

Well, remember, I'm a Buddhist, I think so. Not that I'm any good at it, because I have known, right? As long as you have known. The title is I have I Who Have Never Known Men, but it's really everything else as well that she has never known. So therefore she doesn't miss. Right. So I have all these attachments. I wouldn't do well thrust into that world devoid of these attachments. It would be wonderful to be a blank slate like her and just able to exist without them. But we don't. And we derive so much of our purpose and our value as human beings from things that are external from ourselves. And because we do that, we give away a lot of our own agency.

SPEAKER_00 35:37

Right.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

And we give away a lot of our own power and we place it into things that can ultimately fail us and bring us suffering.

SPEAKER_00 35:44

Right. I think that for me, there's a happy medium, and I think there is something to be said about being alone. I don't feel like it's a healthy life to be completely devoid of human contact and to be like the child. I don't think that would be a life that would make me happy. And although we don't need to feel sorry for her, she doesn't seem to be quote unquote unhappy. She doesn't seem to be happy either. She just is. I don't think that's a life as I would want life to be.

SPEAKER_01 36:13

So you were asking me if if I think it would be better to be alone?

SPEAKER_00 36:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 36:16

Oh, no.

SPEAKER_00 36:17

Well, so but here's my thing. I think there's a balance. And I I've said this to some of my students before as I've talked to them and my feelings about social media and cell phones and the way that we live our lives at this point in society, is that I believe people that have the best relationships with other people, the people that are most balanced in their lives and are able to truly have autonomy, know themselves, and then also relate to other people in the most balanced way and in the most productive way, are people that are okay being alone.

SPEAKER_01 36:51

Right.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

And I think that most of us aren't okay being alone. And I had a former student who kind of was like a bonus daughter to me for a while. And I remember us having this conversation as I watched her kind of go from relationship to relationship. And I suggested to her one day, you know, it would be good if you sat with yourself for a while. Just sat with yourself for a while. And I watch you, and you can't sit with yourself for a day. So my suggestion would be once you get to a point where you can sit with yourself and be comfortable with yourself for a good period of time and you get to know yourself, you will have more success getting to know someone else and allowing them to get to know you. And so there is something very important about aloneness, about the ability to be alone and to know yourself. And I think this book has something to say about that because people who are unable to be alone lose their ability to function when all the noise goes quiet. We become so addicted to the noise that we can't stop and allow ourselves to think about anything personal. We're drowning, we're drowning the personal out, we're drowning those things that we don't want to think about, we're drowning the self-reflection out, we're drowning seeing ourselves. And if you're doing that, there's something wrong. So, in my mind, we have overcomplicated our lives so much that we have lost the ability to be alone. And I think that there's a balance there. So, existentially, as we discuss the existential crisis or the existential journey, I think the book does have something to say about the ability to do that.

SPEAKER_01 38:37

I completely agree. As a matter of fact, I once took a self-development course that had these three graphs, and the idea was to talk about and study how well you move between two different points. And one of the graphs was connectedness, and the other side was labeled loneliness, and not in the sense of loneliness as a negative emotion, but the ability to cultivate being alone or master the art of being sitting with yourself, right? Right. And so if we can observe ourselves effectively, both in relationship to others and to our own mind, that is the best balanced person that you can be.

SPEAKER_00 39:10

Right. So I will go back to say that I think this is a book that will cause you to reflect on those things.

SPEAKER_01 39:17

Yes.

Rereads Book Clubs And Beckett

SPEAKER_00 39:18

And I am really continuing to process this book and really think about a lot of the things in it. And I've gone back to look at different sections. I may go back and read it again or listen to it again in order to process it again. And it may be one of those books where you have to do that. So, you know, going back to the enjoyment thing, no, not enjoyable, but not like say Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath that I read once and I will never touch again for the rest of my life. Not unenjoyable either. I will go back to this book because I need to, I need to revisit some sections of this to really reconsider some of what Harpman is proposing.

SPEAKER_01 39:58

I agree. This would be an excellent book, also, to sit down with a book club piece by piece and discuss a different part of it every single week. I think you get a lot out of that. I too would say that this is something that you should reread and reread and reread over and over again because it's fascinating. It reminded me a lot of waiting for Godot in a way.

SPEAKER_00 40:18

Right.

SPEAKER_01 40:18

Except instead of waiting for Godot or God, God is dead in this world. You're not waiting for anybody. There's no longing for that. No one's showing up. It's like at the end, that quote at the end that she says. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:28

I think human humanity had an amazing imagination.

SPEAKER_01 40:31

But if you like Beckett, you'll like this book.

SPEAKER_00 40:33

Right. Okay, so Peter, what are we reading next time?

SPEAKER_01 40:36

Well, next time, we're gonna read another Percival Everett book, his book, Erasure. And the reason why we're gonna read that is because Liz and I are getting the chance to go see Percival Everett speak tomorrow at South Carolina State University.

SPEAKER_00 40:50

The University of South Carolina.

SPEAKER_01 40:51

The University of South Carolina, okay. And uh as we have been reading Erasure, we have been slowly coming to the conclusion that we will also probably be revisiting James because the subject of Erasure is really putting James into a perspective for me.

SPEAKER_00 41:08

Yes, and I am just blown away by this book. I'm more than halfway through it already, and I just like I pause it every once in a while and I'm like, wow. And then I'm thinking about James again, and then I'm going forward and I'm like, wow, this is gonna make such a good discussion. So I'm super excited about this next time.

SPEAKER_01 41:24

I am too.

SPEAKER_00 41:25

So until then, keep reading and keep thinking, and we'll talk to you again soon.