Crop Rotation - 006 - Penelope Fitzgerald - The Gate of Angels

Penelope Fitzgerald: The Gate of Angels

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears while we all suck sorrow with the boy. There's a song that will linger forever in our ears. Oh hard times come again no more Tis the song the sigh of the weary Hard times hard times come again no more Many days you have lingered around my cabin door Oh hard times come again no more Welcome to Crop Rotation, a literature, theology, and philosophy discussion podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

A good farmer doesn't grow the same thing every year. For the soil to thrive, there needs to be variety. We're a group of friends who found that we missed the life of the mind that we were able to live together when we were at St. John's College in Annapolis two decades ago. This podcast is an opportunity to explore and discuss works of art and of intellect that we've each discovered in the intervening years. Before each meeting, one of us gives the group an assignment. This leader is also responsible for asking an opening question to begin the discussion. Hey! Here we are. I don't think we have a spiel for the beginning of these things, and maybe we should invent one. But uh we're gonna be talking about The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald. What I'm about to talk through is basically like a little three-part spiel. Part one is a little description of my relationship with this novel, and then I'm gonna give a a brief summary of the novel. So anybody who hasn't actually read it will sort of be able to follow along a little bit, and also to jog my friends' brains, and and then I will ask the opening question. So there's a genre that I think of as 20th century English ladies who I don't understand at all.

SPEAKER_04 2:17

That's a Venn diagram, not a category, but go on.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

It's not really a genre. There's only three authors in this genre, but they're Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald. So the thing is I'm used to experimental literature that like disregards traditional plot structure. And I'm also very used to traditional literature that sticks to genre conventions for what is expected in a plot. And the thing about the experimental literature that like gets rid of plot, and you're just sort of like, oh, there's resonances here, and you treat it sort of like a very long poem, you know. But for some reason, these three particular 20th century English female novelists, I read a book of theirs and I am as interested in what happens next as if it was a traditional plot, and yet usually in these books there's not. It will the a book will be like a woman opens a bookshop and she talks to a bunch of people, and then the novel ends. And if you're like Vonnegut would say every character in a book should want something, what does this character want? The answer is nothing. What's the beginning, middle, and end? Where does Act II start? Nobody knows because there's nothing going on. So these books, to me, the every almost every novel by every all each of these three authors is like good, and I'm interested in it, and I know that there's something going on there, but I can never understand it. I finish a book and I'm like, wow, that was really good. But if you ask me to explain why it was good or like what I liked about it, I would be like, I have no idea. I don't even, I don't know what just happened in that novel. The reason I was really excited when I read The Gate of Angels by Penelope is that I expected it to be a regular Penelope Penelope Fitzgerald novel with no plot, but it has a plot, it has a great plot, and but there's still one part that is extremely mysterious to me, which is the ghost story. So the this one is like 95%, I get it. And then there's one part where it's doing the 20th century English female novelist, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Penelope Fitzgerald thing, and that's the ghost story. So I would feel great if I could figure out what's going on with the ghost story, but that's not my opening question because it's not the right opening question for this book. Now, part two, I'm going to summarize the novel.

SPEAKER_04 4:56

Can I ask you a quick clarifying question about what you asked? Yeah. So can we put a finer point on what it is that these three authors are doing to deviate from traditional plot structure? Is that the primary okay, that's the primary spectrum of deviance? Okay, keep going.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Yeah. I spent a long time thinking, why do I see these three authors as so similar? Why do I see this as its own genre? And why am I still so interested in it, even though I don't understand it? And the reason is that none of them have traditional plot structures, and yet they're interesting in a way that experimental literature that eschews traditional plot structures usually is not interesting. So, really, I'm just interrogating my own feelings, and you guys are going to help me. It's a therapy session, but not really. This book is super interesting, and I hope we talk about lots of things that don't have anything to do with my particular literary questions and struggles. Here is the summary of the Gate of Angels, part one. There are four parts and 22 chapters spread among them. And part one introduces Fred. In chapter one, we follow Fred from somewhere. We don't know where. Does anybody figure out where Fred is coming from in chapter one when he's going back to St. Angelicus? But we follow Fred from somewhere into St. Angelicus. We meet various characters such as the Master, Skippy, and Holcomb, and we see Fred struggle to start a letter that starts with Dear Miss Saunders. In chapter two, it gives the history of St. Angelicus with this very weird pope. No female animals, including humans, are ever permitted inside of the college. The professors must be celibate. Chapter three is a flashback showing how Fred was offered and accepted his job as a fellow at St. Angelicus. We meet Professor Flower do. There is a strange scene involving some women in Austria. Chapter four introduces Dr. Matthews, who tells ghost stories, and also it introduces the narrow and unopenable gate of angels. Dr.

SPEAKER_02 7:14

Yes. The remind me, the women in Austria part is well really briefly, just refresh my memory on that one.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

It's a really brief part. I could probably just read the whole thing. Here we go. This is page 26 for me in this edition. Then Fred went with two of his friends for a walking holiday in Austria. For the first time in his life, he felt he had no obligation to anyone. They went to the Salzburg Alps. At Bruckman's hotel, by candlelight, the two waitresses and the daughter of the house appeared at the door of the three-bed commercial traveler's room where they had taken which they had taken for cheapness's sake. Fred was the only one not asleep. The situation struck him as like a folk tale. He woke his two friends and went down with the daughter, who had the keys, to fetch two bottles of wine from the dining room. More she dare not take. When they got back upstairs the others were all sitting stiffly on the edge of the beds, not undressed, not even speaking, as though waiting for permission to begin. Fred found it hard not to laugh, and then they all laughed. The wine was Gruner Veltliner, tasting violently of pepper. They blew out the candles and opened the shutters to let the stars shine in. The room smelled of the just extinguished candle wicks, of the peppery wine of strong young women's flesh and of starch because the maids had been doing the ironing. Next morning they went on and up the mountain to the hay meadows, etc. Very strange scene. I can't account for it. Maybe I should lump it in with the ghost story.

SPEAKER_04 8:53

Well, at the very least, doesn't it provide a tremendous amount of framing and counterbalancing to Daisy and her almost encounter with Kelly? And that's true. Fred expects Daisy and her entire being to be entirely bent upon him and his feelings to the point that he fantasy projects onto her. And when we were in court and I didn't recognize him, I did that for you. I did it to protect your feelings. And yet he has the gall to expect this woman to be entirely for him, entirely virginal and chase and all. But he has this wine and women. Yeah, sorry, probably. So anyway, I'm just yeah, I'm answering as though he has not already answered.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

I think that's something that Penelope Fitzgerald wants us talking about. On to.

SPEAKER_04 10:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

Okay, so that's chapter three where that happens. Chapter 4 introduces Dr. Matthews, who tells ghost stories and the narrow, unopenable gate of angels. Chapter five is a flashback to when Fred went home to the rectory to tell his family that he's not a Christian anymore. Uh, he finds that nobody cares, and his mother and sisters have suddenly become suffragettes. Chapter six, Fred gives a speech at an ironic beach club and gets crapped on by Holcomb and Dr. Matthews. He starts another letter which starts with Dear Daisy this time. So now we have her full name, Daisy Saunders. Chapter seven is another flashback. Daisy and Fred met previously when they both crashed into a cart on their bicycles and were taken in by the Rayburns. Fred falls instantly in love and Daisy skedaddles.

SPEAKER_04 10:57

We were placed in a single bed together because Daisy had a wedding ring on her hand that she wore to try to protect herself during the commute in and out of the room.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

So they thought that the two were married and stuck them in the same bed. Okay, so here's part two. Part two introduces Daisy. Chapter eight, Daisy grows up very poor in London. She keeps leaving jobs after her bosses mistreat her. Her mother dies, and she decides to go into nursing. Chapter nine has her applying and being accepted at the Blackfriars Hospital as a probationer, which is like a junior junior nurse. She meets Mrs. Martinez. In chapter 10, we see her working in the men's ward, and we meet Dr. Sage, who is a benevolent weirdo. Chapter 11, James Elder, who is a romantic idiot, tries to commit suicide and ends up in the ward. He wants to see himself in the newspaper. He refuses to eat and he might die. In chapter 12, Daisy goes to a newspaper and tells them about James. She meets Kelly, who is a journalist. He has the moral integrity of a journalist. In chapter 13, Kelly publishes a story about James. Daisy gets fired. She decides to go to Cambridge, where Dr. Sage has a mental hospital. Kelly follows her there, which he knows to do because he pays Mrs. Martinez to spy on the hospital. Okay. Part three is where Daisy and Fred really meet. Chapter 14 has Mr. Rayburn coming to Angels to tell Fred that Daisy is living in their house. I have no idea why he decides to do this. In chapter 15, Daisy and Fred go on a date. They look at a for sale house and they take a walk in the country. Fred is obviously obsessed with Daisy. He proposes marriage, and she says, not no. In chapter 16, Mr. Rayburn warns Daisy that Fred will lose his job if he gets married. Also, Fred's family shows up randomly and they meet Daisy. Fred takes them all out on the river where they see all of the bridges. Part 4. This is where the rubber meets the road. Chapter 17 is Dr. Matthew's ghost story. Daisy and Fred's bicycle accident involved two men who fled the scene, another bicyclist and the cart driver. In the ghost story, it is suggested that what happened to them was they were pulled into a culvert under the road by the ghosts of medieval nuns. The ghost story starts some rumors in the town, and so the police decide to charge the farmer who owns the cart that Daisy and Fred crashed into, despite the farmer claiming that it was somebody else driving the cart at the time. Chapter 18 is the court case. Kelly shows up. He was the other bicyclist. And he says that the farmer himself was driving the cart. He IDs it in court. He also says that he was going to spend the night with Daisy in a hotel and he is angry at her. Every character in the book basically is in the court. Daisy's reputation is hosed. Chapter 19, Fred waits for Kelly to come out of the court. When he does, Fred punches him, knocking him unconscious. Skippy, who happens to be there for some reason, helps Fred carry him to a pile of grass in the conservatory where they leave him. Chapter 20, Fred gives some philosophical musing type advice to his students. They think that he's cracking up, and he is cracking up. In chapter 21, Fred goes to Dr. Sage's hospital where Daisy works. She tells him to beat it. Chapter 22 is the final chapter. Fred has to go take notes at a lecture across town for Professor Flower Dew. Daisy quits her job and gets kicked out of the Rayburn house and may decide to throw herself into the river. She talks about being in the newspaper, which seems to be a reference back to the poor romantic idiot from before. She passes by angels and she sees the narrow door which is never open, which the text says emphatically, nobody in the college at all has permission or the ability ever to open. But it's open. She hears the master having some kind of heart attack or incident inside. She goes in, she renders aid, saves the master. The professors all freak out around her, but she doesn't pay them any attention. Then she leaves and closes the door behind her. Because of the you know what? And I'll read the last sentence. She must have spent five minutes in there, not much more. Here's the last sentence. The slight delay, however, meant that she met Fred Fairley walking slowly back to St. Angelicus. Yep. So that's the novel. Here's my opening question. Which I think you can't possibly discuss this novel without asking this question. So it's the most obvious opening question. And so I'm going to ask it, although I think there's a lot more going on. Who opened the door? Who opened the gate of angels? Fate.

SPEAKER_04 16:20

Well, so it's a door, and someone is being struck down. So my question would be: are we looking at a door that is inviting us to see it as partaking in some of the elemental nature of doors of households and judgment and Passover and things like that thing, you know, because she's passing into and through the gate into and then retreating. That's different from Passover, where she was passing over the door. So I don't know. I'm kind of talking myself out of and partially retracting my bid for an archetype here. Maybe that would be my question. Archetypally, what is this gate that she has opened? Can we understand any more about who may have opened it by understanding what the gate is a little bit more?

SPEAKER_02 17:16

I don't have an answer for who opened it, at least not yet, or not that I'm aware of. Um but sorry, let me constrain my context for a moment. I think that there is this is the piece of the story that shows it to be something like an allegory. I think that Daisy is walking from a ruined life in the world with pretty decent intentions overall-ish. Not a lot of spine or some other stuff, but she you know, she's trying-ish. And she makes a left turn unexpectedly when she needs to go right.

SPEAKER_03 17:57

Onto Jesus Street.

SPEAKER_02 17:58

So left turn. A left turn being the unexpected direction. Onto Jesus Street, where she finds the narrow path. In the narrow path, the door has been opened to her, the one who's seeking. She goes in, finds a blind man who would have nothing to do with her, helps him. He can't see her, and she's mysterious to him. He has no idea, like the wind blowing where she's come from, where she's going. She even suspects that the reason he's feeling weird is because there's a breeze, right? That sometimes even the faintest breeze. She goes, helps him. Everybody else is scandalized. She leaves. And I don't think she left back out the same way she came, at least in the allegorical sense. She went through the gate and the journey continued. She wasn't, there wasn't a retrograde motion. So sh this was her some kind of I'll call it redemption, but I really mean something like I'm gonna change it from redemption just because I don't really understand redemption, and I've mentioned before that I have a hard time with it. But something like the what's that? What's a word that means something like the finally manifesting fruit? It's like the fulmination of something in for her life up to that point where she's gotta, she's turned a corner. Anyway, that's what I said. Fruition. Yeah. Fruition, yeah. She she basically I think she had a kind of uh turning point there. I don't know what it is exactly. I don't know. I actually didn't at all understand the significance of the last sentence with Fred. It didn't mean anything to me. But I, you know, it's clearly significant. I just didn't see it.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

Okay. Let me add, I like I like this, but I think I would like to add some context because one thing that we learn about the master is that although he's blind, he knows by sound every person who ever walks in the college. So he identifies Fred fl fairly by his footsteps, even on the grass.

SPEAKER_03 20:04

So I think but he identifies him also he was confused because he wasn't doing what he usually did. It took him a second to identify him.

SPEAKER_04 20:14

Because he knows the way that everybody, he knows the path everyone takes.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

And he's also extremely attuned to the weather. So we see him at one point stoop down and put his hand on the grass and say it's gonna rain in three days. So I think that just the door being open, just that door being open and a breeze blowing in from that door is enough to give this guy like a heart attack.

SPEAKER_02 20:38

He's so attuned to that. On game, if we also point out that well, first of all, two things. He is attuned to some things, but more precisely than he knows those the footsteps of everybody in the college, he believes he knows. He didn't hear that from a privileged perspective. Second, the other thing I would just say is this is another ghost story, right? Except I think there is an interesting bit of I think this time it's a holy ghost story. Um twice in the history of 600 years ago, whatever, 200 years ago, the gate has been opened.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

I was just gonna read that. This is the ghost storyteller, Dr. Matthews. He had a running joke, for example, with the master about the strangely tall and narrow gate, as old as the college itself, in the southwest wall. The only opening, dear master, apart from your front entrance, and quite inexplicable, since the only thought in the mind of the builders seems to have been to keep visitors out. There was no inscription on the gate, and no entry in the records of the college expenses for installing it. On the other hand, it was noted in the annals that it had twice been found standing open, once on the 21st of May 1423. The night of Pope Benedict's death, and once in 1869, when the first women's college, though not of course officially part of the university, was permitted to open. There was no mention on either occasion of who opened your gate, said Dr. Matthews, nor of who shut it again. No one, not even the master, has any authority to do either, said the treasurer. But if anyone had, or even if they had not, and if it were to stand open, who or what do you imagine might come in? I should not like to think about that, said the master.

SPEAKER_04 22:39

Is the master the one who makes a pass at Daisy via Fred? No, through the letter. Who's that's Holcomb? Holcomb, Holcomb, who says who basically is even worse than Kelly, and who says, I can't afford a woman, but I also can't be very picky. And obviously, this Daisy chick can't be very picky either. So mind sending her my way, because you obviously can't marry her. And so it's just absolutely atrocious. I mean, he basically solicits fairly for Daisy as a free whore, practically.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

You know, it's I have no idea what's surely wretched behavior. Yeah. No idea what's going on with Hulk and what his deal is, why he acts the way he does.

SPEAKER_04 23:27

Well, I felt like that was partly to show there's a certain it's a commentary on the hypocrisy of what they're trying to do at the college, where they openly mock and deride the very notion of religious fancy and uh ornate uh um foppishness and things like that. They're they're guilty of worse sins. They're more foppish and more, you know, whatever. And uh to me, all those letters that Fairley shows up to Fairley and Daisy argue, Daisy does not acknowledge his feelings as supreme. And he comes back and he's got all these letters. Uh Fairley gets all these invitations to things. So there's this in the midst of their celibacy and their choice to forego having a family, there's this frenzy of communication and solicitation of engagement. And to me, it read, it coded almost like, and I'm willing to seed the projection here, but I think it could be uh accusation on Miss Fitzgerald's part and not prejudice on mine. But it it felt like uh a condemnation of what they're doing socially, replacing families with showing up to each other's little parties where they make fun of the idea of the soul and then make these, you know, barbaric passes at each other's partners and things like that. Right. Did that lay into you? What would you guys feel like the author was presenting a sarcastic, caustic, judgmental view of what's happening at the college, or is this more triumphant and commendable? I felt like there was some sarcasm and some satire.

SPEAKER_01 25:27

I mean, it's definitely very satirical.

SPEAKER_04 25:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 25:30

When they were built, it talks about the founding of the college and how it was built. Didn't it say it was like trying to be as little like a monastery as possible in its architecture? And yet they created, you know, a monastery. Everyone in it's male, everyone in it has to be celibate, and they don't talk about God, they talk about physics.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

Physics.

SPEAKER_03 25:56

And they want to ground things on only things they can observe, but they keep finding that.

SPEAKER_01 26:05

Well, that's your flower dew. Oh, is he not part of the college? No, he is, but I think he is that's his he's like a dissenter.

SPEAKER_03 26:14

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01 26:15

I think.

SPEAKER_02 26:18

I think Fred also wants to ground things only in perception when he has his uh conversation about apostasy with his father, you know, with the fake one that he's running through his head. Yeah, where he loses. He's just to ground things in one's perceptions and yeah.

SPEAKER_04 26:32

Even in when he's talking at the most nerdy level about physics, he's talking about the outward normal gravitational flux. It's still like he's in the weirdest of weird land of experimental theoretical quantum physics, and it's still about outward normal gravitational flux on a sphere, you know, the 4 pi m field equation. So he's trying to map onto a surface. Yeah, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_03 27:01

And it is Fred the one that's still working on the Mickelson-Morley experiment? Because that's like 20 years ago in the time period of the book, and they're like, oh, maybe finally we're gonna have to give up on ether, even though that's like late 1800s.

SPEAKER_02 27:20

Right. I don't for the record, I have not given up on ether.

SPEAKER_01 27:25

I don't think it's Fred. I think it's somebody. I remember that scene, and I think it's somebody sort of obliquely like hinting to Fred that he might be able to get him work in another college in Cambridge, like another part of the university where he wouldn't.

SPEAKER_03 27:43

And he could be married.

SPEAKER_01 27:45

Yeah, I'm not sure though.

SPEAKER_03 27:47

Oh, but maybe he would have to work with someone who's still banging away at Mickelson Marley, like Sir Robert over here. Sorry, I caused Sir Robert to freeze it.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

And uh well, Professor Flower Dew is even probably even further back than that. He doesn't even want Adam.

SPEAKER_04 28:08

Yeah. What was uh okay, so I disagree with Matthew about what the most important question to be asked for this story is. Yes, I'll admit it's arguable that who opened the gate is the most important question, but to me, it was easily surpassed by the question A, what the frick frack apple snack is beef water, and B, why is it not food? Because beef tea goodnight. I worked it up. If we got some serious air time in this book and a lot of argument, I feel like a lot of things were hanging on beef tea, but go on.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

I looked it up. Um, so yeah, Dr. Sage has this crusade against beef tea.

SPEAKER_05 28:55

And you can hear his jowls wiggle as he says, you know, it's terrible.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

So basically, you you boil beef in water and then you skim the fat off of that. Okay, and then I guess you throw away the beef. So you get you get some amino acids and you get some fat and some you get a little bit of food value there, but there's no protein. Sure. So they used to give it to hospital patients because it doesn't disturb your stomach, it's very easy to digest, but it's but also there's no protein. So the guy is he's wrong that it's not food at all, but he's also not wrong that you can't live on it.

SPEAKER_04 29:43

And so there's a it to me, beef tea felt like the kind of anti-bread of the kingdom of God, that bread is this incredibly simple elemental thing to the degree that Jesus says, my bread is to do the will of my father. But then for us, it's Jesus. Jesus is the will of the Father, is the bread that we have to eat. And by eating it, we perfectly are nourished, we perfectly participate in uh the body of Christ, the nature of Christ. There's something real and salvific and restorative and new, you know, spiritually uh nutritious that happens. This beef tea seems to be the uh typological inverse of that, so to speak. It's uh stuff that's made it's water, it's the lacrosse of food, right? It's the you know, this food has been in water and you consume the water. So there's an extra layer of mediation, it's a substance mediating another substance, and maybe that's the heresy of it, or may and maybe that's just the significant word picture of it, is that it's a modern age, it's a modern time, and here at this changing of the age from the old way of thinking to the atomic quantum way of doing science and the world and worldviews and whatnot, this beef water, right? This question of what is real nutrition, what is blah blah blah. Is that right? Does that seem right to you? So, what is beef in that context? What is this beef tea doing? What does it signify? What is she trying to make us wrestle with or see with the beef tea?

SPEAKER_01 31:28

I don't know. I mean, uh it's at least definitely just it's definitely a joke.

SPEAKER_05 31:35

So, like I I laughed, I thought it was funny.

SPEAKER_03 31:39

Daisy live Daisy did live on it, and he's like, Oh, don't think that you did that you lived on it. She just okay. So maddening.

SPEAKER_04 31:48

I mean so maddening. Don't think he used it. Like, oh my gosh, what is wrong with you, man?

SPEAKER_01 31:54

Yeah, I mean, the character of Dr. Sage is very strange in that he is very opinionated, very wrong. So, like, we know from our standpoint, and the author knows from her standpoint, writing it when she did, that the medicines that they are giving the people in the hospital are bad. He's poisoning these people like a lot.

SPEAKER_03 32:19

Well, because when you give them mercury, they shake too much, too much mercury, and they shake the too much of molecular.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

You can't give them too much strychnine if you're not able to swallow. Yes, right, because it's two sections.

SPEAKER_04 32:31

The first section is all the stuff we give them, the second section is all the things that happen when you give them too much of all these different things.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

But then also he has this insane radical notion that you should listen to people who are mentally ill. So he is like both, and also there's a comic moment with him about the question of suffrage, which is a big theme in this book, where somebody's like, Oh, so he must be four votes for women, and the other person is like, no, actually, Dr. Sage doesn't think that anybody should be allowed to vote.

SPEAKER_04 33:08

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:09

No one should so nobody should be allowed to vote, and all these poisons are great for you. And also, Daisy gets in trouble not for talking back to the doctor, but for talking to the doctor at all. When he asked her a direct question, and she answered him politely, using the appropriate form of address that she was trained to use, and she got in trouble.

SPEAKER_04 33:34

But she didn't answer them the way that he expected her to answer.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

Exactly. And that's made explicit.

SPEAKER_04 33:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:42

I don't know. Maybe I'm saying something very simple that he's a comic character because he represents some of the pathologies of the age that doctors talk to you, you don't talk to doctors. And he represents like what progress that would come to be made, which is to say you should talk to doctors. You you know, psychoanalysis therapy, you know, the doctor should listen to you sometimes. Interesting.

SPEAKER_04 34:11

And so that means that all of his denseness in some ways is really just like really dark paint covering most of the canvas, so that you'll notice and pay attention to that one splotch of light that's happening in the painting. That's the right thing.

SPEAKER_01 34:27

Yeah, he spends all day and all night just listening to what his mental patients have to say, taking notes.

SPEAKER_04 34:36

Oh, interesting. I wonder if that's supposed to be conjoined to Fred's lecture where he's talking to his students and he says, No, don't think that you're any different from normal common people. Your scientific insights are not different kinds of insights. All truth should be common knowledge, and then new insights come from all these things that we know that we take for granted and are commonplace, and they serve as a foundation and a breeding ground for new and uncommon insights. But if they become true, they will become common insights and common knowledge. And so, in that way, this guy is following the teaching methodology that fairly lays out.

SPEAKER_02 35:25

From listening to y'all uh talk about different things, I apparently read the book very differently, at least in some ways. How did you read the book, Sir Robert? I am interested to know. Well, for one, I I didn't the question crossed my mind, I think once. I read it twice, by the way. My policy has been to read everything at least twice that we're doing. And what I did, because you had said that the last paragraph or the last sentence or whatever was significant, I the first time I read, I read all the way through the first half of 22. Then I started over and didn't get the last half of 22 until I the second time through. Just does it make sense? So if there was some kind of big twist there that I didn't know about, it wouldn't spoil the second read for me.

unknown 36:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 36:11

Uh just telling you I read that part. A unique strategy. Okay. So one thing was it crossed my mind, I think once during my reading that there might be any satire in it. And I tried to make it satirical, and I just couldn't. I didn't think that there for sure wasn't, but a recurring thought that I had was that line in Paperback Writer by The Beatles. There's that line that goes, uh he it's talking about the book that the guy's trying to write, and it says it was a dirty story of a dirty man and his clinging wife doesn't understand. And I found the whole book extraordinarily unpleasant the first time I read it through, to the point that I was occasionally distraught enough by it that I stopped being able to follow the plot, the main point. It was just a wretched, wretched book about wretched people being wretched and small-minded and terrible. The second reading was much more tolerable. And by the way, I should say I listened to it on audio and I found the excellent, surely infinitely virtuous woman who read it to have the most grating voice. So that may have contributed. Okay, so all that's a good thing.

SPEAKER_04 37:30

So Robert, I know exactly what you mean.

SPEAKER_02 37:34

So all that's just to say I was frustrated by pretty much every character, much of the time. And uh one of the characters that I really appreciated was Dr. Sage.

SPEAKER_05 37:47

So, Robert, it sounds like you got sucked inadvertently into some sort of parent-child relationship with the characters in these books, taking it upon yourself to ensure that they behave themselves. Why would you do that? Where where did that come from?

SPEAKER_02 38:02

It was well, I'm happy to tell y'all why some of for different characters, if you care, I don't know. But just we were talking about Dr. Sage a few minutes ago, and uh I actually didn't find I found what's his name, Farley? Fred Farley Fred Fairley. Fairly fairly I found him pretty objectionable, but his speech to the college students, I was like, well, thank God somebody's finally saying something reasonable. And I know what you mean.

SPEAKER_04 38:34

It was a sudden taste on the palate. It was. I experienced what you experienced. It was a breath of the stuff. I mean, he's got this change of smell in the room.

SPEAKER_02 38:42

That was good and sensible and real, you know, not all strange and twisted and small-minded like everything else in the book.

SPEAKER_04 38:51

That said, so does Fred open the gate then and summon Daisy?

SPEAKER_02 38:56

No, that's not even there. He's not even there. He's walking up to the school at the end after five minutes, she's leaving leaving. But Dr. Sage, I thought, was a breath of fresh air. He had some eccentricities and whatever, and okay, so he's giving way too much of all these noxious chemicals to people and blah blah blah. But that's only funny if you think that we live in a privileged moment where we don't do that, right? Like it's not it's just how that always has gone.

SPEAKER_03 39:27

Yeah, I mean, I think it's funny that we do that today.

SPEAKER_02 39:29

Yeah, COVID just happened.

SPEAKER_03 39:32

Peculiar, not funny. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:35

It's only it's only funny as a as like a we just as like a joke or something, if it seems to be out of place, particularly. He has what se some people would seem to feel anachronistic. He's anti-suffragette, or anti-suffrage, I guess, for whatever, which I largely have the same disposition as him towards that. I think that he's Whoa.

SPEAKER_01 39:58

We just had our two spiciest takes of the podcast within like 30 seconds. Which were they? We're coming out against COVID vaccines and women's suffrage.

SPEAKER_04 40:12

Hey, whoa, whoa, I am I am I think dogs should vote. I'm with Griffin McElroy. I think dogs should be voting.

SPEAKER_02 40:19

Dogs have issues. I think just to just to deal with this digression here, I think fewer people should be. I think dogs should be giving the COVID vaccine.

SPEAKER_05 40:30

I will not do this project with you if you speak that way. Sir Robert, please shut this man up.

SPEAKER_02 40:37

I was just saying just about the voting thing, just as a quick side note on that, but fewer people should vote in general. And I think the move that we have to quote unquote rock the vote, that little ridiculousness, if that motivates you to vote, do not vote.

SPEAKER_01 40:54

Like for the love of God, do not trying really hard to get people who are the least capable of deciding how police violence should be used on other citizens' bodies to make that decision.

SPEAKER_02 41:08

Okay, let me tell you a quick anecdote. Can I tell you a quick anecdote? Yeah. Okay, this is extracurricular for us, but it is a true story. So my family's business for a number of generations has been printing. I'm not currently doing that myself, but we have for some generations since before the Sooners been doing rubber stamping and different kinds of printing. So my uncle owns a business in Texas. He's in his 80s now, I guess. And they do political campaign printing of signs, the ones that you see on the side of the road that says, like, you know, Abbott or whatever. And his wife at one point uh sorry, the sauce on Abbott was just delicious.

SPEAKER_04 41:50

Keep going.

SPEAKER_02 41:51

Yeah. His wife at one point ran for something, I don't remember, in Texas. I think she was like a controller or something like that. Anyway, so he did an experiment. He was just telling me about this experiment he did, which is since he was a printer anyway, they put the normal like one foot by one and a half foot or something signs all around. Just everywhere they printed thousands of them or something. And then he printed like 20 or something, 12 foot by four foot, eight, four foot by eight foot signs, really giant monster signs, right? That normally would be uh very expensive to have printed for you. And so he put those around and he just said he scattered them sort of around different county spots, right? And when the polls came in, she had something like triple the votes on the places with the biggest signs, and like triple this she had elsewhere. Like it was a one-to-one triple. And in general, it's a known thing that this density of sign increases your votes this much. There's signs that say things like what name recognition. That itself tells us that voting is the wrong mechanism for a lot of students.

SPEAKER_01 43:05

I think you have a misunderstanding about what voting is and what it's for, but we'll have to get into it at another time. Yeah. Anyway, because the point is I sympathize with Dr. Sage.

SPEAKER_04 43:17

Daisy's entire tragic story is dovetailed into the suffragette thing, because it's all uh this is first of all, let me say, really good feminist literature. I typically, I'll here's my spicy take. A lot of feminist literature doesn't sit well with me because of how prominently the thing, well, because of how prominently the thing that it's trying to accomplish takes up so much of the oxygen of the creative process that made the thing come to be. And so all of the other wonderful things about it that would be great literature, they just get Starved of nutrient by the story being made subject to the narrative. And I would find that displeasing in a lot of other forms. I'm not opposed to feminism. Like reading Marxist letters. Exactly. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Or yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:16

Like Christian fiction from the Greenleaf bookstore.

SPEAKER_04 44:19

Sure. So I found that the way that Daisy's character is just being made a joke of by the men in the world, by the court system. You know, to me, the most objectionable moment in the whole story was watching where the plot reaches its zenith of action, I think. Matt alluded to this, I think, is where Daisy's reputation is ruined. I mean, really, the main thrust of the plot of this story is about Daisy's destiny, her and Fred's destiny and their ability to choose one another as partners, right?

SPEAKER_02 44:56

Let me say to that, Josh. That wild buy-in to the absolute abdication of accountability and lack of agency. You freaking kidding me? Who who ruined Daisy's reputation? Oh, wait, let me let me check my calculator. Oh, Daisy did. What the card are you talking about? Like, not you. Right. Not talking to US with the crowd, Josh. She's a she's she has in this story about suffrage, she didn't have to go anywhere with not only did she not have to go anywhere that guy, she didn't have to lie, she didn't have to whatever. She didn't have to do she had so many opportunities to use her voice and didn't.

SPEAKER_04 45:38

And yes, she throws away, she throws away her career to use her voice inappropriately to disclose information to a paper, and it's because the guy is romantic and pathetic, right? But I'd like to I'd like to hear your points of view. Okay, why? Why do you think Daisy puts her entire career on the line and does something so reckless? Is it sympathetic romance? What's her motivation?

SPEAKER_02 46:07

I actually don't care about her motivation. I'm just saying the motive cause, right? She didn't do it because he was some kind of character. This isn't physics. She made a choice. She did a thing, she did it. She's the agent. She made a choice. Okay. So she risks her career to do the thing. Okay, she did risk her career. Didn't turn out the way she wanted, didn't turn out the way she wanted. She's a real thing in a real world, and every single thing in the story is just squalid with that kind of horrifying denial of responsibility and accountability.

SPEAKER_04 46:42

So sure, but what is the way in which she breaks? How does she choose her destruction? There is something about the nature of this man before her and the nature of his story. There's something in her that she recognizes that has to be something true of her. She has to be seeing she's compassionate.

SPEAKER_01 47:05

She thought it would help him in some way. Yeah, I mean, the narrator just says of Daisy that she helps people. She has no choice but to help when she thinks that somebody needs help. And not true.

SPEAKER_02 47:17

She actually the narrator's very clear, especially when talking to Fred later, and the hardest part was hurting him and whatever. It's not that she doesn't have a choice. That would be the physics side of the things, right? It's that she has a choice and it's hard. Okay, that's called life. Sometimes stick your arm down a culvert and get the flesh ripped off. I don't know what what the crud do you want, Daisy?

SPEAKER_04 47:40

So, but what is it? She's obviously okay, fine, but she's obviously experienced from her perspective trauma, traumatic disappointment. There's something crushing and disillusioning to her that has left her deflated and vulnerable and no longer believing in her projected. Like I'm when she hits the wall this time, it causes her to lose faith in herself.

SPEAKER_02 48:10

Is that I'm actually super sympathetic to Daisy. And the reason is because she's 19 and a woman in a situation that is very, very austere. It's very she's in some strident circumstances, and that's terrible. She has no one to care for her. Yeah, she has no one to care for her, and she should, and she's got a great, compassionate heart. The character's great. She should have somebody there who can help her, who will help her, who wants to be kind and generous, whatever. So she's in a she's in a situation here that's not, you know, she does. I mean, and I'm compassionate.

SPEAKER_01 48:46

I want, I like Daisy, and I feel that I feel in my heart that the things that happen to her, even because of her own actions, are unfair. But I must admit that she has a very strange way of being dishonest and just saying to people, I'm dishonest. Like she goes to the local priest to get a letter of reference, and he's like, I'm gonna put down that you're honest. And she's like, Don't put that. I'm not. I actually don't believe in morality. And the priest says something to her, like, you know, okay, I'll say you're hardworking then.

SPEAKER_04 49:26

Yeah, well, and I think he says something to her to the effect of no, no, even that directness, reliable.

SPEAKER_01 49:33

Yeah. But I do think that there is something in this where it's profitable to consider Daisy's attitude and her like philosophy of life, because there is some way in which Daisy's philosophy of life is speaking to or interacting with Fred's philosophy of life.

SPEAKER_04 49:53

She's definitely the contra. There's two kinds of people. There's people who are out in the world making it, like Daisy, and people who hide away in their tiny little worlds, like Fred. Like to me, the part of this whole novel that was the most novel, you know, like where I'm experiencing storytelling through immediate experience of a character's world, was all the stuff about how dangerous it was to commute and how many people get trampled, and how the whole conceit of why they're in a bed together is because she's got this wedding ring on, because it's so dangerous, and she has to present herself as a married woman to keep the men away. And you know, she says about Kelly, oh, I said that to keep him from showing up.

SPEAKER_02 50:42

Just to point out about the wedding ring.

SPEAKER_04 50:44

Her life defensive, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:46

Just to point out about the wedding ring, everybody on that situation had to guard what was valuable to others about them. The men protect their wallets, the women protect their bodies. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 50:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:56

I'm not, yeah, it's not special, right? She's she's got she's in a terrible situation. The reason her relatively good-hearted, whatever, the reason that was unfair, Matt, and turned out poorly for her is because she's in a world where everybody's being unkind and unfair to each other. That's called the real world, right? Not like every single person all the time. But yeah, that's what happens. And that's just what happened in the story. The reason, by the way, I found the story so frustrating was because it was so realistic. I didn't find it like poorly written at all. I found it to be a kind of unvarnished look that to how I at least read it, it just didn't make any attempts to romanticize that the world's any better than it was portrayed, which I found frustratingly realistic and mildly or maybe significantly offensive to my romantic notions.

SPEAKER_01 51:59

Well, there I think the romantic is a key word. Like, although it doesn't the book doesn't really talk about things being romantic or or romance being involved. It does.

SPEAKER_04 52:10

That dude who wants to kill himself. That's the only real adjective he given. But the book does. The book does. He's called romantic. Yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_01 52:19

Yeah. I thought I was I thought that was my judgment of him. Oh. But um Well, he's certainly pathetic. I just wanna here, let me from just the first chapter. He felt better when he overtook a man who, from the back, might have been someone he knew slightly, and turned out, in fact, to be someone he knew slightly, a lecturer in the physiology of the senses who called out, they can't get up again, you know, poor beasts, poor brute beasts, talking about the cows that have fallen over in the wind. And then he comes up on Skippy. He couldn't hear what Skippy said, so dropped back and came up on the other side, the Lee side. You were saying, he says, Thought is blood, Skippy replied. And then the first man, the acquaintance, caught up once more. They were three abreast, his words streamed with the wind. I was in error. It's sheep that can't get up. Sheep, and and Fred responds, The relief of it.

SPEAKER_05 53:18

That was funny. It was funny.

SPEAKER_01 53:20

It's funny.

SPEAKER_04 53:21

Yeah, seeing these little lecturers cycling around each other, jockeying around and shouting at each other.

SPEAKER_01 53:27

Smart for their own good, trying to uh and then the phrase thought is blood keeps coming back. Like Fred Fred says it himself, and somebody else says it as it's like a code word for materialism. Thought is just blood.

SPEAKER_02 53:43

I definitely see the levity of the pettiness of the people who have it. The portrayal is super well done, of people who have neglected the expansion of their soul their entire lives.

SPEAKER_04 54:00

Yeah, I'm with you guys. One of the things that I experienced as I was experiencing the story was a sense of admiration at the sheer volume of sincere uh world building and people uh acting that she rendered within the system that she created. I got a tremendously coherent experience out of a fundamentally incoherent storytelling presentation mechanism. So much so that the incoherent uh storytelling mechanism or the asynchronous, not incoherent, the asynchronous storytelling presentation of the plot and material and stuff was not incongruous to me. It was meaningful, the things that were layered on with the ways with the various different time portions that we jumped to and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 54:55

Well, so here's the thing, and I almost sort of diagrammed this out, making my while I was making my summary, is that literally everything, every person and every event in the novel causally relates to the last sentence. It gets them into the place where they don't have to run into each other. And if they don't run into each other, they're both destroyed and it's all over, and maybe Daisy is dead. And if they do run into each other, then maybe probably they say everything that's really on their hearts, and they get together and they get married, and they make a life together and they live happily ever after. And maybe they cross paths and maybe they don't. And because this door was open for five minutes, they do cross paths, and the door never opens, nobody's ever allowed to open it.

SPEAKER_04 55:53

Except for times when heaven touches earth and these great events happen. So she is the third punctuation of this tesseractic gate that is a gate of heaven and earth, it's a gate of angels, right? So if it's a gate of angels in that it is interdimensional, nobody, no man built it. And that's so funny enough, this is a major uh point of Catholic lore that there is a um monastery of Saint Joseph, didn't have some stairs. A dude shows up from across from out of the desert with a donkey, he's a master craftsman, he builds the staircase for free, he leaves, doesn't take any payment, just disappears into thin air, and everybody says this is an incredible master craftsman. Um that's actually a really cool miracle. Yeah, I've read that before, it's pretty neat. Right. And it's very well documented, and truly, the people that show up and look at the woodwork and look at the level of craftsmanship go, holy crud buckets, this dude was like wizard with what was but what was the miracle? The miracle was that they didn't have the money for a staircase. He shows up, supplies the materials, and builds the staircase and dips out, taking no payment. Oh, and having left behind this truly stunning expert master craftsman level thing.

SPEAKER_02 57:31

Just real quickly, there's another layer of that miracle or so, which is the when they call it a miracle, right? And I don't know. It's a spiral staircase. It has no external supports to the stairs made of wood. There's nothing holding it up except for the stairs themselves. It's an unwooded area. The closest place he would have gotten it would have been hundreds of miles away, 120 or something like that, uh with his donkey cart, and he just had the right amount for it and all that seemed to come from nowhere, go to nowhere. It's a pretty neat little thing. Yeah. Yeah. And you can go look at them, apparently, they're still there.

SPEAKER_04 58:02

So my point being not that she's ripping anything off, but I'm just trying to point out what she's describing phenomenologically, the same kind of thing exists in the real world, in religious dogma, lore, whatever, this idea of uh and it's the Bible, right? Ezekiel and Revelation and all these places, uh one of the most prominent focal architectural pieces of all of prophetic literature are gates. Other than gates, it's you know, just like walls and stuff. It's pretty much just gates. So she's altars. Yeah, altars, altars, sure. But that's really just a matter of scale, right? At that scale of size, that certainly is. So Daisy is the third of the three things that come through the gate, right? And just I just want to point that out.

SPEAKER_01 58:56

Well, we don't know that anything came through the gate on those other occasions. We just know that it was found open.

SPEAKER_02 59:02

Found open. Let me point yes, that's right, right. And let me point out two things. One, in defense of Penelope Grinelope or whatever her name is, um I what is it? Anybody know?

SPEAKER_01 59:14

Penelope Fitzgerald, uh Pelopi Fitzgerald.

SPEAKER_02 59:18

Um so in defense of her, I totally recognize and fully acknowledge here in public before everyone that the difficulty that I had in reading this book is not in her lack of humor or anything like that, but in my over-earnestness. I I genuinely confess and acknowledge that. Number two, I'm gonna play materialist advocate for a second and say that we don't actually know, again, from any privileged perspective, that there were only two times in the past that the thing was left open. What we do know is that there were two records of it being left open. For all we know, as maybe somebody like Fred would say, for all we know, there's people coming in and out ten times a day, right? That's the only time somebody's left it open. That those some times it were recorded, or they maybe just felt like it or something. Well, and this is a time that you know she comes through and does it. We don't actually know that this is a special occasion. Right. And that's again, I'm playing materialist advocate here. If I'm looking at it from what I think is happening, there is something special.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:24

We don't know that it's that special, but we do know it's special enough that Fred's not like, oh, it seems like all these people pretend like the door's never open, but it obviously is always open. Fred's never seen it open either.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:39

Yeah, it is special because this is the third recorded time it's happened. We you're right. We don't know that it hasn't happened other times.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:46

But what we're doing is reported, and they do know who came in or out or who closed it at least this time.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:51

But to strengthen Sir Robert's point, the guy who narrates to us the facts of the gate is the ghost story guy. Yeah. Who's we know will just make up things. Uh but also that the master and the treasurer agree with him as though they treat what he's saying as completely normal and correct. So it's probably true.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:17

Um, probably true. And just to point out, not only does he make up ghost stories and stuff, he seems to spread them around and be delighted when people believe them. Just consequential chaos. So much that they even tried a person for murder, and he was like, Yeah, probably that sounds right. Well, when did that happen?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:37

The whole reason they brought remember what's the not trying him for murder, just for breaking some bicycles.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:44

I thought the whole point of the story there's a story spreading that the third bicyclist is buried under the road. Buried under the road. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:52

Well, that's why the police but the police aren't trying him for that.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:58

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:59

Yeah. That's only because for the causing the accident. They're trying to find who caused the accident.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:06

Got it. The major point there is just that the guy makes up the stories and is cool with like them having whatever impact in the world they have. He's not like, here's a easy story, but don't believe it, kids.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:18

So I understand that the old lady was one of his stories. Was the tan flesh being ripped off a story? Or was there actually a person in the college who had a skeletal hand?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:33

We know of no skeletal hand except from the chapter 17 ghost story.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:38

Okay, so that is a story. Okay, I didn't. Well, I wouldn't he writes it as though it's not. It's in his recollection. The guy moves to Belgium or wherever, and it was a tragic incident from his youth. I it is presented as though it's not a ghost story.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:54

But that's how you frame ghost stories.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:56

But it's the ghost that's right. So I'm only pointing out it's not like a again, not a privileged perspective that we from which we know that it was a ghost story.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:05

The junior dean did not think he had repeated the story to anyone. It circulated, however, and with it the rumor that the provost of St. James believed there was someone, perhaps two people, buried quite recently underneath the Guestingley Road, just a few miles before you come to Dr. Sage's lunatic asylum. After a while, tale elaborated itself with the addition that the police were considering an application to close the road while they made a preliminary search, that, of course, would mean a considerable detour for horse and motor traffic. The police, who had taken no action on the Guestingley Road incident because they couldn't see how to proceed, were well aware that the provost, though cranky, carried weight, and was known often to go up to London where he was consulted by influential people. Perhaps he was not very likely on these occasions to talk about the disappearing Carter, but they decided, in any case, to put an end to a troublesome business. A summons was served on George Turner, farmer, for having provided a carter or driver, with whom he had a master and servant relationship, with an unsafe vehicle not showing front lights or rear lights, as specified by the Roadway Lighting Act of 1904, and also holding him responsible as an employer for the wrongs committed by his employee, who, on February 26, 1912, drove the above-mentioned cart without reasonable care and foresight, causing injuries to Frederick, Aylmer, Fairley, and Daisy Saunders and damage to their machines.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:35

Yeah, but what's the frame story for the story being told where the guy's trying to keep the person from being shoved into the hole?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:45

So here's how it starts. He starts by musing on the disappearance of the two people. If we want to find a man who has been seen on the road and has very positively been driving a cart, and has caused material damage to two bicycles, a man and a woman, but here I have to pause a while. Was there not a third bicyclist? And has he not two disappeared? And are we not told by our scientists and rationalists, who are perhaps not always the same people, that if we do not trust our senses, we have nothing left to trust? Those same five senses which are anointed by the Roman priest on a man's exit from this world and dismissed, so to speak, as having done their best for us, though we may ask, I think we always do our best for them. I met a man lately, a scientist, who had never smoked a pipe. I returned to the Carter. The Carter could be heard, seen, shaken hands with, and, I dare say, if he was an honest day worker, he could also be smell. Haha. Yet he was not found on the road, he was not found on either side of the road, or anywhere within many miles of it. I believe, after all, that the best way to the truth may be to tell you a story. We shall have to proceed, you see, by analogy, which is a less respectable method than it used to be with theologians, but more respectable, I am told, with scientists. That is to say, I'm going to compare the present moment with a past one. Hope that it may throw a little light on our difficulties. I say this even though I do not much care for talking about or even remembering my experiences of 42 years ago, you will have to see what you can make of them. When I was a young man, I took part in any dig that was going, dot dot dot, ending with the nuns dragging the man into the hole and the hand's flesh being ripped off and the et cetera. But so there's clearly this is this is what's happening in me when I read that. Okay, this guy is making some comment on Fred Fairley's life and philosophy. There's something is being said here about science and religion and epistemology and the soul. But like, but what is it? What's going on? What is it?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:45

What's going on? That's what I think. That's what I'm reading it.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:49

So isn't the it seems like Kelly and Fairley accomplish something by what they say and how they both act, where Fairley's speech is all about how science is not dispassionate. In fact, it's very prejudiced. Your digestion, how whether or not somebody that you're very attached to behaves as you expect or behaves very much outside of how you expect them to behave. And there, you know, we're very nakedly projecting about Daisy not meeting his needs in that previous interaction. But Kelly shows up to court and nakedly discloses that his jealous and gnawing uh appetites as a would-be lover have driven him to this location and to perform all the actions he has taken in the court, disclosing all the facts that he's disclosed, naming the person he's trying to do all this to muck it up for Daisy and Fairley so that she'll have to come back to him and have no other option.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:07

Again, incredibly wild that he thinks that he can say in open court and in front of everyone, hey, I was really hoping to treat you so poorly that you were forced to come back to me, and he thinks this is gonna work.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:20

Again, really good feminist literature. What was that, Dwight?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:23

He's did he say that it I thought he was just upset with Dave. There was a part where he said he wanted her to come back to him.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:30

My recollection of it was that he uh thought he was just upset with her, and uh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:36

I I hid before so that I wouldn't give her away, and now I'm done with her, so I am giving her away.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:44

Yeah. So Fred and Kelly are both showing that in this world where there's so much talk and faith in oh, it's not God and reason and the old way, it's science and math and you know, better metaphysics. And uh no, no, like reality is driven not by divine, not by angels going through gates or atoms being quantum or whatnot. It's reality is driven by the actions of knaves and fools and prejudiced people who are, you know, tell like it's interesting that you've got a journalist and a quasi-theologian academic. There's something interesting there about that. Like Kelly is this guy who's presumably a truth teller to the masses, or at least keeping people informed and up to date about what's real. I don't know. It's I I don't know if there's any connection.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:51

Yeah. And also, like, do we even know that he's the third bicyclist? Or yeah, he says he is. Yeah, he says he is, and he also says that the farmer was driving the cart, not someone else.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:05

I mean, would you Kelly have to ask you to use up the mystery?

SPEAKER_03 1:10:09

Yeah, wouldn't Kelly or or you know, there was a worker and he ran away.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:15

If Kelly's lying, though, how does he know that how does he know to name the farmer? Does Kelly have a way of digging that up? Is Kelly lying and saying it was the farmer because he's a tabloid man?

SPEAKER_03 1:10:26

Yeah, I I don't know. I'm just saying that we just get that and then we move on. Really, all truth is in this novel is what someone said. That's true.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:37

And even the truth, yeah, so there is no reports about things are what's so important, right? And that's what's so hilarious about the whole story is that the whole story is one joke. The whole story is that because this one person told this one story about somebody getting messed up and then shoved underneath a great pennywise style, and because these people don't want to get somebody who's their superior upset with them for not being thorough because they know people who are really powerful, and so that the police decide to just do something, and the only thing that they can do is charge the farmer with what he actually did. So what does I forgot what does cause that crash?

SPEAKER_03 1:11:25

What what made Daisy just taking his cart out without lights on?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:30

Yeah, it's getting to night and the cart has no lights and they crash into it, right? But actually, Josh, I think that there is a very real question that you're pointing to there, which is on two occasions, Fred Fairley is riding his bicycle, two angels. It's the first thing that happens in the book is he's riding his bicycle from somewhere to this college, and then the big event where he crashes into this cart along with the woman he's gonna fall in love with happens when he's on the road, but we have we are never given any clue at all, as far as I can tell, where he's coming from or going to, besides angels, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:15

Going from one of his social events back to college. Yeah, first one.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:21

Maybe it's the a bunch of people from Angels went right, and they were all coming back, I guess. Maybe some lecture or something. Yeah. Wait, so wait. I guess it's not important. It just kind of bugs me that we don't know where he's coming from either time.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:36

Sure, and maybe that's part of the nature of the storytelling, right? Is that we're jumping in in media race. Uh we're jumping in. There's something kind of Maxwellian about jumping out in media race, too. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, so there you go. So we're jumping in and jumping out. So there's something about the whole you can you can only know so much about a thing by the time you engage it and observe it, you have collapsed the wave function, so to speak.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:06

Did you have your accident on your bicycle or off it?

SPEAKER_04 1:13:09

Yeah, both at once, I suppose, Master. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was interesting how she was talking about how he's giving this lecture about how the entire field acts as a acts as a point or something like that. And they thought that this was important enough that they should like write this down or something.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:32

You're like, bro, you're I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:37

There's the part where he was talking about Gauss's theorem as applied to gravitational fields, and he's talking about how the field acts as a point mass, and it's just Oh, and he's giving the lecture. Yeah, yeah. So chapter 20? Yeah. But he's giving this lecture and he's getting deep into the paint. On I can read it if you want. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Uh, Fred told us read all the way through the part where it says that there was sympathetic magic happening. That's the phrase. Keep going.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:09

Fred told his class that he would conclude this afternoon with Goss's theorem as applied to gravitational fields. The total outward normal gravitational flux over any surface enclosing a mass m is equal to 4pm. The 4p occurs here because we are using a non-rationalized system, and the negative sign because the gravitational field always acts towards a point mass. For some reason, the class found it necessary to take all this down. There was an element of sympathetic magic here. When the last one had stopped writing and the lid of the last inkwell had been shut, Fred said, Just a moment. Two weeks ago I asked you to write an essay. I have your papers here, but I'm not going to give them back for the moment because I am not quite satisfied with them. Not quite satisfied is, of course, what we say in this university for not at all satisfied, etc.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:05

Yeah, so the sympathetic magic. Like if they write it down, they'll magically know it. Yeah, that he's talking about 4 p.m. And he's talking about all of a field acting as a point mass. And I thought Toward a point mass. Uh uh acts toward. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that word towards is doing a phenomenal amount of heavy lifting. And it was interesting that, you know, the four of us spent four years getting a major in being able to have this conversation about what it means for human hubris to recognize a behavioral pattern or a shape or something, and then think that we know what a thing is because we can describe some major property of it. And so because we see humans understanding that here gravitational flux is happening in this direction of a point mass, is really fascinating. And it made me think about the conversations that we had in Euclid, where we spent the first few days and we had to be crowbared out of those conversations, we had to be dragged by the scruff of our neck out of those conversations by our tutors because we wanted to keep talking about what on earth that point actually was. And I felt like we all had this visceral sense that if we stopped talking about this and just moved on to all of the lines and all the things that we could do with the lines, that we would be cheapening it and we wouldn't really know what we were talking about. We wanted to know our foundations. But here there's the exact inverse that because they're able to apply more and more fancy and elegant functions to the understanding of the thing, the more faith they have that they truly understand the nature of reality and they truly understand metaphysics. And that's this sympathetic magic happening. That as they hear an equation and write something down, they somehow believe that they are physicists. And they like somehow it's magical that they become physicists because they think that they know what reality is because they have these equations when in reality all they know is a rational behavior of a field property. They don't know what it is.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:46

Professor Flower do would agree with you and say they they don't know anything, they haven't observed it, they haven't observed this quote unquote gravitational flux.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:55

Well, I mean, now we have, right? And that's what's so fascinating is that within as of just a year or two ago, we have observed gravitational flux using lasers and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:06

Well, do you think Dr. Flower Dew would accept that?

SPEAKER_04 1:18:09

Uh I think so. Yeah, I mean, they had to go through a lot of work to prove their methodologies and to to validate their findings to the international community. And they've been out of the way.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:23

I think FlowerDoo would say you read the same Flower Dew that you read.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:28

Well, I think Flower Deo would say it's abstraction upon abstraction. That is a kind of Ouija board by which we can discern obscure things and claim they're real. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And none of them are what's up.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:45

And none of them are real.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:47

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:48

They're they're building pyramids in the sky. They're not abstracting successful truth. Well, but Gauss is real. Not to Flower Dew. Flower Dew says, quit fiddling with atoms. You can't see those things.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:06

Right. Flower Dew says, an atom is not a reality. It is just a provisional idea. So how can we say that it is situated in space? We ought to feel suspicious of it when we find that it has been given characteristics which absolutely contradict those which have been observed in any other body. There is a continuity of scientific thought, you know. The continuity is now being thrown out of the window. Let us hope we shall remember where it is when at long last we find that we can't do without it. He goes on to give, he gives a very interesting speech, actually, which Josh, you will probably be interested in. He says, Let me tell you what's going to happen over the coming centuries to atomic research. And of course, Penelope Fitzgerald is writing this from the future. So she's writing the past. She's putting it in his mouth. There will be many apparent results, some useful, some spectacular, some very possibly unpleasant. Like the atomic bomb.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:03

The widowmaker demonstration.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:14

In fact, there are some very nice ones in the Cavendish at the moment. Then they'll find that the models won't do, because they would only work if atoms really existed. So they'll replace them by mathematical terms which can't be stretched which can be stretched to fit. As a result, they'll find that since they're dealing with what they can't observe, they can't measure it. And so we shall hear that all that can be said is that the position is probably this, and the energy is probably that. A la Heisenberg. The energy will be beyond their comprehension.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:44

Oh, he's being chiaphist. Keep going.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:46

So they'll be driven to the theory that it comes and goes more or less at random. Now their hypothesis will be at the beginning of collapse, and they will have to pull out more and more bright notions to paper over the cracks and to cram into unsightly corners. There will be elementary particles which are too strange to have anything but curious names, and antimatter which ought to be there, but isn't. By the end of the century they will have to admit that the laws they are supposed to have discovered seem to act in a profoundly disorderly way. What is a disorderly law, Fairley? Sounds like chaos, said Fred. The chaos will be in their minds only. It too will not be observable.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:31

The chaos will be in their minds only. He's being Caiaphas. It is better that one man should die for the people. Uh that that's really funny. Caiaphas unwittingly, accurately, prophetically declares the ministry of Jesus Christ as speaking as a dastardly dog, and he says it is better that one man should die for the people. He doesn't say in atonement for the people.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:04

He doesn't believe in it, but he accurately predicts for the people correctly.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:09

Yes. Because he wants Christ to die for the people to mollify the current tension in the situation. So anyway, the point being that she is giving Flower Dew the guy who wants to hold on to continuity, the kind of chiaphas prophetic through line of what scientists are going to do that's going to culminate in and this has just happened just now recently. Even particle physics has really kind of dissolved for a lot of people into just field physics. There's not particles that aren't even real. So she she super called it, right? Because she wrote this novel even before particle physics really fully fell. Although she did know about the strange stuff. So yeah, yeah. I mean what year does she write this? 90?

SPEAKER_03 1:23:08

91. 90?

unknown 1:23:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:12

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't at least that's when I published.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:16

Under s yeah, I don't understand what you're saying there, but uh Flower Doo yeah, he she she puts things into his voice, right? But is he wrong? I don't understand how you are saying that he doesn't understand it. He does understand it.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:34

Oh no, no, no, no. Sorry, there are two things. So he is trying to hold on to the continuity of the past and doesn't want to accept all these new true realities that we see but and he just calls them. He he just describes them, and somehow that energy of insincere satire stumbling through the truth. What is the statement? I'm not presuming to say. I I'm I would ask the question what is happening there as he stumbles through the truth? So he's is he stumbling?

SPEAKER_03 1:24:15

He's just saying they're gonna keep making more theories and they're gonna keep saying that they're true, and they're not going to continue on the way science is supposed to work.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:27

So he so if I think about it this way, though what she's doing is what she's doing is imagine that like you made up a completely bogus conspiracy theory. Like you said that Bigfoot shot JFK, right? It's not bogus.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:46

Just kidding. Oh Matthew, my sweet summer child.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:50

You think that Bigfoot shot JFK?

SPEAKER_04 1:24:52

Someone invisible did, Matthew. Do you know somebody else invisible besides this is what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_01 1:24:58

You get it. So because Bigfoot did not actually shoot JFK, my my evidence that works within my theory has to get stranger and stranger in order to like in order to make the epicycles line up with the actual observed effects. I have to be like, oh, Bigfoot was there, but he was invisible, and by shot I mean cosmic rays, and you have to like pull in all this really weird stuff, but the actual problem is not all your weird stuff that you're pulling in to explain things. The actual problem is that you just made a bad assumption at the beginning. So Professor Flowerdoo is saying, or Penelope Fitzgerald is saying, the idea of the atom itself is bogus, and that's why these physicists have to keep on making up crazier and crazier and crazier stories to explain the experimental phenomena. If they I don't think she's saying in terms of the atom.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:59

And so if they would just give up the atom, then maybe they could start to explain the experimental phenomena that they see in terms which like actually come from the phenomena that they're seeing, instead of trying to shoehorn things to fit into an atomic theory that is not really a thing.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:18

It is interesting that she mentions somebody somebody saw Rutherford, and he's the guy who shot things at gold atoms and it they deflected. Right. He was a, you know, and I don't know, maybe there's some other explanation that I'm not sophisticated enough in all of this to understand. But he was like, Oh, it seems like it must be a tiny almost point size, but not quite a point, because it does actually deflect electrons away.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:51

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:52

Can we before we well, so hang out real quick before we move on? So he is wrong about the atom. The atom is real, but he's right about well, but he's listen here, I'll take you out back later. He's right about probabilistic observation phenomena. So, like, you know, he he misses the small and hits the huge. I don't know. I just don't know what's like that seems significant that he's wrong about the particular, but right about the bigger picture stuff that he projects. He's prophetic about. But is that be is he able to be prophetic because he's holding on to the continuity of the past?

SPEAKER_01 1:27:41

The idea is that he's able to be prophetic because he has correctly ascertained the flaws in current atomic theory, and so he can predict where it's going to go before it even goes there. Because he knows more than they do, because he knows that they're wrong and they don't know it.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:57

I don't think he's actually wrong. He's what he says they're wrong about is really just the description of the path of discovery, the the quantum scientific community. I think that's probably right.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:13

Is that there's not really a difference between flower dew and not flower dew. It's just semantics. What you have is a model, and you change the model as you go, as you get more data, and the model gets more accurate. And whether it's like quote unquote based on an incorrect theory from the beginning, who cares as long as it gets more accurate. That the true scientist doesn't care if you have an you start with an atomic model that's like a pudding, and then you end up you go to one that's like a planet, and then you go to one that's like a quantum uh probabilistic field, like who cares as long as it gets more accurate each time you change it. Yeah. Which is why wrong or not doesn't matter. Just fit the data, fit the theory to your data. Who cares what Flower Dew has to say? Can I just for my own edification, can we go around the horn and just each of you say what you thought this ghost story was even doing in the book?

SPEAKER_04 1:29:11

Remind me the rough details of the events. Oh, that's the thing about he's like I was on this dig.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:20

Yeah, you know, this guy's really obsessed with culvert in the middle of a field by a cart track, and he kept trying to go back there and he couldn't sleep. And he said that people were keeping him up with their saying in in. Yeah. And then he went out there and something was pulling him in, and I tried to yank him out, and then his hand was gone. And then when they finished the dig, they found like some bishop or somebody who had been like rolled up into a very thin cylinder and shoved under the culvert and died. Dwight, what do you think that I don't understand? There are ways to get the police if you're plotting, if you're making an outline of this plot and you're Penelope Fitzgerald, and you want the police to charge somebody with something, there are easier ways. You don't have to spend this many pages to get the police to charge somebody with a crime that actually occurred. Right? So, why this whole ghost story? What is it even doing in the novel? I understand everything except for this in a certain way.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:34

Why is it in there, Dwight? My experience of reading this novel was probably 50 different anecdotes like that that I didn't understand why they weren't put together in the novel.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:45

Well, see, that's my normal experience of a Penelope Fitzgerald novel. Okay, what about you, Sir Robert?

SPEAKER_02 1:30:51

Well, I think there are three ghost stories in this novel. Um, in no particular order, I think they are the story of Daisy in Fred's life. When I say ghost stories here, it's isomorphic with a ghost story. Daisy's not strictly a ghost, although she does something sort of ghostly at the end with the angel bit. I don't think it's like exactly a ghost story, but the role she plays in Fred's life, he gets this kind of spooked supernatural experience. He has transcendent knowledge about his life from this experience.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:28

Yeah. Just like the scientist guy who has his hand cleansed is compelled. Most can't go on.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:34

That kind of thing. And she plays the role of a ghostly character, right? The second ghost story is the one you're asking about with the. I took them as hags. I didn't remember the nun, but sure, nuns or whatever. I meant I mean hag in the sort of Celtic lore sense of hag.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:52

Um a banshee, a monster.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:54

Yeah. And then the third ghost story is atomic theory. Right. Um The Unobservables. They are playing the roles, the same roles for the various people. And the guy who's coming up with this tale, he's using these Lovecraftian tropes of civilizations under civilizations getting more ancient and more mysterious, these horror things, right? And he's using that to explain things that he can't quite observe, disappearances. He's making up these tales that are fantastic. Cool and whatever. In the same way he's accusing these materialists of doing. And there's a parallelism between the would-be unromantic scientistic materialism, right? That's it's really actually romantic, right? And this guy who's got a romanticized sort of mystical view of whatever that he can't put on something divine, so instead he's putting it on, you know, ancient sewer nuns. Interesting. Medieval sewer nuns. Attack of the sewer nuns. They made a resurgence in the in New York in the 80s, the turtles.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:08

What about you, Josh? So I fancy myself a bit of a connoisseur of this category of this slice of the human experience. I've spent a great deal of time trying to find out what are the major ways that people who have a unexplainable experience try to get that off their chest, whom they disclose it, who do they tell that story to. There are a number of different, you know, fringe interest groups where based on your fringe interest, you will go out and try to solicit stories from people about stuff. What I find utterly fascinating is that when you look at what each of these individual groups that go out trying to find their own stories, frustratingly enough, what they end up coming up with are each other's stories, and a number of categories emerge because that's what people are seemingly talking about. So to me, it's kind of fascinating that you've got a real body being found as a result of a ghost story motivation. I don't even fully understand where that ghost story comes from, but I think that it's supposed to kind of show the relationship between time and truth for human epistemology, especially when we rely on each other for truth-telling and reality. Like truth is that truth and reality are things that we have to keep track of with continuity. And so the fact that there's this little black box between people being right about certain parts of what they say, and then also being able to be wrong about other things too, it makes for I don't know, the same thing that happens when you hunt, where you snap your head around it in every direction for a possible snap of a twig. It could be a predator or it could be prey. So you have to look at everything. And it just feels like because of that push, because of that drive, because we all live together as humans, and we all set the listen to each other's stories, a lot of yeah, I I don't know. It puts us in this deep tension with each other of treating each other as credible and letting each other into a co-ownership over what we consider to be real. So the fact that this guy is even heard out with his story the way that he is, I think is important. There's something certainly at least dignifying to people who believe that they have had these kinds of experiences to be heard. And I think that that's important. And I think that when you're looking after a sea of people who are having real and not real numinous experiences, it's better to err on the side of at least hearing people's stories and treating them with a kind of patient dignity and not trying to tell them when, where, or how what they're saying is not real or not this, that, or the other. It's the there are things that you will miss, much like a scientist putting their finger on the scale to try to make the sample weigh what they want it to weigh. You do the same thing with people with mental health problems when you cut them off, when you invalidate them. And so, you know, what's his face? Who was actually listening to his crazy patients? There's something in there. I think there's something about listening to people who are actually fully crazy and listening to people who have had experiences that are crazy. That there's that same principle of somewhere in some of those crazy stories, there is truth. And so while it's incredibly important to be discerning, to not go through believing large volumes of stuff to not miss out on the opportunity to believe something true, that there are still things hidden in places of madness and chaos and confusion and metaphysical beyond metaphysical boundaries that we would be comfortable accepting that may still very well be real or true, which is not the point of this, but it's fascinating how much of the story revolves around it.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:28

You're saying something like the story of the Gate of Angels is something like people working together or failing to work together to come up with a story that explains their lives. The physicists are working together to come up with a story that explains the atom. The ghost story guy is working together sort of with the public to come up with a way to explain the missing people. And then Daisy and Fred are trying to work together to come up with a story that explains their relationship to each other. Something like that.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:05

That's exactly what Fred rejects Daisy over and hates her for the first time around, is that she's telling that story for Kelly and saying, Well, he's got to die, you know, he you saw him up close, he dyes his hair, you saw his clothes are really shabby. Don't you have pity for him? He doesn't have your advantages. You know, she's going to town, you know, naming small, intimate little details about him. And so Fred has to ask, Well, do you love the guy? You you're talking about him, you know so much about him, but it's because she's doing this work. Yeah. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:40

Um one interesting little thing that I noticed reading this, the first the way that we get Daisy's name, Daisy Saunders, is first we see a letter that Fred is writing that says Dear Daisy or Dear Miss Saunders. And then next we see him writing a letter that says Dear Daisy. And then when they're in that house, when they're touring the house that's for sale, they find out the name of the owner of the house by putting together multiple different pieces of the person's mail that were sitting around, which is what we had to do to figure out Daisy's name in the first part of the book. That's cute. That's cute. Now, Dwight, you tell me something that you noticed about it, or Don.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:30

When they first described the gate in the college, I was reminded of the gate in the temple that it actually is on the eastern side, not the southwestern side, but the king's gate that is always closed until you know the king comes back. What's going on?

SPEAKER_01 1:39:50

Wait, Dwight, are you saying that the temple in the Old Testament has a gate similar to the one described in this novel?

SPEAKER_03 1:39:58

I don't know how similar. I was just thinking of it. You know, a gate that isn't used is really the only similarity.

SPEAKER_04 1:40:05

Yeah, a gate that stays closed until the prophesied opening. Yeah. And that's where lift up your heads, oh you gates, be lifted up, you ancient doors, that the king of glory may come in. Who is he this king of glory, the Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle? He is the King of Glory. Oh, I have can I ask one last question before we close? So I'm I was curious, how does Fred's role as a facilitator of marri of conjugal time for like Fred is the facilitator of sex time for the parents? It's the only time that the parents get to have sex. I I can read it. Yeah, please, please, please, please.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:48

Fred was so this is he's he's teaching class now, and we're getting a little bit of description. Fred was a good teacher, having begun early by helping out at Sunday school. All the village children of Blow, which is where he's from, attended every Sunday afternoon. It was their parents' only chance in the crowded cottages to get to bed with each other without interruption. This was well understood at the rectory. Fred and Mrs. Fairley, and later on Hester, knew that rain or shine, they must keep hard at it in the parish room till half past three. What was the second plague of Egypt? What was made of shittim wood overlaid with gold? When Balaam's ass was endowed with speech, what was her first remark? It was strange to think how many village children in England, certainly in blow, could answer these questions without hesitation.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:43

I'm convinced that I read that book three times and you just read something from a different book.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:49

That, by the way, Matt, was one of the parts of pieces of humor I noticed. That they have to go hard at it until three in the afternoon, like the parents.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:00

Right. Um, I'm glad at least one of her many, many jokes uh landed for Sir World. I heard a few others, but yeah, not as many as y'all did. I just missed him. He's quite mad. He flung the beef tea.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:17

I liked tea made me laugh a lot.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:20

The police officer came in to interview the guy and they put him off. And he's like, Oh, you know, if y'all just keep him quiet and give him beef tea, he'll probably be all right. That was good.

SPEAKER_05 1:42:32

It's like Opal Teen or something.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:36

Right. Oh man. Yeah. Well, Sir Robert, what are we reading for our next meeting? Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:44

So, first, I have four very short readings. They're short enough that depending on how quickly y'all read, you could probably read all of them in 20 minutes. So, as a request, I request that you consider reading it several times. Reading number one is from the Hagakure. Hagakure is one of my favorite non-Western works in particular. It is book one, chapter one, and it's the first of the PDF I'm sending you, it's the first four pages, basically, not quite four pages. And the specific prompt is please read in the hagakure until such and such a paragraph, and then as far further as you like. Feel free to keep going. Reading number two is a piece of contemplative poetic prayer from the Middle Ages that I that has been really meaningful to me, which is John Dunn's Meditation 17. I will send that PDF as well to you. Say it again. Dwight, that the no man is an island. Yeah, no man's an island and tire of himself. And then reading number three is Psalm 73, and then reading number four is Ecclesiastes two and three. Sweet.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:57

And are we gonna invite somebody new for to be a guest? I was considering inviting Jared. I think that's a great idea. Okay. Please do. I invited him, but I was too late for this one, but I was too late because of being lame. Okay, fair enough.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:16

Jesus can heal that. Like your nickel. He said it before.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:19

Well, there we go, me. All right, cool. Thank you for joining us for this discussion. You are dismissed with the following valediction from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now the hungry lion roars, and the wolf behows the moon, whilst the heavy ploughman snores, all with weary task foredone. Now the wasted brands do glow, whilst the screech owl screeching loud, puts the wretch that lies in woe in remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night that the graves all gaping wide, every one lets forth his sprite in the churchway paths to glide, and we fairies that do run by the triple heckett's team, From the presence of the sun, following darkness like a dream. Now our frolic, not a mouse, shall disturb this hallowed house. I am sent with broom before, to sweep the dust behind the door.