A Hopeful Climate Conversation with Richard Powers

This week, we revisit a soulful conversation around climate change and the restorative power of nature with author Richard Powers. We begin by defining the thematic through-line between The Overstory and Bewilderment (5:06), the eco trauma articulated in each text (9:10), how we may redefine hope today (16:08), and what the pandemic taught us about the climate crisis (26:18). Powers also details the ecological shortcomings of capitalism (29:00) and our myopic interpretation (and fear of) death (30:56). On the back-half, we unpack why he writes (33:48), the need for “productive solitude” (40:40), and the singular way he writes analytical and emotional characters (44:42). To close– a fitting scene from one of Powers’ earlier works, Plowing the Dark (50:30), in which an older man enters an used bookstore, unable to find the book intended. And in the absence of that book, Richard Powers will continue to do so (52:50). Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:14Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show. As some of you may know, we make this program out of Los Angeles, California, have since 2016. I've seen a lot in eight years of living here, but nothing matches the destruction of this past week. The wildfires that are raging across the city right now, as I'm sure you've seen on the news, have decimated an untold amount of homes, schools, and businesses. Thousands of people fleeing the fires have been displaced, lives just completely irrevocably

• 0:53Sam Fragoso?

  altered by one of the most horrific natural disasters in the history of Los Angeles. It would take me an hour to name everyone just in my life, whose apartment, or home, or family home is either damaged, or just completely gone. On Monday, it was life as usual, and on Tuesday, everything changed. And my heart goes out to everyone that is going through it right now. I don't know how this city moves on from here. I don't

• 1:32Sam Fragoso?

  know how it moves forward from here. It's going to take a long, long time. And for the foreseeable future, we'll be a city in repair. So if you can help, and you're looking for a couple of good organizations and GoFundMes to support, we've included some of those links in the show notes of this episode. You can find those on our website, or in the description of this conversation. Los Angeles is a strange, sprawling, beautiful city. But it's weather, as Joan Didion once wrote, is the weather of catastrophe,

• 2:15Sam Fragoso?

  of apocalypse, and the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana, she wrote back in 1967, affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles. It accentuates its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds show us how close to the edge we are. In this moment, there are few writers grappling with the impermanence that Didion is talking about more consistently and honestly and vulnerably than author Richard Powers. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for his novel, The Overstory, a stunning, multi-generational epic that centers on the mysterious lives of trees.

• 2:59Sam Fragoso?

  If that sounds like something you may not immediately reach for, you're not alone. Former President Obama said of the book, "It's not something I would have thought of, but a friend gave it to me. And then I started reading it, and it immediately changed how I thought about the earth, how I see things." The writing of Richard Powers has that singular quality, to change how you see the world around you and, in turn, your place in it. His book from 2021, Bewilderment, has a similar effect. It's set around a widowed father, Theo Byrne, and his nine-year-old son, Robin. Theo is an astrobiologist, Robin, a precocious pre-teen on the spectrum.

• 3:42Sam Fragoso?

  The child is also deeply empathetic and curious and concerned about our looming environmental crisis. In turn, Powers poses a clear, but difficult, maybe impossible, to answer question. How do we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, yet increasingly imperiled planet? It's a question that was on my mind when I sat with Richard in the fall of 2021. And it's become more pressing ever since. We talk about climate change, the cost of capitalism, the restorative power of the outdoors, and so much more in this talk. If you haven't listened to it before, I hope you enjoy it.

• 4:27Sam Fragoso?

  If you haven't heard it in three years and change, I hope you find something new on a second go around. Much love to you and yours. I'll see you back here next week.

• 4:41Sam Fragoso?

  Until then, here is Richard Powers.

• 4:59Sam Fragoso?

  Richard Powers, thank you for being here.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a pleasure to talk with you.

• 5:03Sam Fragoso?

  In 2002, in The Paris Review, you said, "Each of my books is a reaction against the previous one." And so I thought, why don't we begin here with that reaction from The Overstory into Bewilderment?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  I spent a long time writing Overstory, almost six years, and it turned out to be a very long book with a large cast, and it unfolded over centuries. And frankly, it took a lot out of me. I started it in my late 50s and ended it in my early 60s. And when I finished, I wasn't sure I was going to be writing again. I thought, this is, in some ways, really a kind of last word of a journey that I've been making over a long time. And when I started again, I knew that I was in a different place. I knew I wasn't

• 5:56Speaker 01

  going to try to repeat that particular approach. I didn't have it in me to do another large-scale, long, multi-character story. And the connection that I had with Bewilderment was already kind of formed by just where I was psychically. And to regenerate myself, in a way, I decided to write something much more intimate, something that I knew would be a good deal shorter, that would be cast in a single narrative voice. It was like writing a piano sonata after writing a symphony. In that sense, Bewilderment is a reaction formally to The

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Overstory. It's an attempt to really set out into a kind of new narrative contract, ...endeavor that would allow me to rebuild myself and to take a fresh approach to who I was and what I was trying to do. But also thematically, it obviously grows out of the concerns of the overstory. The overstory works its way toward this understanding that we're going to need a new way of being in the world, a new kind of consciousness if we intend to stay around here for much longer. And Bewilderment took that seriously. And in the book, I try to dramatize the story of someone who does stumble into that new

• 7:24Speaker 01

  form of consciousness. And so, in a sense, it is a response to or reaction against the questions that cast down in the overstory.

• 7:33Sam Fragoso?

  Those questions being, how did we lose our sense of living here on Earth? How did we become so alienated and estranged from everything else alive? How did we get convinced that we're the only interesting game in town and the only species worthy of extending a sense of sacred to? Those, at least, were the questions you posed in the New York Times last month.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so this story of 39-year-old Theo Byrne stumbling to bring up his nine-year-old intense and troubled son, Robin, by himself after the death of his wife, becomes a story of how this father and son together might find their way back to planet Earth and return to the neighborhood and close up that distance between the humans and the more-than-humans. It becomes a kind of triple love story in a way. It's the love of a father for his son, who is in trouble, for whom he would do anything to keep him safe.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  It's the love story of a son for his lost mother, who dies two years before the story begins. But it's also the love that these two, father and son, have increasingly for the world around them. And it's that reversal of alienation, I think, that lies at the heart of the new novel.

• 9:01Sam Fragoso?

  On the love shared between this father and his son, you have this line I just kept rereading. You wrote, "But he'd survived his mother's death. I figure he'd survive my best intentions."

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not sure anyone ever knows how to bring up a child in this world. This story is so much about Theo's uncertainties, the consequences of decisions that he makes that he's ambivalent about. But there is that leap of faith at the bottom of his efforts that just throws him back, knowing that all he can do is be present to listen, to try to see what the world looks like from his boy's perspective.

• 9:51Sam Fragoso?

  Well, what it looks like from his perspective is something that you're unpacking page by page. And you write a whole lot in this book about the sort of superpower of this child's autism, how the atypical person is seeing the world around them with more clarity and urgency than the rest of us. Is that a fair description?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  It is quite clear that Robin can't be considered normative. But what particular diagnostic label is going to be most helpful in understanding and treating him is an open question. And so I don't think Theo has reached a degree of comfort with a label of autism. And the label of autism itself is a kind of moving target. The nature of the autism spectrum is that it isn't a single presentation, and it can manifest itself in profoundly different ways for different people. Robin is definitely different. He has great intensity. He's capable of great excitement and great love,

• 10:59Speaker 01

  but he also has extreme difficulty in regulating his emotions. The catchall term neurodivergent, I think, is probably useful. It is, to some extent, his Superpower, as Greta Thunberg has described her own neurodivergence. In some ways, he is very distinctive and his response to his own eco-trauma is very personal and unusual. But in some ways, he is very representative. I think in feeling terror and confusion in the face of the disintegration of the Earth's

• 11:39Speaker 01

  ecosystems, in his growing awareness that this living world that is so important to him is disappearing, he is quite representative of the kind of eco-trauma that I think is absolutely pandemic among children of all kinds. And so he has that sort of dual function as offering a perspective that is exceptionally intense and morally absolute, uncomprehending, both fearful and highly, highly engaged. But he is also just a child who feels deeply about the more than human world and simply can't comprehend any kind of adult logic

• 12:20Speaker 01

  that would allow that disappearance to happen. Robin needs an answer. Is this really happening? And why doesn't anybody do anything about it? And that's a tough question to walk away from when asked by a nine-year-old of such intensity.

• 12:35Sam Fragoso?

  I think no scene in the book better reflects that generational frustration that you're talking about. You know, these unending pangs around the inactivity and inertia of previous generations. And that scene occurs in the middle of page 59, if you'd be open to reading it for us.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  That's great. We sobered up and read.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  The pages turned, we traveled easily, everywhere. Then, without taking his eyes off his book, Robin asked, "So what do you think happened to Mom?" For one awful moment, I thought he meant the night of the accident. All kinds of lies presented themselves, before I realized, he was asking something much easier. "I don't know, Robbie. She went back into the system. She became other creatures. All the good things in her came into us. Now we keep her alive with whatever we can remember." He tipped his head, a little reticent. "My son, growing away from me. I think she's a salamander or something." I rolled to face him. "Wait, what? Where'd you get that?" I knew.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  "The thirty species the Smokies had." "Well, remember how you said Einstein proved nothing could be created or destroyed? That's right, but he was talking about matter and energy, how they keep changing from one form to another." "That's what I'm saying." The words tore out of him so wildly, I had to shush him. "Mom was energy, right?" My face got away from me. "Yes, if Mom was anything, she was energy. And now she's changed into another form." I tried to hug him, but he pushed away. "It's probably just a figure of speech. She's probably not anything." The words froze me. Some awful switch had been thrown in him, and I couldn't tell why. "Two percent, Dad?"

• 14:30Speaker 01

  He snarled, like a cornered badger. "Only two percent of all animals are wild? Everything else is factory cows and factory chickens and us? Please don't shout at me, Robbie." "Is that for real? Is it?" I took our abandoned books and put them on the nightstand. "If your mother said it in a speech for the state legislature, it's for real." His face bumped up like he'd been punched. His eyes curdled and his mouth opened in a silent scream. It took a moment for the soundless jag to turn into tears. I held out my arms, but he shook his head. Something in him hated me for letting that number be true. He backed into the corner of his bed, up against the wall.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  His head swung sideways in disbelief. Just as suddenly, he deflated. He lay back down, his back to me, one ear to the mattress. He lay there, listening to the hum of defeat. He felt around for my body in the space behind him. When he found it, he mumbled into the sheets, "New planet, Dad. Please."

• 15:38Sam Fragoso?

  "New planet, Dad. Please. You could put that into a bumper sticker."

• 15:44Speaker 01

  And in fact, Theo, who is an astrobiologist and whose day job involves searching for biosignatures in the spectroscopy analysis of the atmospheres of other planets, finds that one of the very few things that can calm Robin down is to take him to other planets. In lieu of bedtime stories, a father and son travel to imaginary places throughout the galaxy where the planet is just different enough that it means the possibility for life becomes something altogether different. And it's through these explorations of planets

• 16:29Speaker 01

  that father and son come to understand just how unlikely and difficult and lucky our planet is. And it's through the exploration of these new planets that first Robin and then Theo become recommitted to the possibility of alien life all around us.

• 16:52Sam Fragoso?

  On the flip side of that bumper sticker, I'm calling a bumper sticker, is that eco-trauma you talked about in the beginning of our talk. And I wondered if, since it is consistent throughout the book, if you could articulate what exactly you think that trauma is.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  I think it would be hard to be nine years old and to know that by the time you were an adult, half the large animal species in the world would be gone. To look at an adult world that seems to be in an utter state of denial, traumatized, unable to move forward in any kind of meaningful way, unable to marshal the hope needed to look at the future as something other than catastrophic loss, is to be defeated. If you talk to people who are graduating from high school now, or graduating from college now, and ask them about their hopes for the future, as an increasing number of polls are saying, there's just

• 17:56Speaker 01

  an overwhelming majority of them who don't place much stock in it. It's partly a near-term problem. I mean, capitalism is failing. There's something breaking down. You know, for the first time in modern memory, it is no longer likely that you will do better off materially than your parents. The standard of living for the next generation is likely not to meet or exceed that of the previous generation. So there's that local anxiety about simply not being particularly hopeful for your own material prospects. But way beyond that,

• 18:35Speaker 01

  I think, among young people is just awareness of the utter paralysis that has befallen the politics and social will of the generation before them.

• 18:48Sam Fragoso?

  Back in 2002, when your book, Time of Our Singing, came out, there was a question posed about racism. And you have this quote I quite like, that I think may apply to some of the problems we have when it comes to grappling with nature. You said, "Just as important is an understanding of the degree to which racism is driven by a fear of similarities. We love and hate, and we embrace, and we mistreat, and we exclude, not as a function of how little the other category overlaps with us." But as a function of how close the boundary is, if what looks so different from me is not that different,

• 19:33Sam Fragoso?

  what happens to my sense of uniqueness? Destroy that thing that would destroy our own uniqueness.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  It's really interesting that you have made this connection. You've set off all kinds of associations in my own mind. We really believe that there is a radical discontinuity between us and the rest of the living world. And in many ways, there is. I mean, consciousness, the degree of consciousness that we have, language, high capacity for predictive modeling, all of these things that are distinctive to human beings do in some ways make us a separate creature. But we have intensified that by trying to suppress the degree of resemblance that we have with the rest of living creation.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  It is, in many ways, our own animal nature that makes us hugely anxious about other creatures and hugely determined to distinguish ourselves from them. It is our knowledge of the way in which the cycles of nature dictate the possibilities of individual lives and constrain within the bounds of mortality, all, any aspiration that you might feel. It is our knowledge of those things that has created this culture of dominance and mastery. Every technology that we invent increases the temptation to say, "We can become something nothing else ever was,

• 21:09Speaker 01

  and we can permanently remove ourselves from the constraints and the vicissitudes of the living world and set off on our own." I do think that our continuity with other living things makes us tremendously anxious. And I do think that could be one of the driving factors in how miserably.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  We have treated everything that's not us.

• 21:37Sam Fragoso?

  Now, what do you mean by that exactly? Our fear of the continuity?

• 21:41Speaker 01

  If we felt that we had behavioral affordances and inclinations that weren't all that different from the hopes and fears of other animals, we wouldn't be able to have the food system that we have. For instance, we wouldn't be able to stand the thought of factory farms. I think it's a sense of our own mortality. It's our sense of our own relatedness to other creatures that has resulted in this enormous overreaction that has produced the extremities of human exceptionalism that that make us insist that the rest of the living world

• 22:25Speaker 01

  actually doesn't have agency, doesn't have intelligence or isn't capable of suffering in the way that we are. We want to erect a massive barrier in order to justify treating the rest of the living world as resources.

• 22:42Sam Fragoso?

  The idea of needing that barrier between humans and animals to allow us to circumvent thinking about right from wrong, I think is best displayed in this passage here at the bottom of page 56.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  She recited the facts. Number of participants, weight of winning entry, total animals killed in statewide contests every year, effects of lost animals on ravaged ecosystems. Her sober eloquence would conclude later that night in a two-hour crying jag in bed with me powerless to comfort her. I kicked myself for imagining Robbie could handle this, but he'd wanted to see his mother. And truth be told, he was holding it together pretty well. Nine is the age of great turning. Maybe humanity was a nine-year-old, not yet grown up, not a little kid anymore, seemingly in control, but always on the verge of rage. Alyssa wrapped up. Her conclusion was masterful.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  She always nailed the landing. She said how this bill would restore tradition and dignity to hunting. She said how 98% by weight of animals left on earth were either homo sapiens or they're industrially harvested food.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Only 2% were wild. Didn't the few wild things left need a break? Her closing words chilled me all over again. I remembered her working them out in weeks of laboring over this testimony. "The creatures of this state do not belong to us. We hold them in our trust. The first people who lived here knew, all animals are our relatives. Our ancestors and our descendants are watching our stewardship. Let's make them proud."

• 24:31Speaker 01

  The clip ended. I canceled the one that queued up next. To my relief, Robin didn't argue. He held three fingers against his mouth. The gesture made him look like a four-foot-tall Atticus Finch. "Did that bill pass, Ed?" "Not yet, buddy, but something like it will one of these years."

• 24:52Sam Fragoso?

  "Even in that quiet passage of yours, I sense a lingering hope within you."

• 24:59Speaker 01

  "Absolutely. The question of hope needs to be unpacked a little bit. When people ask me, is this a hopeful book? Do I have hope? The very first thing that I want to ask back is, hope for what? Do I hope that we can get through the crisis that we've set in motion without profound change to how we live and what our expectations for life are? Do I think that we can keep the present system of capitalist, commodity-mediated, individualist, exceptionalist culture intact? No, and I don't think that's something we necessarily want to hope for. When people are demoralized by the climate crisis,

• 25:45Speaker 01

  it often comes because they have intuited correctly that we can't hope to hang on to the cultural formations that we've committed ourselves to. And yet, hope is just the willingness to engage the future as if it's still offered meaning. And that, I think, I absolutely have."

• 26:09Speaker 01

  I believe that once we get over the trauma of having to surrender a culture in which meaning is entirely created for and by individual selves, and feeling as if we are amassing stockpiles of value through the places that we go, the things we accumulate, all of that, I think, once we give up the trauma of surrendering that culture of private meaning and begin to locate meaning out there in a kind of reciprocal and interdependent and communal activity of returning to earth, of rehabilitating

• 26:51Speaker 01

  ourselves in this place, the future opens up magnificently and it's it's full of possibility. It may be that the climate catastrophe actually shocks us into a new relationship with the world, not as a set of resources, but as a community of living things, that gives us more daily sense of richness and possibility, potential, than the old cultures of accumulation ever gave us. I hope for that.

• 27:26Sam Fragoso?

  We'll be right back with our guest, author Richard Powers.

• 27:33Sam Fragoso?

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• 29:03Sam Fragoso?

  And yet, I couldn't help but shake this feeling at the end of what you just said, around this larger crisis, perhaps waking us up, undoing some past habits. I couldn't help but think of the rhetoric around the pandemic, that this event may actually bring us closer together, that it may have a unifying power. And now that we are 18 months into this pandemic, I think we can say quite comfortably or uncomfortably that what we hoped would be progress, something called enlightenment, doesn't particularly feel like enlightenment at all.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  That's for certain. The pandemic did not bring us together, rather the reverse. In very real ways, the pandemic did two things. One, it turned people outside. The pandemic has produced a tremendous hunger to remember what the non-human world looks like. And that's a very hopeful thing. And I also think the other positive development is that it stripped away, almost like this pretense, that we couldn't make mass collective action that wasn't economically justified. The economy was certainly hurt by the pandemic. But when

• 30:24Speaker 01

  you think of what we did to protect the at-risk population... During this time period, it completely invalidates any argument from economic pragmatism. Oh, we can't do that because the economic growth would suffer and that would be the end of everything. Well, it wasn't the end of everything. And in that sense, we are closer to understanding the sleight of hand that goes on in justifying everything that we pursue in terms of immediate economic gain. That's a big blow to that sort of cultural mythos. It's a blow that I think brings us closer to understanding the funny bookkeeping that's at the heart

• 31:07Speaker 01

  of a lot of economics to begin with. The ways in which what we call wealth isn't wealth and that we've actually been drawing on principle in a kind of sleight of hand way. And one thing that the pandemic certainly did was make us realize that we can't be dictated by artificial economic gains that aren't sustainable. And that we have interests that have to drive our choices before this sense that the GDP comes before all things. There's a famous quote by Frederick Jameson, you probably know this. It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Well, for a brief moment in the pandemic, while we were imagining the end of the world for sure, we also began to glimpse that it's possible to imagine the end of capitalism or the transformation of capitalism into something else.

• 32:06Sam Fragoso?

  And what do you imagine that something else could be?

• 32:10Speaker 01

  I think it would be an entirely different set of bookkeeping. It would acknowledge that any system where economics and ecology are at odds with each other isn't doing its bookkeeping right. I believe that once we begin to shift this sense of personal purpose outwards, beyond the self, into this collective enterprise of engaging the future, of rehabilitating, of returning to earth, the economy and Ecology begin to align much more closely. I think about Robin's passage to this book, his growing serenity, his growing joy at being constantly surprised and delighted

• 32:54Speaker 01

  by the more than human world around him as an indication of a kind of wealth that many cultures never stopped tapping into, but the culture that took over the world has forgotten. A world in which, living where you live, within the affordances of the seasons as they unfold, knowing who you share this place with, knowing the agency of those creatures, knowing what the place that you live in wants to do, what kinds of life it has shaped to adapt to the possibilities of that place. Having that kind of outward orientation is immensely enriching. It is also a source of meaning

• 33:38Speaker 01

  that is less threatened by death than the source of meaning that we look for in our culture. When meaning is private, when it depends upon amassing things, it is finished, it is put to an end with death. When instead, you base your sense of economy on these large, interdependent systems of biological wealth, death is not a design flaw to be overcome or vanquished, rather a feature of life, something that allows new possibilities to constantly enter back in. And once someone experiences

• 34:22Speaker 01

  that feeling of connectivity that Robin achieves through the course of the book, where your sense of destiny is imbricated empathetically with the fates of other living things, the idea of disappearing isn't as terrifying because your interests, your desires, and your hopes are invested in this aggregate community, which of course survives beyond you and continues to recombine all the things that you were.

• 34:53Sam Fragoso?

  I love this idea that your fate is inextricably linked to the person across from you on that bus right now, the person driving in the car next to you, maybe someone who's doing the dishes in your house, that your fate is linked to their own. And as we talk about personal purpose and meaning, because we're all searching for some kind of meaning, we've taken a very 30,000-foot view. And I want to go a little bit more granular here in understanding your purpose. And to do that, I thought we'd begin on the final two paragraphs of page 48.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  I woke one morning, looking down on my body where I lay in bed. I saw myself the way my old mentor, Dr. MacMillan, sized up a new species of Archaea. I weighed where I'd come from, my cast of mind, the sum of my failings and capabilities, and I knew what I wanted to do before my small part of this giant experiment ended. I'd visit Enceladus and Europa and Proxima Centauri B, at least via spectroscopy. I'd learn how to read the histories and biographies of their atmospheres, and I'd comb through those distant oceans of air for the slightest signs of anything breathing.

• 36:16Sam Fragoso?

  I present that passage to you and the listener because I want to go back to when you, Richard Powers, knew what you wanted to do before this giant experiment ended. To do that, we have to go back to 1980. You had finished college, you're 23 years old, you're working as a computer programmer, you live near a museum in that time. And on a Saturday, you went to an exhibit that you did not know and found something that changed you.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  I would be inclined to start this story a couple of decades earlier when I was a boy of Robin's age. There were years growing up where I imagined myself being Just about every kind of scientist that I could think to be, you know, I wanted to be a geologist. I wanted to be a paleontologist. I wanted to be an oceanographer. I wanted to be an entomologist. It was just this endless sense of fascination and curiosity. And I just thought, what a great life it would be to just feed that curiosity. You know, the, the problem is, as I grew older, I didn't want to give any of it up. I just felt a kind of panic at having to specialize and make decisions.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  You know, when I graduated from high school and went to college, the idea of declaring a major was like killing forty other lives that I wanted to lead. It was just a period of great stress for me. In fact, I remember freshman year of college was having a kind of pit in my stomach the whole year. I actually went to the doctor and wanted a diagnosis for why I had constant stomach pain. And he said, you're experiencing great stress. Is there any reason for that? And the reason was simple. I was a generalist who was living in a specialist's world. And I didn't know how to move forward without giving up in most of the things that interested me. And when I discovered writing, first poetry and then short fiction,

• 38:18Speaker 01

  I just thought, this is so wonderful because the choice to do this doesn't preclude the choice to fill it up with all these other curiosities. To write was not to give up on being any of these other things. In fact, it was the way forward to be all those other things, one after the other, after the other. So when I was a young man in nineteen eighty, at this moment that you described, and I was making a living as a computer programmer, I no longer felt that sense of low-grade panic that I was a computer programmer and not something else because I had writing.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  I had this idea that I could affix myself and, and define myself and shape myself through this other activity that wasn't professional yet, but that could allow me vicariously to pursue just about. Any other professional course of interest that caught my fancy. And when I did walk into that museum on that Saturday morning and turn around the corner and see this photograph that was looking back at me, these three men in the middle of an empty road in the weeks just before World War I, in their Sunday finest, just looking out over their shoulder. When I stepped into their gaze and kind of completed this circuit across the distance

• 39:41Speaker 01

  of 75 years, I just thought, I could be, for a while, an historian. I could be, for a while, a participant in the lives of these other people who were shaping and seeing the world in very different ways. And that's been the beauty of all 13 of these books. Each one has been a kind of ticket to another way of understanding the world, another kind of discipline, another professional relationship through the eyes of people who pursued the careers that I myself would never pursue.

• 40:17Sam Fragoso?

  I so love that. There's also something curious about the reality of being a writer, which is you have to do the very thing you just described. Imagine people that are not you in a time that you cannot travel back to or ahead to. But the other part of writing is that it pushes the writer into a deep kind of solitude away from other people. And I wondered if you'd be open to sharing a lecture given by Terry Waite that I think inspired you to embrace this way of life.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had written a number of books already. I had lived for some years in the Netherlands. When I left the Netherlands, I went to England for about half a year, and I was living in Cambridge. And while I was in England, I happened to attend a lecture given by Terry Waite, who was in the Special emissary to the Middle East during the years of the Lebanese Civil War, when so many Westerners had been kidnapped. And he himself, on a journey to try to free some of the Western hostages,

• 41:39Speaker 01

  was himself taken hostage and held in solitary confinement for a long period of time. I remember going to the lecture, seeing him come out on stage, limping, walking with a cane. And everyone in the hall knew that was because of the treatment that he had received at the hands of his kidnappers. After the lecture was done, someone from the audience in the question and answer period went to the mic and said, "Can you tell us what you learned from all your years in solitary confinement?" And I could hear a kind of gasp in the audience. And I myself recoiled a bit from the question. And I thought, you know, that's a little blunt, a little reductionist. And I wondered what Wait would say, you know? I thought he might say, you know,

• 42:25Speaker 01

  "All of the truisms that you would reach for, you know, never take anything for granted, you know, savor every connection with every person that you've ever had, be present and live each day as fully as possible." And he said almost the opposite. He said, "I learned that we've lost our capacity for productive solitude." And for me, as someone committed to an activity that does rely, to some extent, on removing yourself, it was moving to think that here was someone who had solitude forced on him and who ultimately learned that there could be a great potential

• 43:08Speaker 01

  for creation and self-realization in that enforcement.

• 43:15Sam Fragoso?

  You said, "What weight told the audience was like a justification for this unjustifiable process that I give in my life to."

• 43:24Speaker 01

  It's funny, though, Sam. I mean, over the course of forty years and thirteen books, I have gotten very comfortable with trying to locate the creative potential of solitude. But it has produced another kind of crisis, which is, as productive solitude becomes more familiar and easier to achieve, what about all of the surprises and inspirations and discoveries that you can only make by being in the thick of the discomfort and messiness of human affairs? If you did nothing, if you did the Proust thing forever, the well would run dry, and

• 44:08Speaker 01

  you would be so cut off from the world of present concerns and consensual explorations and all of the cultural urgencies, that nothing that you said would, you know, have currency among these people who don't have the luxury of being locked in the back room. And so the problem of writing has reversed for me in some ways. I've had to find new ways to force myself out of solitude and to accept the uncontrollable and the irritating and distressing and the stressful aspects of the marketplace of human interaction.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  It's this weird vacillation between throwing yourself into the thick of things and removing yourself to a kind of safe vantage that constitutes the writing act. It's a wild kind of high wire where you lean to the left too far and you have to jerk back to the right. I remember, I think it was Turgenev, who said that he could only write when he had his feet in hot water, wrapped up in blankets, in a very, very comfortable chair, but by an open window where he could look out and see the street and all the crazy things that people... We're doing to each other out in the street. That weird sense of being an insider outsider, of having the protecting womb,

• 45:32Speaker 01

  but also having the inescapable stresses and challenges of the uncontrolled life of bumping against up against human beings who had a very, very different sense of what constituted interest and values and worth.

• 45:48Sam Fragoso?

  You know, I have to say, I sort of marvel at the contradictions at play, both on page and within yourself. Because for the first 20 years of your career, there was this recurring criticism that your characters were unfeeling, merely vessels for a larger ideological point. And then I read this book, this new book, and I have to say, anyone who reads this book would never say, Richard Powers, he's not feeling very much. Richard Powers, he doesn't like people very much because this book is almost pure feeling. And then conversely, you see, I'm ping ponging back and forth, but I'm trying to settle this.

• 46:33Sam Fragoso?

  A profile of you is written in the New York Times just last month, and it's characterization of you. Maybe you don't agree, but I read it as someone who doesn't particularly like people. And I don't know whether that characterization is a faulty one by the New York Times. Certainly, it wouldn't be their first mistake.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:54Sam Fragoso?

  Or if we're trying to pinpoint something more nuanced.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  It absolutely was a false characterization. And I'm not sure whether my tongue in cheek humor was lost on the reporter or whether her tongue in cheek characterization is lost on readers. But any reader who came away from the piece thinking that I am a misanthrope, I think, was badly served. Let me go back to what you were saying about characterization of the early books as being cold or very thinky and not very feeling. I have never, myself, made a profound distinction between thinking and feeling.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  I think they are deeply connected. And I think that the thoughts that we have about ourselves, about other people and about the world, are not the opposite of passion. They're driven by passion. They produce passion. The novel of ideas and the novel of character never seemed like two different things to me. I always thought that you can really get into the heart and soul of a person by understanding the way that they have tried to extend their comprehension on the world. People are passionate about their pursuits. People are passionate about what they've come to learn and know and understand within their professional disciplines

• 48:19Speaker 01

  and in their mastery of the challenges of the world through their intellect. Emotion, affective states, is itself a form of intelligence, a form of fast intuitive intelligence. And these two systems, you know, what Kahneman would call System One and System Two, thinking fast and thinking slow, thinking hot emotionally, thinking cool analytically, are both in the human brain. And if you want to tell the story of what it feels like to be a human here on this earth, you have to let both of those systems have their say. You have to get them firing on all cylinders and feeding off one another in big feedback loops.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  In my novels, I went against a prevailing aesthetic in literary fiction that was much more comfortable dramatizing and representing people more exclusively through affective states and often treated analytical or cognitive processes inside humans as rationalizations or defenses or somehow sidestepping the real truth of this fast, hot way of knowing the world. And what I wanted to do was break up that myth a little bit and say, no, actually, people are much more complicated than that. I love human beings. You know, Proust said that the hermit is the person for whom the judgment of humans is so important and so

• 49:44Speaker 01

  intense that he has to remove himself from human affairs in order to regain self-possession. That is probably a better characterization of my temperament than the one given in the New York Times piece. The comments that were quoted in that piece are the kind of tongue-in-cheek, self-deflating, ironic humor that I put into the books and will often surprise people. To think deeply is not to depart from the realm of the absurd and the humorous and burlesque. They too are of a piece. They are also integral components

• 50:24Speaker 01

  in this big, noisy parliament of the human brain. We are all many. That's this idea of a solid, continuous, singular character at the heart of a person is just misleading, you know? It's a literary simplification. We are all many, and we are all experimental works in progress. We are all discontinuous with who we were in the past, and we are already a kind of distant memory to the people that we're going to be in the future. We have to accept the multiplicity that lies at the heart of each one of us.

• 51:02Sam Fragoso?

  I want to sit with that multiplicity before we go, because you talk about the noisy parliament of our brains, but also yours. And in that, I think, you wanted to produce a kind of writing you felt did not exist. Is that right?

• 51:19Speaker 01

  I think the act of reading and writing is an act of constant evolution. There is something in commodity culture, you know, when we read a book and we feel we have to rush online and say, "That's a five-star book," or "That's a three-star book," or "That's a one-star book." There's something that's desperately trying, in that commodity relationship to reading, that's trying to preserve the continuity of a self that isn't actually continuous and that isn't actually stable in that way. For me, the perfect reading experience is one where I come out the other end with a different idea of what I might like or not like than I had coming in.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  You know, Borges, he says, you know, in the great short story Pierre Menard, the man who wrote Don Quijote, he says, "Liking and not liking are sentimental acts and they have nothing to do with understanding literature." Understanding literature means immersing yourself in a process that completely surprises you with regard to what you thought you liked. You come out the other end a slightly different person. That's certainly the case when you write. I sit down, I start a book, I think I know what I'm doing. Four or five years later, everything has gone and I'm in a completely different place and I understand myself and my goals in a different way. And that's the point.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  The point is not to solidify some sense of hierarchical preference that I had when I started the process. The process is to blow that open and leave myself vulnerable again and open to the surprises of becoming something else.

• 52:58Sam Fragoso?

  I bring all this up because in that Paris Review interview we started with, one of the final questions is the interviewer asked you, "Do you think you write because you've never found a book that quite matches what you feel and think about the world?" And you said, "You go into that bookstore hungering for a world and a coloration and a register and sounds and senses, and you run your finger along the shelf and wonder, 'Is this it? Is this it?'" And you find something that's close or something that surprises you in its divergence from what you needed, but finally, you can't find the book that you want to read, and that's when you start writing.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  The wonderful thing about books is that they're slow and they're silent, and they are exercises in concentration. You are both with other people, the people inside the story. You're vicariously living these lives that are so different from your own. You are with another person in a strange, intense, one-to-one communion with somebody who you don't know from Adam. They might be dead, they might have lived in another country 200 years ago. And yet, you're also by yourself in that room with the pages. What the book can do in training you in this odd sense of stillness but attentiveness,

• 54:24Speaker 01

  of privacy but communion. What learning how to read can do is to teach us each to cultivate those abilities that allow us to be present to the world outside us. We learn in books how to read another person, but we also learn in books how to read the things that are beyond people and the qualities that we need to be a good reader. Stillness, focus, concentration, attention, and presence are the qualities that we as species are going to have to learn if we want to return to planet Earth and stick around.

• 55:04Sam Fragoso?

  That scene in Plowing the Dark. The man enters a used bookstore looking for a book that moved him as a child and that he's been looking for since the age of nine. And at age 64 now, I wonder, when you walk into that bookstore, are you still that child?

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, he's always in there. But he's wrapped in so much. Additional hunger, that he's become a different thing. I think a life unfolds in a way that's analogous to the way that we read a book. We experience it serially and we think somehow that the past is fixed and the future is open. But there's a weird logic to living and to reading a book that stands that on its head. On page nine of life or of the book, we have a sense of what page nine means. But by the time we get to page 64, page nine has changed. The past is constantly being changed by every page that we turn.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  And oddly, the future, the last page that we make our way toward, is out there somewhere. In this odd logic of the book, as Peter Brooks puts it, we read with anticipation of retrospection. We know it on each page, that every page that we've been to is going to be changed by each page that's still ahead.

• 56:32Sam Fragoso?

  Well, whatever it is that is ahead, for you, for your writing, and all of us taking it in, I so look forward to it. Richard Powers, stay safe.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Thanks so much, Sam.

• 57:19Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode with Richard Powers, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you like to listen. If you want to go above and beyond, share the program on social media, tag us at Talk Easy Pod. All of this really does ensure that we can continue making this program each and every Sunday. I want to give a special thanks this week to the team at WW Norton and of course, my guest, Richard Powers. To learn more about all the books discussed today, visit our website at talkeasypod.com. For more episodes with other great authors, I'd recommend Gia Tolatino, George Saunders, and Margaret Atwood. To hear those and more

• 58:02Sam Fragoso?

  Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at Talk Easy Pod. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janix Bravo. Today's talk was originally edited by Clarice Guevara with special assistance this week from Lindsay Ellis. It was mixed by Andre Lynn and Andrew Bastola. Music is by Dylan Peck. Illustrations by Chris Shandling. I'd also like to thank the team at Lemonada Media. I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with another episode. Until then, I

• 58:44Sam Fragoso?

  always say this, but especially this week, stay safe and so long.

• 59:01Speaker 02

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• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:00:39Speaker 03

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:00:43Speaker 04

  As I said.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast, What It's Like to Be.