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Human beings have always chased after
what we might call transcendence.
We’re searching for some higher meaning,
a way to connect with something beyond ourselves.
Things like truth and beauty and yes, even the divine.
For much of our history, religion, for better or worse,
has been the locus of so much of this seeking.
But the world, certainly the Western world,
is becoming less religious.
For a lot of humanist types,
this has been something like a tragedy.
The decline of religion meant that the language
of spirituality also faded away
because these things were bound up with each other.
And a consequence of this has been a loss
of the sense of the sacred in human life.
But does it have to be that way?
Can we still speak of the sacred
in our modern secular world?
And if we can, what does that look like?
I’m Sean Elling and this is The Grey Area.
My guest today is Jennifer Michael Hecht.
She’s a poet and historian,
which are two titles you don’t often see next to each other.
But as we’ll talk about, she sees a lot of overlap
between these disciplines.
She’s written original poetry
and has chronicled the histories of weighty ideas
like doubt, the soul, and suicide.
Jennifer’s book is called The Wonder Paradox,
embracing the weirdness of existence
and the poetry of our lives.
In it, she tries to give new life
to many things associated with religion,
like prayer and ritual and sanctity.
But instead, she grounds them in the non-religious world,
the secular world.
Jennifer’s readers have pegged her as an atheist
and they’re not exactly wrong.
But as she explained to me, it’s a bit more complicated.
– I came to this book already,
a sort of minor famous atheist.
I had written a book called Doubt, A History,
A History of Religious Doubt and Atheism
all over the world throughout time, which came out in 2003.
And I started to be invited all over the place
to groups I didn’t know existed to talk about atheism.
What was so fascinating about writing a history of atheism
was that the people who were atheists
didn’t just say, I’m an atheist.
They came up with other ways of living,
other ways of understanding what life is for
and what meaning is.
So I was already sort of on that track
that I was talking about philosophical and historical
things, but with an emotional component.
And my audiences really gave rise to this new book
by being sort of fascinated by the fact
that there could be an atheist
who was not rejecting ritual
and who was not rejecting what I’ve come to call
the poetry of life.
But yeah, with this book, I’m really mostly saying to people,
go ahead and do the rituals you’re already doing.
We can be the interfaithless,
which I made up sort of as a joke,
but I couldn’t throw out because we believe in the inter.
We believe in the connection between us.
And we can all do some of the rituals that we feel like
because we grew up with them.
But I would say to add a poem
because you need that moment of sort of graceful,
introspection, a moment to just be quiet if nothing else,
to just give them the tiniest bit more meaning
by thinking about it that way.
– I definitely want to get into all that,
but can I ask a little bit more about you?
– Yeah, sure.
– I’m very fascinated by your background.
You’re both a historian, as you were just describing.
And you’re also a poet.
How does that happen?
I don’t often see historian and poet in the same bio.
– I suppose there’s a bunch of ways to tell the story,
but the main thing is that my father
as a first generation college goer
somewhat bumbled into a PhD in physics
and really just suggesting that his three children
also become professors.
So I went to Columbia,
they kept saying they were gonna hire a cultural historian.
I was gonna study sort of the history of poetry.
I didn’t know anything.
I was a child and it just seemed like a more rigorous
or engaged or sort of total way of studying literature
by studying the history that it hangs on.
And I fell in with the historians of science
when I went to Columbia.
So yeah, I became a cultural historian
with a specialty in the history of science
and then migrated over more to the history of science,
which is a kind of poetry of itself.
Rather than a body of knowledge,
the history of science is somewhat about
searching for metaphors that can help you to understand
why science is so different in different periods of time.
And to kind of, when you can begin
to get a gut sense of that,
you can start to dismantle some of the nonsense
from the truth because some of it’s just cultural
and it’s gonna fall away.
You know, we are in a very strange situation
just as being conscious meat.
– Oh yeah.
– Just that’s weird.
Now throw in mortality and ambition.
Oh great, I’ve got both ambition and mortality.
So I wanna do great things and I’m gonna die
and I don’t know when.
The whole thing is a mess of paradoxes.
I mean, there’s so many paradoxes
that have grown up evolutionarily
between the human experience
and the environment and situation that we’re in.
And that’s what poetry is.
– So your dad is an atheist physicist.
Your mom was pretty religious.
– Correct.
– Was that a source of tension in your house?
– Yeah, it was a source of tension in the house
but I would say there was enough
of all sorts of things going on.
I’m not sure it was primary
’cause my dad did sort of let my mom run the kids thing.
But I believed until I had a moment when I was 12 years old
and had one of those moments that I talked to people
and read memoirs, lots of people have a moment
in adolescence where because of a certain slant of light,
a certain shimmering moment,
a certain fall of crystal along your eyesight
and you suddenly notice that you’ve taken an awful lot
for granted, that you could be a being anywhere,
any place with all sorts of different concerns.
And the fact that you were born into this family,
this house, this country is all so arbitrary.
And I suppose because my father was already an atheist,
it was a little bit easier perhaps for a 12 year old
to get all the way to, I don’t believe any of this.
And it was painful.
And I tell the story in the introduction of the book.
I was in a junior high school library
standing in front of a poetry shelf
expecting no help whatsoever.
But at least I look back and say,
well, I knew where to go, right?
And I opened up this book that was explicitly poetry
for depressed teenagers.
And I was not moved by anything
and out wafted this little piece of paper,
a little glossy piece of paper excised from some magazine
or something with vigorous use of a blue ballpoint pen.
And it was this paragraph by Raina Maria Rilke
that says to live the questions.
Live the questions now as if they are books
written in some foreign tongue
that you do not now understand.
You could not now be given the answers to the questions.
You have to live them to understand.
And then if you just live the questions
and forget about the answers,
you may some distant day live your way into the answers.
And this, this cured me so profoundly
because it was the company,
the friendship of being reached across time,
but also just the idea,
oh, you can live the questions.
And love them, right?
Learn to love them.
Love the questions and let them be who you are.
Not the emptiness of the non-answer.
And then you find yourself.
Sometimes perspective can change
and your brain can explode.
I fell in love with that.
I wanted that.
And poetry is where I go for that.
– This new book of yours is so damn interesting.
How would you describe this book
and what you’re trying to do with it?
– The Wonder Paradox,
it’s all about if you don’t have God,
what else do you lose when you lose religion?
And the interesting thing is we come in the United States
from such a Protestant Christian perspective,
even an American Protestant Christian perspective.
So that when I say, what do we lose?
The first thing we might think is the afterlife
or someone to ask for favors when we’re in real trouble
or someone to believe has a morality explanation
for all this suffering, right?
Those are some big things.
Well, not all religions have those things.
Most religions do not have an afterlife.
And you know, Jews don’t make a very big deal of heaven.
And that was my background.
But the idea that we would live on
in some kind of positive way
was definitely part of what I believed.
So the book is really about each of these losses,
but I don’t only go to Christianity to say,
well, what did we used to get?
I really wanted to present people with a reminder
of the different ways that human beings have figured out
to make ourselves feel better.
So many of them have ended up in the bowl we call religion.
And I’m saying we can’t lose all this stuff.
– Yeah, I grew up in the deep South,
very Christian culture.
My family was Catholic, but not in any serious way.
The Catholicism never stuck.
For me, I immediately found it suspect
and drifted into atheism quite naturally.
– Fascinating.
– But as I’ve gotten older,
I have come to think of religion differently,
certainly God differently.
I guess I’m an agnostic at the moment.
I’m still not a fan of organized religion.
And I still think the church is an all too human institution.
But like you, I see so much more in religion
than dogmas and the holy books.
And I appreciate how seriously you take it
because I think it deserves to be taken seriously.
– Sure.
I mean, we organize our emotional lives,
which are very complicated and we don’t know,
I mean, we know the smallest portion of what’s going on
in terms of our social interactions
and how as a group we’re held together.
I always use the metaphor in my mind of meerkats
and how if you just took one into a lab
and started doing experiments on it,
you would not know much about what you would know
if you put a camera on the whole colony.
And I think we think of ourselves as individuals
in a way that is, I don’t think we have a clue
how much we’re holding each other together.
I think it’s much more like meerkats, you know?
And we also have the benefit of a tremendous amount
of language and it’s still hard to reach each other.
But most of this stuff, especially, I suppose,
in the capitalist country has to get shunted off
into a special place and that special place
has been called religion.
And I guess I’m asking people what happens
if we call our special place in that sense, poetry,
joining it with real poetry, poems, short-lined things,
but also just thinking poetically about love and art
and meaning because I don’t see how, look,
if you believe in a God and you place meaning in this God
and then don’t ask many more questions, yes,
if you then lose God, you lose meaning
and you’re in trouble.
But it’s not at all what most religions do.
Most religions don’t have a fella upstairs
who holds all meaning.
You know, justice we have a problem with,
but meaning really, we have more than enough.
The feeling of meaning is sufficient
to the definition of meaning, it is.
– Yeah.
Well, this new book is very much about how religion
has traditionally carved out these spaces in our lives
for reflection and transcendence and connection.
And religion just doesn’t have the kind of purchase
on our lives that it once did.
And that means we have to think harder and more
about creating these spaces in a secular world.
But I do wanna ask if you think
we have really lost something when we moved into,
I don’t wanna say a post-religious world
because we’ll never live in a post-religious world,
but a world in which religion has receded
as a dominant guiding force in our lives.
– And you’re asking if we’ve lost something?
– Yeah, if you think we really have lost something
that is not retrievable.
No, I think that we have everything we started with,
we just don’t notice, I really do.
I can’t imagine what God could have taken with him
since he wasn’t here.
We always found what life is
and what makes it worth living by getting together
by community, ritual, meditation,
by times alone, thinking deeply.
And again, I’ll say that in a sort of capitalist country,
we define anything that’s doing that stuff as religion,
especially when we don’t know the language
of the people we’re talking about,
we just define it as religion.
And as a historian, I see these reverberating
all over society through history,
say the idea of liturgy.
That word doesn’t start in Christianity,
the word starts in ancient Greece,
and it was about the social celebrations
that large landowners were responsible
for putting on on a yearly basis.
So liturgy starts outside the church,
then comes to the church and it can come out again.
And to some degree, it’s a matter of almost self-respect.
– The great power of religion
has always been more social than personal, in my opinion.
I don’t think we need religion to know how to be good.
That has always been the stupidest,
the absolute stupidest critique of atheism.
– I’m with you on that.
But the power of religion
to not just provide a shared moral order,
but also the physical spaces to come together
and affirm those beliefs,
like a secular liberal world
in which the individual is sovereign,
where the individual is left to her own lights.
– Yes, I will agree with you right away
that as long as there’s some kind of continuum
between community and individualism,
if I’m gonna choose individualism, which I am,
so the question is then,
do I lose some of that good feeling of community?
Yes.
But what I’m suggesting is that
without much change in behavior,
we can notice that those of us who don’t believe in God
or don’t believe in a certain kind of God,
we do all sorts of different things for our,
well, what the religious would call soul,
but what I would call an emotional
and intellectually fulfilling life, we go to museums.
Those museums are temples of reflection.
We send our kids to school and in many cases,
they put their hands on their hearts
and they say a chant about how we’re all together
and then a song plays and they sing along to some degree.
We have many places in society where we have figured out
that people feel good when they say something together,
especially when they say something positive together
and they try together.
And when something terrible happens,
we know to come together to grieve.
I live in New York City.
You can sort of always figure out
where people might be mourning.
If something really sad is happening, someone has died,
you can go to certain landmarks
and expect there’ll be other people grieving there.
When Lou Reed died, there was a grand piano
in Washington Square Park
and someone was playing Perfect Day.
I didn’t know that was gonna happen, I just walked there.
And what I’m saying is that in the cities,
it’s a very human-based, art-based kind of way
that we make our lives sacred,
communally sacred and privately sacred.
When you live more in the country,
you have access to a whole different kind of temple, right?
Which in many ways works better.
I mean, the shock of sickness and death
that happens in the city
because you just think everything’s supposed to work.
But in this country, you see death is work.
Death is how this thing works.
This thing is just the life-death machine
and you don’t get as shocked and as appalled.
What do religions that don’t have an afterlife do about death?
They look in another direction.
They concentrate their attention in another direction.
I know I have an awful lot to say,
but I really felt that I was reading
what people were already doing
and seeing it as more profound than they seemed to see it was.
And I wanted to show,
no, this is amazing.
Take the assist.
Let that into your heart.
And if other people are passing around a poem,
that doesn’t mean, oh, that’s a cliche, that’s cheap.
No, that means that’s cultural liturgy.
Grab on and hold on.
And this can give you some peace.
(upbeat music)
– So what’s the power of religious rituals?
Is it the tradition?
Is it the symbolism?
Or is it really the belief in God?
I’ll ask Jennifer after a quick break.
(upbeat music)
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you’re in. Shopify.com/box. Again, I grew up in the South and I moved back here a few years ago.
And I know people who don’t read the Bible, who don’t take any of it seriously, who don’t even go
to church, but they still feel compelled to participate in these symbolic rituals like
communion or getting your child baptized or whatever. I guess I have mixed feelings about it,
but I also get it. And it sounds like a lot of other people, you included, also get it. And
that’s the part of religion we have to take seriously if we’re going to think about what
secular equivalents might look like. Right. I think my own practice is relatively minimal.
I like to check in with the holidays. My husband was raised Catholic and we sort of decided in
the beginning we were raising the children Jewish. Really, we just sort of do the holidays. And for
me, it’s very light. I’m not saying, oh, because I believe in ritual, I’m going to go sit in a
pew for hours. I don’t. I don’t want to. But many people do. And maybe at some point in my life,
I will want to. My point is really that when you start to be able to take a little of the
political heat out of this question, you realize that there are things that one rejects in a kind
of state of fear. Right. I don’t want to give a credit to the religious. I don’t want them
to have a point because I said that this aspect of religion might be okay. Well,
what if we can move away from that a little? I mean, I’m glad there are hard line nail-spitting
atheists out there. I don’t want them all to be me, but there could be one me. The story I tell in
the introduction of the book, which was really what set me out on this, my very first doubt talk,
a very pregnant couple came up to me at the signing and I was expecting a question on history or
philosophy, which was mostly what I talked about. But I also made it clear what I think. And so they
came up and they wanted to have a brisk. They knew the baby was going to be a boy. Since then,
I’ve had many people ask me the baptism question too. And what they’re asking is, may I, you know,
they asked me, can we do this? Would it be a betrayal of our parents’ faith to do this? Would
it be a hypocritical act? And also would it be a breaking of faith with our true beliefs,
which are atheism? But I could tell they wanted to have the party. So I said, Mazel tov, have the
party. Have the damn party. But then as they were walking away, they were almost at the door,
and I shout out, but add some Whitman. You know, when they turn around and look at me,
and so I tell them this Whitman line, there’s a part in Leaves of Grass where he actually writes
the word “question.” Oh, me, so much myself, despising so much, you know, and talking about how
life is so hard and we’re all toiling and working in the pain and the hypocrisy and the lying.
What is it all? Is there any point in it? And then he writes the word “answer.” And the answer is
that you exist, that we exist and identity. I love that and identity. It’s not just that we exist,
but identity, what an extraordinary thing to be part of, to be accidentally part of.
And then he says that the powerful play may go on, and you may contribute a verse.
It’s two lines. I had to give it a little context, right? But I’m shouting at a cross of room. Other
people are waiting in line, and they turn around in the whole room, and I feel that room, that room
needed those words. And I later really thought about that, that I had been to many ceremonies
in my life. And if a priest says over two people, “I love, God is going to keep you together,”
I’m sitting out there thinking, “Jesus, I hope something else is going to be,” because they
don’t believe in God and I know it. The point I just want to make is I’ve been to ceremonies where
someone adds a poem and suddenly the room changes and everybody feels okay about death or birth or
marriage. Well, let me ask you about how poetry does that. Yeah. Look, human beings have a deep
desire for transcendence, for meaning, for some connection to something beyond ourselves. And the
question is, do we need to look to the supernatural for any of these things? And the answer to that,
for you and for me, is clearly no. So what is it about great poetry or great art and literature
that allows us to connect with these deep human needs? Well, one answer is they speak directly
to it. They talk about death and life and birth. And the truth is, in our normal conversation,
we don’t talk about these things very much. All of art is where we engage in these questions
without necessarily having the supernatural. But poetry is one where it’s condensed speech.
It’s very much like prayer. And I mean that in terms of the prayers that have been around so long
that they stayed because they’re beautiful or fun to say. You know, prayers change with every
generation, every 100 years or so. Religions change all the time. It’s those little pieces of
speech that we call poetry that can kind of slot into where we might have called religious meditation
or prayer. This is really a tiny recipe. They mention the infinitesimal and the gigantic in
terms of size and time. Just those two things are enough to rattle the human mind. Just noticing
that parrots live longer than us can rattle the human mind. Wait, parrots live longer than us?
I think so, yeah, I think. Or in any case, there are birds that live 130 years.
Okay. I don’t know how I feel about that. I know. It’s disturbing. It seems odd if anything could
manage to keep going. But there are turtles that are hundreds of years old. Why the turtle and why
not I? It’s a reasonable question. Why indeed? You know, there’s that line. And I’m so sorry,
I don’t even remember who wrote it or who said it. But it’s something to the effect of the success
of poetry depends on the failure of language. Oh, that’s good, yeah. I love what that’s getting
at or what I think it’s getting at. And I’ll tell you what I think it’s getting at. You,
the poet, will tell me what it’s actually getting at. I think the point there is that
conventional speech, it can only say so much. But poetry plays a different game with language.
It uses language to point beyond language to try to say what’s actually not sayable,
because we don’t have the words for it. And in that way, it touches something beyond what’s
comprehensible. Right. I mean, poetry has certain tricks that it uses. One aspect of a trick, say,
is the fact that we can read sense in a single line and also the sentence that the line is part of.
Poets are doing that, thinking about what their individual lines mean and how they mean if you
read them as a grammatical sentence. That means that you can say several different things at once,
each of your lines making certain kinds of claims, while the sentence that includes them
is making a different kind of claim. Why is that so important? Because of the ambivalence of the
human experience. We almost never feel only one way. We also almost never feel that other people’s
words fully contain our experience. And so when words attempt to contain our experience,
but include some strangeness, some spaces in understanding, we, the reader, bring that part.
I think that’s true of all art. But yeah, with poetry in particular, it has to get up and talk.
Right. You can sit in a lab and make beings all day long, these little poems you make,
but one of them every once in a while stands up and says hello, to be or not to be. It doesn’t
fall apart. We’re never going to forget to be or not to be. It’s too good. I don’t know how that
works. But sometimes you put words together and they are stuck forever. And most of the time,
we babble away and nothing sticks. But when poetry sticks, it sticks forever. And there’s
something very special about language that can hold together like that even across time.
I wish I could stick together words like that. I’ve tried to write poetry and I can’t do it.
There’s just, my mind cannot help but go back into that sort of logical mode where it’s trying to
make sense of things. It’s trying to order things in such a way. And it’s just not the
poetical mindset, right? I’m resigned to just enjoying other people.
You can think a little bit in terms of wit, people who are charming and witty and make jokes.
What are they doing in their minds? They’re kind of, I always think of it as a sort of a tumbler.
Somebody said something. Is there something funny around that? I just tumble it around,
look for it. Yeah, that or nope, nothing, keep moving. Somebody else said something funny,
keep moving. That little tumble, tumble, tumble. That’s the action of poetry for me. I sit,
I wait for something true to come out of my mouth, which can be forever, just anything that
doesn’t feel like a blatant falsehood. And I go from there and you come up with nothing a lot of
the time. But every once in a while, you come up with something that lives. What I’ve suggested for
people with this book is you should pick out 12 occasions in your life, either holidays or human
needs, pick out the poem in advance, put it in a booklet, and you can go to it. You’ll then know
that if somebody dies, you have a poem for that. I believe that people who read a great deal of
poetry already have this in their heads. And I ask people to take those 12 poems from world poetry
if they can. If we all take from that, A, it’s a cultural bond. It makes us stretch outside
race, gender, class, time. It obliterates all of that. It gets right to somebody else’s heart,
but it also makes it so that we might choose poems that match. And if you and I turn out to
have the same poem for grief, it’s going to be a bond. What I’m trying to do is imagine a world
where we do have a prayer book, but it’s each our own, but we don’t have to write it. It’s
already there. The great poetry is already there. The great rituals are already there. We just
snap them together. What’s your favorite ritual in your life? What do you find yourself turning
to the most? And does poetry play a part in that? Or is it something altogether different?
I mean, you seem to have an appreciation for what rituals do for us. So I assume
ritual is a part of your life as well. And I’m just asking, what’s your kind of go-to ritual?
Well, like I said, I do enjoy taking part of the rituals that everybody else is doing.
I mean, one way to answer a question is Halloween is my favorite holiday. I’ve always
loved dressing up my kids. We all put a lot into it. We decorate the house. My husband puts the,
you know, we happen to live in a neighborhood that likes Halloween. We’re in Brooklyn in a
neighborhood that does Halloween a lot. There are neighborhoods that do Christmas. And
I’ve definitely gotten in a car with somebody who wanted to go look at the lights. And I enjoy that
a lot. We light the menorah all the way through. Hanukkah is not the most important of Jewish
holidays, but we like that feeling of being in the holidays with the rest of the country,
the rest of the world, really. I like New Year’s because the whole world celebrates it.
So for me, personally, if I look out the back windows in my apartment, there’s trees
and a little yard. And I feed the birds because I like the cardinals and the blue jays.
So I like watching the birds. And I do read poetry or recite poetry in my mind. And looking
out the front, I get to watch people walk by. There’s something about people watching. It
doesn’t do it for everyone, but for a lot of people, it’s a real entertainment and a real
meditation. Where I live, they’re not dressed up in crazy costumes, but there’s certainly going
to be interesting things happening going by. I’m on a side street in Brooklyn.
And if you look out the window for a little, you know, five minutes, you see some interesting
humanity. We’re going to take one last short break. But when we come back, I’ll ask Jennifer
if there are still reasons to pray if you’re not a believer.
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Do you ever pray? Do I pray?
Yeah, ever. Let’s see. I’m gonna say no. I really have no sense of up
at all and there’s nobody up there. Yeah, but okay, I’m glad you said that because I do pray
sometimes. I started doing that not too long ago and it’s not because I think there’s someone
listening. Right, right. It’s not that. Okay, then I do that. I talk out loud.
It’s almost like a meditation. Yes. And this is what I’ve come to appreciate about prayer
as a practice. I’ll just, I try to sit down and I just quietly say to myself sometimes
allow the things I’m grateful for in my life, my family, my health, that I have rewarding
work on and on and on. And it’s just a space for me to just affirm these things and it doesn’t
require any deity. No one has to be listening on the other end of the line for that to be useful.
And that’s how I came to think a little bit differently about prayer.
But I am curious. You said that you think in terms of agnosticism now,
you have a sense that, first let me say, I think that there’s a gray area.
Nice. I think there’s a gray area where poetic people have a choice of saying,
I believe in God and all I think of as God is love. I cannot tell you how many religious people
have told me that they believe in nothing supernatural, but they like the idea that
God is love and for them, they believe in God. And they can see that I believe the same things
they do, but I don’t care to use that language because I think it’s important to be precise.
And the word God has no precise meaning. So if God is love, then I believe in love,
but I don’t want to use that crazy other word, which means every single thing in the world
and nothing. But I really think it’s important to think this thing through. We’re alive for a
short amount of time. I always say, look, if we were the only things on the planet, I would say,
I don’t know what consciousness is. I have no reason to guess whether it comes from some divine
thing, whether it exists afterwards. But there are ants and there are wallabies and there are so
many conscious creatures on this planet. And if I look at an ant, does an ant have a consciousness?
Yeah. Do I think that it needed a divine one or that it will exist afterwards? Ridiculous.
So I just can’t help thinking of anything else as a kind of unnecessary delusion.
We got used to a strange religion that liked the idea of a guy who listens.
And I think that the abyss is just having stared at heaven too long. It’s just an
after effect. It’s a hangover. Wait, so what were you going to ask me? Were you going to ask
why I’m an agnostic? I did ask you if you were an agnostic and you said that you prayed. Tell me
more. Why am I identified as an agnostic? I don’t think that has anything to do with prayer. The
prayer is really just a practice. The agnostic part, I don’t want to go too much into it. I’ll
just put it this way. I’ve had some experiences later in life that have made me a little more
alive to the strangeness of the world. Yes, sure. And so I guess I’m a little more uncertain
about what’s possible. Sure. Or maybe more awakened to the possibility of possibility,
if that makes any sense. I just don’t know. I am fairly confident that if there is such a thing as
God, I don’t have any faith in one of my fellow mammals as some kind of exclusive vehicle for
communicating what that God wants me to do or who I should be naked with or whatever, right?
But also farther, if God is in charge of morality, I call bullshit. How can I stand in front of this
great being and be satisfied that babies suffer and die for nothing? I find it offensive, the idea
that some being could reconcile all this suffering. I find it ridiculous and offensive. I’m not saying
that you said it, but I’m saying that we have to think through what we’re saying. And again,
I’ll say that I feel like I’m more describing what I see as happening now than prescribing anything.
But what I see is a whole bunch of human beings making moves towards a non-supernatural kind of
poetic way of being that I don’t think helps us to call a non-supernatural religion, especially
because I’m saying, you know, don’t change anything. All these people already do these little holidays
that they like to do, but they don’t remember that if you believe in a real religion that’s alive,
then on the day that, well, say, we’re in Lent right now, okay? If you truly believe in Catholicism,
you have a way of cleaning yourself and starting new that is connected to all your other beliefs.
And that’s all I’m trying to say is that a lot of us have ways where we’ve already figured out how
to reach for the poetic, how to be grateful, how to have those moments. And I’m just saying, hey,
doesn’t it look like we actually have something here? Maybe if we think about it like that and
remember that probably the most important part is community, probably the most important part
is remembering the humanity of other people, then we might survive, you know? You and I are perfectly
aligned on all of that. And isn’t it funny that like some of the titles that we use, the title
sounds like we might have different beliefs, but then you dig down, consciousness is so strange.
I always say consciousness is weirder than virgin birth by far. Virgin birth, come on,
you got a couple of cells reproducing on their own, they manage it without a sperm once, big deal.
But the meat thinks and wrote all of the symphonies, what, out of nothing, out of slime? So we live in
an absolutely ridiculous situation, absurd and poetic, and we pretend it isn’t all the time.
And art and poetry is just dipping our heads into noticing, yes, this is bizarre.
No, look, I’m a Camus scholar, so I’m here for embracing the absurdity.
I wanted to ask you what your favorite poem is, and I’m told by my trusted producer or colleague
that you came prepared with a poem that you might read for us.
Absolutely. I mean, yeah, I have a lot of favorites and they’re always coming to me.
Here’s a pretty short poem, and it’s one of the most famous Spanish language poems,
I’m reading an English translation, it’s known all over the world, and it’s by Antonio Machado.
Traveler, there is no road. Traveler, your footprints are the only road and nothing else.
Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking. As you walk, you make the road,
and turning to look back, you see a path that will never be traveled again.
Traveler, there is no path, only a foam trail on the sea.
I don’t want to ruin that poem by, oh, were you still reading?
No, I just, I remember someone said once that the silence after a Bach piece is also by Bach.
I would love that. I’m like, yeah, the silence after the Machado poems also by Machado.
So I leave a little quiet. No, I was just going to say, I was sitting
with that listening. I don’t want to ruin it by asking you to explain it.
No, I don’t mind. I believe in explaining poems. Yeah.
Well then, how does that one land for you? What’s going on there?
Well, I think that so many people love it because of the word traveler.
Traveler is always at the beginning of sentences in this poem, so it’s at the beginning of lines,
it’s always capitalized. It’s always like, we’re talking to you. I’ll tell you that I happen to
believe the poets are, especially when they sound like they’re bossing you around or telling you
what’s true. They’re talking to themselves. They’re just trying to remember something they
figured out, which once you have that in your head, sometimes it lowers one’s resistance
when you realize this person’s just trying to remember. And I talked to you before about line
breaks. He’ll say, you know, look back and you’ll see a path, line break, that never can be traveled
again. I mean, there is no path. And that’s what he does throughout it. He gives you a little bit
of a sense that you have left footprints. There is a little bit of foam after a boat travels.
It’s not like we make no dent. I also like to say that poetry, unlike prose, doesn’t end on truth.
It’ll throw some truth up and then have a turn that tries something else and then try a different
kind of truth. It doesn’t mean that whatever they land on is what they’re absolutely, you know,
whatever is suggested that isn’t negated entirely is in there. And so he is saying we are travelers.
And he is saying that our sense that we’re supposed to be going in certain ways is illusory.
There is no path, which means there is no other path. You’re not doing it wrong.
As a matter of fact, your experience is the universe. As far as you’re concerned,
the universe cohere around your consciousness as you were born. And as you experience the world,
your life is the path. Can anyone else follow you? Yes and no. The suggestion of footsteps,
the suggestion of the wake of the sea. But what’s the largest thing that reaches us?
Even bigger than the footsteps or the wake of the sea is the poem. The poem, which made it through
decades and decades and decades and at least one language to get to me, to shift my perspective.
The first thing that you learn from poems always is the reminder that there’s another human being
out there, that there’s another heart beating out there trying to say something true. And then
whatever it is that they say, which in this case is, you know, relax, whatever you’re doing is right
in this particular universe. Have you ever read Bertrand Russell’s
A Free Band’s Worship? I have read a great deal of Bertrand Russell. I couldn’t put my finger on
whether I’ve read that one. It’s maybe my favorite piece of writing, period. Yeah. You inspired me to
read it last night and I did. And there’s a passage that I remember how it hit me the first time I
read it and I read it again last night and it almost makes me teary-eyed. Can I read it to you?
Please. All right, here we go. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight,
seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them,
in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path,
to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection.
Let us not weigh, in grudging scales, their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their needs,
of their sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses that make the misery of their lives.
Let us remember that they are fellow-suffers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy as
ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when they’re good and they’re evil, have become eternal
by the immortality of the past. Be it ours to feel that where they suffered, where they failed,
no deed of ours was the cause. But wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts,
we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.
Now, that’s not quite poetry, but it is.
Yeah, it is. It’s gorgeous. I find such comfort and inspiration in it every time I read it.
There’s no false salvation. There’s no retreat into illusion. It’s just an acknowledgement
that the world rolls on without any thought or concern for a particular mammal on an unimportant
rock in a remote solar system. But there’s so much poetry in the acceptance of all that and in
this call to solidarity and love. And this may be a morbid thing to say, but I’ve had the thought
more than once that if anyone was going to read anything at my funeral, I want it to be that.
Yeah, I love it. I suppose that it is close to poetry, but that what might make it not
what poetry is, is that it faces joy so strongly. Because in real life, it’s so very hard to be
kind even for what, 20, 25 minutes? I mean, it is hard. Don’t get me wrong. We all screw up.
I just like texts that include that this is the goal and it’s basically impossible. Like,
I want that acknowledged that having the goal of being kind and recognizing the humanity of other
people is the whole ball of acts, the whole thing. As a matter of fact, along with Levinas,
I don’t know if you’ve read him. Oh, yeah. I’m not sure we exist outside of relation.
I’m a very solitary person, but I understand all that solitude as in relation with all the
words I’ve read and all the people I’ve known to perhaps a profound level, to perhaps a level
where there is no thinking or being outside of relation. So, I mean, this is where I allow
myself to sound slightly what I wouldn’t call your description of agnosticism a dip into woo,
nor would I describe what I’m trying to say here a dip into woo, but others might, which is
just looking at what we’ve learned about the brain and what we’ve learned about the forest
and the fungus and the mother trees. It is abundantly clear that we don’t know what’s going
on here. What’s amazing is that unlike the meerkats and the forest with the fungus,
not only are we connected in ways we can’t imagine, but we’re also connected in this way,
this really unbelievably straightforward way where we move our mouths and actually hear each other.
It’s unbelievable that we have so much that makes us one, and yet we feel so separate,
but nothing feels as good as helping other people. It’s so hard to get ourselves to do,
but everything you just read, the point is when you need help, go help somebody else.
When you need existential help, go help someone else with their existential help,
and you perk right up. I don’t know how it works, but you perk right up.
In the end, what would you say is the greatest reward of a life filled with poetry? I don’t
want to say benefit because I don’t want to reduce poetry to that kind of economic calculus,
but apart from just the beauty of great literature and great poetry, what do you
hope people can most gain from engagement with it?
I guess a kind of freedom. I think when you’re not trying to believe something you don’t believe
or trying to hide from a very scary dark thought, you get to live a bigger life and be less scared,
be able to connect to people and do the things you want to do to be a whole human being.
So many people are either trying to block out the idea that the world’s about to end,
which it really isn’t. It’s about to go through some terrible stuff, but it’s not about to end,
and we’re overselling that. You cannot have a retirement plan that is the apocalypse.
The apocalypse is not going to be there and destroy everything. You are going to have to figure it out,
and the sun is not going to expand and eat the earth in billions of years or too much to think of.
It’s as good as not happening. The world is permanent. It’s here, and you’re part of it,
and you can take part in it. If you can bear just dropping all the things you think are holding you
up, you’ll notice you don’t fall. We’re holding each other up. It doesn’t mean nothing. What it means
is bigger than you. We make our own meaning to a degree. Mostly we join the meaning of the people
around us, and we figure that out. And it’s a much more rewarding kind of life. I think it’s
even harder to believe something you don’t believe because you think you need to believe it.
So either the people who are blocking out the abyss or the people who have put up a fake floor
over the abyss, I think they’re both going to feel a whole lot better if they just walk away
from the abyss. It’s not there. It’s an after effect. A lot of this stuff is an after effect
of the fact that we’re living in a time of profound change with religion. But individually,
I think we’re doing a great job. It just takes a little recontextualizing. That’s really it.
We’re already doing it. Just a little more intention leads to, in my personal experience,
emotional freedom. The book is called The Wonder Paradox, embracing the weirdness of
existence and the poetry of our lives. Jennifer, this was an absolute joy. Thanks for being here.
Thank you. I loved it. I really enjoyed it so much. Thanks.
I know you hear me say this a lot, but I really loved this conversation.
I’m not exactly a believer, but I have a deep appreciation for these sorts of questions,
and I wish other secular-minded people took them more seriously, like Jennifer does.
But let me know what you think. Drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
And if you appreciated this episode, share it with the aspiring poets in your life.
This episode was originally produced by Eric Janikis and A.M. Hall, and it was engineered by
Patrick Boyd. The Gray Area is edited by Jorge Just, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
New episodes drop Mondays, listen, and subscribe. This show is part of VOX. Support VOX’s
journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
[MUSIC]
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Human beings have always chased after
what we might call transcendence.
We’re searching for some higher meaning,
a way to connect with something beyond ourselves.
Things like truth and beauty and yes, even the divine.
For much of our history, religion, for better or worse,
has been the locus of so much of this seeking.
But the world, certainly the Western world,
is becoming less religious.
For a lot of humanist types,
this has been something like a tragedy.
The decline of religion meant that the language
of spirituality also faded away
because these things were bound up with each other.
And a consequence of this has been a loss
of the sense of the sacred in human life.
But does it have to be that way?
Can we still speak of the sacred
in our modern secular world?
And if we can, what does that look like?
I’m Sean Elling and this is The Grey Area.
My guest today is Jennifer Michael Hecht.
She’s a poet and historian,
which are two titles you don’t often see next to each other.
But as we’ll talk about, she sees a lot of overlap
between these disciplines.
She’s written original poetry
and has chronicled the histories of weighty ideas
like doubt, the soul, and suicide.
Jennifer’s book is called The Wonder Paradox,
embracing the weirdness of existence
and the poetry of our lives.
In it, she tries to give new life
to many things associated with religion,
like prayer and ritual and sanctity.
But instead, she grounds them in the non-religious world,
the secular world.
Jennifer’s readers have pegged her as an atheist
and they’re not exactly wrong.
But as she explained to me, it’s a bit more complicated.
– I came to this book already,
a sort of minor famous atheist.
I had written a book called Doubt, A History,
A History of Religious Doubt and Atheism
all over the world throughout time, which came out in 2003.
And I started to be invited all over the place
to groups I didn’t know existed to talk about atheism.
What was so fascinating about writing a history of atheism
was that the people who were atheists
didn’t just say, I’m an atheist.
They came up with other ways of living,
other ways of understanding what life is for
and what meaning is.
So I was already sort of on that track
that I was talking about philosophical and historical
things, but with an emotional component.
And my audiences really gave rise to this new book
by being sort of fascinated by the fact
that there could be an atheist
who was not rejecting ritual
and who was not rejecting what I’ve come to call
the poetry of life.
But yeah, with this book, I’m really mostly saying to people,
go ahead and do the rituals you’re already doing.
We can be the interfaithless,
which I made up sort of as a joke,
but I couldn’t throw out because we believe in the inter.
We believe in the connection between us.
And we can all do some of the rituals that we feel like
because we grew up with them.
But I would say to add a poem
because you need that moment of sort of graceful,
introspection, a moment to just be quiet if nothing else,
to just give them the tiniest bit more meaning
by thinking about it that way.
– I definitely want to get into all that,
but can I ask a little bit more about you?
– Yeah, sure.
– I’m very fascinated by your background.
You’re both a historian, as you were just describing.
And you’re also a poet.
How does that happen?
I don’t often see historian and poet in the same bio.
– I suppose there’s a bunch of ways to tell the story,
but the main thing is that my father
as a first generation college goer
somewhat bumbled into a PhD in physics
and really just suggesting that his three children
also become professors.
So I went to Columbia,
they kept saying they were gonna hire a cultural historian.
I was gonna study sort of the history of poetry.
I didn’t know anything.
I was a child and it just seemed like a more rigorous
or engaged or sort of total way of studying literature
by studying the history that it hangs on.
And I fell in with the historians of science
when I went to Columbia.
So yeah, I became a cultural historian
with a specialty in the history of science
and then migrated over more to the history of science,
which is a kind of poetry of itself.
Rather than a body of knowledge,
the history of science is somewhat about
searching for metaphors that can help you to understand
why science is so different in different periods of time.
And to kind of, when you can begin
to get a gut sense of that,
you can start to dismantle some of the nonsense
from the truth because some of it’s just cultural
and it’s gonna fall away.
You know, we are in a very strange situation
just as being conscious meat.
– Oh yeah.
– Just that’s weird.
Now throw in mortality and ambition.
Oh great, I’ve got both ambition and mortality.
So I wanna do great things and I’m gonna die
and I don’t know when.
The whole thing is a mess of paradoxes.
I mean, there’s so many paradoxes
that have grown up evolutionarily
between the human experience
and the environment and situation that we’re in.
And that’s what poetry is.
– So your dad is an atheist physicist.
Your mom was pretty religious.
– Correct.
– Was that a source of tension in your house?
– Yeah, it was a source of tension in the house
but I would say there was enough
of all sorts of things going on.
I’m not sure it was primary
’cause my dad did sort of let my mom run the kids thing.
But I believed until I had a moment when I was 12 years old
and had one of those moments that I talked to people
and read memoirs, lots of people have a moment
in adolescence where because of a certain slant of light,
a certain shimmering moment,
a certain fall of crystal along your eyesight
and you suddenly notice that you’ve taken an awful lot
for granted, that you could be a being anywhere,
any place with all sorts of different concerns.
And the fact that you were born into this family,
this house, this country is all so arbitrary.
And I suppose because my father was already an atheist,
it was a little bit easier perhaps for a 12 year old
to get all the way to, I don’t believe any of this.
And it was painful.
And I tell the story in the introduction of the book.
I was in a junior high school library
standing in front of a poetry shelf
expecting no help whatsoever.
But at least I look back and say,
well, I knew where to go, right?
And I opened up this book that was explicitly poetry
for depressed teenagers.
And I was not moved by anything
and out wafted this little piece of paper,
a little glossy piece of paper excised from some magazine
or something with vigorous use of a blue ballpoint pen.
And it was this paragraph by Raina Maria Rilke
that says to live the questions.
Live the questions now as if they are books
written in some foreign tongue
that you do not now understand.
You could not now be given the answers to the questions.
You have to live them to understand.
And then if you just live the questions
and forget about the answers,
you may some distant day live your way into the answers.
And this, this cured me so profoundly
because it was the company,
the friendship of being reached across time,
but also just the idea,
oh, you can live the questions.
And love them, right?
Learn to love them.
Love the questions and let them be who you are.
Not the emptiness of the non-answer.
And then you find yourself.
Sometimes perspective can change
and your brain can explode.
I fell in love with that.
I wanted that.
And poetry is where I go for that.
– This new book of yours is so damn interesting.
How would you describe this book
and what you’re trying to do with it?
– The Wonder Paradox,
it’s all about if you don’t have God,
what else do you lose when you lose religion?
And the interesting thing is we come in the United States
from such a Protestant Christian perspective,
even an American Protestant Christian perspective.
So that when I say, what do we lose?
The first thing we might think is the afterlife
or someone to ask for favors when we’re in real trouble
or someone to believe has a morality explanation
for all this suffering, right?
Those are some big things.
Well, not all religions have those things.
Most religions do not have an afterlife.
And you know, Jews don’t make a very big deal of heaven.
And that was my background.
But the idea that we would live on
in some kind of positive way
was definitely part of what I believed.
So the book is really about each of these losses,
but I don’t only go to Christianity to say,
well, what did we used to get?
I really wanted to present people with a reminder
of the different ways that human beings have figured out
to make ourselves feel better.
So many of them have ended up in the bowl we call religion.
And I’m saying we can’t lose all this stuff.
– Yeah, I grew up in the deep South,
very Christian culture.
My family was Catholic, but not in any serious way.
The Catholicism never stuck.
For me, I immediately found it suspect
and drifted into atheism quite naturally.
– Fascinating.
– But as I’ve gotten older,
I have come to think of religion differently,
certainly God differently.
I guess I’m an agnostic at the moment.
I’m still not a fan of organized religion.
And I still think the church is an all too human institution.
But like you, I see so much more in religion
than dogmas and the holy books.
And I appreciate how seriously you take it
because I think it deserves to be taken seriously.
– Sure.
I mean, we organize our emotional lives,
which are very complicated and we don’t know,
I mean, we know the smallest portion of what’s going on
in terms of our social interactions
and how as a group we’re held together.
I always use the metaphor in my mind of meerkats
and how if you just took one into a lab
and started doing experiments on it,
you would not know much about what you would know
if you put a camera on the whole colony.
And I think we think of ourselves as individuals
in a way that is, I don’t think we have a clue
how much we’re holding each other together.
I think it’s much more like meerkats, you know?
And we also have the benefit of a tremendous amount
of language and it’s still hard to reach each other.
But most of this stuff, especially, I suppose,
in the capitalist country has to get shunted off
into a special place and that special place
has been called religion.
And I guess I’m asking people what happens
if we call our special place in that sense, poetry,
joining it with real poetry, poems, short-lined things,
but also just thinking poetically about love and art
and meaning because I don’t see how, look,
if you believe in a God and you place meaning in this God
and then don’t ask many more questions, yes,
if you then lose God, you lose meaning
and you’re in trouble.
But it’s not at all what most religions do.
Most religions don’t have a fella upstairs
who holds all meaning.
You know, justice we have a problem with,
but meaning really, we have more than enough.
The feeling of meaning is sufficient
to the definition of meaning, it is.
– Yeah.
Well, this new book is very much about how religion
has traditionally carved out these spaces in our lives
for reflection and transcendence and connection.
And religion just doesn’t have the kind of purchase
on our lives that it once did.
And that means we have to think harder and more
about creating these spaces in a secular world.
But I do wanna ask if you think
we have really lost something when we moved into,
I don’t wanna say a post-religious world
because we’ll never live in a post-religious world,
but a world in which religion has receded
as a dominant guiding force in our lives.
– And you’re asking if we’ve lost something?
– Yeah, if you think we really have lost something
that is not retrievable.
No, I think that we have everything we started with,
we just don’t notice, I really do.
I can’t imagine what God could have taken with him
since he wasn’t here.
We always found what life is
and what makes it worth living by getting together
by community, ritual, meditation,
by times alone, thinking deeply.
And again, I’ll say that in a sort of capitalist country,
we define anything that’s doing that stuff as religion,
especially when we don’t know the language
of the people we’re talking about,
we just define it as religion.
And as a historian, I see these reverberating
all over society through history,
say the idea of liturgy.
That word doesn’t start in Christianity,
the word starts in ancient Greece,
and it was about the social celebrations
that large landowners were responsible
for putting on on a yearly basis.
So liturgy starts outside the church,
then comes to the church and it can come out again.
And to some degree, it’s a matter of almost self-respect.
– The great power of religion
has always been more social than personal, in my opinion.
I don’t think we need religion to know how to be good.
That has always been the stupidest,
the absolute stupidest critique of atheism.
– I’m with you on that.
But the power of religion
to not just provide a shared moral order,
but also the physical spaces to come together
and affirm those beliefs,
like a secular liberal world
in which the individual is sovereign,
where the individual is left to her own lights.
– Yes, I will agree with you right away
that as long as there’s some kind of continuum
between community and individualism,
if I’m gonna choose individualism, which I am,
so the question is then,
do I lose some of that good feeling of community?
Yes.
But what I’m suggesting is that
without much change in behavior,
we can notice that those of us who don’t believe in God
or don’t believe in a certain kind of God,
we do all sorts of different things for our,
well, what the religious would call soul,
but what I would call an emotional
and intellectually fulfilling life, we go to museums.
Those museums are temples of reflection.
We send our kids to school and in many cases,
they put their hands on their hearts
and they say a chant about how we’re all together
and then a song plays and they sing along to some degree.
We have many places in society where we have figured out
that people feel good when they say something together,
especially when they say something positive together
and they try together.
And when something terrible happens,
we know to come together to grieve.
I live in New York City.
You can sort of always figure out
where people might be mourning.
If something really sad is happening, someone has died,
you can go to certain landmarks
and expect there’ll be other people grieving there.
When Lou Reed died, there was a grand piano
in Washington Square Park
and someone was playing Perfect Day.
I didn’t know that was gonna happen, I just walked there.
And what I’m saying is that in the cities,
it’s a very human-based, art-based kind of way
that we make our lives sacred,
communally sacred and privately sacred.
When you live more in the country,
you have access to a whole different kind of temple, right?
Which in many ways works better.
I mean, the shock of sickness and death
that happens in the city
because you just think everything’s supposed to work.
But in this country, you see death is work.
Death is how this thing works.
This thing is just the life-death machine
and you don’t get as shocked and as appalled.
What do religions that don’t have an afterlife do about death?
They look in another direction.
They concentrate their attention in another direction.
I know I have an awful lot to say,
but I really felt that I was reading
what people were already doing
and seeing it as more profound than they seemed to see it was.
And I wanted to show,
no, this is amazing.
Take the assist.
Let that into your heart.
And if other people are passing around a poem,
that doesn’t mean, oh, that’s a cliche, that’s cheap.
No, that means that’s cultural liturgy.
Grab on and hold on.
And this can give you some peace.
(upbeat music)
– So what’s the power of religious rituals?
Is it the tradition?
Is it the symbolism?
Or is it really the belief in God?
I’ll ask Jennifer after a quick break.
(upbeat music)
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you’re in. Shopify.com/box. Again, I grew up in the South and I moved back here a few years ago.
And I know people who don’t read the Bible, who don’t take any of it seriously, who don’t even go
to church, but they still feel compelled to participate in these symbolic rituals like
communion or getting your child baptized or whatever. I guess I have mixed feelings about it,
but I also get it. And it sounds like a lot of other people, you included, also get it. And
that’s the part of religion we have to take seriously if we’re going to think about what
secular equivalents might look like. Right. I think my own practice is relatively minimal.
I like to check in with the holidays. My husband was raised Catholic and we sort of decided in
the beginning we were raising the children Jewish. Really, we just sort of do the holidays. And for
me, it’s very light. I’m not saying, oh, because I believe in ritual, I’m going to go sit in a
pew for hours. I don’t. I don’t want to. But many people do. And maybe at some point in my life,
I will want to. My point is really that when you start to be able to take a little of the
political heat out of this question, you realize that there are things that one rejects in a kind
of state of fear. Right. I don’t want to give a credit to the religious. I don’t want them
to have a point because I said that this aspect of religion might be okay. Well,
what if we can move away from that a little? I mean, I’m glad there are hard line nail-spitting
atheists out there. I don’t want them all to be me, but there could be one me. The story I tell in
the introduction of the book, which was really what set me out on this, my very first doubt talk,
a very pregnant couple came up to me at the signing and I was expecting a question on history or
philosophy, which was mostly what I talked about. But I also made it clear what I think. And so they
came up and they wanted to have a brisk. They knew the baby was going to be a boy. Since then,
I’ve had many people ask me the baptism question too. And what they’re asking is, may I, you know,
they asked me, can we do this? Would it be a betrayal of our parents’ faith to do this? Would
it be a hypocritical act? And also would it be a breaking of faith with our true beliefs,
which are atheism? But I could tell they wanted to have the party. So I said, Mazel tov, have the
party. Have the damn party. But then as they were walking away, they were almost at the door,
and I shout out, but add some Whitman. You know, when they turn around and look at me,
and so I tell them this Whitman line, there’s a part in Leaves of Grass where he actually writes
the word “question.” Oh, me, so much myself, despising so much, you know, and talking about how
life is so hard and we’re all toiling and working in the pain and the hypocrisy and the lying.
What is it all? Is there any point in it? And then he writes the word “answer.” And the answer is
that you exist, that we exist and identity. I love that and identity. It’s not just that we exist,
but identity, what an extraordinary thing to be part of, to be accidentally part of.
And then he says that the powerful play may go on, and you may contribute a verse.
It’s two lines. I had to give it a little context, right? But I’m shouting at a cross of room. Other
people are waiting in line, and they turn around in the whole room, and I feel that room, that room
needed those words. And I later really thought about that, that I had been to many ceremonies
in my life. And if a priest says over two people, “I love, God is going to keep you together,”
I’m sitting out there thinking, “Jesus, I hope something else is going to be,” because they
don’t believe in God and I know it. The point I just want to make is I’ve been to ceremonies where
someone adds a poem and suddenly the room changes and everybody feels okay about death or birth or
marriage. Well, let me ask you about how poetry does that. Yeah. Look, human beings have a deep
desire for transcendence, for meaning, for some connection to something beyond ourselves. And the
question is, do we need to look to the supernatural for any of these things? And the answer to that,
for you and for me, is clearly no. So what is it about great poetry or great art and literature
that allows us to connect with these deep human needs? Well, one answer is they speak directly
to it. They talk about death and life and birth. And the truth is, in our normal conversation,
we don’t talk about these things very much. All of art is where we engage in these questions
without necessarily having the supernatural. But poetry is one where it’s condensed speech.
It’s very much like prayer. And I mean that in terms of the prayers that have been around so long
that they stayed because they’re beautiful or fun to say. You know, prayers change with every
generation, every 100 years or so. Religions change all the time. It’s those little pieces of
speech that we call poetry that can kind of slot into where we might have called religious meditation
or prayer. This is really a tiny recipe. They mention the infinitesimal and the gigantic in
terms of size and time. Just those two things are enough to rattle the human mind. Just noticing
that parrots live longer than us can rattle the human mind. Wait, parrots live longer than us?
I think so, yeah, I think. Or in any case, there are birds that live 130 years.
Okay. I don’t know how I feel about that. I know. It’s disturbing. It seems odd if anything could
manage to keep going. But there are turtles that are hundreds of years old. Why the turtle and why
not I? It’s a reasonable question. Why indeed? You know, there’s that line. And I’m so sorry,
I don’t even remember who wrote it or who said it. But it’s something to the effect of the success
of poetry depends on the failure of language. Oh, that’s good, yeah. I love what that’s getting
at or what I think it’s getting at. And I’ll tell you what I think it’s getting at. You,
the poet, will tell me what it’s actually getting at. I think the point there is that
conventional speech, it can only say so much. But poetry plays a different game with language.
It uses language to point beyond language to try to say what’s actually not sayable,
because we don’t have the words for it. And in that way, it touches something beyond what’s
comprehensible. Right. I mean, poetry has certain tricks that it uses. One aspect of a trick, say,
is the fact that we can read sense in a single line and also the sentence that the line is part of.
Poets are doing that, thinking about what their individual lines mean and how they mean if you
read them as a grammatical sentence. That means that you can say several different things at once,
each of your lines making certain kinds of claims, while the sentence that includes them
is making a different kind of claim. Why is that so important? Because of the ambivalence of the
human experience. We almost never feel only one way. We also almost never feel that other people’s
words fully contain our experience. And so when words attempt to contain our experience,
but include some strangeness, some spaces in understanding, we, the reader, bring that part.
I think that’s true of all art. But yeah, with poetry in particular, it has to get up and talk.
Right. You can sit in a lab and make beings all day long, these little poems you make,
but one of them every once in a while stands up and says hello, to be or not to be. It doesn’t
fall apart. We’re never going to forget to be or not to be. It’s too good. I don’t know how that
works. But sometimes you put words together and they are stuck forever. And most of the time,
we babble away and nothing sticks. But when poetry sticks, it sticks forever. And there’s
something very special about language that can hold together like that even across time.
I wish I could stick together words like that. I’ve tried to write poetry and I can’t do it.
There’s just, my mind cannot help but go back into that sort of logical mode where it’s trying to
make sense of things. It’s trying to order things in such a way. And it’s just not the
poetical mindset, right? I’m resigned to just enjoying other people.
You can think a little bit in terms of wit, people who are charming and witty and make jokes.
What are they doing in their minds? They’re kind of, I always think of it as a sort of a tumbler.
Somebody said something. Is there something funny around that? I just tumble it around,
look for it. Yeah, that or nope, nothing, keep moving. Somebody else said something funny,
keep moving. That little tumble, tumble, tumble. That’s the action of poetry for me. I sit,
I wait for something true to come out of my mouth, which can be forever, just anything that
doesn’t feel like a blatant falsehood. And I go from there and you come up with nothing a lot of
the time. But every once in a while, you come up with something that lives. What I’ve suggested for
people with this book is you should pick out 12 occasions in your life, either holidays or human
needs, pick out the poem in advance, put it in a booklet, and you can go to it. You’ll then know
that if somebody dies, you have a poem for that. I believe that people who read a great deal of
poetry already have this in their heads. And I ask people to take those 12 poems from world poetry
if they can. If we all take from that, A, it’s a cultural bond. It makes us stretch outside
race, gender, class, time. It obliterates all of that. It gets right to somebody else’s heart,
but it also makes it so that we might choose poems that match. And if you and I turn out to
have the same poem for grief, it’s going to be a bond. What I’m trying to do is imagine a world
where we do have a prayer book, but it’s each our own, but we don’t have to write it. It’s
already there. The great poetry is already there. The great rituals are already there. We just
snap them together. What’s your favorite ritual in your life? What do you find yourself turning
to the most? And does poetry play a part in that? Or is it something altogether different?
I mean, you seem to have an appreciation for what rituals do for us. So I assume
ritual is a part of your life as well. And I’m just asking, what’s your kind of go-to ritual?
Well, like I said, I do enjoy taking part of the rituals that everybody else is doing.
I mean, one way to answer a question is Halloween is my favorite holiday. I’ve always
loved dressing up my kids. We all put a lot into it. We decorate the house. My husband puts the,
you know, we happen to live in a neighborhood that likes Halloween. We’re in Brooklyn in a
neighborhood that does Halloween a lot. There are neighborhoods that do Christmas. And
I’ve definitely gotten in a car with somebody who wanted to go look at the lights. And I enjoy that
a lot. We light the menorah all the way through. Hanukkah is not the most important of Jewish
holidays, but we like that feeling of being in the holidays with the rest of the country,
the rest of the world, really. I like New Year’s because the whole world celebrates it.
So for me, personally, if I look out the back windows in my apartment, there’s trees
and a little yard. And I feed the birds because I like the cardinals and the blue jays.
So I like watching the birds. And I do read poetry or recite poetry in my mind. And looking
out the front, I get to watch people walk by. There’s something about people watching. It
doesn’t do it for everyone, but for a lot of people, it’s a real entertainment and a real
meditation. Where I live, they’re not dressed up in crazy costumes, but there’s certainly going
to be interesting things happening going by. I’m on a side street in Brooklyn.
And if you look out the window for a little, you know, five minutes, you see some interesting
humanity. We’re going to take one last short break. But when we come back, I’ll ask Jennifer
if there are still reasons to pray if you’re not a believer.
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Do you ever pray? Do I pray?
Yeah, ever. Let’s see. I’m gonna say no. I really have no sense of up
at all and there’s nobody up there. Yeah, but okay, I’m glad you said that because I do pray
sometimes. I started doing that not too long ago and it’s not because I think there’s someone
listening. Right, right. It’s not that. Okay, then I do that. I talk out loud.
It’s almost like a meditation. Yes. And this is what I’ve come to appreciate about prayer
as a practice. I’ll just, I try to sit down and I just quietly say to myself sometimes
allow the things I’m grateful for in my life, my family, my health, that I have rewarding
work on and on and on. And it’s just a space for me to just affirm these things and it doesn’t
require any deity. No one has to be listening on the other end of the line for that to be useful.
And that’s how I came to think a little bit differently about prayer.
But I am curious. You said that you think in terms of agnosticism now,
you have a sense that, first let me say, I think that there’s a gray area.
Nice. I think there’s a gray area where poetic people have a choice of saying,
I believe in God and all I think of as God is love. I cannot tell you how many religious people
have told me that they believe in nothing supernatural, but they like the idea that
God is love and for them, they believe in God. And they can see that I believe the same things
they do, but I don’t care to use that language because I think it’s important to be precise.
And the word God has no precise meaning. So if God is love, then I believe in love,
but I don’t want to use that crazy other word, which means every single thing in the world
and nothing. But I really think it’s important to think this thing through. We’re alive for a
short amount of time. I always say, look, if we were the only things on the planet, I would say,
I don’t know what consciousness is. I have no reason to guess whether it comes from some divine
thing, whether it exists afterwards. But there are ants and there are wallabies and there are so
many conscious creatures on this planet. And if I look at an ant, does an ant have a consciousness?
Yeah. Do I think that it needed a divine one or that it will exist afterwards? Ridiculous.
So I just can’t help thinking of anything else as a kind of unnecessary delusion.
We got used to a strange religion that liked the idea of a guy who listens.
And I think that the abyss is just having stared at heaven too long. It’s just an
after effect. It’s a hangover. Wait, so what were you going to ask me? Were you going to ask
why I’m an agnostic? I did ask you if you were an agnostic and you said that you prayed. Tell me
more. Why am I identified as an agnostic? I don’t think that has anything to do with prayer. The
prayer is really just a practice. The agnostic part, I don’t want to go too much into it. I’ll
just put it this way. I’ve had some experiences later in life that have made me a little more
alive to the strangeness of the world. Yes, sure. And so I guess I’m a little more uncertain
about what’s possible. Sure. Or maybe more awakened to the possibility of possibility,
if that makes any sense. I just don’t know. I am fairly confident that if there is such a thing as
God, I don’t have any faith in one of my fellow mammals as some kind of exclusive vehicle for
communicating what that God wants me to do or who I should be naked with or whatever, right?
But also farther, if God is in charge of morality, I call bullshit. How can I stand in front of this
great being and be satisfied that babies suffer and die for nothing? I find it offensive, the idea
that some being could reconcile all this suffering. I find it ridiculous and offensive. I’m not saying
that you said it, but I’m saying that we have to think through what we’re saying. And again,
I’ll say that I feel like I’m more describing what I see as happening now than prescribing anything.
But what I see is a whole bunch of human beings making moves towards a non-supernatural kind of
poetic way of being that I don’t think helps us to call a non-supernatural religion, especially
because I’m saying, you know, don’t change anything. All these people already do these little holidays
that they like to do, but they don’t remember that if you believe in a real religion that’s alive,
then on the day that, well, say, we’re in Lent right now, okay? If you truly believe in Catholicism,
you have a way of cleaning yourself and starting new that is connected to all your other beliefs.
And that’s all I’m trying to say is that a lot of us have ways where we’ve already figured out how
to reach for the poetic, how to be grateful, how to have those moments. And I’m just saying, hey,
doesn’t it look like we actually have something here? Maybe if we think about it like that and
remember that probably the most important part is community, probably the most important part
is remembering the humanity of other people, then we might survive, you know? You and I are perfectly
aligned on all of that. And isn’t it funny that like some of the titles that we use, the title
sounds like we might have different beliefs, but then you dig down, consciousness is so strange.
I always say consciousness is weirder than virgin birth by far. Virgin birth, come on,
you got a couple of cells reproducing on their own, they manage it without a sperm once, big deal.
But the meat thinks and wrote all of the symphonies, what, out of nothing, out of slime? So we live in
an absolutely ridiculous situation, absurd and poetic, and we pretend it isn’t all the time.
And art and poetry is just dipping our heads into noticing, yes, this is bizarre.
No, look, I’m a Camus scholar, so I’m here for embracing the absurdity.
I wanted to ask you what your favorite poem is, and I’m told by my trusted producer or colleague
that you came prepared with a poem that you might read for us.
Absolutely. I mean, yeah, I have a lot of favorites and they’re always coming to me.
Here’s a pretty short poem, and it’s one of the most famous Spanish language poems,
I’m reading an English translation, it’s known all over the world, and it’s by Antonio Machado.
Traveler, there is no road. Traveler, your footprints are the only road and nothing else.
Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking. As you walk, you make the road,
and turning to look back, you see a path that will never be traveled again.
Traveler, there is no path, only a foam trail on the sea.
I don’t want to ruin that poem by, oh, were you still reading?
No, I just, I remember someone said once that the silence after a Bach piece is also by Bach.
I would love that. I’m like, yeah, the silence after the Machado poems also by Machado.
So I leave a little quiet. No, I was just going to say, I was sitting
with that listening. I don’t want to ruin it by asking you to explain it.
No, I don’t mind. I believe in explaining poems. Yeah.
Well then, how does that one land for you? What’s going on there?
Well, I think that so many people love it because of the word traveler.
Traveler is always at the beginning of sentences in this poem, so it’s at the beginning of lines,
it’s always capitalized. It’s always like, we’re talking to you. I’ll tell you that I happen to
believe the poets are, especially when they sound like they’re bossing you around or telling you
what’s true. They’re talking to themselves. They’re just trying to remember something they
figured out, which once you have that in your head, sometimes it lowers one’s resistance
when you realize this person’s just trying to remember. And I talked to you before about line
breaks. He’ll say, you know, look back and you’ll see a path, line break, that never can be traveled
again. I mean, there is no path. And that’s what he does throughout it. He gives you a little bit
of a sense that you have left footprints. There is a little bit of foam after a boat travels.
It’s not like we make no dent. I also like to say that poetry, unlike prose, doesn’t end on truth.
It’ll throw some truth up and then have a turn that tries something else and then try a different
kind of truth. It doesn’t mean that whatever they land on is what they’re absolutely, you know,
whatever is suggested that isn’t negated entirely is in there. And so he is saying we are travelers.
And he is saying that our sense that we’re supposed to be going in certain ways is illusory.
There is no path, which means there is no other path. You’re not doing it wrong.
As a matter of fact, your experience is the universe. As far as you’re concerned,
the universe cohere around your consciousness as you were born. And as you experience the world,
your life is the path. Can anyone else follow you? Yes and no. The suggestion of footsteps,
the suggestion of the wake of the sea. But what’s the largest thing that reaches us?
Even bigger than the footsteps or the wake of the sea is the poem. The poem, which made it through
decades and decades and decades and at least one language to get to me, to shift my perspective.
The first thing that you learn from poems always is the reminder that there’s another human being
out there, that there’s another heart beating out there trying to say something true. And then
whatever it is that they say, which in this case is, you know, relax, whatever you’re doing is right
in this particular universe. Have you ever read Bertrand Russell’s
A Free Band’s Worship? I have read a great deal of Bertrand Russell. I couldn’t put my finger on
whether I’ve read that one. It’s maybe my favorite piece of writing, period. Yeah. You inspired me to
read it last night and I did. And there’s a passage that I remember how it hit me the first time I
read it and I read it again last night and it almost makes me teary-eyed. Can I read it to you?
Please. All right, here we go. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight,
seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them,
in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path,
to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection.
Let us not weigh, in grudging scales, their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their needs,
of their sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses that make the misery of their lives.
Let us remember that they are fellow-suffers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy as
ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when they’re good and they’re evil, have become eternal
by the immortality of the past. Be it ours to feel that where they suffered, where they failed,
no deed of ours was the cause. But wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts,
we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.
Now, that’s not quite poetry, but it is.
Yeah, it is. It’s gorgeous. I find such comfort and inspiration in it every time I read it.
There’s no false salvation. There’s no retreat into illusion. It’s just an acknowledgement
that the world rolls on without any thought or concern for a particular mammal on an unimportant
rock in a remote solar system. But there’s so much poetry in the acceptance of all that and in
this call to solidarity and love. And this may be a morbid thing to say, but I’ve had the thought
more than once that if anyone was going to read anything at my funeral, I want it to be that.
Yeah, I love it. I suppose that it is close to poetry, but that what might make it not
what poetry is, is that it faces joy so strongly. Because in real life, it’s so very hard to be
kind even for what, 20, 25 minutes? I mean, it is hard. Don’t get me wrong. We all screw up.
I just like texts that include that this is the goal and it’s basically impossible. Like,
I want that acknowledged that having the goal of being kind and recognizing the humanity of other
people is the whole ball of acts, the whole thing. As a matter of fact, along with Levinas,
I don’t know if you’ve read him. Oh, yeah. I’m not sure we exist outside of relation.
I’m a very solitary person, but I understand all that solitude as in relation with all the
words I’ve read and all the people I’ve known to perhaps a profound level, to perhaps a level
where there is no thinking or being outside of relation. So, I mean, this is where I allow
myself to sound slightly what I wouldn’t call your description of agnosticism a dip into woo,
nor would I describe what I’m trying to say here a dip into woo, but others might, which is
just looking at what we’ve learned about the brain and what we’ve learned about the forest
and the fungus and the mother trees. It is abundantly clear that we don’t know what’s going
on here. What’s amazing is that unlike the meerkats and the forest with the fungus,
not only are we connected in ways we can’t imagine, but we’re also connected in this way,
this really unbelievably straightforward way where we move our mouths and actually hear each other.
It’s unbelievable that we have so much that makes us one, and yet we feel so separate,
but nothing feels as good as helping other people. It’s so hard to get ourselves to do,
but everything you just read, the point is when you need help, go help somebody else.
When you need existential help, go help someone else with their existential help,
and you perk right up. I don’t know how it works, but you perk right up.
In the end, what would you say is the greatest reward of a life filled with poetry? I don’t
want to say benefit because I don’t want to reduce poetry to that kind of economic calculus,
but apart from just the beauty of great literature and great poetry, what do you
hope people can most gain from engagement with it?
I guess a kind of freedom. I think when you’re not trying to believe something you don’t believe
or trying to hide from a very scary dark thought, you get to live a bigger life and be less scared,
be able to connect to people and do the things you want to do to be a whole human being.
So many people are either trying to block out the idea that the world’s about to end,
which it really isn’t. It’s about to go through some terrible stuff, but it’s not about to end,
and we’re overselling that. You cannot have a retirement plan that is the apocalypse.
The apocalypse is not going to be there and destroy everything. You are going to have to figure it out,
and the sun is not going to expand and eat the earth in billions of years or too much to think of.
It’s as good as not happening. The world is permanent. It’s here, and you’re part of it,
and you can take part in it. If you can bear just dropping all the things you think are holding you
up, you’ll notice you don’t fall. We’re holding each other up. It doesn’t mean nothing. What it means
is bigger than you. We make our own meaning to a degree. Mostly we join the meaning of the people
around us, and we figure that out. And it’s a much more rewarding kind of life. I think it’s
even harder to believe something you don’t believe because you think you need to believe it.
So either the people who are blocking out the abyss or the people who have put up a fake floor
over the abyss, I think they’re both going to feel a whole lot better if they just walk away
from the abyss. It’s not there. It’s an after effect. A lot of this stuff is an after effect
of the fact that we’re living in a time of profound change with religion. But individually,
I think we’re doing a great job. It just takes a little recontextualizing. That’s really it.
We’re already doing it. Just a little more intention leads to, in my personal experience,
emotional freedom. The book is called The Wonder Paradox, embracing the weirdness of
existence and the poetry of our lives. Jennifer, this was an absolute joy. Thanks for being here.
Thank you. I loved it. I really enjoyed it so much. Thanks.
I know you hear me say this a lot, but I really loved this conversation.
I’m not exactly a believer, but I have a deep appreciation for these sorts of questions,
and I wish other secular-minded people took them more seriously, like Jennifer does.
But let me know what you think. Drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
And if you appreciated this episode, share it with the aspiring poets in your life.
This episode was originally produced by Eric Janikis and A.M. Hall, and it was engineered by
Patrick Boyd. The Gray Area is edited by Jorge Just, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
New episodes drop Mondays, listen, and subscribe. This show is part of VOX. Support VOX’s
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Sean Illing speaks with poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht, whose book The Wonder Paradox asks: If we don’t have God or religion, what — if anything — do we lose? They discuss how religion accesses meaning — through things like prayer, ceremony, and ritual — and Jennifer speaks on the ways that poetry can play similar roles in a secular way. They also discuss some of the “tricks” that poets use, share favorite poems, and explore what it would mean to “live the questions” — and even learn to love them — without having the answers.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Jennifer Michael Hecht (@Freudeinstein), poet, historian; author
References:
- The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives by Jennifer Michael Hecht (FSG; 2023)
- Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht (HarperOne; 2004)
- Rainer Maria Rilke, from a 1903 letter to Franz Kappus, published in Letters to a Young Poet (pub. 1929)
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855)
- “Why do parrots live so long?” by Charles Q. Choi (LiveScience; May 23, 2022)
- “The survival of poetry depends on the failure of language,” from The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind, and Ecology by Robert Bringhurst (Counterpoint; 2009)
- “Traveler, There Is No Road” (“Caminante, no hay camino”) by Antonio Machado (1917)
- “A Free Man’s Worship” by Bertrand Russell (1903)
- Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas (1961)
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