Conversation, Interintellect, and Arcadia (with Anna Gát)

Anna Gát: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so delighted to be here.

Anna Gát: Sure. I do remember your episode that Bronwyn Williams hosted, who is a South African economist. And, you came on to talk about your book, Wild Problems, that came out in 2022, which I greatly enjoyed. And, yeah, I do still recommend it to people. And, if somebody seems especially troubled in my life, I get it for them for Christmas with a little wink-wink, ‘Just read this.’

I started Interintellect altogether in 2014, so 11 years ago. I was studying theater for my third master’s degree–because I make weird life choices–in London. And, I mean, I started doing academic level classics when I was 19 in 2002. And, I had always been in these special programs at high school as well. So, I always lived amongst the great philosophers. And, having grown up in a show business family where people wrote screenplays and plays, it was very interesting to get the kind of Greek or Enlightenment, German Enlightenment, French perspectives, and then later romantic perspectives on how to write drama.

And, it was always weird to me that screenwriters, playwrights, since Aristotle, have understood how to write dialogue. Like, it’s a science almost. If you walk into a Hollywood writer’s room at a popular TV series, those people work in a delightfully formulaic way that actually allows that type of creativity to arise, because, like in classical music, the foundations are very formalized. You can teach it to a three-year-old, right? Like [?]. And, it never made sense to me why, other than maybe Gottman’s science of couples therapy and other fringe experiments, we never really tried to help real human beings have conversations with each other the way we are so adamant of helping completely fictional people to have great conversations with each other. And, I think this frustration of mine kind of came to its own zeniths in around 2015, 2016, when I felt that humanity at large is losing some kind of ability to communicate.

And, I know that every generation thinks this. Every generation since biblical times has thought that the world was falling apart and that this is the last generation. And, after us, there will be no life because somehow that’s more comforting to us than the idea of our own death. It’s okay you die, but everybody else does, too; great, great. So, chill out.

And so, I think gradually I went from writing plays and screenplays into trying to figure out the human stage. How would it work with people coming together? How can you interfere with the format in a way that doesn’t interfere with the content? I mean, people still have to come and bring their own selves, their own ideas, because otherwise it’s not a conversation by definition. And so, I went from this very strange kind of circular way into building spaces where people can face reality, and what does that mean?

And, I think humans have a–I mean, this is the David Mamet idea from Three Uses of the Knife, which is one of the best books on dramatic writing that any layperson can read. Humans have a natural understanding of the stage. We have a natural understanding of the sacred and the profane. And so, you can create–I mean, when you teach ex cathedra, when a surgeon is in the theater of operation, we understand that there are special spaces in the world where people can be at their best selves, where some breakthrough can happen between people, or religions rest on this understanding of the Holy of Holies, the altar.

And so, I came to Interintellect from that angle, but it surprised me how much technology can actually help with this and how many elements from theater can actually be applied to these encounters in real life between real people trying to work on real problems.

Anna Gát: Let’s converse about conversation.

Anna Gát: Let’s go meta.

Anna Gát: I think I never thought about this fact that people are not taught to listen, although definitely coming from Eastern European Jewish culture, I come from the land of interruptions, everybody talking at the same time and your life is a little bit like a Robert Altman movie where everybody just says their own thing; and maybe at the end, but kind of something at the end comes out of it.

I really think that one strange thing that people misunderstand about conversation is that the one-on-one conversation would be a kind of natural unit of exchange. Right? We say ‘dialogue.’ So, there’s monologue, and then there’s dialogue when there are two people. And, in actual conversation science and psycholinguistics, there have been a lot of interesting findings about how when somebody, for instance, is being shared a difficult piece of news–like, if your doctor is giving you a difficult diagnosis that will take a long time to deal with–it’s actually really bad to have this facing each other across the desk set up because your monkey brain feels that it’s some kind of opposition.

So, the physicality of the exchange–like, you and I, we are talking on Zoom; and even on Zoom, we kind of look aside when we’re thinking. So, we’re trying to break up this antlers-locked setup. And not because we would be in any way opposed to each other in opinion, but because we are also the animals in this situation and for an animal face-to-face, is a kind of fighting position. And so, humans, naturally friends–when you’re in a cafe, when you’re having dinner with your wife–we create these diagonals. And, even in camera work, when the famous scene in Heat is being filmed and Robert De Niro is having this very tense conversation with Al Pacino, there’s a lot of beautiful analysis on how the camera work changes from the diagonal, friendly exchange, sometimes to the head on, which to the viewer signals that there is an opposition.

And I think one of the best ways to break this up is through having a host. And, the host can be any figure of temporary authority that people accept. Conversations in this sense are not really democratic the same way as even however democratic a situation is–unless you’re an anarchist or some kind of crazy communist denomination, you will probably have an appointed person to run the event. In a family dinner, this can be the mother. This can be the father. The grandmother. In a friend group, it can be the person who booked the restaurant or in whose house we are having dinner. Having people be able to trust somebody and outsource the listening to this person as a host, my greatest task on Interintellect–I mean, I just hosted my 1,000th salon on my own platform, so I’ve done quite a few–is I’m listening because people don’t want to or cannot. It’s not always a matter of will.

And so, I say, ‘Oh, so Russ, you said that, and Jenny, you said that? And, Fabrice, you said that, and Karshik, you said that? So, does that mean that Russ, you actually disagree with Fabrice, but you two are actually saying the same thing,’ and there I can take it to a third place.

So, in a sense, this is the dialectic, right? You get two views and you kind of try to find a way to combine them and move forward so it doesn’t become a kind of static setup.

I think it’s very difficult for two people to do, which any couple or any pair of siblings will attest: When you are the two of you, you get back to the same things because there’s no third to take you out. And, that’s why it’s great to drag the kids into it.

Anna Gát: I don’t know if that’s the kindest or the rudest thing to ask somewhere. Maybe both. Interesting. I have encountered that in America where people ask you, like, ‘Do you need me to listen now or do you need advice?’ Which I also don’t like. First of all, it kind of removes the veil of Maya, of human behavior. You don’t want to feel that you’re acting. Even if you are to some degree acting, this is not something you want to necessarily name in a real situation, because what happens is that there are the seams at the beginning and that they disappear and it becomes real. Right? You just choose a format at the beginning as a way to enter the real human situation, but you’re not going to hold it throughout unless you are a very strange person with very strange habits. But, I think most people don’t do that.

I never just listen. I have owned up to my person being more of this kind of discursive: let’s figure out, let’s find a solution. So, I don’t have really friends calling me up just for complaining.

I sometimes do. And, maybe I have a line, like if you have a big enough problem that really cannot be solved–like, someone has passed away, you have a big life problem that is going to take many years to solve, that’s a different thing. But I am not a kind of person who will enjoy something like, ‘Oh, I want to lose weight. Great. Let’s talk about it.’ No, let’s go to the gym. I’m more that kind of person.

It’s really interesting. I sometimes have this problem that people invite me to dinner and then they expect me to host. And my thought is that: Then pay me. Because it’s my job. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I happen to be there and now I’m going to work.’ Because this is my free time.

It’s interesting. One of my favorite kind of factoids about this whole issue is that the word ‘tribe’ comes from the word three. So more than two. And, that’s so human. Somehow we feel that two is not enough. Two is such a tense situation. Something will have to be figured out or people will fall in love or people will fight. It’s an opposition. And, in the kind of dialectic of it, some third thing wants to come out of it. Some breakthrough wants to happen.

I’m also not a really great fan of two-person plays. I know I mentioned Mamet, but I just feel it’s quite unnatural. One of the first things that people teach to acting students is when you’re in a situation on the stage, don’t just come in and sit down. Nobody does that at home. Like you never go home, sit down on the couch, and then just sit there until a new character walks in. But that’s what new acting students usually first do.

And, it’s the same. Two people very rarely spend many hours together in one room just talking. It has to be really a remarkable extreme situation for whatever reason.

And, I once saw a play like that, and two people had to talk through that play because they were kind of stuck somewhere and they didn’t have a choice. And, I think that’s how it happens.

Anna Gát: Sure. Interintellect is my experiment at having at scale conversations without the traditional cultural war polarization kind of toxicity appearing. And, we have done tens of thousands of events in the past six and a half years without any toxic events. So, I think the format does work.

It’s: Conversations as entertainment. So, people come in; they find friends, they find ideas, they are recharged. It’s a place to kind of bring together groups that don’t necessarily hang out together anymore, may that be Americans and foreigners; or left wing and right wing; or STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics] and the humanities; religious people and atheists; or sometimes in some political areas. Just men and women or older people and younger people who seem to be kind of in an artificial standoff these days. And, I don’t think that we can really figure things out as a society or even society in the smaller sense, like a local professional community, without somehow at least smoothing out these existing or imaginary divisions.

And so, we just do it in a very playful way. I long noticed that this kind of third thing is always very important in a conversation. You will feel more liberated to talk about the great questions of life, spirituality, morality. It’s about Dostoevsky and not about spirituality and morality. So, we just seemingly come together and talk about great books and great ideas, our favorite movies, an interesting scientific discovery, an interesting company. And, using that vessel, people relax into these moderated conversations or host them.

And, we found that, first of all, this is very popular and a lot of people actually crave it deeply. And very, very deep, beautiful relationships grow out of it. Co-authors, marriages and babies, people moving to the same country together. It’s a very generative space.

Anna Gát: It really depends. I’m going to an in-person event on–tomorrow, actually–that’s going to be 10 people. It’s a dinner and a conversation about gastronomy in the life of immigrants in America and the family dinner as a cultural constant. But, we have also mega-salons: Bloomberg Beta are hosting their book talks, which can be 300 people.

Maybe my most typical room sizes, I like maybe 20, 25 people because then I can really give everybody a chance to have a go and people will be, I think, very, very good participants in a conversation if they can be sure that they will get the mic and they don’t have to–you will actually listen more if you know that you don’t have to just focus on your own question for 50 minutes, because we will come to you.

Anna Gát: I mean, it’s a salon, so it’s supposed to be the size of your living room. And, it actually started in 2019 in the current format of Interintellect in living rooms around the world. I started them in London and San Francisco, and they started kind of mushrooming around the world, from Mumbai to Atlanta to South Africa. When you list an Interintellect salon on the website, you can actually choose both the size of the room, and you can add certain notes like, ‘This is going to be a talk, this is going to be a reading group,’ etc., etc. I always tell hosts–I do a lot of host trainings myself where it’s like an open, free lecture basically by me that anybody can join. I always tell people, just inform the audience, like, if it’s going to be a talk where you have slides and then you take questions via video chat, that’s fine. If you say it’s a salon, people will expect to comment, behave like they would in your living room where everybody is equal.

We don’t really care how famous the invite is. It’s a little bit the opposite of TED Talks [Technology, Entertainment, Design talks]. We don’t put anybody on the stage and everybody else is in the dark. At Interintellect salons, I mean, we just hosted for Quiama[?]. I have an Applebaum coming up in two days. They are with the attendees, and the conversations are less status bound and more about just minds at play. Here’s a book everybody has read it, or here’s an author of somebody and everybody is familiar with that. Let’s discuss.

Anna Gát: It happens surprisingly rarely because it is set up in a way that nothing incentivizes that kind of behavior. So, first of all, people pay to come to Interintellect events, whether through a membership with which they get free tickets or they have bought a ticket for, like, $45. It’s an intentional space. You can’t really just drop into an Interintellect event. You have to intentionally go there and allocate time. So, you get a lot of extremely well-focused and well-behaved attendees.

I mean, if it’s online, you can actually just keep your audience muted if you think that there’s a problem. I tell my hosts at my trainings that it’s a little bit like aviate, navigate, communicate for pilots as the priorities. First, keep the plane up. Second, try to go where you have to go. And, only third is the communication.

I think it’s the same or similar for hosting conversations. You have Facilitate, Moderate, Mediate.

Facilitate–in the word, it has the word easy, right? It’s chill. You are just there so the kids know you’re there. You’re just reading newspaper in the corner, or the host is really just the listener just trying to pick up on things that maybe the attendees in the kind of moment of passion in the conversation they might have not picked up on, and you just kind of tie it together; you ensure that everybody has had a go.

Moderate is when you notice that there are some more serious disagreements or in the very rare case you have a very domineering person.

And mediate is something that on Interintellect, at least, you don’t get to. You never get to the kind of post-bellum state of some conflict already having had happened. I advise my hosts to be a very strong presence so people can feel your authority.

I often find that somebody trying to dominate is a way to take over the hosting role without being the host. And, it’s often a reaction to a kind of power vacuum. The host is not present enough or maybe has misread the situation a little bit and hasn’t started moderating and is still in facilitation mode.

I think I had maybe, out of the thousand salons, twice situations, and very rarely–maybe I’m just very scary–where somebody would dominate. And I just told the person, like, ‘Thank you so much for your point. That was great. And, now let’s go to Gina.’

We have had, I think maybe a couple of bans from Interintellect, but they were from the Discords. So, we have a community forum, and moderating that is obviously a very different situation and people don’t behave like in a normal conversation. But I think that’s just the statistics of running a company for seven years.

Anna Gát: I’m not sure. That’s a thing that I keep thinking about. Maybe yes, in the sense that it’s hard to surprise me; but it’s also much harder to really impassion me now. You know? I’m developing my own routines. And, when I was teaching at university, I noticed that as a lecturer, I was having the same issue. I think every performer, whether that’s a teacher or an actor, a presenter, a dancer, will have this strange arc where with great routine comes great routine. And, I’m sometimes meditating on how–you know, people constantly ask me, like, ‘Oh, who is your dream guest? Who would you want on Interintellect?’ And, I think we are having our dream guests. It’s reality. And, I always tell my team, ‘We want a company where magic is just a Wednesday.’

Anna Gát: But, that also means that then magic is just a Wednesday.

Anna Gát: So, Interintellect offlines are almost always members only. So, they are much less about this marketplace of ideas, activity that we’re doing, or mission, and they’re more about the local attendees also having a kind of secondary activity and coming together, spending time. We do sometimes–like, I’m just putting on a play reading for Matthew Guzda’s new play about Brian Johnson on the 18th of January. That’s going to be in New York. We have sometimes bigger festivals where a lot of our guests and intellectuals come together in person and they are in a space the whole day and have multiple conversations. I have also a podcast called The Hope Axis, which is my response to the hopelessness discourse in the American public square. And, I have a new Substack called American Innocence, which is my training myself for my book and writing about my new life in America and my strange cultural impressions there. [More to come, 30:34]

Anna Gát: Yeah, I think it’s on the 27th of December.

Anna Gát: So, around four years ago, I had this idea that we should do play readings with the hosts online. And, I sometimes have these ideas, and I just throw them into the community and see what happens in Interintellect salons. And, people loved this idea.

So, we actually have already done Arcadia once, years ago. Then we have done Uncle Vanya. We have done all our favorites–Much Ado About Nothing. We have done A Streetcar Named Desire, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? So, a number of plays, and we’re just having a blast. Actually, a couple of people during these play readings realized that they have acting ambitions and went into acting school. For other people, it’s an opportunity to take a break from a completely different career because there is absolutely no reason why plays should be restricted. It’s the same way as hosting shouldn’t be restricted just for professors and famous intellectuals to give talks on TV. Anybody can host, and anybody can read up a role. It’s kind of like the people’s theater.

And so, this is the second time doing Arcadia. And, actually the girl who was reading Thomasina years ago is now reading Lady Kroom. So, we’re officially coming of age.

Anna Gát: Absolutely.

Arcadia is also one of my favorite modern plays, maybe among, I don’t know, four or five other works. I think there’s absolutely nothing like it. And, I distinctly remember the first time I read it. I remember what affected that on me. And, it’s just something that everybody should acquaint themselves with, who is interested in science, who is interested in historical truth and what historical research means, whether that is into literature and literary figures or that’s the history of a scientific discovery. It’s extremely playful in language. It is actually very easy to understand for a lay audience, which is not necessarily the case with other stock art plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Jumpers [British term for ‘Are Dead’–Econlib Ed.]. It’s a delight. It’s for everybody.

Anna Gát: I love this. It’s so interesting. First of all, in the play, the switching doesn’t happen. I wouldn’t necessarily, as a director, choose this because if you switch Thomasina with Gus, they are the relatives, so they cannot be a couple.

Anna Gát: Interesting choice. So, in another–I mean, a little bit earlier, 1980s, Christopher Hampton adapted Les Liaisons dangereuses–Dangerous Liaisons–into a play that was formidably successful in both England and then on Broadway, and then ended up being two movies that were coincidentally shot in parallel. One was Steven Frears, Dangerous Liaisons, with Glenn Close and John Malkovich–

Anna Gát: one of a number of [inaudible 00:39:20]. And then, but also Milos Forman did the same year, complete coincidence, another movie that was kind of forgotten with Colin Firth and Annette Bening called Valmont. And, nobody has seen it. Apparently it’s very good. I should actually watch it. And, in the Laclos novel, which is phenomenal, the ending is very kind of soul shaking, obviously. I mean, Madam [inaudible 00:39:44] dies. And, by the way, you can’t spoil plays. Plays are not like crime TV series. You know how Romeo and Juliet stars and they tell you they will die. We can totally spoil Arcadia. You don’t read Arcadia for the plot.

Anna Gát: We can talk about it.

And, in the end, in the Christopher Hampton stage directions at the end, as the two women–like, in the movie, when Glenn Close’s character is shamed publicly in the opera in Paris, there’s this incredible, very theatrical, very breaking the fourth wall moment where she washes off this extremely deep white makeup from her face and just the red remains in a very candlelit boudoir at the end. But in the play, two women are playing, I think it’s the Madame de Volanges with somebody, and behind them on the stage, Christopher Hampton writes in the stage direction in the play, the text, a shadow–a silhouette of the guillotine shows up. Which most directors don’t include. This is not stuff you have to explain to people that–I mean, you’ve just spent many hours explaining to people that the aristocracy is rotten to the core, and people understand that all of these people will be decapitated within a pretty short period of time.

And so, I–and actually you mentioned the number of characters. One of the most important readers for Arcadia is called Stage Directions. Because, it’s not just with the dancing of the characters at the end where you have multiple people. The second half of the second act, people are literally talking over each other. And it’s phenomenal.

Hamilton tried to do something like this, right? So, Hamilton, when they have this turnstile situation happening on stage on Broadway, and the different–they jump times of how Eliza meets Hamilton and then the sister sings, and then they turn back the time, which is very interesting. And, it’s the same period.

I was obsessed in college with Possession, like all depressed 20 year old liberal arts students who are female and left wing must be. So, I went through this mandatory period, and that is where for me the first time I would encounter this huge problem that was probably already familiar to everybody who has read or had read Pale Fire: that we have no idea how poets worked, letters get lost, like, things burn, and whatever you’re reading in literary history, somebody can always come by tomorrow and find something else. And, everything that has been written about the genesis of this work can be thrown out the window, including careers, tenures, you name it.

And, it’s very interesting that there is an equivalency here in the play where the Valentine character says, ‘Oh, this is just like science.’ If you are a scientist–and Richard Dawkins writes about this very beautifully–your finding is only valid until somebody else proves it wrong. Your goal basically is to grow old and die before that happens and win a bunch of awards.

So, we have a very interesting game of truth and perception. There is a character–so as you mentioned, the play takes place on two different timelines or in two different timelines. One is the Regency Period of the early 1800s. So, we are in the Jane Austen era of gorgeous country houses, and there is a young mathematical genius girl and her tutor, very kind of Goethe-esque.

And, there’s a lot of passionate piano playing in a separate room, and servants who know everything about everybody and for half a guinea they will tell you. There are candles and wine for breakfast, and people shooting hares for lunch.

And then, we are also in contemporary times, which at the time was the early 1990s where early computer work enables people to analyze texts differently, to understand complexity differently, and in a household of literary researchers, the landed gentry and some Oxford students studying the grounds; you have an interesting kind of exploration of how chaos works.

Actually, one of the interesting things to me about the Arcadia is James Gleick’s role in this whole thing. So, James Gleick in 1988 publishes Chaos, his book explaining chaos theory to a general audience. And, today, of course, my generation knows James Gleick primarily from The Information, which is his much newer book, I think 2011 or 2010, which explains information theory to a lay audience fantastically.

But, for Stoppard’s generation, the big catechismatic event intellectually was getting to understand chaos.

And so, Gleick publishes this book and I noticed–and actually I wrote James Gleick. I was like, ‘Oh my God, look at what I noticed.’ And, he was like, ‘Nobody ever noticed that.’ I was, like, ‘I did.’ So, he writes this book and it leads to two extraordinary works of literature, basically. One is Arcadia. So, clearly Stoppard sat down after a period of working on so many different things, sat down to read Chaos and then wrote his first play in eight years, inspired by it. And, Mike Leigh also reads it and it leads to the movie Naked with David Thewlis, and the character actually is reading the book Chaos in film, which is another take on early 1990s. So, we’re in post-Thatcherite London, trying to, or at least the British kind of educated classes, trying to find a footing.

And so, it seems like Chaos could be seen as one of the most important science books to inspire dramatic writing since maybe Darwin, I mean, if you look at the direct, fast, immediate effect of people dropping whatever they were doing and just going into that. So, yeah, you should absolutely have James Gleick on the podcast and ask him how his work inadvertently led to all these incredible pieces written.

Anna Gát: I completely forgot. I got so excited–

Anna Gát: I completely forgot the original question, even though I did write it down. It’s in front of me. And, by the way, all Stoppard’s plays have some kind of mathematical game. I mean, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is starting with the coin toss, the independent coin tosses, head, head, head, head. And, we are throwing the coin. And, the first sentence in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the character looking the audience right in the face and says, ‘There is an art to the building up of suspense.’ And then, they go back to throwing it. I think it’s ingenious.

So, I lived in London for six and a half years, and I had three reading experiences that caused kind of a public disturbance. So, this included Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir where I was laughing so hard on the subway that people asked me what I was reading. It also included Ferenc Molnar’s A Play at the Castle, where I was laughing so hard that I think I dropped the book. And also Arcadia, which I first read on the upper deck of a bus in London. And, I was laughing so hard that I remember crying tears on the book that was soaking wet, and I could not believe how anything can be this funny. I was completely out of it.

And then, because I had the privilege of living in London–or the bad luck, depending on where you look at it from–I went to the National Theatre Archives because Arcadia was not on at the time. And also, I felt that this play is too good to be performed. Like, I had this sudden reverence to the printed page and the text. I was, like, ‘Okay, if I ever see it, I want to see the original 1993 production, with Rufus Sewell,’ etc., etc. And, I go to National Theater–and if anybody is listening from London, do yourself a favor and go there, because they have videos of most recent plays and anybody can watch it. You just have to sign up for it.

And so, I walk in. Suddenly they don’t have the first season. They have 1993 later in the year, so it’s a little bit of a different casting. And you know, it’s like a church: you’re in a crypt, it’s [?] dead silence. Everybody’s sitting there with the headphones. It’s very serious people watching these plays, and they bring out this giant bible of the stage production from 1993 and just leave you alone with it. It has all the actors and the script and the costume designs and the writer for the lights. It’s fantastic. And you know, I’m a very respectful person, obviously, so I put on my little headphones in this marble room. And I think I could take around 20 minutes being quiet of the three hours; and then I just completely let go and was just roaring with laughter. I thought, ‘I don’t care.’ If they kick me out, this was worth it. If I can never come back to the National Theatre Archives in London, still, this was worth it. This is how to do it. I think if you can watch Arcadia without laughing your head off, there is something wrong with you and you need to seek professional help. This is my assessment.

And so, I expect the reading to also be quite fun. I think Interintellect hosts are–I mean, I don’t even know all of them, right? I mean, some people come to my training, some people go to other people’s training, other hosts’ training; some people just use the site. And so, there will be some new people. I expect it to be pretty fun. Also, we also did The Importance of Being Earnest, and that was hilarious. So, I think we’re just going to laugh our heads off.

By the way: Shakespeare in Love. I think Stoppard didn’t like Shakespeare in Love. And, if I’m not mistaken, Shakespeare in Love went through a very long, crazy rewrite process where John Logan also gave it a go, who later wrote The Aviator. And, I think Spielberg just threw it out, like, ‘Oh, sorry, oops, it didn’t work. My ideas were wrong.’ And they just threw it out. I think they paid him, so that’s good. And, I think they dragged in Stoppard later who edited some very interesting scenes like the one that I love when he’s in the cab–Shakespeare–and then the cab driver, I mean, he is, like, rowing on the dams–but he’s like, ‘I know you from somewhere. You’re an actor.’ Like, that’s clearly somebody who was an actor at some point in New York City and has done that. It’s great, but I think Stoppard is so much better than Shakespeare in Love, don’t start there.

Anna Gát: And, the kind of messlessness of innovation. I mean, one of the best lines is–I think Valentine talks about how Thomasina, the young genius in the early 1800s, could not have innovated mathematically the way the literary researcher-woman in the 1990s thinks; and says she can’t have known: You cannot open a door till there is a house.

Anna Gát: And, people in my world always ask, like, ‘Why didn’t this or that get invented earlier?’ And, I always think about this, both the mental framing of it.

Of course, the play is also about talent and about the ubiquitousness of talent, and that–I mean, this is where maybe this is coming very close to my worldview where it’s much less about going out and hunting for talent and more around looking around your own dinner table. Who are the people that you are so used to or who come from a background or who don’t look the part? You have no idea what this person is working on in private or what they are thinking about, what Wikipedia rabbit hole they spent their lives in. And, the fact that you have Lady Croom who doesn’t recognize her own daughter’s genius beyond the fact that she is getting, quote unquote, “educated beyond marriage ability,” and that’s worrying to her as the mother.

I think there’s more talent missed by people standing right next to them in this play than how much talent gets destroyed or misunderstood. And, to me, that’s a bigger tragedy.

Anna Gát: It’s actually quite interesting that you point this out because we never see the poet. So, Byron is at some point in the house, in the Coverly estate, Sidley Park, but he’s off-stage throughout. And so is the wife who meddles with the Newtonian system and would upturn it very shortly–as they point out frequently in the play–because one thing science has no resistance to is attraction between people, which just messes up all the models and all the systems and complicates everything. Which I think everything is great. We only see Ezra Chater, who is a terrible poet and funnily becomes a botanist, kind of in the worst possible way of how you can become a botanist, and dies being bitten by a monkey, which is either hilarious or a very suspicious way of perishing [?] jungle by the man who wants your wife, or probably by his hands.

And so, you see the scientists and that weird creature who is a scientist but studies literature–because is Bernard really a scientist? If you went to a quantum physicist, that all this guy researches Byron at Oxford, would really this physicist think of this researcher as a, quote unquote, “scientist”? There are a lot of questions there; but we never see the poet. Byron is there. His name is in the game book. We later find out that he didn’t even shoot that hare. He just claimed the young Lord’s hare; and then gets into a scandal in five minutes, obviously, and then he’s promptly kicked out. At 4:00 AM, his horse was brought about by the stable boy.

Anna Gát: We wish, we wish–

Anna Gát: If you permit me to be a little bit pedantic here, it’s really important to know about dramatic writing that it’s a play. It’s never Stoppard talking to you. If he wants to talk to you, he will write an essay in The London Review of Books or go on TV. This is a paragraph that is uttered by the character Septimus Hodge to his young pupil, and it’s a character. So, he–as Mamet always warns us in dramatic writing, there are always three things to ask whatever anybody does in a play: Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don’t get it? Why now?

So, as a playwright myself, I will look at this and ask why Septimus is saying this rather than this being some absolute truth that Stoppard kind of pronounced it on stage. Why does Septimus say it? Well, first of all, he’s talking from an early 1800s perspective. He is himself a kind of lost talent, right? He’s constantly in the shadow of Byron, his school friend, that everybody is fawning over. We never see him. He’s, quote unquote, “only the tutor” in this house. The best he can do is to write these reviews taking down even worse poets, right? So, I always look at it as a kind of manifesto for just how to process this. And, I think every student at some point, whether it’s because you’re reading The Name of the Rose, whether it’s because you’re studying the history of these ancient manuscripts, at some point you have to face the Library of Alexandria’s demise and what happened to this knowledge. And, I think what Septimus says is kind of how we’re dealing with this emotionally. So, it’s more descriptive, more like a positive than a normative thing here. This is not how it was. It’s just a character sharing a moment with the audience of how to live knowing how much was lost.

Anna Gát: And he says, ‘You wrote that coming home from a park.’

Anna Gát: I think it’s refreshing for contemporary audiences to understand how far back–and way farther back, obviously, than just Arcadia–the science versus the humanities debate goes. That this has been actually debated since Biblical and Socratic times–the ways of knowing. It’s funny that you have two very imperfect characters, both motivated by petty desires and little insecurities, debating these grand things; but that’s what people do. If you wait for perfection in people to allow them to talk about the big things, you will never find it. There is no one technically big enough to talk about these things. And so, we all can do it.

It’s quite interesting to me. I would probably debate with Bernard about philosophy being timeless. I think I see it much more closely intertwined with scientific thinking. But I think in academia these are the eternal divisions. It’s like two football teams constantly at each other’s throats. Both parties are greatly motivated to never settle. People who actually collaborate and create interdisciplinary dialogue and research get a little bit ostracized by both communities. So there is little kind of career upside also to try to go at it in a more synthetic way.

But this is why conversation matters. These people are having this argument–after probably four glasses of wine–because they are in the same space and they have to confront these ideas.

I’m very curious. I mean, to me personally, I don’t–so I think where Bernard, or Bernard, is correct is that whilst in science and in the scientific research of literature you are always kind of in an arms race with the other researchers to not have been proven wrong–or to not appear to have been proven wrong because that’s also possible that somebody comes up with some very convincing research that debunks yours and later on they find out to have been wrong, but by then it’s too late for you because now you’re completely traumatized. But, there really is nothing to improve on a Byron poem. You listen to Bach and you don’t think that somebody could come and debunk Bach.

And so, you have, to me, it’s more the differentiation between the kind of substantive works that humans can produce that are kind of entities in themselves and will have lives of their own as a fixed entity throughout history, through inspiring other people, through different interpretations. Hamlet is not improved by many interpretations. It’s somehow like a person who goes and puts on a raft[?] of costumes like these characters do in the second half, then you retreat into yourself. You acquire all these historical memories and they attach to you in some ways, but they don’t alter the substance–I’m being very Continental here. Versus, you have instrumental types of knowledge where the telos of that knowledge is the truth. It’s outside. The telos of Bach is contained in itself; or maybe it’s about God, like, something more than human.

Historical research, the research into the biography of a long gone author, the understanding of the laws of the universe are in some sense instrumental. And so, everybody can collaborate on it and everybody can add their own voices; and debunking Newton or discovering the laws of the quantum world were not innovations on the ancients. This is the kind of paradigmatic shifts within the instrumental knowledge.

And so, I think it’s less about science versus poetry and more about the intellectual output of humans that are substantive: that are fixed creations and they live among us like people from then on, like a person being born, versus methodology and instrumentalization of knowledge where really someone will at some point come and we will have a better method and better tools. Maybe in 20 years we will not have any of the remaining scientific methods we have today because AI [artificial intelligence] will have a completely different paradigm.

But is it the same loss as losing Aristotle’s comedy? No, because that was as tragic as the loss of a person, versus overwriting a previous scientific understanding is an improvement and we’re just getting closer to its goal.

Anna Gát: Here’s, I think, where the difference between Hannah’s method of literary research and Bernard’s kind of come into play. And, I’m sure for you as an academic, this must remind you of so many people you know as the two different ways of going at academic research. Because, you have Hannah who, at the end–and this is why she actually gets to bond with the scientist pursuing instrumental knowledge–she says that it’s about us trying. It’s about the kind of relentless pursuit of knowledge. You almost can’t care about where it’s going. It doesn’t matter.

Whereas for Bernard, he’s the other type of academic who sees it as a sport and there are winners and losers. He wants to win. He kind of wants the truth. Right? But he wants the truth because if he says something false, then it will be debunked faster. And that would be a fail for him. So, I think that’s just charming.

But I think Stoppard, at least how I feel him treating his characters, I feel that he is quite forgiving of all the characters and their crazy idiosyncrasies. Maybe less so of Ezra. I think Ezra really just gets bitten by a monkey. He has no redeeming qualities.

Anna Gát: ‘I went to the Breakfast Hour,’ he says, when they debunked; ‘I was on the Morning Show on the BBC [British Broadcasting Company].’ Oh, my God.

Anna Gát: We do archive these. So, this is a members-only event. So, when we record them, it’s only available for members. But, in this case, I might ask the participants if they permit me to actually put it on YouTube. Sometimes we do that. It’s all fun. And, if people have ideas for what we should read in January, we are now taking suggestions. [More to come, 1:18:30]