Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Bridging the Chasm Between Academia and the Public | John Vervaeke & Adam Walker

33:06So let's, we've done quite a bit of critique. We've cleared some space, a metaphor, by the way. And so let's maybe do at least some initial exploration of the alternative. Tell me about the students that come to your classes and what's going on in your classes. Like, why do they come? What do you do? and what are they getting out of it? I mean, I'm not asking you to break any confidentiality or anything like that, but just general review in some sense. Well, when I made this platform, I knew that discussion and conversation of dialogos was going to be really important to our approach to poetry.

33:57It was John Henry Newman in his The Idea of the University who said that the real unsung value of university is not the lecture room, but the cafeteria room, the common room. He said that conversations are a lecture unto themselves. And the people who are there on verse who are supporting me, to whom I'm very grateful to, who are also learning from me are folks anywhere between homeschooled middle schoolers and couple and then retirees, octogenarians. And, you know, it's all across the spectrum from America, South America, the UK, Europe, India, Australia, China, Africa, even so in New Zealand.

34:47So it's predominantly Americans and the UK and Europe, I think because of the lectures and discussions that I host are within those timeframes that can accommodate folks from there. But we come together, we spend a week reading, we meet on Mondays usually for 45 minutes of a lecture I've prepared, and then the rest 45 minutes, we're in open discussion. If it's a discussion-based course, if it's more like a seminar, I have given them prompts to engage with the text in different ways. So there's, of course, the analytical. We're studying the four quartets right now by T.S. Eliot, his best poem, one of the best poems in the English language, I'd say.

35:35And there are four of them, and we read one each week for this month. And this is more like a seminar that I'm running. So 45 minutes of lecture and then 45 minutes of guided discussion with the questions I've asked. Now the questions, some of them are analytical, like, okay, how does this quartet build upon the theme of time that the previous quartet did? How is it carrying that forward? But it's also spiritual. You know, Eliot was engaged with several Eastern religions. He could read Sanskrit. He studied several ancient scriptures from the East. He's conversant with Western Christianity in the Latin West and Eastern Christianity even, along with all the various Protestant incarnations from Puritanism to Unitarianism, which he has in his lineage.

36:28So it's like, this is actually a poem that opens up the conversation to everyone. I have people in there who have studied Zen Buddhism who will see things in this poem. So I'll ask a question, what spiritual traditions do you find this poem's drawing from? And we'll have a conversation about that. And they'll be showing me things that I would have never seen. Oh, wow. We have somebody who studies the Rig Vedas, somebody who studies the Upanishads, the Srimad Bhagavatam. And Eliot's acquainted with these texts. It's not something I don't see. I'm very much like within the Latin Western literary tradition being a student of English literature, as I am.

37:05but breaking that open actually allows us in conversation to see something no one alone would have ever been able to see right and that's the dialogue about like okay so what is this line why is this line so difficult let's talk about it uh that's not something that a lecturer can give and i think you know instead of just putting up i think literature works for this really well you of have to have the classroom dialogue. Instead of just the lectures, we've got to build that in too. And so, the other prompt I'll say is try to write a poem in imitation of this or after the style of this. Because it's one thing to say, oh, look at the syntax and how he's developed the style and do it from the analytical perspective.

37:51It's a totally different mindset, a totally different engagement when you're like, now let me create something after this. And so I've got them thinking analytically, we're bringing in the spiritual traditions, they're bringing themselves in their experiences with the poem, but they're also bringing in and furthering the tradition with their own poetry and engaging it that way. So I'm trying to, that's something you sometimes see in the academy, but not very often, it's mostly analytical, but I'm trying to bring in that more creative and more dynamic, dialogic experience with poetry. And so that's often what we'll do with these literature courses.

38:32So two things come to mind. First of all, so it sounds like, as you said, you get into Dialogos, which like where everybody gets to a place they couldn't have got to on their own. A Logos shows up and takes on a life of its own. And that's interesting because, you know, the logos and coming to terms is this great phrase that means, you know, encountering something existentially, but also being able to, you know, produce terms like for it. And then the other thing is all the work out of deep learning and predictive processing. I won't bore you with the cog's eye, but the processes we use to recognize phenomena, we try as much as possible to reuse processes by which we generate phenomena.

39:27So, for example, we do gesture. Gesture is originally I do things in order to move things around in the world in a certain way. But then you can recognize my intent because you use the same processes by which you generate a gesture to recognize it and then understand how I'm interacting with. So like when people have to practice generating, that improves. It improves their recognition, like their appreciation, their apprehension, even their aperception of something. But then as that improves, their ability to generate improves and you get the platonic loop, right? You get that anagogic thing start to happen.

40:10And so I think it's really, really cool that you've got both of those. To my ear, it sounds very Socratic, which is you're trying to make us, you bring in the analytics. So people are, right, they're critical, they're rigorous. but then you open up to the dialogical, the logo shows up, and then you put people into this cycle where they're generating to recognize and recognizing to generate. That sounds very powerful. And you're nodding when I'm saying, so this seems to be landing. It is. I mean, it's such a beautiful experience for me because I'll walk away having learned and come to a fuller appreciation of whatever we're studying just through the conversation itself.

40:51That's beautiful from a cognitive science perspective. I actually learned a lot from that. So thank you for sharing that. But yeah, the platonic loop. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. Well, I just want to, sorry for interrupting. I'm glad it's really landing for you because if we have sort of a shared common ground around that cog sci, and also the way I'm integrating it with the Socratic platonic tradition, we do a similar, like we do some Lectio Divina and Philosophical Fellowship, and some of my students have described this as a secular seance. What they mean is they go from reading Spinoza to encountering Spinoza.

41:31Spinoza's perspective feels like a sensed presence that is now there challenging them. It's like the third man, the extra. Do you get that? Do people do that with the poets when they're reading the poem? Does Eliot start to become present to the people? He does. And I think especially because around this time last year, we read The Wasteland, which was published in 1922. Oh, I did a whole thing on The Wasteland. Did you? Yeah, they were doing a dramatic production on it. And so I was their consultant and wrote an accompanying essay for, they were doing sort of dance and music and image in order to do The Wasteland.

42:13Anyways, I'm interrupting. Go ahead. No, no. I mean, that's it. The Wasteland was right after World War I. Four Quartets was written. 1936 was when it was started around that time, right before World War II. In fact, the last three quartets were composed during the war. So in a way, they're both war poems. One is a response to the collapse that happened after the first, and one is anticipating the collapse that's following the second. And they're both concerned with the spiritual fabric of culture that's, in a way, ripping. People are not understanding what to do with that. But there is a real sense that having an understanding of Eliot's The Wasteland, I think, is informing us that we're able to see him as a person and see him change.

42:55And that was something very interesting we did in August. We read through W.B. Yeats's poetry from his teenage years all the way up to his later years, his last stuff. And you get a real sense of a mind who's turning and oscillating and speaking to itself. And we're overhearing that conversation over the long arc of this poet's career. And I think it's in moments like that where you can see that, where I love that idea of the seance, the third man. Yeah, where Elliot somehow becomes present. I'll be writing sometimes about Wordsworth and I feel like he becomes present sometimes as well in strange ways.

43:36But a beautiful way to put that. But I think it does happen. Yeah. And what's interesting for me then is another possibility. So when you do research into why people are religious, and I'm just going to use that as a broad category right now. or versus non-religious or anti-religious. It's not whether or not they're analytic in their thinking or if they have hyperactive agency detection. All of these are very weakly predictive of religiosity or the lack therein. What's important is what's called cred, credibility enhancing displays. So think about a child looking up. So that metaphor is really important.

44:23You're an adult that seems to be doing things that from the child's perspective don't make much sense. They seem costly. They seem, what do you, like, what's all that for? But this adult is like, their presence is one that you find trustworthy. And so you imitate them, you indwell them and internalize them, and thereby you grow into them. You grow into their perspective taking ability, their identity assuming abilities, you know, and children of course are doing this when they're pretending to be Superman. And one of the functions of a religious community is to provide these kinds of role models, whether living or traditionally dead, still alive within the tradition.

45:08But what I want to bring to you is the possibility that the kind of reading you're doing of the poet is also giving us credible perspectives, right? It's giving us a person and a perspective that we might not very much understand because the poetry is in some way a credibility enhancing display why is he talking this way why doesn't he just say it's straight but i'm going to trust that he's there's something there i'm going to imitate i'm going to indwell and internalize and that and thereby grow my own perspective taking abilities i want to make that proposal to Yeah, I think that's so, first off, so beautifully said, and also so much in line with the way we understand poets on my teaching platform verse.

45:56You know, Eliot himself, he says, shortly after he wrote The Wasteland, he wrote a letter. He said, I was reading the letters of W.H. Lawrence, and Lawrence says that modern poetry should be translucent. It should disappear. It should be so bare, not flowery. So in a way, this is the revolt against the Victorian extravagance. And he wants it to be, he wants it to become a window. And that's what Eliot too is trying to do with his poetry. And it's interesting with the, I don't know how this was resonant with the cognitive science perspective, but to me, it sounds like it's harmonious. But St. Maximus the Confessor said that language is the symbol of the soul's cognitive energy.

46:43Yeah. And it's like, it's that, yeah. Somehow that energy is encoded. I don't think encoded is the right metaphor because in a way it's not really the poem on the page that exists, but in that space between the reading of it, the mind and the page, it's that third space where the poem actually exists. um so do do you i mean well i'll i'll ask you because uh from from your dissertation do you think you've become and i want to i'm trying to make it into an adverb do you think you've become woodsworthian in your thinking because of all of uh of the time you've spent with him and his poetry? Well, yeah, actually.

47:30Yeah. Yeah, actually. To me, that's deeply analogous. And I mean this respectfully to anybody, to someone who, I'm reading a book called Practicing the Way, where he says, you know, being a Christian is only mentioned three times in the New Testament, but being an apprentice, that's how he translate this Hebrew rule, being an apprentice of Jesus is measured, is mentioned like 265 times. And he said, And when you apprentice to somebody, you want to live with them and you want to imitate them so that you can become more and more like them so that eventually you can become like them to other people.

48:06And it sounds to me you're doing the same thing with these poets. That's an interesting point. And I hadn't thought about that, but it seems to me to be the same principle underlying the doctrine of theosis in the Eastern Church. Yes. You know, what you meditate upon, what you yield your attention to actually elevates you closer to it. So that - And this goes back to Plotinus. It goes, you know, the organ of cognition is fitted to the object, right? Yeah, very much. Yes. Exactly. In the desire for God, the whole eros for the divine is obviously that pool. And I think that, you know, to go back to where we started in this conversation, that's one of the things that's lacking from the discourse and the way literature is.

48:49often taught in the American Academy is that they're often pulled down off the pedestals, which is, there's a place for that, but often they're not replaced, but somewhat discarded. And, you know, there's this idea that greatness is a burden. W. Jackson Bate, who was a professor at Harvard, wrote a book, The Burden of the Past. And it's very much, it was partly what bloom was what was partly what harold bloom was responding to in his anxiety of influence but i much prefer uh walter jackson bates theory about this that it's it's in a way soul crushing your your ego does not go unbruised with an encounter with this angel or these angels um again to use another corbin phrase like the encounter with the angel doesn't leave you the same.

49:43You walk away with a limp for the rest of your life. And you have to be okay with that. You have to be okay surrendering the ego. C.S. Lewis talks about how when he reads a Greek poem, in this third space of the imagination, he becomes the Greek person, the Greek person reading it. He sees with a myriad of eyes, he says. And it is that moment in which the work of art becomes translucent, even in its greatness. And it's so impossibly far away from you in its greatness that yet you can, in a way, ascend to it. And I think that's how Longinus describes how to make the effect of the sublime. He says, you know, you can study syntax, you can study all the five ways that sublime works, but the shortcut is imitate, which is so platonian so platonic right just imitate the great poets and i think imitation is all a part of looking up it's that it's that upward look um which the academy is often looking down and i think if you can lose if you could lift your eyes above the horizon you'll um encounter something beyond reckoning with your intellect or with your rational side of the intellect.

51:06Because it is the intellect from the platonic sense that actually achieves that, seeing through the appearance of the material world into the forms. So, yeah. I had a moment when I was, Jason and I, we share a love for Spinoza. That's my son who's reading through your list and watching your videos. But part of how I was able to interest him, and Claire Carlisle talks about it in her astonishing book, Spinoza's Religion. But you have this moment, and I had a very distinct experience. You're reading Spinoza and you're working and you're really working hard. The ethics is like reading Euclid's geometries, right?

51:52It's very hard. You're reading it, you're really wrestling with it. And then something happens, you get this aspect shift, this figure ground reversal, where you go from thinking about Spinoza to thinking Spinozistically about the world and seeing the world Spinozistically. And it goes from being in front of you to being sort of behind you and how you're looking out. I'm using metaphors here to try and explain it.

52:23Absolutely. It's almost like you kind of inhabit the thought and the thought becomes a part of you, right? Is that sort of, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think it's the same thing. And we've been doing this, I think, since the upper Paleolithic transition. It's that process by which we become the person on the screen when we're watching a movie. We do that where we go from watching them to starting to see things the way they see. We take their point of view, as we say. We're using all these spatial ocular metaphors to try and convey something. But, and I get it. I get why there's, like, you need periods of iconoclasm because things can fall into idolatry.

53:03I get that. But too much, like, Plato, this is the great, to me, the great platonic lesson. Like, we are finite transcendence. If we only exercise our transcendence, we can fall into hubris and become tyrants over others. But if we only embrace our finitude, we can fall into despair and become slaves to others. And I get the iconic classic worry about the hubris, but if you take it too far, you are opening people up to despair because you're basically saying, sorry, no role models for you. No, nothing for you to aspire to. Nothing beyond you, a man's reach should exceed his grasp, right? Nothing beyond you, right?

53:48Through which you can reflect on yourself in a critical, and I mean that in a positive sense, transformative way. And so, yeah, I liked your metaphor, right? We have to do both. We have to look down and up and we have to be able to move between them in a balanced manner, I would argue. Absolutely. And I feel like poetry is exactly what you've just beautifully laid out here, is that it actually calls us out of the look downward and upward to something else. The word sonnet actually means little sound. And it's often, I think, if the bells in the Latin West, when the consecration would take place, the bells would ring because people couldn't understand the Latin.

54:30So they had to know when the great moment of transformation was happening. So they would ring the little bells at the altar. And in a way, a poem is like that. It's saying, hey, here's a moment. Here's a moment of transformation. Here's the opportunity for change. You think of Rilke's, you must dein Leben ändern, right? Like you have to change your life. And poetry is constantly asking you to do that. Yeah. Yeah, that moment. I mean, Rilke is one of my favorite poets. And I didn't do German just from my undergrad. And so I don't try to read it in the German. But even in the translation, when I first read that, The Archaic Bust of Apollo, then the final line, I was like, and that's where I really got the idea of the shock of beauty rather than the smoothness that Han criticizes.

55:22Like, you must change your life. And it's like, oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, man. And in the translations, so much is not lost. Like Stephen Mitchell, for instance, has - Oh, I love Stephen Mitchell's translations. I love all of his translations. His translation of the Tao Te Ching. And the way you know if it's a good translation is if you're a Tai Chi player. I've been a Tai Chi player for like 30, what, five years. And here's the analogy I use. Imagine you're trying to read the Kama Sutra and you've never made love. You're not going to really get it. And if you're reading the Tao Te Ching and you haven't done a Taoist practice like Tai Chi Chuan, you're missing it.

56:09But on the other, generate to recognize, right? Recognize to generate. Because I do the Tai Chi, I can say, oh, Mitchell's translation is excellent because it's just resonating with what 31 years of practice have done for me or something like that. See, and there's that, I don't know what you'd call it, like an embodied confirmation, like your body knows when you read good poetry. To go back to Emily Dickinson, she says, how do I know when I read a good poem? I mean, it feels like the top of my head has just come off, which is such a Dickinsonian way to describe the effect of poetry. But I just love that, that kind of confirmation you just described.

56:51I have moments too in reading Wordsworth where I'll be brought to tears or chills on the back of the neck sort of indicate a confirmation of an encounter that's invisible and otherwise leads to no other kind of mark. Yeah. So, I mean, we've got a bit more time for our first one. And so I want to talk a little bit about when people do the course, and let's say a lot of what we're talking about here is happening to them, it sounds like that's right. Then they go into their lives and they go into a culture that is at best indifferent and often hostile to everything we're talking about. And yet they come back.

57:37And what I'm interested right now is what do they say when they come back or do they say anything? Because you're asking them often to write a poem or maybe see how it's landing in their life. And what happens? I mean, what you're doing is it's countercultural in an important way. It's countermodern. I'm not going to say postmodern. It's countermodern. I like that. So what happens? Do they talk about that at all? Or do you get reflections? Does it come back into the discussions? in some ways? That's a really great question. And I think in some ways, we have wrestled with that on versed in ways that we haven't put words to it in the way that you so eloquently just did.

58:25But there's this, I don't know, a dissonance, a sort of difference between what we're doing and what you're doing when you're reading poetry and who you are when you're writing poetry.

58:39The way one feels out in the world when you're pumping gas at a gas station, you've got a screen that they've installed now in America on every gas station so that they can pump advertisements in your face while you can't escape the car while you're pumping gas. There's no way to turn off the volume or anything on some of these gadgets. So it's very infuriating, but you're trapped in this cycle of materialism and you become aware of the difference. And I think that's the important thing, to not allow the habituation of postmodern life to overtake the mind and our expectations about the way the world is supposed to work and what we're supposed to do with our one wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver says in that much quoted poem.

59:25but you get the sense that I think the more you encounter poetry and talking to people on Versed community which is the name of my platform I they're feeling that too although we haven't you know put words exactly to that but there's this enrichment there's this permission to say wait a minute, the encounters with beauty can be found. And poetry teaches us, models even, how that happens. Wordsworth said, I wish to be considered a teacher or nothing else. He said, the purpose of my poems is to add sunshine to daylight, to make the dreary more cheerful. And in that letter, it's a letter to Lady Beaumont in the early 1800s.

1:00:20In that letter, he beautifully is so aware of the power of poetry to redeem those parts of our lives where we're stuck in the post-digital world or the post-modern world and the conditions that these worlds are imposing upon us. And I think the first step is to recognize, is to develop that difference, that dissonance that you've described in your question between the encounters with art and the hermeneutics of beauty and of meaning, encounters with meaning. And then to return to the world, it's almost like going back to the cave after Plato's, you know, you're stumbling a bit, your eyes are a bit dimmed, you're not used to the light.

1:01:04You're kind of a fool to everyone else. It depends on how intoxicated on poetry you happen to be at the moment. But it's that return back and forth, which is, I think, important. Because the more we go into the light and come back into the cave, the more brightness one is bringing into the cave, so to speak. It sounds very familiar to Tolkien's recovery theory on fairy stories. It sounds like the way poetry is helping people, that dissonance is sort of opening their eyes, maybe creating apertures by which they can recover the world they're living in. Maybe they start to get moments of beauty in their everyday lives and the way beauty can often disclose depths that we'd usually be unaware of.

1:01:52The obvious often makes us oblivious to what is most important. And so those moments of beauty can wake us up, I think. And I think what might be irritating to, I don't know what to call it, the advertising people or whatever, is that is hard to quantify, commodify. because you can't readily predict it. You know, Plato wrestles with this in the seventh letter. It's like you have to sort of live with somebody a long time and then the spark unknown when it happens and it catches, it passes and then something catches fire. It's like before you meet somebody, like can you predict how we're going to become best friends or that's the person I'm going to spend the rest of my life with.

1:02:47Like that, that, that, that takes, that, that's not something you can easily quantify or measure. Exactly. Or even learn how to do our, why it works. Yes. Yes. Yes. Which is a good thing, which is partly what's protecting it, I think, from commodification in a way. so when people are doing this recovery and it's also um an education they're seeing and they're seeing the k the sunlight they come back in the cave and i think of wind's work on this in recovering the senses he says well we should stay a little bit longer with them in the cave and ask about have they acquired their spiritual senses can they now see things in the cave that they couldn't see before um he said that's what i'm really concerned about um and that's that's more like the recovery we're talking about here.

1:03:40Does that, well, I'll put it sort of simply, and of course, you'll bring in the nuance you think is needed. Does that deepen the faith of religious people, or does it move people who might not be religious into a more spiritual way of being um is is that happening for people such a beautiful question i i hope it is and i i know for some it is who've told me and i know that it happened to me um i this is this is where i feel like i have become wordsworthian because there's an interesting phenomenon with wordsworth's poetry i'm about to teach his poetry in april and so i'm preparing the lectures now i was just working on this.

1:04:26When you look at his reception, who was reading Wordsworth in the 19th century, and who was claiming him? It was the Christians, the deists, the pantheists, the Unitarians, the atheists, the agnostics. They were all claiming him for themselves. Oh, excellent. How does that work? How can you achieve that in poetry? And some Christians were actually rather annoyed that he was not very doctrinal. I mean, you read Wordsworth and it sounds Christian, but there's nothing explicitly Christian in much of his poetry outside of the ecclesiastical sonnets or the excursion. And so part of my dissertation was trying to figure out why that was.

1:05:04And I think poetry, I think what Wordsworth saw in the industrial revolution, which was just emerging during his lifetime and of which we are grandchildren, he saw the erosion of the human heart and feeling and he saw the erosion of the spirit by materialism he was he was saddened by it so much that he even said he'd rather be a pagan uh in a suckled in a creed outworn than than a christian because of how much materialism was entering into the christian church at a time around 1802. And you look at that and you think, he really understood that poetry has the power to awaken people out of their materialist slumber and into some spiritual awareness.

1:06:00And he doesn't care where that spiritual impulse, once it's awakened, is directed. If you want to go into Calvinist Christianity with that, you can. If you want to become a pantheist or deist. Poetry is not interested in that. It's interested in awakening that impulse, which is dying and being eroded in the industrial age. And I think in our own iron age, we see this happening. I think the work on verse, I hope the work on verse I'm doing is doing the same thing where it's, I'm not actually interested in converting anyone to a religion, even though I'm technically a religious person. I'm actually interested in helping the poets that we're reading wake people up from the materialist slumber that is being like a spell cast upon so many people before they're even able to develop a cognitive resistance to it.

1:06:55Especially young people with the phones and now with AI. I mean, it's all very dark. And it's the spiritual power that Wordsworth was wanting to awaken. And I think that's what poetry still offers this now and it's interesting that he saw it as early as you know the 1830s 1850s around the time he died in 1850 the industrial revolution was well underway so yeah yeah yeah okay we that's very powerful so there's there's two things that are now bubbling for me the one is this awakening um you know we've got the two what the three primary metaphors are awakening, enlightenment, and maturation. As the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage.

1:07:40Interesting. Right. And all of them are rolling out here, but we got this awakening and this impulse and waking up from, and I want to ask, I'm going to, I'm going to like next time when we meet, I want to ask, what's it, what are we waking? You told me what I'm waking up from. What am I, what am I waking to? because it's not only freedom from, it's also freedom to. And so what am I awakening to? And then secondly, I want to take this, right now we've been very individually focused and I want to take this idea of awakening and then zoom out to the cultural lens because you've been arguing that we might be on the cusp of a second renaissance or at least another renaissance.

1:08:28Maybe they've been multiple ones. I think the upper Paleo-Secratus might have been one, and Athens might have been one, and things like that. Northern India at the time of Siddhartha, I think, is another one. So I want to bring those two together. I want to leave these questions with you, which is, what are we awakening to? And how do the individual acts of awakening, how do they participate in? how do they afford and how are they afforded by the collective awakening that you seem to be sensing intimations of it. And of course, you're not just oracular, you also make arguments and historical cases.

1:09:14And I want to get all of that together. And so I'm going to propose that as what we pick up for our second talk. What do you think for that? I would love that. The two very great questions. I'd be curious, actually, of your own thoughts on that as well. So I'm very much looking forward to that conversation, John. That's wonderful. So Adam, I always like to have, and take your time with this. We're not under any rush. I like to have my guests have the last word. And before I pass it to you, let me thank you again for coming. This has been wonderful. It's just really catching fire. I knew it would.

1:09:52it is my sincere hope that you and I will develop a friendship. I think what you're doing is important and valuable. And you're already making a huge difference to my son. You're helping him through. It's a spiritual awakening time for him, a spiritual challenging time, and you are helping him. And I'm very grateful to that. That endears me to you in a significant way. And so I want to thank you. but I want to give you the last word. What do you want to leave people with as a parting thought? It can be summative. It can be provocative. It can be reflective. Last word. Thank you. Thank you so much for the opportunity to have the last word and thank you so much for this conversation, which has given me so much to think about and has been such a joy, honestly.

1:10:45Having been a longtime admirer of your work from afar, It's an honor to be having this conversation with you. As for what I would leave with other people right now, as my parting word, it would be we're living in a time of really great darkness, almost paralyzing hopelessness. And it's, I think, going to get worse, not from an oracular way, but if you just look at how we've gone so far, you can really see how things are accelerating in a direction that we cannot quite stop. But it would be a message of hope to say that these patterns we've seen in the past, we talk about the Renaissance, but there have been many Renaissance moments.

1:11:33As you rightly said, John, I've argued that as well. I mean, if you look at the modernist period, it's a Renaissance, a revolt against Victorian and stagnation and courtesy. If you look at the Romantic period, it's a revolt against the political tyranny and the Industrial Revolution. You look at the American Renaissance in the 1850s, 1840s, 1850s, you see this flourishing of American art for the very first time. Up until that point, there was not a distinct American art. It was all very British, very English-based or very derivative from other older, but you finally have this birth right in the middle of the market revolution when everybody's busy, busy, busy making money.

1:12:19And you see the great European Renaissance and the Florentine Renaissance coming out of this period of academic stagnation, war, pandemics, power-hungry tyrants, and yet humanity has always swerved. They've always turned. And there is a turn happening. I see it so many places. Versed is just a small little pebble directing the stream, maybe, I'd like to think. Your channel is another. And there are so many people who are moving, who are moving to appreciate, to rescue, to value, to apply the arts, literature, and culture, and all things that make us human and that have awakened us to the possibilities and the realizations of what it means to be a human being.

1:13:12And I think the more people can participate in that, can read poetry, can enjoy art, can take the moment to stop and just watch the clouds for two hours maybe. You are participating in that. You are feeding it. You're helping cultivate. You're helping bury the seeds that might lie dormant for many winters, but will one day bloom. And I think there's much to be hopeful for, even though it's not very apparent.

1:13:47Thank you, Adam. Thank you very much. Thank you, John. This was an absolute pleasure. Pleasure. It was all mine. thank you everyone for following and Adam will be back I hope multiple times take care everyone