David Lang

It's a long book.

And it's, you know, 18th century language.

The language is very hard.

And there's a lot of stuff that I

wouldn't have read if I wasn't reading it for purpose.

So what was the experience reading it for you then, once you had a purpose?

Then it was really exciting because I started trying to figure out what the themes were that resonated with me.

One of the original ideas was that I would compare this to Handel's Messiah because mine is an oratorio about a serious book as a popular entertainment for a general audience, which the Messiah is as well.

And so my first reading of The Wealth of Nations was reading for every incidence I could find of sheep because sheep play a prominent role in the Messiah.

And I thought, okay, I'm going to make a joke out of the connection to sheep.

And of course, being from Scotland, there are a lot of sheep used in examples in The Wealth of Nations.

There's the woolen coat.

The woolen coat.

Eventually, those sheep ideas fell by the wayside and the jokes ended up getting edited out of this piece.

But that was the original idea.

I was reading for, like, what's the thread that I'm going to be able to pull through this book?

At first, I thought I was going to be dealing with the factory images, the division of labor, creation of wealth.

And then I just realized maybe that wasn't as interesting as the idea that trade connects us and that money itself doesn't really have any value, but money exists as a kind of token that goes from person to person as we are connected through trade.

Money doesn't really represent anything by itself, but it represents the amount of labor that we put into doing something.

And to me, that was much more interesting and much more provocative.