Ezra Klein

And it makes me wonder, are we doing the right thing in our more excavatory culture? Or was there wisdom we have lost in the, not that people should live in denial, but the balance of how much we go in and how much we simply move forward?

And it makes me wonder, are we doing the right thing in our more excavatory culture? Or was there wisdom we have lost in the, not that people should live in denial, but the balance of how much we go in and how much we simply move forward?

I guess I'm also driving at something else. What moved me quite deeply in your book is its attention to suffering and loss. And there's something about that I think is pretty subtle about being open to it versus pushing it away. It feels very deep. Neither of those are denial. And... You spend a lot of time in the book on the time you spent with your father in the hospital as he was passing away.

I guess I'm also driving at something else. What moved me quite deeply in your book is its attention to suffering and loss. And there's something about that I think is pretty subtle about being open to it versus pushing it away. It feels very deep. Neither of those are denial. And... You spend a lot of time in the book on the time you spent with your father in the hospital as he was passing away.

You have this line about hospitals where you say, and I'm truncating your quote a bit, but I like this part. In an ICU, you are as aware of the brevity of life and the great looming precipice of eternity. Yet at the same time, you're basically stuck in an airport. And there's this sort of coexistence of the banal and the profound. What were those days like for you?

You have this line about hospitals where you say, and I'm truncating your quote a bit, but I like this part. In an ICU, you are as aware of the brevity of life and the great looming precipice of eternity. Yet at the same time, you're basically stuck in an airport. And there's this sort of coexistence of the banal and the profound. What were those days like for you?

I visited a friend in a hospital recently. And on one level, this felt like the smallest possible reaction, but it also felt very true. I just found myself thinking, because she'd been there a while, like, I wish you could be somewhere more beautiful for this. As you were hurting and as you were, you know, in this experience, that it didn't have to be here.

I visited a friend in a hospital recently. And on one level, this felt like the smallest possible reaction, but it also felt very true. I just found myself thinking, because she'd been there a while, like, I wish you could be somewhere more beautiful for this. As you were hurting and as you were, you know, in this experience, that it didn't have to be here.

That that feels like its own level of cruelty. Yeah.

That that feels like its own level of cruelty. Yeah.

I think it's the lines that begin and end that, that you could not stop seeing the world as it really is, that there is this hidden order to existence that emerges only in the presence of grief, which stopped me a bit short, which feel true, which get a bit to our conversation earlier about denial. Tell me about that sense of this is a more honest perspective of the world.

I think it's the lines that begin and end that, that you could not stop seeing the world as it really is, that there is this hidden order to existence that emerges only in the presence of grief, which stopped me a bit short, which feel true, which get a bit to our conversation earlier about denial. Tell me about that sense of this is a more honest perspective of the world.

You call it bleak, and there's a dimension of it where it is very bleak and very frightening. And then also the people I know who abide in it Often, I don't want to say they don't find it bleak, but they also describe a certain beauty that comes from the noticing of it.

You call it bleak, and there's a dimension of it where it is very bleak and very frightening. And then also the people I know who abide in it Often, I don't want to say they don't find it bleak, but they also describe a certain beauty that comes from the noticing of it.

A friend of mine who lost his mother not long ago always tells me with some real sadness that time doesn't heal wounds, it makes just everything fade. And that I've sort of watched him grieve the diminishment of his grief more. And that there was a sort of a beauty in seeing things as they more really were, the sort of interconnection of life, the fragility of it.

A friend of mine who lost his mother not long ago always tells me with some real sadness that time doesn't heal wounds, it makes just everything fade. And that I've sort of watched him grieve the diminishment of his grief more. And that there was a sort of a beauty in seeing things as they more really were, the sort of interconnection of life, the fragility of it.

I think one reason we turn away from these things is it feels annihilating to look at them, but then the people I know who are looking at them, there's a kind of connection to something very profound that seems to abide there as well.

I think one reason we turn away from these things is it feels annihilating to look at them, but then the people I know who are looking at them, there's a kind of connection to something very profound that seems to abide there as well.

Thank you.

Thank you.