Ezra Klein

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.

It's a question about attention that brought me to this book because my experience of the last couple of years for me, it's been particularly acute the last couple of months, and this has been both a personal and at times a very political experience, is this feeling that to try to hold the extremes, to give everything its attention at the same time,

It's a question about attention that brought me to this book because my experience of the last couple of years for me, it's been particularly acute the last couple of months, and this has been both a personal and at times a very political experience, is this feeling that to try to hold the extremes, to give everything its attention at the same time,

the loss and the horror, like the beauty and the elation, also just the normalcy. You know, I'll sit here for a day and I'll cover deportations to El Salvador and torture prisons, and then I'll go home and just have to make dinner and read books. And feeling that, I'm sure somebody has the attentional capacity to hold it, but I don't feel like I do.

the loss and the horror, like the beauty and the elation, also just the normalcy. You know, I'll sit here for a day and I'll cover deportations to El Salvador and torture prisons, and then I'll go home and just have to make dinner and read books. And feeling that, I'm sure somebody has the attentional capacity to hold it, but I don't feel like I do.

I have never quite felt this sort of overwhelm of, the system. And it felt to me like something you were exploring in this book, because you also meet your partner in a similar time. It feels like you should be able to settle on an emotional interpretation of a moment, that the affect of the story should be more or less one thing, which of course is not ever true.

I have never quite felt this sort of overwhelm of, the system. And it felt to me like something you were exploring in this book, because you also meet your partner in a similar time. It feels like you should be able to settle on an emotional interpretation of a moment, that the affect of the story should be more or less one thing, which of course is not ever true.