Jacob Howland
speaker
188 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jacob Howland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Not just from that point. I mean, he actually remembers everything, but his experience is as vivid. His memories are as vivid as the moment of experience itself. And so he's completely overwhelmed and he just lies in the bed. He can't even, he lies in the dark. And then we have, for example, The Immortal. And it's about a guy who is in North Africa in fighting. This is his earliest memory anyway.
And fighting in North Africa in a Roman legion and accidentally drinks the water of life, the water of immortality. And then after centuries and centuries, he seeks death. And he reasons that there must be an antidote, right? If there's a place where you can drink water, it makes you immortal. There's got to be some other spring or something that you can drink and allow you to die.
But the problem is that his life just blends together. He can't separate anything out because...
Yes, well, let me put it a different way. What he is suggesting is that we are creatures of finitude. We are creatures of finitude in terms of our lifespan. We are creatures of finitude in terms of our intelligence, our memory. We are creatures of finitude in terms of our capacity to understand. So, for example, there's another wonderful story.
It's about a Mayan priest during the time of the conquistadors. And they destroy the civilization. They throw him in an underground prison. And there are some bars. And on the other side is a jaguar. And he begins to recall that there's an ancient myth that, The gods have inscribed in the world somehow a phrase that gives you complete omnipotence, if you could utter the phrase.
Anyway, and one day he's watching the jaguar and he realizes that its spots spell out somehow this phrase, which he then utters. And then he's looking for a way to destroy the conquistadors and restore Mayan civilization. But now he sees everything, this great wheel, the entire universe. He understands everything. And he has no longer any interest in doing anything.
Because that knowledge simply... It's complete. It's complete. And it's totally irrelevant what's happening here on Earth or anything like that.
My favorite is the Library of Babel, which is about this, the universe is a library, and the library has hexagonal cells, and every cell has X number of shelves, and every shelf has X number of books of exactly the same length, written in 23 characters, or 24, whatever it is, a certain number of letters, comma, period, space.
And it's inhabited by librarians, and they're looking through these books, and they're trying to find... some meaning, but there's- It's an infinite library. It's an infinite library. And by the way, the mathematicians have done the calculations on this. Yeah, yeah.
So anyway, and like the most coherent phrase in any book that any librarian, that this librarian who's narrating it knows, and he's gone all as far as he can, is something like, oh, time thy pyramids, right? So everyone starts looking for books because they realize like, There's, you know, I want to find something that will explain the meaning of my life or my purpose or something.
And then the fundamental proposition of the library is formulated, which is that any book that is possible is actual in the library. In other words, any, and you know, they can use like a million characters or something. So any combination of characters exists. That means that there is a book in this library that describes exactly this event. We're sitting here having this podcast.
This is a possible book. It must exist in this library. But there are also weird mathematical problems, because if you think about it, it can't be the case that any possible book is actual, because you can have catalogs of catalogs of catalogs, so that mathematically it explodes. But anyway, so my point is, what happens in a universe where finite beings, finite rational intellects, try to...
find some meaning and encounter or are afflicted by infinity in some way. So just to go back here, that's Borges' idea.
But the point I really wanted to emphasize in what you were saying is this question becomes a fertile soil for these literary growths. In other words, this is the question that animates his being as a writer. And it's highly, highly productive. So we all know that questions are highly productive.
Exactly.
Yes. Well, look, so as you know, in the Hebrew scriptures, God creates human beings. He's almost immediately disappointed with Adam and Eve. Now they're on their own, you know, they get their wish, right? I mean, the serpent says to them, oh no, God knows you will become as gods.
The best interpretation here I think is Maimonides who cites another rabbi and he says, well, the word for gods is Elohim, but it can also mean rulers. So they actually get what they wish for because there's no need for rule in the sense that we understand it, that is limitation law and so forth to order chaos in the garden. because you're sort of, you're in the presence of God.
Now, once you're kicked out, now you've got a problem. And the problem of chaos that's internal to the human soul immediately asserts itself because Cain kills Abel. And of course, they screw up so badly.
And see, so after all these failures, and yes, you know, the flood and the Tower of Babel and everything. So finally we speed up. In this part of Exodus where the Ten Commandments and then the so-called Book of the Covenant and the rest of the laws are laid out, This seems to me to fit exactly what you're saying. God is limiting these human beings, right? Like, here you are, these freed slaves.
We gotta give you some sorts of channels in which to move your desires and stop signs and restrictions and so forth. And only within those 613 laws can you have a flourishing life.
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