Kathryn Schulz
speaker
152 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Kathryn Schulz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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You can't look at the grand sweep of things and not realize how tenuous our foothold in this world is and how quickly we will be not merely lost, but forgotten. You know, I had this arresting moment when I realized, you know, I'm I can barely tell you my great-grandparents' names. I mean, that is three generations, right? That is the blink of an eye. But so it goes.
And everything we love, everyone we love, we are going to have to confront just the devastating loss of literally all of them. That's the bleak version, you know, and it's real. I don't think it's the whole story. There are ways to try to hold the bifocal vision of that kind of loss and why our lives are nonetheless not insignificant or at least not meaningless.
But certainly, you know, in hard moments, and I think for people who struggle with depression or who have a truly unfair burden of grief in their lives, it can seem like the only truth about existence.
Oh, no question about it. I mean, grief is just an amazing lens. I mean, its capacity for sharp focus is incredible. And it is true that there were moments in the depths of grieving or preparing to grieve my father that the world had never seemed so beautiful to me or so much like a gift. And there's a reason we...
honor death so much and why so many generations of philosophers have regarded studying death as the key to figuring out how to live a good life. The incredible thing about death is it forces you to recognize that you are alive and that that is not a permanent condition, right? We have this moment and no other known or given moments. To relish that fact and to savor it and to be grateful for it.
And it is true. I write a lot towards the end of this book about attention and the gift of attention. And I do think, you know, some kinds of grief can turn us inward and away from the world and obliterate attention in troubling ways. But I think very often...
grief and the awareness of the inevitability of death truly does heighten our sense of attention and our capacity to look at the world with gratitude and look at it with admiration. And I don't know what other force could do that. I mean, that's tragic. I wish there were something else.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. To be honest, it's actually the reason I wrote this book.
The moment that I started thinking seriously about what it was like to have experienced those two quite momentous life experiences in extremely short succession, short enough that I was still falling in love while my father was dying and found myself kind of grappling with these extraordinarily different emotions at the same time. Speaking of attention, that's what got my attention.
I thought, well, this is interesting, right? This actually is... the fundamental nature of life, right? We are actually always dealing with more than one thing at once. And sometimes they are profoundly contradictory. Sometimes they're just deeply unrelated. And yet somehow we have to spread our attention among them.
And we then sort of just got swept headlong into the pandemic, which was, I think for many of us, an experience of living inside a lot of entirely irreconcilable realities simultaneously you know it's like suddenly you were working from home and that was amazing because you didn't have a two-hour commute any day every day and and you got to be around your kids all the time but also like
oh my gosh, you were around your kids all the time and you couldn't get any work done. And it was so amazing to watch them grow and to have time around them, but also they made you crazy. And I mean, I just think everyone, or, you know, more tragically, you know, people around you were getting sick and suffering. And in this weird way, your family system was thriving.
It just, everyone I think was dealing with these profoundly contradictory experiences. And Of course, that was not actually about the pandemic, right? The pandemic brought into focus a fundamental feature of existence, which is we are always inundated by profoundly clashing realities. And some of the question is, how much attention do we pay to them?
You know, you are in a position right now where you have to pay attention to it, right? You're covering these deportations and going home to your family, and you have to live in both of those realities. But, you know, even in the most peaceable of times, The extent to which we are confronting the world beyond our own immediate reality is just a choice, right?
I mean, there's always boundless suffering. There's always boundless beauty. And it really is a matter of where do we look? And it's tough, right? You both have to do both at once and can't do both at once. And the question of what kind of balance you strike is infinitely interesting to me.
I'd be happy to. Finding, like losing, is an enormous category, bursting with seemingly unrelated contents, from gold doubloons to God. We can find things like pencils and couch cushions, and things like new planets and distant solar systems, and things that aren't things at all. Inner peace, old elementary school classmates, the solution to a problem.
We can find things that we're never missing, except from our own lives, as when we find a new job or a hole in the wall barbecue joint. And we can find things so deeply hidden that almost no one else thought to look for them, as when we find glial cells or quarks.
I love it when people ask me questions I've not been asked. And that one actually does feel kind of core to who I am in this interesting way. I think I experience the world that way. I mean, I love the bigness of the world, right? I mean, my most profoundly peaceful and interested place is up on top of a mountain where I can see really far.
And that's not just because I happen to love mountains, right? Although I do. I am soothed and intrigued by the experience of the longest possible view. I'm profoundly drawn to questions of scale. I mean, we human beings have a very unique situation, which is that we are finite creatures, to the best of my knowledge, finite creatures in an infinite universe.
And that's kind of a troubling position to be in. And I'm endlessly interested in it. It has all kinds of implications in our day-to-day reality, in our whole existence as a species. That is our context. And I think some part of my brain, for whatever reason, is always looking kind of upward and outward. I think it's kind of native to my brain.
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