Shankar Vedantam

We just can't manage it because we have lives.

And so the amount of yourself that you're willing to give to that might vary for different people.

But we certainly have sympathy for someone who gave so much of himself to it.

I don't know if you're familiar with the anthropologist Arnold Van Genep.

He's the person who popularized the term rites of passage.

And Van Genep wrote a piece called The Research Project or Folklore Without End.

And it was about a person who decided to write the definitive work on the evil eye.

And he went to his carol in the library and he began getting all the books about the evil eye and he compiled all of the references that he could find.

And he took it to his advisor and his advisor says, this is a great start, but there's still other cultures and there's, you know, ancient Greek and Roman sources that you should look at.

And so he goes back and he works on those.

And this continues for years and years.

And eventually this man dies.

dies at his carol in the library and nobody quite remembers what he was doing there.

And that's kind of the impression that you get of Riley Shepard.

But it turned out there was someone next to Riley in his final days as he labored away in his carol.

Before he collapsed and was sent to the hospital, Riley was living in a small house.

On D Street in Porterville.

He was in rough shape.

I thought, you know, he's a little bit disheveled.

But Steve Enslin, a Porterville native, says once you got to know Riley, he grew on you.