One of my most rewarding listening experiences this year has been Past Present Future, a podcast produced by the London Review of Books. If you’re not familiar with the LRB, I will only note that, despite its title, this literary publication does not deal solely with the “review of books”; you can also find nuanced explorations of global events, history, and cultural studies among its other essays. The reporting is painstaking, and resists a common pull among news media, into forgetting the full lineage of worldly crises and serving instead as a vehicle for hot takes. Put another way, the LRB doesn’t feel like a publication writing a first or even second draft of history, so much as one striving to set down key concepts, tensions, and details with a desire to reflect posterity as much as possible in the present. The full attainment of such foresight is impossible, of course, but the attempt nevertheless reminds us of the existence of posterity—which is no small feat we’re in the throes of here and now, and susceptible to all its failings.
The Past Present Future podcast lives up to its parent-publication’s reputation, through episodes connecting history to contemporary politics, and episodes analyzing iconic essays not only in light of their themes, but also with respect to how their arguments weathered the course of time. General conversations of note include a chat with Lea Ypi around whether democracy can ever surmount the problems of the nation-state, one with Mary Beard on the fetishized gloss of Roman history in technocrat culture, another with Andrés Velasco on how to talk about US complicity in Chilean atrocity without stripping Chileans of their own political agency, and another with Meehan Crist on why we’ve been fretting about overpopulation for the last 200 years.
Within the podcast, though, is also a History of Ideas series, with a short season on “The Great Essays, and the Great Essayists”. In it, David Runciman explores work by Montaigne, Hume, Thoreau, Woolf, Orwell, Weil, Baldwin, Sontag, Didion, Wallace, Eco, and Coates. Runciman never styles this as an exercise in “definitive” canon, but rather, strives to use these fairly well-known authors to do the work of a high quality humanities education. Each episode demonstrates how textual analysis, when approached with clear-eyed attention to the faults of the authors, the pecularities of their writing contexts, and a careful consideration of any weaknesses in the prose, might be employed to help us think more robustly about similar concerns today.
My favourite episodes address complex and perhaps lesser-known facets of each writer’s output: David Hume’s analysis of national debt, in surprisingly fitting conjunction with his thoughts on suicide; Orwell’s wartime essay on being English and hypocrisy in the fight against fascism; Simone Weil’s challenge to personhood as a basis for political action, and where it leaves us; and Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”, which is often reduced to strange soundbites when cited.
Just summarizing a few pieces doesn’t offer a strong sense of the voice, though, so here’s an excerpt from Runciman on Hume, to give you a taste of the former in action:
He was prepared to think anything, and it’s the contrast between that person and the person who writes the essays that gives the essays their extraordinary bite.
Hume wasn’t the best advocate of his own craft. He did write an essay about essay-writing—an essay about the essay: pretty meta and also pretty off-putting—and it is, frankly, not one of his best. It contains a very unfortunate central image.
Hume believed that he was living in the great age of essay-writing, and in some ways he was right. This was the Scottish Enlightenment; we’re in the middle of the 18th century. This is the era of new magazines and newspapers that are communicating, not with a general readership, but with a growing, curious, wider readership of people who want to hear the latest ideas; and the essay is often the form in which those ideas are expressed.
And Hume celebrates this. He thinks it’s wonderful. He says it’s bridged a gap that previously existed in the way in which human beings sought to understand the world. So, he contrasts what he calls the world of learning with the world of conversation. Until his era, he thought, human understanding was divided, almost unbridgeably, between these two worlds. Learning is literally cloistered: it’s what happens in a monastery, or in a university, in a library—in a room cut off, in which someone reads books, reflects, comes up with ideas that have an academic quality to them. Then, as now, Hume believed that a lot of academic thought didn’t translate very well, struggled to reach a wider audience or readership—partly because the people who come up with it don’t really know how to communicate it. [S]ome of the best ideas are cut off from circulation by the circumstances by which they’re produced.
And on the other side you have the world of conversation, or as he calls it “chat”, gossip: what most people do, most of the time—also curious, inquisitive, but he thought more or less unfounded on philosophical reflection; often in itself rather superficial; easily twisted or provoked by things that hadn’t been properly thought through.
And the great thing about the essay—this is what Hume thinks—is that it comes from the world of learning, but communicates to the world of chat, or the world of conversation. It bridges that gap. And the really unfortunate way he expresses this is to say that the world of learning is the world of men: that’s what men do. And the world of conversation is the world of women. And he describes himself as an ambassador from the world of learning to the world of conversation.
In other words, he literally—literally!—describes the essay as a form of mansplaining.
(And even he notices this isn’t a great idea, because about a page after he comes up with this image, he backtracks from it.)
Now, I quite enjoy never knowing when Runciman will slip into present concern or explore more of the past, because there’s a great deal of empathy irrespective of where his reflections take us. I don’t always agree with his conclusions, and I sometimes wish he’d take a different path through the work, but the aim of such discussion is never to reach a uniformity of perspective. The goal of any good humanities education is simply to learn how to hold ideas in tension (which is not the same as “balance”), and from that tension pursue a better understanding of all the factors informing how we move through the world today. On this accord, Runciman splendidly provides.
But at the close of this series, just ahead of a final Q&A, there came one episode of Past Present Future, titled “The Art of the Essay”, that looked at premises underpinning not just the form but also our veneration of literature in general. And this episode has haunted me ever since. Whether that was the point, I do not know!
Today, I’d like to invite my paid subscribers into a deeper dive around what troubled me about that piece. Free readers: I do hope the nudge toward some excellent episodes tickles your fancy. If not, though, I’ll have another piece for you soon, reflecting on part of today’s topic through a review of some of my own essays this year.
Then we’ll round out the year with something lighter.
After the year we’ve all had, won’t that be fun?
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