98 - Jon Fosse's Melancholy I-II

And I look at the picture of the mountain back home and our boat and I can see that the picture is really a lot like Lars when he gets like that. Of course it's like the mountain at home and our boat but other than that it's the most like Lars when he gets the way he is sometimes. I feel that it's strange how much the picture makes me think of Lars when he's like that. It's black in the same way Lars is black. The darkness is the same. It's a darkness that isn't dead it shines. It's a shining darkness in a way. Hello, this is David. This is Eric. And this is Nick and thank you for listening to another episode of the Books of Some Substance Podcast where today we're discussing Jan Foss's melancholy 1-2. So this book published originally in two pieces 1-1995, 1-1996 is the fictional telling of the life of Norwegian painter Lars Hurtavig. He was a painter in the mid 19th century and large portions of this book are around Hurtavig's mental illness, his family and basically the interactions between these things along with classic Jan Fasa topics of art and death and just how all of this contributes to the meaning of life. And so with that in mind I have read a decent amount of Fasa at this point which is kind of why this book got teed up. I read Septology totally in love with it trilogy totally in love with it. So we decided to read this book. So I'm curious David and Eric what's your experience with Fasa and if this is your first experience how goes it? I've also read trilogy and really really loved trilogy and he's written a short novel called Morning and Evening which I also am a huge fan of. So I had those expectations coming into this and I would say it mostly lived up to my expectations. I really enjoyed the majority of the book but found my self questioning some of its length and repetition in moments I would say. Though I think Kistyle works really well with Lars in the beginning because of how it captures the mind of someone with it skits a frenic disorder. I have a very close family member who suffers from such a thing and the circular thinking getting trapped in patterns and just repeating things and it really actually feels very realistic even if it might be somewhat frustrating to read at times. So yeah that's my initial reaction to it. I think Eric this might be your first was that right? I am the Neophyte Fasa Neophyte first sure this was my first although I was I was very anxious to read it because again I'd heard a lot from both of you via various posts and whatnot and so you know I think I had pretty high expectations and I feel they were met. You know I would say that he well I mean I think like everybody hopefully on this podcast it sounds like Nick you just finished it. You know I'm still kind of even though a day afterwards I'm still processing a lot of what I read and and I have to admit when when I was like up the first I don't know 50 or 60 pages and I was like if this is the whole book you know there's no way I'm I'm going through this. I mean I I appreciate the craft I think you're absolutely right David that he captured this inner monologue or mind of someone who has this mental illness I think quite well and I was impressed with with that internal monologue and how I would know but it felt very realistic to me so I was impressed with that craft but I was definitely hoping that it would be more and and I think it delivered I I think it's very dependent on reading both at once. If the last volume hadn't been part of this it would have felt a bit incomplete and lopsided to me whereas I feel like male and collie too which switches to the point of view of his sister. You know I think it gave it a lot of context and it and it gave it a lot of soul I think too. I think we needed to be grounded a little bit more in somebody who wasn't having delusions to really have this thing hit and so I really appreciated the last part of it quite a bit and that's that's really what turned me to be honest on the book. That last melancholy too was really the the clincher for me that made me go oh yeah this is this is very singular and to understand that I think as I understand it he wrote these first parts and then realized oh there's maybe something that the middle section is too short and maybe not enough to kind of complete what he wanted to complete and I think his sense that he needed to kind of add more at the end there from a different point of view is a smart move and for me is what made the the books as a whole. So I think the the volume one versus volume two that's a whole additional topic that I want to get into but before we get into that I want to talk about just the pros itself because that's basically that's Fossa. Fossa is a very unique voice. I previously would have described him as a long sentence guy coming out of septology because that's basically one sentence and so I was surprised that volume one is actually not just a long sentence guy book it's very choppy it's very broken up and it isn't until volume two that he kind of pulls out the really page long sentence stuff regularly and this kind of elliptical bending of time and flashbacks and stuff and so I'm curious coming into it maybe Eric since you know you're you're looking at it fresh and we've read plenty of other stuff that's like you know crazna horki classic like long sentence stuff proust has plenty of long sentences you know which which one from a prose standpoint do you feel kind of hits better. Which volume do you mean yeah because to me there's a distinct difference between the two and I don't think it's necessarily entirely because of the character I think it's kind of a shift in Fossa's like craft. Yeah I mean I think it's a testament to him that AI wasn't necessarily noticing the form in a way that that I was going oh these sentences are very long or I mean certainly in the beginning as we said before that there was this very kind of what I'm calling Gertrude Stein S kind of you know anxiety which is this repetition of things happening over this kind of getting caught in these loops and and I understand totally why he did that he was trying to make us understand what it would be like to be in this in this disturbed unsettled head right but I think what's really great about it and why I think I'm drawn to the second one is I think he managed to keep he managed to do a good balance of like still keeping us in as a olene's head and and feeling like it was very internal but at the same way it didn't feel self-conscious in a way that I think a lot of this kind of writing can sometimes feel right it really it really put me in her mindset but but in a way that felt very real and and quite emotionally engaging you know I think it wasn't only about to me it was a lot about her aging right and this idea of being in firm and old age that I felt like he captured really well and I found it to be very sort of empathetic to that and and these these feelings of you know I mean spoiler alert she you know her brother is ill and you know ends up dying at the end and I think that that sort of storyline and you know the way that they captured the sort of sorrow and regrett around that and you know and just her thinking about Lars you know in the past tense that just that part felt very genuine and very moving to me in the style although very distinct never seemed to get in the way of that and I think that's really hard to do and I think that's why I found it so more compelling I think than the first part which felt like I'm trying to get inside this guy's head and that's really what it is and you're going to be annoyed by it and it's going to drag on a little bit but it's really important that you understand that and it's not that I don't appreciate it or find it compelling but you know I think it's that classic thing that you kind of appreciate from kind of a conceptual standpoint but in the moment or maybe less appreciative of especially as it goes on and on for pages and pages so that's why that counterbalance of volume two to me was was was really great because it made the first part feel worth it to me because you understand the sorrow of the people around him and what he must have put them through. I think from a form standpoint Vasa really pulls off this style because it's married so well to its function I think with some kind of stylists they tend to divorce their form from what the novel is about and they just enjoy the style for the style which I don't mind but I think his functions as a part of the narrative really well and so the first part you see that repetition that getting trapped in loops of thought and those delusions jarring you in and out. of reality from one sentence to the next. And it works in those short abrupt sentences, whereas part two, and you see the difference in form even in part one once it switches over to the writer, the last section, right? His sec, it still has some of those thoughts, but it's much, much less. It fits the sort of mind of a writer. And so it's, it's not simply that all of part one is that form. I think he can change it based on the character that he's sort of mind he's in. And in the second one, the form alters, but it still has a bit of that jarring disassociation because you're in the mind of this old woman who can't really separate the present from the past and is losing her mind slowly. Memory issues. Memory issues. She doesn't really know who people are. And she's close to death and I assume I think we all are on the same page. She dies at the end, big spoiler. But that's what really I think makes it better writing is that it fits the story it's trying to tell in such a great way. Yeah, he's almost a master of depicting what I would call mental time as opposed to linear time. This is all interior to the max. So, so how do you place the, I don't know if you read the translators note at the end, but the history of this book or books is that volume number one was translated into English, sort of donkey archive book, I believe, and existed for a while without number two. And it was fascinating to me that it sounds like it was almost just a decision of the translator saying that, well, I felt number one ended appropriately, and I didn't think it was necessary to put out number two. But I love number two. I think it rounds everything out. I think it makes Lars more human. You know, you can get really mad at a lot of the stuff that he says. It's pretty terrible in volume one, but volume two gives you that like external view through his sister. And you know, it seemed very, very mandatory to me. So I was kind of shocked that somebody could just say, Hey, you only get the first half because that's all I think you need. Well, maybe translators are, you know, more obsessed with the form like David saying, right? David is saying it's sort of like the marriage of form and content here is so perfect, but the translator is more obsessed with language, right? Because they need to get that translation, right? But yeah, I think you're right. Nick, I couldn't imagine like that that section from when he shows her the paintings that he does like on the wood, I think. Oh, yeah. There's a reason like takes her to this weird place and he's got the charcoal mixed with like water. Yeah. And then through to that sort of storm scene with his father going up on the roof and sort of taking the tile sound, you begin, and you also understand like, Oh, this mental illness is probably congenital. And I just thought that whole sequence was very revealing and just really richly written and like that, that part was really the moment that I was like, Oh, yeah, this book is a keeper. You know, I just seem to click really into place at those moments. That part is really important for a Yon Faso kind of theme that comes up through a lot of his books. And even an expression that he says a couple times, which is I have to paint it away or I have to paint it out. She's basically this release mechanism through art that also then approaches the divine. And if you know some of Yon Faso's history, it's that he was away from the church for a long time. And then I believe converted to Catholicism fairly late in life. And so as a writer, you sort of see these pieces in his individual books of grappling with kind of the weight of art, but also its connection to spirituality and religion and whatnot. And so if you see these pieces as basically, you know, for Lars, painting it out was his way of dealing with it. And then the connection with with the writer in that small part at the end of volume two of trying to figure out or put something, put his finger on what made these paintings divine. And kind of going a step that he never thought he would, which would be seeking out, you know, somebody of the church to try to discuss it with him. And so this whole sort of theme is very prevalent in a lot of Faso books. But again, if you didn't have that stuff in the melancholy too, I think it would be hard to, I don't know, get that full picture of exactly that theme. Yeah, the idea of art and divine. There's a couple of things there. I know Faso said that writing for him was like prayer, which is an interesting thing to think about. And then also the idea of art being this connection to the divine. And you see that, especially in the, is it Vidme? Yes. Is that how you pronounce it, Vidme? The Vidme section, who has that? Well, it's almost, if Nick, if what you say, Nick is true of Vidme almost seems like a proxy for as much the author as Lars. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I would, I would agree with that even though, you know, we often talk about this, if don't make a character into the author, but it's kind of the Faso character. Certainly. Yeah, seems that way. And he has that, that moment of seeing these paintings in a museum by happenstance and having this, this experience of transcendence in front of them. And it's interesting that people feel that and you can have that through art created by someone like Lars, who in reading, especially the opening of the book, it's hard to, it's hard for people. I think a lot of people to see any sort of divine in that kind of behavior and that kind of mentality, someone who is clearly troubled. And you do have empathy for him in some regard, in the opening section, because he's just brutally humiliated by these other painters who can't paint. Yeah, you see him just, especially in the middle section of him in the hospital, clearly not doing well, talking about murdering all women or whores can't keep his hand from between his legs. He's just, he's having a hard time. So it's kind of hard to see, I think, someone like that can create these paintings that are so that open up people to the transcendent. Yeah. Well, I mean, he's almost like a Norwegian van Gogh. If we're going to really, you know, go somewhere in terms of parallels, right? I mean, Van Gogh is in and out of hospitals and, you know, and certainly people go to his paintings for, you know, that, that kind of transcendence to, I mean, it's reached the point now where he's, you know, they're doing the crazy immersive shows in cities and stuff with Van Gogh. But I mean, I think for me, from coming from my vantage point, I find the sort of tortured artist thing sort of trite at this point. Like it's been done so many times that I just feel that, I think initially too, it was like, I don't know if I want to, you know, read through another one of these stories. And I think it's a testament to the author that he brought something new to it that maybe I had not seen before. And maybe it's just that he got us so close to being inside the head of what it would be like that it felt a little bit more both fresh and empathetic too, because I think often the tortured artist is also this monkey and the cage thing too, or it's like, oh, you know, Van Gogh got his ear off. What a weirdo. You know what I mean? Whereas here, he did a really great job of both seeing the horror of what it must be. He must have been like, but also managing to build empathy for him too. And I think that's really one of the big accomplishments of the novel is that it would be easy to sort of dismiss a character like this. And he somehow has made him not only flesh and blood, but someone you can sympathize and empathize with. And to go to the paintings too, I mean, it's interesting. I didn't really have a chance to think about it, but it does feel like he was a little bit of head of his time in terms of what he was painting. I mean, there's definitely sort of impressionistic romanticism, even surrealism that are in these paintings that really did not kind of catch hold until the 20th century, I would argue, or very late 19th. And so it's interesting to think about, you know, there are these pockets of art history that aren't part of the large continuum that I was taught, you know, in school, and many other people are taught that I think was also very revealing to me, you know, and I feel like maybe this book is as much about elevating him to a more sort of celebrated place as a painter as much as it is a fictional exercise or one could hope anyway. And he kept creating art, the real Lars in his life. It kind of mentions in the book that at the end, O'Lean goes to visit him in a poor house. Eric, I don't know if you mentioned it earlier, or this was before we were recording, there's not a lot of his oil paintings around. There's a lot of sketches and things, but throughout his life until his death, I think he would, he didn't have much money, he would just like make art on loose scraps of paper on the back of tins, he just kept doing it. And you see that in the beginning, when he's first starting doing things on wood, on driftwood essentially, it seems like that will to create is in him. And it's hard to say if it's the only thing like keeping him going, or I haven't figured out how I feel about what the book is trying to say, if it's trying to say anything at all about that. drive to create. I think it leans in that direction if I had to you know take a side which is that even though especially in the first volume you know you get all that interiority and he's certainly struggling but I feel like he struggles the most when it's taken away from him and so I think there's there's an element there too and it again it fits in with that sort of painted away type of mentality and I think you know that's worth that's worth kind of exploring for modern life too is you know what are the things that that we do that are therapeutic for ourselves and I feel like the world is perhaps growing less and less tolerant of of many people on their behaviors in many cases rightfully so but I think there's an argument for humanity here that's pretty powerful that you really get when you see you know the second volume the the flashbacks of Lars as a child you just see it in his eyes he'd be out all night not sleeping because he's just tormented right and so the only thing that really pulled it together was being able to produce this art and one could argue then that also benefits society because then we have that and so I think it's a complicated story I'm not apologizing for certain behaviors or comments and such but I think it doesn't flinch yeah exactly it forces you to think about that and I think that you know common theme that we always discuss is really important for quality art is to not give you an answer but rather oppose that question and I think Fossa poses that question really well and he he seems in both his output and his personal life like converting to Catholicism like life and what he writes about in terms of creation and art and maybe I'm making a large leap but it he seems very connected to the idea of the artist suffering to create and Christ yeah and maybe that's the leap but I wonder if that's something that he I mean it's touched on a little bit when the dialogue between Maria the young new pastor I think this is how she's referred to and the writer I don't know just a passing thought I guess what is it with these torture Scandinavians man you know like what I was thinking was you know you talked about this intersection of sort of religion and art in this book and with with Fossa and then I think my father's favorite film director was Ingmar Bergman and so I was introduced to it at a very young age and I've kind of blown through a lot of those films over the last three decades and talk about someone again who is playing at this little you know intersection of art and religion right because religion looms very large and Bergman's work too and it's interesting to frame it in today's age where I feel that at least a lot of learned people who maybe live in cosmopolitan places tend to be more secular than you know tend to have a very interesting interesting a very strong a version to anything around religion and so the sort of secular secular churches are often these places of art right which are theaters or museums or or we think it's creative people that that can fill this void that maybe religion provided you know generations centuries ago and you could make the argument that Fossa is grappling with this idea that maybe it's not enough you know that art maybe is not enough to fill that void and if he's converting to Catholicism late in life he's maybe making the realization that I need something more and I think unfortunately I think religion has the sort of taint for a lot of us in our generation because of evangelical evangelical religion and the United States and you know the wars that are based on it and but certainly I've there's been in people in my family that you know have are not evangelical are very smart people but find a lot of comfort and having a religious practice to kind of fill in some of those or at least grab let them grapple with certain questions or fill a void that maybe they're feeling and I think that this book doesn't take that head on but I think it's definitely trying to say something especially in that middle vidmus section you know where he's clearly like should I join the church should I not you know is art enough hmm you know I think it's it's hard for someone to consume at least in my opinion a lot of art and not sort of question that idea because if if you have those experiences of transcendence through art and you feel something beyond yourself beyond the world it's hard not to grapple with those questions and so for someone like Fossil who seems to be very much attuned to those questions and creating so much of it and I imagine that section on the writer near the end of part one really must be a version of him because at least what I read was that he loved the paintings of of Lars so much that he did he felt like he had to write this book hmm yeah but yeah I think you're hitting on a really great point about you know questioning secularism essentially and I honestly I find myself kind of increasingly less tolerant of just this blanket I'm gonna make fun of religion which is super common like you said in cosmopolitan area yeah me too there's plenty of stuff to target right I mean pick apart catholicism pick apart you know you throw it at a dartboard you'll hit something but it seems like the general concept is lost and of course like you said there's been plenty of rough stuff that's happened around that but all of these Fossil books I feel like for me they're transcendent to me because it's showing various characters who are aren't Fossil who are questioning that and who specifically went against the church ditched it completely and lived lives and found a gap and had to grapple with that had to figure out what that meant and no I'm not projecting what you know my future holds but that quest I think is very valid I think it's a very intellectual thing to do I don't think it says silly as basically the one-liners that I hear people say about religion and what not quite frankly I'm proud if you find something that is what gets you through the day and I think that that's more mature quite frankly and so it's interesting going through that process myself because I'm not sure I would have processed these books in the same way 10 years ago 15 years ago where I would just been like ah whatever god okay cool great file that book in that category but it's much much more valid to me now yeah vague spirituality or even concrete spirituality in a work of fiction would have turned me completely off of reading in my 20s yeah exactly where's now yeah I think having more experience and more more experience both of transcendence and with the darkness of the void of reality does mature people in a way well I mean I don't know if either of you had this but as someone who has always put a lot of put a lot of stake in creativity and art as as I sort of operate slightly peripherally from you know being an artist and I've always kind of gone to it as a place of refuge I think for me personally the the pandemic sort of for me was like I don't know if art's enough like I was beginning to question that a little bit not I'm not anymore religious than I was before the pandemic but it did make me flinch a little bit in terms of like thinking about that famous adage there are no atheists and foxholes you know it's sort of this thing where I think we've all relatively live privileged lives that have allowed us to leave religion behind because we haven't needed it any sort of acute way and and maybe this is getting a little off topic but it's interesting to think about you know what was fossa plumbing in this that he felt he was missing you know it's certainly important to we always grapple with quite existential questions whether they were religious based or not I think if you're a thoughtful person but what was it for him that sort of provoke this turn that he was exploring in this book is an interesting question in itself to ask you know never mind your own personal questions that come up around this topic there's also a level of fossa's personal life I believe you struggle with alcoholism and so that's a layer to it as well I'm not sure where that lines up with this book but septology is very much a sober man grappling with things with no assistance from anything else hence the religious aspect but I did want to read a vidma quote so from the end of volume two that I think fleshes this out really well that I identified with and so goes now he vidma has for many years gone around and thought it was blasphemous to use expressions like the divine and god people shouldn't use expressions like that or if they do use expressions like the divine and god then they shouldn't mean anything by them and now as he thinks this thought vidmas sees before him all the despairing people who have tried to give meaning to their lives by saying that it's God's will this or that happens because the darkness has always been heavy. The wind hard, love has always always been somewhere between killing and caring. The ocean has always been hard, births even harder, and above it all there has always been an enormous sky, the blue ocean and the blue sky, impenetrable darkness and whistling wind, and then a church, a house of prayer, up on the hill, a graveyard in darkness and rain, and there has to be a meaning to it all. So yeah, life's hard. That's why people believe. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that I don't know if either one of you ever wore a fan or listened to the singer Nick Cave, but you know he was always this anti-religion guy and then his 14-year-old son falls off a cliff and dies, his older son dies of an overdose, and suddenly he's like, maybe I was a little harsh in my young age, being so anti-religion, and I wouldn't say he's proselytizing necessarily, but he's just saying now it's like, you know, I think people need to keep an open mind, and if you know, going to church once a week opens them up to healing, then I don't have any judgment, because like you said, Nick, life can throw you some curveballs and, you know, who are we to judge how people deal with that as long as they're not overly pushing it on other people in unreasonable ways, you know. Yeah, that's basically it. And that's why I think this book's so fascinating, and he is so fascinating, because we look to fiction to not be so deterministic, right, to raise questions, to make us grapple with these questions, and arguably I think that's what religion and its purest form is supposed to do, and now it's not supposed to be so prescriptive, and so that gets us back to that sort of art and religion maybe aren't so far away, it's just the way they've been framed in contemporary times, they make them seem so far apart. I'm still not going to church though. I'll read all these books, but you guys should come to shul every once in a while with me, it's fun. So I don't know how to phrase the question or how to ask it, and Nick, you kind of talked about it a little bit in terms of your own feelings on religion, but what is this for both of you, I guess, does this book make you, how does it make you feel about that word divine in relation to art, or what are your thoughts on that idea? Do you feel a connection in art, in literature, in paintings, whatever, it doesn't matter? The answer is yes. Yes, I do. Okay. And what does that mean? I don't think we'd still be doing this podcast if that didn't exist. I mean, not to get hyperbolic, but there is some of that connection for me when I'm reading Fossa, because I think it hits at an intellectual level, but it also hits at something deeper. And there's plenty of books that love at an intellectual level, but aren't really hitting that thing. You know, not that, again, just talking about books that I read in a row, but I just read demons, Dostoevsky, right? And that's an intellectual book, but it's not really hitting anything from an emotional level. Also, Dostoevsky is quite frankly after we read all that Tolstoy, less good or a writer, but that's a whole nother podcast. And I think that's the key to all this stuff, which is you can connect with things in different levels, but when it hits multiple levels, it kind of unlocks something. And I think the topic of divine has been distorted by lots of, I don't know, like this divine mean that you have to be speaking in tongues, does divine mean that you have to have an out of body experience, does divine mean anything. And to me, it's just, you know, the thing that you connect with that helps you identify with your external surroundings more, or I guess maybe even your your internal what's going on. And I think when you get that, it feels right. And this book to me felt right. And I love that it was talking about somebody experiencing art that felt divine, whereas I can read the book about the experience of the divine and feel divine about that. And so he's very clearly tapping into a thing that very much works for me. I was going to say that word divine is very loaded. And so I think it sort of implies this kind of trance and transcendental experience on the, you know, level of I saw angels in the sky. But but, you know, I'm with Nick. I think that, you know, art both making it and or playing it or experiencing it. I think, you know, especially when it when it's really great and it sort of seems to stop time in some ways, or you're sort of you're almost pulled out of sort of the linear, you know, contemporary time that we live in. The way we perceive time, I think, you know, I think for me is is why, you know, I want to keep on living. And I would argue that, you know, this book, there were moments where I was so sucked into it that I did have, you know, moments of like, wow, a moment like that. But I think it can come from from so many other smaller, even smaller things and much larger things. I mean, I think about like there are certain songs that I hear that I've heard a thousand times, but still feel transcendental to me, right? And, and, you know, that's art working its magic. And I feel lucky that it's that I was tuned to observe and find those things and it can still do that for me. Because I'm not so sure that people, other people, everybody can get there, you know, all the time. And, you know, I think I feel very fortunate that, you know, I feel like I've had a lot of those experiences. I wouldn't call them religious. I wouldn't necessarily call them divine, but I will, I would call them like time stopping in a way that makes me feel very full in a way that maybe a more scientific or intellectual or rational kind of approach to something does not. Yeah, you hit on something that I liked a lot. With that alchemy, you basically talked about unlocking time, which I like that we've absorbed the very pristine idea of that, which is 100% true. Like, that's, that's what it is. And I think there could be a lot of things that unlock time and art is one of them. And I guess to to piggyback on on top of that of the, you know, what is the definition of the divine experience? I feel like at least in my religious experience going to plenty of church whatnot, growing up is that, you know, I never, I never got the thing that they were saying that I was supposed to, right? Like, nobody talked to me. I didn't see anything, all that stuff. But maybe if it was reframed in a much more pragmatic fashion, maybe I'd still be there. I don't know, because what I get from this is very powerful. And that exists within other sources as well. But if you're sitting around waiting for, you know, a vision to appear in front of you, you might be waiting for a while. And I think that's like kind of unrealistic. And I think that's a core of what Fossa gets at is reframing the divine. That's what I would say is like that. Well, and that part is work, art is work, whether it's making it or receiving it. Yeah, you don't get it for free. Yeah. And I would say by extension, so is religion, if practice correctly, or not, I don't know what that correctly means, but, you know, practice in a concerted way. I think it's, I think a lot of people sort of aversion to religion. And maybe the people who practice, other people who practice it is that it's too easy sometimes, you know, like it makes it too easy for you to be passive in the way you receive it. And I would argue that, you know, the best art for me is the stuff that I had to like really concentrate or really work for. Or, you know, the lasting stuff is the stuff that I, you know, invested my time and energy into too. So I think there's a element of that that's in the Fossa book too. But I think there's also something very easy about the way Fossa can, can stop time or reveal that little window into the transcendent. It's because it at least, or maybe, maybe I'm wrong, but it's not hard. There's books that have felt difficult to get into, to get to that moment, but I don't know why I find Fossa very easy in that regard. I don't know if it's so much that it's hard to read as it is opening yourself up to the questions, you know, of what he's presenting. I think that a lot of people would shut down because I think it presents a lot of things that are scary. Like I think O'Lean, you know, getting old in that chapter and ultimately dying is, it's rough, you know, and I think that it's not that it's hard to read. It's just, it's hard to experience it through her because we're all going to end up there in one way or another. Yeah. Yeah. We talked a lot about transcendence and divine, but Fossa doesn't shy away from the darkness of life and the mystery that can be totally attached to it. Yeah. You're talking about the divine and I kind of mentioned a word and it made me think of this quote that actually our other podcast, gentleman Nathan who could not be here because he's in Alaska. Him and I have both read, there's a, I think recently deceased British philosopher named Roger Scruton who wrote on aesthetics and religion and other things, but him and I have both read some of his stuff and there's a. passage that I have sitting here from one of his things about this idea of I'm just going to read it real quick because I think it's relevant. It says, "Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur, it is as though on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window through which we catch sight of another and brighter world, a world to which we belong, but which we cannot enter." And he's talking about that feeling of transcendence in art and nature and other things. Hey, man, brother. Yeah. It's a strange thing because I keep thinking about it, but I have such a hard time defining what that feeling is. It's like we're not going to let them know when you see it. Well, there's your end. Thanks for listening. You can find out more about us at booksofsubstance.com and on Twitter and Instagram with the handle books O Substance. And if you do head on over to our website, make sure you check out our store, which has new, cool, proust-themed merch which you can use to identify other proust lovers out in the wild. And as always, if you can click things, subscribe buttons, like buttons, leave reviews, that really helps. 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