Welcome to the New Thinkery. Welcome back. I'm David Barr. With me, as always, is my good friend Greg McPrayer.
How are you, Greg? I'm doing really well. Good to see you, David. Good to hear you.
Likewise. And it's kind of nice, relaxing. It's a cool 36 degrees here at the end of the semester. Are you teaching summer courses?
I am actually. I'm teaching, actually this is actually kind of interesting. I'm teaching a class on Zenfins Education of Cyrus for High School Teachers. It's a month long class with the Great Hearts Academy.
And then I'm teaching three summer academies with the Ashbrook Center. One is on Abraham Lincoln. Another is on sort of political economy in the American regime. The third one is on sort of principles of the American Revolution.
So it's very interesting. If you have any high school students out there listening to us, they can probably kind of hope not. But if you are listening, you can register for those high school classes still. Oh, it's the high school students.
I thought it was teachers on how to slave their students. The Cyrus classes to teachers. Right. The other three I mentioned were for high school students.
And you get two college credits for them. So interesting. And Alex, how are you? Any summer classes with you?
Yeah, I'm doing well. Yeah, I'm teaching right now. Intensive three week course on Machiavellian Bacon. I'm doing the Princeton, the New Organon, and the New Atlantis.
And on Greg's recommendation, I'm throwing a little bit of swift. I'm interested. You're doing the LePoutins? Yeah, the LePoutins.
I thought that would be a nice sort of way to end the semester and make it a little easy. We should do that. This is a special book. I was reading to my daughter the other day.
You know the book, The Tuna? David? No, no, I don't. The Tuna is a book about a goose, a silly goose actually.
And what happens is she comes in, she's feeding, just pecking around, look for stuff, and she comes across a book and she says, what is this thing? And then she recalls that some kid Billy was sitting on his grandfather's lap in. Billy's grandfather says, he who owns books and loves them is wise. And so, I'll just love and hold on to this book.
And her neck grows longer and longer because she gets so proud and she starts giving advice to all the animals, but it's bad advice. She's not wise. The book about sophistry, I was wondering, I like these books where you start realizing there's some good moral lessons, you know, substantive lessons that aren't just about making like your maybe woker anti-racist or something, but actually I've prude it. And I was thinking, I was like, ah, this reminds me of somebody who holds books and is proud of holding books.
I just really read them. And I'll leave it to the listeners to figure out what podcasts we're talking about. We can call it that Petunia Petunia examined life. Yeah.
I was there four of them and three of us when they meet us at a conference, they're gonna be bad for us. Yeah, but there's soft bodies. You got our body, Greg. He's just old and leathery and sinewy.
Greg, you're 50 years old. You and Alex, both of you, one share, thank you. You and Alex both venture over 300 pounds. So I'm not sure.
That's not true. It is true. We're talking with Jake Cannon. Jake, thank you, Jake Cannon.
Yeah. Thank you, Jake. All right. So today we're talking about my favorite English author.
You should have said about Jake. Yeah, Jake Spears always the exception, but Joseph Conrad. And it's funny to refer to him as an English author. This was his third language.
So it's amazing. He was so we know him as Joseph Conrad, his full name. I don't even know how to pronounce this. Joseph Teodor Conrad now ligs course in Niauski.
I think you had that spot on. That sounded perfect to me. That's a lot of names. So he was born in 1857 in Ukraine to under under the czar, but his parents were Polish patriots and they die when he's a kid.
He's adopted by his uncle, Sadius, who takes care of him for the next few decades. Conrad served in French merchant vessels and the British merchant surface throughout his German general. He didn't know that this was David. One was alive.
He was born in 1857 and he dies in 1924. So he did him. He burned right for only a short period of time. But he spent his life like other interesting writers.
It's just enamored with the sea and everything that comes with it. So the sea was his, my favorite quote about the the sea as teacher is by Melville who calls it his Harvard and Yale where he doesn't see puts that in the mouth of his protagonist. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on maybe Alex?
Why? I mean, I love Melville and you actually gave me a book, a book, a book that I graduated from when I graduated from doctoral studies. But do you have any ideas? Anybody thoughts on why this genre of literature was so popular at this time?
Was it just because that's what was happening in the world? Are you asking Alex or me? I agree with you. Yeah, yeah.
Okay. So I do have theories about it. I mean, it was the mode of transportation to get to the unknown world. So I mean, boats are how Conrad discovered the horrors of what was going on in Congo.
And his famous Heart of Darkness, right? That's another famous novella short work by Conrad. I should say a little bit. I don't want to dodge your question because it's interesting.
Greg, we should return to it. But his most famous works are Lord Jim, full novel, Nostromo. He's another good one under Western skies or eyes. I'm narcissist one too.
There's one narcissist that's not the full name, but it has a bad word in the name. I don't know how that's taught these days. He co-wrote a book with Ford Maddox Ford, another well-known writer, and then just a slew of interesting short stories of which I mean, Tae Fun is one of the most preeminent along with a secret agent. She's another book about anarchists and bombs.
His writing style is fairly complex and maybe as a result of having learned English as his third language. I'm so used to Conrad. I've been enjoying him for so many years. I kind of washed his off of me.
But you and Alex both mentioned that you found some of the pros tougher going. Not like the sentence structure or anything but the vocabulary was odd. And I think some of the meaning of the words had changed. I just found sometimes I'd be reading and I wouldn't realize something that said I have to go back and say, I think he means this word anymore.
Yeah. Different way than what we need it now. But I don't know how you guys feel about it. But whenever I read a book that's on something nautical, the term's just always overwhelming.
There's a billion in terms of art that I just don't know. Yeah, I agree with you. The sentence structure wasn't just the terminology which I had to look at a lot of words, including one that is a dirty word. But I also did that.
I didn't struggle with the sentence structure but preparing for this episode I thought, you read texts in different ways. And so as I was just trying to figure out what was going on, I thought the sentence structure was not conducive to just trying to figure out what's going on. Because these extraordinarily long sentences complex and often the subject and the main thrust of the sentence wouldn't. He would hold that from the reader until the end.
I think maybe like a wave sort of crashing over you. So it seems like he was trying to imitate what was going on. I felt like my beautiful, I was actually quite surprised to learn. I didn't know until recently that Conrad wasn't wasn't English.
And then you sort of are amazed at the power of his diction. And then I just started wondering to myself, if the best writers don't, in fact, if it's not their native tongue, like having it not be your native tongue allows you to be more precise in ways. I'm wondering now, but Cobb is like this. Yeah.
So that's the language you think in. So things kind of come sort of easily to you. But I was thinking like Strauss wrote in English right now as a native tongue. And so a lot of philosophers wrote in Latin, which is not necessarily a tongue language.
So maybe being a foreign tongue allows you to be much more precise in your terminology. I don't know, just a weird sort of thing to notice. Yeah, there's an interesting account though of the way he spoke was he was kind of aristocratic. So the way that he spoke was formal.
I found it in a calendar Wikipedia today right before this with Bertrand Russell meeting Conrad for the first time. And he said it was amazing. Like looking into his soul, it was like a kindred spirit. They like Bertrand Russell and that's their lives overlapped enough.
Because he just died a decade or two ago. And we did it, correct? I don't know. He died in the 60s.
Oh, yeah, yeah. So Conrad knew the preeminent men and women of his time. His circumlocutions with his writing that you pointed out, Greg, it's funny that he was a great admirer of Henry James. Other writers criticized him like Nabokov wrote him up as wrote him off as just another guy that writes about the sea.
And look how boring this is. Like this is your main topic. I mean, you've exhausted it. I will say you wrote you wrote up a little piece on Forbes on this and this contrasts with Hemingway's short terse prose.
And I will say I find this much more interesting than Hemingway's short terse prose. I realized that we may lose listeners to this. But I don't see the appeal of Hemingway. This is much more interesting to me.
I really enjoy the longer sentences and more complex sentence structure. I agree with you. And Hemingway wrote the preface to my grandfather's book of short stories. I've told you this.
You don't know him because he's a writer, but he was on the same publishing house, Scribner's and Sons. And Hemingway wrote the preface to his book of short stories called All Good Americans, which is a phrase that I sometimes weave into what I write next to Joe. What's your name? Jerome Barr.
My father's father. Yeah. And so date my grandmother and my grandfather visited Hemingway in Florida for a few weeks. Very so.
Yeah, yeah, cool. Go on. Go on. Go on.
Go on. I was going to ask you about the sea. Yeah. What was the question?
Do you ask the question about the sea? The interest in the sea. Yeah. I'm sorry.
My question was, you know, Melville, I mean a little bit earlier, but Robinson Crusoe, all these nautical books. I was just wondering if you did say you had some ideas here. Why this became such a popular genre. Yeah, it's just that the sea and ships that was the vehicle to the unknown.
So you couldn't get around the voyage, like the aspect of the voyage. Airplane travel so boring. It's hard to weave into a novel. It's a one-time.
Even a nice travel lover space travel. Totally. Yeah. Yeah.
If it really takes off and if we can go further and further, I think I was on the Twitter the other day about this. He doesn't think that that's so because there's nothing actually out there to maybe this is not representing. Yeah. I'll tell you knows all that.
Yeah. That's right. Well, I think when they discover when they're like, we might have found life and you're like, okay, well, how many eyes does it have? Does it shoot lasers from its fingertips?
Like, what is this? Like, it's an amoeba. Oh, I mean, Alex. There's so much more down here to be understood and also it's just, you know, the circumstances, this is so often the circumstances that allow us to survive and flourish are here.
They're not out there. We kind of turned it into a frontier. But on the, you know, the interest of the sea is I think long standing. He said makes a big deal of it, you know, thousands of years ago with Conrad with Conrad, what struck me as interesting about his is that he sees, and this is built, I think this plays off of McWearn away, the captain of the ship.
But he sees technology as having mastered, to an extent, the seas more than it ever been. There's a couple of remarks to the effect that if this wasn't a steamship, if it didn't have an engine, it would have been destroyed a lot earlier. The seas have turned far more commercial where they're able to ship workers far more easily. So it does seem like what this fixation is, is the sea is the least hospitable place on Earth.
It just completely neutralizes human powers. And yet we're getting on the cusp of a moment. It looks like in the story where we can even forge our way through a hurricane, right? So there, I think there's a kind of subtext of the story about human mastery and nature's most violent forces, right?
Yeah, I agree. I wanted to read, so just again to remind this story, short story, typhoon, six chapters, I don't know, 80 pages or so. It came out of serialized and then it came out in a collection of three other short stories. I think it was called typhoon and other stories.
And it has in 1903 as a quote on the frontispiece by Keats called Far as the Mariner on highest mast can see all around upon the calumpt vast, the calumpt vast, so wide was Neptune's Hall. And I think that for Conrad, there's a quote I couldn't find it by come across it before. He considered the sea as inexhaustible, the sea in man's adventures upon it as inexhaustible as eternity, or as with the life of the gods, which is kind of interesting perspective because now we consider the sea as something that just has to be leapt over to get to Europe or wherever they'll. But I wanted to read a passage just we talked a little bit about as pros to kick us off and then we can talk about the summary.
So backstory is there's a typhoon happening. There's Captain McWhir who's a relative of Greg's father actually, and McWhir is the heads up the steamer called the Nan Shan and the steamer has a cargo of Chinese laborers, about 200 of them, and it encounters a storm. And they're two interesting things to kind of think about first. So first let me read you a description of Captain McWhir because he's the protagonist.
He and with like his second mate, Jukes JUKS, but you have to understand McWhir's personality to kind of unlock the story. And then I'll read you a passage about the storm if that's all right with you guys. So with McWhir, the way the book begins is the first sentence. Captain McWhir of the steamer and Nan Shan had a physion, a physion, a hypnomy that in the order of material appearances was the exact counterpart of his mind.
It presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity. It had no pronounced characteristics, whatever. It was simply ordinary, irresponsive, and unruffled. And later on in the first chapter, I describe Conrad writes, Captain McWhir had sailed over the surface of the oceans as some men go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last without ever having been made to see all that may contain of perfity, of violence, and of terror.
There are on sea and land such men thus fortunate or thus sustained by destiny or by the sea. So I think Conrad here indicates that it's the violence and terrors of the ocean, the violence and terror of life, the vicissitudes of life, especially at its hardest points that help unlock its secrets. What are we going to say Alex? If I had one more detail to his personality, it's emphasized a few times how much he's committed to facts.
Just read a couple passages about this. He says, Conrad says, with a temperament neither Laquatius nor Tastajourn, he found a very little occasion to talk. He's very, very anti-talk about the novella. There were matters of duty, of course, directions, orders, and so on, but the past being to his mind done with the future, not there yet.
There were general actualities of the day required no comment because facts can speak for themselves with overwhelming precision. A little later, he's called Faithful of Facts. And then he describes how the sea appeals to these sorts of people. He says, the China seas, north and south are narrow seas.
They are seas full of everyday eloquent facts, such as islands, sandbanks, reefs, swift, and changeable currents, tangled facts that never let speak to a semen in clear and definite language. Their speech appealed to Captain McWhir's sense of realities, so forcibly that he had given up his state room below and practically lived all his days on the bridge of his ship, often having his meals sent up and sleeping at night in the chart room. So he has this sort of inclination to just look at the present facts and just live among them, not wanting to talk too much, not wanting to interpret too much. And this is an important feature I think of is his personality, not wanting to engage in too much speculation, but just take the facts as they are before us and deal with them as, and this is what gets him to the typhoon.
Yeah, and then the other, just to piggyback off of that, as the typhoon approaches as it starts lashing the ship, I'll read some passages so readers can get a taste of Conrad's prose. Jukes encounters McWhir consulting a book on like nautical storms. And like McWhir is reading, he's like, oh, there's nothing here that's going to teach me anything. Even though we know that McWhir is untested, so one would think that in this book on navigating storms.
He'd learn something, he distains this theoretical knowledge and he puts the book down. Now he doesn't think it has anything to teach him. And in fact, he does the opposite of what the book says. The book and some of the people around McWhir, I think Jukes, they advocate turning four points away from the storm.
So to move away from the storm, but McWhir says no, we're going to rush headlong into the typhoon. Go on, Greg. Well, something else but on that point in particular, his personality, the way that McWhir is presented seems sort of even keeled, I guess that's the point for the whole way through. But what struck me is that seemed like a mistake to me.
When he says he won't do it, he's like, we're going to headlong in the storm. It's because I think it's Jukes says, you know, there's a storm up there. It looks like he's like, how do you know? And he's like, man, there's what we think there is.
And then he says, well, you know, I went through an account of a guy who did what you recommended turning around and avoiding the storm. And then he wrote this long account of how awful the storm was, but how would he have known off of the storm was because he didn't go into the storm. And so there's this weird epistemic, like he's like, because of the epistemic uncertainty of the storm, he's willing to go straight into it. Like maybe there's not a bad storm.
And that struck me as otherwise, he seems so cool headed, he seems completely on top of things throughout, he seems always to make the right decisions with that one extraordinary exception to me seems like the decision to go headlong in the storm. I know that I think if we disagree, that's fine. That strikes me as somewhat foolhard, you're imprudent to have just tackled the storm straight on algae, trying to jump in. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right.
He's distrustful of science with same reason, he's distrustful of images and obviously, I mean, he's in a way, he's right and he's wrong, right? He doesn't, he doesn't trust what, you know, people have researched to find out and he discovers the truth of the storm in a way, no other mariner does, but it's a great cost, obviously. But but in a way, he's also right. He's looking at these, these captains who brag about avoiding danger using their scientific acumen.
I mean, it's like me saying I avoided so many bears and mountain lions because I stayed out of the hills like, well, how did you know you would have counted a bear? I don't know what's there. And what I think is remarkable to pick off of that is that, well, he goes straight into the storm and he enters the eye of the storm and he alone really knows what the storm is. And so in a way, he has bragging rights, obviously, stupid, but he has that sort of that ability to say, I know what what our hurricane actually is.
It's not just based on measurements and speculation, but I've seen it and experienced the fact of the storm. We should probably, I don't want to spoil things for the readers, but it's pretty obvious at this point that the captain successfully navigates the ship through the storm. That's important to see. And it takes a kind of courage, although I know David was trying to jump in, but I was going to mention something relevant to his courage.
But if you wanted to go in first, go ahead, David. So what I wrote in the Forbes review is that Mick were so that little sentence passage I wrote describing his character as a man who'd been thus disdain by fortune to have experienced nothing difficult in life. My interpretation was that Mick were finds his humanity in through the storm. So he snaps.
He is the fellow. Greg has been advocating for listeners that we tackle the movie office space and in that form, which I think Dallas, everybody's seen. The protagonist is a man who comes in with a white star shirt into the office every single day and it's the most terrible existence, but safe existence that one can imagine. And one day he says, you know, I'm through with it.
There's another movie also with Michael Douglas, where I think he flips out and shoots a bunch of people and people and people and people falling down. Yeah, but there's so many examples of this. And we all know this feeling in modern life, anybody that's worked in a cubicle for years. It's terrible.
But my thing is not that he snaps, but he says, well, this is it. And there's also some backstory. Mick Wurr's life is sad. He has a wife at home who doesn't even read the letters that he sends back from his journeys.
She just cares that he's getting paid well so that she can go on shopping sprees. The daughter seems wholly unaware that she even has a father. We'll talk about this at the very end, but he writes, he seems to write a letter during the typhoon. He breaks on and off of the letter.
And so you get his inner thoughts. His wife turns it over, but barely reads it. He doesn't care. So this is the background and this is the cast of mind.
In my theory is that he just, he says, well, I need to reclaim my humanity. And the storm helps him do that. One thing I want to touch on in that reclamation of this humanity is that he seems to be very impressive in his, I'm not like Alex, I don't really know novel terms very well, but like when things are really going to hell and hampask, he just has this amazing ability to do this, you do this, you do that dirty weather, exactly. It's very calm.
He doesn't seem to get in any way agitated. This has to be done. This has to be done. He's checking the pressure of this, the brahometer, everything is sort of mechanically him going through and just sort of issuing orders in a very cool, clear way.
And I was struck by, I was like, man, he's so courageous. At least that's what I thought originally. And then you think about it more and it doesn't. I mean, maybe it is courageous, but it's definitely something, it's not a brand of courage that we often see.
And I'll just point out to connect this to one of our earlier episodes that his heroics are sort of a distinct kind if they are heroic. And the narrator says, this is I'm reading from the text here in chapter four. These are the moments of do nothing heroics to which even good men surrender at times. Many officers of ships can no doubt recall a case in their experience when just such a trans of confounded stoicism would come all at once over a whole ships company.
And Jukes, however, had no wide experience of men or storms. So that's talking about Jukes there. But I thought the contrast was with McWhir and the implication, I think, is that McWhir does have this kind of stoic courage. Like do your job, know your role, a resignation to fate.
Like we're in it like, what good does it do in the middle of a storm to be like, oh my God, we're in the middle of a storm. I'm like, that doesn't do any good. Like you need to man those ropes. You need to go down there and tell the Chinese people.
You need to make sure the runners working, you need to make sure those engineers are getting cold or whatever those into the furnace. Right. It was just all very methodical. It's nothing like Achilles heroism or something like that, just to contrast it.
Yeah. And maybe McWhir deserves a little bit more credit. I mean, we've met people like him. We're just sort of.
I was actually very impressed. I wasn't trying to denigrate him. Sorry. No, no, no.
I'm trying to build off of what you're saying. And he deserves a bit of credit. We've all met very factual people. And the reason his wife doesn't read his letters is because, well, he has nothing really important to say.
We had nice weather. We did this. It's just all matter of fact. It's not until he actually confronts some very terrifying and unexpected facts that then he sees that his approach to life is somehow inadequate.
Right. You know, a person who's never had their character really tried by their circumstance and really tested isn't necessarily going to develop. Now, he finds himself in the perfect situation to experience something, you know, really remarkable. And as a result, I'd like to hear David say a little bit about what he, you know, how he comes in touch with this humanity and what that, how that develops in the story is that that's an interesting idea.
But before I do that, can I read the description of the storm too, so that listeners can kind of have an understanding of what McWhir is facing before you do. Can I just mention that there are two storms? That's right. Okay.
So you're reading an account of the first storm that's very and a passage from the second one. Right. The two storms? The one storm, sorry, but there's a lull in the storm, a long lull.
He goes into the eye of the hurricane, I thought. So he goes through the... This is one of my favorite parts of the book. I'll...
I'm sure go for it. I hate to spoil it. They go through the eye of the hurricane. It's awful.
There's this lull and then it becomes apparent to them that, well, and actually McWhir says like, oh, God, there's nothing. There's nothing. He doesn't say, oh, God, that's two. So that's another one coming and it's going to be worse than this one.
Right. So we don't get that account. Kind of the short after 50 pages of description of a terrifying storm, we then learn there's a worst storm. But we don't get that recounted.
And then the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to get the quote right. And the quote right. And the quote right. And the narrator says, and they do.
That's one of the most famous lines in the... I didn't do this literature. Yeah. What's the line?
I don't know. I should have... T-shirt. So this is a very famous line in...
You can go in the middle and they're looking up and they can see a glimpse of the stars. One of the themes is how black everything gets. You can't see anything. There's no lights.
The lights are blown out. And then finally they can see a couple stars up through the eye of the hurricane and they... While they see it and then finally it starts to get pushed out and the lights start to get tossed out and then they go into the second part of the... Right.
So here's David. So this is the lull in the storm. This is the end of chapter five. Captain Nagur was trying to do up the top button of his oil skin coat with unwanted haste.
The hurricane, with its power to man in the seas, to sink ships, to uproot trees, to overturn strong walls and dash the very birds of the air to the ground, had found this taciturn man in its path. And doing its utmost, had managed to ring out a few words. Before the renewed wrath of winds swooped on his ship, Captain Nagur was moved to declare in a tone of vexation as it were. I wouldn't like to lose her.
He was spared that annoyance. End of chapter. Yeah. Yeah.
So here's the passage. I love the word annoyance there because it shows he's really bought into McWhirr in a way. That's the way he... Right.
Right. Very good. Mac Whirr is the way I would pronounce his name in my head. Here's something about his name.
That's the name of a real captain that's Ron Redhad. Yeah. But it's an interesting name because it means something like the son of the Whirr. And the word whirr is used of things being whirled around.
So it's also a constant word. The word whirr means a low constant sound. So it's sort of steady. And jukes by the way, means a quick sudden movement.
So you see this contrast in the names between Whirr. He sort of steady even keel. And then jukes was juking around the whole time doing this thing together. Yeah.
Sorry. I had to like interpret... I can think of Lucretius because I looked up the same... I had the same interpretation.
Yeah. The name is Alex. But it was a real guy as you mentioned. Yeah.
Yeah. And apparently much nicer and sensible. He was a sensitive man. But jukes was not.
And so therefore it could... I mean, just because real guy doesn't mean he wasn't using that name intentionally. But the fact that he contrasted with jukes shows that he... I think that to me that shows that he actually did intend for Whirr to be sort of taken seriously.
No. The name just happens to fit the character. Oh, because... Because ass is Bray.
I see. Oh, that's very clever. So you got a smart one. So here's the storm really quick.
This is the onset, right? So the very storm. It was something formidable and swift. Like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath.
It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion in rush of great waters. As if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. And in an instant, the men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind.
It isolates one from one's kind. An earthquake, a landslide slip, an avalanche overtake a man incidentally. As it were without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy.
Tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind. Seeks to rout his very spirit out of him. A little bit later, a second passage. The seas and the darks seem to rush from all sides to keep her at the nanshan.
Back where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was handled. And a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a living creature thrown to the rage of a mob.
Hustled terribly struck at, born up, flung down, leaped upon. Captain McWhirr and Jukes kept hold of each other. Defined by the noise, gaggled by the wind. And the great physical tumult beating about their bodies brought like an unbridled display of passion.
A profound trouble to their souls. One of these wild and appalling shrieks that are heard at times passing mysteriously overhead. And the steady roar of a hurricane. Swooped as if born on wings upon the ship.
And Jukes tried to outscream it. Will she live through this? The cry was wrenched out of his breast. It was unintentional as the birth of a thought in the head.
And he heard nothing of it himself. It all became extinct at once. Thought, intention, effort. And of his cry, the inaudible vibration added to the tempest waves of the air.
He expected nothing from it. Nothing at all. For, indeed, what answer could be made. But after a while, he heard with amazement the frail and resisting voice in his ear.
The dwarf sound unconquered in the giant tumult. She may. And that she may is from McWhir. So during the storm, McWhir and Jukes have this on again off again dialogue.
That's interrupted by the ferocity of the typhoon. So they catch each other kind of in patches. But they seem to have a connection because during the storm, McWhir, and this is the other part of the story that is a little bit mysterious to me. All the while, you have to remember there is a cargo of human, 200 human souls.
Chinese laborers below the steamer. And they are being thrown about and tossed about in a fight breaks up because as laborers, they have each been paid. So they have all these silver dollars, or coins, chests of treasure. And they're all smashed up things to the typhoon.
So this just fight breaks out and Jukes has to bring order to it. So that's kind of the other dramatic aspect of the story. Yeah. And I think what's interesting about this is having gone through this and come close to perishing and really discovered the fact of the destruction of nature.
And I think that's the way that McWhir is in a way, as you said, he's in touch with his humanity. But I was trying to think about this relative to this other theme of technology and avoiding suffering. And it seems like on the one hand, you have these steamships, these navigational devices, all the sort of diagrams that geometry and everything that shows them and tells them, there's something really horrible over there. And you can avoid it.
And in avoiding it, it's great because you alleviate suffering, but you also never experience suffering. And the extreme suffering that McWhir witnesses because he's just trustable of that, because he experiences the reality of the storm, shows him a sort of fragility or a human frailty. Or that makes him have, I think, a greater sympathy for his fellow man. So the people on the ship, these are Chinese laborers, right?
And Conrad shows a lot of sympathy for their plight, the fact that they're reduced to such hardship and that they're struggling just to get a little bit of money. And all of their worldly belongings, all of their valuables fit into a small chest. And then they're crossed open. In a way, these people who are just kind of treated as sort of fungible sort of human assets, cargo, we're as discovers them as human beings.
Right. And I think it's only says how we got to treat them fairly. This is what we ought to do them right now. And so maybe a shame to die under there, a low deck.
Yeah. And it's really horrible. The descriptions we get, they're belonging to tossed around. They have porcelain that breaks and cuts their feet.
You know, this is really, you know, hellish. And in a way, I think what McWhir is interesting to me, at least, as somebody who, because he's so flat-footed or so matter of fact, and in the moment, he finds himself in a position that actually allows him to discover something that most sort of scientifically minded people won't discover because they're precisely trying to avoid it. And in seeing that, he actually exposes the other captains as too factual, right? And he discovers something they themselves would not, I think, have found on their own.
Yeah, that's, that's really good. You know what it made me think of Alex? And I sometimes have these same feelings and thoughts when I listen to a podcast with somebody that's fought in a war, let's say, where they talk about the personal discovery that comes at the cost of great physical suffering. So we've all, I think that emotional, psychological distress is something that's available to all of us.
So when the cheese, for instance, runs out at Grand Pause Cheese Emporium or whatever, S&M Club that Greg goes through in the wilds about horror. Yeah. He gets really upset. Right.
We're talking about this as if we have experience with some of this insight. But do you ever think about that in long for, I think about it, and I long for it. And then I think, do I really want that? Do you really want insight that comes through passing that I have a hurricane or a battle?
No, but we read about it and we're like, oh man, this is something that everybody, I was like, we don't want it. A very small scale example of this, which is sort of when I read this, I was thinking about who responds to danger in this sort of matter of fact way. I was camping once and I was eating. This is a much smaller scale, but like the little tank, little cancer of gas that sort of helps a stove go and we can't be so.
It was clear to me that the fire was going into that and it was going to cause an explosion. And so I walked, I'm like eating, I've got a bowl in my hand left, I'm like, I'm like eating and I go over there and I'm like kicking it kind of apart and like stamp out of my feet while it's like about to explode. And I stepped away and I realized, I was like, that was really stupid. Like I didn't put my, I just kept eating the whole time.
I was like, well, going down as well, I'm doing work goes into it. I've been cheating and Greg, Greg kicks over a bunsome burner. And he was so brave. I don't like to brag, but I saved easily somebody's life that day.
So one of the things we should have talked about. I shouldn't have brought that up. One of the things we should have talked about is how this is related to political philosophy. That should have been probably, you know, that was, you know, I was going to say that usually I write the wrong show because you guys are the talent and I just, you know, I help keep things going.
I'm like the guys in the furnace room just shoveling the coal into the furnace while you guys are captaining. You guys are McWorren's jukes up there. I'm just just going to just pour his living. But today we let David Bar do the wrong show.
I got to say, man, David, just I shouldn't write anymore. I mean, it was so exceptional. Yeah, I can read it. Who was Conrad the storm, the reaction?
McWorren's will. McWorren's God. Where verse jukes. Conclusion.
Well, you guys, this has been a fun episode. It's been a lot of... We should we got to return to the main theme though. Why this for political floss?
I think why literature for political floss? But even for this, I mean, I do think there's obviously a political element. There's obviously a social element to what's going on with these Chinese laborers and the trade that's involved. There's technological elements that's there as well and sort of a scientific mindset and how it's situated.
And how it's situated. And so I do think and then this discovery of a sense of justice and human suffering and sort of a sense of obligation that McWorren has. And that his role on the ship is not merely one of assessing the facts and navigating, but somehow maintaining peace amidst the greatest calamities. Look, I'm sorry, go on, Greg.
I said one small detail. Did you guys notice when the storm was? Like what day it was? It's Christmas day.
Oh, and the letter he says to his wife, it was December 25th in the morning, one to three or something like this. I don't know what to do with that. But that seems like a pre significant fact. And it's the only date mentioned.
I mean, what does that do with McWorren now? Is that changes status in some way? And it goes overnight into the morning. It's like, it must have been like 10 hours of this stuff.
Right? It takes six hours, I think, to get into the morning. Yeah, it starts at Christmas even goes into Christmas day. Christmas morning.
Yeah. So yeah, I wonder. I mean, there's certainly a kind of providential feature to the story that they sure, does anybody die? I think so.
Nobody dies. Nobody dies. So first when they're talking about the morning, this is where the language really troubled me. But first I thought all the Chinese laborers just got heaved over at the ship.
I didn't realize. I thought they'd be drowned is what I thought. And then, but yeah, it turns out nobody dies. So there's a kind of providential aspect to it, right?
Well, look, I just wonder if that factoring into this decision, you go into the storm in some, like surely God will look out for us on Christmas. I mean, that makes sense, but I mean, that way to this decision or not. But it wouldn't accord with the, his cast of mind is described only on as a simple meal. Unless, I mean, he says, what's the last thing that he doesn't say is Christmas.
And what's the last line of this story? It's a little stupid. Somebody says he's a joke. This certainly is coming as near as can be to keeping the thing quiet for the benefit of all concern.
What's your opinion? You pampered mail boats swell. The old chief says that this was plainly the only thing that could be done. Right.
This is jukes remembering. I don't think juice is view as the Texas view or Conrad's view necessarily. The skipper remarked to me. So the skipper is his mquare.
The skipper remarked to me the other day, quote, there are things you find nothing about in books. I think he got out of it very well for such a stupid man. I don't think McWhir is stupid. He's been called stupid.
I think he snaps. In fact, I would say as he starts it saying he's not stupid. Right. Yeah.
That's the first line that you read. Right. It was simply ordinary. No, it says that his body was the exact counterpart of his mind.
It presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity. Yeah, that's okay. Okay. No pronounced characteristics.
Fine. That's fine. I think that's totally average. I guess fine.
He's not stupid, but I mean he's kind of reasonable. I mean, if you've never had to worry about the future or the past has never come back to haunt you. We'll just sort of deal with what's in front of you every day. You know.
I want to talk before we go a little bit on this relationship with literature and how it enhances understanding of political philosophy. Okay. Before we, I think that's awesome. I have one more topic from the text.
I want to talk about. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't mean this.
Mine is the structure of the story is six chapters, as you mentioned, the first five chapters, more or less outline the storm. Here we go, Alex. And then the sixth chapter is about the after effects of the storm. And it's basically the sixth chapter seems to be told mostly from other narrators that's telling him, but seems to focus principally on people who are hearing about the storm's second hand.
Three of their three, their three stories. Yes. So McWhir has written a letter to his wife. Rout has written a letter to his wife.
The engineer. Yes. And Jukes has written a letter to his friend. So what I find fascinating about this sixth chapter is you already touched on this a little bit, but McWhir's wife kind of skims a letter and she has no grasp of the seriousness of the storm.
She has no, like she's much more interested in shopping as you mentioned. She's like, he's fine. The letter says, right? He's fine.
And the same with Rout's wife, right? So both wives sort of don't see the big deal. They don't understand that the storm was like threatening. They don't, they seem to minimize the danger of the situation.
They don't seem to grasp it. And by the way, I think that's partly because McWhir and Rout don't do a good job conveying in speech or in written word, just the danger. But if he had McWhir's wife had seen the timestamp on his letter, this is what Jukes finds out afterwards that he thought they were all going to die. He discovers who McWhir is letter to his wife.
Oh my God. The captain thought we were all going to die. But by contrast, so Jukes does capture adequately or he at least is able to write an extensive account of the storm to his friend. But his friend thinks it's a joke.
So like the first two guys can't adequately grasp or capture in word what's happened and their wives sort of don't think anything serious happened. The third guy does, but his, but it seems so over the top to his friends that they just have to find him. And so it's like the sixth chapter is a sort of reflection on the difficulty, the impossibility of conveying in speech, some of these things that have happened. And then you can trust that to take it out a little, though, whereas Conrad, who wasn't, I mean, this is fictionalized, right?
Conrad does do a good job in prose of explaining how terrible the storm was. And I don't know what to do with it except that I think that the sixth chapter shows that part of this text is a reflection on the character writing itself. Like the men who are there can't do it, but Conrad can. And so there's a really interesting contrast between the author and the men who are there.
Yeah, go ahead. In, in Odyssey when Penelope thinks that Odysseus is dead, I won't point she cries and I won't describes it as he's like, as when the, you know, the white surf hits their side of a rocket, you know, Rocky Mountain and it all comes trickling down so do the tears can benefit. And that's a very sort of poetic kind of Conrad's position, right? And when you just laid out and it's beautiful.
I mean, you can picture that and you can see it and you can imagine somebody crying and it conveys the depth of sadness within. Then I could go and I could give a very scientific account. I say, well, Penelope was very sad. In fact, she cried so and so many, you know, milliliters of tears.
The average crying is about this. This puts her in the 99th percentile, which therefore means she was exceptionally sad. It does, it's proves, I guess to you that it's very, very sad. But it doesn't communicate the experiences of the soul.
And so, so you have these scientific accounts of the typhoons, right? And then you have these non poets trying to give their own accounts of the typhoon. And then you have a poet who didn't experience it but can somehow convey it. And I think that shows that there are certain experiences in the world that are not conveyed through experiment or through mathematics, but through something like poetry because what you're discovering is not a natural matter of fact but a sort of aspect of the human condition.
Yeah, excellent. But I'm glad we brought that. That's perfect, Alex. That was very nice, Greg.
And that does connect to the text that connects perfectly to the theme that you wanted to take us to, to take us out David. Yeah. A connection of why literature, why poetry, why content? And I think.
Yeah. Yeah. And so I can tell you that I find that that if you have an appreciation for literature, it helps you understand. I think it helps you become more sensitive and understand the human condition in a way that I think is going to push back on this.
I think that philosophy is, is unable to. It enhances my ability to understand philosophy. Philosophy can operate sometimes on the level of something that's wholly abstract, but to put flesh and bone on it, I think only a writer can do that or a poet to use our old stand in. And so I think that it's, it's seriously important for the student, but especially political philosophy because of the themes that we're interested in, understand literature and read literature.
And look, you don't have to, you don't have to read somebody crappy like solbello. You can stick with Shakespeare if you want. But he's a hacker right under your raising your hands. Well, the Nobel Prize.
Oh, great. You know, who didn't Conrad. All right. And so, so we can, there are a few other people that want who I don't.
Can you say? Captain Dylan either. No, Bob Dylan deserved it. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. No. Was there a Norwegian friend thing? You a Dylan fan there?
No way. Yeah. But look, I think it helps you become more sensitive and, and it's, it's, Alex, but this a lot better than I just did about the tears. That was a wonderful example.
Yeah. So, but one thing I'll say is let's not confuse philosophy with science, right? And then we make things true abstract and numbs it sticks it into, you know, symbolic. And do material.
I mean, right? Focusing on material cause. Yeah. But philosophy can engage in things like thought experiments, right?
I mean, one of the, I think most moving critiques of democracy is in book six of Plato's Republic when Socrates gives this description, you know, the ship of state and what it's like. But he's doing it is that it's almost like literature right there. Yeah. It's poetic and then he can expand upon it afterwards.
And so there's a way in which philosophy can, can give a sort of powerful example, right? Or powerful sort of narrative and then unpack that afterwards in the way much of the way that sort of Conrad and then we had the conversation trying to wrestle with what's embedded in there. Philosophy has an aspect of it that's more, I think it's somewhat parasitic on poetry, but it has a sort of relationship to it that's not wholly one of tension. I agree with you.
I think a lot about Aristotle's ethics that a man or woman who hasn't lived and who hasn't read widely, I think would underappreciate a book like the ethics versus somebody that's paid more attention to these things because you wouldn't understand these opposites that he keeps postulating like it wouldn't, what great which means would be something that you would wholly lack an understanding of. I think that's excellent. Alex, maybe you can take us to the mail band. No, I have one.