Two Professors Embarked on an Extended Conversation During the Pandemic – Columbia University

Q. Can you give some examples from the book of the lessons that a catastrophe can teach about the future, and about how to live and face death?

A. Jack and I have spent our lives reading, teaching, and writing about religion, philosophy, and art. In our conversation in the book, we explore the lessons of two major themesdeath and friendshipthat great writers and artists of the past can offer us today.

Suffering life-threatening disease is a humbling experience that reminds you how fragile life is. Acknowledging this vulnerability and accepting deaths inevitability can be liberating, and it opens you to empathetic relationships with other people.

Genuine friendship is a rare gift. Isolation and solitude are not the sameisolation separates, solitude connects. Though often alone and separated by a continent during those long months, our epistolary conversation deepened our friendship.

Q. Do things seem less bleak now than they didwhile you were working on the book?

A. Though we knew the pandemic would be devastating, we never anticipated that many millions of people globally would contract the disease, and over one million would die in the U.S. This virus is smart and adapts to human intervention faster than humans adapt to it. We started writing about a biological virus, but quickly realized that the body politic and global media are also infected with deadly viruses. The different strains of these viruses are co-evolving at an accelerating rate. Given the political paralysis in this country, and the growing instability of the global financial and political situation, things are so much worse now that it is hard to be hopeful. Hopelessness, however, is a luxury we cannot afford.

Q. What have you read lately that you would recommend, and why?

A. Suzanne Simards Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest is a well-researched book about plant intelligence that makes you rethink the relationship between human beings and the natural world.

Lee Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. A provocative reinterpretation of the most fundamental dimension of life.

Matt Haig, The Midnight Library. An inventive novel of regrets framed in terms of quantum physics and multiple worlds theory.

Q. What's on your night stand now?

A. Since I tend to read all day every day, I dont keep books on my night stand, but the books beside my desk are: Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity; David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics; and a novel, Olga Ravns The Employees.

Q. What do you read when you're working on a book, and what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?

A. After months, sometimes years, of reading, I will suddenly see the book; its a strange experience. At that point, a book more or less writes itself. When in this zone, I read nothing else because reading more can break my rhythm and make me lose the thread.

Q. Any interesting summer plans?

A. I live in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. This summer I am looking forward to a welcome relief from COVID summersmy children and grandchildren will be returning home. In addition, I have created a philosophical sculpture garden, which requires lots of work. I am beginning the design of a new sculpture.

Q. You're hosting a dinner party. Which three academics or scholars, dead or alive, would you invite, and why?

A. If I could time travel, I would return to Jena in Germany on New Years Eve 1803, and throw a dinner party for Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schelling, Caroline Schelling, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Holderlin, Alexander von Humboldt, the Schlegel brothers, Dorothea von Schlegel, and, above all, G.W.F. Hegel.

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Two Professors Embarked on an Extended Conversation During the Pandemic - Columbia University