“When it comes to thinking about the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust, we’re nearing the end of the twilight of living memory,” says Jeremy Eichler in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Pretty soon, there will be a time when not a single living soul on our planet has firsthand lived experience—felt contact with this particular world, these historical events. And our ways of accessing and understanding them will be exclusively passed toward dealing with different aspects of the historical record. I wanted to invite readers to join me in thinking about how music as an art form can actually burn through history’s ‘cold storage.’ Unlike another book on the era, music itself can release into the present something of the raw emotion of these earlier lives and earlier eras in order to allow for an expanded contact with the now. When we have an older work of music played again in the room right before us, we’re hearing in a very literal way the past speaking again in the present. In that sense, music is the language of time’s non-linearity and brings these distant moments closer to us.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Jeremy Eichler, historian, former chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe, and author of Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War, which considers the lives and the works of Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten. Eichler practices what he calls “deep listening.” Traveling to places associated with musical war memorials written by each of his four composers, he returns “these works to history, not for their sake but for ours, so that they may become, among other things, a prism through which we ‘remember’ what was lost.” Audio excerpts of works by Bach, Schoenberg, Strauss, Shostakovich, and Britten punctuate the conversation.

“Marlowe is—astonishingly—inventing this; it’s not as if he can draw upon Shakespeare,” says Stephen Greenblatt in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Doctor Faustus was already written. It’s a remarkable, almost inexplicable achievement to figure out how to get inside in a play where, after all, people are standing up before 2,000 or 3,000 people and revealing something. How to get inside the character quietly. In this case, it’s a scholar who has reached the end of his rope, feels despair at the exhaustion of his own learning. It has to be something in Marlowe. It’s Marlowe’s genius, but it also has to draw upon something deep inside him and his experience. Shakespeare couldn’t do quite that. Shakespeare does amazing things with Hamlet and with Prospero in The Tempest, but he wasn’t at university and wasn’t intellectual in the sense that Marlowe was trained. So this is Marlowe’s extraordinary invention, and you have to think that Marlowe was murdered at twenty-nine. If Shakespeare had been murdered at the age of twenty-nine, we would say, ‘Shakespeare, who’s that?’ ”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, about Greenblatt’s new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, a history of the life and times of Christopher Marlowe, cobbler’s son turned gentleman-scholar, turned spy in Queen Elizabeth’s secret service, turned playwright and poet who collaborated with Shakespeare. In Greenblatt’s telling, Marlowe’s career, cut violently and mysteriously short, is almost as improbable and tragic as that of his most famous creation, Doctor Faustus.

“There is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends,” Ishmael tells us in “A Bosom Friend,” chapter ten of Moby Dick, excerpted in the “Friendship” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. “Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon lay I and Queequeg—a cozy, loving pair.”

In an extended, three-part installment of our intermittent series on Moby Dick and the history of the sea, this episode of The World in Time considers the novel’s love story—the story of Queequeg and Ishmael’s friendship and marriage—as well as the novel’s dedication to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Novelist and essayist Alexander Chee joins Donovan Hohn to talk about chapter four, “The Counterpane,” in which Queequeg and Ishmael, having just met, spend the night together. Melville scholar and historian Aaron Sachs closely reads the ideological, philosophical, political, and ecological implications of chapter 72, “The Monkey-Rope,” wherein we find Ishmael and Queequeg tethered to each other by a hemp line, Ishmael aboard the Pequod, Queequeg balancing perilously atop the carcass of a slaughtered whale. Finally, novelist Caleb Crain goes swimming around in the Platonic mysteries of chapter 110, “Queequeg in His Coffin.” Both Chee and Crain propose that the entire novel, dedicated to Hawthorne, might be read as “a love letter.”

“Religion gives people certainty and it gives people solace,” says Brenda Wineapple in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And according to William Jennings Bryan, it gives you a moral center, too, which would make impossible the cruelties of, say, World War One, which horrified him. But that kind of intolerable meaninglessness is something Clarence Darrow, too, feels so strongly. He said, and I’m paraphrasing: everybody needs their dope, whatever it is, whether it’s the church or whether it’s drugs or whether it’s sex. He’s open-minded about that. He's basically saying life is hard. Life is very hard. There are a lot of things we don’t understand. Whatever makes you feel better. One of the poignancies of Darrow’s life is that it was hard for him to feel better. He wanted people to feel better. There was so much cruelty in the world. I wonder if, in his heart of hearts, Bryan also couldn’t stand that meaninglessness.”

 

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Brenda Wineapple, longtime member of the Lapham’s Quarterly editorial board, about her new book, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation, which narrates and excavates the history of The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes. That case, tried and adjudicated in 1925, was, in Wineapple’s estimation, the “trial of the century,” pitting Clarence Darrow, the renowned labor lawyer, against William Jennings Bryan, the “boy orator” and three-time Democratic presidential nominee. As Wineapple’s book reveals, many of the conflicts that animated the courtroom drama in Dayton, Tennessee—between democratic majority rule and academic freedom, between the pursuit of scientific truth and the consolations of faith—are with us still, a century after the verdict in the Scopes trial was delivered.

“There’s nothing more extraordinary than the world we live in,” says Elizabeth Kolbert in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “We are extremely tied up as humans for whatever reason. We have obviously evolved to pay a lot of attention to our fellow humans. But if we look beyond that, even for an instant, we see that the world is an absolutely amazing place. We are surrounded by species that all have long and rich evolutionary histories. They also have extraordinary talents that we can only appreciate by actually learning something about them. That parasitic wasp—it’s just another sort of pesky wasp or whatever. But if you delve into its life cycle, you find that every species has its own form of genius.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Elizabeth Kolbert—New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction—about her new book, Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World, which introduces us to a bestiary of creatures and to a gallery of natural scientists, and transports us to points remote, from the Arctic to New Zealand. Kolbert shares the stories and the thinking behind the field trips that the book collects, dwelling at length on “Talk to Me,” her 2023 New Yorker piece for which she joined the cetologists using machine learning to decipher—or so they hope—the communications of whales. The episode concludes with Kolbert’s firsthand account of a sperm whale’s birth, a scene that calls to mind Melville’s own visit to a whale nursery in “The Grand Armada,” chapter 87 of Moby Dick.

“Father Mapple is in some strange, almost obscure way, a kind of negative double for Ahab,” says novelist and critic Charles Baxter in this episode of The World in Time. “Like Ahab, he is speaking from a great height. He begins his sermon by issuing orders. He tells all the congregants to sit down. And, you know, they have to listen to him. What other choice do they have? But what is important to me in ‘The Sermon’ is that he—how can I put this? He is the person who wants to bring a sense of proportion. And Ahab is the person who wants you to give up any sense of proportionality. It’s almost impossible to put things into perspective with Ahab. Father Mapple kind of supplies a warning and a possible lens for a reading of the entire novel. What Mapple is saying in his sermon, starting from the Book of Jonah, is that we have to learn humility. It is no use to flee from God. God will find us. And the last paragraph of ‘The Sermon’ is one of the most beautiful things, I think, that Melville ever wrote.” Charles Baxter, author most recently of Blood Test: A Comedy and Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature, visits The World in Time to talk with Donovan Hohn about the politics and the mysteries of charisma in Moby-Dick. The conversation dwells on Chapter 9: “The Sermon,” in which Father Mapple, from his cockpit of a pulpit, pilots a congregation of New Bedford whalers through the theological storms of the Book of Jonah. Baxter and Hohn consider whether the novel affirms what Father Mapple preaches. They contrast his humble leadership with Captain Ahab’s narcissistic yet magnetic charisma. And they consider what both Ahab and a showman like P.T. Barnum might reveal about the charismatic confidence men who command our attention and our country today.

“They were against all categories,” says Nicholas Boggs of James Baldwin and the men he loved in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “They really were outsiders, all of them. Sometimes people think, oh, well, he was just drawn to these men who were essentially straight, like he had some kind of complex or something. Maybe. But he was also just drawn to these crazy outsiders. As Yoran Cazac put it, they were ‘eating the same substance,’ and they happened to be of different nationalities and races and even sexualities. I appreciate that they had these complicated relationships where they saw each other across difference for who they were and what they shared. It’s what sustained Baldwin. It’s what enabled him to write. It’s what he wrote about.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with biographer Nicholas Boggs about Baldwin: A Love Story, a book three decades in the making. The episode follows James Baldwin on his transatlantic commutes, introducing listeners to four formative—and transformative—friendships with “crazy outsiders” that sustained Baldwin and that organize this new biography. We meet painter Beauford Delaney, the “spiritual father” and artistic mentor Baldwin found in Greenwich Village. In post-war Paris, we meet Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss émigré who would become Baldwin’s lover, muse, and lifelong friend. We meet Engin Cezzar, the “blood brother” who created for Baldwin a home in Istanbul. Finally, Boggs introduces us to Yoran Cazac, the French painter with whom Baldwin collaborated on his “child’s story for adults,” Little Man, Little Man, which Boggs helped bring back into print. Along the way, Boggs and Hohn dwell on the meaning of love in Baldwin’s life and work, and on his yearning for a home “by the side of the mountain, on the edge of the sea.” Hohn and Boggs also spend time with Otto Friedrich, who befriended Baldwin during his Paris years and would become Lewis Lapham’s editor and mentor. The episode concludes with a selection of entries about Baldwin from the journal Friedrich kept in 1949

“In this part of the essay, Emerson is talking about walking a lot, you know, sort of walking through nature, taking a stroll,” says James Marcus in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “He has this rather sublime experience, and he describes it in this way: ‘Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the universal being circulate through me. I am a part or particle of God.’ Now, I mean, that is lofty stuff, and it can edge over into silliness. In a way, if you picture it, it starts to be silly and that is why Christopher Cranch’s cartoon is hilarious, because a literalization of it is kind of ridiculous, in a way. Part of the thing I love about Emerson is that he wasn’t afraid to seem silly in his eagerness to render the experience. What he's talking about—if you get away from the actual image of an eyeball with a top hat on—is a kind of ecstatic merger with the universe, where the walls drop, the boundaries drop, the currents of the universe move through you. If you look at it that way, he’s talking about a classic ecstatic experience.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with writer and biographer James Marcus about his book Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s sense of self was, Marcus says, “kaleidoscopic,” and so is this episode, presenting not one Emerson but many: Emerson the public intellectual who cherished the privacy of his study, Emerson the lapsed minister who left the church but continued to preach on the lyceum circuit, Emerson the initially reluctant but eventually ardent abolitionist, Emerson the Swedenborgian mystic, Emerson the loner who deeply loved his friends Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau, Emerson the son estranged from his father, Emerson the father undone by grief for his dead son, and, finally, Emerson the volunteer firefighter. Marcus and Hohn also go searching for Emersonian influences in “The Mast-Head” chapter of Moby Dick. But they spend most of the conversation with the essayist from Concord, that artisan of indelible sentences, whom Melville once compared to a great philosophical whale who could dive “five miles or more,” sounding the depths.

“This is a sea that will take your life,” says Matthew Hollis in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “This is the cruel sea. This is the hard sea. And it takes extraordinary skill and good luck to survive it. But we come quickly to realize in this poem that actually there is a different kind of allegorical turmoil within as well. It’s one of the things that makes this poem so compelling, it seems to me, because it does have ideas about moral choices, and it does have ideas about belonging that seem as important today as they were then. One of the great things that strikes me with the great parts of the Anglo-Saxon opus is how modern it feels—or rather, to put it a different way, how timeless the cares and concerns and worries of human beings can be. Some of the fears about loneliness, some of the fears about pain, some of the worries about doubt, about making a good life or the life of right choosing, are issues that trouble us in exactly the same way, or challenge us in exactly the same way, as they did this sailor.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with poet Matthew Hollis about his new translation of The Seafarer, about the world from which this mysterious tenth-century Anglo-Saxon poem emerged, about the history of the poem’s improbable survival, and about its rediscovery by the Romantics and the Modernists. Into the conversation the episode weaves audio samples from different translations and different recordings, including one made by Lewis Lapham, another by Ezra Pound, and a third by Matthew Hollis himself.

“Well, I mean for starters it still is the greatest first sentence ever,” says Francine Prose in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I mean, three words. A three-word first sentence. I think if you were to ask a kind of range of readers, ‘Can you think of a first sentence?’ You know, you probably get ‘It was the best of times, and the worst of times’ or ‘the worst of times, and the best of times,’ and people would get it backwards. But then you get ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Because it establishes this kind of—you know, so much of the book is about authority. About authority, and the lack of authority, and what authority is, and who has it, and what you do with it. And that sentence is just pure authority. Pure narrative authority. ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Bingo. It’s like, ‘Okay, well, we’re going to call you Ishmael.’” This week on the podcast, the Quarterly’s editor-at-large Francine Prose returns for an in-depth conversation with Donovan Hohn about Moby Dick’s first chapter, “Loomings.” They consider the meanings of the verb to loom, whether Ishmael is likeable or funny, whether the American sermon influenced Melville’s oratorical prose, why the antebellum religious press condemned the novel, and what the best medicine might be for “the universal thump.” Earlier episodes in this series: Episode 7 with Daniel Mendelsohn and Episode 8 with Wyatt Mason.

“In tyranny, you may not have a whole lot of political freedom, but you can still live a pretty free life under tyranny,” says Roger Berkowitz in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “In your private world, you can live under a dictator and still read what books you want and talk to people as long as you don’t act out in the public sphere. Totalitarianism is quite different. It tries to get inside your head, and make you, and make everyone, believe. And it has secret police, and snitches, and surveillance. And it tries to fully organize society. It’s the most organized and successful attack on freedom that one can imagine. And so for Arendt, you can’t just be an individual and sit in jail and be free if you’re going to protect yourselves from the dangers of totalitarianism and the end of constitutional, free government, which is what she’s worried about. You need to act politically, and you need to act politically with a certain amount of power.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn sits down for a conversation with Roger Berkowitz, writer, scholar, and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. They discuss the life and work of Hannah Arendt and two essays that share a name, “Civil Disobedience”—one by Arendt, the other by Thoreau, both recently collected in a volume that Berkowitz edited and introduced. Their conversation touches broadly on the works of the two writers, on their differences and disagreements, on the political tumults that inspired their famous essays, and on the lessons to be learned from them in the present day.