John and Rosianna discuss Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. This episode was originally released to subscribers in August 2019.
“A great short story can end in that way where you almost feel a turn inside of you. Like you feel a turn in your gut.” John Green and Rosianna Halse Rojas discuss letting oneself fall into short stories and the moments in them when things just click.
This episode was originally released to subscribers in August 2019. The Life’s Library Discord and subscriptions are now closed after a wonderful three years of reading together. Check out past books at www.lifeslibrarybookclub.com, Twitter, and Instagram.
Life’s Library logo by Bethany Mannion.
John Green: Hello, and welcome to the Life's Library podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm here with Rosianna Halse Rojas, my co-curator of Life's Library. Hi, Rosianna.
Rosianna Halse Rojas: Hello, how's it going?
John: I'm all right. You might be able to hear a certain gravelly-ness in my voice, which is owing to the fact that last night was the Exodus Refugee gala here in Indianapolis. One of the weirder events in the gala season of Indianapolis.
Rosianna: I love that there's a gala season.
John: Well, we have a—it's a very small gala season and it's not like New York's, which is really reprehensible, where the wealthiest people in New York could go from charity fundraiser to charity fundraiser while never giving more than 1% of their wealth.
Rosianna: Sounds divine. Sounds ideal.
John: So the Exodus gala is a—it's a fundraiser for the refugee resettlement organization in Indianapolis and every year there are speakers who came to the United States through the refugee resettlement program. And, oh my god, last night's speaker...just incredible. I was sobbing. And I was also thinking about this book a little bit, because there's so much—so many things in this book are about dislocated people and/or aliens, you know, and about different versions of statelessness or placeless-ness or having to struggle with place. So yeah, there was a bit of a connection for me. But mostly I'm just trying to explain why my voice is gravelly.
Rosianna: It's one of my favorite Indianapolis events that I went to when I was living out there. The Exodus gala—like the speakers are amazing.
John: It is. It's incredible. And wherever you live, even if you live outside the U.S. there is probably a refugee resettlement organization in your community, and they're so important to support because those are the people who make it possible for refugees, not only to come and resettle, but also to be supported in that process. And it's a very, very difficult thing to—you know, obviously to be forced from your home and to end up in a place that feels very weird. Especially Indianapolis—like I think it's one thing to move to, you know, Chicago, but it's got to be pretty weird to move to Indianapolis. I found it weird moving from New York.
Rosianna: It's slightly less of a massive life transition as well.
John: Exactly.
Rosianna: Oh, well, I've been spending all my morning listening to the new Taylor Swift album.
John: Oh, how is it?
Rosianna: Oh, it's great. It's really great. I know that I'm biased and have favor constantly, but I really, really like it. So it's been fun.
John: I'm also biased in her favor. And I feel like—like a lot of people who are near the center of popular culture, she gets treated sort of horribly.
Rosianna: Yes.
John: And in a way that's like completely out of touch with her work and who she is. But, of course, the problems of super successful people feel real to me in a way that the problems of extremely marginalized people feel distant to me. And I try to remain conscious of that.
Rosianna: Right.
John: Like, I'm always like, oh, I'm worried about Britney Spears, but shouldn't I really—like it's okay to worry about Britney Spears, but shouldn't I also be worried about people whose lives I don't hear about on a regular basis?
Rosianna: Maybe, but I don't know. No, definitely, definitely. It's hard. It's complicated.
John: I think I—well, it's more about expanding our capacity for empathy and being able to do that effectively.
Rosianna: Which, as you said, is a theme in Stories of Your Life and Others.
John: It is. The Story—
Rosianna: Not to segue too harshly.
John: Yeah, that was a good—that was a great segue. I mean, the end of Division by Zero is, "But he stopped himself for this was an empathy that separated rather than united them. And he couldn't tell her that." Which is a way of constructing empathy I'd never thought of before.
Rosianna: Yeah. That line is crushing. I saw all over Discord.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Like every single shelf has quoted that.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: But it's really beautiful.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: That story in general, I found hard to read.
John: Yeah, that was—in some ways that was the hardest story for me. I mean, rereading Story of Your Life, I definitely wept. But oh, yeah, I mean that end of Division by Zero. It just reminds you of how a great short story can end in that O. Henry way—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —where things turn and you feel—you almost feel a turn inside of you. Like you feel a turn in your gut.
Rosianna: And you kind of feel like—I felt the emptiness that I think he'd been feeling all along.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: It just kind of settles at the end. Oh.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah. It really, it really stuck with me. I did find the maths really hard to not scan. Not, like, kind of skim over.
John: Sure.
Rosianna: And then it was nice to have the Discord and then go in and see people explaining what was going on.
John: Yeah, definitely one of those times when it's helpful to read a book with other people.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Because yeah, well, there's a lot of mathematical thinking in this book that I'm pretty sure it goes over my head.
Rosianna: Yes.
John: There's a lot of—including in the ways the stories are constructed—like the shapes of the stories themselves. I always feel like I'm on the cusp of understanding that, but I'm not quite smart enough to.
Rosianna: Right. Like, I haven't fully clocked into it. And part of that feels kind of intentional, especially in this story, Understand—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —about this higher intelligence. There does seem something very intentional about keeping the reader almost like a step behind. They're all these like logical leaps and the narrative changes as it goes on that does feel a bit by design, but also just kind of has this idea of—if I did have more of like an architectural or mathematical understanding, then I would have an added appreciation to it. But what I don't see, I suppose, when we all read is we don't see often the things that we do bring to it and the understanding that we do have, and you can't discount that.
John: That's a great point. I hadn't thought of that. I always—that's exactly the way I read. I always feel like—I always feel my emptiness-es or the holes in my understanding of the universe rather than feeling my strengths. And I'm sure that there are ways in which I am a strong reader, although reading this book, I did not feel them.
Rosianna: Yeah. I felt like Borges trained me well with that. He was like my favorite short story writer.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Yeah. Because you just have to be like, listen, I'm bringing what I'm bringing to the table. That's all I've got.
John: Right. Which is enough, right?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I mean, by definition, it's enough. If you're able to get anything out of the stories. I don't read a lot of short stories and I don't read a lot of science fiction. And so this was new for me on a couple levels, but I have to say, I really enjoyed these stories. We've talked in the past about giving yourself over to a different kind of writing than the kind you're used to. And how that's really challenging. And it's been challenging for a lot of people with a lot of the other books in Life's Library. It was challenging for me in this book because highly structured, carefully plotted writing is not what I'm naturally inclined toward.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And so I really had to, like, let myself go into the stories and let myself fall into them, rather than keep trying to pull myself out and try to understand how the strings of the puppets are moving. But once I was able to do that, I really enjoyed it. Like with each story, there was a moment and I don't know if this is just a science fiction thing, but with each story there was a moment where I realized that the world was much bigger than I was thinking it was.
Rosianna: Yes. Totally.
John: And that moment was so exciting and so beautiful. And from that moment that that clicked in, in each story, I loved it. So in the first story, that moment was when he writes about the gardens that are happening on the tower.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And then as you go up higher, the gardens have to grow upside down because they are above the sun, and—
Rosianna: Well, they mostly eat onions out of one level, which I really love.
John: Yes. Right, right. Or, yeah, or there's the area where they mostly make onions. That—I just—the moment I saw that in my mind, I saw the tower.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And like, I'd been reading about the tower, the architecture of the tower had been described to me, but that's when the world became big and real. And those little moments in each of these stories where I start to feel like—and I have the same feeling when I read Harry Potter, there are little moments where I'm like, oh my gosh, like Hogwarts is real and it's bigger than my imagination can allow for. And that's so fun.
Rosianna: Yeah. And you let it carry you through that world because it kind of—the narrative has almost accepted the world that it's creating as a given. And so it doesn't mean to say, and then you looked over here and saw this thing, and then you saw that. It feels like it's just going on and there's like a bustle around
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: It's just kind of the bustle of life.
John: Yeah. And maybe that's what I've never been able to do in the times I've tried to write like science fiction or fantasy stories—is I've never been able to get that feeling—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —of the bustle is just around you and this world is totally real. Like there's a line in that first story, Tower of Babylon, where they talk about one of the prayers to Yahweh and Chiang writes, "They gave thanks that they were permitted to see so much and begged forgiveness for their desire to see more."
Rosianna: Oh.
John: Which both felt like the fundamental definition of human consciousness.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And like a pretty good summary of how I felt reading these stories.
Rosianna: Yep.
John: I felt thankful that I was able to see so much and I begged forgiveness for my desire to see more.
Rosianna: Yeah. I mean, it's like, I also can't write anything that has that level of world-building. And I think that sometimes that's what I go to science fiction for, but I—again, like you—I haven't read loads of it. I think that growing up, it was very much a, oh, you're a science fiction reader—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —or your other book reader. And I feel like I've lost a lot from that strange segregation of genres. And it's nice seeing genre in general becoming more integrated in a bigger way, more broadly.
John: Yeah. Like when I was growing up, there was definitely a science fiction kind of reader—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And there was, you know, it was a version of the Simpsons character, Comic Book Guy—was the science fiction reader and they were male and they were, you know, there were all these things about them and of course all those things are wrong. Right? Like—of the science fiction I've read, most of my favorite science fiction work is by N. K. Jemisin or by Nalo Hopkinson, you know. And doesn't at all fit into like what I thought science fiction was, which was kind of Star Trek—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —you know? And it's such a big genre, of course, like every genre, but I brought my own—I think I brought my own preconceptions to it. And even in a way, reading these stories, I brought my own preconceptions to it because I was astonished, I have to say, by the intellectual sophistication of the stories. By the—how carefully crafted they are, how weird they are, how effectively wrenched in the gut I was at the ending of each one of them. I don't know. It was really—it really kind of blew my mind.
Rosianna: Yeah. I think that's—and that's such a huge appeal of it, is that kind of—when it's that really strong conceptual thinking behind it that lets you explore all these really big questions, but then it's still tied into a really compelling story and you know, some stories more than others, like character you connect to and are supposed to connect to on a very emotional level on top of all of that. I'm like, how are you moving all of these strings at once Like how you doing all these things?
John: Yeah. Yeah, I guess—it's hard for me, a lot of times when I read books like this, not to feel like A) jealous—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —right? Like I would like to be able to write those sentences. I would be able to—I would like to be able to come up with these stories. And then B) it's hard for me not to try to understand how it's working.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like, because it's so impressive to me, I want to get to the bottom of it somehow. Like I want to understand how it gets written. But that's not the point of reading. You don't—I guess it's a point of reading, but to me, the most joyful parts of reading are not when you're trying to, you know, break something down so that you can try to steal it or try to mimic it or whatever. The most enjoyable parts of reading are when you're just lost in the story. And there were many times there were many stories that I got lost in. Like I got totally lost in Understand, the one where the guy—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —is recovering from a serious brain injury and then becomes either extremely paranoid or superhuman in his powers.
Rosianna: It's funny because I assumed he was superhuman. And then again, on the Discord, I saw people talking about, well, maybe he's just really paranoid and maybe he and Reynolds are the same person. I was like, that never even occurred to me! And that made me then go back and reread it, which I think, as I said in my letter, is the joy of short stories to me. You can go back and reread it.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And not lose your entire day to it.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Not lose your entire day, but you know what I mean.
John: I know what you mean.
Rosianna: And yeah, that was such a fun idea.
John: Yeah, I assumed for the first part that he was paranoid and then, yeah, I went back. And I wanted—that was one of the times when I went on the Discord to see, like, what do other people think?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Because, I don't know, some of his—I have to say some of his thinking patterns felt a bit familiar to me. Not the stuff where you think that you're the smartest person in the world or that you can hack the CIA's computers or whatever, but the not necessarily having a great sense of proportionality felt familiar to me. You know, there's a lot of times in my life when, because of my mental health problems, I struggled to see things at their appropriate size.
Rosianna: Mhm.
John: And that—it felt to me like he might be doing that. And—but that's what's so—I love sitting—that's what I loved about that story. There was—I loved sitting in that discomfort of being like, am I in an extremely intellectual version of the movie Limitless, or am I inside the mind of an extremely troubled person or, clearly, both.
Rosianna: Right.
John: And that's so hard to pull off. It's so hard to write a story where one reader is going to spend the whole time thinking this is—this narrator is completely reliable and another reader is going to spend the whole story thinking this narrator is completely unreliable.
Rosianna: And how many injections are any of us away from becoming some extreme version of ourselves and what does that extreme look like, as well?
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: It was something I was a lot about.
John: Yeah. And is it desirable, right?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I mean, if we could do that, you know, if we could better see the patterns that shape all of human interaction, if we could understand how people are feeling with more acuity, if we could figure out the problems of the world and um—fathom the universe, is that worth it? It's a bit of a Faustian dilemma. Like, what's that Robert Penn Warren line? "The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know if knowledge will save him or kill him."
Rosianna: Yeah, it's exactly that, it feels like. Something I really appreciate about the stories that—even though it's so cerebral, obviously, and so centered on the brain, it feels very physical. Like it feels like his intelligence is very centered on the body—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —and not as separate from the brain—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —it's kind of all part of one. And that his heightened awareness and heightened powers, really, over himself and over other people are very physically located, which I liked.
John: Yeah, like he can control his pulse—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —and he can control his blood pressure and the oxygenation levels or whatever in his blood. And I kept—I mean, the thing I kept thinking about was that I take a pill every day that allows me to control my emotions better and allows me to understand the world around me with a lot more clarity. And lots of people take a version, one version or another of such a pill. And to what extent am I already on that journey? You know. Obviously—without, again, without the CIA.
Rosianna: Probably. I don't know, man.
John: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I would—I was about to say, like, I'm a hundred percent sure that the CIA isn't after me, but actually we're not a hundred percent sure.
Rosianna: I told you this already. But I went to the Casino Royale Immersive Cinema experience yesterday.
John: Yes.
Rosianna: Which was great because you get given a character and you dress up and you play that character the entire night and get as involved as you want and I get very involved. And yeah, I was recruited by the CIA to basically poses as a double agent. It's great.
John: Wow.
Rosianna: Anyway. It was really fun.
John: So does it all—like at the end of an immersive experience like that, does it all work out?
Rosianna: It kind of—well, there are all these different pieces that have to happen. There are so many different things going at once. A lot of people have lots of different missions and somehow they still get to all these set pieces that then transition into when you're suddenly in the casino and then they turn it into seating and then you're watching the film. Like it worked—I don't know how they do it, but it's masterful. It's amazing.
John: That is so cool. It's like being inside of a short story.
Rosianna. Yeah. Yeah.
John: Which is another thing that I kept wanting. Like I kept wanting—I wanted to see the tower of Babylon.
Rosianna: Yes!
John: I wanted to— like I wanted to see that movie, except that, of course, the ending of that movie—everyone would walk out of the theater and be like, boo, that's not—I want a satisfactory ending.
Rosianna: Yeah. Give me some closure!
John: Yeah. I thought the ending of that story was perfect, but it's not Hollywood perfect.
Rosianna: I found this great comment from Sunny in Cygnus. He said, "Do you think the tunnels Hillalum found up there were the same as he (or other miners) dug into the earth? So he not only came back to the surface of the earth, but back into the same mines he started from?" Which I loved. I love that.
John: I love that idea. And you do get the feeling that it also—that would also mean that they were very near to heaven down there.
Rosianna: Yes.
John: And it would mean that they—that he only survived—like he survived in part because he dug those mines.
Rosianna: Oh, I love that.
John: Which I think has a lot of metaphorical resonance. Like sometimes you don't know that the work that you're doing—you don't know the value of the work that you're doing until you're doing different work. And then you understand how important what you did in the past was.
Rosianna: Yes, that idea of building the Republic of Heaven where you are. I was rereading His Dark Materials at the same time as rereading this and there was so many parallels to that story of the Tower of Babylon and then, um, what's the latest story called? Hell is the Absence of God.
John: Mm.
Rosianna: That felt like—yeah, that very much felt like that. This exploration of seeing where we are and truly, truly seeing it and seeing—understanding it and what our responsibilities are, if we are kind of living in or familiar with our heaven. It's such an interesting idea to me. But the physical architecture of it was also—just like my head was trying to wrap around it. And there's a moment in the story where they talk about being at a point in the tower where you're so distant from below, but distant from above as well, so that you kind of lose all your orientation.
John: Right, right. You can't see the top of the tower or the bottom of the tower.
Rosianna: Yeah. Which I really liked.
John: That's just—it's such an architecturally beautiful story. They—I mean, that for me is the real genius here. And reading these stories, I was like, I mean, is this guy going to win the Nobel Prize?
Rosianna: Well, everyone keeps talking about Exhalation, which I haven't read yet, which is the new one.
John: Oh yeah, I'm excited to read it. I wanted to ask you one other thing, which is, I don't know if you if you read the story notes after—
Rosianna: Yes.
John: —at the end of the book, but I thought that was so interesting. Like, such an interesting choice and I don't know how I feel about it. Like I read them with great interest. I might've read them closer than anything else because it felt like a window into the author, but I don't—I just—I don't know, I'm conflicted. Because I do a version of that in my books where like a lot of times there's like a Q and A after the book, where the Q's are all either questions that were asked me on the social internet or questions that Julie, my editor, asks. So—which has a similar function, but I really dug not doing it in Q and A format and just instead being like, here's what I was thinking and here's how this came about.
Rosianna: Yeah, here's what I want to say. I like—I really like that it's at the end because then I've already read it—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —and had my own experience with it. And I also—to be honest, like I read them and was like, you know, very fascinated in his perspective and the kind of—he talked a lot about the inspiration for all of the stories and explains about the science for some of it. But then I found I read it and then I sort of dismissed it. Like it didn't carry an extra weight to the story.
John: Mm.
Rosianna: It gave me some interesting context and made me think about different things, but in a way—I don't know. When I got to the end of it, I was—when I saw the story notes appear, I was like, oh, maybe I should have been reading these as I went along, but I was kind of glad I didn't.
John: Yeah, it's one of those things where, like, how much authorial intent do you want? You know, and a lot of times you want less than you think you want.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Or at least I do. Like I think I want to know, but I don't really. In the same way that I think I want to hear from my favorite authors on Twitter, but then I read their Twitters and I'm like, oh, you're just a regular person.
Rosianna: I don't want to hear from a human.
John: Yeah. You get mad at Delta because your flight is delayed. Oh, god, that's so disappointing.
Rosianna: Oh, it's so crushing, please stop tweeting Delta. Just call them. Gosh.
John: Yeah, exactly!
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: You're doing it from your phone, so I know you can make the call and keep it private.
Rosianna: Oh.
John: I did want to say on the Division by Zero story notes that I had known about this equation.
Rosianna: Mhm.
John: But it wasn't until it was explained to me how much it is like the ending of a great short story that E to the power of pi I plus one equals zero. But I knew about that equation because a mathematician friend of mine, a friend of Daniel Biss's, and I were out drinking one night when I was in my early twenties. And somehow or another, we got on the topic of what we would want on our tombstones.
Rosianna: Yeah. Nice and cheery night out.
John: Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty standard night out for me. And I was like, you know, I'm a strictly a name and dates person. I love a name and a date. And he said, I don't want my name or the dates of my birth and death. All I want is that equation.
Rosianna: What? Why?
John: It's just very, very beautiful to people who love math. That like—
Rosianna: I'm so confused by it. I just can't process maths.
John: Yeah, I kind of want to take a test to find out if I have dyscalculia.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I know that I'm 42 years old and it doesn't matter, but I kind of want to take a test because I'm starting to think I do. But anyway, when this guy explained to me this equation in—and I had been drinking—it was very beautiful. Like I almost started crying the way that he was so passionate about it and you could hear the quaver in his voice as he thought about the awe of how weird it is that this should equal zero.
Rosianna: I mean, I love hearing mathematicians talk about math. Like even when I don't understand it, that kind of commitment to it. I think maybe it's sometimes because I don't feel like I can understand it. It has an extra aura of beauty to it.
John: Yeah, totally. It feels magical to me. It feels kind of like holy and sacred and weird.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Which is part of, I think, why it lends itself well in these stories to that kind of science fictional realm.
Rosianna: Yeah. And the thing that you think of is cold and distant actually having this really emotional connection to this faith, religious role in a lot of ways for Renee?
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Is her name Renee? Yeah.
John: Yeah, that—and that, the heat of it, you know. Like we think of the sciences as being cold, as being distant, as being rational. But to feel the heat of it, to feel the emotion of it, to, you know, to glimpse a little bit of the splendor that keeps people—you know, that fascinates people for their whole lives. I feel the same way about chess. Like I don't know how to play chess. I don't know anything about what makes chess beautiful. But when I watch people who understand chess watch beautiful chess. And I see their awe and I watch them gasp and I see them be like, oh! Oh! It's the way that I feel watching soccer. And so I get that.
Rosianna: It's the same thing. Yeah, I think it was a—I mean, as with all of these books, like, it's funny to read this after Yiddish Policemen's Union and have that extra level of chess understanding in that book—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —and then the maths level understanding here. I don't know. I mean, I think that this is probably the case when you read any sequence of books in a row that you think about the one that came before, but it's been really fun to draw the lines between all of the books.
John: Yeah, and especially to make connections that aren't naturally there, necessarily.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like, I don't think that either of these authors were consciously responding to each other's work, right? But that doesn't mean the connections aren't there if you look for them. That's what I love about the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, actually, is that it's about what happens when you pay close attention and what you're paying close attention to is actually less important than the quality and seriousness of your attention.
Rosianna: Makes you want to do another degree.
John: Yeah, I would—I kind of want to go back to college. I think I would fail. Like I don't—I don't know that I could get a bachelor's degree in like biology and physics, but I—that was another thing I kept thinking about while reading this book was oh, I wish I understood this stuff a little bit better. Because it seems really beautiful.
Rosianna: It seems lovely. I love the—all the Fermat's principle stuff in The Story of Your Life.
John: Yes.
Rosianna: It's just so beautiful.
John: Oh, god.
Rosianna: It's so great. That whole story is so great.
John: That whole story is so, so great and wrenching. And just—it's perfectly constructed it. It explores language and the relationship between thought and language so beautifully. It's just—it's incredible.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I mean, that is, I think, the marquee story in the collection. But they're all really good. But yeah, The Story of Your Life is—oh, god.
Rosianna: It's great.
John: I mean, I don't—I desperately wish that I had read it before I saw Arrival.
Rosianna: Yeah. But I think actually it's one of the few times where it kind of worked for me. Seeing it the other way or doing it the other way around, because I normally do like reading it first and then seeing it. But in a way, I don't know, in a way it almost gave me the courage to keep reading when I was first reading the book.
John: I see what you mean, yeah. I get what you mean by that. Like that it gave you enough of a background that you could feel confident and comfortable in territory that feels pretty alien to you.
Rosianna: Yeah, and then it's different enough that I then, reading it, could separate it from the film. But I'm quite—I find that—I don't find that too hard. Separating it.
John: Yeah. Oh.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: God, the end of that story.
Rosianna: Oh, god. I didn't think I even thought it would still impact me as much as it did and it could—having known the story on some level and then it still does every time.
John: Yeah, I guess that's what I wish I could have had. I wish I could've had that last, like—there's a space break, and then there's about a one-page closing bit that's so good. And I knew, broadly speaking, what was going to happen in that one page bit, and I kind of wish that I hadn't known.
Rosianna: Right.
John: But it didn't matter. I still ugly cried.
Rosianna: Yeah. There's a bit that also reminded me of you, which is when she tells her favorite joke. And it just made me think of you and the moth joke.
John: Yeah, I mean it's—I did get the distinct feeling that's Ted Chiang's favorite joke.
Rosianna: Yeah. Just love it.
John: Uh, yeah. I mean, the unfortunate thing about that is that I am on—as you know, Rosanna, I am always on the hunt for a good, metaphorically resonant joke. In fact, if anybody knows any metaphorically resonant jokes along the lines of the joke in Story of Your Life or the moth joke, which I would retell, but I'm sure—I'll retell it.
Rosianna: Oh, god.
John: Moth walks into a podiatrist's office. And the podiatrist says what seems to be the problem and the moth says, oh, god, doc, if only there were one problem. My wife doesn't love me anymore. I looked in the mirror. All I see is failure. My children—they are just pale reflections of my own failure and I see them going through the motions of life. But nothing means anything, doc, like deep down, it's all empty. It's all for nothing. And the podiatrist says those seem to be very serious problems, moth, but, I'm a podiatrist. What brought you here today? The moth says, oh, the light was on.
Rosianna: [laughs]
John: Still laugh! I've told that joke five hundred times.
Rosianna: That's your favorite joke.
John: That wasn't the best version of it. You should hear my twelve-minute version of that joke.
Rosianna: I was going to say, that felt short.
John: So anyway, if you have a metaphorically resonant joke along the lines of the moth joke—the metaphor, of course, being that all humans all the time are just going where the light is on. And complaining about our problems. Or along the lines of the joke about the, what if they grew up and blame me for everything that's wrong with their lives. What do you mean, what if?
Rosianna: It's pretty great.
John: It's brutal and it's true.
Rosianna: Man, my favorite joke is not that smart.
John: Tell me your favorite joke.
Rosianna: What did the cheese say when it looked in the mirror?
John: What?
Rosianna: Halloumi!
John: That is not a good joke.
Rosianna: My favorite joke in the world. Love it!
John: I mean, there's probably some resonance in it. I could probably—Hank told a joke on the pod recently that was so good. Can I tell it to you?
Rosianna: Please do.
John: All right, so an ancient Greek playwright goes to the tailor because he needs some mending of his pants. And the tailor looks him over for a while and just kind of stretches them out. Takes a good look at the pants, holds them up, and then looks at the playwright and says, Euripides?
Rosianna: [laughs]
John: [laughs]
Rosianna: Oh, that's great.
John: It's so much better than all of Hank's other jokes—
Rosianna: Yeah, by a country mile.
John: —that like I'm now willing to let Hank tell jokes on the podcast for two more years in the hopes of having a moment of joy that pure.
Rosianna: That's so great.
John: So yeah, if you know any metaphorically resonant jokes, please let me know because I am desperate for them. I'm writing something—I don't want to add more than that—where I need metaphorically resonant jokes, but I only know two of them. And I've tried to make them up and it turns out it's very hard to make up good jokes. So, at least for me.
Rosianna: Yeah, it's not my talent.
John: So, yeah. Let me know.
Rosianna: Great. I think we've crushed it. I think we've covered all the book.
John: Yeah, it's been a bit of a winding road today. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for reading with us. I mean, this is the joy of reading though, right? Is that part of the time you're talking about the book and part of the time you're talking about Euripides and chess and a mathematician you got drunk with once.
Rosianna: And tombstones, yeah.
John: And tombstones. Thank you for reading with us. Thanks for being part of Life's Library. And we're excited to chat with you on the Discord and then to read our next book, which is really going to bring home the work that you are supporting with your membership at Life's Library, the work that PIH is doing.
Rosianna: Yeah. Very excited for that one as well. Well, thank you for podding with me, John.
John: It's been a pleasure and thanks to Sheridan Gibson, our producer and editor on the Life's Library podcast. And again, thanks to all of you. Thanks to all the mods at the Discord who do such amazing work. And we'll talk to you next time.
Rosianna: Speak to you then.