Anthony Doerr

I'm Mini driver. Welcome to Many Questions Season two. I've always loved Cruce's question. It was originally a nineteenth century Harlag game where players would ask each other thirty five questions aimed at revealing the other player's true nature. It's just the scientific method really. In asking different people the same set of questions, you can make observations about which

truths appeared to be universal. I love this discipline, and it made me wonder, what if these questions were just the jumping off point, what greater depths would be revealed if I ask these questions as conversation starters with thought leaders and trailblazers across all these different disciplines. So I adapted prus questionnaire and I wrote my own seven questions that I personally think a pertinent to a person's story. They are when and where were you happiest? What is

the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped you the most? What would be your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that's grown out of a personal disaster. And I've gathered a group of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored and

humbled to have had the chance to engage with. You may not hear their answers to all seven of these questions. We've whittled it down to which questions felt closest to their experience, or the most surprising, or created the most fertile ground to connect. My guest today is the author Anthony Door, whose book All the Light We Cannot See One the Pulitzer Prize. This, it turns out, is not surprising at all if you have ever read a single

word he has written. His more recent novel claud Cuckoo Land is genuinely one of my favorite books ever, and the level of lyricism present in his writing is there when he speaks to I wrote down so many things he said all the way through the interview, you know, as though the whole thing wasn't being recorded and I had to take notes. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. I'm very interested. Do you

mean to start up with since my mother died? But since my mother died, I think about the things that I didn't realize until after she'd gone, that went into the basic architecture, the stuff that was impassing, rather than the big moments. And it was weird. It was like it was like having the foundation of something revealed when I'd really just been looking at the building the whole time,

this beautiful building, because she was this amazing person. It's been like this weird posthumous gift to feel all these other things. So now when I do something and my son rolls his eyes and like things that I'm super embarrassing and that we've spent five hours making a sock,

I do go. Now you know what he's going to remember this because we listened to New Order while we made this cow zone and we chatted about some something that's so interesting, because that's kind of the lesson for like beginning writers want to write about the big architecture, you know, they want to write about love for what it feels to be confused. But the only way to deliver that to another person is through detail, through like

these moment by moment details of life. That's how memories get built, you know, is New Order and making a cow zone exactly. And you know what, I had this teacher who I dedicated my book to my English teachers. My three teachers were so huge in my life as

a whole, but Alistair one of them. On a Monday morning, a piece of a four paper would be posted on the notice board in my school from the age of ten onwards, and there would be a list in his really beautiful, strange italic handwriting, and it would be like drinking a cup of tea, tying my shoelaces, getting out of bed, and you had to write two sides of a four describing this extraordinarily mundane thing. And he was like,

this is just like exercise. He was like, this is the same as you're running around playing fields, playing hockey, basketball, whatever it is. So many years later, when I was still working my way through the anthology of what he told me to read in my Life, he said it was about getting you to pay attention to not just

having to do this thing. The thing was not the thing, but to your life, to all those things that it would trigger that whenever you noticed something, it would trigger the memory of your interest in the fact that you've had that muscle built in from an early age to appreciate it and to be able to kind of develop ideas from it. Yeah, detail is how you communicate with people. If you had said I had this teacher our stair he was meaningful to me, that would kind of bounce

off me. But if you describe his handwriting and you describe this list on his door and the details of what he was asking you to do, described telling your shoelaces, it means something to me. That's how you communicate a motion. It's ironically it's like you're reaching for the stars. But the way to do it is like the tiny little pieces of broken glass on the ground, and that we keep retrieving memory, Like I've just moved back to the

town that I'm from. I don't like how it feels because I don't feel like I can make new memories here. I'm so in the trough of what went before and I'm fascinated by At the same time, it's feeling incredibly sad. It feels palpable. I keep asking everybody, how do you create new memories in a totally familiar environment. That's super interesting.

It makes me think about Germans and like the seventies trying to deal with like the weight of the memory of all the stuff that had happened, and you're just trying to listen to music and be eighteen years old, and there's always this impulse to renew. I mean, I think that's what's so beautifu. Those grass always ends up growing over the battlefields and it's so important to remember that blood was spilled there, but at the same time allow space for young people to move around. So our

twin boys just went off to college. Oh wow, Yeah, I worry so much about you know, this world, Like I keep saying, like a little world's warming up, oh, and like it's gonna get worse. You know, he doesn't need that, he needs to be able to go make new memories and discover the world anew and go to a party as if it was like the first time anybody ever went to a party? Did you go to any good parties? And what you're busy going? Can you believe the ice caps? Not? What about that Kappa Kappa

gamma that's totally it? Yeah, And then his mom's like, ask him about COVID. She's like the cherry on top, that's really funny. Well, God, I'd better get on because I could really just ask you about a thousand questions that have nothing to do with these seven questions, but I will glean all the answers that I would like to ask you. If these having questions allow a ski, will you tell me where and when you were happiest?

Of course I thought about it. I'm gonna choose a general when, but a specific where I love to ski. I live in Idaho, in the mountains in the United States, one of the last places middle class families can still ski, and you know afford it. We raised our boy skiing on this mountain called Brundage Mountain, about two hours north of here, where you know, they just put a keg of beer in the snow and like grill Hamburgers and you could still get a seasons pass for about two bucks.

Oh my god. There's something about joy for me that's always connected to the ephemeral, and for me, it's fresh snow is like this great reminder of it, when the whole world's like made new again by a big dump of fresh white snow. To be there with my boys, like moving downhill, there's some joy and speed are linked in my head too for some reason. But skiing through fresh snow like your joints filled twenty years younger, because you can just land without pain and moving and hearing

them like whooping. You can hear like the joy of other people. And you know what's gonna go away. It's going to get tracked up, but I'll get too warm. The moment of freshnow is unpredictable. You just have to be lucky enough to be there when it comes, and then to feel yourself dancing. It's really a kind of dance moving down through that all of your troubles kind of vanished and evaporate, and you're just present in the

now and you're creating like you're dancing. Is especially if there are trees you're dancing down through them, so you're kind of improvising and making music in your head. It's really sharing that with somebody is so special. Oh my god, for how you describe that. It is so akin to the ocean. I mean, I know that snow is visited upon us and the oceans are always there, But that's feeling. That is what surfing is like. For me. Everything feels young.

It's only the next day when you feel your knees and my shoulders in my back and the thing in that moment, that's it. And the waves aren't always predictive, but me you're waiting to see what way will common. Sometimes they aren't there and sometimes they're too big, and so it's very very similar. Yeah, and you're using gravity the forces of nature to move you through an environment something so deeply human. It connects us to our ancestors. Yeah,

it really does. It really does that. Moving through nature, particularly like the mountains, feel particularly sort of atavistic because there's it's so much to do with survival, Like I don't know, the part of my brain is always on a mountain or high up or on a glacier like super super super, more turned on than it is anywhere else, even in the ocean where I know that there are great white sharks. They swim right by me to go

up to the seal colony and eat their breakfast. It's not switched on in the same way as it is in the mountains. It's funny, but there is always a thread of injury. There's always there's something that makes you feel a little more alive. I'm not chasing like down crazy cool wars or something, but a little bit of threat of danger does help keep you kind of present and in a mind like mine that's always like what

do I have to do next Friday? Or why can't I solve this problem in the book I'm working on right now, to just be present is something I'm chasing, and it's always so leading, you know. I just want to grab on that and remember, like, my boys are going to get bigger, you know, they won't always ski with me. I'm going to get older, sort of have those moments when you get to be with them and to try to appreciate them for what they are before

they're gone. Yes, my son barely looked over I mean he did, but he did barely look over his shoulder when he went off on this camping trip. His first week back at school, and I was like, I carry him around in my pocket if I could, Like I would be in the back of his class, being like this an agent ron great, Like I'd be you want to sit together at what should we have the lunch? Like I would be his worst night matter if I possibly could. But I called his name out, and I

must have There must have been something. You know how when you hear someone shout and you can tell that they're in vain, you know it's not a shriek of Joe way, You really know that they've trodden on the thumb tack or stuff. That time, I must have said his name with something in it, because he turned around so quickly, and I sort of like cheshire cat grinned at him, and he was like, mom, it's gonna be okay. Yeah, And then I asked him if I was damaging him. Well, yeah,

we just we have twin boys. Will just drop them off at college, so it's like the same thing. God, that must have been really hard. Your whole job is to get them to live on their own, and yet you're trying to make your deepest emotional connection of your life really over and over with them and then you're expected to kind of say okay and let them go. Yeah,

let them go. I know it's way more evolved than humans actually are, which makes me feel like we used to be so evolved, because clearly we used to do it, We've been doing it for this long, but like it doesn't hasn't gotten any easier, Like how come everything else is supposed to evolve and there are these things that just do not. It never becomes easier, or you can't intellectual qualify. Maybe we didn't evolve to send our kids

three thousand miles away at the university. There's a lot of things that are kind of artificial demands that modern life puts on us that maybe our ancestors didn't have to deal with. I think, you know, we would be around our elders a lot more, we would be around our grown kids. And the way we segment kids in schools, for example, like all the twelve year old shipped together now, but the village is like kids of all different ages

would be helping each other. The three year olds would be attended by the nine year olds, and the fifteen year olds are helping the nine year olds. Sometimes I wonder, you know, all this segmentation in the distance. You know, our kids got into so called good universities, but they're far from home, and maybe that's a little artificial, I

know for people listening. Clokkleland is honestly one of my favorite books I ever read, and the part that I cried in the most was one of may is leaving home, being forced to leave with his cattle, yeah, and knowing that he will never see them again. This idea that

even if one returns. There was something particularly unbearable about how going to I don't know how far Constantinople was from where his woods were, probably only three hundred and fifty miles, but you know, in those days, that's forever. The whole book really is about returning and how you can never step in the same river twice, and yet that's part of life. Like letting your son go off camping.

You know he'll come back slightly changed and he'll still need you for a few more years, but you have to celebrate his growing independence even as he's pushing against those boundaries that you're building around him. Our boys need to go build new families, new tribes, and they're not rejecting us. We're not losing them as much as kind of sharing them with other people. As what I keep trying to tell myself. Anyway, you're a little bit ahead in terms of like the college thing, but Henry goes

to boarding schools. There is something of them like going off and taking what you've given them out into the world and saying, this is what we did. This was the point was to build good, strong, kind, intellectually curious, independent people who can go out and be a nice addition to whatever environment they find themselves in. Yeah, that's so BEAUTIFU fleet put, that's a kindness. I mean, I think we're successful if we build kind people for the

next generation. Yeah, I mean I will saw later obviously, but I will remember these what relationship real or fictionalized? De find love fear? This was your hardest of your questions. I've been reading a lot about Rachel Carson. Her most

famous book was called Silent Spring. It came out in the sixties, and as she was dying of cancer, she made a very persuasive and emotional and beautifully written to argument that d d T this pesticide that humans were spring everywhere, was going to lead to a silent spring. It thins that the shells of bird eggs, and so it really makes bird reproduction complicated. You know, it's an insecticide.

In World War Two, it arrived as like this magic silver bullet that could eradicate, especially during war when everybody's all close together, these diseases that you know, these awful pandemics that were occurring, especially saying Naples, and they shower a million people with D d T and all the life sty and then there's no typhus anymore, so saving tons of lives and also malaria. It's amazing mosquito eradicating pesticide,

but if the collateral damage is immense. So anyway, Rachel Carson was living at a time when I definitely wasn't okay to be a lesbian or even just be interested in sexuality in a different way. And she had a relationship with a woman named Dorothy Freeman. And there's about nine d letters that survived between them, and they had this amazing romantic relationship that was always kind of fearful of being found out Dorothy was married to a man.

And so I've just been reading through some of those letters and trying to understand they're very different, and I think what's so interesting about loves. We often think, what do we have a comment, you know, like, hey, let's go out on the scorpio. You're you like skateboarding. But a differences, I think are what ultimately make relationship. It's interesting the way you try to embrace what's different about each other, and that's how you learned and evolved together.

It's like, oh, man, he likes to go to bed at ten and I like to go to bed at eight thirty or whatever. I think those kinds of things that really help push you to grow as a person if you can embrace the differences of your beloved. So called beloved, were they very different Dorothy and Rachel Carson. Yes, Rachel kind of had a little ego, which is interesting to learn. And you know, she became a famous writer about ten years before Silent Springs, so she had to

deal with fame. Of course, she didn't have another person in her life, so there's always that kind of strange jealousy too, where Dorothy has this husband stand. But they shared so much love for beauty and for the natural world that they could, you know, be out just like in their dresses in their nineteen fifties dresses tiebooling together, and they took such joy and sharing that, so sharing the beauty of the world with each other, I think

was this thing they had in common. But then Dorothy would go back to her so called heterosexual life and all these worms that are pressed down upon these women so that the time they could spend together is so intense. There's something really beautiful. That's amazing. I love that. I love that that's in a book, But it's not fiction. That's really cool. What quality do you like least about yourself in patience? I take a long time to write these books, like how long. My book before Cloud cook

Land was called All the Light We Can't See. It took me ten years to write. I started it when I was thirty and I finished it as forty. Took me forever. You did win the fullest surprise for its or maybe it was worth it. I guess that was an epically beautiful book. The Shell Collector was my gateway book, and then All the Light we Can't See and then Cloud Cookie Learned, and then your memoir Thank you so much.

He's so sweet. But anyway, you know, at least Americans were kind of taught to worship efficiency, like don't waste a chapter. Don't like, oh if you would take a research trip to France for this book. Every minute better be productive or you're failing, like you know, especially leaving my wife back at home with two kids, taking a financial risk to go there. You just put so much pressure on your stuff, Like I can't just go entering

cider and look out at the sea. I've got to be working to the point where I think, you know, through my thirties, I was teaching myself if I'm stuck in a line at the grocery store, you should be back at your desk, like this is a waste of time, Like you should at least be reading something, like you should be researching while you're waiting three people deep to

buy this lettuce. And I'm trying, as I can get older, to accept that sometimes you can't control life, like you just get stuck in traffic or your flight is delayed, and there are real pleasures in trying to find moments of the day to just breathe. For example, I was just on the flight and it was right on time.

Everything was going great, but it was like the third flight is long flight back home from Europe has probably happened to you, and the gate people aren't ready to like dock the plane with the jetway and you know your bladders full, and I'm like, I've timed my patients just for this last thirty seconds so i could get off the plane. I'm just telling myself, like, here's an opportunity for you to just breathe, sit in the chair.

I'm totally failing at this, by the way, but I'm trying to say, like, now you can exercise patients and say you're alive. You have so many things to be grateful for. You have a book in your bag, Just pull the book back out. It's gonna be okay. But I'm not that great at that. So in patience, I wish I was more patient. What do you think would happen if you were more patient? Maybe you would lose

like some kind of engine. I think that's okay, Like the engine of like that makes you write books, or that makes you go say yes to the film project that's probably landing in your email box right now. Sometimes saying yes to those things is so valuable because you go to Fiji or whatever, You'll meet people and you'll give you participant in this great team making this film. But sometimes if you tone down the engine, maybe stillness is something that we need to embrace a little more.

At least for me as I'm getting older, the pandemic really helped teach me that I used to think, like I've got to have a list of things I've got to see before I die. Like you've never been to the multi coast, Tony, like you ever read all of Edith Wharton Tony to take Washington Square to goddamn a most exactly, and then while you're there, make sure you also go for a run and to push ups. And you know, I think I've got to say it's okay.

Like there were these moments, especially early in the pandemic, and there's no airplanes in the sky. You know, we have these beautiful blue spring skies, and the snow kis were migrating like a mile above our yard. You'd see this little thread, this little like bracelet of white birds and you could hear them because there was no other sound. You hear them honking at each other, and you realize, like, just here in our backyard versus many miracles as I've

been chasing. When I'm trying to like go all the way to Kenya or something. So I'm trying to learn that right around us there's all these gifts and that I don't have to always be running the engine as high as I think I should in your life, Can you tell me about something that has grown out of a personal disaster. So we've been talking about our kids just heading off to school. They're eighteen years older. Twins. Are they identical? Twins? Are they fraternal? Their fraternal? They're

quite different looking at inside too. But we got married two years ago and dated for a few years before that, and we both wanted to be parents and it wasn't working out. I forgot married, were like, let's see if we can make babies, and it wasn't happening. And in the beginning we were kind of like in this arms race with some friends who were getting pregnant, or like semi unconsciously bragging about it, and you just sort of like, oh,

I guess it is hard for us. We're struggling. And it felt very much like a personal disaster, even though I know there are many worst problems in the world. And thanks to science and UH in detro we were able with quite a bit of expense that wasn't covered by our healthcare plan able to get pregnant, got pregnant with twins. When I look back now, I am so grateful that we went through those thickets because I want I knew I wanted these kids, and every minute that

I was with them, I was pumped. I was so grateful that I got to see those kids run around and jump in puddles and play basketball and skin their knees and yell at me. And I just really had to go through that journey to understand, like, this is an immense privilege to get to have an offspring that I get to hang out with. I've just been thinking about that lately, how that so called personal disaster at least the troubles we were going through really helped us

appreciate what we had. That's really what their childhood was. M you noticed it happening, and now noticing that it's so there in all. I mean, I know that that is It's sort of what you're famous for in your books, is the detail with which you tell these stories. But it is very interesting that that is like how you live your life as well. I'm trying my favorite art, whatever does film or a painting or a symphony or like a quilt. It shows you the world with new eyes.

It wakes you up to the miracle of being alive, because I think the worst crime you can commit is to sleep walk through your life, you know, And of course there's days when you're tired and it's fine too, you know whatever. Taken a junkie film where you know every single thing that's going to happen, But to challenge yourself occasionally to wake up and see the familiar with unfamiliar eyes. That's what I try to do in my sentences, to try to disrupt little patterns so that you're disrupting

cliche at the sentence level. And then stories that kind of disrupt expectations in surprise the reader. They bring me so much pleasure. So that's the kind of stuff I'm trying to make anyway, So, now, what question would you most like answer to? I was thinking about this and I was like, oh, it's obviously gonna be aliens, Like

are there aliens? And I thought, that's okay. Here's my midlife journey is just like tying in with my previous answer, trying to get more comfortable with not knowing, like not knowing when the dudes are going to use their little joystick and put the jetway onto the plane. Get more comfortable with that, and so I think I would just say it's okay, I'm happy with not knowing what I

don't know. Like you know, the classic exercise if they handed any driver and envelope and said inside is the date and the cause of your death, you know, would you open it? No, right, because knowing would suck. Knowing would suck, totally suck. Like again, why are we not better at it? All we do is humans? Is not nice stuff? How we know better at this? Like I'm

I want to know that. I want to know about why these parts of ourselves don't evolve when we have so much information, Like you just saying, I just want to get more comfortable with the unknown, Like it feels so freeing, it feels like like a breath, Like God. That's the way to do it. It's not to seek to you know. It's like God isn't in the God, It's in the faith. If you can get into the notion of faith and you can really get into the idea of God. I mean, this is how my Christian

friends have fixed my and got to me. And I understand that because they're wanting me to just cozy up with the void. And I feel differently about that on any different day. But it's interestingly we haven't developed a better relationship with not knowing. Yes, for me, that's all time with the future. Like my anxiety is often about like what is coming, what will come next? What will happen next Tuesday when I have to talk to a

French journalist, how badly will I flame out? And if I can just be more president like the Buddhists, maybe like Christians. You know, Buddhist idea of living now and accepting now means you have to be comfortable with not knowing what's coming and whatever comes, being comfortable with your ability to cope with it. And I'm just saying words. I'm not good at following any of this, but well, okay, well, which leads me to what I'm going to have to

ask you this. How does one get from the self awareness and the knowledge that the words create of what it is we need to know, and then the not doing of that, and the continuing not doing of the thing that we know would make us feel better? How do bridge that schism? Tony, come on quick. The novelist friends who meditate. For me, it's yoga in the morning.

The moments that you can just take in the day to practice being comfortable in the now, even if it's twenty minutes, I think can help prepare you to make you a little more resilient for the rest of the day. When you're uber is late and you're like, when will he get here? I have to be blank. And then also I think for me, like accepting the invitation of like the night sky of the universe often helps me.

Right before we dropped our boys off a college, I took them backpack and we're really lucky to have smoke free skies. And remembering how tiny you are can sometimes be so helpful because our problems start to seem like we're the center of the universe. And if you remember, like the Earth's four and a half billion years old, like percent of species have gone extinct, you know humans

will be the same eventually. You know your life is small and huge, and that's kind of like that's the paradox in fiction, right think, Really, you know you're dealing with the details of some person's life, and yet this person's life in the pages of a novel becomes enormous but it's also tiny because you're connecting with readers across time and space, and so you can remember somehow your

smallness by exercising that imagination, that imaginative empathy. To say, oh, Minny driver has felt the same way as I have felt about saying goodbye to her son before he goes off to camp. Means I'm not alone, and it means my problems aren't so unique in the history of the world. And I think reading is one way to really help me exercise that and just looking up at the stars and contemplating, you know, our tiny little whirling kunk of

carbon that's like whirling around out here. We're just tiny. Even the Milky Way is just a tiny little galaxy in a sea of galaxies. God, it's nuts when you say that the Milky Way is a tiny little galaxy in a sea of galaxies. As my mother was dying, which is the kind of the agonizing everyday pot of grief subsides and like, you start watching it grow into something else if you've developed a relationship with it, which

I think it's incredibly important to do. And the days where you can approach your loss in this more robust way and remember and think about that person, and I think about my mother. And she did say a version of We were lying in her bed pretty close to the end, and she said, I just I can't believe how fast this is all happening. And I said, do you mean dying? And she said, I do. I mean dying, but I also mean living. She's like it happened so quickly.

And then she and she didn't not and she wasn't in a self pitching when she said, and you know the other thing that was crazy. She was like, the lack of significance and the significance of my life is happening in real time and in real awareness, and it is the trippiest feeling and thought to hold that it meant everything and it meant nothing. And those two things are existing in time and space and here in my

physical body, which is soon going to be gone. And it was so interesting because you want I wanted to have a really evolved spiritual reaction to that, but invariably, because again one is comforted and also confounded by your humanness, all I could do is just squeeze her hand just so tightly. And I suppose in recognition or in comfort or in whatever it was she needed to get out that squeeze. But it's wild remembering that. Yeah, that's beautiful.

And don't be impatient with yourself if that spiritual moment doesn't last, because you are alive, Like eventually you have to go eat and have breakfast and change your shoes. And these revelate, these like epiphanies that we have don't last. That's just part of being human and we kind of have to keep relearning those lessons of our vast significance and our massive insignificance all at once exactly. So, will you tell me what person, place, or experience most a

to your life. Yeah, I think my wife Shanna gets a shout out here. She's taught me patients. Shauna grew up in a family. She had three sisters and her oldest has an intellectual disability, and as a consequence, her house was filled with patients in a way mine wasn't because Kelly just takes much longer to do everything. And also they just kept conflict to a minimum. I had three brothers, was kind of this other yin yang household, and there's just always movement in mud and creatures and

action in our house. And I think Shanna has taught me so much about patients, and she'll just drop me. She teaches me about love every minute. She'll just drop whatever she's doing to talk to all of her friends, our kids, me about our problems, you know, versus me. I'm like, I'm tying being a very important email. You know. Can I hear about your heartbreak later? You know, kindness patients.

When we first got married, Like if we're in the grocery store and I'd be like, oh, I decided we don't want this pancake mix or something, and I'm just gonna put it back here in the soft drink style. She'd be like, no, We're gonna walk all the way back to Aisle three and put it back where you found it. Oh my gosh, are we okay? Oh we are? Oh wow, we're doing this all right. Okay. Education of being a better person all the time. That's a great

that you love that though. That's clearly obviously why she loves you, because you don't mind things that are kind of making you a more thoughtful and considerate humans. Yeah, the love is especially you know, over decades, it helps you grow as a person. You know, if you can keep challenging each other and help each other evolve and appreciate that changes, like the only music and the world that you know, change is going to keep coming, and

how do you help each other through that? You know, I remember the first days in the pandemic when we thought like we're going to be dragging each other's corpses to the curb or who knows. I remember both of us saying like, we are so grateful we have had this time together, and those little resets are so important. I think, Yeah, how is she doing with your son's being off for college. Yeah, thanks for asking. Since we're only eight days in, we just neither of us really know.

Sevent of the traffic and our house came from our boys and their pals, and so it's super quiet. Thankfully. My career is kind of busy, so that kind of helps me maybe ignore feelings that like the dumb men aren't good at this way and she's probably a little farther along and processing this is part of the journey. But you know, phones are interesting. You know, when I went to college, I called my parents every other Sunday and that was it. And they're texting her a lot,

and so I think she's getting connected to them. Because of technology in a way that's mostly healthy. I don't think they're ignoring their experienced to touch base with home, but it does make you feel connected to them, like, oh, they've figured out what dining hall to eat at, or they figured out how to do their laundry, or they figured out how to get a package. You know that stuff is kind of nice. Yeah, No, I love the mundane. I checked the weather where he is right now, he's

on this camping track. I'm obsessively refreshing the met office here in England, which is notorious and they useless and predict weather. But I'm looking at it in real time, not ahead, So I feel like I'm staying very present with the weather where he is. So that's good, isn't it. I'm in the now and he's in the rain. It is just raining and it's quite cold, and are you comfortable with that? Can you sit with that? Be like

he's called? Yeah, because I know how many socks he's got because I packed them and I realized, really what you need is you need fifteen pairs of socks, because really what you want is your feet to feel dry, even if your boots are wet, putting on dry socks makes you feel better. I know that from having done a lot of trekking. And if you've gotten wet, you have to have warm clothes to change into. So I'm not worried. Boys are so funny that I guarantee doesn't

even know everything that's in his back. I swear to you he will have won the same two pass socks and the one sweater you know I packed five. Yeah. I like being connected by mundane things that makes me feel safe in the world rather than being connected by the loftier stuff. I just want him to text me and go, can you get some salt and vinegar crisps for when I get back? And I'll be like, yeah, totally, and like that's it, And that's what love is, though,

that's love. That's what love is. It's like it doesn't need to be she experience on it, you know, it's Yeah, you have those moments or they volunteered them. That's what's great, those moments. The poetry of your children comes in the rarest, most amazing moments, you know, not when you necessarily need it or are asking for it, but when they deliver it. And there's something I mean, I tend to write down

a lot of the stuff that he says. But I sometimes I do write down the Crisps conversations too, because they are incredibly comforting, like verbatim. I'll do it and they make me chuckle. That's great, and you'll love them in twenty years. And I've been doing it since he

was about three. I've been writing down the weird ship that he says, and it's really good going back and reading and knowing that he's wound up where he is currently and we'll continue, Yeah, making that unscheduled time for that. You know, corporations are always trying to sell us on like come to this resort and have meaningful family tough. But you know you can just do that by being president dinner, you know, just burned some pork chops. By the way, I went to hear Rumdus speak when I

was quite young. He came to London and I went and sat on the floor and listened to this. You know, he was amazing and amazing being in person, and his whole thing was you know, not only not only can you, but you will and you should think about it. If you won't think about anything, having your big spiritual experiences in the butcher's shop, in picking your tomatoes, waiting in line at the dentist in the waiting room as you will,

like sitting under the Banyan tree. It goes back to what you were saying about detail, like there is such life in detail, and that is mundane and that is also poetic. The mundane and the sublime are linked there, like braided around each other all the time. Boy, they really are. I love sort of videgar crisps. They are the food of the gods. Thank you so much for coming and chatting and where all these ideas. It is

absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much. Mini. I've really enjoyed diving into the podcast, and I think it's so cool that you're exercising your curiosity and you get to bring all these different people together. So wonderful. Thank you, Tony, and please say hello to your wife and your boys. Okay, same, say hi to Henry. We'll do well when he gets

back with his clean socks socks. Anthony's newest book, Cloud cookoo Land, is out now in hardcover and paperback, and be sure to read his other incredible works, including All the Light We Cannot See About Grace and This wonderful collection of short stories called The Shell Collector. Mini Questions is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, supervising producer Aaron Kaufman, Producer more Than Levoy, Research assistant Marissa Brown. Original music Sorry Baby by Mini Driver, Additional music by

Aaron Kauffman, Executive produced by Me Mini Driver. Special thanks to Jim Nikolay, Will Pearson, Addison No Day, Lisa Castella and a Unique Oppenheim at w kPr, de La Pescador, Kate Driver and Jason Weinberg. And for constantly solicited tech support, Henry Driver.