I'm Helene Cooper. I cover the U.S. military for The New York Times. So I'm sitting in my car in a parking lot outside the Pentagon. I had a cubicle with a desk inside the building for years, but the Trump administration has taken that away. People in power have always made it difficult for journalists. It hasn't stopped us in the past. It's not going to stop us now. I will keep working to get you the facts. This work doesn't happen without subscribers to the New York Times.
you I don't know how to hold all the feelings, even all the thoughts. I should have in a day right now. The emergency is here and the kids need help with their homework. I have friends who have fallen terribly ill and others who have just seen their test results come back clear. I spend days covering efforts to rip healthcare from people and torch the global economy. And then I'm supposed to go to a birthday party. I look down at my phone at smoldering ruins in Ukraine and Gaza and Sudan.
and then I look up into a spring day. I know on some level this is always true, that we are just more or less alive to it at different times. But I guess I'm feeling more alive to it right now. more overwhelmed by it right now, more curious about how to keep myself open to it right now. And then I ran into this unusually beautiful book that's all about this experience.
It's called Lost and Found. It's by Katherine Schultz, a writer at The New Yorker. And it's structured around a loss, that of her father, around a finding, that of finding and falling in love with her partner. And then it's this really moving meditation on the way it's all connected. The way that we, quote, live with both at once, with many things at once. Everything connected to its opposite. Everything connected to everything.
It seemed worth a conversation. Catherine Schultz, welcome to the show. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks so much.
I want to start by having you tell me a bit about your father. Where did he come from? What a wonderful question to begin with, because it has these kind of two valences, the practical matter of where he came from and the kind of... mystifying question of where any human being and all their wonderful specificity comes from in the case of my father both answers are a little complicated
His mother had fled the shtetl in Poland when it was clear that the shadow of the Second World War was kind of creeping ever further across Poland. She came from a family of 12. They had the resources too. get one of them to safety, and they chose their youngest daughter, who was my grandmother, and indeed her parents. And most of her siblings subsequently perished in Auschwitz. So she gets herself to Tel Aviv. My father is born. And then at a very young age, he was sent away from...
His mother, he was sent to live on a kibbutz and spent a few years alone there. His father vanishes or dies. We don't know. My grandmother remarries. And after the war, their family in a... truly unusual trajectory when half of global Jewry in its terrible decimated and refugee status is trying to get to the Holy Land. My father and his family flee Tel Aviv and go of all places in the world to Germany.
So my father left Tel Aviv at about seven, spent from seven to 12 in Germany. And then finally, the family obtained refugee visas and wound up in Detroit, which is where he then spent his teenage years. You have a beautiful passage about your father being on the boat, coming to America, and trying to conceive of how much turmoil and loss he had already experienced.
Tell me a bit about how much dislocation he'd seen before the age of 12. Just shocking amounts, really. I mean, my father was born in 1941, so all around him, what should have been... whole vast branches of family trees are just being hewn off viciously and whole communities are being leveled and destroyed. So there was this kind of background dislocation attendant upon.
every Jew born in that era. But then quite specifically, you know, he was born essentially a stranger in a strange land in 1948 when my father's family left Israel. or I should say left Palestine, it was still Palestine. It was effectively a war zone. And indeed, an uncle who was traveling with him in the caravan to Haifa to leave at the port there was shot and killed in the car with my father in the car in the backseat when it happened.
There was a kind of omnipresent violence and insecurity that characterized his young life that is just shocking for me to contemplate, in part because he then... dedicated his adult life to providing for his children the stability he did not have growing up. I read stories like this, and I've been reading Melting Point, which is a different sort of very interesting kaleidoscopic history of...
this era for Jewish people. But I was also reading Wolf Hall, where everybody's endlessly dying of tuberculosis. I think of the modesty of the things I try to protect my children from now. The things that upset me if it happens to them. And then what, you know, every generation of humanity, including many people alive today, the extremism of the experience. And it's hard to imagine how you go through that.
and just keep going. And yet people did and do. So this is a person who's, I mean, he's watched his uncle get murdered in the car next to him. What kind of person does he become? My father became the kind of person who you would never guess the quantity of tragedy that lay.
in his past. You would never guess that his whole family had been decimated by the Holocaust, that he had all of this grief and loss and violence at every stage of his life. My father was ebullient. He was joyful. He was incredibly... witty. He was shockingly brilliant. And my dad spoke, I think, eight languages. But basically, English was the last of his many languages. And I like to think I'm a reasonably articulate person, and my father could...
talk me out of the table. I mean, he just was beautifully gifted with languages and I guess fundamentally generous of spirit, you know, his response to the privations of his life. were to live as generous a life as he could, both with material means, but also with his joy, with his intellect, with his energy, his happiness, and sharing it with the world. Do you understand his temperament as an act of denial or an act of acceptance?
What an interesting question. I've never been asked it before. I suppose I understand his temperament mostly as a great gift. And I'm not trying to deny my father credit he deserves. I know my father made a great many decisions about the kind of life he wanted to live and the kind of man he wanted to be, including in ways that changed over the course of my life. I saw him actively become...
a more patient man. Patience did not naturally run strong in him, nor in me, for that matter. And I saw him make choices about equilibrium and patience. But I think in some fundamental way... I don't think my father was ever in denial about the experiences that shaped him. He didn't speak about them in great detail until I was myself an adult. But he certainly never pretended away the past. And he didn't conversely speak of himself as who he was because he had been forged in the flames of...
disaster or whatever. I don't think he valorized suffering as the thing that made him who he was. Now I certainly think that he had a very acute sense of what it had meant to be. a Jew in the world in the middle of the last century, an acute sense of what it meant to be a refugee in this country. I mean, look, my father had two brothers and one of them was just a year younger than him and for all intents and purposes shaped by...
identical forces and could not have been a more different human being. So there is something way deep down below the choices we make or our act of will in the world that is inextricable from who we become. I always wonder when I think about what my grandparents did not complain much about and what I do complain about and what the generations younger than me seem to complain about and our cultural attitude towards
trauma and self-revelation and self-work. And I'm more of that culture than of the opposite, but I don't look around and think we're happier. I think that's absolutely right. And it makes me wonder, are we... doing the right thing in our more excavatory culture? Or was there wisdom we have lost in the, not that people should live in denial.
but the balance of how much we go in and how much we simply move forward. Sure, and what is resolving versus what is dwelling upon and what aspects of our life we choose to emphasize versus downplay. You know, there was this sort of... greatest generation stoicism, right? And this valorization of never speaking about suffering. And I don't know that that was a perfect solution, right? I mean, my father was an ebullient character, but his mother, my grandmother, was...
A deeply, deeply bitter, unhappy, volatile woman. And heaven knows she came by those qualities, honestly, right? I mean, her life had been unrelentingly. traumatic and tragic in ways I cannot fathom surviving. She refused to talk about it. I tried at various occasions. So did many other people close to her. And I don't know that her life was improved by...
never confronting the vast sources of pain within it, at least never in any way visible to any of the rest of us. Right? Life is full of suffering. It's unevenly distributed in tragic ways. I would never dispute that. But even the best and luckiest and most privileged life has a...
unfortunate share of suffering in it and there are choices to be made about how much do we focus on it how much do we dwell on it how much do we speak of it how do we speak of it and how much do we pay attention to our own suffering versus the suffering of others. And I think you're driving at something a little deeper than everyday complaining, which is a fundamental question about, do we regard ourselves as strong?
And this is such an overused word right now, but resilient and able to overcome. And do we dwell on what is going well or on what we hope to do, on our aspirations, on our motives? on our goals, or do we get excessively mired in what has been done to us or ways that we've been wronged? And I don't pretend to know the answer, and I'm not suggesting we shouldn't speak about.
trauma and upset. As I said, I think it was a great revolution in our culture that people have permission to do so. But I share the sense that something was slightly lost in these generations that, yeah, I mean, my father spent decades not... really saying altogether that much about both a fascinating and also unquestionably disruptive and upsetting and traumatic childhood. I guess I'm also driving at something else. What moved me quite...
deeply in your book is its attention to suffering and loss. And there's something about that I think is pretty subtle, being open to it versus pushing it away. That feels very deep. Neither of those are denial. And you spend a lot of time in the book on the time you spent with your father in the hospital as he was passing away. You have this line about hospitals.
where you say, and I'm truncating your quote a bit, but I like this part, in an ICU, you are as aware of the brevity of life and the great looming precipice of eternity, yet at the same time, you're basically stuck in an airport. And there's this sort of coexistence of the banal and the profound. What were those days like for you? Deadly dull. I mean, when nothing is happening, which is a lot of the time when you have someone... in an ICU with a kind of mysterious set of failing bodily systems.
Much of your time is spent doing absolutely nothing. Much of your time is spent waiting for someone who has the faintest idea what's going on to come and talk to you, which inevitably happens in the 10 minutes you decide you're finally going to go get a cup of coffee. So, you know, they felt... They felt long. They felt repetitive. They, of course, had this—
kind of specter of fear always on the edges of them, because it's not like I knew my father was dying the whole time. At some point that became clear, but for a lot of the time it wasn't clear at all. I will say, and this is so much of what this book is about, they felt... a little bit like a gift. It was this bit of time carved out from the daily grind of I'm at work, I'm on deadlines, you know, I'm doing all these predictable things. It's like, well, no, I am here in this hospital and...
Here we are as a family, like my family of origin, together in a room. And how wonderful. And so it had moments of sweetness. There was a kind of... bleak tedium to it and yet it was always punctuated by the gift of family um and then of course gratitude for the medical professionals who are trying to help us and um Outside and around and infusing all of it, this fear, which proved accurate that these were my final days with my dad. I visited a friend in a hospital recently.
On one level, this felt like the smallest possible reaction, but it also felt very true. I just found myself thinking, because she'd been there a while, like, I wish you could be somewhere more beautiful for this. as you were hurting and as you were, you know, in this experience, that it didn't have to be here, that that feels like a, that feels like its own level of cruelty.
I think that's often true. And I think many people experience it that way. You know, this longing people have still today to die at home, right? And the resistance to entering various kinds of care settings. It's not, I don't think, just... stubbornness or even fear about, you know, being warehoused in an institution or no one will come visit you or this kind of thing. It is a real sense that much of what makes life meaningful is absent from these places.
There is a kind of cruelty at the end of life of all times to not be confronting beauty. I mean, I will never forget. I don't know how much of it you could take in, but... I'll never forget turning on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in my father's hospital room because we felt like he loved music and he loved classical music.
The urge to fill this incredibly sterile space with something awe-inspiring and overwhelming in its beauty was overwhelming within us in that moment. And we've recited in poetry for the same reason. On the one hand, look, I want to be incredibly clear. I'm profoundly grateful to the medical team who took care of my father at that moment and many others. And so I don't mean to suggest there's not a reason these places are the way they are.
Acts of incredible courage and grace and beauty don't happen there. They do every single day. But when you are there every single day for a long period of time, you also feel their kind of emotional. thinness, you know, that life is so abundant. We'll talk about abundance, I hope, at some point here, but life is so rich and wonderful and varied. Not abundance as we mean it on my podcast, to be honest.
Well, sure. So much of that is forcibly kept at bay in a hospital. And you're right, one once more for the sick and the dying. I'd like to ask you to read a passage. It's one of my favorite in your book. It's on page six. Sure. For a while after my father died, I could not stop seeing the world as it really is, marked everywhere by the evidence of past losses and the imminence of future ones. This was not because his death was a tragedy.
My father died peacefully at 74, tended throughout his final weeks by those he loved most. It was because his death was not a tragedy. What shocked me was that something so sad could be the normal, necessary way of things. In its aftermath, each individual life seemed to contain too much heartbreak for its fleeting duration. History, which I had always loved even in its silences and mysteries, suddenly seemed like little more than a record of loss on an epic scale.
especially where it could offer no record at all. The world itself seemed ephemeral, glaciers and species and ecosystems vanishing, the pace of change as swift as in a time-lapse. as if those of us alive today had been permitted to see it from the harrowing perspective of eternity. Everything felt fragile. Everything felt vulnerable. The idea of loss pressed in all around me.
like a hidden order to existence that emerged only in the presence of grief. I think it's the lines that begin and end that, that you could not stop seeing the world as it really is. That there is this hidden order to existence that emerges only in the presence of grief, which stopped me a bit short, which feel true, which get a bit to our conversation earlier about denial. Tell me about that sense of this is a more honest.
perspective of the world. It's so funny. Is it a more honest perspective of the world? It is certainly accurate by many lights. Loss is omnipresent. We will die. The people we love will die. The things we build in the grand scheme of things, even in the medium scheme of things, are relatively transient and fleeting. There are times in life when the omnipresence and the scale of this loss do become profoundly visible to us, at least to me. I think a lot about scale, right? And if you dwell...
on the scale of the world, let alone the scale of the cosmos. Our lives are stunningly short. They seem, or can seem, stunningly insignificant. And this sense that everything around us is terrifyingly fragile is accurate. You can't look at the grand sweep of things and not realize how tenuous our footholds.
in this world is and how quickly we will be not merely lost, but forgotten. You know, I had this arresting moment when I realized, you know, I can barely tell you my great grandparents' names. I mean, that is three. generations right that is the blink of an eye but so it goes and um everything we love everyone we love we are going to have to confront just the devastating loss of literally all of them
that's the bleak version, you know, and it's real. I don't think it's the whole story. There are ways to try to hold the bifocal vision of that kind of loss and why our lives are nonetheless not.
insignificant or at least not meaningless but certainly you know in hard moments and I think for people who struggle with depression or who have a truly unfair burden of grief in their lives it can seem like the only truth about existence you call it bleak and there's a dimension of it where it is very bleak and very frightening and then also the people i know who abide in it
often, I don't want to say they don't find it bleak, but they also describe a certain beauty that comes from the noticing of it. A friend of mine who lost his mother not long ago always tells me with some real sadness that time doesn't heal wounds, it makes just everything fade. And that I've sort of watched him grieve the diminishment of his grief. And that there was a sort of a beauty.
in seeing things as they more really were, the sort of interconnection of life, the fragility of it. I think one reason we turn away from these things is it feels annihilating to look at them, but then the people I know who... are looking at them, there's a kind of connection to something very profound that seems to abide there as well. Oh, no question about it. I mean, grief is just an amazing
I mean, its capacity for sharp focus is incredible. And it is true that there were moments in the depths of grieving or preparing to grieve my father that the world had never seemed so... beautiful to me or so much like a gift and there's a reason we honor death so much and why so many generations of philosophers have regarded studying death as the key to figuring out how to live a good life. The incredible thing about death is it forces you
to recognize that you are alive and that that is not a permanent condition, right? We have this moment and no other known or given moments to relish that fact and to savor it and to be grateful for it.
It is true. I write a lot towards the end of this book about attention and the gift of attention. And I do think some kinds of grief can turn us inward and away from the world and obliterate attention in troubling ways. But I think very often... grief and the awareness of the inevitability of death truly does heighten our sense of attention and our capacity to...
look at the world with gratitude and look at it with admiration. And I don't know what other force could do that. I mean, that's tragic. I wish there were something else. I mean, maybe some, you know, illegal drugs I haven't tried. But otherwise, I don't know what else can make us so... profoundly in awe of and grateful for life.
The New York Times app has all this stuff that you may not have seen. I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling. The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections. It's just easier to navigate that way. There is something for everyone.
personalized page, the UTEP. That one's my favorite. I can also save my articles easily in this area. Right under the byline, it says, click here if you'd like to listen to this article. I like that the cooking tab on top is really easily accessible. So I'm on my way.
home and I'm just thinking, oh, what am I going to make for dinner? I'll just quickly go on to cooking and say, oh, I've got this in my pantry. I'm going to try out some of these recipes I see in here. I go to games always. Doing the mini, doing the wordle. I loved how much content it exposed me. to, things that I never would have thought to turn to a news app for. This app is essential. The New York Times app. All of the times, all in one place. Download it now at nytimes.com slash app.
It's a question about attention that brought me to this book. Because my experience of the last couple of years for me, it's been particularly acute the last couple of months. and this has been both a personal and at times a very political experience, is this feeling that to try to hold the extremes, to give everything...
It's a tension at the same time. The loss and the horror, like the beauty and the elation, also just the normalcy. You know, I'll sit here for a day and I'll cover deportations to El Salvadorans. torture prisons, and then I'll go home. You just have to make dinner and read books. And feeling that I'm sure somebody has the attentional capacity to hold it, but I don't feel like I do. I have never quite felt...
this sort of overwhelm of the system. And it felt to me like something you were exploring in this book because you also meet your partner in a similar time. It feels like you should be able to settle. on an emotional interpretation of a moment. That the affect of the story should be more or less one thing, which of course is not ever true. We're just sort of more or less alert to it.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. To be honest, it's actually the reason I wrote this book. The moment that I started thinking seriously about what it was like to have experienced... Those two quite momentous life experiences in extremely short succession, short enough that I was still falling in love while my father was dying and found myself kind of grappling with these extraordinarily different emotions at the same time.
Speaking of attention, that's what got my attention. I thought, well, this is interesting, right? This actually is the fundamental nature of life, right? We are actually always dealing with more than one thing at once. And sometimes they are... profoundly contradictory. Sometimes they're just deeply unrelated, and yet somehow we have to spread our attention among them. And we then sort of just got swept headlong into the pandemic, which was, I think, for many of us.
An experience of living inside a lot of entirely irreconcilable realities simultaneously. You know, it's like suddenly you were working from home and... That was amazing because you didn't have a two-hour commute every day. And you got to be around your kids all the time. But also like, oh my gosh, you were around your kids all the time and you couldn't get any work done. And it was so amazing to watch them.
grow and to have time around them, but also they made you crazy. And I mean, I just think everyone, or, you know, more tragically, you know, people around you were getting sick and suffering. in this weird way, your family system was thriving. Just everyone, I think, was dealing with these profoundly contradictory experiences.
Of course, that was not actually about the pandemic, right? The pandemic brought into focus a fundamental feature of existence, which is we are always inundated by profoundly clashing realities. And some of the question is, how much attention do we... pay to them you know you are in a position right now where you have to pay attention to it right you're covering these
and going home to your family. And you have to live in both of those realities. But, you know, even in the most peaceable of times, the extent to which we are confronting the world. beyond our own immediate reality is just a choice, right? I mean, there's always boundless suffering. There's always boundless beauty. And it really is a matter of where do we look? And it's tough, right?
You both have to do both at once and can't do both at once. And the question of what kind of balance you strike is infinitely interesting to me. I read this book and I wondered about the quality of your actual attention. You write... and not just here in your journalism too, as if you're able to tune your attention to very deep levels of experiences, but also somehow to the cosmic and geological context in which those experiences are taking place, you sort of zoom.
between timescales very smoothly. There's a passage you have on finding and the various forms of takes that I think is quite beautiful. Do you mind reading it? I'd be happy to. Finding, like losing, is an enormous category. bursting with seemingly unrelated contents from gold doubloons to God. We can find things like pencils and couch cushions, and things like new planets and distant solar systems, and things that aren't things at all.
inner peace, old elementary school classmates, the solution to a problem. We can find things that we're never missing, except from our own lives, as when we find a new job or a hole-in-the-wall barbecue joint. And we can find things so deeply hidden that almost no one else thought to look for them, as when we find glial cells or quarks. Do you really experience the world this way? Or is that a thing that...
It's a matter of craft and writing and reflection. I love it when people ask me questions I've not been asked. And that one actually does feel kind of core to who I am in this interesting way. I think I experience the world that way. I mean, I... I love the bigness of the world, right? I mean, my most...
profoundly peaceful and interested place is up on top of a mountain where I can see really far. And that's not just because I happen to love mountains, right? Although I do, I am soothed and intrigued by the experience of the... the longest possible view. I'm profoundly drawn to questions of scale. I mean, we human beings have a very unique situation, which is that we are finite creatures.
to the best of my knowledge, finite creatures in an infinite universe. And that's kind of a troubling position to be in, and I'm endlessly interested in it. It has all kinds of implications in our day-to-day reality and in our whole existence as a species. That is our context. And I think some part of my brain, for whatever reason, is always looking kind of upward and outward. I think it's kind of native to my brain. I don't know how...
helpful it is in a day-to-day way for these kinds of balancing acts you're talking about, which are endlessly hard. But for good or real, I do think that's just kind of how I look at the world. Is there an experience that comes to mind for you recently where you were looking at something small and you saw something big in it or big and you saw something small in it? Sure. I mean, I'm going to tell a story that sounds...
Like it can't possibly be true. And I swear it is. And what you need to know by way of context for this story is that a year or so ago, my partner and I bought the house across the street from the farm where she was born and raised and where her parents still live. And we've been gradually renovating it ever since then and incredibly excited to move in and to be near family and frankly, near more childcare. And so we finally move in.
And I'm just reveling in this beautiful new home as we settle into it. Then, this is only a week ago, my daughter, who's now three and a half, we have these beautiful fields outside of our house, and she wanders off into the field and she returns with a stalk of wheat. Look, Mama. And so I'm thinking, oh, she found a stalk of wheat. Fun. You know, children pick up everything, right? Clovers, coins, anything muddy, tarantulas, whatever they can find. So she hands me this stalk of wheat.
And I'm just thinking, oh, how sweet she gets to live in this beautiful setting where the outdoors is full of so many wonderful little things for her to study. And she looks at me very seriously and she says, Mama. We should use this wheat to make bread for people who don't have any. And just one of those moments as a parent where on the one hand...
You're just so in love with your child. You think, I mean, who made this remarkable mind? Like the last thing I'm sitting there thinking like, oh, it's like she found a pretty flower or something. there she is apparently thinking about like the poor and privation and need. So right away, my kind of sense of the scale of what we were talking about just wildly shifted. But also to be honest, it's just, I felt...
Right alongside feeling overwhelming kind of awe for her, I felt so morally indicted. I mean, I am literally in the middle of, you know, reveling in my... pretty new kitchen and then suddenly I'm confronted with real hunger in the world and I'm thinking, why do I have this? Beautiful backsplash? Like, what have I done here? My three-year-old has more moral clarity than I do about how we should spend our money and our time and what actually matters in life. So, yeah, I mean, in a wonderful way.
I feel like my world is full of discoveries that seem small and blossom out into the enormous or seem enormous and then have some kind of bearing on small practical things. how to be a family and how to raise children. And it's often incredibly humbling. And sometimes it's very funny and sometimes it's very moving. And in that case, it was all of the above. There's this way of thinking about these questions.
where it really feels like the goal is to live in full awareness of the fragility of life, the horrors, the happiness. And then it also feels that... If you really did that, how would you ever get anything done? If you were really fully present in the beauty of each moment, the ephemerality of, you know, I go and I... play soccer with my six-year-old most nights right now.
And on the one hand, I know I am not enjoying it the way I want to be. I know this moment is more beautiful than the way my tired self is experiencing it. Who's also thinking about bedtime and are we going to be late for dinner? And so I want to be more of the... the sort of monk. And then, you know, you probably understand the way that the constant compartmentalization and filtration of life is adaptive to moving through it. Absolutely. I mean, I think, look, even the monks...
are not that monkish, right? I mean, there's a wonderful body of literature about distraction, you know, in these spaces that are supposed to be sanctuaries from all the pressures of the outside world and focus the mind. And, you know, you're meant to just... Think purely about God. And if it were easy, we would all be monks and the monks would be better at being monks. It's incredibly difficult. And they usually don't have kids.
And they don't have kids, right, which are appropriately, I would never say a distraction. They are the essence. They are the thing we are meant to be paying the most attention to. And sometimes that attention is... profound and existential. And sometimes it's like, you know, sweetheart, go put your underwear on. It's just like a lot of parenting is just pragmatics, right? I don't know that we should aspire.
Or I suppose we should aspire to be in touch with the beauty and wonderful givenness of every moment. Aspiration does not actually have to be reality. Like, I think aspiring probably is why... three and a half percent of the time we have the transcendent experience of like, here I am like curled up in bed with my daughter, reading her a bedtime story.
Nothing will ever be so profoundly sweet as this. And you feel it deep inside you and you know you will always retain it. And the other 97% of the time you won't. And that's... probably okay you know the amazing thing about these moments of awe at the universe at life at what we have is they are so potent you don't actually need that many of them
So I don't think you can give up the goal of trying to have more of them or recognize them. But I don't think we need that many of them to kind of sustain our souls. So since finishing the writing of the book, you've had two children. That's right. So much of the book is about being found. What have you found? Oh my gosh. I mean, everything in the most wonderful ways.
I found a particular hair tie that's got yellow daisies on it that my daughter loves that vanished for a month and she's thrilled to come across it again. And I have found... resources of meaning and patience I had no idea existed prior to this. I mean, it is the whole scale of discovery. I think one thing I've found
Well, first of all, just as like a basic reflection on parenting, I've never been so grateful for anything in my life. I was a little bit older when our first daughter was born. And to be honest, I had kind of given up on... I don't want to say given up. I had resigned myself to the possibility that I might never have children of my own and had sort of made a deep peace of the world is full of children who need love and who are a delight to me and I'm related to some of them and that is its own.
beauty and it can be sufficient if it has to be sufficient and that I did have children of my own and so much is written about all the things that are difficult about parenthood and I am not gonna sit here and diminish those things. But my overwhelming experience of parenting, it's just delight. I'll never forget when my first daughter was born, my partner and I had this moment. We were like, getting ready to leave the hospital. And we both were like, so we can just take her home.
Like that's since you gave us a human being, right? That's incredible. I mean, to be clear, like we, you know, my partner grew that human being for nine months. They didn't give her to you. But it kind of has that feeling of like, wow, I mean, we just go home. and raise these children and they are their own creatures and having new minds to interact with feels incredible to me. I think I've also found and I feel...
based on our earlier conversation about kind of what's been lost from past generations, that perhaps you'll appreciate it. I have found a tremendous satisfaction in duty. I can't say that duty is something I thought about much before this. I'm not...
of a generation where duty, like thrift, was an obvious value. I didn't join an institution like the military where duty is an obvious value. But I'll tell you, no matter how tired you are, at 7.30 in the morning, when your kid wakes up, you go in and you... help her get dressed and you make sure she has a good breakfast. Your kid wakes up at 7.30 in the morning? Oh, God bless her. She has for every day since she was like three and a half months old. The littler one, if they are, but...
Oh, I just, you know, it's not always what you want to be doing. I mean, my number one fear about parenthood is I am so deeply not a morning person. I mean, my favorite hours to write are 10 p.m. to 4 in the morning. So on some fundamental level, everything I had been doing for my entire life.
adult life was deeply at odds with the task of parenting, which is frankly being up at the crack of dawn many days in a row. And yet it's a deep kind of satisfaction to feel like this is what you do. You do it for yourself. You do it for your children. You do it for your partner.
You do it because you have to. And that's a kind of liberation and a kind of wonderfulness and a whole category of existence I found because I had children that I had never appreciated, let alone kind of valorized before. You said something really interesting in an email to me when we were talking about doing this show. And you wrote to me, and you're talking about parenting, that where you're looking matters so much. And it is so hard to look both near and far at the same time.
Can you say more about that? Oh, yeah. I think that actually a real imperative of parenting and a real imperative of being human is you are present for those around you who need you most. And you provide stability and security and you... find hope because actually it's crucial to foster hope for the next generation and so yes of course I mean it's very tricky you know there are
Children the age of my children whose parents vanished overnight. And that's horrifying to me. We are living in trying times, let us say. That said, you know, again, depending on where you look, all times are trying times. There's never been a shortage of suffering in the world. But I am troubled by the forms of suffering that are happening. all around us now and I feel complicit in some of them and I want to be giving them my undivided attention and not
ignoring them, even when it's not obvious to me how I might positively intervene on them. I certainly don't want to just pretend they don't exist. And yet I still have to be joyful.
for my kids and goofy for my kids and those are hard emotions to hold together all at once and yet I find that to be a necessary and productive friction not least because as i said earlier it reminds us that actually we should always live that way you know if we if like you and me we are among the fortunate and we have the
resources and the lives to even have the possibility of ignoring the suffering in the world we should be grateful for everything that reminds us not to and reminds us like we should experience this kind of friction in our lives all the time one of my most inconvenient beliefs about the world is that we now know too much about it and that the human mind is not meant to be stretched over
this much threat and danger and tragedy at all times. I work in the news. My show is part of this dynamic I'm about to describe. But the news can sometimes be an engine. for finding and bringing you whatever is going to most upset you that is happening literally anywhere on earth at that exact moment. And it's not that it's not...
On some level, good to know, but I don't want to go to the point where we never knew about it. But I often think that probably the healthy medium was to be able to pick up a newspaper once a day and find out about... terrible things happening elsewhere, and important things happening elsewhere, and sometimes wonderful things, but less often wonderful things happening elsewhere, as opposed to be with your kids in the park.
And your phone buzzes. And it's just something terrible that you cannot affect. It's not even happening to anybody you know. You definitely don't have power over it. But somebody somewhere thought it would grab you. to know about it. And it's strange. It both makes you aware of suffering, but also I think it has some kind of other quality, some numbing and exhausting quality that is not healthy.
I think that's almost certainly true. I mean, it's so interesting. You said you were reading Melting Point, and there's an arresting moment in there when one of the sources in the book who we're hearing from talks about how, you know, you used to... read one newspaper, and you'd get 20 minutes of news in the evening, or maybe you'd get 10 minutes of newsreels before a movie, and that was it. End.
I put down the book when I read that. I thought about it for a long time because, I mean, there was not a shortage of news in the world. This was in the middle of the Second World War. And she goes on to say something I found equally arresting and highly related, which is...
The world seemed much bigger and more mysterious then. So I think you're right, although I also think it's a little bit more complicated than that because in this kind of tragic way, I feel like we simultaneously know more about the world and... less about our own communities in a certain sense. Like we have traded bits of news from all over, much of it tragic, some of it just inflammatory.
for a deep and connected knowledge of our own immediate communities. And that does feel tragic and upsetting to me. And this kind of absolute flattening of distinctions. you I want to ask you about happiness. And I'd like to do that by asking you to read a short passage from your book which is on page 174. Sure.
Happiness routinely gets not only less attention, but also more criticism than its opposite number. Contemporary thinkers sometimes dismiss it as a shallow fixation of modern life, but to condemn it on those grounds is to mistake it for proximate but different phenomena.
Either superficial forms of itself, like amusement and pleasure, or superficial means of trying to achieve it, from substance abuse to so-called retail therapy. I like this idea that happiness does not get enough attention or theorizing. So if it's not these proximate forms, amusement and pleasure, T, what is it? I can't believe you're asking me to define happiness on the fly in your podcast as recorded.
What do I think happiness is? I didn't write the book. I didn't raise the question. Well, you know it when you feel it. I mean, I think that happiness is a state of profound appreciation for what you have in that exact moment. I guess if I were... going to generate a spontaneous definition, that's what it would be. I mean, I was moved to write about because I was lucky enough to find myself extremely happy. And, you know, I knew I was going to be telling...
at least two kinds of stories in this book. And one was about grief and one was about love. And when you go and you survey the landscape of love stories, the vast majority of them are covert tragedies. There are love stories that get told because they either end in divorce or premature death. They darken drastically over the course of telling them. And as a result, most of...
What we read and hear and watch of love stories is either the beginning or the ending. We get the how did you meet and the kind of falling in love and all of the shiny, exciting romance and passion at the beginning. And either it just ends there, right? It ends with marriage. It ends with getting together or having kids or, you know, there's just the kind of implicit or explicit happily ever after. Or we then kind of leap ahead to the...
destruction and dissolution of this much-longed-for state, whether through separation or death. And I found this curious because, of course, that leaves off the vast majority of most, or at least many. relationships, right? When you are happily together with someone, actually what matters to you is the middle. And actually what you want to have go on and on and on is the middle. But nobody writes about the middle, right? There's very little about just the kind of day-to-day.
happiness and just texture of a happy life, which isn't just happy. I mean, a lot of this book is about the kind of... endless overlap and contradiction and friction and different emotions and a lot of happiness is infused with or frustration or bad days or whatever it may be, but still somehow fundamentally feels for us that the deep and essential name you would give to it is happiness. And that was interesting to me, and I wanted to write about it. Well, I wonder if that's because we expect...
happiness to be simpler and purer, I think sometimes there are periods in my life that I am certain I will look back on them as virtually perfect. That the problems were small. Nobody I loved was sick in that moment. I was, you know, surrounded by family and friends. My work was satisfying. Even as my experience of that period is often...
exhausted, overstretched, overscheduled, anxious. And this sort of question of, I mean, maybe one reason people don't write about those middles is that the middle is always more of everything. Your description of your first kiss with your partner, which is functionally cosmic in its language, is probably going to be different than the way you experience a Tuesday when everybody's on deadline and everybody needs to be on the table, even if...
You'll probably look back on that as a beautiful period. I think we think the feeling of it should be simpler maybe than it ends up being. I think that's absolutely true, but I don't think that's just true of happiness. I mean, yes, happiness is... more than just happiness, but everything is more than just everything. I mean, there's this wonderful C.S. Lewis line about how you never encounter just cancer or just war or just happiness or just unhappiness.
always incredibly variable in the lived experience of them. There are good moments and hard times. There are hard moments and good times. And we want to act like that's the anomaly, but it's not, right? It's like the actual. texture of life and in fact i think we would probably all be happier if we recognize that happiness is not a pure experience love is not a pure experience grief is not a pure experience all of them are always amalgamated with their opposite
And it's so sweet, actually, your awareness that like someday this will seem wonderful and easy. And sure, of course, my life and my partner's life with two children and 17 book deadlines and whatever else may be going on is not the... bliss of a first kiss when the world suddenly seems to be opening up and and this entire new path is shining before you but i'll tell you the path is beautiful and part of what we don't i think pay enough attention to is
the beauty of that path of any path. And it's what I said earlier about duty, you know, on some level, a beautiful thing about hard moments in marriage or in anything is like, well, You're doing this because you're committed to it, even in the moments that aren't just bliss and joy. And like, do I want to?
take the compost out in the pouring rain as I did first thing this morning? Absolutely not. But do I want my partner to have to do it? Nope. Like, why shouldn't I, right? Like, isn't the better thing to do in this moment is to man up, as we used to say, and just go do the thing. And there's a kind of...
beauty in that and a kind of happiness and a kind of fulfillment in it and it's not the shiny glossy kind but it's what a lot of life is made of right and and i i do find it possible to regard it as I don't want to say fun, you know, but purposeful and meaningful. What is different about the relationship between happiness and duty from happiness and fun? Well, probably happiness and duty is more sustainable.
One can always be dutiful. There are always jobs to be done, work to be done, needs to be met in this world. And if you derive happiness from a sense of duty, I actually think... That is an infinitely sustainable source. And it kind of comports with my broad theory of happiness, which is, I think in our worst moments, the thing that can sustain us is serving others. I really do.
It's really powerful to remember that there are other needs in the world that other people have needs and that actually you can help meet them and ameliorate them in whatever small ways. There's no community on earth that does not need your help. It is good to get outside of your head and outside of your own misery. So if duty is part of your sense of happiness, you will never have to look far to replenish it. Fun. I love fun. Do not get me wrong. Fun is wonderful. Fun is amazing.
My family and I were going to the beach this weekend, and I honestly can't wait. In a kind of narrowly defined sense of it, we don't have a lot of self-evident fun right now just because. We have a three-and-a-half-month-old. We have a three-year-old. We used to just jump in a car at the whiff of an interesting story or a fun thing to do and gallivant through the night. And that was really fun, right? And do I miss it? Sometimes. Of course I miss it. And in that.
kind of narrowly defined way there's less fun in my life. On the other hand, children are infinite fun. I mean, children are hilarious, right? Like I have never had as consistent a source other than perhaps my father. I've never had such a consistent source of hilarity in my life as young children.
say hilarious things. They think hilarious thoughts. They do funny things. They live with a kind of glee and humor that is contagious and interesting. So I'm certainly not here to diminish the value of fun. I actually think the laughing is... Just profoundly good for the mind and body and heart. And my kids make me do it all the time. One thing that I really enjoyed about the book is the emphasis on the connectivity of all of these things.
Part of just the human experience is you don't get any of them all at once, and you couldn't have any of them in a way without the others. You have an interesting section on how the philosopher William James thought about our thoughts. And particularly, I guess, the connectivity between them, the sort of shadowy substructure of our thoughts. Can you talk a bit about that?
I can. William James was the guy who gave us this idea of the stream of consciousness, this awareness that your mind is always... full of thoughts, many of them unrelated to the task at hand or whatever you're looking at. It's just teeming with ideas and instincts and impulses and impressions from the world around you all the time. constant flow of thoughts in our mind sometimes we're paying attention to it sometimes we're not but as we all know from how difficult it is to
meditate or focus or fall asleep at night. There's just always noise in our minds, you know, generating all these things. So William James writes about the stream of consciousness and in the middle of doing so, he... in this kind of odd way, sort of shifts metaphors and starts talking about the thoughts in our minds as birds flying around. And sometimes they're flying, and sometimes they perch somewhere.
And he says, you know, we only ever really pay attention to the places they perch, which in his mind is like, you know, the nouns and the verbs and the adjectives, like the really obvious things. Ezra Klein, you're a noun, you're a bird perched somewhere. We can talk about Ezra Klein or, you know, we can talk about a rainstorm or a word like red.
It feels like it has content for us. So there's all this stuff that happens when the birds are flying around, which is the and and the if and the or, these kind of subtle but absolutely crucial elements of our thought that we don't pay attention to and yet profoundly shape. what we're able to think and what we think about in the way that we think. He says, you know, we should, there should be a feel of and just as much as we have a sense of a feel for blue or cold or Ezra Klein.
And that was incredibly helpful to me because I thought, oh, yeah, that's kind of what I'm here to do. I'm here to try to figure out what's the feeling of and. Like, what is this idea, what is this word doing for us? And what's the role that it plays in language, which is a different way of saying what's the role that it plays in how we think.
Did you feel like you came to an answer to that? What is the feel of and? So, a little bit, in distinction from every other conjunction that the English language has, you know, but, if, or. All of those... actually describe a kind of necessary relationship if this then that that's a causal relationship
it actually tells us something about the two halves of the sentence we're creating. The beautiful thing about and is you can stick any two things together with it. They can have absolutely no relationship to each other. I give you apples and oranges, right? Or they can have every relationship to each other, Romeo and Juliet. or none on earth, you know, crab apples and...
And this morning, what we're dealing with is like, we have 30 minutes to get dressed and get to the library to do a podcast with Ezra Klein and our nephew who's at our house, who's two and a half, just vomited. in the crib, which means there's nowhere for him to sleep. And also, whoops, I'm ignoring a note from my editor, and I need to go to the grocery store. I mean, this is life, right? And that's before we get to, like, oh, man, and, like, you open the New York Times, and...
Joe Biden has cancer and people are being deported. I mean, the number of linked thoughts, experiences, demands in our days is infinite. So part of this feeling of and is the sense that everything is connected to everything else, which I want to say can be a really beautiful thing. I mean, the sense that everything is connected to everything else is also the sense that we can make a difference.
Right. Like if indeed we are all connected, then our actions matter. They matter to each other. They matter to people far away. They matter to people we will never meet because they're not even born yet. So it's overwhelming, but I think also kind of hopeful. kind of exciting but there's this other feeling that and has which is the feeling that something is about to happen right like if you're telling me a story and you stop talking what I'm going to say to you is and meaning like
What happens next, right? Like, it's almost a feeling of suspense. And is this kind of little word that propels us into the future. And in that sense, it's a kind of... it gestures towards this kind of temporal abundance too, right? Like that's the William James feeling like, well, there's always something else that we can reach beyond and connect to. There's always something more kind of coming down the line towards us.
think it is a feeling of connection it's a feeling of continuation it is a feeling of abundance and all those to me are fundamentally and ultimately quite hopeful feelings i'm struck how much you're talking about the feeling In a way of the word and. The way it connects things. The way it implies procession. I guess I'm interested in the feeling.
Of the experience. I mean, so much of the book is about holding these two extremes of experience at the same time. The loss of your father, the finding of your partner, and that love. And I think that's been what I've... been interested in. I feel in my own attention a desire to constantly be choosing a lane of sensation or feeling. I should feel badly about things right now. I should feel good about them.
As if I'm running some calculation in my head that ends with where on the sentiment scale I'm supposed to net out. And that also, some part of me realizes that's wrong, that what I'd like to be able to do is feel different things at the same time. I find that very hard to do. I'm curious if writing this book or going through that experience or reflecting on this the way you have has made that easier, made your sense of feeling more capacious.
I don't know if it's made it easier. It's certainly made me more aware of it. And I guess that is a kind of ease to feel peaceful about both the necessity and sometimes the impossibility of feeling all the things at the same time. It has given me a sense of, well, this is life and it's actually okay to have. mixed feelings, mixed experiences. I adore my partner and I think she's brilliant and she fills my days with wisdom and humor and surprise and stability. And also we've been married for...
seven years and together for 10 and we have two kids and sometimes we drive each other crazy or we're frustrated or we fight. And actually I have a lot of peace around that, which I think is helpful. Like I just, I'm like, well, that's, that's not, not love. You know, that's. part of the deal here and we feel a lot of things at once and we should and sometimes it still stops me up short you know in good ways and I said earlier I think it's important to be open to the surprising
feeling because I think it can trouble us morally and that's probably a good thing. I'm a word nerd, of course. I think about it. how and works and I actually do think it's interesting and I think it's philosophically interesting and profoundly related to the question of how we feel in these moments but of course I feel it right I feel these tensions all the time it's impossible to be
alive and fortunate in the world today and not feel like which of these things am I actually supposed it's not which of these things am I supposed to be feeling we feel them all I think the real problem is which of these feelings should I act on Well, then let's end on a point of word nerdery. I learned something from your book that I didn't know, which is that the English alphabet used to end with the symbol for and. I was really surprised to learn that.
I was really surprised to learn that too. I know. And I mean, talk about scale, right? And space and time. This was true until quite recently, like all the way up to the end of the 19th century when children learned the alphabet. The procession started with A, B, C and ended X, Y, Z, and. That's literally how they were taught the alphabet. It's incredible to me that that piece of knowledge instilled in generation upon generation of schoolchildren could degrade in the course of...
less than a century when I was coming up through school to the point that we had no idea that that had once been part of the alphabet, but indeed it was, which of course I found both fascinating just because how funny that people used to learn that. Now we don't. But why was it part of the alphabet? We don't spell words with the and sign. I think, you know, the only answer I can reasonably provide is it actually did feel that crucial to the kinds of...
We learn to write the alphabet so we can learn to write words. And we learn to write words so we can learn to write sentences. And actually, the word and is the third most common word in the English language. And the only ones we use more often are the, you know, the article, the, and various conjugations. of the verb to be. But it is, I agree, it's very interesting. It suggests a kind of importance to the ability to incorporate that into how we write down our experience of the world.
metaphor for what you're working with in your book and what a lot of us are working with in our lives. It's quite moving. I know. What a beautiful idea, actually, that anything should end in and, right? Something that seems like an ending is actually an explicit reminder that there's always more, that something else can be connected, that something else can happen next. I find it very beautiful. And always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
First of all, I have to say, thank you so much for always asking this question, both because I delight in learning what people read about and because, oh, it's just nice to know that literary culture, however embattled it might be, is still...
shaping our lives and our thoughts and all of these wonderful and enduring ways. Okay, my three. Number one, it's so funny you mentioned that you're reading Wolf Hall. I would like to encourage you and your listeners at some point to go read A Place of Greater Safety. which is the book Hilary Mantel wrote before turning to Thomas Cromwell and his compatriots. It is about the French Revolution, 800 pages long, incredibly undisciplined, absolutely unruly.
wildly great to read. I also recommend it because it is fundamentally the story of three people who are trying in full sincerity to make a better nation. And instead just absolutely destroying it and destroying themselves in the process. And I don't mean to suggest we're on the eve of a French Revolution-style catastrophe. I certainly hope not. But it is nonetheless extraordinarily interesting reading material right now.
So that's number one. Number two is a book that just is out this week, I believe, which is this wonderful graphic novel spent by Alison Bechtel with beautiful color artwork by her partner, Holly Ray Taylor. It's about the experience of... growing up in a relatively hardscrabble family and living this kind of marginal artistic existence and then suddenly finding yourself reasonably well off. And it's very adjacent to these questions we've been discussing of, well, how do you...
enjoy your life and your money and also live your values and interact with your community. And it's very smart on the questions of what we do with our money and our money and our morals. And it's also just riotously funny as all of her work is. So that's number two.
And number three is a book I think I've heard you talk about as well, also a relatively new book, and I'm partly shouting out my partner here because she was involved in the Michael Lewis Project, Who Is Government, which is this collection of essays. by these wildly different writers about government bureaucrats, which at the time that I first heard about it, I was like, I don't really know how well a book about...
an anthology of essays about government bureaucrats is going to do. And tragically, it met the moment. And I can't think of a better thing for people to be reading right now than these, I found, just incredibly moving stories about... what these alleged agents of the deep state are actually doing with their time and doing on behalf of the American people. So those are my three recommendations for you. Catherine Schultz, thank you very much. Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
Bye. This episode of The Ezra Clown Show is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Gelb, with additional mixing by Amun Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Koble, Kristen Lynn, and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samulewski and Shannon Busta.
The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Rostrasser, and special thanks to Talbot County Free Library.