Backlisted - The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is the groundbreaking book featured in this episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to discuss this influential study of philosophy, psychology and faith - and the life and beliefs of its author, whose younger brother was the novelist Henry James - is John Williams, daily books editor and a staff writer at the New York Times.* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. uh john not john mitchinson john williams where are you i can see where you are you're in a room but where in the world are you you have found me out i am in a room um i am in a room in my apartment in brooklyn new york a neighborhood called williamsburg is the williamsburg of where

the uh the hasidic community is there is a large Hasidic community in Williamsburg. There are a lot of Italian people who have lived here for a very long time. And then there are relatively younger people like me who are destroying the whole place. And it's also most famously or infamously the locale for the HBO series Girls, which is where it got its reputation from, I think. Is your continuing presence in Williamsburg, John, a sign of its ongoing hipness or the opposite?

You know, for the first several years I lived in New York, I lived in a neighborhood called Park Slope in Brooklyn, which is sort of a quiet family neighborhood. And then as I approached 40, I moved to Williamsburg. So I sort of did the reverse life commute. It is, it is fairly hip in Williamsburg, but pretty gentrified at this point. So the real hipsters have gone two or three neighborhoods over toward the East. Have we got enough there, Nick, for general ambience? We have, haven't we? We have. I'm not used to seeing Nicky look so dressed up and against the backdrop. I feel very

underdressed today. I feel like I ought to go and at least get a cardigan to put on. I've done that thing where you can touch up your appearance. You can make yourself on Zoom, get rid of your wrinkles. How weird. I've got rid of my wrinkles by shaving off my beard. Look at me. I'm 12 again again but with gray hair weird it's a religious experience for us i know i am having a fairly severe hair and

beard trim on tuesday so that's one of the things i'm doing when i how low are you gonna go i'll go as low as i feel feel like i'm not gonna go very low. Don't ruin the brand. Well, you know, it's too many years now. It could be getting on for 14 years. Wow. Wow. The first time I met John Mitchinson, which I remember and he doesn't, was in 1990 when, as a youth. Were you at a rave?

Yeah. In 1990. Yeah, that's right. I met him there. It was good. No, you remember Yeah, in 1990. Yeah, that's right. I met him there. It was good. No, you remember. He doesn't. No, that's years.

His techno awakening is many years. Many years in the future. Yeah, yeah. He came on a branch visit to the bookshop that I was working in. Was that Earl's Court? In Brighton. Oh, Brighton. Way back 30 years ago.

30 years ago. 30 years ago. My God. It struck me at the time that he was a surprisingly young man. Yeah. He had black, black hair and he was clean shaven. Yeah. And he was very cheerful. And he was talking to a shop staffed with...

Once born. That's me. Once born. With old Sheridan Hughes staff who'd converted over to Waterstones. Yeah, it was kind of an attempt to convert them to the faith of Waterstones, wasn't it? Or as Maggie Lennon said, what the hell is probably what the fuck is the man

who does the bugs and ribbons doing standing on the stage next to Tim? That was known. It was known as the man who did the bags and ribbons because that's apparently all she needed head office for. The lack of deference in Waterstones was a marvellous thing, wasn't it? It was a brilliant thing. We loved it. Ah, well, shall we get on with it? Let's do it.

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you'll find us in Edinburgh in May 1901. We're packed into the polished oak and marble magnificence of the rhetoric and humanities lecture theatre in the university's old college on Southbridge. At the front of the room, sitting on a raised platform at a wooden table, a distinguished bearded American in his late 50s is looking through his papers, preparing to address the room. it's quite like a normal episode

of that listen i'm i'm john mitchinson the publisher of unbound the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read and i'm andy miller author of the world atlas of cheeses and i'd like to thank listener ian for giving me permission to do that thank you ian that's marvelous joining us today is all the way from williamsburg usa our first transatlantic link up by satellite john williams yay thank you guys i. I am honored and frightened to be here. John, please tell listeners, before I tell them who you are, tell them who you aren't.

Yeah, this will be a two-part backlist. The first part will be dedicated to this. I am not a classical guitarist. I am not the Star Wars composer. I am not a former Cleveland Cavalier or Seattle Seahawk professional football player. I am not the author of Stoner. I'm not all, I mean, if you look at my disambiguation page on Wikipedia, it's not that I have an entry, but it's very funny. You know, there's like Australian sailors,

and then there'll be nine listed. It'll go to the next subcategory. Fortunately, there are no other writers called andrew miller worth bothering with anyway joining us today is john williams he is his own special creation he is the daily books editor and a staff writer at the new york times he is what is, where he has worked since 2011. Before that, John spent several years on the editorial side of book publishing and founded and ran the website The Second Pass, which was built partly on the love of older and more obscure books. And you sent us that description, and I realised that you were sort of having a dig, really, weren't you, John? You were sort of saying, backlisted is nothing but an audio ripoff of your website the second pass

well we'll talk about royalties afterwards yeah we met because you commissioned a book that I was writing in the states that it took me a long time to finish but you also let me write a couple of things for that website the second pass second pass was really brilliant website has it is it still archived and available online it is archived i think the second pass.com everything is still up there including your two uh rather great essays one about um a book one of many books you've turned me on to uh which was uh was it absolute beginners absolute beginners absolute beginners yes which i which i loved and which you wrote about at length but also sort of weaved in some of your own personal story so that's up there yeah it still exists for people to go back and

you're you're kind to say that it was great it was great because people like you contributed to it um when it was great as danny baker says let's stop lacing daisies into one another's hair. Why I wondered about the second pass, because the second pass, you were doing that about 10 years ago, weren't you? Yeah, about 10, 11 years ago. I think the world has changed quite a lot. I think in the last 10 years, what with e-books and the internet and one thing and another, it's actually much easier to both learn about and get hold of older books or books that had been out of print. Are there books that you covered that are far less obscure now than when your contributors were writing about them? Well, one in particular comes to mind. I mean, that was part of the whole purpose of the website.

Those changes were certainly starting back then. I think they've increased in the past 10 years. But I think even in my initial editor's note, I said something about the ease with which you can find even out-of-print books. And one of the first essays we had in the section for sort of older and out-of-print books was an essay by a friend of mine named Deborah Shapiro, who's a novelist. And she wrote about Eve's Hollywood by Eve Babbitts, which at the time I hadn't heard of. And she sent me, I think, a picture of, there was some incredible art, maybe the author photo. You can imagine if you're familiar with Eve Babbitts, I think she was wearing some kind of tiger print. And then she sent me a JPEG of the acknowledgements in the book, which she sort of starts the essay with, which is this hysterical

list of her painkillers and therapists and all the people she thanks and objects that she thanks. And that's, um, that's become here, uh, a pretty big cult hit through the New York review of books line, which is, which is one of the many places doing great, great work in rescuing books and bringing them back. I mean, I'd never heard of Eve's Hollywood before reading about it on the second pass. And it was several years before I read it. And we talked about it on the second pass and it was several years before i read it and we talked about it on if people want to find it we talked about it on the huisman's episode that we recorded in paris i mean it's one of the books that people who listen to batlist is go off find read and love that's a that's a fairly consistent pattern that is a funny book oh she's hysterical. Yeah. In all kinds of ways. Yeah, quite. So the book we're here to talk about is The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, younger brother of Henry,

professor of philosophy at Harvard, who delivered 20 hour long talks as part of the prestigious Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. And the texts of these were gathered together and first published in book form in 1902 by Longmans, Green and Co. with the subtitle, A Study in Human Nature. It was an instant bestseller, and it's a landmark book that continues to influence our attitudes to and our understanding of religious experience in all its diverse kinds i i'd just like to say i've spent several weeks john williams living with this book because it does nikki is is the queen of the great question on this podcast is this book easy to read she will be waiting to ask right this book is easy to read but you want to pace yourself yeah listeners is my advice so so this isn't this isn't a page turner it's up to you

to turn the pages would you agree how long do you think it should take the uh an average reader well i would say we're not we're not prescriptive like that, Nicky, but... I did it with the assistance of the audio book. Very good idea. Specifically the one read by John Pruden, which is on Audible. And actually that was a really great way to do it because the book was originally written as lectures, so each chapter is about an hour long. I did it over the space of about three weeks,

listening to it mostly and then rereading bits if they felt a bit chewy or I felt I hadn't quite got them. So I guess what I'm saying to the listeners is it is really worth your time, but take your time. Do you think, Mitch? I totally agree. And I love the, I've also listened to some of them on that very recording. I've also listened to some of them on that very recording. And the way the book is structured is it is a dense book, but it's a very well-read audiobook. And he was apparently a very, very good lecturer.

In fact, some of the criticism that he attracted early on was that it was too popular. You know, he packed 300 people into the hall, whereas previous, this was about the 15th or 16th in the series of Gifford lectures. We'll come on to this, but it felt to me like it was written by somebody who knew they would edit it. He was exactly right. He's a kind of a very, very, very good public speaker and lecturer. John, this is the book that you so wanted to talk about on this podcast. Can you tell us a bit about when you first encountered it or the work of William James?

Yes, I should say that I did want to talk about it, but I also was not expecting you to say yes and was pleasantly surprised when you did. So I'm glad we're doing it. I think I read an essay of James's called The Will to Believe, which is, I have a collection of his essays of the same title, long time ago, early, early the century. And so sort of got interested in him that way. And then I bought the Varieties of Religious Experience at a bookstore in New York, sat on it for a few years. And in the summer of 2007, I picked it up because I was interested in it. But the reason that it made such a difference to me, I was watching, I think it was a live event that you guys did at a bookstore where

John was describing the start of the show and how one of the things you wanted to get at was not just obscure books, but books that changed people's lives. And that got me to thinking that, you know, I heard that after I chose this book, but there really is no, I can't say that there's an individual book that has changed my life in general. Books collectively certainly have. This is the one that comes closest though. And I think I probably can say that it changed certainly my mood at the moment, which was very downcast. And I was going through a hard time and the book felt very much like a consolation to me. And James felt very much like a living friend. So you're twice born.

I am twice born. It taught me a lot of things, obviously, but it also confirmed a lot of the things that I feel instinctively about the world and his sort of many-sidedness I felt very sympathetic to. And I was someone who was raised with some religion and had the expectation of, you know, my mother very much wanted us all to be religious. And we all drifted from it at various times. I read a lot about religion and I don't practice any myself, but I'm very interested in the subject and I do feel a lot of those sort of the yearnings that we'll be talking about, I'm sure, throughout the episode. Mitch, had you read this before? No, is the honest answer. Although I had quoted it liberally

because it's one of those books that you get. Not personally. Well, you know what I'm saying. You read bleeding chunks of it and you sort of know that it's in the background. I'd read maybe a couple of essays by James and was sort of intrigued. He was one of those people I was,

I'd always thought at some point in my life, I must sit down and actually read that book because it so meshes with all my interests and have not been disappointed, I have to say. I mean, it's quite ambitious considering it was in 1902. Religion is such a difficult word, isn't it? It makes people think of organized religion, and it's emphatically not a book about organized religion. James himself very explicitly several times in the lectures says that he is not very interested in institutional religion, but personal experience

and personal religion. And so I think it is a book obviously about religion, but I think I said somewhere that I think its subtitle is actually a more accurate title for it, which is A Study of Human Nature. I find it to be a much more broad sort of searching about human psychology and human need. I've got the Oxford University Press edition here of the Varieties of Religious Experience. Have you got that, John? Mitch has got that as well. Hey, John Williams, what have you got? Oh, he's got a filthy mass market Penguin edition.

Look at that. It is not a mass. It is a trade paperback. It is a perfectly sized Penguin classic. Listen to us laughing about the technical terms for different formats. That is such an in-joke. Appalling. Anyway, here's the blurb on the oxford copy right i think this is pretty good the varieties of religious experience 1902

is william james's classic survey of religious belief in its most personal and often its most heterodox aspects asking questions such as how we define evil to ourselves, the difference between a healthy and a divided mind, the value of saintly behaviour and what animates and characterises the mental landscape of sudden conversion, James's masterpiece stands at a unique moment in the relationship between belief and culture. Faith in institutional religion and dogmatic theology was fading away, and the search for an authentic religion rooted in personality and subjectivity was a project conducted as an urgent necessity. With psychological insight, philosophical rigour, and a determination not to jump to the conclusion that in tracing religion's mental causes, we necessarily diminish its truth or value.

In the Varieties of Religious Experience, James wrote a truly foundational text for modern belief. That is longer and better than the one on my book. Nikki, did that communicate selling points to you? I think so. John, what's on your book? Mine says, there's a little extra blurb at the top that says, Standing at the crossroads of psychology and religion, this groundbreaking work applied the scientific method to humankind's religious behavior. This groundbreaking work applied the scientific method to humankind's religious behavior.

William James believed individual religious experiences rather than the precepts of organized religions were the backbone of the world's spiritual life. His discussions of conversion, repentance, mysticism, and saintliness, and his observations on actual personal religious experiences all support this thesis. In his introduction, I think you guys will get a kick out of this name, and it's a good introduction. In his introduction, Martin E. Marty discusses how James's pluralistic view of religion led to his remarkable tolerance of extreme forms of religious behavior, his challenging, highly original theories, and his welcome lack of pretension in all of his observations on the individual and the divine. on the individual and the divine. I would stress the lack of pretension. I would say the one sort of overarching thing I would say about this book to someone like Nikki or anyone who is really just here trying to be sold a little bit

is that it is both completely unpretentious. He's got this very conversational voice for someone so rigorous. And it is also not, even though it is dense and you have to get used to its rhythms, it's perfectly comprehensible. As you're reading it, does it make you think of your own life and your own experiences? Speaking for myself, almost all it made me think about was my own psychology and reactions to the world and a bit those of people I know or care about. And it felt like a guidebook to human nature, really, more than anything else.

The thing that is most astonishing about it and why I would give it a whirl, Nikki, is that because it's about these experiences, and in some ways it's a really interesting anthology of experience, both experience that people have written about, but also firsthand experience. There's some amazing firsthand experience that he's gathered. You read it in the same way maybe as you might read um freud you know but without the without the heavy overlay of i'm trying to prove a theory what's brilliant about

william james is he's genuinely he is the pragmatic empiricist who just wants to gather the evidence and when he does come up with his kind of um his sort of declarations of what he feels at the end, they're very open-ended. So none of this book feels, even though it was written 120 years ago, none of it feels out of date. None of it feels old-fashioned. We should say that William James is devised,

you know, he's a follower of pragmatism and a great proponent of pragmatism as a philosophy. And the phrase radical empiricism, in terms of what John was just talking about, the phrase the divided self comes from William James. The actual phrase, the varieties of religious experience, which is passed into general parlance, I think anyway, is, of course, another Jamesian motto. I think anyway, is of course another Jamesian motto. Before we move on to the next Beatle-led discussion,

John, could you read us a little bit from the Varieties of Religious Experience, just so we can get a flavor of how William James talks to the reader? Yes, I would be more than happy to. This is from a two-part lecture that I think is probably my favorite in the series called The Sick Soul. A lot of what James is writing about in that pragmatism is about how to feel better, essentially. And a lot of the book is about really what it feels like to feel depressed or pessimistic. So this is the page here where he talks about that.

To begin with, how can things so insecure as the successful experiences of this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are always interposed? Unsuspectedly, from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up. A touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell. For fugitive as they may be,

they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a piano string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it. Of course, the music can commence again, and again and again, at intervals. But with this, the healthy-minded consciousness is left with an irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack. It draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident. Even if we suppose a man so packed with healthy-mindedness as never

to have experienced in his own person any of these sobering intervals, still, if he is a reflecting being he must generalize and class his own lot with that of others, and doing so he must see that his escape is just a lucky chance and no essential difference. He might just as well have been born to an entirely different fortune. And then indeed the hollow security. What kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is, thank God it has let me off clear this time? Is not its blessedness a fragile fiction? Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success? If indeed it were all success, even on such terms as that. But take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world,

and in nine cases out of ten, his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals and the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting. That's 120 years old. I mean, I know there's a certain archaic kind of vocabulary to it, but even so, you can hear the willingness to reach out to the audience, to whoever was going to turn up in Edinburgh. I think that six-hole, that double chapter is my favorite as well, the the presentation of depression and he does that thing in the middle of it where he he claims that there's a french person who has

having a really a bad depressive episode and it turns out we discover that it was in fact him it was him writing about his own depression i could read a short little passage of it while in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing room in the twilight to procure some article that was there, when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I'd seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic. He used to sit all day on

one of the benches or rather shelves against the wall with his knees drawn up against his chin and the coarse grey undershirt which was his only garment drawn over them and enclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape I am, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it has struck for him. So it's a religious book, but it's also religion informed by the developments of psychology, John, that have been taking place in the late 19th century and now here into the earlier 20th

century, right? Well, James was first and foremost a philosopher and psychologist. And that's why to sort of think about the book as a book about religion is both accurate and not enough. Religion is such a huge subject that it allowed him to get at these other things, I think, that primarily interested him, including, as Lennon would say, and that was a brilliant choice, how to measure our pain, how to overcome our pain. But to me, I always describe this as a book primarily about psychology. And that's not just because I don't want to scare people off of it because I don't think they're as interested in reading about religion as I am. I genuinely think that that is at its heart what this is. He spends a lot of time on healthy-mindedness,

but you get the sense, like that brilliant part that John read a minute ago, that James doesn't really cast his lot with the healthy-minded. He doesn't sympathize with them, and he doesn't think they need the help. If you're healthy-minded, what you really need, I guess, is a reflection of why you think the world is full of good, why it's a bounteous place, what your place in it should be, and that's all fine. But he's really interested in people who reach a breaking point, essentially, and almost break through their ego. There's a lot of vaguely new age material in here too, which he's very friendly toward in his open-mindedness. And he's talking maybe 40 years after the world started to tangle with Darwin. And it's still fresh, I think, that sense

of not knowing where to turn, but being interested in it. One of the things that I really enjoyed about the book was the way, you've both referred to it, but the way James uses secondary sources and how he doesn't prefer types of secondary source. So he's very happy to pull in eyewitness reports that are barely literate right up to Tolstoy. And he specifically talks about Tolstoy's Confession, which is an incredible book in its own right. I'd just like to read a little bit from that,

from the bit that William James draws to our attention. And again, it's from The Sick Soul. Tolstoy describes an experience that clearly james had gone through in fact john that he'd just written about in the bit you read he's talking about somebody french but he's talking about himself a crisis not merely of faith but an existential crisis of thinking why why am i here this i'm you know um i ought to be happy i am I here? I ought to be happy. I ought to be satisfied. I ought to be fulfilled. Not only am I none of those things, I'm the opposite.

I'm on the brink of suicide. And he quotes this section from A Confession by Tolstoy. And it was so pleasing to see this again. And he talks about an oriental fable of a traveler surprised in the desert by a wild beast. Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler jumps into a well with no water in it. But at the bottom of this well,

he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be prey of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate, but still he clings and sees two mice, one white, one black, evenly moving around the bush to which he hangs and gnawing off its roots. The traveller sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish. But while thus hanging, he looks about him and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches

with his tongue and licks them off with rapture. Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoled me, but the honey pleases me no longer. And day and night, the white mouse and the black mouse, nor the branch to which I cling, and the black mouse nor the branch to which i cling i can see but one thing the inevitable dragon and the mice i cannot turn my gaze away from them i mean first and foremost told the genius of tolstoy of course but the varieties of religious experience is one of the ways that William James seeks to address that dilemma. We're all hanging from the bough. Should we seek out the honey?

Should we take our eyes off the mice? What should we do? I mean, also, he is brave. You know, he's prepared to put his mind where his mouth is. He takes drugs. He takes nitrous oxide, famously. And why does he do that, Mitch? He's a scientist.

Part of him is he wants to try it. And one of the unexpected kind of delights of nitrous oxide is that it means he starts to enjoy reading Hegel. If you say so. Is that what the oxide addicts get into? Hegel. I love that. He says this. He says this. The effects will of course vary within a very individual,

just as they vary in the same individual from time to time. But it's probable in the former case, as in the latter, a generic resemblance will obtain. With me, as with every other person who I've heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth flies open to the view in depth, beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel. Only as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases as one stares at the cadaverous looking snow peak from which the sunset glow has just fled

or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand now that is brilliant there's a famous story about him which is that he'd taken nitrous oxide and he wrote down on a piece of paper what he thought was the meaning of the universe. And when he came down from it, what was written on the piece of paper is this phrase, the smell of turpentine pervades throughout. But you know what? He didn't just try nitrous oxide. He tried chloral hydrate and he wrote about that. He tried amyl nitrate and he wrote about that. And he tried peyote to try and free the mind so his ass

would follow try that you know that story john just told the first time the beatles met bob dylan uh famously bob dylan turned them on to marijuana and paul mccartney tells a story about he smoked his first joint and suddenly everything was revealed to him and he said to mal evans you've got to get me a piece of paper and a pen you've got to get me a piece of paper and a pen i've i've got it i've got it i've got to write it down and just hang on to it till tomorrow morning so mal evans is the beatles roadie and gopher he goes off he finds paul the stone paul mccartney a piece of paper bit of pen paul scribbles it down they go on to enjoy the rest of the the evening with bob dylan mccartney wakes up the next morning and there's on to enjoy the rest of the evening with Bob Dylan.

McCartney wakes up the next morning and there's the bit of paper folded by his bed with the meaning of life on it. And he opens it up and it says, there are five levels. It's like the Jamesian experience through the prism of the Beatles again. There are five levels. Now we have to figure out what the levels are. But to answer that question, I mean, in terms of why he took the drugs, I think he has this great line in the book that I can't find, of course, now, about how if there's something that can give us some wisdom, why wouldn't we do it?

And he's just interested in anything that might enlighten or help or anything. He's just very open-minded, and that's sort of his trademark quality. But actually, that's interesting because religious experiences for many are in taking drugs, aren't they? And that's why ayahuasca is so popular. So that's what people do. There's a really good book by an American writer named John Horgan, who's a popular science writer, and it's called Rational Mysticism. And it's about the sort of border between science and religion from about 15 years ago. We may well come on to spiritual experiences induced by imbibing substances. We might do, we might not.

We've all talked about the varieties of religious experience as a repository of not just William James's writing, but other interesting or striking writing. So when the philosopher Mary Midgley appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2005, she was asked about her luxuries. And this is what she said. Now, Mary, I have to ask you three questions. If you could only take one of those eight records, which one would you take? Oh, my.

I think it has to be Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Talies. I think that's a kind of all-purpose one, you know, that will always make one feel better whatever might be going on. And a book you can take with you as well. Ah, now, yes. Here, no trouble. William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. This is 500 pages long. It's boneful of excellent stories about people's different religious attitudes and what got them into them and out of them.

And the thoughts that he has about them are jolly interesting. I know that this will work because last summer I was actually quite ill and I was convalescing and I thought, oh, dear, what am I going to read? I know I've got War and Peace, but it won't last me, you see, the whole of August. And I took this practice of religious experience off the shelf thinking it was pretty good. And indeed, it is absolutely marvellous. You can read it many times without the slightest trouble. John Williams, that rings really true, right? The idea that it's a plural text, a pluralist text. Well, first of all, one of the other books of his I've read, a philosophy book, is called A Pluralistic Universe. And that's very much the William James. I mean, I have so many

things to say about that. First is that I had no idea that Mary Midgley had done a Desert Island Disc. So thank you for that, because I need to go back and listen to that whole thing. And I love Mary Midgley. So I'm buffeted by the fact that she also loves William James. And she has my inner voice, I think, much like Anita Bruckner. I think I sound like Mary Midgley on the inside of me. But yes, it's funny that you read from Tolstoy. I always forget when I dip back into it, I'm reminded of how many other sources there are and how often he's quoting at length other sources. And he has a great length other sources. And he has a

great eye for that. And he's a very trustworthy curator. So even though he's interrupting himself all the time, it's almost always for a good reason and with a good text. And then you'll get Tolstoy and you'll see something like, I noticed the other night I was rereading it. I read this quote and I think, oh, that's interesting. I looked down at the footnote and it says something like, this quote and I think, oh, that's interesting. I looked down at the footnote and it says something like the life and memoirs of Henry Thomas Butterworth, you know, Lebanon, Ohio, 1886. And so it's just a wide net that he is casting from everything from Tolstoy to just very everyday experiences. Time now for an advert. So we've talked about it as a religious book and we've talked about it as a work of psychology.

Maybe I should say just a bit about who William James was. So the James family, there are five of them. William James is the eldest. He's the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Senior. And he is, of course, the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James and the diarist Alice James and two younger Jameses who nobody. There's a definite kind of Salinger stroke Wes Anderson theme running through this, right? About a highly intellectual family like the Tenenbaums or the Glasses. William James and Henry James didn't have a really close relationship, did they? They kind of had a fairly sparky relationship. And I thought you might enjoy this letter that William wrote to younger brother Henry in 1905 about his most recent novel.

I just want you to think here are two brothers with a few years difference between them who are also William James and Henry James both those elements are constantly in play right in their early 60s yeah here we go here we go William James writes I read your golden bowl a month or more ago and it put me as most of your recent along stories have put me, in a very puzzled state of mind. I don't enjoy the kind of problem, especially when, as in this case, it is treated as problematic. And the method of narration, by interminable elaboration of suggestive reference, brackets, I don't know what to call it, but you know what I mean, close brackets, goes again the grain of all my own impulses in writing. And yet, in spite of it all,

brackets little brother, there is a brilliancy and cleanness of effect. And in this book, especially a high tone social atmosphere that are unique and extraordinary your methods and my ideals seem the reverse the one of the other and yet i have to admit your extreme success in this book but why won't you just to please brother sit down and write a new book with no twilight or mustiness in the plot with great vigor and decisiveness in the action no fencing in the dialogue no psychological commentaries and absolute straightness in the style isn't that that's lovely right That's what everybody would like to say to Henry James. For God's sake, man, get to the point. Yeah, beautiful.

John, did you say that you sort of, you look more beneficently on Henry James as a result of reading William James? Well, I think that's giving me too much credit. I hadn't really given Henry much of a chance. I think I probably read him too young. I felt all the things that William expresses in that letter, and I put it down, and I never really gave it all that much thought again, even though I figured I'd go back someday and try him again. But no, just between falling in love with this person and figuring that someone who shares his family would be pretty interesting too. But it was really Richardson's biography that put me back toward Henry because it's great on all the family dynamics. The family is endlessly fascinating. There are dozens of books about them. And Richardson really gets at their relationship, the thorniness of it. But also ultimately, there's a very moving scene toward the end about them.

I think I read The Americans first, which is kind of a weird choice, but I liked it a lot. But eventually I read the, obviously, Portrait of a Lady, which is the masterpiece is the masterpiece i think yeah so i've read five or six of his novels now when william james died henry james said this sounds like one of those things like if somebody tried i mean i'm not saying they didn't love one another they clearly did love one another but henry james said of his brother my brother had an endless spontaneity of mind it's almost like a backhanded compliment my brother had an endless spontaneity of mind and alice james who i think died before william james she described him as a blob of mercury that he was what you can read in the varieties of religious experience you know the idea of literature as an expression of personality actually i think that does come through however artfully rerouted in the varieties of religious

experience he's endlessly fascinated in things and he doesn't want to be stuck in one area forever so we've talked about the book as a religious book as a psychological text or as a work of philosophy what's the thing that binds all those things together it's the the god of the of the text which is the author it's the author's personality kind of kind of uh uh because they it's the best kind of book because they are interested in it you should be interested in it bravo yes and that that is that that is is his ideal in the end, really. He was an artist. He was a failed artist himself. And when he says religion, he takes it to mean the feelings, acts,

and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Well, now that is the perfect, perfect definition. Individually, whatever we consider the divine. Well, now that is the perfect, perfect definition. Individually, whatever we consider the divine. I would like to round out the conversation about the book, and given that it's given us so much food for thought, by asking each of you what you consider to be the closest thing

that you have experienced personally to a spiritual experience or or a religious experience in those terms in those jamesian terms not organized religion necessary though i suppose it can be organized religion but in terms of just you and your consciousness so well why don't we go around the group consciousness so well why don't we go around the group mitch why don't you go first um well i think the nearest i've had to anything like that was um before i'd moved to the village i now live in um i used to occasionally come here and i used to visit the church which i loved greatly it's an amazing building one of the reasons it's amazing it's surrounded by trees and it's got no stained glass windows so the light is incredible and i remember sitting in there one

winter's afternoon not because i was having a you know communing with god but because it's a it's a space one of those thing it's the t.s elliott line a place where prayer has been made valid you know people have worshipped whatever they believed in over a thousand years there. And I was completely conscious of my grandfather sitting next to me who had died six months earlier. And there was no doubt in my mind at all that he was with me. I've never had that experience before or since.

And its influence, I think, it gave me some kind of weird permission later on when i was thinking about moving to the village i now live in it was that that experience was and and you know i i'd say we've you know we've baptized all our children there we were married in that church we buried rachel's sister in the in the churchyard yeah and that's that's as close as i've ever got. And that would come into the chapter, the reality of the unseen in this book. And do you consider yourself once born or twice born? I'm going to ask everyone this.

Do you consider yourself once born or twice born? Once born, you're happy. You're a happy person. Twice born, you need a religious experience. Yeah, I think I'm liminal actually i think i'm fundamentally once born but i have uh sometimes the the plank as emily to consent the plank in reason breaks there's a great description of whitman being as fatherington thomas as anyone has ever been ever in the book about uh never getting cross never being never being crossed

with anybody never criticizing anybody my best self is once born. I think the phrase, I think I'm liminal should be the title of your solo album. John, tell us if you can, if you've had a moment. Yeah, it was difficult to think about this. And John actually just triggered something that I'm going to say. This was not what I had prepared, but it's definitely the answer for me. but it's definitely the answer for me. The first time that I visited the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, which is a non-denominational, essentially it's a work of art by Rothko. It's an octagonal shaped building that you walk in and it has his signature paintings, but they're all in,

as much as this is a contradiction, various shades of black. They're very, very dark colors that are barely distinguishable from each other. It's very quiet in there and it's obviously temperature controlled because it's in Texas. And I stood there and you have these experiences, I think, with art and with nature that I don't think always apply. I mean, the first time I, when I saw the, um, when I walked into the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona a couple of years ago, with a couple of hours of sun left in the day and the sun was just streaming throughout the whole place, that was an incredible feeling of awe. And I did think about religious things, obviously because of the setting, but I wouldn't call it this. This was more that it turned me,

it turned me inside myself and made me disappear at the same time, which is, I think, part of what James is getting at. It made me both highly conscious of my own sensations and feeling, and it also made me feel as if everything, including me, was meaningless and that was okay. everything including me was meaningless and that was okay. And it moved me very, very deeply. And so that would be my... James says that mystical experiences have no intellectual content whatsoever, a true mystical experience. And so you can't really articulate them. Yes. By asking you, all I can ask you to do is edge towards the thing itself, because the thing itself probably can't be articulated. He quotes someone else saying, have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your mental vision except in a few hallowed moments? Beautiful. Aren't you going to ask me how many times I've been born?

Would you say you are once born, twice born, or neither? I'm going to crib from Mitch a little bit here, if I may call him Mitch. I think that temperamentally, I am once born. I think that people who know me would say that the way I express myself is once born. But I definitely feel like I am someone who is waiting to be twice born and thinking it's probably never going to happen. Oh, this is good. And we're just about to turn to our producer, Nikki Birch.

Nikki, you were saying, you said to me earlier, you were hedging around how personal you thought this should be, right? Weren't you? Because it could be really personal. But all I want is a moment. I want like a moment where you thought wow there's something bigger than me whatever whatever that might be whenever that might be so can i go with twice born once from first yeah do it do it yes so i i'm definitely once born straight up born, occasionally at Glastonbury weekend, twice born. But most of the rest of the year, once born.

So religious experience, given that I am once born, I wouldn't say I've had a deeply religious experience, but I am part of a cult. I don't know if I told you this. I've had a deeply religious experience, but I am part of a cult. I don't know if I told you this. So I have, I'm part of, I'm not going to say what the cult's called because I don't want to publicise it, but let's just call it a tree cult. Okay, so I'm part of a tree cult where me and a number of other people

get together. It involves spending a lot of time amongst the trees, camping, you know, hanging out by the fire. Forest bathing. Forest bathing, yeah. Anyway, so this weekend, just back from something similar, having been in lockdown for many, many months, there's been no tree culting.

You know, the cult has not gathered right we have not spent the time in the woods we have not hung out we have not like uh breathed in nature and we've not been together and this weekend we had our first um connection we kind of met again some of us not with us it's there's actually thousands of people in this cult which makes it sound really creepy, but it's pretty amazing. This is way beyond anything I was hoping for. Right, okay. So anyway, this weekend we spent some time in the woods

and by a river and watching members of the tree cult one by one as they emerged from their car to see where they were, to see they were being outside, to get straight into the river because it was lovely and sunny. Everybody just walked one by one. There's only about 10 of us. There wasn't many of us. And everyone's face was just like, you can just imagine.

It was just jubilant. It was ecstatic. It was like, oh, my God, I'm back again in the woods, in the water. I mean, naked in the water or just do you have kind of no i mean swimming costumes john it's not that kind of cult obviously if you came you could get naked it's up to you you know be yourself but there are children there are children non-judgmental sex well actually you know there's children involved so we do that we do like we do like swimming costumes important yeah yeah

yeah yeah anyway so that i'd say was a religious experience not just for me but for and watching everybody enjoying the fact that they weren't no longer at home that was pretty wonderful yeah so there's a mixture of things there so there's the the there's the you know the back to nature element but there's also doing it with other people so it's a communal experience right yes and you mentioned glastonbury. That's another kind of the spiritual moment of a festival or dancing or any of those things. They all seem to fit to me.

Burning Man, famously. Burning Man, right. Okay, yeah. All my spiritual experiences, I tried to address this as seriously as I could in a non-ironic non-flinching away from the topic because obviously i'm not very comfortable with anything that can't be flinched away from and i'm doing it then i'm making a joke about it but it's actually true all my spiritual experiences are to do with books and music and art and film and TV

and cultural experiences. Always. That when it comes down to it, always. And they're always solitary. They aren't communal. And I would describe myself as twice born and still waiting. You know, each epiphany for me is appointed to the next epiphany. And it'll be like William James, if I may be so bold.

It'll be a sad day when I stop looking. It's better to travel, you know, it's better to travel and find new things and find those moments. And actually, I had one of these, and I am going to call it spiritual. I have one of these epiphanies in the run-up to this episode. If you're a patron and subscriber and you can listen to Lotlisted, you'll hear me talk about this in more depth on that episode. But I read initially out of duty and increasingly out of enthusiasm

everything written by J.D. Salinger in the space for about a fortnight and I had dismissed J.D. Salinger's work when I was 19 because it didn't speak to me and all I can tell you is at the age of 52 having just read the varieties of religious experience it really spoke to me loud and clear especially the short stories in For Esme with Love and Squalor or as it's called in the States, Nine Stories. And even as I was reading them, I was thinking, goodness, these seem connected with the varieties of religious experience. I was thinking about William James writing in the varieties of religious experience about how even epiphanies are the result of gradual movements towards moments rather than lightning bolts. So he discusses in the book.

And I was thinking, wow, it's like reading William James has primed me to have this experience. But that doesn't mean this experience isn't valid. And what struck me about the stories in Nine Stories, and i read through salinger's work is that it's profoundly concerned with spirituality you know we think of him in terms of the capture in the rye and whatever our prejudices are about the capture in the rye and whenever we read capture in the rye and we think about his retreat from the world but we don't think about him as somebody who in his work is trying to find an accommodation between the demands of the secular world the american world the commercial world in which he's been born

once born and the sense of something bigger the sense of a kind of jamesian need to reach out and find something else and john and mitch and I both noticed that in Salinger's very first published story, which is called The Young Folks, published in a magazine in 1940 and available only on the internet and nowhere else. You'll have to look for it. There's a character called william james son jr it's like there's a joke at the very beginning in the second paragraph of anything jd salinger ever published about a character who is entirely without any spiritual element whatsoever and his name is william james

son you know so the the clue is there at the very beginning of the work. And then as Salinger goes on, it seemed to me, as I read these over the space of a week, I just thought, wow, this guy is, why would this guy, it seems common sense, it all fell away. I thought, well, why would this guy be published in the New Yorker by William Maxwell if he weren't a great writer he's a great writer he just has this he just has this freak cultural monolith to carry around with him and i guess i would interpret what he does with the

rest of his career and what he does with the rest of his life as a way of finding, making the work the spiritual quest. So I asked my friends on this podcast to read Nine Stories. And I'm going to ask John Williams first. In New York City, an American man. Through and through. You'd never read Nine Stories before. I hadn't. I had read The Catcher in the Rye way back when. And that's the only Salinger I had read. And I would gladly come back. I'm not inviting myself back, but I would do another five-hour show on Salinger. Because I have a lot, like you do. I have a lot to say because I wasn't prepared for the variety of feelings I had and and where he fit into so many different things in American culture and in definitely in William James ish ways because of the catcher in the rye.

As far as I remember, I'm sure there is spiritual stuff in it, but the books I'm reading now, Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories, there's much more explicit, you know, sort of verging on new agey, very Eastern philosophy inflected seeking for experience and for wisdom. And I love the story. I didn't love all the stories in the collection equally, but I found it really interesting. You know, he has this really weird combination of like this sort of wised up naive voice in terms of the tone i'm not saying he's naive but just the the sense you get it's very mid-century american and very mid-century a certain kind of new york that like you're saying i think wes anderson would have created if he had lived back then and mitch what did you make of it uh i was absolutely amazed i have to say i you know we we have talked elsewhere about catcher in the rye but that was the only salinger i'd read and um you know rachel my wife is a massive salinger fan and had always said i should read them and i don't know what i was expecting

but i wasn't expecting this cumulative kind of build up through the nine stories to two stories at the end, which are as really as interesting as any short stories. I think they've been written in the second half of the 20th century by anyone and much more spiritual and and and complex what one um teddy and the other domious blue period you know had william james written it after his his book after i'm almost certain that these that he would have quoted these the experiences in these stories as as perfect examples of a particular variety of religious experience. To Daumier-Smith's Blue Period in particular has a brilliant narrative conceit where a young man who seems fine goes to work tutoring in an art school and it's only when he receives some artwork from a nun which has been sent in and then writes a letter to the nun that you realize he's not

nearly as well as he seemed at first right so it has this brilliant thing in the letter to the nun which signs off i mean this made me laugh out loud with sincere hope that you are enjoying completely perfect health i am yours respectfully john de domie smSmith, right? That's just one of the tells. And then near the end of the story, he has the very thing that William James writes about so often, where he says, the narrator says, something extremely out of the way happened to me some 15 minutes later, a statement I'm aware that has all the unpleasant earmarks of a build-up but quite the contrary is true I'm about to touch on an extraordinary

experience one that still strikes me as having been quite transcendent and I'd like if possible to avoid seeming to pass it off as a case or even a borderline case of genuine mysticism and then he goes on to describe that event and tie up the story over the course of a page in a way that I had to read three or four times. I don't want to read it on here because I don't want to spoil it for anyone who might read it. I mean, clearly getting into reading secret messages into J.D. Salinger doesn't lead anywhere good, especially as we've been playing bits from Beatlesles records but uh but it's a genius decision to read that story on your part i was just really profoundly

spiritually intellectually moved by that book and that story for the reasons you're talking about yeah there are there are that teddy and i think for resume with love and squalor are, yeah, I mean, they're mind blowing stories. It made me blue period. What it made me wish is that I had gone through my life writing down these moments because the banality of the moment, the actual moment is, I think there have been moments where that's when that feeling has come over me almost like it did in the Rothko chapel, but it just wasn't noteworthy enough in its surrounding details to be noted by me. Yeah. Well, listen, we have to wrap up. I'm going to want to give the last word on William James to our guest, John. As people leave this podcast, filing out of our chapel into the sunshine, what will they get from reading this book?

into the sunshine, what will they get from reading this book? I think they'll get solace. And I think if they, I think they will understand themselves and other people better. That's a big claim, but I really think that's what they'll get. In 2020, that's what we need from any book, isn't it? And I would like to thank john and the thank of the three of you today actually this is one of the books i've enjoyed most thinking about and getting ready for to do backlisted and anticipated this conversation and it's been wonderful so it was like christmas morning for me this morning i was very excited and nervous thank you guys for having me on i really appreciate it i mean formal thanks to john for helping us engage once more uh with a text which is i think as relevant maybe more relevant than

ever at the moment and of course to nikki for pulling our epiphanies into an intelligible oral experience and to unbound for paying for the nitrous oxide. Oh, you can download all 116 previous episodes of this thing. Plus follow linked clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, backlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter or Facebook or our new Instagram page. Yep, and if you've enjoyed this, you could also show your love directly

by supporting our Patreon at www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted we're trying to survive without paid for adverts but quality demands time so your generosity helps us by that and it's our sole source of income all patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early and for less than the price of an online meditation course lock listeners get two extra locklisted a month, the place where we go to commune with the higher power and find sounds, words, images and visions to share. And actually, it might be worth mentioning that the next episode of Backlisted

will be highlights from Locklisted. That's a good point. Summer special. We're not talking about one book next time. We're doing a summer special where we're taking some of the bits from Lotlisted over the last few months during the lockdown and some of the books that we've read and enjoyed and talked about with one another.

And so we hope that will provide you with a useful guide of things you could read over the summer. It's pragmatic. It's plural. It's James in the full sense of the word. But now we have to read some names out for the lovely lot listeners. Shall I start? Go.

Excellent. Richard Bray, novelist and good man. Joe Elcote. Faye. Julia Van Toole. Anna Disley. Melanie Hunger. Sanjay Hazarika.

Robin Muir. Rachel Malik. Hi, Rachel. Mark Ellingham. Great publisher. Hi, Rachel. Mark Ellingham, great publisher. Hi, Mark. Thank you. Stephen Maynard, Kylie Day, David Cooper, Sally Walden, Ewan Tant. Ah, Ewan Tant.

The great Ewan Tant. Hi, Ewan. I'd like to just bung in here our friends Nick Riddle and Joe Darling, who both contacted me this week and said, where are we there you are thank you nick thank you joe uh you're both brilliant keep the comments coming we love hearing from you jenny brophy philippa lang mary reedy robin herndon deborahfton, David O'Connell, Will Gore. Hi, Will. Patsy Irwin.

Thanks, Patsy. Thanks, Patsy. Still waiting for that, Julie. Julian Gunn, Anita Simons, Jackie Fry, Jen Willis, Russell Strode, Helen Shavin, Sia Stewart. Thank you so much, everybody. We literally couldn't make this without you, so thank you. Thank you. And that's it. thank you so much, everybody. We literally couldn't make this without you. So thank you. Thank you.

And that's it. Thank you for listening. We are back, as Andy says, in the main show in a fortnight. Or sign up for the Patreon and you'll get two extra shows each month. Thank you for listening. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early,

you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.