The Eric Metaxas Show - Karen Swallow Prior

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

Karen Swallow Prior, award-winning professor of English at Liberty University, has discovered a more focused way of navigating the classics, including "Sense and Sensibility" and "Heart of Darkness."

You know that Eric worst dentures had a bit in his family for generations? It's true. They're discolored and disgusting. But they have deep personal meaning for Eric, so we ask that you respect that. And now your host, Eric Mataxis. Hey there, folks. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. As I have promised you in the past and continued to do,

I have fascinating conversations on this program with fascinating people about wonderful subjects. I am really thrilled to have back on the program, my friend Karen Swallow, Pryor, who is a celebrated English professor at Liberty University and an author. Karen, welcome back. It's good to be back with you, Eric. Even in this time of crisis. You really have been through a lot since I've last spoken with you. I can hardly believe it.

I don't know if you want to touch on that briefly before we get into Jane Austen. Sure, yeah. I mean, basically almost two years ago. I was in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, actually going to a meeting with the publisher for this series that I have. And I stepped into a crosswalk and didn't see the bus coming until it hit me. And so I was hit by a bus spent eight days in Vanderbilt Hospital, came home, recovered, and I'm pretty much fully recovered now. But it was quite a traumatic experience.

It's unbelievable. You get to go through the rest of your life now saying I was hit by a bus. I mean... Almost worth it. Yeah, I'm sure it's not worth it. But my goodness. Well, look, it's just great to see you looking like your old self. I mean, you don't look like you were hit by a bus or anything.

So I'm just glad to be able to see you thriving with all the books behind you. I got so excited when I heard. I mean, you've written a number of books, but you've come out with this series of books. why don't you tell my audience about the series of books and the idea behind it? Well, it's actually B&H publishers that contacted me with this idea for me to edit a series of classic works of literature, because that's my love and my expertise, that would include introductions written by me for general readers, maybe first-time readers, also Christian readers.

So using a Christian worldview to look at these books. and discussion questions. And the big feature besides that would be that these would be beautifully bound, hardcover books that would be keepsakes. And so that's what we are doing. We will have a six-volume set that will complete in a couple of years. And the first two just came out, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad,

because those two books really go together, don't they? I don't know yet? Let me ask you before we get into talking about those two books and the larger project. Can you say what the four titles are beyond these two? Yes. This next two will certainly be Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And then I'm pretty sure the final two will be Tessa of the Derbervilles by Thomas Hardy and the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne,

like my token American work. Your token American work. Well, that's a good one. Tess, you know, as I remember it, just makes me sad. So I feel like I don't want to see it. I don't want to read it, but it's certainly beautiful. It just so happens that during this odd lockdown pandemic, my wife, Suzanne and I have been spending most evenings

looking Netflix has like nothing but I think Hulu and Amazon Prime have a lot of Dickens and Jane Austen and Bronte and Trallup miniseries that the BBC have created

that some of which are just spectacular and it really just so happened that last night we were watching sense and sensibility I'm ashamed to say that there's so many books that I'm familiar with but I have never actually read. And I don't think I actually have ever read Heart of Darkness.

I may have, you know, like, and forgot, but that seems impossible because it's, I don't think you could forget reading a book like that. And I know I've not read sense and sensibility. So which one should we talk about first? Well, let's talk about sense and sensibility. But I also want to say, Eric, I'm an English professor, and there are 100 or 1,000 times more books that I haven't read than I have read. I mean, there are just so many good books, and even those of us who are readers and lovers of good literature, haven't read them all.

So there's no shame in not having read some great work of literature. And part of the reason I admit it, I say it publicly, is because I think there are all these people out there maybe listening to this radio program who have some idea that I've read all the great books, like on the contrary, not even close. And particularly when I think of Austin, I think of Dickens. I mean, there's certain writers, you really want to read everything that they've done, are most of the things that they've done. So let's talk about sense and sensibility. I find it funny because I have been watching so many of these BBC dramas, you really do feel it's a little bit like Groundhog Day with Jane Austen,

because it's always about, you know, the marriage and the match and how many pounds per year, year. And it almost, it just comes across as funny in a way because it's, it's always at the centerpiece, at least of the ones that, that we've watched. It's, it's hard for us in the 21st century to think of the 19th century, early 19th century in England as being that kind of a culture. Yeah, I mean, in some ways, Austin's world, it's so on the surface, it's so very different from our own. But this is the genius of Austin, is that she captures things about human nature and human society that have never changed. And the marriage plot is really just the surface level. It's the stage on which she plays out really the human drama, which is about, you know,

about pettiness and greed and virtue and vice and of course love and romance. But she's really satirizing the excesses that we all have. And that's actually why I chose of all of Austin's works, because I love them all. I chose sense and sensibility because I think it's one that speaks particularly to our time because the two main characters, you know, our sisters, each one aligned with one or the other. So sense represents reason or rational thinking and sensibility, emotion. And so we have these two sisters, one who's very rational and the other who's very emotional, to an extreme in both cases.

And I think in this polarized political time that we live in, I don't know if you know that we live in a polarized political time. I don't know what you're talking about. Okay. Yeah. Well, we do. We just take my word for it. We do. And, you know, I think we find ourselves easily pulled to any of any set of polls.

And Austin, you know, all of her books do this, but sense and sensibility most, she shows us how virtue is the moderation. between two extremes, one of the excess and one of deficiency. And I think this novel of all of them have a particular resonance for us in these polarized times today. One of the reasons that I so love watching these BBC programs and obviously reading these kinds of books is that it's so obvious that it's a Christian sensibility. I wasn't aware until I think you told me that Jane Austen was herself quite a strong Christian, but it's so obvious. It's not that she's evangelistic in her writing, but the sensibility, forgive me, of everything is deeply Christian. She was profoundly Christian.

Now, what's really interesting, again, for our times is that we think post-2016 that the term evangelical has only been controversial or around for a few years. We find in Austin's letters that evangelical Christianity was controversial in her time as well. And she actually kind of, as a high church Anglican and the daughter of an Anglican minister, she shunned the label evangelical, just as many do today, for political and social and cultural reasons. yet she still was very small evangelical in her faith, in her belief, in her writing, not in the sense of having an altar call or being overtly evangelistic, but just as you said, her sensibility, her worldview is imbued with Christianity,

with the book of common prayer. She's a powerful Christian intellectual and one that we have forgotten and we need to reclaim. Forgive me for interrupting. We're going to go to a break. We'll be right back, folks. I am talking to Karen Swallow Pryor. We're talking about Jane Austen. I don't need to tell you to stick around. Of course you will. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Karen Swallow Pryor, who teaches English literature at liberty. It sounds like a really fun job, Karen. And now you've been writing all these wonderful books, and you now have these series, you have this series of books, the first two of which are Conrad's

Heart of Darkness. and Jane Austen's sense and sensibility, which we're discussing now. When you talk about Jane Austen and evangelicalism, you know, around 1800, let's say, obviously I think of Wilber Forrest and Hannah Moore. You've written a beautiful biography of Hannah Moore. When Jane Austen, you say, shrank from the label evangelical, but you're saying she was a serious believer nonetheless, as there were a number of people. I mean, Hannah Moore and Wilberforce never left the Anglican fold officially, but he was, you know, a Methodist, as they used to call them.

Yes, I mean, at that time, evangelicalism was considered a sect, and it really exceeded the bounds of any denomination. So you have some Anglicans who were evangelicals and people, dissenters who were evangelicals. And then you had the high church Anglicans like Austin who didn't adopt the label, because at that time evangelicals were seen as kind of disruptive, as low church and divisive. And so that's another thing that I find is interesting and helpful about reading from these works, from the past and reading about these writers, it's because so many of the controversies and debates that we have today aren't really that new. People have been struggling with these questions of identity and labels and what Christianity should look like and what politics should look like

for a long time. And so we really enlarge our understanding of the present when we read works from the past. So in the series that you're editing, right, you write an introduction. And then you sort of guide the reader, specifically the Christian reader, through the book. So talk about that. How do you do that? Well, one of the things that I have done in the introductions is to not include any spoilers. Of course, great works of literature are eminently rereadable. That's why they're great. So once we've read it and we know what happens, they invite rereadings. But because I teach many of these novels in college classes, and I have many students who've not read them before, this is just one of the great gifts. And so in my classroom, when we're reading a novel, students who've read it before

or who've read ahead are not allowed to give anything away in our discussions, because there's just such a delight and joy in discovering for the first time what happens in these great books. And as I was writing the series, some people mentioned to me how they never read the introductions to classic works that are usually included because they include spoilers. So I made the decision to not include any spoilers. So these introductions are meant to be true introductions, read before reading, and then I include discussion questions after each section, major section of the book. And that's where I deal with some of the things that have happened in the plot.

And so the discussion questions, many readers have already given me feedback, really do help readers to kind of see what passages are important, what themes are important, or what to make of some puzzling part of, the story. And so those are the parts where you can kind of read afterwards and look back and think about the things that you've just read about. So that's really where the guide part comes in. I think, yeah, so if people are wanting to do a book club or something like that, obviously this would be ideal. So thank you for that. I often get questions about my own books. Is there a study guide or something? And usually I have to say, no, I'm sorry. There's no study guide. I wish there

were. You know, it's important for us to say how funny Jane Austen is. I mean, this was a brilliantly funny woman who, you know, I don't know to whom she could be compared. I only remember that theoretically Hannah Moore's book sold many more than Austin's, but I can't think, what did Hannah Moore write, you're the person to ask, what in the world did Hannah Moore write that sold so much more than Jane Austen's brilliant books? That is such a good question and it's so interesting to today look back and see which writers who were popular in their time, like Hannah Moore, didn't really pass the test of time. And Austin, who was warmly received, but really not widely received in her time wasn't really discovered as a brilliant writer, the brilliant writer that she is until later.

She was really ahead of her time. Hannah Moore's works tended to be very earnest and pious and evangelical. They were spiritual. They were treatises often. And even the one novel that she wrote was very didactic. And there was a hunger for that kind of writing in her time, which is why she was so popular during her day and sold so many books. But here comes Austin. You know, she's a young, young woman at first when she's writing, and she's writing this brilliant satire. And no one really knows what to do with it. I mean, mainly, you know, men and male critics read her works like Sir Walter Scott, and they appreciated it. But she didn't become, you know, so beloved and popular until much later. And part of that, I actually think, is because of a misunderstanding of her work.

Because as you said, some people, especially if they just are exposed to the films, they don't understand or they don't, at least at first, recognize the satire that she has in her works. And she's really just using the romance plot to correct all of us in our errors and excesses. I'm trying to think which of her books. The one she didn't finish was Sandition, right? Correct. And then the one just before that, is it Northanger Abbey? Northanger Abbey was finished.

It was actually one of her earliest works, but it's less mature. It's very satirical, but almost over the top satirical. So it was published after her death, but it was one of her earliest written. Oh, okay. That's why I always get confused, because it's, seems to, unless I'm mistaking it for another one, because they're all jumbled in my head right now, but it seems to refer to itself and to book writing. I mean, it has this postmodern, I mean, I guess Tristram Shandy has more than enough of that, so it's not like it started with her,

but I was surprised to see it. Right. I mean, so Austin is really, in Northanger Abbey, is poking fun at novels and romances, which is just, yeah, it's very meta. Yeah, right? Two hundred years ago. So then what would you regard as her most mature work? Well, that's a good question. So I think her most mature work is persuasion. And I write about that in my book on reading well. It's the least satirical of her works, although it certainly does have satire,

but it has the most mature character. And I think it's the most subtle in its satire. And the deepest and rich. just, and maybe even the slowest of her works, because it's not as, you know, laugh out loud, funny. Right. So I would say persuasion. And did you get a chance to see the new version, the film version of Emma that just came out?

I did, and I was very delighted. It was well done. I was amazed at the, if the, if the, what are they called, the production designer does not win the Oscar, I don't know. I was stunned that every single, you know, frame looked like a set piece. It was just heavenly. It was gorgeous. I could almost not take my eyes off of the gowns and the wallpaper and the set. It was just, it really was gorgeous.

Yeah. No, it was so well done. I guess anytime I see a film of a classic work, I'm always afraid that it's going to be some kind of a politically correct updating, you know, that it's. It's going to have to push whatever it is, women's empowerment or something. It's going to have to just sort of push something in a way that the author didn't. The fact that they don't do that in this Emma, you know, just thrilled me. I just get to see Jane Austen on the screen as it were.

Although I would have to say I think that Austin was a little for women's empowerment. But no, but that's different. That's what I'm trying to say is that it's one thing when the author is, for something. But when they insert that, I mean, if you ever see Shakespeare in the park here in New York, they can't just do Shakespeare. They have to sort of, you know, Gilda Lily to quote Shakespeare. And so when a film doesn't do that, when a film just presents it as it is, you know, I really appreciate that. And this one did. Yes, yes. It was beautifully done. I had anyone who want, you know, I definitely recommend that film as well as

Aung Lee's sense and sensibility, which is a little less true because it cuts some things out, but most of them do. Those are some excellent films, film adaptations. And did you see Greta Gerwig's film recently? Little women, yes. That was beautiful. That was very well done. And it was more of a, it had some adaptive elements to it, but it was true not only to the novel, but also to the author's life. And I think it intermingled those things well. And again, the set design and costumes were stopping. Okay. Well, because if you've said that, now I'll watch it, because I'm just always afraid

that they've ruined something beautiful. We're going to be right back, folks. I'm talking to Karen Swallow Pryor. We're talking about English literature. Do not go away. and speaker, Richard E. Simmons, does not shy away from the big questions of life. His latest book is called reflections on the existence of God, and it tackles the biggest question of all, does God exist? I've read this book, and I got to tell you, I'm a little biased, but you can imagine that I like it a lot, because Simmons offers insights for those grappling with life's biggest questions. Where do we find meaning in life? Who determines what is evil? Can we be moral without God? Does God? Does God?

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If you want to challenge yourself to spiritual and intellectual growth, and I hope you do, then be willing to ask yourself life's toughest questions. Dive in today by picking up a copy of reflections on the existence of God right now. Go to existence of Godbook.com. That's existence of Godbook.com. Hey folks, it's the Eric McAxas Show. I'm talking to Karen Swallow Prior at Liberty University, and we're talking about great literature.

Karen, the second book in the series that you are editing is Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Conrad is a strange figure and an interesting writer. For people who know nothing about Joseph Conrad, what do we need to know? Well, the first thing we need to know is that heart of darkness was drawn, very heavily from his own life experiences. There's a lot of actual biography, autobiography, and history in the book. And so even though it's written in a way like a very dense poem,

many of the facts of the book are true. Conrad was also, English was his third language. And so I had a reader mentioned recently that knowing that fact changed his experience of reading Heart of darkness because the language is, you know, some call it turgid, I call it dense, but Conrad was a very careful writer. And when you know that it's, you know, partly because English is his third language and he's choosing his words carefully, but maybe once in a while, you know, it's an odd choice. That helps to explain it, I think. And it's just the fact that he lived so many of these experiences, not not the central one of finding this figure in the middle of the Congo, but the things that he witnessed during the period

of colonization in Africa and the treatment of the Africans, which was so horrific, is very much rooted in history and is actually muted in the book compared to what we know the facts to be. But before we get further into the book, I was just going to say, you know, the only other great writer that I can think of who was trilingual or for whom English was a third language is Nabokov. who my goodness, when you talk about somebody who's careful with words and who loves, who just clearly loves words and who's crafting with them so beautifully, but what geniuses they must have been to be able to write in several languages. When you talk about the Belgian colonization of the Congo, it is horrific. Most of us don't know that history. So what years

are we talking about? We're talking about the second half of the 1800s, 1860s or so, but the period, the historical period of the colonization was much, much longer. In fact, one of the things that is so, I don't know, it's just, it's just so horrific in doing the research is that this brutalization of the Africans by King Leopold, was went so long that they're actually, I guess this is remarkable to me because so much of the literature that I study is older, but there are black and white photographs of the murdered and maimed Africans

who were, again, just brutalized by the overseers who are using their labor to, to exploit the land. And so to think of something as being so recent in history that we actually have photographs of it is a good, it's just a powerful, reminder that history is not that long ago. Well, and obviously Belgium thought itself as some kind of a Christian nation, so that makes it all the more horrific. And you talk about that a little bit in your

introduction. Yeah, one of the things that we, again, is I'm an evangelicals, so I say we as evangelicals, that we have to contend with is the dark part. of our history. Evangelicalism and the whole missionary spirit was used and exploited in slavery and in the colonization of these countries. And again, I only touch upon these things in an introductory way here, but many of the people who were going in and colonizing these Africans and exploiting the land and the goods justified it because they said they were bringing the gospel and education and Western civilization to these places. They believed that.

And there was some good that certainly was done, but it doesn't even come close to outweighing the evil, not only of the deeds, but the evil of exploiting Christianity to perpetrate such deeds of darkness. Right. And obviously we know the history of colonization. There's so much of that. And there's some good and there's a lot of horrible things. I always think of Wilberforce.

When I think of the good side of colonization is that Wilberforce brought the faith into India. But he really fought a battle because they wanted to keep missionaries out of India. In other words, they were happy to be there and to treat the people like, you know, like, like, like worse than animals in a way. And he said, if we're going to be there, we need to bring our real Christian values there and bring missionaries there and end, you know, Souti and a number of these kinds of things.

But it's so mixed and so horrible. So obviously Conrad deals with that. We should probably mention that Francis Ford Coppola's film, Apocalypse Now, is some kind of, an adaptation of this book. To what extent is that the case? Yeah, and of course, it's been years since I've seen it, but basically Apocalypse now sort of takes the story of Heart of Darkness and resets it in the Vietnam War. So there's, there are many strong parallels, but it is a different story, but that's, that's the power of this, of this novel is that it,

even though it's set in a very particular time and place and moment in history, the human condition that it shows, the atrocities, the propensities, the heart of darkness that we all have is still a lot. They're all still alive and well, and we need to contend with them. I want to talk about that when we come back. Folks, I'm talking to Karen Swallow Pryor. Don't go away. Hey there, folks.

It's the Eric McTax. I'm talking to Karen Swallow Pryor at Liberty University, where she is a celebrated professor of English literature, and there's a series of books that she has edited. Actually, I happen to have them here, and for anyone who is not listening on radio, but rather watching on YouTube, you can, maybe I can hold them up.

They're beautiful books, and, you know, they're the kind of thing that you just say, I want that. Give me one of those. And then hopefully you'll read it. Karen, they really are beautifully bound books. We were just talking about the Heart of Darkness, which is a dark book.

Let's face it, this is not sense and sensibility. Was Conrad any kind of Christian that we know of? He was not. I mean, he was brought up, you know, nominally Catholic and seems to have rejected that. And that's one of the powerful things that I find in this novel because, and really in all great literature, it doesn't have to be Christian to teach us a great deal about Christian worldview and about God. because Conrad clearly in this book recognizes this human depravity that is our heart of darkness, and he recognizes that we need something outside of ourselves in order to govern ourselves.

It's like he's yearning and looking for that. He doesn't find it, but he certainly does show us that we cannot rely solely on ourselves or on civilization. That's a recurring theme in the book is the supposedly civilized Europeans go into the supposedly uncivilized Africa and we find out there that what we think is civilization is really just a veneer. Right, which is of course precisely what happened here in the United States that, you know, we treated the so-called savages very savagely and we need to face those things. Did did it's funny because heart of darkness is one of these phrases that has become so familiar at least to me that I think did did Conrad get it from some place is is it is something of his coinage or did he get it from you know it sounds like something that you would find in in in one of the prophets in Isaiah or something or from something or from Milton I mean did did he coined it himself as far as I know he is just it's just a phrase that comes from this novel I mean but it has

multi layers of meaning because again I've been talking about it as being the heart of darkness which is human depravity that's really more than metaphorical meaning but when he uses it in the book he's primarily talking about going down that trip on the Congo into the heart of Africa which again using the tropes of the colonial period and the tropes we still use today is supposed to be the dark place you know so the dark people and the dark races are the savages and the white and the light are not. Now, Conrad shows us how those tropes are entirely untrue, but that's what the whole story depends upon,

is these sort of stereotypes of what constitutes civilization. And, you know, one of the famous opening line or words of Marlowe, who's the narrator, is, and this, too, was once one of the dark places, and he's talking about England, which at this time was, you know, ruled the world. And there's a real lesson in that because, you know, it was said that the sun never set on the British Empire. And the sun has set on that empire. And it could certainly set on this one, too, that we call America if we aren't careful. Yeah, it's interesting.

I mean, we don't have time to get into whether we're an empire or not. But I guess the point is that it's fascinating to me, even mentioning, you know, the Belgian Congo, to think that Belgium was once a world. power that, you know, the Dutch were once a major empire. And you think, what, what happened? Where did they go? What were they founded on? It is, it is really fascinating to think how quickly the British Empire vanished. I don't know. We could talk about that another time. So where do you think Conrad gets his conscience from? Was, was he really? raised among people sensitive to these things?

Well, he was actually orphaned as a young boy, but his parents died as a result of being persecuted by the government and sent basically, you know, to Siberia, where they, you know, they contracted the illnesses that probably took their lives. And so he, so he had that kind of experience. I think that's the experience that he brings to bear when he later, as a pretty empowered and franchised European goes into the African Congo as someone with some power and privilege and encounters people there who are being persecuted

and treated really the way that his parents were at least in a more in a political way. And so that life experience and then, you know, his own travels on the sea and his own learning in language, all of those things come to bear on this work, which, as you said, is very dark. And it's actually kind of a difficult read. But it's short.

But it's short, right. And that's another reason why sense of sensibility is long and thick. And then I thought, well, I would counterbalance that with a shorter work and one that's darker and completely the opposite. Right. Thank you for not including Howl by Ellen Ginsberg. Oh, that's just a joke. We're just about out of time.

Where did Conrad live most of his life? Well, he ends up, I mean, when he spends his early years at sea and has kind of a, you know, a rough time, but he ends up eventually settling in England and marrying there and writing in English. And that's why we who teach British literature get to claim him because he became an English citizen and then wrote most of his works, I think all of his works in English. and how long did he live? Oh, that, you know, I don't even remember. I think that he lived, I don't know, to 60 or 60.

Do I have the years there? Probably in your book, I could look it up right now. It is probably in my book. Now, I find it funny, though, we've got no, like, no time left. Do you, you know, you put the Scarlet Letter in there. You had to have to think about putting in Moby Dick. I mean, did you not? I have not.

No, I'm not a big fan of Moby Dick. What's that? I'm not a big fan of Moby Dick. I'm going to have to reread it because I only fake read it when I was in college and my guilty conscience makes me have to go back and I'm going to have to read it for real one. You never really read it. I didn't. It's so good I could shriek.

Really? But I don't want to freak. It's what turned me on to me. British literature. That's funny. That's very funny. I'm really sorry we're out of time, but just wonderful to see you and to talk to you

about such wonderful thing. Congratulations on the series. Thank you. All right. Bless you. Bye bye-bye. Sometimes I'd like to quit. Nothing ever seems to fit.

Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone. Hey, folks. News. Yes, yes, exciting news on the Eric Metaxi show. Can I tell you what it is? Can I tell you? How can you stop me? Albin, I'm going to tell them. Chris? Tell them, tell them, tell them. We've just figured out this minute, we've just figured out what we are going to do for those people who are able to give $200 to Angel Tree. Mettaxasotalk.com, click on the angel tree banner. You help the children of prisoners. We cannot send them to camp. Why? Because there's this COVID pandemic. shutdown. Every year we send kids to camp for a week who are in urban environments and it's a wonderful thing, but we can't do it this year. So the folks at Angel Tree said, hey, we are going to

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book signed by yours truly over there, Eric, Texas, right, including seven more. my man, right? And if you just give $200, you get a signed copy. Okay. So I'm going to try to, I'm going to try to clarify this if I can, if I can. Whatever you give, folks, you go to metastastocot.com, click on the banner, any amount you give, any amount. We want to encourage everybody to participate. It's a wonderful idea. It's actually an important idea, a great organization. Anything you give, you're entered in a drawing, we've done this before, for an insane grand prize, okay, which means you get to visit the studio. If you can't visit the studio, you get to send friends to visit the studio, like the whole nine yards, tons of fun. Okay. You get signed books more than you're going to want.

You're going to be sick of these signed books, okay? But that's the grand prize, right? For anybody who gives $200 just, that's what Prison Fellowship is recommending for this package, any of those people, of course you're entered in the grand prize drawing, but anyone who gives $200 gets a signed copy of my book, seven more men. It's just a way of thanking you. And we want to do that. And you also, of course, get a free subscription to Metaxis super. If you don't want to hear commercials, you just want to click and listen to the program. No commercials. So you get that. Okay. But we want to make clear that for $2,000, you get seven more men now. We should also clarify everybody who gives $500, gets to visit the studio, and you'll get a number of signed books, obviously. But the studio visit is a fun thing.

It's a fun gift to give to a friend who maybe is going to be passing through New York. It's a lot of fun. Obviously, we're not in the studio now, but you know we're getting back there soon, right? And then I want to say, finally, anyone who's able to give $10,000 to Angel Tree, anyone who's able to give $10,000 to prison fellowship and did this angel free program,

you're going to be blessing more kids than I can count in my head right now. And we would like to thank you by having dinner with you, spending an evening with you. We always offer that whenever we're doing anything like this. So I just want to make that really clear. I also actually, Alvin, before we go for the day, we should remind people, if you have not already done so, go to no safe spaces.com and put in the code save 25. You've got to see this. It's been deep platformed, yada, yada, yada.

Don't forget, no safespaces.com and Patterns of Evidence. Patterns of Evidence. And I think there's a code. Is the code Eric? Eric and Eric. The code is Eric. We're sort of out of time. I hate to be out of time, but we'll just have to talk to you tomorrow, and we will.

Thanks for listening.