The One You Feed - Jesse Browner

Episode Date: December 14, 2016

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Jesse Browner Jesse Browner is the author of the novels The Uncertain Hour and Everything Happens Today. His latest book is the memoir How Did I Get Here: Making Peace with the Road Not Taken. Browner has also translated books by Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard and Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as Frédéric Vitoux's award-winning Céline: A Biography. More recently, he translated Matthieu Ricard's Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill and Frédéric Mitterrand's The Bad Life. His freelance writing includes contributions to Nest magazine, Food & Wine, Gastronomica, New York magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Salon.com, Slate.com and others. . In This Interview, Jesse Browner and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable His new book, How Did I Get Here? Making Peace with the Road Not Taken That in our "unlived lives" we are always happier and more fulfilled Making peace with the choices we've made in our lives How to approach the question, "what if" by asking instead, "what is" That the most persistent monkey on an artists back is happiness The belief that happiness whitewashes all the things that makes us unique Bet on the likelihood that you're not a genius and that you can make meaning in your life in other ways than your art Why bet against yourself? To work hard at something you love: you'll be the best you can His life's motto: Work and Love How he's been called "the angry Buddhist" by his children The importance of and remedy in being more deeply involved in the life you have     Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you're going to be put off by the easy things, like not having enough time, then you really have to question your vocation. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how

other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Jesse Browner, author, translator, and freelance writer. Jesse's writing includes many books as well as contributions to Nest Magazine, New York Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Salon.com, Slate.com, and others. His latest book is his memoir called How Did I Get Here? Making Peace with the road not taken. supporting the show. Please be part of the 5% that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you feed.net slash support. Thank you in advance for your help.

Hi, Jesse, welcome to the show. Thanks, Aaron. I'm happy to have you on. Your book talks a lot about the choices we don't make in life, what the unlived part of our life looks like. And as someone who spends a lot of time wrestling in those same areas, I'm really excited to get into that conversation. But before we do, let's start like we usually do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one

you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. If I can counter your parable with a parable of my own. Sure, a parable duel would be great. A few years ago, about 10 years ago, I translated a book by a French Buddhist monk. His name is Mathieu Ricard. He's quite well known. Yep. And he wrote this beautiful book called Happiness about learning. I believe the subtitle is Learning Life's Most Important Skill. And his thesis is that happiness is not something that automatically comes, but it's something that you work at, just like yoga, just like meditation. It's a discipline that you learn. And although I had had some familiarity with Buddhism before I translated the book, it really had a profound effect on me. And I have a dog, which is not a wolf, but it's close.

And my dog is not always very good on the leash. She likes to stop and she likes to smell everything. And she can be very slow. She's not one of those dogs that goes trotting down the street with her head started looking at our morning walks in a very different way. And suddenly, I mean, not only was I looking at the to learn from her about patience and slowness and non-purpose-driven activity. And so suddenly our walks became incredibly pleasurable for both of us, where they had been quite stressful for both of us before that. And so for me, I would say I had been feeding the wrong wolf all that time.

And suddenly when I realized what was the right wolf to feed, everything fell into place. And quite a few years later, Mathieu came to New York. And I had mentioned this to him in one of my letters to him and one of the first things he asked me and this was years and years later he said how is your dog doing how are your walks and he really understood how profoundly i had taken his lessons to heart because specifically as illustrated in the parable of the dog walk. So, um, I hope that that works as a response to the parable. It works great.

I think I have learned more from my dogs than probably nearly anyone else. Uh, so they are, they have been a great teacher to me too, of some of the very same lessons. Yeah. I think they're all Buddhists without telling us. So your latest book is called How Did I Get Here? Making Peace with the Road Not Taken. And kind of right at the heart of it is you are an author, but you're not a full-time author. As in, well, let me rephrase thatase that you are an author but you also have a job that you do in addition to that and the book is really about you're wrestling with should you have taken that job should you have that job should you be able to pursue your art full-time and and

the questions about how you balance those things out and i just found it really compelling as somebody who wrestles with a lot of the same questions. Well, thank you. I mean, of course, virtually every novelist has to have a job of some sort. You know, almost everybody I know, who writes novels teaches, that's quite normal. It was not the choice that I made. I took a much more, I guess you would say, straight job. I'm an international civil servant, which means I work in the bureaucracy at the United Nations. So we all make our choices. If you're a teacher, of course, one of your choices is accepting that you're never going to really make a lot of money.

And what I was concerned with when I finally made the decision to take this job, which was my first full-time job ever in my life at the age of 30, was I had spent the last 10 years scrabbling to make a living while I was trying to write. And of course, in those days, in your 20s, I had not published anything of note. I had not published my first novel yet. I had felt that that sense of worry about money was more harmful to me than spending my days at a job. Because the point is always you want to be able to devote yourself fully to your work. And that mostly entails thinking about it while you're not doing it. Because, you know, at the most, you're going to be writing four or five hours a day. But you need to be thinking about that work for the rest of the time. And so you worry about having a job that's

going to distract you, that's going to soak up some of your emotional and intellectual energy. that's going to soak up some of your emotional and intellectual energy. And I had found that working freelance was not helpful to me. Yes, I was free to make my own hours, but always being worried about where the next paycheck was going to come from was not really conducive to being able to focus on my work. So that was part of the decision-making process for me. And now I've been at that job for well over 20 years. And I still wrestle with the consequences of that decision, which is

why I wrote the book. You know, just because you make a decision doesn't automatically mean that you've trusted your instincts. I think most of us, especially writers and artists in general, have a tendency to second guess ourselves all the time. That's natural and it's good. You know, it's very helpful to the creative process because you never want to be complacent about something you've put down on the page or on the canvas, but it doesn't always make for a smooth, pleasant life. And you just have to accept that that's not your lot. You talk about in the book, you say that what all our unlived lives have in common is that we are somehow more ourselves, more true to what we believe our true selves to be.

We are somehow more ourselves, more true to what we believe our true selves to be. You quote Adam Phillips, who says, In our unlived lives, he says, we are always more satisfied, less frustrated versions of ourselves. And so you've got this idea of what your life might look like if you could focus on your writing full time. And that's the sort of thing that we talk on this show an awful lot about. It's I kind of call it the, you know, the if then, you know, life proposition, like, if I had this, then, you know, and that this can be anything from a car to thinking I write full time or the right relationship. But it's always this idea that if something was different, then I would be this better version of myself. Well, yeah, I mean, I can't speak for other people. You would naturally presume that almost

everybody has moments like that, if not entire lifetimes live that way. But so it was very important to me when I began to consider how I would write this book, that this not be exclusively, first of all, that it should not be about me, because my life really isn't especially interesting. I've been going to an office for 25 years, there's not a lot to write about. But also that in general, it should not exclusively be about artists or writers. I wanted it to expand to encompass the experiences of people who may be questioning the decisions they've made that have nothing to do with artistic expression or self-fulfillment, simply people going about their ordinary lives and wondering what if. This is not exactly an earth-shattering topic. What ifs make up 90% of our dreams. It's the backdrop to so much social discourse, I'm sorry to say, including, of course, the current political scenario, you can't escape the question, what if? But approaching it from a creative perspective

and learning that the question ultimately is not what if, but what is. It helped me. I'm very careful in the book to disclaim any intention of writing a self-help book because I don't claim to have any answers. But I do say without a doubt that writing the book was helpful to me. And therefore, you can only hope that some people are going to find a kindred spirit in it. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the wooly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Before we get back to the interview, I just wanted to give another big thank you to our listeners who have pledged their support of the show via the Patreon campaign page. If you go to patreon.com slash one you feed, that's p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com slash one you feed, all spelled out o-n-e-y-o-u-f-e-e-d. So if you haven't had the chance to do so, please consider a small monthly donation and keep the show growing and going. It does take money to keep the show going and growing. So depending on the donation level you choose, we have gifts for you to show

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the listeners and contributions for this campaign. We wouldn't be us without you. So go to patreon.com slash one you feed and make a monthly donation and let's keep this great show going. And here's the rest of the interview with Jesse Browner. Kind of back to the wolf parable, right? We have this life that is, and I like the way you said that. To me, the good wolf is being involved in that life and appreciative of that life and living in it. And for me, feeding the bad wolf is really when

I'm in that constant grass is always greener. And we talk about it on the show a lot because I wrestle with it a lot. It's just my nature tends to be that way. So what are some of the things besides writing a whole book that you have found helpful for yourself when you find that you're living more in the resentment or the feeling like you squandered your potential by taking a job? What are some of the things you do to bring you back to your own life that help you to inhabit it more fully? Oh, I wish I had some earth shattering answer for that. But I think it's, it's pretty much what anybody would say in the same circumstances. My family is very important to me.

And I always know that no matter what else I may potentially have failed at as a, as a human being or as an artist. This is one endeavor that I have indubitably not failed at. I have two wonderful children who fill me with love and pride. And I would have to say that I was born to be a parent, at least as much as I was born to be a writer. And that's probably the problem as well as the solution. Then, of course, is my work. As a writer, I'm not sure that I work. I don't really know how other writers work. I don't spend a lot of time asking them how they work or worrying about it. We all work different ways. time asking them how they work or worrying about it. We all work different ways. However, for me, I often have long hiatuses between my books and I forget exactly the kind of peace of mind that I get when I'm writing. So when I am, for instance, as I am right now, right in the middle of a book,

I will get up at four o'clock in the morning, and I will put in three very productive hours before I have to walk the dog, which is another very productive 45 minutes before I go off to my job. But having spent those three hours in the morning doing what I was born to do, colors the rest of my day and nothing can really bother me after that. And so I'm extremely lucky and I'm able to remind myself constantly while I'm writing how lucky I am, what a gift it is to have something that you feel you need to do every day. The problem is, if I'm finished with a book, and I'm involved in the publication process,

which can be stressful and time consuming, and then later involved in the process of gestating another book before it starts to go on paper, it's easy to forget that you have something like this that you can turn to when you're feeling that you're forgetting that maybe your life has a higher purpose. So it's a seesaw. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, it doesn't always work. But when it works, it really works. And I think that that's a trap a lot of people get into is if I can't be this thing 100% all the time, then I'm not going to do it. I see people who get trapped in. They've got something they want to pursue. But they feel like if they can't make a living doing that, then they shouldn't do it.

And there's a whole middle ground in between there where you can both have a job, take care of a family, and engage in things in your life that really matter to you. Who was the poet who said, I'm of three minds about that? Like a tree with three ravens. On the one hand, if you're a writer, you write, and nothing's going to stop you from doing it. And if you're making excuses for not doing it, stop you from doing it. And if you're making excuses for not doing it, there's a bigger problem. And you need to really ask yourself why you think you're a writer if you're not writing. Because ultimately, it does come to that. That's that can sound cruel. But you know, it has to be a little bit cruel. You know. Even 90% of us who are publishing are publishing garbage, and I potentially include myself in that. We are only 1% of the people who think of ourselves as

writers. If you're going to be put off by the easy things like not having enough time, then you really have to question your vocation. The flip side to that, that is the second mind, is the one that bothers me all the time, which is, well, if I can't do it 100%, why should I do it? Why engage in something on a mediocre or half-hearted foundation when there are enough people out there doing it really well and fully committed to it? And I wrestle with that a lot. That's what this book was a lot, was asking myself, if I'm not creating at my highest potential, maybe I shouldn't be doing it at all. Because then I'm just doing it for selfish purposes to make myself feel smart or creative or to win the admiration of my peers, peers, all of which are terrible reasons to be a writer because you have to, the only personal quality that every writer really needs to have is humility. And if you're not humbled by the

task that's facing you, again, you're not going to be approaching it with the correct openness of heart and mind. So there's that. And then there's the third raven in the tree, if that's the right quote, which is what I do, is, well, I'm going to do my best. I know I am not able to devote myself 100% to it. able to devote myself 100% to it, and I am going to hope, without any evidence to back up that hope, that there is actually an upside to living a full life that involves more than simply a single-minded devotion to your craft. And maybe there are advantages to the way I'm doing it that I'm not even aware of. But, you know, that requires a certain amount of blind faith, which fortunately, when you're a civil servant, you have a lot of time to cultivate blind faith. And I'm quite good at that, if not. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition

signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I agree with you that I could be of three minds on that. You know, I believe that the Buddha's perhaps his best teaching to me was the idea of the middle way, which is really option three for you, which is that it's not exactly the way you would have it be, but you're finding the middle ground between giving up and doing it 100%. And I also think that there are things that we do in our lives, not always because we could be the best at it or that it adds some tremendous value to the world, so much as it helps us find a truer part of ourself,

whether that be some sort of creative action, whether that be an exercise we enjoy. But I think that those things kind of fall into, if you take the artistic piece of it away, I think that those things kind of fall into if you take the artistic piece of it away i think that those things can add a lot of value and depth to life if we're not too attached to the results well i agree completely um and i think that probably the most persistent monkey on an artist's back is the idea of happiness, especially those of us who grew up in the 20th century and grew up with the tradition of the bohemian suffering artist. We're afraid to be happy. Mathieu Ricard, again, speaks a lot about that. People are afraid that, and especially artists, and even more especially writers, are afraid that they're going to lose something that is exclusively theirs if they are simultaneously seeking artistic fulfillment and happiness.

and happiness. Happiness is somehow a kind of a bleach in their minds that whitewashes all the things that make them unique. And of course, this goes back to War and Peace with Tolstoy's opening lines about all happy families are the same and every unhappy family is unique in its own way. We have this idea that if we are able to cultivate a sense of dissatisfaction, that is somehow reaching in to the deepest aspects of our individuality, both as human beings and as writers, and we're afraid of being happy. And that is definitely true for me. That is definitely the iconography of the 20th century artist. You know, obviously, you think of Franz Kafka, or Jack Kerouac, you name it. You know, if they're happy, there's something wrong with them. They can't be very good writers or artists.

The really great artists are the Van Goghs and the other, you know, people who saw off their ears and howled at the moon. So we're afraid to be happy and we're afraid to do things that are going to make us happy. Making writing makes me happy. And I'm not really supposed to say that. I'm supposed to say that writing makes me feel the most isolated or the most unique, alone, wandering the empty rooms of the mansion of my soul it could be true you have to fight to be happy as an artist but uh i don't really think it's true i don't think you lose anything by trying to be to be happy and trying to be good. In other words, happiness is what you feel inside, and being good is the way you project it to the outer world. I don't really see the contradiction, but lots of people do.

Yeah, I was having this conversation with Ohio's Poet Laureate a couple weeks ago, and we were talking about this, and part of the thing that we were talking about was the idea that the artists we hear about having these very destructive and wild lives are the only ones we talk about, because the artists who are successful who don't do that, there's not very much to say. It's kind of a boring topic. Well, he's well adjusted and produces great art. It's kind of a boring story. And I love what you say in the book. You say, perhaps the vicarious thrill we get from reading these lives lies in the fact that, whereas genius is elusive and beyond the grasp of most of us, we can all imagine ourselves acting transgressively and destructively,

selfishly and irresponsibly, at least once, even if we are not in reality prepared to accept the consequences. And I just thought that was great, because I think being a bohemian in my 20s also, it was easier to focus on the selfructive things that artists did than actually being an artist. It's a lot more fun. You know, it's very simple. I mean, how many of us are geniuses? Virtually none of us. Certainly not me.

I would have loved to have been a genius being a miserable bastard to myself and to other people on the tiniest, slimmest chance that being unhappy and being selfish is going to nurture my genius. I mean, that's a terrible odds. I'm a poker player and I would never bet on that hand. So, you know, bet on the likelihood that you're not a genius and that you can make meaning in your life in other ways. That is, through the love that you project within your family and within your community, you project within your family and within your community. The ability to make meaning outside of your art is going to preserve you against a lot of the absolutely inevitable heartbreaks that come with deciding that you're an artist

and you're going to dedicate your life to creating art. you're an artist and you're going to dedicate your life to creating art. There are so many frustrations and setbacks and moments of self-doubt, perhaps of self-loathing, that are absolutely incumbent on the job of being an artist. Why bet against yourself? incumbent on the job of being an artist. Why bet against yourself? And that's what I was trying to figure out. Could I be a happy person, even if it turned out that I wasn't a great writer? I certainly won't know whether I'm a good writer in my own lifetime. So if by some miracle, I end up being a Henry Roth or some Doignet Rousseau, whose genius is only discovered long after I'm dead. Well, as an atheist, that doesn't mean a lot to me. So why not? How are you going to reconcile yourself at the end of your life if you're both a lousy artist and a lousy

person? There you go. That's a bitter pill to swallow. Both, though,'re both a lousy artist and a lousy person. There you go. That's a bitter pill to swallow. Both, though. Certainly being a lousy person is difficult, too. You just mentioned you're someone without God, and you say that work hard at something you love, and even if you may never be the best, you can always be the best you can. For someone without God, I find this as close to a workable definition of the meaning of life as I've ever come across. There's a wonderful Finnish novelist, and of course now that I need to find her name, I am not going to. She is the author of the famous set of series of children's books called The Moomin Trolls.

And I'll think of her name in a minute. I'm sorry for your listeners having to hear me in one of my old man's moments. Anyway, her motto was simply work and love. It was in Latin, of course, but it's really that simple. Just work, you know? Work is what makes us who we are, at least it's true for me. And love is what makes us who we can be. And I feel as if in recent years, not for the majority of my life, but in the last, say, five years since I began writing this book, I've had a big change in my life. I tried to become a Buddhist at the wrong moment. And my children used to call me the angry Buddhist. Because I was really good at talking about it, but not very good at living it. And I'm still not very good at living it. But I never forget, I'm here to try to make other

people happy. And I can do that, if I'm very, very lucky through my writing. And you know what? If I'm not so lucky, I can still do it. So ultimately, it's not two contradictory paths. It's not two paths that diverged in the woods. It's two paths that come together in the woods. But maybe you need to walk both of them to their logical conclusions. Yeah. And I think that's probably a great place to start wrapping up. I love the book. It's called how did I get here? And like I said, I wrestle with this unlived life idea. This grass is always greener on, on the other side thing in my own life. And I found like you, there's no easy answer to that. But that, for me, most of the answer seems to be in what you're describing, which is to be

more deeply involved in the life you actually have. Exactly. I couldn't have put it better myself. Thanks so much, Jesse, for taking the time to come on. Like I said, I really did enjoy the book. It was one of those that I whole time I was reading it, I was like, I relate with all of this. So thanks so much. And one of the things I loved about it a lot is that you don't have easy answers in the book. And I don't think there's easy answers to most of life's questions, but there's a lot of deep thought about it that I found very helpful. So thank you. Well, thank you. I'm really pleased that it reached you in some way. Excellent. Well, take care. Same to you, Eric. Thank found very helpful. So thank you. Well, thank you. I'm really pleased that it reached you in some way. Excellent. Well, take care. Same to you, Eric. Thank you very much. Bye. Yep. Bye. You can learn more about Jesse Browner and this podcast at one you feed.net slash Jesse. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the one you feed podcast.

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