TrueLife - Dr. Marianna Torgovnick - Crossing Over

Episode Date: May 18, 2022

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Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the True Life podcast. We are here with a special guest, a tenured professor at Duke University and best-selling author, Mariana DeMarco Tregovnik. Did I say that right, I hope? I accept Turgovnik or Turgovnik, but I say Turgovnik.

Or Govnik. She's written an amazing book, crossing back. Can you just introduce the book a little bit and maybe tell us a little bit about it? Sure. Well, I'll start with the idea that it's a sequel. When it seems now when I was very, very young, I wrote a memoir about growing up Italian-American in New York, which at the time was not privileged position. Italian Americans were suspect mafiosi and were not educationally advantaged in New York as I was growing up. So I wrote this memoir about having turned out to be a college professor at First Williams College, which is a very waspy, very elite four-year college in New England.

And then Duke University, which is a somewhat less waspy, but also elite institution, North Carolina. And that was a book of essays and half of it was memoir. and half of it was critical essays, and the memoir part addressed my father's death. He died as I was writing it. So that became an important part of it. In that memoir, my father had been the leading character because he was the parent I associated with my educational path

and my movement from extreme working class, Brooklyn, to elite university America. So life goes on. I wrote other books. I continue teaching at Duke. I've directed for a long time a program called Duke in New York Arts and Media. Life was just moving along. And then my mother got sick rather abruptly.

It wasn't a heart attack. It wasn't that kind of abrupt. But she had a stroke during surgery for her first ever hospitalization, which was for colon cancer, a removal of a tumor. And I found myself just thrown. I had been writing a book about reading, the classics at a time of war. And that turned into a grief memoir about my mother. And I wasn't sure what I was doing anymore. And then there were chapters about food. All kinds of stuff was going on.

I wasn't sure what was happening. So I basically had a manuscript that was a mess. This happens as an author. And so I said, oh, this manuscript is a mess. And I think I'll put it away. What I in part did not realize, but came to realize later is that I was emotionally en masse because I had been, very reluctant to accept grief because of various traits in my personality and background, both personal and intellectual. And then I also discovered that I had a, I don't know how to put this, kind of an unresolved issue of mourning about a child who died in infancy. And that was all mixed up in this. I kept coming back to it. I know this sounds nuts. I mean, as an author, I've worked on books and I tend to write one every four or five years, which is a pretty brisk clip for a professor.

And I couldn't finish this one. So after 12 years, after 12 years, I decided that what I was really doing was writing a sequel to the first book, which was called Crossing Ocean Parkway, which is a symbolic street in Brooklyn of the movement from working class to middle class, upper middle class. And so I called this one crossing back. And I had chapters that just weren't working. They just wouldn't work. And so I just took them out and said, there's going to be a poetic book. It's not going to be very long. It's going to be very poetic. And it's going to speak to the problem of grief and how to accept grief and the specific ways that I move beyond grief, which are not the specific ways that other people would, but the specific ways that I did.

Wow. You're such a hero in some ways to go from working class to the elite. And then I didn't catch the metaphor about that street being symbolic from moving places in life like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's something I say in that first book, which I think is true, and I think I quoted in this book as well. I have crossed Ocean Parkway. I will never cross Ocean Parkway. You know, I mean, it's a kind of a kind of a psychological thing where I still think of myself sometimes as a working class kid, and I manifestly am not either a kid or working class. Yeah. Yeah.

Do you think that maybe the way you dealt with Greene, do you think, that maybe one class of people deals with grief on one side of Ocean Parkway and the other people deal with it differently? Or do you think that everybody deals with it maybe differently? I think everybody deals with it differently. I mean, for me, I was raised Roman Catholic. I'm not a practicing Roman Catholic, but like many Roman Catholics, there's a kind of a resonance in my mind. One of the things that I think was different from me was that for both my father and then my mother and then my brother who died shortly after my mother of pancreatic cancers. It was a double kind of thing. I did all the Catholic rituals, but they were not effective for me. One of the things that differs,

my husband is Jewish from the other side of Ocean Parkway. And one of the things that's different about Jewish rituals and much more like Protestant rituals that I've come to know since. People talk about the dead at the funeral, whereas Roman Catholicism was very wedded to, there's a funeral mass and we believe in the afterlife and we look toward the afterlife. And if I suppose that works for many people, and I'm sure it works for many people, why not? Many people do. But if you're not in the religious tradition, it becomes a kind of sterile ritual and there's no opportunity to talk about the person who's lost.

And at Jewish funerals, there's usually a moment and Protestant funerals I've seen too. people talk about the dead and there's this kind of laughter and bantering and all that happens. That can happen at Catholic funerals, but after the funeral, you know, awake. And I think that that has a kind of consolatory power that the rituals that I was experiencing just didn't. So I think there is a difference, but I think everybody handles it differently. I think a lot depends on who dies, when they die, the circumstances, whether there's any feeling of guilt or not. I mean, I really do think it's a kind of individual process, which is one reason why memoir oftentimes deals with death because it's a very big thing in life. And it's a very big thing when it happens to you.

I mean, it happens to all of us sooner or later. So you're going to have to deal with it. Yeah. And the subtitle of this book is called Books, Meditation, and Memory. These are the ways or methodologies you've found to help kind of cope with the strategy. Can we start with the first one? Maybe what do you mean when you say books with books? I teach books. I'm an English professor. One of the things that I thought was very original, very original indeed, when my mother died, was that I found myself rereading classic books.

I'm forgetting right now what the order was, but I think I started with the Odyssey by Homer. And then I think I read the Inead by Homer. And then I read a book which had been deeply meaningful to me, at different points in my life, in part because of the Italian-American nests of my life, Dante's Divine Comedy. I thought I was being very original. Oh, I think I lost you there. Oh, okay.

I kind of froze up for a minute, right, right after Dante's Inferno. Right after Dante, well, it's a great place to lose me. Who knows what might happen. At any rate, as I began to do the research portion of this, which for somebody like me means reading other memories, Mars, I discovered how many intellectual people read classic books after loss. And so I then began to think about, well, why is that? Why is that? So that became part of the theory part of the book. Why do we read classics? And I think the reason is, it's complicated. I'm not sure how quickly I can articulate

it verbally here. But I think the reason is, some people go to the classics because they've been told all their lives that the classics are bright and shining books that offer wisdom and comfort. But when you read the classics, they're bright and shining, but they're also about the death of mothers, the death of fathers, the loss of home, the need to regain home, patricide, matricide, murders, revenge, very messy books. And so I think that the idea of the classics as idyllic books is wrong. And I think we read them because they're about the messy things in life that we don't necessarily want to happen to us. And so we read them as a way of kind of kind of prophylactic to prevent them from happening and as a way of coping when they do happen.

So that became my theory of reading classic books. As somebody who has been educated in novels and has taught novels, I also read War in Peace, which favorite book of mine, a book which does talk quite a bit about death and coping with death because it's a book about war. It's much more recent. Ian McEwen's Atonement, I don't know if you know that one. I'm not familiar with that one. It's a beautiful book about an author figure who clearly is based on Virginia Woolf, who does something unforgivable in her youth to damage the relationship of her sister and her sister's boyfriend who's lower class, and then World War II breaks out. And you read the novel and you think that the sister and the boyfriend have married,

and it's a happy ending. But the last time you see the boyfriend before the happy ending, he's wounded at Dunker, the evacuation of the British from France. And then at the very end of the book, it turns out that the author has just made up a happy ending for this couple. She can't do anything, you know, what she did in real life, is irreparable. their lives have been ruined, but she tries to make up written fiction. So it's quite a beautiful and very touching book for me.

It seems to me, like I'm a huge Joseph Campbell fan, and it seems to me that when we would go back to be it the Iliad or the Odyssey or even some of the King Arthur myths for me, there's so much in there that speaks to our own hero's journey. And when you're forced with death, when you're forced with loss, that you have no control over whatsoever, it's almost like you have to find the heroine yourself to overcome this. And it's, it seems to me that the people that left you would want you to be a hero.

When, when you spoke about those different books, do you think that maybe part of the healing process was that you got to see the situation from a third person point of view? Or was it that you got to relive some of the messy stuff? What do you think was so therapeutic about reading the books? That's, that's an interesting question. I'm pretty sure it wasn't seeing it from another point of view. I mean, I'm somebody who, um, I'm very, I'm very, I'm very, I'm very, I'm very, politic. That's who I am. So when I see a movie, when I see a television show, when I see a novel, I empathize and identify with the situation almost immediately. So I don't think that was it.

No, I think it was the process of using your mind and having your mind kind of work interpretively, which creates a kind of, I suppose it's a distancing mechanism which intellectuals use and which I used. I thought pretty effectively in this case, but I don't think it would have worked. worked on its own. So the second thing was family. Nice. Part of what I had to realize in the process of this is that families change. They go on. They go on. And I have two adult daughters, so I certainly noticed that during their teenage years. Oh, yes, they changed. These darling children who adored me so much. And they became somewhat difficult. And then they stopped being difficult. So yes, families change.

Memories are very strong, you know, linking force. And so my own family, which consists of a husband to whom I have been married for over 50 years and two adult daughters. And I don't mention them in the book because I'm a somewhat superstitious Italian, but my two young granddaughters were very sustaining forces during this process. And I think most people who go through an unconstitutional. unresolved grieving process, and I would have to say mine was unresolved for much more than I could have believed. There's a moment when you're kind of pissy to be around and difficult to be around and actually

strike out at the people closest to you, in this case, my husband. And you actually can kind of endanger a relationship by having unresolved grief. But family became a very sustaining force so that that middle section of the book is about family, family memories. The third part of the book is actually called memory without pain, which is a hard concept. It comes from a literary critic named Roland Barth, who doesn't use those words exactly, but he talks about the death of his mother and how he needed to arrive at a state where he could think about her without pain. And that clearly was what I was looking for, too, thinking about my mother, thinking about my brother, with whom I had a vexed relationship as an adult, not a terrible relationship, but a vexed relationship as an adult.

I don't think that's that uncommon either. We were friendly, but not intimate anymore. But I needed a way to be able to think about them. So for me, that came through, and this is another important strand in the book and looking at your website, I think it might be interested through yoga and meditation. Yeah. I've been a practicing practitioner of yoga for many years. The year after my mother died, I had this crazy thought of learning, of doing it seriously enough to become a yoga instructor. Now, you can't see, I mean, your audience can't see this. My arms are short. My legs are short.

I'm not the most practicing yoga teacher and material. My husband actually has taught yoga, but he's got a very slender, you know, a more flexible kind of body than I have. But, you know, I've done yoga for a very long time. But the year after my mother died, I started meditating every day for 20 minutes, which is a pretty serious amount of meditation. And meditation, and this I think relates to the hero thing that you were talking about. Meditation creates what Giochic traditions and meditation is called the witness mind. So you're observing the situation, but you're not, you're not letting it emotionally mess you up. you're not getting all riled up by it.

And it just cultivates a kind of not passivity, but a kind of equanimity. You know, the I'm accepting kind of state. And so, you know, doing this for years and years and years as I have was also very helpful to me. So those things. And it's memory without pain because the very last chapter in the book, which is the longest chapter in the book, is an evocation of three memories of my father, flying kites when I was a kid and the kite got caught in the tree and we couldn't get it out.

They came to me right away when I was thinking of the memory of my father. He, as we were walking back, he wanted to give me his kite, but no kid would want that. So my father, we were walking back and my father said to me, well, but we sure had fun. And at the time, I probably didn't agree. I lost my kite. That couldn't have been such fun. But now I totally agreed. We had fun, and it was a very pleasant memory.

The memory of my mother was more unpleasant. I remembered inviting her to a school event, and she was a working mom, so she usually didn't get to come, but she was laid off. She was a garment worker, and so she got to come. And she was the only mom who came, and I was mortified for her. And it was a funny memory, except that, I mean, there was love behind it. She had dressed up to come. I had wanted her to come. And then the third memory was of my, my, oh, I'm going to get emotional, which I'm sure is fine.

My infant son, who I remembered, and one of the memories I did have of my mother that was very fond, was she of her making a financial sacrifice to buy me a Kelly green dress that we couldn't afford, but she bought it for me. So the memory of my infant son was when he was at the pediatrician's office wearing a Kelly Green outfit because that's the way memory works, right? And he saw himself in the mirror. He was three months old for the first time. And he fell in love.

And for me, it was a perfect example of why people usually marry people who sort of resemble themselves, either around the mouth or the eyes. And it was the mystery to that was totally solved. I mean, babies see themselves. And they say, ah, you know, you're good looking person in the mirror. Yeah. I love you. So anyway, I ended the book with those three memories.

and then a little bit about meditation, which in the yogic tradition, and especially the one that I've been educated in, the body is rental. The body is yours. You enjoy it. You go through life with it. Many pleasures. I mean, there is no way of living without the body and enjoying life without the body, but it's rental. And then at death, you know, you leave the body and whether you believe in an afterlife. life or whether you believe in energy forces in the universe, it's not your home anymore, you know, and your home is somewhere else. Anyway, so that was the idea of memory without pain. A friend of mine thought it was a eubristic phrase that didn't make any sense.

But to me, it does make sense. There are times when memory is very painful, and there are times when memory can be pleasurable, and there are times when you don't want to go into memory, and there are times you do. And this was a book about exploring those different. polarities. I think it's beautiful. I don't I think that it's far from hubristic and I think it's something that people can use to make their life better. You know, it's a sort of therapy to know that you can remember people you love and it even if it's painful, the fact that you can remember, like you think about that word remember, you're recreating the memory. Like, why not recreate the memory that's beautiful

that you can have instead of holding on to something that you don't want, you know, I think it's beautiful. If I could tell your friend, I would say it's not hubristic, Mr. or Mrs. Tell him I said that. Yeah. Of course, I mean, one of the things I realized in writing this book is that, you know, there have been certainly sadnesses.

But, I mean, you know, knock on wood, because I am dying America and so I'm knocking on wood as we speak. I mean, I mean, I had a happy childhood. I had caring parents, you know, money was scarce, but lots of people have that. and it's not like having, you know, it's not like the kinds of things that scar you as a child and make it harder. You know, and I have been married for a long time, and that's a sustaining thing too. I mean, I think the process I'm talking about here and what I mean by it being individual,

I mean, I think there are people for whom religion would have been the way to go. There are people for whom chanting rather than meditating or praying rather than meditating would have been the way to go. But I think they achieve much of the same thing, a kind of neutral state of mind and a state of mind which is able to step away from some of the most painful things, some of the things that won't let you resolve the state of grief followed by mourning. Both of them are processes that need to be gone through. I think you're onto something with that combination of relief from grief. If I may sure, can I share a quick story with you?

Sure. My wife is Laotian and she recently had a cousin that passed away. and, you know, being from the, being from from Laos, they have a whole different system, but it's similar to what you just said. And your story reminded me of that. What they did was when the, the young lady passed away, the whole family got together for multiple days and they would chant. And if you think, when I think about chanting, I think of breathwork, like everyone's breathing together and out and like they're connecting their heartbeats and they're connecting their breathwork and they're thinking good thoughts. And so, you know, it's, while it's different, it's similar in that they're getting to remember, they're together and they're breathing,

they're meditating, you know, and heard you speak of these three methods that you use. I thought it was very similar. I wanted to touch on one thing. You had mentioned your brother and your mother dying at a similar time and how your relationship with your brother had changed while your mother was sick. Would you mind sharing a little bit about that? Well, I share it in print. And one of the women are memoirists you've done sharing. My brother and I were extremely close as children. We were two years apart, and we were playmates for a very long time. In fact, we didn't really stop being playmates until we were in middle school, high school. And then there was a kind of divergence of the paths that just sort of happened.

My brother was the first person in our family to go to college, which I don't think was an accident. I think my parents must have, I don't know if they worked hard for it, but they were certainly open to it. And when it came up, they didn't prevent it. And he became a chemical engineer until his first divorce, after which he sold parts to chemical engineers. So there was a kind of continuity. He also became politically at the opposite end of, at the opposite spectrum, opposite spectrum for me.

I don't know whether to specify the spectrum or not. But his political beliefs were extremely different from mine. I went to NYU in New York and then to Columbia. I became an English professor. My political beliefs became extremely different from his. It kind of sat there. We always, we were not distant from one another, but we didn't talk regularly. We got together with my parents and then after my father died with my mother and for my mother. And when both parents got ill, we immediately came together. We made decisions. there were no differences. Until my father died, about three years after my father died,

my mother was spotted by, and I guess that's the correct way to put it, a downstairs neighbor who was also an elderly Italian-American. He felt totally in love with her. And she, you know, they were both in their 80s, so it's hard to know how to characterize the relationship, but they were companionable, very companionable. And my brother was, My brother thought he was a jiggleow. My brother thought my mother would be hurt. He took no pleasure in the companionship that she was getting at all. So during the period of my mother's illness, he was very hostile to this man whose name was Joe. And my mother was very responsive to Joe, you know, especially after the stroke. My brother didn't care about whether Joe got to see her or not. Joe would travel two

hours a day by bus in Brooklyn to go see her. My brother would drive from New Jersey to go see her. Maybe within a year, my brother called me on the phone, which my brother never did. And I was at a restaurant with my family. And so there was noise around me. And I thought he said he had prostate cancer. And I was right. I take notes sometimes when I need to concentrate. And then I looked at the notes after the phone call. I said, wait a minute, did you say prostate or did you say pancreatic? and he said pancreatic. And I said, oh, you know, I said, oh, my God, because I knew what that meant. We had had a cousin who had died of it after my mother and before my brother.

I called him from home later that night, and we talked a little bit about it. And his wife insisted that he called me. He wasn't told me. But, you know, and he made a decision, I mean, it was his decision to continue chemotherapy. until the very end. I have a dear friend who's ill with pancreatic cancer right now. It was making a similar decision, but I think for different reasons than my brother.

And I said, I hope it'll be all right for him. But it eventually reached the point where he couldn't even get to a hospice. He continued the chemotherapy for so long. And so it was a bad, a bad process. I wish I could say that there was a reconciliation with my brother, but there was never,

there was never over rupture. And when I, his wife called me to say that I should come to New York quickly. I was in North Carolina where I teach. I did and was there with him while he was dying. But it was too late. I couldn't understand what he was saying. He might have been saying, get out of here. He might have been saying, I love you, Marianne.

It could have been, you know, it could have been anything. And it was too late for reconciliation. So it would be, it would be nice to say, there was a reconciliation, but he didn't want to talk about it. His wife didn't want to talk about it. And it wasn't my business to talk about it if they didn't want to talk about it. So, I mean, it was my business, but not with them. Yeah. It's such a, thank you very much for sharing that. Like, it's such a personal story. The ladies and gentlemen, the book is called Crossing Back and and it's filled with so much helpful knowledge that may be painful at times. But I think everybody

should pick this book up. There's so much knowledge in there. Thank you for sharing that with us. Thank you so much, George. Yeah. You know, there's some other interesting questions that I was thinking about. You talk about how intersectionality played a huge part in mending someone's important relationships that had long been tenuous. Am I miss reading that like a knucklehead? Well, it's not a term that I would typically use, so I'm not exactly sure what you mean. What do you mean by intersectionality?

Just maybe like you spoke about being an Italian-American, living on one side of the street over there. and maybe the way then becoming a teacher and having different values than your family. Right. Do you think all those things kind of came together to help you create this system of brief resolution? I don't know if brief resolution is a word, but the system you use as far as like meditation and book reading. Like, do you think it was all these factors that somehow this pathway showed you that allowed you to create this? Like that's what I mean. And that's what I mean by everybody finding their own way for this.

And that was the combination that made sense for me, whether it makes sense for everyone. I don't know. But I did. Oh, yeah. Okay. There is one place where I'm, this is true. I was having a lot of trouble with the grieving process to put it wildly. I mean, 10 years, 10 years.

I mean, who spends 10 years, you know, unable to resolve a mother's death? I actually think probably a lot of people do, but they do it in different ways. And it's hardly like I was, I mean, I was functioning at a high level. I was working. I was teaching. I was writing. I was living. I was traveling. I was doing all kinds of things. But that was still an unresolved grief. And when I kind of realized that I was putting all these things together, I felt like I did feel like this was a discovery and that it was something I wanted to share. And so in that sense, yes, putting these things together was something I wanted to share.

There was a part that like this one sentence really got to me and it says after the loss of your loved ones, you speak about entering a spiritual and psychological state of transcendental homelessness. That is what is transcendental home? First it's beautiful. What is transcendental homelessness? It's a beautiful phrase. It's it must be a phrase in translation. It comes from a Hungarian critic named Georg Lukash, L.U. K-A-C-S.

And he wrote during World War I and was talking about the state of transcendental homelessness being the state of modern people. And actually, it comes back to the classics because he talks about how, and I think this is an overly idealistic view of the classics, but he talks about how once in classic times the gods appeared and questions were asked and answers were given. And then he talks about how for modern people, many questions, we have many questions about meaning, especially during an event like World War II or the COVID pandemic or many of the things that we're living through. But there are no answers that are given. And he describes that condition of uncertainty as transcendental homelessness. Now, I took that phrase in a book, one of my favorite

books. It's a book called Gone Primitive. I wrote a book called Gone Primitive a number of a a number of years ago now, but I took that phrase to talk about people like Lukash himself, who was Hungarian living in Germany or your wife, Laotian living in Hawaii, or me, an Italian, American living in academia land, but anyone who has that sense of being unmoored. And it seemed to me a very, one of the things I found in my work on primitivism and gone primitive was that a lot of people who travel to exotic locales, the South Pacific, Africa, and I have exotic in quotation marks with my friends. I know that can't see that on old.

Yeah. But, and a lot of people who do that, who, who, who, who pack it all in and just sort of say, ah, I'm going to go to Africa. Ah, I'm going to go to India. Are people who are, who are acting out various kinds of transcendental homelessness. And it's a very common in anthropologists as well and ethnographers. So I felt, I felt that being unmoored in a grieving process was like being transcendentally homeless. Like, you just, you know, where are you? Why are you? there were times, I'm sure people do this. There were times I'd go to Google and I'd type in, what do I want?

Where am I? Why am I? And, you know, Google would give you various kinds of answers to those questions, but they weren't necessarily what you were looking for. And, you know, I just, it's actually, that would be a kind of funny study, how often those questions get typed into Google and what kinds of answers pop up. So that's what I meant. And it is a beautiful, supple phrase, isn't it beautiful? Transcendental homelessness. But the homelessness means that the feeling of being ill at ease, not at home. And that applies to a number of conditions.

And then the transcendental puts it to a kind of metaphysical level. It's more than just temporary. It's transcendental. Yeah. It's so beautiful in so many ways. I feel like we're all trying to find our way home. And sometimes the most difficult and depressing and sad instances are like road signs on this pathway of like, hey, this happened. You got to make a left right here. Or if you keep going down this road, this is the road of grief. Like you can't keep going here, you know. No, I mean, that's true.

I mean, it's you either go forward. And I mean, a common phrase is one step at a time. Oh, yeah. One step at a time, one day at a time. one day at a time. And sometimes, you know, depending on the level of grief and the level of loss, I mean, that's all you can do one day at a time, one step at a time. But then, you know, they one step adds to another, one day adds to another. And then you get to weeks, months, and years. And then you can emerge. I mean, there are people who don't. There are people who

stay fixed in a kind of grieving process and become recluse or let it become a person. permanent kind of damage. I mean, that's a possibility. It's always a possibility. But I mean, obviously it doesn't seem like the healthiest or the best possibility. No, it doesn't. I often think that you know, and when I was reading and listening to you, I think maybe I get the idea that the purpose of tragedy is for it to happen to really strong people and then have them reach back and pull someone up. And I feel like that's what you're doing with your books. It's called crossing back, ladies and gentlemen, if you need a guidepost or you need a helping hand, Mariana here has written a little bit of a manual that can help pull you up. I mean, do you think that maybe that might be part of the

purpose of tragedy is because the world or God or the transcendental being at the end of the universe wants to find someone strong so they can help other people? What do you think about tragedy? Again, I'm a literature professor. When I think about tragedy, I immediately think of Aristotle. the classic tragedies, Eipus Rex, Antigone. I mean, one of the most beautiful and brilliant set of tragedies ever written, the Orostia about the matricide and its patricide, matricide, and its consequences. But Aristotle said that the purpose of tragedy is for you as an audience member to experience tragedy vicariously,

to have it be a kind of cathartic event, be something that it deeply riles your emotions, but then you walk out of the theater. And it's a little bit, I mean, we don't, we don't, Aristotelian tragedy doesn't quite work in the same way anymore. But one of the things that we used to do, we do it a little less the last two years,

but all of the destruction movies, the urban destruction movies, the apocalyptic movies, it was the same thing. You'd go to the movie, you'd see the world is coming apart. People are dying. All kinds of stuff is happening. And then you walk out and, oh, the buildings are still standing. The people are still going about their business. And it's a little bit of that same effect too. So, no, no, I do think that tragedy, destruction narratives, all of that is a way of acting it out, acting out one's fears, letting it at a distance, and then coming back into a sense of the cell that can go forward.

I think that's really true. I don't know, do you want to talk a little bit about where we are right now? I love to. As I speak, the worst surges of COVID appear to be over. Vaccinations are available for people who want them. Boosters are available for people who want them. A lot of people don't, haven't wanted them. We're entering what clearly seems both in North Carolina, where I am now and in New York, where I will be for part of this summer, there's another surge happening.

And it seems to be, at the moment, the surge is producing less hospitalizations and less death, but it's hard to know. And so one of the things that I have been thinking about at this period, and it's the period when we've reached the $1 million mark, not a market. that I expected us to reach. I was among those when I published Crossing Back who thought, man, if it got to $675,000, which was the figure for 1918, that would be unbelievable. I mean, I thought it was possible, but I thought it would be really, really unlikely. And here we are at a million. And obviously, it's going to go past a million. So it seems to me that it's a moment of, it should be a moment of reflection. And yet I'm not noticing very much reflection. I mean, A lot of people have decided they don't want to work from offices anymore.

Well, maybe we should think about that. What does that mean? A lot of people have decided they want to be able to spend more time with spouses and children and pets and gardening and taking walks. What does that mean? And what can we do about it? There's a lot of divisiveness about, you know, ah, you're wearing a mask. You should be wearing a mask. You're not wearing, you know, you know, and so on and so forth.

And I mean, all that's happening if you're wearing a mask and you're a young person is you're protecting somebody else. You're unlikely to get sick, but somebody else might not be unlikely to get sick. It's an odd moment, and I'm not seeing a lot of desire for reflection here. And yet it seems to me a period when reflection seems to be precisely what's called for. People might come to different conclusions. I mean, I don't think it's an unreasonable conclusion. I attended a family wedding in Atlanta with a bunch of people who were handling things a little differently

from the way that my family had been. But I was there, so I was going to do it their way. And one of my cousins said to me, yeah, let the vaccines do their work. And that's a good point. Let the vaccines do their work. And then some people say, I'm going to get it sooner or later.

Let me get it out of the way, except it looks like I can get it multiple times. I mean, I think there are different conclusions that one can reach, or I'm not going to let it change my life. I mean, some people reach that conclusion, and that's reasonable too. But, you know, there are different conclusions one can reach, but I just would like to see maybe a little bit more reflection that something serious has taken place. I was stunned. I was stunned that the figure is one in 357 Americans died of COVID. One in 357 Americans died of COVID. I mean, I knew that was a stat for New York.

I was worse than that. But one in 357, that's astonishing. That's astonishing. And what I'm noticing now, because I move in these circles that I move in, but I'm noticing more people are, you know, are saying they have COVID. A dear relative recently told me she had COVID. It was mild. Great.

Just last night, we were talking about death and the surprisingness of it, just last night we learned that my husband's 97-year-old great-aunt who had survived COVID, died on Thursday, and the funeral arrangements were up in the air because her younger daughter, who had been with her, has COVID. So I'm starting to hear about it kind of in the circles that I move, and I haven't been, which tells me that the transmissibility of the current form is for real, that, you know, it's happening in circles that I move. So far, no one is getting sick. again, that's enough wood. But again, it just strikes me as an opportunity for reflection, which doesn't seem to be happening. Yeah, there is so many things happening that I think we're

not taking the message away. Like we should like, what's wrong with working from home? Like, there's some real changes that we could make as a community, as a world, and as a people, that would make everyone lives better. And if we look at these, regardless of what people think of COVID or the war, these incredible events happening, I think maybe the takeaway should be, to take a good look at ourselves and our society and how we treat each other. Like we could really treat each other better. And life could be better for all of us if we'd be a little bit more willing to not focus so much on what divides us, but what unites us.

You know, like coming together, right? No, I think that's absolutely true. I mean, I have trouble gauging people's ages, but I'd say I'm older than you are. And I remember that there was, for a long time, there was talk about the inevitability of the four-day work week. And then that went away. And it became the five-day work week and the five-and-a-half-day work week and the six-day work week. And, you know, my children and many young professionals did that as a matter of course. And then I began to notice even before COVID, so people were stepping away from it and saying, you know, exactly what is that about?

But I think that the desire to work from home is very much part of that. there's a guy I work with at Duke University who doesn't work for the university but works for a kind of allied thing. And recently, the meetings I've had with him have been online and he's at home. And he said, I'm going to go walk for my dog after this. Great. I love it. And I think that that's the kind of, there's nothing wrong with that. You know, there's nothing wrong with that.

I think that working, even if all you're doing is saving the commuting time, that can be an hour a day, half hour a day, two hours a day, sometimes three hours a day. What's a lot of time to save to be able to devote to other things. Now, as somebody who engineered her life so that that's been my life all along, I'm saying, oh man, now everybody has it. But it's okay. It's okay. I think it's good. I think it allows you to have a broader spectrum life, which I think is an important thing and a good thing. That is one thing. I don't know if that's going to go away or not. My own university is letting its staff work from home. I read somewhere that only 10% of people are being allowed to work from home. My experience is that it's more, but I don't really know that. I just returned from a

visit to my daughter in California, extended visit in California. And one of the things I noticed there is that a lot of people there are kind of in, by definition, in the freelance mode. You're working, you're working, you're working. You're not. You're working, you're working, you're not. And because there's, you know, that's just part of the regular rhythm. I noticed a lot of people going out for lunch and just sort of chilling. And I thought, that's, that's kind of nice. That's kind of nice. Nothing wrong with that, especially if you're making enough to make a go of it. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I, you know, when I look at my own family and I grew up similar Latchkey kid and two parents working and, you know, as I got older and I have kids of my own, it kind of breaks

my heart to think about the way in which Western ideals and Western philosophy has treated a family. Like we put our parents in an institution. We send our kids to an institution and we go work for somebody else. You know, you speak so highly of family and where you came from and what your father had instilled in you and your mother and flying kites and who's going to take care of your family better than you? On a side note, my wife, she comes from a really type family where the grandparents were there, the mom and dad were there, and they were there. And there's so much wisdom grandparents have that new parents do not have. Like, it's just a world of difference. And my daughter got to be around my wife's mother who was just, you know,

she was profound in the way she could deal with children. And I got to see the way my wife's relationship with her mom changed. My wife never saw her mom treat her kid. And I got to be there and be like, She's like, George, I cannot believe my mom can do all this. I had no idea how hard she worked or what she knew. And it was like this new evolution. I think there's something there. Well, again, I think the last two years, the phenomenon of people moving in with parents, which has been going on for a while because of just the socioeconomic factors.

But it happened more. And so you were having multi-generational households. I have not moved in. with my daughter. But my, one of my daughters has an Airbnb that they use as their country house. And it's a big house. And my first road trip during COVID was to go visit them. And I hate driving. Oh, I hate driving. My husband drives, but he doesn't even like it. But we did this 10-hour road trip to go to their Woodstock house from North Carolina. And I pulled up to the driveway. And my young, my older granddaughter was doing a war dance of joy in the driveway. And the younger one kind of looked at me

and she knew who I was, but she kind of, am I allowed to hug her? Because it was pretty, it was pretty, you know, it was mid-pandemic. And her mother said it was fine and she kind of ran over to me. And we've spent, my whole family has spent time now in that house. And, you know, it's nice. It produces a different rhythm. The children, children are always a handful, even if they're good children. It was really hard on young parents having to take care of children and not being able to send them to school, not being able to get, you know, daycare in many instances. It was really hard on them. So I think that being able to disperse those kinds of responsibilities across the family. Yeah, it's really beautiful.

I'm going to say this, and I'm not sure it has anything to do with it. But I mentioned a cousin's wife who died of pancreatic cancer, and she was Filipino at her funeral. rather than being an occasion, to some extent you'd want to get through and just move on, which certainly an Italian American would want to do. Everyone was taking pictures. Everyone was taking photographs. And I thought, hmm, that's a cultural difference. And I suppose it's just part of it, that you, this is part of the life cycle.

This is part of the family cycle. And you want to have a memory of everybody being there and doing this. So it was another instance of different grief and mourning. rituals that I had never seen. It was surprising to me. Yeah, it's almost like a celebration of life instead of a morning of life. And I think there's room for both. But I think that there should be much more celebrating the lives of the people we love. I think that's what I mean, I think a lot of people would want that. I don't want people just to be moping around. I would like them to be sharing stories. And hey, remember that one time George did this, you know? It's part of it's part of the, it's, it's,

part of an ongoing life tradition. Yeah. So, oh, wow, I don't even know why I'm going to say this. You know, and I guess you're free, edited out if you want it. But a couple of years ago, my husband and I saw a documentary called A Will for the Woods, and it was about natural burial rather than, you know, embalmed kind of burial. And so we kind of looked at each other and we're of different religious tradition. So the question of where to be buried had never been discussed between us. But we looked at me, that sounds like really, that sounds like really good. We like that idea. So we looked into it and actually made some arrangements. And one of the women we spoke to who supervises one of these cemeteries, there aren't that many around the country that have

portions, but there are some. And she said, it's a different kind of funeral. Those tend to be more celebratory and less lugubrious. And I thought, that's okay. You know, it's good. It's good that it be more celebratory and less lugubrious. Yeah, that's a great, that's an interesting conversation. I wonder how many people have that conversation about, so what do you think we should do? Should we, you know? We saw a documentary at a film festival.

I mean, where people would go to film festivals. Well, now we do it virtually a lot, but we did film festivals a lot. And we just saw it, it was just, it was just very striking. Like, like, you know, why do people do? Why do people do this? Yeah. I feel like there's a little nugget in,

all the different cultures that if we just put it together, we would have the puzzle. You know, like, everybody has one little people. It's a temple, right? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. He's such an amazing guy.

There's so much in, there's just so much in mythology that is like oral tradition, right? You could make the, you can make the argument that that is mythology, is the oral tradition passed down and down. And you're right when you spoke about Homer's, the Homeric verses, there's just so much in there that sometimes you've got to read a page. just stop and be like, wait, what are they talking about? Then you realize maybe it's, it almost feels like it's being told specifically to you. And it's weird.

You're an orator. You're a teacher. So in a way, you are teaching the Homeric verse and you're teaching literature the way it was taught back in the ancient days where it was like a verbal hand down. Well, one of the things also that makes one of the things that makes a classic, a classic is that it says different things to you at different times. I mean, that's just true. When I read Homer's Odyssey as an adult, it was very different. from when I read Homer's Odyssey as a grieving mother, certainly from when I read Homer's Odyssey as a freshman in college where it's nothing to me at all. I just had to make my way through

this book. But I mean, I think that students are sometimes exposed to these books at a too young age. I mean, I think there's a point at which you're ready for it and, you know, not sooner than that. You know, that brings me to an interesting point. I've had this idea. I was talking to Simon Critchley a while back, and we were talking about elusis in the Elusinian Mysteries. like a rite of passage. Imagine going to something like you lose. Symbolic rights of passage. They allow you to not, it not only points towards the thing, but it allows you to participate in it. Does that kind of make sense? So you get to see the symbolic gestures happening, but then you get to participate in it. And it almost gives you, it's like the Trinity kind of. You get to participate on three different levels.

And I think that that's what our society is missing is the absence of rights of passage. And that's kind of what a funeral. role is, but, you know, there should be something along the way to prepare us. And I think that this divisive nature of, be it COVID or war, or right or left, there's, all this division has stripped us of that which unites us. And that what unites us is these rights of passage, like the Eucinian mysteries used to be or, or, I think there's something there. Yeah, no, that there's definitely something there. I mean, the importance of ritual. Ritual. Thank you. Yeah, and, and thank you, because that was also something I realized. Reading a book is a ritual.

Meditation is a ritual. Family tradition, those are rituals. And in a way, it was being able to put together my rituals, which was extremely helpful for me. They can be very simple and sort of surprising that this is a memory from a July 4th a while ago. I was in North Carolina and we were outdoors on a hot summer night. you know, the fireworks were about to go off. And then the host did something that was surprising.

World War I veterans stand. Well, were very few of those. World War II veterans stand. Fewer of those. Korean veterans stand. There were very few of those. And then he said, Vietnam veterans stand. And there were good many of those.

And the applause was very warm. And it was, you know, it was still close enough to the point where that would have been not happening, maybe even just a few years before. It was a beautiful moment. And it was a kind of shared ritual. We were applauding the veterans like we were going to sing the star spangled banner before the before the fireworks went off. And it was a shared ritual.

It was good. It was good. Yeah. That's beautiful. Like there should be more of, like that, that is the antidote to the divisive nature that we're constantly being bombarded with is people gathering together, shared ritual, shared sacrifice. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're listening to this, do yourself a huge favor.

and get the book by Mariana. It's right here. It's crossing back time. And it's a beautiful story. And you're going to learn and you're going to laugh and you're probably going to cry. I think everybody can find it. It's like these great myths. I think you can find something in there.

So where can people find you at if they wanted to buy your book? Well, my book is available on Amazon. As a Kindle, it's available at Barnes & Noble. It's available at the independent book store shop, which I think is called shop bookshop, bookshop. It's available from Fordham University Press, which published it. And, you know, I do think it's a beautiful book. It's not a long read. It's in chapters that can be read in bytes.

And it's a book which wants to be read. So I hope that you read it. George, it's been a pleasure talking to you. The pleasure is all mine. I really thank you for your time. And I'm going to put all the links in the show notes. Thank you, George. Pleasure meeting you.

Pleasure is all mine. Have a great day. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.