Most songs are about love, heartbreak or sex, but great books are drawn to darkness, and inside the darkness, if you look, is black humor that teaches you how to survive.
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More insights from this episode
- Equanimity can't answer an enigma
Stoicism, Kipling and the Gita teach you to meet joy and sorrow evenly, but an enigma is neither: it's a 'why', and it pushes you onto more treacherous philosophical paths.
- Three responses to mystery
Most people either push life's enigmas away to keep their day-to-day equilibrium, get paralyzed by them, or go on a lifelong crusade for the answer; choosing to live with mystery is a…
- We would choose the unknown anyway
Following Alan Watts: given total control over every dream, we would eventually tire of certainty and choose a life like the one we have, where we don't know what happens next. There is…
- Fiction soothes us through others' enigmas
When you hit the limit of what you can know, one of the few ways to soothe yourself is fiction: watching other people live through their own enigmas.
- Only non-fiction breeds false control
Reading only self-improvement breeds the illusion that you can control everything just by saying so; reading only fiction can leave you living in a fairy tale. You need both.
- Fiction teaches unconsciously
Fiction's lessons rarely arrive as a one-to-one character arc. They work unconsciously: ruminating on the problems characters face helps you deal with your own.