Yeah. So it took several tries with me, actually, of people telling me to read Gerard and me reading it and not being impressed. And yeah, this happened three times before I finally took to it. Have you read his book about 19th century novels? Oh, yes. Deceit, Desire and the novel. That is my favorite Girard book.

So that, I think, is a great book and is a great reading of Dostoevsky and Stendhal and others. But that comes back to what I was saying earlier, how cleanly we should draw a line from our literary conclusions to our broader thoughts about society and humanity. I would be much more cautious than Girard is, right?

Yeah, I think that I agree with you. I see this temptation in myself, and I think that one of the reasons I have this temptation is that it's easier to compartmentalize than to integrate. And if you think, and I should say, I do think I'm still on the sympathetic side to this idea that we are in a kind of revolutionary moment, then if you combine that with the compartmentalizing, which I'm not really favorable of, but I think I'm still susceptible to, then you get a lot of people going from pure science, pure calibrating existing systems without questioning the fundamental premises too far into the other direction and too far into just, I don't know, taking one reading or one implication way too far. Sure. And we

all do it and it's inevitable and Girardian ideas are good. And so if they get overemphasized, what that means is that we'll settle down into a position of having integrated them properly. That's part of the dynamic of how new ideas get absorbed into intellectual and cultural life at the appropriate level. One of the real things you can learn from literature, though, is what sometimes gets called negative capability, it sometimes gets called polyphony, but you see this in Shakespeare all the time. Lots of different ideas will exist on the stage at once, and the play is not always trying to immediately pick between them and to push an ideological or philosophical view. The play is trying to get you to hold all these separate ideas in suspension and see the picture, see the bigger picture for what it is and to think in those terms. And in a way, I think it was Helen Wendler who said this, the poem does not have a conclusion. The aim is not to understand each line so that you can understand the conclusion like a set of premises in an argument. The aim is to see how the poem thinks at every stage. And this is a very different way of thinking to to some of the more logical and rational ways but it's very important because you can as you say you can get bound up in your conclusions and in your ideas and what you need to do a lot of the time is lift it all up and say what's the panorama here what's the overall situation so a good example is Antony and Cleopatra the source material for that comes from Plutarch. Plutarch's very against Antony, makes a whole series of criticisms of him, drinks too much wine, lies on the couch, only interested in Cleopatra, lazy, indulgent, not taking up responsibilities, not going to war, not being a good politician. Shakespeare takes all those criticisms, but he disperses them among all sorts of different characters in the play. And he shows Antony's side much more clearly and disperses that too. So what you get is this polyphonic effect, lots of different ideas, lots of different voices. Now, in the end, you might still side with or against Antony. I think it's pretty clear that Shakespeare sides with him. But the play is trying to give you a totally different way of thinking about this than Plutarch did. And that, I think, is one of the great values of imaginative literature. It's one of the things we've been talking about in Macbeth. You get it on every page of Middlemarch. And just that way of thinking is probably what most people need more of, rather than, oh, I finally struck on Girard and that's the answer, or whatever. It's more of this many-sidedness is what's going to be most useful at the margin, I think.