George Saunders On: Getting Un-Stuck, Calming the Inner Critic, and Building Empathy Without Becoming a Chump

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello my fellow suffering beings. How we doing today? Today I'm going to talk to one of the greatest living novelists about how to get out of stuckness and self-criticism, how to be less judgmental of yourself and other people, how to be empathic without being a chump, how empathy properly understood actually enhances your edge rather than eroding it, and how thinking and talking about the afterlife can improve your life right now. I always love talking to George Sanders. This is his third tour of duty on this show. Many of you are familiar with George, but real quick he won the Man Booker Prize for his excellent novel, Lincoln and the Bardo, and he's back with a new novel called Vigil, which I have read and it's excellent. George also teaches creative writing at Syracuse University and hosts Story Club, which is a popular sub-stack where he analyzes classic short stories. Real quick before we dive in here, don't forget to check out my new app. It's called 10% with Dan Harris and you can sign up at danharis.com, the most egotistical web address in the world. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to check out the app before you buy it. Let me just tell you though, we've got an amazing and growing library of guided meditations from amazing teachers, including people like Joseph Goldstein. We also do weekly live video meditation and Q&A sessions so you can get your questions answered and we've set it up so that you can connect with your fellow meditators and create relationships so you don't feel so alone in this weird thing called meditation. Okay, we'll get started with George Saunders right after this. A thoughtfully built wardrobe comes down to pieces that mix well and last, and that is where Quince shines. Premium fabrics, considered design and everyday essentials that feel effortless to wear and dependable even as the seasons change. 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That's a full year to build your wardrobe and love it and you will. Now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to qince.com slash happier for free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash happier. George Saunders, welcome back to the show. It's so nice to be here Dan. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Congratulations on your new book. I'm holding it up in my hand. This is the galley copy that you sent me a while ago, Vigil by George Saunders. It's phenomenal. So congratulations and thank you. Thank you for reading it and thanks for having me back. I always look forward to being here if you'll have me. So thanks. I've got a list of people who have open invites and you're firmly on that list so you just hit me up anytime. Thank you. So let's talk about the book. If you wouldn't mind without spoilers would you just describe the basic plot of the book? Yeah this is always a hard part for me because this always sounds so wacky but basically there's a woman who died in 1976 in her early 20s and since then she's sort of unable to go on to whatever's next and she's been kind of roaming the earth and she's decided that her mission is to comfort the dying to sort of be like a death doula who's already dead I guess. So she's been doing this since the 70s. She's done like 343 interventions of this kind and her whole thing is that she just wants to comfort. So this night she kind of gets the challenge of her career I guess you know she drops in on this guy and it turns out he's a former oil exec who was very instrumental in that kind of early 90s climate change denial. So he's kind of a stubborn old guy and she's put to the task comforting him and hilarity ensues. Actually hilarity does often ensue which is which is interesting. So let me start with the obvious question I'm sure in your press tour for this book everybody's going to ask you this question but what is it with you and ghosts and the afterlife and the bardo or space between etc etc? The truth is what I found about writing is it has to come out of a place of I don't know if you'd call it joy but kind of anticipatory frolic you know like I can have some fun with this. If you imagine 180 blank pages sitting there like how am I going to fill those up? You can't fill them with duty you know you can't fill them with being pedantic. So for me I'm always kind of just scanning around for something that I think would be fun and also I know I'm getting older I find I want something that's going to be really almost impossible like something that'll cause me to stretch. So whenever I think of ghosts somehow that makes me laugh a little bit I kind of feel interested in it. So there's a sort of a tactical component that if I put ghosts in there I know I can do it. Now behind that I think there's kind of a lot of other maybe more serious things about mortality and that kind of thing but to me it's kind of like if I have two people in a cafe talking I don't really know what to do with that but if I put a ghost of a former waiter in there suddenly I'm like oh that could be funny. I mean Flannery O'Connor said this great thing about a writer can choose what your rice but he can't choose what he makes live. So often when you're a young writer you decide in capital letters what you want to write about and it's usually something about your worldview or the trip you just took or something. Yes you get more experience you see that it's actually not your choice. You're just kind of scanning around for something that will light you up and then you march in that direction and see what happens. Well you hinted at that there's something a little bit more serious underneath. I'm pausing just because there were two things you said that I wanted to follow up on and I'm having a little argument in my brain about which one I should follow up on. I'm interested in what you said about wanting to push yourself and stretch the older you get. I'm also interested in the fact that the older you get there's maybe some stuff around mortality that makes you interested in the subject of ghosts and the afterlife. Which one would you prefer to start with? Well I can dispense with the second one a little bit because that mortality dread I've had that since I was a little kid. I mean it's getting a little worse now that I'm you know in my 300th decade but I remember as a little kid being in my grandparents house in Texas hearing them sleeping in the next room breathing and they were you know ancient they're probably 48 at that point but it just seemed like oh my god so life is tied to that breath if either one of them stops I don't know how I can deal with it you know even as a little kid you know being raised Catholic it was very much the idea that life was intrinsically a morally urgent thing every minute matter and all that kind of stuff so that has gotten a little more heightened as I'm getting older but not much. I think that's always been kind of something that's been on my mind and I know we've talked about here before just the way that you know if you were at a really amazing party with great food and beautiful conversation and having a great time and somebody came up to you and said uh you're gonna have to leave but I can't tell you when either you would say it's a lot worse and it's terrifying or I think you'd want to say this party is even better and I've got to submerge myself into the pleasures of this and because I don't know when I'm going that's a pretty urgent feeling. I'm just thinking like would the party be better or worse for me if somebody said that to me? Yeah. And then how do I feel about my actual life in light of that? Certainly all the spiritual practices that we do I feel like you were trying to move ourselves into the category that would find it a better party but I don't think that's true of me just yet that would just make me clench up you know and start eating a bunch of treats and the snacks drinking more dancing more wildly you know. Wasn't there some Catholic saint who said Lord make me chaste just not yet? Yeah. I've had a couple of outbursts of that kind of feeling of like okay this is better because it's limited but that's a fairly transient feeling I think. Is there some sort of cosmology that you actually have a suspicion about that's reflected in the two novels that deal with what happens after we die? Yeah I think there's kind of a big and a little the big one is I suspect that there's an experience after death or that when someone dies and is lying there they're still experiencing some stuff. I don't know exactly when that occurs or how but I think that makes sense to me even if you just want to say it's the brain flickering out or something still to the person experiencing it it could be in the way the dreams are it could be quite vivid and real and it also could be unlimited in time. I have a suspicion that experience wouldn't be entirely untethered from either the way you lived your life or maybe terrifyingly the state of your mind at the moment of the exit that's a little more horrific to me so I think those things are reflected in the books a little bit the idea that you could look at this whole book as being something that's happening in a kind of a quasi dream state that these dead people are trapped in because of their the moment of their passing or something like that. On the other level I think these books kind of enact psychodramas in other words in Lincoln all those people were stuck in Lincoln and Nebartho they were stuck there because of some delusional mental habit that they had that resulted in an unfulfilled desire for example so you could see that as a kind of a cosmological thing but it's also every one of us in every minute really I mean we've got some delusion going on that keeps us separate from actual reality we're suffering for it we're often stuck in some kind of denial so I kind of see it both ways and the cosmology the books isn't really consistent in other words if you really were if Jill in this book for example was having that experience at the moment of her death it would be kind of weird that she would well maybe it wouldn't I don't know I have to think about that one it might actually be totally consistent. I don't think anybody is grating you for consistency. I hope not. No it's. But what do you think about as of right now what do you think happens if one of us drops it this moment from the dropped person's perspective? To state the obvious just to get it out there I don't know. I do find as you said I find it horrifying that the proximate cause of your fate after death would be not the quality of your ethical conduct in your arc of your life but instead the quality of your mind at the moment of expiration because the latter is really in many ways out of your control what might the quality of my mind be if I'm being murdered right or if I'm in incredible pain and terrified or in incredible pain and drug and I fully plan to be drugged if I'm in incredible pain at the end. Even start a little early you know. I've tried that. Just in case. But I mean there's an interesting kind of third option which is that you might have something to do with certain habits you cultivated of I suppose a spiritual discipline or aspiration so that even in that moment you would have a habit of some kind of thought that might I don't know. I like that Woody Allen thing I'm not afraid of death I just don't want to be there when it happens. I feel so guilty quoting Woody Allen and yet dude has a lot of good lines but I think what you're saying is this is not an area of Buddhist cosmology or I don't know what the right word is philosophy that I understand well but to the extent that I understand any of it I do think the Buddhist would hold that your what's happening in your mind at the moment of death really is important in terms of what happens next but given how complex the mind is how I think the Buddha said there are a thousand or a billion mind moments every second that a lifetime of hopefully like 80-20 ethical conduct and a decent amount of mental training you know strengthening the wholesome factors of the mind will be in there even if you're in a state of horror or anger or pain or delusion and so you've got a fighting chance of a next act that's pleasant. Yeah and this is something in that's present in the books is that if you at that moment if you have some kind of ability to step out and look at and recognize that whatever is happening to you it's your mind you know your mind is generating that phenomenon but again I know that that's something that takes years and years of practice but like in Lincoln and the Bartle those ghosts had to kind of have the self-possession to recognize that they were dead that was kind of their way of getting out so I don't know but it's interesting to me because whatever we sort of speculate about the afterlife it always feels like there's a mirror and whatever you say about that is true right this minute as well you know so salvation in this moment what does that look like hell in this moment what does that look like. How does that observation you just made does it play out in your life in any consistent way. For me the thing is if you you know these are all things I know intellectually and I'm not very good at moving the knowledge from my head into my actual heart or life but the idea that if you exist in a delusional relation to reality then there's ongoing suffering every minute so for example if you're somebody who only talks and never listens that kind of person I mean you may never get called on in this life people might tolerate or they you know but somewhere in the actual quality of every moment is being affected by that mind state that's causing you to only talk and not listen so I would say in a certain maybe kind of sophisticated way that's actually heaven or hell you know if you go through your whole life not listening to other people say or you know being aggressive with them or overriding them or whatever it is there's some kind of negativity that accrues for me the mind blowing thing is you might never become aware of it you just missed out I think in our western traditions we always want there to be a big hammer that comes out at the end and says boom go directly to hell you're a bad listener but it could also be the punishment and reward is being collected in every instant whether or not you ever learn about it to me that rings true in a certain way and it rings true if you see someone else doing it if someone else is making an error you can see oh that poor guy you know but then you turn on yourself and it might not be so easy to discern what your delusion you're catering to and every instant I was thinking about this very thing the other day when I was talking to somebody and I can't remember who about a third person who we both felt was you know capable of a level of self deception and delusion that was unusual and that bad things ensued for that person and anybody in that person's orbit and then I made the move of wondering well what's that thing about me and it's really hard to know yeah it's a blind spot that was something in this book that I think I'm talking about because I found it in in the book this main guy is not a good person but one of the technical challenges of the book was that once it got set up I didn't have a authorial way to fully tell you how bad he was because a lot of the book is in his mind so he's got all kinds of defenses and practiced denial moves built up and the other characters are kind of they're from other times this 1970s and the 1880s as the two other main characters so they don't really understand the nature of what he's done so it was kind of an interesting inadvertent technical challenge to say okay how do I if all I can do is represent this guy's life from inside his head how do I signal over his head to you the reader that he's a pretty not great person so that's fun that's the fun of it really you're writing a book and you think it's going to be easy and perfect and then in the middle of it you go oh I've made myself a little bit of a problem here you know I'm just so interested and now we're bouncing around a bit because I do want to come back to self-deception but when you say that that authorial challenge was fun as a kind of JV writer myself I don't find authorial challenges fun I howl at the moon when I'm in the middle of them so are you being fully honest that you find it fun or do you have moments of frustration oh yeah and tearing your hair out I'm defining the word fun kind of widely for me what the fun is howling at the moon and going oh look at that I'm howling at the moon that's happened before it'll be okay or howling at the moon is part of the process that kind of thing yeah with this book there's a lot of stuckness actually in the middle of it and part of me was despairing about that because you think oh I can't do it I picked the wrong book but I think at this stage I have those feelings and I have a second level of feelings like yeah that's okay you've been here before and also a new or dawning understanding that the harder it is in the middle the greater the problem the book is trying to solve you know it's almost like Houdini like if Houdini said I'm gonna now escape from this windbreaker you'd be like okay well you know you can escape from a windbreaker but if he's got you know if he's got a straight jacket and some chains and he dropped them in the hudson then you're like okay so there's a feeling of like the subconscious is very trickster you know and it'll give you some really really difficult obstruction and for me it's just grind is come back day in day and hit your head against the obstruction and then eventually it gives so to me that's fun in a way you know if you have that sort of slight understanding that this is the process then it can be fun and I guess in the same way that if you're doing something really difficult and strenuous physically like climbing Everest is that fun it maybe depends I guess if you've done before you understand the stages and that kind of thing I'm interested in what you said about getting yourself out of stuckness because whether and now speaking to the listener whether you're a writer or not we all have massive challenges in our lives if I'm hearing you correctly and now I some of what I'm about to say will include some projection or guesswork on my part but it sounds to me George like you have a way of talking to yourself in those really difficult moments that allows you to kind of work through this stuckness over time yeah I do a lot of talking to myself my thing in writing is I'm mostly trying to avoid anxiety I didn't get a book out tell us 38 partly because I was so anxious about which book it would be you know I want to make sure I'm in the right lineage have the right voice so at some point I just thought you know let's develop a an approach to the writing life that minimizes anxiety and therefore increases freshness and productivity and so on so one of things I'll try to say to myself it sounds a little bit corny but I'll just say like if there's a problem in the book I kind of almost turn to the book and say okay what's happening here not you son of a bitch you're ruining my career but what is going on with us you know and the book you know actually kind of answers like well you know this section in here is just dull or whatever it wants to say it can say it so for me a lot of the approach to stuckness is first of all to say oh I'm stuck not oh damn it I'm stuck I'm worthless but oh okay I'm stuck and then kind of I think for me personally when I am proceeding negatively in a place of stuckness it's because I'm overthinking it my brain is going crazy there's self-accusation there's all kinds of peripheral worries and stuff like that whereas in a more positive mode the mind is fairly quiet and it's fairly curious about the state of the stuckness like okay so what's actually happening here there's one mode where you don't want to hear any answers and you're defensive and there's another mode where you're really open to hearing the answer whether it's from a person or in this case from the book that second mode is when I try to nurture in my revising just to sort of go okay accept any answer even accept a fatal answer if the answer is this book is doomed you've got to throw it away okay often the book doesn't have that answer it just has a much smaller simpler one so for me a lot of it's just trying to cultivate that mind you know to say well I thought this part was good yesterday it's reading badly today huh okay so there's all kinds of weird little mental moves one of which is for example when I start reading something to revise part of my mind breaks out and looks at the way I'm reading that day and it says how are you as a reader and if I say I'm in a terrible mood and I am going to cut the shit out of this thing I go okay you can do that or if I say oh I love everything about this document even the mistakes I love them you know okay remember that so that kind of colors how seriously you take that day's edits but it also does a kind of a magic trick of saying I'm going to allow all the writers that you are to weigh in on this even the irrational ones even the ones that are wrong that are too generous or too stringent you guys are all welcome to come in if you make a mistake don't worry we'll straighten it out tomorrow it's kind of a something that I discovered in writing and it's interesting for me now to try to think is there a real world version of this you know where you you have that kind of attitude yeah a real world version meaning outside of writing yeah to me the answer is it sounds a lot like what I've come to understand about dharma practice but it's just kind of like when you enter a situation in the world can you have that same attitude of saying okay first of all my mind is over determining things projecting as you said my mind is telling me with more certainty what's happening than it should be because that's what the mind does okay so can I quiet that down a little bit if data comes at me from the world what's my relation to that am I defensive or am I accepting it what would I have to do with my mind and my eyes and my breath you know to get to a place where I was getting all the data that a moment offered that kind of thing and then maybe also kind of a that acceptance of this moment might be a complete disaster I might be in a terrible situation or for me the hardest thing is if I make a mistake my mind flares up in all kinds of neurotic things so in that moment to say okay you made a mistake your mind is flaring up that's not good for you that's all kind of modeled in miniature in a writing moment for me yeah of course to me it seems eminently scalable what I hear in what you're saying is just a habit of warm metacognition where you're just constantly dropping back out of whatever discursive thought loop you're in you're dropping back and you're dropping back again to see like what kind of goggles am I wearing as I look at my writing and at my thinking you're in a kind of a grandfatherly way you're adding in levels of warm remove over and over is that a decent description it's a perfect a warm metacognition I remember that that's exactly it it's sort of a put on in a sense I mean I feel that way kind of but it also I think comes out of the love that I have for the form you know like I've wanted to be a writer since I was pretty young and I have a lot of reverence for it so that makes that warm metacognition more possible because I so much want a story of mine to be good and to speak to people and to yeah all those things that I have that extra level of pragmatism you know like okay how can I get this to work warm metacognition is one way and so it's easy to apply that in something that matters very much to you I guess if you were a doctor and you're a person on the table that you really wanted to save you would be very energetic in investigating which mental states might make you most efficient to say so I have a love for that form that I think it also makes me really willing to be patient and to do many many many rewrites because somehow for me the idea of putting out something that isn't my best or doesn't show good intention that really would kill me I think it is a useful way to use one's OCD you know just just a little something you said in the last 25 seconds of your last answer that doesn't show good intention what do you mean by that well I guess what I mean really is that I would not like it if somebody read a book of mine and felt that it was phoned in in any level so I mean good intention yeah I think I probably mean more good intention for a result I want you to say well this book didn't speak to me but he clearly is sincere in it he's investigating something interesting to him therefore I still like them okay you know that kind of thing as opposed to god this guy checked out you know he's checked out and he just sent me he wrote this book that doesn't have any I mean I know in another sense there's the other kind of good intention which you know I hope this book will move somebody and help somebody and that part of it which is very Buddhist but I think that comes from the work if I'm in here every day doing my best to make the book sing that has good intention written all over it and good intentions will be communicated by the work and also because and I think we've talked about this before the way I imagine this process is that when I'm writing I'm kind of imagining you or other readers on the other end well a lot of the revision process has to do with what's your imaginary projection of your reader look like if it's some schmuck who's going to give me $20 that I can easily fool that's going to come across in the editing whereas if it's that's my beloved friend who's smarter than me who's been around the world who I'm not going to compel if I just don't do my best in other words a kind of intimate positive relational kind of thing that comes through in the edits as well and then I think good intentions comes through that way I mean I'm making it sound very dreamy it's also of course very ambition driven I want to be good at something but all this stuff kind of comes in one package I think you know for me it's really comes down to revision that's kind of the holy grail is to come to something fresh again and again all this stuff will happen in that process coming up George Saunders on the role of empathy as a writer and how understanding even the sorrows of your enemy as George puts it can be instructed I'm going to attempt a segue here we'll see how I do to me it seems like a straight line you and I have just been talking about your attitude toward your own mind in moments of stuckness or to use your term self-accusation in writing and I think and in my experience how we are with ourselves is often how we are with the world and empathy toward others is a massive theme in your work writ large and yet again a massive theme in this book at least as I read it and so I want to set up one moment from the book and actually read it back to you and then get you to talk about it on the other side are you cool with that good segue yeah I love it okay okay so at one point there's the main character who we keep talking about Jill and then her nickname is doll Jill doll Blaine Blaine is her last name so she is as we've discussed you don't ever use the term angel or ghost but she's somebody who has passed away in the 70s and has either decided on her own or accepted the assignment of comforting people in their moment of death and in one moment she is actually inhabiting the mind of the man who was responsible for her death the guy's name is Bowman I don't think this is spoiling anything to say that well can I say a little bit about how she died would that spoil anything yeah I think you can say that okay I don't think it spoils anything but I wanted to check with you anyway Bowman had been trying to hurt her husband Lloyd but ended up hurting her and she takes this moment to inhabit the mind of Bowman who's still alive and in so doing he no longer seemed strange he seemed and now I'm quoting the character he seemed inevitable and because he is inevitable it would be ludicrous to pass judgment on him so I'm just going to read a little bit of a quote from that part of the book he had left his mother's womb with a particular predisposed mind and started living and immediately that predisposed mind had run up against various events and been altered in exactly the way such a mind buffeted by those exact events would be altered and all the while he Bowman trapped inside Bowman had believed he was making choices but what looked to him like choices had been so severely delimited in advance by the mind body and disposition thrust upon him that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing his feelings of rage of shame of being worthless of needing to lash out preemptively at even the slightest threat were all real and he must suffer them every day and why because he had been born him but he had not chosen to be born him that had just happened to him and then life had happened to that him exerting upon it certain deleterious effects including but not limited to the desire to blow up Lloyd again Lloyd her husband whom he perceived correctly by the way in the relative sense to be his enemy anyway I could go on this is just speaking to I'll use a word that you used a lavish sense of empathy of a deep understanding of other people's why's and wherefor's before I ask further questions about it let me just get you to comment on the foregoing and then I'll ask some more questions I didn't realize this as I was writing her but she's a first person omniscient narrator so she's always talking to us but she has this ability to inhabit other minds it started with this incident that you're talking about you read from when I was a little kid I remember this one incident where I was in Catholic school and I was a real kind of goody two shoes I was a good reader I was very well behaved and one of the nuns was praising me and of course I was lapping up I loved it meanwhile there's a kid that I'd known you know for a while and he's over here and he's not a good reader and she's kind of giving him a little grief about it you know why don't you get up to speed and he's at the end of the day I saw me crying so I thought well that's weird because I didn't like in the womb I didn't check the box it said good reader I just was a good reader and I didn't check the box obedient kiss up I just you know I just was that in the same way that he didn't in the womb decide that he would be a poor reader that struck me because I certainly enjoyed the praise as I still enjoy any praise but I was looking a little scarce at it like well you're praising me for something that I you know whatever that is didn't choose there's a second element that people often talk about like well but you worked hard at whatever the thing is you improved you got to be a better reader you spent a lot of time reading but even that I think wasn't on the checklist or was on the checklist and I had no ability to check it so there was an item called will be a hard worker I don't remember checking that box it kind of makes an elaborate case for predestination in a certain way and in a software level it says maybe we should judge a little less harshly and praise with a little more reserve because none of us designed ourselves and even our ability to change ourselves I would say is sort of a predestined quality so that's Jill's point of view in a philosophical sense we're talking about that's an absolute view but then she also has a relative view which is she's her and she likes what she likes she likes to be praised and she likes to be not blamed that section where she died and that you just read it just could have appeared to me and sort of blocked the path of the book in a certain way and I kept taking it out and putting it back in and taking it out and putting back in and in the end it sort of became I think what the book is about a little bit you know do we have on the one hand a bear chasing prey is totally natural and you can't blame the bear for it but if you're the one he's chasing you know suddenly you want a gun so Right so it does raise a bunch of practical questions like how far do you take empathy in the face of a bear chasing you or a trump in the White House we'll get to that in a second but let me just ask more broadly is it your view that we should all endeavor to attempt when appropriate and safe Jill's ultimate worldview and if so how? Yeah it's a little complicated she doesn't really do what she says she's got a good idea and I think if as I was writing the book it became clear that she's not exactly on target in the way that she handles the situation at hand but that said I think the answer is yes and I think we agree that I don't see any limitation to empathy because if you think of empathy as an elaborate thought experiment where you attempt to understand the sorrows of your enemy you can do that for a long time and you can still act I would argue that it makes you a more effective actor if you are have a political opponent the more time you can spend trying to understand them from the inside the more effectively you can push back I don't think there's any limitation we sometimes make the mistake though I think and I certainly do this of getting empathetic and getting kind of warm and rosy and therefore not really calling people to task if they need to be called a task and I think in the spiritual traditions like in Dharma there's a very honorable tradition of like the wrathful teacher and the idea is if you could stop someone from a bad behavior it doesn't really matter how you do it if you have to be angry be angry if you have to be funny be funny if you have to whatever you have to do to alter the behavior would ultimately be compassionate you know so yeah I don't I don't see any limitation in empathy as long as you're you don't do like idiot compassion and start just thinking I know how you're feeling you know go ahead and hit me with that stick fine you know or that kind of idea where somebody drives a spike through your head and you're like oh thank you for the coat rack you know I don't think that's that's a reasonable kind of empathy but in writing that's kind of the main thing is how do you and I remember as a kid hearing the stories about Jesus and like the woman at the well and on and it seemed to me that's what he was doing is through some kind of power maybe just of of alertness he was able to um meet a person get inside their consciousness and know just how to inflect them in a positive way which seemed to me as a kid like a great great superpower you mentioned Jesus I mean he really has the ultimate worldview of you know I'm not I'm not a scholar of the bible but uh I believe one of the last things he says before he dies and then comes back is forgive them lord they know not what they do yeah yeah I think if you had an experience like Jill has in other words if you could for five seconds truly occupy the mind of another person and then come back out I think that would be just life changing what you'd see kind of automatically is what yourself is what Dan is for five seconds you weren't Dan you were me then you go zing and back into your own head and suddenly the uh juxtaposition of those two things tells you so much about consciousness and about that jail that we're in all the time I'm in the george dale since 1958 so I think in fiction you're kind of trying to do that imaginatively but it's interesting because I don't think to spend these years thinking about this kind of rotten guy this kj boon who's in the who's dying in the bed was interesting because I'm not sure I mean I know for a fact you can't actually do that I can't actually imagine myself in someone else's head so what's actually happening is you're trying to do that but the other person is colored with your phenomenon in a certain way so that's part of the challenge too but yeah I think even you know in times like these that are so difficult I still contend that we we can be fierce opponents of negative movements but that empathy is a really powerful tool in that pursuit even it's kind of like if you're you know if you're I'm gonna fix that car well you might want to spend some time figuring out what car it is how does it work you could still have the fierce desire to fix the car but then you'd have some tools and as you said it does not preclude taking stern action there's that story I love from the great meditation teacher Sharon Salzburg about her early days in India when she's listening to all these dharma teachers talk about the importance of compassion and she says well what if somebody tries to mug me out in the street and the teacher said well you should take your umbrella and very compassionately smack them right right they're prevented from doing the bad thing they were going to do it's a funny thing the confusion I think we have with kindness and niceness that's yes an interesting yeah yes in the book there's this state that Jill goes into repeatedly elevation can you describe what that is well I think it's whatever happened to her in that passage you just read or she inhabits the person who responsible for her death intuits that what herself actually is and then is free of it a little bit I think it's something like enlightenment but she didn't know that word and also I'm not sure that it's actual enlightenment but anyways it's sort of like she had a great experience of being free of herself and intuitively knows that that's where she needs to be headed one of the things about the book is her addiction changes her real life addiction is sort of lower and regular and then when she's in this elevation state she's got access to a higher range of language and she likes that and I think she likes the fact that she's not stuck in a body until she decides that she does you know she kind of does like being stuck in a body so that was one of the tensions of the book is I make this state called elevation which I think at least in my early work on the book I thought that's what I want to I want to be elevated like she is she's compassionate she's full of love she's got omniscience she's got this vast view of things but then in the book she keeps getting drawn back to her physical self and she makes a pretty good list of the things that she enjoyed in that realm and I thought oh yeah that's how I feel too I want to be free of myself and I also want to be me yes again Lord make me chase just not yet or you know give me moments of chastity but also carnality yeah yeah there's this idea and I stumbled upon when I was writing a book about the Russian literature Chekhov said you know work of art doesn't have to solve a problem it just has to formulate it correctly so in this one a lot of the things we're talking about there's a division of opinion the book has two minds on a certain issue and about halfway through I thought oh yeah that's good actually I don't have to decide I just have to sort of improve the presentation of both views so that they're having the best possible argument and then hopefully that involves you as a reader and if you look to me and say George is it A or B I'm like yeah so in my model of fishing what that does is it makes you go oh I often decide too early I often identify a binary and then I throw down on one side or the other before I actually need to you know and when I read Chekhov often the experience is I'm having my proclivity for facile judgment shown to me and I oh I can actually wait I can wait I can wait I can get more information more information and often at the in the Chekhov story you get so much information that your whole desire to judge dissipates and you get this feeling like ah that's how it is yeah didn't you describe Chekhov stories as a brief reconsideration machines yes I did I hope I did but yeah no that's exactly the idea I'm talking about and me you know maybe it's especially relevant now and so much of our we're expected to have opinions on so many things so quickly things that actually don't have much to do with our day-to-day lives we have to opine in a Chekhov story or maybe any good story you're made aware of your desire to judge and decide by the tension you feel as you read the story there's a great toll story story called Master and Man and there's a real stink a real greedy guy who insists on going out on a business deal on a holiday evening he takes his peasant along with him your mind is just really arrayed against this guy and it's kind of fun like oh god I hope he catches it he's such a jerk if I had him here I'd give him a piece of my mind and then the story unfolds and you're kind of really enjoying that energy that kind of vengeance energy or and then a really bad thing happens to him and it's almost like your mind goes oh I didn't I didn't mean it except you go well I did mean it so in that moment you're aware of how much ill you're wishing on this guy then it happens and suddenly you're rooting for him to be saved so all of that is a way of sort of subtly lovingly outing the mind for its usual habits which in the fictive world which slows things down and exaggerates them suddenly you can see what your mind does all the time in every waking moment I have been deeply influenced by that line I haven't even read Chekhov honestly I'm embarrassed to admit but your line about Chekhov of reconsideration machines it comes into my mind a lot because my goal is to turn my mind into a reconsideration machine right yeah so I think fiction kind of is a you know a light weight training in that very practice it's hard to do it when the world is rushing by and you know you're inside your mind and your body and it's got all of its imperatives but in that moment where you're just reading and somebody has gone ahead on the path Chekhov in this case and prepared it cultivated it in a highly exaggerated way so that you following in his footsteps will have these experience we're talking about that's the skill and he had a great heart I think and I don't know I think he had a sense of innate fairness so when he was writing a story and told stories to you know writing a story and they were feeling a certain way about a character that maybe wasn't entirely fair they noticed and then the story would take that into account so in a certain way of writing a story is a really high very slow down high alertness practice because you're reading your own text and you're going okay how do I feel how would a reader feel and often there are things that happen there you didn't put them there you didn't plan it at all I mean this book visual is a big example that I didn't know planning but the task is in rereading are you on high alert to what it's weird but what an imaginary person your reader might feel so it's like a dream moment in life almost like the matrix everything slows down and you can become aware of your writerly feelings you can become somewhat aware of what a reader might be feeling you can become aware of the micro movements of the characters mind very very satisfying then I step away from the writer's desk back into the world and I start fucking things up immediately like it's all going too fast slow down let me rewrite you coming up more from George Saunders on empathy for his characters plus his thoughts about salvation absolution and karma a thoughtfully built wardrobe comes down to pieces 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to a dinner party last night to the socks I'm wearing right now and on and on right now go to quints.com slash happier for free shipping and 365 day returns that's a full year to build your wardrobe and love it and you will now available in Canada too don't keep settling for clothes that don't last go to qince.com slash happier for free shipping and 365 day returns quints.com slash happier you mentioned kj boon the the guy who's dying in the story who's a climate denier and oil executive who I think a lot of readers would think has it all come in but I'm curious you have a view on the subject of absolution and whether it uh can apply last minute to somebody who's done civilizational damage yeah it was interesting because I I didn't realize this until late I think he's only speaks once in the book and at this point there's no way he's fixing anything he's got both feet in the grave so then the question became is there anything at that point one can do I think if kj boon 10 years ago decided to fix things and you know he could have but at this point there's nothing except internally and so I think what I felt about him was that or kind of what the reader is waiting for and what Jill's waiting for or somebody's waiting for is for him to say yikes I was entirely in the wrong I misspent my life every minute of my life was in service of this bad goal if a person could do that I think it is a kind of a salvation because they're not trapped in that denial mindset anymore and they're face to face with the truth it doesn't undo anything that they did and I think all of us have the feeling when we look at these anyone we consider a bad actor we kind of want them to get nailed and for them to know about it this is one of the things about Hitler killing himself in the bonkers like okay I think he saw that he was doomed but did he see he was wrong and you know do we get to administer the punishment we didn't so it's an interesting idea for me I came to kind of it's weird how it happens politically I can't stand a guy like this and I think you should be in jail probably you know but as a writer you know you spend all these hours inside of his head and basically what you're saying to him is are you tell me tell me your side I'm right here and I want to hear your best version how did you get here what's happening to you doing that I start to feel a kind of a warmth for him in spite of his sins and that's a really weird place to be and it's hard to stay there and then in the end I think Jill has that same kind of thing she's also been in his head with me or vice versa and so there's a really complicated moment at the end I won't spoil but it's kind of like very localized empathy where I think she has an overall really negative view of him but in that exact moment she opts to give him some comfort as opposed to letting him continue to suffer so that's the moment I'm still thinking about but anyway to be with him for that long was interesting and as I said the book made me a kind of a trap because there's no place for my cliche borderline progressive views to come in and save the day I made a point of view structure that makes it impossible for me to come in and say dear reader here are his sins I actually had a scene because I wanted so badly to communicate to the reader that I understood the how bad he was you know in spite of my empathizing with him and so I had one scene where this activist there's a wedding going on next door and there was a scene where the activist wanders over and looks at the house and basically just reads the laundry list of all this guy's sins and it dropped the bottom right out of the book it didn't work so I just have to trust that the reader will hearing the story through boon's point of view will be able to reconstruct an accurate picture of what this guy actually did in the world which is pretty awful this reader did and I think more importantly I picked up that the point was not to argue that what this guy did was bad as the moral of the story but instead the moral of the story is the elevation is the empathy yeah yeah but then you know it's funny as I was finishing the book in the last like six or eight months I started to look a little scant at Jill too because she I think her idea is solid I believe it but it's funny she's not the most effective teacher actually for him I think the book's done and now I'm kind of reading it as a reader but I mean she's there all night and she she doesn't really find a way to get through to him I'm interested in that too and in the end you know she doubles down on her view I had a lot of sort of multiplicity in this book like I like her I love her I think she's great I think she's screwing up I think KJ Boone is a criminal and I kind of love him yeah so so that was nice I was a nice experience to have that you know don't know how you feel about the people in your own book let me go back to something you said at the beginning that I said I was going to follow up on but didn't about the notion of stretching I'm just going to read something you wrote on your sub-stack which is called Story Club that everybody should go check out one of the things we've talked about here at Story Club is the way in which we have to try not to be too sure about what we're doing not resting on our laurels or knowing too well what our approach is or what we're best at rather we try to let the work tell us teach us even what it wants us to do in the process the work might show us some new things about ourselves and our talent it can serve as a self-expansion device the obstructions and challenges we run into as we're writing the doubts the frustrations are what it feels like to be stretched so you said early on that as you've gotten older you feel it's even more important to stretch yourself why well one reason is I got started getting published late and found out that I did actually have a talent but it was very slender I'm not somebody who's particularly well read or naturally articulate and so a lot of my books come out of a doubling down on my limitations if I could put it that way at 67 you find that you've you know you had a little little wedge of cake of talent and you've eaten most of it and so the only way you're going to get a couple more books out of it in a sense is to go to the places that you think you probably can't do or we start out by saying I want to have fun when I write I want to have a certain joyfulness that's how I know what to write but with this book there was a sense of well yes that's in place but also that's going to be really hard I don't quite know how one does that or it could be really corny if I do it this way so that kind of feeling I really welcome because it means you're going to have to use modes of your ability that have been a little lazy or been neglected in this book there was a lot you know the other places where I'm in his head that's kind of old-fashioned modernism which I gave up a long time ago because I couldn't do it so if I'm going to represent this guy I kind of have to be sort of a Virginia wolf light I have to kind of go back to that at this age I think a person on one level knows himself way too well I actually look myself go are you saying that again are you making that same joke are you having that same mind stream thought so anything that can pop you out of that is so welcome and revision is something that does that for sure again if you pick a book that you think you can't write that's a good way to kind of I think there's an accretion that happens with age maybe it's actually in the brain you become very familiar to yourself and you start you know you use the same tricks and the same moves it's almost like a cycle the more you do that the more you do that so for me writing a book that is hard for me is a way of reminding myself that actually consciousness is unlimited but we sort of pen it in with habit I think the rigor of art is one way to kind of kick down that wall for a couple hours a day maybe I love everything you just said my projection onto the statement that I didn't know you were going to make which is that the older I get the more stretching seems important to me my projection for my POV was I know this is how I think of it as as I'm getting older I need to prove to myself that I'm not dying yet so I need to take on more audacious projects as a result yes I think that's the graph you write I remember that like the first kind of breakthrough I had in writing you know what a joy that was you know to feel and again I mean partly it was just ambition but was also oh there's parts of me I didn't know existed that I can get to by this route that was really wonderful you know to kind of walk around with a secret knowledge that you just nailed three really good paragraphs that the world would someday see you also want to recreate that which is harder and harder as you work longer in the field I suppose you know that so this that craving for freshness and then two you know again just the idea that you think you know yourself but the art says no you don't he says dude you you know you only know a fraction of yourself but your habits keep you there but now let's see if we can find some unexplored quadrants of yourself before it's too late you said earlier that this is going way back in this conversation but you said that you've been worrying about death since you were a kid at your grandparents house listening to the tenuousness of their breath has the fear of death not accelerated at all as we flip into each new calendar year for you oh no it has for sure what I feel more is a certainty that it will happen that I didn't feel 10 years ago I mean then I still thought there was gonna be some special arrangement or something but and also I think it's weird I can start to see not how it will happen okay for example when I was younger I thought what happened was you got to be 106 and you were weakened and then you died but at this age a lot of people I know and love have gone on and that's not how it happened for them they're perfectly fine and then suddenly they weren't there's something going on and they that makes me feel strange you know just that it could it will it will drop on you on us unexpectedly like a thief in the night and then you'll still be you you'll still be vital probably to some extent you still have a lot of ambitions and it'll come you know so I think maybe in a way I believe that it will come for me a little more than I used to yeah that which I guess is appropriate at 67 so not so much fear as consciousness alertness awareness awakeness to the reality yeah and I think I can also feel my mind going yeah but not really it's not I mean it's gonna happen you but not really or not not soon I guess that's the other thing but then you know again I mean I think in that in that spirit of I can remember how you put about the inner warmth then I can kind of say okay yes that's true it's also true that you don't really understand it so what do you think you could do George to one make yourself believe it a little more fully and two not be so scared of it and three make the best use of your time the weird thing is I know the answer to those questions and I'm a bit of a procrastinator somehow that's the mystery but for me like the meditation practice that we've done has been so beautiful because I can remember I'm not doing much these days but I can remember when I was and all of these this whole equation gets altered doesn't it you know like suddenly you're the clinging to yourself gets a little bit gets six percent less under whatever or 10% and suddenly then okay yeah I'm still afraid of death but kind of less this book was a real obsession of mine and now I'm kind of trying to figure out a way to just slightly reorient my life so I'm paying more attention to those kind of things. Meaning doing more meditation. Yeah. Let me in closing here read you another quote from you and let you weigh in on it this is not from the book this is a from an interview you gave I think it was a I think you were typing back and forth with your interviewer for this but maybe this came out of you verbally I don't know. If it's articulate I it didn't. I doubt that. Here it is I find Buddhism inspiring in that it says everything matters suffering is real death is imminent pay attention to everything as if this was your last moment on earth and then I see writing as part of an ongoing attempt to really viscerally believe that everything matters suffering is real and death is imminent. Chekhov said that art prepares us for tenderness and I think that this is also what spiritual practice can do. Yeah I agree with that. Maybe with the addition that you know art slows things down as we talked about earlier so it gives you sort of an increased chance to notice those things and yeah I think that's true. You know it's funny though lately I've been wondering well there's writing and there's talking about writing and I in the mode of writing lots of amazing things happen that we've been discussing and then of course when you go to talk about it it's just been approximation and I find myself well I go in waves that I teach at Syracuse so sometimes I'm talking about writing a lot and with Story Club I'm talking about writing a lot and it's always kind of a relief to not be talking about it and just be doing the thing because I think when you talk about it you always fuck it up you know you kind of reduce it you sound more confident than you actually are and in a game that really is all about showing up to the thing you're working on and being willing to accept any answer as we talked about earlier the more method you have the more you set yourself up for a kind of a temporary blindness. In other words if I go to a story and I have on I know what my method is I have a sub stack then that mindset might preclude certain solutions or it might preclude certain long periods of confusion and stuckness that could be very fruitful so I have to really watch at this stage of life to not be too sure of method even as I'm pontificating about it I have to go yeah and that's kind of bullshit you know when you actually go to do it that's not what you're doing it's kind of a double awareness of that. Before I let you go let me ask you two questions that I always ask the first is is there something you were hoping we would get to that we didn't? Well I actually you know I'm interested in your life in particular I listen to you and I'm just amazed by the people you find and what you bring out of them so I would like to hear over the course of you doing this kind of work what has happened to you from the exposure to all of these different very wise people. One thing that comes to mind just specifically from hosting the show for now we're a couple months away from our 10th anniversary. Oh happy anniversary. Thank you. One of the things you can hear if you go back and listen to the earlier episodes is a kind of impetuosity, impatience that is still there in my mind stream but the host thing the show has taught me you mentioned this earlier it's taught me to be a better listener and you talked about how there might be an eternal damnation for those who are bad listeners and much of my life I was that I was good at one to many communication as a network news anchor not very good at really listening and listening in a way that then leads to the next question and that instead of just ticking off the next question on my list so I would say that's a big benefit. I still screw this up all the time I heard the CEO of my company say to somebody recently and I can't remember what the number she used was I think it was either 60 or 70 but she said yeah Dan practices what he preaches about 70% of the time or maybe 60% of the time which either one I'll take. Well that's pretty good yeah that's pretty good yeah yeah no no I think that's that's a superpower you have of listening and having a conversation that actually is responsive and I recognize that from teaching too because when I was a younger teacher it was all about me making sure that they knew what I knew and that's how I thought I was going to help them and then now I still talk too much in class but I get in good roles where you know it's not it isn't funny it's just a slight adjustment of the mind like a mental leaning back and if I do that the student will talk talk talk and then lead right to the perfect place for me to make my very light judo like suggestion and then they'll hear it whereas in the old days I'd be anticipating that I'd flood them with the comment which they wouldn't hear and then we'd miss that moment so yeah. You used the word flood and I mention these guys all the time on the show but I for eight years now I've been working with and I think this my introduction to the two people I'm about to name is what changed my hosting style and my interpersonal style. I met through Joseph Goldstein who you're familiar with he's a great meditation teacher I met these two I didn't even know there was such a thing as a communication coach but my friends Dan Klerman and Budita Nisker they teach people how to talk and listen I still work with them and almost everybody in my close close orbit also works with them now and one of their terms is flooding that's a bad thing you should never flood people with information because they just can't hear it you should instead come up with little judo like chunks of information that you can judiciously slide across the table toward them and I think about this is not the way they describe their work but I think about it as we are in this constant exchange with other people of we're hurling words across this like unfathomable chasm right of my inner world through yours like comes out of my face hole just leaps across this unbelievable gulf into their ears and their mind gets cut with their childhood and their biases and whatever happened to them that morning and the state of their bowels and all of that and we hope that they understand it and so we're dealing with this very flawed system and the thing is what you what you want are some skills that give you the best opportunity to keep people in their prefrontal cortex instead of their amygdala and to keep yourself in your prefrontal cortex instead of the amygdala and that is the best chance in this really fraught endeavor of achieving some success and the prefrontal is is it awareness versus monkey mind is that kind of the yeah that makes sense rationality versus fear right huh I had a really good writing teacher who talked about dialogue that way and he said a quality of bad dialogue is that the two people are really listening to each other you know and they respond directly but good dialogue is you're answering out of your thought stream yes and I'm answering your distorted response out of my thought stream and we go zing past each other you know yes no I love that yeah so life therefore what you want I think a life well lived is to make it as dissimilar from good fiction as possible because you you want boring dialogue boring heartfelt communication that's gonna be the name of my next book boring heartfelt efficient communication a novel final question for you is if you don't mind just reminding everybody of the name of your new novel and maybe talk a little bit about story club sure so the new novel is called vigil it's out in january 27th with random house I also host this subject called story club that came out of a book I wrote called the swimming upon in the rain which was kind of a close loving I hope dissection of some russian short stories and that was so much fun and got such nice feedback that I started this subject kind of every week I introduce a classic short story and we talk about it the kind of wonderful thing about story club is that for some reason the community is just super positive people are so smart and so well read and well lived there's a kind of unbelievable level of courtesy that is there I was going to just do it for a year and I got so addicted to that community to to learning from them and also really just observing the kindness and the engagement so I'll often have the experience of you know being in the the world of the news and kind of feeling despairing about human communication and then drop in there and you've got like two or three hundred people talking about a whole story story with a great deal of interest in each other you know so so I really love that I know why the community is great over on story club because and that this is going to sound negative but the fish rots from the head so in this case the fridge the fish isn't the head of the fish is not rotten right and therefore the the body of the fish is thriving that's my blurb from you he's not exactly a fish rotting from the head down you got it take it run with it thank you for your time thanks for writing this beautiful book it's always a pleasure to talk to you well and thank you for all you do you're a big fixture around our house and you're always always helping us we appreciate it thanks again to george always love talking to that dude don't forget to check out my app 10 with dan harris you can sign up at danharris.com we've got lots of guided meditations and we do weekly live meditation and q&a sessions join the park finally thank you very much to everybody who works so hard to make this show our producers are tara anderson and elinor vasili our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at pod people loren smith is our managing producer marissa schneiderman is our senior producer dj kajmir is our executive producer and nick thorburn of the band islands wrote our theme