The Secret Lives of Ordinary People

I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO, and I believe reading good books makes us better men. Today, I'm talking with David Aronovich. David is an award-winning journalist, TV and radio presenter, and an author. Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, a 1954 radio play originally commissioned for the BBC, changed David's life. Today, I'm asking him why. This is Old School. David Aronovich, welcome to Old School. It's a huge pleasure. I wanted to talk to you today about an extraordinary book, a gift that you've given me to read, Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood. This came out of left field for me. I had not read much, Thomas. Talk to me about the way you found this book. How did you come into contact with it? When did you first read this thing? Right. So it wasn't a book when I came into contact with him. At home in North London, in a little kind of semi-detached house that I was brought up in, we had a thing called a radiogram. And a radiogram was a great big radio with lots of kind of dials and so on. And you could turn that knob and you'd get Hilversham and, you know, Radio Tirana and things like this. And it also had a record player. And we had a fairly, we're not a rich family at all. We had a fairly limited supply of records. But one of the records that we had was a recording of the 1954 BBC production of Under Milk Wood, which many people think is the original production. It's the original recorded production. So as a child, I listened to this thing. I listened to the thing that starts with Richard Burton saying, to begin at the beginning. Okay. Can you imagine a seven-year-old, six-year-old listening to that and then being... And those days weren't like now. I mean, television was on for about five or six hours in the evening in the UK. It finished at 10.30, but anyway, I wasn't allowed to stay up that late. There was a limited amount of radio programming which was available. So what you had was you had books and then you had records and you had a bit of the radio. So we had this record of Under Miltwood and we played it from the time I was very, very, very small. And as a consequence, it has become completely part of my internal wiring, part of my internal language. it was also helped by the fact that my mother had spent some time in wales just after the second world war she my half-sister um who uh was was born on the wrong side of the blanket as i think it gets called she was brought up by my mother in north wales just after the war so we also used to visit some welsh places where she'd been so the the lilt of the welsh language the way in which it works, it's kind of what you might call its sonority. It was very, it was just in my ear. So this creation on this record of this one day in the life of this fictional small Welsh village, Thwaragib, the songs that are in it, the discourse that's in it, the jokes that are in it, the characters, the poignancy of some of the characters, their variety. It's just never left me. So we should clarify for folks, this was performed originally, and I believe written to be what today, we don't call this anymore, a radio play. And so it's unique, and it's unique for old school in that it's something written by a master writer, but it was written to be heard and in fact not written to be seen. This is a pretty unique literary artifact in that the medium in which it came into being no longer exists. Like there aren't just radio plays being written and performed all the time now. So that's pretty interesting. So what do you think about the way, first of all, this was composed in that kind of medium? And second, how would you recommend a listener encounter under Milk Wood? Yeah. I mean, the trouble when you've encountered something in a particular way yourself, and it means a lot to you, is that it's hard for you to imagine a better way of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so obviously I'm going to say, go out, find the recording of Under Milt Wood recorded by Richard Burton and the cast and perform first on the BBC third program in 1954. Listen to that. And then whenever you pick up the book, whenever you pick up the text, the voices will be in your ears. That was, we can't know whether Dylan Thomas absolutely intended it to be read in the way that Burton did because Thomas was already dead. I mean, you know the history of this, which is he was commissioned to write this play in 1946. By 1953, he hadn't quite finished it, but he had a kind of most of the draft just about, he'd been bullied into doing it. Flies off to New York with it and gets it performed for the first time in New York and then promptly dies. Right, at 39. At the age of 39. Right. So at the time he died, many people regard him as the greatest living poet in the United Kingdom. So this was a desperate tragedy that we lost him so early. So a lot of people will have heard it. A lot of people will have encountered it for the first time as a text. As far as I know, and ridiculously, it's not one of the set texts that's been used in English literature. You know, we get Shakespeare, over here that is. So we get, and I think we still do, you get Shakespeare, you get a poet. Maybe the other poems of Dylan Thomas's, because he has quite a full collection, would be studied. But not under Milkwood so much. But if you see it as not just a play, but as a poem, it's almost on an epic scale, it's that big. Yeah. Can you just summarize for them what this book is about in its essence? Essentially, it's a day. Yeah. It's a day and it's a place. It's a day in a place. And it's the characters in that day, in that place. And you visit them. What you're privileged to do by the artifice of the poet is you're told very early on, you alone are able to do this. Yes. You alone are able to see all these things. You alone are able to hear all these things. and so you're brought into essentially you're eavesdropping but you're eavesdropping in the most marvellous language all of a sudden you find available to you to describe the things that you alone are seeing you find available to you the most marvellous vocabulary almost which is available in 20th century English language out of the mouth of this Welsh poet so and you start at the beginning of the day everyone's asleep everything is asleep and we have described for us by the first narrator um the village as it is asleep and all the things which are in the village as it is asleep from the boats bobbing on the slow black slow black crow like fishing boat bobbing sea right the way through the village with its people snoring or not snoring, the kinds of houses that they have. So you're there. The village comes to life. You get to see the individual villagers of one sort or another, the postman, the draper, the blind Captain Cat who's once been a sailor, who has his memories, and who only... he describes things he hears, which is absolutely wonderful for an audio play. You see these characters wake up, get up, begin their breakfast, they interrelate with each other, the domestics between them, and you take them right the way through the day, the kids playing their games, singing their songs, etc., until you get to the evening. And in the evening, they go back to bed. and it's asleep again and that's your day. And it's perfectly encapsulated. Plot-wise, there's no problem with it at all. What we can't easily give credit to, and you mentioned it really, is just the extraordinary exactness and richness and beauty and poetic nature of the language. And the reason why, in a way, for me, I have to hear it, is because I hear it as spoken in the Welsh tongue, in the Welsh lilt, which is peculiar in a way because you soon discover that Dylan Thomas himself didn't speak like that, but he heard like that, and those people around him had spoken like that, which makes, say, reading a passage from it problematic because I can't do it in any other way than to try and give a kind of Welsh element to it So tell people, for the Welsh real quick, back in America, they may not understand the distinction between Welsh and, you know, the British English and these sorts of things. Tell people about this. Well, I mean, Wales, as they will know, is this western part of Britain, though not as west as Ireland and Northern Ireland, which was a kind of independent principality right the way up until the 12th, 13th century. Then the English, in their way, English way, conquered Wales. and made the heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales. And Americans are fairly familiar with that. That may be their only familiarity with it, actually. So what it is, is it's a country of itself. The things to remember, it had a very industrialized part, which was in South Wales. It had a kind of rural part, which was in West Wales. And then it has this mountainous part, which is in North Wales. Very, for us at least, very spectacular. But the most important thing, I suppose, about this is that the Welsh have always had their own language. Welsh. It's not an easy language to master for English people. But if you can imagine what Tolkien had in mind when he created the Elvish language and so on. I think Welsh was probably his model for all the elves. So if you can communicate with the elves a bit, maybe you can communicate with the Welsh. The Welsh were famously bards and poets because the Welsh language gives itself to poetry. But Wales has always been rather looked down upon, unlike the Scots. You know, the Scots have always been kind of incredibly proud of being Scottish, et cetera, and had this sort of great kind of martial tradition. And everybody respected that. But the Welsh have always been rather kind of looked down upon. And a lot of people say things like, you know, there's no kind of real Welsh culture, which is complete nonsense. so there's always been that sort of slight feeling of being on the edge of things in Wales not completely integrated for years educated Welsh people would move to London to become teachers and so on would have to kind of move out of the valleys so it's a very very particular part of the United Kingdom and to me a romantic part as well and Thomas plays with some of that language that you're talking about he plays with the and some of this kind of notion that the Welsh are in a way backwoods or sort of country bumpkin type people. I wanted to ask you about that because, you know, you described to folks a moment ago, you said, well, you know, it's this play that's set in a town and it's a day in the town and it opens with the dreams of the townsfolk and they're dreaming and then we go into their ordinary day. One of the things that we're encouraged to do is see how the dreams color the activities of the day. One of the questions that I wanted to ask you was, Do you think that Thomas is mocking these people or ennobling these people I mean you know there a person could read this and say look at these people with all their country you know backwoods small soul concerns We sophisticated city. Or you could read this and say, no, these people are people of a kind of profound human longing. And so I wanted to see, do you think it's a comedy? Because somebody could read it as a tragedy. What is this? Yeah, no, I wouldn't. What I was trying to say was they're a comic part. I don't see it as a comedy. They're not the deplorables, the people in this, as we would say in America. Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, there are, they are and they're not. I mean, it's very interesting kind of going back into it, how you find certain kind of expressions which are put in there, which are not expressions which we would use commonly so much anymore, but which definitely were the common expressions of anybody in the United Kingdom who wasn't, let's say, of the professional classes back in the day. So, these are ordinary people. They're not to be looked down upon. They're not to be looked up to. Their fears, their loves, their lusts, their murderous, occasionally murderous attentions um that there were you know they're the sometimes the kind of the hideousness of domestic situations but also their their longings they're all there and it's encapsulated actually in under milk wood in two but in one particular uh poem which is a part of poem which is part of the play which is when the reverend eli jenkins who's the vicar of the the the parish priest, has a little prayer that he says in the morning about the town. We are neither bad nor good here under Milkwood. And I haven't got the words exactly and so on, but we can find them in a moment. Eli Jenkins there tells you, in a way, what to think about all this, which is we're ordinary folk. Yeah. In all our occasional nobility, and there is nobility. There is. and in our sins. We're ordinary power. And we are you. It's not to be understood, I don't think, as these are other. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with you. I couldn't agree. And I can see a cosmopolitan person reading Under Milk Wood and thinking, look at these people with their tiny lives and these sorts of things. But what I would say to that person is, no, these people are you. Like these desires, their secret lives, and we should talk about this, their innermost longings, which they don't express, and which you have and I have, and we all have secret lives inside of us. Thomas is a master at bringing those things out. I mean, and you sort of think, well, that person's a pervert. Well, that person, as you mentioned a moment ago, secretly wants to murder his wife. What a psychopath. But on the other hand, it makes you think about your own things that you don't want to say to anyone or that you don't, that you are, these are you, is what I'm saying. All the time. Yeah, right? All the time. Yeah. I mean, absolutely all the time. Every morning, every evening. I know, I know. Every day you have thoughts which you wouldn't want anyone else to know you have. He tells you what those thoughts in these characters are. Yeah. You alone can see them. You alone can hear them. Right. You alone know. Yeah, and so that's interesting too because in a way, I don't know, this may not be the right way to phrase this, but the narrator puts the reader in the position of God at the very beginning of the play and says, look, you alone will be able to see into their souls. What I'm first going to do is show you what these people are dreaming, things that they don't tell to anyone. And then I'm going to show you their lives and how they go about their day. And in a way, you should think about the way their dreams color their day and begin to psychologize them. But it's a very interesting premise for a play because you're put in the position of a kind of omnipotent seer, not just of the ordinary days of people, but their hearts. You can see into their souls the way you hear God should be able to see into the souls of man. And so it's just a brilliant premise for a play. And I guess I wanted to kind of get us to reflect a little bit on the relationship between the unconscious and the conscious in the play, if that makes any sense. The way you're encouraged to think about the way the unconscious lives of these folks color the way they go about their daily business. And the way they go about their daily business filters back into their dreams. I don't know what Thomas is trying to say about that. Or if you have thoughts on that. Yeah, well, lots of thoughts. Some of them, unfortunately, relatively unstructured. I mean, as I said, I absorbed all this as a kid so in a way, it's like other things that you take in as a child I take it a bit for granted and now thinking about it and you've forced me to think about it in a way that I haven't before I think it may explain certain things that I've become that I've become interested in I have a very good friend who's a psychoanalyst and I've become very, very interested in the way in which we have, the way in which our thoughts and feelings are so innate to us that sometimes we hardly notice we're having them. And what he does is he draws out the fact that people have them and reminds you that you do have them because otherwise you wouldn't be able to understand what they're going through. You wouldn't be able to kind of comprehend. And I think, I'm amazed that people could look at this and think I want to be judgmental about the characters. That's the one thing that I don't think I have ever emerged from this with. I am always at one. There's a kind of wonderful moment in which the Bynons treasure, Butcher Bynons, they have a girl who works for them called Lily Smalls. And Lily Smalls wakes up in the morning and looks at herself in the mirror and has a little kind of soliloquy about how she doesn't look like much and she doesn't amount to much, but she has these feelings. She has a kind of sense of realism about herself, but she also has these feelings. And it is so poignant. And, you know, most of us who aren't gorgeous have had moments in front of the mirror with bits like that, where you kind of, you look and think, well, I mean, I had to make do with that face. That's mine. I'm not getting around it. I had to make do with that. That's the way it is. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, do you find a character, I mean, you mentioned there's a couple that you're interested in. Is there one who really resonates with you? I mean, you know, we should tell people, The play's extraordinary because it's a series of characters whose inner thoughts you're exposed to. Sometimes they interact with each other and you can see what they think about each other. You've also seen what they dream. There's some really hilarious storylines, some really terrifying storylines. And I've read that there are certain characters that, as you've already mentioned, a few of them, that people come back to again and again, the old ship captain. but is there somebody else whose eccentricities stand out to you? It's also in the relationships. I mean, you have Cherry Owen and his wife. He's a drunkard. Yeah. But she loves him. And they have this, I mean, unfortunately, you really need different voices in order to be able to read that one off and so on. But they have this interchange where he talks about what he did last night. Right. He tells him how drunk he was. That one, yeah. And what he did. Yeah. And it's just wonderfully intercut. The language is absolutely amazing. I don't think that you... I think you identify with everybody. I think you identify in some way with the murderous husband, but with the prim wife. Because we have our primnesses, and we have our murderousness, and we have our kind of drunken moments. So if you rise above it, the Reverend Eli Jenkins asking God to look upon you all as human beings and so on, that's at one level. No good boyo sitting there wished that nobody ever allowed him to be good. No good boyo is just kind of a ne'er-do-well who spends most of his time in a fishing boat not managing to catch anything and so on and ogling the girls. And then at some point he says, well, nobody really gave me a chance to be good boyo, really but the one above all who you do identify with partially because that's the way it's structured is blind captain captain blind captain now imagine this for me as an eight-year-old say listening to the reminiscences of a blind sea captain who is having conversations with long dead people in his mind people he's known in the past i mean some of his uh reading it back this which some of his interactions I didn't really understand because they had things to do with adult sexuality and sexuality which I couldn't really comprehend and so on. But you could comprehend that he was feeling about them. You could comprehend them coming back. You know, Rosie Probert who says, come on up, boys, I'm dead. And of course, yeah, that's right. That's right. You know, that's what you do remember. You remember her, but she's dead. So that's what she's saying to you. Right. So Captain Cat probably more than anybody else because his voice appears more often. And also he's talking to himself. Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the things, you talk about these people talking to themselves, you know, we've discussed their innermost thoughts. I mean, this play is in a certain way a kind of, it's like reality TV before it's time. I mean, you know, you get to sit on the wire and stare down inside the lives of people. And what I found this did, I mean, it's a very contemporary sentiment. I mean, we seem, you know, folks are obsessed with celebrities in their lives or, you know, reality TV. And we're going to take some cameras into a house, you know, these sorts of things. That's sort of what happens here. But what it did for me, and I wonder if this was the same for you, was it made me see the ways in which now we're so obsessed with our exterior, you know, the way one looks on the Internet, the way one appears to others, that we wholly neglect the rich and complicated and sometimes terrifying and sometimes, you know, utterly joyful inner lives that we possess. And so Thomas, I mean, the play, I mean, for all that it does with respect to illuminating human nature and the kind of bizarre longings and universal longings of men that we all long for loves. Many of these people long for certain sorts of erotic experiences or just to have love or to be loved and to have friendship and, you know, to be people of stature and standing and distinction. Those things are universal, whether you're in a Welsh town or whether you're in London or whether you're famous or whether you're not, those sorts of things. but it called me back to the interiority of my own life. It sort of made me stop and be silent for a moment and realize that I live in this world where exterior is so front and center. You're so right. But there are two points, the two things that you're realizing. It's not just the interiority of your own life, but to recall the interiority of other people's lives. And this is why reality TV has got nothing to do with reality, because you're not invited to do that really. I don't think, at least I don't think you are. You're not invited really to recall the interiority of your own life and you're not really encouraged to think of these people as people with deeply interior lives. And this is absolutely what he does. So what it means is that person walking down the street, you have to kind of make an immediate, you know, heuristic judgment about what kind of person that is based on maybe what they look like or how they're walking and how you're feeling at the time, whatever. One of the things that I learned, certainly from my friend who is a psychoanalyst, is to try and detach yourself from your own, or rather to examine your own assumptions, both about yourself and about other people So the initial story the surface story that you want to tell yourself it may be a comforting story it may be just what you done by default is always actually to be examined, is always to be looked at, is always to be questioned. And so in inviting you to see people in such kind of depth and detail, I think it takes you away from judgment and makes you really in that sense. But to do that doesn't make you a detached observer. It doesn't detach you from the people. It actually attaches you to them. So the more you become attached to them, the less you're inclined simply to rely upon your surface judgment of them. Right, right. And I wonder in what that attachment consists. My answer to that question is you come, I mean, if you're reading the thing or listening to the thing correctly, you come to see they are you. In other words, you're not free from the thing that you're fascinated by them for being. You see them initially as a kind of bizarre character in a play, but if you properly attach, you come to see, or you at least confess to yourself that you too are a bizarre character in a play. You know, something like this. Your attachment to them consists in your own confession that you yourself have oddities which could be exposed by Dylan Thomas if he could see into your soul. Shiloh and David's day. Exactly right. Shiloh and David's day. That's right. We start off asleep with our dreams. Yeah. Now we find ourselves in this situation and Dylan Thomas maybe kind of creates some dialogue for us. Yeah, if he was here. That's an interior dialogue. Yeah. We could be greatly embarrassed by him. Well, look, let's turn to, I know, you know, you've talked a lot about the way the language of this, and you've written about it, the way the language of this piece moves you. Let's turn to a passage, and let's read it out loud. Sure. Read it to us. Tell us what's beautiful about it. Okay, there's a passage that makes me laugh, and that has wonderful language. It obviously made you laugh, too, because you've already actually alluded to it. And now, you have to bear in mind that we're talking about, there are three separate voices here. Yeah. And I'll tell you who they are. So, are you ready? Yeah. In the blind-drawn dark dining room of Schoolhouse, dusty and echoing as a dining room in a vault, Mr. and Mrs. Pugh are silent over cold grey cottage pie. Mr. Pugh reads as he forks the shroud meat in from lives of the great poisoners. He's bound a plain brown paper cover round the book. Slyly, between slow mouthfuls, he sidespies up as Mrs. Pugh poisons her with his eye. Sorry. Slyly, between slow mouthfuls, he sidespies up at Mrs. Pugh, poisons her with his eye, then goes on reading. He underlines certain passages and smiles in secret. Mrs. Pugh, persons with manners do not read at table, says Mrs. Pugh. She swallows a digestive tablet as big as a horse pill, washing it down with clouded pea soup water. Some persons were brought up in pigsties. Pigs don't read at table, dear. Bitterly, she flicks dust from the broken cruet. It settles on the pie in a thin gnat rain. Pigs can't read, my dear. I know one who can. Alone in the hissing laboratory of his wishes Mr. Pugh minces among bad vats and jeroboams Tiptoes through spinnies of murdering herbs Agony dancing in his crucibles And mixes, especially for Mrs. Pugh A venomous porridge, unknown to toxicologists Which will scald and viper through her Until her ears fall off like figs Her toes grow big and black as balloons And steam comes screaming out of her navel You know best, dear, says Mr. Pugh, and quick as a flash, he ducks her in rat soup. What's that book by your trough, Mr. Pugh? It's a theological work, my dear, Lives of the Great Saints. Mrs. Pugh smiles. An icicle forms in the cold air of the dining vault. So this is a terrible marriage. So tell us about this marriage. Tell us about this passage. What makes you laugh? You said the humor, you know, struck you and had shaped your own sense of humor. Tell me about that. There's two elements to the humor. I mean, obviously, this man is having secret thoughts about the murder of him. Yes, right. But to have him appalling wife. And although we've talked about the interiority of everybody, actually, poor old Mrs. Pugh doesn't get much interiority from Dylan Thomas. She's merely, obviously, the kind of terrible wife of Mr. Pugh. somehow back in the day this match has been made and can't be unmade and he's stuck with it and she's stuck with it and so on and they loathe each other sitting there over their grey cottage pie right anyway so he has a secret thought he wants to murder her she is unaware of this secret thought and so on and there he is reading this book about how he might actually do it you know perfectly well he's never going to do it then they come to that passage about the hissing laboratory of his wishes. And there he is wicked. There he dreams all these, he's having all these kind of thoughts about what would happen if he were to poison her in the most kind of painful and appalling way. And the comedy there is both in their interchange, but it's also just in the language, right the way up to an icicle forms in the cold air, the dining hall. That's because she smiles. Her smile is wintry, her smile is, we've seen smiles like that. So there's both comedy and there's drama. There's the unspoken thought. I don't know. We don't even really know whether he has completely caught up with himself on this. But the hissing laboratory of his wishes. Yeah. Yeah. Who doesn't have a hissing laboratory of your wishes? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, what's funny, too, about this is, like, obviously, I mean, just full disclosure, I do not want to murder my wife. I love my wife. I hope she listens to this. But at the same time, you kind of know what he feels if you've been in a, you're like, you know, you've seen that smile a hundred times and you know what this is about. And so I find it hilarious too, but I also find, I suppose, terrifying in a way Thomas's ability, even though, as I say, I love my wife a great deal and don't want to murder her, his ability to make me think that thought and be like, I know where this is going. Yeah, point out, you can't be entirely sure that she doesn't want to murder you. Yeah, oh, absolutely, absolutely. But that's what I meant earlier when I talked about the brilliance of Thomas attaching you to these characters. That is to say, the attachment consists in you slowly seeing that as foreign as their thoughts are, as outrageous as they are poisoning your wife or lusting after this person or whatever, that those are your thoughts too. And if you're really being honest, you can't have contempt for these people. these small-town people. I come from a small town myself because what they feel is universal and the play is a mirror of you. And so when the narrator says, only you can see, it's almost like the narrator's inviting you into a confessional box under the premise that he's going to show you these bizarre souls, but the payoff is really that you're going to be shown your own soul or something like that. It's beautiful. You're going to be shown your own soul. You're going to be shown the possibility of all the other souls around you. Exactly, exactly right. Because that's why I said the thing about your wife. I mean, you cannot be totally sure that that person who you think you have a kind of notion of, they also have secret interior. That's right. Have you ever stopped to think that the terrible thoughts that you have or the really kind of things you wouldn't tell your wife, she has thought. Oh, absolutely. No, but I never think that. I'm only thinking like that for the first time now. Right now, right now. Yeah, and now I'm reasonably sure that in my marriage, I'm Mrs. Pugh, and she's probably going to pull. That's right. And this is a meditation on human nature because it calls you to see that those things are universal, not just in you, but in others. But with respect to this extraordinary aspect of the play, one of the things that I do, and it's in a way the premise of all that we do on Old School, is I read books as medicine for some ailment. In other words, you encounter a book sometimes in life and it comes at you at just the right time. Sometimes it's the wrong time, but other times it's the right time and it shapes you. So let me ask you this. If somebody's out there and they're suffering from something, an illness, is under milk wood a remedy for it? And if so, what is the thing you're suffering from such that when you read under milk wood, you come to see life in a fuller way or seeing things in a fuller way? Firstly, we sometimes live in a world of flatness and cliche, where the words that are applied to our everyday lives, actually instead of illuminating them and taking further into them, give you a set of assumptions about them and flat words for them, which actually don't take you behind anything. And as you've talked about here, rightly, Dylan Thomas does the opposite, but he also does it with words that are so wonderful, and poetry that is so kind of wonderful, that it opens up doors. In other words, if you use words in a certain way, you want to think behind the use of the word. It's a very particular kind of, it's the thing that cliché destroys, which is, you know, one of the reasons why I value so much the work of somebody like, you know, Amos and Christopher Hitchens in their battles against the use of cliche. Cliche, in a way, is our great enemy. The way in which you can replace thinking with non-thinking by the use of language that doesn't take you anywhere. So the great thing about reading and the great thing about the use of words, where it can be also the great thing about speaking, is that if you can be brought to speak and use words in ways that people are not totally familiar with it and not the kind of, you know, the simple kind of first kind of go-to phrases. What will happen is that you begin to think behind the word a bit. It does more for you than just a kind of simple stock phrase does. And I think that, I mean, it's very interesting when you think about work in translation, whether or not the translator is able to do that thing for you and so on because you can see quite often that a translator wants to be able to relate the the phrase to you in language that you're likely to use but may actually lose something of the idiom within which the language is originally expressed which is the language which got you behind the thought rather than to the if you like the kind of surface patterner of the thought nothing about under miltwood is surface really it's all happening below the surface it all as you say invites you beneath it invites you to think about it invites you to react to it and each and every each and every time and the more you use a kind of word which is unusual um you know as just take the cold gray cottage pie you don't talk about food in that way but you've but you've eaten food in that yeah yeah it makes you think about how that how that food came into being what that food tells you about that household. Why would it be cold? Why would it be gray? Yeah. You know, one of the things that I take from your comment about cliché in particular is the narrowness of the world in which we live is, in a way, a consequence of the narrowness of the words that we use to understand the world. And so these clichés, clichés, let's say, about human nature, cliches about, you know, the way the world appears to us, just those simple words we use to describe it, make it a much less rich place than it actually is. And so what you get with Thomas, you just read that quote about the food, is a kind of intellectual athleticism and depth, which adds vitality and vibrancy to the world by way of giving us a larger palette of colors with which to paint. Because the language is so rich this world this small Welsh world comes to be such a world of vitality even though it a small town of 500 people And I really compelled by that because the self you know I teach young people a lot, and the self-conception of young people is shaped by cliches such that the way that they begin to see themselves, human nature, its possibilities, the possibilities for them are pretty narrow. And I think that a play like this with words like this and a poet like this opens up to you the vast variety and vitality of what human beings can do and can be, precisely by declaring war on common ways of seeing the world, ordinary language, tired phrasings, you know, a kind of nihilistic, rote, everyday way of seeing. Thomas shakes you out of that with this language. From the very first few lines, when you talked about the slow black, crow black, I mean, these sorts of things, and you start to see just the richness of color. The world comes to life, for you through this play. It's really extraordinary in that way. Well, it is. Just take the phrase you just said. It's really remarkable that you go, the slow black. Black is a slow. Yeah. Slow black. Slow black. Comma black. Yeah. Comma black. Yeah, yeah. It does. All of a sudden, you have to think about that. Why is slow black different from slow black? Yeah. It is. Yeah. S-L-O-E versus S-L-O-W for people. Yeah. Yeah. But of course, it's a radio play. Yeah. So you've also got to say it in such a way. You've got to invoke it. You've got to invoke it. Yeah, for the mind, for the image. Yeah, it's really beautiful. This play is one that you have said to me has shaped you, the way you see. You're a writer. Are there things that, you know, in ordinary life, in your writing, in the way you see the world, in the way you see the UK, I mean, you know, whatever the case may be that you draw on Under Milk Wood for as a kind of source or compass? Yeah, and I think we've referred to it several times, and you've really brought it out for me. I dislike writing people off. I dislike the business of making judgments about people too quickly, about what we think about them. That has taken me to the business of really hating what you might call scapegoating people, making people the objects of, particularly of mass derision, in order to, because you become aware of the kind of, in a way it is the kind of, it's the grandest cliche of all, in the sense that it stops you having to think about your own humanity and about their humanity. I think I can be brought into some kind of sympathy. We're talking about ordinary people here, you know, I'm not talking about, you know, Hitler or something like that, But the way in which you can be brought into sympathy with other human beings if you think about their situation a bit and you think about your own. Now, that sounds kind of pious, really. But I think it's an absolutely necessary part of understanding who we really are. Yeah. And, you know, as I go back to it, I first heard this when I was seven or eight and I was absorbing it before I'd reached the age of 10 without even necessarily understanding it. So how could it not have an effect? Now, whether or not my family notice these pieties that I've just kind of expressed and so on all the time, well, I mean, we'll have to ask them. Yeah. We use this word slowblack, S-L-O-E, B-L-A-C-K. The word of the day is slow black. And I'm going to read the sentence in which this word appears. It's quite beautiful. And it's an example of Thomas's artistry. It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and Bible black, the cobble streets silent and the hunched courtiers and rabbit's wood, limping invisible down to the slow black, slow black, crow black, fishing boat bobbing sea. So you can see there, it's a beautiful play on words. He talks about, he's talking about the darkness and the darkness of the sea. He calls it slow black, S-L-O-E-B-L-A-C-K. And then he does slow, S-L-O-W, comma, black. And then crow black, C. What does slow black mean? S-L-O-E, B-L-A-C-K. Well, it's a reference to the slow berry, which is the fruit of the blackthorn bush. And when the slow berry gets really, really, really ripe, it turns very black, so black that it's got a bluish, deep bluish purple coloration to it. And so when Thomas uses the word slow black, he's describing the slowberry. And what makes it so beautiful is that he also uses the word Bible black, right? Which is a reference to the black cover of a Bible. And then slow, black, right? This kind of slowness of the dark sea. This episode is brought to you by Of Roughnecks and Riches, the incredible new book from Dan Doyle. Picture this. It's November 2008. The economy is in free fall. 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It's odd today to me, in our universities, there are few who have more contempt for ordinary people than people who teach humanities. I mean, I don't want to put everybody in the same bucket, but I do think, you know, there's this kind of snootiness about cultured people, the heights to which we can rise by way of our knowledge of culture. I mean, you know, the humanities and people who are sort of deeply immersed in them as I am can come to have a kind of contempt for ordinary people or people who aren't so culturally versed in these sorts of things and your vulgar things that you're not associated with. But what you've just done is said, no, no, what Dylan Thomas has done for me is make me not have contempt for anybody anywhere. That is to say, it's helped me not pass judgment on people. It's helped me see myself in them such that far from seeing myself on a height, I see myself down in the trenches with them and I see myself in them. And that's the genuine spirit of the humanities. Whatever perversion we've gotten ourselves into in universities where we have contempt for the deplorables or whatever the case may be, that's not, I suspect, what the essence of the best sorts of humanistic educators are doing. And I appreciate what you've said there. It brings out what I think is the genuine spirit and the humanizing spirit of the human being. Yeah, I think, I mean, there is a war. It's a war against flatness and cliche. So to give some kind of idea of the depth of human experience and the fact that everybody has a depth of experience in one way or another, even if they don't have the language. I mean, one of the things that Thomas convinces you of also, if you think about it, is that actually none of us have the language usually to describe it best, which is a good reason for turning to the very, very few people who do as a way of kind of opening up your capacity to think about it. Yeah, yeah, well said. Do you have time for a lightning round? I sure do, but I don't know what it is. Well, it's going to be surprising, surprise questions. You can answer as briefly, hopefully be brief because we want to move through. What's your favorite Welsh word? Do you have one? I love, well, I love Welsh place names. So I love, so I love saying the word Llangollen. Yeah. Which is a dog gethly. Well, these, well, these. I know it's a lightning round, but I got to hear. Well, these are places. I mean, my wife is Welsh. My parents-in-law, my mother-in-law died fairly recently, were Welsh. My father-in-law, much, much loved, could speak Welsh, and he had a lovely kind of Welsh lilt to his language. Their favorite song was a Welsh name called Mavanwy. So Mavanwy is a name, and just as kind of spoken is, I kind of think it's a name, but it's still a word. Do you have a book that you've read lately that's changed your mind about something? And what was it? One of the books which I was considering when we were thinking about doing this was a book by a writer called Paul Scott. It's called Staying On. And it's about an Indian couple. He's been an officer in the British Army in India and she's his wife. And they're staying on in India. And he has a set of terrible attitudes. But Paul Scott does the thing that actually Dylan Thomas does, but I didn't realize quite how Dylan Thomas did it until you and I were talking about it, which is it makes you sympathetic to the unsympathetic, even if that person holds a set of attitudes which are completely anathema to you. You begin to understand where they come from. So one of the things which I think is really important is we don't understand very often, because we don't want to, where we have so recently been. And you talk about people in academia, and there's been a lot of discussion about people in universities and so on. One of the reasons why you have a kind of woke intolerance, I don't like the word woke, by the way, because it has, one of the reasons we have it is because people simply don't understand how recently we were the un-woke and where we've come from and how we, until very recently, have had this set of prejudices and we now have that set of prejudices and those will too, at some kind of point, pass. So a book like Staying On really helps you examine whether or not you're, whether or not your judgment about the immediate past is fair. I've been given to understand you have written a book about conspiracy theory. I did. What is the most either hilarious or mind-boggling one? There's a lot. Yeah, give me a good one. Mind-boggling. Well, I kind of started, I mean, the one's not hilarious, but the one which tells you so much about people was the idea after Princess Diana died, that there was a conspiracy to kill her, when actually it was obviously a road accident. So much so that if she'd been wearing a seatbelt, she would have survived. And I thought that told you a lot about people's desire for the better story. A big, big kind of reaching out for the better story. Their desire for neat narrative arcs and so on. So that's a kind of, that's a learning one. Every day, people will come up with a conspiracy theory. Describe the Prime Minister in one word. The Prime Minister. One word. Impassive. Ah, yes. British politics in one word. A mess. Hempstead Ponds or Beach Day Out? Hempstead Ponds is right next to where I live. Did you know that? I may have I can't you may or I divined it yeah I don't like beaches so Hampstead Ponds I am a American visiting London for the first time give me a hidden gem that I must go and see or do so many Sir John Soane's museum in in Clerkenwell no no sorry not in Clerkenwell in Bloomsbury alright David Aronovich thank you for coming on Old School and thank you for giving me and our listeners the gift of Under Milk Wood it's a life-changing book poem, play, I highly recommend it to everyone thank you and I'm going to listen to all of these now yeah, thank you