Abram: Hello, IÕm Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And IÕm Joanne Diaz. Abram: And this is Poetry For All. Joanne: And today weÕre delighted to be joined by our guest Shankar Vedantam who will be guiding us through a reading of W.H. AudenÕs MusŽe des Beaux Arts. You might recognize the voice of Shankar Vedantam because he is the host and creator of the podcast Hidden Brain. Before Hidden Brain, Shankar was a correspondent for NPR and a reporter for the Washington Post. He is the recipient of an Edward R. Murrow Award. He was a Nieman Foundation Fellow at Harvard University. Shankar, we are enormous fans of your podcast and are so delighted to have you with us today.Ê Shankar: Joanne and Abram, IÕm thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for having me.Ê Abram:Ê Well, thank you. And Shankar, would you be willing to read the poem for us? This is a poem that you picked out and wanted us to do together. We are delighted that you picked this poem. WeÕve been waiting to do an Auden poem. So, would you be willing to read it for us?Ê Shankar: I would be delighted to. I have to say, IÕm somewhat shocked that you havenÕt had Auden on the podcast before.Ê Abram: WeÕve just been waiting for you! *laughs* Shankar: Yeah, so this is a poem that my mother introduced me to many, many years ago as a child. And we can talk a little bit about it, but IÕve returned over and over the years to this poem. And it has, I think, a great truth, but also a great untruth that is embedded inside it. And I'm hoping we can talk about both. But let me read the poem to you first. MusŽe des Beaux Arts, the translation is Fine Arts Museum. And Auden is writing about a painting that he saw at a museum.Ê [You can read this poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159364/musee-des-beaux-arts-63a1efde036cd] Joanne: Great reading. Abram: Yeah. A heck of a good poem.Ê Joanne: Yeah. Abram: We reached out to you and you said Òyes, of course, I love poetry, letÕs do this poem.Ó And so, it was sort of an immediate choice for you. And I just wonder if you just want to say a quick word about why this poem in particular arose as the one you were hoping to do. Shankar:Ê Well, I have to say that IÕve been a fan of W.H. AudenÕs work for many, many years. And I find that when I return to his poetry, every time I read a new poem or I read a poem that IÕve read many times before, I see it in a new light. And, in some ways, thatÕs my mark of a great writer, or an artist, or a painting, or a movie. Which is when you come back to it, not only do you want to come back to it over and over again, but every time you come back to it you see something new, or you see something different, or it provokes a different set of thoughts in your mind. As I said, my mother introduced me to this poem many, many years ago as a child. And so I was drawn to its rhythm, its cadence, thought deeply about it. And over the years, as I have come to cover social science research on Hidden Brain, IÕve realized that there are mistakes in the poem. There are psychological mistakes in the poem that have come to fascinate me. So IÕm both fascinated by the fact that the poem, as I said, reveals a great truth about human nature but also a great untruth about human nature. And IÕm hoping we get to talk about both.Ê Abram:Ê Well, letÕs definitely get to those truths. But I wonder if we could also just pause on the rhythm and cadence that you mention. Because one of the things I find fascinating about this poem is itÕs a poem about a person whoÕs walking through a museum, whoÕs looking at a picture, and then whoÕs reflecting on it, about suffering, right? So heÕs seeing all these pictures in the museum. And the pace of the poem itself is quite leisurely. It almost mimics the idea of sort of strolling through a museum, noticing things on the wall. Shankar: See this is something else about the poem that I hadnÕt noticed. So youÕve taught me something about the poem, Abram. *laughter* And, I consider myself an Auden fan and youÕre absolutely right. I mean, so much of Auden has sort of that brisk cadence or in some ways that compression that he often brings to his work. And you donÕt have that here. And I love the idea that in some ways the leisureliness of the poem is mimicking someone walking through a museum and taking it in and thinking about the paintings that heÕs seeing in the museum. I love that idea. I was in Paris quite recently for the Olympics, and besides going to the Olympics, my family and I visited the Louvre.Ê And I had the same sense, as youÕre walking through this beautiful building and youÕre seeing painting after painting, for the first twenty minutes youÕre moving somewhat frantically. But after some time you sort of slow down and thereÕs a cadence and thereÕs a rhythm that sort of emerges. And I completely agree with you, I think thatÕs exactly what AudenÕs going for in his cadence on this poem.Ê Joanne:Ê Well, also, that cadence, as seductive as it is, and those adjectives that he uses. ÒWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.Ó Right? ÒIn BrueghelÕs Icarus [...] how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.Ó ThereÕs a juxtaposition between the catastrophe thatÕs being described by the painting and that casualness with which you can browse from one painting to another. ItÕs very disturbing, isnÕt it? Shankar: It is. And, in some ways, it might be worth saying a word about this painting. ItÕs a painting that dates back to the sixteenth century. By Peter Brueghel, the elder. Although, I just looked up Wikipedia and it actually says there are questions about whether Brueghel actually painted this painting. It looks like it actually might be a reproduction of an original that he had painted, but a reproduction by an unknown artist. So in fact, the painting that hangs right now at a fine arts museum in Brussels might not actually be from Peter Brueghel. But whatÕs striking about the painting is that itÕs called "Landscape of the Fall of Icarus.Ó And itÕs referring, of course, to the famous myth about the fall of Icarus. Icarus and his father, Daedalus, were imprisoned on an island. And in order to escape the island they crafted wings made from the feathers of birds. And they attached these wings to their bodies with wax. Daedalus and Icarus fly off from the island to free themselves, but the father wants the sun not to fly too high because as you get closer to the sun itÕs going to get hotter. This is, by the way, I think another error in the poem in terms of physics. I think it actually gets colder as you get higher, not warmer. *laughter* But letÕs leave aside the science quibbling for a second. According to the myth, Icarus in fact does fly very high, his wings melt, and he falls into the sea and he drowns. And thatÕs the original myth. But if you look at the painting, Landscape of the Fall of Icarus, what is striking about it is that at first glance you canÕt see Icarus at all. All you can see is this beautiful picture of an ocean, and thereÕs a sail boat going, and in the foreground thereÕs a plowman whoÕs basically working the field. Everything looks idyllic. And you have to look very closely at the right bottom corner of the picture to see two legs that are disappearing into the water. So even though the painting is called Landscape of the Fall of Icarus, the painting is really designed to suggest that the tragedy of Icarus was a localized tragedy. It was a tragedy for, it was a tragedy for his father. But the rest of the world, in some ways, moved on. It made no difference to them. And I think thatÕs what Auden was picking up on. Abram: You know, one of the things I love about the painting, and one of things that Auden picks up and extends in his poem, is that this fall of Icarus, this great mythology, is being in a certain sense transported into the present day by Brueghel. So Breughel is really painting his own scenery, even though heÕs got the fall of Icarus in it. And one of the things to notice about the poem is that the children skating on the edge of the wood and so on, these are references to other Brueghel paintings that were hanging also in the museum. And so Auden is actually pulling together several paintings here. The Census at Bethlehem is another one. And that too is an updated painting. So youÕve got Mary and Joseph, from, you know, 2000 years ago, walking through the 1500s Flanders or 1500s Netherlands, basically. And the whole painting is updated. And again, like this one, so much is going on. Some of it quite disastrous. And meanwhile, there are others that donÕt even hardly notice. The children are skating on the pond and so on and so forth.Ê So, Auden is again taking the observations of these paintings and then moving it all the way forward to our own present day. So time is doing this weird thing where weÕre always present regardless of the actual mythology being referenced.Ê Shankar: ItÕs also worth noting that Auden wrote this poem on the eve of World War II. So storm clouds were, you know, already gathering in Europe. Things looked very dire. It was quite clear that war was going to break out. So, in some ways, that probably colored the way he was thinking about what was happening. Emotionally, IÕm sure, it must have affected everyone to see the rise of Nazi Germany and see the spread of, you know, the German imperial war machine sort of rolling over Europe. So IÕm sure that played a role. But, I think what I love, and this might be what I call the great truth about the poem, is that I think that when we think about our own lives, many of us have what psychologists call an egocentric bias. Which is that we canÕt help but see the world from our perspective. And so our triumphs, our tribulations, our challenges, they seem so huge, they seem so important. And when the rest of the world doesnÕt stop to celebrate with us when something fantastic happens to us, when the rest of the world doesnÕt stop to weep with us when something terrible happens to us, thereÕs a part of us that says how could this be? How could it be that the world goes on? How can the torturerÕs horse scratch its behind on a tree *laughter* while someone is being killed? How could that happen? And I think thatÕs the great truth about the poem. Which is that I think that itÕs capturing the sense that from our perspective we are the centers of our universes, but of course, from other peopleÕs perspective, we are by no means the center of their universes. Abram: Yeah. So, and captured so perfectly in this line towards the bottom, which I take to be sort of, in a way, the crux of the poem. As the legs are falling into the sea, IcarusÕs great disaster is happening, you can barely spot it in the painting. And Auden, reflecting on the plowman, who is so prominent in the foreground, and it says, ÒBut for him it was not an important failure.Ó This death of this boy falling out of the sky, but for him it was not an important failure.Ê Shankar: Yeah. Joanne: ItÕs incredible. I wonder if we could, could we go to the top of the poem, just to think about the human position of suffering. ÒAbout suffering, they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. / How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting / For the miraculous birth, there must always be / Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating / On a pond at the edge of the wood : [É]Ó The casualness with which he says it is devastating but also quite funny.Ê Shankar: Yeah. And I love the line, you know, sort of, Òwhile someone else is eating or opening a window [...]Ó You know, these are things we all do in our daily lives that weÕre not even thinking about. And, of course, as weÕre opening windows, or walking dully along, or working at our computers, terrible things are happening elsewhere in the world. And that is true today. Not just in the sixteenth century and not just in 1939.Ê Joanne: You know, IÕm thinking of an episode that I listened to of Hidden Brain where you were working through this idea of habituation and how easy it is for us to, not only get into habits physically throughout our day, but also mentally.Ê Shankar: Yeah, so the idea of habituation is a very powerful idea. Which is that the brain is fundamentally designed to pay attention to whatÕs new. In general, we have a functional advantage by paying attention to whatÕs new and ignoring what is old. And so we stop noticing the furniture in our rooms, and we stop noticing the clothes that our colleagues are wearing, and we stop noticing the way that the streets are organized because, in fact, itÕs more functional for us to notice the motorcycle that is speeding up the road, which is new and could harm us, than the street signs that are stationary. So, at a very functional level, in fact, itÕs useful for us to tune out much of whatÕs happening in the world, especially when whatÕs happening in the world has been happening for a very long time or is an ever present reality. But what this also means is that when it comes to terrible things happening in the world, when it comes to discrimination, when it comes to suffering, when it comes to malnutrition, or hunger, or war, if those things are also happening on a regular basis, if those things are also happening on a wide-spread basis, they also start to fade away into the background and our brains then stop processing those things. And so if I tell you about how many people died in traffic crashes today, and how many people died in traffic crashes tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, by day 721, it has just become background noise. YouÕre no longer thinking about people dying in traffic crashes, even though for the people dying, of course, it makes an enormous difference. For their families it makes an enormous difference. So I think the habituation idea is a powerful idea here, Joanne, because it suggests that even though in our regular lives habituation plays a useful role, when it comes to our moral sentiments, habituation also plays a role where it dulls our moral sentiments. It makes it harder for us to empathize with the suffering of other people. Joanne: Well, and the reason I bring this up, is because, of course, you just brought up when Auden wrote the poem, the lead up to World War II. And, of course, I thought of that podcast episode about habituation as it relates to how much time it took for people to be desensitized to various forms of intolerance in Germany, in the 1930s. I feel like having that context for the poem, not just this amazing Renaissance painting, not just all the other poets who have responded to it, not just how it ripples across ancient Greece and then the Renaissance, but also up through the present. I think that has some bearing on understanding this poem. Right? Shankar: It absolutely does. And I do think that Auden is someone who, you know, itÕs hard to, there are authors and writers whose works are so vast, and I think Auden is one of them, that you have to look at it in its totality. And I would say that in general, I think of Auden as being a very insightful poet. And very insightful at the level of human behavior and human nature. Of noticing things about who we are as people. And I think part of my fascination with Auden is connected to my fascination with the world of human behavior and psychology because I think in some ways Auden was bringing a psychologistÕs eye to thinking about human nature. And I think, if you look at this poem that we just read, it has very, very strong psychological underpinnings.Ê Abram: You know, poets and critics have often said about poetry that part of its point, or one point that it can make, is to make the familiar unfamiliar. And so, the great Russian critic Victor Shklovsky once said that this is, in fact, the point of art. Then he talks about habituation in there. And he says that habituation ends up devouring things that we love or should fear. He includes in there things like your spouse or the fear of war. And he says that the point of art is to make it fresh again, to make us realize the world in which we live. And he says at the end of it Òto make the stone stony.Ó *laughter* Which is, I think, just a wonderful line about it. But one way of doing that, it strikes me, is by actually pointing out to us the way in which it becomes habitualized. And this is a poem that, in a certain sense, is conscious of the fact of habituation. And by making us conscious of it might actually make it unfamiliar. And so, just to point out, one way that Auden does this, I love this line, this is the whole line unto itself, ÒThey never forgot.Ó We have really long lines in this poem, and then we have this really short line. And one thing that short lines do is they your attention to them. So, Òthey never forgot,Ó three words. And, of course, the thing that they never forgot, these Old Masters, is the way in which people forget things. The thing they never forgot, the thing they notice and never forget, is how much human beings fail to notice and how quickly we forget things. And that sits on its own, in its own sort of line.Ê Shankar: I love that. I have to say that the idea of habituation actually cuts in two ways here. And I think this might lead us to discuss the great untruth of the poem. In that it is true that habituation can cause us to become desensitized to the bad things happening in the world, to the suffering of other people. It makes us coarser in some ways. We sort of walk past people who are suffering or people in pain and we basically donÕt notice them anymore. But habituation, I think, also cuts in the other direction. And I think that may be one of the errors, psychological errors, I think, in this poem. Which is it assumes that most human nature, in fact, is oblivious to what is happening to other people. That most of us, in fact, are not interested in whatÕs happening to other people. That most of us, in fact, are uncaring. And the reason that I think this is connected to the idea of habituation is that just as we get used to people suffering and then cease to notice that they are suffering, we also get used to people who do kind, and wonderful, and generous things and then stop noticing that, in fact, the world is filled with people who do kind, and generous, and wonderful things.Ê Joanne: Wow. Shankar: And I think that this is what I think of being the great untruth of the poem. Which is that it has a message which says that human beings fundamentally are uncaring about other people. And I think there is an element of that that is absolutely true. I think that we look out at the world, we see examples of that all the time. But there is a mirrored image which also says that human beings are oblivious to all the things that we do that are kind, that are generous. And if you think about just how the two of you got to your studios today, Joanne and Abram, you will think about multiple people whose work, and labor, and effort, and kindness, and love, allowed you to get to where you are today. And itÕs not until you stop to say who are those people? Who are the people who paved the streets, and painted the street signs, and made sure that the traffic runs properly, and designed my car, and made sure I have air conditioning in my office, and built the table IÕm sitting before. And when you start thinking about this you realize Òoh, my god, there are actually a ton of people who care about me.Ó And these are total strangers. Total strangers have built these things that allow me to do what I want to do, what I need to do. And I hope we can talk a little bit about that idea, as well. Because I think that at a psychological level, the idea that people are uncaring is, at one level, a powerful idea. But itÕs also, I think, a dangerous idea. ItÕs a dangerous idea in that it keeps us from seeing what good that people can do and then it also keeps us from seeing how we can do more good in the world. Because if you create a world where you tell people people are uncaring, people donÕt care, you can suffer and no one else cares about you, it prompts you then to say, alright, if the world is uncaring about me, maybe I should be uncaring about the world. And I think there is a great danger in that.Ê Abram: So the human position here in line three is so much richer. *laughter* When we start to think about human interaction, and even just the many various interactions happening within the paintings themselves suggest that Auden is noticing one thing but perhaps not even noticing everything thatÕs happening in the paintings themselves. I mean the plowman is not just plowing for himself.Ê Shankar: Exactly. Abram: And the children who are skating are skating together. And thatÕs not to go unnoticed either.Ê Shankar:Ê Exactly. Exactly. And I think when you think about the model that I think Auden is painting here, and I think this is a model that you see in economics, you see it in politics, you see it in all manners of different ways. Where the message is: people are untrustworthy, watch out for them, letÕs build guardrails to make sure that people donÕt do the wrong thing, letÕs make sure we punish people who do the wrong thing because unless there are punishments people, in fact, wonÕt do the right thing. And, in fact, each of these things is systematically untrue. Systematically untrue. ThereÕs just voluminous evidence that far fewer people cheat on their taxes than makes rational sense. When you think about the risk of getting caught, many more of us should be cheating on our taxes than actually do. *laughter* Right? Many more of us should be cheating on paying off our credit card bills.Ê Abram: If the IRS is listening, we donÕt stand behind everything that Shankar has said. *laughter* Shankar: Well, so they are both simultaneously true.Ê Joanne: Yeah. Shankar: There are people who are cheating on their taxes who are not being caught, but there are also people who are not cheating on their taxes. In fact, theyÕre not cheating not because of the IRS, but just because they say: this is part of what it means to be in a compact with other people. And in fact, the taxes that IÕm paying are helping build the roads and run the schools, and IÕm happy to be doing that. And we underestimate the value of those people when we set up rules and regulations that are focused only on the people whoÊ are breaking the rules. IÕm not suggesting that there are not uncaring people or lawbreakers. There certainly are and we need to deal with them. But we shouldnÕt treat all human beings as if they were ipso facto lawbreakers. Joanne. Maybe. And as I hear you talking, I canÕt help but think, not only of AudenÕs cultural and political moment, but our own cultural and political moment, as I hear you talking. Because I do think, that at least for me in recent years, there has been a very dark view of humanity that feels very pervasive. So as I hear you talking, IÕm thinking, wow, what would it mean to turn habituation on its head and flip it toward virtue, toward goodness and kindness. That would be a narrative I have not been hearing as a dominant one lately, right? Shankar: You know, there was a wonderful study that I think about almost every other week by this psychologist at the University of Oregon whose name is Paul Slovic. You might be familiar with a thought experiment that has made its rounds in various conferences and universities over the years, this is from the philosopher Peter Singer, who said: imagine youÕre walking by a pond and, very much like Icarus, you see a child drowning in the pond. But you can jump into the pond now and save the childÕs life at no risk to your own life, but youÕre wearing a very fine pair of shoes that cost $200. And if you act quickly and jump in to save the life of the child, you will ruin your shoes that cost $200. Do you prefer to save your shoes or do you prefer to save the child? Now, when you put this question to people, a hundred percent of people will say: of course, I would save the child. A childÕs life is worth more than a pair of shoes. And so Peter Singer, the philosopher, uses this example to say, in that case, if, in fact, you think a childÕs life is worth more than $200, why donÕt you write a check for $200 to Oxfam or an NGO that is providing childhood vaccinations around the world because, in fact, $200 could save the life of a child around the world. So, thatÕs the original thought experiment. Paul Slovic, the psychologist at the University of Oregon, took the same thought experiment but he added a wrinkle to it. And he said, now imagine youÕre walking by the side of the pond, you see a child drowning in the pond, youÕre wearing a fine pair of shoes, you have the same dilemma.Ê But now, you also see that further out in the pond, there is a second child who is drowning in very deep water and you know that you cannot save the second childÕs life. Does knowing that you cannot save the second childÕs life change whether you save the first childÕs life? Now, of course, at a rational level, the answer should be: it makes no difference, of course, I can save the life that I can save, I should always save that life. But what the psychological experiment reveals is that when people are told about all the things that they cannot do, all the lives that they cannot save, all the helplessness that they are confronted with, paradoxically, it makes them say: IÕm going to throw up my hands and IÕm not even going to do the things that I think that I can do. And I think in some ways the power of that study, and I think about that study in the context of this poem, is that we have sometimes set up things in our world that actually encourage apathy, that in some ways allow apathy to grow. And if we think about human nature as not being either engaged or apathetic, but think about human nature as saying we, in fact, have both these capacities within us. We have the capacity to be engaged with the lives of others and we have this capacity to be disengaged from the lives of others. What are the things that we can do that prompt human beings in one direction rather than another? And I think that may be one mistake that Auden made.Ê Which is that, I think, when you read this poem, you have the sense that this is what human nature is like. And I think a more nuanced and subtle understanding of human nature suggests that human nature is partly how we make it, what we choose to do. We have agency here. WeÕre not just stuck with being these uncaring people. Abram: Well, and IÕd like to jump in on that last point because to that error that youÕre describing, thereÕs actually some language in this poem. So, if you look, this is a very funny way to describe the way that the sun shines. In the fifth to last line, it says, Òthe sun shone as it had to.Ó And, it actually connects to the last line in the poem where the ship had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.Ê Shankar: Yeah. Abram: Now, in a certain sense, that last line is the reflection of the speaker himself whoÕs standing in front of this painting, thinking about suffering, but has somewhere to get to and is going to move calmly on through the museum. And so, itÕs kind of a reflection back on to the viewpoint of the speaker of the poem himself. But both those ÒhadÓs kind of take the moral choice, the agency, out of it. The sun just has to shine.Ê Shankar:Ê Yes. Abram: This person just had to move on. Shankar: Yeah. Abram: But actually the whole poem is really about attention, where we place it, and as youÕre saying, thereÕs actually more choice to where we place our attention than the poem is giving us.Ê Shankar: Yeah, I love that. And, in some ways, he is very cleverly sneaking in an analogy between the ship that is sailing calmly on and the sun having to shine even as this boy is falling into the water. Now, I would say, in fact, the second part of that statement is true. The sun does have to shine *laughter* regardless of whether boys fall into the ocean or they donÕt fall into the ocean. The sun doesnÕt have a choice about it. But, the ship, in fact, does have a choice. The ship, in fact, is making a moral choice. Right? It is making a moral choice. And even though Auden is very cleverly sort of allowing us to believe that the ship and the sun are basically behaving in the same way, one actually has human agency. And I think, in some ways, we sell ourselves short when we imagine that, if fact, we donÕt have that kind of agency.Ê Abram: Well, it relates directly to the psychological experiment you just gave us because notice, again, the adjectives. ItÕs not just any ship, itÕs an expensive, delicate ship.Ê Joanne: ItÕs a $200 pair of shoes. *laughter* Abram: ItÕs a $200 pair of shoes kind of ship and that kind of ship has somewhere to get to. Joanne: Yes, it does. Yes, it does.Ê Shankar: Yeah, but notice how often ships, in fact, do stop. I mean, think about the times that youÕve seen movies or accounts of rescues on the high seas where, in fact, someone does see somebody else who is adrift. How often do we just say: sorry, IÕd love to help you, but in fact, I have an appointment, so IÕm going to leave you floating *laughter* on a raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Human beings just donÕt do that. In fact, in all kinds of ways, we actually come to each otherÕs assistance. If you see someone stumble and fall on the sidewalk, very often people will say: are you okay, can I help you, can I help you up? And these are total strangers, these are not people who expect that you are going to help them back up when they take a spill, you know, two years down the road, theyÕre just doing it because thatÕs what human nature is. And you could equally, I think, write a poem thatÕs about that aspect of human nature. I think that's what IÕm getting at. ItÕs not so much that Auden is wrong, or that the poem is wrong, but I think that the poem is incomplete.Ê Joanne:Ê You started this conversation by telling us that this has been in your life for a long time. Your mother introduced this. Why do you think this poem had value for her and why she wanted to share it with you at a young age? Shankar: Yeah, thatÕs a really important and profound question. And I donÕt think I know the answer to that question. I know that she had struggled with many things in her life. And itÕs possible that part of the reason this poem spoke to her and I think it speaks to many people who have been through suffering themselves and found that the world is an uncaring place. They found that other people somehow go on with their lives, they eat their food, and walk their dogs, and go to work, and they donÕt seem to think that my catastrophe is their catastrophe. And, I think that might have been true for my mother, as well. She might have, in fact, felt, you know, IÕve been through very difficult times and I have felt alone. And I think that in some ways thatÕs the message of the poem is that we are alone in our suffering. When bad things happen to us, we are alone. And, IÕm speculating here, that perhaps part of the reason the poem spoke to her is because there were times in her life she felt alone. ItÕs possible that she was thinking about this poem because at various points in her life she was going through various challenges. Joanne: I wonder, too, I think I heard you say earlier, that, you know, you may have encountered this poem in one way as a young person and now, years later, you may revisit the poem in a new way. Shankar: Yeah, so I think in some ways, IÔve lived a somewhat curious life. Which is, I think, many young people start out being very idealistic in their teens and twenties and then become more cynical as they grow older. And, in some ways, I think IÕve had something of the reverse happen in my life. I think I may have been more cynical in my teens and twenties and the idea that we live in an uncaring, unfeeling world may have aligned better with the way that I saw the world when I was twenty-two or twenty-five. And, I think a couple decades on, itÕs not that I donÕt believe that the world can be an uncaring place, I think it often is. But I do think I see many examples of people acting heroically. One of the things that underlines this for me, is that a couple of years ago on Hidden Brain we started recognizing people that had helped us build the show. And we had this little segment at the end of the show called ÒUnsung Hero,Ó and so we would just thank janitors, and chefs, an Uber driver that took us somewhere. And, of course, once you start doing this, once you start thinking about the people who are unsung heroes in your life, all of us recognize that, in fact, there are thousands of them. Literally, you cannot thank all the unsung heroes in your life because there are so many whose helping hands have allowed you to get to where you are today. And so, a couple years ago we started a spin-off podcast called ÒMy Unsung Hero.Ó ItÕs now distributed on NPRÕs All Things Considered on Monday afternoons. And it has these very short-form stories, two to three minute long stories, of people describing a time when they were in trouble and someone came to their assistance. So contra Auden, these are people describing moments when they were, in fact, falling into the ocean and the plowman, in fact, dropped what he was doing to try and save the child, or the ship turned around to try and save the child. And, I think whatÕs wonderful about these stories is they are wonderfully heartwarming stories, theyÕre beautiful stories, they make you realize there is good in other people. But I think the most powerful thing that comes from this project that I have seen is that when people hear these stories of everyday generosity and heroism, it prompts them to say: what can I do where I can become an unsung hero in someone elseÕs life? It might be a small action that I am doing, but the small action that I am doing can actually make a big difference in someone elseÕs life. Because thatÕs what you see over and over again in these stories. The people recollecting these stories are the people for whom the good deed is being done. But very often, the person doing the good deed is not really going way out of their way to help. Sometimes they are. But very often what they are doing is small, but because itÕs coming at a time of great need, it makes an enormous difference in the life of a person. And I think that these stories remind people that as we go through our days, there are small things that we can do that could make a world of difference to other people. Abram: You know, your comments here, make me think of one of the thingÕs Joanne and I have often said is to imagine the narrative position of the speaker as they go into the poem itself. And one of the things thatÕs striking, is you talk about how this poem presents a world in which weÕre fundamentally alone, and the speaker seems to be fundamentally alone in the museum looking at the image. And I just wonder what a different form of poem would have emerged if Auden had been with a friend looking at this painting. And the reason I say that is because, yes, this is written one year before the outbreak of World War II, and that seems to be on the horizon in this poem itself, but it was also written one year before Auden has this almost mystical experience of friendship and writes the extraordinary poem about friendship and how in the midst ofÊ communal friendship fears lay down and go to sleep. And heÕs just one year away from both of these extraordinary events in his life.Ê Shankar: Yeah, and I think if you look at many poems of Auden, they have an immense generosity of spirit, and I think thatÕs part of his genius as a writer. Which is heÕs capturing many different facets of human nature. I canÕt remember which poem this was but he has this famous line from another poem where he says: what if starts should burn with a passion for us we could not return, if equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me. And again, thatÕs a wonderful meditation of what it means to be a friend, what it means to be a lover, what it means to be a partner, or a parent. Where youÕre actually asking first not what can the world do for me, but what can I do for someone else.Ê Joanne: Wow. That is, oh, my god, IÕm so moved by that. With all that weÕve discussed and thought about, I wonder if we could bring that to a second reading of the poem. Would you be willing to read it a second time? Shankar: I would. And, I have to say that, in some ways, IÕve been critical of Auden in this conversation. And in some ways, thatÕs complete at odds with how much I admire his work. So, if there are Auden fans out there, please know that I am one of you. *laughter* Let me read it again. [Reads poem] Abram: So good. Diaz: Yeah. Abram: To learn more about AudenÕs poem you can visit our website at poetryforallpod.com Joanne: And thank you to Curtis Brown Ltd. for granting us permission to read this poem today. Abram: If you donÕt already subscribe to Poetry for All, please do and please write us, and review us, and let us know how weÕre doing. Joanne: And to learn more about Shankar VedantamÕs podcast Hidden Brain, please subscribe to his podcast and listen to it. IÕll be quite honest with you, Shankar, your podcast has gotten me through so many, everything from happy jogs to sad jogs, to high points in my life, to low points in my life. And I feel like even though we had not met before today, your voice and your sensibility have been on my mind for years now, and it brings me so much joy to have this conversation with you. So, thank you so much for joining us today. Shankar: Thank you, Joanne. ThatÕs very kind of you to say. IÕm really moved by what you just said. And, Abram, thank you for a wonderful conversation today. Abram: Thank you. Joanne: Thank you.