This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
I don’t know how to hold all the feelings, even all the thoughts I should have in a day. Right now, the emergency is here, and the kids need help with their homework. I have friends who have fallen terribly ill and others who have just seen their test results come back clear. I spend days covering efforts to rip health care from people and torch the global economy, and then I’m supposed to go to a birthday party. I look down at my phone at smoldering ruins in Ukraine and Gaza and Sudan, and then I look up into a spring day.
I know on some level this has always been true, that we are just more or less alive to it at different times, but I guess I’m feeling more alive to it right now. More overwhelmed by it right now. More curious about how to keep myself open to it right now.
And then I ran into this unusually beautiful book that’s all about this experience. It’s called “Lost & Found.” It’s by Kathryn Schulz, a writer at The New Yorker.
The book is structured around a loss, that of her father, and around a finding: that of finding and falling in love with her partner. And then it’s this really moving meditation on the way it’s all connected. The way that “we live with both at once, with many things at once — everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything.
It seemed worth a conversation.
Ezra Klein: Kathryn Schulz, welcome to the show.
Kathryn Schulz: I’m delighted to be here. Thanks so much.
I want to start by having you tell me a bit about your father. Where did he come from?
What a wonderful question to begin with, because it has these two valences: the practical matter of where he came from and the mystifying question of where any human being in all their wonderful specificity comes from.
In the case of my father, both answers are a little complicated. His mother had fled the shtetl in Poland when it was clear that the shadow of the Second World War was creeping ever further across Poland. She came from a family of 12.
They had the resources to get one of them to safety, and they chose their youngest daughter, who was my grandmother. And indeed, her parents and most of her siblings subsequently perished in Auschwitz. She gets herself to Tel Aviv.
My father is born, and then at a very young age he is sent away from his mother. He was sent to live on a kibbutz and spent a few years alone there, and his father vanishes or dies — we don’t know. My grandmother remarries, and after the war, their family — in a truly unusual trajectory, when half of global Jewry in its terrible decimated and refugee status is trying to get to the Holy Land — my father and his family flee Tel Aviv and go, of all places in the world, to Germany. [Chuckles.]
So my father left Tel Aviv at about 7 years old and spent ages 7 to 12 in Germany. Then finally the family obtained refugee visas and wound up in Detroit, which is where he then spent his teenage years.
You have a beautiful passage about your father being on the boat, coming to America and trying to conceive of how much turmoil and loss he had already experienced. Tell me a bit about how much dislocation he’d seen before the age of 12.
Just shocking amounts, really. There was the contextual dislocation of my father being a Jew born in 1941, so all around him what should have been whole, vast branches of family trees are just being hewed off viciously, and whole communities are being leveled and destroyed. There was this kind of background dislocation attendant upon every Jew born in that era.
But also, quite specifically, he was born essentially a stranger in a strange land. In 1948, when my father’s family left Israel — or I should say left Palestine, it was still Palestine — it was effectively a war zone. And indeed, an uncle who was traveling with him in the caravan to Haifa, to leave at the port there, was shot and killed in the car, with my father in the car in the back seat when it happened.
There was a kind of omnipresent violence and insecurity that characterized his young life that is just shocking for me to contemplate, in part because he then dedicated his adult life to providing for his children the stability he just absolutely did not have growing up.
I read stories like this. I’ve been reading “Melting Point,” which is a different, very interesting, kaleidoscopic history of this era for Jewish people. But I was also reading “Wolf Hall,” where everybody is endlessly dying of tuberculosis.
I think of the modesty of the things I try to protect my children from now — the things that upset me if they happen to them — and then the extremism of the experience of every generation of humanity, including many people alive today. It’s hard to imagine how you go through that and just keep going. And yet people did — and do.
Your father is a person who has watched his uncle get murdered in the car, next to him. What kind of person does he become?
My father became the kind of person about whom you would never guess the quantity of tragedy that lay in his past. You would never guess that his whole family had been decimated by the Holocaust, that he had all of this grief and loss and violence at every stage of his life.
My father was ebullient. He was joyful. He was incredibly witty. He was shockingly brilliant. My dad spoke, I think, eight languages. Basically, English was the last. I like to think I’m a reasonably articulate person, but my father could talk me under the table. He just was beautifully gifted with languages.
And he was fundamentally generous of spirit. His response to the privations of his life was to live as generous a life as he could, both with material means but also with his joy, with his intellect, with his energy. His happiness lay in sharing it with the world.
Do you understand his temperament as an act of denial or an act of acceptance?
What an interesting question. I’ve never been asked that before. I suppose I understand his temperament mostly as a great gift.
I’m not trying to deny my father the credit he deserves. I know my father made a great many decisions about the kind of life he wanted to live and the kind of man he wanted to be, including in ways that changed over the course of my life.
I saw him actively become a more patient man. Patience did not naturally run strong in him — nor in me, for that matter — and I saw him make choices about equilibrium and patience.
But in some fundamental way, I don’t think my father was ever in denial about the experiences that shaped him. He didn’t speak about them in great detail until I was an adult myself. But he certainly never pretended away the past.
Conversely, he didn’t speak of himself as who he was because he had been forged in the flames of disaster. I don’t think he valorized suffering as the thing that made him who he was. I certainly think that he had a very acute sense of what it had meant to be a Jew in the world in the middle of the last century — and an acute sense of what it meant to be a refugee in this country.
My father had two brothers. and one of them was just a year younger than him. For all intents and purposes, he was shaped by identical forces but could not have been a more different human being. So there is something underlying, something way deep down below the choices we make or our active will in the world that is inextricable from who we become.
I think about what my grandparents did not complain much about, and what I do complain about — and what the generations younger than me seem to complain about — and our cultural attitude toward trauma and self-revelation and self-work.
I’m more of that culture than of the opposite. But I don’t look around and think we’re happier. [Chuckles.]
[Chuckles.] I think that’s absolutely right.
It makes me wonder: Are we doing the right thing in our more excavatory culture? Or is there wisdom we have lost — not that people should live in denial, but in the balance of how much we go in and how much we simply move forward?
Sure. And what is resolving versus what is dwelling upon and what aspects of our life we choose to emphasize versus downplay. There was this Greatest Generation stoicism and a valorization of never speaking about suffering.
I don’t know if that was a perfect solution. My father was an ebullient character, but his mother — my grandmother — was a deeply, deeply bitter, unhappy, volatile woman.
Heaven knows she came by those qualities honestly: Her life had been unrelentingly traumatic and tragic in ways I cannot fathom surviving.
She refused to talk about it. I tried on various occasions — so did many other people close to her. I don’t know that her life was improved by never confronting the vast sources of pain within it, at least never in any way visible to any of the rest of us.
Life is full of suffering. It’s unevenly distributed in tragic ways — I would never dispute that. But even the best and luckiest and most privileged life has an unfortunate share of suffering in it. And there are choices to be made: How much do we focus on it? How much do we dwell on it? How much do we speak of it? How do we speak of it? And how much do we pay attention to our own suffering versus the suffering of others?
I think you’re driving at something a little deeper than everyday complaining, which is a fundamental question: Do we regard ourselves as strong and — this is such an overused word right now — “resilient” and able to overcome? Do we dwell on what is going well or what we hope to do? On our aspirations, on our motives, on our goals? Or do we get excessively mired in what has been done to us or ways that we’ve been wronged?
I don’t pretend to know the answer. And I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t speak about trauma and upset. As I said, I think it was a great revolution in our culture that people have permission to do so. But I share the sense that something was slightly lost in these generations. I mean, my father spent decades not really saying all that much about both a fascinating and also unquestionably disruptive, upsetting and traumatic childhood.
I guess I’m also driving at something else. What moved me quite deeply in your book is its attention to suffering and loss. There’s something about being open to it — versus pushing it away — that I think is pretty subtle but feels very deep. Neither of those is denial.
A lot of your book is about the time you spent with your father in the hospital as he was passing away. You have this line about hospitals where you say — and I’m truncating your quote a bit, but I like this part: In an I.C.U., you are as aware of the brevity of life and the great looming precipice of eternity. Yet at the same time, you’re basically stuck in an airport.
There’s this coexistence of the banal and the profound. What were those days like for you?
Deadly dull. When nothing is happening — which is a lot of the time when you have someone in an I.C.U. with a mysterious set of failing bodily systems — much of your time is spent doing absolutely nothing.
Much of your time is spent waiting for someone who has the faintest idea of what’s going on to come and talk to you, which inevitably happens in the 10 minutes you decide you’re finally going to get a cup of coffee.
They felt long. They felt repetitive. They of course had this specter of fear always on the edges of them, because it’s not like I knew my father was dying the whole time. At some point that became clear, but for a lot of the time it wasn’t clear at all.
I will say — and this is so much of what this book is about — sometimes they felt a little bit like a gift. It was this bit of time carved out from the daily grind of: I’m at work, I’m on deadlines, I’m doing all these predictable things. It was like: Well, no. I am here in this hospital. Here we are as a family — my family of origin together in a room — and how wonderful. So it had moments of sweetness.
There was a bleak tedium to it, and yet it was always punctuated by the gift of family. And, of course, gratitude for the medical professionals who were trying to help us. And outside and around and infusing all of it this fear — which proved accurate — that these were my final days with my dad.
I visited a friend in a hospital recently. On one level, this felt like the smallest possible reaction, but it also felt very true. I found myself thinking, because she had been there a while: I wish you could be somewhere more beautiful for this terrible thing you’re going through. I wish — as you are hurting — and as you are in this experience — that it didn’t have to be here.
That feels like its own level of cruelty.
I think that’s often true, and I think many people experience it that way. This longing people still have today to die at home and the resistance to entering various kinds of care settings — it’s not, I don’t think, just stubbornness or even fear about being warehoused in an institution or no one will come visit you or this kind of thing. It is a real sense that much of what makes life meaningful is absent from these places. And there is a cruelty — at the end of life, of all times — to not be confronting beauty.
I don’t know how much of it he could take in, but I’ll never forget turning on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in my father’s hospital room. He loved music, and he loved classical music, and the urge to fill this incredibly sterile space with something awe inspiring and overwhelming in its beauty was overwhelming within us in that moment. We recited poetry for the same reason.
And I want to be incredibly clear: I’m profoundly grateful to the medical team who took care of my father at that moment and many others. I don’t mean to suggest there’s not a reason these places are the way they are and that acts of incredible courage and grace and beauty don’t happen there. They do, every single day. But when you are there every single day for a long period of time, you also feel their emotional thinness.
Life is so abundant. We’ll talk about abundance, I hope, at some point here, but life is so rich and wonderful and varied —
Not abundance as we mean it on my podcast. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] Well, sure. But so much of that is forcibly kept at bay in a hospital. And you’re right: One wants more for the sick and the dying.
I’d like to ask you to read a passage. It’s one of my favorites in your book. It’s on Page 6.
Sure.
For a while after my father died, I could not stop seeing the world as it really is, marked everywhere by the evidence of past losses and the imminence of future ones. This was not because his death was a tragedy. My father died peacefully at 74, tended throughout his final weeks by those he loved most. It was because his death was not a tragedy; what shocked me was that something so sad could be the normal, necessary way of things. In its aftermath, each individual life seemed to contain too much heartbreak for its fleeting duration. History, which I had always loved, even in its silences and mysteries, suddenly seemed like little more than a record of loss on an epic scale, especially where it could offer no record at all. The world itself seemed ephemeral, glaciers and species and ecosystems vanishing, the pace of change as swift as in a time lapse, as if those of us alive today had been permitted to see it from the harrowing perspective of eternity. Everything felt fragile, everything felt vulnerable; the idea of loss pressed in all around me, like a hidden order to existence that emerged only in the presence of grief.
I think it’s the lines that begin and end that — that you could not stop seeing the world as it really is, that there is this hidden order to existence that emerges only in the presence of grief — which stopped me a bit short, which feel true and which gets a bit to our conversation earlier about denial. Tell me about that sense of this as a more honest perspective of the world.
It’s so funny. Is it a more honest perspective of the world? It is certainly accurate. Loss is omnipresent. We will die. The people we love will die. The things we build, in the grand scheme of things — even in the medium scheme of things — are relatively transient and fleeting.
There are times in life when the omnipresence and the scale of this loss do become profoundly visible to us — at least to me. I think a lot about scale, and if you dwell on the scale of the world, let alone the scale of the cosmos, our lives are stunningly short.
They seem, or can seem, stunningly insignificant. And this sense that everything around us is terrifyingly fragile is accurate, right? You can’t look at the grand sweep of things and not realize how tenuous our foothold in this world is, and how quickly we will be not merely lost but forgotten.
I had this arresting moment when I realized I could barely tell you my great-grandparents’ names. I mean, that is three generations — the blink of an eye. But so it goes. And everything we love, everyone we love — we are going to have to confront the devastating loss of literally all of them.
That’s the bleak version, and it’s real. I don’t think it’s the whole story. There are ways to try to hold the bifocal vision of that kind of loss and why our lives are nonetheless not insignificant or at least not meaningless. But certainly in hard moments — and I think, for people who struggle with depression or who have a truly unfair burden of grief in their lives — it can seem like the only truth about existence.
You call it bleak — and there’s a dimension of it where it is very bleak and very frightening. And the people I know who abide in it often — I don’t want to say they don’t find it bleak, but that they also describe a certain beauty that comes from noticing it.
A friend of mine who lost his mother not long ago always tells me with some real sadness that time doesn’t heal wounds — it just makes everything fade. And I watched him grieve the diminishment of his grief and that there was beauty in seeing things as they more really were: the interconnection of life, the fragility of it.
I think one reason we turn away from these things is it feels annihilating to look at them. But then the people I know who are looking at them, there’s a connection to something very profound that seems to abide there, as well.
Oh, no question about it. Grief is an amazing lens. Its capacity for sharp focus is incredible. And it is true that there were moments in the depths of grieving or preparing to grieve my father that the world had never seemed so beautiful to me or so much like a gift.
There’s a reason we honor death so much and why so many generations of philosophers have regarded studying death as the key to figuring out how to live a good life. The incredible thing about death is it forces you to recognize that you are alive — and that it is not a permanent condition. We have this moment — and no other known or given moments — to relish that fact and to savor it and to be grateful for it.
I write a lot toward the end of this book about attention and the gift of attention. I do think some kinds of grief can turn us inward and away from the world and obliterate attention in troubling ways. But I think very often grief and the awareness of the inevitability of death truly do heighten our sense of attention and our capacity to look at the world with gratitude and admiration.
I don’t know what other force could do that. I mean, that’s tragic. I wish there were something else — maybe some illegal drugs I haven’t tried. But otherwise, I don’t know what else can make us so profoundly in awe of and grateful for life.
It’s a question about attention that brought me to this book. My experience of the last couple of years — it has been particularly acute the last couple of months, and this has been both a personal and at times a very political experience — is this feeling of trying to hold the extremes and give everything its attention at the same time: the loss and the horror, the beauty and the elation, and also just the normalcy. I’ll sit here for a day and I’ll cover deportations to El Salvador and torture prisons. Then I’ll go home, and you just have to make dinner and read books.
I’m sure somebody has the attentional capacity to hold these extremes, but I don’t feel like I do. I have never quite felt this overwhelm of the system.
It felt like something you were exploring in this book because you also meet your partner in a similar time. It feels like you should be able to settle on an emotional interpretation of a moment, that the affect of the story should be more or less one thing. Which of course is not ever true. We’re just more or less alert to it.
Yes, absolutely. To be honest, it’s actually the reason I wrote this book. The moment that I started thinking seriously about what it was like to have experienced those two quite momentous life experiences in extremely short succession, short enough that I was still falling in love while my father was dying and found myself grappling with these extraordinarily different emotions at the same time. Speaking of attention, that’s what got my attention.
I thought: Well, this is interesting. This actually is the fundamental nature of life. We are always dealing with more than one thing at once. Sometimes they’re profoundly contradictory, sometimes they’re just deeply unrelated. And yet somehow we have to spread our attention among them.
Then we got swept headlong into the pandemic, which was, for many of us, an experience of living inside a lot of entirely irreconcilable realities simultaneously. Suddenly you were working from home, and that was amazing because you didn’t have a two-hour commute every day, and you got to be around your kids all the time.
But also: Oh, my gosh, you were around your kids all the time, and you couldn’t get any work done. It was so amazing to watch them grow and have time around them, but also they made you crazy. Or, more tragically, people around you were getting sick and were suffering, and in this weird way, your family system was thriving.
Everyone was dealing with these profoundly contradictory experiences — and of course, that was not actually about the pandemic. The pandemic brought into focus a fundamental feature of existence, which is that we are always inundated by profoundly clashing realities. And the question is: How much attention do we pay to them?
You are in a position right now where you have to pay attention to it. You’re covering these deportations and going home to your family — and you have to live in both of those realities.
But even in the most peaceable of times, the extent to which we are confronting the world beyond our own immediate reality is a choice. There’s always boundless suffering. There’s always boundless beauty.
It really is a matter of: Where do we look? And it’s tough. You both have to do both at once — and can’t do both at once. The question of what kind of balance you strike is infinitely interesting to me.
I read this book and wondered about the quality of your actual attention. You write here — and in your journalism, too — as if you’re able to tune your attention to very deep levels of experiences but also somehow to the cosmic and geological contexts in which those experiences are taking place. You zoom between time scales very smoothly.
There’s a passage you have on finding — and the various forms it takes — that I think is quite beautiful. Do you mind reading it?
I’d be happy to.
Finding, like losing, is an enormous category, bursting with seemingly unrelated contents, from gold doubloons to God. We can find things like pencils and couch cushions and things like new planets in distant solar systems and things that aren’t things at all: inner peace, old elementary school classmates, the solution to a problem. We can find things that were never missing, except from our own lives (as when we find a new job or a hole-in-the-wall barbecue joint), and we can find things so deeply hidden that almost no one else thought to look for them (as when we find glial cells or quarks).
Do you really experience the world this way? Or is that a thing that happens as a matter of craft and writing and reflection?
I love it when people ask me questions I’ve not been asked, and that one actually does feel core to who I am in this interesting way. I think I experience the world that way.
I love the bigness of the world. My most profoundly peaceful and interesting place is up on top of a mountain where I can see really far. And that’s not just because I happen to love mountains, although I do. I am soothed and intrigued by the experience of the longest possible view. I’m profoundly drawn to questions of scale.
We human beings have a very unique situation: We are finite creatures — to the best of my knowledge — in an infinite universe. And that’s a troubling position to be in. I’m endlessly interested in it. It has all kinds of implications in our day-to-day reality, in our whole existence as a species. That is our context. And some part of my brain, for whatever reason, is always looking upward and outward. I think it’s native to my brain.
I don’t know how helpful it is in a day-to-day way for these kinds of balancing acts you’re talking about, which are endlessly hard. But for good or real, I do think that’s just how I look at the world.
Is there an experience that comes to mind for you recently, where you were looking at something small and you saw something big in it — or big and you saw something small in it?
Sure. I’m going to tell a story that sounds like it can’t possibly be true, and I swear it is.
What you need to know by way of context for this story is that a year or so ago, my partner and I bought the house across the street from the farm where she was born and raised, and where her parents still live. We’ve been gradually renovating it ever since then and were incredibly excited to move in and to be near family and, frankly, near more child care.
We finally move in, and I’m reveling in this beautiful new home as we settle in. Then — this is only a week ago — my daughter, who’s now 3½ — we have these beautiful fields outside of our house, and she wanders off into the field and returns with a stalk of wheat and says: Look, Mama. So I’m thinking: Oh, she found a stalk of wheat — fun! Children pick up everything, right? Clovers, coins, anything muddy, tarantulas — whatever they can find.
So she hands me this stalk of wheat, and I’m thinking: Oh, how sweet, she gets to live in this beautiful setting where the outdoors is full of so many wonderful little things for her to study. Then she looks at me very seriously and says: Mama, we should use this wheat to make bread for people who don’t have any.
It’s just one of those moments as a parent, where, on the one hand, you’re just so in love with your child. You think: Who made this remarkable mind?
I’m sitting there thinking she found a pretty flower or something, and there she is apparently thinking about the poor and privation and need. So right away my sense of the scale of what we were talking about just wildly shifted.
But also, to be honest, right alongside feeling overwhelming awe for her, I felt so morally indicted. I am literally in the middle of reveling in my pretty new kitchen, and then suddenly, I’m confronted with real hunger in the world, and I’m thinking: Why do I have this beautiful backsplash? What have I done here? My 3-year-old has more moral clarity than I do about how we should spend our money and our time and what actually matters in life.
So, yes, in a wonderful way, I feel like my world is full of discoveries that seem small and blossom out into the enormous. Or seem enormous and then have some kind of bearing on small, practical things, like how to be a family and how to raise children. It’s often incredibly humbling. And sometimes it’s very funny, and sometimes it’s very moving. In that case, it was all the above.
There’s this way of thinking about these questions where it really feels like the goal is to live in full awareness of the fragility of life, the horrors, the happiness. And then it also feels that if you really did that, how would you ever get anything done? If you were really, fully present in the beauty of each moment, the ephemerality.
I go and play soccer with my 3- and 6-year-olds most nights right now. On the one hand, I know I’m not enjoying it the way I want to be. I know this moment is more beautiful than the way my tired self is experiencing it, who’s also thinking about bedtime and: Are we going to be late for dinner?
I want to be more of the monk. And then you probably understand the way that the constant compartmentalization and filtration of life is adaptive to moving through it.
Absolutely. I mean, even the monks are not that monkish.
There’s a wonderful body of literature about distraction in these spaces that are supposed to be sanctuaries from all the pressures of the outside world and focus the mind. And you’re meant to just think purely about God. If it were easy, we would all be monks, and the monks would be better at being monks. It’s incredibly difficult.
They usually don’t have kids. [Chuckles.]
And they don’t have kids. Which are — appropriately, I would never say a distraction. They are the essence. They’re the thing we are meant to be paying the most attention to. And sometimes that attention is profound and existential, and sometimes it’s: Sweetheart, go put your underwear on. [Laughs.] A lot of parenting is just pragmatics.
I suppose we should aspire to be in touch with the beauty and wonderful givenness of every moment. Aspiration does not actually have to be reality. I think aspiring probably is why 3.5 percent of the time we have the transcendent experience of: Here I am, curled up in bed with my daughter, reading her a bedtime story, and nothing will ever be so profoundly sweet as this. You feel it deep, deep inside you, and you know you will always retain it, and the other 97 percent of the time you won’t. And that’s probably OK.
The amazing thing about these moments of awe — at the universe, at life, at what we have — is they are so potent, you don’t actually need that many of them. So I don’t think you can give up the goal of trying to have more of them or recognize them. But I don’t think we need that many of them to sustain our souls.
Since finishing the writing of the book, you’ve had two children.
That’s right.
So much of the book is about being found. What have you found?
Oh, my gosh — everything, in the most wonderful ways. For me, the joy of writing about both finding and losing was the capaciousness of the categories. And nothing is more true when you have children.
What have I found? I found the particular hair tie that has yellow daisies on it that my daughter loves, that vanished for a month, and she’s thrilled to come across it again. And I have found resources of meaning and patience I had no idea existed prior to this. It is the whole scale of discovery.
As a basic reflection on parenting, I’ve never been so grateful for anything in my life. I was a little bit older when our first daughter was born, and to be honest, I had kind of given up — I don’t want to say given up — I had resigned myself to the possibility that I might never have children of my own and had made a deep peace with: The world is full of children who need love and who are a delight to me, and I’m related to some of them. That is its own beauty, and it can be sufficient if it has to be sufficient. And then I did have children of my own.
So much is written about all the things that are difficult about parenthood, and I am not going to sit here and diminish those things. But my overwhelming experience of parenting is just delight.
I’ll never forget when my first daughter was born, my partner and I had this moment. We were getting ready to leave the hospital and we both were like: So we can just take her home? That’s insane. You gave us a human being? That’s incredible.
And to be clear, my partner grew that human being for nine months. We weren’t kidnapping her. [Laughs.]
Yes, yes. They didn’t give her to you. [Laughs.]
But it had that feeling of: Wow.
I mean, we just go home and raise these children. They are their own creatures, and having new minds to interact with feels incredible to me.
I think I’ve also found — and I feel, based on our earlier conversation about what has been lost from past generations that perhaps you’ll appreciate it — I have found a tremendous satisfaction in duty.
I can’t say that duty is something I thought about much before this. I’m not of a generation where duty, like thrift, was an obvious value. I didn’t join an institution like the military where duty is an obvious value. But I’ll tell you, no matter how tired you are, at 7:30 in the morning when your kid wakes up, you go in and you help her get dressed and you make sure she has a good breakfast.
Your kid wakes up at 7:30 in the morning?
Oh, God bless her. Yes, she does.
[Laughs.]
She has every day since she was 3½ months old. [Laughs.] The littler one, iffier.
But it is not always what you want to be doing. My No. 1 fear about parenthood is I’m so deeply not a morning person. My favorite hours to write are 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. So on some fundamental level, everything I had been doing for my entire adult life was deeply at odds with the task of parenting, which is, frankly, being up at the crack of dawn many days in a row.
And yet it’s a deep satisfaction to feel like this is what you do. You do it for yourself, you do it for your children, you do it for your partner, and you do it because you have to. And that’s a kind of liberation and a wonderfulness and a whole category of existence I found because I had children who I had never appreciated, let alone valorized before.
You said something really interesting in an email to me when we were talking about doing the show. You were talking about parenting, that where you’re looking matters so much. And it is so hard to look both near and far at the same time. Can you say more about that?
Oh, yes. I think that actually a real imperative of parenting — and of being human — is you are present for those around you who need you most. You provide stability and security. And you find hope because actually, it’s crucial to foster hope for the next generation.
It’s very tricky. There are children the age of my children whose parents vanished overnight, and that’s horrifying to me. We are living in trying times, let us say. That said, again, depending on where you look, all times are trying times. There’s never been a shortage of suffering in the world.
But I am troubled by forms of suffering that are happening all around us now, and I feel complicit in some of them. I want to be giving them my undivided attention and not ignoring them. Even when it’s not obvious to me how I might positively intervene in them, I certainly don’t want to just pretend they don’t exist.
Yet I still have to be joyful for my kids and goofy for my kids. Those are hard emotions to hold together all at once. And yet I find that to be a necessary and productive friction, not least because, as I said earlier, it reminds us that actually we should always live that way.
You and me, we are among the fortunate. We have the resources and the lives to even have the possibility of ignoring the suffering in the world. We should be grateful for everything that reminds us not to and reminds us we should experience this kind of friction in our lives all the time.
One of my most inconvenient beliefs about the world is that we now know too much about it. And that the human mind is not meant to be stretched over this much threat and danger and tragedy at all times.
I work in the news. My show is part of this dynamic I’m about to describe, but the news can sometimes be an engine for finding and bringing you whatever is going to most upset you that is happening literally anywhere on Earth at that exact moment.
It’s not that it’s not, on some level, good to know — I don’t want to go to the point where we never know about it — but I often think that probably the healthy medium was to be able to pick up a newspaper once a day and find out about terrible things happening elsewhere and important things happening elsewhere and sometimes, but less often, wonderful things happening elsewhere.
As opposed to being with your kids in the park, and your phone buzzes, and it’s just something terrible that you cannot affect. Not even happening to anybody you know. You definitely don’t have power over it. But somebody somewhere thought it would grab you to know about it.
And it’s strange. It both makes you aware of suffering, but also it has some other quality, some numbing and exhausting quality that is not healthy.
I think that’s almost certainly true. It’s so interesting you said you were reading “Melting Point.” There’s an arresting moment in there when one of the sources in the book who we’re hearing from just talks about how you used to read one newspaper and you’d get 20 minutes of news in the evening. Or maybe you’d get 10 minutes of newsreels before a movie, and that was it.
I put down the book when I read that, and I thought about it for a long time, because there was not a shortage of news in the world. This was in the middle of the Second World War. And she goes on to say something I found equally arresting and highly related, which is: The world seemed much bigger and more mysterious then.
So I think you’re right — although I also think it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Because in this tragic way, I feel like we simultaneously know more about the world and less about our own communities in a certain sense.
Oh, yes.
We have traded bits of news from all over — much of it tragic, some of it just inflammatory — for a deep and connected knowledge of our own immediate communities. And that does feel tragic and upsetting to me. And this kind of absolute flattening of distinctions.
So I’ll make a hard turn here. I want to ask you about happiness, and I’d like to do that by asking you to read a short passage from your book, which is on Page 174.
Happiness routinely gets not only less attention but also more criticism than its opposite number. Contemporary thinkers sometimes dismiss it as a shallow fixation of modern life, but to condemn it on those grounds is to mistake it for proximate but different phenomena — either superficial forms of itself, like amusement and pleasure, or superficial means of trying to achieve it, from substance abuse to so-called retail therapy.
I like this idea that happiness does not get enough attention or theorizing. So if it’s not these proximate forms — amusement and pleasure — to you, what is it?
I can’t believe you’re asking me to define happiness on the fly on your podcast, Ezra Klein. What do I think happiness is? [Laughs.]
Well, you know it when you feel it. I think that happiness is a state of profound appreciation for what you have in that exact moment. I guess if I were going to generate a spontaneous definition, that’s what it would be.
I was moved to write about it because I was lucky enough to find myself extremely happy, and I knew I was going to be telling at least two kinds of stories in this book: One was about grief, and one was about love. And when you go and you survey the landscape of love stories, the vast majority of them are covert tragedies. There are love stories that get told because they either end in divorce or premature death, or they darken drastically over the course of telling them.
As a result, most of what we read and hear and watch of love stories is either the beginning or the ending. We get the “How did you meet?” and the falling in love and all of the shiny, exciting romance and passion at the beginning. And either it just ends there — with marriage, with getting together or having kids or there’s just the implicit or explicit happily ever after. Or we then leap ahead to the destruction and dissolution of this much-longed-for state, whether through separation or death. I found this curious because, of course, that leaves off the vast majority of most, or at least many, relationships.
When you are happily together with someone, what actually matters to you is the middle. And actually what you want to have go on and on and on is the middle. But nobody writes about the middle. There’s very little about the day-to-day happiness and texture of a happy life, which isn’t just happy.
A lot of this book is about the endless overlap and contradiction and friction in different emotions. And a lot of happiness is infused with annoyance or frustration or bad days or whatever it may be, but still somehow, fundamentally feels for us that the deep and essential name you would give to it is happiness. That was interesting to me, and I wanted to write about it.
Well, I wonder if that’s because we expect happiness to be simpler and pure. I think sometimes about periods in my life that I’m certain I will look back on as virtually perfect. That the problems were small. Nobody I loved was sick in that moment. I was surrounded by family and friends. My work was satisfying. Even as my experience of that period is often exhausted, overstretched, overscheduled, anxious.
Maybe one reason people don’t write about those middles is that the middle is always more of everything. Your description of your first kiss with your partner, which is functionally cosmic in its language, is probably going to be different than the way you experience a Tuesday, when everybody is on deadline and dinner needs to be on the table, even if you’ll probably look back on that as a beautiful period. I think we think that the feeling of it should be simpler maybe than it ends up being.
I think that’s absolutely true, but I don’t think that’s just true of happiness. I mean, yes, happiness is more than just happiness, but everything is more than just everything.
There’s this wonderful C.S. Lewis line about how you never encounter just cancer or just war or just happiness or just unhappiness. They’re always incredibly variable in the lived experience of them: There are good moments and hard times. There are hard moments and good times. We want to act like that’s the anomaly, but it’s not. It’s the actual texture of life.
In fact, I think we would probably all be happier if we recognized that happiness is not a pure experience. Love is not a pure experience. Grief is not a pure experience. All of them are always amalgamated with their opposite.
It’s so sweet, actually, your awareness that someday this will seem wonderful and easy. And sure, of course, my life and my partner’s life with two children and 17 book deadlines and whatever else may be going on is not the bliss of a first kiss — when the world suddenly seems to be opening up and this entire new path is shining before you. But I’ll tell you, the path is beautiful. And part of what we don’t pay enough attention to is the beauty of that path, of any path.
It’s what I said earlier about duty. On some level, a beautiful thing about hard moments — in marriage or in anything — is: Well, you’re doing this because you’re committed to it, even in the moments that aren’t just bliss and joy.
Do I want to take the compost out in the pouring rain as I did first thing this morning? Absolutely not. But do I want my partner to have to do it? Nope. Why shouldn’t I? Isn’t the better thing to do in this moment to man up, as we used to say, and just go do the thing?
There’s a beauty in that and a happiness and a fulfillment in it. It’s not the shiny, glossy kind, but it’s what a lot of life is made of. And I do find it possible to regard it as, I don’t want to say fun, but purposeful and meaningful.
What is different about the relationship between happiness and duty, from happiness and fun?
Well, probably happiness and duty is more sustainable. One can always be dutiful. There are always jobs to be done, work to be done, needs to be met in this world. And if you derive happiness from a sense of duty, I actually think that is an infinitely sustainable source.
It comports with my broad theory of happiness, which is: I think in our absolute worst moments, the thing that can sustain us is serving others. I really do. It’s really powerful to remember that there are other needs in the world, that other people have needs and that actually you can help meet them and ameliorate them in whatever small ways.
There’s no community on Earth that does not need your help. And it is good to get outside of your head and outside of your own misery. So if duty is part of your sense of happiness, you will never have to look far to replenish it.
Fun — I love fun. Do not get me wrong. Fun is wonderful. Fun is amazing. My family and I, we’re going to the beach this weekend, and I honestly can’t wait. In a narrowly defined sense of it, we don’t have a lot of self-evident fun right now just because we have a 3½-month-old. We have a 3-year-old.
We used to just jump in a car at the whiff of an interesting story or a fun thing to do and gallivant through the night, and that was really fun. And do I miss it? Sometimes. Of course I miss it. And in that narrowly defined way, there’s less fun in my life.
On the other hand, children are infinite fun. I mean, children are hilarious. Other than perhaps my father, I’ve never had such a consistent source of hilarity in my life as young children: They say hilarious things, they think hilarious thoughts, they do funny things, they live with a kind of glee and humor that is contagious and interesting.
I’m certainly not here to diminish the value of fun. I actually think laughing is just profoundly good for the mind and body and heart, and my kids make me do it all the time.
One thing that I really enjoyed about the book is the emphasis on the connectivity of all of these things, that part of the human experience is that you don’t get any of them all at once, and you couldn’t have any of them, in a way, without the others.
You have an interesting section on how the philosopher William James thought about our thoughts. And particularly, the connectivity between them, the shadowy substructure of our thoughts. Can you talk a bit about that?
I can.
William James was the guy who gave us this idea of the stream of consciousness: the awareness that your mind is always full of thoughts, many of them unrelated to the task at hand or whatever you’re looking at. It’s just teaming with ideas and instincts and impulses and impressions from the world around you all the time, this constant flow of thoughts in our mind. Sometimes we’re paying attention to it, sometimes we’re not, but as we all know from how difficult it is to meditate or focus or fall asleep at night, there’s always noise in our minds generating all these things.
So William James writes about the stream of consciousness, and in the middle of doing so, in this odd way, he shifts metaphors and starts talking about the thoughts in our minds as birds flying around: Sometimes they’re flying, and sometimes they perch somewhere. And he says: We only ever really pay attention to the places they perch. Which in his mind is like the nouns and the verbs and the adjectives — the really obvious things. Like, Ezra Klein, you’re a noun, you’re a bird perched somewhere. We can talk about Ezra Klein or we can talk about a rainstorm or a word like “red.” It feels like it has content for us.
There’s all this stuff that happens when the birds are flying around, which is the “and” and the “if” and the “or”: these subtle but absolutely crucial elements of our thoughts that we don’t pay attention to and yet profoundly shape what we’re able to think and what we think about and the way that we think. He says there should be a feel of “and” just as much as we have a sense of a feel for blue or cold or Ezra Klein.
That was incredibly helpful to me because I thought: Yes, that’s what I’m here to do. I’m here to try to figure out: What’s the feeling of “and”? What does this idea, this word do for us? And what’s the role that it plays in language? Which is a different way of saying: What’s the role that it plays in how we think?
Did you feel like you came to an answer to that? What is the feel of “and”?
A little bit. In distinction from every other conjunction that the English language has — “but,” “if,” “or” — all of those actually describe a necessary relationship. “If,” “this,” “then,” “that” — that’s a causal relationship. It actually tells us something about the two halves of the sentence we’re creating.
The beautiful thing about “and” is you can stick any two things together with it. They can have absolutely no relationship to each other — I give you “apples and oranges.” Or they can have every relationship to each other — “Romeo and Juliet.” Or none on Earth — “crab apples and tuxedos.”
This morning, what we’re dealing with is: We have 30 minutes to get dressed and get to the library to do a podcast with Ezra Klein, and our nephew, who’s at our house, who’s 2½, just vomited in the crib, which means there’s nowhere for him to sleep. And also, whoops, I’m ignoring a note from my editor and I need to go to the grocery store.
This is just life. And that’s before: Oh man, you open The New York Times, and Joe Biden has cancer, and people are being deported. I mean, the number of linked thoughts, experiences, demands in our days is infinite.
So part of this feeling of “and” is the sense that everything is connected to everything else. Which, I want to say, can be a really beautiful thing.
The sense that everything is connected to everything else is also the sense that we can make a difference. If indeed we are all connected, then our actions matter: They matter to each other, they matter to people far away, they matter to people we will never meet because they’re not even born yet. It’s overwhelming, but also kind of hopeful. Kind of exciting.
But there’s this other feeling that “and” has: the feeling that something is about to happen. If you’re telling me a story and you stop talking, what I’m going to say to you is: And? Meaning: What happens next? It’s almost a feeling of suspense.
“And” is this little word that propels us into the future. In that sense, it gestures toward this temporal abundance, too. That’s the William James feeling: Well, there’s always something else that we can reach beyond and connect to. There’s always something more coming down the line toward us.
So I think it is a feeling of connection, it’s a feeling of continuation, it is a feeling of abundance. All of those, to me, are fundamentally and ultimately quite hopeful feelings.
I’m struck by how much you’re talking about the feeling, in a way, of the word “and” — the way it connects things, the way it implies procession.
I guess I’m interested in the feeling of the experience. So much of the book is about holding these two extremes of experience at the same time — the loss of your father, the finding of your partner and that love — and I think that’s what I’ve been interested in.
I feel in my own attention a desire to constantly be choosing a lane of sensation or feeling: I should feel badly about things right now. I should feel good about them. As if I’m running some calculation in my head that ends with where on the sentiment scale I’m supposed to net out.
And that also some part of me realizes that’s wrong, that what I’d like to be able to do is feel different things at the same time. [Laughs.] I find that very hard to do.
I’m curious if writing this book or going through that experience or reflecting on this the way you have has made that easier, made your sense of feeling more capacious?
I don’t know if it has made it easier. It has certainly made me more aware of it. And I guess that is a kind of ease: to feel peaceful about both the necessity and sometimes the impossibility of feeling all the things at the same time. It has given me a sense of: Well, this is life, and it’s actually OK to have mixed feelings, mixed experiences.
I adore my partner, and I think she’s brilliant, and she fills my days with wisdom and humor and surprise and stability. And also we’ve been married for seven years and together for 10, and we have two kids, and sometimes we drive each other crazy or we’re frustrated or we fight.
I have a lot of peace around that, which I think is helpful. I’m like: Well, that’s not not love — that’s just part of the deal here. We feel a lot of things at once — and we should.
Sometimes it still stops me up short in good ways. I said earlier, I think it’s important to be open to the surprising feeling because I think it can trouble us morally. That’s probably a good thing.
I’m a word nerd. Of course I think about how “and” works. I actually do think it’s interesting — philosophically interesting — and profoundly related to the question of how we feel in these moments.
But of course I feel it. I feel these tensions all the time. It’s impossible to be alive and fortunate in the world today and not. It’s not: Which of these things am I supposed to be feeling? We feel them all. I think the real problem is: Which of these feelings should I act on?
Well, then let’s end on a point of word nerdery. I learned something in your book that I didn’t know, which is that the English alphabet used to end with the symbol for “and.” I was really surprised to learn that.
I was really surprised to learn that, too. I mean, talk about scale and space and time. This was true until quite recently, all the way up to the end of the 19th century: When children learned the alphabet, the procession started with A, B, C and ended X, Y, Z, &. That’s literally how they were taught the alphabet.
It’s incredible to me that piece of knowledge instilled in generation upon generation of schoolchildren could degrade in the course of less than a century, when I was coming up through school, to the point that we had no idea that it had once been part of the alphabet. But indeed it was. Which of course I found fascinating, just because: How funny that people used to learn that, and now we don’t.
But why was it part of the alphabet? We don’t spell words with the “and” sign.
I think the only answer I can reasonably provide is it actually did feel that crucial. We learned to write the alphabet so we could learn to write words, and we learn to write words so we can learn to write sentences. And actually the word “and” is the third most common word in the English language. The only ones we use more often are the article “the” and various conjugations of the verb “to be.”
But I agree, it’s very interesting. It suggests a kind of importance to the ability to make an “and,” to incorporate that into how we write down our experience of the world.
As a metaphor for what you worked with in your book and what a lot of us are working with in our lives, it struck me as quite moving.
What a beautiful idea that anything should end in “and.” That something that seems like an ending is actually an explicit reminder that there’s always more, that something else can be connected, that something else can happen next. I find it very beautiful.
And always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Oh, my gosh, I almost forgot over the course of all this. First of all, I have to say, thank you so much for always asking this question. Both because I delight in learning what people read about and because it’s just nice to know that literary culture, however embattled it might be, is still shaping our lives and our thoughts in all of these wonderful and enduring ways.
OK. My three. No. 1 — it’s so funny you mentioned that you’re reading “Wolf Hall.” I would like to encourage you and your listeners at some point to read “A Place of Greater Safety,” which is the book Hilary Mantel wrote before turning to Thomas Cromwell and his compatriots.
It is about the French Revolution. It is 800 pages long, incredibly undisciplined, absolutely unruly and wildly great to read. I also recommend it because it is fundamentally the story of three people who are trying in full sincerity to make a better nation, and instead just absolutely destroying it and destroying themselves in the process.
I don’t mean to suggest we’re on the eve of a French Revolution-style catastrophe — I certainly hope not — but it is nonetheless extraordinarily interesting reading material right now. So that’s No. 1.
No. 2 is a book that’s out this week, I believe, which is this wonderful graphic novel “Spent” by Alison Bechdel, with beautiful color artwork by her partner Holly Rae Taylor. It’s about the experience of growing up in a relatively hardscrabble family and living this marginal artistic existence and then suddenly finding yourself reasonably well-off. It’s very adjacent to these questions we’ve been discussing: How do you enjoy your life and your money and also live your values and interact with your community?
It’s very smart on the questions of what we do with our money, and our money and our morals. And it’s also just riotously funny, as all of her work is. So that’s No. 2.
And No. 3 is this book I think I’ve heard you talk about, as well. It’s also a relatively new book — and I’m partly shouting out my partner here because she was involved in the Michael Lewis project “Who Is Government?” It’s this collection of essays by these wildly different writers about government bureaucrats.
At the time that I first heard about it, I was like: I don’t really know how well a book about an anthology of essays about government bureaucrats is going to do. Tragically, it met the moment, and I can’t think of a better thing for people to be reading right now than these incredibly moving stories about what these alleged agents of the “Deep State” are actually doing with their time and doing on behalf of the American people.
So those are my three recommendations for you.
Kathryn Schulz, thank you very much.
Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to the Talbot County Free Library.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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