... on an American university campus?

Higher education.

Higher education is the education in the higher things, at least in theory.

It's the place to ask the big questions, the biggest questions about God, about sex, about love, about meaning, about life.

You know, questions that may not have answers, but the asking, the active pursuit in asking is enough of a meaning.

And I think that maybe, maybe higher education has become a place where it's a little bit less, uh, friendly to larger questions like that, just as it is less friendly in the culture at large to be asking larger questions like that.

Clearly obsessions for the very real writer himself.

I think increasingly we are confronted by an informational environment where we don't know what is concocted by AI or what is propaganda, what is point of view, what is advertising, what is discourse.

So I'm going to ask you what you mean by that.

Yeah, sure.

So with Homeland Elegies, I kind of had a sense that something had changed in the reader, the ability to focus and concentrate.

And that fragmenting narrative was going to be essential.

But what was the ordering principle? And so Instagram struck me as a great way of thinking about it because Instagram is a kind of unifying platform that allows you to look at pictures of sunsets and recipes and selfies and...

quotes from Nietzsche and book reviews and it all makes sense because it's all ordered.

So in Homeland Elegies, there was this continuity of the staging of the self that is a kind of Instagram feed in which you get this repository of things, wines and landscapes and sex and all kinds of stuff, Trump, whatever.

yep

And what happens when they surface?

Tess, I mean, the question is so beautifully articulated, I'm not sure there's an answer.

You've answered the question in asking it as beautifully as you have.

I wanted to represent the rich braid of experience, personal, collective, and the way in which our, as you said, what our forebears have lived lives on in us.

unknown unknown to us in many ways shaping us in many ways i wanted to depict all of that without there being a without reducing any aspect of the experience to any one thing Because I think our lives are made of these multitudes, these pluralities that move us.

And what the ordering logic of it is, is not necessarily a category.

It isn't a category.

And I wanted to ask what your, what you think constitutes greatness in a person.

And so I wanted to ask you about this idea of epigenetics, ancestral trauma, the way energies, individual and collective, live in us subterraneally, and what happens when they surface.

Tess, I mean, the question is so beautifully articulated, I'm not sure there's an answer.

You've answered the question in asking it as beautifully as you have.

I wanted to represent the rich braid of experience, personal, collective, and the way in which our, as you said, what our forebears have lived lives on in us.

Unknown, unknown to us in many ways, shaping us in many ways.

I wanted to depict all of that without reducing any aspect of the experience to any one thing.

Because I think our lives are made of these multitudes, these pluralities that move us.

And I wanted to ask what you're, what you think constitutes greatness in a person.

But how did you come out of that experience of being an outsider, of being the other, with this sense of very positive, like optimism and curiosity? Yeah.

I think it's a great question.

It's probably the central question in my life.

Like, I don't fully understand.

I mean, one thing I would say is that I think my father... was a very unusual sort of person, very, very larger than life.

And someone who was a natural center.

He was one of the world's foremost electrophysiologists for two generations and built a medical practice after being in academic cardiology that was the largest cardiology practice in the state of Wisconsin.

And I was curious in your own life, if you had a soul box, what's something that would be in it that would help provide you some inspiration when you feel low?

It just doesn't feel authentic to me," or, or h- have there been ad- advantages and disadvantages to, uh, this spiritual sense that's not tied to an institutionalized religion?

I mean, it's such a, it's such a beautiful and cutting question.

Um, I don't know.

I, I, I think I'm trying to live by an empirical ethic, an ethos of being attentive to my experience, being attentive to those who've written about their experiences, trying to accumulate whatever wisdom over time that I can, recognizing that they are making connections both which I value and others which I don't understand.

I don't wanna take anything on faith, because to me, faith is not about an object.

It's about an orientation.

I think I put it in the, in The Atlantic essay.

Describe some of that and what it means to you.