Jeff Holmes: uncertainty

Transcript context

…There’s a number of recent books about early 20th-century intellectuals and their love lives. I reviewed them on MR. Those were just fun, and you don’t have to read all of it. You can just pick out figures you’re interested in. There’s one of them — it’s about what different top central European thinkers were doing, often with their love lives, right before World War I broke out. There should be more books like that. It brings things to life. It helps you appreciate. It makes it vivid. You get some sense of what might have actually motivated them. It’s like if you read the letters, Heidegger and Hannah Arendt — a very strange romance. He’s this Nazi, really, and she’s Jewish. It’s a fraught romance, but there was a really deep, electrifying connection between the two as well. Of course, you should read that stuff. This is a very Tyler book. I don’t know if you’ve invented a new genre there, but the reason this came up is, you spoke positively of a book called Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages. Oh yes, that’s a good example. Yes.…

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