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(mellow music) (mellow music continues) - Good evening, and welcome to "Reading for Life."

Tonight we will be discussing the book "The Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller.

"Reading for Life" is a movement of the imagination with the purpose of growing community around a shared love of literature.

The idea is that real community begins and ends with our imaginations, and few resources are as vital to the imagination's development as works of literature.

Our presenter tonight is Michael Verde.

Michael graduated with honors from the University of Texas's Plan II Honors Program, earned a master's degree in literary studies from the University of Iowa, and a master's degree in theology from the University of Durham, England, where he graduated at the top of his international class.

He taught for 15 years at the university and college prep school levels, most recently at Indiana University, and is currently completing his PhD with a focus on literature and religion.

Michael founded "Reading for Life" in 2005.

Our guests this evening are Sally Garry and Brigette Rol.

Sally is a public health supervisor with Mower County Health and Human Services in Austin, Minnesota.

And Brigette is the library director in Lake City, Minnesota.

My name is Julie Clinefelter, and I'm the library director in Austin, Minnesota.

- Thank you Julie, and just happy that everyone is, that this day is possible.

You know, I've grown up reading mostly by myself and never imagined that there would come a day when I would have so many friends with whom I could share something that's a big pleasure for me.

And I have a feeling that that's true for a lot of readers, particularly people who would say that they read religiously.

My guess is that a lot of people live private intellectual lives, and when they attempt, say in the context of a book club, to come together and experience a kind of community around a shared passion, it is not as easy as it sounds to have a stimulating intellectual discussion with a bunch of people.

And in my experience, that's because it's not always easy to follow an insight into the depths at which these works of art invite us to follow.

There's just so many ways to be distracted.

Someone may dominate the conversation.

There may be just so many different themes on the table that none get explored in a sort of satisfactory way.

So I hope tonight and feel confident tonight that we'll be able to do something that's not easy to do, and that is to collaborate together on experience a work of art at some of the depths at which make it a great work of art.

One of the things that makes a work of art great is the integrity of the artifact.

And what I mean by that is that all of the parts, now, this is ideally, that all of the parts come together to create a whole that is larger than all the parts, and simultaneously the whole is somehow refracted.

In other words, the whole is in all the parts, and the parts are all in the whole.

And to the degree that that's true, you feel a kind of concentration and intensity that works with your imagination, that moves your imagination in ways that something less concentrated wouldn't be able to do.

So with that thought in mind, we should be able to take any piece of this play, scratch it a bit, and we should find that the entire play is somehow implicated in whatever little sliver it is that we focus on.

So I'm gonna experiment that with what seems to be, at least in my mind, an absolute non-sequitur, at least in a first pass, a phrase or a passage that you just have to say, what in the world is this doing in here?

It doesn't make sense in any sort of psychologically plausible way.

And the passage I have in mind is when Biff has entered his dad's hotel room in Boston, catches his father with The Woman, as she's referred to in the play, the woman that his father is having an affair with.

And you can imagine how uncomfortable that is.

Willy and Biff are both experiencing a kind of trauma.

The Woman's experiencing a trauma 'cause Willy's throwing her out of the room and she's not entirely clad, pretending that that's not where, pretending that she just came over to borrow the shower.

In any case, she's on her way out of the room.

You can imagine a less sort of comfortable moment for father and son.

And the woman stops, turns to Biff, and she says, "Are you football or are you baseball?"

Now, if you could imagine something that doesn't make sense psychologically in whatever quote, real world, that we would fantasize the play was somehow reflecting, who would imagine that question in that moment?

So either Arthur Miller has kind of goofed and thrown in a sort of random query that doesn't make any sense with the rest of the play, or he hasn't, and the rest of the play is somehow implicated in that particular line.

Now, did you also experience it as kind of strange?

Or what was your thoughts about that?

- I just thought, this woman doesn't have a sense of what's going on, or not necessarily what's going on, but the severity of what's going on.

And so she's just trying to make polite conversation with this kid, and it's just not working out for her.

- Okay.

All right, great.

- Yeah, I agree.

I think that was kind of my thought too.

I was like, wow, she's really missing, she's missing what's going on here, 'cause there's obviously something fairly big going on for the kid at least, and Willy also.

- I think that makes perfect psychological sense, and I also think it shows how inclined we are as readers to imagine a context in which that passage would make sense.

In other words, it's sort of like we gotta sort of make up for whatever Arthur Miller may have failed to do and make this make sense.

And I want to propose that that's, one, a completely understandable instinct.

But two, it also reveals a kind of movement that I want to bring to everyone's attention tonight as sort of the key to breaking in to great works of literature.

Based on what you said, Brigette and Julie, my guess is you were trying to say, how would this phrase make sense in some real world that I might find myself in?

In other words, how would I translate this into a real world experience so that it would make some kind of, be psychologically plausible?

Which tells me that in one sense, the way that you're reading is imagining the play as reflecting some world outside of the play.

Completely understandable.

That's how we read virtually everything.

We pick up the newspaper, we read something and we think, okay, is this true, because it actually happened off the newspaper.

What I want to propose is that works of literature actually make a kind of sense if we don't imagine what's going on off the page and turn our attention back into the work of art and ask ourselves essentially this, how does this phrase or these words relate to the rest of the words in this play?

So if you're following with me, instead of moving from the play out to some real world, I'm proposing that we take these words and turn back into the play as if the play is the most real world that we'll ever know.

In other words, that these words are real as a work of art.

That is kind of counterintuitive, but I just wanna put that on the table, and we'll revisit that, because that's a kind of move of the imagination that will illuminate depths of the play that would never come into at least conscious visibility if we don't do that.

So here's an example of why that's the case.

Are you baseball and football turns out to be really a profound question for all of the characters in the play, and we become aware of that if we scratch what is implicit in these two sports.

So for instance, with baseball, one of the ways that you score in baseball is to hit a home run.

Home run.

Now, let's think about that for just a second.

The play begins with Biff running home.

A salesman like Willy will go out onto the road and then come home.

There's a kind of, in other words, repetition, a cycle involved that's shaped like a circle or like a wheel somewhat.

In other words, you go around the bases and you come back home and you end where you started.

That's a very powerful image with respect to the entire play.

How many circles do we find in the play?

For instance, the belt on the refrigerator gives out just when Willy pays it off.

The recording wire machine.

What is the daughter, what is Howard's daughter saying, the song she's whistling?

"Roll Out the Barrel."

These are all images.

When Happy lays on his back and pedals his feet and just, "Look Dad, I'm losing weight," this is another example of repetition that is going nowhere or that's just bringing us back to where we started.

Now, contrast those directions with how you score in football, and you score with a touchdown.

And then we can imagine touching down.

How many images or passages in the play is something up in the air attempting to touch down?

In other words, to get one's feet on the ground.

I think in some way that what we hear in those two sports is the kind of question that both of Willy's sons are going to answer with regards to their future.

And at the requiem, we see that the two brothers answer that question in different ways.

When Happy affirms that Willy had a good dream and that he's going to stay there at home and make it work, then Happy said, "I'm baseball."

And when Biff grabs the pen off Bill Oliver's desk and begins to descend those flights of stairs, 'cause he's touching down, and then stops and realizes that he has been living a lie, that he is not all of these things that Willy has blown into the air, when he has an epiphany, in other words, that he is not who his father imagined he would be in his father's image.

That is the beginning of Biff touching down.

All of that to say, and the point here is that we would not make connections like that if we didn't take those words and read them in the context of the play as opposed to the real world.

That one little move right there of not reading, let's say, centrifugally, 'cause that's from the inside out, but instead reading centripetally, or centripetally, I can't pronounce the word.

I'm from East Texas.

English is my second language.

But instead of moving out or inward out, we're gonna move back into the words as a body of words, so to speak, and see what kind of connections that we can make between these words.

And when we do that, certain patterns will begin to become visible, and certain passages and phrases, their relevance will become apparent to us in a way that they wouldn't if we moved in the other direction.

So that was just a kind of, just a way to introduce a way of reading that is counterintuitive, and yet in some ways is the key to participating in works of art at their depths.

So with that said, just for fun, any passage, word, or anything in the play?

And don't overthink this, I'm asking you.

Any passage or part of the play that for whatever reason you may not know, jumped out at you and just sort of impressed itself on your imagination?

- One thing that came to mind is when she's darning the socks, and then he gets really upset, like instantly gets upset about that.

And I was, at first I was thinking, oh, it's because he's feeling bad, like we shouldn't be this poor, we shouldn't be this where you have to darn the socks.

But then it's like, like you're saying, like there's a lot more in each one of these images.

And so, yeah, and then he goes back in his mind and he's thinking about his affair that he's having and feeling bad about it.

But that was one thing I liked about this story is how much you're living in the past as you're, I mean, I think we all do that, but just the way, this is what really stood out to me was all of those scenes where his mind is going in the past.

- Wonderful - He's actually there, but people don't know he's there.

Like Dad talks to himself a lot, but- - It's a wonder, you know, the actual play itself occurs over 24 hours, or almost even less than 24 hours.

And to imagine the skill, the artistic skill to integrate a person's span of their life within a 24-hour period with those flashbacks is really, really artful and powerful.

Okay, so let's just take this idea of time and talk about past, future, and present, and consider for just a moment how difficult it is in the play for any of the Loman family anyway to live in the present.

How difficult it is to live in the present, either because they're living in the past or because they're imagining something in the future, something big in the future that's going to happen.

And between those two different past and the future, the present seems to be where they're not living in, in some kind of powerful way.

So I just want to say, going back to that circle imagery, that a clock is a circle.

It goes around and around and around, and ostensibly it's gonna do that till we die.

And one of the questions I think that's implicit in the play is what are we doing with all those revolutions?

What are all of these minutes going to add up to?

What have I done?

To give an example of this, when Howard and Willy has gone in to talk about Howard of getting off the road and Howard's showing him this brand-new gadget that he himself Willy should get, it's only $168, not realizing that Willy's broke.

Any case, at one moment, Howard's wife, Howard's having each member of his family speak into the wire recorder, and Howard's wife is abashed about didn't know what to say.

And then at some point Howard says to her, "It's turning.

Talk."

And in the moment that obviously means one thing, she needs to hurry up and talk.

But then there's another sense in which is anyone in the Loman family, while the clock is still turning, going to talk in such a way that they're actually saying something that's of consequence?

In other words, is our family going to risk talking in a way that we need to talk while this clock is still turning?

Or are we gonna keep delaying that talk until this clock's not turning anymore?

- I was just gonna say, that was one of the things that I picked up on was that a lot of the times when the Lomans are talking to each other, one of them is in the past and one of them is in the future, and it's usually Willy is in the past, but nobody else knows it.

So the conversations, they really don't ever connect.

They think they're connecting and they think they're talking about the same thing, but they really aren't.

And I think that's kind of almost what Sally was talking about with the stockings.

You know, she thought that he was upset because it made them look like they were poor, and really he was upset about something else entirely.

And I think that you do see that, and when you first start the play, you don't realize that's what's happening until all of a sudden it dawns on you that a lot of the things that Willy says don't make... Like he, when you go back and read it again, so many times I wrote in the margins, like, that's not even the truth, like, where is that coming from?

And I do think that's exactly part of it is that he's not, they're not connecting because one of them is never, they're never in the same, they're never in the past together, they're never in the present together, and they're never in the future together.

Each one of them is always on some different level.

- This, is anyone gonna say anything, no, they're not.

I mean, they, everybody around Willy protects him from realizing that everything he says, everything he's doing, it's a lie.

I mean, he's trying to kill himself and she puts the hose back because we don't wanna humiliate him.

Well, he's gonna die.

I mean, like, and then the brother who's paying the mortgage, we can't talk about it, but that's what he's doing.

And you know, like, nobody can confront Willy with the reality of his whole life.

I mean, it makes you wonder like, was he this great salesman at one time?

I don't know.

Was that a lie?

Is that a lie and he's created that in his mind?

I mean, nobody's confronting anybody.

- Wonderful.

I think that's true.

In fact, when one of the characters starts to say something of consequence, and it's usually Biff, Biff feels the need, okay?

As soon as in the Loman family you start to move in that direction, someone will say, "Shh, go to sleep.

Shh, go to sleep."

And so that calls our attention to a couple things.

One, people are not touching when they communicate.

And that's another way of saying that they were missing each other in a way, and we could say, well, why is that?

And I think we would agree that if Willy and Linda started to talk about why Willy doesn't want her mending stockings in a real way, what would happen?

The family would blow up, right?

Because it would lead them to a reality that would be very, very painful, right?

That Willy's had an affair.

And yet I think we could also agree that if that conversation never happens, this family's gonna keep talking in a bubble.

And isn't this kind of, doesn't this sort of ring true that what we would need to say to get real, but to use the play's imagery, what we would need to come down from the hot air that we're living in, what we would need to touch down, I'm just going back to this touchdown and running home, what we would need conversationally to touch down would be the very thing that would pop us, so to speak.

And I'm saying pop because that's a word that Miller uses very, very, I think, beautifully, when for instance, Biff tells him with regards to the day he's going to play a game in Ebbets Field, he says, "Pop, when I take off my helmet, that touchdown will be for you."

In other words, I'm gonna signal to you that I'm about to score a touchdown for you.

But what does he do?

He says, when I take off my helmet there, Pop.

I'm saying that because at one point Biff says to Willy, "You've filled me so full of hot air, I could never take orders from anyone."

Now look what Miller's doing with pop.

He's taken a word that's vernacularly dead, but he's also listening to the word as a word, and the word says pop, which means there's something that is a bubble.

And isn't this what Willy and Linda once say about Biff, that he just needs to be solidified.

It takes some men longer.

In other words, Biff is up in the air trying to touch down, and the rest of the family, I think Brigette, as you've insightfully pointed out, the rest of the family is in a tacit conspiracy, unspoken conspiracy to make sure that no one in this family dares to touch down.

No one is going to talk in a real way while this is turning.

- Even when Willy has options to get out, like when he goes to talk to Charley and Charley's like, "I've offered you a job," like I will give you this job.

And he says, "I've got a job," even though he had just gotten fired.

And then later on he kind of mentions, "Oh, well, yeah, I was fired."

And Charley's like, "Yeah, I'm offering you an out."

Even when Willy has the opportunity to, you know, kind of maybe jump off that circle a little bit and touch down, he doesn't take it.

And I thought that was a really interesting scene where I kept trying to figure out like, what is it about this that he can't even, he's going to this man and asking for money, which seems such a painful thing for Willy to do, and Charley's offering him a job and he won't even do that 'cause he just can't bring himself to work for Charley.

- I think that's a perfect insight.

And to my mind, it makes me think, doesn't that shed some light on how much courage it's taken Biff, for Biff, to do what no one in the family...

In other words, I think it just calls attention what Biff was risking by touching down.

That's the point that I wanna make, that the kind of courage that it takes to touch down seems to me a very interesting kind of courage.

It's not the courage, let's say, that a boxer might have.

Or the courage that Evel Knievel might have, but the courage to talk truthfully is a very interesting kind of courage, particularly if your entire society is in a kind of complicit with the conspiracy to keep you talking hot air.

In other words, you know, Willy is something of a tragic figure here because what has been his big course of his failure, his ruined life, is he bought into the American dream.

You know, this is Willy's, this is a terrible thing that he's done is believed in the hot air that was blown into his mind.

To touch down is not only to risk your own local friendship group or your family's precarious sort of membership, but you're actually moving against the current perhaps of the entire social world into which you have been raised, you have been blown up to live in a kind of illusion.

What kind of courage does it take?

And where does one find the courage to step out of a bubble that everyone else seems to be, at least on the surface, committed to living in?

- And it's interesting because that gets back then to that moment when The Woman asks, "Are you football or baseball," because that kind of then becomes a linchpin, is that the right word?

A linchpin moment for Biff because it gives him the motivation to step out, and at the same time, then Willy, it's where it seems like Willy starts to unravel at that point.

So that seems like that's a much more meaningful moment, that one moment, than you would otherwise think of.

You know, like Brigette and and I both said when we first thought about that scene, we thought, well, she's just missing the point.

But this takes that in a whole different, you know, that really makes that a really important moment in the story.

- And the fact that Biff answers touchdown, based on what you just said, would give a kind of, as they say in English class, foreshadowing that actually he's committed to touching down.

And that the rest of this, Act II of this play, in fact, some say the whole play is, is Biff going to touch down?

That's a way to imagine the play.

And what are the kind of impediments to Biff touching down, and what happens when he does touch down?

Because there is a kind of powerful explosion that does take place, right, when he takes out that rubber tube and puts it on the table and says, "And today I realized," I mean he just, he's coming clean.

This is a phrase from the play, coming clean.

He's coming clean, we're gonna come clean in this family.

But one of the things that strikes me with regards to what's the cost of coming down is at one point he says, after he tells him you filled me so full of hot air, he says, "Pop, I'm a dime a dozen.

I'm not a great leader of men."

"Pop," this is the exact phrase, "Pop," comma, "I'm nothing."

Now, think about that for just a moment.

Every fantasy of his identity just got popped.

And with all of those illusions popped, what's left?

Nothing.

What kind of courage does it take to step out of a bubble if what you're gonna step into is a absolute awareness of your nothingness?

That I think is, that, in other words, is a kind of death.

We can think of it as an ego death, right?

This is really the death of the ego.

And yet I think we would also agree for all of the pain that certainly followed in the wake of that explosion was the beginning, at least of Biff, of something real.

In that moment, he touched down.

And the moment that he said I'm nothing, I'm just playing with a paradox here, that the moment he said he was nothing was the moment that he quit running home.

The moment that he got off the barrel.

The moment that he got from behind the wheel.

The moment that he got off the road.

In other words, this was kind of a birth at the cost of a death of the ego.

And I'm going back to that idea, what does it take when your entire society is in on this tacit agreement to keep you going around and around in a circle, or keeping you half asleep?

What kind of courage does it take to step out of that, and all of a sudden, at least as regards to your social world scoreboards, to become nothing?

I mean, you're not pursuing what the rest of the people on the block are pursuing.

So what are you now?

And the reason I'm bringing that up is because we're reading for life here, and one of the questions I'm asking myself is, where would someone who is committed to touching down come by that kind of courage if their entire social world is in a conspiracy to keep them from talking, really, as long as the wheel's turning, where would they find the encouragement?

Where would they find the vision of something other than going around and around in a circle?

And I'm gonna propose for all of our consideration that this is what great works of art do.

They give us a vision that is, you might say, countercurrent to the hot air that we may be imbibing from other sorts of media.

In other words, this may be one place in our cultural universe that we can turn to that's not hot air, that is allied with us and our commitment to live something real before we die.

And if insofar as that's the case, that's a good reason for reading I want to propose.

- Well, and we've talked about that a little bit before, is, you know, who do dictators go after first?

- Right.

Wonderful, yeah.

Why is it that scientists, it's no problem, in fact, the dictators need scientists if they're gonna have the kind of power that they need to blow up the world or threaten it.

But poets, right, even Plato said the poets in a republic, we gotta get rid of the poets.

So what is so dangerous about poets?

You would think of anything that was, if you're just gonna read and have these dreamy little things about when your heart gets broken in high school, how's that dangerous to the state?

Well, I think we started putting our finger on it.

If your entire power depends upon people agreeing to live a lie, and there is one sort of source of energy in your social world that's not only gonna not participate in that lie, but that is going to bear witness that one, it is a lie, and two, there is another reality.

What does Ben say?

"William, there's a continent right out of your doorstep."

In other words, Ben is this, at least for parts of the play, he is this contradictory spirit that keeps telling Willy that the riches that he's seeking are not here in the city.

And that he has to step out of the, he has to turn in a way.

And Alaska, where is it?

It's outside of your doorstep.

In other words, you don't have to go to Alaska, Willy.

You gotta touch down right here.

Well, I'm suggesting that Ben is a kind of incarnation of the threatening voice in any social world that insists on reminding people that they're living a lie and that there is another continent outside of their doorstep.

And that other continent is partly, I'm suggesting, being made visible by great works of art.

- Well, isn't Ben the one too that says, "What are you selling?"

You know, "Can you touch it?"

Doesn't he say something about that?

- There you go.

There's the word again, touch, right?

He says, "Can you lay your hands on it?"

So now, what does that do?

That connects the imagery of hands with touch.

And what is Biff trying to do at the end of the play?

He's trying to touch Willy, he's trying to take, he's trying to hug, he's trying to take his hand, and Willy won't offer him his hand.

Now, all of a sudden hands start to be a big deal.

And one of the things that Biff says at the requiem, there was more of that man in the back stoop, meaning the back porch, than there was in anything else he ever did, which is implying that Willy lost his hands.

He gave up his hands for his mouth.

Another way of saying this.

And then we go to that filling him full of hot air.

In other words, Willy lost his hands when he decided to live the death of a salesman.

He gave up, in other words, something that was very real and a part, integrally a part of his actual body.

He gave that away to enter into this life of hot air.

And one of the things that Ben is essentially saying is, get out of these cities, it's a bunch of talk, Willy.

It's a bunch of talk, but not real talk.

So this is another way of imagining that Willy has lost a part of himself because he's living in this balloon, in this hot air.

His hands, what he was gifted with, what he could've been good at, is the very thing that he sacrificed to live the death of a salesman.

instead of living the life of Willy Loman with his hands, he lived the death of Dave Singleman with his mouth.

I say Dave Singleman because that's the salesman that he wants to live, that's his actual name.

Why Dave Singleman?

Well, let's listen to the word like we did football and baseball.

Dave single man.

He was a single man.

He was a man that could not wed.

He was a man that could not touch other people.

You see the irony, he made it to the top at the cost of being able to touch anybody else.

He made it to the top at the cost of being able to be integrated or meaningfully apart.

That's the kind of irony, in other words, of what you get when you die the death of a salesman.

You get to die all alone.

You're a single man.

You made it.

This is a profound, you can say, bubble-popping play.

You see, the whole play in a sense, I mean, it's kind of cruel in a way, isn't it?

To pop the bubble of an entire nation's dream.

I mean, can you think about that though?

An entire nation live in a kind of, I mean, you turn on the TV, you turn on the radio, and everybody is blowing hot air, and you have the audacity to create a little work of art that pops that bubble.

It makes you wonder, do we really wanna read these things this deeply?

If you see what I mean, that our reading might get evasive.

We might, if as readers, in other words, we might not want to go that deep with these works of art because it may get too real.

Flannery O'Connor said, "You can make plenty of money writing if you only learn to write poorly enough."

And what was she saying?

There's always gonna be a market for hot air.

There's always gonna be a market for hot air.

In fact, if you want a good job writing, then you just agree to participate in the hot air machine.

I'm suggesting that Arthur Miller was doing something like Biff.

- Well, and I think it's interesting what you said about the hands too, because doesn't Biff, when he's talking about being a ranch hand, doesn't he talk about building things and working with his hands, and he really wants Hap to go back with him to that?

- Yeah.

Wonderful.

So that's what you get when you're nothing, you get your body back.

That's a metaphorical way of saying it.

When you get out of this hot air, all of a sudden you reclaim desires.

In other words, you just said, Julie, that Biff was alienated from his own desires.

He would say every time he started to feel really good, he would think he was wasting, I would think...

He's telling Happy.

Anytime he would describe this incredible moment with these colts being born and his shirt off, and then he would start saying to himself, "Am I wasting my life?"

Well, what voice was that?

That was Willy's voice.

In other words, Willy, he had internalized his father's voice and it was sabotaging.

There he was about to experience the present, and that voice came and injected enough doubt so that he did what, run home.

Now he's back on the circle.

Works of literature, in other words, can help us by giving us voices that are counter, you might say, counter spirits to the spirits that we're imbibing from so many other places in a culture that is dependent upon us going around and around on a gerbil wheel generating whatever kind of...

In other words, society needs us to go around and around and around and around.

It keeps the consumer economy going, right?

Works of art might be beckoning us to step off the wheel and to talk while it's turning.

- Well, and I imagine it must mean something that so many, like we've talked about this before with other books.

So it must mean something that these books are, that bring this up, like you said, it's kind of this subversive idea and even kind of cruel.

But these are the books that are considered classics and that stick around and that last throughout the years.

So there must be, you know, a desire, even if it's not something that we're aware of, to kind of get off that wheel.

- I think that's a very important point, Julie, that there's something about us that wants to talk while it's turning, even when we don't wanna talk.

There's something about us that wants to get real.

There's something, in other words, there might be multiple voices within each of us.

Did you know that the initial title that Arthur Miller was going to give to this "Death of a Salesman" was something, "One Man's Head."

It would all be inside Willy's head.

And I'm just throwing it out there in this context to suggest that we may have multiple spirits in our heads, and those spirits may be competing for our fidelity, or another way of saying it, competing for our body, if we're gonna get right down to it, that there may be multiple spirits in our head competing for our body.

Not only our individual body, but our social body in the sense of which of these spirits are going to be realized is what I mean by that.

In other words, there's big stakes when we pick up great works of literature.

A lot is at stake, and it may take a certain kind of courage, in other words, to pursue these trails that are imagination, in other words, by giving us these works of art, has given us so many kind of cookie crumbs.

But going back to my initial point, if we don't recognize that these words are connected to each other in this artful way, and that these words are the real world as far as this play is concerned.

This is what I wanna just, I'm talking to myself because it's a lecture I give myself every time I sit down to read.

If I read this and read through the words to something off the page in my head, I'm going to miss this work of art.

But if I read each of these words and imagine that what they mean has to do with the other words in this work of art, in other words, I'm gonna create something by making these words talk to each other the way we're doing right now.

That's the first move towards touching down.

And you don't have to be a rocket scientist to learn this.

You know, when I taught English for a lot of years, some of my best students, when they were not the students that thought that they even liked English when they came into the classroom because they had bad experiences with English.

But once they learned, you know what, this is a kind of cool game with words.

That I can play.

Then all of a sudden they were turning in some of the most insightful papers.

So this is a very learnable skill of paying attention to these words and saying, how does this word relate to that word?

How does this hands imagery relate to touching down, for instance.

Just to give you some examples of how much fun Arthur Miller's having, Bill Oliver, okay, his is who Biff is gonna go speak to, Bill Oliver.

Gonna go talk to Bill Oliver.

What is that?

Oliver, sounds like green, Bill sounds like Bill, a green bill, I'm gonna go speak to a dollar bill, right?

I mean, here's one of my favorite passages, and it's on page 31, I'll just read it.

And it's just so, this is to bring home how much wordplay is in every passage, okay?

This is Willy, and he's talking about his life on the road, and someday he's going to meet the mayor of Providence, and the mayor of Providence is up north.

One of the things that this play's doing is playing with direction.

So north, south, east, and west.

Biff is out West when he comes home.

Willy's living in the East.

Is the riches in Alaska up north, or is it in Africa down south?

Well, it turns out that the diamonds are down south.

In other words, we got a kind of a geography here that it starts to be a spiritual geography of what direction do I go?

So to go down would be to go south, right?

The diamonds are going south.

So going down is where you get the diamonds, in other words.

But any case, the mayor of Providence, sounds like the mayor of Providence would be what?

That would be God.

The mayor of Providence, and he's gonna meet the mayor of Providence up north.

And what's he gonna say when he meet?

Okay, this is what he's saying, he's telling Linda or somebody here.

He's telling his kids in his fantasy world that he met the mayor of Providence.

And he said, "Morning,' is what the, that's what the mayor of Providence, why did he say morning?

'Cause that's when you wake up.

You see, morning, in other words, Willy, you just woke up.

Another way he could say it playfully is what happens when Willy dies?

Well, he's gonna meet the mayor of Providence, and the mayor's gonna say good morning.

In other words, his death is also gonna be kind of his birth.

That's when it's gonna be, he's gonna wake up.

The only way he could get out of that dream, paradoxically, was to kill himself.

I mean, I'm just playing around the imagination, that the real ending of this play might be right there when the mayor says, "Good morning, Willy."

Any case, and then he's fantasizing this conversation, he's telling his boys, "And I said, you got a fine city here, Mayor."

Think of the irony now if we're talking about heaven.

Right, if this is Providence, "You got a fine city here, Mayor," that's kind of funny.

And then he had coffee with me.

Why would he have coffee?

Because that's what you would drink to wake up.

Do you see what I mean?

This is a stimulant.

You would wake up, you'd have coffee.

So he's gonna have coffee with the mayor of Providence.

It's a beautiful moment.

Willy's waking up here.

And then I went to Waterbury.

Now, why is that interesting?

Well, how does Willy die?

He drives his car into the water.

He has a water burial.

All of this I'm suggesting is implicit in this passage on page 31.

"And I went to Waterbury, and Waterbury's a fine city.

Big clock city, the famous Waterbury Clock."

Now we're talking all about that time business.

"Sold a nice bill there.

And then Boston."

Boston, this is his route.

"Boston is the cradle of the Revolution."

Now, why is that so supercharged?

Because that's where Biff walked in on Willy.

That was the cradle of the revolution for Biff.

This is Arthur Miller playing with these, playing with language is what I'm trying to say.

That taking this historical thing, that Boston's the cradle of the Revolution, building it into the play, but look, why is revolution important?

We've been talking about circles.

This is the beginning of reversing the circle.

All of this I'm suggesting you just scratch the passage.

This is why these are great works of art.

Okay, but it gets even funnier.

"A fine city, and a couple of other towns in Mass, and onto Portland, and Bangor.

Now, listen to that.

I'm just gonna show you the fun that Arthur Miller's having.

And Bangor, and straight home.

I mean, there's a little, he's playing with words.

What did he do?

I mean, let's just bang her, and on your way home.

That's what Willy does.

He goes out on the road and he ends with, he bangs her and comes home.

I'm suggesting that none of these words in this work of art are here accidentally.

And that if we will at least give the words the benefit of the doubt, that they are talking to each other, and we're willing to just pay attention.

You see, this doesn't require you having to know any theories about deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis.

In other words, you don't have to bring any profound theoretical super structure to the play.

You just have to pay attention to the words.

You see there, all the answers in other words are in the play, not in what the SparkNotes or whatever those things are you get.

You see what I mean?

I'm suggesting that all the answers are in the play and that we learn to hear those answers by paying attention to the words.

- Well, then I guess it's super ironic then that Biff then says, "Jeez, Dad, I'd love to go with you sometime."

- Yeah, okay, there you go.

That's it.

The irony in this play is everywhere.

You know, I can almost see Arthur Miller writing these things and trying to like suppress the chortle.

Because he's doing this all over the play.

He's playing around with this kind of subtext.

And a lot of authors are doing this.

And one of the reasons why is that, well, I'll give you an example.

I heard Tim O'Brien speak in Chicago when the Chicago, entire city for one year, they focused on a book, it was gonna be "The Things They Carried."

And then they celebrated by Tim O'Brien coming to one of the big libraries and 200 or 300 people in the auditorium.

And because the book is ostensibly about Vietnam, for the first hour when people could ask questions of Tim O'Brien, each question had something to do with Vietnam, and Tim O'Brien was being polite and giving answers, but you could feel that he was sort of tepid about the whole interaction.

And then someone in the audience said, "Now, didn't you have a very special English teacher?"

I think it was like the fifth grade or something.

And then all of a sudden Tim O'Brien got excited about the conversation because "The Things They Carried," on the surface it might be about Vietnam, but what it really is, is a work of art, a art of words.

And Tim O'Brien fell in love with words.

And all of these people that write great works of art, they fall in love with words.

It's their medium.

In the same way that a carpenter falls in love with wood.

And they learn how to work with the words.

I'm giving an appeal for us to pay attention to the words by suggesting that the people who write these works of art, they're in love with words, and words are very real to them.

It is the real world.

In fact, if you believe sort of what we're talking about, that this is a play that can kind of wake you up from a dream, the real world is actually not out there off the page, if you see what I mean.

If we take what we're saying to heart, what's out there is not a real world.

It's a hot air balloon.

So where are we gonna turn?

I'm giving an appeal of wanting to turn into the words because these words are leading us, as Ben said, "There's a continent outside of your doorstep, William."

I'm suggesting this is the portal.

This is the door that you step out of by learning to read.

But notice that learning to read in this instance isn't bringing in some super sophisticated academic whatever, it's simply paying attention to the words on the page and taking those words as they're real as words, not just to what they point to.

They're real in themselves.

We do this with, if we go to hear a great work of music, we don't sit there and think, God, this reminds me of something that happened in 19...

If we did that, we'd be missing the music, right?

And people, I mean that's the only, I can't understand music, so maybe I'm doing that.

But people that love music, they're getting into the music, right, they are feeling forms.

They are into the music in a way that I'm not.

And so it's moving them.

Well, I'm suggesting as an analogy that when we read works of art, that we actually pay attention to the words or we're going to miss the work of art.

- I would like to talk about Biff stealing things.

- Okay, good.

What do you think about it?

- I don't know.

I don't know what I think about it.

It seems ridiculous, but... And I'm not sure why he's doing it.

- I'm not sure either.

I think it's a great question because the reason why I think it's a great question is because it occurs so often that it's not just happenstance, right?

So this is the play saying paying attention to this.

I don't know the answer.

I think it's a great question.

I will throw this out for consideration, that the last thing Biff steals is a fountain pen.

I think that's interesting for a couple of reasons.

One, it's a fountain pen, it's playfully, it's a fountain.

In other words, there's a source of water.

That's interesting to me.

And also it's partly interesting because, well, it's a playwright that's writing a play.

So if we're just playfully suggesting that Biff has walked away from being a salesman, at one point, what does Happy tell him?

"Biff, you're a poet."

Biff is telling him something back in the bedroom.

"Biff, you're a poet."

So I'm proposing possibly that the theft of all of those things culminated in what he was really looking for as a source of a medium of a new source of labor.

In other words, he's gonna write plays like this one that helps people touch down.

Now, that's a little bit too psychologically sophisticated, but I do think it's important to pay attention to what he's stealing.

One point, what is he stealing?

He's stealing lumber.

Why is that important?

Because Willy is always fantasizing about working in wood.

And in other words, he seems to be stealing things that would lead him to his next life.

We talked about there being little spirits inside of us that are trying to be realized.

I'm proposing that the spirit in him that wanted to be born again, so to speak, was getting a word in edgewise at inopportune moments.

In other words, that these were thefts that were leading him out of the hot air.

And his body was sabotaging his father's hot air dream would be another way of saying, that his body knew that he didn't want to live like this.

I don't know that that's the answer, but I think it's a great question, really.

Why is he stealing this?

And I'm just saying paying attention to what he's stealing may be suggestive.

- I thought probably the sabotage, just like, this is what my dad wants for me.

I'm gonna ruin it for myself and get myself out of it.

- That's what I'm coming up with.

That's what I feel like sort of the case, that there's a part of him like the Ben spirit that's leading him in an opposite direction.

And I do think it's interesting to think however that maybe listening to our body is actually a wise way to wake up.

In other words, if we're, maybe that there's all, you know, as Julie mentioned, there's always a part of us that wants to hear the truth.

I'm suggesting maybe part of that has to do with our body being the truth speaker.

You know, your body's desires might be very, they may be very powerfully destructive, but they also might be powerfully creative.

You know, your body in other words is not happy going around and around in a circle making lots of money.

Or maybe that's not meaningful a lot to your body, if you see what I mean, that your body has other desires.

One of the things that Howard says to Willy when Willy's having a breakdown in his office is, "Pull yourself together."

He says it twice.

That's why I'm paying attention to it.

Well, you could think of pulling ourselves together may have something to do with integrating our mind and our body, integrating these different parts of ourselves into a whole.

To be a whole person.

That may not be an easy thing to do.

And furthermore, not only to be a whole person with yourself, could you wed another person?

In other words, complete yourself with another body.

That Dave Singleman couldn't do that, if you see what I mean.

And this place seems to be suggesting partly that to be able to wed, what, if Happy could go with Biff, what does he say?

We would stand up together.

We would make it together out there.

In other words, these are two brothers that can't come together.

And if they could, they would both be whole in a way that they want, you know?

And I'm saying that this play is partly, if we're gonna talk truthfully, it could be the beginning of a real marriage.

- Once again, we've had a really interesting conversation.

Thank you so much, and thank you Sally and Brigette.

- I wanna thank the Austin Public Library.

I wanna thank your local PBS affiliate.

I think that's really inspiring to think that there are resources available to us socially and culturally that are actually committed to speaking in a way that is nourishing to us, and not simply ways to keep us going around and around in the circle.

And I can't imagine, Julie, a higher calling than to be a custodian of these truth-telling artifacts.

- Yes, and you did a great job of introducing our next novel that we will be doing, which is Tim O'Brien's, "The Things They Carried."

- Oh my gosh.

- So that is definitely something that anyone is listening can pick that up, and we can be prepared to have this conversation again with that book here coming up very soon.

So thank you again, and we will see you next time.

(mellow music) (mellow music continues) (bright music) - [Announcer] This program brought to you in part by Selco.

- [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.