MB So the question I think I sort of put myself really, is that the main driver of much of my writing is around home and making home. A few years ago I remember kind of coming across that much more sort of American term ‘homemaker’, and thinking that, you know, in a way you could sum up a large part of my life activity has been a homemaker, and I liked that sort of I see it as a bit of a sort of suitcase phrase; one of those phrases that actually you can unpack in all sorts of ways. But it had a sort of emotional resonance because I think one of the reasons why I first ever heard of the word was a very good friend of my mother’s who was American, so she used the word. She would have definitely seen herself as a homemaker. I still am in touch with her and I remember as a small child the way my mother and this other woman talked about their creativity and their projects. So they were both raising children but they were both very, very creative people, and they were creative in visual arts. So my mother was a ceramicist but actually she just turned her creativity to absolutely everything. I remember when I was a very small child she decided she wanted to decorate the bathroom cupboard, so she started cutting up magazines to make a collage. She had a sort of natural creativity that just spilled over in every direction – anything she could paint or decorate she did, and she was sewing all the time, so she was always making patchworks. She had this kind of furious sort of crafting process going on all the time, and much of it was about making a home out of very limited financial resources.

My parents were sort of impoverished, artistic kind of bohos. They’d sort of gone to the country and had next to no money, and it was all kind of trying to sort of make ends meet. So they both had a habit, actually both my mother and my father are kind of resourceful, adaptable. This same friend of my mother’s had a wonderful anecdote about my father. When they first moved into this derelict Yorkshire farmhouse my father, who was a sculptor, spotted a chair seat and took the chair seat away from a derelict broken down chair, and returned it the later in the day as a chopping board for a meat roasting board, so that it had the runnels carved into it for the meat juices. My father had sort of adapted a chair seat into this kind of Sunday roast type carving board. So that was my parents’ creativity which kind of influenced the whole sort of world of my childhood; this constant making, and that was professional and domestic and I think I began from a very early age kind of using words and loving words and you know, reading voraciously.

And again, this idea that home is something you make, it’s not something that just sort of arrives ready made. It is a profoundly personal creation. And you know, if I look back on books that I read as a child, the books that were by far the most important for me were the Lorringles Wilder series, which is Little House on the Prairie, and it became very sentimentalised when it was put on to telly. But actually the sort of American pioneering travelling across the Midwest, constantly making home, and then remaking home because they kept moving – so they made log cabins and then they had to move on again, and it’s an extraordinary practice of home making. They were sort of virtually nomadic at that point, because the way America was settled by white people across the Midwest, from Kentucky through to the Prairie country and beyond. And again it was about how you made yourself at home.

And I wonder if part of why that resonated for me was because my parents were Londoners who’d arrived in North Yorkshire for work you know, my father was going to teach at a school while he did his sculpture, and they had this dream of sort of a house in the country and growing vegetables and all the rest of it. But we were acutely conscious that we’d arrived in a very complex social milieu in which we had no place because we were Londoners – my mother was Jewish, we were Catholic, my mother had converted. We just didn’t fit any kind of Yorkshire County categorisation. So this was North Yorkshire in the 1960s and 70s, which was rigidly class stratified and in our village of 250 people, everybody knew exactly where they were in the pecking order and an understanding of our rather precarious middle class status I think was, you know, my parents kind of obsession. They’d just, you know, they were terrified. They didn’t want us to develop a Yorkshire accident. So we had to constantly be reminded of received pronunciation, and that sort of sense of ‘are we really at home here? Is this really home?’

I think it was a sort of undercurrent and when I came to write the plot, a biography of my father’s English acre, I was writing about that Yorkshire. In the course of the research for that book, there was this really extraordinary moment when I was in the kitchen of this Yorkshire farmer whose family had lived in that farm for generations and he had an acutely vivid sense of being in place. Actually, I mean, I think he was an extremely interesting and intelligent man, and I think he’d made some rather large compromises in his life in order to stay on the farm, which was very unproductive, you know, marginal agricultural land. But he turned to me in this the kitchen and said something about, you know, for those of us who live around here, who come from around here; and then he stopped mid-sentence because he suddenly realized well, actually you come from around here originally and yet you’re not part of here. He recognized both the way in which I didn’t belong, and the way that I could make a claim to belonging, and we both sort of slightly laughed a bit awkwardly. Because I was writing a book about a place that I was born into and grew up in, and yet actually he was, you know, reminding me yet again that I didn’t really belong.

So I, but I think these kinds of experiences of different forms of migration are pervasive now, everywhere people have this experience of some form of migration, and when I look back through my parents, my family history, it’s Jewish migration from Germany, it’s Irish migration from Ireland and it’s Scottish migration from Scotland. You know, the different histories of migration have been meticulously maintained in my family for, you know, a mixture of sentimental or reasons or sense of duty, and you know it’s quite an interesting sort of family history. I mean, the Scottish ancestry is four generations back, but it is the surname because it was my grandfather. My paternal grandfather is a Farquasson, and so my mother brought us up absolutely clear, you are quarter Scottish. And it was only when I looked into the history of it that I discovered that my grandfather was born to a Gordon and a Farquasson, both of whom had been born in Hornsey, north London. So he was already a second generation Scott. So that means I’m fourth generation. But you know, it’s such a kind of tenuous link, and yet my mother believed it was important. So where did I belong? And that’s, of course, in Love of Country, my book about Scotland and about the Hebrides where I’m exploring exactly that issue – which is, you know, is that fourth generation Scottish kind of link? Does it amount to anything?

KP Was it the Hebrides that your family originated from then?

MB No, but it was Galic, so Farquasson is a Galic name. They fought at Culloden, 500 Farquassons. This is all really important in the family history there’s; there’s those sort of stones for each of the clans that fought at Culloden and the Farquassons have their stone and 500 of them died at Culloden. Actually I think it’s Western Aberdeenshire where the Farquasson name is from.

KP Ah, Aberdeenshire is where I would probably call home. It’s where I mostly grew up. What I hear you talking about is really a sense of belonging, and that belonging comes from a history, but also connection to the land and of being accepted. Those are all things that feed into this notion of home. If we were going to do a word association, what words, concepts, ideas would pop to mind first for you when talking about home?
MB I find belonging a rather complicated word actually. I think, and in fact I think in the Love of Country book, I do go into the etymology of belonging and because it’s not it’s, I think it’s about commitment. So I can’t remember now the sentence, but I think what this is all about is security.

KP I have a line that you’ve written in front of me ‘Belonging is about commitment rather than possession’.

MB Yeah. So I think that the emotional driver here is about security, a sense of security.

KP You observe quite rightly that many of us feel alienated from the places that we live or that we don’t quite belong because we don’t have a sense of security. There’s no doubt myriad complex reasons that that’s the case. But one of your observations in talking about home is that it gives us a sense of coherence and story in our lives and that really resonated with me. I wonder if whether we’ve become increasingly mythically deprived, detached from grand narratives and religious narratives we maybe grew up with, and that has fed into kind of global economy where we move around at home is where you hang your hat and so on – and that part of losing the big narratives and stories in our lives has given us a kind of sense of homelessness.

MB Yes, well it’s, that’s possible. I mean, there are times when I would, I think, have completely agreed with you about that. I’m just sort of, you know, I’m just kind of really mulling that one over, because I was brought up within a very powerful sense of a grand narrative, the Christian grand narrative, and the loss of that has been a very, very significant for me and, as often, a quite sort of tangible sense of grief and loss. But I’m not sure how you know, I don’t know how it affects this issue about security. Rowan, um gosh, who’s the former Archbishop, sorry, Rowan Williams, yes, Rowan Williams once talked about a sense of, it’s not quite entitlement, because entitlement is such a sort of loaded word that I’m not nervous about using that. But he said, you know, to feel that you’re allowed to stand on your little bit of the earth and breathe the air that you need – that it’s okay to do that and be that, and have that. And at the heart of that is a sort of understanding of entitlement, but at its most essential kind of human thing, not the class entitlement that is so problematic. It’s a kind of entitlement that, yes, I can live this. You know I’m allowed to live this life. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m making myself clear?

KP I think I do. It sounds like it’s similar to what you talk about when you talk about belonging. As you say, you’ve got permission to be here, to feel committed, to feel like you’ve got a right to it. One of the questions, and I wonder what you take from this is that since we’ve become kind of more atomised in our communities and we move around for work and so on, there’s a greater sense of homelessness and disconnection. But part of me wonders whether it runs quite deep, whether the sense of home is something we’re always going to be looking for in adulthood, because home is associated with a kind of safety and security of childhood. So it’s always a chimera. And maybe even your Yorkshire man with generations in the land, maybe there’s still the sense of longing. It’s the story in a sense of the fall in Genesis you belonged once and now you’re alienated and trying to find your way back. That seems like a kind of common human experience. CS Lewis has that lovely line about sensing the smell the scent of a flower we haven’t seen, and the echo of a tune we haven’t yet heard, or news from a country we haven’t been to before. And there’s even that German word ‘fernweh’, which I think means homesick for a place we’ve never been, and so this idea of belonging and acceptance and rest maybe is freighted with what it means to feel at home. Maybe that’s just a reflection of my own experience of being a kind of 20th century nomad who actually really wants to belong.

MB Out of what you’ve just said, the word that just really sparked me off is rest. Yeah, and that’s why I’m sort of you know, I’m slightly putting belonging to one side, because I think that if belonging is about commitment, then you know, one can very committed. I mean like I lived in Hackney for 20, 30 years, I can’t remember now. I mean I lived in Hackney and I was very committed in various ways street parties, food banks, you know lots of different forms of commitment, but I think that the really, really crucial thing is our desire for safety and security and rest. What security gives you is rest. I mean, I kind of think peace is such a kind of crucial idea that we have so little grasp of in our own lives, let alone geopolitics. But you know what does it like, what does it mean to lead a peaceful life, and you know a life that expresses peace?

So you know that interests me a lot and you know I’m wondering when, when you’re talking and you’re raising lots of really interesting issues, that I wonder whether I mean my family home was a very fraught place. It was a kind of dangerous place and there was a lot of anxiety, I think I absorbed a lot of anxiety around the conflict of my parents, and my father was a catastrophist, no doubt about that, and he thought the world was always about to end and he thought the hillside behind our house was going to, there was going to be a landslide and it was going to slide into the back of our house. So my understanding of home was precarious. It was always balanced with this landslide about to arrive, so that kind of you know there was. There was quite a sort of theme of landslides in my childhood in a number of different ways. So the land is not steady, and we perch our homes on this unsteady land and they’re always slightly makeshift, and you have to make them and keep remaking them. It’s not a sort of one off task. You can then sit back. So it’s a kind of constant work, if you like. Yeah, so there’s this. There’s some very sort of rich questions there about peacefulness, I think.

KP That’s really interesting. In your radio three lecture series ‘Home Sweet Home’ you observe that the home has moved from being a place of work and care to a place of leisure. It used to be a unit production, now it’s much more unit of consumption. Education, for example, used to happen at the home and no longer does. Looking after elderly parents parents used to happen at home, now that’s outsourced for the majority of people in the UK. But at the same time the home seems to have become less restful in some significant ways.

MB Well, the interesting thing is, since I wrote those essays for Radio Three, the home has become more of a workplace than ever before. We have been through a complete revolution. I mean, my God, Covid, what that did to our understandings of home and our experiences of home. We were locked at home, and what an extraordinary sense of confinement. That was utterly shocking. And then, of course, now everybody’s been told to carry on working from home. So actually what happened was the most astonishing shift in working culture in the space of a few days, literally with lockdown. So yeah, I mean quite what the implications of all that are. I still think it’s been so dramatic and so sudden. I’m sort of flabbergasted by it. Actually, I went to visit a friend last weekend who lives in a flat at the top of a block in London. She’s on Zoom sort of dawn till dusk and she’s, you know, crunched over the same table. She says she’s barely moving. You know she’s not moving her body at all. She’s sitting there at Zoom and she’s obviously not got office equipment so it’s not ergonomic and it’s, you know, it’s basically crippling her upper body. So it’s not a place of rest at all and I don’t know how one boundaries one’s work.

You know we’re going back to 18th century experience where work and leisure just kind of, you know, they sort of didn’t have clear demarcation. How does one put the boundary into place when people are basically often working in their bedrooms, you know, and you can see the bed in the background on the wardrobe, and, and there’s somebody on a zoom meeting with their boss. We’re losing our sense of privacy and refuge around the home. Unless you, you know, cover up your background, people start looking in the back, thinking, oh yeah, what have you got there? You know what’s going on. So, so our understandings of home as a private place are shifting as well.

KP You’re listening to the examined life podcast with me, Kenny Primrose. Today I’m speaking to the writer Madeline Bunting about the meaning of home. When we return to the conversation in just a minute, we’ll discuss how home has changed over the years, the importance of memory and relationships to the past, and the centrality of hospitality and what the boundaries of home are.

You use the word refuge, which I think is a helpful word to associate with the idea of home and with rest. It seems like we have increasingly geared our homes around convenience. Because convenience is convenient, right, it removes some labour for us and that’s not necessarily altogether good, I think in some ways. There was a philosopher called Albert Borgman, who talks about focal things. In the house you’ve got a fire in the background and that would have been a focal thing. People would sit around it. But with central heating we can all sit in separate rooms, or even the TV that was a focal thing. People don’t even sit in the same room to watch TV, let alone watch the same program anymore. And so there is this sense that convenience has atomised life, even in the home, the people who live together in a house, and I suppose part of a sense of safety or rest is developed through strong relationships which come out of family rhythms and so on. Does that resonate with some of your thinking on this idea of home?

MB I find that point about a focal thing really interesting because I would say in our house the focal thing is the dinner table. So my husband’s a great cook, the kids love the meals he cooks, so the dinner table becomes the place where we gather around and eat the food together. And that, of course, is absolutely kind of central to the home making of both the Jewish heritage, but also the Catholic. Both of them make meals into something that’s sacred, which I think is a very interesting similarity between the Jewish and the Catholic. But recently I was with one of my kids looking at a place to buy, a flat to buy, and there was nowhere to put a dinner table and the estate agent said, yeah, well, you don’t need that because nobody uses dinner tables anymore, they just eat on their laps in front of the telly. So now the home is a kind of space that people share and what does that look like? I mean, I’ve always been fascinated by that because in Italy people carry on eating with their parents, right up into adulthood without stopping; whereas teenagers in the UK by a very, very large margin, stop eating with their parents. And there’s been some really interesting research material connected with that about how people develop a capacity for conversation, for difference, for disagreement, the quality of the relationship with the parents. All sorts of conversation is made possible around food. So you know, food and the preparation of food is, is of course a kind of central part of home.

I remember once I’m going to interview Gloria Steinem in New York, famously she didn’t have an oven. You know, she stored her shoes in the oven or something. I mean, she just never cooked. And that’s quite common, and you know has always been the case in New York, so many places you can eat. While I have a kitchen, you don’t need one. So I guess, if you’re, you know the components of home, definitely the kitchen, would you know it’s, it’s, that’s the heart of the home, isn’t it? It’s the kitchen, that’s the, that’s the real kind of focal point.

KP Yeah, so food and hearths and fires, the places that people gather. But also it seems like as we simplify our possessions because we, you know, we we lack space or we have kindles instead of books and so on, we lose something in that process. There seems to be a kind of sense of memory or layered relationship to the people, the places you’ve been, to, your own history, and the modern house becomes kind of more minimalist, and seems to be jettisoning a lot of what gives one a sense of who we are, of kind of coherence, if you like. I mean, perhaps it’s just a personal taste thing, but there’s something in the way that we organize our house now which is towards efficiency.
MB Yeah, I mean I, I feel that, but I do wonder sometimes. I mean I kind of, you know, there’s always a question in the back of my mind about you know, am I being sentimental? I mean I have, one way or another, accumulated various bits of family stuff from different parts of my family and I look after them very, very carefully. They’re very important to me. So, for example, I have a portrait on the wall of my great uncle who died in the first world war and you know he’s definitely keeping an eye on me. I mean he has. He was 21 when he died and the portrait he’s probably about 20. But there’s a way in which he’s kind of keeping an eye.

I have a big thing about ancestors, about the way they, they I don’t, you know, it’s not, it’s not that they speak to us, although in some ways it does kind of sound like you know they do. There is some way in which their example, their experience informs our lives and it can inspire. It’s kind of like, you know, the voices are there if you want to listen to them, and if you listen to your ancestors, there are all sorts of things that I think, become available to you in terms of insight, of understanding about the shape of your family and your parents and your previous, you know your kind of grandparents. So you understand the continuity of family life from generation to generation, and that all has to happen in the home. Actually, I’m not sure where else it would happen. So those, those fragments of your ancestors, the material fragments of their lives, which end up, sort of, you know, in cupboards and, and some of it I’m not talking about sort of you know, grand stuff. Some of it can be very modest, but my I’ve started writing recently about my mother’s sewing basket and how she’d inherited that, actually from her nanny who had inherited it from this great uncle who died in the First World War. So my mother and the nanny had used it as a sewing basket, and my great uncle had used it as a box, a bag for collars at his school you know to have, you know, Edwardian stiff collars. So this is, this is a material object which has a history, and as a child, my mother explained this history to me when she was using this sewing bag. I think there’s all sorts of things around in my house which have these histories, and it’s like the objects help trigger the histories. So here I am in a home which I feel has traces of great uncles that I never knew, grandparents, great grandparents, particularly my great grandmother – she’s very present and my grandmother, they’re very, very present because they were homemakers. I mean, if there was one thing that really motivated my great grandmother, my grandmother, was their homemaking. You know, my grandmother would have been an interior designer or something. I mean it was the most important thing for her was looking after her home. She lived in the same house for 70 years, and it was just such an important stage for her performance. I mean she understood life as a performance. She was an actor, and the home was a stage on which she played out that performance right up to 100. She never left her home. She died still living in the same house that she’d moved into in her 30’s, and I don’t think she could have done the performance without the home. She was sensible to realize she couldn’t move out of her house because everything would have crumbled. She would have crumbled and the performance would make no sense anymore. She was one of those rather sort of intimidating matriarchs, you know, born in the Edwardian times but actually kind of really shaped by Victorians, and she died in 2007. So it was an extraordinary sense of history that I knew through her and now, having inherited some of her things, all of that is with me on a kind of daily basis, so that sort of understanding of the past that the home, my home, represents. And then I go and visit friends because you know I have to do that. I stay with them and they have nothing on the wall, they have nothing that isn’t sort of older than 10 years, and you know that’s fine for them, you know it works for them. So I don’t understand why it works for them, but it does work for them.

KP Yeah, so part of it’s kind of personal choice and subjectivity and so on. But this idea of home you can see trends in what that means over time. I wonder what are those things that concern you most?

MB Well, I think, politically, I think one of the, you know, the huge crises in this country is around housing policy, which we have just failed to tackle. So I worry a lot about how unequal, how desperately appallingly unequal it is, where you know, ah God, I mean, where does one start? Not just homelessness, but lack of affordable housing, so people can’t afford to buy anywhere. And when they do buy somewhere, they’re absolutely crippled by the scale of the mortgages. So London has become an unlivable city. I can’t think of, you know, any youngster who’s going to be able to buy a home in London unless they’re doing a very limited number of jobs.

So the the kind of the way in which the inner city is becoming absurdly expensive and it’s not just London, it’s Edinburgh, Manchester, it’s, you know it’s those kinds of questions and the way housing wealth has accumulated amongst an older generation, of whom I’m, you know I’m one. I’m a sort of baby boomer who benefited from rising house prices. But talk about kicking away a ladder underneath you. You know it’s. It’s madness. It’s madness what’s been allowed to happen. You know, all the time I lived in London, 35 years, house prices were going up and I can’t believe the sort of insanity of it because it’s, you know, it just drives so many problems.

So I’ve just finished writing a book about this English seaside and the you know the kind of problems around housing evident in almost every part of the English seaside. The English coastline is so striking. So you know, how do you kind of improve the dreadful poverty of east Kent, Margate, Ramsgate, Folkstone? Well, you know, you gentrify – you build some nice art galleries, boutique hotels move in, at which point house prices shoot up and locals are like hang on, this isn’t working for us, we can’t now live here. So what model of regeneration is that that enforces locals out of living in the town? You know rents. So everyone wants to do Airbnb. I mean, we haven’t talked about Airbnb, which is a fascinating, fascinating interpretation of home. That’s because we talked about home as a place of rest. We’ve talked about work, home as a place of work. Airbnb turns your home into a business. You know, it’s a place of work and it’s a place where you’re actually kind of, you know, using it as a business.

And the other thing we haven’t talked about I’m jumping around here, right so we haven’t talked about hospitality, which I think is an extraordinarily powerful and important idea, but which has got so sort of obscured in English culture. But if you think, I mean I traveled a lot in my 20s time and time again I was, you know, blown away by the hospitality of other cultures and their ethic of hospitality which was so warm-hearted and so generous. And you know, we, we’ve turned hospitality into a sort of, you know, intimidating exercise of etiquette or something. I don’t know. It’s either that or it’s nothing.

So the idea of really making someone feel at home and it’s an incredibly generous thing to do, hospitality, because it’s opening up your home, so you know, it’s kind of, it’s kind of giving you, giving people your privacy in some ways. So hospitality is, I think, is it sort of the way it’s practiced in places where I’ve traveled in Africa and and Asia. It’s, it’s such an astonishingly generous act. And you know that there is ultimately, you know, the big issue of hospitality around asylum and offering safe haven and allowing migration into the UK. And there we’re into another massive political subject which, of course, has become toxic. You know we’ve lost an understanding as a nation as to what it is to be hospitable. We, you know we used to get, we used to have that. We don’t have it anymore.

KP I feel like that’s partly perhaps due to the loss of mythos of these big stories that can help us as as people, as families, as communities, but also the nuclear family where you shut the front door in the outside world. High walls make good neighbors kind of thinking, and with that kind of privatised, individualised sense of home you no longer have. This takes a village to raise a child, kind of mentality that you still, you know, see in probably most of the world, and hospitality seems to be a casualty of that. Interestingly, hospitality seems to be, you know, far better practiced in much more impoverished parts of the world whereas here, if we’re going to invite you in then I want to use that as a stage to shape the way you see me.

MB Exactly

KP It’s almost like you know, social media functions like that. ‘Don’t mind the dirty washing’ is not something you often hear. I was chatting to someone the other day about this. We were talking about Christianity and stories, and someone had made the observation that Jesus is only recognized after the resurrection, around the dinner table, when sharing hospitality, whether that’s the meal after the resurrection or eating breakfast with Peter. It’s a kind of really charming detail that seems significant to me.

MB Yeah, that is, I agree, a charming detail. That’s a really good point that it is in the sharing of food that you have a moment of real encounter, that you can see the person in a way that you can’t otherwise.

KP I think that’s a really really nice point, yeah, so you’re kind of driven by this question, or have been, and you have a recent book that came out in May, the Seaside, England’s Love Affair. How is this notion of home woven into that? How did it kind of drive this particular inquiry?

MB Ah, that’s interesting. Well, I think I’m trying to explore the edges of Englishness. Really, that’s what the book is about. It’s about, I mean, home has a boundary, it always has a boundary. Sometimes it’s a wall, sometimes it’s a fence, whatever, but it is a boundaried space and the coastline, of course, is a boundaried space. You know, this is, this is the way the nation is, in part, defined. It shares a land border with Scotland and Wales, but most of its edges are coastlines.

So I think what I got very curious about really is how the tides deposit tide rack on the beaches, and then they kind of the tide pulls back and you see that line of sort of rubbish and seaweed etc along the shoreline and that’s the kind of tide line. Well, I was intrigued by whether there’s something that also propels out from the centre to the edge, and you know, what is it that you find along the edge of the coastline that has kind of come from the interior. So you get this idea that this is a sort of liminal area between land and sea, but also it’s well, things get washed up on both sides. They get washed up from the centre, they get washed up from the sea and, as as is often the case, I felt that, just as geologically, you see the land exposed because the sea erodes the cliff and you see the layers of rock and earth. It sort of exposes something about the land. So, similarly, exposes something about the nature of the society, and I think what I found in those seaside towns was such appalling levels of poverty that are now 30 years in the making. I think that the seaside is a place of extraordinary inequalities, because the wealthy go to the seaside to retire with their big sea views, but so do also the poor go to the seaside to escape their demons and end up in the kind of cheap hotels. So going around the English coastline you go from wealth to poverty, back to wealth, with some of the biggest gaps in life expectancy of anywhere in the country, you know, 10 years, 11 years, 12 years. Blackpool has the lowest life expectancy in the whole country, and it was all these kind of sharp contrasts that kind of get exposed at the coastline. So there’s something of a lamentation that I think plays out on the coastline and it’s deeply nostalgic.

I mean, the coastline is a very symbolic space. You know, as liminal spaces are, it’s a symbolic space where we go often in grief, often in joy, for celebrations and you know, in a secular society it is actually often where people go to mark a death. So there’ll be flowers and plaques on benches or just some sort of memorial, lots of impromptu personal memorials on all sorts of piers, you know, in all kinds of resorts I went to. So I was fascinated by the symbolic space and by the social economic situation. That sort of sits alongside that, the kind of nostalgia – I think nostalgia is a really really fascinating subject – it’s both deeply sort of emotional, laden with emotion. It can be very reactionary. I think it can also be a very important kind of feeling and emotion. You can’t repress nostalgia. I mean it feeds very much into this sense of home. Nostalgia is that sort of yearning for home and rest and security, and in a way yearning for the place that we have never known and never will know, kind of thing. It’s always incoherent nostalgia. I don’t think it can ever be kind of pinned down as a powerful emotion, it has no kind of rational explanation. It lands on particular places and subjects and it lands on the seaside in probably, I think, some of the most potent ways. People get nostalgic about the seaside and it becomes a metaphor of national decline. You know, the collapsing piers, the impoverished neighbourhoods, the struggle to try and regenerate. It sort of speaks to a sort of wider national story. So it’s, you know, it was a very rich subject.

KP Gosh, there’s such a lot in that Madeleine, we’ve touched on such a lot that relates to home, and I wonder if I could just home in, as it were, on a final question, and that’s kind of maybe a personal what kind of home do you personally aspire to, and what words would you associate with home?

MB Oh well, sort of two questions there. What kind of home would I aspire to in the future? What are the words? It’s funny how I’ve always wanted home to be a very creative space and I guess that goes back to my sort of childhood memories. So, you know, I love the making involved in home, and I’ve kind of reconnected to that in the last few months in a way that I hadn’t done since I was a child. So I’ve gone back into making things, which I always did as a child, and now I’m doing a lot of it now, and so I’m replacing words with, with the making and using my hands. You know, having used words so much over the last you know four decades or whatever, I’m enjoying sort of resting the words, if you like. You know I’m not writing as much, but I’m looking at my fingernails and actually they’re stained because of the making I’ve been doing this morning and you can’t quite see, but actually there’s stuff all around me and I get very distracted from my desk because there’s a sewing machine, interior line, printing. You know it’s honestly all around me. I have this kind of you know space where I’m making everything.
And then the other thing is growing. We’ve got a vegetable garden, and this is a very interesting time of year because one’s itching to start planting, start sowing seeds, but because it’s been a very cold early spring, you know, it’s kind of like one’s at the starting point of the race, you know, and you’re kind of waiting for that starting garden and it’s just not coming.

KP That’s a very wholesome place to round off this conversation. Home as a place of generative creativity, of making and growing and sewing, which are all things I would like to be present in my own homestead a bit more. I’ve so enjoyed hearing your thoughts on this incredibly rich subject of what home means. It’s given me lots to think about. So thank you very much, Madeleine. It’s been a pleasure talking to you today.

MB And you, and you.

KP Ihope you’ve enjoyed listening to the eighth episode of The Examined Life Podcast. Madeleine Bunting’s book this East Side England’s Love Affair was published by Granta in May and can be found wherever books are sold. I’d encourage you to seek out her writing, which I’ve always found compelling and insightful and full of wisdom.

This has been the final episode of the first series of the Examined Life Podcast. I hope to produce a follow up episode with some concluding highlights and thoughts. I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to this series and that it’s made you think. I’d love to know what episode you’ve enjoyed the most and why. I hope to create a second interview series later on this year. In the meantime, do please share this episode with others, rate the podcast and get in touch with any feedback. Please do subscribe on the website, if you haven’t yet, at www.examined-life.com. I really do try to ensure that everything I send out to the mailing list is helpful and relevant and there’s not much of it to be honest, once per episode and it shares the same intention as this podcast, which is to provoke and feed your curiosity about what it means to live well in this cultural moment. Thanks again for listening, wherever you are. I look forward to reaching out to you again in the future with more insights from today’s most influential thinkers.

This interview was conducted early in 2017 in the West London Synagogue

KP Could I begin by asking how this question has animated and influenced you over the years?

JN I think I need to go back and say that I grew up in a family surrounded by different forms of activism. My grandmother was responsible for getting quite a lot of refugees – Jewish refugees and other refugees – from Germany and Austria into Britain. One of the things she always said was that you haven’t got long on this earth, and so you have got to make the best use of it. Of course, that’s a very Jewish way of thinking because we’re not terribly good on the afterlife, in fact we’re pretty rubbish. Certainly we don’t have a well-developed sense of the afterlife – contemplation of it is not a major part of Judaism. Judaism focuses on this world, with sayings like ‘if you save a single life it is as if you have saved the whole world’ – that kind of thing is very strong within Judaism…So I suppose before I knew where the thinking lay, it was almost as if it was part of my DNA because that’s just what I grew up with.

I think I always felt that just doing what you absolutely must do, isn’t enough. Even as a kid I used to volunteer. I volunteered for an organisation where I was visiting isolated elderly people, and I got very involved in issues about poverty and hunger and so on while I was still at school. It was a sense of, you can’t just do your homework – that’s just not enough! I have an interest in music and I play the violin extremely badly – I mean really, really, really, badly. But from quite an early age at school I was encouraged to go to concerts, and I remember battling with my dad about whether I could go to concerts instead of synagogue on Saturday mornings. In the process music began to matter to me hugely, and it wasn’t because I was doing it for an exam of any sort – it just made me explore some ideas about what was really possible in life, and wonder how people were able to do these amazing things. So from quite early on I thought, you can’t just use your spare time for watching movies or reading rubbish novels – you’ve actually got to get your head around the great novels, the great musical works or whatever, and you’ve got to get involved with some kind of social activism.

KP You indicated that social action and spending time with those who are suffering gives you some perspective, can you tell me – what has your own involvement taught you about why you’re here, what kind of perspective has it given you?

JN I really started spending time with people who were suffering and dying at the very end of my time at university, then during my time training to be a Rabbi. When I was a student Rabbi with a congregation that didn’t have another Rabbi, I did spend time with people who were dying for the first time. It taught that almost everybody who is dying has regrets about what they haven’t done. They largely (at least in my case which may be totally idiosyncratic), don’t have many regrets about what they have done, but they do have regrets about what they didn’t do. Often, they have very real regrets about things they didn’t learn, places they didn’t visit, books they didn’t read or whatever. And what it teaches you is that you need to fill your life with as much as you can, so you have as few of those regrets as you can – so all passions are spent, as it were. You won’t succeed, and the younger you are to die, the less likely you are to succeed, but do all the things you want to do – don’t say, ‘I’ll leave it until next year’, carpe diem and all of that.

That’s one bit, but the other bit is the way people deal with that when they are suffering and when they are dying, and the way they come to terms with things is very moving. The capacity for the human spirit to overcome regret and to face the unknown with equanimity is something that’s magnificent.

KP So seeing people face death has been a fairly instructive teacher for you?

JN Massively instructive, it’s extraordinary. My first congregation was in Streatham in South London where a lot of the people were not at all well-off, and had quite hard lives. They would mostly describe themselves as very ordinary people. When you were with them and they were dying, they would say ‘I’m really a very ordinary person, I haven’t done anything extraordinary with my life’, and you would think ‘you are not ordinary, you are remarkable. The fact that you are able to talk about yourself like this is remarkable, most people are not able to do that’. It’s like they are watching the film of their life backwards, and that is a very remarkable thing to do – particularly with clarity when you probably haven’t got terribly long left. There is something about nobody being ordinary, and the remarkability of the human spirit where you see the individual shine through, in what is for them, very extreme circumstances.

KP So you’ve learned through the experiences that you’ve been through that life is precious and short, but you have also got a road map through religion, can you talk about that?

JN I have found a road map through religion, but it’s a religion which is very different from Christianity, and perhaps more like Islam in some ways. My road map is a form of Judaism which is very much about social conscience and social action and what you do in this world – actually, I think all of Judaism is about what you do in this world. It’s very much about how you live your life here on earth. What I get from religion is Jewish teaching and the sense of community acting together. One of the things that is so important about a community is that they feel this sense of cohesion, even though the people are very different – they do things together, in the name of their community. I get that from religion, but in a sense it is not only from the religion itself, but from how Jewish communities behave – which I think is quite a significant distinction. So, for example, this congregation [West London Synagogue] runs a drop in centre for asylum seekers and winter night shelter with some local churches. The drop in for asylum seekers is a mixture of things, and all those who come to the drop-in centre are either Muslim or Christian, not Jews – for obvious reasons because that’s where most asylum seekers are coming from. As a congregation of Jews, we offer help, support, succour or whatever, to Muslim’s and Christians. What is interesting is that it is hugely popular to volunteer at the drop-in, we have more volunteers than we can use. That’s not just about doing what God tells you to do – it’s about being taught in our religion that you do what you can in this life, but also that Jews have had historically huge experiences of being asylum seekers. It’s about thinking ‘I’m well and I’m safe in this country, but I’m going to do my best to ensure that others can be safe and well too, and we’re going to do it together as a community.’

KP Can you tell me about volunteering, what is it that makes people want to use the little time they have to volunteer and help others?

JN Nobody volunteers for its own sake, we may think we do but that’s not what happens. Research shows that perfectly clearly. I chaired the commission on volunteering, and if you ask why people volunteer you quickly discover that the reasons people volunteer are all in one way or another to do with themselves. Why do we volunteer? We volunteer to give ourselves a reason to get up in the morning, we volunteer to get some meaning in our lives, we volunteer so that we can make friends, we volunteer because we think it is the right thing to do and we will feel better about ourselves if we do it…I think that it is really important that we understand that people volunteer for all sorts of reasons, but those reasons will in some way always refer back to themselves.

KP So this question of how to use the time you have, what are the ways that the question continues to guide you in your current position?

JN I’m quite old, I could retire – but instead I’m thinking, what can I do to change the country? What can be done about our very restrictive access to asylum seekers, which I feel is wrong? Brexit seems to have licensed a form of hatred that I thought we wouldn’t see, how might that be challenged? So, in this little bit of life I have left I would like to see what I can do to make the world a better place.

This interview was conducted over a video-call in early 2016. The photos were sent by Tariq Ramadan’s office.

KP: Can you begin by explaining why you chose this question, what brought you to it?

TR: If I come back to the very essence of what I believe, and if I look at the value system from within the Islamic tradition, the main question for me which is very particular to Islam – though also universal – is ‘am I on my way to peace?’

Peace has to do with inner peace, peace with the environment, peace with our fellow brothers and sisters in humanity. So peace is not just ‘peace and love’, peace is very demanding. We have to take peace seriously with our heart and with our mind.

The second question coming out of this is how much am I consistent? Consistency is important, because you are at peace when you are consistent. And also when your questions get their answers. So it is an intellectual process and it is a psychological process. But the ultimate thing for me is to try to be at peace.

KP: The English word peace can mean a number of things, and perhaps does not have the same scope or depth as its Arabic equivalent ‘Salam’, can you unpack the meaning of Salam a bit?

TR: Salam means peace with all the dimensions. It is one of the names of God, it is the name of paradise in Islam, but it’s also what we need to try to get inside of us. It is the very root of Islam – Islam means peace. It is also to be at peace with the environment, to show respect for creation and the creator and to spread peace to human beings.

KP: Peace as you describe it, is a very evasive thing – how do we find it?

TR: So, this is why the second part of the question is very important – looking for consistency. Intellectually, to be at peace is to never avoid questioning, but always be looking for answers. It is a process, we do not arrive but to ask – ‘am I on my way to peace?’ – means that has to be translated into many ways. Am I on my way to intellectual peace, to psychological and spiritual peace, am I on my way to human peace – which is peace with the environment and peace with human beings. So when philosophers are saying that the ultimate goal is happiness, I would say for me it is to reach a state of peace with God, and with myself, and with humanity.

KP: What do you think is at war with our quest to seek and to find peace in our culture today?

TR: When we think that happiness is in what we have, not whom we are. Consumerism is the ultimate alienation. It is confusing emotions with spirituality. Emotions are necessary, but they are not the spiritual state of peace that we are talking about. In fact it is very difficult to be emotionally at peace. Very often you have to master your emotions to be at peace, because emotions are coming from outside. Emotions could be good as much as bad, depending on how you deal with them. We should never be the object of our emotions, we should be the subject of our emotions.

KP: You have found that road to peace to be through Islam. Do you look at people of different faiths and say that they are on their own road to peace?

TR: Of course, of course. I think that peace is not the monopoly of any one tradition. I think peace is when your questions find their answer, it is when your heart feels that ‘this is it’. So this is why the spiritual communion between people of different spiritual backgrounds can find this peace. I have met people who are not Muslim who are much more at peace with themselves than Muslim’s I know. This is the image of the mountain that I have in ‘The Quest for Meaning’, that we are on different paths up the mountain, and peace is at the top of the mountain – this is what we are all sharing. So we cannot just confuse the path towards peace with peace itself. We have many paths, and we have this state of peace that we are all longing for. It is the ultimate question for human beings, I would say. It is very demanding, it is the opposite of what we think. You can’t be passive and at peace, you can only reach peace through struggling; through adding knowledge to knowledge, developing interpersonal relations with human beings, and even with nature.  If there are contradictions, you know you should start your journey towards peace.

So the only way you can get moments of peace, is to be on your way towards more consistency. The deep questions you might have require deep quests and deep answers as well.

KP: Perhaps I misunderstand the mountain analogy, how do you square that image with the exclusive claims of Islam and other religions?

TR: Because I as a Muslim really think that God is the truth. Now, I belong to this truth, but it does not belong to me. I can understand that some people can experience this peace in the way they deal with truth in their life, so at the end I don’t have the final word on truth. I think that He is the one and He is the only one, and He is the ultimate one that can provide my heart with peace. Can I judge the other paths? No, I just have to acknowledge the fact that God wanted many paths, and there should be a reason there that I cannot get.

KP: It seems to requires some humility then?

TR: Yes, that’s very essential – no humility, no peace.

MV: A question that I am thinking a lot about at the moment is how to see spiritually. Seeing spiritually is about how to see with the imagination, or see with the soul – you might say. It comes particularly from Plato, who offered a  philosophy that is about a reality that is immanent and all around us, but which we are otherwise rather blind to. This is one way of reading his myth of the cave, the idea that we are stuck at the back of the cave, and what we take to be reality is really shadows dancing on the wall, and there is a journey that we have to undergo – and it’s a fearful journey as well as a joyful journey – but if you undertake it, then your inner eye opens up, and you perceive the same world, but in a very different way.

So how do we see spiritually – what might that be about, what does it take within me? Because Plato was very clear that we have to resonate with reality, in order to perceive reality. And so if our minds are narrow, or our minds are preoccupied with certain questions (maybe personal questions that are quite troubling), that will be what we perceive as reality. Whereas if we can get over ourselves a bit, and open our minds, then we will perceive reality in a very different way – because we are resonating with it. Knowing was all about participating to Plato, so that’s what we must try to focus on.

KP: Can you unpack this idea that knowing is about participating a little more?

MV: It might help to contrast it with scientific understanding because knowing in this way stresses not participating in reality. So a  scientist aims to be objective, detached, and scientific knowledge doesn’t depend on how the scientist lives or who the scientist is. Reality is treated as something that can be studied from the outside in, whereas participative knowing argues that it must also be studied from the inside out. Who you are and how you’re living makes all the difference to what you see. This is what is meant by participation.

KP: What do you mean by the soul or spirituality – these are important concepts here, but also difficult to define…

MV: Soul is the quality of aliveness that you and I have. It’s what makes us ourselves. It’s what makes us a person as opposed to a biomechanical machine. It’s something felt rather than measured. Spirituality is the capacity to appreciate this felt aliveness both in yourself and everything else. To be spiritual is to take this dimension of life seriously.

KP: So what is the process then, how do we begin to see spiritually?

MV: I think the first task is to know yourself, as the old adage in the Greek world went. What that does is help you to realise the limits of yourself, and the limits to your perception – then you begin to see over the horizon of your perception.

KP: Is this something that is really only known through experience, that perhaps you can be guided towards, but you cannot learn it in the same way as you might learn facts about a subject?

MV: I think it’s something that comes to you. You might read someone who is describing it. For example, you might read a bit of poetry one year, then you return to it five years later and think ‘goodness me, that is extraordinary’. I really like William Blake’s line ‘eternity’s sunrise’

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

I remember reading that years ago and not really understanding what it meant. Now when I read it, I think this is him on the cusp of a spiritual awakening. He’s got over himself, which is why he can fly with the dawn – and what he sees is eternity’s sunrise, divine presence wherever he looks.

KP: As a psychotherapist, do you think seeing spiritually is related to mental health?

MV: The premise of psychotherapy is that you cannot solve your problems in the way that you think you should be able to solve your problems – because if you could, then you would probably would have done it already. Psychotherapy works on the idea that we are trapped in a worldview that we think should help release us from our problems, but in fact it is part of the problem. So in psychotherapy what you are trying to do is work with people so that gradually they become less tied to the worldview that is troubling them so much, and they start to see different possibilities and new ways of dealing with the world start to emerge. Spiritually, the same sort of principle applies. In a ‘spiritual psychotherapy’, you are seeking to be free from a world perspective (the kind of worldview of our time), which is materialistic and causes us all sorts of anxieties about mortality, wanting to possess more, having concerns about the future etc. That seems to be the neurosis of our time, but working with that – seeing the limits of that, becoming less tied to that, could happen through a process that might be like psychotherapy, and could be liberating and lead to these different perceptions.

KP: How do you think the dominant worldview of our time is at war with our ability to see spiritually? Do we have the vocabulary for this at the moment, or is there language and ways of thinking that need to be reintroduced?

MV: I certainly think that spiritual sight which would have been regarded as the best form of sight until about 300 or 400 years ago, that has reversed and now everybody has to give a nod to materialism some way or another. There is of course some reason for that, because materially our world is a lot easier to live in than the world was a few hundred years ago – so it’s not all bad…I would much rather have a tooth ache in 2018 than in 1618, that’s fair enough. But I think the gains come at a tremendous cost. We don’t appreciate the inner life of things anymore, we appreciate very much their exterior life – which science reveals so amazingly, but we don’t directly experience the soul of things and how they have a kind of vitality and liveliness which complements our own vitality and liveliness. And so spiritual sight would be about reawakening to the inside of the whole world, as well as our own inside. That is an expression of a chap called Owen Barfield who I am very influenced by, he said that consciousness is not one thing stuck onto the rest of everything else, it is the inside of the whole world. Nowadays we need to learn to participate with this inner life afresh.

KP: It seems that one of the problems in society is with what might be called expressive individualism, this obsession with the self – and so, in a sense you might think that one of the issues is thinking too much about yourself, and so one of the ways to heal yourself is to start doing things for other people, like stop thinking so much and just start doing. Do you think there is any truth in that?

MV: I think you have to be careful there, because that kind of advice can become a bit of a moral burden, saying that ‘you should be doing this or you should be doing that’. That actually just makes you more self-obsessed because you just feel guilty for not doing enough etc. I think the key to becoming an individual is to love yourself enough to forget yourself. Knowing yourself is part of that, because you become more at ease with yourself and more comfortable in your own skin, and then you start to become aware that there is more than just yourself. Iris Murdoch, the great Platonist, had a great way of putting it, she said that ‘love is the painful realisation that something other than myself is real’. That only really begins by loving yourself enough to be able to forget yourself. In psychotherapy we say that the problem with narcissism is not loving yourself, it’s not being able to love yourself, so that you become self-preoccupied with the self. Your whole life becomes an effort to love yourself, in ways which will never fully deliver.

KP: In terms of where you look for answers to the question of how one sees spiritually, some of these answers for you lie in the great thought of great thinkers. Are there ways of trying to see spiritually that are not so cognitively demanding and intellectual?

MV: Take something like music. I think music is way we all have of hearing spiritually. The reason is that the scientific description of music is just the notes, but what the physical description never gets is the melody, or the meaning or the emotion – which is the real impact that music makes. That real impact is partly emotional, partly psychological, but I think it is also spiritual because it awakens us to the transcendent or to ‘the more’ as William James puts it. When you’re immersed in music, it is quite as real as anything you could touch. So things like music, art, poetry help us access the spiritual. Owen Barfield thought that words have a kind of soul, and that the art of the poet is to put words in an order that releases the soul, so you have a felt sense of what the words are doing, as well as just a descriptive sense. He said imagine a prose writer writing the two words ‘old prophets’. When you hear that phrase you think of people who had a gift to see the future who were either elderly or lived a long time ago, it’s kind of a description. But the poet would say ‘prophets old’, and that phrase with the inversion has a very different resonance. It makes you think of the spirit of those prophets. It almost feels like it’s conjuring their presence. That’s the kind of thing that poetry does. It puts words in an unexpected order that releases the inside of the words, as it were. The best kind of spiritual poetry takes you to the edge, and encourages you to look over the edge because of the way the words are put together.

KP To what extent do you think learning to see spiritually is something we must learn to do individually, or is it something that can and should be done in community?

MV: It’s both an individual and collective undertaking. You must know yourself and work on yourself in order to see more. But seeing spiritually  is greatly aided by engaging with what others have already discerned and conveyed. They offer a path that you can follow, though you yourself have to follow it.

Mark has a series of videos on the question of how we learn to see spiritually, these can be found here.

I met Sugata Mitra following a brief and intriguing correspondence in which he had replied to a letter I had written with:

Question: ‘Is this a dream?’

Where to look for an answer: Inside the old matchbox somewhere at the back of the lowest right hand drawer.

We met to discuss this in Newcastle in the Summer of 2015.

KP What did you mean by saying that we should look inside an old matchbox for the answer?

SM I think I meant that there is an answer, but we just don’t know where to look for it. If you ask somebody how long will it take for an object of 20g to fall to the ground if I drop it one meter from the surface of the earth.  But then I say, I don’t want to know the actual answer, I want to know how you would find it.  So then, what could we do – well we could say I need to know the fundamentals of why things fall, and figure it out. Or you could say, I’ll google it and find a formulae, and then I’ll figure it out. Or you could say, I ‘ll take a stopwatch and an object and I’ll tell you. Or you could ask a friend. These are all valid answers.  But you could not say, ‘I need to look inside a teacup’ – that is considered not a valid answer. Nor would it be be valid to say ‘I’ll ask my dog’.

What I’d like to question is the last two examples, is it really true that you can’t find the answer by looking into a teacup or asking your dog? What if the real answer is that you can find the answer by looking anywhere.  What if the answers to all questions were in everything, and not in specific places?  Somehow it seems more elegant to me to say that all the answers are everywhere, they are multiplexed, as opposed to saying that answers are kept inside little boxes, which are kept inside other little boxes, and until you know the sequence of boxes to look for, you can’t find the answer.

KP The scientific method has been very effective, so why would we look elsewhere?

SM Yes, we would look elsewhere only if there are questions to which the scientific method is unable to answer, like ‘is this a dream?’  So since such questions exist, therefore the method of answering them must also be questioned.

KP Is the question in any way borne of a worldview influenced by Hinduism?

SH Most Indians are affected by that view of the universe – that it could all be a dream. But on the other hand, the Hindu texts are very different from other religions, because they also after a while say that maybe the argument itself is not correct.  The most famous one being about the existence of God.  One of the vedas speaks about multiple God’s, that you cannot have this reality without having millions of Gods. Then the next one says you don’t need that, there is only one God. Then the third one says, what if there is no God at all? And it just leaves you with that.  I don’t know if the authors were merely having fun, or were they seriously trying to say that you can’t box things [in]. You cannot say that ‘this is true’ and ‘this is false’.  The true can be false and the false can be true…it depends on how you look at it. It basically says that it isn’t an ‘ism’, it never says that it’s a religion, it never says that it is right.  It just raises certain issues for you to think about. It is a way of thinking, and a way of looking at life.

KP So Hinduism inescapably influences thought, but your training is in physics – presumably that has influenced where this question comes from too?

SM Yes. I find it interesting to think about not only in terms of mysticism, but also in terms of hard science. In my work as a particle physicist I have done many experiments to look for where meaning comes from.  They all made some scientific sense, but left me with the feeling that somebody is fooling around with you. Somebody or something is fooling around. Let me put it this way…

Imagine a space which is full of an absolutely random distribution of little things that are and little things that are not. It is quite easy to imagine that can be true. Since we think in three dimensions, let’s think in three dimensions. So, a huge three dimensional space full of ones and zeros. If it is big enough, can I not say that all possible strings [of digits] exist inside it? Of course I can, quite easily. So Beethoven’s 9th symphony exists inside there, depending on where you look at it from. But to know where to look at it from, you need a conscious being to make sense of it. So what is consciousness? I have no idea what consciousness is, but I know that there is well over 100 trillion neural synapses in the brain, and each neuron either fires or it doesn’t. So I could represent my entire brain as long string of ones and zeros. If that is so, then in that infinite space of one’s and zero’s, that string also exists somewhere. So if that string encounters the right header [starting point for a sequence] and the right string, it will then hear Beethoven’s 9th symphony. It is a string listening to or interpreting another string…But then I can imagine a world without physics, because this world doesn’t need any physics – it’s just strings reading each other. And since all such strings exist in that infinite space, all realities can exist inside there. This is immaterial, there is no matter involved in this – because matter doesn’t have to exist in this reality. All you need is a state of being and a state of non-being – an infinite number, an infinite volume. And then you can have a self-consistent universe of strings reading each other. Some strings think that they are brains, some strings think that they are music (if strings could think) – so there you go. At that point I gave up, because I thought – is there a way I could prove this or disprove this?

I started with the search for where meaning, where does meaning come from? Then I ended up with this situation where being didn’t seem to be a requirement for the world to exist.

KP So the question is not as playful as it sounds?

SM Not at all, so – is it a dream? Yes…it could be. I’m not even sure our binary thinking of ‘this is real because it exists’ and ‘this is not real because it is not made of matter’ is valid, that seems to me a false dichotomy. This table is real, I can feel it and so on…but is my mind not real because I can’t feel it? That can’t be right either. Sometimes to my students I ask, what is matter? Does matter have to exist in space somewhere? They would say yes, things that exist have to be somewhere – at least in science. But what about the internet, does the internet exist? Of course it does, but then where is it? The internet is everywhere, and it is nowhere. We actually created it, we created a non-tangible object. So that settles the issue as far as I’m concerned – reality doesn’t have to be occupying space, time, to have a weight, to react to forces, to exist. As I was growing up I learned about a lot of things that I thought existed, but in the end didn’t – like ghosts, Santa etc. So what if we’re the same – what is we are not real? It could be this way.

KP How does asking and investigating this question personally affect you?

SM Hinduism doesn’t make me feel very happy, because it confuses you. It constantly brings up this question of – is it a dream? Being a Hindu and studying quantum physics means that you cannot put your foot down and say ‘this is the way it is’ for anything. The most you can say is that this has the highest probability. I think that makes a huge difference, because the rest of Western civilisation is built on the fact that there is right and there is wrong.

So that is the origins of the question of whether or not this is a dream.  The answer I gave you – where to look. That comes from a story from when I was about 9 years old, and I had learned to write hieroglyphics – because it’s an exciting thing to do for a 9 year old. We had bungalow in Delhi with a garden, and I took a piece of bark and scratched out in hieroglyphics and I think what I wrote was ‘it is all a dream’. And then I put that bark into a matchbox, and I buried the matchbox in the garden after blindfolding myself. Then I covered it up well, spun myself around and took my blindfold off, so I don’t know to this day where that matchbox is.

KP One day some archeologist might dig it up…

SM That was exactly my 9 year old thinking! I thought they would dig it up and find it a contradiction, because they would find the hieroglyphics but wonder why it is in a matchbox, and why does it say – it is all a dream?

KP Is it a question worth asking if you never resolve it?

SH You would have to ask the Buddha. He used to be pretty good at this sort of thing. There were some questions to which he would say, the question is more important than the answer.  Questions have a great deal of intrinsic value, and the answer can sometimes not be as important as the question. Mainly because the answer could be different depending on where it is that you are coming from. For example, if we don’t have the header for hearing Beethoven’s music, it will come out as horrendous noise – we’ll be asking, what kind of shit is this? Likewise, for all we know when we hear a bird chirping, it could actually be reciting the solution for quadratic equations. It depends on where you’re standing.

Though what you ask is a very important thing, is it worth thinking about? Because, what will it do to you? That kind of brings us back to Hinduism and one of the Upanishads, which says – is it worth it now that you have read this huge book? Well, we don’t know the answer to that, but it says that if you have finished it, you should find yourself some wine, women and chariots.