Chloé Cooper Jones: When We Hold Ourselves Apart
Chloé Cooper Jones is the author of the truly stunning memoir Easy Beauty, which unsurprisingly, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Chloé was born with sacral agenesis, a rare congenital condition that impacts her gait and her stature, and makes it at times painful to move throughout the world. Her memoir is a study in the way her condition has kept her apart, driving her toward intellectual superiority as a defense mechanism against a world that doesn’t feel like it belongs to her. In Easy Beauty, she travels the globe, reclaiming spaces and her own body as she had always refused to make it the center of her scholarship. As she travels, Chloé probes big questions, like why do we gather at places where terrible things have happened and who gets to be a philosopher? She also explores the qualities of easy versus difficult beauty, beauty we have to work for. Chloé is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and an Associate Professor at Columbia University’s MFA program. This is one of my favorite conversations to date, so let’s turn to it now.
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity).
ELISE: When did Easy Beauty come out?
CHLOE: April, 2022.
ELISE: Okay. Oh, wow. It's only been... A year.
CHLOE: It's been a year and a little bit of change.
ELISE: And a Pulitzer Prize nomination, no big deal.
CHLOE: it's my second loss, so I keep joking, I lost for feature writing as well in 2020, so my joke now is that, although it's not really a joke, I'm kind of like trying to figure out how to do this, is to try to lose the Pulitzer in every category but never win it, because I think like that's actually legitimately cooler, like if my bio was like, Chloe Cooper Jones has lost the Pulitzer in feature writing, memoir writing, novel writing, play writing, like that's an incredible bio.
ELISE: That is an incredible bio. You don't want to be Susan Lucci, right? Wasn't she the one, she was nominated in the same category, right?
CHLOE: yes, I do want to be the Susan Lucci of the Pulitzers, but with more...
ELISE: more breadth.
CHLOE: Yeah, exactly.
ELISE: I love that for you.
CHLOE: Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you for having me on. I've been really excited to talk to you and really honored that you found the book and took the time that you did with it and wanted to chat.
ELISE: Well, not to dunk on my brother, but I first heard about your book probably shortly after it came out. My friend Kim was talking to me about it and how stunning she thought it was. And then I ordered it and it's been on my TBR shelves. And then I feel like when you were nominated for the Pulitzer, and I was like, oh, this is an avid reader press book, and my brother didn't tell me. I know that Lauren is your editor, but this is typical of my brother. He doesn't actually tell me or pitch me anything, so, anyway, but I know you're very loved. I'm sure this isn't surprising to you. And you have one of the best editors in the business.
CHLOE: I absolutely do. I mean, I can't believe how lucky I got. It was wild to have gone through the publishing process feeling like I have literally no complaints, I have only immense amounts of gratitude. That team at Avid Reader is just... I think the best in the publishing business, like just so exceptional. And Lauren, I mean, she's just such a brilliant human being and a kind and warm and generous human being, but also I see her all through the book and I always, when I talk to her, I'm just like, look at we got or like we, you know, like I always like include her in the sense because it just feels like such a deeply collaborative object, I think, not just because of the editing, but because of the profound trust that I felt in her allowed me to go places in terms of vulnerability of writing and style and, like, risks, structural risks or craft decisions because I had so much faith in her, I was able to, like, write the book that I really wanted to write.
ELISE: Yeah, did you know that? Cause, you know, even starting there at the end of the book There's such a beautiful scene in which I could relate so intensely, where you acknowledge how easier it is in life to take sort of an intellectual high ground or to sit on like the shelf of snobbery and look down on the world and retreat, right, into your highly academic mind, your philosophy degree accolades, and that your husband shared in this, that scene, when he talks about how he went to school dances. You're watching your son, right? Enjoy a magic show and you're sort of Interrupting the spell by your own Skeptical nature. I don't know if that's accurate, but that was such a moving experience of you talking about Wolfgang. Can you talk to us about that?
CHLOE: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's important that that scene comes at the end of the book, because the book is, I mean, chronologically, it came at the end of that time period, but, you know, the book is very much about this struggle to feel present and not defensive and like open to living a life full of experiences with other people. And you see me making a lot of progress toward this in the book. But one thing that was very important to me was to end the book in a space of continued struggle with that, to say that there's nothing about this book that's written from some hindsight of, oh, I've got it all figured out and now I know how to live perfectly in a world of others.
It's like, no, it's a book about a type of growth that I will be engaged in for the rest of my life. And so the book ends with yet another opportunity for me to kind of learn and fail and try to re, you know, redirect myself. So my son and I are, and my husband, we're all at a magic show in our Brooklyn neighborhood in Prospect Park. And my son is so smart and intuitive and he was using his intelligence to disrupt the magic of this show. So he just, and he actually, he still loves to do this even now, many years later, but he can just like figure out magic tricks really fast. He has sort of like a sixth sense of like how they work or like any sort of thing that's like a con job, like he has a really fast mind for like systems in that way. So we were at this magic show and as this poor woman is trying to entertain this, you know, these children on this beautiful summer day, Wolfgang just kept being like, You know, I know how she did this trick, and he would name it, and he'd be like, she's gonna open that drawer, and this thing will be in here, and that won't be there, like, there's food coloring on the newspaper print, and that's why the water, you know.
And he could just do that, and he was right every single time. And I was really proud of him. I was like, egging him on, and I was like, yeah, like, tell her, and I was so proud of his intelligence. It was this moment in which You can see both my influence in his life in sort of a negative way, but then also his father's in this more positive way. And the negative way was that exactly what you just said to sort of frame it, that there's a way in which a person can choose to use their skill set, their insights, their intuitions, or their intelligence. As a weapon that keeps them sort of separate from a life with others or possible magic, you know, in whatever way you want to describe or define the possibility of magic in one's life and Wolfgang was doing that and that was clearly an echo of how I had lived a lot of my life. You know, I had used my intelligence to insulate me from the things that I feared, which was other people's judgment of me the difficulty of making a life committed to other people. And here's this little microcosm of it, right? Instead of Wolfgang running to the front of this circle of children to join his peers and allow himself to just be in the presence of a fun magic show, he had to like, dissect it.
But not just that, he was using his intelligence to kind of keep himself separate from his peers. And I was egging that on. And then Andrew, Wolfgang's father, just says you know, I went to school dances and I didn't dance. And I said, yeah, I mean, I did too. I absolutely did that. And he said, I think that there's a time in which using, you know, one sort of, I mean, I'm going to get his line wrong, but he says, There's times in which, like, going against the crowd is an act of bravery, and there's a time when going against the crowd is actually an act of cowardice, and Wolfgang is both compassionate and intelligent enough to learn the difference between those two things if we just manage to stay out of his way.
And that was a very powerful moment for me in the sense of like, you know, you have kids, you always see, they form these incredible little mirrors of your own strengths and failures, your own spaces to grow. And that was yet another moment of, you know, the possibility for growth. And then at the end of that scene, he's able to go hug a rabbit and, you know, like have a really fun moment and hug, you know, the great Moody Trudy, who's this magician and, and have this sweet moment of connection and, and pet a real rabbit that's come out of a hat. And what a shame if he had missed that, you know, if he didn't have this other influence coming from his father of like knowing the difference between when to join and when to step back, like would have been such a shame to have missed that, that beautiful moment. And he didn't. So yeah.
ELISE: Oh, it's such a beautiful story and I felt it acutely and it made me wonder, you know, in the context of thinking about the process of working on this book and working with Lauren and watching a very subtle, very deft, not unraveling of yourself because that makes it seem like you're coming undone, but this like gradual revealing. And this moment, which I didn't expect as a reader, and I'm not giving anything away for people who haven't yet read the book, but where I'm suddenly like seeing you after seeing your dazzling mind for the first half of the book, not your dazzling mind only, but like you have an incredible mind. I'm sure you know this. And then suddenly the revelations, that keep coming. When you wrote the book, is that the form that emerged? Or did Lauren have to bring you into the book? Or was that the actual experience?
CHLOE: No. I mean, I had a lot of ideas for how I wanted to structure the book. And luckily I had in Lauren just like a tremendous teammate in helping me see my ambition and then hit that mark. So I had a couple really important ideas for what felt important to me rather like about what the book should be. One is really influenced by the shape of a Richard Serra sculpture, which in one chapter my son gets lost inside of a Richard Serra sculpture. And, you know, very briefly, the thing I was taking as inspiration from that was in the Richards Zara sculpture, you pass between two walls, and the two walls are always curving in or out, and so it feels like your path through these two shapes is always narrowing and widening, and you have a very hard time getting a perceptual grasp on what's coming next. And I think that was very important as a structural metaphor for how my life was, in that people were always writing assumptions on me, and, There was always a perceptual assumption that was being changed, but also the way that I looked at my life, the fact that I thought I could never get pregnant and got pregnant, that I could never do certain things that I end up doing, it's this way of sort of highlighting, structurally, the way that the mind wants to auto complete our future, or what's coming next, or assumptions about other people, and then as we move through those moments, we're always being sort of challenged and changed, so The way that manifests in the book is on almost every single page of the book, there's a moment in which I think I'm perceiving one thing and then something changes that or someone's perceiving something about me and something changes, whether it's as subtle as I'm looking at a train window and then the train goes around a bend and suddenly new light allows me to re see everything inside of the train. Or bigger moments in which, you know, people's massive perceptual changes, like, affect how they see me or how I can see myself. So there's that Kind of structural and linguistic, like, constant play with perspective shift. But then the other thing is, I wanted to take a lot of risks with language and with philosophy and with, you know, really challenging myself and the reader to delve into some, like, pretty thorny complex spaces, both emotionally and intellectually with me. And I think the way that I felt like I could do that is if I really grounded the book In a structure that we know deeply instinctually so well, which is just the quest structure. So the book is a standard, in many ways, just an absolute standard quest structure. There's a call to action in the first chapter of this man who, his real name is something else, but I renamed him in the book, Colin.
ELISE: Jay. Yeah, Colin.
CHLOE: The call to action. So his name is Colin. I mean, that's why I chose that pseudonym.
ELISE: Oh, interesting.
CHLOE: and then there's 12 steps in like Joseph Campbell's a hero's journey. There's 12 chapters of the book. I meet mentors and that helped me cross thresholds. I meet monsters that propose obstacles in my book the mentors are like. Beyonce and Roger Federer and my mother, and the obstacles and the monsters are usually internal ones, but it's still the same structure, but the end of each hero's quest requires the hero to return home with new knowledge.
ELISE: And an elixir, right?
CHLOE: Yeah, or something, yeah, they need to bring something home. I mean, that's the new knowledge, whether it's an elixir or it's, you know, the stone or the chalice or whatever it is, and then be able to reintegrate that into their sense of home, which is why the book ends with me in Brooklyn, really testing whether or not I have acquired new knowledge. And the last moments of the book are me writing about walking my son home from school under the sun with the same sort of prose and, like, linguistic reverence that I use at the beginning of the book to talk about, like, a Bernini sculpture, so that's part of the arc. So that structure was set for me and...
ELISE: blowing my mind.
CHLOE: oh, in a good way or a bad way?
ELISE: No, in an amazing way. I mean, I already felt like your book was so meta and was working on me in so many levels. And now, wow, That's amazing.
CHLOE: There's a lot of secrets in the book. There's a lot of, like, little, little secrets. The sun, like, every time I write about the sun, that operates in a certain way. And yeah, one example is just, like, when I explain the neutral room at the beginning of the book, which is a space in which I sort of retreat to to Get some separation from the world and my doctor taught me about how to dissociate from pain by kind of going into this separated space in my mind, which we call the neutral room. My doctor told me to count to eight. So it's like pain or discomfort lasts in this eight second chunk and then the eight seconds begins again and in the first Bernini chapter of the book when I'm in Rome and the Galleria Borghese, I introduced this concept of the neutral room, and then every sentence in the paragraph that follows has eight syllables in it. So, will anybody notice that? No, but It forces you to do your own mental eight count with me as you're reading that section of the book. So you're reading about me in pain, doing my own eight count in this dissociated state, but the rhythm the sentences will make in your ear, or if you listen to the audiobook, the rhythm of my reading the sentences to you will force you subliminally into an eight count. And I just think like, It's not that I ever felt like people would be able to pick that out, but I do think we know, like we feel, when we're reading a book that says, or encountering any artwork that's just from as generous a source as possible. And that's what I wanted to put in this book, like as much of my, time, intellect, and ability, not for all of that to be recognized, but just for the feeling, hopefully, that it would convey of richness, kind of a desire to, like, keep it on your shelf, you know?
ELISE: No, it makes me want to reread it now. It's like Ulysses, you know? Like I that's a book that I don't know how many times I read it. I haven't read it in a while, but you can read it again and again and again and trace almost any concept or theme and find it. It's so rich. It's obviously so hard, but it's so fun, when it's like an unyielding treasure. Will you tell us just to orient people about the inciting event? That night in the bar with Colin and Jay.
CHLOE: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, just to say, yeah, Ulysses is a book that will never leave my shelf, right? I mean, I know you get sent so many books, I get sent so many books, and now it's like, my goal as a writer is that I'm desperate to write things that people read and they go like, I'm not giving this away, this is staying on my shelf. I feel like that's the best. Like, that's the accolade I want, that's the award that I want, is people just seeing my work and going, like, it's earned its spot in my home but, yeah, the the inciting event of the book is I'm going out for a drink with two of my friends who, at that time, were in the philosophy PhD program that I was in. And we begin talking about a very famous bioethics case, which I had taught that day or that week which has to do with deaf parents being able to choose embryos that are deaf to implant if they're doing IVF. And in the course of this bioethics case, one of my friends begins to articulate his, you know, very eugenicist beliefs, which he's sort of covering under the guise of moral philosophy and makes an argument that a life like mine, you know, with a disability, disabled life, is inherently inferior and therefore not only less worth living, but he made the argument that parents who get pregnant should have to do all kinds of testing and abort any disabled children that they may have.
So that's not a new argument for me. Like the inciting event is not this guy saying all of that. We've all lived with these beliefs, whether we recognize them or not. I mean, every disabled person recognizes them because they're a huge part of your consciousness, is people treating you as though your life is filled with tragedy, people addressing you in the lens of pity, or the removal of agency, that is such a constant sort of drumbeat of social interaction for any specifically maybe More so for visibly disabled people. So the idea that someone found my life less worth living was certainly not new to me. What was new and what's the true inciting event is that I recognized for the first time that instead of wanting to engage and make an argument or explain to him why these beliefs were really reductive and dehumanizing, I was choosing to retreat and go back into this like neutral room, which I just spoke about, which is the sort of dissociated mental space. And maybe listeners or readers can be empathetic with me for a minute and go like, sure, you know, it's like a Friday night and on a warm evening and like, shouldn't she be allowed to go to a bar and not have to defend her life? Or like the very means of her existence. And that's kind of how I felt. But what I recognized in this dissociated space for the first time was that If I didn't have the language to communicate the value of my life, if I didn't have the bravery or the energy to engage and defend and refute these beliefs, then I was also complicit in their existence. And that was completely unacceptable, like, not just for me, but if I'm complicit in the existence of these beliefs, then I'm adding to the harm that other disabled people feel when people carry these beliefs toward them. And so that kind of begins this journey of trying to figure out how to acquire the right language. And also acquire the right orientation to public and social life such that I was no longer afraid to talk about my disability or to communicate in a productive way about what a disabled life is and how full and real mine is and how, you know, absolutely abhorrent it is to imagine that my life is not worth living or that lives like mine are not worth living.
ELISE: I thought you did such a beautiful job of exploring, too, the interior resistance to making your disability the thing in which you were prospering or writing or circumnavigating the world. It's almost like you felt like it was some, I don't know, I don't want to put words in your mouth, like an easy out, or like, of course, that would be expected, but then to also turn and face it and be like, well, No, this is my unique position on the world.
I thought that exploration was really beautiful because often in academic spaces, there's an opportunity within sort of like intellectual snobbery or rigor to devalue all lived and real experience, right? And to like live exclusively in the mind, untouched by who we are sort of in the mortal plane. And I think the fact that you sort of so beautifully bring them together...
CHLOE: hmm.
ELISE: though you didn't seem to want to, which I also understand.
CHLOE: Yeah, thank you. I think that's, yeah, exactly the read that I would want on the book and the struggle that I think is absolutely universal as nothing. There's nothing unique about that struggle, or there's nothing that disability owns about that struggle. That's just like the human struggle, is how is it that our interiority and the way that we're perceived externally, how do we live with that? How does it act? Like, how do those things influence each other? Like, that's maybe the human problem. And so academia puts another layer on that, disability puts another layer on that, being an artist puts another layer on that because there is this expectation I think in those spaces to both use your identity to flag something socially to the world, but also, if you do that, then you take on all the trappings, the preconceived notions, the stereotypes of that. And sometimes I think in academia, especially, there was both, a skepticism, maybe, about people who are talking about social identity, because it seemed to some of my colleagues as, less pure than, you know, the high level, like, legit, you know, logic, that they were modal logic or whatever.
ELISE: Yeah, but it's actually so wild because you think about philosophy, which you know far more intimately than I do, but you think about the way that our. I'm assuming by like primarily able bodied, cis, white, like Plato, Plotinus, all of the people that you refer and write about. So we're so attuned to this dominant view that is completely filtered through a very specific existence, but then it's given to us as like, this is the view, and it happens to come from a very specific type of person, that it's interesting that everything else, it then becomes deviant or different. We're just very used to hearing the thoughts of men as defining the world, right?
CHLOE: absolutely. That's the history of Western thought is, I mean, in certainly disciplines you know, ranging far wider than just philosophy, but philosophy being an amazing example of that. I think that this is really changing more and more these days, but there was a study that a really great philosopher named Sarah Jane Leslie did, she's at Princeton, where she was talking about how the statistics in philosophy are in terms of diversity are the second worst of any discipline, the one discipline that beats philosophy in terms of terrible diversity is music composition. And her argument was that, like, in both of those cases, a lot of what people think they need in order to be a musical classical composer or a philosopher is innate genius. And that is what gets taught a lot in philosophy, is that, you know, Aristotle was a genius, Plato was a genius, Kant was a genius, like, that they possessed this sort of magical beam of light that echoed from their intellect into the world, and that's a narrative that women historically are excluded from. Women are often given stories in which they can achieve a lot through hard work, labor, persistence. And moving, you know, making their will sort of forcing their will into the world, but men are often given a lot of narratives of the ability to be innate geniuses.
And Sarah Jane Leslie had this amazing paper, which is, you know, I received this in my first year. So this is you know, maybe 10 years older or so, but she was just like, look at cultural examples in which men and women are working together, like the X files, like molders, the genius, Scully works or more contemporary version is like the new Sherlock Holmes show, like elementary, which has Lucy Lou as Watson. So it's like Holmes is a genius. You know, the white man has this innate ability to solve things. And Lucy Lou's character can be very helpful and intelligent, but it's through work. It's through you know, putting our hands on a thing. And so if that narrative, yeah, it's like if we imbibe that narrative over and over and over again, then women may feel, and certainly people of color may feel or disabled people may feel that any realm in which one must be some sort of magical genius must not be the realm for them.
So you see all these statistics and philosophy of students beginning like intro to philosophy as freshmen that the numbers are very diverse and you have a really good mix of people, but the further they go with philosophy, the more people get sorted out. And one of the very many possible theories for that is the way in which we think of philosophy as some sort of untouchable realm of genius when, in fact, it's like any other discipline. You have to do a major apprenticeship, you have to learn it. You have to be persistent and and then one can acquire these skills just like anyone else. But, I mean, I say all this not to, not to make some grand point about academic philosophy, but rather in my book I think I internalized a lot of these lessons and then try to explore them in terms of how profoundly the narratives that we can form around our body, Or the world, or the way that people will receive us, how that just shapes consciousness. And a lot of the work of my book is trying to get a new story to tell, to reshape my own consciousness, but also tell a new story about disability and the fullness and complexity of a disabled life, so that if you spend time reading my story, that will be a narrative that positively, I hope, reshapes your consciousness or any reader's consciousness about the disabled life.
ELISE: Yeah.
CHLOE: Yeah, these things are all like really deeply connected for me.
ELISE: Yeah. No, and it's such a beautiful insight about this idea of innate genius belonging almost exclusively to men. And then you think about someone like Aristotle, isn't he the one who said that all women were deformed men? Wasn't that his?
CHLOE: Yeah, I mean...
ELISE: just so many great insights.
CHLOE: there's also a lot of not so great things about women and yeah, the philosophers are pretty hard on women, they're pretty hard on, you know, anybody who wasn't just like them and, I mean, Plato's The Republic is, you know, one of the most influential works of philosophy and certainly of Western thought and incredible book I think everyone should read, but there's some really dark stuff in that book, The Republic, and there's a lot of, you know, like, social engineering ideas that are pretty dystopian and classist and racist.
ELISE: But I also, like, fell in love, I think, similarly, I took philosophy in college. I was scared out of it by a professor at Yale who was a victim of the Unabomber. I can't remember his name, but, like, I didn't get it, and I got a terrible grade in that class, and I was like, I'm not smart enough to engage here. I'm out.
CHLOE: I hate that! See, that's exactly what I'm talking about! Wait, I'm sorry, will you tell me more about this? Like what was so opaque, because philosophy ideally should be like the most relatable thing because it's all about these big human questions that everybody's concerned with, like, what is good and what is knowledge and what is real and, you know, nice answers. So yeah, what happened in that class?
ELISE: And as an adult, these are the questions that I'm interested in. In fact, like you have this quote from Maria Popova, where you write, "philosophy by its very nature required uncertainty. It was, wrote Maria Popova, the art of remaining in doubt." And this, I think, is where I want to live. This is where I live. I want to nuance, complexity, bearing dissonance, trying to pull all of these threads together into some sort of cohesive whole, right? Like building the house to contain All these different closets of experience, but yeah, this is at Yale and I can't remember this professor's name. He was very grumpy. He was he had been, he had received a package from the Unabomber and lost, I want to say a hand, if not an arm, do you know who I'm talking about? I can't remember his name. Yeah. I don't.
CHLOE: should know who you're talking about that can't be that many philosophers that...
ELISE: that were opened a bomb. Yeah.
CHLOE: Obvious and I'm going to be embarrassed that I don't know who it is. Go ahead.
ELISE: I don't even remember. It was like, I want to say it was a lecture my freshman year, sophomore year, early on in college, and I'd never taken philosophy. And I thought that I was understanding, or like having some sort of insight, and I just kept bombing papers, like I would just get Cs, there wasn't a lot of feedback, and yeah, I just was like, I don't understand, clearly I do not understand this, and I cannot hang, like I cannot hang here, I'm missing something concrete, or essential, or my mind can't grasp these concepts And maybe I need more durability in the face of bad grades, maybe that's really what it's about, but maybe that was my challenge, but I I didn't see any way to...
CHLOE: sounds like you didn't have an educator who understood, I mean let's go easy on this guy because I don't know how good of an educator I would be if I'd been sent a package from the Unabomber but yeah I mean I think it's really the..
ELISE: David Galertner
CHLOE: Okay, sure.
ELISE: I guess he was a computer scientist, I don't know. Yeah, I bombed his class.
CHLOE: But here we are. I mean...
ELISE: here we are and I loved your book. I mean now I want I'm like, can I go into a PhD in philosophy? I want to hang out with minds like yours So, all right. Let's talk a little bit about your dad because the way that so much of this book is about Discomfort. You write, "I have a hunger to be elsewhere and otherwise. In an essay my father wrote right after my birth, he described himself as having a motorcycle personality, meaning that he was unstable when idling, but solid on the move. He wanted to be where things were in the state of becoming. He did not like to be firmly set in the present. He was fearful of stillness. I'd inherited this fear. I, too, want to go where everything is new, which means I always want to be somewhere other than where I am." Oof! I mean, I relate. I, like, engage in this culture of busyness, less about, like, moving around, but more about just covering over my own anxiety. But that's such an stunning metaphor, a motorcycle personality. Do you feel like you still have this in you?
CHLOE: Yes, absolutely. But I think that a lot of the work of the book and also my life is trying to understand how that can be used for good and not for hurting people. So I think, you know, One of the biggest mistakes that I think I've made in my whole life is looking at my father, understanding his fate, which is to be alone and to not really have Any close connections in this world, or very few and I've been so afraid of that fate, and, you know, he left my family, left my mother, I have no relationship with him, so I was so fearful of that fate that for a long time what I thought I was supposed to do was be angry at him, resent him, and then root out like a cavity any parts of him that I felt in myself. And so when certain types of restlessness would occur or when I would start to feel a longing that I identified very closely with my father, I would see that as like an evil in me or like a darkness in me that I needed to get rid of. And so for a long time, I was trying to like kill the part of me that is like very profoundly and deeply my father, comes from my father, but I think that a lot of the work of the book is remembering that I'm also half my mother who knows absolutely how to stay grounded and present for the people she loves. She's the hero of this book in every conceivable way and the hero of my life and her way of thinking about art and beauty in the world and love and connection is so complex and vast, but is not often as like lionized or prized as my father's, which was much more sort of, I don't know, like bombastic or charming. He's deeply charming person. He's very successful in terms of his intellectual pursuits and I think that one of the most important things was to recognize that in every single one of us, if I can be reductive for a second, like there's some dominant thing about you that is both your best and your worst quality and I think for me that thing is restlessness. So there's a threshold and on one side of the threshold that restlessness is the tool that has given me all the best things in this world like my intellectual restlessness has allowed me to barrel into degrees and learn a lot of things. My desire for artistic newness and creation has allowed me to write and do things that feel really important to me. I've been able to travel and take my son to see all kinds of things. I like to eat everything and meet everyone. I live in New York City and I like to see all the art and every experience feels like I can draw some positive thing from it because I have this like deep Curiosity about life, so negative things have positive aspects to them because I can always be learning and you know, it's like there's a lot on one side of the threshold that it's like deep restlessness that I inherited from my father yields only good things like beautiful things.
The problem is, is there's the other side of the threshold which Draws me away from people, which creates a desire in me to break commitments, to devalue things like building a deep and reliable sense of home, however that word home can be interpreted, and that's the part that I want to be more mindful of, because the one fate that I cannot repeat is the abandonment of my child. It's a non negotiable for me, but That impulse that created that abandonment and my father is not foreign to me. I know what it is. The problem is, like, you can't just kill those parts of yourself, and you can't just build shame around those parts of yourself, because, the first day of therapy, they'll say, like, shame doesn't help you process these things. So all you can do is sort of understand that threshold, have a much more, like, clear eye and form of awareness around it, and then just try to stay on the right side of it. And I think so much of this book is about, and so much of my life is about, the desire to locate those thresholds and then become more conscious about staying on the right side. So I want to keep all this intellectual curiosity. And restlessness for my father, but I just want to make sure that I'm looking at the version of that restlessness that generates joy and excitement and adventure in my life, rather than that fearful need to, like, always be on the move, always be moving away from any sort of thing that resembles home.
But I'm curious if this resonates with you at all. Do you think there's a dominant thing in you that's both, you know, a quality or an orientation to the world where you go, yes, this is the best and worst thing about me. And if I'm on the right side of the threshold, look at all it generates. And if I'm on the wrong side of the threshold, it creates, you know, sort of mass problems.
ELISE: No. I think for me it's less about physical restlessness and it's more about intellectual busyness and or wrapped up in my productivity so it's like hoarding. In that way, like, hoarding of information books read, like, output measured, and rather than just, like, being present, that's my restlessness, that my busyness is sort of this, like, more and more, like, feeding this sort of trough, and then not really, like, taking the time to be super, super present or deep with any one thing. Width, not depth, maybe. And I don't know what that is. But I definitely feel at times like I'm missing my whole life because I'm so busy doing stuff.
CHLOE: yeah, yeah. I think that probably resonates with so many people, maybe especially women who feel like often they're taught they need to put the whole world on their shoulders. But that's such a great example of this, because obviously so many of the wonderful things that you have in your life are the result of that effort, that work ethic, that ability to acquire and process knowledge, and then if you slip on the wrong side of the threshold, it you makes you feel like your life is passing you. Yeah, it's like that duality is so fascinating and I wonder how you think about that duality and like how you try to locate that threshold and keep, keep some good relation to it.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, I think that in that, for whatever reason, staying still mentally sends me into like my neutral room or my dissociative place. And it's even, you know, I had a book come out a few months ago and it's just like the endless chatter in my mind, I don't know if you relate to this or not, about like, what am I doing next? Like, what ocean am I going to boil next? And some of that, it's like I always immediately go to like the material need. Well, I need to make a living. I need to sell another book. I need, you know, and some of that is real. And there is that, that intellectual restlessness of what's the next problem? What's the next question? What's the next, next, next, that I envy people who, In some ways I envy them and in other ways I can't imagine being them. Like people who are like, I'm going to spend my whole life on Shakespeare, you know? Like that to me is so foreign. Or I'm in a practice, you know, my dad was a, or he's retired now, but a physician and the idea of sort of being like, I'm a lung specialist.
CHLOE: Yeah.
ELISE: is so, strange to me. Wild, right?
CHLOE: I hear that there's so many philosophers and academics that work on the same problem for, you know, 20 years and I really admire that to a certain extent I always think of like, yeah, there's a kind of intellect that's like a drill that just goes down.
ELISE: Mine isn't, I don't work like that. And I sometimes sort of wish that I could. I wanna, the name of the book, Easy Beauty, which works on so many levels, but when you actually get to an explication of that, and it goes to how we started the conversation. The way that you sort of, I think it's in the context of Beyonce, but that, instinct to push away easy beauty. I thought that was, can you explain the difference between easy and difficult beauty?
CHLOE: Yeah. The terms come from a philosopher named Bernard Bozenkatt. I just want to say, like, we're talking so much about philosophy, but there's not even that much philosophy in the book. It's like a travel narrative.
ELISE: It's a travel narrative. I mean, there are a million directions. We could talk about flanners. We could talk about people. I mean, the paradox of tragedy, like all of that. I mean, there's so many, so many ways to go.
CHLOE: nobody's listening going like, I too failed that class of that horrible teacher and now I don't want to read this person's book. But Yeah, this, this idea comes from this philosopher, Bernard Bozenkett, who just writes about a helpful distinction that one could make in their mind between easy and difficult beauty. He does not put any value judgment on one being better than the other. That's a mistake that I bring to the concept, very importantly, as you just intimated. But the two ideas are just like easy beauty is the kind of beauty that arrives to our senses somewhat immediately. And the vast majority of our life's pleasures probably come from easy beauty. The second you put some incredible piece of food in your mouth, you know, the perfect ripe strawberry on a summer day and you go like instantly like, Oh, this is so good. I'm having like a tremendously positive aesthetic experience. Or when you see a sunset or a flower or a piece of music comes on that immediately makes you want to dance or puts you in a sort of positive state of mind or or any sort of, you know, deeply aesthetically responsive state of mind. So easy beauty is just simply that like The experience of the world's beauty, either things that people make or that nature gifts us or, you know, art hanging in an art museum, music that comes on the radio at a grocery store, when we can receive it via our senses, sort of instantaneously, that's easy beauty.
Difficult beauty, he says, is beauty that can only be accessed through some more patience. Oftentimes, sometimes we need a great educator to help lead us to an appreciation of that beauty, he says, difficult beauty also often encompasses a lot of complexity that complexity can also create tension. And so through contradiction, you know, difficult beauty might be a really complicated piece of music that your ears don't, like when you first hear it, you don't even know quite what you're hearing. Maybe an abstract painting that you would need some background knowledge on in order to really understand what you're seeing. So complexity tension, and then he has this third category, which he says difficult beauty often sometimes sort of encompasses this thing that he calls width. And he's using that in a sort of semi technical term to describe This feeling that we will get sometimes where the world or some concept or something will kind of remind us of how small we are. And he says, you know, that can happen like you're on vacation and you're looking at a massive mountain range and for a moment, perhaps it even strikes you with like a sense of fear and a sense of insignificance because the mountains have been there long before you, will long outlast you, and in comparison, you're nothing but a tiny speck of dust in like, you know, the trajectory of time in the universe. And for me, I sort of make this analogous with the feeling of motherhood, like, entering into this sort of tribe of mothers or something, reminds me of... how tiny my, you know, being a part of this massive thing that's created life on this planet and me just being this like tiny little speck of this gigantic thing, you know, like there's something about that that's sort of terrifying, but he says also perhaps awe inducing and if we have the kind of constitution that can sit and be patient with complexity with tension with uncertainty, like you were talking about, with the ability to allow our mind to take time to learn something rather than making a judgment about it instantly, but also with this with with this feeling that sometimes beauty reminds us of how finite we are. and that feeling if we can sit and recognize beauty in it allows us access to a whole other world of beauty outside of easy beauty, which he simply calls difficult beauty. The problem that I write on to this is I feel that my body is in the realm of difficult beauty, right?
Like, being a disabled woman, there aren't a lot of people that look at me right away and go, what a beautiful woman, or what a woman of value, like, or what a life of value. But often if people will take the time and learn and think and be patient and sit with their own prejudice, like, Then slowly it becomes apparent that I'm okay, like, and maybe even like datable or something like that. And that had been my history. It's not my present, but it had been my history. And so I just really deeply identified with difficult beauty and believed that that was the beauty of more value in the world. I think also as an academic, I really valued my ability to kind of access difficult beauty or use my brain to help me access things that other people I thought couldn't and the real negative thing that comes out of that is a dismissal of easy beauty or writing off of things that give me pleasure immediately. And that's shutting a whole world of beauty out of my life through a defensiveness. And so part of this experience that I have throughout the book, but especially at this Beyonce concert is like an embrace of what Bozenkett also calls like blunt triumphant beauty, which is like easy beauty that arrives and like hits us. So it's like, there's a moment in which. The music starts at this concert and I can feel like the sound waves are like moving through my body. And it's so visceral, it's so physical, and it's also so immediate. And that kind of experience often really scares me. But in this book, I'm trying to figure out how to, how to gift myself those experiences of tremendous and immediate beauty.
ELISE: Mm. Oh my God, Chloe thank you for this. Thank you for your book. It's so beautiful. And, for anyone who's listening, it is stunning. It is not exclusively about philosophy, but it is about these big, huge questions and Beyonce.
CHLOE: And Beyoncé. And Roger Federer. And other stuff. Some mountains, some flowers, some palm trees. Like, some sexy sculptures at a museum around. Like, books got it all.
ELISE: Yeah, Bernini and tragedy and we didn't even get into that, but that was also fascinating. This idea of people who spend their time and money going to memorials to death and disaster, which is in of itself a fascinating topic.
CHLOE: Yeah.
ELISE: All right. Thank you. Thank you for your time.
Chloé’s mind and her book, Easy Beauty, are so stunning. And now I feel like I need to go back and re-read her book with some of these insights into all of the deft moves that she layered into the text, although I think I felt it. I mean it’s one of those books where every single sentence is beautifully crafted. She writes: “I’ve found so much solace in engaging in things that were fixed—dead philosophers and their theories. Art on the wall. Stone statues. In these relationships, I was the dynamic thing. I named, analyzed, judged, moved against the unmoving. I diagnosed and demarcated from within my neutral room, which, I begin to see—and of course this is obvious, and something I should have known much earlier in life, and I would have seen this sooner had I not been so busy building my little cocoon of self-regard—was not so neutral. I easily could spend my life keeping Andrew, Wolfgang, and everyone else at a fixed distance. That was a choice I could make.” And as she goes on at the end of the book, not that she overcame this, but that she recognized the way in which taking a stance of intellectual superiority was keeping herself from life, and keeping her son from life too. And in terms of what her husband had said to her son that day at the magic show, he says, “‘I didn’t participate. And it might have felt good to be united with my peers. But I missed the chance to find out. I look at Wolfgang and I see someone smart and kind. I want him to be critical, but not at the expense of camaraderie. His compassion and his intelligence are complex enough to allow for both if we just don’t get in his way.’” Thanks for listening, I’ll see you next week.
