The Long Thing

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-12

[00:00:01]I felt since I read it like a very haughty connoisseur for preferring the pale king to infinite jest.

[00:00:07]I read it immediately after infinite jest around 6 years ago maybe returned [music] to it intermittently over the following 3 years or so. The thing that makes this book so thrilling to me is present in each sentence. There's a famous opening a page and a half long sentence fragment breaking off into lists. Tiny details all the native plants of Illinois. It's long but it's a fragment. It has no central verb. It carines along this sentence, picking up more details and never resolves into any kind of active meaning. This isn't the only time he does this. When he opens chapter 8, he does the same thing.

[00:00:43]Another fragment, only this time with human characters.

[00:00:49]Under the sign erected every May above the outer highway reading, "It's spring.

[00:00:53]Think farm safety." And through the north ingress with its own defaced name and signs dressed to soliciting and speed and universal glyph for children at play. And down the blacktops gauntlet of double wide showpieces past the rottweiler humping nothing in crazed spasms at chain's end. And the sound of frying through the kitchenet window of the trailer at the hairpin right [music] and then hard left along the length of a speed bump into the dense cops as yet uncleared for new single words and the sound of dry things snapping and stridulation of bugs in the duff of the cops and the two bottles and bright plastic packet impaled on the malbury twig. Seeing through shifting parallax of saplings, branches, sections then of trailers along the north parks and fracturous roads, and lane skirting the corrugate trailer where it was said that the man left his family and returned sometime later with a gun and killed them all as they watched Dragna.

[00:01:43]and the torn abandoned 16 wide half overgrown by the edge of the cops where boys and their girls made strange agnate forms [music] on pallets and left bright torn packs until a mishap with a stove blew the gas lead and ruptured the trailer's south wall in a great labial tear that exposes the trailer's [music] gutted insides to view from the edge of the cops and the plurality of eyes as the needles and stems of a long winter noisomely crunch beneath a plurality of shoes where the cops leaves [music] off at a tangent past At the end of the undeveloped culdeac, but they come now at dusk to watch the parked car heave on its springs.

[00:02:20]The window steamed nearly opaque and so alive in the chassis that it seems to move without running. The boat-sized car squeaker struts and absorbers in a jiggle just short of true rhythm.

[00:02:36]Now, Wallace is what we'll call a formally conscious writer. is what makes his writing style so [music] distinctive, so brilliant and annoying.

[00:02:43]He knows exactly what he's doing. We can summize [music] when he puts a long sentence accumulating momentum, deflating itself and bringing itself back up to speed and then ending with no movement, no resolution next to a sentence describing a car that moves without running and stops short of true rhythm.

[00:03:02]It's a feat in itself to put 300 words in a sentence as he does here and not even accidentally throwing an active verb.

[00:03:10]The arythmic accumulation, the endless undifferiated description is the point.

[00:03:16]It's not supposed to end.

[00:03:20]He employs a plot device in the Pale King that supports the same tonal ambition. Claude Silvenshine, one of the book's more prominent characters, [music] is a fact psychic.

[00:03:30]This means that in the course of his day, Silvershine is accosted by information he doesn't seek. He is like the bulk of the main cast, a tax accountant in Poria, Illinois. And [music] yet, as he goes over the forms, he receives ephemeral, useless, undramatic, [music] distracting information.

[00:03:49]What Quantro tasted like to someone with a mild head cold on the Espanard of Vienna State Opera House on the 2nd of October, 1874.

[00:03:58]How many people faced southeast to witness guy forks hanging in 1606?

[00:04:03]The number of frames in Breathless. That somebody named Fangi or Fangio won the 1959 Grand Prix.

[00:04:11]The percentage of Egyptian deities that have animal faces instead of [music] human faces. The length and average circumference of Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger's small intestine.

[00:04:23]Zero points to anyone who can find the common thread linking this plot device to the earliest stylistic device.

[00:04:29]If you listen to David Foster Wallace talk about what he did with this novel, he'll say it's about boredom, about the superhuman potential of somebody who can accept boredom in [music] a society where so many jobs require that tolerance.

[00:04:42]But this isn't boredom in the sense of having nothing to do.

[00:04:46]It's boredom in the sense of infinite, disconnected, discreet, [music] ephemeral, useless, undramatic, distracting information.

[00:04:54]The novel doesn't end. It trails off like a 500page version of the first sentence. Masses of description, 30 characters, no finished action, no plot, just event, event, event.

[00:05:07]I don't want to get too biographical.

[00:05:09]He's a man who left living relations behind and they all differ in their accounts of him at the time of writing and I just don't have enough information to make it a productive line of inquiry for me.

[00:05:18]He died before he could finish a novel.

[00:05:20]But whether or not he knew it consciously, the massive endeavor he was undertaking was, it seems to me, actively resisting its own ending seems impossible to finish from the very beginning in its style, in its form, in its focus.

[00:05:36]The Pill King isn't as long as Infinite Chest, but it is, despite the former title, more aware of the centrality of length, of material, of sheer accumulation than Infinite Chest is.

[00:05:49]Writing The Pale King, David Foster Wallace didn't call it the novel he was working on. When people asked him about it, he said, "Yeah, I'm working on the long thing."

[00:06:01]Think about a novel as usually a lot like a play. The writer invents the characters, then invents the setting, and then has the two interact, modeling the ways they will. Wallace novels are a little bit more like one man shows. You know, you can always feel him writing.

[00:06:17]This is obvious when you consider the centrality of endotes to reading infinite gest where so many parts of the plot gesture to the end of the book where you can then go and read a footnote ranging from about two lines to 10 pages describing just whatever other thoughts you might have on that that topic. But even in his so-called dialogue in both novels, he'll sometimes try and disguise it, but basically all the time the characters speak in his voice. He can't make characters that don't sound like David Fosterall is doing a voice, which is okay because his voice is so encompassing and so capable.

[00:06:50]He has a lot of capacity within it to talk about all different kinds of life.

[00:06:54]But it also gives you the feeling of a puppet show. Listening to both sides of a conversation is a constant game of what will David Foster Wallace say next?

[00:07:04]One of the chapters in The Pale King is republished under the title Something to Do with Paying Attention as a standalone novela.

[00:07:13]The main character is in search of a career and instead starts many things, universities, jobs, short-term vocations, till his [music] transcript resembled a collage.

[00:07:25]He says it himself. As for myself, I had trouble just paying attention, and the things I can remember now seem mostly pointless.

[00:07:33]This character in the course of his kind of recounting the woes of this life where everything starts and nothing ends and it's just event event event. He describes a difficulty with written language.

[00:07:44]This is another one of these real slips in [music] terms of a character ending up sounding more and more like David Fostallis. But this character loses the ability to read in elementary school instead counting the words in each [music] sentence. For example, here came old yella to save me from the hogs would equate to 10 words which I would count off from 1 to 10 instead of it being a sentence that made you love old yell in the book even more.

[00:08:09]There's an information loss and sentences instead of being things that resolve into some concrete meaning or effect are reduced to funible countable words. The novel does this. The first sentence does this.

[00:08:22]The acceptable chapters prove this. The characters with their fact psychism, their incapacity to recognize sentences as self-reerential, meaning containing composites, but instead seeing the whole world as a series of facts, countable, funible, with no arc [music] and no end, all point in the same direction.

[00:08:43]David Foster Wallace had been working on the Pale King for more [music] than a decade. On the one hand, you might think 50 pages a year from the man who wrote infinite [music] gest and whose thrown away remarks decorate infinite Facebook posts seem like very low output.

[00:08:58]But on the other, of course, when you work on a single book for a decade and end up with 500 pages of material, that work can become singularly consuming as the focus you can afford it swallows up all of your time until the longer time results in fewer and fewer pages of continually revised, reordered, rewritten fragments, ideas from years back, sitting disjointed alongside your views today.

[00:09:22]It's not just something to do with paying attention. There are multiple chapters from the Pale King, excerpted and republished as standalone novelas and short stories.

[00:09:30]Good people, the soul is not a smithy incarnations of children being burned, I think is one of them. They don't suffer from their exorption because they are essentially funible units of static storytelling.

[00:09:42]They don't build up to any final resolution. Rather, they simply add up to a whole. Not a complete hole, but kind of like, you know, most novels you couldn't take out four separate chapters and republish them in magazines or as books and not have them suffer from their lack of context.

[00:09:59]But actually, the whole of The Pale King is this sequential series of events, series of characters, each given a little moment to do a turn on the stage and then put back away.

[00:10:10]This tendency [music] then to formally resist any sense of completion operates across all registers. Stylistically, narratively, structurally, he was writing a book in a way that could never meaningfully be finished.

[00:10:26]There's a model for this kind of writing in the history of the 20th century.

[00:10:29][music] The famous text took a man almost entire lifetime to make, was never finished, changed to accommodate every new thought he had.

[00:10:38]I spent a year reading and rereading and researching and rereading [music] the Kantos by Ezra Pound. one sprawling, disjointed 700page long poem that took him more than 50 years to produce.

[00:10:52]He knew it would be doomed somewhat in some way from the very beginning. In the first Kanto, which were the first published drafts of what was to be a 50-year project, Pound describes what the Kantos is for.

[00:11:06]The modern world needs such a rag bag to stuff all its thought in. say that I dump my catch, shiny [music] and silvery as fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles.

[00:11:19]Then he proceeds to do just that for half a century for the rest of his life [music] to gather up silvery fish from his mind and from all the world's seas and dump them onto the cobbles into the margins of one impossibly long poem. Footnotes on footnotes on footnotes.

[00:11:36]The cantos is very difficult to to describe as a book. There was an attempt by a poet called Basil Bunting [music] who lived for a while with pound and tried to learn kind of the art of modern poetry from him but they taught one another a lot. He wrote a poem describing his experience of the cantos but he couldn't even mention them in the poem.

[00:11:56]He compares them to the Alps. There are the Alps. What is there to say about them? They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags, cranks, climb, jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder scree.

[00:12:12]It might be the most ambitious poem ever conceived.

[00:12:15]Like the Alps, it's full of this scree, [music] this rubble, but also these huge peaks. From one canto to the next, he [music] jumps from Greek mythology to Renaissance Italy to stories of fonts London to ancient China to Venice to Elizabeth and England to the foundation of America.

[00:12:32]The book does all of this in a form looser than any written before. There's no constant to its rhythm or to its voice, and yet simultaneously more precise. Tiny edits made in the margins.

[00:12:42]Every phrase weighed up and revised a dozen times till the constellations of tiny details collapsed under their own weight.

[00:12:50]Ezreal didn't waste words. He taught Hemingway how to write by Hemingway's own admission. He was a person who told him to tighten his pros until it was as short as possible.

[00:12:59]He also edited TS [music] Elliot's The Wasteland, James Joyce's Ulyses.

[00:13:04]Everything he wrote after their time together in Stone Cottage. He more than anyone else is responsible for Victorian writing sounding so different to writing from the [music] 20th century.

[00:13:15]He was there at the turn of a century thinking we need to distance ourselves from everything that's come before.

[00:13:22]In places, the Kantos is the most beautiful poem I've ever read. [music] In others, it's the ugliest, documenting his descent into fascism, into madness, into hatred and anger and doubt.

[00:13:34]Pound kicks off what was to be a 50-year project by describing his ideal form, a rag bag into [music] which ideas can be stuffed and then demonstrates it with a beautiful rendering of the story of Dianisis washed up on Knax and kidnapped by pirates blending in figures half translated half digested from Chinese [music] mythology in striking precise im imagery dense verse.

[00:13:57]He knows from the beginning that this work [music] will likely be impossible.

[00:14:00]He says it in the poem elsewhere. He talks about how the underpinninging desire here is the idea that somebody has to make an epic poem for the modern world, a tale of a tribe, something that the people of the modern world can tell ourselves in the way that ancient Greece [music] in his view might have used the Odyssey or North cultures might have used Beaolf after arriving in England.

[00:14:25]But his life keeps changing and he can't keep sight of that initial [music] purpose for long without getting bogged down in more and more information.

[00:14:32]The form that he's created for it expands to take it in.

[00:14:38]I could pick lines from anywhere in the cantos to demonstrate this method. I'd be sort of missing the point. The length is the point.

[00:14:46]Taken as a sample, the Kantos is notoriously hard to anthologize.

[00:14:51]There's a lot of different versions that try and cut it down to the sort of the greatest hits, [music] but they lose an awful lot of what makes it such an impressive book.

[00:15:00]When describing what the Kantos was to be, he continually called it a poem of some length. Again, like David Foster Wallace, the exhaustive [music] search for new topics and the indeterminate but sizable quantity of a thing produced [music] is the hallmark of the process.

[00:15:15]like David Foster Wallace calling it the long thing. He could only refer to it as a poem of some length.

[00:15:21]He didn't have a form. It wasn't going to land. Didn't have an arc he could map out. He couldn't say, "I'm going to write the first 11 books and then tie it all together in the 12th book." Because he didn't know this could go on forever.

[00:15:31]He was trying to make [music] an epic poem of the modern world. Something that can combine all the world's history, all [music] the world's theology, all the mythology, and coexist with the reality of modern warfare, finance, art, and culture.

[00:15:48]Arrested for treason at the close of the Second World War in which he had unsuccessfully offered his skill as an editor to Mussolini's fascist war effort. Pound was locked up in a cage outside in Pisa.

[00:15:59]They gave him a dictionary, a book of Confucious, and toilet paper to write on. In the cantos, he wrote there. Yeah.

[00:16:05]The first real instance that he thinks this might have been an impossible task from the beginning. He feels like actually maybe he's not the man for the job. you know, he was a a kind of frighteningly egotistical guy. He was incredibly talented, but he also he would cast people down. He thought that his view of the future was was very much supreme to anyone else's. And yet, you have the first kind of crack in this confidence here.

[00:16:29]The form begins to creek under its own weight at this point and splinters into remembered conversations, translations, historical references, anti-semitic screeds, and occasionally beautiful images sneaking through.

[00:16:42]You have this figure who 20 years earlier was the greatest stylist in the world, who was busy shaping the future of art, locked up in an outdoor cage, insane and starving, and still committed to trying to produce this unfinishable poem.

[00:16:56]After his arrest, he ends up in an asylum. He's diagnosed with schizophrenia, partially perhaps to save him from the death penalty, and he ends up in a mental hospital in Massachusetts.

[00:17:10]In the very last Kanto, the Kanto from which I took the name of this channel, he begins to recognize how impossible it was from the outset.

[00:17:19]He looks back on the thing that he's made. He says, "May the gods forgive what I have made. Though my errors and wrecks lie about me, and I am not a demigod, I cannot make it cohhere."

[00:17:34]The Kantos came in sections, but as more sections were published, he would go back and change the previous ones, too, trying to drag them all into a shape he hadn't yet developed, that would never develop, till in his final finished series of poems, the poem becomes about its own incapacity to resolve.

[00:17:50]He stops with that revision and redaction later on, just as the material behind him becomes too big to even try and figure out.

[00:17:59]Like the Pale King, this incomplete formal structure reproduces itself across both style and content.

[00:18:06]Constantly switching between languages, requiring you to go to the companions that began to be produced almost as soon as the cantos were published. The sentences sit around one another, never repeating their rhythms, never resolving. The poem begins with the line and then went down to the ships. A translation of a line from midway through the Odyssey, an in Media Ray's excerpt from a work that also begins in Meteor. All these nested endless avenues and his attention like yours as a reader continually forced to look up his references flows through recursive constantly bifocating and complicating channels never even approaching a narrative arc never drawing in to focus on a single character a single [music] message until in the end it is revealed that the major message is the impossibility of this kind of endeavor.

[00:18:52]How could it ever be finished? It's a poem about the unfinishable nature of life. About the flux of power from Trojan king to song dynasty emperor to quattrochanto Italian warlord to John Quincy Adams of a destruction of war of a totally fleeting nature of beauty and of the impossibility of any kind of resolved form.

[00:19:14]It was at the end of my year of pound scholarship that I went to see Francis Ford Coppa Megalopouloolis.

[00:19:19]So that's good to say [music] as well, isn't it? Ford Copolis Megalopouloolis is an attempt at an epic of the modern world which if you'll allow me to drop a little Graham she means it's an epic of the American empire right [music] that's that maybe wasn't the case when Pound was writing his epic of the modern world but we're 50 years into American cultural supremacy now anyway [music] Megalopouloolis like the Kantos is a colossal failure it achieves nothing makes no sense was a totally bewilding bewildering experience and resolved none of its own questions. [music] Critics broadly hated it. Steeped in my view of impossible ambition. I left the cinema thinking I'd never seen a film so enthralling, so exciting and magical and completely unfinishable. I watched as characters mutated, shouldered different ambitions, story arcs knocked out their own legs in front of me. I hadn't had such an incredible experience in a cinema in a long time.

[00:20:15]Part of this is certainly that [music] I am at heart a contrarian, but I was really genuinely thrilled.

[00:20:22]Coppler is trying to tell four or five stories at once. He's attempting to describe the Cataline conspiracy, the legal case that made Cicero's name in the kind of final days of the Roman Republic in which the Petrician Cataline, subject of the most handsome single painting of the Renaissance, which I'll put on screen now, attempts to murder a slowmoving bureaucratic senators who stand between him and his destiny.

[00:20:45]Confusingly, he names his main character Caesar Catalina.

[00:20:49]Caesar was also there during the Cataline conspiracy. Played a major role. Tried to get Cataline kind of let off the death penalty. Succeeded. He was imprisoned instead. But he played a role separate to Cataline. And conflating them muddies the water completely.

[00:21:03]Caesar Catalina in this film is an architect who in some unexplained series of events has developed a new building material called Megalon. And also in the first scene and in the last scene and at maybe two other points throughout the film uses this. Anyway, he can stop time with his mind. He's also accused by Mayor Cicero. Clever, you know, Cicero like Cicero of killing his wife a decade previously. He's in a relationship with a news reader called Wow Platinum who later marries the world's richest man who's called Hamilton Cassus whose nephew is Claius Pulare.

[00:21:38]I appreciate that we're not all classicists. I'm not a classist either.

[00:21:43]Uh these characters are all major players in the form of the Roman for the Roman Republic. You know, Crass, Claius, Booker, uh Caesar, Catalina, Cicero.

[00:21:52]Though these particular events never happen and certainly never happen in this order.

[00:21:57]Later, Caesar Catalina gets blackmailed for being a pedophile. He's later exonerated because the teen pop star he slept with was actually lying about her age. Then out of nowhere, a Soviet satellite called Carthage, which on the Roman schemer was destroyed hundreds of years before Caesar or any of the other characters in the history were born, crashes into New York City. Claius, as in the history, becomes a populist demagogue. Caesar starts building a new city called Megalopolis, and the ruins of the city, which is called New Rome, but it's New York. Uh Caesar gets assassinated, but then he uses his new material to rebuild his own skulls.

[00:22:33]>> [music] >> So he comes back. Claius gets hung upside down like Mussolini. A scene also depicted in the peas and cantos for what it's worth. And Caesar, now married to Cicero's daughter, Julia, which is the name of Cicero's daughter in the history, completes the new city and discovers that his baby can also stop time. Then the film ends.

[00:22:54]I left the cinema and I immediately wanted to find out how it had been made.

[00:22:59]personal fortune like copplers. It turns out smooths over any objections a Hollywood producer might have about a film which is totally unmarketable, completely visibly unfinished and doesn't make any sense.

[00:23:11]As I suspected, he'd been writing the film for a long time. It felt like the cantos watching it. It felt like somebody had gone over and changed everything and tried to bring it in while also bring it bring it into shape while also bringing in more information clashing with the last stuff. Anyway, he'd been writing it for 40 years. too long for anything to accurately respond to any moment.

[00:23:33]There's an idea in textual history of the palmest.

[00:23:37]When paper used to be extremely valuable, new text would be written over old texts, in the gaps, in the margins, over the top, until textual transmission was a mishmash of dozens of texts at once on the same page.

[00:23:50]Obsessive editing, the passion project of somebody given total creative control and decades of stew on their ideas, has the same effect. You know, there'd be palmst where Aristotle is written over the top of the Bible or in translation, you might have one text in Arabic mixed with a text in Greek, all sharing the same paper and kind of getting in each other's way a little bit, but also making it so that if you spoke both languages, you kind of couldn't read the Bible without thinking about Aristotle.

[00:24:18]It kind of is like setting lenses or halfop opaque film screens in front of the thing you're actually [music] looking at.

[00:24:26]The cantos is a palmst. You can see in the manuscripts like this is literally a palmst. He's writing over himself constantly second guessing, obsessing, and reordering. They're in the alle archives. The pale king and megalopouloolis too bear these same scars of constant reconsideration.

[00:24:44]There are multiple scenes in the final hour of what is by all accounts too long of a film where you can see Coppler trying to finish the film.

[00:24:53]The satellite falls. of an apocalypse from above rain down on New York City.

[00:24:59]Where a novel has sentences, a film has to dictate its pace through shot editing. And in this film, the scenes really, really show. So, you see this happens. The end of the world happens in New York. The collapse of the satellite onto New York. A meteor shower of space hardware apocalypse event. The next scene shows no major changes to the city really. It just kind of gets wiped out.

[00:25:20]It it just happens and then you move on to the next thing.

[00:25:24]It's very impressionistic, right? I found out later that this was because he'd written a script that did end there in 2001. And around that time, though, of an event that meant raining down flaming debris on New York, wasn't an acceptable ending for a film anymore.

[00:25:38]The film could then have ended with the destruction of Caesar's reputation after his affair with the teen pop star.

[00:25:44]A major public figure having their reputation destroyed beyond repair by an event like that wouldn't, for obvious reasons, have landed us totally authentic in our current political climate. But he did start making the film in 1983.

[00:25:58]The constant stop starting, the impossibility of any major theme, the sheer number of clashing historical references, visual references, cultural and social references. It's a palm that has grown too large in its content to ever have resolved into the neat realizable bounds of a Hollywood film.

[00:26:15]The advantage of a project like the Kantos is that you don't have to get anybody to agree to fund you to write a poem. Well, you do if you're going to be really serious about it. Now, one of Pound's real talents was rustling up money for himself and for other writers.

[00:26:30]You know, the famous letter where he sends Joyce some money in a pair of shoes because he's walking barefoot around Paris.

[00:26:38]But basically, the outlay is is massively reduced compared to a huge budget film where you have to get Adam Driver because he looks the most like the paintings of Catalan.

[00:26:47]But at some point in the 40-year period of accretion that brings a thing like this together. Coppa must have thought, well, this is as close as I'm going to get. And then thinking that, send it out into the world, unfinished, straining at the seams, and totally endless.

[00:27:05]I'd argue that there's a reason that these works are [music] all unfinishable. They're all attempts to produce a cultural epic. They all bite off far more than they can chew. There's another model for this kind of writing, too. Before Pound Deep in the prehistory [music] of English literature, there was a religious man [music] called William Langland active in the mid-4th century in the West Midlands of England who sat down to write a religious epic.

[00:27:30]William Langland from the West Midlands [music] that's good as well, the same as Coppler's Megalopoulos. Anyway, he called it the vision of William of Pierce Plowman and it describes a series of dream visions [music] explicating the way to live a true Christian life mixed in with fables illustrating the nature of medieval feudal society.

[00:27:49]He meets with personifications of truth, conscience, reason, payment, [music] falsehood, imagination, character, scripture, fortune, wit, study, mercy, peace, a combination character who's at at one time hope and Moses. Good deeds, a plowman called Pierers, who is Peter and Jesus, need the antichrist, old age, death, and pestilence.

[00:28:11]These characters all expound upon their various kind of what would we call it? Their attributes.

[00:28:18]You know, they character explains the importance of character. Truth explains the importance of truth. At the same time, as they're doing this, they are also characters who act like people.

[00:28:26]There's a lot of clashing things going on. Basically, that's too many characters for a poem, even a long one.

[00:28:33]But it's an attempt to make a whole study of life.

[00:28:36]He didn't write it all at once. The absence of printing technology meant that as various versions were being distributed and copied out, he was at work on the same text again, revising it, copying it out again, changing it, [music] expanding it, filling in more information.

[00:28:52]The effect is that later versions are filled with a lot more doubt as he began to think that maybe his task was impossible.

[00:28:59]We have three proper versions that exist. 50 different manuscripts, but they basically coales around three central versions. We call them A, B, and C. He didn't call them that. Anyway, the A text is 2 and a half thousand lines.

[00:29:11]The B text written later is three times as long. So, he writes the poem. He starts copying it out and giving it to people. Starts distributing a little bit. The whole time he's copying it out, he's thinking, "Oh, but how is this going to go out into the world if there's no Moses appearance?" He rewrites [music] it a lot more goes in.

[00:29:29]You know, it quadruples in size, but it triples in size. And then he writes it a second time, uh, rewrites it a second time, and it's about the same length, but he's taken a lot out of the second one. He's added a lot more. It takes a decidedly dimmer view of the church as it stood and of a person's capacity to approach any kind of Christlike virtue.

[00:29:48]Over the decades, Langland revised, added, chopped, and changed until the text he started with, which had a clear view of the world and the Christians role in it, was irredeemably clouded with doubt, with the unbearable weight of new information, of new experience, and of the impossibility of its own endeavor, both morally and actually formally.

[00:30:12]There's an even earlier model too of this disease of the epic poet to attempt to capture the whole world in his text and find out that his text can't quite make it there.

[00:30:21]Virgil began the ina in a time of Roman ascendancy under Augustus the first true Roman emperor. It was to be the new national epic an odyssey for Rome just as Pound attempted an odyssey for the modern world and Coppa a Roman history for America.

[00:30:38]He starts in on this task going back revising each of the 12 books in turn and he produces this propaganda epic you know he's doing a sod he's doing an Iliad for Rome he's writing about Anaeas the kind of mythical founder of Rome who has various exploits from a Trojan war and then escapes to Italy afterwards he doesn't make it to the foundation of Rome really he's dying as he writes it he knows there isn't time and in a move not unlike Langland instead of ending as planned with the glorious birth of Rome with Anaeus fleeing Troy founding the city on the Italian hill. He leaves the story in a moment of shock and rage and confusion and violence with Anaas killing his rival Turnis. That's all she wrote.

[00:31:23]His hero epic ends with his hero failing to live up to his own ideals of martial honor, refusing to spare his wounded enemy. And then on his deathbed, Virgil begs his friends to burn the manuscript, losing all trust in his attempt to build an epic for a world that hadn't really come to pass yet. You know, he's writing this imperial epic in the first generation to live under Roman Empire.

[00:31:45]He asked that it's destroyed instead.

[00:31:47]They don't burn it and it stands as a monument of poetry for the following two millennia. Here we are.

[00:31:53]A history of attempts to contain the whole world in your work. to write a long thing, a piece of monumental poetry, fiction, cinema. Watching your grasp on the world slowly dissolve out of view as you realize quite how big it is.