YouSaid · the spoken record

Cynthia L. Haven

lines on the record: 67
first: 2022-08-24
most recent: 2022-08-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Intuition the way he saw these patterns and saw patterns that no one else did of competition, rivalry, violence, his big religious intuition was the New Testament is moving us from the kingdom of violence to the kingdom of God and what that meant to make that transition”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They wrote a book about some of the eastern religions called sacrifice that was mostly focusing on Hinduism. I think when people ask that question well what about Buddhism? What about Confucianism? But like we use these labels of religions, there's millions of individuals within them and whatever the religion says there are medic behaviors. Human behavior doesn't suspend itself because of the label of a religion that you're going under. He did say and he did feel that Christianity and Judaism, and beginning with Judaism, were the first religions to focus in such a concentrated way on the way people, competition, strife, and the reasons for conflict and the pressures to scapegoats.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's not a prediction, it's not a way that you can predict something. I think that there's too many variables in almost any equation to make it foolproof in that sense. One of the things that always interests me about Renee was the way he could pull up factors that you didn't see in a situation. The thing that you weren't looking at.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that was one of his first major literary interests, finding that book as he was leaving for America, he found that in a bookstore. It was very influential, leading him to see how social groups work in the snobbery of social circles and the way that they can lure you and repel you at the same time”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was not tremendously interested. Of course he used a computer, he was on the internet. He was always on his own wavelength. He was an amazing man to know, an amazing man to talk to.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's very mimetic, don't you? A lot of that is Peter Teal's influence. It's kind of a mixed bag. It's interesting that people always want to ask me about Peter Teal as the leader of this kind of mimetic wave. But I think he's got a lot more to say about a lot more things that are going to be of longstanding interest. We've already had some good analyses of his effect on Silicon Valley, but his effect on human behavior, his call for universal forgiveness, his call for being more independent, not being mimetic in moral ones desires. I think that those are his enduring messages that are more important than the world of technology.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's becoming more and more mainstream, but it's taken a long while for that to happen. He was in academia but not of academia in a lot of ways. Basically, the head of the Michigan State University press's series on Renee approached me and asked me to think of an idea for writing about Renee. And I noted that there had never been anything weaving together the life and the work. So the only reason that it happened is because I did it. I think that it was the conformist thing. Nobody wanted to stick their heads out, and people wanted to hold them at a distance, I think.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is allowed to make the great breakthrough book or whatever as long as its breakthrough within certain confines, within certain limits. That's an interesting point. What is the point at which it becomes something unacceptable outrageous rather than just innovative? And who decides that? How does that get decided?”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think because he wanted to make it more part of himself. Remember he was going through an enormous amount of suffering at that point in his life too, with his wife dying, with his son going mad.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was sympathetic with the students, but as he commented, they complain because they have too much. It was very different from the environment that he had just left, where students had very few rights and very few freedoms. He also thought the famous incident, of course, is when he was going through the campus and he was surrounded by protesters.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would think so was the central point of his whole work for Renee Gerard, but we're looking at human phenomena pretty much everywhere.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think they were. I think that they had a great deal in common in that regard, but they expressed it in a different way. They used a different language. For one thing one was a poet.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was purely memetic. Yes. I mean, it was a pretty universally Stalinist atmosphere. And the only person that befriended him was Camus. There were a few others, the people in Kultura, but they were Polish ⁇ migr ⁇ s themselves. So there's a lot of conformity. I don't think conformity is left or right or liberal or conservative. It's just human nature.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their politics and their thinking was not quite that easy to characterize. Renee considered himself. I think they all lose, certainly Mibosche considered himself a liberal in Poland, but the terms changed so quickly with the rise of Stalinism, with what was happening in Europe that suddenly the terms keep shifting. And it's kind of hard to place any of them politically. Renee has been called a conservative, but he was pretty mainline democratic. These are terms that we've put a great deal of meaning on. I'm not sure that they're that fixed as we think they are.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure it does interest me so much. I don't think that was what attracted me to them. I guess we're all exiles in a way, I feel like one.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Renee was not self exiled. He came here after the war because it was a place where he could get a job. He was recruited by the Americans that were going abroad and looking for bright young men to come and refill the colleges after the war and teach the GIs on the GI bill.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an interesting question. I've never thought about it that way. I am interested in them. There were three people I happened to know.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source