# Joshua Landy

قسمت های برتر پادکست
به روز شده:

Haunting (full episode)

October is full of ghosts, but in our show we will not be talking about little kids who wear white sheets. We're embracing the unseen, and talking about haunting: how things we can't see nonetheless press upon us, affect our choices, our actions, and sometimes even our beliefs. We'll be talking abo…

Season 7 Trailer: In Search of Lost Time

The new season of The Cosmic Library is on the way, and this time we’re talking about—and listening to—Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Conversations go everywhere: we’re thinking about the nature of time, music, and the self, and we’re figuring out how focusing on self might take us way bey…

How Fiction Shapes Us

A good novel can do many things. It can distract us from the humdrum of daily existence, stimulate our imaginations, and delight us with its creative use of language. But isn’t there something more we gain from engaging with fictional worlds and characters? Do we, for example, use literary texts to…

Reading, Narrative, and the Self

Reading is a lot of fun, especially narrative fiction – everyone loves a good story. But maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe everyone is, or at least tries to be, a good story themselves. Perhaps our very personal identities rest on narratives we form about ourselves, narratives that give our…

Language of Fiction

What are we talking about when we talk about Sherlock Holmes or Santa Claus? Something that doesn’t exist?  Something that exists only in the mind? Something that exists only in a fictional or imaginary world? Are statements about fictional objects true?  Is there a distinction between literal trut…

7.1 In Search of Lost Time: Imaginary Music

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time lifts off on page after page, but it always returns to earth, back to the narrator’s memories and thoughts and experiences. Somehow, this seven-volume French novel from the early twentieth century covers a vast range of possibility and surprise while still con…

7.2 In Search of Lost Time: Enchanted Self-Discovery

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time follows the development of a self. The narrator grows up in Combray, in the seaside town of Balbec, in Paris, and resolves to become a writer. But that narrative also encompasses so much else, from historical crises to philosophical riffs to self-doubts. Prou…

7.3 In Search of Lost Time: Wasting Time

The “lost time” of In Search of Lost Time can connote “wasted time,” and Marcel Proust’s narrator does confront wastes of time, through pretentious conversations and moments when habit takes control. But the novel makes much of this waste, and we glimpse something beyond wasted time when involuntar…

7.4 In Search of Lost Time: Art vs. Jealousy

The Prisoner—the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time—spirals through the vortex of the narrator’s jealousy concerning Albertine. Something of that vortex churns on into The Fugitive—the sixth volume—and then the focus moves toward grief. But across the entire novel, there are intimations of othe…

7.5 In Search of Lost Time: Surprise Ending

In Time Regained, the concluding volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, an older version of the narrator gloomily decides to attend a gathering at the Guermantes' mansion. He’s thinking, as Joshua Landy paraphrases here, "I might as well go and waste my time with these high-society snobs…