Juliette Sellgren 

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliet Sellgren, and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www.Adam Smith works.org. Welcome back. Today on November 5th, 2024. I'm excited to be away from the polls and in the recording studio getting ready to talk about my main man, Adam Smith. I'm really excited to invite Sarah Squire back to the podcast today. She was once on the podcast a very long time ago in the youth of the podcast. She is a woman who knows things about people who thought things as we established before, but more importantly, she is a senior program officer at Liberty Fund. So welcome back to the podcast.

Sarah Skwire 

Thank you so much. It's great to be back, Juliette.

Juliette Sellgren (1:09)

So a question before we get started, but I guess we already have started. So saying that it's kind of redundant, what is one piece of advice that you'd give to your younger self?

Sarah Skwire (1:20)

Oh, I have so many. I think the one that I'm thinking about most now is to not limit myself. Don't limit yourself before you have to. Don't persuade yourself that you can't learn something or you can't figure out how to do something or you don't have a talent for whatever. Try things first, then decide you're no good at them or discover something new about yourself. But don't just assume that you can't because I don't know nobody in your family ever has.

Juliette Sellgren (2:00)

Yeah. I decided the other day that in a different life I would probably be some sort of engineer. It was kind of a weird thought. I was like, no, I could never, who knows what asphalt is even made of, whatever. And then I realized part of the reason why I ended up doing economics and doing thought stuff and intellectual history and just talking about ideas is because my family does that. And sure, I guess we end up doing that because we like doing that. But there are other things you can learn that maybe aren't a vocation or going to be your main thing or just for whatever reason. We do specialize by nature of just how our economy works and how honestly, I think human beings thrive. But doesn't mean you can't mini specialize in your side activities like learning about concrete. Doesn't that sound fascinating

Sarah Skwire (3:02)

Or, my kids have persuaded me and some friends of mine have persuaded me that you can find a YouTube video to teach you anything. Right? There's no reason I can't fix my toilet myself. There's a video out there that will teach me how to do that. Just because I've never considered doing it before now doesn't mean I can't learn it.

Juliette Sellgren 

Yes. 

Sarah Skwire 

Unless you don't want to learn it. So why talk myself out of it before I make the attempt?

Juliette Sellgren (3:32)

I never thought about that one. But gardening, you learn how to garden. There's so many things you could learn how to do cooking. I feel like that's a big and obvious one.

Sarah Skwire 

Yeah, I knit. I break boards. Well, I used to break boards. I don't do that anymore. But,

Juliette Sellgren 

You mean karate, karate, TaeKwonDo, chopping.

Sarah Skwire (3:49)

Yeah. Wow, that's impressive. It's a random thing I decided to learn how to do, even though nobody else in my family did it, and I didn't have any reason for thinking that I could. So yeah, I wish I had had more of the kind of experimental spirit that I've developed in my fifties back when I was in my late teens and early twenties.

Juliette Sellgren (4:16)

So actually along those lines, something that I always want to ask, but there's not always time to, or it doesn't always fit, is what is that piece of advice and how did you learn it now? Because in order to give advice, you kind of have to learn that for yourself. And if you're giving it to your younger self, you didn't know it then. So what happened that led you to realize this?

Sarah Skwire (4:45)

I mean, a whole series of things. Probably the most immediate example is doing things like TaeKwonDo, which is I was not raised in an athletic family. We played cribbage. What is cribbage and Scrabble? Cribbage is a card game. We played cribbage and we played Scrabble and we did not play football on the front lawn. And I wildly decided the senior year of college to experiment with TaeKwonDo. Trained for two or three years then and then stopped until my kids rolled old enough to train. And then I went back when my kids rolled old enough to train, and I trained long enough that I have a third degree black belt in TaeKwonDo, which is not something I would ever have thought that I would be able to do. Whoa. And I just sort of decided it was worth learning and I went and I learned it. And I feel like that's true for so many things, and it's true for physical skills and craft skills as much as it is true for intellectual skills, I think. No, continue. Oh, if you want to learn and you find a good teacher, that's all you really need.

Juliette Sellgren (6:14)

I think my friends and I have been struggling with this kind of in the inverse direction recently because we had our final course selection for college yesterday, and on Sunday we were trying to figure out what courses we wanted to take, and it's always a big deal. It's so fun. There are hundreds of options. We're so lucky to have so many options, blah, blah, blah. But what if this is the last time I could possibly take a class in oceanography and trying to figure out what if my schedule looked like intro to salsa dancing oceanography, the age of Thomas Jefferson, the material science of cooking, the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you realize you couldn't possibly do all those things or there's a reason why you haven't done them yet. And kind of trying to balance, I could read a book about this or I could watch a video and also knowing it is worth actually taking a college class and trying to grapple with which path do I take to learn about this thing that is somewhat vaguely interesting to me.

Sarah Skwire (7:26)

But I mean, as our man, Adam Smith would remind you, right? Learning's not limited to the classroom, right? Learning. He went off to the university and was very dissatisfied with what happened in the classroom and probably learned a great deal more outside of it than inside it. So your last slate of college courses is indeed a nice moment to have a little sort of moment of rite of passage and melancholy over that rite of passage, but it's certainly not the end of what should be a lifetime of learning for all of us, right? Yeah.

Juliette Sellgren (8:06)

Adam Smith always says it so well, doesn't he? Along those lines, along the lines of Adam Smith, I don't know if it's just me right now that I've been kind of preparing for this in the last few hours and I've been reading the word grief like 1,000,010 times, and that means that the word has started to lose meaning and just sound weird like grief. G-R-I-E-F. Grief kind of sounds like, I don't know, weird. But what is grief? Can we just basic definition or vibes, what are the vibes on grief?

Sarah Skwire (8:48)

Well, I think there are probably some different vibes. And I think one of the things that can be tricky when we're reading Smith about grief is that grief is an emotional response that we can have in reaction to any of a number of kinds of losses. So I would say short version grief is an emotional response to loss. For Smith, I think it matters more than somewhat as to what the loss was that spurs that grief. He is much more sympathetic, and I use that word with great intent, but much more sympathetic to losses that come through death and through illness than he is to say. Losing a lover, though one might grieve both of those kinds of circumstances.

Juliette Sellgren (10:05)

I guess kind of important for context, what experience has Smith had with grief? What do we know critical moments that might influence the way he's thinking and why he kind of ends up where he does?

Sarah Skwire (10:26)

Okay, so this is super interesting. Smith has fairly late in his life to substantial losses. He loses his best friend, his probably friend of longest standing and of greatest intellectual equality, someone who is an intellectual fellow traveler, someone with whom he corresponds about his work, his dear friend, the great philosopher David Hume Smith loses, I believe shortly after the publication of the Wealth of Nations. And then later on after that, Smith loses his mother when she is 90. He lived with her for nearly all of his adult life, so they were very, very close. And so he has these two enormous losses of people who are very, very dear to him.

Juliette Sellgren (11:39)

So then when we're talking about, okay, so this is around when [Wealth of] Nations was published, and it's been a while since I've looked or thought about the timeline. He published most of TMS before then, and most of he wrote about grief is in there and not really relevant to The Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Yes. Yeah.

Sarah Skwire 

No, no, go ahead.

Juliette Sellgren (12:09)

Go ahead. I was just going to say, how do we know, so if he's writing mostly in TMS about this before all that happens, how do we know how that stuff has been relevant to the way he thinks about grief and the way that he feels about it and the way he intellectualizes a feeling?

Sarah Skwire (12:35)

Okay. So I think this is super, super interesting, and I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I was talking with some friends not too long ago about what it is like to experience great griefs and the way in which it's sort of like being unwillingly shoved through a door and once you're through it, everybody else who hasn't had that same experience is on the other side and they just literally do not get it and cannot get it. They're incapable of understanding what it's like to be on the other side of the door. And I think that we can actually see this happening in Smith's writing. We can find one of the moments when he's suddenly on the other side of the door. And I think that that's really cool. So let me back up a little bit and tell me if I'm going on at too great length and you want to interrupt me.

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, I think that Smith's approach to grief is largely one of someone who has read a lot about grief and thought a lot about grief and considered it sort of how it plays out in different philosophical systems, but is not necessarily the writing of someone who has experienced grief for himself. So he's often, I think, giving very good advice about grief that he may have gotten from watching the world around him. But he's not great about understanding what grief really feels like, or at least we don't see him being what I would consider to be really accurate about what the experience of a great grief feels like until much later in his life, particularly in a letter that he writes about the death of his mother. So for example, here's the big moment where I think it matters in theory and moral sentiments. Smith talks about how tragic the deaths of children are, and he says, we mourn the loss of their possible futures. We mourn all the promise of those young children that is lost to us. And then he says, but in ordinary cases, an old man dies without being much regretted by anybody.

When Smith's mother dies, he writes to his publisher to apologize for not answering sooner. He says, I'm sorry I didn't answer your letter. I've been not myself lately because my mother just died. And then he says, and I'm going to read if it's okay, I'm going to read a chunk of this letter. In contrast with that line about an old man not being much regretted by anybody, he says about the death of his mother, “…though the death of a person in the 90th year of her age was no doubt an event most agreeable to the course of nature and therefore to be foreseen and prepared for. Yet I must say to you what I've said to other people, that the final separation from a person who certainly loved me more than any other person ever did or ever will love me and whom I certainly loved and respected more than I shall either love or respect any other person, I cannot help feeling even at this hour. It's a very heavy stroke upon me.”

And so that moment for me is when Smith sort of says, well, I read all the Stoics and I said, you've got to be tough and you've got to be strong and you have to bear up under the burdens of your great grief. And old men die and they're not much regretted because they've accomplished so much in their lives and we feel like they've really sort of lived the full experience being human. And he says, I know all of this and I understand all of this intellectually, and it doesn't mean anything when you hold it up against what it actually feels like to lose someone who has loved you greatly and whom you have loved greatly.

Juliette Sellgren (17:27)

Wow. It's the direct quote, it just hits really different to, I guess intellectualize him, right?

Sarah Skwire (17:40)

Right. Smith is so much, he's so much someone who lives in his mind. He's so much someone who, to me at least when I read him, his interaction with the world around him is always sort of at that remove of I am observing all of the things that are happening around me and then I am recording them and he's not sort of vibrating to the experience of the world around him in the way that the poets do or the romantic writers later do. He does better self-regulation than that, and I think he'd be pleased to have people say that. Right. And so to have this moment when he's speaking about his mother where that just breaks through and he says all of these things that I know none of them are helpful.

Juliette Sellgren (18:37)

Helpful. Yeah. Well, so this is what I've been wondering about, so it's kind of clear. So you mentioned the Stoics. I was reading up on this a bit. He did really read from the Stoics, and that's where a lot of his earlier TMS takes on grief align. I remember reading through this and being like, okay, well some of it makes sense. How do you cope with grief? Well, sometimes it's really important to be with people who don't understand what you're going through because since they can't sympathize, it makes you feel better because they can't know. It makes you somewhat distracted and it didn't seem like he was coming at it from a bottle things up or even from stoic, you're going to be fine. But he was just like in his very observational, this is how sympathy works. This is why you will feel better maybe when you do that. Not you should do this, this is a cure necessarily. But how do his TMS kind of takes, how are they implicated by his response to his mother's passing? Can we still read that, use that learn from that when he has such a big turnaround? Or I guess how does it change the context?

Sarah Skwire (20:17)

So I think that we might think about Smith's letter on the death of his mother as a moment kind of between. So he is equipped with the tools that he needs to deal with grief, but before he can use those tools right before he can, all of that philosophy, he needs to actually take some time to feel the grief. So I think that that letter and those moments, he is where we can actually sort of feel that emotion peeking through are moments that he needs in order to then be able to pick up from there and do all of the things that he says you need to do when you're grieving. And as you say, he says, when you're grieving, it's good. It's good to be with friends ends, but you shouldn't be with them too much because they might indulge your grief and they might baby you. And if that's happening, you need to maybe go live with strangers who aren't going to keep sort of babying you along through your grief. You just need to get back to something that looks like real life instead of remaining a permanent mourner. And he also says you have to retain your dignity.

He says, the man who feels the full distress of the calamity, which has befallen him, but he feels still more strongly what the dignity of his own character requires is lone the man of real virtue. And so it almost feels to me as if the writing and theory of moral sentiments is pulling together all of the tools that you need to pull yourself back together after something horrible happens and you fall apart.

Juliette Sellgren (22:33)

Yeah, I can see that. I guess part of me, I read this and I'm like, but I want to know the steps, how much time feeling, and I guess he's not in the business of giving you a how-to guide Well, and he says, we don't want to think about it.

Sarah Skwire (22:53)

Right. He's got this great line. Grief is painful and our mind naturally resists and recoils from it. We endeavor not to conceive of it or to shake it off as soon as we have conceived. It's hard for us to even think about grief, which is why when you're plunged into it, I think no matter how well you can be Adam Smith for heaven's sake and still feel ill-equipped to deal with what it's like to be in a moment of great grief.

Juliette Sellgren (23:25)

It's kind of interesting because based on that quote that you read, when he is writing to his editor or publisher, whoever, it seems as though he is kind of having an existential moment. I don't know if that comes across to you when you read that, but it seems like he's kind of not shocked so much, but at a loss of words, I guess.

Sarah Skwire (23:57)

Oh, I mean, I think it is shock. I don't think that's hyperbole at all. I think what he's saying is I thought I was prepared. I'm a great philosopher. I have written about dealing with grief. I have understood that all of us are mortal. I have understood that a full life well lived is a great gift and we shouldn't be sorry for people who lived a full life and died peacefully. And I understand all of those things he says, and they're not helping. Why they helping? It's a very heavy, even at this hour, it is a very heavy stroke upon me. Why don't I feel better yet?

Juliette Sellgren

Yeah…

Sarah Skwire (24:51)

My mother was 90. I understood what was going to happen. Any intelligent person understood what was going to happen and yet…

Juliette Sellgren (25:00)

I wonder what your thoughts are on this. He refers to grief as a selfish virtue. And I wonder if it almost comes fully to bear when this happens. He actually comes to realize what that really means because the thing that he seems hung up on is the fact that the person who is going to love him most. I've never thought about that. It seems like the sort of thing, maybe you've thought about it before, something like that happens, but it's the sort of thing I would hope you wouldn't necessarily, that wouldn't cross your mind before it happens, unfortunately. And I don't know, it seems like such a thought that you literally could not have before the framing of the person who's going to love me more than anyone else is gone. And obviously it's out of care for them and your relationship with them and all of that. But I don't know. I just think that that's kind of a funny connection that he describes it in that way. And yet it seems more true than ever when he is unable to process. And the only way he can verbalize it is in that way.

Sarah Skwire (26:29)

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that you lose when you lose people who are very close to you is you lose the specific ways in which you were close to that person. I lost my husband about, oh goodness, it's going on four years now. And he was a writer and he was a teacher, and he was a public intellectual. So people knew him a lot. Great one in those ways, and they knew him a lot in those very public ways. But when I mourn for him, it's not those things that I mourn for. It's the small stuff. It's the ways in which my husband was mine and belonged to me. He was my husband. Right. Adam Smith is mourning his mother. When Hume dies, he mourns his friend. And when Hume dies, he's in that same position of mourning someone. I mean, heaven knows my late husband. No, David Hume. And I do not mean to make the comparison, but I think that when you mourn someone who has some sort of a public presence, there's this sense of, well, the person that everyone else is talking about, is it the person who I knew and I need to make those two images connect with each other. And I think that Smith works out a great deal of his grief over the death of Hume by writing in defense of, he writes a great letter again, I think to publish. He writes to his publisher a lot, but writes a letter, I think to his publisher giving or to Hume's publisher giving a sort of intellectual biography of Hume and describing his virtuous character and his virtuous death while defending Hume's atheism or at least skepticism. And I think that that act for Smith as an act of respect and an act of warning as well.

Juliette Sellgren (29:03)

Yeah. I think what that shows, I guess, and I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, but that he keeps doing this, that he kind of not only writes it out, but he's writing to his publisher. He doesn't really need to do what he does to grieve Hume to pay his respect or to Hume's publisher, and yet he does. It's almost as though as much as his words themselves are really important, grief is almost this thing, this feeling, this experience that you really have to look at almost, I mean, not to throw an econ term in here, but revealed preferences. How are you acting?

Sarah Skwire 

And I think, sorry, go ahead.

Juliette Sellgren 

No, no, no, go ahead.

Sarah Skwire (30:03)

Yeah, and I think that one of the things Smith very much is concerned about, especially with Hume, is that Hume's death not be co-opted by people who want to argue that Hume has some sort of great deathbed conversion or something. And so Smith wants to defend Hume both as sticking to his principles until the end of his life, but also as being a person of virtue of a man of virtue, despite his not aligning with the religious preferences of the 18th century. And so I think Smith really feels that if Hume is not there any longer to fight that fight, Smith needs to step in to do that. But I cannot imagine the effort that must have taken on his part.

Juliette Sellgren (31:01)

Yeah, because I mean, again, with the econ, you're doing something that's not your comparative advantage out of just feeling the gravity of that loss.

Sarah Skwire 

And Smith wasn't particularly pugnacious guy, right? That was kind of Hume's strong point, right? Smith didn't like to start arguments,

Juliette Sellgren 

And yet…

Sarah Skwire (31:27)

He didn't really seem to enjoy throwing down with people. But this letter in defense of Hume that he writes is very much throwing down and challenging people who he thinks are going to challenge or denigrate Hume's memory. And so he does step out of character to do this for his friend, and I think that's a tremendous act …of bravery on his part.

Juliette Sellgren (31:56)

So what can we learn about Smith, I guess, but also about grief? I'm asking you as someone who knows things about what people thought and how they think, what does grief do to a person? I mean, I guess as someone who's also obviously experienced it, can anyone hide and is there anything we can learn just about the phenomenon of grief by reading about it, or do you just have to experience it and then maybe you can read the stoics and pick yourself up by your bootstraps, but there does have to be something within you and some experience that there's no way you can prepare for.

Sarah Skwire (32:48)

So there's a story in Talmud, but you didn't expect to go there in this podcast, there's a story in Talmud about a rabbi who loses 10 of his children, and when his 10th child who is a son dies, he carries a small bone, maybe a tooth or a finger bone, something small that he keeps with him all of the time as a memorial to the child. And he used to, when he met other people who were grieving, he would show them that bone, which sounds incredibly weird and grizzly.

Juliette Sellgren 

A little.

Sarah Skwire (33:34)

Bit, but I think is a Talmudic answer to the question that you just asked me, which is to say you don't understand it until you do. You don't understand grief until you grieve, and you probably don't understand grief until after you are through the worst of the grief. You have to get past the point where Smith writes this letter and says, I don't, this is a very heavy stroke upon me, and all my intellectualizing has not equipped me to deal with it. You have to be able to sort of write that letter and say that in order to be able to begin to sort of really get it right. And I wonder so much if he'd written a third big book and if it had contained anything about grief or moral sentiments, which it might have or it might not have, whether he would've had revisions to his very sort of stoic recommendations throughout theory of Moral sentiments.

Juliette Sellgren 

And I guess unfortunately we'll never know that. I always get upset about that.

Sarah Skwire (35:07)

Well, and I wonder, and this is absolute base speculation on my part, but theory of, no, sorry, Wealth of Nations is published in March of 1776, 17 76. Hume dies in August of the same year. Smith never writes another big book. He moves house and never writes another big book. And I wonder whether the fact that he doesn't write another big book is influenced by the loss of his greatest intellectual friend, his dearest critic, and the person who most agreed with him and most challenged him at the same time. I wonder about that. I have absolutely no factual information on that whatsoever, but it feels very plausible to me.

Juliette Sellgren (36:28)

Yeah, no, that does seem kind of possible. I mean, how long did he live after that? I feel like I should know this.

Sarah Skwire 

I also should know Smith's death date, but I don't, I can Google it. No, that's fine. And tell you, I mean,

Juliette Sellgren 

Are you Googling it???

Sarah Skwire 

It? No, I'm not. It's at least 1780s or nineties. Yeah.

Juliette Sellgren 

Yeah.

Sarah Skwire 

So it's a good long while.

Juliette Sellgren (37:01)

Yeah.

Do you think, this is something I've been thinking about, which is kind of even starting from the point where you mentioned earlier that Smith has different views on grief based on basically what it's about, that losing a lover is not the same thing as losing someone who has died. But even if we're looking at grieving those who have passed, do you think that it's possible that grief is not just one thing that it, it's kind of pretty dependent on the person and your relationship with them and all of that, even though there are some similarities, obviously because loss is loss, that each grief is kind of different?

Sarah Skwire (37:54)

Yes. I think that that is absolutely true. I think that is absolutely true because you mourn, and I actually think that this is what Smith comes to understand or what we can see. Smith coming to understand philosophy prepares you to deal with the generalities of grief. All men are mortal. I am mortal, therefore, I must die. You should say goodbye to your children in the morning as if you're never going to see them again, because you might not. All of this sort of stoic philosophy prepares you for the generalities of grief, but nothing prepares you, I think. And there is no way to understand another person's intimate grief, their personal and specific grief. And I think that's what he's saying when he focuses so much on, my mother loved me more than anyone ever did or ever will, and I loved and respected her more than I ever will, than I ever have or ever will love and respect another person. And it's that particularity there of that relationship and philosophy can help you with the generalities, but nothing can help you with the particularities.

Juliette Sellgren 

Yeah. Philosophy doesn't have anything to say about you and your mother very specifically

Sarah Skwire (39:36)

Because philosophy can't know that. Right. If have to tell you general things about parents and children, and certainly you can have recourse to great poetry. There's a heartbreaking lament as part of the old English epic poem, Beowulf of a Father mourning the death of a Son. So you can read about the intimate griefs of other people and they may or may not speak to your own personal experience of your personal grief. They may help. That may be the specificity that we can get through art, might be through music, through poetry might be more helpful for specific grief than a more generalizing philosophical take.

Juliette Sellgren (40:50)

Yeah. I think this is kind of an interesting, makes me think about liberalism. It's kind of this very interesting divide between, well, obviously philosophy being this conversation about ideas between people through generations, across time, whatever. Obviously the people who had those thoughts are somewhat embedded in the ideas and the outputs and whatever, but there's something about art that is so much more raw, even when it's refined, has taken a really long time, whatever. I think because art can be in conversation and it can be related to philosophy, it's always more individual, so it's going to look a lot more you. There's going to be a lot more of the individual who created reflected in it in the same way that if I were to co-author something with a bunch of my friends, obviously I would be a part of it. But me talking on the podcast, obviously that's my voice. I'm saying this, it's going to be a lot more like me. And I'm really glad that, I guess I feel like this is possible in a liberal framework and kind of like a liberal understanding of human nature and human society because we kind of need both and one doesn't kind of substitute for the other.

Sarah Skwire (42:26)

Yes. I think that that is exactly right. I think that that is exactly right. Philosophy serves to tell us things like theory of moral sentiments serve to tell us where we fit into the great picture of humanity and how we move through a world that has millions of us in it and a world that has millions of us in it right now, but also stretches back over time and across space, what it means to be a human being writ large. But something like poetry gives you the details of the individual person. There's a beautiful poem by Thedore Ruki about a student of his who died and he starts, it starts, I remember the neck curls, limp and damp as tendrils and her quick look, a sidelong, ral smile, none of which would matter to the philosophers. And there's no reason that they should, but they matter with enormous crushing intensity to the poet because that's what makes the person a person. That's what makes this student his student, and not just a student.

Juliette Sellgren (43:50)

I've been having this debate for a few years now with various people in my life, and I'm kind of wonder, it plays in very well to this, but about the role of culture and context in understanding literature, what makes great books, not great books like Great books, but a great book. And I always find myself on the side of a really great book you can appreciate regardless, but it still becomes a lot greater the more about the context of the author and the specifics and what it's really about, what the author thought about it, things like that. Because I've always kind of thought that that makes it more personal. Books are art, whether or not you want them to be, I guess. And it has part of the author in it. So the more about the author, the more you can get out of the book because it's closer to actually knowing the author almost as though personally because it is part of them. And I don't know, there's so many people around me that argue, that know a great book has to be completely detachable from the author. Anyone has to be able to pick it up and love it immediately and think that it's fantastic and understand what it is meant by the book, whatever. And I'm kind of wondering what you think, but also how that kind of fits into what we've been talking about. I know we've kind of veered off track a little bit, but it's there still.

Sarah Skwire (45:30)

All of my threads are threads, Juliette, so it's fine. It's all drift. No actual topic. I think if you were going to shove me in a corner and make me define a great book, I would say that a great book is one that invites and rewards repeated reading. And I think that's part of what you're talking about when you say, the more that you know about an author, the better the book gets. Because part of what you can get from repeated readings and repeated interactions with a book is that urge to learn more about the author and to learn more about the context and bring that all into the reading. But I also don't necessarily, there are plenty of great books about the authors of which we know nothing or next to nothing. And I don't think that our appreciation for their greatness needs to be limited by whether we know, say who wrote Beowulf. Right. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, we are never going to discover that. I mean, I'll be proved wrong next week when somebody comes in a manuscript version somewhere, but I'll go out on that limb. But I don't think that diminishes the greatness of the poem or the Iliad and the Odyssey. We have the name Homer for one poet or one group of poets, or we're not quite sure. We've given the name Homer to the creative force behind those poems, but that doesn't really tell us very much

So we can find a work great just by knowing the text. Right. So I think that a great book is one that invites us back in and that it opens itself up to repeated readings by us at varying points in our lives. Which to bring this back to Smith, you didn't know if I was going to do that. To bring this back to Smith, is something we can see him doing, I think here as he assesses the understanding of the stoics about grief and then experiences grief and then reassess the understanding of the stoics about grief. He doesn't read the stoics, decide he's understood them and he's done with them.

Juliette Sellgren 

He's preparing to go back. 

Sarah Skwire (48:53)

Yeah, he's probably preparing to go back or he doesn't have to go back because he's read them and he has them in his head. And he's sort of mentally

Juliette Sellgren 

Grappling,

Sarah Skwire 

Mentally grappling with the text that he has, he has in his head and saying, how are these texts different now that I, Adam Smith am different?

Juliette Sellgren (49:16)

Yeah. He's almost in this way. He's almost like, obviously we say he's the father of modern economics, but that is the idea of people being different across time. We treat different people, the same person at different times, as different people. In a lot of ways it's useful for a lot of things, but he seems to kind of understand that even if it's not this meta commentary on like, oh, I'm realizing that this is what I'm feeling. He realizes that he didn't get it, that he hadn't experience, and that's just so cool. That's so cool.

Sarah Skwire (50:01)

And we can do that when we return to reading Smith or when we return to reading King Lear, when we return to reading Beowulf or the poems of Ruki or whatever it is that we're currently reading. Lear, when I first read it when I was 18, was a very different play for me than it was when I read it when I was in my late twenties. It was when I read it when I had children of my own. And then it was when I read it as my parents started to really age, it's a play that, and the words are all the same. Shakespeare didn't write a new version of Lear in the mid-nineties for me, but what I brought to it becomes so different. And this is a really interesting moment, and I think you've really put your finger on something here that this is a moment when we can sort of see Smith rereading almost these great works that he's examined in the past and thinking, so now what do they mean to me? And now how do I understand them? And now who am I in relation to them? I understood them well enough to write a book.

Juliette Sellgren (51:27)

What I'm thinking about now, I was going to ask you how sympathy kind of plays into this more nuanced understanding, but I think I have a little vague inkling of an idea, but you let me know because you definitely also have thoughts, and I might be wrong slash you might not agree. I'm thinking that. Okay. We always talk about sympathy as you can see other people, you can see other people reacting to you and you're perceiving that. And so the impartial Spectator is a makeup of all these people that you can imagine reacting to you. But what happens when you change? Does the impartial spectator change a little bit.

Sarah Skwire (52:22)

I mean well, but the job of the impartial spectator is to change us. The impartial spectator observes what we're doing and reports to us as to whether we're living up to the right standards and behaving in an appropriate way. And if we're not, we're meant to alter our behavior.

Juliette Sellgren (52:48)

So then does the loss of a significant person in your life change the impartial spectator within you because the people who are responding to you are different?

Sarah Skwire (53:01)

I mean, I think that it probably does, and I think some of that is because like Rabbi Jonathan with his bone that he carries around. Once you have experienced great grief, you are more, I think, able to sympathize with the great griefs of others. So there's that and yeah, sure. Our friends are our external spectators, and so if you lose your David Hume, you feel not to be punty about it, but you feel at a loss, right? You've lost something. You are at a loss. You are in a moment of enormous loss where maybe that person who reflects the external spectator, that friend who reflects you back to yourself best is no longer there to do that. And maybe that's why you don't write another book, and maybe that's why you move. Maybe that's why you take a job at the Customs House.

Juliette Sellgren (54:15)

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this and to talk about all sorts of things that are all tangentially related. I have one last question for you, and that is, what is one thing that you are currently working on to improve yourself or your skills?

Sarah Skwire (54:33)

Oh, I'm just trying to be less lazy, Juliette. What I have a terrible, my greatest sin is sloth. Given the opportunity, I would curl up with novels and television and cups of tea and never write anything and never go anywhere. And so I do things like call you up and say, Hey, want to do a podcast episode about Adam Smith in grief and try to get myself up off of the couch. So that is my current challenge to myself.

Juliette Sellgren 

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to the Great Antidote Podcast. It means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at Great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.