This man, his name is Gay Talese. This year he's 94 years old. He's still going strong. This is his wife, Nan Talese. For decades they were the first couple of American literature in New York City. And I'm very proud to have him as my About 30 years ago, I was in Beijing. I had just graduated from Yale College. I was working as a high school teacher. But I wanted to become a writer. I was an English literature major at Yale. And so, I met some journalist friends who introduced me to Gay Talese.
In the summer of '99, he came to Beijing to work on a story. And he needed a translator. So, I became his translator for 6 months. And during those 6 months, I received the best education any young writer could receive from the greatest American writer of his generation. He practices an art called And no one else practices this the way he does.
So, what he does is that he will spend hours and hours just talking with someone, trying to get to know this person, trying to understand the world from this person's perspective. And then, after spending days, months with that person, and talking to other people around him or her, he will try to draw out a memory from that person and put it in words in a way that resonates with his And he is a genius. And when I say he's a genius, I mean he is unique in what he does. Every writer we've read this semester, whether it's Homer or Dante, even Gay Talese, whom we'll read today, they are unique in what they do.
Harold Bloom, the great American literary critic, says that great literature is shocking. You read it and you are shaken by it in a way that you remember forever. It is a deep emotional experience that stays with you for your entire life. It shakes you in a way that forces you to reorient your worldview. It forces you to better understand who you are, your place in the world, and your understanding of the world. And that's what Gay Talese does. What he does is unique. No one else does what he does. No one else can do what he does, and it is shocking.
It is shocking because it transcends time and space. His writing is able to transcend the time he's writing in and then spread across different cultures. So, we will not fully appreciate his genius maybe until 50 years from now, 100 years from now. Okay? So, he is mainly known for his journalism. He is the greatest journalist of his generation, probably the greatest journalist of all time. American journalism is dying, so people like him will no longer be able to work. These are his boxes. What's amazing about his boxes is that they are living souls, okay?
You can't really see it because the picture quality isn't great, but what he does is that he turns each box into a unique soul with its own time, its own place, its own memories. He uses his boxes in order to create articles and essays and books. Okay? So, he takes memories of life, real memories of life, and turns them into great works of literature. He is mainly known for his book The Kingdom and the Power, which is about the New York Times. If you work at the New York Times, you still read that book today as a young journalist.
He wrote a book called Honor Thy Father, which is about the American And he wrote an essay, a magazine article, called Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, which is considered the greatest American magazine essay ever written. Today, I want to talk about a work that people don't really discuss about Gay Talese. It's called Thy Neighbor's Wife. Yeah, Thy Neighbor's Wife.
This is a book that is one of the best-selling American books of all time. It sold millions of copies. It made him filthy rich. It made millions of dollars. At the same time, it basically destroyed his career because in the late '70s, when this book was published, he was a really respected journalist, writer, he was a celebrity, and he was married to a beautiful book editor named Nan Talese, who will go on to have a spectacular publishing And when you're famous as an American in the 70s there are certain ways you have to behave.
Okay? You have to respect rules and conventions. You have to respect taboos. And at the height of his fame, and this is his, you know, mid-40s, he decides to do something that completely went against the convention, the rules, the morality of that time. He decided to write a book on And there have been lots of books published about sex before, but the way he decided to write this book was itself unconventional.
He decided to write about sex, he needed to go into the heart of darkness itself. He needed to explore the deepest, darkest, most depraved secrets of humans.
And so he would spend at least 10 engaging in all sorts of really strange activities which famous men should not do in public, okay? Yes, I understand rich famous men are hypocrites and they do this in private, but they don't do it in public and let the whole world know about it and certainly don't write a book about it, okay? But the guy decides to become a manager at a massage parlor. He will go to California and engage in He will masturbate with other men, but he is an anthropologist.
He is trying to understand humans. And to do that, you first need to appreciate sex. Okay? So, this is a book that no one talks about because it is so controversial. It is so disturbing. It's disturbing because it's truthful. All right?
Because it tells us that human beings are ultimately animals. And so, I think this is one of the most courageous books ever written because it puts a mirror to us and shows us that we're just basically monkeys. But at the same time, it's also one of the most enlightening, inspiring books that has ever been written because if you look at the act of sex of human beings, it's different from animals because ultimately what lies behind sex is our need, our search for God. Ultimately, that's why we have sex.
If you actually read this anthropological study of sex, then you understand that we humans are first and fundamentally that seek to return to God. That's something that Homer and Dante have talked about before in the past, right? Okay. So, before we go into Thy Neighbor's Wife and explore how it's fundamentally a book about religion, I'm going to go into some mysticism, okay? So, this is something called Kabbalah.
The Kabbalah means to receive. The Kabbalah is an understanding of how the universe works, why we're where we came from, where we're going. Okay, this is called the tree of life. And the story is this. In the beginning, God is everything. It's pure energy. And God wants to know itself. God wants to complete itself. God wants to extend itself. And so, what it does is it creates a new being called Adam Kadmon, okay? Think of Adam Kadmon as the cosmic man. The first cosmic man. And God is the will to bestow. God is love, generosity, forgiveness.
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So, God wants to extend himself onto Adam Kadmon. And to do that, he creates Adam Kadmon as the will to receive, okay? The will to receive. God is the will to bestow. Adam Kadmon is the will to receive. But the problem with this is that as the will to receive, Adam Kadmon is pure And so, he doesn't really appreciate why God is so generous with him, why God is willing to bestow his essence onto him. So, Adam Kadmon rejects God because he's full of doubt. He's skeptical. He's scared. He's embarrassed.
Okay? And this ultimately leads to something called the breaking, the shattering, of the vessels. Shattering the vessels. All right? So, what happens is that this is the tree of life, which is basically Adam Kadmon. All right? And as God is trying to pour his essence into Adam Kadmon, Adam Kadmon turns away. And so, what happens is that light spills outside the tree of life, okay? And these sparks of divinity, sparks of divinity, scattered across the world. And this breaks the world.
As a result, this leads to sin, death in our world. So, in order for us to repair the world, what we need to do is collect those sparks that have spilled over from the tree of life, and then combine them together, repair the vessel, so that God may come to our world and reunify with us. Okay? So, according to Jewish mysticism, that is the purpose of life. All right? So, this is a very basic understanding of the Kabbalah, which helps us understand our place in the world and why we're here to do what we do.
Now, there are three things I need you guys to remember about the tree of life, okay? The first thing to remember about the tree of life is that it's sexual in So, the idea is that two forces are combining to create a new force. Right? So, God is the will to bestow and Adam Kadmon is the will to receive.
So this is a divine fundamental force to You've been taught that it's a dirty thing, but in fact, it's a very fundamental force of the universe. Okay? And because the world is sexual, it moves in certain logic. Okay? And the logic is this. You start off with a being who creates another being in order to complete itself. Okay? And this leads to a new being which then creates another being, which creates another being.
And this is the tree of life. In other words, the tree of life is the movement of the universe. And we can also frame it as synthesis Oh, sorry. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Okay, that's number two. Okay? This is a fundamental logic of the universe.
And the third thing that we need to appreciate is that our mission on Earth, our journey, our purpose, is to repair the world by saving the sparks of light. Okay? The sparks of light are of God, memories of God that are now scattered across the world. The problem is that as they become scattered in the world, they become enveloped by husk, okay? Material things. Husk. And we call these the body, right? So, in other words, the spirit inside us, it's divine, but we're covered by our body, which is the husk.
And as a result, we're blinded by our material desires. And so, this is a fundamental conflict in the universe. How do we go about repairing the world? Well, we go about repairing the world by repairing ourselves, by discovering the light inside of us. All right? And so, this is the question that Gay Talese is going to undertake. What he's going to do is that he's going to risk his entire career. He did actually risk his entire career. And he's going to go into the deepest, darkest corners of the human heart to figure out how we can liberate our divine aspects from the husk that has imprisoned it.
Okay? That is the fundamental conflict driving the book Thy Neighbor's Wife. All right? And if you read the book, three different solutions are being proposed. Okay? Three different solutions are being proposed to answer this mystery. The first solution is Okay? Meaning that we ourselves have the energy, the power to liberate our spark from our husk through intense But in a sexual sense, what is meditation? Meditation is masturbation.
I know this sounds really weird. Okay, I know this is going to be disturbing for some of us, but it will make sense when we get to the passage. Okay? I'm just building the framework, the theory, for when we read Thy Neighbor's Wife. Okay? So, that's the first solution. Second is to embrace sex.
Okay. So, the theory here is that sex is meant to be free, to be casual, to be joyous. But society has imposed restrictions on sex. So, sex is a mechanism to control your feelings, to imprison your soul. Okay? Because sex is taboo. So, if you were to get married, you're not supposed to sleep with other people who are not your wife or your If you do so, you have betrayed your wife, yourself, and society as a whole. And then you ask yourself, "Well, why is that important?
Is sex and love really the same thing? So, what if you have sex with another person? Why does that matter? Why can't you separate your husk from your soul? Your soul can belong to another person, but your husk can be enjoyed with other people. Okay? And the way to liberate people from this convention, from this taboo, is to fully embrace sex. Okay? The more sex there is between different people, the more they recognize that what matters is not the sex, what matters is the love. Okay? Through sin, you can break the taboo.
You can liberate yourself from the taboo. When you liberate yourself from the taboo, you liberate your soul. Okay? And then your soul can reconnect with God. So, there's a second solution proposed in Thy Neighbor's Wife. And the third, to recognize that the world, as constructed, is perfect. It's not broken, it's perfect. It's not malfunctioning, it's doing exactly what it should be doing. Why? Because we're here not to find the sparks of light, we're here to create sparks of light.
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And how can we do so? We can do so through love and the imagination. We're not here to return to God, we're here to do what God cannot do, extend the boundaries of the universe by using our imagination. By creating memories that are transcendental, that travel beyond time and space, and which are able to inspire others to imagine and to dream as well. Okay? And this is the idea of Dante.
So, you have three radical visions of what it means to seek liberation. You have three radical visions of what it means to free your soul and to be one with All right. But the argument I want to make to you today is that Thy Neighbor's Wife is a great book. The reason why millions have read it, the reason why, even though it was written 50 years ago, we still read it and resonate with it, is because regardless of whether these paths fail or succeed, they do resonate with us because they remind us of our fundamental need to return to God.
Okay? They remind us of who we are. And that's why Thy Neighbor's Wife is still such a beautiful and divine book. All right. Okay. So, what we're going to do is we're going to look at all three different solutions together. Okay, so the first is meditation through All right. So, this is chapter one. And this is a man named Harold Rubin. And Harold Rubin, at this stage, is a teenager living in a very abusive household. He's not happy where he is. He seeks escape. The way he seeks escape is that he falls in love with a woman named Diane Webber.
The problem though is that Diane Webber is really not a person. Diane Webber is a model who poses nude on beaches. And Harold Rubin will masturbate to the nude pictures of Diane Webber. So, we're going to read a couple of paragraphs from the story of Harold Rubin in Thy Neighbor's Wife. And what I want you to focus on is the fact that this act of masturbation is really one of devotion.
Okay? Religious devotion. You can read this and think that here Rubin is a priest in a temple and he's working very meticulously, very carefully in order to create a devotion worthy of God. Okay? So, don't think of this as a sexual scene, think of this as a religious scene. He's masturbating, but what he's really doing is he's offering himself to his A lean, dark-eyed woman on page four attracted Harold, but the first photographer had posed her awkwardly on a narrow branch of a tree and he felt her discomfort. Okay, this is a really interesting sentence.
What he's saying is this, when Harold Rubin is reading or looking at pornography, it is an act of giving. It's an act of empathy. And so, what he's seeking is not control or power, what he's seeking is to be with this woman that he's looking at. Okay? It's an act of empathy, it's an act of imagination. So, if she feels discomfort, he also feels discomfort. That is what religious devotion really is about, giving yourself completely to God in a way that you open your heart and your soul to God.
Okay? The nude on page six, sitting cross-legged on a studio floor next to an easel, had fine breasts but a bland expression on her face. Okay? So, it's like Harold is having a with each of these people. His imagination is creating a person in front of him in order to have a dialogue. So, it's not just sexual attraction, it's also dialogue in search of mutual understanding. Harold, still on his back with knees slightly raised under the blanket, continued to turn the pages past various legs and breasts, hips and buttocks, female fingers and arms reaching out, eyes looking away from him, eyes looking at him, as he occasionally paused to lightly stroke his genitals with his left hand, tilting the magazine in his right hand to eliminate the slight glare on the glossy pages.
So, we skip a bit. And then there were those extremely weird pictures, those of Diane Webber that could fulfill him constantly. He estimated that his collection contained 50 photographs of her and within a moment he could locate every one of them in the 200 magazines that he kept. He would merely have to glance at the cover and would know exactly where she was within, how she was standing, what was in the background, what her attitude seemed to be during that split second when the camera had clicked. He could remember too first seeing these pictures, could reconstruct where and when he had bought them, he could practically mark a moment in his life from each of her poses, each being so real that he believed he knew her personally, she was part of him and through her had become more in touch with himself in several ways, not merely through acts which Victorian moralists had defined as self-abuse, but rather through self-acceptance, his understanding of the naturalness of his desires and of asserting his right to an idealized woman, okay?
So, think back to the Kabbalah. What is God? God is trying to bestow himself onto us. We receive him completely, this creates a union which allows us to understand ourselves and understand the universe. Okay? So, this is exactly describing the Kabbalah, where because Harold Rubin has been meditating on Diane Webber for years, so much so that she's become part of him, this has allowed him to better understand himself as well as his sexuality.
Not able to resist any longer, Harold turned the page to Diane Webber on the dune. He looked at her lying on her stomach, her head held up into the wind, her eyes closed, the nipple on her left breast erect, her legs spread wide, the late afternoon sun casting an exaggerated shadow of her curvaceous body along the smooth white sand. Beyond her body was nothing but a sprawling empty desert. She seemed so alone, so possible and available. Harold had many desire her, and she was his. Okay? So, this is a climax.
So, this is what sex is for humans. Sex for humans is not about pleasure. It's fundamentally about discovering who you are and creating a reunion between yourself and another person so that you dissolve each other and become one and the whole. Okay? So, again, I understand this is a scene about masturbation, but what makes this genius, what makes this beautiful and divine, is it's really a description of religious devotion. Okay? So, the greatness of this writing is to show us that sex at its height, sex at its fundamental level, is really about religious worship.
But as you read this book, what you recognize is that Harold Rubin, ultimately, he lives a fantasy. Even though it sounds great that through meditation you can become one with God, it doesn't really work. And so, what happens is that Rubin will actually never meet Diane Webber, he was just one of her life. And one major reason why he will never meet Diane Webber is because he's too afraid to meet Diane Webber, okay? Diane Webber is not a real person. It's just a fantasy. He does not want to meet the real Diane Webber because meeting her would shatter his fantasy and thus shatter his religion.
Okay? So, this is one solution. It doesn't really work. Meditation doesn't really work. Another solution is proposed by John Williamson. John Williamson, okay? And his wife Barbara Williamson. And what they're going to do is they're going to create a sex cult together.
His understanding is this. Modern society has made everyone Why has it made everyone miserable? Because we're always lying to ourselves. Because we're always repressed. We know we don't like the jobs we do. We know that we didn't learn anything in school. We know that the person we're married to we don't actually like. Okay? And so, we are in We have imprisoned our soul in the husk. This society enforces a husk onto us. So, the path to liberation means to break out of this husk. And how do you break out of this husk?
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By engaging in To remove the power of sex over you, right? Because in our society sex is about shame. Right? So, what he's going to do is he's going to create a cult in which married couples come together and have sex with other people. And this will liberate them from the limitations of marriage. And so, when you get rid of the social convention, what is left is your love for either yourself or for your partner. And if there's no love, then that's good because you will know that you've been living a lie all this Okay?
So, what he's going to do is first create this group. And so, he's going to recruit individuals in order to join his cult. And one of the first people he recruits is John Balero. And his wife is named And they are in a conventional marriage, which is to say that they are in an unhappy marriage where they do what they're supposed to do. John Balero makes good money as an insurance salesman. Judith is at home taking care of the kids. So, they do what they're supposed to do, but it's unhappy.
And so, John Williamson knows he's unhappy, and he arranges for John Balero to have First with his wife, Barbara, and then with other people as well. And then what he's going to do is that he's going to invite both John Balero and Judith to his house where John Balero is going to have sex with another woman in another room. And Judith is going to be in another room listening in on her husband having sex. Okay? And this is a very disturbing scene. And it's so disturbing, we're not going to read it together, okay?
But if you're interested in reading it for yourself, then you can pause the video and read it. Okay? But ultimately what happens is that John Balero is having sex, Judith screams. But the scream, it is considered cathartic. It's therapeutic because the screaming allows you to purge yourself of your fears, of your ego, and your You now see that your husband is no longer yours. You lose your fear because you recognize that your fear that your husband will run away, will leave you, well, he's already done so. Okay? So, when you leave your ego and your fear, what happens is the only thing that remains is who you really are, which is the divine spark.
Okay? Divine spark. That's a theory anyway, okay? It doesn't happen this way, but this is a theory. All right? Then what happens is that a few nights later they do it again. John Balero goes to this house, he's having sex with another woman, and Judith is in the room, Listening in, okay?
But instead of just listening and screaming, she decides she's going to have sex with John Williamson, because now her soul is liberated. She's now free. She doesn't care about losing her husband, she doesn't care about being mocked by other people. So, she just engages, she indulges in her passion, and she has sex with John Williamson. Okay?
John Balero hears the sex, he comes out, and he is startled, he's traumatized to find his wife having sex with another man. Okay? And again, you can pause the video and read the scene. It's a very powerful scene.
He is shattered, okay? But this shattering is good because it allows you to repair yourself. Once your ego and your fear dissipate, you can now resurrect yourself as you truly are. Okay? Again, this is a theory. I'm not saying this works. I'm Guys, don't try this at home, okay? But this is a theory. And guess what, guys? It doesn't work. It doesn't work because maybe for the first couple of times it works with people, but when you actually try this at scale, it kind of screws up. So, John Williamson decides to take his religion and spread it to as many people as possible.
So, he sets up a retreat called the Sandstone Retreat. Sandstone Retreat.
And it's basically just a sex club. And so, Gay Talese will go to the sex club and spend a lot of time there. And he writes this scene about this sex club of these They're just having orgies all the time. And we know it doesn't work because one day Gay Talese sees John Williamson looking at a very strong, handsome, muscular black man having sex with his wife, Barbara. And it freaks him out. So, the theory is great. Oh, if we just sin enough, we will absolve ourselves of our guilt, of our fear, and that will truly liberate us.
But in practice, the opposite happens. In practice, what happens is that when you engage in sin, the guilt compounds itself. So, the theory is to remove the husk, okay, the husk, so that the soul can be liberated. But when you engage in the material world, when you have too much sex, the husk just extends itself, and you become truly blind. Okay? And this is why, even though John Williamson succeeds in starting a sex cult, even though he becomes very famous with his Sandstone Retreat, what happens next is that he falls into a deep depression.
Okay? And he turns away from the sex cult, and I think he opens a tiger sanctuary. He goes and plays with animals, all right? So the second solution doesn't work either. The first solution, which is devotion, meditation, that doesn't really work because you depart yourself from the world and from yourself. The second solution, which is that you embrace sex, you embrace the husk, you embrace the material world, that doesn't work either because it just makes you even more guilty of It makes you feel more guilt, more shame, okay? So what's the solution?
At the very end of the book Thy Neighbor's Wife, Gay Talese proposes a solution, okay? And we're going to read it together. But what happens is this. Gay Talese grew up in Ocean City, New Jersey. He is Catholic, and Ocean City, New Jersey is mainly Protestant. So he's an outsider. He's Italian, everyone else is white, and his family are immigrants, everyone else has been there for generations. So he's always been an outsider. As an outsider, you feel nothing but guilt, shame, and fear. And so after he takes this sexual journey into the heart of human darkness, into sex.
He returns to Ocean City and by now he's in his mid-40s. And he decides to do something really risky. He decides to go to a nude beach. This is something that, you know, if you're an immigrant young boy, you could never ever dream of doing, okay? Because you yourself already fear being ostracized or being laughed at or being mocked at, right? There's no way you're going to a nude beach. But Gay Talese is now in his He's still suffering a lot of scars from his immigrant childhood.
But he decides, "I'm going to go to a beach, the nude beach, okay?" So he goes to the nude beach and he takes off his clothes and he's there naked.
And everyone else around him is Then he spots some sailboats sailing across and these are people watching them, okay? So this is society. This represents society laughing at you, mocking you, ridiculing you for being And what happens is that Talese stands up and he stares back at them. Representing the fact that he's learned the courage to accept who he is. He's learned the power to see social convention, social taboos, as prisons, okay? So this is the very last paragraph of Thy Neighbor's Wife. Painted on the stern of most of the boats beneath the declaration of their names was the lettering of the locale, Ocean City, New Jersey.
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And seated on the decks were people wearing Bermuda shorts and sailing caps, bathing suits, straw hats, and dark glasses. And in their hands they held cans of beer, thermos bottles, transistor radios, and handkerchiefs that they waved at the nudists, okay? This is a lot of detail. The only way you could have this detail is if you were actually one of them on these trips, okay? So, this is telling us that before going to the nude beach, he himself was on a sailboat sailing like everyone else watching the nudists. And now he himself has become one of the nudists, okay?
There were also some catcalls coming from the boats, whistles, and cheers. And after watching for a few moments, Talese stepped forward on the deck separating himself from the other quiet nudists, and he faced the boats, recognizing a few of the sailing ships, and he thought some of their passengers, okay? So, these are his friends. All right? These are people that he's most afraid of knowing that he's nude. He also noticed for the first time that many of the passengers held silvery telescopes and dark binoculars, and they sat rigidly on their decks and swayed in the water and squinted in the sun.
Okay, so these are voyeurs. These are people who secretly spy on people being nude. Why do they secretly spy? Because they are afraid. They have ego. They have fear. They have guilt. They have shame. So, they have to hide themselves. And so, to show that he's not afraid, what he does is they were unabashed voyeurs and looking at him, and Talese looked back, So, he's looking directly at those spying on him and saying, "I was once also afraid and living in fear, and now I've liberated myself.
Okay, I am now free." The question then is, how is it that Gay Talese succeeded, but Harold Rubin and John Williamson, they And it has to do with the nature of poetry and the purpose of writing.
The Kabbalah asks us, "Where are the sparks of light?" All right. So, we first have to figure out what consciousness is. And something that I've been teaching in this class for the past semester is that our consciousness is what's real. Our are infinite dimensions, okay? And we can know by using this visual depiction where our consciousness is spread through infinite dimensions.
And at a certain dimension, we're all just one force, okay? The monad. So, the separation is only superficial. In reality, we're all connected in some Now, because of this, it tells us that memories are not stored inside of brains, but inside this universal All right. So, these memories of ours are stored in the universal consciousness. Some of our memories are so powerful, are so great that they're shared amongst others, okay? So, even though you have had this memory, it is such a spectacular memory because it's so imaginative, it is so unique, it's so special that it affects other people as All right.
So, these are these memories. And these are the sparks of light. Okay? So, in other words, yes, the purpose of life is to find the sparks of light. But what we need to remember is, and this is what Homer and Dante tell us, is that we have the to create sparks of light ourselves by living great lives. What are great lives? Lives that are unique. Lives that are filled with courage.
Lives that are filled with passion. Lives that seek to distinguish themselves from others. Okay? And that's why Gay Talese wrote the book Thy Neighbor's Wife. Because he wanted to distinguish himself from others. Because he was on a search for the truth, okay? He wanted to for the sparks, okay? Search for the truth, the sparks of light.
And in so doing, he himself created sparks of light. Why? Because he spent years interviewing these people in a draw out the sparks of light from the universe. And when you do that and you can write it down and show it to others, then you expand the imagination of the universe. Okay? And this is really the purpose of life. Why are we here? We're here to create sparks of light ourselves so that we can inspire others to search for their own sparks of light. And that is the ultimate message of Thy Neighbor's Wife.
All right. Well, that's it for us, guys. All right? It's been great teaching you. This is my last class at the school. This is not the end of my journey. I will continue to teach. 2 weeks from now, I'll be teaching Dante. I'll be live streaming Dante to a global audience. And after that, there'll be more classes. And I hope that this is also the beginning of your own journey into life. Remember that it's ultimately your choice how to live your life. But to live a truly great life, remember that there are sparks of light out there, and it is an opportunity to create sparks of light in the world.
Okay? All right. So, thank