Writings

S1E5: When Sophus’s grandfather died, he left behind an old encyclopedia with a mysteriously empty page. In this episode, Sophus talks about happens when we run out of words, as when the mind is made blank by old age or when our loved ones die and we grieve them in silence. Empty pages are a powerfully symbol. They can mark both an ending and a new beginning, they can represent hope as well as grief. Blank pages are everywhere, and surprisingly beautiful.

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Hosted and written by Sophus Helle. Sound editing by Simone Nystrup-Larsen. Edited by Andreas Lindinger Saxild.

Further notes

I found much inspiration for this episode in the essay “Black on Black” by Eugene Thacker, which is where I discovered the wonderful black page by Robert Fludd.

The legendary encyclopedia Salmonsens Konversationsleksikon has been completely digitized; you can find it here. The notice to readers in the 1918 version read: “Naar Forholdene tillader det, vil der blive leveret Subskribenterne et nyt Kort: Europa, politisk” (“When circumstances allow, we will deliver to our subscribers a new Map: Europe, political“).

You can find my book on Gilgamesh here. The blank page on which Enkidu dies is p. 70, and I discuss its eerie beauty on p. xxv. I would also like to note that the system I use for marking missing passages in the epic, with a raised dot, was devised by the designers Åse Eg and Wrong Studio.

For the much-discussed black page in Tristan Shandy, check out this catalogue of blankness at the Laurence Sterne Trust’s website.

The Iraqi artist I discuss is Wafaa Bilal, and you can find more information about his 168:01, as the art project is called, at his website.

The quote by Inger Christensen that I discuss is from the essay, “Verden ønsker at se sig selv” (“The world wishes to see itself”), the title essay of a collection of posthumously published pieces put out by Gyldendal (2018).

In this episode, I draw on three essays I wrote for the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen: the essay on falling that my grandfather read, an essay about my grandfather’s death, and an essay about Salmonsens.

One famous blank page that I did not discuss is that by another Danish author, Karen Blixen (better known in the English-speaking world as Isak Dinesen), from her short story collection Last Tales (Random House, 1957), which I won’t spoil for you. This particular blank page was the topic of one of the famous essays in feminist literary criticism, Susan Gubar’s “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity” (Critical Inquiry, vol. 8 no. 2, 1981, p. 243–63).

I’m currently writing a book, provisionally entitled The Beauty of the Broken: Essays on Philology, in which I will discuss the blank page in Gilgamesh and Bilal’s artwork.

S1E4: We all have something we would like to forget, or something we would like others to forget about us. But that’s surprisingly difficult. You can try to make yourself hold on harder to a memory – but it can be much trickier to let go of it. Forgetfulness comes, wanted or unwanted, but always at its own pace. This episode charts various people who have tried, and failed, to bring about forgetfulness, from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant to the American actress Barbra Streisand.

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Hosted and written by Sophus Helle. Sound editing by Simone Nystrup-Larsen. Edited by Andreas Lindinger Saxild.

Further notes

The stories in this episode come from all over the place. The unforgettable story of Kant’s note-to-self is told in the first biography about the famous philosopher, Ehregott Andreas Wasianski’s Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren (1804). See the details in this blog post by Justin Erik Halldór Smith. Because my memory is hazy (…), I’m not fully sure, but I think I first came across this story in – of all places, a Donald Duck magazine.

If you want to take this episode as an occasion to reread “The Raven” or The Little Prince, you absolutely should. You can find the first one here, and the second one – in no less than 54 languages! – here.

Like, I assume, most people, I first heard of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, from this meme:

The screenshot is from the book Brief Lives by the English historian John Aubrey, which was published toward the end of the seventeenth century. You can find an edition of the book at the Internet Archive.

Incidentally, Vere is one of the leading candidates among conspiracy theorists for the authorship of William Shakespeare’s plays, as dramatized in the 2011 film Anonymous, which I cannot in good conscience recommend.

As with several other episodes in the first two series of the podcast, this episode began life as an essay for the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen.

S1E3: Why do people treat their books so differently? Some people like to keep their books in near-mint condition, handling them with metaphorical gloves on and making sure that there is not a single scratch to be found on their cover. Other people, like Sophus, want to dogear the corners, doodle in the margins, and crack the spine of every book they read. In this episode, Sophus traces the origins of this book-lover battle.

Hosted and written by Sophus Helle. Sound editing by Simone Nystrup-Larsen. Edited by Andreas Lindinger Saxild.

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Hosted and written by Sophus Helle. Sound editing by Simone Nystrup-Larsen. Edited by Andreas Lindinger Saxild.

Further notes

The essay by Walter Benjamin that I draw on is called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” 1935). You can read the full essay here.

I mention a number of books in this episode:

• Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (Harcourt, 1983, originally published in 1980), a murder mystery set among Medieval monks,
• Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (or The Golden Compass, Scholastic Point, 1995), my teenage self’s favorite interdimensional journey to kill God,
• Michael Allin, Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris (Random House, 1998), from which I lifted the dubious anecdote about Napoleon trekking through the desert, and
• The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (find them e.g. in the translation by Betta Radice for Penguin Classics, 2004), the weird and wonderful correspondence between a Medieval philosopher and the teacher with whom she had an affair, and who was also a Medieval philosopher.

The episode is based on an essay that I wrote for the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen.

Finally, enjoy the meme, courtesy of Writers HQ.

S1E2: The episode traces the history of a single word, serendipity, across seven centuries and just as many countries. A “serendipity” is a “happy and unexpected discovery”, and the history of the word is itself full of happy and unexpected discoveries, including the history of horror and the origins of crime fiction. Along the way, we meet such fascinating figures as Edgar Allan Poe, the English writer Horace Walpole, the French philosopher Voltaire, and the Sufi poet Amir Khusrau.

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Hosted and written by Sophus Helle. Sound editing by Simone Nystrup-Larsen. Edited by Andreas Lindinger Saxild.

Further notes

I started this journey in the best way possible—totally by accident. I was vaguely wondering about the etymology of the word serendipity, looked it up, and then things went from there…

As an introduction to the story, I recommend the book The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science by Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber, written in the 1950s but published in 2004 (Princeton University Press).

The strange, intertwined histories of the words “consider” and “desire” are discussed in this useful article by Merriam-Webster.

My history of serendipity and crime fiction was first published as a Danish essay in the newspaper Weekendavisen.

S1E1: Sophus launches the podcast with a deep-dive into the human mind, this engine of chaos and expanse of possibility we all carry around inside us. The episode begins with a reminder—taken from, of all places, the British tax collection agency—to marvel at the clouds and allow ourselves to be stunned by volcanoes. And it ends with a walk through the woods of southern Italy, in the company of a dog and three Paleolithic teenagers.

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Hosted and written by Sophus Helle. Sound editing by Simone Nystrup-Larsen. Edited by Andreas Lindinger Saxild.

Further notes

I first heard about the British tax collection agency’s policy and the woman who was stunned by a volcanic eruption on this episode of the delightful podcast No Such Thing as a Fish. Read more about the excuses that people have filed on this Guardian article.

The metaphor of the monkey mind (心猿) is a mainstay in Buddhist philosophy and other traditions that were influenced by it, including Daoism, Zen, and later forms of Confucianism. Find Julia Lovell’s amazing translation of The Journey to the West, which she titles Monkey King, here.

I reference the political philosopher David Runciman’s description of essays as walks through the woods, which comes from his discussion of Montaigne.

Le Ciampate del Diavolo is located in southern Italy, between Naples and Rome. You can read more about them on this article at Atlas Obscura. OBS! Should you ever find yourself in that area, do feel free to visit the site, but DO NOT touch the footsteps. They are far more fragile than they appear, and even gentle touches can wear on the stone.

While many people have marveled at clouds over the centuries, perhaps no one has done so as eloquently as Virgina Woolf in this passage from her essay “On Being Ill“:

Ordinarily to look at the sky for any length of time is impossible. Pedestrians would be impeded and disconcerted by a public sky-gazer. What snatches we get of it are mutilated by chimneys and churches, serve as a background for man, signify wet weather or fine, daub windows gold, and, filling in the branches, complete the pathos of dishevelled autumnal plane trees in autumnal squares. Now, lying recumbent, staring straight up, the sky is discovered to be something so different from this that really it is a little shocking. This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it!—this incessant making up of shapes and casting them down, this buffeting of clouds together, and drawing vast trains of ships and waggons from North to South, this incessant ringing up and down of curtains of light and shade, this interminable experiment with gold shafts and blue shadows, with veiling the sun and unveiling it, with making rock ramparts and wafting them away—this endless activity, with the waste of Heaven knows how many million horse power of energy, has been left to work its will year in year out. The fact seems to call for comment and indeed for censure. Ought not some one to write to The Times? Use should be made of it. One should not let this gigantic cinema play perpetually to an empty house. But watch a little longer and another emotion drowns the stirrings of civic ardour. Divinely beautiful it is also divinely heartless. Immeasurable resources are used for some purpose which has nothing to do with human pleasure or human profit. If we were all laid prone, stiff, still the sky would be experimenting with its blues and its golds.