Conversations: Chloé Cooper Jones

 

SYNOPSIS

 

Emily speaks with writer and philosophy professor Chloé Cooper Jones about her memoir Easy Beauty, which chronicles her quest to widen perceptions of beauty, motherhood, and disability.

 
 
 

LISTEN

 
 
 
 
 
 

GUEST

 

Chloé Cooper Jones is a philosophy professor, journalist, and the author of the memoir Easy Beauty. Her memoir was recently named a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir/Autobiography and was recognized as one of the best books of 2022 by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine, and others. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient and, in 2020, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 
 
 

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Mentioned in the episode:

 
 
 

CREDITS

Hosted by Emily Silverman

Produced by Emily Silverman, Jon Oliver, and Carly Besser

Edited and mixed by Jon Oliver

Original theme music by Yosef Munro with additional music by Blue Dot Sessions

The Nocturnists is made possible by the California Medical Association, and people like you who have donated through our website and Patreon page

 
 
 

TRANSCRIPT

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The Nocturnists: Conversations
Emily in Conversation with Chloé Cooper Jones
Episode Transcript

Note: The Nocturnists is created primarily as a listening experience. The audio contains emotion, emphasis, and soundscapes that are not easily transcribed. We encourage you to listen to the episode if at all possible. Our transcripts are produced using both speech recognition software and human copy editors, and may not be 100% accurate. Thank you for consulting the audio before quoting in print.

Emily Silverman
You're listening to The Nocturnists: Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman.

Today, we’ll be hearing from brilliant writer and philosophy professor Chloé Cooper Jones.

Chloé lives with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis, and recently wrote a memoir called Easy Beauty, in which she gives us a glimpse into what it’s like to live in her body, and takes us with her all around the world as she quests for an understanding of beauty – what it is, and how it can change our perspective on ourselves and each other.

Chloé is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient and, in 2020, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. Easy Beauty was named a best book of 2022 by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and more – and I can definitely see why, because this book completely changed the way I think about aesthetics among many other things.

In my conversation with Chloé, we talk about the difference between easy beauty and difficult beauty, how those ideas apply to disability and assumptions about disability, the unexpected creative joys of motherhood, and so much more. I know you’ll love the conversation just as much as I did, but first, here’s Chloé reading a brief excerpt from Easy Beauty:

Chloé Cooper Jones
“Days pass, all the same.

Trash in cans steam in August’s humid heat. Petals from rotting blossoms fall from branches and the wind sends them skittering like beetles across the avenues. September brings a sudden chill that strips the trees of their leaves. October’s easy skies turn orange with smoke from Canadian wildfires. The last of the leaves die, desiccate on the stem. New York City is loud, stays loud. A bar opens below our apartment and other people’s drunken conversations filter through our bedroom window, distort and invade my dreams.

I spend my weekdays at school. Teaching goes well. I’m happy and focused in the classroom when I’m with my students, but when I later sit in my office alone and grade papers I lose all my concentration. I am too anxious. Every line I try to read appears out of focus, just slightly. I’m not quite awake, it seems. There’s a buzzing in my ears. I’m outside of my body. My awareness functions like a spotlight, selecting a tiny circle of reality. One day, early in November, I open my office window and look out at Harlem below. A pigeon shits on the pavement, the air is thick and hits me like a wet rag. Truck wheels scream. I close the window. I find coiled strands of my hair on my office floor. My hair is falling out? My mind drifts out the window until a knock on my door startles me back into my body. It’s the dean of my school. I’m in trouble. I’d lost time and missed the faculty meeting.

At night, in bed, I hold my phone close enough to kiss it and pull up pictures of faraway places. Mountain ranges, waterfalls, railways into cities, streams, beaches; the world reaches for me through the screen. I can’t sleep. I’d left Italy hopeful, so hopeful, but I returned to Brooklyn still myself. Knowing I need to change doesn’t make it happen. I’d intended to bring home the happiness I’d felt but I can’t hold on to it. I stare above me until I disappear into the black swirling ceiling. The sun rises. It is morning again. Wolfgang scrapes his spoon across the bottom of his breakfast bowl, a shovel on the head of a drum. The smell of yogurt, the sour stink of saliva; tattered light, blunted by buildings; buzzsaws buzzing, screams from the street; feet stomp on metal grates and concrete. Elsewhere, a door exhausts its hinges. Andrew coughs, then sneezes: all explosions, they startle and oppose me. I can’t read or write. I can’t find a place of rest. Day drones.

I resume the performance of normalcy. I cook, I teach my classes, I attempt timely email responses. I hold my son and read him to sleep, I kiss my husband, I see my friends, I eat at restaurants, I go to readings, I go to museums, I move convincingly through my very good life. But in the dark, while my family sleeps, I click on images of temples, jungles, deserts, lakes and rivers, always far away, as far away as possible.”

Emily Silverman
I am sitting here with Chloé Cooper Jones. Chloé, thank you so much for coming on today.

Chloé Cooper Jones
Thank you so much for having me.

Emily Silverman
So Chloé, I've really loved your book, but for those who aren't familiar with you and your work, I just wanted to lay the groundwork. And since we're a medical podcast, just start with sort of the medical facts of the situation. Tell us about the condition that you were born with, sacral agenesis. What is sacral agenesis, and what is it like to live with sacral agenesis?

Chloé Cooper Jones
Well, sacral agenesis just means that I was born without a sacrum, a bone that connects, you know, your spine to your pelvis, and controls a set of nerves that primarily control the muscle growth or just muscle control in my legs from about my knees down. I also have hip dysplasia, which means that I walk with a sort of rolling side-to-side gait, because the ball and socket joints of my hips don't function the way that most people's do. And, I have some scoliosis as well, so I 'm shorter than the average woman. I have a very distinctive gait. And certain things are difficult, things that require a lot of hip control or muscle control, like going upstairs. I can do it, but it's more difficult for me. Or running... Or I'm not competitive in the long jump, or anything like that. And, all these things combine to create some inflammatory issues that result in chronic pain. So there's a pain management aspect to all of these combined differences.

Emily Silverman
And so, this book is a memoir. And, we open with this scene in a bar, and you're with a couple guys, and you're telling them a story about a Biomedical Ethics class that you taught. And, as medical people, probably some of us have been students in classes like that. Tell us a bit about the story that you told them, and then their response to the story, and then how that response catapulted you on this whole journey.

Chloé Cooper Jones
I taught Biomedical Ethics for quite a long time, and I taught it in nursing college. So, all of my students were New York City nurses, so people who are directly applying it to their daily lives. So there's four basic principles: respect for a patient's autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and distributive justice. So we talk about these case studies that kind of put some of those things, theoretically, in direct contradiction, or at least tension with each other. And there's one really famous biomedical ethics case that really has to do with respect for a patient's autonomy, which is simply that there's a deaf couple that are doing IVF, and out of the embryos available to them, they want to select the embryos that are genetically deaf. And so, what they want is to continue their culture within their family to raise a deaf child, as deaf parents. And, is there any ethical reason why they shouldn't be able to select certain embryos over others, based on their preference? So, the interesting things about this case that often come up is... Even though the whole term, you're talking about principles, right? And these biomedical ethical principles are in place to get us to check what might be a gut reaction, or prejudice reaction, or just an unprincipled reaction. That's why we have these principles to sort of balance against. And so, in some ways, this biomedical ethics case is about whether or not somebody can still respect autonomy, in a situation that might cause them to feel a certain type of resistance, or even disgust, that's often a reaction to disabled lives. And, I was just discussing this, a day in which I taught this class with my friends who were in my philosophy program, doing their PhD at the time that I was doing mine. And one of them, being a an ethicist himself, and he had a very strong reaction to this, and then put a counter-argument forward, which was more extreme than any of the cases that that we were studying, which was that he believed that disabled lives were inherently less worth living. That they were, in fact, such a lower form of existence that all pregnant mothers should be forced to test for any disabilities, and if any, are found, that the child should be aborted. So this argument, in and of itself, was nothing new to me. It wasn't particularly shocking. It's in fact, of course, the basis of all eugenicist arguments, that have existed for a very, very long time. It's also an argument that I've heard explicitly or implicitly my whole life, as people's ideas about disability are... are often informed by profoundly limited imagination. So, it wasn't that that being said to me was the catalyst for the book. What became the catalyst for the book, is that I recognized that, in the moment when he was saying this deeply dehumanizing thing about me and my body or other bodies like mine, that I was retreating from the moment I was sort of holing myself up in a separated mental space, dissociating a little bit, in order to just let the moment pass. Because what I wanted was to just have a nice beer with my friends, and I didn't want to have to, on a Friday night at midnight, a couple of beers in, have to, like, defend my existence. And when I recognized that I was doing that, I also recognized, for the first time, that this habit of separating myself from painful reality was understandable on one hand as a coping mechanism for pain, but in a case like this was actually a form of complicity. And I knew that had to change. But, you know, we don't change just because we think we need to. There's a process to it. So the book is about really genuinely sitting in that process of needing to change, and struggling with it, and then being very honest about that struggle.

Emily Silverman
So when the guys say this thing to you, this horrible thing, you say that you enter almost a dissociative state. And you have a name for that state, and you call it the "neutral room", and it's this place that you go. And this idea was actually taught to you, or introduced to you by a physician, by an orthopedic surgeon. How are you thinking about the neutral room, as this coping mechanism for dealing with comments like the one that... that he said?

Chloé Cooper Jones
Yeah, the neutral room is an incredibly useful and powerful tool. And, like any sort of useful and powerful tool, it has a threshold in which it can become a destructive tool. So, the neutral room was something that was taught to me by my orthopedic surgeon when I was very young. And, it was a way of explaining to me how to manage perceived pain, or anticipatory pain. If I had to walk a really long distance, and I live in New York City, so I still have to do this all the time... I would start to feel pain that was more anticipatory pain than actual pain. I would worry about the pain to come, or the pain that I would feel the next morning, being sore from exerting myself past a certain limit. And my doctor said one of the amazing things about our very strange and complicated brains is that we can make imagined pain feel real. So the tool that he gave me was to separate myself from the moment. Separate myself from, like, the spiraling anxiety that I was feeling. And to go into this mental space that always looks the same, that nobody's allowed in. It has white walls in this imagined neutral room, and to imagine numbers flashing on these walls, and I just count to eight. And he would say, "You're not in pain for the rest of the day," or "You're not in tomorrow's pain. You're only in pain for eight seconds, and you can handle that; just count to eight." And, of course, the eight seconds repeats, but it's just about staying really, in that localized moment. I found out later that long distance runners do a version of this, instead of saying to themselves, "Oh, my gosh, I'm running 26 miles," which who would do that? You would just stop, I think. They instead say, "I'm running to that bench," or "I'm just passing this one person, I don't need to worry about anybody else." And it's a way of just breaking down a really complex, painful, difficult task into achievable units. And so that tool, once I figured this out, as a kid, I realized I could apply it to so many other circumstances in my life. And I think it's been a tool, really, at the heart of a lot of the things that I've accomplished. When I was working on my PhD, I didn't think, "Oh, my gosh, I'm in school for six, seven years... This is gonna be horrible. Who can possibly keep this up for that long?" No, I would just think, "Well, I'm only writing this paper," or "I'm only reading this paragraph and trying to solve what this theorist is saying, or unpack this very dense piece of work," is I'm just doing it one paragraph at a time. And so, I think, in that way, I didn't feel overwhelmed by difficult tasks. And so, in that sense, it's been a great tool. I also think everybody has a version of the neutral room, a place that they go when reality becomes overwhelming. And I think that retreat and looking for peace, or looking for distance from painful reality, is a tool for strength, if then you rest, and... and have suddenly renewed energy to face the world that you need to face. So I think the neutral room, for all of us, whatever our version of it is... And I'd be so curious, Emily, if you would tell us if you have a version of this. But the struggle of the book, and the struggle of my life, is how can I consistently locate the threshold in which that tool for peace or agency or productive rest or productive distance turns into avoidance, complicity or a problematic absenting myself from being importantly present in my life, especially with my family. So, that's the work... is trying to locate that threshold and stay on the right side of it. But, yeah, does any of this resonate for you? Do you have your own neutral room?

Emily Silverman
I love that you're turning the tables and asking me.

Chloé Cooper Jones
Am I allowed to do that?

Emily Silverman
You are; you are. Well, the first thing that I'll say is, when you were describing the marathon runners, it also reminded me of childbirth, and how when women are giving birth, they're told to count, or they're told to breathe, and that, sort of, breaking it up into concrete tasks. So that resonated. For me, personally, I was an only child of older parents, and spent a lot of time just with these two older people. I didn't have siblings to play with. And so, I just spent a lot of time kind of dissociating from whatever was happening. Like, I would fall asleep really easily. I have so many nights, I fell asleep on my Dad's lap at a restaurant... just so bored by all the adult conversation. I would read a lot. But I definitely felt myself just getting caught up in my imagination, and dissociating in that way. It was like the only place that I could go. And I think... I don't know, this is sort of me psychoanalyzing myself, but it may have led to a little bit of a head's-in-the-cloud-ness, and an inability to come back down... And maybe even a little bit of hyperfocus ADD, where I kind of get into a task and eight hours will go by and I'll have a headache. And I'll think, you know, "Why do I have a headache?" Like, "Oh, I haven't eaten for eight hours," or... Like, I'll just go to this place, and time doesn't even register. And then I'll snap out of it. And, you're right, that can be really productive when I'm, like, working on a piece of writing or a project, but not very productive when I leave the oven on.

Chloé Cooper Jones
I just got a text from my husband yesterday that said, "You know, you left the burner on, right?" Because I'm constantly making myself tea, and then walking out of the room. And, in this case, I left the house for many hours, and I just left the burner on. Or left the oven on, or... My husband also called me the "Michael Jordan of losing my phone".

Emily Silverman
Yes.

Chloé Cooper Jones
Just 'cause, sometimes tangible physical realities does not seem as real as whatever's happening in my own mind. And, I think, for a lot of people, just reading, in general, can be that sort of neutral room or... or listening to podcasts, or watching certain television shows. Like, things that give us reprieve. But, if we disappear too long, what is lost in that absence? So, it's... These sorts of tools, our personal neutral rooms are so incredibly important. I don't want to get rid of mine; it's where some of my best work gets done. And it sounds like, for you too, it's where some of your best work gets done. But then, we add partners and children, and all these things that say, "Please be present. Please don't burn the apartment down, and figure out how to be here with me now."

Emily Silverman
I relate to this book. I don't live with a disability, so not in that way. But in some of these other ways. Another part of it that I related to, that I'd love to talk about, is this investigation of the concept of beauty. Maybe I'll start with this question. I feel like your approach could have been at any angle. Right? You could have been, the history of walking or chronic pain or function or embryology or, you know, any aspect that intersects with your particular condition. So why beauty? Why did you choose to go that way?

Chloé Cooper Jones
Yeah. Well, first of all, I just want to say I'm glad that there's relatable things in the book. It was really important to me that this was a book less about even me; that it transcended any personal thing, and really was about being a mind and a body and trying to move around the world. And, the specific thing that I'm trying to do in this book is change something about myself, and change something profoundly personal. And interwoven into it, feels like it is my consciousness. And, that's a really hard thing to do. Everybody has had that moment where they're recognizing they need to change but it's, of course, always easier said than done. So, because of my training, I just look to the philosophers. I look to the artists, and I ask them what to do. And I find guidance there. And the guidance that I found, that was really at the core of this project, is from the philosopher novelist, Iris Murdoch, who wrote about this theory, which she calls "unselfing". And, she says that the experience of beauty in the world can cause us to come outside of our own limited perspectives, and gain a sort of widening effect, that when we return to ourselves, we can see ourselves a little bit better. So she thinks that experiencing beauty in the world can be a true agent for changing your consciousness. And "If you change your consciousness," she says, "you change the way that you see. And if you change the way that you see, you will change the way that you act or react." And the book is in two parts, called "The Window" and "The Kestrel". And that comes from Murdoch. She's... gives us an example of sitting at her kitchen window, and she's stuck in a self-obsessive, anxious mindset. and she's worried about her reputation. And maybe, she's gotten some sort of bad review or something like this. And, for a second, she just glimpses this kestrel, this beautiful bird. And she says, in that moment, nothing exists but the kestrel. She's un-selved, or she's outside of her palace of self-regard. That's her phrase. And she's just looking at the beauty of this bird, hovering outside her window. And she's broken free of her own perspective of the world. And when she returns to herself, she's different; something has changed. And that resonated with me so deeply, because I think that my whole life has been revolving around the pursuit of aesthetic joy and aesthetic pleasure. And the widening experience that reading a profound work of literature or seeing a film that shows me another side of the human experience, or traveling and looking at natural beauty that's so different from the environment that I grew up in, or going to museums, or listening to music. And all of those things have given me a sort of freedom from my own, necessarily limited, and ego-driven, perspective. We can only be in one body, one mind, and see from one perspective. So, to get some freedom from that, Murdoch thinks that that's a true agent for change, that are... doesn't exist just for pleasure or for entertainment, but it's a powerful tool for changing our consciousness. So I thought, "That sounds great. I want to test that out." Because now I can travel the world and look at things I want to look at. And so, every single chapter of this book is a test of that hypothesis. Every chapter finds me in a different city, contemplating a different art object, whether it be at a museum, or an opera, or a Beyonce concert, or watching Roger Federer play tennis. And then it finds me returning home, to see if I can have that similar or renewed experience of beauty in the domesticity of my everyday life.

Emily Silverman
I loved following you on each of those journeys. And I loved also just tracking your understanding of the concept of beauty. And we start in Italy. You're looking at all this classical architecture, the sculptures by Bernini, and you're talking about things like symmetry and proportion, and how a lot of these works of art were commissioned by religious organizations and they're invoking God and the Divine, and things like the golden ratio. And this idea, almost like an objective beauty that comes through also in the tennis chapter, which I loved. I don't really follow tennis. But now I'm, like, very into Roger Federer after reading your book. In the book, you say The New Yorker wrote that Federer embodied a platonic ideal. It's... "Rooting for him is like rooting for the truth. And watching him is almost like reaching a state of religious ecstasy." And then we track you with these different philosophers. We have Plato; we have Hume; we have Elaine Scarry. We have Bernard Bosanquet. (I'm probably not pronouncing that correctly.) And you talk about this idea of "easy beauty", and then this other idea of "difficult beauty". So, before we get to the idea of beauty as an agent for change, what is Easy Beauty, which is the title of your book? What is "difficult beauty", and where are you landing in this conversation about what beauty is?

Chloé Cooper Jones
Oh, good. Well, the great thing about philosophy is that it takes a question that's impossible to answer, and then puts really brilliant people on it for, you know, thousands of years. And then you can kind of track all these great arguments that they've had, and my book does that lightly. And one of the philosophers that inspires the title, and a very important distinction in the book, is Bernard Bosanquet's idea of easy versus difficult beauty. "Easy beauty," he says, "is just simply beauty that arrives to us immediately." For example, a nice sunset, you just see it and you go, "Wow, that's great." Or the ocean, and you're just looking at the beauty of a nice day. Or you're listening to a simple song, that the second your ear perceives it, you feel an immediate response to it. And I think the vast majority of life's pleasures are often easy beauties. And they're things that feel like just instant gifts. And then. "Difficult beauty," he says, "is beauty that just will require a lot more patience to perceive." So, within that patience, you may need just time, effort. You also may need a guide; you may need a mentor or a teacher, to help unlock the beauty that you're struggling to perceive. He says, "Difficult beauty often encompasses more complexity." It might encompass things that create tension, things that feel almost that they're pushing us out, or that they contain contradictions. And then he has this third idea: Difficult beauty often uses this thing called "width", and what he means by that... It's a technical term for a feeling. And he describes the feeling as the one where something happens, and it makes you realize how big and vast the world is, and how small you are in comparison to that vastness. So he says, "Imagine you're standing at the edge of a great mountain range, and suddenly you're looking at this massive mountain range..." And going, "Oh my gosh, like, this is forever. I am but a speck in time; my life is so brief. And this is so permanent, and massive, and I am nothing in the face of the omnipotence of nature." And that feeling can be panicky, and awful. And he says, "If you can try to find beauty in that, in the world getting wider, and you, by comparison, becoming smaller, that you will be able to access more beauty, difficult beauty. And that really resonates with me on a lot of levels. I think the greatest experience of Bosanquet's width that I ever had, was when I became a mother, and just heard my son cry for the first time, when he was born. And the sound of that cry suddenly made the world seem very big, very scary. I suddenly saw myself as a tiny entry into this grand human experience, which is motherhood, and that was terrifying. To sort of sit in the complexity, or the width of that moment, and then rise to it and find that it was a tremendously beautiful experience. So a lot of the book sees me sort of in a dialogue between searching for difficult beauty, devaluing easy beauty; trying to figure out how to process those ideas productively and with more nuance. So, a lot of the book is me, growing with those ideas, not just explaining them to the readers and going, "Here they are." Really trying them on, and in different circumstances, and feeling my perspective on the change, as experience helps me change.

Emily Silverman
So as we move through the world and look around, easy beauty is easy to find. That's why it's called easy. Is there enough difficult beauty around? And how does this tie back to disability? For example, in the book, you talk about this beautiful sculpture of a disabled pregnant woman, and how meaningful it was to examine that work of art. You also talk about some of the ancient, I think Greek, sculptures and how some of them... It'll be like arms chopped off, and like a partial torso. And, like, how is that related to disability? Or not? And where do we look to find difficult beauty? And... and how are you thinking about that?

Chloé Cooper Jones
Well, difficult beauty is everywhere. I think that we can find difficult beauty in museums,; we can find it in the great abstract paintings that look like scribbles to us or drips on a canvas at first. But then, perhaps with some education about what abstract art is trying to do, or what action painting is, or what energy exists in brushstrokes, like, suddenly, we can have these tremendous perceptual shifts and see things differently. And, the pieces that you're talking about... There's this artist Marc Quinn, who was in the British Museum, and he was looking at the Parthenon Marbles, which is a collection of sculptures. Because they're from antiquity, they are partial sculptures. So, their arm's missing; there's parts of faces that are eroded by time. There's limbs that are damaged in different ways. And he was looking around at this museum full of people who had made these special trips to come and look at these unbelievably famous sculptures. And he thought to himself, if a real human walked in with a similar body type, people would not have the same awe or respect that they're giving to these Parthenon... you know, these famous... But what's the difference? Why are these beautiful, but a woman like Alison Lapper, who he made the large sculpture of, that I'm talking about in my book. Alison Lapper was a real woman who... (She's still alive.)... was born with foreshortened legs and arms. And he did this, I think it was like eight-foot sculpture, of her... (Might have been larger; I can't remember the exact dimensions of it now.) ...when she was nine months pregnant. And it's just this beautiful sculpture of her, made from Carrara marble. And it's so similar in a lot of ways to the Parthenon Marbles, but it was met with tremendous disgust, not just by the public, but by art critics who are writing about it. And I think difficult beauty comes into play here, where we can say, if you have a disgust reaction to this beautiful sculpture of this real woman, but not to the Parthenon Marbles, like, what's happening? And, rather than judge that disgust, difficult beauty asks us to sit with it, to question it, to wonder what social, perhaps prejudices, are informing that. To get more education about it, to read about it, to allow tension to exist, without it prompting our dismissal. So, difficult beauty, if we can really embrace it, becomes a tool of learning. It becomes a tool of our own expansion. It becomes a tool of resisting judgment. But we have to value that. And I think there's so much value that's put on easy beauty, because it's simple and it instantly confirms our question. "Is this beautiful?" "Yes. Good, done. Case closed." "Is this other thing beautiful?" "No, I don't like it. It's freaking me out." It's like, well, Bosanquet says like, "But maybe the case isn't closed. Like, maybe we'll just think about it for a little while longer." And that becomes a very powerful idea for someone who lives in a body like mine, that is outside of easily recognized standards of beauty. If you know enough about me, if you think long enough, if you give some time and generosity and grace to disability, can you get to the point where you see my life as valuable, or my beauty as as apparent? And that's not always a grace that we give to people that are outside of the sort of realms of easy beauty. Part of the problem in the book is that I value difficult beauty so much, because I identify with it as a disabled woman, that I don't give.... And this is a huge problem. I don't give as much value or credence to easy beauty. I see anything that comes to me that quickly, or that immediately, as suspicious. And that becomes an issue in my family, in the way that I can perceive simple, easy moments of joy, or what Bosanquet calls "blunt, triumphant beauty", I will reject that or judge that or have bad pre-conceived notions about it. So. part of this tension between easy and difficult beauty is recognizing where your prejudices lie, and they can be on either side of that divide. And, of how to work on on excavating those, so that you can enjoy all the diverse beauties of the world and of your life.

Emily Silverman
It's understandable how one might develop that suspicion or rejection, as a defense mechanism given what you have to deal with. And you describe this in the book. And, as somebody who is able-bodied, it was so eye-opening to me to learn a little bit about the bullshit, essentially, that people have to deal with. Like the woman at the restaurant who snaps her fingers, and she says, "Explain yourself." Or the people who offer to help, and you say, "No, I'm okay." But then they insist, and they won't let you reject their help. Because it's about them helping; it's not really about you. Beyond just gaining awareness of what that is like, for you and for other people, is your discussion about the different options for how to be in the world given that reality? Given that... those facts?

Chloé Cooper Jones
I mean, there are these things that I talk about in the book, about people responding to my body, and having really quick, often cruel, things to say, or responses. And then I think there are these more complicated examples that you're talking about, with people offering help, which is... In and of itself, that's never a problem. I never get offended if someone says, "Do you need help with this thing?" Sometimes the thing they're offering me help with is so bizarre. Like, quite often, if I'm in the subway, someone will say, "Do you need help getting out of the subway?" I always think to myself, like, "Did you think I got in the subway with no plan to get out?" And sometimes those offerings of help reveal the ways in which people's imaginations are limited about how I can figure out, and be resourceful in my own body, and also their limited expectations that they have for me. But, for the most part, it's fine to offer help. The problem is, and this is... I write about this a couple of times throughout the book, is when people don't care to hear my answer. When I say, "No, I'm fine. Thank you." And people insist that they know better than I do. And that is a common thing, I think, with disability. But I don't think that's limited to disability. People ,all the time, take one look at somebody and make a decision about their agency, their ability, their intelligence, their resourcefulness, and those assumptions are quite often wrong. And you don't have to be disabled to have felt that way before. I think almost everybody's probably been in that type of situation. The thing that's really important to me in the book is that we all do this; we all do this to each other. Nobody is a villain in this book. And I am as capable of reductive, harmful assumptions, as anybody else in the book. And the path that I strive to follow.... And this is where the book sort of ends, is with a realization that the thing that I'm so ardently asking for, from others, is to be not reduced down to one visual thing that they can identify, but rather to be seen as a whole person, a whole and complex person. And so when I make a mistake, or if I'm capable of saying a hurtful or harmful thing, I ask to not be reduced down to a simple mistake, or the worst day. I ask to be seen as complicated and flawed, but also whole and capable of growth, and capable of change. The irony is that if that's what I'm asking from other people, I have to be able to give that to them. Or maybe it's not the irony, it's just sort of the principled reality of the thing. I have to be able to give that to others. So the book begins and ends with a man at a bar, saying a sort of cruel thing to me. The beginning of the book, I retreat from it, and I just am like, "That's an... Jerk, I'm out of here", mentally. And, at the end of the book, somebody says a different sort of harmful thing, and I try to give that person the grace of seeing him as not reducible down to that single moment, as having more wholeness than that comment would indicate, and try to have as much compassion, without complicity. But compassion guiding the way that I respond to that, because that's what I... That's what I need from others. So I have to be willing to give that. But that does require being there, you know. It does require being present, and processing with that person what's happening. Which is hard, and often painful, and is exactly the thing I've been hiding from for so long. But I do think it leads to, just, the better life for myself, but more crucially, the better model for my son. If there's any sort of true beating heart of the book, it's me trying to be better for him.

Emily Silverman
Yeah, that scene at the end... It's almost like a bookend, where we're back at a bar, this time with a different guy. And he asks you a, just, really insulting question, and you respond differently. And you say, "A year ago, I might have taken the question and turned it inward, using it as a weapon against myself. But, this time, I searched myself for anger or the impulse to retreat, and I found only attention. I had no need for my neutral room. It was his pain, not mine, and I would not take it on. It would stay with him." And I kept thinking to myself, how did she do that?

Chloé Cooper Jones
Well, like the millions of stories that exist before this, I had to go on a quest. And that's a very intentional bookend: that it begins and ends with the same sort of version of a dude in the bar, because quests begin with someone leaving home in search of a prize, and they end with someone returning home with new knowledge. That's the structure of every single quest, from Star Wars to the Odyssey. So the quest that I'm on, and the prize that I'm after, is this change in myself and in my perspective. And my mentor is Iris Murdoch, and this pursuit of consciousness-shifting beauty. You know, I wish I could just be a more complete seamless person and just be like, "Oh, I married a nice guy. He's the best. And our kid's cute." Like, "I'm all fixed." One, that wouldn't make for a very good book. And two, it's just not how I am. I'm a more flawed person than that. So I needed this quest. And I think part of the quest was to get outside of the roles in which I inhabited in my day-to-day life, the heavy expectations that come along with those roles. Being a mother, being a wife, being a woman, being a professional, being a professor. All of those roles come with a lot of pressure to have your shit together. And I didn't, and I needed freedom from those roles. But I also needed to figure out how valuable it was to feel a part of a world of others, and experiencing beauty in crowds while being on the move, or being surrounded by strangers. I mean, there's so much struggle in this book, where I find myself both wanting to retreat from groups of people or being fearful of groups of people. But then I'm in the crowd at Indian Wells, and Roger Federer is winning the most magnificent point I've ever seen, and the crowd is cheering and their arms are around me, and I'm cheering, and I'm with them. And, and it's so fun. It's so great to be unified with a world of others, with a community. With people that are complex and full of the potential for harm, but worth our best beliefs anyway. And I think art, and being in appreciation of art... Together, like, that was just a very transformative experience. So the present of the book is... It's only about 18 months, and that's the bookend, is these two things. And what happens in between is, I'm gone, I'm traveling alone, and I'm being free. And I'm on this journey, and I'm learning things. And I'm still learning all of these things. But, because of these experiences, I could come home and look at the incredible beauty of my husband making me a cup of coffee in the morning, and have the same sort of aesthetic reaction to that, that I have to the Bernini's at the beginning. And the only way for me to have done that is through distance and experience. And luckily, I'm partnered with someone who absolutely understood that. There's a line where he says, like, "I could just see the person you wanted to be, and I knew you would just get there if I let you, and got out of your way." And I think that was one of the most incredible gifts of love and trust that I'll ever receive.

Emily Silverman
Yeah, and there was another line where you asked, like, "Are you mad at me that I went away, and then I traveled so much?" And he said something like, "I just wanted to be the type of person that you would want to come home to." Or, there was something like that too, and...

Chloé Cooper Jones
Yeah, he says, "I can't control what you do, I can only control my attempt to be the kind of person you would want to come home to." I don't really know how I got so lucky. But he really sees love as tracking the happiness of another person. It doesn't make any sense to him that love would be about control. And he also just really trusted me and could see me more clearly than I could see myself, and just was like, "She'll figure it out." And so far that's been right.

Emily Silverman
And how is little Wolfgang doing? I so enjoyed those parts of the book. I mean, especially being a new mother myself. I loved watching him grow in the book, and there was that part where he didn't want to eat food, because he didn't want to hurt the food, and just this like...

Chloé Cooper Jones
He's still as sensitive as a little soft boy. He has the most tender heart in the world. And yeah, he just has a very strong animistic impulse. So he just sees everything as having feelings and emotions and a heart, and very tenderly, every single morning, tucks his stuffed animals in and kisses them and says, "I'll just be gone until the afternoon and I'll see you later." Like, he sees eleven, and he still does that, and... But he's incredible. He is the best travel partner in the world. And I'm very honest with him about how I felt about motherhood, and what I was scared of, and we have had a lot of really great conversations about that. And he says to me all the time, "Aren't you surprised that we really love to travel together? And that you didn't have to give up any of this." And, when I did my book tour, he came with me for almost all of my book tour, and was just the best partner to do all of this stuff with. And the answer is, like, "Yes, I am surprised." Because the narrative that I'm always hearing about motherhood, or that I was given, at least, was that you just had to give everything up. You have to forget your dreams, and become, you know, the sort of milk box to your child. Which, like, is true, the... Parts of that are really true. But also, what I didn't hear enough about, and what would have been really helpful to me, is to see motherhood as this incredibly creative opportunity, this chance to see life as a collaborative art project. And that's very much how he sees it, and how we're living our lives.

Emily Silverman
This word width that the philosopher offers and also your mother offers it too. I think she says, just try to widen your perspective a bit at one point. And I really have found that with, with my daughter, like when I hear her banging a drum, there's this weird like, Harry Potter connection. You know how in Harry Potter like when Voldemort gets close, his scar starts to hurt. Like, like when she cries my like C section scar starts. Or like when she's banging a drum, there's this weird part of my brain that thinks that it's me banging the drum. But I'm like, No, it's not me. It's her. And like, I just feel that it's almost like a consciousness distributing itself across to people. And I love what you said about it being a creative act and being a collaboration.

Chloé Cooper Jones
Yeah, it's been the joy of my life to be so wrong about what I thought motherhood would do. I think this is in the book, when I found out I was pregnant, I had this unbelievably melodramatic reaction, which is that I literally saw this long road in my head, and it had all the streetlights. And all the street lights just went off one by one, why, why it's so heavy handed this image of like all the lights of your future path going out. And I know why I had that fear. Because it's so prevalent, that that's what parenthood could be like. And I'm just so grateful that it's instead made me feel more creative, more open, but also put me inside of a tradition that is so powerful to me, which is the tradition of unconditional love for a little thing that you get to take care of. And that feeling of a consciousness spread across two bodies are that cliche of seeing your child is like seeing your own heart outside your chest running around, it's like, people say all those things for a reason, because we're suddenly in touch with a different type of consciousness, a different type of knowledge, and even a different type of physiological response that I could never have understood. And I can write from that perspective now. So it's made me a better writer and thinker, because I have this new vision on the world because of Wolfgang, so it's definitely not always been easy. But man, what a great project. The whole love project is.

Emily Silverman
Well, as we wind to a close, I just wanted to ask you if you had anything that you wanted to say to our audience, again, doctors, nurses, students, as somebody who's interfaced with doctors through your health condition, and I'm sure other ways as well. Before you answer, I'll just say that a friend of mine just did a book club with your book at the hospital. And she was telling me how much everybody loved it and how it really kind of shifted the way that they think about people who are living with disabilities, as healthcare providers, I'm sure there's a lot of ways where we get things wrong. And so just curious if you had any thoughts to share with our group.

Chloé Cooper Jones
I'm so grateful that your friend did that book club. And so please pass on my gratitude. I think the medical humanities are really important. There's a study that came out maybe you saw this, and I'm sure there's lots of things that are flawed with any one single study. But there's study that came out just a few years ago, that said that 87% of people in the medical industry do see disabled lives as less worth living, or is inherently lower quality of life. There's certainly tons of medical cases that corroborate this when quick decisions need to be made as they do in the medical field. How quickly certain prejudices mean just learned certainly not even conscious or explicit prejudice, but just that learned acquired deep narrative about disability it comes up again and again and again. And my explicit goal with this project outside of myself and they all the things I wanted to do to make my own life better, the bigger goal and certainly the much more important goal is that if you end up reading this book and you spend 300 pages with me, my hope is that there's no way that you can come out of that experience thinking that my life shouldn't exist or that lives like mine aren't worth living, and that the challenges are different, but also maybe not so different. Maybe they're very relatable, if of a different variety to anybody who picks up this book. So I just think that's so crucial for changing our minds for the better and seeing other people's lives that are different from ours as possessing as much value as ours. I would also just say that there's been a lot of health issues in my family recently, and my mom has cancer right now and my stepfather just passed have Alzheimer's. So I've been in a lot of hospitals, in the last two months, it's been like a massive part of my life. And the difference that the nurses have made in my mother's treatment is just so incredible. And I know how hard that job is because I've taught nurses for many years, and how hard families who are terrified, who are just feeling such grief, and therefore sometimes anger, or have limited emotional resources, as I have had in last couple of months, like how much that patience and empathy can change the scariest experience to a really wonderful experience, which is what we've been having with the medical professionals that are caring for my mother. So it's like, I'm just really right now feeling like a tremendous wave of all and gratitude for that. And so if there are any nurses or doctors that are listening and are like, ah, these patients are making me crazy. I know happens, I just say like, I am sending you love, sending you gratitude, and I'm feeling the massive impact that empathy and time and care in that sort of space has on a patient's trajectory through illness. So that's a dominant thing in my mind right now.

Emily Silverman
Well, I think we'll leave it there. Thank you so much for coming on to the show. I have been speaking with Chloé Cooper Jones, she is a philosopher. She's a journalist, and her memoir, easy beauty is out. I highly recommend that you read this book. This for me was sort of a like life before and life after book. So really glad that you came in and it's just such a pleasure to speak with you.

Chloé Cooper Jones
Thank you so much for having me. I loved this conversation. Thank you, Emily.

 
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