“We have language. That’s the best tool we have for understanding the consciousness of another,” says Michael Pollan on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “You can go pretty far with it, as Proust himself showed, but that is, in the end, the function of art: to translate one consciousness into another. That’s the only way we know how to do it right now, and it’s pretty powerful, but there’s still a remnant, some residue that can never be translated. Even Proust, who wrote millions of words and was a great believer in the power of words, said consciousness is not a verbal construction. He didn’t think that consciousness was made of words. The visual arts can tell us things, too. A Rothko painting conveys so much consciousness. That’s the importance of art—helping to ferry us from one island of consciousness to another.”
This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Michael Pollan, award-winning author and journalist, about his new book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, in which Pollan explores one of our most complex and enduring mysteries: the “hard problem” of consciousness. Initially, he seeks the headwaters of consciousness in neuroscience, computer science, and in science that bridges computers and biology, but, midway through the book, and midway through this episode, suspecting that “third-person” science might be inadequate to the mystery, he looks elsewhere—to philosophy, literary history, the arts, and, as his journey ends, to Buddhism.
The ad-free, unabridged version of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, concludes with a bonus segment, an audio version of an essay on animal consciousness, by John Jeremiah Sullivan, that originally appeared in the Spring 2013 Animals issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
WORKS CITED
(In order of mention.)
Michael Pollan. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. New York: Grove Press, 2003.
Michael Pollan. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002.
Michael Pollan. “Cultivating Virtue. Compost and its moral imperatives,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1987.
Michael Pollan. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. New York: Penguin Press, 2026.
William James. The Principles of Psychology: Volume 1. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1950.
Lucy Ellmann. Ducks, Newburyport. Windsor, ON: Biblioasis, 2019.
Frank O’Hara. Lunch Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964.
Virginia Woolf. Collected Essays: Volume Two. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966.
Francis Crick. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Scribner, 1995.
Galileo Galilei. Sidereus Nuncius or the Sidereal Messenger. Translated by Albert Van Helden. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
David J. Chalmers. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Aldous Huxley. The Doors of Perception. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.
Henri Bergson. Matter and Memory. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 2004.
René Descartes. Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by Michael Moriarty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Antonio Damasio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Mariner Books, 2000.
Henry David Thoreau. Walden and Civil Disobedience. New York: Penguin Classics, 1983.
Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary. Translated by Geoffrey Wall. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.
Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson. The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2025.
Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time Volume I: Swann’s Way. Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Modern Library, 1998.
Mark Rothko. No. 37/No. 19 (Slate Blue and Brown on Plum). 1958. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art.
Johann Sebastian Bach. Fugue in G Minor, BWV 578. Composed ca. 1707.
Joan Halifax. Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet. New York: Flatiron Books, 2019.
Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl. The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind. New York: Mariner Books, 2000.
John Jeremiah Sullivan. “One of Us: Can animals think or feel, experience joy or sadness? Can they know their own existence?” Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 2013: Animals.
APROPOS
Episode 5: Ben Tarnoff and John Jeremiah Sullivan
“I think the conflict for Twain is that he does want to be taken seriously as a writer,” says Ben Tarnoff on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The tricky part is that he does have a deep affinity for the low culture of the frontier expressed primarily through humor and tall tales. That he connects to that at an intuitive level. He has an ear for it. But he worries that if he goes too far in that direction, he’ll never be able to develop a reputation as a real writer. And that’s something he really wants, too. And arguably, his breakthrough—which I argued that he achieves in the West first—is coming to recognize that those two aren’t mutually exclusive, that that’s a false choice, that he can actually do both, and do both quite well, and that what he thought was a weakness could be a strength.”
DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE
