John Gray

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This is the

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B B C

Presenter0:03

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.

Presenter0:16

For rights' reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. You can find over two thousand more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Disc's website.

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My castaway this week is the philosopher John Gray. If you count yourself as curious, then listen up. His forte is using a glintingly sharp intellect to prod the pulp cavity of Western liberal presumptions, penetrating comfy certainties with deft intellectual precision, painfully exposing a plethora of widely held preconceptions. These days he writes full time and broadcast too.

Presenter1:14

But for almost ten years he was Professor of European thought at the LSE, having also spent a stretch as Professor of Politics at Oxford, and time too as visiting professor at both Harvard and Yale.

Presenter1:26

The eldest son of a Tyneside docker, he started out on the political left, but his self confessed recurrent habit of inquiry seems to have resulted in a refreshingly supple approach to political allegiance he's had stints identifying with both the right and left.

Presenter1:43

He says My aim is not to convert anyone. I don't care what you believe. I write for those that are curious, who want to question, who want to look at their thinking and reflect on it, and see whether they want to carry on with it. So, John Gray, welcome. The notion that you don't care is a very interesting thing to me.

Presenter2:02

So your purpose in writing and broadcasting then is to encourage your readers, encourage listeners to really think about what they think.

Presenter2:10

How do you know if you're being effective? Because it's a sort of one-way conversation.

John Gray2:15

Oh, it's not one way at all, really. My writings do tend to provoke strong responses. And I can see when I've touched a nerve in the strong, sometimes virulent, reactions of many of my critics. Many of them have said that I, for example, they would say, don't believe in anything. I'm a kind of nihilist. I'm just critically and negatively and destructively attacking other views. But I don't think that's true at all. I have a clear and strong and in its own terms hopeful view of the world. Not optimistic, hopeful. They're different. Well, yes, explain to me why they're different. Well, an optimist is someone who thinks they can find strong reasons.

John Gray2:57

for a positive view of the human predicament. I think that

John Gray3:04

The human predicament is hopeful because the very absence of any such reasons evokes the best things in human beings, which are stoicism, self-assertion against fate, resisting aspects of one's environment or even of the human situation itself that thwart human fulfilment. The value of human life comes more from the exercise of innate human capacities of imagination, which are shown not only in art, but I would think in religion. I mean I view religion as a great work of the human imagination and essential to being human.

Presenter3:40

So as you would have it, our history isn't a process of continuous development. We are not, sadly, getting better at being human. But just because wars or famine in an alarmingly fast period can turn a country or a continent back a quarter of a century in let's say six months surely that doesn't mean that we shouldn't even try.

John Gray4:01

To improve the loss of people. We definitely should continue to try. What we shouldn't assume, though, is that the improvements that have been achieved in the past are permanent and cumulative. So we should be acutely aware of that. You see, I think improvement occurs regularly in history, but so does the loss of the gains that have been made during the period of improvement. And I mean, the time I think for me, which was the most striking, was when just before the Iraq war, I wrote a satirical piece in which I argued that torture should be among the practices used by defenders of human rights.

John Gray4:38

And three months later, we had Abu Ghraib. Now, how many people thought that torture it had never disappeared, of course, but it was extensively condemned and banned. How many people thought that it would return as a practice of the pre-eminent liberal democracy in the world? And it's that kind of paradox which happens over and over again in history. This is why I was less surprised by Abu Ghraib, because I assume that in the life of civilization as a whole, in ethics and politics, human life is cyclical, not progressive. If we could be alert to it more than we are, then we might actually thwart some of that reversion. But I fear that's impossible.

John Gray5:19

Tell me

Presenter5:19

About your first piece of music. We need to know about your list. Tell me about this. Why have you chosen it?

John Gray5:23

Well, I suppose for many people of my generation, Bowie was more than a formative influence. Life on Mars, one of his most evocative recordings, captured to me at the time something I wouldn't have understood until much later, which was that we were moving into a period in which identities, ideas, all that had seemed fixed would cease to be fixed and would be put together in new and striking forms. And I found that deeply resonant at the time and still do.

Speaker 45:54

fighting in the dance hall Oh man, look at those gay men go

Speaker 46:04

If the creeky is shallow

Speaker 46:08

Take a look at her, oh man, meaning on the wrong guy, oh ma'am, wonder if you'll ever know.

Speaker 46:19

Who's on the best selling show?

Speaker 46:23

Is their life on Mars?

Presenter6:30

That was David Bowie and Life on Mars. John Gray, in September 2016, it was a few weeks before Trump was elected. You did an essay on Radio 4 at the time.

Presenter6:41

I remember hearing it. You pretty much called the result.

Presenter6:45

On the night that Donald Trump was actually elected, personally, what were your thoughts? Did you think I was right?

John Gray6:52

No, I didn't think that then. I was I I wasn't certain, of course, that he would be elected. And when he was elected, it was by a very small margin.

Speaker 46:59

Okay.

John Gray6:59

But I thought there was a very good chance that it would happen. A lot of the commentary at the time was saying.

John Gray7:05

Clinton, Hillary Clinton's bound to win because she's up against a charlatan and a fraud. In other words, the analysis was Trump is the ideal candidate for Clinton. I thought it was the other way round that Clinton was the ideal candidate for Trump because what I believed was tens of millions of people were fed up with conventional politics and that they'd do anything other than vote.

John Gray7:27

for a candidate Clinton who embodied conventional politics. He'd been there all that time. I think many of the people who voted for Trump didn't like him, thought he was a liar even then.

Presenter7:36

But he wasn't her.

John Gray7:37

Not only was he not her, he wasn't anything they'd seen before in American politics. What did I feel on the night? Yes. A certain degree of trepidation because I thought he would move very quickly to betraying the supporters that had voted for him. Now, as I've just said, many of those supporters didn't trust him. So they might not have been terribly surprised if he turned out to be not so different in certain of his policies from the right-wing Republicans of the past. And I suppose I'm confirming my reputation as a pessimist when I said I fear a post-Trump version of Trump, who's more skillful, more disciplined.

Presenter7:43

Yeah.

John Gray8:11

and more dangerous even than he is.

Presenter8:13

More music, John Grey. Tell me about this second one.

John Gray8:15

Well, When the Boat Comes In was a wonderful television series set in the town where I grew up or a version of that. It confirmed to me how extraordinarily lucky I'd been in being born into and brought up in that part of the world after the Second World War. The form of life, the way of life which is captured in the series in the working class northeast, it was the same form of life that I grew up in and it only started to change really in the 1960s. for various reasons. One was the decline of the traditional industries. Another reason, more paradoxical, is that the housing policies of neighbour local authorities in the area, I think, although they were beneficial in many ways, people lived in better housing, they helped destroy the communities that actually were there because the street communities, which I grew up in them, were simply demolished and people were put in new housing where there were no communities.

Speaker 49:10

Come, hear me, little Jacky, no I've smoked me backee, Have a bit o' cracky till the boat comes in Dance to the daddy, sing to the mammy, Dance to the daddy to the mammy, sing Thou shalt have a fishy and a little dishy, Thou shalt ever fishy, when the boat comes in

Speaker 49:38

Here's the mother humming like a candy woman Yonder comes the father, drunk he cannot stand Dance to the daddy sing to the mummy dance

Presenter9:47

That was Alex Glasgow and When the Book Comes In. John Gray, I'm very interested in you talking about your origins because I have read you say.

Presenter9:55

That you are, you know, you're determinedly uninterested in yourself. And I want to know a bit about you and the life you led. So, will you entertain me in that way? Well, yes.

John Gray9:59

And I won't.

John Gray10:03

Uh

Presenter10:03

Uh

John Gray10:03

I am uninterested in myself. Because there are much more interesting things in the world than me.

Presenter10:08

Well, here's the thing. When I'm reading the introduction today and I'm saying all the extraordinary things you've done, you know, Yale and Harvard and Oxford and the LSE and then I say son of a docker.

John Gray10:16

Hmm.

Presenter10:16

There aren't many of those to the pound. Well

John Gray10:18

Well, I was part of a generation.

Presenter10:19

Yeah.

John Gray10:19

I went to a grammar school, not now a popular institution. I mean, I I I enjoyed it. Top of the class? No, no, because I followed a kind of pattern which I followed throughout my entire life of reading what I wanted. I haunted the local libraries.

Presenter10:33

What did you start with?

John Gray10:34

Edwardian fiction. I liked the science fiction of H. G. Wells. I liked the sea stories of Joseph Conrad. I read a lot and I'm more proud of what I've read than of what I've written. So I wasn't ever top of the class. Quite the contrary.

Presenter10:52

Think back.

John Gray10:53

Yeah.

John Gray10:54

Fishing in the sea with my father.

Presenter10:55

Bow.

John Gray10:55

In a small boat.

Presenter10:55

Uh

Presenter10:57

What would you be catching?

John Gray10:58

Could be lobster in those days. And I enjoyed that enormously. My father worked in the docks, but he was actually by trade a joiner and carpenter. He was a skilled man during the Second World War. My father eventually died of a cancer that he attributed to the asbestos that was very common in the docks back. And was it did he have mesotheliomia, or he just thought that? He just thought that. So a feature of the life at that time was that males had relatively short, fairly hard lives.

Presenter11:19

And was it time?

Presenter11:29

Yeah.

John Gray11:29

Yes. Although I have positive memories, I don't romanticize the period.

Presenter11:33

Were you quite a self-contained child? Because I have, I don't know if this is accurate, but I have this idea that, you know, if you'd asked your mother, she would have said, well, John's at the library again. I think she'd have been right. Right. And she was what? What was she?

John Gray11:40

I mean we could sh

John Gray11:43

She was a housewife and brought us up according to her own ethical code, which was a version of the ethical code which she, my grandparents and others accepted, which was one now which is a kind of mixture of stoicism. You couldn't expect life to be all happiness, all fulfilment. But you had to assert yourself against that. And this is something which I think is not understood. Now, when I myself have said the improvements we now take for granted will be lost, people say, I'm not getting up tomorrow morning. I can't accept that. Now, that very much goes against my grain, because my response would be, yes, they probably will be lost, these improvements. But that's another reason to dig in and make sure that they last as long as they can. Let's fit in some music, John Grey. This third disc, why have you chosen it?

Speaker 112:00

Don't fulfill.

John Gray12:27

The third disc is the theme music from Get Carter and I myself, although I came to self-awareness in the late 60s, I preferred the 70s because they had a harder edge. The art and the film were closer to the truth of the matter than before or after. And Get Carter, the film, doesn't pull any punches, it doesn't end with any redemptive significance. And yet it's a beautiful film. It's a film in which there's great poetry and a certain kind of lyricism even, which is in the music. But it's certainly not an optimistic film.

Presenter13:39

Roy Budd, the theme from the film Get Carter. John Grey, you worked, as I said in the introduction in higher education for many years at some of the world's most elite institutions, Yale and Oxford and Harvard and the London School of Economics. The grammar school system clearly worked for you. It did. At a philosophical level, what's your view of the grammar school system?

John Gray14:01

The grammar schools enabled an unusual

John Gray14:05

Degree of social mobility in society, and they also.

John Gray14:10

They enabled uh talent which was spread out in a variety of communities and parts of society to achieve more of its potential. But of course they cast a shadow on anyone who didn't succeed in getting through the Eleven Plus, who who wasn't selected. And I suppose my view at the level of philosophy, so to speak, is that they illustrate a very uncomfortable truth.

John Gray14:34

which is that there are practically no good aspects of human institutions that don't come with a shadow. In other words, part of the faith in improvement that people have nowadays is that you can have the good without the bad, you can have the light without the shadow. You can't. I think they did have benefits, but I don't think history can be rolled back and they can be revived in any simple way. Too many things have moved on.

Presenter14:56

Did any of your brothers and sisters go to grammar school?

John Gray14:58

Uh I mean and I myself I must say when I took the 11 plus I wasn't really aware of its importance but I was one of those who was lucky.

Presenter15:06

Tell me about your history teacher, Charles Constable. I think he was

John Gray15:08

I think he was called. Why was he so important? Well, because, as I mentioned earlier, I was so wayward in my reading. I didn't really.

Presenter15:10

Well

John Gray15:14

pay all that much attention. But then after three or four years I came under the influence of a single human being, Charles Constable, who was a great and an inspired history teacher. But he also had us reading, not just me personally, but people in the sixth form, things like Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. He'd come from a modest background himself. He sought as his role to enable at least some of his pupils to go on and realize their intellectual and other capabilities. So he was a profound influence on me.

Presenter15:45

As well as reading, reading, reading, reading, what else were you doing as a schoolboy? Were you kicking a football up against a wall? Were you running through

John Gray15:51

I used to run. I never played collective sports. I used to run and do the high jump, which I suppose in other ways I've still continued doing.

Presenter15:58

Dewey.

John Gray15:59

I liked uh d doing that.

Presenter16:02

Long distance or

John Gray16:02

Um, both. But, you know, I never got anywhere in either of those sports. But I enjoyed them and I did them. I probably should do more of it now.

Presenter16:09

What was your earliest ambition?

John Gray16:11

To carry on reading.

John Gray16:13

And that was the way I approached my initial life in Oxford in October 1968, which was not exactly a time of quietness.

John Gray16:22

That was the period of the big anti-Vietnam demonstrations, which I attended.

Presenter16:25

Gas

Presenter16:26

How long was you here?

John Gray16:28

Pretty long at that time.

Presenter16:30

Tell me about this next piece of music. We're going to hear your fourth.

John Gray16:33

Well, the next piece of music is from Shostakovich. It's called Romance. And one of the many things that was opened up to me in Oxford was the world of Russian art and culture, which was mainly conveyed to me at that time by someone I got to know almost immediately after the end of my undergraduate work, which was Isaiah Belin the Philosopher, who was Russian.

John Gray16:54

And he talked an enormous amount about Russian art and Russian culture and ever since then I've read Russian writers and liked Russian music including this.

Presenter18:13

Part of Romance composed by Shostakovich from the 1955 film The Gadfly performed there by Chloe Hanslip and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Mann. John Gray, going into that, we heard you talk about Isaiah Berlin. Your 1995 book on him was a very important book. When you had first met him.

Presenter18:35

Why did he capture you?

John Gray18:37

He captured me and my imagination as well as my scholarly interests partly by his well-known capacity for conversation. You couldn't talk to him for more than five minutes without him saying something which was arresting and would stay in the mind for a long time. But there was another reason which was that he had actually

Presenter18:45

Through the

Speaker 118:45

Yeah.

John Gray18:59

lived through some great historical conflicts and played a part in them. For example, he had worked in the British Embassy in Washington during the Second World War and talked to me about witnessing the two Russian revolutions.

John Gray19:14

the one that he liked, which was the First Revolution, the Menshevik Revolution, he said everyone was very happy. Then six months later there was the Bolshevik Revolution, and at that time he witnessed some scenes that filled him with a horror of violence. I mean, he was only a little boy, but he witnessed them.

Presenter19:28

Um did you feel that your great intellectual flowering distanced you from your background? And if it did, did you care about that?

John Gray19:35

Men

John Gray19:37

Uh Uh

John Gray19:38

Well, you know, it did, but it was a pattern which was not really about intellectual prowess because the good side of that way of life I was born into was that it was very close, it was very cohesive, it was very communal. But if you didn't fit in or if your ambitions or your goals or what you wanted to do with your life weren't feasible in that fairly tight community, you left and that would be true regardless of how intellectually interested or how intellectually you were. So for example, some people joined the Merchant Marine if they were men, or if they were women, they left, took university degrees elsewhere. It was very common. Let's have some more music, John Gray. We're going to listen to your fifth choice of the date. Well, in the 1980s, I'd become captivated by America. I used to spend some weeks a year in New York, and I was enchanted by that city, which I saw from the time when it was still quite dangerous through the period in which it became safer and much easier to live in, and in some ways more beautiful, but also less exciting.

Presenter20:09

Philam

Speaker 420:43

Don't drink coffee, I take tea, my dear

Speaker 420:48

I like my toast done on one side.

Speaker 420:51

You can hear it in my accent when I talk. I'm an Englishman in New York.

Speaker 421:02

You see me walking down Fifth Avenue

Speaker 421:07

Walking cane here at my side

Speaker 421:12

Take it everywhere I was

Speaker 421:15

I'm an Englishman in New York

Presenter21:21

That was Sting and the Englishman in New York. John Gray, we tend to think of politicians who change their minds as being rather weak characters. You were in the late seventies and early to mid eighties you were a very influential right wing thinker. You advocated small government, free markets.

Presenter21:40

Over time, rather famously, you you became I mean a very strong worded critic of Thatcherism. When you were a supporter of Thatcherism, what did the people back home make of that? Because it'd be fair to say that she she wasn't the most popular poster girl for the

John Gray21:56

Um

John Gray21:57

I mean, I certainly had friends who strongly disagreed with me, but these were times which were less ideologically divided than they are now. I mean, I'm seventy this year, and in the whole of my life I've never lived in Britain at a time when there was so deep polarization of opinion, for example on Brexit.

Presenter22:13

You've said politics are a bit like drains. You said that a while back. What did you mean by that?

John Gray22:18

Um they don't bear too much thinking about, but they're very necessary.

John Gray22:22

That's to say, politics is a difficult business. What politics is, is the search for partial remedies to recurring human evils. And as the nature of those evils changes over time, so the nature of the evils that Britain faced in 1939 was different from the evils it started to face in the 1970s and 80s, and they are different from the ones it faces now, the responsibility of someone who takes politics seriously is to look at the evils that are predominant at any one time and try and at least point to some possible partial remedies. That means shifting your stance radically as the evils change.

Presenter23:01

Where do you sit politically now?

John Gray23:03

Nowhere.

Presenter23:05

Is is that because there's nowhere appropriately for you or is that because you are uninterested in places?

John Gray23:09

No, I'm not uninterested in politics because, as you know, I took a fairly strong pro-Brexit stance and I still would, although I think the project is semi-derailed now because it's of the way it's been politically handled and managed. But it's still going to happen in one way or another.

Presenter23:23

Many of the arguments about Brexit have been and will be hashed and rehashed and played out. I want to ask you about how you were treated among your own folk, and I'm thinking now about the intellectual elite, for being in favour of Brexit.

John Gray23:38

Yes, a pro-Brexit view is not only disagreed with in many academic circles, it's regarded as retrogressive, implicitly nationalist, implicitly even racist. Although not everyone in academia thinks this, quite recently there was a list of academics, some of them quite senior, very senior, who expressed their support for it.

John Gray24:02

But I mean, in terms of how it affects me by the way, a very important point is that I think uh the whole issue of Brexit and Remain is so deep and so difficult that there are very reasonable arguments on both sides. So therefore I don't condemn people who take a different view. What I dislike about the present debate

John Gray24:21

is that those who take the view that I took have been so often caricatured and so often viewed as not having thought deeply about the issues or as being ignorant or as wanting to go back to an imperial past. For me, the past is the European project.

Presenter24:38

Let's take a break from politics and let's have some more music. Tell me about your sixth choice. Why is this in your list?

John Gray24:43

Well, Skriabin is one of those Russian composers I admire. Skriabin's music is full of contradictions, it's full of emotions that are hard to describe, particularly in this famous black mass.

Presenter26:05

Grigory Sokolov playing Scariabin's piano sonata number nine, Black Mass.

Presenter26:11

John Gray, one book currently in the pipeline, as I understand it, is entitled Feline Philosophy, Cats and the Meaning of Life. I worry that this might easily be your biggest seller.

John Gray26:22

Oh well, I don't worry about that prospect, but if it happens I'll be delighted.

Presenter26:22

Uh

Presenter26:26

Why do you like cats so much?

John Gray26:27

Yeah. Well, they're beautiful and they're a kind of mixture of tranquility and sudden energy, which I admire very much. But also, I admire them and enjoy being with them partly for their differences from human beings. Cats enjoy their lives without needing to turn them into stories. Human beings, very often, because they see their lives as stories, they want to create the story that is to come. But we know that's very difficult unless you're really writing a book.

Presenter26:54

I'm very interested in this apparent disregard you have for humans spinning their own stories about their own lives, because surely in telling ourselves stories and listening to the stories of the people born before us,

John Gray27:01

Except

Speaker 127:07

Uh

John Gray27:07

The stories of the people

Presenter27:08

We understand human experience surely it's an incredibly useful part of human nature.

John Gray27:12

It is part of human nature. Essential. But human beings can get hung up on their own stories. Is that why you don't like talking about your stories? Yes, it's one of the reasons I don't make much of my own story. People can get hung up on their story, and even worse, I think, and you could see this in politics, they can include other people in their own story without those other people giving their permission. In other words, if you say the story of the world in which I play a part is this: it's world communism, Thatcherite neoliberalism, what you're doing is not only telling a story which gives your life meaning, which

Presenter27:17

Is that

Speaker 427:32

Okay.

John Gray27:44

Maybe a benefit to you. You're including other people as bit players.

John Gray27:48

Isaiah Berlin used to put it like this. What he didn't like about big philosophies of human destiny is it thought of the human species as a a kind of orchestra, and we've all got our part. And he said, Well, supposing mine is just to ping the triangle for a time. He said, But supposing I don't want to do it.

John Gray28:05

Buzzing I don't want to be part of the melody. Bruce, I have a different melody in kind. But the composer, or the people with the loudest instruments, they determine what is played. So that's what I dislike.

Presenter28:15

Given that you are disarmingly short on introspection, how comfortable are you in this world that is now overtaken by discussions about well, these are my feelings and this is what I ate today, and this is my time line, and I'm going here tomorrow and I'll take a photograph of it and I'll tell everybody.

John Gray28:32

Well, one thing I've noticed, especially in the last couple of years, when politics has become to many people unintelligible,

John Gray28:39

is that many writers who used to write on politics have started to write about lifestyle issues.

John Gray28:45

Even more about themselves. Now, if you have an experience, if someone, for example, has lived through something either very terrible like Syria or very wonderful like the heroic phase of civil rights in America, then I'm interested in what they experienced. I want to know about it. But if what they're doing is sitting at a computer confecting feelings and emotions about issues they haven't experienced, I'm not interested. But doesn't.

Presenter29:08

But doesn't it help us connect? If you think, well, well, there's that person saying that their mental health for them is an issue or a struggle or they've sought help for it, then maybe I'm not alone. And maybe in doing that I feel more connected to the world rather than I think it's a good idea.

John Gray29:15

Yeah.

John Gray29:16

Zabion

John Gray29:19

I feel m

John Gray29:20

So now

John Gray29:21

People should speak up about these problems and they're now speaking up more about them, and I think that's good. But I don't think the most interesting thing about being human is your introspective feelings. It's what you have the feelings about.

Presenter29:33

Let's have some music, John Gray. We're going to your cell.

John Gray29:36

Uh

Presenter29:36

Uh Yeah.

John Gray29:36

Tell me about this. Well, Sati's shynopadi I like for its combination of playfulness and a kind of oblique pointing to again a kind of stillness. One can listen to it forever.

Presenter30:58

Eric Sati's Shymnopode No. One, performed there by Pascal Roger. John Gray, you you're you're married. When did you meet your wife, Mika, and what brought you together as a couple?

John Gray31:09

Well, what brought us together partly was my interest in Oriental philosophy and Zen Buddhism. Her family were Zen Buddhists, but we met in London. She was pursuing a course. And what I love about that philosophy is that there's very little belief in it. People associate religion with belief, even philosophy with belief. But to me, it's more about how you live and how you conduct your life. And it's even more about ceremony. Some of the ceremonies are extraordinarily beautiful.

Presenter31:13

The family

Presenter31:36

Um we have talked a lot about well, you yourself talked about say you know you said you're not optimistic, but you are hopeful.

John Gray31:43

But

Presenter31:43

You you you drew that very interest it seems like slightly fine line maybe to s

John Gray31:47

Two. No, I don't think it is a fine line because optimism is a kind of an attitude of mind.

Presenter31:47

No, I don't think it is.

John Gray31:52

according to which there's some process of the growth of knowledge, the advance of technology, the advance of science. I'm sometimes asked, are there any examples of human advances where there's no shadow of a cost of the kind I mentioned earlier? The one I normally mention is anesthetic dentistry.

John Gray32:11

A second which could be mentioned is maybe contraception. So there are some, but on the whole human knowledge is ethically ambiguous.

Presenter32:19

This is a question that has preoccupied philosophers for thousands of years. How do we live a good life simply?

John Gray32:24

You follow your best impulses and you reason about them as to their consequences and for the people you care about and the things you care about. But you follow the impulses that are best in you and that's all that can really in the end be said about it.

Presenter32:39

Tell me about your last piece of music, John Grey. What are we going to hear?

John Gray32:41

Well, this is Federica Mompoux, who knew Sati. He was a Catalan composer, and he, in a way developed some of Sati's work. And the piece that we'll hear now is part of a series of what he called silent music. It's music in which the silences are as important as what is heard. And so I find that very compelling when the role of language is not to say something, but to point at things that can't be said.

Presenter34:09

Frederico Mumpu's Angelico from Musica Calada, performed there by Herbert Henck. It's time then, John, for me to give you some books. I give all our castaways the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You're smiling slightly there at that. And what will

John Gray34:23

Yeah. But

Presenter34:23

Yeah.

John Gray34:23

No, I would want to have the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, great works of the English language, but my book would be a collection of poetry called The Palm at the End of the Mind, which is one of the last poems written by the poet who, to my mind, w was the greatest English-speaking twentieth century poet, the American Wallace Stevens. One could read it forever, and I suppose, just in case I wasn't picked up on the island, I'd need to read it forever.

Presenter34:50

Do that then.

John Gray34:51

Luxury

Presenter34:51

Big

John Gray34:51

What's yours?

Presenter34:52

And be

John Gray34:52

A limitless supply of marmite.

John Gray34:55

And perhaps find some leaves I could spread it on.

Presenter34:58

Yeah, okay, a lifetime supply of Marmite. Then which of these eight discs that we've

John Gray35:00

Yeah.

John Gray35:02

Uh

Presenter35:02

But Today we

John Gray35:03

Do you save? Probably the Sati, because it's the most playful. And if I'm going to be stuck on this island for decades, I'd want something which wasn't too turbulent, but also wasn't in a way too calm. But it's a hard choice to make. It was hard to make a choice of eight. It's even harder to make a choice of one.

Presenter35:18

Well, you've made it now. It's your discs to save then. John Gray, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

John Gray35:20

Yeah.

John Gray35:22

Thank you very much.

Presenter35:34

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Desert Island Discs. You'll find over 2,000 interviews with artists, musicians, scientists, sports stars, comedians, and more at bbc.co.uk/slash desertisland discs. And I have a favour to ask: if you could rate and review the Desert Island Discs podcast wherever you download your podcasts, it'll really help other people find us. Thanks again for listening.

Speaker 136:11

This is the BBC.

Speaker 136:15

Hello, I'm Elvin Bragg and just before you go, I wanted to let you know about another podcast from the BBC that I think you might like. It's called In Our Time. And each week, three expert academics join me to discuss ideas from culture, science, history, philosophy, religion. At the end of each podcast, there's more discussion we couldn't fit into the live programme. To subscribe to In Our Time, go to your usual podcast provider, search for In Our Time, click subscribe, and you can enjoy the programme and that extra content every week.