# data[].attributes.body
Zeno gets Luther!

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
I use one-pagers with kids. I struggle with the art, so the noun project is invaluable!

# data[].attributes.body
I am so glad I am getting to reread this novel! Lots of tears today…

# data[].attributes.body
I will never forget this Twilight Zone from my childhood. I think of it now when I connect Zeno, Seymour and Konstance…actually Anna and Omeir, too, now that they’ve lost their tethers to the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
" The Obsolete Man" is episode 65 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone, starring Burgess Meredith as Romney Wordsworth. It originally aired on June 2, 1961, on CBS. The story was later adapted for The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas starring Jason Alexander as Wordsworth.

You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace. This is Mr. Romney Wordsworth, in his last forty-eight hours on Earth. He's a citizen of the State but will soon have to be eliminated, because he's built out of flesh and because he has a mind. Mr. Romney Wordsworth, who will draw his last breaths in The Twilight Zone.

In a future totalitarian state, Romney Wordsworth is put on trial for being obsolete. His professed occupation as a librarian is punishable by death as the State has eliminated books. He believes in God, also proof of obsolescence, as the State claims to have proven God does not exist. Following a bitter exchange, the Chancellor finds Wordsworth guilty and sentences him to death, allowing him to choose his method of execution. Wordsworth requests that he be granted a personal assassin, who will be the only one who knows the method of his death, and that his execution be televised nationwide. While televised executions are commonplace and the secretive method is highly unorthodox, the Chancellor grants both requests.

A television camera is installed in Wordsworth's study to broadcast his final hour live to the nation. He summons the Chancellor, who agrees to this unusual request out of curiosity, arriving early in Wordsworth's final hour. The librarian reveals that the execution method he chose is a bomb set to go off in the room at midnight. The Chancellor expresses approval until Wordsworth further explains that the door is locked, and the Chancellor will die with him, providing the viewers with a more interesting death than his own. He also points out that, as the events are being broadcast live, the State would risk losing its status in the people's eyes by rescuing the Chancellor. Wordsworth proceeds to read from his illegal, long-hidden copy of the Bible, expressing his trust in God. Wordsworth's calm acceptance of death stands in sharp contrast with the Chancellor's increasing panic as the bomb ticks.

At the last minute, the Chancellor breaks down and begs to be let go "in the name of God." Wordsworth agrees to do so on those terms and immediately unlocks the door for him. Wordsworth stays as the Chancellor flees from the room and the bomb explodes, killing him alone.

Due to his cowardly display in Wordsworth's room and invoking God, the Chancellor is replaced by his own subaltern and declared obsolete. He protests against this and tries to escape but is overwhelmed by the tribunal's attendants, who then beat him to death.

Unusually, Serling appears on camera to deliver the closing narration. While he had made a gag appearance towards the end of an earlier episode (" A World of His Own"), Serling still delivered the closing narration of that episode off-camera, as he would for all other Twilight Zone episodes save this one and season 3's " The Fugitive". As broadcast, Serling's narration reads:

The chancellor, the late chancellor, was only partly correct. He was obsolete. But so is the State, the entity he worshiped. Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man...that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under "M" for "Mankind" - in The Twilight Zone.

Serling's original narration was longer, but the middle section was cut for broadcast. As scripted, the original narration reads as follows (with the cut section in italics):

The chancellor, the late chancellor, was only partly correct. He was obsolete. But so is the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, entity, or ideology becomes obsolete when it stockpiles the wrong weapons: when it captures territories, but not minds; when it enslaves millions, but convinces nobody. When it is naked, yet puts on armor and calls it faith, while in the Eyes of God it has no faith at all. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man...that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under "M" for "Mankind" - in The Twilight Zone.

Serling's opening narration is sampled in the song "Thieves! (Screamed the Ghost)" by American hip-hop duo Run the Jewels on their 2016 album, Run the Jewels 3.

DeVoe, Bill. (2008). Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0

Grams, Martin. (2008). The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0

Peak, Alexander S. (2006). "The Obsolete Man." LewRockwell.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
" The Obsolete Man" is episode 65 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone , starring Burgess Meredith as Romney Wordsworth. It originally aired on June 2, 1961, on CBS. The story was later adapted for The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas starring Jason Alexander as Wordsworth.

# data[].attributes.headline
Konstance and Aethon Understand the Limits of “Knowledge”

# data[].attributes.subject
Konstance and Aethon Understand the Limits of “Knowledge”

# data[].attributes.body
“How many times, as a little girl, was she assured that Sybil contained everything she could ever imagine, everything she would ever need?….But it wasn’t true” (424).

“He that knows all learning ever writ, knows only this — that he knows nothing” (445).

# data[].attributes.body
“Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we were young?” (475)

# data[].attributes.headline
"I know why those librarians read the old stories to you," Rex says.  "Because if it's told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap."

# data[].attributes.subject
"I know why those librarians read the old stories to you," Rex says.  "Because if it's told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap."

# data[].attributes.body
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline tells a story with a metaverse very much like the one in Cloud Cuckoo Land. What do you think about a Metaverse? These are two very different ways to portray that.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/25/1040669138/anthony-doerr-on-the-spark-that-inspired-cloud-cuckoo-land

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Anthony Doerr, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 with his last novel "All The Light We Cannot See," has a new novel that ties together stories from medieval Constantinople, a contemporary small-town library held at gunpoint by a teenage environmentalist, and a spaceship in the next century. Let's not delay in asking him to read a section.

ANTHONY DOERR: (Reading) On the fourth hill of the city we call Constantinople but which the inhabitants at the time simply called the city, across the street from the convent of Saint Teo Fanno (ph) the Empress, in the once-great embroidery house of Nicholas Kalaphates, lives an orphan named Anna. She does not speak until she's 3. Then it's all questions all the time. Anna and her older sister Maria sleep in a one-window cell barely large enough for a horsehair pallet. Between them, they own four copper coins, three ivory buttons, a patched wool blanket and an icon of Saint Koralia that may or may not have belonged to their mother. Anna has never tasted sweet cream, never eaten an orange, and never set foot outside the city walls. Before she turns 14, every person she knows will be either enslaved or dead.

SIMON: Boy. Anthony Doerr joins us from Boise, Idaho - his novel, "Cloud Cuckoo Land." Thanks so much for joining us.

DOERR: Oh, thanks so much for having me, Scott. And thanks so much for covering books in general. Forget about my book. It's so great that you cover books every weekend.

SIMON: Well, they're important to us and to a lot of people. What ties these stories together of Anna, Zeno, Omeir, Konstance and Seymour?

DOERR: Yeah, the novel has five protagonists living at different times, and they all, at various points in their lives, fall in love with this story, a fable called Cloud Cuckoo Land, a fable I invented, although the writer who I attribute it to did write books - named Antonius Diogenes. But all of his books are lost. And this - it's a silly fable. It's about a man who strives and hopes to be turned into a bird so he can fly to this paradise in the sky called Cloud Cuckoo Land. And especially in the English language, over the past two or three hundred years, it's come to mean a kind of a fanciful domain, a utopia. But to say you're living in Cloud Cuckoo Land says you're kind of living in an unrealistic paradise.

SIMON: Hmm. And I gather the spark for this novel came from what you learned about the limited life span - let me put it that way - of ancient texts.

DOERR: Yeah, my previous book, "All The Light We Cannot See," is set primarily in this town called Saint Malo in Brittany, France. And it's got medieval walls, about 2 kilometers of medieval walls around it. And every text I would read about the history of defensive walls would mention the walls of Constantinople, which I knew basically nothing about. They stood for 1,100 years. They were kind of the preeminent defensive technology in the whole world. And yet in high school, at least in my high school, we kind of got to the end of the fall of the Roman Empire and Western civilization that we just leapt to the Renaissance and skipped over a thousand years.

And so I just started reading about the walls of Constantinople and how, among all the different kinds of wealth they preserved, was also books and book culture. And, you know, when you're young, you think all the ancient texts that we have were all the ancient texts that were ever written. And so I'm just so interested in why certain things last and what we can do as people to be stewards of - both of human culture and, of course, of the natural world, too.

SIMON: You have said that you - in this age of people being encouraged to write about what they know and from their own perspectives, you wrote you want to write about what you don't know.

DOERR: Yeah, that's right. I like to kind of write into what I don't know. I think it puts you on edge and makes you a little more alert, and you don't take anything for granted. And I think we're here for such a short amount of time - if you're so lucky, seven or eight decades. And I just want to learn as much as I can. And the glory of a job like yours or a job like mine is you get to chase these different curiosities all the time and spend your day learning.

SIMON: I want to ask you about both my favorite character and a character it was harder to get warm about. So let me begin with Konstance. I love Konstance.

DOERR: Oh, thanks. She lives in the future. This was a huge leap for me. And she's in confined circumstances. I won't give too much away. But she is a very curious person. And she loves stories, and she loves plants. Her father is a gardener in this spaceship. They live on this little community inside of an interstellar spaceship. And he grows fresh plants. And Konstance loves stories. So you know, the very opening of the book, her father's telling her a story. And that story is Cloud Cuckoo Land. And then you have to kind of wait until the end of the book to understand the long journey that that story took from ancient times all the way to land in Konstance's lap.

SIMON: And this is a human being who has come to be in space. She - her feet have never touched the soil of Earth.

DOERR: That's right. Yeah, there are a few people on this ship who grew up and have some memories of Earth, but the bulk of them don't. And so Konstance is told at a young age, she's one of the bridge generations. Her job is to keep culture and humans alive until they can get to this place they're headed.

SIMON: By contrast, I got to tell you, hard to like Seymour. He's willing to kill innocent people for what he believes is a pure and compelling cause. And all that intervenes is chance. What am I missing about Seymour?

DOERR: Seymour is a very complicated soul. He's one of the other five protagonists. And Seymour is in love with the natural world, but he's also radicalized and possibly militant. He's so sensitive to the destruction of the natural world. And there are parts of me in Seymour that - there are times when grief turns into anger. And so I was just trying to process the way I feel about the lack of wild creatures now versus the way they were around when I was a kid. And the baseline that gets drawn when you're a kid for what wildness should be and then when you go out and see it now, just over four decades, and how that has changed sometimes can elicit really strong emotions in me. And so just trying to process that and also process what it means for young people growing up right now, and do they feel angry at older generations? So Seymour struggles with a lot of that.

SIMON: So many of your narrators are young people. Why?

DOERR: I think I have several answers. My main one is that as I get older, there's this encrustation that habit forms over your eyes. There's an old proverb - habits are cobwebs at first, cables at last. And as I get older, I'm trying and failing all the time to try to sever my connections to some of these habits so that I can keep seeing the world for this amazing, astonishing thing that it is. And so using young characters has been a way for me to do that.

I think young people, as everybody knows, see things. They see it a little more easily. They adopt new ideas and new technologies a little more nimbly. And so sometimes, by channeling my own consciousness for seven or eight hours a day at my desk through young people, it helps me rip away the scales that have formed over my eyes.

SIMON: I want to read the dedication. (Reading) For the librarians then, now and in the years to come.

Librarians have been important in your life.

DOERR: Absolutely. Each of the main characters in the novel has a relationship with a librarian and a broader definition of what a librarian can be, a custodian of books in some way. And yeah, and my mom was a science teacher. And understandably, she was tired at the end of the day sometimes and would use the library as a kind of de facto day care center for my brothers and me. And so, yeah, the shoutouts to the Mayfield Public Library in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Bainbridge Public Library - those were real havens. They were third places for me. They were a place where I felt completely safe. And just the miracle of them, there's something that - talk about peeling the scales off your eyes. Like, here's the work of all these masters available to you for free. And you can take them home.

SIMON: Anthony Doerr's new novel "Cloud Cuckoo Land" - thank you so much for being with us.

DOERR: Thanks so much for having me, Scott.

(SOUNDBITE OF CORY WONG'S "LILYPAD")

Copyright © 2021 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Anthony Doerr On The Spark That Inspired 'Cloud Cuckoo Land'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Anthony Doerr, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 with his last novel "All The Light We Cannot See," has a new novel that ties together stories from medieval Constantinople, a contemporary small-town library held at gunpoint by a teenage environmentalist, and a spaceship in the next century.

# data[].attributes.body
Trusty Friend
Tree and Moonlight
Athena

# data[].attributes.body
"Each of these books, child, is a door, a gateway to another place and time. You have your whole life in front of you, and for all of it, you'll have this. It will be enough, don't you think?"
p. 214

# data[].attributes.body
I found the Italians searching for ancient manuscripts fascinating. I just read Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, telling the true story of the discovery of an ancient text by an Italian book hunter in 1417. On The Nature of Things by Lucretius had been lost for almost a thousand years. Its discovery and circulation changed the thought of Galileo, Freud, Darwin, and Einstein.  https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Swerve/.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction * Winner of the National Book Award * New York Times Bestseller Renowned scholar Stephen Greenblatt brings the past to vivid life in what is at once a supreme work of scholarship, a literary page-turner, and a thrilling testament to the power of the written word., The Swerve, How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt, 9780393343403

# data[].attributes.headline
Theme (Inspired by Trish): All of the plots revolve around a creative or someone who is an outsider surrounded by a world of normies: Anna likes to read, but is surrounded by religious conservatives. Constance has imagination (and likes to "read") in a group of linear-logical thinkers. Omir has a physical disability and talks to animals. Seymour is neurodivergent. Xeno is gay (and likes to read). 

# data[].attributes.subject
Theme (Inspired by Trish): All of the plots revolve around a creative or someone who is an outsider surrounded by a world of normies: Anna likes to read, but is surrounded by religious conservatives. Constance has imagination (and likes to "read") in a group of linear-logical thinkers. Omir has a physical disability and talks to animals. Seymour is neurodivergent. Xeno is gay (and likes to read). 

# data[].attributes.body
Hey! What is this book saying about people who like to read??

# data[].attributes.body
“Fear of the thing,” Maher murmurs, more to himself than to Omeir, “will be more powerful than the thing itself.”

# data[].attributes.body
"A text--a book--is a resting place for the resting memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on." p. 51

# data[].attributes.body
Where did the ant come from?