PZ’s Podcast Double-Feature, Part One: Inside Looking Out

EPISODE 23 So I was standing in line at the Hess Station the other day and began to be critical of everyone else who was standing in line with me. I thought about lottery tickets and poor people, Jerry Springer, obesity, ‘Joe Six-Pack’, the few free individuals who were purchasing cigarettes, Little Debbie, Black Coffee (in Bed), the Spanish language, the excellent Mexican restaurant I frequent Mondays because of the Lunch Specials, the ads blaring from the gas pumps themselves, and so on and so forth.

Talk, Talk (“It’s My Life”); and What is the Meaning of Life? (I even got that far in my talk.)

This week’s podcast attempts to understand what’s going on with this inner dialogue.  Or is it monologue? It is actually a “conversation”, to use the dreaded word, and it’s between me, myself, and I.

The text for the podcast is the passage from By Love Possessed in which Arthur Winner is ‘interviewed’ by Mrs. Pratt. Mrs. Pratt is a fearsomely articulate Roman Catholic who, with her pleasant questions, has an agenda for which even the ‘man of reason’, Arthur Winner, is unprepared. We come in on his inward realization that she is beginning to stir some deep waters.  First, a yellow flight begins to flicker.  Then it turns to red, going quickly from ‘a whisper to a scream’ (Icicle Works).

In a second passage, Cozzens takes us from the squadrons of inward associations which go on in human beings during such difficult conversations, some of them unconscious; to the great questions of purpose and meaning, and God.  The second passage is taken from the climax of Guard of Honor.

“What Goes On (In your Heart)?  What Goes On (In your Mind)? It is tearing me apart.”

This is all in service of understanding better the divided man of Romans, Chapter Seven.

To listen, click here.