 Welcome to this special Zoom event coming to you from the A&U Meet the Author series and organised by the wonderful Colin Steele. Thanks for all you do for our great city, Colin. I'm Alex Sloan and grateful to be broadcasting you from Canberra, not a whole country, a country that was never ceded. And I'd like to acknowledge Indigenous people past and present and thank them for their ongoing custodianship of this land. It really is my pleasure to be speaking with fellow Canberra and writer and social researcher Hugh McKay about not just one, but two books, one a novel and one nonfiction. They're not written as a pair, but deliciously they have some crossover themes, particularly that question, who am I? What am I and what makes me? The nonfiction book The Inner Self is a book about the way we hide from the truth about ourselves both as individuals and as human beings, and it describes the psychological freedom of knowing who we really are and argues, Hugh beautifully argues that our capacity for love is the very essence of our humanity. In the novel A Question of Love, which is actually Hugh's eighth novel, it's what he calls a real book. This novel explores the state of a marriage between Richard and architect and Freya a violinist. And in some ways it's like a case study of some of the themes which Hugh has explored in The Inner Self, things like denial, projection, guilt, ambition, inhibitions. And it has a really unusual structure, adapting the musical theme and variations format to the written word. Hugh is a choral singer and he has very much looked to Bach's variations for this novel, which I think is a great beautiful thing to do a work of art. Hugh, OK, a joy to be speaking to you. And to you, Alex, thank you very much. Congratulations on both these books. As I said, they're not written as a pair. No, it's not written as a pair. In fact, the novel was drafted about four years ago, but because of the unusual structure which I was determined to get right, it took quite a long time to get it right. And by the time I was happy with it, I was on the brink of starting work on The Nonfiction, The Inner Self. And my rather astute publisher said, hang on, these two kind of fit together. Why don't we hold the novel back and bring it out at the same time as The Nonfiction, because it is a bit like a case study of a couple who are both hiding from themselves and from each other in some ways. So they literally came out on the same day, which was a brave decision, I hope, not courageous in the yes, minister. No, because in the novel, you go back again and again on the variations of a husband coming home, so the rich should come home to Freya's back. And you get the perspectives from both of them, from both Richard and Freya, which, I guess, what happens in any relationship. Yes, yes, and with each homecoming, with each variation on the theme, the idea is that we peel away a few more layers of the relationship and of the individuals, particularly Richard, who is the one who's more hidden at the beginning, and I hope less hidden by the end. But it's a bit like jazz. I mean, a jazz musician establishes the theme and then goes off into all these improvisations and then restates the theme at the end. So in fact, the last chapter of the book is almost identical, spot the difference, almost identical to the first chapter. But I hope by the time a reader gets to the last chapter, they're reading it in a completely different way because now they've got insights into both these individuals, some of their family, their professional lives and their relationship. I think you've really nailed it. It's really clever. I'll come back to it, but let's begin with go to the nonfiction, which is the inner self, the joy of discovering who we really are. You say you started writing this after writing the novel. Was there a catalyst for this nonfiction work? I'm not sure whether it's a catalyst. I mean, as usual with these things, it evolves in discussions that go on with my publisher, Ingrid Olson, continuously about other things that might be written. But I think maybe the catalyst was age. I think, I mean, I'm at the end of my active career as a social researcher and I've spent all my working life trying to understand and interpret and explain what's been going on in Australian society for very interesting 50 years of Australian society. But it's all been about society, external reality, identity in the sense of the outer shell that we show to each other. And I guess I felt before I was finished, I wanted to get right back to my core discipline of psychology and say, well, all that external stuff is true when people talk about their personal identity. It's true to say that that's an external construct that you can't discover your identity from looking inside yourself. Identity, as the word implies, is all about how we identify each other, how we tell the difference between Alex and Hugh. There are all kinds of ways of telling that, but our identity is about difference. And I thought, well, now what happens when we get to a point, which many people do around the middle of their lives, I mean, the classic midlife crisis is often about this very thing, of realising that how we appear to each other, that the kind of superficial differences between us, the external visible differences, conceal something else, that there is an inner sense of who I am, which is not always or easily revealed to other people and it doesn't always line up and this is what the middle half crisis is all about. It doesn't line up with my appearance. What was it all for? What's it all about? Most of us get to that question quite a few times, but I love it that, in fact, if there was someone that was a catalyst, it was an actor. I so relate to Emma Thompson. She's the same age as me and had a daughter at the same age as me. We both had a daughter at 40. So I so relate to this, but what's the story about Emma Thompson? Well, she's possibly my favourite actor and when she was on the brink of her 60th birthday, so it was a bit later than the normal trigger point for people, although it could be your 80th birthday, but on the brink of her 60th birthday, she suddenly had this sense of who am I really? She said she started taking away all the masks from her face, all the roles that she'd had, mother, wife, actor, public celebrity, all of those things. Take all that away and what are you left with, which led to the question, who am I really? Which she said, and I think many of our audience can probably relate to this, until that point she had always thought it was a boring question. Who am I really? Let's go on a weekend retreat to find ourselves. She didn't have any time for any of that, but suddenly she found it the most riveting question of all because she realised that all those masks she'd been wearing were not the whole story. An important part of the story, I'm not for a moment saying that the external stuff, the identity, the way we distinguish between you and me, is important. Of course, it's critically important in our social lives, but what Emma Thompson was describing, which is what I'm dealing with in the book, was there's something underneath all that, there's something behind all that, something that Robert Berezin, an American psychiatrist, that I've quoted a few times in the book, describes as the authentic being, and he says we all sooner or later have a sense of the authentic being, which is not always, in fact, often not the same as the image of ourselves we project. And as you talked about being 80, Emma Thompson at 60 started to say, actually, I find this question really fascinating. Does it take a milestone or even trauma, pain, retrenchment? Does it take something like that for us to kind of really knuckle down and go, okay, who are we? I mean, there are some young people who come to this because they seem wise beyond their years. You know, there are adolescents, there are young adults in their 20s who are exploring the idea of the self as different from the identity, the external social identity, but more typically, I think it does need a trigger. And that trigger is often a critical birthday. For some people, it's the birth of the first child. For some people it is a life-threatening illness or a relationship breakdown or a retrenchment. I think in 2020, for many people, the trigger has been the pandemic. I think one of the, I mean, the pandemic is a dreadful thing from a health point of view and from an economic point of view, but we can see that the upside is many of us have been forced into a position where a bit of introspection was about all we had left to do. An opportunity to do what we might not have done yet, which was use some of this time to reflect on what really matters to me, what's important, what kind of person do I really want to become and who is the real me? What's important, particularly, and I suppose the questions coming out of COVID-19 will be, what do we want the world to be? We are throwing up great big things. In the end, it doesn't matter how much money or how much fame, we're all having to stay at home and pull together, we hope, to get through this. I think it's probably come back to that we're a biological unit on this living planet. Maybe we start to think about that. That edges us very close to the core message of the book, in fact, Alex, because, yes, the coronavirus does not distinguish between the young and the old, the rich, the poor, the Buddhists, the Hindus, I mean, a pandemic. Yes, any disease is a reminder of the fact that we are a single species. Certainly, it affects different people in different ways, but invading us, there's no selection process that coronavirus is not triaging us and saying, oh, Alex looks like a juicy specimen to invade, not at all. It's humans. And that's the beginning of a serious realization about what it means to be me, what the inner self is about, when we go deeply into ourselves we discover something that seems a bit like a paradox that we discover something that is actually not unique like our externally constructed identity, but we discover our common humanity. We get this blinding insight. I think of it as our personal moment of enlightenment when it dawns on us that we are indivisibly part of a particular species with particular characteristics. You've chosen a quote from Danish philosopher Sorin Kierkegaard at the front of your book, Hugh. And the quote is, the deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than oneself. Yes, yes. Yes, I love that quote. Because I think many of us, until we come to this moment of enlightenment, this moment of insight about who we really are, do live with a peculiar kind of despair that was his word, it's a kind of despair that arises from being inauthentic. And I don't think until we come to a deeper understanding of the inner self, I don't think we understand where that despair comes from, which is why people often say, and I feel vaguely restless, and I feel there must be more to life than this. I don't know, I'm just out of sorts. I feel lethargic. People say I'm a bit hard to get to know my partner seems irritated with me a lot of the time. We don't understand where this comes from, but I think where it does come from is that we are not being authentically ourselves and other people pick that up. So this, and in this book, you then talk about the top 20 hiding places. Explain what these are. Yes, yes. I said when we go deeply inside ourselves and discover that we are essentially human, that we're part of a species, that's the biggest single, and I think the most inspiring truth about us as well. And I said that's not unique. But what is unique is how we respond to even a half-formed sense of that truth about ourselves. Now, in order to explain that, I need to take one step back. When you look at what it means to be human, what it means to belong to a social species, which is what humans are, where we're hopeless in isolation, we absolutely need families, neighbourhoods, groups, communities, workplace, colleagues, choirs, football teams. We are naturally sociable. That's our nature. Not all the time, we need solitude and isolation as well, but our character as a species is that we're social. And so our health, including our mental health, depends upon belonging to groups, communities, neighbourhoods, et cetera, that are functioning. How do they function? They function when enough of us understand that it's our duty as humans to promote social harmony. And how do we promote social harmony? There's a long answer to your question. Sorry, Alec. How do we promote social harmony? Well, we do it by treating each other always and without exception, kindly and respectfully, because we are fellow humans, because we are all part of this one thing called humanity. But that's a very demanding responsibility that's laid on us for being human. I'm born to love. I'm born to be compassionate. I'm born to be kind to you, whether I like you or not, whether I agree with your politics or not. You and I are in this together. We're humans. We're part of the same community. We've got to treat each other with the respect and the kindness, the compassion that's due to us. Now, of course, we find that sometimes we really need demand. So it's not surprising that we hide from it. And we find all kinds of clever ways of ducking our responsibility to be compassionate. In the book, I use the metaphor of a kind of personal solar system, where I say, think of yourself as being like a solar system. The sun at your center is love, is your capacity for compassion, your capacity to show this kind of kindness towards other people. And you have planets revolving around that sun, which are your distinct characteristics. And because they're rotating like real planets, our metaphorical planets are constantly providing the dark side as they rotate in and out of the light. Or if you want to put it more simply, any light cast shadows, including our capacity for love, which is the light at the center of our lives. So there are plenty of shadows on offer when we decide that we don't want to be kind. In fact, we feel quite indifferent towards something. We don't want to be tolerant because our prejudices are too much fun. We don't want to be selfless because at this moment, we've got some ambition that we want to satisfy. Don't want to treat this person with respect because I feel contempt towards them. All those things are very human responses, but they all deny our true nature. So in the book, I've listed what I'd rather trickily called the Top 20. I'm sure some readers will say, well, I could give you another 20, mate. But these are my Top 20, reflecting on all the people I've ever known and all the hiding I've ever done and watched other people do. But they are places where... And some of them seem like a strange thing to call a hiding place because some of them we get praised for. And some of them, of course, are not hiding places. Some people use busyness as a hiding place, but some people are just busy and there's nothing they can do about it. They wish they weren't so busy. There's no hiding place for them. Yeah, the busy one is great. It's a bit of a mantra in Australia. How are you going, busy? It's a pat on the back. If you're busy, you've got meaning. It's become a badge we wear. The switch is on or off. You're either busy or you're dead. But that's a classic example of... When you're busy, if you're using busyness as a hiding place, it's a very clever hiding place because people won't criticise you for being busy. They'll praise you for being busy. Don't disturb daddy. He's busy. Oh, I couldn't come to that. I'm busy. He's busy. I couldn't respond to your email immediately. I was a bit busy. Well, that's a great way to absolve ourselves of the responsibility from looking inside and seeing whether this is the authentic me or whether my busyness is a hiding place not just from my authentic self, but from other people around me. It's a great insulator. It's a great barrier to social cohesion. I've been thinking about this queue and I thought, yes, that the busy one is something. And if you do the barbecue test, you say you're busy. But if someone came back and went... If I go to the top of your list, which you've done it in alphabetical order, your top 20 hiding places, so addiction. So if I came back to the person and said, well, actually, I'm fighting addiction with alcohol. And I then went into a long kind of description of my addiction to alcohol. Whether or not my fellow Australian or fellow human being wants to hear that, that's the other thing. Do they really want us out of our hiding places? You've just gone on mute, thank you for a minute. No, they don't want to hear it, but we need to hear it ourselves. No one else wants to know about your hiding places, Alex. I was going to list them all off. This is private information. I've written to my smartphone here. It's a secret between you and your inner self. Although when I say no one wants to know about it, of course, our nearest and dearest often do know this about us. There are plenty of close relationships, partners, friends, colleagues, where people know that we're hiding. They're probably not prepared to say to us, I think you're hiding from yourself, but often other people pick it up even before we do and they understand that we're using some of these strategies like relentless ambition or an addiction or our busyness or our devotion to work or our nostalgia or our materialism. All of these are classic hiding places and it is sometimes obvious to other people that there's something a bit neurotic about this, but I'm actually, you know, I'm so nostalgic I seem to prefer the past to the present. So what am I hiding from? Well, the answer, of course, in that case, I think nostalgia is one of the slipperyest of the hiding places. The answer in that case is I'm probably hiding from the uncomfortable knowledge that I'm not truly myself now and I think that I preferred the self I used to be back in that era that I pretend to prefer the fifties. How wonderful were the fifties? I was there. Great, great, great time for women and little of colour. Time for domestic violence, crime, both fatalities, yeah, oh yes. I got to your hiding place fatalism. It is what it is. And this has been borne out. I mean, President Trump has just said that exact thing when asked, was pressed about their response, the US response to COVID-19. It is what it is. I think I'll scream the next time I hear that, but I won't have to wait long to scream because we're saying it all the time. It's the sort of contemporary version of case or ass or rat. Now, sometimes that's a very wise and sensible response to what's happening. If you've been diagnosed with a terminal illness and you know it's just a matter of months, it's very appropriate to say, well, it is what it is. If you've been retrenched, well, it is what it is. But that's only half the story, isn't it? We want to say, we want to hear, it is what it is and here's my response. It is what it is and here's what I'm going to do about it. I fear that it's become such a popular little saying that instead of it being the beginning of a statement about how I'm going to address the situation I'm in, it's just like throwing up your hands in a fatalistic way and say, well, there's nothing I can do about it beyond my control, go with the flow. That's the way it is. And that leads to fatalism, nihilism, and disengagement. I mean, if we lived by the it is what it is philosophy, we wouldn't be much use to the enrichment of our neighbourhood or the enlightenment of our kids or anything else. We'd just be people who shrug and say it is what it is. It's a very dangerous cliche. Another great one is victimhood. And I think particularly in times like this with conspiracy theories really getting around, looking around for someone to blame, they must be the problem. It's a huge one. It's a great discussion in your book. Yes. Well, victimhood is a classic hiding place. Now, again, I have to say it's not always a hiding place. I mean, some people have been so brutally victimised in one way or another that they do actually feel like victims because they are. And the only way for us to respond to them is with compassion and kindness and as much support as we can muster to try and help them heal the wounds. But when people play the victim, in the way that you've just described, when people think it's always someone else's fault, don't blame me. Look at the child. Look what terrible parents I had or look what a rotten boss I got or whatever it might be. When people play the victim, what they are doing is hiding from their responsibility to be compassionate, kind, loving people. I mean, victimhood, I think a good way to think about victimhood is an abdication of responsibility. But also, I think, sadly, rather pathetically in a way, it's a sign of something that runs very deep in all of us, which is our desire to be heard, our desire to be noticed, our desire to be taken seriously. That's perhaps the most profound of all the human desires. And the tragedy is that sometimes people feel they're not being taken seriously, they're not being acknowledged or noticed or listened to and only by playing the victim can they get a bit of attention or a bit of sympathy. So sometimes, as with all these hiding places, I mean, this is not a book that attacks people for hiding. It's a book that really reminds us that often other people hiding is something we can do something about that we can help them, ease them out of their hiding place, say, hey, you're hiding, but by reassuring them that we love them as they are, that they can be more authentic, more transparent and we're not going to die of fright. Because you've incorporated your beautiful social research that you've done over many, many years where you've met with people and you've heard their stories and you've got the story of Dennis and Sasha and Dennis's smartphone addiction, which did really ring a bell with me, Hugh. I'm afraid. But that is a fantastic one. They put a restriction on their children using their smartphone and then Sasha says, actually, Dennis, guess what? Same applies to you. He doesn't like it. He confiscates his phone for a week and it's a dramatic little story which has a very happy ending, I should assure, of potential readers. But of course, that's an example. Social technology has become a classic hiding place because something, when you turn that phone on, and some people, of course, never turn it off, but when you look at that phone, something is always happening. There is all, and that was Sasha's complaint about Dennis that she felt he had become inaccessible to her because he was hiding in his phone or in his emails. And he eventually saw the truth of what she was saying. But that is the temptation. When you've got something that's coming at you all the time, there's always something on that screen. There are always more messages and if there aren't more messages, there's something you can scroll through the history of messages or just check what someone's Facebook post would have. It's a place of constant activity and stimulation. And that, of course, is very dangerous when it comes to the inner journey, when it comes to keeping in touch with our inner life because that's a very external kind of activity and can act as a great insulator between us and the inner self. And I suppose, you know, to stay with Dennis's addiction to his phone, the online world social media, and that is where a lot of people turn to to be either comforted and there's a lot of beautiful things that you can get on social media. And then there is the outrage and the anger and the nastiness. Do you not start to despair? You remain quite optimistic, don't you, Hugh, about this time in our history and us realising what we're doing to ourselves? Yes. Yes, I do because I think the history of the humans, well, partly because of what I've been saying about our core quality, the essential human quality, which is compassion because the species needs that in order to survive. So we have a history of bringing ourselves back from the brink of chaos. When it looks as though we've lost our capacity for compassion, we find it again, whether that was due to wars or other terrible things we've done to each other. And I think this madness with information technology and particularly social media and particularly the dark side of social media, the whole trolling phenomenon and so on, I think that's so bad for us that it's eventually going to dawn on us that for us and for our children or our grandchildren, this is a deeply unhealthy expression of the darkness that's in all of us, but it's only there because the light cast the shadow and we better get back into the light. And we usually do, and I think we will again, I think we'll... I mean, there was a time when people thought reading was the work of the day. The printed word was the work of the people burying their nose in a book. They were disconnecting from their families and there was a time when television was regarded as something that was taking us away from our inner life and our relationships. Of course, that was true. There was a time. I was around when that happened, when television entered our lives and everyone went mad about television and invited neighbors in to come and watch I Love Lucy, et cetera. And, you know, television was a kind of magical thing that we worship rather in the way we're now worshiping information technology, but we moved beyond that. Television is now parked in the corner and it flickers away or, you know, we take out of it what we want rather as we take out of the fridge what we want. We don't think isn't the fridge a miracle, but the smartphone is still a miracle, but we'll incorporate it into saying alive in the next generation or two. But I suppose it's giving voice to the ugliest sides of us. You know, the things that would have perhaps been set out of the side of the mouth down at the pub or wherever actually get now sent. There is an example of the wonderful Magda Zhabansky doing the health promotion for, you know, we send our love to people in isolation in Melbourne, you know, if you're talking about how much we'd love to gather together and if you're joining us from Melbourne we're sending our love and we know the death toll there is terrible but the numbers are getting better. But Magda, making a beautiful health ad and then getting the most revolting trolling online, it makes you despair. Well, it makes you despair. Yes, that's that's incredibly, well, it's unkind for a start worse than worse than unkind. It's loathsome, but it's there and it's there because all of us have dark stuff within us. But as you say, the phenomenon of the internet and social media allows us to unleash this anonymously. It must be said on a very large stage. Now that that's bringing out the worst in us, but I think because it is so ugly because it is such a nasty demonstration of the dark stuff that's in all of us, we are eventually as a society going to find a way to control that to encourage people to put all that stuff back on the leash. If that was left uncontrolled life would become intolerable. I mean, people on the road sometimes shout at their fellow motorists the most revolting obscenities and abuse because they know they can't be hurt and they can't be identified but that actually run into them. So the internet social media has provided us with a place where we can both hide and shout. Now, I don't think that's the way of the future. I don't think the species is going to turn darker as a result of that because that isn't how the species... I mean, if we actually transported all of that into our actual social lives into the way we behave with our colleagues or in a cure at the coffee shop or at the checkout in the supermarket or something, life would become unsustainable. We would descend into chaos and that's not the kind of species we are. So it's a very, very ugly phase we're going through but I think it's a phase. And beautifully, Hugh, you have dipped into many of our great thinkers and philosophers throughout history for this book, The Inner Self. A friend of mine who's studying Foucault at the moment said, oh, are hiding places, is that a Christian concept? Well, not at all. I don't... I mean, I personally came out of the Christian tradition as a kid, as a young adult. I think this is an almost universal. There's a point in which I quote everyone from Marcus Aurelius to Iris Murdoch and Philip Larkin all saying roughly the same thing about the essence of humanity being love and the proposition that the dark side of us, the hiding places, are a response to the demands of love. I mean, that's... it feels like my take on everything I've learned over the years from observing people, from reading, thinking, etc. I don't think it's specifically Christian, although I suppose it's true that every religious tradition is, even though the religions become corrupted by their own institutional power and we know all sorts of horrible things are done in the name of religion. In fact, religion and science are two of the... one are bracketed together, one of the hiding places I mentioned on my list. But more fundamentally, the purpose of religion, the reason why religion has evolved through human history and the role of all the major religions is to promote compassion. That's what they try to do. They try to get us to live better, to live more kindly, more lovingly, etc. So it wouldn't be... the idea that when we hide from love or the demands of love, this can bring out the worst in us would not be any more Christian than it would be Buddhist or Muslim or Hindu. In my novel, and I noticed in an interview you did in the camera times, you go, this is what I call a real book. Which and this is your eighth novel. A question of love. I must say, I think just to put it in perspective, my novels have been comprehensively ignored by the reading couple. Not by me and I notice there's a crossover character in this book that comes from Telling the Dream. Yes. Link on the Hunter makes a return appearance. But why tell me about the importance of a novel for you and the importance of this novel. A question of love. This is the story of the marriage between Richard and Freya that we see looked at again and again and again to finally reveal what's going on. Look, I think this all starts in childhood. I was one of those people for whom books were a hiding place. I always have my nose in a book and that hasn't stopped. And I always preferred reading fiction and as I grew into my early adulthood and since I always felt that to get to the real truth about human nature, to get to understand how it really is for people and to try and explain why people behave the way they behave, even as a student of psychology I would say a psychology textbook will give you a framework for thinking about it but it won't be anything like as revealing as the great novels. Go to literature to find out what makes humans tick. I really believe that which is why I made that somewhat facetious remark in that interview about when my first book was published, a book called Reinventing Australia which was a kind of compendium of a whole lot of my research at that point. Didn't feel like a real book. I didn't feel like a genuine author. I just felt like it was another research report just multiplied up a bit and it wasn't until my first novel was published I thought now I'm actually a writer. But my readers disagree. They think that the nonfiction is what I do. But I have enormous faith in my own fiction. I mean I do take it very seriously and this latest book, The Question of Love, perhaps more seriously than any of its predecessors because this was when I decided I was just, I wasn't there's not going to be no car chasers, no murders, no skydiving. This was going to be a really intimate forensic exploration of what it is actually like when two people are in an intimate relationship. I mean it was kind of like a researcher's dream that I was going to be a fly on the wall in the home of Richard and Freya and I was going to know everything that was going on and of course all my professional life that's what I wished. But I interviewed someone at great length or I've listened to friends and neighbours in a group discussion. We got to the end of the conversation and I walked out and got into my car and driven home and thought that was fantastic but how much more is there? What's the rest of the story? I'm sure in your broadcasting career you must often have felt at the end of an interview but I need two more hours to get my lessons in this. So this book was really my attempt to say okay no holds barred, we're going to get right inside this. And one of the features of it which some readers may find slightly puzzling early on, I hope the point of it becomes clear as we go, is that Richard and Freya rather look as though they wouldn't work. So this was a partnership that would not be very successful. They're so different and he's so creative about so much of himself and his background and the death of his mother and all kinds of things that we only learn as we go along. And that's one of the things I've tried to demonstrate in this novel that no one who isn't actually inside a relationship can understand a relationship. That there are many marriages, partnerships where you say how on earth do they, how come they're still together after 30 years? It's a very improbable thing. And you can read this and say there's a lot of stuff about Richard I'd find too annoying. Why does Freya put up with this? And the answer about human nature and it's to do with the inner self. The answer about human nature is we often put up with all kinds of things because we do love someone. We probably love them and therefore become improbably tolerant. And that's what's so beautiful about this book. I mean he comes home and says every night when he walks in, home is the sailor home from the sea and the Hunter home from the hill. I looked it up and actually I heard Robert Louis Stevenson reading this requiem and I won't give away. I won't give it away here why he says this. But yeah, Freya has no idea why he's saying this. Yes, and that is actually an example of the fact that on one of his homecomings we get inside Freya's head when he's saying this and she's saying to herself don't say it. But I've actually always thought that as I read this book I've always thought that when tragically relationships break up and everyone has an opinion and I've always thought no one knows what's going on between them and it's no business and it's you can never know what's going on in a relationship. So anyway, by the end of the book for reasons we don't need to explore, Freya becomes so sympathetic to this nightly recital that she almost wants to join in. But characteristic of humans again she won't join in because she thinks that might embarrass Richard even at the end when they know so much, we know so much about both of them. There's still this tendency to be restrained and to hold things back. But I do think one of the well, one of the pleasures of writing that novel and I hope one of the pleasures of reading it is that getting such an intimate glimpse into someone else's relationship is very clarifying for our own. You say that underlying all our reasons from ourselves is our reluctance to face the question what will be required of me if I get to the core of who I am. It could be quite devastating once I get there. That's right. I think there are two things that restrain people from the inward journey. That's one of them that, you know, well, you know, when I find out what's going to happen next and of course what's going to happen next is I will realise that I need to become a more compassionate person in my dealings with everyone from a partner to a stranger on a bus. The other thing that inhibits people, I think and I've so often heard people say this that they think they'd rather not know what's inside. They fear the dark stuff as though there would only be dark stuff and as though they hadn't realised that it's only dark because there's light and there's contrast within all of us. But those are the two great inhibitors. Now Q, I think we've got a lot of questions. We've got quite a few questions and I want everyone to get their questions to Q while I'm talking to him and just let me have a look at them. What are the ways to discover your true self? Meditation? Asking others how they see us? Have you got any other suggestions? Yes, meditation is demonstrably a wonderful way of doing it. But I think introspection even without the formal structure of meditation I think running a movie in your head of the day and looking at yourself introspectively and saying now was that me? Did I let myself down? Did I let other people down? Was I less compassionate than I could have been? Just reflecting almost as a daily discipline on that is going to get us very quickly. Excuse me to the essence of who we are. Some people seek the advice of a counsellor or a psychotherapist to help them on this process. Have a drink there of good cold camera water. It comes naturally chilled, which we love. Alan Spira has got a couple here. I think what does he mean when he talks of the inner self? Is it just a more virtuous form of ourselves or does it transcend our identities? It certainly transcends our identity. It's interesting that the word virtuous has come up. I wouldn't have said that and yet of course compassion is associated with other virtues. We become courageous. We become tolerant. We become kind etc. Because we are driven by compassion as our core characteristic I certainly think once we are enlightened in the sense that I've been describing it once we have a sense of the inner self we are bound to be nicer people. I mean you can't make this discovery about yourself and easily set it aside. We do sometimes set it aside. Sometimes as with our morality sometimes we know what is the right thing to do but for various reasons we're not going to do it. We're going to do what we want to do which we know is not the right thing to do but it satisfies some other desire. Well it can be like that in being true to ourselves but I think once we've got a glimmer of understanding that the human core quality is compassion it's a bit hard to set it aside because we know what we're doing when we set it aside when we hide from it is we are actually diminishing ourselves we are becoming less truly human. A question from Natalie Hugh how do we resolve the dilemma that our external identities which are often based on the characteristics we share with specific groups sometimes block our ability to identify with all people who share our inner reality as a single human race. Yeah, what a wonderful question that really does go to the heart of the identity problem. I mean we've gone mad over identity it's an overworked thing now we're endlessly agonising about the Australian national identity and we've got identity politics with all kinds of groups wanting to assert their identity and their difference and their need for special treatment and so on. Some of those groups of course do need special treatment I'm not denying that but the obsession with identity masks our common humanity and that I think is the point of the question we can identify so strongly with a group whether a political, ethnic religious, professional or some other group that that seems as though that's who we really are and it's very easy then to think of people not in that group as other, alien, inferior all that sort of stuff go a little deeper recognise that anything to do with our identity even if it is our ethnicity even if it is our gender even if it is our core religious beliefs whatever it is that all the shell that we present to distinguish between us and others and behind it and beneath it there is a deeper human truth that has nothing to do with gender nothing to do with ethnicity I mean if you think of the soul that's a rather mystical way of thinking about this I mean self and soul almost interchangeable terms but it would be crazy to think of soul having a gender or soul having ethnicity we're talking about the essence of the human being and it does transcend a very good word that the questioner used it transcends all of that stuff and takes us to a more universal connection that's very nice here all that rubbish that we go through of gender wars and racism just as you say when it comes to soul a question from Ray which says hi Hugh I love your optimism the dark side of social media attacks and the dark side of humans generally in shouting at each other and holding firm on prejudices do you think we are now seeing the consequences of that unfold in the worst way currently in the United States they are ripping themselves apart we get some of that here too Ray what do you think Hugh yes we are seeing a very nasty example of it in the US but there are other countries around the world where we're also seeing some pretty nasty examples of it and as you say Alex let's not be too enthusiastic about pointing the finger let's acknowledge that in Australian society we've still got a great deal of work to do the dark side is expressed most confidently when it's expressed anonymously and it will be a wonderful thing and techno wiz will be able to develop the answer to this anonymity on the internet will give way to transparency so we'll know who you are and once that happens people will be much less inclined to foment all this hatred and prejudice and lies and rubbish conspiracy theories etc that's dark and our moral and cultural landscape yes America is in a terrible mess and it's not all Donald Trump's fault but lots of countries are in a terrible mess and lots of streets and neighbourhoods in Australia are in a mess though they're in less of a mess now than they were before the pandemic I think a lot of us have rediscovered that the people we live near are a very particular responsibility for our reservoir of compassion when we saw a young 26-year-old woman of colour chased out of Australia but daring to have an opinion which she took down but the story of Gassman is one of our great disgraces it breaks my heart what happened to that beautiful incredibly smart Australian was chased out Amy Chan one other thing about all this hatred and dark stuff one of the favourite human hiding places is projection and projection is where we project stuff in us negative nasty stuff on to other people and a lot of what goes on in the darkness of social media is people projecting blaming others criticising attacking others for things that they half obviously know are in themselves Amy has asked the question the writer Nais Nien once said there are many ways to be free one of them is to transcend reality by imagination as I try to do could novel writing be another example of creating a hiding place for oneself 10 out of 10 Amy of course it could so isn't it good that I write both most of what I write is non-fiction look I'm absolutely prepared to admit that I love getting off into the business of writing fiction it is the work of imagination and to some extent imagination fantasy is an escape from reality but it can also help to clarify reality as long as we remember to come back actually Alan is back asking what your favourite and most influential novels have you got a sort of when you say they reveal you find novels and I agree with you they reveal so much about the human character for me it's a really long list of all the novels of Iris Murdoch all the novels of Anthony Powell all the novels of George Ward most of the novels of Julian Barnes plus some of the some of the greats from the past many of the novels of Charles Dickens I'm sure the case that novels that survive novels that become classics become classics because we see ourselves in the mirror that they hold up to human existence I remember and I think it's actually 25 years since Colin Firth burst and dived into the pond as Mr Darcy but I remember a friend who by the way does not occur in the novel and he dived onto a mattress apparently but anyway I remember a friend going he was a male going I can't watch this this is too emotionally violent for me in terms of pride and prejudice and the kind of observations about human nature and it's true I mean I thought later that's actually you know you can crush it I should have outed the novels of Jane Austen because there's a long, long list Tanya we work we work on a house we work on the garden we work out but it's seen as self-indulgent if we work on our inner cells why is it not given more priority it's a great question it is working on the house working on the garden working on all that stuff that's all identity building it's all about the shell choosing our job choosing our partner choosing what sort of car we'll drive how we'll talk what we'll wear what sort of garden we'll have all identity building and mostly the first half of our lives is devoted to that I don't think that going inside triggered by the sort of thing we were discussing earlier is hard work at all I think once we begin to introspect about what it means to be human about what kind of person I would like to be in the world what I'd like people to say about me after I've gone it's pretty easy to see where that's going to lead us the hard work of course comes in trying to deal with our tendency to hide from that that's the challenge finding the inner self I think is not hard living in a way that's true to it that is the hard work it's work that's typically associated with the second half of life when people get better and better at it it's one reason why there's this famous you curve about life satisfaction which shows generally speaking we reach the point of least life satisfaction around about our 40s and middle years and then it climbs and climbs and climbs by the time you're 80 you're feeling a lot more satisfaction than when you were 40 and I think that's typically to do with the fact that you have paid less attention to the outer shell become more closely in touch with who you are and be more prepared to live as if that is who you are I think this might be the final question and it's from Tanita Hugh, how do we reconcile the tension between finding true to our inner compassionate self and the constant cultural pressure to strive, compete and improve ourselves a pressure that tends to accompany a belief that we are less than and we should and could be hmm well it is a wonderful question to end on and that's that goes right to the core of this point we were just discussing that all the social pressures are about burnishing our outer shell it's all about buy this stuff go on this holiday even write this book do something to distinguish yourself to make your mark to let people identify you at some point and I do think that age is a big factor in this I do think it becomes easier and easier as we move beyond our 40s into our 50s and 60s to say I see through all that stuff I don't have to I'm not going to be charged by the car I drive I'm not going to be I can remember when we got a new kitchen and we expected everyone to think more warmly of us because we had a new kitchen admiring my new kitchen is like admiring me complete nonsense eventually we realise it's nonsense but it does take a long time Carl Jung said up till then it's just research and I think there's some truth in that too Kim McKay of course I'd like to talk to you a lot longer but we know it's hard on zoom and we thank you so much if you've tuned in this evening so what I want you to do is go and buy many many multiple copies of A Question of Love and The Inner Self and you take it instead of wine I'm sorry for people in Melbourne just order it online multiple copies and think this is what I'm going to take when we're finally out of lockdown because it will happen but Hugh congratulations I think you just keep getting better and better actually so I look forward to the next books congratulations thank you very much for hosting this I really appreciate it oh no I value our friendship enormously my thanks to Pam Lurandis for basically bringing this all together and getting Hugh and I on to zoom so thanks so much Pam and to Colin Steele and the ANU for running this event and really contributing to our cultural life in such a big way by talking about The Inner Self our hiding places talking about reading about books I say with great intent go safely and with love look for that love the one we're all capable of the one we're all born to do and don't be frightened of it I think that's my message from Hugh McCay Hugh did you want to sign off in any way no I endorse that 100% one thing I didn't say but perhaps I do need to say as a footnote to that comment Alex is that the sort of compassion that characterizes human beings has actually got nothing to do with emotion we don't have to feel love, affection towards someone in order to treat them kindly and respectfully we do that just because they're humans not because we like them Hugh McCay and the books are called The Inner Self and A Question of Love one novel, one nonfiction you will enjoy them immensely thanks so much everyone enjoy your evening