#485： Why Visiting Dark Places Is Good for the Soul
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Summary
When you go on vacation, you probably travel to places where great human suffering and tragedy has occurred. In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, I speak with crime fiction writer, Thomas Cook, about the importance of visiting dark places and the lessons he learned from them.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast when you go on
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vacation you probably travel to places help you feel good relax and have fun my guest today well
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he likes to visit places where great human suffering and tragedy has occurred his name
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is thomas cook he's a writer of crime fiction but in his latest book even darkness sings he takes
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readers with him on the real family trips he's taken to see humanity's darkest places including
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auschwitz they're done and hiroshima we begin our conversation discussing how thomas and his wife got
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the idea to visit dark places how all dark places are different yet connected and how darkness has
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unique power to offer insight and even hope and optimism tom then takes us on a tour of some of
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the tragic places he's visited and the lessons he learned from them we end our conversation discussing
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the importance of treating dark places with somber reverence and how a personal dark place was
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created for tom while he was writing this book after the show's over check out our show notes at
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aom.is darkness thomas joins me now via clearcast.io
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all right thomas cook welcome to the show thank you very much for having me
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so you wrote a book even darkness sings it's about your travels now what's interesting about
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your travels a lot of people you know they pick themes for the travel and i've known folks that
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visited world war ii sites civil war sites homes of famous authors places where hemingway lived
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you and your late wife decided to visit dark places now before we get there how did you guys define
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a dark place and what drew you to visiting those types of places well i think that we had i i knew
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especially uh given the fact that uh it occurred to me at one point that this would be a a book was
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that we had to define dark places in various various ways you couldn't just go from one concentration
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camp or one battlefield to another you had to define the kinds of darkness that exist in life
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and so of course we you had the celebrity sites you might call them of dark places like auschwitz and
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robinsbrook and verdun but i also wanted to visit places where there had been for example a romantic
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tragedy or a medical tragedy or a natural disaster or a political tragedy that did not involve necessarily
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atrocities but was a tragedy so i just came up with various kinds of places that i that i wanted to go
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and um in a sense also just in my travels they began to define themselves and i and these places
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sort of began to speak to me in in tragic ways that you wouldn't necessarily notice if you didn't sort
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of have that broader understanding of what human tragedy is in your mind and i mean what drew you to
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that i mean did you visit like there was a dark place you visited and you saw something there that
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maybe i want to go see more of this i think it was really the moment that it really
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began to to occur to me the value of all of this was when i was uh in italy with my daughter we had
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been living in spain and we rented a car every summer she went to the american school of madrid she
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was 12 years old and we would rent a car every summer she had six years off and travel all around
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europe we also went to north africa and other places like that we were in um cosenza a little town
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dreary actually little town in on the on in italy and we'd been driving all day and she was 12 years
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old and we'd been going to museums what she called broken pot museums and we were on this river and
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susan had its incredible ability to take a 10 minute nap and be completely refreshed so during that time
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justine and i would go out and we would play a game of of hearts or rummy or something like that
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but we were on this river and i could tell you it was the end of the day it was extremely hot in italy
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she was very tired and we were looking at the river the the little busetto river and i said you know this
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is where alaric died and she didn't know who alaric was but she asked and i said well he was the last
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pagan emperor of rome and that sort of sparked a little bit of interest not much but a little
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and then i said you know when he died here they wanted to keep his birthplace secret so they rerouted
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the river they had hundreds of slaves who rerouted the river and then they buried him in that river
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and then they brought the river back to the channel all of which is true uh so that no one would ever know
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where he he was buried and that sparked yet more interest and i could see the river looked a little
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bit different to her now something had happened and then i said and when it was over they slaughtered
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all of the slaves who had buried alaric so that none of them could tell where he lay
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and i saw something different come into her eyes suddenly this was a place something very very dark
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had happened and there was just more a kind of intellectual passion for that place that wouldn't
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have been there otherwise and it struck me then in a child 12 years old that this was this was a good
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thing to do a place to not just disneyland or six flags or to take your kids to places like this from
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time to time and i always say brett that you know it's fine to take your kids to disneyland and six
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flags and other places i've done that we went to disneyland we went to great fairs we've gone to
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amusement parks in barcelona throughout the world but from time to time you know there's you might
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want to go to a dark place and have a different kind of conversation with your children yeah and
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what's interesting in these dark places they what the place you went to you know human atrocities
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occurred tragedies occurred but what you the theme that comes up over and over again in your book is that
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these dark places can can bring light they can sing they can give insights about life but they
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they do so obliquely it's like it's not direct right it's not like it you get hammered in the head
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with it but it happens maybe a few days or months after you leave the place so i'm curious like over the
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time you've been doing this what are some of the sort of general themes or life lessons you've gotten
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from visiting these places i think you know i say in the book at one point that the dark places speak
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to each other and in a way it works like if you go to one dark place after another certain lessons
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occur that really are germane to all of those lessons all of those places and come out of that
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experience and so that the lessons are compounded and i remember particularly at auschwitz we had gone
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there and spent the day there and it was very dark and there was nothing really about auschwitz that
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you could find in any really redeeming way so you really don't look for that although there were there
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were acts of great courage and at auschwitz and great goodness that happened there as well in it among
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individuals but what happened was i left auschwitz was that i remembered the trip there and we had left
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budapest that morning believing that we would be in krakow by you know by four in the afternoon but
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the roads were very bad the signage was awful i would have to get out and talk to these german bus
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drivers in these big buses and you know my german isn't very good and their directions were always
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ember direct to ember directed which means straight on but then you'd get to a fork in the road okay
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straight on which way like you know left or right so as we got sort of bumblingly closer to the polish
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border it was getting very very late it was after midnight and we finally reached the polish border
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at around three in the morning and these three guards came out and i'll i'll say now it was a little
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suspicious because they were all wearing different parts of their of a single uniform i mean this was
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really right glasnost had not approached this place it was right out of uh john le carré and they began
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to talk to me in polish and they wouldn't let me in poland even though i had you know passports and
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everything like that they kept asking for something and i didn't speak a word of polish but they kept
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asking and they kept asking and i thought okay i'm i'm gonna have to turn back and go to budapest they're
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not gonna let me in at this border crossing and then all of a sudden this i heard this voice i it was
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absolutely angelic this voice said may i be of assistance sir and i turned around and there was
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a guy named sigi who had lived in the united states but his wife wanted to come back to krakow they were
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on their way to krakow as well he negotiated everything for me everything for me and got me
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across the border and i thought that was just an act of human kindness that was absolutely wonderful
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but that man would not have been able to do that if i were a jew fleeing poland in in 1944 or 1943 he
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would not have been able to do that and the lesson there was one that really before tyranny comes that's
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when you act against it because once tyranny is in place it's it takes superhuman courage to oppose it
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you can oppose hitler before he's a complete autocrat but you can't oppose him after unless
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you are truly truly truly courageous and so i guess my lesson there was that it's sort of a moral
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responsibility to be wise to know that you have to begin to foresee what's liable to happen what are
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the consequences of certain kinds of political decisions and to look forward as much as you can
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and that happened again and again to me in places that if people could have just taken a moment and
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thought and tried to really figure out what the consequences of their actions are going to be
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and we're not perfect in that you know obviously you know the rear mirror is perfectly clear but at least
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try and then maybe we can prevent some of these things in the future yeah i mean it's maybe it's how
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somewhat one way dark places you know are connected and they talk to each other because a lot of these
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things and these tragedies happen you know people really didn't see it coming or they weren't paying
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attention that's exactly right i mean the austrians voted for on schluz we keep forgetting that hitler
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was elected by the german people and it's when you see the steps toward authoritarianism before
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authority is has completely instilled itself embedded in itself in the political process then you have a
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chance to stop it but you have to really look ahead you know there's a wonderful letter to lenin i've
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often quoted it to to my more left-wing friends and it is a letter that said if a government is
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dominated by one party it will finally be dominated by one committee within that party and it will
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finally be dominated by one man within that committee and that was a letter written of warning
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written by rosa luxembourg to nikolai lenin before the communist revolution became stalinist you might
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say right well let's let's talk let's take a little visit of some of these dark places you you visited
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throughout you know writing this book and throughout your life i loved i mean you start off with this
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really poignant scene with the with the book it's the spanish civil war colonel jose moscarado he was
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the leader of the nationalist army he was in a fort called alcazar and he gets a phone call and you went to
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go visit this fort and you got to see this phone yes what happened during that phone call that he that
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he got this was the alcazar which is really the military academy the west point of spain and if
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you go to toleto toleto is built on a hill and the alcazar just dominates that hill and he was in
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charge of the of the fascist forces franco's forces there the republicans had captured his son who was 17
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years old i believe named louis and they called him and they told him that they had his son and that
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if he did not surrender the alcazar they would execute him so on the pretext of wanting to make
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sure that this was his son colonel moscato asked to speak to louis and louis came on the phone and they
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talked for a little while and then colonel moscato said to him prepare to die my son and when i saw that
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i saw it in a film called to die in madrid a documentary about the spanish civil war i just
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had this incredible impulse to see that phone to go to the alcazar and see that phone it took me years
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to do it i was already married by then so i went with susan and i went with justine but i did see
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that phone and they still have it there it's part of the uh and the room is completely preserved
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except they've now put up portraits of louis and colonel moscato but it has entered sort of the
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legend of spanish civil war and it makes you what happened there to me was that i went out on the
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the esplanade outside that and for some reason began to think of my own father and that's what
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really gave me the notion that these dark places sort of unmoor you and they let you think about your
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own life and it's a really intimate kind of moment in which you share with yourself your own past
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and the past of mankind and all of that sort of is comes together in those moments if you just let
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your mind go free what insights about your father did that that experience give you well my father and
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i did not have a lot in common he was a very sweet man a very very kind man but we we did not have
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a lot in common but we did have one thing in common he'd like to go to weird places he liked
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to go where there were floods where a tornado we were in the south i was i was brought up in the
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appalachian foothills of port pain alabama and we would go to places where tornadoes had ripped up a
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barn or or unearthed a tree or they'd have these sleet storms and he would love to go out and see the
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sleet storms where the power lines have been torn down he was just tremendously attracted to the
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to the to the sort of the topsy-turvy the things that looked weird and i realized that i probably
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although i didn't think that i had a lot in common with him i had that in common with him and it was
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all it was huge it was a it was a very deep kind of connection that we had he would always take me
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with him and we had our we had our greatest moments doing that when i was growing up as a little boy
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and i suddenly realized that you know how much he meant to me because i had not thought of my father
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you know very much other than ordinary ways in a long time and suddenly though at the alcazar he
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really came roaring back into my my heart now i love how you said that visiting places unmoor you
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like they disorient you it sounds almost like it's they're like physical tragedies right like
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geographic tragedies like the like the tragic place from ancient greece where they did the same
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thing that sort of disoriented you got you thinking about things you experienced a catharsis and it
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helped you think about things that you probably otherwise weren't wouldn't think about that's
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exactly right it because you're not distracted by rides and attractions and all that sort of thing
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and your mind is really can become a little bit unfocused even on even on the place that you're at
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it allows you just simply to make connections with your own life so that history connects with you
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and your most intimate aspects of your life and it's an incredibly powerful experience sometimes
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we're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors and now back to the show as you
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said earlier you know you visited some of the really big places like auschwitz and hiroshima but some
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of my favorite sections were like on the places that at first blush didn't they don't look like dark
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places and one of those is a place called lourdes in france tell us about that and why is it a dark
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place lourdes is uh is in the pyrenees and it's a very famous place of catholic pilgrimage it's based
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on uh this young woman bernadette who really didn't even speak french because that part of at that time
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that part of france was really sort of not really france it was nationally but the people there really
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didn't speak french she saw a vision in the grotto there a little rock cave it was very very poor
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area and over time this grotto became a very famous place of of pilgrimage if you go there now
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and i was again there recently it's very honky-tonk i mean it's a it's a huge tourist attraction they
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bring in big buses and all that sort of thing because it is so famous lourdes and we spent the day
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there and the night and it was it was not a it was it was a dark place only because it seemed to me
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that they had commercialized an element of faith in an extremely garish way i mean they have statues
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of mary that are really a a water bottle where you you knock off her crown and pour water in it i mean
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it's very very vulgar with almost like it was an elvis presley shrine i mean it's really it's really
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awful and we were about to leave and then the nights the night procession began and it was so
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extraordinarily beautiful that it just simply washed away all of the ill feeling and disappointment that
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i had at lourdes and my wife and my daughter as well because you use the procession is of people who
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are who are deathly ill and you see wheelchairs and you see people in hospital beds and they're being
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pushed by family members or sometimes by hospital staff or by nuns and in many cases you can tell
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by the threadbare clothes they wear that this trip to lourdes is the only trip they've ever they've ever
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made and they've made they've made it there because they are in desperate straits and i saw that a dark
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place can really overcome almost everything that's done to make it less dark it can overcome even the
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commercialism around it and that made that made lourdes very powerful and in its darkness very
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bright another interesting thing that you do throughout the book is you have these little
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snapshots they're little vignettes of dark places popping up almost spontaneously during your travels
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where you least expected it for example you you found a dark place unexpectedly while you were in
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fiji which is you know that's a prime vacation destination for most westerners what was what
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dark place did you find there and what insight did you get from it well you're right that was
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completely unexpected i mean uh susan and i and justine we all we always believed in traveling on
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public transportation we could not in tourist buses we never went on tours or anything like that
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and uh there's a wonderful line from a travel writer that says life is best seen in a third
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class carriage and i found that that's that really is true so we were taking a bus into i believe the
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town was called nadi a little town in fiji because fiji is basically divided between the way people
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actually live in the towns and villages and these huge resorts and for the tourists the buses just take
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you from resort to resort you don't ever have to really go into the real fiji but we were on the bus
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going in there and um this man sat down next to me very very friendly man he was very very large
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he had lived in england and he said to me did you know that fijians are good bouncers and i said no he
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said oh yes they employ us a great deal in in britain and other places because we're very big but we're
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very nice and we had a really nice conversation he was a very lovely man and i was thinking of the book
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at that time and i said what do you think's the worst thing that ever the worst thing that ever
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happened to fiji and he said the british leaving because they would never have allowed fiji to become
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the way it is and fiji is in fact a police state and i thought how sad to be a person who lives in an
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island indigenously this is his island and to think that it takes foreigners to impose kind of the rule
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of law upon you that may or may not be true but that's how he felt and i thought that was extremely
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extremely sad i mean did you see any hope there with these guys or was it just sort of just man this is
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really sad it just kind of speaks to the human condition that sometimes life you you just you're
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born in the wrong country or you're born in the wrong time whatever well i i don't think there's
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any question but that people are you're just simply born in the wrong in the wrong time and history just
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rolls over you there's an incredibly poignant scene that happened at a killing field in uh in poland
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and it's actually photographed you can actually see the video but i was reading about it in walking
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fest book a biography of hitler and they had dug a ditch they had dug a great a big ditch and they
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were running people naked they had taken off all their clothes they were running people naked
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into that ditch to be shot and they would run the one group in and the other group would run over that
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group and he talks about a girl who is running naked they toward that ditch and as she runs she points
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to herself and she says 17 17 meaning that she was going to die at 17 and that was the most poignant
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thing she could say at that moment and that for me has always been the symbol of history just simply
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rolling over you and there's nothing you can do about it man that's haunting it's really really haunting
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so another place you visited was the world over one place verdun in france can you describe the
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darkness that took place there verdun is generally regarded as the worst battlefield experience ever
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ever experienced by soldiers uh anywhere it was called the the meat grinder it was designed to be
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that in a christmas memo a general had said that in order to distract the french and bleed them away
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from the the western front they would create a kind of eastern front and bleed the french
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army white that's exactly what was said in that christmas memo and so it was always designed to be an
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absolute killing field and when you go there you really see just what a killing field it is it's
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one of the places where the landscape has actually taken on what happened there because most of the
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most of the wounds that were suffered by soldiers during verdun they were concussion wounds they were
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not bullet wounds they were or bayonet wounds they were concussion wounds by mortars and high explosives
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so they were literally blown to bits so the the mortars would hit and they would blow up the earth
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and pile the earth up and and then blow up another one in pit and and blow it up so when you look at
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the landscape around verdun it's very very jagged because some trees since then have grown up at the
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bottom of those pits while others have grown up at the top of those pits and so the whole landscape
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is sort of jagged and what you see is a part of the earth that has simply not recovered from from what
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happened there and the slaughter was really quite quite unbelievable i mean i i remember reading that
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the average lifespan of a first lieutenant there was about six weeks of another soldier about a month
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but the trip to verdun really also sort of gave me a metaphor for what i was doing because
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we left paris heading for verdun in a in a rented car and you go down what the french call the sacre
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voire which is the the sacred road the road down which the flower french youth went in trains and buses and
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even taxi cabs to the battle side of verdun it's now a highway and french highways are very very good
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they're very very clean they're very well maintained and you just zip down that that highway and all the
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way you see these huge posters for disneyland because disneyland france is the most visited place
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in france it is extremely popular and you see all of these people going to disneyland and you see these
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children and these teenagers and i thought yes it's you know to repeat it yes it's fine to take your kids
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there but if you go just a little further down the road after that or next year you get to verdun
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and you can have a wonderful experience there with your family as well by walking the battlefield by
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talking about the war by seeing the films by giving them a sense of what other people suffered who didn't
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have the chance to go to disneyland and never will but you also speaking of young people you had an
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insight there while you were in your visit because there was a group of german high schoolers taking
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a tour with their school and they were kind of just joking and jostling around like they didn't
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recognize the dark place for what it is did did that happen a lot during your travel like you'd go
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someplace where something really terrible happened and people just they didn't really didn't really
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connect with that well in some places yes and in some places no some places have taken a step
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in in creating a more somber atmosphere than just simply letting people wander about for example in
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the killing fields there's a sign before you enter in cambodia there's a sign before you enter the
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killing fields that tells you that you should not smoke you should not play radios you should not
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let's get your phone in other words you should you should take a moment and be be somber because
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this is a moment of great a place of great tragedy at auschwitz there's a huge sign right before you
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you know that famous arbat machra that you that you go under there's a very big sign in in many
00:26:29.360
languages that says that this is a place of great suffering you should comport yourself in such a way
00:26:35.160
as to respect the suffering that was that was inflicted upon and uh people here
00:26:40.720
and that does actually work and i also noticed that the holocaust museum in washington the light is
00:26:48.340
very low it's not a brightly lit museum and that adds also to a somberness so when places really do
00:26:55.980
attempt to give you a sense of the somberness of it it it can it can really be effective at verdun
00:27:04.040
there's not much of an attempt to do that and they have a you know a little shop where you can buy
00:27:09.340
things and you know touristy things bracelets with your name on it and that sort of thing
00:27:14.020
but verdun is very large so people are all all over and this group of german kids they were just
00:27:19.520
jumping around and leaping around they looked like they were like 14 or 15 years old and i was because i
00:27:25.860
got sort of irritated about it it just it sort of seemed to me they shouldn't be behaving in this way
00:27:31.020
and there's a very large uh ossuary there and this is where they keep the bones of the fallen
00:27:37.140
of their done and as we were leaving i could look up at the tower and everything and see those bones
00:27:43.040
and i and the and the german bus was pulling away with all the kids in it and they were frolicking
00:27:47.580
and everything and i said to my wife you know really this was wasted on them wasted on them
00:27:53.100
and she said well i think you may be a little bit more intolerant than the people whose bones are in
00:27:58.680
the tower because if they could look down and see these kids frolicking and having a good time
00:28:04.180
they might think well i'm glad they can i'm glad they have their lives we don't and she was probably
00:28:12.960
right yeah i mean some i'm sure some of those bones in there were they were probably 14 15 years old
00:28:18.080
right they'd probably they'd rather be those kids they do the same thing and speaking of going to
00:28:23.920
that point of of places trying to make it somber and you know let people know this is a place where
00:28:30.620
tragedy occurred you also talk about how they can go too far and it can actually backfire and like
00:28:35.960
sort of eliminate the the feeling and of i guess reverence is the right word or respect i think
00:28:42.340
there's one example you gave like there's some medieval castle where they're you know they depicted
00:28:45.960
you know people getting boiled alive and it's sort of i don't know they were trying to like really
00:28:51.520
hit on the idea that something bad happened here but it actually backfired and people kind of thought
00:28:54.800
it was funny yeah i you're there were there are a few places that really really are bad they are not
00:29:02.020
they are not good at evoking even remotely what happened there i think chief among those is is the is
00:29:08.740
the tower of london which is a very dark place you know people have starved to death there the
00:29:14.360
executions that were carried out there were awful and and thomas macaulay actually called the royal
00:29:19.580
chapel inside the tower of london the saddest place on earth so he certainly must have felt something
00:29:25.840
very very deep there but when you go there now it's you know they're selling beef everybody's in a
00:29:31.340
beef eater costume they're selling candy they're selling tea they're they have these big glass boots
00:29:37.640
at extravagant prices you you go into the tower of london and they've turned it into a sort of prison
00:29:43.360
disneyland another place where they they fail is phokok which is a prison in an island in the
00:29:51.020
bay of thailand which was a south vietnamese prison where north vietnamese soldiers were kept
00:29:56.900
and they have these sort of paper mache figures that are carrying out torture and everything and
00:30:02.680
and they have the lion the tiger cages and they put paper mache figures in their life-size paper mache
00:30:09.820
figures and what you see is people putting cigarettes in those people's mouths and in the paper mache
00:30:15.920
figures mouths frolicking around joking they had a human-sized sort of frying pan and they have
00:30:24.100
soldiers putting a man in that frying pan and you know some people near most of them were vietnamese i
00:30:30.600
didn't see any uh westerners there you know they're gonna wow ow ow ow ow ow ow and just sort of joking
00:30:36.820
around and stuff like that so places have to be aware of how of how they display themselves and if
00:30:43.880
they are going to evoke sort of frivolity and human beings rather than somberness then they should they
00:30:50.100
should find another way to display it it's quite different in tol sling in cambodia which is the
00:30:55.500
torture center there during the kama rouge and there they've just left it exactly as it is with the
00:31:03.180
torture implements out with the wire beds out and you walk from room to room and it's it's very very
00:31:10.760
somber and you really get a sense of what people suffered there which you don't get at full cock
00:31:15.580
when you were doing these travels and you know some places you visited people would ask you like
00:31:21.540
why are you here right like i mean did when you told people like what you were doing like what were
00:31:26.400
the responses when you told them i'm visiting dark places well i mean i i think often what happened
00:31:33.660
which surprised me was that they suddenly told me about a dark place they had gone and i could tell
00:31:41.760
that they were very moved by that place but they were not inclined necessarily to go to to another one
00:31:49.360
and what i was trying to teach is that you know you really can go from one to the other not in sort
00:31:56.460
of some sort of parade through the history of horror but as a moving experience for your own emotional
00:32:02.940
emotional life and i could tell that from time to time people really did respond to that in in the
00:32:10.880
very individual ways of the things that they had seen and the places they had been in the course of
00:32:15.920
writing this book your wife died of cancer did that create a personal dark place for you like a
00:32:21.100
location where like that's now a dark place well i think yes of when you know i recently went into the
00:32:28.440
room where she died because the apartment was being sold and and of course you you feel that but i think
00:32:35.540
her death she died at 60 at 62 of metastatic breast cancer and i guess what that taught me was that
00:32:44.320
sort of the task of life is to is to outrun regret and it's hard to do but that is that is our task
00:32:52.520
and susan's great love was travel and even though at 62 dying i'm sure she felt like cheated out of a
00:33:02.080
great deal of life she never got to see her grandchildren for example which is was very very sad to me
00:33:08.100
but we had done so much and since her great love was travel and she had done so much of it
00:33:14.460
i thought how much more she would have felt cheated if we had waited to when we retired or
00:33:21.520
waited when it would have been easier or waited when we had more money how much more cheated she would
00:33:28.280
have felt had we not done so many of the things that we really really wanted to do and since then i you
00:33:35.080
know i mean i'm older now i'm 71 years old and so you know i've seen people who have waited to retire
00:33:40.660
and then all of a sudden someone has a stroke or or something else happens and they'd never get to do
00:33:46.200
the things that they sort of dream of doing only later now i'm certainly aware that you know you have
00:33:51.760
to have a little money uh you but it's also how you how you choose to spend uh spend your vacations
00:33:58.000
and everything like that and this is what she wanted she got a great deal of it before she died
00:34:03.440
and if there's any uh if i feel any sort of recompense with regard to her it is that
00:34:09.860
she actually did have great experiences in her life even though it was taken from her way too soon
00:34:16.320
and we literally scratched the servers there's so many places you talk about in the book and you even
00:34:20.320
give at the end an itinerary of dark places that you'd like to visit but where can people go to learn
00:34:25.940
more about the book and your work well uh you the book is of course available uh you know in bookstores
00:34:32.160
and uh in amazon and uh they can they can buy the book it's also available available uh on kindle
00:34:39.480
digitally and and they can buy the book and they can see if there are any of those places appeal to
00:34:45.260
them they might want to go and they can also look at the itinerary of places that if i lived forever
00:34:50.700
i would i would i would visit because i liked i believe that this has been so infinitely valuable
00:34:56.740
an experience that i would like to continue it as long as i can and the even greater lesson i think
00:35:02.520
is that um my daughter wants to do this for her children she considers it an extremely valuable
00:35:09.080
experience that she had as growing up and she is bent upon with her two children and her husband
00:35:15.020
repeating these voyages with their children because she just considers it an absolutely unforgettable
00:35:21.120
experience that deepened her and made her a citizen of the world rather than just a citizen of one
00:35:27.720
country or one state thomas this has been a great conversation thank you so much for your time it's
00:35:31.540
been a pleasure thank you very much for having me brad i really appreciate the opportunity my guest
00:35:35.660
today was thomas cook he's the author of the book even darkness sings it's available on amazon.com
00:35:40.060
and bookstores everywhere also check out our show notes at aom.is darkness we find links to
00:35:44.520
resources ring delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast
00:36:01.300
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