The Art of Manliness - #485： Why Visiting Dark Places Is Good for the Soul

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast when you go on

00:00:18.980 vacation you probably travel to places help you feel good relax and have fun my guest today well

00:00:23.900 he likes to visit places where great human suffering and tragedy has occurred his name

00:00:27.700 is thomas cook he's a writer of crime fiction but in his latest book even darkness sings he takes

00:00:32.440 readers with him on the real family trips he's taken to see humanity's darkest places including

00:00:36.660 auschwitz they're done and hiroshima we begin our conversation discussing how thomas and his wife got

00:00:41.420 the idea to visit dark places how all dark places are different yet connected and how darkness has

00:00:46.200 unique power to offer insight and even hope and optimism tom then takes us on a tour of some of

00:00:50.720 the tragic places he's visited and the lessons he learned from them we end our conversation discussing

00:00:54.860 the importance of treating dark places with somber reverence and how a personal dark place was

00:00:58.660 created for tom while he was writing this book after the show's over check out our show notes at

00:01:02.460 aom.is darkness thomas joins me now via clearcast.io

00:01:06.840 all right thomas cook welcome to the show thank you very much for having me

00:01:21.940 so you wrote a book even darkness sings it's about your travels now what's interesting about

00:01:29.300 your travels a lot of people you know they pick themes for the travel and i've known folks that

00:01:33.580 visited world war ii sites civil war sites homes of famous authors places where hemingway lived

00:01:39.900 you and your late wife decided to visit dark places now before we get there how did you guys define

00:01:46.600 a dark place and what drew you to visiting those types of places well i think that we had i i knew

00:01:52.660 especially uh given the fact that uh it occurred to me at one point that this would be a a book was

00:01:59.340 that we had to define dark places in various various ways you couldn't just go from one concentration

00:02:04.640 camp or one battlefield to another you had to define the kinds of darkness that exist in life

00:02:10.340 and so of course we you had the celebrity sites you might call them of dark places like auschwitz and

00:02:16.660 robinsbrook and verdun but i also wanted to visit places where there had been for example a romantic

00:02:23.180 tragedy or a medical tragedy or a natural disaster or a political tragedy that did not involve necessarily

00:02:31.380 atrocities but was a tragedy so i just came up with various kinds of places that i that i wanted to go

00:02:38.980 and um in a sense also just in my travels they began to define themselves and i and these places

00:02:46.440 sort of began to speak to me in in tragic ways that you wouldn't necessarily notice if you didn't sort

00:02:52.860 of have that broader understanding of what human tragedy is in your mind and i mean what drew you to

00:02:59.860 that i mean did you visit like there was a dark place you visited and you saw something there that

00:03:03.500 maybe i want to go see more of this i think it was really the moment that it really

00:03:08.720 began to to occur to me the value of all of this was when i was uh in italy with my daughter we had

00:03:16.700 been living in spain and we rented a car every summer she went to the american school of madrid she

00:03:22.280 was 12 years old and we would rent a car every summer she had six years off and travel all around

00:03:27.560 europe we also went to north africa and other places like that we were in um cosenza a little town

00:03:34.300 dreary actually little town in on the on in italy and we'd been driving all day and she was 12 years

00:03:41.140 old and we'd been going to museums what she called broken pot museums and we were on this river and

00:03:47.760 susan had its incredible ability to take a 10 minute nap and be completely refreshed so during that time 0.56

00:03:56.460 justine and i would go out and we would play a game of of hearts or rummy or something like that

00:04:02.080 but we were on this river and i could tell you it was the end of the day it was extremely hot in italy

00:04:07.100 she was very tired and we were looking at the river the the little busetto river and i said you know this

00:04:14.120 is where alaric died and she didn't know who alaric was but she asked and i said well he was the last

00:04:21.360 pagan emperor of rome and that sort of sparked a little bit of interest not much but a little

00:04:26.340 and then i said you know when he died here they wanted to keep his birthplace secret so they rerouted

00:04:32.840 the river they had hundreds of slaves who rerouted the river and then they buried him in that river

00:04:38.840 and then they brought the river back to the channel all of which is true uh so that no one would ever know

00:04:45.180 where he he was buried and that sparked yet more interest and i could see the river looked a little

00:04:51.620 bit different to her now something had happened and then i said and when it was over they slaughtered

00:04:57.600 all of the slaves who had buried alaric so that none of them could tell where he lay

00:05:02.400 and i saw something different come into her eyes suddenly this was a place something very very dark

00:05:09.260 had happened and there was just more a kind of intellectual passion for that place that wouldn't

00:05:15.680 have been there otherwise and it struck me then in a child 12 years old that this was this was a good

00:05:22.120 thing to do a place to not just disneyland or six flags or to take your kids to places like this from

00:05:29.200 time to time and i always say brett that you know it's fine to take your kids to disneyland and six

00:05:34.360 flags and other places i've done that we went to disneyland we went to great fairs we've gone to

00:05:40.580 amusement parks in barcelona throughout the world but from time to time you know there's you might

00:05:46.140 want to go to a dark place and have a different kind of conversation with your children yeah and

00:05:50.800 what's interesting in these dark places they what the place you went to you know human atrocities

00:05:55.520 occurred tragedies occurred but what you the theme that comes up over and over again in your book is that

00:06:00.520 these dark places can can bring light they can sing they can give insights about life but they

00:06:06.640 they do so obliquely it's like it's not direct right it's not like it you get hammered in the head

00:06:11.540 with it but it happens maybe a few days or months after you leave the place so i'm curious like over the

00:06:19.300 time you've been doing this what are some of the sort of general themes or life lessons you've gotten

00:06:24.340 from visiting these places i think you know i say in the book at one point that the dark places speak

00:06:30.840 to each other and in a way it works like if you go to one dark place after another certain lessons

00:06:36.480 occur that really are germane to all of those lessons all of those places and come out of that

00:06:43.000 experience and so that the lessons are compounded and i remember particularly at auschwitz we had gone

00:06:51.400 there and spent the day there and it was very dark and there was nothing really about auschwitz that

00:06:56.660 you could find in any really redeeming way so you really don't look for that although there were there

00:07:02.660 were acts of great courage and at auschwitz and great goodness that happened there as well in it among

00:07:08.280 individuals but what happened was i left auschwitz was that i remembered the trip there and we had left

00:07:16.140 budapest that morning believing that we would be in krakow by you know by four in the afternoon but

00:07:22.400 the roads were very bad the signage was awful i would have to get out and talk to these german bus

00:07:29.240 drivers in these big buses and you know my german isn't very good and their directions were always

00:07:35.000 ember direct to ember directed which means straight on but then you'd get to a fork in the road okay

00:07:39.700 straight on which way like you know left or right so as we got sort of bumblingly closer to the polish 1.00

00:07:46.400 border it was getting very very late it was after midnight and we finally reached the polish border

00:07:52.240 at around three in the morning and these three guards came out and i'll i'll say now it was a little

00:07:58.980 suspicious because they were all wearing different parts of their of a single uniform i mean this was

00:08:03.200 really right glasnost had not approached this place it was right out of uh john le carré and they began

00:08:10.640 to talk to me in polish and they wouldn't let me in poland even though i had you know passports and

00:08:15.260 everything like that they kept asking for something and i didn't speak a word of polish but they kept

00:08:20.100 asking and they kept asking and i thought okay i'm i'm gonna have to turn back and go to budapest they're

00:08:25.400 not gonna let me in at this border crossing and then all of a sudden this i heard this voice i it was

00:08:30.440 absolutely angelic this voice said may i be of assistance sir and i turned around and there was

00:08:36.560 a guy named sigi who had lived in the united states but his wife wanted to come back to krakow they were

00:08:41.320 on their way to krakow as well he negotiated everything for me everything for me and got me

00:08:46.900 across the border and i thought that was just an act of human kindness that was absolutely wonderful

00:08:53.420 but that man would not have been able to do that if i were a jew fleeing poland in in 1944 or 1943 he

00:09:03.600 would not have been able to do that and the lesson there was one that really before tyranny comes that's

00:09:10.600 when you act against it because once tyranny is in place it's it takes superhuman courage to oppose it

00:09:19.480 you can oppose hitler before he's a complete autocrat but you can't oppose him after unless 0.61

00:09:25.720 you are truly truly truly courageous and so i guess my lesson there was that it's sort of a moral

00:09:32.560 responsibility to be wise to know that you have to begin to foresee what's liable to happen what are

00:09:40.180 the consequences of certain kinds of political decisions and to look forward as much as you can

00:09:46.880 and that happened again and again to me in places that if people could have just taken a moment and

00:09:52.640 thought and tried to really figure out what the consequences of their actions are going to be

00:09:57.280 and we're not perfect in that you know obviously you know the rear mirror is perfectly clear but at least

00:10:04.860 try and then maybe we can prevent some of these things in the future yeah i mean it's maybe it's how

00:10:10.460 somewhat one way dark places you know are connected and they talk to each other because a lot of these

00:10:14.660 things and these tragedies happen you know people really didn't see it coming or they weren't paying

00:10:19.560 attention that's exactly right i mean the austrians voted for on schluz we keep forgetting that hitler

00:10:25.400 was elected by the german people and it's when you see the steps toward authoritarianism before

00:10:32.700 authority is has completely instilled itself embedded in itself in the political process then you have a

00:10:39.240 chance to stop it but you have to really look ahead you know there's a wonderful letter to lenin i've

00:10:45.860 often quoted it to to my more left-wing friends and it is a letter that said if a government is

00:10:52.800 dominated by one party it will finally be dominated by one committee within that party and it will

00:10:59.260 finally be dominated by one man within that committee and that was a letter written of warning

00:11:04.940 written by rosa luxembourg to nikolai lenin before the communist revolution became stalinist you might

00:11:12.480 say right well let's let's talk let's take a little visit of some of these dark places you you visited

00:11:17.900 throughout you know writing this book and throughout your life i loved i mean you start off with this

00:11:22.260 really poignant scene with the with the book it's the spanish civil war colonel jose moscarado he was

00:11:28.780 the leader of the nationalist army he was in a fort called alcazar and he gets a phone call and you went to

00:11:34.120 go visit this fort and you got to see this phone yes what happened during that phone call that he that

00:11:39.120 he got this was the alcazar which is really the military academy the west point of spain and if

00:11:46.000 you go to toleto toleto is built on a hill and the alcazar just dominates that hill and he was in

00:11:53.140 charge of the of the fascist forces franco's forces there the republicans had captured his son who was 17

00:12:00.920 years old i believe named louis and they called him and they told him that they had his son and that

00:12:08.220 if he did not surrender the alcazar they would execute him so on the pretext of wanting to make 1.00

00:12:15.120 sure that this was his son colonel moscato asked to speak to louis and louis came on the phone and they

00:12:21.360 talked for a little while and then colonel moscato said to him prepare to die my son and when i saw that

00:12:29.760 i saw it in a film called to die in madrid a documentary about the spanish civil war i just

00:12:35.720 had this incredible impulse to see that phone to go to the alcazar and see that phone it took me years

00:12:42.980 to do it i was already married by then so i went with susan and i went with justine but i did see

00:12:48.540 that phone and they still have it there it's part of the uh and the room is completely preserved

00:12:53.400 except they've now put up portraits of louis and colonel moscato but it has entered sort of the

00:12:59.580 legend of spanish civil war and it makes you what happened there to me was that i went out on the

00:13:07.040 the esplanade outside that and for some reason began to think of my own father and that's what

00:13:13.240 really gave me the notion that these dark places sort of unmoor you and they let you think about your

00:13:18.560 own life and it's a really intimate kind of moment in which you share with yourself your own past

00:13:25.400 and the past of mankind and all of that sort of is comes together in those moments if you just let

00:13:31.740 your mind go free what insights about your father did that that experience give you well my father and

00:13:39.320 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

00:13:45.360 a lot in common but we did have one thing in common he'd like to go to weird places he liked

00:13:51.700 to go where there were floods where a tornado we were in the south i was i was brought up in the

00:13:56.560 appalachian foothills of port pain alabama and we would go to places where tornadoes had ripped up a

00:14:01.780 barn or or unearthed a tree or they'd have these sleet storms and he would love to go out and see the

00:14:08.900 sleet storms where the power lines have been torn down he was just tremendously attracted to the

00:14:14.720 to the to the sort of the topsy-turvy the things that looked weird and i realized that i probably

00:14:21.540 although i didn't think that i had a lot in common with him i had that in common with him and it was

00:14:28.680 all it was huge it was a it was a very deep kind of connection that we had he would always take me

00:14:36.020 with him and we had our we had our greatest moments doing that when i was growing up as a little boy

00:14:42.480 and i suddenly realized that you know how much he meant to me because i had not thought of my father

00:14:47.700 you know very much other than ordinary ways in a long time and suddenly though at the alcazar he

00:14:54.660 really came roaring back into my my heart now i love how you said that visiting places unmoor you

00:15:01.260 like they disorient you it sounds almost like it's they're like physical tragedies right like

00:15:07.760 geographic tragedies like the like the tragic place from ancient greece where they did the same

00:15:12.920 thing that sort of disoriented you got you thinking about things you experienced a catharsis and it

00:15:17.780 helped you think about things that you probably otherwise weren't wouldn't think about that's

00:15:21.920 exactly right it because you're not distracted by rides and attractions and all that sort of thing

00:15:28.760 and your mind is really can become a little bit unfocused even on even on the place that you're at

00:15:35.340 it allows you just simply to make connections with your own life so that history connects with you

00:15:40.780 and your most intimate aspects of your life and it's an incredibly powerful experience sometimes

00:15:47.180 we're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors and now back to the show as you

00:15:53.140 said earlier you know you visited some of the really big places like auschwitz and hiroshima but some

00:15:58.200 of my favorite sections were like on the places that at first blush didn't they don't look like dark 0.56

00:16:03.080 places and one of those is a place called lourdes in france tell us about that and why is it a dark

00:16:08.460 place lourdes is uh is in the pyrenees and it's a very famous place of catholic pilgrimage it's based

00:16:19.260 on uh this young woman bernadette who really didn't even speak french because that part of at that time 0.91

00:16:25.280 that part of france was really sort of not really france it was nationally but the people there really

00:16:31.480 didn't speak french she saw a vision in the grotto there a little rock cave it was very very poor

00:16:37.180 area and over time this grotto became a very famous place of of pilgrimage if you go there now

00:16:46.580 and i was again there recently it's very honky-tonk i mean it's a it's a huge tourist attraction they

00:16:54.340 bring in big buses and all that sort of thing because it is so famous lourdes and we spent the day

00:17:00.540 there and the night and it was it was not a it was it was a dark place only because it seemed to me

00:17:07.000 that they had commercialized an element of faith in an extremely garish way i mean they have statues

00:17:13.680 of mary that are really a a water bottle where you you knock off her crown and pour water in it i mean

00:17:19.840 it's very very vulgar with almost like it was an elvis presley shrine i mean it's really it's really

00:17:26.360 awful and we were about to leave and then the nights the night procession began and it was so

00:17:33.420 extraordinarily beautiful that it just simply washed away all of the ill feeling and disappointment that

00:17:40.700 i had at lourdes and my wife and my daughter as well because you use the procession is of people who

00:17:46.780 are who are deathly ill and you see wheelchairs and you see people in hospital beds and they're being

00:17:53.480 pushed by family members or sometimes by hospital staff or by nuns and in many cases you can tell

00:17:59.840 by the threadbare clothes they wear that this trip to lourdes is the only trip they've ever they've ever

00:18:05.720 made and they've made they've made it there because they are in desperate straits and i saw that a dark

00:18:12.900 place can really overcome almost everything that's done to make it less dark it can overcome even the

00:18:20.620 commercialism around it and that made that made lourdes very powerful and in its darkness very

00:18:27.540 bright another interesting thing that you do throughout the book is you have these little

00:18:32.780 snapshots they're little vignettes of dark places popping up almost spontaneously during your travels

00:18:39.800 where you least expected it for example you you found a dark place unexpectedly while you were in

00:18:45.260 fiji which is you know that's a prime vacation destination for most westerners what was what

00:18:50.800 dark place did you find there and what insight did you get from it well you're right that was

00:18:55.180 completely unexpected i mean uh susan and i and justine we all we always believed in traveling on

00:19:02.780 public transportation we could not in tourist buses we never went on tours or anything like that

00:19:08.640 and uh there's a wonderful line from a travel writer that says life is best seen in a third

00:19:13.660 class carriage and i found that that's that really is true so we were taking a bus into i believe the

00:19:20.920 town was called nadi a little town in fiji because fiji is basically divided between the way people

00:19:28.160 actually live in the towns and villages and these huge resorts and for the tourists the buses just take

00:19:35.520 you from resort to resort you don't ever have to really go into the real fiji but we were on the bus

00:19:42.420 going in there and um this man sat down next to me very very friendly man he was very very large

00:19:49.280 he had lived in england and he said to me did you know that fijians are good bouncers and i said no he 0.95

00:19:56.680 said oh yes they employ us a great deal in in britain and other places because we're very big but we're

00:20:02.940 very nice and we had a really nice conversation he was a very lovely man and i was thinking of the book

00:20:09.480 at that time and i said what do you think's the worst thing that ever the worst thing that ever

00:20:15.040 happened to fiji and he said the british leaving because they would never have allowed fiji to become 0.66

00:20:24.120 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

00:20:33.320 island indigenously this is his island and to think that it takes foreigners to impose kind of the rule

00:20:40.840 of law upon you that may or may not be true but that's how he felt and i thought that was extremely

00:20:47.520 extremely sad i mean did you see any hope there with these guys or was it just sort of just man this is

00:20:53.600 really sad it just kind of speaks to the human condition that sometimes life you you just you're

00:20:58.400 born in the wrong country or you're born in the wrong time whatever well i i don't think there's

00:21:03.080 any question but that people are you're just simply born in the wrong in the wrong time and history just

00:21:08.980 rolls over you there's an incredibly poignant scene that happened at a killing field in uh in poland

00:21:16.140 and it's actually photographed you can actually see the video but i was reading about it in walking

00:21:21.580 fest book a biography of hitler and they had dug a ditch they had dug a great a big ditch and they

00:21:28.840 were running people naked they had taken off all their clothes they were running people naked

00:21:32.920 into that ditch to be shot and they would run the one group in and the other group would run over that

00:21:38.640 group and he talks about a girl who is running naked they toward that ditch and as she runs she points

00:21:45.700 to herself and she says 17 17 meaning that she was going to die at 17 and that was the most poignant

00:21:56.120 thing she could say at that moment and that for me has always been the symbol of history just simply

00:22:01.480 rolling over you and there's nothing you can do about it man that's haunting it's really really haunting

00:22:07.660 so another place you visited was the world over one place verdun in france can you describe the

00:22:15.020 darkness that took place there verdun is generally regarded as the worst battlefield experience ever

00:22:22.800 ever experienced by soldiers uh anywhere it was called the the meat grinder it was designed to be

00:22:29.840 that in a christmas memo a general had said that in order to distract the french and bleed them away

00:22:38.440 from the the western front they would create a kind of eastern front and bleed the french 1.00

00:22:44.860 army white that's exactly what was said in that christmas memo and so it was always designed to be an

00:22:51.400 absolute killing field and when you go there you really see just what a killing field it is it's

00:22:57.860 one of the places where the landscape has actually taken on what happened there because most of the

00:23:03.720 most of the wounds that were suffered by soldiers during verdun they were concussion wounds they were

00:23:10.020 not bullet wounds they were or bayonet wounds they were concussion wounds by mortars and high explosives

00:23:15.560 so they were literally blown to bits so the the mortars would hit and they would blow up the earth

00:23:22.540 and pile the earth up and and then blow up another one in pit and and blow it up so when you look at

00:23:29.700 the landscape around verdun it's very very jagged because some trees since then have grown up at the

00:23:36.020 bottom of those pits while others have grown up at the top of those pits and so the whole landscape

00:23:41.740 is sort of jagged and what you see is a part of the earth that has simply not recovered from from what

00:23:49.120 happened there and the slaughter was really quite quite unbelievable i mean i i remember reading that

00:23:56.460 the average lifespan of a first lieutenant there was about six weeks of another soldier about a month

00:24:03.820 but the trip to verdun really also sort of gave me a metaphor for what i was doing because

00:24:10.100 we left paris heading for verdun in a in a rented car and you go down what the french call the sacre

00:24:18.400 voire which is the the sacred road the road down which the flower french youth went in trains and buses and

00:24:26.100 even taxi cabs to the battle side of verdun it's now a highway and french highways are very very good

00:24:32.420 they're very very clean they're very well maintained and you just zip down that that highway and all the

00:24:38.480 way you see these huge posters for disneyland because disneyland france is the most visited place

00:24:46.360 in france it is extremely popular and you see all of these people going to disneyland and you see these

00:24:53.300 children and these teenagers and i thought yes it's you know to repeat it yes it's fine to take your kids

00:24:58.500 there but if you go just a little further down the road after that or next year you get to verdun

00:25:05.300 and you can have a wonderful experience there with your family as well by walking the battlefield by

00:25:11.900 talking about the war by seeing the films by giving them a sense of what other people suffered who didn't

00:25:18.300 have the chance to go to disneyland and never will but you also speaking of young people you had an

00:25:23.580 insight there while you were in your visit because there was a group of german high schoolers taking

00:25:28.440 a tour with their school and they were kind of just joking and jostling around like they didn't

00:25:33.760 recognize the dark place for what it is did did that happen a lot during your travel like you'd go

00:25:39.140 someplace where something really terrible happened and people just they didn't really didn't really

00:25:44.160 connect with that well in some places yes and in some places no some places have taken a step

00:25:52.280 in in creating a more somber atmosphere than just simply letting people wander about for example in

00:26:01.200 the killing fields there's a sign before you enter in cambodia there's a sign before you enter the

00:26:06.340 killing fields that tells you that you should not smoke you should not play radios you should not

00:26:11.440 let's get your phone in other words you should you should take a moment and be be somber because

00:26:17.040 this is a moment of great a place of great tragedy at auschwitz there's a huge sign right before you

00:26:22.380 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 0.81

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 0.66

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 0.51

00:33:21.520 waited when it would have been easier or waited when we had more money how much more cheated she would 1.00

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

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The Art of Manliness - February 25, 2019

#485： Why Visiting Dark Places Is Good for the Soul

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