Adriana Babeţi: You wrote me once about books you’ve lost while doing this. Which ones? Tell us about the lost books, because what you said sounded almost supernatural. We couldn’t understand what garbage you were carrying, what bags of scrap metal you collected . . .
Michael Heim: It’s ridiculous. There’s so much waste in America . . . If you’ve never been there, you can’t imagine it. There are vending machines every hundred meters where you can buy juice or mineral water. They are restocked every three hours. No one packs a lunch. All the restaurants sell food in plastic containers, which are then thrown away. Mounds of cans are thrown into plastic garbage bags that, in turn, are thrown away. I read somewhere that if we didn’t use plastic bags, we would save six million barrels of oil per day. And you can’t do anything about it, because people refuse to think. In fact, you don’t need any of it. You can make a sandwich and take it to work in a box that will last you forty years.
Adriana Babeţi: When we were in kindergarten, we had little metal lunchboxes . . .
Michael Heim: Made of sheet metal, yes, that was the way to do it.
Daciana Branea: You’ve been reading too much Hrabal!
Michael Heim: You may be right.
Adriana Babeţi: Or Klíma, Love and Garbage. Have you read Love and Garbage? It’s a book about the author’s time as a garbage collector.
Michael Heim: You asked how I lose my books. On my way to school, I study foreign languages. I did this with Romanian. It’s not part of my research, so I study while I walk. But when I read while I’m picking up garbage, sometimes I put my book in the trash.
Adriana Babeţi: You wrote once that, perhaps at the same moment you were writing me, the lost book was being recycled.
Daciana Branea: How long ago did you lose your Romanian book?
Michael Heim: Not long. I got another copy, but I had to promise I wouldn’t take it out of the house. I didn’t, and so I never finished it.
Ioana Copil-Popovici: Michael, do you have any other obsessions besides recycling?
Michael Heim: Yes, I do. What I’m about to say might make you think I’m a little odd. I’ve noticed that, in the last twenty, thirty years—I’ve been teaching at UCLA almost three decades—people have become obsessed with photocopies. I remember when I was in college and I bought a book from the bookstore, I would feel, subconsciously, that owning the book was as good as reading it. Obviously that’s not true, but I kept the book on my shelf and I could open it whenever I wanted or needed to. Photocopying today creates the same sensation, but much worse: when you make a copy, you feel you know that book. In Germany I once saw a sticker over a Xerox machine that said: “Kopiert is nicht kapiert,” that is, “copying is not understanding.” For us, the problem has another, more pernicious side: in college, rather than have the students buy books, many professors use photocopied anthologies. Let’s say you are teaching a course on the Russian novel. You make a course pack that includes the ten novels you will cover. It seems like a good idea, because the students will have the material, and it’s cheaper than buying six or seven books. But in my opinion, it’s very dangerous. In the first place, the students will never buy those books. This means they will never have those books on their bookshelves. Even if they don’t read all that many stories by Chekhov or Pushkin in the class, when they have the books on their shelf, they can always come back to them, loan them to their friends . . .
Ioana Copil-Popovici: But books, at least for us at this moment, have become too expensive for students to use.
Michael Heim: That may be. When we talk about Central Europe, we have to put the question differently. We all know there were no Xerox machines under the totalitarian regimes. Because, in general, copy machines were considered subversive: you could make hundreds of copies of a manifesto, pass them out, and disappear. So Xerox machines were few and well guarded. (In 1980 I did a summer course at the College of Letters in Moscow. The sole copy machine was kept under lock and key.) So you are going through a real Xeroxing euphoria, when you can make copies of anything at no cost. You are in fact in the same situation we are, maybe it’s even more serious for you, since here the copy machine is a novelty. But we tell ourselves the same thing: students don’t have money for books, because they cost a lot for us, too. Books are not any more expensive than they were, relatively speaking, in my time. But think how much money your generation spends, for example, on cassettes, CDs—goodness, on batteries! Why don’t you spend it on books, if you’re a student? A student reads books. That’s his job. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, and the truth is that today’s students don’t read originals, only copies. Still, I believe that something is lost if they never own these books. When you are done with a course pack, you throw it away. It is not a beautiful thing, something you want to keep. In a way, course packs feel like ID cards, documents, bureaucracy.
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Marius Lazurca: If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a more personal question. You said once, before we started recording, that Dostoyevsky appeared in your life in a certain moment, that he made an impression in this moment, but later you moved away from his vision of the world, toward a different cultural sphere. Would it be correct to say you traveled from a period of belief toward one of atheism?
Michael Heim: No, I wouldn’t say that.
Marius Lazurca: Or, to put it another way, from a period of unknowing piety to lucid atheism?
Michael Heim: Not at all. I would love to answer this question, I don’t mind at all. When I was 16 or 17, I was searching, like all young people, I wasn’t any different, but maybe I thought I was, at the time. This is why I like to teach Dostoyevsky to young people. I know that this author may become very important for them, that they need a point of reference for their ideas, and Dostoyevsky seems like a good choice. I enjoy his books to this day, but I do so from my students’ perspective. Chekhov never mentions God, but he seems to show a world in which imagining God is possible. It is much subtler, a veiled way of speaking about the divine, an approach that later became stimulating for me, as much intellectually as spiritually. I found something like it in works by Central European authors. They don’t try to fix my problems, don’t offer solutions or try to make me their disciple, but instead, their texts suggest new ways to think about the ideas that interest me, ways I would have not discovered on my own. This is why I believe that literature plays an extremely important role for those drawn to study the spiritual side of existence. For me, as a twentieth-century person, Havel’s words are extremely important—perhaps even more important than Dostoyevsky’s theology. We are part of a world in which we, the human race, are not alone, but connected to a power above us, which we can call whatever we like, but which calls on us to take responsibility for our deeds. If we don’t think reality is above us, but within us, then perhaps there is no real reason—this is going to sound like Dostoyevsky—why we shouldn’t kill each other. Responsibility for our freedom—words that again sound like Dostoyevsky, but I think that Havel’s way of putting it is more appropriate for the twentieth century—comes from the sense that we are not the sole or supreme beings in this world.
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Cornel Ungureanu: There is a great Hungarian author who wrote a Cultural History of Human Stupidity. Have you read it?
Michael Heim: No, unfortunately.
Cornel Ungureanu: I’m wondering what signs of stupidity you see in the world . . .
Michael