Robert Greene: This Is The Most Important Book I've Ever Written
Ryan Holiday talks with Robert Greene about his new book, The Law of the Sublime, written over seven years while recovering from a stroke. Greene argues wonder is all around us if we wake up from our daily trance.
The gist
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Greene describes writing the book by hand across multiple notebooks, dictating and editing with one hand, after a near-death experience left him unable to travel.
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Greene says the sublime means waking up to ordinary reality, and his book offers 12 thresholds into it, including animals, childhood, history, paganism and death.
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Holiday recommends Death Comes for the Archbishop and Under the Jaguar Sun as books that transport readers into other times, places and minds.
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Greene urges travelers to act as time travelers rather than tourists, while Holiday describes running the original route from Marathon to Athens and visiting Thermopylae.
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Greene suggests seeing places like an airport as a child would, and worries that AI shortcuts and money pressures are erasing careful, human-scale work.
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"Well, it's beautiful. And every bit of that struggle and effort is in here and you can feel it, and everyone should read it."
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"I'm just now rereading Thucydides. We're reading, for a book club, History of the Peloponnesian War, and one of the arguments I think Pericles makes at the beginning is like, well, we have all this gold at Delphi."
▶ Play at 57:12What they recommend · 4 picks
"Well, it's beautiful. And every bit of that struggle and effort is in here and you can feel it, and everyone should read it."
"That's why I think I was so struck by Death Comes for the Archbishop. Like it should have been... it should be a boring book. Like nothing happens... It's kind of cerebral and s..."
"Have you read Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino? He wrote these series of essays like one on each sense... It's incredible, and it's just like I would never have been able t..."
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