Looking into the Book
Readings and Interviews
- What is Real?
- On Point interview by Tom Ashbrook, broadcast August 18, 2008
- Listen online
- The Book Show
- Host Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina interviews Richard Todd, broadcast August 26, 2008
- Listen online
- Amherst Reads, an Interview with Richard Todd
- Amherst Reads interview by Catherine Newman, recorded November 8, 2008
- Listen online
- Vanity Fair's Writers Reading
- by Feifei Sun, recorded August 18, 2009
- Listen online
Excerpts from The Thing Itself
A desire for the tangible
The rippled glass of the windowpanes. Spring rain. A wall of green outside: trees in the mist. The stone fence. I look out the window, I look down at my hand, its one crippled finger. Stone, water, leaf, flesh. The checkbook on the desk—though in a sense more real than rain, considering its power to constrain my life—seems something of an abstraction, leading as it does to the great world of obligation and choice. Sometimes the mind wants only what the eye can see, the here-ness of the tangible, a table, a tool, and sometimes words that have passed beyond words.
A box that lied
Sometimes things really seem alive. During the drive, only about an hour and a half, I felt emanations from the box, and they were not good. Something was making me uneasy, something made me glance over at the box and back to the road. I was eager to look at it more closely, and yet I wasn’t so eager. Something was telling me the box wasn’t what it claimed to be.
The Lady and the Unicorn
Once anyone did anything this complex, the creation of the computer, for example, looked like a foregone conclusion. Can the circuitry of a microchip be more complex? And in a completely different way there lurks in the fabric a pervasive wit that would seem to prefigure every modernist notion about the mystery of the self. It cannot be an accident that at the center of the center tapestry, “Sight,” is the image that draws one in with such paradox and delight: the Unicorn stares into a looking glass held for him by the Lady. When an imaginary beast sees his own reflection, what is it that he sees?
A fake Vermeer
“Yesterday this picture was worth millions of guilders, and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it. Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What has?”
The Windsor chair
The oldest Windsor chair, in the corner, is damaged, a crack in its arm. Somebody sat down too hard. It is embarrassing to admit how much this saddens me. The thing had endured two hundred years and now it has broken under my brief care.
Feedback / Questions
Richard Todd invites comments and questions from readers. Email