The Hour is Blue

An Italian Constellation: Six Scientists and a Voice Recorder

In this special solo edition of The Blue Hour, I introduce what I've begun calling my Italian constellation: six distinguished scientists and thinkers whom I'll be travelling to Italy to interview in January 2027, each in person with my portable voice recorder.

The constellation includes evolutionary philosopher Telmo Pievani, whose work brings together biology, philosophy and literature; zoologist Maurizio Casiraghi, who studies evolution, symbiosis and the relationships between living organisms; neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara, internationally recognized for his research into animal cognition and the origins of knowledge; and Giuseppe Remuzzi, one of the world's leading authorities in nephrology and director of the Mario Negri Institute.

Joining them are Paolo Ferri, former Head of Mission Operations at the European Space Agency, whose career spans nearly four decades of European space exploration, and Guido Tonelli, the CERN particle physicist who played a leading role in the discovery of the Higgs boson.

What began as a series of individual invitations has revealed an extraordinary intellectual network. Five of these scientists are connected through the Scientific Committee of BergamoScienza, one of Italy's important science festivals. Telmo Pievani is president of the committee, Guido Tonelli is honorary president, and Maurizio Casiraghi, Paolo Ferri and Giorgio Vallortigara are members. Several have also collaborated on books exploring evolution, medicine, cognition and the interconnectedness of life.

I reflect on these connections, the remarkable generosity of their responses to my invitations, and something that has become increasingly important to me: the intimacy of an unhurried conversation between two people, without cameras, production crews or interruptions.

The episode also includes readings from two of my essays, The Case for Old-School Radio and Primo incontro, reflecting on listening, imagination and what it means to encounter another mind for the first time.

The six forthcoming interviews are part of The Blue Hour's Winter Conversations 2026–27.

CiTR 101.9 FM / The Blue Hour

Broadcast live from the studio on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, at 2 p.m. PT, at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Listen: CiTR | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

The Blue Hour, hosted by Farha Guerrero, airs live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. PT on CiTR 101.9 FM at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Transcript

[Lightly edited for clarity. Additional factual information and editorial corrections appear in italicized brackets.]

Hello, my name is Farha Guerrero.

Well, today I'm sitting alone in the studio.

I had to reschedule a guest, and to make things more fun, I've arrived here without my reading glasses, so we'll see how this goes.

But actually, I have something rather wonderful to share with you today. This morning I was at the Italian Consulate in Vancouver, where I had the pleasure of meeting with Italy's Consul General, Paolo Miraglia Del Giudice.

He's originally from Naples. What I imagined might be a brief meeting turned into a conversation lasting almost 90 minutes. I thought that was quite extraordinary.

And the reason for the meeting was a project I have been putting together here for The Blue Hour. I have another home in northern Italy, and I will be returning there this winter. So I began to think about whether I might be able to arrange a few radio conversations with some Italian thinkers, intellectuals, while I was there.

And so one invitation led to another and another, and now I have six remarkable scientists who have agreed to be interviewed.

I've begun calling them my Italian constellation. I rather like that image.

Six stars, each occupying a different place in the scientific world, but connected in ways that I hadn't really understood until I first began writing to them.

Now, these individuals are not simply six famous Italians. Some are internationally recognized for discoveries that have changed their fields. Others have devoted their lives to understanding evolution, intelligence, medicine, or the extraordinary technical challenges of exploring space.

I thought it would be really nice to spend today's show telling you a little about each of them, and to give you, I guess, a snapshot of a world that exists across the Atlantic, of people who are, just like here at UBC, doing such extraordinary things.

So the first man I want to introduce is someone named Telmo Pievani.

He is an evolutionary philosopher and professor at the University of Milan, whom I first contacted after listening to one of his lectures online. It was titled Imparo, dunque evolvo. I learn, therefore I evolve.

He's one of Italy's leading public intellectuals, and what makes his work very interesting, at least to me, is that he can move so comfortably between evolutionary biology, philosophy, and even literature.

He's interested in contingency, in chance, in the enormous role that unpredictable events can play in this sort of history or story of life. Why are we here, and why did evolution take this particular path when so many other possibilities existed?

His latest book in English, Multiplicity, was published by MIT Press just last month.

I received a copy, and I sent him a photo. I placed the book in the forest just outside my home in Whistler to show him that I was really happy to receive it. He brings together something quite special: an Argentine writer whom I adore by the name of Jorge Luis Borges.

And he entwines Borges' thinking, especially his beautiful story The Library of Babel, along with the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Frances Arnold. And that is sort of the idea of all of the evolutionary possibilities that might have existed scientifically, but maybe never came to be.

And so here you have someone who is moving from the molecular world of biology into Borges' imaginary libraries, and thinking about literature to help us think about evolution. I find that extraordinarily interesting.

And so I have the great privilege of meeting Telmo Pievani in Milan on January 8th.

And what's fun about this first invitation is that it was on a whim.

After that lecture, I was sitting on a couch late at night, and I had never encountered this man before. I wanted to listen to the beautiful Italian language that I love. And I find one way of doing that is just listening to great thinkers like Telmo, although I didn't know who he was.

It was probably an algorithm on YouTube that gave him to me.

And so I listened, and that same night, I sent an email invitation to him, inviting him on my show. I didn't think anything about it.

And about nine days later, I received an email back. And he not only said yes, he very graciously did, and he seemed very enthusiastic.

And what really was interesting is that I proposed two options. One was that we could meet on Zoom, because I knew I would be in Italy and we would be in the same time zone. Or I suggested that I could meet him in person with my little voice recorder.

I actually own an old voice recorder. It reminds me of the days when I was a student at UBC, and I used to work for the Ubyssey paper.

And so I sent that message off.

And then, sure enough, I get another email. And he says, "I would love it in person. I prefer that."

And so right away, there was this beautiful connection. And as a writer, I could already see it, me with my voice recorder.

And at that time, I thought he was in Padua, where at least his email signature suggested he was.

But I only later learned that he'd just recently been appointed as a Distinguished professor in Milan.

And so after nine days, he writes to me, and by then I really understand who he is. So beyond the lecture that I mentioned, I had listened to many more. And I've read many works of his online.

And so it was just like, wow, I now know who you are. And I really feel very grateful for this opportunity.

And so subsequently, I decided, well, maybe I will write to the other people that I knew were in his circle. Other scientists that were also working with him in collaboration, and certainly on books together.

And so I began to write to these individuals thinking, why not? I'll mention that I'm interviewing Pievani, and maybe the others will be interested.

And so guess what? All of them, the six now that I've called this little constellation, all said yes!

So the next one is someone very close to Pievani. He also is in Milan, but at the University of Milano-Bicocca.

And his name is Maurizio Casiraghi. He is also an evolutionary biologist, and the idea is that I will interview both of these men in the same city is nice.

He's a professor of zoology, and his research concerns the relationships between organisms, particularly the microscopic organisms that live within other living creatures.

Fascinating.

And he studies social wasps, bacteria, parasitism and symbiosis.

One of the organisms he's worked with is a bacterium called Wolbachia, which lives inside many insects and can profoundly influence their biology and reproduction.

So what interests me is this sort of larger question emerging from his research. We often think of evolution in terms of competition, one species struggling against another.

But as he explains, the history of life is also a history of cooperation, of organisms depending upon one another. And sometimes that dependency is so complete that one cannot survive without the other.

What a beautiful image.

So Casiraghi and Pievani have written a book together called Uniti per la vita, or United for Life. And it's about symbiosis and cooperation as forces in evolution.

And so what these scientists are doing is approaching the subject from different directions, but also working together, which is quite beautiful.

Now that book and quite a few other books, which I hopefully will name as I go through this list, I will be getting very soon. I couldn't order them in Canada. It's very difficult to get works in Italian from Canada.

I have the good fortune of going to Greece next week on a rock climbing trip. And the woman who is bringing this collection of books to me in Greece, she was very nice to do this, is Federica Mingolla, whom I interviewed on my radio show.

If you want to listen to that podcast, she is this incredible rock climber, one of the best in Italy, without doubt, of her generation, certainly as a woman.

And she's leading a beautiful rock climbing course in Greece. And so she very kindly picked up all of these Italian books that I couldn't get here, so I an starting reading them soon.

The next person, I actually just received his book a couple of days ago in English, his name is Giorgio Vallortigara.

He is an internationally distinguished neuroscientist at the University of Trento's Centre for Mind-Brain Sciences. It reminds me of the incredible neuroscience centre that we have here at UBC. [Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health (DMCBH)]

He lives in, and actually spent his childhood in, this beautiful northern Italian city called Rovereto.

And I hope to be interviewing him on Monday, January 11th.

His research concerns animal cognition and the evolutionary origins of intelligence. He has published so much, more than 400 scientific papers.

And his work has been cited tens of thousands of times in the international scientific literature.

Now, some of his most intriguing experiments involve newly hatched chicks.

And so imagine a chick emerging from its egg with almost no experience of the world, yet already possessing certain expectations about objects, movement, number, and space.

And so the question he's interested in, and his researchers are interested in, is how can an animal know something before it has had the opportunity to learn it?

And so the book that I want to mention, that I spoke about just now, is called Born Knowing: Imprinting and the Origins of Knowledge. It's from MIT Press, and I just received it in the mail, and I'm starting to read it. And it's fascinating.

It's beautiful. I should have put it beside me because I have the book here in the studio. And I should mention the artist too because the book has beautiful drawings, and it really gives the visual of much of Giorgio's research.

[The illustrations in Born Knowing are by Italian artist Claudia Losi. The book was published by MIT Press in 2021.]

And so anyway, what part of our understanding of the world is acquired through experience? And what part might be inherited through evolution?

These are some of the questions that go back to the oldest debates in philosophy, the heart of many ideas in scientific research.

But Giorgio Vallortigara approaches them through experiments with animals, looking for the biological origins of capacities we often think of as uniquely human.

You know, what's very nice about these scientists, and I said this to the Italian Consul General today, what I'm amazed at is I haven't even met them yet.

I have only corresponded with them through email. And what I'm learning is that all of them have been just so kind in giving me their time and exchanging ideas. But I'm also learning another side of them.

And definitely another side of Giorgio, because I don't remember how we exchanged this idea. I think he had offered to send me his books to my place in Italy. And I said, well, I'd already ordered them, not to worry.

But he is actually also a writer of fiction.

Did you hear that? He's a neuroscientist, but he's also a writer of fiction.

And I will go as far as saying that he's a beautiful writer, even in this book, Born Knowing, which he actually wrote in English and then translated into Italian, which I think is quite interesting.

I've experimented in literary translations, so I know that's not an easy undertaking.

But his first novel, Desiderare, came out in 2025.

So this novel brings another dimension, really, to someone whose scientific life has been devoted to the mind. But of course, this is his fictional side.

And he's very well read. We've exchanged a lot of literature, you could say, names of writers that he's given me that I didn't know.

And certainly, I feel I'm doing the same for him.

And one story in particular that made so much sense to send him was by Julio Cortázar, which is called Axolotl.

If you want to read a remarkable story, this is one.

When I first started to investigate Giorgio's world, especially his scientific world, and then realized that he had this love of literature, I just thought, that's the story for him.

And I don't want to give away the story, but it's a short story by this Argentine writer who actually spent a good half of his life, in Paris.

I'm trying to think of the time, but I know he was in Paris after the 1950s.

[Editorial clarification: Cortázar settled in Paris in 1951 and lived there for much of his adult life. He did return to Argentina, including a visit in 1983.]

But he wrote primarily in Spanish, and very Argentine Spanish as well.

And I love this writer for many reasons. I'm a writer of short fiction, and he writes beautiful short stories. He even translated into Spanish Edgar Allan Poe's works.

But the story Axolotl is really interesting because Julio Cortázar used to go to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.

There's this little aquarium where he could see axolotls. He, the writer, had seen these axolotls a few times.

And if anyone wants to know, they are a very strange, very ancient creature, and very interesting. But I don't want to give away the story.

But anyway, we know from his letters that Cortázar himself saw the axolotls.

And then he invented this story with a completely different fictional character.

And it was really beautiful because we, even as a family, later on, actually on our first trip to Paris about nine years ago, went to that aquarium in Paris to see the axolotls, which actually has a little didactic in the aquarium, as a kind of homage to Cortázar's story, because the story certainly did become famous.

And then, of course, we went to Cortazar's grave in the cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.

And so I had to send that story to Giorgio.

And Giorgio maybe was quite intrigued because he hadn't read it before.

And so that's the beauty of literary exchange. I do love that.

Now I'm going to move on to another incredible scientist from the little constellation that I have in January.

And this is Giuseppe Remuzzi.

He's one of the world's leading authorities in nephrology, the study of kidney disease. He's the director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research, an internationally respected biomedical research institution.

And he served as president of the International Society of Nephrology. His research has helped improve our understanding of how kidney diseases develop and progress, and how transplanted organs can be protected from rejection.

And he's published hundreds of scientific papers.

And I didn't mention Pievani, but Pievani and the others have also published extensively.

But going back to Giuseppe Remuzzi, he's received major international awards for his contributions to medicine.

And what's very significant is that his work extends beyond the laboratory and the hospital.

He's been concerned with access to medical treatment, especially in poorer parts of the world, where people can die from conditions that could be treated with the proper resources.

And so he's an important public intellectual in his own right in Italy. Beyond writing books, he also contributes to Corriere della Sera, one of the newspapers in Italy.

And so here's the connection again with Pievani.

Remuzzi and Telmo Pievani have just recently published a book together. It's called Se non c’eri, non c’ero — If You Hadn’t Been There, I Wouldn’t Have Been Either, examining our evolutionary history and the extraordinary interdependence of living things.

And so, again, this physician and the evolutionary philosopher are having a conversation of their own, really going to the heart of what it means to be human.

And I've seen some recent lectures online by Pievani where he brings this new book into the public sphere.

And so I'll be meeting Giuseppe Remuzzi in Bergamo on January 12th.

And it's in the Kilometro Rosso district, which I'm curious about. I've never been to Bergamo. But I've heard it's a beautiful place, and there are hills, and I can imagine it must be gorgeous.

And I should mention that there is a BergamoScienza Scientific Committee, that is really, really important. Maybe I'll find something to read about it.

So let's move on.

The next guest that I will have the privilege of interviewing, we're not sure if we will meet in January, or if that might happen on another trip.

But again, this man, Paolo Ferri, was so nice to accept my invitation, but also to work out the idea that if we can't meet in person in January, because he is not currently in Italy, he's in Frankfurt, Germany, we could arrange something else another time.

And he's already said, well, we could do a second interview together, which I thought was lovely, because I haven't even had one yet.

So I like the confidence in that. That's quite lovely, accepting one and possibly two invitations to be on my show.

And when he said that, I said, well, you're kind of like Jaymie Matthews, whom I've had on my show at UBC a couple of times, a wonderful astrophysicist, who was involved in launching Canada's first space telescope, MOST, and whom I interviewed this past spring, again, after many years.

And you can find that interview on my podcast list.

But let's go back to Paolo Ferri.

So he's a physicist who spent almost, are you guys ready for this, 40 years at the European Space Agency.

And eventually he became head of mission operations for all of ESA's robotic spacecraft.

And this is why Ferri is not just an ordinary person.

He wasn't simply studying space exploration. He was one of the people actually making these missions happen, right?

So he helped direct missions to Venus and other parts of our solar system. But perhaps his most celebrated work was with Rosetta, the European spacecraft that travelled for more than 10 years before reaching a comet and deploying a small lander onto its surface.

Just think about that for a moment.

A spacecraft travelling through space for a decade, reaching a tiny moving object hundreds of millions of kilometres from Earth, and attempting something that had never been done before.

Wow, what would the planning and the uncertainty and the failures and the enormous patience, what would that have looked like? What would that have required?

Ferri was inside that world, making decisions with teams of scientists and engineers on missions that pushed the limits of what we human beings can accomplish.

And so when I meet him, I would love to know what it does to a person to spend a lifetime engaged in projects at such an extraordinary scale.

So he was very kind actually to send me a PDF of his book in Italian, which I'm currently reading. And I will be getting the physical book very soon when I'm in Italy.

[The book is Il cacciatore di comete: Diario di un'avventura nello spazio profondo, published by Laterza in 2020, with a paperback edition in 2022.]

But it's really this sort of what he calls his, I don't know, in English I would say it was like his baby, his lifetime love, certainly that Rosetta mission.

And our interview date, as I said, is still being arranged. But maybe I might sneak over to Frankfurt. I'm Canadian, we travel easily. Two hours going anywhere is nothing for us.

So maybe I will meet him in person in January as well.

And finally, I want to get to Guido Tonelli.

So Tonelli is a particle physicist.

He is, I think, the first person I'm going to be interviewing in January. He's a professor emeritus at the University of Pisa, and one of the leading scientists involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN.

Did you just hear what I said?

I mean, you might have heard about the God particle, right? At CERN.

So CERN is this, you know, we have TRIUMF here at UBC. CERN is just this much bigger sort of TRIUMF.

But it holds the Large Hadron Collider. It's huge. Particle physics.

So I think that to call the Large Hadron Collider the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator is maybe an understatement.

And what's interesting is I took my children to CERN many years ago when they were very young, when my oldest son was interested in physics.

And it was great to show them TRIUMF at UBC, but I thought going to CERN would be a wonderful excuse for a family vacation.

So we went to Geneva. And we went to see CERN. And it was amazing.

The underground world of CERN was closed at the time, but it certainly was a lovely occasion just to be there.

But going back to Guido Tonelli, he was the spokesperson for the CMS experiment during a critical period of the search for this elusive particle, which had been predicted theoretically almost 50 years earlier.

And in 2012, scientists at CERN announced the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson, confirming a fundamental part of our understanding of how certain elementary particles acquire mass.

So Tonelli received a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for his leadership in the work that made that discovery possible.

But what I find especially interesting is that Tonelli is also a writer deeply interested in the philosophical implications of modern physics.

And so he's written a lot about the origins of the universe, the nature of matter, time, and the strange and almost unimaginable conditions that existed at the very beginning of cosmic history.

And so I'll be travelling to CERN in Geneva on January 7th, the first day after CERN's holiday closure.

So, quite exciting.

This is a really wonderful time, at least for me, because I never imagined that I would have this kind of opportunity outside of Canada.

It's something that feels a little surreal sometimes, because, given the way that even radio works, and this has been on my mind for a while, I will be physically going, to meet these scientists that I've just named and described.

Recording interviews with them in person on my little voice recorder, transferring that voice recorder's data onto my computer, which will convert it to an MP3, and then coming back to the CiTR studio and playing it on air when it's live.

And even though that seems like a silly idea, one might ask, why go to that length in this day and age, when I could easily Zoom, have a Zoom meeting with all of these people?

In fact, I could possibly do it live in the studio, maybe. They could be Zooming back at me right now.

But knowing that it's pretty late in Italy, maybe we're getting close to 11 p.m. there, I didn't think that was very nice.

And I also thought, I really don't like Zoom.

And it's too bad I don't, because a lot of people like it.

I just like being in touch with people.

I like eye contact. I like the presence of another human being, feeling them, the closeness they bring.

I spoke with Kimberley Brownlee a few weeks ago. She's a philosopher professor here at UBC, and we talked a lot about this.

She is a philosopher who actually studies loneliness. And so this idea of human interaction feels really important.

And the other thing is, maybe because I'm a writer, and maybe I'm making this bigger than it is.

But the idea that I'm crossing the Atlantic to record the interviews in person, and then crossing the Atlantic back again, and bringing them into the studio, airing their voices this way feels special.

I'll literally be back here in the studio after my trip pressing that play button, playing them live on the air, on 101.9 FM, which has a wonderful radius, wonderful reach in the Lower Mainland.

And since all of these scientists speak English, my interviews will be in English.

And imagine that somebody out in Greater Vancouver is driving, maybe they're running an errand, maybe they just happen to be pressing the button on the FM dial, switching through the various radio channels, and they suddenly hear the voice of one of these Italian scientists.

And what could that mean?

And is it special, the idea of that raw experience of hearing a new voice?

Why am I interested in radio, in a time when we're so used to podcasts, when we have our own playlists, when we curate our sounds that we want.

Why is radio still important?

Well, it's kind of in line with what I was reading earlier about science, that randomness, the idea of something that could be like serendipity, something that can happen by chance.

Maybe a person comes into your living room through a radio speaker, or in my case at home, in a sauna. (I listen to the radio often while I'm in the sauna).

And to give you something else, just think about this image.

This has actually happened to me, not in Canada, but in Italy, where I have a vivid memory of just when my Italian was finally getting to that level where I felt that I could really understand the language.

Well, I had been studying it for about a year and a half at that point, two years maybe.

And I was sitting in a car.

And it was raining heavily, which was nice, because I feel like home when it rains in Italy. After-all, I grew up in British Columbia.

And there was this voice that came on the radio. I was flipping through the channels. We have an old Alfa.

I had never heard the voice before. It was a new voice to me. And I ask to myself, who is this voice?

I felt drawn into it. And then I started to listen and listen and listen.

And the more I felt absorbed in that voice, the more I wanted to know who he was.

But what struck me was really interesting, because I was sitting there going, oh my gosh, I can understand every word.

And so it was sort of an epiphany of, wow, I finally have the Italian language residing inside me.

And I'm now hearing and understanding it word for word.

But what's important about this is that, the voice was random. I didn't hear the beginning of the man's talk. It turned out to be a lecture on RAI.

(RAI is similar to CBC in Canada).

And so it was somewhere in between, maybe during the middle of the lecture, let's say, or the end of the lecture, I can't remember.

But it was just enough for me to be intrigued.

And then listening, and then of course, understanding.

The lecture was being delivered by a man named Massimo Recalcati, who is a psychoanalyst, also a kind of philosopher, and a very prolific public speaker, I've learned since.

And it was precisely just that randomness of listening to a lecture somewhere in this mountain valley in the Alps that I was transposed right into his world.

And he was speaking about a very hard topic.

He was talking about death.

And I had lost my mother. I don't remember the year now, but it would have been a few years before I'd listened to Recalcati.

It still felt raw to me at that moment, if that makes sense.

And so, to understand the Italian, to listen to this new man, I became emotional. I started to cry.

But that emotion was really special, because I was touched by someone by chance.

I wasn't looking for Recalcati that afternoon. I wasn't playing a podcast, that I'd already curated or queued to listen to.

And I had to listen very intensely to the end of the interview to catch his name, because otherwise I would not know who he was.

And so I did, finally catch the name, and then instantly went to find him. And googled him, or however you want to call that now.

And sure enough, by that evening, I was absorbed in more of his thoughts, in more of his lectures, and continued to listen to him.

And then, of course, fast forward, I ended up buying some of his books.

I've had a new blog post in my head for a while called Radio Transmission.

The idea that radio, even in the traditional old sense, has value even today.

Because someone will be always be listening to the AM or FM dial, to live radio.

And that can have all kinds of beautiful aftereffects. Just like the one that I described happening to me.

So going back to the little constellation of stars from Italy, just imagine now that, talking about CERN, from the first fractions of a second, after the Big Bang, (I don't even think the word second is applicable).

But after the Big Bang, to the evolutionary history of life on Earth, to the mysterious origins of intelligence, to medicine, and then out to the solar system with spacecraft.

You know, that's kind of what all these people have devoted their lives to.

And so there's six individuals, and six very different/complementing ways of trying to understand the world.

Let me name them again, in case you've just tuned in.

So Telmo Pievani is one, Maurizio Casiraghi, Giorgio Vallortigara, Giuseppe Remuzzi, Paolo Ferri, and Guido Tonelli.

And I should mention five of these scientists are connected through BergamoScienza.

The BergamoScienza Scientific Committee. They put on one of Italy's most important science festivals, which just happened recently. I wish I had been there.

Telmo Pievani is president of its scientific committee, and Guido Tonelli is honorary president, and Casiraghi, Ferri and Vallortigara are members.

And of course, Remuzzi has collaborated with Pievani.

So you can see they know one another. They've written together, they've worked together, they've participated in the same intellectual conversations.

And so what began as a few individual invitations has become something rather different.

I've found myself entering an existing network of Italian scientific thought, and I hadn't anticipated that at all.

And so it's just lovely that when I wrote to these scientists, in those original emails, I explained to them I was Canadian, I had a radio show here on CiTR 101.9 FM at the University of British Columbia, and I just wanted to come and meet them in person, bringing along my portable voice recorder and simply sitting down for a conversation.

Nothing elaborate, no television cameras, no production crew, just two people, a recorder and time to talk together.

And how warmly they've responded to this, and how kind, and how sweet. They have all been very generous with their time.

These are people who spend their professional lives giving a lot to their respective universities and research centres, but also speaking at international conferences, publishing, giving lectures to their students.

And so the possibility of an unhurried conversation without an audience, without having to perform or deliver a prepared presentation, is just something that they're giving me, and I think it's going to be quite lovely.

And I've been hosting this show for a little while now. I might have surpassed my 100th interview. I still don't think I have. I might be at 99.

But it's one of the things that has kept me going all these years, just being able to sit down with someone like this.

And let's see if I can end today's show with a little bit of something I wrote on my blog, The Case for Old-School Radio.

So when I relaunched The Blue Hour on CiTR 101.9 FM this past spring, my goal was to bring back an old form of radio that I think may have been lost to the decades.

In archival radio interviews from the mid-twentieth century, I found someone by the name of Studs Terkel, whose show was often a simple conversation between two individuals.

So in a 1959 interview with writer Dorothy Parker, it's easy to hear that the conversation was not polished. There was room for error. There were no sound disruptions, just two people speaking.

And so when I relaunched The Blue Hour, I aimed to do exactly this.

I begin each episode with words and end each show with words. There's no recognizable jingle announcing that the radio program has begun, and there are no sound disruptions during conversations with guests.

And even as I interviewed professors from the School of Music, when it could have been a natural moment to play pieces of opera, examples of polyrhythm, or a Francophone folk song, I deliberately avoided this.

And instead, I let the absence of other sounds carry the interview forward, each professor describing music without listeners actually hearing it.

And so old-school radio perhaps once enabled us to imagine rather than just to simply hear.

In the absence of these other sounds, maybe we may have heard more.

And maybe there is something to be said for just listening to an old-fashioned conversation between two people. Words exchanged, laughter, emotion, all in the mix.

The kind of conversation we often have at a café, our eyes meeting, our lips moving as we sit and converse and listen.

This is also on my blog. It's called Primo incontro. That means first encounter.

And I wrote it in Italian and in English.

I'm interested in the first encounter, the first meeting with another mind, a new consciousness.

(I'll be honest with you, now that I'm in touch with Giorgio Vallortigara, I might change that because is it maybe it's just another new mind? Consciousness? What is consciousness? That's a good question).

I would suggest that a first encounter of this kind is not ordinary, trivial, or predictable, even if it begins by chance.

It's a moment when, for the first time, two pairs of human eyes meet.

For the first time, one hears a new voice.

And sometimes one may immediately feel a sublime sense of another.

This kind of first encounter predates the second, because the possibility of more encounters always exists.

And so I want to say briefly, if possible, within this first encounter, try to understand precisely what this encounter might mean philosophically.

And of course, what may happen following it.

And so I go on in my blog to talk about a first encounter where arguably it's still a first encounter. So it was an encounter with a writer I had never read, or, in quotations, "met" before.

And so some years ago, I loaded a small iPod with an audiobook of immense length. Wearing only wired headphones, I began ascending the steep mountain forest trail close to home with my dog.

It was in this ascent that I began listening to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's extraordinary masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, through the voice of a narrator in English.

And I remember this moment with such lucidity that while I hiked, I was transposed almost instantaneously to nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, Russia, while still afoot in Whistler, British Columbia.

And just as I was ascending a trail, the protagonist of this novel, Raskolnikov, was descending an apartment staircase trying to avert his eyes from the sickly feeling of encountering his landlady whom he despised.

And so this descent before Raskolnikov retreated into the streets of St. Petersburg had such an enormous effect on me that I began to replay his descent multiple times, almost subconsciously, hitting the playback button repeatedly on the small device in my hands.

All the while, I kept ascending that mountain.

And so who was this author? I thought to myself, what is this beautiful narrative unfolding on its invisible pages as I walk through a forest?

And so that primo incontro, the first meeting with Dostoyevsky and his main character across time and space, would be the beginning of something that I could never have predicted.

And so not only would this great writer of fiction soon evolve into an exceptional literary figure in my life, he would also become someone who would bring me deep into the psychology of life itself.

And so that is kind of just a glimpse of this piece on my blog that says the primo incontro is special. That first meeting is special.

And just like I mentioned, Telmo Pievani, who was delivering a lecture in Italian, Imparo, dunque evolvo, I was also drawn into his words and worlds, just nestling on a blue couch late at night, listening to this man's voice on my laptop for the first time.

I will leave it there since I'm out of time.

But it was lovely to be in the studio alone today and to just think about what fun there is to have in the future, future encounters, more primi incontri with more people.

Thank you again for listening today. All my best.

References & Further Reading

Books by the Italian Scientists

Literature

Lectures, Archives & Scientific References

From The Hour is Blue