This is KZSU, Stanford.

Welcome to entitled Opinions.

My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.

Our guest today is Nate Klemp, co-author of the New York Times bestselling book, Start Here.

He joins me to discuss a topic I've broached often on this show, namely how to take one's distance from a hyper-connected world and find one's way back to that inner place of reflective silence within the self.

He addresses this topic in his brand new book called Open, Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World.

But before I welcome Nate Kemp to entitled Opinions, let's hear from one of this radio programs,

Venerable Trustees, I mean Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote a poem called Alone, which opens with the following verses.

From childhood's hour I have not been as others were, I have not seen as others saw.

I could not bring my passions from a common spring.

From the same source I have not taken my sorrow.

I could not awaken my heart to joy at the same tone, and all I loved, I loved alone.

From this uncommon spring deep within the self, everything essential, everything personal,

as well as interpersonal, comes forth into the world we share in common.

Without the uncommon differences that separate one person from another,

the world that comes between men, as Hannah Arendt called it,

would not have plurality as one of its basic constituents.

If the world is defined by plurality, it's because each one of us

and each one of the citizens in our polities has an idiosyncratic first-person singular.

I say idiosyncratic, first-person singular.

I say idiosyncratic because a subterranean place of ecstatic interiority hides in every one of us, whether we're aware of it or not.

That place remains the self's native homeland, even though most of us abandon or flee from it for reasons that remain mysterious.

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