The Literary Life Podcast · Angelina Stanford Thomas Banks

"Falling Inward" with Dr. Jason Baxter

January 13, 2026·1 hr 13 min·5 clips

Baxter argues technology won't replace literature — but every hour online now demands an equal hour with old books to prevent the 'evacuation of interiority.'

Dr. Jason Baxter returns to the table. Angelina Stanford begins with warm banter beside Thomas Banks, and then the conversation settles into reading as a learned openness to art. Nobody is rushing. The episode resists the idea that beauty has one approved look. Instead, the speakers stay with its different guises and with the humbling business of letting taste stretch over time. Caspar David Friedrich gives them one doorway. The Wanderer in the Sea of Fog carries a sublime beauty that even early, untrained taste can feel before it knows what to do with all the nuance. Vermeer gives them another. A quiet Dutch or Flemish domestic scene may not feel sublime at all, but it can still stop a person cold with loveliness. That difference is the point. Baxter frames the book as a way out of narrow personal taste, not through scolding but through invitation. Growth sounds modest here, and unfinished. No one claims full catholicity of appreciation. Still, moving toward that breadth matters more with age. Angelina receives that as deeply beautiful. She names the way beauty speaks a thousand languages, from ancient Greek forms to medieval Italian textures to elegant nineteenth-century prose, and the room seems to open when she says it. Beauty is not treated as one mood or one school. It calls from different directions, under different guises, without losing the deeper pull underneath. Eternity stays close, almost under the surface of the art and language being discussed. Expansiveness is the word the conversation keeps earning. The book, as described here, offers depth chapter by chapter by reminding readers that the world is bigger than their preferences. The close turns outward again. After the sponsor and listener notes, Thomas Banks reads Trumbull Stickney's The Passions That We Fought With, leaving the hour with a sober picture of old struggles that do not quite die.

As heard by us

A thoughtful arts conversation about beauty, inwardness, and the slow widening of taste.

Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks welcome Dr. Jason Baxter back for a reflective conversation on inwardness, beauty, and the discipline of widening one's taste.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a patient conversation about beauty that expands taste without flattening it.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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