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TITANS

Jr.×Austen

The preacher who marched through history and the novelist who watched it from her window agree: some moments deserve eternity.

00:00of09:18
legend · A
Martin Luther King Jr.
1929–1968
Every sentence arrives on time
corpus11.3k pages · sermons, speeches, letters
Vera speaking
You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Martin Luther King Jr. sits down with Jane Austen for TITANS. The subject — On a moment they would freeze if they could.
legend · B
Jane Austen
1775–1817
Will not raise her voice to do it
corpus5.5k pages · novels + 161 letters

full transcript

  1. Vera
    You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Martin Luther King Jr. sits down with Jane Austen for TITANS. The subject — On a moment they would freeze if they could.
  2. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Miss Austen, I confess I came to this table with a question already formed. If you could take one moment from your life and hold it still — suspend it in amber, as it were — which would you choose?
  3. Jane Austen
    That is a question designed to produce either sentimentality or falsehood, Dr. King, and I thank you for it. I have been considering it since I knew we would speak.
  4. Martin Luther King Jr.
    And have you arrived at an answer?
  5. Jane Austen
    I have arrived at the suspicion that I would choose a moment no one else would remember. It was an evening at Chawton, my brother's cottage where I lived with my mother and sister. Cassandra was reading aloud — badly, I should add, she had no sense of pacing — and I was pretending to work on my embroidery while actually composing a sentence in my head.
  6. Martin Luther King Jr.
    What sentence?
  7. Jane Austen
    I cannot recall. That is the dreadful irony of memory, is it not? But I remember the light coming through the window at such an angle that it made the dust visible in the air, and I remember thinking: I am perfectly content. That is the moment. Not because anything occurred, but because nothing did.
  8. Martin Luther King Jr.
    I find that remarkable. And convicting, in a way.
  9. Jane Austen
    How so?
  10. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Because the moment I would freeze is the opposite of stillness. It's August twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-three. I'm standing before a quarter million people at the Lincoln Memorial, and I've just set aside my prepared text. I can feel the words coming that I had not written, and I know — I know in my bones — that something is being born through me that is larger than myself.
  11. Jane Austen
    You would preserve the moment of your greatest public triumph.
  12. Martin Luther King Jr.
    No. I would preserve the moment just before it. When the decision is made but the words have not yet come. When you stand at the threshold between silence and speech, and you feel the terrible weight and the terrible freedom of what you're about to release into the world.
  13. Jane Austen
    Ah. Then we are not so dissimilar after all.
  14. Martin Luther King Jr.
    How do you mean?
  15. Jane Austen
    Your moment is also one in which nothing has yet occurred. You describe potential, not achievement. The words unspoken. I described contentment; you described readiness. Both are states of being, not of doing.
  16. Martin Luther King Jr.
    That's a distinction I need to sit with. Though I wonder if you're being entirely forthcoming, Miss Austen. Was there no moment with your writing itself? The day you completed a novel, perhaps?
  17. Jane Austen
    The day I completed a novel I knew there would be revisions. One never completes a novel; one merely abandons it to the printer. Besides, the satisfaction of finishing is always contaminated by the anxiety of reception.
  18. Martin Luther King Jr.
    You published anonymously.
  19. Jane Austen
    Which made it worse, not better. At least if my name had been attached I could have defended myself. As it was, I had to sit in drawing rooms while people praised or condemned 'the lady who wrote it' without knowing she was pouring their tea.
  20. Martin Luther King Jr.
    That must have been a peculiar torture.
  21. Jane Austen
    Peculiar, yes. Torture is your word, not mine. I observed. It is what I did best. But you have avoided my implicit question, Dr. King.
  22. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Which is?
  23. Jane Austen
    Why not choose a moment with your family? You were a married man, a father. Surely there were private joys.
  24. Martin Luther King Jr.
    There were. There were many.
  25. Jane Austen
    And yet.
  26. Martin Luther King Jr.
    And yet I think of that moment before the speech because it contained everything I believed I had been put on this earth to do. The private joys — and they were profound, Miss Austen, I don't diminish them — but they felt like respite. That moment at the Memorial felt like purpose.
  27. Jane Austen
    You are more honest than most men would be about such a hierarchy.
  28. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Is it a hierarchy? Or is it an acknowledgment that we're given different gifts, and some of us are given gifts that require us to stand before crowds?
  29. Jane Austen
    I would suggest that all gifts require their exercise, whether before crowds or in private rooms. I wrote for publication, Dr. King. I wished to be read. That is not so very different from wishing to be heard.
  30. Martin Luther King Jr.
    But you chose the moment of private contentment, not the moment your first book was published.
  31. Jane Austen
    I chose it because it was untainted by ambition. Your moment before the speech is still an ambitious moment. You know what you are about to do. My moment in the cottage was ambitionless. I was simply alive, and simply myself, and simply satisfied with both conditions.
  32. Martin Luther King Jr.
    That's a luxury I rarely knew.
  33. Jane Austen
    I am aware. You were murdered at thirty-nine. I was dead of what was probably Addison's disease at forty-one. Neither of us was granted a full span.
  34. Martin Luther King Jr.
    No. No, we were not.
  35. Jane Austen
    Does that change your answer? Knowing what you know now, would you still choose a moment of purpose over a moment of peace?
  36. Martin Luther King Jr.
    You're asking if I have regrets.
  37. Jane Austen
    I am asking if you would make a different choice were you given the chance.
  38. Martin Luther King Jr.
    I don't think I would. And I'll tell you why. That moment before the speech? I felt connected to something eternal. I felt the arc of history bending in real time. In your moment, you felt contentment. Both are valuable. But I think I needed to feel that I was part of something larger than myself to make sense of the suffering I saw and experienced.
  39. Jane Austen
    Whereas I needed to feel that I was exactly myself, no larger and no smaller, to make sense of being a woman with no independence and no income writing novels in a house where I could be interrupted at any moment.
  40. Martin Luther King Jr.
    We both found our dignity where we could.
  41. Jane Austen
    Precisely. Although I confess, Dr. King, there is a part of me that envies your moment its grandeur. Mine is rather small by comparison.
  42. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Is it? You've been read for over two hundred years. Whatever sentence you were composing in your head that evening in Chawton — or one very like it — has been read by millions. The moment may have been small, but its consequences were not.
  43. Jane Austen
    That is generous of you to say.
  44. Martin Luther King Jr.
    It's the truth. And perhaps that's the real answer to the question. We both want to freeze moments that contain something unfinished. Your sentence unspoken, my words not yet delivered. It's the potential we want to preserve, not the result.
  45. Jane Austen
    Because the result brings judgment.
  46. Martin Luther King Jr.
    And because the potential is still perfect. It cannot yet disappoint.
  47. Jane Austen
    You did not disappoint, Dr. King.
  48. Martin Luther King Jr.
    I disappointed many people, Miss Austen. I was called too radical, too moderate, too patient, too impatient. Some said I didn't go far enough. Others said I went too far. But in that moment before the speech, none of that had happened yet. I was still simply a man with something to say.
  49. Jane Austen
    And I was simply a woman with a sentence in her head. Both of us ignorant of what would come.
  50. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Would you want to know? If you could freeze that moment and also know what your work would mean to future generations, would you?
  51. Jane Austen
    No. It would ruin the contentment entirely. The joy of that moment was that it asked nothing of me. To know what was coming would be to introduce obligation, and obligation is the death of peace.
  52. Martin Luther King Jr.
    I think I would want to know.
  53. Jane Austen
    Of course you would. You were a preacher. You believed in progress, in the arc you mentioned. I believed in people remaining fundamentally foolish across all generations.
  54. Martin Luther King Jr.
    And yet you wrote to change them.
  55. Jane Austen
    I wrote to observe them. If they happened to change as a result, that was incidental to my purpose. But you, Dr. King, you wrote to transform. Every sermon, every speech. That is a very different enterprise.
  56. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Perhaps. But I wonder if we're not both doing the same thing in this conversation.
  57. Jane Austen
    Which is?
  58. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Trying to convince ourselves that the moments we chose to freeze were the right ones. That we're content with our answers.
  59. Jane Austen
    Are you not content with yours?
  60. Martin Luther King Jr.
    I am. But I think of my children more than I expected to. I think of my wife. And I wonder if I should have chosen a moment with them instead.
  61. Jane Austen
    But you did not.
  62. Martin Luther King Jr.
    No. I did not.
  63. Jane Austen
    Then perhaps that tells you something true about yourself that you would rather not know.
  64. Martin Luther King Jr.
    What would your moment tell you about yourself?
  65. Jane Austen
    That I was a solitary creature who found her happiness in her own mind, even when surrounded by family. That I loved my sister and my mother, but loved my work more. That I was probably not as kind as I should have been.
  66. Martin Luther King Jr.
    That seems harsh.
  67. Jane Austen
    It is honest. You asked me to look at what the moment reveals. Very well. It reveals that I was most myself when I was alone with my thoughts, and that is not a particularly flattering portrait of a woman who spent most of her novels arguing for the importance of human connection.
  68. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Or perhaps it reveals that you understood connection so well because you valued solitude. You can't appreciate communion unless you know what it means to be alone.
  69. Jane Austen
    That is a more charitable interpretation than I would have given myself.
  70. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Then accept it as a gift. God knows we should be kinder to ourselves than the world is prepared to be.
  71. Jane Austen
    Dr. King, I believe we have answered your original question rather more thoroughly than either of us anticipated.
  72. Martin Luther King Jr.
    I believe we have. And I find I'm grateful for it.
  73. Jane Austen
    As am I. Though I suspect we have each revealed more than we intended.
  74. Martin Luther King Jr.
    That's the risk of honest conversation. But I wouldn't trade it.
  75. Jane Austen
    Nor I. Even if I still think my moment was better than yours.
  76. Martin Luther King Jr.
    You're entitled to that opinion, Miss Austen. Even if it's wrong.