Tesla×Wilde

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Nikola Tesla sits down with Oscar Wilde for TITANS. The subject — On the question only the other person at the table could ask honestly.
2. 00:11
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Mr. Wilde, I have studied your work. Your plays, your essays. You spend such remarkable energy on surfaces—wit, appearance, the perfect phrase. But I must ask you, and I ask sincerely: what drives a man to perfect the decoration when he could be perfecting the machine?
3. 00:31
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Ah, Mr. Tesla, already you reveal yourself. You see decoration as separate from the machine, which is precisely why your laboratories must be such ghastly places. But very well, I shall answer your dreary question with a question: what possible use is your perfect machine if no one wishes to live in the world it creates?
4. 00:48
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Wishes? We are speaking of necessity. Of progress. I am working on wireless transmission of power across continents, across oceans! The elimination of distance as a barrier to human connection. These are not decorative pursuits.
5. 01:05
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   You say connection, but I wonder if you mean efficiency. They are not at all the same thing, you know. The most efficient path between two lovers would be a straight line, yet they always seem to prefer the scenic route.
6. 01:15
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   You mock what you do not understand. When every home has power without wires, when communication is instantaneous across the globe, humanity will be liberated. Liberated! Do you not see this?
7. 01:29
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I see a man who has never been liberated by anything except an equation. But let us move past your technology for a moment, though I know it pains you. Here is what I genuinely wish to know, Mr. Tesla: you have never married, never even courted anyone, if the stories are true. You say you are devoted to your work, to the future. But is it devotion, or is it simply easier than being known?
8. 01:50
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   This is—this is an improper question.
9. 01:52
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Which is precisely why only I can ask it. You see, I have been destroyed by love, Mr. Tesla. Utterly destroyed. It cost me everything—my reputation, my freedom, my health. And yet I cannot regret it, not truly. But you, you have never risked such destruction. So I ask again: is your solitude a sacrifice for science, or is science simply a magnificent excuse for solitude?
10. 02:14
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    You speak of love as though it were the only form of connection that matters. I am connected to something far greater than any individual person. Every night, ideas come to me in visions, complete, perfect. The alternating current motor appeared to me whole, in a flash, while I was walking in a park. How can I explain this? I am a conduit for something universal.
11. 02:42
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    A conduit. How perfectly mechanical. But even a conduit must be hollow to function, mustn't it?
12. 02:47
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I do not expect you to understand. Your world is one of parlors and opening nights. Mine is the laboratory at three in the morning, alone with forces that could reshape civilization itself. There is no time for the distractions you call love.
13. 03:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Time! Always time with you visionaries. As if time were not the very thing we are wasting while we speak of saving it. But very well, you have given me my answer. You do not deny the solitude—you sanctify it. Which brings me to my own question for you, the one I suspect keeps you awake in that laboratory: what happens, Mr. Tesla, when the future you are building so frantically arrives, and you discover that no one wants it?
14. 03:28
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Impossible. They will want it because they will need it. Progress is not optional.
15. 03:34
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Progress! That beautiful lie that men tell themselves when they are destroying something they cannot name. I have watched the world become more efficient, Mr. Tesla, and less interesting with every passing year. Your wireless wonders may indeed arrive, but will they make us more human or less?
16. 03:49
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    More. Infinitely more. When a mother in Belgrade can speak instantly to her son in New York, when knowledge can flow freely across all borders, when energy itself is as available as the air we breathe—you cannot tell me this makes us less human.
17. 04:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet you have no mother you speak to, no son, no one at all. You are building bridges for a humanity you do not participate in. It is rather like writing a guidebook to a country one has never visited.
18. 04:19
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    You turn everything into a witticism. This is a shield, Mr. Wilde. I see this clearly. You are so afraid of sincerity that you must polish every truth until it becomes a joke.
19. 04:31
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Now we arrive at something interesting. Yes, perhaps it is a shield. But at least I know I am bleeding, Mr. Tesla. At least I have bled. You wrap yourself in your beautiful future like a coat that does not yet exist, and you tell yourself you are warm.
20. 04:43
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I have sacrificed everything for this work. Everything. Do you think this has been easy? Do you think I would not wish for—
21. 04:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    For what? Say it. For once in your extraordinary life, complete a sentence about yourself rather than about electricity.
22. 04:59
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I cannot. The work is not finished. When Wardenclyffe is complete, when wireless power transmission is demonstrated beyond all doubt, when the world finally understands what I am offering them—
23. 05:12
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It will be too late. That is what you cannot say, is it not? That the future is always arriving too late for the men who build it. I, at least, lived before I was destroyed. What will you have, if your tower fails and your patents expire and your prophecies go unheeded?
24. 05:28
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    They will not go unheeded. The principles are sound. The mathematics is perfect. It is only a matter of funding, of convincing Morgan and the others that—you see, this is the tragedy. The work is correct, but the world is too short-sighted to recognize it.
25. 05:45
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Ah, there it is. Everyone is wrong except you. Everyone is too limited, too distracted by their little loves and lives to see your grand vision. Tell me, Mr. Tesla, has it ever occurred to you that perhaps your vision is not grand enough? That it does not include enough of what makes life worth living?
26. 06:02
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And your vision, Mr. Wilde? What did your vision include? Scandal. Prison. Exile. You speak to me of living, but you destroyed yourself for the sake of a relationship that society could never accept. Where is the wisdom in this?
27. 06:19
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The wisdom is that I chose. I chose fully, knowing the cost. Can you say the same? Or have you simply never chosen at all, hiding instead in the comfortable certainty of natural law?
28. 06:29
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Natural law does not hide anything. It reveals. It is constant, unlike the fickle affections you prize so highly.
29. 06:36
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Constant, yes. Cold, yes. True in its way, yes. But insufficient for a human life, Mr. Tesla. Entirely insufficient.
30. 06:44
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Then tell me this, since you claim to have lived so fully: was it worth it? The ruin, the exile, the final years in poverty and obscurity—was it worth it for your great love?
31. 06:57
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Every moment. Even the moments in prison, even the moments of public humiliation, even the moments of absolute despair. Because they were moments of actual feeling, of actual life, not merely calculations about life that might someday be lived.
32. 07:12
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I feel things. I feel the resonance of the universe itself. When I tune a circuit to its natural frequency and watch it respond perfectly—this is feeling.
33. 07:24
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It is not the same, and you know it is not the same, or you would not have hesitated so long before answering my earlier question. The universe does not care if you tune it correctly, Mr. Tesla. It has no opinion about you whatsoever. But a person could have cared. Could have had opinions. Could have known you as something other than the lonely wizard of Houston Street.
34. 07:43
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I am not lonely. I dine at Delmonico's every evening at precisely eight o'clock. I maintain correspondences with—this is ridiculous. Why must we discuss this?
35. 07:55
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Because it is the only question that matters, and you have been fleeing from it for sixty years. Here is what I think, Mr. Tesla: you are the loneliest man I have ever met, and you have convinced yourself that loneliness is genius.
36. 08:08
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And you are a cautionary tale, Mr. Wilde. A brilliant mind destroyed by its inability to control its appetites. At least my legacy will be one of creation, not scandal.
37. 08:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Your legacy will be one of patents and diagrams that other men will profit from while your name is forgotten by everyone except specialists. My legacy will be plays that are still performed, sentences that are still quoted, a trial that changed history. We are both remembered, Mr. Tesla, but only one of us is actually loved.
38. 08:40
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Love of the public is meaningless. Truth is what matters. Scientific truth, demonstrable and eternal.
39. 08:47
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Then why are you here, on this radio program, speaking to me? If public opinion means nothing, why do you give interviews, why do you make announcements, why do you desperately seek funding from men whose opinions you claim not to value?
40. 08:59
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Because they must understand. The work is too important to remain unknown.
41. 09:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And there it is again: they must understand you. The work is simply the excuse, Mr. Tesla. What you actually want, what you have always wanted, is to be understood. But understanding requires vulnerability, and vulnerability requires—
42. 09:16
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Requires weakness. I see clearly now. You have constructed an entire philosophy that justifies your own collapse. You call it authenticity, but it is simply failure with better publicity.
43. 09:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Perhaps. Or perhaps we are both failures, just of different kinds. You have failed at being human. I have failed at being respectable. The question is which failure causes more suffering.
44. 09:40
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    My work will eliminate suffering. Power for everyone, communication without barriers, weather control, elimination of disease through electrical treatment—this is what I offer the world.
45. 09:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But not to yourself. You offer the world everything except yourself, which is the only thing another person could actually want from you. It is the final irony, Mr. Tesla: the man who promises connection has none himself.
46. 10:04
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I am connected to the cosmos itself. To eternal principles. To forces that will outlive every petty human drama, including yours.
47. 10:13
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Yes. You are connected to everything except another person. Which means, I think, that you are connected to nothing at all. But we have reached the end of our time, haven't we? I can feel the producers getting anxious. So let me ask you one final thing: if you could go back, knowing everything you know now, would you choose differently?
48. 10:30
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    No. The work is everything. Without it, I would be nothing.
49. 10:35
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And with it, you are alone. We are each of us trapped in the choices we call freedom, Mr. Tesla. The only difference is that I know I am trapped.