Director's Notes - Episode 206 "The Great Librarian of the Western Sands

This episode is a riff on Moby Dick obviously. I’ve never read Moby Dick, but statistically, you haven’t either. Still we know the main signifiers: the first line, the premise, “from hell’s heart” etc. Some books live two lives: the first as a book, written by a specific person, that you can have a specific and personal experience with when you read it. The second life is as a grand cultural signifier, one that may have little to do with what the book meant to the author or to any given reader.

Originally this episode was going to be entirely from Cecil’s point of view. All other thing’s equal, that is what we tend to settle into when writing Night Vale. Cecil’s narrative voice is also the voice of the show, and it’s one we have a lot of practice working in. But we also have this huge cast of incredible actors, and it’s good for us to remember that and let them help us make this world come alive. Symphony is not only a wonderful actor, but a close friend, and any time we can involve her in our work I’m glad to do so.

The bit about Cecil saying “nyes” comes straight from an actual event in my family. We were having Christmas dinner at my wife’s parents' house and my wife’s sister asked her father if he would like a slice of cake and he, after a bit of hemming and hawing, replied “nyes”. And then the room went silent for a second and she said “I’m sorry, did you just say ‘nyes’?” and then we laughed about it for the rest of the night. They say that you should write what you know, and what I know is that the funniest answer to a yes or no question is “nyes”.

Ultimately this is an episode about failure: how we define it, what its role in our life is, and how much of it we can tolerate for ourselves. To live a life is to experience failure. It is as certain as anything else. Which means to try to avoid failure is to avoid life. It’s all mixed in together, and there’s no picking out the good bits from the bad.

I can’t get into any detail, but just today I experienced one of the larger failures of my career to date. And it sucked. It sucked a lot. But then my wife brought our baby out to my office, and we sat together on the couch, and my daughter clapped her hands and tried to pull my nose off my face, and I remembered what mattered and what did not.

We can define ourselves by our failures, but we all know that isn’t right. We can also define ourselves by our successes, but ultimately that’s a thin line to walk, and one that is easy to teeter off of. The best thing, I think, is to define ourselves outside of our failures and our successes. They are just part of our environment, as impossible to control as the wind. What matters is me, and my wife, and the baby who is trying as hard as she can to pull my nose off my face, and is so far failing at it.

-Joseph Fink