One thing that I am certain of, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s epic story of brothers wrestling with the evil and good in the world and the question of God’s existence is utterly essential. A life without having read The Brothers Karamazov is a life unfulfilled.

I would say this: even if you haven’t read the novel, you have read the novel. We live in Dostoyevsky’s world, just as we live in Einstein’s. Dostoyevsky is to literature what Albert Einstein is to physics. Both push back the horizons of the universe and plunge the depths of the human soul.

I have just read Karamazov again, and it never gets old. Each reading reveals more about who I am. That’s what literature is, a gift that keeps giving. I am in a conversation with Dostoyevsky that has no end. He is always whispering in my ear; think again; think again; think again.

There is one thing that I return to over, and over. It is the phrase on which the novel, indeed our very existence turns. It is the lesson that we still cannot heed.

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We live in a loud age. We are awash with words. Too many people speaking, everyone with an opinion. Doesn’t matter if we know anything, start talking and let your thoughts catch up.

Just listen to the endless drone of 24/7 news to see what I mean. On second thoughts, don’t! You won’t find anything dangerous there. Predictable, boring, smug, self-righteous yes; but not dangerous.

We don’t do dangerous ideas. We do certainty. We do affirmation. We do approval. We want the applause, but only from the right people.

Where are the heretics?

I am thinking about this because I am speaking at a Festival of Dangerous Ideas and I am now wondering why.

A friend of mine told me not to bother. The audience will applaud for all the wrong things. They will ask questions that will make you ask if anyone even listened to a word anyone said.

People go to these things, he said, to hear themselves. The last thing they want is to change their minds.

Oh God, I hope not. I have not entirely given up yet, but that may be a triumph of hope over experience.

So, that question: what is a dangerous idea? What would you be willing to say that you will be crucified for?

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I agree with Henry Ford, even if I don’t share his philosophy. The industrialist was more interested in the future than the past. He believed in progress. I don’t.

I don’t think the future is any more real than the past; both are bunk. Both are defined by a time that does not exist. You can’t bottle time. You can’t put it under a microscope. Where is time? Here. Where is here? Wherever we are.

But are we here? That’s another question.

Physicists debate the reality of time. Do not confuse time with ageing. Do not confuse it with clocks. Clocks don’t tell us about time, they tell us about clocks. Anyway, I will save that existential rabbit hole for another day.

But history; yes it is bunk. Like time, we invest history with far too much meaning. So much nonsense is written about history. If we look to history for truth, we will not find it. If we look to history for justice, look elsewhere. If we look to history for healing, forget it.

T.S Eliot was right, time is no healer, the patient is no longer here.

When I think about history, it brings to mind what Kafka said about a cage in search of a bird.

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Think about it: ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘All Day and All of the Night’, ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, ‘Days’, ‘Stop Your Sobbing’, ‘Picture Book’, ‘See My Friends’, then later ‘Apeman’ or ‘Lola’.

My friend agreed with me. In his best songs, the Kinks’ songwriter, Ray Davies, shrunk the world to the size of a front room. He sang songs of suburbia. Kitchen sink dramas. Davies had an ear for a riff and a feel for the vernacular.

Were the Kinks the best band of the sixties? No. That’s the Beatles. Put aside personal taste – Stones v Beatles – the grandeur of the Fab Four’s musical vision exceeds all others. Yes, some bands did certain things better than the Beatles: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Zombies, Moody Blues, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield to name some.

But the Beatles did it all.

Like Bob Dylan. No one moved the dial of what was considered popular music more than Dylan.

Anyway, what I am getting at is, what is the best?

The Kinks were phenomenal, the Beatles were the best. Elvis was incendiary but Dylan was the best.

If everything is great nothing is great. Not everyone agrees with me, I suggested recently that a poll listing the best 100 Australian books was ludicrous. The same applies to any nation. My God, the abuse I received, it was like I had slandered someone’s grandmother.

Some suggested I should read more. Now, in my defence, I have a library of 18 thousand books, I have written eleven books of my own, I have written a feature documentary, I am writing a libretto for an opera and I have a PhD, but okay, if you say so, I should read more.

But I stand by it. A top 100 is ludicrous. Top ten maybe. But what if you had to pick just one, who would it be and why? Who is your Beatles or Dylan? No second prizes and certainly no top 100!

Music, art, literature: choose just one. It may not be your favourite, it may not be to your taste, it may not accord to your politics or identity, but it is a work of genius.

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I picked it up, plugged it in and it sounded like it looked. Imagine the sound of liquid gold. The neck was like butter. This guitar was made for me.

The price was another matter. I could buy a decent car for the same price. But no car would match this. I started doing my arithmetic and my conscience told me all the reasons I shouldn’t buy it.

I decided to sleep on it. Next morning I raced back to the store, and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn’t to be.

A year later I wandered into the same store and there it was. The person who bought it had run into some financial trouble and needed to sell it. This time I did not hesitate.

The guitar has pride of place in my way too large collection. It makes me a better player.

There are things we need to get through life. Beyond my family, I couldn’t make it without music. My wife sometimes shakes her head and asks why I have so many guitars.

It is simple, I am still searching for the sound of my soul.

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Now, I love it when conversations take an unexpected turn. That’s when you strike gold. It happened to me this week recording an episode for a podcast called Club Sandwich, which explores the generation of people, still parenting, caring for ageing parents and ageing ourselves.

The sandwich generation – stuck in the middle. That’s me. That’s a lot of us.

I thought I was going to talk about ageing, but I ended up talking about what is derided as woo-woo. That is, the reality unseen. You know, elves and fairies and ghosts and talking trees.

In this I am in good company. Arthur Conan Doyle, W.B. Yeats, J.R.R. Tolkien, Toni Morrison, were all devotees of a supernatural world.

Anyway, the podcast host, Sarah Macdonald, asked me if, as I age, I have found myself returning to childhood. Oh yes, I said, and for me, that is a very weird and wonderful place indeed.

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I have never stopped moving. My career as a journalist took me around the world. I have reported from more than seventy countries and called London, Hong Kong, Beijing, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Doha home.

I have spent enough time in Islamabad and New York on and off, that those cities feel like home too.

Home is the road.

I wonder if I just do not trust the world enough to stand still? I wonder, if I left myself back there, and all the while I have been trying to get back home.

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He was passing through the village where I spend a lot of my time these days. He’d been camping with Indigenous elders in the sacred Lake Mungo. Mungo is the home of the oldest human remains located in Australia.

Hugh and I have known each other for forty years. We started our careers in the same newsroom and our lives have wound around each other since. We have been colleagues and rivals. We worked in London for opposing networks then in China together for the American news giant CNN.

We have covered together and apart, the biggest stories of our time, from revolution to natural disaster and war. We have lost friends on the way. We are fortunate to be still standing. Still close. A little weary, a bit slower. Ambition dimmed but still vital.

We don’t quite rival the antiquity of Mungo Man and Woman, but we have gathered our share of dust.

We have great futures behind us, Hugh and me. What a wonderful place to be. I wonder though, how many days like this we still have. What surprises does life still hold?

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The book is a collection of lectures I delivered at Australian Catholic University, in honour of the French philosopher, Simone Weil.

The Simone Weil lectures are among the most prestigious philosophy lectures on the Australian calendar and have been delivered over the years by some of the world’s leading thinkers. I was honoured to be invited to speak last year.

I decided to focus on the importance of words. I believe the failure to communicate, to speak with generosity, respect and love, to disagree well, is a blight on our age. Simone Weil said that humans require silence and warmth, what we receive instead is an “icy pandemonium”. What a chilling phrase, and how it captures our shrill, crowd, brittle age.

My lectures were an invitation to sit in silence. To find a new language of the sacred. I hope you enjoy this small offering.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is one of those classic novels that has passed me by. I can’t really say why I have not read it, likely it is because I have read it by osmosis; I have absorbed it. It is built into our culture. I know the book without ever having opened it.

I have never seen any of the film adaptations either.

So I have rectified that. This past week I sat down with it and it only confirmed my suspicions. The characters are loathsome, they inhabit a vacuous world, it stinks of the new.

Hell is indeed other people.

This is America: a soulless, sham of a nation. Violence is its trade. Loneliness is its relief.

How fitting I read this awful story as Donald Trump celebrated his nation’s 250^th birthday with a punch up on the White House lawn.

I am still asking: who is Jay Gatsby?

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