Editor’s Note: In this engaging talk, acclaimed author Ann Patchett reflects on how a chance encounter with a stranger at an airport shaped her lifelong commitment to sharing the power of literature. She explores why reading is an essential tool for empathy, deep thinking, and human connection in an increasingly digital world. (Recorded at TED2026 on April 16, 2026)
Listen to the audio version:
TRANSCRIPT:
Lost in O’Hare
ANN PATCHETT: I had just turned 22 when I finished my first semester of graduate school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I was also taking classes in the printmaking program, ambitious young art-loving thing that I was. I had flown from Iowa City to Chicago O’Hare where I’d change planes and go home to Nashville for Christmas.
I had my Hermes 3000 typewriter with me, technically portable at 14 pounds because I wrote stories. I also had a shoulder bag of zinc plates which I planned to engrave over the break. Have you ever traveled with a bag of zinc plates? They’re a lot heavier than a typewriter.
In O’Hare I got very, very lost. I put my typewriter down, stood there lopsided looking at my ticket when a young man walked up and asked me if I needed help. Time changes memory, but I remember him clearly. He had on khaki pants and a pink Oxford shirt. He had straight sandy blonde hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He looked like the young John Denver.
“You are really lost,” he said. And then he took my extraordinarily heavy bag from my shoulder and the typewriter from my hand and said he would walk me to my gate.
Side note, this is 1986. I was shy and I was plain. I was not the kind of girl whose typewriter was carried by men who look like John Denver. And my heart expanded with the wonder.
Together we traversed many concourses and I began to worry about the time. I said he shouldn’t risk missing his flight so that I could make mine. That’s when he told me he didn’t have a flight. I asked him if he worked in the airport and he said, yeah, sort of. He said he was a Hare Krishna.
A Beautiful, Vanished World
What a beautiful world it was when you could still get lost in an airport. When zinc plates sharp as meat cleavers filled your carry-ons. When Hare Krishnas, those dancing, chanting members of a religious sect, roamed freely from gate to gate.
I was terrified. But of what? That he’d kidnap me and make me a vegetarian? I was already a vegetarian. I had to keep walking with him because he had my typewriter and I was in love with my typewriter.
In those days there were no screens updating travelers as to departure times. So I didn’t know that my flight was two hours delayed until I reached the gate. The Hare Krishna laid my burdens down and said he’d wait with me.
Would I have chosen to spend two hours in O’Hare with a Hare Krishna? No. But I lacked the courage to bolt. I decided that given the circumstances, the only thing I could do was listen.
The Greatest Love He Had Ever Known
The ability to really listen to another person is an essential skill for a novelist. It’s an essential skill for all human beings. And what the Hare Krishna told me was one of the most remarkable things I had ever heard in my life.
He said, imagine loving God so much that you would be willing to stand in an airport all day so that you could tell people about God’s love. All day long, people rushed past him. Even after he had forsaken his traditional saffron robes to mitigate first impressions. They buried their faces in their newspapers as soon as he started to speak. And still, he kept showing up because God’s love was the greatest thing he had ever known and he wanted to share it.
Becoming That Hare Krishna
When I finally made it home to Nashville, I told this story to everyone. In fact, I told it for years. Two hours in an airport with a Hare Krishna.
As I got older, I could see myself becoming that Hare Krishna. Wanting to testify about the greatest love in my life, which is reading. So great is my need to share this love that it outweighs my significant need for privacy.
I gave up printmaking when I left Iowa, but books have been my steadfast companions. My solace, my teachers, my joy. I can’t imagine what life would be without reading.
And so pretty much every day in every situation I find myself in, I’m out there sharing the good news. For a long time, my love for books was more cloistered, less zealot. But in 2011, all of that changed.
Opening a Bookstore Out of Irritation
The two major bookstores in Nashville closed. And after waiting around for someone else to open a bookstore, I decided to do it myself. It was not the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. It was more like irritation.
People love to tell me that bookstores are dead. That books themselves are hobbling towards the dust heap of cultural irrelevance. Heresy, I say. Books are the rock on which I built my church. Why do the Hare Krishna? I didn’t do this because of what I needed. I had books. I would always have books. I fought for books because you need them.
Lessons from the Road
The summer before we opened Parnassus Books, I went on tour. I’ve been going on tour regularly since 1992. This one for a novel I wrote called State of Wonder was going to be my fact-finding mission. I collected information from all the booksellers I knew. But the most valuable came from my friend Daniel Golden at Boswell Books in Milwaukee.
He told me people were desperate to buy anything that was hanging from the ceiling, which is true.