Tag: Books

Tuesday Morning Wake-Up Call (“Getting inside the machine”)

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Almost nothing is worse, then, than realizing that your life itself has become boring. Perhaps you have at one time or another concluded that your work is drudgery, your hobbies humdrum; that even your relationships are superficial and unsatisfying. Each day reminds you of the one before. What is there to do?

One obvious answer is to run away, to throw out the old routines and connections, and find new ones instead. But maybe the solution to boredom is the exact opposite: not to seek a new life, but to go deeper into the one you have. This is exactly what the Danish existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard advocated. When life becomes tedious to you, he argued, you don’t need to look outside for something to shake up your malaise. You need instead to look inward and find what’s missing within your own heart and soul…

According to Kierkegaard, when we first find life boring, we seek new delights…This is the time, usually in early adulthood, when people are most open to new experiences and opportunities. For some…“the aesthetic” might encompass a more innocent sort of experience—a hobby such as travel, say.

This is fine for a while. For many, though, this consumerist approach to living eventually comes to seem trivial—and, ultimately, boring. “Is this all there is?” you ask yourself. At this transition to the next stage, you need to shift from treating life as an act of consumption to becoming part of a process that creates deeper experiences. You need to “get inside the machine.” …

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Lightly Child, Lightly.

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One thing is certain, and I have always known it — the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence,

— May Sarton, from At Seventy: A Journal

Notes:

  1. DK photo @ 6:13 am, January 10, 2024, Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. 51° F in January! More photos from yesterday morning’s walk here.
  2. Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Prophet Song

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Benjamin Markovits, in his lukewarm NY Times Book Review titled Life Descends Into Chaos in This Year’s Booker Prize Winner, states “the ’emergency’ is never explained…the political crisis here is a kind of blank; it has no history…we never learn what they’re arguing about, apart from the rule of law…The other big decision is stylistic. There are sections and chapters in the novel but no paragraphs. Dialogue is not punctuated with quotation marks, and is often interrupted by descriptions and sudden dives into interiority. All of which means that following a conversation takes some detective work…”

Markovits is right, all true. But set it all aside. Easily, this was the best book I’ve read in 2023, and one that will stick for some time. I’ve shared a two excerpts from the book below:

Tell me, he says, do you believe in reality? Dad, what is that supposed to mean? We belong to a tradition but tradition is nothing more than what everyone can agree on – the scientists, the teachers, the institutions, if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing… (they are) trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true – this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you’re watching it happen in your own time and not in a book… Sooner or later, of course, reality reveals itself, he says, you can borrow for a time against reality but reality is always waiting, patiently, silently, to exact a price and level the scales——

For how many days the shelling and gunfire has continued, the fighting stopped for the night but her body does not believe the silence, a sensory prickling in her nerves, the banging deep in her skull. She turns to Molly inhaling from her hair the fading scent of jasmine, sensing the mind at peace beneath the sleeping breath, to reach in with her hand and pull the terror out by the root, to caress the mind back to its old shape. Something has winged from the dark of her mind and she holds very still, then turns from Molly, gets up and goes into the kitchen. The sky in astronomical twilight, watching the trees rooted in the earth, thinking, there will be goodness again, there will be high and happy voices, the sound of feet seeking for slippers and the clicking of bicycle wheels through the porch.

— Paul Lynch, Prophet Song (Atlantic Monthly Press, December 5, 2023)

Lightly Child. Lightly.

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Yet we’re still programmed to think and act as if we don’t have enough. As if we’re still in those ancient times of scarcity. That three-pound bundle of nerves in our skull is always scanning the background, picking up and prioritizing scarcity cues and pushing us to consume more… Aren’t addiction, obesity, anxiety, chronic diseases, debt, environmental destruction, political dispute, war, and more all driven by our craving for…more?

— Michael Easter, from “Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive” (Rodale Books, Sept 23, 2023)

Notes:

  • Highly rated by Amazon readers and Goodreads. Amazon’s Pick for Book of the Month in October, 2023. An engaging book explaining the what and the why, but if you are seeking solutions to break addictions, cravings, etc, you won’t find them here. (I was left wanting! Where’s the chocolate ice cream!?!)
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly Child. Lightly.

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I hit a low point today. I felt I could not go on. It was like knowing that a free garden, calm and full of rest, lay on the other side of a wall. I knew where the gate was, I could walk through it whenever I felt like it. I was withholding release from myself. Then I had a coffee and a cake, went back to the desk, forced a solution, and kept going.

— Helen Garner, One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries 1987–1995

  • Portrait via Inside Story. “Garner Territory” by Zora Simic: “In one of the most remarkable entries, in the thick of torment, Garner envisions a new life for herself… “Sometimes we know what we want even when we think we want something else.” Another friend declares, “I think these diaries are the best thing she’s ever written.” I agree; they are her life’s work, and the ideal mode for a “writer who works off and is nourished by the events of daily life.” •
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.