The Consolations of Boredom

October 9, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written about some of the better escapes I’ve been enjoying in posts about “shoe gaze” music and “gourmet cheeseburger” TV, but after having these experiences and telling others about them, I always return to the same place I briefly left behind.

It’s the every-day-to-day where we spend most of our lives—because even when we’re trying to escape it’s routines and foregone conclusions, its mono-tones and tastes, we still carry its most troubling baggage with us. (Have you ever noticed how little you can truly “get away” on vacation?)

So I’ve been wondering for years now about ways to eke more sustenance out of the familiar places we want to escape from while reducing their uneasiness.

The question gained greater-than-normal urgency when we sheltered in place during the pandemic. At the time I argued for establishing everyday rituals to conjure more satisfaction, even meaning, out of a meal or how we get up in the morning (Extra From the Ordinary). I also drew some comfort from seeing how others—like comedian Bo Burnham—not only coped but almost thrived during the isolation because he knew, from being a kind of outsider as a child, “how to turn an uncomfortable situation into comedy” (Why We Gravitate Towards the Work We Do).

Moreover, the bankrupting aspects of everyday life don’t have to be a problem we solve on our own or just with the aid of our immediate families. By expressing our intention to face a common fate together, so-called “intentional communities” that share religious or social convictions can elevate some of the day’s opportunities and relieve some of its burdens by enabling their adherents to approach them together (The Re-Purposing of Ancient Wisdoms).

That time my example was of a kind a modern, Benedictine-Rule-based monasticism. But even then, its high level of commitment to any community made its solution wobble a bit (particularly here in America) where we keep saying we value our freedom and independence far too much to subordinate ourselves to the tyranny of any group. Like Groucho Marx, I feared too many of us would rather be alone than join any club that would be willing to have us.

So if we can’t imagine the long-term community benefits that might come with sacrificing some of our short-term personal preferences, what else might offer a consistent path to less stressful “living and working” on a regular basis? This week—yet another one I found difficult to weather “with my chin up”—I’ve been wondering out loud about the following:

Is it possible to experience a blissful relief within the boring intervals between our occasional escapes?

_{Pictured here (and up top) are different views of an “action sculpture” from 1999’s Wasser[or Water] installation Series by Swiss artist Roman Signer. As a boy, Signer dreamed of navigating white-water rivers and as an adult embarked on kayaking trips in remote mountainous areas until, one day, a companion of his failed to return with him. The kayak has been a recurring element in his work ever since. According to one commentator,“Wasserinstallation creates a vacuum where the beginning and the end of an imaginary journey converge.” You can explore more of Signer’s lifetime of visual artistry here.}

When Robert Signer lost his kayaking companion, he tried to make sense of it, but when he found that he couldn’t he started creating what he called “action sculptures” to help him (along with those viewing them) go inside themselves, into a kind of meditative place, where instead of providing answers to impossible questions “meanings flow into one another effortlessly, without ever taking definite shape,” thereby offering a semblance of peace.

It’s akin to the facility that science-fiction writer and all-around-sage Ursula K. Le Guin was describing when she said once:

_{“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”}

—in other words, in times like we’re in today.

Why has another child needlessly been killed in a refugee boat, border war or neglectful home?

Why did the flood sweep away this family or that village?

Why do the venal and wicked always seem to triumph over the honest and virtuous?

Why did my kayaking companion fail to return, but I did?

Then I asked:

How can we learn to sit with questions like these without sadness or remorse, anxiety or recrimination?

Where in our lives and work would finding relief from these gnawing discomforts be possible?

Could it be within our least engaging and most boring activities every day?

Well, that’s exactly what Justin McDaniel wanted me to believe. He’s the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and (to my surprise) he’s been thinking and teaching others about the liberating effects of boredom for more than 20 years. McDaniel talked about the theory and his own experience testing it out on a podcast that I listened to this week.

I wouldn’t have thought of boredom—and in particular doing the kinds of things that we associate with it—as an escape hatch “from stress and darkness,” but for some reason I started playing closer attention as he started to explore the linguistic roots of the word “boring.”

The word’s root is “to bore,” of course, like putting a hole in a container and (by doing so) “rendering it useless” because it can no longer hold what it was intended to hold. In other words, it’s still a vessel, just not one that can also do something else, like hold water. In much the same way, many of our daily activities are similarly without much broader “use,” particularly when we refuse to fill them with some higher agenda, like “being more productive.”

When simply done “for their own sake” with no broader purpose, boring activities can be “incredibly liberating” according to McDaniel, allowing us to find simple relief in the task itself and not in what we’re getting done or producing. As a result, activities that are “boring” and effectively “useless” in this positive sense can trigger “a new beginning, a reset,” as he calls it, from the negativity that regularly weighs us down.

It’s a principle that’s been institutionalized for centuries by Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia where McDaniel studied as a student. Their days (and his) were consumed with tasks, repeated daily (like sweeping the same path or washing the day’s fruits and vegetables) that allowed them to empty their minds of everything beyond the task itself—like “boring a hole in yourself” and letting the extraneous out. Instead of aiming to do more, the point of boring/repetitive activities is actually to do less. In essence, McDaniel and the monks he was learning from found escape in boredom, or the repetitive monotony that characterizes many of our days too–at least when we refuse to compound the monotony with worry.

To somebody like me, who often feels overwhelmed by a 24/7 overload of “bad news” and my inability to absorb (let alone respond to) even a portion of it, hearing about an escape into boredom sounded like Relief. It was then that McDaniel started talking about how our brains “crave nothingness, crave non-productivity.” Stepping back from his remarks, I recalled making a similar point in a post from a couple years back called We Don’t Have to be Productive All the Time. But what McDaniel gestured towards was something that had been more elusive back then, namely, the potential cure that was offered by the non-productive activities that I perform all the time in the course of living and working.

It’s the every-day boredom of tasks at home: the cleaning, dressing, washing, eating, shopping, mowing the lawn, taking the dog out. It’s the daily boredom of tasks at work: research, writing, emailing, calling, meeting, promoting, monitoring information flows. All of these tasks have a repetitive monotony in them. To find their relief, I just need to strip them of their larger goals, objectives, the anxieties that I’m (somehow) not meeting them, and everything else I might be worrying about.

It really is like turning all the charging switches off while leaving the boring one on.

During his podcast appearance, McDaniel gave a beautiful illustration of this healing kind of boredom, and as he recounted it I realized he was talking about something he clearly does himself.

As a chaired professor at a prestigious university, his book-filled office likely hosts many “highly charged” but also “anxiety inducing” activities that could benefit greatly from the relief of a little boredom. For example, the students who visit it may want an “A” in his course, his endorsement for an internship, or a letter of recommendation that will flatter them when the time comes. As a professor, he might be hosting an ambitious colleague seeking tenure, a rival being competitive, or the professional pressure to do more impactful research himself. What all of these purposeful acts have in common, said McDaniel, is “do, do, do.”

But at that point in the podcast, he tried to offer us the same view that he simultaneously has of the books on his office’s bookshelves. “Who cares what’s in them,” he exclaimed (without the reverence I might have expected from a scholar.) What I do sometimes is “just look at them, and all the variety of the colors on their covers.” At that point I realized, that’s exactly what Justin McDaniel can be found doing in his office sometimes, particularly when his brain “craves non-productivity” and all the “do, do, do” that’s around him needs “a reset.” In these intervals, hiis books don’t have the higher purpose of scholarship or greater wisdom but simply the boredom of covers with many colors.

To me, this everyday and always-available peace is not unlike what Roman Signer is also offering in another one of his kayak-related installations.

Good luck with the boredom this week! I’ll see you next Sunday.

This post was adapted from my October 8, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Best Gifts Are A Shared Experience

July 23, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When you’ve lived in a place a long time, you accumulate.

There are all kinds of reasons for valuing something enough that you’ve kept it around.

But one downside of this was revealed to me last winter when relatively warm days were followed by a couple of frigid ones which caused a pipe to freeze and then burst behind some floor-to-ceiling shelves that I’d packed full of “things to keep.”

This geyser-fueled alarm bell gave rise to several reactions at the time: relief when my trusty plumber answered the call; irritability when removing the mess of water; and clarity when I realized that most of the stuff I’d set out to dry like treasured cod or leaves of tobacco just had to go.

With some headway into spring yard-work under my belt, I’ll be turning to these shelves and their contents this week. Who’d appreciate 20 clay pots, a serious set of weights, or TVs that have fallen behind the curve? Only one thing is clear: by sometime next week, they’ll all be headed someplace else.

Mine is a fairly common situation, I suspect. How do I get this stuff that I’ve valued enough to keep to those who’ll appreciate having it at least as much–in other words, where there’s enough gratitude around the transaction to benefit us both? As it turns out, while I’ve been in the middle of this quandary, I’ve also been corresponding with a life-long friend who’s discovered that he only has a few months to live. So I’ve also been thinking about how we pass along “what we’ve valued” in a spirit of mutual appreciation towards the end of our lives too.

Coincidentally, a piece called “You Can’t Take It With You” crossed my transom this week. It seems that a couple of trusts-and-estates profs at Yale Law School conducted the first national survey that asked Americans “how they would divide their property among relatives, friends and others if they were to pass away immediately.” Not surprisingly, a survey like this tells us a lot about the people we actually care about during our lifetimes and how we’d like to provide for them when we’re gone.

It turns out that what we thought we knew about these matters was pretty limited before this survey.

Most of the information about how people pass along their property comes from the wills of deceased people that have gone through probate [in state court systems]. But that’s a very biased sample — people with wills are very different from people without wills. Also, wills don’t tell us anything about any of the most complex and interesting family situations because they don’t contain enough information. [For example,] wills can’t tell us anything about how often people make gifts to their stepchildren or nonmarital partners…

According to a companion piece in the Wall Street Journal, 54% of Americans told Gallup pollsters in 2021 that they don’t have wills at all. And this isn’t just poor or middle-income people. Apparently one in five Americans with assets of $1 million or more don’t have wills indicating how they want their property to pass. In other words, if you die “intestate,” state law will determine who inherits whether that’s where you want your assets to go or not. Among other things, someone living with you outside of marriage may get kicked out of your house when you’re no longer around to prevent it, while relatives you thought you’d written off years ago could be surprised by unexpected gifts along with the tax payments that go with them.

The Yale survey also indicated just how widely peoples’ expectations around inheritance tend to vary. For example, Black-Americans, the poor and less well-educated, along with women in general told the pollsters that they would give less to their spouses and more to their children than others. Many of those contacted also stated that there were un-related people in their lives that they’d like to provide for after they die. Once again, the law in most states won’t recognize wishes like these if the deceased has failed to include them in “a last will and testament.”

Another issue that the Yale researchers pointed out was that American viewpoints “gathered by pollsters on the spur of the moment,” are likely to change if there were more time to think about their answers. (In other words, maybe the wife would have second thoughts about the financial needs of that grumpy guy in the other room who’s dribbling on himself while watching reruns of Matlock.) Instead of policy changes that involve tinkering with state laws on inheritance to match spur-of–the-moment preferences, the better course might be for each of us to think though our wishes in these regards with legal advisors and those that we care most about before we die.

But since too few of us want to confront end-of-life realities, there’s no indication in the survey data or otherwise that people are rushing to ensure that their resources will go where they want them to go when they’re no longer around to make those decisions for themselves.

One way around this avoidance may be passing along “far more of what we value most” while we’re still alive and the beneficial glow around our gift-giving can be shared with the recipients.

I’ve written about gift-giving on this page before.

For example, when the Sachler family was being excoriated for fueling the opioid crisis with their company’s lust for profits, it seemed appropriate to comment on how they attempted to cloak their avarice with a veneer of civic-minded responsibility by donating millions for naming rights at various art museums and academic institutions. In fact, just this week, theTimes reported that Oxford University joined others in short-circuiting this honor by “de-naming” another Sachler building. (If Jeffery Epstein had lived long enough or Harvey Weinstein had gotten farther in his defense we might have been over-hearing more of these give-and-take-back debates.)

A little more than a year ago, I wrote a post called “The Art of Passing Along What We Value.” It began with stories about giving people things they saw while visiting and admired, and how I’d been thrilled by some early-in-life gifts that had been given to me under similar circumstances. I thought at the time:

When someone else’s interest meets an object of your affection, the best time to move it into some new hands might be now.

Because spur-of-the-moment giving and receiving can feel that good.

And because we also tend to accumulate a lot of treasure, we cannot (and perhaps should not) keep all of it

From there, the post explored an essay called “The Unbearable Heaviness of Clutter” and it’s advice on avoiding “over-attachment” to our stuff. What interested me most wasn’t the hoarding phenomenon but how and why we attach significance to particular things. I concluded at the time that while “weak attachments” (like to an article of clothing) can be broken by employing one or another clever tactic (like having someone else hold up the item while asking “do you need this?), an equally affective solution might be keeping your attachment to the item in tact and simply transferring it to someone else who will value it is as much if not more than you do.

[S]ince whatever-it-is was never stripped of its [personal] meaning, the depth of the generosity around the giving and receiving of it is often felt-all-around.

The post concluded with a giving strategy I was less familiar with, namely Bill Perkin’s advice about how to (according to the title of his 2020 book) Die With Zero. He urges a level of intentionality “around passing along what you have” that goes far beyond writing a will.

While I go into it more deeply in the post, Perkin’s advice arises from the fact that each season of our lives is blessed with different abilities and resource requirements. He proposes a formula for adjusting the amounts that we spend/give and save accordingly, so that by the end of our lives we’ve experienced the fullness of every season (and maybe helped others to do so as well) while reaching the finish line with essentially nothing left over beyond a life-well-lived.

He persuasively argues that with regular adjustments to your giving-and-saving strategies, it’s possible to lead the experience-rich life that many of us aspire to but too few of us have—while perhaps also getting to witness our children or other young people, and even organizations we care about, “fulfill their seasonal mandates too” with assistance we provide while we’re alive and can still enjoy watching them do so.

To those with less discretionary spending and fewer assets to deploy, Perkin’s “seasonally adjusted” advice also makes sense because it encourages us to examine our capabilities and resource requirements at each point in our lives—including those points that we haven’t reached yet and never considered before—such as “how much less we’ll need as we get older.” For him, it’s better to plan a way “to climb the highest mountain” when you’re 30 than regret that you never did so when you’re 70, and careful planning can help you to have the thrill and avoid that regret.

In this, Perkins advocates a kind of gift-giving and receiving between your older and younger self, whatever season of your life you happen to be in.

Gifts that we give to the dead are often in the form of grave-side eulogies or reflections that you write when you’ve had more time to absorb the loss.

Several years ago, I wrote something like this for a cousin I’d travelled to see and essentially say “good-bye” to as Joe’s health declined. I didn’t tell him the things about him that I was most thankful for, but I tried to convey, in a dozen different ways, my respect and affection for him in the hours we spent together—and I think he got the message. But it was only after his passing that I got into the stories we shared that mattered most me.

Here is some of what I wrote afterwards:

My cousin Joe died after a long struggle with illness last week. What was remarkable was the loving peace he somehow found in the midst of those struggles….

I knew him as a man with strong opinions, not suffering fools gladly—even when they happened to be related to him. He could be sarcastic and stubborn, but also playful and funny. I found that you were ‘in’ when he got ‘a kick’ out of you, and I guess he got a kick out of me.

Joe loved sailing, and took me out one windy day in the New Haven harbor. I had dreaded going out a first, fearing the tongue-lashing my minimal boating skills were sure to invite, but had a great time. Joe was in his element when he was out on the water, loved the speed and wind and spray, and his love of it was infectious.

My strongest memory of the man came after my mother died unexpectedly and Joe offered to help me move her stuff out of the apartment where she had been living. ‘Her stuff’ was a surprisingly large amount of what she had accumulated in a suburban house over thirty years and managed to cram from floor to ceiling in various corners of her apartment. Another day I’d been dreading was elevated by sharing it with Joe, as my right-hand man this time around. Stories, jokes, strength, competence, support. What he brought to the endeavor that day provided all the right counters to the sadness, resentment, and exhaustion I was feeling that day. I marveled at the nuance of his caring then and still marvel at it now.

I spent a day with him in Florida after Christmas. I knew I might never see him again and had visited, in part, to say good-bye. While he was surrounded by the paraphernalia that was keeping him alive, I was struck by how Joe was almost aglow with a loving radiance in the midst of it. It was a place beyond acceptance of his poor health. Being glad to see me and pleased at the respect of my visit also didn’t account for it. More than anyone else I have known towards the end of life, Joe had already found a place in his mind and spirit beyond the afflictions of his body and anything non-essential. It was an honor for me to see that— something quite marvelous and blessed about it—a gift that I will take with me as I get older and try to find that place too. What began as a farewell ended in a hopeful glimpse of the future.

Another companion-in-life named Hunter is dying (a continent away) as I write to you today. He may make it to summer, he may not. But I resolved to have the conversation with him that I didn’t have with Joe. And the only way I could accomplish it was by writing a letter to his son and caregiver, asking Nathan to read what I’d written to his father “on a good day.”

Those of you who read this post know I can be “a man of many words” and I’d originally planned to include all or at least parts of my letter to Hunter here today. It’s too long for one thing, and hangs together as a whole, making any excerpt from it a poor representative. But perhaps more importantly, it’s also fresh in its pain and private in its intimacy, making it too early and too close to “put out there” to others just yet.

But I can tell you, it’s a conversation with Hunter that I’m grateful to be having (whenever it actually occurs) because I think I know how he’ll react to each and every part of it, even though the communication between us passes through the grace of his loving son.

In terms of “parting gifts” whether to a total stranger, to your plumber when he admires an artifact in your home, or to a life-long friend whose days are numbered, it is always better, it seems to me, to squeeze as much benefit out of the gift-giving as possible by making what it provides to the gift-giver and its receiver as meaningful as you can for both of you.

– I valued this thing while it “lived” in my house and am grateful (through your thanks upon receiving it) that I’m giving it another home.

– I’ve taken as much enjoyment as I’m entitled to from this book or photo or souvenir. Besides, I have other books and photos and souvenirs, and need fewer of them these days. The season has come for you to enjoy something you’ve admired here full-time, in your home.

– Instead of giving you resources in my will, you’ll have what you would have gotten now, when you’re young enough and vigorous enough to enjoy it—which you probably won’t be 50 years from now, when I finally get probated out of the courts of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

– I want to share the gift of our stories together while you’re alive because we can’t once you’re gone. Then it will truly be a gift to you as well as to me.

This post was adapted from my May 21, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Common Beat

June 4, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’ve been finding lately that the biggest obstacle to feeling the common beat is other people.

It’s just easier to imagine sharing the rhythm and release—that universal correspondence environmentalists always wax-on about—when it’s all of the other living things and people aren’t involved. Just the animals that hop, the birds that soar, the fish that ride the waves and the trees that are always reaching towards the sun: you wouldn’t call any of them mean, selfish or lost in their petty concerns. They all know (all the time) that they need “the rest of their world” to live and thrive, as I was reminded in a brilliant episode of Nature this week called “Soul of the Ocean.” But we’ll get to that….

I was in John’s yoga class this week and finding it even more of a blessing than usual after way too much work (“Thanks, man!”). He began, as he always does, with a reading to pull us from the preoccupied places we’d brought with us to where he always hopes to take us. This is some of the bridge that he thought might help us out last Thursday, from The Book of Awakening:

If you place two living heart cells from different people in a Petrie dish, they will in time find and maintain a third and common beat. (Molly Vass) This biological fact holds the secret of all relationship. It is cellular proof that beneath any resistance we might pose and beyond all our attempts that fall short, there is in the very nature of life itself some essential joining force. This inborn ability to find and enliven a common beat is the miracle of love. This force is what makes compassion possible, even probable. For if two cells can find the common pulse beneath everything, how much more can full hearts feel when all excuses fall away?

This drive toward a common beat is the force beneath curiosity and passion. It is what makes strangers talk to strangers, despite the discomfort. It is how we risk new knowledge. For being still enough, long enough, next to anything living, we find a way to sing the one voiceless song. Yet we often tire ourselves by fighting how our hearts want to join, seldom realizing that both strength and peace come from our hearts beating in unison with all that is alive.

I know, I know. This sort of thing is for the chanting voices, murmuring drums and free-floating love in a yoga room, not for life on Philadelphia’s “Blade Runner”streets, where we’re hitting and running and shooting the life out of our neighbors except, of course, when the Eagles are on TV. (It’s worth noting here that “in an earlier life,” John had been a police officer.)

Because this post is about the kind of heart that yearns to beat with all the others that are alive, and further, because Valentine’s Day will be giving us its own version of that before too many more days, I thought of another attempt to capture the common beat in this City.

At the Franklin Institute, which is our science museum, there’s been (since the year after I was born) a Giant Heart that (at 28-feet wide and 18 feet high) is said to be big enough to fit into a 220-foot tall person. For several of the decades that followed, it was a rubbery cavern where streams of school children would relieve themselves until its smell became so intolerable that “a deep cleaning” was performed and a new advertising campaign was launched—as you can see at the top of this page.

Pictures of that Giant Heart itself follow as we explore (first) how living things have often evolved into finding the common beat in nature and (last) how supposedly lower forms of life can coral supposedly higher forms of life into doing their bidding because both have come to embrace that we’re all “in this” together and might as well help one another out when called upon to do so.

There are a million examples in nature that show us how we can flourish by sharing instead of destroying the world around us. But we’ll have to broaden the limited reading of human advancement that we’ve enshrined in our ideologies and other excuses to truly see them.

In an interview in the Times this week, author (Braiding Sweet Grass) and scientist Robin Wall Kemmerer chastened capitalists generally, and (I think) American capitalists in particular, when she said:

Unquestionably the contemporary economic systems have brought great benefit in terms of human longevity, health care, education and the liberation to chart one’s own path as a sovereign being. But what are the costs that we pay for that? ….We have to think about more than our own species, that these liberatory benefits have come at the price of extinction of other species and extinctions of entire landscapes and biomes, and that’s a tragedy.

Can we derive other ways of being that allow our species to flourish and our more-than-human relatives to flourish as well? I think we can. It’s a false dichotomy to say we could have human well-being or ecological flourishing. There are too many examples worldwide where we have both, and that narrative of one or the other is deeply destructive and cuts us off from imagining a different future for ourselves.

Another concept besides “freedom” that includes our aspirations as well as punishments is “survival of the fittest.” While the concept has unquestionable evolutionary benefits, ever since “forward thinkers” dragged it under the canopy of Social Darwinism it has also produced tragedies, including thinking that our dominance, subjugation and pillage are the necessary (collateral) damages for our social advancement. But in addition to motivating centuries of conquest, colonialism, and “milking of the Earth,” the continuous need to demonstrate that “we’re the fittest” has also given us the distorted picture that we’re only operating in the ways that Mother Nature does.

The problem is: the natural world doesn’t operate in this one-sided way and never has, however much we want to anthropomorphize its internal dynamics to feel greater comfort about our own means and ends.

In a recent book called Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World, science writer Kristin Ohlson takes our mistaken alignment with this social theory on directly:

Even many scientists don’t grasp how pervasive cooperative interactions are in nature. Consequently, we seem to have developed a zero-sum view of nature, suggesting that whatever we take . . . comes at the expense of other living things and the overall shared environment.

To challenge this self-serving view, Ohlson cites the remarkable “give-and-take” that happens throughout nature, including in the soil that’s as close as our back or front yards. Microbes, fungi, wild flowers, scrubs and trees not only share nutrients and dispose of waste, they also message one another via neural-like networks that actually “challenge what we mean by cognition.” Reading this I was reminded of the new “Avatar” movie and (like in the original) its subsurface webs of mutual aid, support and resilience that the colonists missed until they “crossed-over” into the natural world. While Darwin himself hardly needed reminding, Ohlson introduces the rest of us to one of his contemporaries, Russian scientist Peter Kropotkin, who wrote the following at the same time that Social Darwinism was on the rise:

Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another? We at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.

Fittness, then, is more complicated than simply surviving or coming out on top. It also includes a great deal of cooperation.

If you still have any doubt, I recommend the visual and (sometimes) spoken-word feast of Nature’s “Soul of the Ocean” episode this week. (Here’s a link to watch this “never-before-seen look at how life underwater co-exists” on whatever viewing device you happen to be using.)

This nature documentary invites us “to dive into a better world.” It’s a place where “everywhere you look, fish aren’t eating one another but cleaning each other.” There seems to be “an older alchemy” where all of the inhabitants are playing in a vast game with rules that hold the entire playing field in a delicate balance. Some of it is “surely the ancient biochemistry of cooperation.”

My favorite examples included the colorful goby fish who maintains a permanent relationship with a tiny shrimp “that does its housecleaning” during their lifetimes together. (Off the coast of the Philippines where they live, it’s said that one has never been seen without the other.) In other examples, each clown fish has “its own” stinging anemone for protection, and species of fan coral have their own identically-colored species of seahorses. A carrier crab gives a poisonous urchin a ride, perhaps for additional protection, while in a gorgeous sequence on traveling jellyfish streaming long tentacles behind them we get a glimpse of “a delicate medusa fish” hitching a ride “in a fragile mobile home”—or maybe something else is going on, since we can never stop understanding nature through our excessively human ways of looking at things.

Nor do all examples of mutuality in nature seem fair, or fully balanced. Just because cooperation is needed to maintain the overall harmony, one party in a shared arrangement may have the far easier job—and it’s often not the one you’d expect who ends up “running things.”

_{“Make sure you all visit the bathroom before going inside.”}

It’s easier for us to imagine that when one party in nature seems to come out on top while the other seems to be working “much, much harder,” the over-worker must be staying in the relationship out of “love,” or at least some “alchemy” or “biochemistry” that we still can’t totally fathom. Such is the case with a parasitic plant that gets a rare island rabbit to continuously do its evolutionary bidding, a startling new story that’s still revealing its secrets somewhere on the Amami Islands off the coast of Japan.

The plant is balanophora yuwanensis (no friendly name has yet been given, so just “BY” for now). It’s a bundle of “strange, red globes” that (straight out of “Avatar”) look like “strawberries crossed with red cap mushrooms.” Instead of producing the energy that it needs from photosynthesis, BY leaches its sustenance from the roots of other plants, making it parasitic by nature. The developing mystery involves how BY—with bad tasting seeds and no wind to carry them about—has managed to propagate itself throughout these remote Islands.

Enter the only dark-furred rabbit in the world (called, somewhat unimaginatively, the Amami rabbit.) This past week, two Japanese scientists documented “an evolutionary bargain” in which the root-sucking BY gives food in exchange for this rabbit’s seed dispersal services, an arrangement “that [apparently] has never been documented between a mammal and a parasitic plant” before.

Nocturnal filming allowed the scientists to capture Amami rabbits regularly chowing down on BY’s less-than-appetizing “strawberries” and “red caps.” Meanwhile, a follow-up investigation revealed that considerably more viable seeds were able to pass through these rabbits’ digestive systems than those of other seed-consuming rabbits. As if that weren’t enough, the Amami species conveniently likes to burrow (and release the BY’s seeds) at the base of large trees and close to a new host plant’s roots (or exactly the food source that baby BYs will need access to).

“In other words,” according to these scientists, “the rabbits’ dropping patterns are less random [and infinitely more desirable] in the evolutionary eyes of the parasites.” Unfortunately for us, while revealing this extraordinary example of inter-reliance between species, the research has yet to explain why Amami rabbits are attracted to these unappealing seeds in the first place, or agreed to do almost all of the work in this admittedly unusual relationship.

Now imagine (if you can) a similar example of cross-species reliance where the supposedly less sophisticated species somehow convinces the more sophisticated one to do its bidding. In this scenario, Wally the resident terrier, who’s playing the role of the dominating plant, somehow convinces the author to play the gullible, hard-working rabbit in yet another “evolutionary bargain.”

As I’ve eluded to in recent posts, Wally has been suffering from a serious digestive aliment and it’s been requiring higher amounts of medication (including steroids) to kick the nasties out of his system. The meds also make him thirsty and drink far more water than usual. Well this past week began a life-on-steroids regime that involves my taking him outside to pee every few hours (whether I’m asleep or not) if I wish to avoid accidents in the bed (his preferred place for sleeping, of course) or elsewhere. How did my little guy negotiate this evolutionary advantage I wonder as I stagger down the stairs every night at 12, 3 and 6 am, put on my parka and brave the sub-freezing temperatures in order to “accommodate the two of us”?

In other words, how did another “plant” convince his “rabbit” to do this?

I guess it brings me back to John, The Book of Awakening, the Franklin Institute’s “love our heart” promotion, all the LOVE that’s wafting around this “brotherly love” kind of city, as well as the “older alchemy” and “ancient biochemistry” of cooperation that exists among species in nature. When two hearts beat side by side, at some point they become “a common beat” that makes cooperation, compassion and (yes) even Love possible.

Through all of his life Wally has done everything that his pure little heart can do for me so, of course, I’ll endeavor to do the same for him. While I’ve not always been happy to be “the rabbit to his plant” this week, I also can’t imagine acting in any other way.

This post was adapted from my February 5, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

An Artist Needs to Write Us a Better Story About the Future

March 9, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

To make the hard decisions around climate change, we need the pull of a compelling story that tells us about all the great things that will follow and the ways we’ll be rewarded when we do.

Because changing the ways we live and work will be hard, disruptive, (and given the nature of change generally) uncomfortable, we’ll need to want, really want, what comes after if we’re ever going to bite all the bullets that we should be biting already.

So far, there’s not been enough biting—and the clock is ticking, at two seconds to midnight or whatever, like a cattle prod—because our imaginations have yet to be captured by a version of the future that gives us enough to look forward to so that all those necessary changes, “our adopting simpler lives fueled by windmills etc.,” will finally feel like they’ve been “worth it” when everything settles down again.

Or to illustrate with a different, supposedly dumb animal, if we’re ever to get through the maze of our fossil-fueled obstacles and over the desire to consume our entire planet, we’ll need a really strong whiff of the new cheese in the middle—and our twitching noses just haven’t picked it up yet.

That “we” is you and me of course, a really specific and fairly small number of Earth’s nearly 8 billion inhabitants. That’s because (as Rebecca Solnit wrote about so well this week):

By saying ‘we are all responsible’ [for the environmental catastrophe], we avoid the fact that the global majority of us don’t need to change much, but a minority needs to change a lot. This is also a reminder that the idea that we need to renounce our luxuries and live more simply doesn’t really apply to the majority of human beings outside what we could perhaps call the overdeveloped world. What is true of Beverly Hills is [simply] not true of the majority from Bangladesh to Bolivia.

So the people who need to be convinced by a better story are the relatively few of us who either live in this “overdeveloped world” or in gated communities with gun turrets in the less-developed parts of it.

We are the ones facing the hardest, most disruptive choices. But, says Solnit, the only stories about what comes next and how we’ll get there are coming from scientists, with their mind-boggling charts and “climate models” and speculative technologies. Her call is for artists—on the scale of Dickens—or science fiction writers who can tantalize us with the promise of marvelous tomorrows instead of paralyzing us into “deer in the headlights” with their views of dystopian ones. (We really are like cattle, rats and deer.) Solnit also goes on to describe some of what these new storytellers should be weaving into their narratives and how they should go about doing so, but before we turn to her remarks a few words about the images—they’re photo collages—in my post today.

Because he includes “us” as passive spectators in our own disaster narratives, a 30-something visual artist who’s working in Brussels captures “where many of us are these days” quite affectively: tourists viewing their own apocalypse, swimming while the surrounding hills burn, jumping into the unknown when we could be helped to know (and even look forward to) whatever’s down there.

The artist’s name is David Delruelle, and by capturing today’s mood with his brilliant juxtapositions it’s almost like he wants to jar us out of our dumb-animal complacency. If you’re as captivated as I am by his work, here’s a link to a catalog that features more of it and another to a 4-minute video about the creation of these surreal visuals.

_{“La Boîte Verte (The Green Box)” or swimming while the rest burns.}

The Solnit essay in The Guardian this week says it was adapted from a speech she gave at Princeton last November but in all the ways that matter it’s the most recent child of her 2004 book, Hope in the Dark. That book’s important arguments showed how history is written by committed individuals who find the conviction to take the next small step, in difficult times, towards a goal that seems beyond reach and may never materialize. That’s why the brand of “Hope” that Solnit writes about there needs to find its conviction to act “in the Dark” instead of waiting for the imminent victory of a rising sun.

Her Guardian essay describes the folly of expecting the battle against climate change (or whatever we’re up against) to unfold like a Hollywood action movie, yet that is what many of us seem to be magically thinking. (We won’t have to make difficult decisions. All we’ll need to do is wait for somebody else to sort things out and turn the lights back on.)

These movies also encourage the myth that our salvation will come in battles, fought by loners, with “the capacity to inflict and endure extreme violence,” while the skills that we’ll ACTUALLY need (according to Solnit) are “solidarity, strategy, patience, persistence, vision and the ability to inspire hope in others.” At the same time, the rescuers that will save us “are mostly not individuals [at all], they are collectives—movements, coalitions, campaigns, civil society [and]….We are sadly lacking in stories in which collective actions or the patient determination of organizers is what changes the world.”

A similarly fanciful lesson “from our [‘entirely inadequate,’ she’d say] films and fictions” is that there will be “a sudden victory, a celebration, and the trouble [will be] over.” From her own activism and from writing about social change for decades, Solnit has learned that “[c]hange often functions [more] like a relay race, with new protagonists picking up where the last left off,” citing the following example for resonance:

In 2019, a Berkeley city councilwoman decided to propose banning fossil-gas connections in new construction, and it was passed by the council unanimously. This small city’s commitment to all-electric new buildings could seem insignificant, but more than 50 other California municipalities picked it up, as did the city of New York. The state of New York failed to pass a similar measure, but Washington state succeeded, and the idea that new construction should not include gas has spread internationally.

The trick, as she describes it in Hope in the Dark, is to maintain your convictions and your hopes for the desired outcome at each stage of our real-world rely race, because without reserves of endurance during periods of uncertainty (and lots of new blood joining the chain), we often abandon our victories and concede our defeats too quickly. In that book, Solnit illustrates the quandary as well as our way out of it through this example, about the struggle for pay equity for women:

[A] cranky guy wrote in that women used to make sixty-two cents to the male dollar and now we made seventy-seven cents, so what were we complaining about? It doesn’t seem like it should be so complicated to acknowledge that seventy-seven cents is better than sixty-six cents and [at the same time] that seventy-seven cents isn’t good enough, but the politics we have is so pathetically bipolar that we only tell this story two ways: either seventy-seven cents is a victory, and victories are points where you shut up and stop fighting; or seventy-seven cents is ugly, so activism accomplishes nothing and what’s the pint of fighting? Both versions are defeatist because they are static. What’s missing from these two ways of telling is an ability to recognize a situation in which you are traveling and have not arrived, in which you have cause both to celebrate and to fight, in which the world is always being made and is never finished.

In her Guardian essay, Solnit introduces a dozen additional themes for inclusion in a story about the future that might motivate us to intensify our struggle against climate change in the ways that we need to—including these:

_{– how ending “an era of profligate consumption by the few that has consequences for the many means changing how we think about [and imagine] pretty much everything: wealth, power, joy, time, space, nature, value, what constitutes a good life, what matters, how change itself happens.” It’s both the challenge and promise of radical reinvention.

– how “we’ve largely won the battle to make people [who are like us] aware and concerned” already, but that the story also needs to mobilize us to take the necessary actions now (like cutting back on our consumption and valuing nature differently) for the sake of a future that can pull us towards it while never being a certainty.

– how improving our literacy about profound and fundamental change in the past (like the transformative nature of the Industrial Revolution, or even more recently, the rise of the smart phone) can fuel the effort to produce equally profound and fundamental changes for the sake of our future.}

Each of these elements is part of a new story that will need to take us beyond the crisis of climate change to a world that we want to live in far more than the one we’re living in today. That story also needs to show us how to “break things we’re attached to” in order to get there, while dazzling us with the promise of its wonders and fullness once we arrive. Because as Solnit says so well in this, the heart of her remarks:

Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis. This is as true of climate chaos as anything else. We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change. Some are habits of mind, some are industry propaganda. Sometimes, the situation has changed but the stories haven’t, and people follow the old versions, like outdated maps, into dead ends.

We need to leave the age of fossil fuel behind, swiftly and decisively. But what drives our machines won’t change until we change what drives our ideas. The visionary organizer Adrienne Maree Brown wrote not long ago that there is an element of science fiction in climate action: ‘We are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle’….

[And since we are,] for too long the climate fight has been limited to scientists and policy experts. While we need their skills, we also need so much more. When I survey the field, it’s clear that what we desperately need is more artists.

What the climate crisis is, what we can do about it, and what kind of a world we can have is all about what stories we tell and whose stories are [engaging enough to be] heard.

_{“Great Mountain Fire” or jumping into the unknown.}

In reviewing old posts that I’ve written about the challenges facing the health of the Earth—including the hazards of climate change, global warming and biodiversity loss—I was surprised by how hard I’ve been looking for that new story (or at least some key themes) that will mobilize me to reduce my consumption, find new forms of gratification (beyond eating the planet), stop the environmental damage I’m causing, restore what I can mend (like how to bring rabbits, or certain kinds of birds back to my backyard), discover new ways of living and working, and help to build a future that’s more satisfying than the one I’m anticipating today. So in closing, I’d like to add a few of the storylines and themes that I’ve considered to the ones that Rebecca Solnit is proposing.

_{– how something called “the Clock of the Long Now,” which calculates time 10,000 years into the future, operates as a kind of “act of faith” in our long-term prospects, and how we reaffirm that belief and the value of such a clock whenever we invite a new baby to join us down here. (Bringing a Child Into a World Like This, April 24, 2023).

– how we’re finding new ways to cover the costs to industries and workers of changing today’s harmful environmental practices. Demonstrating a kind of “virtuous economic circle,” this is a storyline about New England’s lobster industry, a declining right whale population, and how valuing the whales’ contributions to ocean health differently could finance changes in lobster trapping so current methods no longer endanger these migrating giants. (Valuing Nature in Ways the World Can Understand, November 13, 2019).

– how the UK’s government has gotten behind a breathtaking proposal to value nature like an asset, and natural systems like portfolios of assets, so a dollars & cents world can finally join in finding sustainable solutions to biodiversity with “a common grammar” of economic costs and benefits. (Economics Takes a Leading Role in the Biodiversity Story, February 21, 2021).

– and how the future can look better—more interesting and far more promising—when we put ourselves in that future and look back at how far we’ve come, because we’re finally experiencing the combined impact of the much smaller changes we made in the 2020s in areas like battery technology, urban design and soil management. (A Different Future Will Get Us Out From Under the Cloud, September 19, 2021).}

Particularly as our political landscape degraded and the pandemic surged—that is, when the future seemed particularly bleak over the past few years—I dove into these stories to see if I could find in them “some hope in the dark” for me and maybe for you. And there was a kind of glimmer in the growing realization that our imaginations in the face of environmental peril might indeed see us through these daunting challenges.

Now if only I were enough of an artist to write the compelling story that could help to carry humanity to a more sustainable finish line. Or that someone far more talented could.

This post was adapted from my January 29, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Reading Last Year and This Year

January 12, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s been a busy week for me, and not in a good way.

It was probably RSV that took down the first three days of it in a torrent of congestion and runny nose, until I felt my old self begin to return on Thursday, only to discover while heading out for necessities, that the rapid thaw had burst two pipes in our carriage house (which holds both car and office) so I ended up spending all of my relief mopping, moving, drying and hoping that my plumber would come to the rescue.

By Friday I was tired, back to recovering and not yet relieved again, but Andrew the unflappable pipe fixer had come and gone and it now appears that I’ll finally be getting rid of the old computer equipment that’s been gathering out there because I never got around to removing “the sensitive bits” before it’s composting until now.

If all of this has to happen, it might as well be in this dangling participle of a week, lodged between a culmination of sorts (on Christmas) and a new beginning (today, on New Years). While I was casting about for a headline image this morning, it seemed to me that the one above is either about capturing the last or the first light, and therefore, just that kind of inbetweeness. (Photographer Sasha Elage gets my thanks for it.)

In a similar vein, this is also a time of year for looking back on some of its high points and maybe anticipating some new ones. I covered some of the songs that held my ear in 2022 last week, and today it’s a short dash through things I’ve read that have left their mark on me this year and might do the same for you.

However, before turning to my short list of books, essays and stories, a observation about the current state of our literacy (more generally) from, of all people, Henry Kissinger. Nixon’s Secretary of State is 100 years old now and looking a bit like Stephen Hawking while he retreats into his business suit at gatherings, but God-Bless-Him the man is still raising concerns and speaking out about them given his undiminished sense of public duty. It’s remarkable, but also invaluable—especially because so few of our “public figures” work up the gumption to do so today.

_{Henry Kissinger as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future.}

Above everything, Kissinger is concerned that our culture is losing the academic-and-life-long commitments to “deep literacy” that its road warriors seemed to have earlier in his career. That is: To know what our greatest minds are thinking about, to be able to talk about those things too, and most importantly, to discern the most telling insights in this cultural conversation and apply them to how we live and work, govern ourselves and interact with strangers. He believes that there used to be more public-spirited individuals with a deep understanding of history, world affairs and human interaction (from literature, among other sources) who were prepared to lead their communities or countries.

Kissinger fears we are losing the farm teams and even the starting benches of leadership that our civilization once depended on because the men and women who are drawn to public service no longer bring “the deep literacy” that our colleges and universities once fostered. There are lots of reasons for this of course, including an emphasis on “vocational” education (or only-study-now-what-you-can-get-paid-to-do-later) and on the STEM disciplines (given remarkable advances in science and technology and the high-paying jobs that accompany them).

But Kissinger cites two other culprits, both related to the growing dominance of electronic communication today. Increasingly, “we gain what we know” from pictures or tweets instead of from reading about something (anythng) in any greater depth. A constant barrage of brief impressions has caused us to have shorter attention spans and made us less likely to take any kind of dive (let alone a deep one) into complicated subject matter. Kissinger fears that our leaders and “the educated strata” in our societies that once produced their brain trusts are becoming increasingly “less literate,” with consequences that we can unfortunately see all around us.

It’s a point that social psychologist Jonathan Haidt also made this year in an Atlantic article called “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anticipating Kissinger’s alarm, this article was already “one of the year’s best reads” and the subject of my Divided We Fall post six months ago. Haidt argues that social media, and its appeal to emotion instead of reason, has increased our civic illiteracy, making it harder to safeguard the institutions and commitments we profess to hold in common. While, like many of you, I was briefly heartened by the U.S. mid-term elections in November, the coming year is likely to remind those of us in the US (with our new Congress) and elsewhere (given widening conflicts and fresh horrors) just how fleeting that “good news” really was.

Today’s undermining of literacy is not somebody else’s problem. I know only too well how much “easier” it is for me to scroll through photo or video-sharing sites or watch “what Netflix recommends for me next” than to commit to a lengthy essay or a new book. So I sense the cognitive degrading in and around me too, a lassitude that the pandemic and other travails has only amplified, and I actively try to vote against it—although not as much as I’d like.

So with that somewhat sobering preface, allow me to share my other favorite “reads” of the year and hopefully an occasion or two for you to cast your own votes for “deeper literacy” over easier diversions.

_{(photo by Leo Berne)}

2 MORE ESSAYS AND ONE STORY

– Eula Biss, “The Theft of the Commons,” in The New Yorker, June 8, 2022. I have one of you to thank for this one (“Happy New Year, Tedd!”) This essay is about private property versus the land as well as the other privileges and freedoms that we still hold “in common.” It turns on the author’s visit to the farming community of Lawton in rural England where the common resources that everyone depends on have somehow resisted the private interests that keep wanting to gobble them up.

Laxton has a tight center where the farmers all live within walking distance of the pub. This makes it distinct from all the rural places I have known. Standing at the center of the village, I had the feeling that I was standing inside an idea, an idea about how to live in relationships of necessity with other people. I felt at home in the idea, and I puzzled over this for a moment, feeling held close by the tight center of a village where I had never been, wondering if I was making myself at home in my own imagination.

It’s imagination that we need now in places like the unclaimed oceans and polar regions, the Amazon and Congo River basins, the rainforests and coral reefs, and where the water flows down the Colorado and towards an American desert that tries to sustain more people than it ever expected.

– Lucas Mann, “An Essay About Watching Brad Pitt Eat That is Really About My Own Shit,” at Hobartpulp.com, August 16, 2022. From its title, you might be wondering what this could possibly have to do with “making the world a better place” at the humanities end of the pool. Well I wouldn’t have found out either if I hadn’t already been thinking about Brad Pitt’s screen persona and the impact that seeing somebody like him over and over might have on an even mildly susceptible person.

Pitt has never chosen to not be Brad Pitt in the image on-screen. Even as he’s taken strange, anti-careerist roles, earned that character-actor-trapped-in-a-leading-man cliché, each performance comes attached to the promise of Brad Pitt’s body. He may have done a wacky Irish Traveler accent in Snatch, but he was still a boxer, and there was a slow-motion break in the movie’s frantic comedy to watch him pull off his shirt. It’s almost as if he’s set himself a lifelong artistic challenge — I can believably be anybody, even when I look like this. Or there’s that lingering, glorious possibility that he hasn’t considered his body enough to wonder whether it’s a gift or a hindrance. Or maybe it’s a moral decision, honoring what has always been the money-maker, refusing to take on that greatest and easiest bit of artifice, the physical kind, even in a profession all about playing pretend.

By getting an imprint like this into the right author’s head, great literature (and this comes close) can change the way that you see the world. Mann confronts the shame of his personal cravings around food, his tendency to be overweight, and his desire that his new daughter be free of these burdens in the shadow of Pitt’s treating food like another accessory to his preternatural good looks. Above even Mann’s powers of observation and serious writing chops, this autobiographical tour-de-force is about how “what we see” might never stop affecting “who we are” once “it gets under our skin.”

“Watching Brad Pitt Eat” is another cautionary note in an era that’s full to the gills with damaging, media-driven impressions, and not just the ones that are made on vulnerable, 13-year-old girls (although in my post next week, called Watching in 2022, one of my favorites was a advertisement for Dove soap that showed “the nearly parental effect” that Instagram or TikTok can have when it’s urging these same 13-year olds to strive for greater beauty.)

– Alyssa Harad, “To Live in the Ending,” in Kenyon Review, July-August, 2022.

When you live in a time that can feel almost apocalyptic you deeply appreciate new ways to frame “the imminent threats” you’re constantly facing. In gorgeous “braids” of storytelling, Harad manages to do just this by weaving several endings in her own life with the “end times” stories that echo around her in order to make more manageable sense out of the harrowing times in which we live. For example, the voice of an environmentalist that she’s followed:

offers a way to think about the end of the world not as a singular explosive event—something true only from the long view of geological time—but as a Chinese box or a matryoshka doll. In a time of climate emergency we live in a series of nested crises. When we emerge from one, the larger one is always there waiting for us. And inside the big troubles—the global rise of fascism, a kleptocratic presidency, white supremacist police violence, concentration camps on our southern border, a pandemic—the smaller crises of ordinary human life continue—a broken heart, a sick child, the rent falling due—all of it framed, structured, intensified, and continually interrupted by the ongoing alarm of the climate crisis.

So how does nesting these crises cushion their blows? Because doing so allows us to acknowledge the occasional victories that occur within them and, when that happens, to feel their respites (if only briefly).

The rolling flow of Harad’s narrative allows us to experience what she means by this: the epiphany of blue flowers in a dying lakebed or of the heroism of a public defender who works “within but against a violent system, quietly, in an obscurity that makes the work possible, trading purity for efficacy, jimmying open the places where the edges don’t quite come together, to make room for a few more people to breathe.”

_{Shadow & light packets.}

BOOKS

– I have piles of unread books, but not a finished one that’s worth sharing since I extolled the virtues of a slim volume about effective writing and a short memoir by “one of our great innovators in modern autobiographical writing” over the summer. In a post called The Relaxing Curiosity That Is Also August, I have more to say about Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “Several Short Sentences About Writing” and Margot Jefferson’s “Constructing a Nervous System: a Memoir.” (Both of them are still sending me reminders.) You’ll find quotes, links to reviews and other impressions that I had about them in that post.

– I follow the second half of the year-in-books quite closely, in particular the National Book Award finalists and longlist for American writers, the same winnowing down for the Booker Prize given to a book that’s written in English this year, and the “notable” and “best” books according to book editors at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other literary arbiters. I do it because I want to know what I should be reading next.

One compilation of note came via a daily post from the publishing industry—a kind of compilation of compilations for the year’s fiction and non-fiction books and “the 10 Very Best Books for 2022 Overall” when the categories are combined. This is how Publisher’s Lunch (yes, it conveniently drops at lunchtime everyday) describes the operation of this remarkable annual service:

Below as usual are our top 10s for the year — based on 61 ‘votes’ from a variety of highly selective lists from critics and reviewers, award nominees, bookseller and librarian picks, book club selections and more.

(“And more!”) You see, they’re aiming to measure quality here, not the quantity of books sold. So in the coming year, if you’re looking for a book to read that comes highly recommended by (apparently) all the right people, their “10 Very Best Books for 2022 Overall” are as follows:

_{1. Trust, Hernan Diaz
2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
3. Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng
4. If I Survive You, Jonathan Escoffery
An Immense World, Ed Yong
6. The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty
I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy
8. Babel, R.F. Kuang
Constructing a Nervous System, Margo Jefferson
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
All This Could Be Different, Sarah Thankam Mathews.}

(I am at a loss as to why there are 11 books on their top 10 list. It must be the “ties” at #8 that are responsible.)

– And last but hardly least, here are the 3 books that I’m currently standing-in-line to take out of my local library. One I was after long before I saw the list above (Ed Yong’s “Immense World” about the infinite varieties of living experience that are flourishing around us but that we know so little about).

A second is also on the list, but I only got interested in it after the buzz from delighted readers I trust gradually became so deafening that I felt like I’d be missing out otherwise (Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” about the origin story of video games and how friendships can sometimes be “as complicated, perplexing and rewarding as a great love story.”)

Finally, a book that came to my attention outside of any list (Claire Keegan’s “Foster,” set in rural Ireland and full of the rich details of daily life, but composed with an artfulness that promises to linger and gnaw. What I know of the plot—about a temporarily-loved girl—has shown me more than enough about why this just might be true.)

If these three live up to their evangelists, I may be writing to you about them here in coming months too.

In the meantime, to you and your loved ones, I wish you all the best in the coming year. Keep in touch and may the wind be at our backs in the months ahead.

This post was adapted from my January 1, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.