Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
Welcome to my 12 new subscribers this week. Every other week, my goal is to prepare a three-course meal made up of a short piece, three links and a quote from a book I am reading.
I hope you enjoy this latest edition,
Florian
The Sandman
“Daddy, daddy, I don’t want to sleep.”
Just when I thought the daily boot camp of post-school routines was done, I’m in for one last trial: convincing my son to stay in bed.
“It’s time to sleep!”
“If you keep calling, I will close the door!”
“I’m going to get angry!”
None of my weak warnings deliver the expected result.
But then I remember a story that my parents used to tell me at bedtime when I was a child.
I give that a go.
“The Sandman is going to visit you soon and sprinkle magic sand over your eyes and you will fall asleep.” I add my own little twist: “He is very shy and he will only show up if you keep quiet”.
He looks at me intrigued but seemingly convinced. I leave his room holding my breath. One minute goes by, two, three... It works. A single story defeated a bedtime insurrection no army of rational arguments could ever take down.
Something in the age-old tale of the Sandman felt off though. I just couldn’t quite reconcile having sand thrown into your eyeballs and getting a good night sleep. I decided to do some digging.
German writer E.T.A Hoffman introduced the Sandman in a short novel he published in 1816. This is how he describes him:
“He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won't go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there.”
Not exactly bedtime story material.
A few decades later, Hans Christian Andersen came up with a slightly less psychopathic version of the Sandman. “Ole Lukøje" would visit children at night with two umbrellas under his arm. One with pictures inside it and one without. Ole Lukøje would hold the one with pictures above the bed of well-behaved kids. They would have the most beautiful dreams. But if the children were naughty, he would hold the other one. The children would have a restless, dreamless night.
Weekly Wisdom
👅 On Taste: Taste is such an elusive concept. We all have friends with “good taste” and yet it’s hard to define what “taste” is or how it can be developed. Brie Wolfson’s notes on taste is the kind of read that gets you nodding along. It is a celebration of developing taste as a way to live a more fulfilling life. And if you think taste can’t be trained, think again and check out Brie’s taste workbook.
🎰 Being Basic as Virtue: This piece puts a finger on our culture of signalling status through the books we’ve read, the movies we’ve seen etc. “What are you thinking?” is the new “where are you working?”. The “thinking fatigue” she talks about deeply resonates with me. I often wonder whether we haven’t gone too far in the direction of an economy of thinking where any manual work is necessarily relegated to the ranks of a hobby. As an antidote, the piece imagines a counter-culture where we ought to cultivate a form of anti-thinking.
🍃Observers of the Mundane: I am fascinated by art which elevates the mundane. I came across a painting by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer called “Little Street” which depicts people going about their routine tasks. Isn't it incredibly soothing to look at? Now look at “Gas” by Edward Hopper right below it. It was painted 280 years later and yet you can feel a similar desire to seek beauty in seemingly uninteresting activities.
Lateral Thought
“In the history of the world, most of the people who have ever lived either did not know how to write or, if they did, left no writing behind, which is among the reasons why the historical record is so maddeningly unfair. To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind.”
Jill Lepore