Hi Friends,
If you don’t have a personal website, I strongly recommend it. It’s a bit like hosting dinner. There are a bunch of decisions that you’re making that reflect your taste and preferences from the dishes you’re going to make to the choice of plates you’re going to serve them in. The intent is to share a bit of your taste with your guests, to cut them a slice of your personality.
The purpose of putting together a website is similar. You may want to share the books that most influenced you, hard-earned life lessons or the questions that you’re investigating. The difference with hosting a dinner is that everyone is invited and it’s a 24/7 kind of party, no washing-the-dishes involved.
Personally, I’d rather learn about someone browsing their website than scrolling through a cookie-cutter list of jobs and achievements. But mostly, it’s just a really fun and fulfilling way of curating and organizing your intellectual life.
And if you don’t know where to start, my friend Nate put together the ultimate guide to starting a personal website.
Until next time,
Florian
Weekly Wisdom
🌸 Catching Beauty: This is a piece about how drawing can help you capture the beauty of a building or landscape. But I think it applies to any craft, whether it’s photography, writing, or drawing.
✍ Glimpsing God: When I see Nadia Eghbal popping up in my inbox, I know I’m in for a something special. The latest piece she wrote kept me reading as I got off the train and walked up the subway stairs. She delves into her complicated and almost addictive relationship with writing. This passage resonated with me:
“In recent years, I've begun to suspect that a life consumed by ideas will not bring me closer to the divine. The freedom I seek, it seems, doesn't lie in my laying about, steeped in my own brain, but rather in the stillness I've found in the more mundane moments of my life. In these moments, there is no euphoria, nor even any active reflection on gratitude or happiness. Rather, it's the sense of just being – the absence of introspection – that brings me peace.”
🛞 Building Slowly: In 1997, a group of French craftsmen and archaeologists set out to build a medieval castle from scratch. Their one constraint: they would only use materials and building techniques available in the 13th century. Unsurprisingly, the project is still going today and you won’t see any excavators on the construction site. What you might see is someone walking inside of a giant hamster wheel made out of wood, which is nothing but the ancestor of the modern crane. You can read more about it here.
Lateral Thought
“The pilgrim’s path is not merely a thoroughfare, but a transition to a There. In temporal terms, the pilgrim is on the way to the future, which is expected to bring salvation. To that extent, he is not a tourist. A transition is an alien notion to a tourist for whom everywhere is Here and Now. A tourist is not on the way in the proper sense. Paths are impoverished, turned into empty thoroughfares that would not be worth seeing. The totalization of Here and Now divests the in-between spaces of any meaning. Today’s experience is characterized by the fact that it is very poor in transitions.”
Byung-Chul Han
I love it that you mentioned Guédelon! It's a wonderful site and a great place to visit (including for kids!).
Reading this on your website made me think of another similar(ish) creation, which is in particular a testimony to Franco-American friendship: the reconstruction of the frigate L'Hermione, in the Arsenal de Rochefort (more on this website: https://fregate-hermione.com/en/lhermione/ship-s-reconstruction/). Even if it is now sailing away from there, the construction site is something to see, as well as the Corderie Royale near by.
Thanks Florian for sharing your thoughts and suggestions in your wonderful newsletter!!!
That castle looks amazing! Now I want to go visit.