On Liminality

The Practical Polymath #24

Hi Friends, 

Greetings from Brooklyn! 

I’m back in the US after a month in Europe enjoying cobblestone streets, four hour-long lunches and FDA-banned cheese. As I scroll through pictures of all the great moments I’ve had with friends and family, I realize how the adage “live the moment” is somewhat overrated. When we revisit a memory, we are somehow reliving it and appreciating it. There’s no reason appreciating a moment should be confined to the present.

Until next week, 

Florian 

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On Liminality

I’m sitting 35,000 feet above the ground. The cabin is low-lit and the only audible sound is the gentle hum of the Boeing 787’s engine. This is the perfect place to reflect about liminality. 

Something is “liminal” when it occupies a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary. As I’m cruising across the Atlantic Ocean I’m no longer where I came from and not yet where I’m going. The monitor in front of me gives me the time at origin and at destination. The time in the plane though, is suspended. 

In anthropology, the concept of liminality has been used to describe the transition phase of a rite of passage between childhood and adulthood. It’s usually associated with a feeling of disorientation and ambiguity that stems from shedding your old self without having fully integrated the next phase of life. 

Transient spaces like hallways, malls, roads or airport lobbies are also liminal. We seldom notice them, we only pass through them to get to where we want to go. How many hotel corridors or shopping mall escalators can you recall? Their architecture favors the functional over the aesthetic. You recognize liminal spaces more by the template they reproduce than by their particular features. They are the neglected realm of architecture.

Our disdain for liminality seems to extend beyond physical spaces. It might just be the central feature of our mental geography. As much as we want to fight it, we are binary creatures making sense of the world through absolute categories: “right/ wrong”, “male/female”, “progressive/conservative”, “national/ alien”. Everything that stands “in between” those bounded wholes becomes inconvenient at best and often suspicious. An anomaly that must be brought back into more recognizable territory. 

As someone with a dual citizenship, I’m often asked whether I feel more French or more Italian. How about a blend? Or neither? These options never seem to be a possibility to begin with. A telling example of our inclination to force thresholds back into preset boundaries. 

What would a world where we celebrate thresholds look like? 

The plane has docked at the gate. People are frantically grabbing their suitcases, eager to leave this seven hour-long liminal experience and anxious to rejoin the comfort of a bounded reality.

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Weekly Wisdom

🪟 The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Have you ever had the realization that every stranger around you has a life as complex as yours? The sense that time keeps going faster? Or nostalgia for a time you’ve never known? John Koenig invented names for those complex emotions we feel but don’t have a word for and made beautiful videos for each of them.

✍️ Write to Connect the Dots: Writing radically changed the way I read books. David Perell’s framework perfectly captures how it augments what you read. I might have finished reading a book but I feel like I’m not done with it until I write about one of the ideas it contains.

David Perell @david_perell

Read to collect the dots, write to connect them

🗣️ The Benefits of Talking to Yourself: I read all my pieces out loud to hear the rhythm of the sentences. There’s no better way to check whether what you wrote sounds monotonous or whether it sings. It turns out, talking your ideas out loud might come in handy earlier in the creative process. Research shows that it can help generate new ideas in a way that thinking can’t. So next time you’re hit by writer’s block, talk yourself out of it.

Lateral Thought

“The vocabulary used to organize nature typically betrays the overriding interests of its human users. In fact, utilitarian discourse replaces the term ‘nature’ with the term ‘natural resources,’ focusing on those aspects of nature that can be appropriated for human use.”

James C. Scott