Hi Friends,
Greetings from snowy Brooklyn!
Last year was marked by novelty for me. I started this newsletter, built deep friendships with fellow writers and joined Stripe. This year I want to focus on finding balance between my family, my career and my writing. Balance is an exotic bird. You can never really tame it. But if you want a chance to see it, you have to care for its environment. To me, pursuing balance is not so much about what you do but rather how you do things. With that in mind, I will experiment with publishing this newsletter every other week. I’m slightly terrified of deviating from my weekly schedule but I think it’s worth a try. Let’s see.
I’m looking forward to this new year with all of you.
See you in two weeks,
Florian
Runaway Reader
I read like a runner trains for race day.
Bookless weeks make me feel like I’m letting my brain muscles waste away. “You’re one book behind schedule”, shouts the Goodreads notification. I grab Lana Del Rey’s debut poetry book. It’s really bad but it’s really short. I’m back on track. Only fifteen books left to log before the end of the year.
Until now, I never really questioned that way of reading. Books teach you stuff. The more you read, the more you learn. Reading is to the mind what regular exercise is to the body.
But is it?
Reading enjoys the top rung of the socially respectable activities ladder. Perhaps that is why we are so quick to embrace its virtues and ignore the downsides.
Let’s take books as a way to learn. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably zombie-read your way through a book passage before realizing you can’t recall what you just read. The reality is that unless you’re reading Harry Potter, merely reading a book doesn’t get you very far. In order to unleash the educational potential of a book, you need to study it. That means highlighting passages, taking notes and possibly writing your takeaways when you’re done. It’s a lot of work!
Reading also gets praised for opening our minds to new ideas. Undeniable. But there’s a bit of a trade-off we underestimate. The frenetic ascent of Mount Well Read assumes that wisdom is a journey that we can only take wearing other people’s shoes.
In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.”
In other words, reading is running away from thinking. It is slipping into the comfort of pre-made ideas about the world at the expense of our own reflection.
I’m not making the case against reading here. That would be silly. But we should embrace a decision not to read as an act of mental self-determination instead of agonizing about the dusty stack of unfinished books on our bedside table.
Weekly Wisdom
🧘 Silence, Obedience & Joy: The latest episode of “Philosophize This” is a gem that I’d recommend you consume with your morning coffee. It takes us for a spin of Kierkegaard’s philosophy and what we can learn from a flower and a bird to navigate existence.
🧐 The Roots of Curiosity: I’m fascinated by the mechanics of curiosity. We often think of it as a trait of character but I want to believe curiosity is a muscle that can be trained. lost myself in this Tweet and the responses it received.
✍ On Wildness: I love Anna Gàt’s eleven sentence essays series but this one was something special altogether. An ode to the untamable wildness of our younger selves.
🎡 The Bookwheel: The illustration below made my week. 16th century Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli conceived this rotating device as a way to consult multiple books at the same time. If that’s not the 3D ancestor of the multi-tab browser, I don’t know what is.
Lateral Thought
“Faced with a quantity of books so vast that nearly all of them must remain unknown, how can we escape the conclusion that even a lifetime of reading is utterly in vain?”
Pierre Bayard
I often struggle with the idea that the learnings in a (non-fictional) book can be synthesised. If reading to expand my knowledge and given the time commitment required to read a book cover to cover, I like to think that reading the synopsis is enough, but then get FOMO on that home run sentence or passage that might resonate more than any synopsis can. What do you think?