Hi Friends,
Greetings from Manhattan!
Today is my birthday so I'm treating myself to a morning at the New York Public Library’s Rose Reading Room. I've read somewhere that the space around you influences your thoughts. High ceilings allegedly are good for abstract thinking. The one here is fifty feet high. A good opportunity to test this theory.
Until next week,
Florian
What is Writing?
Writing profoundly changes your relationship with the world.
Anne Lamott brilliantly summarizes this in her book Bird by Bird:
One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.
When you start writing regularly, you develop some sort of sixth sense for things you could be turning into a piece. Cars cutting the line on the highway? That’s a piece. A heated email exchange with an editor about attributing quotes? Another piece. A rusty bottle-opener from the 1950s found in your parents’ kitchen? There’s got to be something to say about that.
The best thing about writing isn’t the act of sitting in front of your computer and hammering the keyboard. That’s the hard bit. The exhilarating thing about writing happens when you’re not actually doing any writing at all. It is living with the conviction that the most banal of situations carry a fragment of meaning for you to unearth. It is the liberating realization that everything is interesting.
It's not all kittens and rainbows. It comes with some serious side-effects. The slightest whiff of inspiration steers your attention like the scent of blood hits the nostrils of a flesh-eating zombie. You’ve got to hunt that runaway idea down. “Mmmmh, that’s interesting” has become the unequivocal signal that I will pull out of a conversation to take notes. Or worse, I might start talking out loud to my voice recording app. Not exactly socially acceptable behavior.
Sometimes it’s a struggle. Your senses get numbed by the gentle chaos of everyday life. Sick child, work deadlines, no help. You only have yourself to blame for the black hole you find yourself into. Everything is interesting, remember? Somebody once asked Neil Gaiman where he found ideas when inspiration failed him. His answer: desperation, deadlines and daydreaming. I can relate to the first two. The third one still feels like an elusive garden of Eden.
When my imagination is as fertile as the Mojave desert, I become bizarrely drawn to manufacturing my own drama. I’ve sat at an intersection watching nannies pushing overfed babies and delivery guys running red lights hoping for a jolt of inspiration. I’ve taken notes of every question I could spot on subway ads thinking I could use them as writing prompts (hopefully one day I’ll find a way to use “Why commit to furniture when you can barely commit to brunch?”). I even woke up at 6 am for a week and sat still on my couch for no other particular reason than to see what it felt like to do nothing.
I used to think of writing as an introspective exercise. A matter of conversation between me and my own thoughts. Now I see it more as a game of hide and seek with an untamable beast.
Weekly Wisdom
🧨 Why Nietzsche Never Goes out of Fashion : My first memory of learning about the tormented philosopher dates back to high school. Somebody had marked the school toilet walls with the words “God is Dead - Nietzsche. Nietzsche is dead - God”. Alex Ross explores the recurrent fascination for Nietzsche’s ideas and the political fight for a piece of his philosophical cake of which we’re still trying to work out the recipe.
🏛️ Saving the Liberal Arts: David Perell argues that we should separate education into two branches: one that teaches you the skills you need to earn an income (practical knowledge) and the other that nurtures our humanity and yearning for wisdom (fundamental knowledge). Trying to teach both at the same has led to failure on both fronts. Instead, we should start by focusing on the skills that will enable us to earn an income and be financially autonomous and only later in life, return to study the Liberal Arts. Here’s a sizzling excerpt: “As a society, we measure progress in changes to the material world, where we prioritize what we can see and measure. We evaluate ourselves by productivity, our economy by the availability of cheap goods, and our civilization by the rate of technological progress. We’ve forgotten about our human need for wonder, beauty, and contemplation. Today, we worship the Factual, the Useful, and the Monetizable.”
📚 How to Talk about Books you Haven’t Read: I’m only one chapter into this book but I’m already in love with it. With razor-sharp humor, the author argues that if you really care about books, reading them is a foolish pursuit. If you do, then you’re condemning yourself to the eternal FOMO of never having enough time to consumer the infinite amount of literature out there. What you should do instead is learn how to see books as a system and study how they relate to each other which is far more enlightening than focusing on the individual content of any single book.
Lateral Thought
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; [...] who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt