Ruthless winter clearance of spirit
Solace, consumption, entirety
January is, as ever, a brutal month. If anything in your life is going to go sideways, it’s probably going to happen in January.
We are all finding ways to make it out.
January solaces
Massive history books, read by candlelight, after the kids go down
Luxury hand balm from your sister
A box of chocolates you didn’t know you needed
When you put on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on the way to school, and the 3-year-old exclaims, “Oh, man, YESSSSS”
The exuberant splashing of the baby the moment you place her in bathwater
Tea! Just the fact that it is and that you have so much unfettered access to it
Tiny, gorgeous little warblers in the spruce tree in the backyard
The post-library trance that the boys fall into, surrounded by books, refusing food and contact until they’ve read everything they checked out
Pink lightness in the sky, now persisting past 5 pm
Read something that takes you a long time
In the face of an increasingly screen-based life, reading real books—in their entirety—is an act of resistance.
We’re encouraged to turn all information into tiny, bite-sized pieces. Little factoids. Bits and bobs and overviews and recaps. Here’s a 20-second video of someone summarizing a 90-second video. Here’s Anna Karenina broken down into seven bullet points. Here’s Marxism in one meme.
Very often, when I Google a book title, the second result is [Book Title] summary. Give it to me in a few seconds so I don’t have to read it. Then read everything back to me at 2x speed.
I loathe all of this. I keep trying to build the endurance necessary to read full and long and deep things. It is an effort. It is a labor that works against the dopamine hits we’re constantly served.
A favorite newsletter writer, Simon Sarris, wrote recently about how AI is intent on turning everything into summary. One prominent danger of relying on large language models so much is that we become unable to think deeply. He says:
“I suspect careful thinkers do not gain a mastery of mystery, or attention to detail, by scrolling Reddit or listening to current event podcasts or asking ‘AI’ to summarize anything. Instead I imagine they spend their time with primary sources, correspondence, stories, engaging with their own senses in one way or another, or some other form of exploring the world in detail.”
Life is a rich tapestry! It is wading through the flotsam and jetsam of thought that makes our own thinking deeper. You have to dive into it and process it yourself, not via robots, to sharpen your brain. The details, the complexity, the contradictions: all of it resists easy summary.
Read huge books, read dense books, read books that take months, read lots of them. Don’t keep your phone anywhere in sight. I am feeling this call right now more urgently, which is perhaps why I feel thrilled to attempt to Jacques Barzun’s enormous magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. What better time than the present to break away from the machines? To train the brain with something that wasn’t built to give you snippets? And to that end, let’s not forget…
The billionaires have always been bad
Something that has been amusing me lately: The collective freak-out left-leaning people are having re: Zuckerberg and Musk’s politics.
The public hand-wringing! The shock! The twisted declarations and threats to “delete my account” for real this time! (That’ll show them!)
Sweethearts, did we think they were benign billionaires before? Intent on upholding the public good? Married to a robust code of personal and public ethics? What prior evidence made us feel safe and secure in their digital bosoms?
Truly, I am baffled. Zuckerberg and Musk have been fairly plain about their beliefs from the beginning. Nothing about their recent public behavior is surprising. Of course this is the precise power play. Of course the new/old president has them in his silk-lined pocket.
I am troubled by their unchecked access, by the information systems they have built and sustained that choke us all, by the new administration’s affection for unbridled monopolies. All of that is bad. Very bad. But the performative pearl-clutching from the denizens of Instagram and X? Kind of lame. And funny.
A time of pruning
“A time of bleakness can also be a time of pruning. Sometimes when our minds are dispersed and scattered, this pruning cuts away all the false branching where our passion and energy were leaking out. While it is painful to experience and endure this, a new focus and clarity emerge. The light that is hard won offers the greatest illumination. A gift wrestled from bleakness will often confer a sense of sureness and grounding of the self, a strengthening proportionate to the travail of its birth. The severity of Nothingness can lead to beauty. Where life had gone stale, transfiguration occurs. The ruthless winter clearance of spirit quietly leads to springtime of new possibility.”
— A good word from John O’Donohue in his book, Beauty
Currently reading
From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun
Intermezzo, Sally Rooney
Washington Black, Esi Edugyan
Always appreciate what you write, Abby. Thank you. One longer book I'm looking forward to enjoying this year is Lonesome Dove.