A little about reading, a little about the quiet.
sorry I said "nostalgiamaxxing"...
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Hello friend,
I hope you’re doing well! I saw this New Yorker cartoon recently that showed how most of this summer has felt a lot like waiting for one thing to change after another.
It’s behind a paywall, because of course it is, but it shows a woman looking outside her apartment window in four panels; waiting for the temp to drop enough for her to go outside, then waiting for the air to be safe to breathe outside, then waiting for the flood-inducing rain to stop so she can go outside, then sitting through three hours of The Odyssey so she can go outside. This is a pretty great representation of how I’ve felt this summer (although I’m seeing The Odyssey on Monday, so that’s more of a prophecy than a backward looking illustration).
The past several days I’ve woken up earlier than usual and gone straight to my patio/rooftop space outside my kitchen that my landlord says “isn’t like a real patio” and sat there with a book for an hour-ish. It feels indulgent, because I’m reading fantasy for fun instead of theology for school (there’s a joke about how they’re the same thing, but along with being a joke it’s also like… kind of wise I think…). Even though the weather hasn’t been perfect and I’ve had to sit on wet patio furniture a few times, it’s been worth it. Otherwise I can go for days at a time without exiting the indoors. My bed, my food, my cats, my work, and my school are all here.
A theme of the fantasy books I’ve been reading lately (I’ve been nostalgiamaxxing and reading Redwall and Sabriel and might even finally re-read Tolkien 💀1) is a certain provincial or pastoral sensibility and the richness that simple life can bring. Progress is only progress sometimes and it can very easily leave people behind. Sometimes moving at the pace of change means moving slowly and it can happen when you don’t force it, even.
For unrelated reasons that I’ll keep to myself for the moment, I’ve also been re-watching a show I barely remembered, but was temporarily obsessed with as a child from the History Channel, Life After People. The kids today don’t know the pleasures of waking up before your parents on a Saturday morning and getting existentially terrified by a program with collage graphics and generic voice over, then never being able to watch it again because it just… ended. No searchable database of media, no pirated videos freely available on Al Gore’s Internet.
These experiences, the nostalgic YA books, the History Channel doc, and the time in the morning out on my patio, have all gotten me thinking about silence and how loud people can be. It’s extremely hard to find places these days that are really all that quiet, or that humans aren’t making unquiet at least.
We did an exercise in that herbalism course I started but couldn’t finish last fall that involved sitting in a relatively secluded and wooded area and pushing our senses out as far as we could. Even there, it wasn’t long before the soft drone of a distant plane was heard. The same is true in all my favorite respites. Whether it’s a highway out of site but not earshot just over the hill, the telephone poles and wires that you can almost but not quite ignore out of familiarity, or silent-but-loud picture taking on an iPhone, we’re all over the place.
I don’t see this as inherently evil, to be clear; it’s easy to over-moralize the technical which is silly since we’ve been technical in some sense or another for as long as we’ve been human. It’s just a lot. Really can’t say much better than that, it’s just a lot.
I’ve got a few weeks coming up between summer and fall classes, during which I’m going to really try to get out of the city a couple times and away from some of the noise. Need to introduce some variety, at least, even if overall I’m happy to be in a very human-filled, human-loved place most of the time. The variety seems important and is something I’ve got the ability to do something about, so do something I will.
Not much sounds better right now than sitting on a porch where it’s mostly quiet, with a coffee in the morning and a glass of wine in the evening, and reading. So I guess I’ll find a way to make that happen.
Cheers,
Fred
I turned off payments for the next year, at least for everyone subscribed now. I cannot state how much I appreciate your support and belief and overall encouragement.
I do intend to get back into the swing of things to be offering payment-worthy work, which isn’t to say I’m embarrassed or disappointed in these little conversational missives. But I just think, while I’m in school, I’m feeling like re-orienting this place. Little to no planning and a little more openness. Hopefully the general pleasures of voyeurism keep it interesting.
This’ll also allow me to give some more time to some other projects, because, of course, I’ve got plenty of those crowding around my brain. I’ll talk about them here as they percolate. Thanks for reading. Let me know what your nostalgia reads are, I’d love to check them out and get a peek into what stories linger longest for the rest of you.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
Then I can truly claim the title of theology bro 🧙🏼