I don’t have a coherent thought about anything right now, the days when life forces me from my desk are what they are and so here is just everything… strewn about. I’m a boat dragging a net and picking up jetsam and hauling it up and having a look at it all… (As seen here.)
I’m listening to The Library Book by Susan Orlean and am totally captivated by the story. It has everything I like: books, history, interesting characters, masterful writing. The author’s mother would weekly bring her daughter to the library, like mine.
Previously, I was listening to My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead. I appreciated her appraisal of the letters Eliot wrote in her youth. Rather than roll her eyes at their earnestness, Mead strikes an understanding tone, offering compassion for that youthful age where I often feel embarrassment. She writes:
Lacking in charm they may be, but they were not written to charm, and certainly they were not written to charm professors of English Literature at Yale. They were written out of passion and exuberance and boredom and ostentation and her desire to discover what she was thinking by putting it on the page, which is to say, they are letters written by a young woman who is trying to work out who she is and where she’s going. (…) And if my teenage correspondence was much less learned than George Elliot’s, the letters I wrote were no less painfully self-exposing, filled with the enthusiasm and obliviousness and un-earned world-weariness of youth.
Rebecca Mead was recently interviewed on “Working” for her most recent book, Home/Land.
The weekend before this one was particularly productive. I buzzed about checking off tasks, decluttering, and getting ahead on things I often put off. Then Monday came and I felt drained of energy. Austin Kleon happened to put his finger on it in a Q and A in on Ask Polly.
That said, there’s some weird point at which if I make too much in one day, I don’t feel good at all. I sort of feel despondent. I think it has to do with doing so much and knowing there’s so much more to be done? My wife Meghan loves to garden, but if she spends too much time gardening, there’s some threshold at which she becomes depressed. I think there’s an ideal amount of work to be done every day — enough that you feel like you’ve done something, but not so much that you feel wrung out and existentially fried. I imagine setting a timer and stopping when time is up no matter what would help.
Life is strange. But let us pause in our befuddlement over the human condition for a study in contrast. Here I present:
Should I be chiming in here to criticize media? Probably not… Jesse Brown does a fine job of it and still I want to brew him a cup of tea and tell him to calm down. Yet here I am ready to provoke a poor time-crunched journalist with 20 questions. (Snowfall in Winnipeg varies how much from winter to winter? How does the city manage the range? Accidents? Number of complaints? Etc.) Were it left to historians, newspapers would never publish on time. I like reading news from the archives where it has acquired a funk, like cheese.
This miscellany began with a link to The Ocean Cleanup TikTok and will end with Joy Williams. The Subtle Manoeuvres newsletter prompted me to look up Joy Williams’ book The Florida Keys and skim the introduction. I liked how it ended:
“Keys” comes from the Spanish word cayos, for “little islands.” The Keys are little, and they cannot sustain any more “dream houses” or “dream resorts.” The sustaining dream is in the natural world - the world that each of us should respect, enjoy, and protect so that it may be enjoyed again - the world to which one can return and be refreshed.
Time passes. There are more of the many, and they want too much. The bill is coming. It’s not like the bill from a wonderful restaurant, Louie’s, for example. It’s not the bill for the lovely fresh snapper, the lovely wines, the lovely brownie with bourbon ice cream and caramel sauce at the lovely table beside the lovely sea. It’s the bill for all our environmental mistakes of the past. The big bill.
But I really must be off. Sporadic entries for the next while. Work bears down.