Society categorizes us, and then we obey its categories. After centuries of prioritizing sedate mental work, we who are wedded to our screens turn our Roombas loose and then jog at our standing desks, desperate for a little balance. If we were never seduced into the life of the mind, we sit idle and fume, because the physical work is drying up fast.
If you train your mind to think deeply, you are not predestined to be a blazing success in our culture’s material terms. You are likelier to wind up juggling data in the tech world or doing slightly blurry, multipurpose work supporting a nonprofit. If you are really lucky, you might get to brew beer.
In my Irish family, strong tea was inseparable from emotional crisis, and my hand moves the dishtowel faster, nervous at the thought of all the unknown upset ahead. Grief and distress are far more likely to require this kettle’s services than an unexpected home birth.
Take the right precautions, and you are acting out of an abundance of care. You need not remain cautious, your steps slowing as you peer nervously ahead. You can move ahead with relative confidence. Nonetheless, you will still be mocked.
John O’Brien, the head of the much-admired Dalkey Archive Press, has died. Here is a piece I wrote in December 2009, after a visit to the Press, when it was located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. O’Brien was in his element. —JG …
If the regime becomes repressive, Mohammed Mupenda added, “you can make a few good career moves snitching on your colleagues and neighbors, doing little else.” And there are cosmetic improvements: “Noisy minorities, bums, and panhandlers disappear from the streets, which visibly enhances the urban environment.”
As I wrote in September, my friend Charlie bought my kids and me a ticket for a Willy Wonka-ish contest. Promoter and businessman David Klein, who likes to be called The Candyman, is giving away a candy factory in Florida, and the winner will come from…
I miss hugs, an accidental brush against a stranger’s arm, the downy head of a friend’s baby as I curve my hand to support it. But above all, I miss how people smell. The soft, milky smell of that baby’s skin. Exhalations of coffee, garlic, chocolate. The drench of heavy…
So often we walk at someone else’s pace, keeping up with a companion’s long strides or the pedestrians jostling alongside us. Sauntering requires a deliberate aimlessness, an ease.
A screenshot from ‘Nomad,’ distributed by Music Box Films. The film Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin was shown at Tribeca and Telluride, and on the BBC, in 2019, but it is just now available in the US, on several platforms. The film is a documentary on…