Small things for the days and years ahead

They're all I have for you this week.

I. This book, a cold compress to my feverish head:

Salient passage:

As far as the education of children is concerned, I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but a love of one’s neighbour and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know. [Natalia Ginzburg, Italian essayist and publisher]

The cultivation of the little virtues, small-mindedness, trivia, kitsch, stupidity—what does this have to do with the return of fascism? Unfortunately everything. Late in life the director of La Dolce Vita and Amacord, Frederico Fellini, a close friend of Natalia Ginzburg, looked back at his own life, which included for a brief period being a member of the Italian fascist youth movement. He came to the following conclusion:

Fascism always arises from a provincial spirit, a lack of knowledge of real problems, and people’s refusal—through laziness, prejudice, greed, or arrogance—to give their lives deeper meaning. Worse, they boast of their ignorance and pursue success for themselves or their group, through bragging, unsubstantiated claims, and a false display of good characteristics, instead of drawing from true ability, experience, or cultural reflection. Fascism cannot be fought if we don’t recognize that it is nothing more than the stupid, pathetic, frustrated side of ourselves, of which we should be ashamed. To curb that part of ourselves, we need more than activism for an antifascist part, because latent fascism is hidden in all of us. It once gained a voice, authority, and trust, and it can do so again.

II. This music, and this, and this.

III. All of James Crews’ poetry, but particularly this one:

IV. Have you ever thought about quitting Twitter? It was never all that important for platform, anyway—really; a large Twitter audience per se almost never moved the needle on book sales.

After 15 years on that platform, I Irish-goodbyed on Wednesday. It felt like quitting smoking, if the cigarettes I was smoking had all been dipped in embalming fluid by the end.¹

V. This quote from D.W. Winnicott, the pioneering pediatrician and psychoanalyst:

The catastrophe you fear will happen has in fact already happened.

It applies to so much: to what you fear is coming; to what America’s marginalized people already know; to fascism and history; to “are you mad at me?” and “will any agent ever pay attention to my query?” and “am I going to die alone?”

It is what we were tripping on when we woke up in the middle of the night on Tuesday, feeling like we were going insane: like there was a barn burning down in our head, and there was a horse chained inside that barn, frantic to escape, and we were somehow each both the horse and the barn—both at the same time, both in the same head.

The catastrophe you fear will happen has in fact already happened.

We can only put out the fire by experiencing the catastrophe again—consciously this time—and weeping until there is only quiet ash. That’s when rebuilding can begin.

VI. Buddhism. Start with Pema Chödron and When Things Fall Apart.

Salient passage:

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations, until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.

VII. The knowledge that we are all in the business of narrativizing, and ours is a commerce of make-believe. No one on Earth actually knows what the story is going to be, least of all us.

As Joan Didion said: life changes in the instant.

Stories do have a way of shaping the instant, though.

VIII. Charles Ephraim Burchfield’s art—his paintings are William Blake’s for the atomic age, numinous and synesthetic. They do what human beings are here on Earth to do—find the meaning and purpose here; evolve the world; rise to die, and in dying, give life to something new.

Here’s one of my favorites: “Autumnal Fantasy,” 1944. Look at the indistinguishability of death and resurrection, hope and burning:

IX. A thing that happened to me in the fall of 2020, miles into one of my lonely pandemic night walks. (I told this story on Twitter once, back when I had Twitter, in case it sounds familiar.)

I had my headphones on. I was trespassing in someone’s yard, looking at an interesting tree.

MA’AM.

I heard a man’s voice behind me—a loud one.

MA’AM. MA’AM!!!

Oh, God, I thought, turning around slowly. I was about to be yelled at, wasn’t I. Or worse—or much, much worse. Did he have a gun?

I pushed my headphones down and saw an older guy 20 feet away, holding a glass of wine.

He pointed up. SORRY TO STARTLE YOU, he said, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING. LOOK TO THE HORIZON THERE. IN A MOMENT, YOU WILL SEE THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION.

“Oh, wow,” I said. And a moment later, there it was: a slow firefly, making its way across the night sky.

We stared up together, mouths open.

THEY’RE JUST GOING ABOUT THEIR BUSINESS UP THERE, he said.

“Do you…do this often?” I said.

YES, I HAVE AN APP, he said.

I held up my phone and a leaf I’d just low-key ripped off the interesting tree. “I also have an app,” I told him. “For trees.”

We nodded at each other solemnly: weirdo recognizing weirdo.

The bright spark passed by, unhurried, while an old man and not-young woman stared up in their frozen places from an empty street.

I thought it then, and I still think it now: Your people are out there, even in the dark.

X. Never have your readers ever so needed to know that they are not alone.

XI. You aren’t, either.

1. I don’t judge you if you stay on, though—for heaven’s sake, I DRIVE A TESLA.