going deeper

There is, in fact, no master plan, but this is what is happening: I'm growing.

No, I'm not referring to the physiological impact of the morning oatmeal cookie (butterscotch!). I'm referring to my spheres of interest, the books I'm reading, the ways I'm paying attention to the news, the bravado I displayed when I buckled down to learn how to throw a clay pot on a wheel (to learn, not to master; hardly master), the expanding repertoire in the kitchen. Hisham Matar's The Return has taught me some of the history, geography, and politics of Libya (and disappeared dissidents). Rebecca Mead has taught me Middlemarch and George Eliot. Katie Roiphe has taught me John Updike, Maurice Sendak, Dylan Thomas, and James Salter (among others). Scott Anderson, with his glorious New York Times Magazine essay, has taught me the antecedents of contemporary Middle East. Viet Thanh Nguyen is teaching me, with his Pulitzer winning The Sympathizer, the Vietnamese experience of war.


The world is complex. The news requires perspective. Life is once. I'm going deeper.

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Fear less, love more: wise words from Marilynne Robinson, in conversation with Wyatt Mason

Our greatest writers do not merely assuage, entertain, delight, and challenge us. They teach us something about humanity, something about how art gets done.

Marilynne Robinson is one of our greatest writers, and while I have not yet read her new novel, Lila (I will), I have been taking great pleasure from the reviews and conversations surrounding its release.

Take the magnificent conversation Robinson has with New York Times Magazine writer Wyatt Mason, which can be found here. The profile goes far beyond the bounds of the writer's work and ways. It dives straight into the heart of us. Here, for example, the two are musing over fear—the control it has over our lives:

“I hate to say it, but I think a default posture of human beings is fear.” Perched on the edge of a sofa, hands loosely clasped, Robinson leaned forward as if breaking bad news to a gentle heart. “What it comes down to — and I think this has become prominent in our culture recently — is that fear is an excuse: ‘I would like to have done something, but of course I couldn’t.’ Fear is so opportunistic that people can call on it under the slightest provocations: ‘He looked at me funny.’ ”

“ ‘So I shot him,’ ” I said.

“Exactly.”

“ ‘Can you blame me?’ ”

‘‘Exactly. Fear has, in this moment, a respectability I’ve never seen in my life.”

Later, Mason returns to the topic:

And it was here that Robinson brought up fear: How it has come to keep us at bay from our best selves, the selves that could and should “do something.” In her case, that “something” has been writing. For Robinson, writing is not a craft; it is “testimony,” a bearing witness: an act that demands much of its maker, not least of which is the courage to reveal what one loves.

Fear less. Love more. An urging I needed desperately this weekend.

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How do we spend our time: Around the World in One Day

I have been thinking about how people spend their time.  About what we do when heat overtakes us, or horrific news erupts, or dreams are crushed, or people disappoint us.  About how we show those we love that we do love them.  About how we make time's passing matter.  The other evening, while at dinner, my son was explaining what matters to him when choosing friends.  "I don't want to spend that much time with people who spend too much time judging other people," he said, naming a top criteria.  I thought about me:  Do I spend enough of my own time not judging?

During this past week of both celebrating birthdays and escaping heat, I have found myself at more restaurants than usual, watching those at neighboring tables spend the great portion of their time interacting alone with their own jewel-encrusted phones.  Three teen sisters never once spoke to one another.  They texted, the three of them alone on their phones, through the lemonade, the salads, and the shared dessert.

How do people spend their time? 

How is a day delivered and consumed by a gardener, say, in Dubai, or by a man who is in radiant love?  Yesterday, I read a story I encourage you to read about the making of a documentary film based entirely on YouTube footage.  The story, which appears in the July 24, 2011 New York Times Magazine, was written by Adam Sternbergh and is subtitled "How more than 80,000 videos and 4,500 hours of raw footage turned into one unexpectedly emotional 95-minute movie."  The film, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott, was edited by Joe Walker.  From the story:

"I noticed fairly early on that a lot of men with very good cameras were taking beautiful pictures of their very beautiful girlfriends backlit in parks," Walker says. So they tagged all those clips "My Beautiful Girlfriend" and built a montage out of them.  Other tags included "Ablutions" and "Footwork." "So many people shot their own feet walking, we could have made a continuous 12-hour film out of people walking," he said. "We could have made a film out of watermelons. We could have made a film entirely shot by women named Linda...."

Read the whole story.  Watch a few of the clips here.  And ask yourself what film you'd make about the life that you are living.

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