Prying on People's Home Lives

How to live

Dear Reader

In order to have a conversation with someone, you must reveal yourself.

- James Baldwin

The Intimate and Ordinary

I love this observation, which also explains our love of newsletters¹ very well.

In “Parallel Lives,” a study of five couples in the Victorian era, the literary critic Phyllis Rose observes that we tend to disparage talk about marriage as gossip. “But gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the platonic ladder which leads to self-understanding,” she writes. “We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying.” Rose describes marriage as a political experience and argues that talking about it should be taken as seriously as conversations about national elections: “Cultural pressure to avoid such talk as ‘gossip’ ought to be resisted, in a spirit of good citizenship.”

Agnes views romantic relationships as the place where some of the most pressing philosophical problems surface in life, and she tries to “navigate the moral-opprobrium reflexes in the right way,” she said, so that people won’t dismiss the topic as unworthy of public discussion. “If you’re a real philosopher,” she once tweeted, “you don’t need privacy, because you’re a living embodiment of your theory at every moment, even in your sleep, even in your dreams.”

From Rachel Aviv’s Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds in The New Yorker.

Poor Callard copped a hiding for her revelations in this piece, but I really enjoyed her relationship confessions.

Here are my other favourite quotes in that article.

1. Manifesting

Sometimes it seemed to Agnes that the universe had been prearranged for her benefit. If she and Arnold were taking a walk together and she craved a croissant, a bakery would suddenly appear. If she needed a book, she would realize that she was passing a bookstore, and the text she wanted was displayed in the window. She thought that this was now her permanent reality.

2. The fallacy of independence

Agnes said that in moments of disconnection she repeats a little mantra to herself: “It’s fine—you can do this on your own. You can figure things out on your own.” But she knows it’s a lie. “I almost have a feeling of pleasure, like a sick pleasure, as I placate myself with the thought,” she told me.

3. The relationship between intimacy and solitude

“It’s this idea that we want marriage to have a point,” Arnold said. People talk about the aim of their careers, but they don’t use that sort of vocabulary for marriage. “When Socrates says that philosophy is a preparation for death, he’s very clear that he doesn’t mean you’re supposed to commit suicide. It’s just that there’s some way in which philosophy could stand up to the task of making you able to deal with death when it comes.”

“The corresponding claim,” Agnes said, “would be that somehow the project of marriage would make you capable of being alone.”

4. Intimate life is worth taking seriously

But Agnes is impatient with the “let’s-get-through-the-next-fifteen-minutes kind of approach. The way that I think about it is: there’s no other time when you could understand this thing. Devastating problems in your life can also be interesting, and they can interest you as they’re happening to you and as they’re causing you intense pain.” When Baraz tries to look for a cure, “I’m, like, No,” Agnes said. “This is my chance to understand it. This is the time when we can be serious about our lives.”

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Ears Up, Girls

I like the lady horses best,

how they make it all look easy,

like running 40 miles per hour

is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.

I like their lady horse swagger,

after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!

But mainly, let’s be honest, I like

that they’re ladies. As if this big

dangerous animal is also a part of me,

that somewhere inside the delicate

skin of my body, there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart,

giant with power, heavy with blood.

Don’t you want to believe it?

Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see

the huge beating genius machine

that thinks, no, it knows,

it’s going to come in first.

- How to Triumph Like a Girl by Ada Limón

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Pani Puri

I tried pani puri for the first time the other day and what an extraordinary food! Usually, when I discover a food I like I start cooking it at home, but I don’t think I am ever going to try making this food myself. It looks intimidating. (But, so pretty). I will order it whenever I can, instead.

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Eccentricity I

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time.

- John Stuart Mills

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Eccentricity II

“I tried to praise her once, and she literally hissed in my direction. Well, I am from Mississippi. I don’t care: I love her. I don’t care if she is rude or mad or both - she is an artist, and a great one, and she has shared with us what is most important. I can live without the warm response, but I can’t live without her music.”

- Tennessee Williams on Nina Simone²

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Eccentricity III

That Summer is a gorgeous documentary. It’s available for free viewing on YouTube at the moment, too.

It’s the filming that preceded cult classic documentary, Grey Gardens and because it is a combination of being a beach holiday film project, as well as Lee Radziwill’s family home movies it has this intoxicating intimacy to it. Radziwill’s cousin is Little Edie, described here by Owen Gleiberman -

..she’s a found-object character, a high-society fruitcake dropping breathy pensées that make her sound weirdly worldly and utterly around the bend..

Little Edie is all that. And incredibly charismatic. Perhaps the two are not unrelated.

In both this documentary and Grey Gardens, I was struck by the difference wealth makes to mental illness and one’s capacity to live freely as an eccentric. They might be intermittently harassed by local government and puritan neighbors, but they are not in jail. They live in a house of their own that is as much dilapidated as it is magical.

I was therefore interested to see Gleiberman’s reaction.

What’s scarier is that the Beales’ relatives don’t seem to understand the problem. In “That Summer,” Lee Radziwill is all warm family smiles, treating her relatives like the lovable eccentrics she obviously thought they were.

What I saw in That Summer was a great capacity for tolerating eccentricity, including when it inevitably veers into the uncomfortable. I suspect that’s a result of Radziwill and her friends being an artistic community more than it is about them being a wealthy one.

I don’t mean to be critical of Gleiberman, because it really is an entertaining review, but when he complains - “their friends and relatives enabling and protecting them, when what they should have done was closed the place down” - I am reminded just how much faith we middle class have in social welfare institutions.

Because close them down and then what? What price this protection?

Anyway, the main thing I want to say is that the documentary is so dreamy to look at, and I love things like that. Even when they are touched with sadness.

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Rebrand Your 45-Minute Midafternoon Nap as “Transcendental Meditation”

How to Be a Mysterious Woman Who is Also in Bed by 9.30 P.M.

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The Idea that Different Cultures Make Different Kinds of Joy - It’s Enough to Give You Serious Wanderlust

Since January, the glossary has grown to nearly four hundred entries from sixty-two languages, and visitors to the Web site have proposed new entries and refined definitions. It is a veritable catalogue of life’s many joys, featuring terms like utepils (Norwegian, “a beer that is enjoyed outside . . . particularly on the first hot day of the year”), mbuki-mvuki (Swahili, “to shed clothes to dance uninhibited”), tarab (Arabic, “musically induced ecstasy or enchantment”), and gigil (Tagalog, “the irresistible urge to pinch/squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished”). In the course of compiling his lexicon, Lomas has noted several interesting patterns. A handful of Northern European languages, for instance, have terms that describe a sort of existential coziness. The words—koselig (Norwegian), mysa (Swedish), hygge (Danish), and gezellig (Dutch)—convey both physical and emotional comfort. “Does that relate to the fact that the climate is colder up there and you would value the sense of being warm and secure and cozy inside?” Lomas asked. “Perhaps you can start to link culture to geography to climate. In contrast, more Southern European cultures have some words about being outside and strolling around and savoring the atmosphere. And those words”—like the French flâner and the Greek volta—“might be more likely to emerge in those cultures.”

From Emily Anthes’ piece, “The Glossary of Happiness” in The New Yorker.

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I Can’t See Anything I Recognise

Gosh, I am looking forward to reading Susan Johnson’s memoir about a complicated mother daughter relationship and their time living in Greece together.

But it’s one of the many truths Johnson discovers on Kythera, that even while her mother defends her as a writer, always, she doesn’t always admire her as a person.

Barbara is fully aware that she will become one of the memoir’s threads of story. But frustratingly for Johnson, she does not embrace Kytheran life, or does so unpredictably. They arrive in winter to poor heating and a “ceaseless crying wind” that Barbara, a Queenslander through and through, understandably finds unbearable. After a while, Johnson locates a new house for them to live in: warmer, prettier, and with neighbours who become close friends.

She tries in so many ways to make Barbara comfortable.

If I have given the impression I was concerned for her welfare because she was the timid, pleasing sort, let me correct that.

Barbara often refuses to go with Johnson on walks, or into churches to view icons and other “sinful acts of idolatary”, or accompany her on other adventures across the island. She is uninterested in hearing from her daughter about the island’s ancient or recent history, its place in the great myths and legends. Frequently (but not reliably) she is wary and even dislikes their visitors and new friends, Kytheran and Australian. (Johnson says nothing to her about an hilarious affair with a foolish Frenchman.)

Barbara often sees strangeness where Johnson sees the marvellous. About the night sky, Barbara says, “I can’t see anything […] I recognise”.

From Jane Messer’s excellent review of Susan Johnson’s new book in The Conversation.

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There is a Formula for Bringing Them Back to You

This podcast with developmental psychologist, Amy Baker is fascinating. She specialises in restoring family connections between parents and adult children after estrangement.

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An Apology Rests on Symmetry

The online public is also formless: it’s just an amorphous churn of emoting and reacting to things. This is what I was trying to express in my post on public apologies. An apology, which rests on symmetry, ends something and starts anew. That can’t happen now: someone is always there to say, “It’s not over, I want more content. I don’t accept. Let’s keep this going.”

- The wonderfully grumpy John Ganz in his newsletter, Unpopular Front. But he is not wrong, is he?

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Instantly Interruptible

More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible.

- Tillie Olsen

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Is This a Message?

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman down beside you at the counter who says, Last night, the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder, is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the pond, where whole generations of biological processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds speak to you of the natural world: they whisper, they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old enough to appreciate the moment? Too old? There is movement beneath the water, but it may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the years you ran around, the years you developed a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon, owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have become. And then life lets you go home to think about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one who never had any conditions, the one who waited you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave, so you’ll have to settle for lucky). Because you were born at a good time. Because you were able to listen when people spoke to you. Because you stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your late night dessert. (Pie for the dogs, as well). And then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland, while outside, the starfish drift through the channel, with smiles on their starry faces as they head out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

- Starfish by Eleanor Lerman

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Mothering, Art and Wanderlust

I really recommend this episode, “Unbothered in the United Kingdom with Ani Lacy” on the Flourish In the Foreign podcast about Black women living and thriving abroad, which is hosted by Christine Job.

Ani Lacy is a longtime online friend of mine, and her story is really interesting. She is a Black woman from the United States who now lives in Bath, England but who has also lived in Mexico and Morocco.

She grew up in foster care, and around the time we were first connecting she was being really frighteningly harassed for homeschooling her son. She talks a little about that in this podcast, as well as the enduring trauma of trying to raise a Black son safely in the US.

“I feel relaxed about being a mother abroad,” Lacy says, and it is heavy with significance.

Listening to her talk about this reminded me of Carl Hart’s quote in a previous newsletter of mine.

The thing about coming back here is you have to be ready to fight and I don’t want to fight anymore. I just want to be able to help a society and people. So, I will have to keep a place in Europe to go and decompress and then come back to be able to tolerate the situation.

Her interview is also full of these joyous quotes I love, describing what they call the ‘soft life’.

I am almost 40 and people ask why don’t you have any wrinkles... because I just don’t care. I don’t care to be bothered.

Check it out.

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What Might Old Age Look Like

This.

This.

This.

This.

This.

This.

This.

From Isabella Cotier.

Recommend Me

I am Chairing a couple of panels at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival again this year. One of the panels is on shame and includes writers I have mentioned in these newsletters before - Eve Vincent and Ianto Ware. What a gift to get the opportunity to have a conversation with these people.

Finally

Hope you’re being more yourself than ever.

1. And blogs.

2. I have talked about Nina Simone and ‘difficult people’ in an earlier newsletter. And about the importance of tolerating eccentricity here and here and here in our world.