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Succulents
I have been drawing succulents. As I explain in my letter, “For no good reason”:
I continue to wear down my new Caran d’Ache pastels. Right now I’m drawing succulents that I see on my morning walks onto old sheet music and pages from thrifted books. I’m not sure what I’m doing or why I’m doing it or what I’m going to do with these drawings. “It’s a good way to do stuff,” Ralph Steadman says. “For no good reason.”
Not included in that letter is my attempt at a much larger drawing:
Writing about editing
In my letter “Just cut stuff” I wrote about working on the copyedits of the manuscript for Don’t Call It Art, and how you don’t have to rewrite what’s not there:
Whenever I find myself snagged on a suggested edit, the first thing I ask myself is: Does this even need to be here?
I find the easiest thing to do with something that isn’t working in a piece of writing is to just cut it out completely.
In my letter “All publishing is self-publishing,” I shared my 3 tips for self-editing:
The best editor is you… tomorrow, print your work out and edit it by hand, and record the audiobook before you finish the manuscript!
The easiest thing to write about when you’re writing is writing and the easiest thing to write about when you’re editing… is editing.
Why our house is a library
I’ve often joked that if I were to write a parenting book I’d call it Parent Like A Librarian.
At the library, there are strict rules for behavior that create an environment in which anyone can learn, but there is no agenda, no plan — only time, space, and resources.
The librarian is there to serve whoever comes through the door by connecting them with what they need.
The librarian creates and maintains a collection of materials, makes spaces in which people can work and study, and curates programming tailored to the interests of the humans they serve.
The librarian does not demand any results, does not ask us to be anything other than what we are.
The library is a truly lifelong learning environment — our relationship with the library never ends. As we grow and change, the librarian connects us with what we need.
Read more: “Why our house is a library”
Exhausting routines
As a followup to my letter, “Your hobby looks exhausting!” I wrote another letter, “Your routine sounds exhausting!” about why we care what creative people do with their days:
Maybe your own personal routine should look exhausting to someone else! What sets you free — the more it’s really yours — should probably look like torture to someone else.
Read the rest here.
Fear and… something
In the first episode of Civilisation (1969), “The Skin of our Teeth,” Kenneth Clark takes on why the Roman Empire fell:
“However complex and solid it seems, civilisation is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear — fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague… fears that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planning next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And then boredom. The feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity…”
In the book, Clark switches the word “boredom” to “exhaustion,” which is interesting to me. He continues:
“[Civilisation] requires confidence — confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers… People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid.
Jeez, alright K.C., so where does that leave the individual?
Here’s what Jungian James Hollis has to say in his book Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:
Each morning the twin gremlins of fear and lethargy sit at the foot of our bed and smirk. Fear of further departure, fear of the unknown, fear of the challenge of largeness intimidates us back into our convenient rituals, conventional thinking, and familiar surroundings. To be recurrently intimidated by the task of life is a form of spiritual annihilation. On the other front, lethargy seduces us with sibilant whispers: kick back, chill out, numb out, take it easy for a while . . . sometimes for a long while, sometimes a lifetime, sometimes a spiritual oblivion.
Hollis says that this daily confrontation “obliges us to choose between anxiety and depression.”
Faced with such a choice, choose anxiety and ambiguity, for they are developmental, always, while depression is regressive. Anxiety is an elixir, and depression a sedative. The former keeps us on the edge of our life, and the latter in the sleep of childhood.
To quote Kenneth Clark in the last episode of Civilisation, “One may be optimistic, but one can’t exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.”
(I’m not quite sure yet if/how Hunter S. Thompson’s “fear and loathing” fits in, or Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” which comes from Philippians 2:12: “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”)
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