I am a practitioner of Twyla Tharp’s creative habit of assigning a banker’s box to each project, so I was delighted when my friend Kristen Delap sent me these photos of the boxes designer Alexander Girard used to organize his textiles. (They can be found in the Vitra Design Museum.) Guess we all need to step up our box game!
“Am I a masterpiece or simply a pile of junk?”
—Donald Barthelme
I was sick in bed yesterday, and after I posted a picture of my makeshift office, a follower asked to see all the books on my nightstand. I was bored and bedridden, so I figured, what the heck. (I forgot the hashtag #shelfie.)
Several folks commented in relief that they weren’t the only readers with unread books piled everywhere. Heck no, you aren’t the only reader with unread piles everywhere! In fact, I would argue, as others have, that your library should consist mostly of unread books. Here’s Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. [Your] library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there.
“The important books in my library,” says Edward Tufte, “are the unread books.”
The Japanese even have a word for the unread books that pile up: “Tsundoku.” (It literally means “reading pile.”)
The nightstand isn’t the only place my books pile up. My dad keeps a gigantic junky stack of magazines on the fireplace next to his chair, and I used to make fun of him for it, but now look at me turning into him:
At the end of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (a terrific thriller), serial killer Hannibal Lector writes inspector Clarice Starling a letter to let her know he won’t come after her if she won’t come after him. “I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it. Be sure to extend me the same courtesy.”
In the (perfect) movie adaptation, Hannibal calls Clarice on the phone, and he says it just a little differently: “The world’s more interesting with you in it.”
I think about this line all the time in our contemporary era. The world is so big and full of people and we’re receiving updates about it all constantly. Sometimes it’s a relief when people — particularly celebrities or artists — mess up and do something awful and we feel we can now just write them off completely. We can unfollow. We can cancel our subscriptions to them, so to speak. “Everyone is Canceled,” was the title of a recent NYTimes piece about the phenomenon, starting with the lede, “Almost everyone worth knowing has been canceled by someone.”
I cancel as much as anyone, I suppose, but I often find myself thinking of that Hannibal Lector line, with a little change to the pronoun. “The world’s more interesting with him in it.” (I used to apply it to Kanye, but never to the president.) Sometimes I modify it for use on music, movies, books, etc.: “This book wasn’t for me, but the world’s more interesting with this book in it.”
The line works in many contexts. You could, for example, flip it around and aim it at yourself: Don’t disappear on us. Don’t cancel your own subscription. Stick around. Keep going. The world is more interesting with you in it.
“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.”
—John Cage, Silence (quoted in Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise)
I posted this Cage quote this morning and — I kid you not! — for tonight’s reading, my son Jules picked Jean Horton Berg and Art Seiden’s 1950 picture book, The Noisy Clock Shop, a story of a clock shop owner who tries desperately to escape the noise of the city only to to find the noises of the country. From the jacket copy: “[N]o matter where he goes (the train, the countryside, and the woods), he can’t find any peace. There’s noise everywhere!”
As a Great Indoorsman, for most of my life I’d ignored the work of Henry David Thoreau. I owned a copy of Walden, but never read it. In 2015, the New Yorker published a “Why do people even like Thoreau?” piece with the subtle title, “Pond Scum,” and I felt validated in my ignorance.
Then, last year, Levi Stahl started raving about Laura Walls’ biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, and I got him to send me an advance copy. The book blew my mind — it’s one of those perfect bios that’s intensely researched but highly enjoyable to read. (I read it so much my wife made me put sticky notes over Thoreau’s “creepy” eyes.) The Thoreau rendered by Walls is fully human, and the book is really a perfectly-timed portrait of an American trying to keep his soul in chaotic times.
Walls gave me a whole new way of thinking about Thoreau, but maybe her greatest gift is that she got me to pick up his published journal. Here’s what I wrote about it in Keep Going:
A dip into Henry David Thoreau’s journals paints a portrait of a plant-loving man who is overeducated, underemployed, upset about politics, and living with his parents—he sounds exactly like one of my fellow millennials!
I set out on a daily reading of the abridged journal in the fall last year, and just recently lapped myself. (I’m still going, re-reading, and finding new passages to underline.) If you follow this blog, you know I’ve blogged at least a dozen times in the past year about my reading.
As a writer, there are two basic instructions I take from the journals:
1) Take long walks. Get out. Try to arrange your life in a way that you can get out for longer than you even think you can.
2) Go home and write in your journal about what you saw and heard and felt and thought about.
Repeat as necessary. (And when you’ve written enough, go back and pilfer your journals for good material to publish.)
I still haven’t read Walden or his other books (I’ve read a few essays), but his journals have had a huge (unexpected) impact on my life in the past year. He seems to me one of those authors who gets judged by the fact that his disciples (annoyingly) steal the wrong message from him. For me, it’s not: go live on the land out in the woods, it’s: How can you live deliberately? How can you be part of the world in a way you can live with?
He also, in his haughtiness, sort of doomed himself to cries of hypocrisy. (In response to people who say, “But his mom did his laundry!” Walls responds, “No other male American writer has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry.”)
Yeah, he could be a prick, he was wrong about quite a bit, and I doubt we’d even get along if we met, but he’s been a constant companion to me in the past year. He’s taught me to walk, walk, walk, to look more closely at everything, to love the seasons, and to not let your inner life be destroyed by the status quo or the awful actions of your country.
I love him.
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