Today’s newsletter comes with a free zine and other love-adjacent items: “Love is not a gadget.”
The inner state of the average man
In his book, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, the Jungian analyst James Hollis recalls being asked to speak to women’s groups who ask him to help them understand men:
I have suggested that women look at men this way: if they took away their own network of intimate friends, those with whom they share their personal journey, removed their sense of instinctual guidance, concluded that they were almost wholly alone in the world, and understood that they would be defined only by standards of productivity external to them, they would then know the inner state of the average man. They are horrified at this notion.
They then ask Hollis if there’s anything they can do, and he replies, “No.” (It is up to men.)
Hollis has told a variation of this story in several audiobooks and podcasts I’ve listened to and his diagnosis always chills me. I found myself recalling it to a friend yesterday on my bike ride.
One thing I find hopeful is that I think you can reverse-engineer a to-do list from this diagnosis:
- build a network of intimate friends (start by being a good node)
- learn to listen to yourself, pay attention to your thoughts and feelings, authorize yourself that what you notice is important, and trust your intuition
- search for meaning in your life outside the realm of the quantifiable
Easy peasy, right? Ha. (Cries.)
As for being a man, finding myself a member in a club I never asked to join: Whenever I think that we’re making no progress whatsoever, I think about the fact that I have two friends, grown men my own age, who, unprompted, within the last year, have told me that they loved me. And I told them I loved them back.
It’s a start.
You have to really love your idea
I saw a clip of writer Robert Greene talking about creative work that really rang true:
“You have to really love your idea. It has to be something from deep within. It has to be personal. It has to excite you on a deep level. Because you’re going to have to persevere for several years. There are going to be a lot of critics, a lot of mean-spirited people are gonna say, ‘You can never do that!’
When you create anything, the spirit you create it with, the energy, the excitement, is translated into the product itself. So when somebody writes a book just for money, you can kind of smell it. When you read the book, it kind of reeks. We can sense that. But when the writer is excited, it excites the reader. So the love and the desire you put into your project will translate.”
3 additional thoughts on this:
1) I would worry less about mean-spirited people, and worry more about well-intentioned people. The mean-spirited you can ignore pretty easily, but the well-intentioned can actually do much more damage, because you really care what they have to say. This includes agents, editors, friends, colleagues, loved ones, etc.
2) Not only will you have to persevere for many years, if your wildest dreams come true and your project is a huge hit, you have to be ready to talk for years — if not decades! — about it. So at the very least, it better be something you were passionate about at the time of its making.
3) I truly believe that great books are sort of crystallizations of the energy of writer at a certain moment in time and magic happens when the reader’s energy and the writer’s energy sort of unlock each other. (I wrote a little more bit about this in the afterword to Steal — you put all the energy in as the writer, but it’s really the reader’s energy that completes the circuit.)
Love is not mind-reading
Meghan said a version of this on our walk this morning and I thought it was wisdom worth sharing on Valentine’s Day. (And any other day.)
Attention is a form of love
In response to my post about ignorance and curiosity, my friend Jason Kottke pointed to a scene in the movie Lady Bird, summarized by critic A.O. Scott:
Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith), the principal, has read Lady Bird’s college application essay. “It’s clear how much you love Sacramento,” Sister Sarah remarks. This comes as a surprise, both to Lady Bird and the viewer, who is by now aware of Lady Bird’s frustration with her hometown. “I guess I pay attention,” she says, not wanting to be contrary.
“Don’t you think they’re the same thing?” the wise sister asks.
The idea that attention is a form of love (and vice versa) is a beautiful insight.
Which made me think of a line by John Tarrant I quoted in Keep Going: “Attention is the most basic form of love.”
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