On Substack

Hello friends,

Starting this week I wanted to shape the newsletter up a little bit. This allows me to share what I’ve been really obsessing about. We are going to have three sections:

Delights - The name says it all. These are small things that delighted me this week. And, which I hope will make your week delightful.

Jukebox - In the rapid fire consumption of “content” that we do off late. I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the media that really spoke to me.

The last section is an exploration of an idea that has been growing in my mind the past few weeks.

Delights #

1. Standard Ebooks is a volunteer run website, bringing classics to life. They bring public domain books kicking and screaming into the 21st century. With great care, they take badly formatted texts and redo them to help support multiple formats. What seems simple on the surface, is incredibly hard work which becomes obvious if you ever tried to read a book from Project Gutenburg. If you ever wanted to explore Dickens, Jane Austen, or read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. You can do all that for free. Along the way, find more classics to fall in love with.

2. Bookstores: By Max Joseph

Sleep is good, he said, and books are better. - George R. R. Martin

Max Joseph takes on a journey deep into the idea of reading. How many books can you read if you spend 30 minutes a day? (Hint: a lot )

Why do we read what we read? I have always been a voracious reader, but this video really made me consider what books I read. He mixes it with footage of some of the most beautiful bookstores from around the world.

Virgin Springs #

In an amalgamation of religion, vengeance and folk tales; Bergman drops us smack-dab in medieval Sweden. Max Von Sydow plays Töre, a prosperous patriarch whose daughter, Karin, gets raped and murdered when he sends her to deliver candles for their church. The men who partook in the hideous act unwittingly ask for shelter from Töre. Over the course of the night, he must decide what he needs to do next.

In a world with growing paganism, how much can faith provide comfort for a man in grief? Would vengeance help bring balance to a depraved act? Bergman gives us no simple answers. Just more questions.

Hedgehogs Dilemma #

As we are getting older, there is a growing split between who we are and who we want be. We use ideologies, unrepentant capitalism and half-truths to bridge it. This split vanishes with the superficial coat of paint that is daily life. In the cold of night,  it rears its ugly head. Like Camus’s protagonist in The Stranger, that absurd reality of the truth will shake us to our very being.

In Schopenhauer’s parable, Hedgehog’s Dilemma, we find ourselves with a group of hedgehogs on a cold winter night. In their attempt to get warm, they try to huddle together. In doing so, prick each other. Moving away from each other they are stuck shivering in the cold, alone. So, they devise the perfect distance that they can endure together.

Freud took this parable to talk about boundaries, isolation and intimacy in relationships. For me, this gets to the core of the split in modern nature. The perils of staying on the path of understanding. Marooned between artistic needs and a deep desire for acceptance and being seen. Trying to hold on to hope and despair simultaneously in our minds. Are we forever stuck in this tango of being right and being happy? Of never being satisfied? Of asserting our T-ruth and F-reedom in everything we do.

I left out this part of the parable earlier,

“Yet whoever has a great deal of internal warmth of his own will prefer to keep away from society in order to avoid giving or receiving trouble or annoyance.”

I think Schopenhauer’s idea of internal warmth is the way forward. Albeit, not in trying to make myself self-sufficient in order to untie myself from everyone around me. Rather, to let that internal warmth warm up the people closest to me.