Alexandersmap

    Category: reading

    • 11 of My Favorite Books Read in 2020

      Looking back on this maddening year, I found I read a lot of poetry that inspired and a lot of page-turner novels that distracted. It would be easy to make half this list collections of Mary Oliver poems, but I subtracted poetry from the list altogether to focus on the craft of the written novel or book. Still, I like to bend the rules, so in making my list of top ten favorite books for the year, I chose eleven. This was a nod to Charlie Mackesy, who spun a bit of magic in a year where it was essential. Illustrating the timeless nature of books (or perhaps how far behind I am in catching up), only four of the eleven were released in 2020. These eleven books are listed in no particular order, largely because there’s a bit of wonder in each of them. Each informed and delighted me.

      Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor
      “The more oxygen life can consume, the more electron excitability it gains, the more animated it becomes. When living matter is bristling and able to absorb and transfer electrons in a controlled way, it remains healthy. When cells lose the ability to offload and absorb electrons, they begin to break down.”

      I find myself thinking often about breathing after reading this book. Waking up with a dry mouth reminds me I need to be better at nasal breathing, when hiking I try to control my breath and focus on how I’m taking in oxygen, and when I chew almonds I crunch with satisfaction, knowing it helps release stem cells and increase bone density. This book is highly informative and strongly recommended for anyone, well, breathing.

      The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More With Less by Richard Koch
      “Equality ends in dominance: that is one of the messages of chaos theory. The 80/20 Principle’s message is different yet complementary. It tells us that, at any one point, a majority of any phenomenon will be explained or caused by a minority of the actors participating in the phenomenon. Eighty percent of the results come from 20 percent of the causes. A few things are important; most are not.”

      This was the most highlighted book of the bunch. Honestly, there were chapters I skimmed over because they didn’t sing a tune I wanted to hear, but the theories here are sound. I wish I’d read this book at the beginning of my career, but it’s not too late to implement the core principles in many aspects of my life.

      The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson
      Hitler wanted still more force applied against Britain. America seemed increasingly likely to enter the war but would do so only, he reasoned, if Britain continued to exist. On March 5 he issued another directive, No. 24, this signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), aimed mainly at how Germany and Japan might coordinate strategy under the Tripartite Pact, which both had signed with Italy the preceding fall. The goal, the directive said, “must be to induce Japan to take action in the Far East as soon as possible. This will tie down strong English forces and will divert the main effort of the United States of America to the Pacific.” Beyond this Germany had no particular interest in the Far East. “The common aim of strategy,” the directive stated, “must be represented as the swift conquest of England in order to keep America out of the war.”

      We all grew up sort of knowing about The Blitz. This book neatly sums up just how tenuous the situation was. I fancy myself well-informed about World War II, but I learned far more from the The Splendid and the Vile than I expected to. For all our complaints about the pandemic, most of us have no idea what real sacrifice is. Larson brings us closer to understanding with this book.

      The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
      “What do you want to be when you grow up?” asked the mole.
      “Kind,” said the boy.

      A beautiful, simple book. I picked this up for my daughter as a gift and read it quickly before wrapping it up. If 2020 kicked you in the ass, read this. Then read it again. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is art, meditation and a warm hug disguised as a book.

      Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved The Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by David Sobel
      The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time. This difference makes finding latitude child’s play, and turns the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma—one that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history.

      I’ve danced around this book for years, never getting around to reading it. And then I went to Greenwich and saw the chronometers ticking away in their plexiglass cases and resolved to get right to it when I returned home. This is a story of perseverance solving what was believed to be the impossible. A delightful book.

      Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick
      No longer mindful of the debt they owed the Pokanokets, without whom their parents would never have endured their first year in America, some of the Pilgrims’ children were less willing to treat Native leaders with the tolerance and respect their parents had once afforded Massasoit.

      Living in New England, you can’t really get away from the story of the Pilgrims. But the part we seem to forget with the Pilgrims is how much they relied on luck and the strategic kindness of Massasoit to survive at all. It seems I’m a descendent of a Pilgrim (or two), so I’m told, and that lineage makes me all the more indebted to the Pokanokets who assured that those first few years here weren’t the last for the passengers on the Mayflower. As the quote above suggests, that indebtedness seemed to skip the next generation, paving the way for the tragedy of King Phillip’s War.

      Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee
      “That four-to-one ratio in writing time—first draft versus the other drafts combined—has for me been consistent in projects of any length, even if the first draft takes only a few days or weeks. There are psychological differences from phase to phase, and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum. After that, it seems as if a different person is taking over. Dread largely disappears. Problems become less threatening, more interesting. Experience is more helpful, as if an amateur is being replaced by a professional. Days go by quickly and not a few could be called pleasant, I’ll admit.“

      Reading McPhee, like reading Hemingway, it’s easy to get just a bit intimidated. The beauty of this book is that he pulls back the curtains to show you the way. Great research, editors and fact checkers smooth out the rough edges and polish the story, but the work you put into it makes the finished product shine.

      Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau
      “The ocean there is commonly but a tantalizing prospect in hot weather, for with all that water before you, there is, as we were afterward told, no bathing on the Atlantic side, on account of the undertow and the rumor of sharks. At the lighthouse both in Eastham and Truro, the only houses quite on the shore, they declared, the next year, that they would not bathe there “for any sum,” for they sometimes saw the sharks tossed up and quiver for a moment on the sand. Others laughed at these stories, but perhaps they could afford to because they never bathed anywhere. One old wrecker told us that he killed a regular man-eating shark fourteen feet long, and hauled him out with his oxen, where we had bathed; and another, that his father caught a smaller one of the same kind that was stranded there, by standing him up on his snout so that the waves could not take him. They will tell you tough stories of sharks all over the Cape, which I do not presume to doubt utterly,—how they will sometimes upset a boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. I can easily believe in the undertow, but I have no doubt that one shark in a dozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach a hundred miles long.“

      This book, like Philbrick’s Mayflower, informs the native New Englander about the places that once were the places that now are. I have a stack of quotes from this book that I’m saving for other blog posts, but the one above reminds us that the question of sharks has been around a lot longer than we might believe. Like Thoreau I’m much more concerned about undertow when swimming in the surf, but hey, you never know…

      Siddhartha: A Novel by Hermann Hesse
      “Were not all sufferings then time, and were not all self-torments and personal fears time? Weren’t all the difficult and hostile things in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time, and as soon as time could be thrust out of the mind?“

      I’ve heard enough people recommend this book that eventually I had to read it, and I finished it in 2020. Amazingly, it feels like I read this a decade ago, for all that’s happened this year. Like The Alchemist, it’s a story that teaches you a bit about yourself as you wade through it.

      Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All The Facts by Annie Duke
      What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure.”

      How do you make decisions? How can you make better, more informed decisions when you don’t have all the facts? And what is a game of strategy versus a game of chance? This book uncovers some of these answers. As with anything, there’s book smart and there’s street smart, and reading about it and understanding it in real life are different things. Duke sprinkles in some street smarts hard won on the poker tables.

      Sailing True North: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character by James G. Stavridis
      “The contemporary malaise is the unwillingness to take chances. Everyone is playing it safe. We’ve lost our guts. It’s much more fun to stick your neck out and take chances. The whole attitude is to protect yourself against everything, don’t take chances. But we’ve built this country on taking chances” (Quoting Rear Admiral Grace Hopper)

      A quick, enjoyable read that offers lessons learned from some of the great “Admirals” in history. This is examination of character in ten short biographies, but also an unflinching look at racism and sexism in the Navy and how that battle continues to be fought to this day. And there’s no mistaking the Admiral’s feelings about character in certain political leaders we currently suffer through. A timely message for all of us.

    • Maintaining Streaks

      “Build streaks. Do the work every single day. Blog daily. Write daily. Ship daily. Show up daily. Find your streak and maintain it.” – Seth Godin, The Practice

      I made a relatively big deal (by my standards) of blog number 900. Well, this is 914 and I just keep quietly going. I have some exciting plans for blog posts in 2021, which rely on good health and the freedom of mobility that comes with a world getting back on its feet again – dare I say – after the pandemic. But I’ll write either way. I like this particular streak I’m on too much to stop just because I’m not out there seeing the world. And so the streak continues for as long as I’m blessed with another day and the acuity to do something with it.

      The concept of streaks is nothing new, but I’ll credit James Clear with writing the right book at the right time (for me) a couple of years ago shining a spotlight on habits and building streaks with them. It hit me in a way that Charles Duhigg’s book on the same topic didn’t. Both informative, but Clear’s book was catalytic. Since reading it I’ve tried to string together consecutive streaks for many things, but the writing is the one that’s lasted the longest. If you search for James Clear in this blog you’ll find plenty of quotes on this topic, but here are three I don’t believe I’ve used before:

      “The point is to master the habit of showing up.”

      “The identity itself becomes the reinforcer. You do it because it’s who you are and it feels good to be you.”

      “Never miss twice.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits

      So every morning begins with maintaining the streaks: Writing and reading. Fitness is saved for the middle of the day, and the evening is Duolingo to close out the day. Which may explain why I’ve had to use the streak saver several times with Duolingo (though I’ve never missed twice in a row) and the exercise streak gets broken more than it should. That exercise streak is just as critical for overall health as the writing, reading and language learning are for mental fitness. But it tends to get lost in that middle of the day time slot, so I’m debating moving it to the beginning of the day without breaking what’s working.

      As a morning person, the payoff is more obvious in the morning streaks. I publish every day, usually before I eat breakfast unless there’s an early start for a flight or a hike or whatnot. And I chip away at the reading immediately afterwards. I finished John McPhee’s Draft no. 4 (for five books in a week). That reading streak is paying off as much as the writing streak. They go hand-in-hand, of course, but it’s nice to finish things and “check the box”. For the blog checking the box means clicking Publish. For reading checking the box means reviewing the book after I’ve finished it on Goodreads. This also serves as my de facto tracker for how many books I finish in a year.

      “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

      Reading that McPhee book reminded me of what I don’t know. I spent a fair amount of time looking up the definitions of words he’d drop, or places he’d been to that I wasn’t familiar with. You could look at that in two ways: either you’re hopelessly behind on the learning curve, or you’ve reached another hurdle to clear on your sprint around the track of life. Embrace the humbling process of learning what you didn’t previously know, and look with anticipation towards the next hurdle in line.

      So that’s where you’ll find me each morning: maintaining streaks while sprinting around the track of life. We’re moving around it either way, we might as well keep a few streaks alive as we go. Now, about that fitness goal…

    • 20 Days Left in 2020

      Today there are twenty days left in 2020. What are you going to do with those twenty days? The other 346 tumultuous, maddening days of this year are behind us. All that’s left in this year are twenty days and it will be a memory stacked with all of our other memories. So what will we make of them?

      Time isn’t our friend, my friend. With so little time available in our productive lifetimes, deciding what you will finish, what will define your time here, is in itself life altering. Boiled down even further (since time isn’t guaranteed anyway), deciding what you will finish in a year, a month, a week and, you guessed it, a day lends urgency to the most mundane of tasks. Luckily for us, twenty days is a small enough sample that we can wrap our minds around it.

      What are you here for anyway? Decide what to be and go be it, as the Avett Brothers would suggest. And as the days shrink into the dark nuggets of December days and we round the corner into the New Year, what are you going to do with that precious time anyway? Finishing more seems a good answer.

      For me that means work goals, final chapters in several books, fitness goals and places to be. Everything else is time with loved ones. That’s more than enough to focus on as we hit the home stretch.

      Final Chapters
      I’ve got a stack of critical reading to finish. Seven books in all, that I’ve mentally noted as my finish in 2020 books. For all my complaining about my tendency to bounce around between books, I’ve made steady progress despite it all. If you’re the average of the five people you hang around with the most then raising that average with the authors of exceptional books is a worthy use of limited time. Notably, I’ve set aside some other books that I’ve chosen not to finish. Life is full of compromise. Just make compromises that will still move you forward.

      Fitness
      Stretching your mental boundaries through reading is one thing, but we can’t let our bodies waste away in the meantime. Worthwhile fitness goals force the issue of how you spend your days. I’ve accepted a rowing challenge from old college friends. And so I’ll be spending more of that precious time rowing a few hundred thousand miles in preparation for the moment of truth: 2000 meters for time. Nothing focuses the mind on the task of getting in peak shape like a 2000 meter row on a Concept 2 Rowing Ergometer.

      Places to Be
      Getting fit is great, but I’m an outdoor creature at heart and I can’t very well spend my entire winter indoors rowing. As luck would have it there are worthy places to go and things to see within reach in a year where travel is prohibited. Hiking trails, mountain peaks, waterfalls and long stretches of sandy beach with no footprints on them in winter are all waiting patiently for you. Lonely sites of historical significance with ghosts waiting to whisper to you. All outside the door and a short drive away. Forget binge-watching, try binge-doing.

      Only twenty days left in the year. A power twenty, as rowers would recognize: twenty at maximum effort to pull ahead. Not all that much for a year we’ll surely never forget in our lifetimes. Why not make something positive out of the last twenty? Twenty powerful days to finish this year, and to set ourselves up for a brighter future.

    • Developing Oneself

      “If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.” – John McPhee

      Now and then I re-read that quote to shake myself out of my own head. The implications of that McPhee sentence are profound enough on the merit of “marine limestone”, but wait; there’s more. There’s also the craft of forming a sentence so starkly beautiful, so elegant in its simplicity, that it inspires you to be a bit better at your own writing.

      “No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing.”
      ― John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process

      I have this McPhee book, partially read, in my virtual stack of books to finish this year. I began reading it, was pulled towards some weighty books that demanded attention, and keep looking back at it wanting to finish what I’d started. Another case for reading one book at a time, as if it were required to build a case at all.

      Ryan Holiday writes about this time during the pandemic through a Stoic lens. He’s a prolific reader, and also a prolific writer. His mentor is another prolific writer in Robert Greene. What he said rings in my ears as this crazy year spirals towards an end:

      “I remembered a piece of advice I had gotten from the author Robert Greene many years earlier. He told me there are two types of time: alive time and dead time. One is when you sit around, when you wait until things happen to you. The other is when you are in control, when you make every second count, when you are learning and improving and growing.” – Ryan Holiday

      I note the challenge, and accept it. We’ve all wasted too many seconds in 2020, and the years that preceded it. Focused action, high agency, and discipline matter more than ever. You don’t get down the path if you keep detouring off to view every distraction along the way. To ship the work you must complete the work.

      Reading inspires action, but it also distracts. If you’re caught up in the greatness of the work of another you can get cavalier about your own work. Reading is alive time, but so is productive action towards a goal. There’s time enough for both in a day, should you use your day wisely, and with urgency. You develop yourself through the work. Embrace it.

    • The Lifting Fog

      “Opinions are like nails: the stronger you hit them, the deeper inside they go.” – Decimus Junius Juvenalis

      Or maybe in 2020 it’s “the more you express them the more your friends mute you on Facebook”. Or look at you funny when you see them in public. The lesson, I suppose, is to stop hammering all the time. And, as we all know, you can’t change other people, only yourself. So focus your energy in the right place.

      We begin another work week with deep fog outside. The heat of yesterday gave way to a cold, clammy fog that descended into the woods and surrounds the house this morning. It inspires me even as it drives nails into the ankle I thought was healed. The fog offers lessons: This day marks a new beginning, as every day does. Enough hammering opinions and defending positions.

      If you’re wondering, Decimus Junius Juvenalis, AKA Juvenus, has a wealth of wisdom/great quotes you’re familiar with in The Sixteen Satires (like “who watches the watchmen?”). Worth a search if you geek out on such things (as I clearly do). There are days when I wish I could just read all day just to catch up on things that I skimmed through in school because I wasn’t mentally developed enough to fully grasp what they were saying at the time. But that’s what lifetimes are for.

      “You can never step into the same book twice, because you are different each time you read it.” – John Barton

      And so we change, day-to-day. The fog slowly lifts, and a new understanding develops. I’m clearing out the fog of politics and rancor from the last several months and looking ahead with clarity and purpose. To grow in the new light emerging from the fog. To begin again.

    • Reading is Autobiographical

      “The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things well.”

      It happens this way, that I’ll pick up some random quote such as the one above, plucked from a James Clear newsletter, and immediately I feel compelled to hunt down the source. In this case Hugh Walpole’s Reading: An Essay. Short enough to devour in a few quick bites, I blew through his essay in no time at all. I suppose it was inevitable, I’ve heard about this short essay for years, but never got around to it… until I read the quote above.

      Written in 1929, the essay references “The War” frequently, and I shudder to know what he didn’t know about the world to come over the next 12 years. There would soon be another war. Walpole would pass away in 1941, well before the outcome was certain. A discretely gay man in a time when discretion was required, he never had children and turned his energy into a prolific writing career. Reading: An Essay is a love letter to his favorite pastime, and I found myself plucking quote-after-quote from it. I’m sure there are plenty I missed, and perhaps I’ll read it again sometime soon. But who wants to get everything out of an essay on the first go-around anyway? With reading, Walpole is a kindred spirit from a hundred years ago. He capitalizes “Reading” as if it were a person or a sacred subject, because of course it was to him. And in his reverence for the topic, the essay felt like a quiet conversation with a friend. So here are a few gems from this short essay:

      “I believe, with the pleasures of Reading it can be nothing if it is not autobiographical, for the only certain thing about Reading is that it is personal first, personal second, and personal all the time, and Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divina Comedia may be the twin dominating peaks of a glorious range, but they are nothing to you whatsoever if you happen to be looking the other way.” – Hugh Walpole, Reading: An Essay

      “For the rest of my days there should be always at my hand a land of escape and enchantment.”

      “Reading must be a personal adventure or the salt goes out of it.”

      “Libraries should be penetrated with the love of books, so that when you enter a room where the books are the air is warm with a kind of delicious humanity, and the books have been always so affectionately treated that, like the right kind of dog, they know no fear and yet have their fitting dignity.”

      “I believe that circumstances have altered very little, and that a novel to be absorbing has to have precisely the two ingredients that it had a hundred years ago, a narrative gift (and it doesn’t matter whether the narrative is about a tea party or a murder trial) and the creation of living characters.”

      “There is a kind of luxury in reading which is perhaps the best thing in the world; it is to be captured only, I think, through the old books, books that you know so well that they step out and meet you, take you by the arm and whisper in your ear: ‘Now lie back and talk to us, and then we will in turn tell you a thing or two. There’s no need to be clever this evening, we don’t want you to shine, we’ll have an hour or two together so pleasant that you’ll scarcely know we’re here.’”

      All of this talk of libraries and Reading makes me want to immerse myself in a good book. The house is still quiet, the sun hasn’t risen yet on this cold morning, and there’s time for another mug of coffee and a few chapters before the frenzied swirl of activity begins. If you’ll excuse me…

    • A Moment With Harold Evans

      “I appreciate engineers, I wrote a book about their achievements, but I deprecate what they and other techies do to English words. Hey, these nouns and verbs aren’t bits of silicon you can dope with chemicals (boron, phosphorus, and arsenic), drop into a kiln at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and slice and dice. Words breathe. They need TLC—you know,”
      ― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

      When the world seems to be looking too far inward, when everyone around you seems to be spun up into things that shouldn’t matter, when the conversation turns towards the latest scandal in Hollywood or Washington or Buckingham Palace… seek other voices. Because the only way you’ll grow is to rise up towards it. The larger conversations in the world are happening without you until you join the adult table. When you get to the adult table, by all means be ready to join the conversation.

      Sir Harold Evans passed away last week at the age of 92. In a wild case of six degrees of separation I once had Thanksgiving dinner with Harold Evans and his wife Tina Brown, putting me literally at the adult table with two of the most influential and brilliant people in the publishing industry. I was a college student who happened to be in the right place at the right time – they lived next door to the place we were for the long weekend and we invited them over. Simple. The parents were up to the conversation at hand, I wasn’t quite up to the task – a college kid who still thought he knew everything and not bothering to do the work needed to get closer to there. Harold Evans asked me a question about which candidate in the Republican Primary I liked, and without any thought to the matter I blurted out “Bob Dole” without explanation. It seemed like a safe answer at the time. He looked at me patiently and diverted to other topics with someone else, ending our conversation instead of trying to draw any logic out of my answer. He and I both knew I’d punted. I always regretted not being better prepared for a conversation like that.

      “His parents had taught him to make the most of himself, so he had. Though he kept a certain working-class deference and friendliness, did not shout, was “Harry” to everyone and would quite kindly tell reporters their copy was hopeless, he had taken on almost every part of the establishment and made it quake.” – Harold Evans’ Obituary, The Economist

      Reading about Evans’ life, I was struck by how hard he had worked to raise himself up and to demand the best from himself and others. I remember he was a voracious reader, and would often devour several books on the drive from New York City out to Quogue, New York. As the editor of Random House he needed to read quickly because he had an endless stream of books coming at him. I would try speed-reading a few times over the years attempting to get as much from it as people like Evans did. But I’ve found that speed-reading doesn’t work for me. I like to linger on words and sentences a bit too much. If I were to have that one conversation with him again I might ask how he approached reading. I suspect he did it two ways, for work and for pleasure, and the speed varied based on which it was. It would have been a better conversation than the Republican Primary of 1987-1988.

      “Running a newspaper gave him “a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil”. – Harold Evans’ Obituary, The Economist

      Harold Evans was fired from The Times by Rupert Murdoch, setting up his move to New York and his rise to the top of the publishing industry. Had he not been fired I would never have met him. He used it as fuel to rise up even higher, and it was surely a gift not having to cater to the whims and biases of Murdoch. Attacking the devil was a purpose, and I wondered sometimes what he thought of the nastiness of present-day politics. But there it was, an interview from 2017 where he called Boris ‘buoyantly reckless’, Trump dangerous and May ‘terrifically smart’. I believe he was on point with all three. No surprise for a man who did the work necessary to find the truth of the matter with the most evasive of characters. Thinking back, I was no match for him at the time. But he helped inspire me to try harder, as I suspect he did with many others over the years. I wish I’d had another conversation with the man, I was more prepared for the next one.

    • Every Day A New Fancy

      “We are carried along by our thoughts, “now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm … every day a new fancy, and our humors shift with the shifts in the weather.” It is no wonder that the mind is like this, since even the apparently solid physical world exists in endless slow turmoil.“ – Sarah Bakewell, quoting Montaigne, who was quoting Heraclitus

      I’ve had the Montagnie’s Essays for some time now, but keep pushing it aside for other reading material. So when Bakewell’s book How To Live or A Life Of Montaigne was recommended by an author I follow closely I decided to dive in. While also reading the excellent Erik Larson book The Splendid And The Vile and Tristan Gooley’s How To Read Water and a business book recommended by the company President. So five books in various stages of completion, and a desire to complete them all. This happens now and then: every day a new fancy. I’m treating the business book like a homework assignment and read it for an hour then put it down for the day. But what of the others? You can’t read everything at once.

      The answer is you put aside the books that aren’t capturing your imagination at the moment. Get out and live, return and see where the mind settles. At the moment I’m settled on The Battle of Britain with Larson’s book. There’s only so much time for reading, just as there’s only so much time for anything else meaningful. We prioritize and complete what we can in this tumultuous world, and accept the day as it is when it ends.

      Being carried along by our thoughts is a very human condition. We all have the tendency to get distracted by the buzz around us, which has grown exponentially since Montaigne’s time. We do a disservice to ourselves having so much to consume, for we can’t possibly consume it all. Instead I’m trying to raise the bar. Consume, but make it nutrient-rich consumption. What are you getting out of this book? is as fair a question to ask as What are you getting following this person’s Twitter account? The price you pay to read it is time you’ll never get back and attention you could have spent on something else. So by all means make it worthwhile.

      In all the madness that is 2020 I forgot that this was a Leap Year. There are 366 days in 2020 – as if we needed another day added to this crazy year. Looking back on the last 250 days that have passed, I’ve managed to read 13 books so far, fewer than anticipated but overall a higher level of reading. I’m barely skating by on learning French and Portuguese, doing just enough to keep the streak alive. And of course I’ve recommitted to hiking and local travel. 2020 will go down as the most unusual year in my lifetime, but it won’t be a lost cause.

      “If you understand everything you consume, you’re probably going to be the same person 6 months from now.” – George Mack

      So there’s the challenge: stretch your limitations and grow. To turn Mack’s quote and look back six months ago when this pandemic really started locking things down, I can say I’ve accomplished a lot in spite of the pandemic (or because?). The time hasn’t been lost at all: filled with learning and family time and local travel I might have otherwise put aside in favor of the faraway. And so to turn that quote back around as a challenge to myself and look out six months from now, what will I have accomplished? When you ask this question of yourself and take it seriously it stills the tumult of the mind and lends focus to the march we’re on. Sure the stack of distractions remain, but the path becomes more defined. A tumultuous river and a still river both arrive at the same sea eventually. Which has the better journey?

    • The Light of Intellect

      “A man who lives an intellectual life is like a man who carries a lantern in front of him to light his way. Such a person will never come to a dark place, because the light of his intellect moves before him.“ – Leo Tolstoy

      I suppose I haven’t reached the intellectual level just yet, as I still stumble into dark places now and then. But on the whole the pursuit of an intellectual life, combined with a pursuit of the active outdoor life, and the family life have kept me above the darkest valleys I know some are struggling in. Feel overwhelmed at times? Tap into the Great Conversation and see what those who came before you thought and did with their own lives. We have it pretty good by comparison. But only if we fight for it.

      Leo Tolstoy was influenced by Henry David Thoreau (and each was an interesting character beyond his writing). He in turn strongly influenced the nonviolent direction that Mahatma Gandhi would take in his own life, and there was a handoff of sorts when the two corresponded for the last year of Tolstoy’s life when he offered insight and direction to Gandhi. Thoreau and Tolstoy and Gandhi in turn influenced Martin Luther King, Jr., who incorporated their wisdom into his own philosophy and referenced them often in his speeches. An intellectual life lights the way for more than just the original carrier of the lantern.

      A daily blog is the slow rising of the lantern. An attempt to light the way for yourself and perhaps for a few others now or someday. A way to balance the stream of consciousness and sound bite world we live in with deeper thought and contemplation. And a catalyst for probing deeper into the world – to travel more, to get outside more, to read more, to learn more, and to write better. The intellectual life is the life of pursuit. Its not a yawn-fest of casual reading in the study but a pursuit of understanding, both the self and the world. It’s a call to action. A call I’ve heard and pursue every day I wake up, which (thankfully) includes this one.

    • Creating the Moon

      “The moon itself may have been born of a great tidal wave of earthly substance, torn off into space. And remember that if the moon was formed in this fashion, the event may have had much to do with shaping the ocean basins and the continents as we know them.

      There were tides in the new earth, long before there was an ocean. In response to the pull of the sun the molten liquids of the earth’s whole surface rose in tides that rolled unhindered around the globe and only gradually slackened and diminished as the earthly shell cooled, congealed, and hardened. Those who believe that the moon is a child of Earth say that during an early stage of the earth’s development something happened that caused this rolling, viscid tide to gather speed and momentum and to rise to unimaginable heights.

      Physicists have calculated that, after 500 years of such monstrous, steadily increasing tides, those on the side toward the sun became too high for stability, and a great wave was torn away and hurled into space. But immediately, of course, the newly created satellite became subject to physical laws that sent it spinning in an orbit of its own about the earth. This is what we call the moon.

      There is to this day a great scar on the surface of the globe. This scar or depression holds the Pacific Ocean.” – Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

      Rachel Carson published The Sea Around Us 69 years ago, and it was a runaway best-seller at the time. I’ve known Carson as the author of Silent Spring, but was ignorant of this book that launched her into fame. As the name suggests, the book explores the sea and is filled with magically breathless wonder. The excerpt above filled me with awe and set the stage to position this book at the top of the stack. For who doesn’t look at the moon and wonder how it got there? And this theory of a massive wave of molten liquid rising up and ripping from the earth to form the moon, and the great scar of the Pacific basin makes as much sense to me as any other.

      Science is a funny thing. I ran away from science in school because the teachers were dispassionate bores. But when I read a passage that delivers a rightful sense of awe to the story, well, it becomes captivating. If the politicization of the pandemic and mask-wearing has demonstrated anything, its that the world needs more captivating story-tellers in science. Carson was a catalyst for a better understanding of our oceans and the environment with a page-turning writing style that betrayed her own wonder at the subject matter. Were her writing style technical and dry she never would have made the impact that she did, and the world may never have realized the threat of nuclear waste dumped into the ocean or of DDT on the food chain we are very much a part of. If she were alive today I expect she’d have a lot to say about plastic and climate change.

      Writing isn’t nearly as epic as creating a moon, but it can feel that way sometimes to the writer. I’m plugging away at the writing, both here and elsewhere, and feel that the words and characters are my own rolling, viscid tide moving unchecked through my mind. At some point maybe that momentum will spawn something awe-worthy. And that’s the challenge isn’t it? To produce something compelling and timeless. Watching the waxing crescent moon peaking through the forest last night as it dropped into the western sky was both an inspiration and a challenge to get it right. I imagine Rachel Carson looked up at the moon in a similar way, and she rose to that challenge. So why not us?