Peaceable Land 9 - Diminish me
For I am but dust postponed!
Thanks very much the two of you who read The Details last weekend on my recommendation. Thanks very much also all of you who read the last entry, which with help from a listing on RCB is now my most read on here. Both are really touching, and I hope they made your Sunday reading better than mine…
It is said the only good reader is a rereader. And usually it’s only good books that are reread. Usually, but not always. My Sunday morning was spent rereading a book I didn’t like because I feared my review was too harsh. Jerry Seinfeld said he loved standup comedians, however bad, just for going on the stage. With obvious exceptions for obvious wankers, you feel like that with authors on the page.
But it was a nice morning – ah, Broadway Market, stretching the lease of two flat whites… – and I found the right tone in the end. Anyway the Spectator review was five times as long and rapturous, so buy the book if you like. It was about how animals hear sound under water.
I’ve reviewed a few nature books now. Here is the most arresting moment from any of them:
“The reintroduction of bison could prevent these former fields becoming overrun by trees… the return of a charismatic mammal could catalyse opportunities for tourism.”
Bison? Charismatic? Charismatic bison?! Get out of town! This is outrageous! The Charisma Myth (2012) told us that charisma only comes to those who learn it. How had these bison seen the YouTube tutorials of ‘Charisma on Command’?! Who gave them the wifi?
The most enduring question of all, though, was ‘Why do I feel relieved?’ Bison being charismatic (and rare woodlice not, for instance) denies us the power to change ourselves. Why would losing power feel nice?
Opportunity does bring angst. The point is often made about America: unprecedented social mobility, unprecedented status anxiety. Likewise, power over who we are, anxiety over who we are. It can be quite unbearable. The first half of Hamilton leaves me so innervated I can hardly sit down for the second! And we’re at an even higher boil of romance than Hamilton was:
Guillotine, 1789: The self can be perfected through suffering.
Pill, 1969: You can choose the suffering to endure and so the perfect self to realise.
Facebook, 2009: Your choice, suffering, and perfection are publicly visible.
The bison are calming because they dull our choice. We are either bison or rare woodlice, and have as little hope of switching as they do. It is useless to worry about becoming or staying charismatic.
Being ready and grateful to lose opportunity is one of the most interesting psychic features of our age. Fleabag: “I just want someone to tell me what to do”. Lots of us are, in ways, like the CEO who pays a woman to dress him in nappies and baby him.
At another time when humans suddenly felt more powerful they also found a way to feel diminished. In the 19th century, as belief in god fell, painters flocked to huge and daunting natural sights like cliffs, valleys, and storms, in order to feel awed and humbled. They called that feeling the sublime, ‘a delightful stillness and amazement’, where:
“Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter, pleasurable, intoxicating even, with human weakness in the face of the strength, age and size of the universe.”
Nature is definitely a nice way to feel diminished. I love to drive out on a Friday evening and reach the sea. You know you can go no further even if you want to. It gives you permission to relax.
I wonder if there was some of that pleasure in covid. Lockdown took away opportunity by force, and we watched a natural peril defy our best efforts and spread over the globe. Perhaps we children of covid will come to show a pronounced taste for the sublime.
Celebrities are also meant to make you feel small but I spoke to a rock star the other day. It was the most opportune rock star for me to find myself in a room with because he’d just declared his love of a book I’d discussed at length in the NS. But he didn’t seem to have read it that deeply, or at all.
My bus passes a full billboard of his face every day. The true readers, I’m proud to tell you, are inside my bus. This week there has been Dalloway, Karenina, and Line of Beauty. Also a Buddhist monk.
With you and my bus that makes a lot of us young and reading well, and after what I sense everyone feels was a really fun summer we now enter beautiful autumn. I hope you got an Oasis ticket and that you have a really nice weekend.
GM
Bulletins
An intelligent colleague seeks a flatmate to join her in Kentish Town for £912.50 a month.
Love the piece and also the napoleon statuette on your desk!