That which will outlast, reading and not reading

#6 | January 2024

That which will outlast

‘The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.’ Of the several Virginia Woolf books that I read last year, this sentence reverberated loudest from a thousand or so pages of her writing. I didn’t know at the time that I would continue to ponder its meaning for many of the months that followed. The summer brought pain and sadness for my family, with the death of someone we loved dearly. Everything came to a standstill. Work came to a stop. Money dried up very soon after. Even the words spoken between us came to a quiet cessation because we couldn’t bear to talk about or around our loss. Time seemed broken – our ‘now’ discontinued from what we knew as ‘before’ and an ‘after’ we were woefully unprepared for.

Time does heal, but not the time of accumulated minutes, hours, days and months – we found ourselves locked within many of those, moving from one phase of now to a next phase of now. The time that heals is what the philosopher Henri Bergson named duration – the seamless connectivity (not merely the seamed accumulation) of each of those clock strokes and numbered calendar days. Bergson’s time described not units of measure, but something far more introspective and subjective, a flow of something that could be felt, that could envelop the senses, that could colour our experiences with emotion.

‘Duration’ comes from the Latin word durare (to last). What heals is an overlapping and merging of past memories with an awareness of a loss we feel in the present and an absence we make accommodation for in our future. Grief is love no longer tethered to life. Woolf’s stone will still be here for years and centuries to come – she knew that nature is indifferent to our fleeting passage through life. But how that life, that boot, so keenly appreciates the stone: considers it, connects with its weight, hears it skid and clatter, measures its stride before connecting with it once more. The stone will outlast these words; but these words will more than do for attempting to feel, describe and understand something of that stone.

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Reading and not reading

One of the things we’ve struggled to re-learn these last six or so months is to look after ourselves ahead of others whenever we can – to focus fully once more on our own welfare and rediscover the patterns and pleasures that were there in our lives previously. That’s not been so easy, but one pleasure which is slowly returning for me is reading. I try to spend the first half-hour, sometimes hour, of every day with a book and that is slowly becoming a habit once again. It seemed a comforting subject with which to rekindle this newsletter.

For several years now, I’ve shared end-of-year reading lists over on Instagram. Due to the loss described above, this year saw a virtual reading hiatus between July and November where I didn’t (couldn’t) read anything. There were two exceptions. I’d started re-reading Albert Camus’ The Plague in July, before my mother-in-law became gravely ill. I finished it over a month later, in 4.30/5.30am windows, in the early days of our mourning. It was more beautiful a read than I had remembered. Then, in the first days of August, I started to read Sarah Winman’s Still Life once again. I had proposed the book to Mama back in January – never more certain that one of the book recommendations we shared so often would so easily win her approval. She had bought the book. I found it on top of the pile next to be read on her bedside table, no trademark downturned page corner or crease of broken spine to betray its newness. We managed to share the first hundred or so pages.

On a humid evening in early September, I tried for the first time to actively pull away from my grief, and nourish something of personal interest once again. I attended John Gray’s book event in Bath and enjoyed having my mind focus on something completely new and yet reassuringly familiar for an hour. It took me another month to start reading Gray’s book, and I enjoyed it less than I did that evening in his company, but as I got up to read on those mid-autumn mornings, before the children were awake, it felt like something of the old me was starting to thaw just as the world outside was beginning to cool and whiten.

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I read two absolutely outstanding books in 2023 – one fiction and one non-fiction.

Sarah Winman’s Still Life is a novel of such beautiful depth and magical storytelling; full of characters you care deeply about, whose pains and pleasures you feel. I devoured perhaps half a dozen podcast interviews with Winman immediately after finishing it, keen to hold onto the spell of the book for longer, but also wanting to know more about the love and cleverness which had gone into its writing. One sentence I scribbled into a notebook at the time was, ‘The two men held one another till a hundred silent words had passed between them.’ I could have copied so many more. Winman writes beautifully and Still Life is a remarkably accomplished novel.

Brian Dillon’s Essayism had exactly the same effect. Wearing its erudition lightly, it is an immensely readable exploration of the essay form, a form which can both explore a subject and digress from it at will, which can come in so many different constructions, do its job with seriousness or frivolity, be perfectly complete or intoxicatingly fragmentary. Laced with vignettes of Dillon’s own journey into and out of depression, there is an absorbing autobiographical thread woven into it, too. If the exhilarating opening page that lists countless published essay subjects one after the other doesn’t whet your appetite – taking in essay giants such as Woolf, Orwell, Perec and Didion – then it might not be the book for you.

E. M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born is literary Marmite. I can’t think of anyone I would recommend this book to, but that’s because I don’t know of anyone who has the same penchant for so pungent a brand of pessimism. But as someone who finds the inauthentic motivational messaging and fake positivity of this social digital age far more depressing than I ever could this sort of material, this won over my heart – even as it seared away at it with one despairing thought after another. There is wit and warmth to be found here, too, but you’ll need to squint quite hard through all of the bleakness to find it. Cioran is probably an author best dipped into rather than one you read from cover to cover (but I confess to getting from first page to last in three or four brief sittings).

Small Things Like These is one of Claire Keegan’s miracle small novellas. I don’t know of another author like her – one who can pack a whole world so concisely into such a small space; describe a setting or character in so few sentences; convey feeling like she does in just a matter of words. She writes with such wonderful economy, and, contrary to Cioran, above, this most definitely is a book to be read in one sitting, but one which will stay with you for a long time after.

I love Rebecca Solnit’s writing and The Faraway Nearby is up there with her very best work. Her writing is like a spider’s web, with threads that lead away from a centre and then back, and then turn left and right and lead you back again. The opening chapter of this essay-memoir collection tells the story of three boxes of apricots, ripening fast, that Solnit inherits, picked from the tree in her mother’s garden. Her mother, in decline with accelerating memory loss, can no longer pick or find use for the fruit. As the pile ripens, macerates and starts to rot, Solnit works beautifully with her metaphor of decay and tells the difficult story of how she loved and nursed her mother. Every other essay in the book has something wonderful which lifts it above a mere mastery of subject and form.

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Finally, for those who really enjoy their lists, this was my full quota of 2023 reading. It was probably the first year of my life that I read more books by women than men. There were two re-reads (Didion, Camus) and several books that I read as research for my own writing (Bachelard, Wollheim, Jamison, Tanizaki), all of which were thoroughly enjoyable/thought-provoking. Finally, one audiobook: Rory Stewart’s fascinating political memoir.

Margaret Atwood, On Writers & Writing • Sarah Winman, Still Life • Blake Morrison, When Did You Last See Your Father • Annie Ernaux, A Man’s Place • Matthew D’Ancona, Identity, Ignorance & Innovation • Gaston Bachelard The Poetics Of Space • Brian Dillon Essayism • Susan Sontag, Regarding The Pain Of Others • Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby • Stephen King, On Writing • Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking • Richard Wollheim, Germs • Kay Jamison, An Unquiet Mind • Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise Of Shadows • Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These • Damian Barr, Maggie And Me • Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One’s Own • Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas • Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse • Bob Mortimer, The Satsuma Complex • Claire Keegan, Foster • Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead • Virginia Woolf, The Waves • E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born • Max Porter, Lanny • Maggie O’Farrell, Instructions For A Heatwave • Albert Camus, The Plague • John Gray, The New Leviathans • Slavoj Žižek, Too Late To Awaken • Alberto Manguel, Packing My Library • Rory Stewart, Politics On The Edge

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Recommended other fragments…

Just read: Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens had been sat on the shelf for several years: never quite feeling like the right time to get my teeth into something so big (in terms of both subject and page count). So when the audiobook version was recommended to me, it seemed like a good incentive to finally give it a go (Derek Perkins narrates the book fantastically well). I’ve never learned so much about so broad a subject from just one book – quite how Harari manages to communicate a complete story of humankind with such sparkling clarity and narrative intrigue is mesmerising. I committed to reading it in print form almost as soon as I’d finished it in audio form.

Now reading: Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis
Varoufakis is one of the most engaging and charmingly provocative leftist thinkers on the world stage today. The economist and former Greek finance minister suggests in his latest book that capitalism has been replaced by an even worse system that he has coined ‘technofeudalism’, explaining that capitalist markets and profit are being usurped by platforms and rents. This new economic system is being turbocharged for free – by us. With every internet click, tweet, Instagram post, Amazon purchase or turn of the Tesla wheel, we are working for free to increase the power and riches of the seriously super-rich – a technological-era version of the old medieval feudal system.

Podcast/Broadcast: Mr Bates and the Post Office, ITV
If you’re a UK-based reader of this newsletter, then you almost certainly can’t have missed either watching this ITV dramatisation and/or seen the ripples (and then waves) that it has set in motion in our justice and legislative systems. The drama tells the story of the British Post Office scandal – a catalogue of miscarriages of justice starting in 1999 – which resulted in nearly a thousand Post Office submasters being wrongly prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting when the discrepancies in their bookkeeping were known and subsequently proven to be the fault of the Post Office’s own accounting software. It’s four hours of beautifully written blood-boiling drama which cannot fail to move you. It will almost certainly win every award going and serves as a reminder of just how powerful the medium of terrestrial television can still be.

Music: I DES, King Creosote
I’ve been a dip-in-and-out fan of King Creosote for over a decade, ever since first hearing this unlikely cover version of a classic old A-ha song. His Diamond Mine album collaboration with Jon Hopkins from that same year is a perfect set of songs (which he updated and enhanced magnificently a year later with this Jubilee Edition). I DES is the best thing King Creosote (Fife-born singer-singwriter, Kenny Anderson) has recorded since and the title track is the most melancholic four minutes of music on an album full of beautifully tender songs. His fey and fractured Scottish brogue and prosaic poetry are tastes I’ll forever be grateful to have acquired back in 2011.

People: Two Photographers
Tim Clinch and Joanna Maclennan– the eponymous two photographers behind the name – are newcomers to Substack, but they already look like they’ve been part of the set-up for a long time. It’s become the perfect platform for them to continue growing a community that they started a few years back on Instagram. They share a love and vast knowledge of photography and offer advice and encouragement to keen, amateur and professional photographers by way of their ‘In Conversation’ broadcasts, tutorials and private mentoring. They run off-screen group workshops too (Provence and Bulgaria are already scheduled for 2024). Here on Substack they’ve added regular newsletter updates and magazine features (such as Desert Island Pics) to their impressive brand of evangelistic photographic encouragement.

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Forthcoming events…

My next Zoom-based phone photography workshop date will be 12th February 2024. Find out all you need to know and book your place here.

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