I enjoyed the film 'while we're young'. It expressed something really deep and profound about human nature. One of my favorite lines is when Ben Stiller says about Adam Driver, after he has completely seen through his duplicitousness - 'it's as if he saw someone being earnest and sincere when he was young and he's been trying to copy it ever since'. I probably don't have that quote exactly right. It's such a funny and perceptive description. It's such a deep observation but it's said in the heat of the moment.
The more realistic you want your story to be, the more contrived you have to make it. Verisimilitude, like any other word with so many i's, doesn't occur naturally.
Jack White wants love to change his friends to enemies and to murder his mother.
I don't think it works like that.
This is a post that I originally published on April 12, 2016, which I've lightly edited. I retrieved it through the magic of the 'wayback machine'.
A book can be the difference between writing and not writing, and what a difference that is. Only you can write what you write - that expression of thoughts and experience and inner-world that is yours alone.
There are few straight lines or uniform curves in nature, but most things that are made by humans are mostly straight lines and uniform curves. That’s a requirement of mass production, but not when God is the creator. God mass produced trees and, though there’s a uniformity about them, no tree is exactly the same as another. The beauty of ruins or their more modern variant — abandoned places — is that they are a collaborative effort between nature and humanity. Humanity builds something with lines and defined edges and then, over time, nature goes to work, eroding the hard lines and introducing an element of chaotic life.
Just because someone knows how to do something or they’re knowledgeable about a topic doesn’t mean they can teach it. There’s a lot of explanation that seems obvious to someone who already knows how to do something that is necessary when teaching others how to do it. Also, you have to work through the material gradually and systematically, not making any quick moves. Sometimes we think that those ‘quick moves’ display our expertise, but they don’t — they just confuse those we are trying to teach. A similar principle applies to writing. To really get your message across, you have to include a lot of ‘signposting’ and explanation that you, the writer, don’t need but which helps the reader to understand what you’re trying to convey.
I think that temperature can be a good analogy for depression. Severe depression is like being permanently cold and having no way to warm up. You’re not free and flexible. Over many years, through catering to my own anxiety and depression, I had cultivated a cold world in my mind. Interest begets warmth, but the problem with depression is that you don’t feel interested in anything. But that’s also something that can be cultivated. Through following my interests, I can build refuges in my mind.
I’ve written before about the 3 crucial conversations I had in 2022. The one I had with the nurse in detox was about how, through catering to my anxiety, through withdrawal and rumination, I had built my anxiety into something all-consuming, like a toxic plant or a monument to terror that requires all my attention. She said, imagine what you could do if you engage in life. You could cultivate a health-giving plant or a monument that celebrates character, spirit, joy, beauty. It’s not just about being physically active — like doing exercise — or being socially active — doing stuff with people — although it is about those things, but there’s a kind of mental activity that is the opposite of rumination and withdrawal.
NF’s song Mansion is about the dwelling we build for ourselves when we take refuge in fear and doubt. That’s a mystery that really interests me — how, with depression especially, what we fear and loathe becomes a refuge that we seek. We take refuge in the thing that we are taking refuge from. It’s like a recursive function. I think it’s about control. We want to tame and domesticate our fear. We serve it, thinking that we will be rewarded by its subservience when what we actually get is our subservience.
When I think in general about all the mental vicissitudes I’ve been through in my life, it’s with a sense of regret, even bitterness. If I wasn’t so messed up mentally, I would have been more successful, more normal, happier, nicer to people. I would have been able to make a meaningful, positive contribution to the world. But for some reason, when I think about the actual experience of those struggles — like, thinking about particular battles rather than the whole war — I feel a sense of appreciation that I went through those things. I see some value that I didn’t see at the time.
