Worth It #4

the very best of what I'm reading + watching + listening to

Welcome to Worth It, a weekly(ish) round-up of the very best of what I’m reading, watching, listening to, and occasionally even cooking. Only the things absolutely worth your valuable minutes.

THE REMAINS OF THE DAY | Kazuo Ishiguro

FWIW, this is not the cover I have, and I hate this one. It seems incredibly detached from the story itself.

When I finished KLARA AND THE SUN last summer, I decided to read everything Ishiguro has ever written.

I devoured this book in two days, but not for the reasons you might think. There is almost zero plot. Seriously, nothing happens. It is a long and winding reflection in a backwards direction, all from the vantage point of an unreliable narrator. Mr. Stevens is a mid-century English butler who has decided to take a few days off for the first time in 30-odd years, and during that first respite from his profession (and from his identity, which are—by design—one in the same), he for the first time considers what he has made of his life.

It isn’t voice that makes this book readable either. The language is what you’d expect from a butler—formal, detached, unfamiliar. Stevens tells us everything without really telling us anything.

At first, that’s frustrating. And then, suddenly, that’s the magic.

You begin to understand much more is happening in Stevens’ retelling of his life than our narrator realizes, so your job as reader is figure out what he has missed (or refused to see). The space between what Stevens understands about his life and what we, the reader, understand about his life fills up with grief.

That’s why you keep reading.

If you read KLARA AND THE SUN or NEVER LET ME GO, you know those narrators, too, are not fully aware of what’s happening. Klara is an AI doll without the human capacity to perceive others’ motivations and therefore connect the dots in her surroundings. Stevens isn’t an AI, but the effect here is similar—he can’t tell himself the truth about his own life (see the quote at the bottom of this page for more on this idea).

If you’ve been here long, you know I’m obsessed with the stories people tell themselves about themselves. We tell stories to give our lives meaning—the problem is, we rarely realize if the story we’re telling ourselves is a true one.

This wasn’t my favorite reading experience. The book didn’t start to work on me until I put it down, and now for days it’s all I can think about. This is Ishiguro: he writes books you’ll think about the rest of your life, whether you want to… or not.

The Russell Moore Show: “Tell Me Where I’m Wrong” with Rainn Wilson

I’d never heard of this podcast until two people recommended this episode to me in the past couple of weeks. It’s called The Russell Moore Show, and for this particular series called “Tell Me Where I’m Wrong,” the editor of Christianity Today asks questions of his guests without arguing in response. For this episode he hosts Rainn Wilson (whom you likely know as Dwight Schrute, and who practices the Baha’i faith).

Actually Rainn Wilson and his character Dwight have astonishingly little in common.

I deeply appreciate the format of the interview, though I’m not sure it’s truly a sincere effort on Moore’s part to have his own mind changed or to engage a new idea. (A better twist would be a moment at the end where the host was committed to articulating a new understanding he had as a result of the conversation.)

Regardless, I wish every interview podcast and public conversation had the “tell me where I’m wrong” format, and I scribbled down many of Wilson’s thoughtful comments. He has a new book called Soul Bloom, which I haven’t read but will now.

I loved this recent post from a Substack called

Science of Creativity

by

Annie Murphy Paul

. She starts by explaining how the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the part of our brain that houses inhibition. According to neuroscientist Arne Dietrich, when we “shut off” our PFC through a physically demanding activity like running, we are also able to shut off the inhibition that might keep us from new levels of creative power. This has a tiny bit to do with my post about the importance of play for creativity and innovation.

Sorry to quote so much, but I find brains really interesting.

Because we can’t directly dial down the inhibiting activity of the prefrontal cortex, we have to find indirect methods of doing so. One way is to use up so much of our brain’s resources on physical movement that the PFC goes temporarily offline; others include engaging in meditation, entering a flow state, and attending to our dreams—the visions that emerge as the frontal parts of the brain take the night off.

One of the appealing things about this theory is its proposal that much of what we need to be creative is already present within us. When we enter a highly creative state, we’re not accessing some alternate reality, some higher plane “out there.” Rather, we’re glimpsing the inner richness of our own minds. We don’t need to add anything; in fact, our task is to subtract—to find ways to temporarily loosen the grip of the judging, inhibiting PFC.

Arne Dietrich’s theory is also a reminder that what he calls the “pinnacle of human evolution”—the sophisticated capacities of the prefrontal cortex, which is often equated with the self, with the “I”—is not all there is to us. The richness goes all the way down.

Accessing the Riches of Your Creative Mind

Everything is Waiting for You | David Whyte

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

You can also listen to Whyte read his poem here.

Here’s a quote from A Little Manual for Knowing, which I pretty much transcribed in its entirety into my notebook. As I mentioned above with Ishiguro’s book, I like to think about how it’s not just one another’s stories we can listen to better. It takes a lot of courage to be willing to listen to our own.

Which is why I write/teach memoir. Often we don’t know the story until we try to tell it to ourselves, and even then we have to tell it to ourselves a hundred times to get it closer to true.

Our listening can be the catalyst that evokes the story waiting to be told.

- Esther Lightcap Meek

I’ve been playing around a bit with the style of these Worth It emails. Last week I tried out a short-form in the style of

Roxane Gay

at

The Audacity.

Hers has about a million links with zero graphics and little to no explanation (but I click on every last one because they are so carefully curated).

This week I reverted to the longer format. Tell me which one you like better? (I can’t see who votes for what!)