This email resonated very much with me, especially the combined subjects of the overwhelm of the internet and memory loss; I feel like I've spent so much of my teens & twenties online that I barely remember anything of certain time periods until I touch something real from that time (I started a scrapbook of little flyaway things, receipts, tickets and such, and am astounded by how much memory floods back in that are otherwise lost in the constant brain fog of too much stimulation). One of my favourite books of the pre-internet times is one I read recently, "All Quiet on the Western Front", a WWI book which is just so enormously heartfelt. Here's a favourite passage:
"From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us - mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often forever. Earth! - Earth! - Earth!"
I woke up this morning with a realization that substack has started to get too much for me and that I need to go back to only reading a few newsletters that I love. Yours included! This message came right on time (as they tend to do).
The pre-internet book I’m reading is the good old Artist’s Way. I feel like I’m in the 1970s when I sit by my window doing morning pages or rip photos from magazines for a collage.
I also think it’s no coincidence that film photography has taken off again over the past decade. It feels good to have to wait for something. Good work takes time.
Speaking of, I’ve been wondering how your show went! I have a vision of you standing in the gallery amidst friends and your sold out drawings, smiling because you know it’s real. Ok, I’ll stop fawning now... -Julia
Love TAW, and for what it's worth I think it meets the guidelines of "pre-internet" because it was well before the smartphone and I don't think we had email in 1992. Loved the episode of Elise Loehnen's podcast with Cameron that came out within the last few months.
I'm having similar struggles with Substack. I was off grid for a week and on my return just gathered all the unread ones in a folder. There's over 80 in there now, and yet I don't feel like I even subscribe to all that many, at least ones that post with any regularity. All this after stopping receipt of those ones by people who post EVERY DAY. 🤯
Whoa. That is overwhelming! It's awesome to realize there's a ton of good writing available now, given the self-publishing platform. But the flip side is that our attention can only hold so much... I toggle with turning off email notifications sometimes, which can help. What hard choices we face lolol
Ok I’m deeply embarrassed to flip to the front cover of AW and see it was published in 1992! Dang. It still gives me 1970s vibes but sorry for not following the prompt
Lovely, Anna. Here, the oft-quoted first paragraph of May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude (1973):
"BEGIN HERE. It is raining. I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my 'real' life again at last. That is what is strange – that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and 'the house and I resume old conversations.'"
"What if right now the best way I can honor my ancestors is to read books they would recognize?" Absolutely loved this thought. What if instead of constantly working through it and mulling over things, we found common ground to connect on? Beautiful <3 My favorite pre-Internet book is definitely Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. There's too many passages to list, but this quote is among my top 5.
“See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it. Stop sniveling,’ [the land] said. ‘Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don’t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on – can you hear me? Pass it on!”
I'm in the midst of reading Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934) and it's had me daydreaming about life before the internet...
"I say that my mind is occupied with these thoughts, but it is not true; it is only later, after I have crossed the Seine, after I have put behind me the carnival of lights, that I allow my mind to play with these ideas. For the moment I can think of nothing -- except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world. All along the banks the trees lean heavily over the tarnished mirror; when the wind rises and fills them with a rustling murmur they will shed a few tears and shiver as the water swirls by. I am suffocated by it. No one to whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings....
Oh my god this thread is already so rich with book excerpts. Can’t remember the last time I was excited to READ this much. Thank you for sharing about your mother, this moment, these books.
Love this so much. Feel this so much. Grateful for your willingness to say what's real, what's happening, with such clarity and aliveness. I hope you find more presence in the dog-eared pages.
The pre-internet book I'm currently re-reading is On Becoming A Person by a longtime mentor-from-afar/hero, Carl Rogers, written in 1961. I return to it often. An excerpt that might resonate:
"Watching my clients, I have come to a much better understanding of creative people. El Greco, for example, must have realized as he looked at some of his early work, that 'good painters do not paint like that.' But somehow he trusted his own experiencing of life, the process of himself, sufficiently that he could go on expressing his own unique perceptions. It was as though he could say, 'Good artists do not paint like this, but I paint like this.' Or to move to another field, Ernest Hemingway was surely aware that 'good writers do not write like this.' But fortunately he moved toward being Hemingway, being himself, rather than toward some one else's conception of a good writer. Einstein seems to have been unusually oblivious to the fact that good physicists did not think his kind of thoughts. Rather than drawing back because of his inadequate academic preparation in physics, he simply moved toward being Einstein, toward thinking his own thoughts, toward being as truly and deeply himself as he could. This is not a phenomenon which occurs only in the artist or the genius. Time and again in my clients, I have seen simple people become significant and creative in their own spheres, as they have developed more trust of the processes going on within themselves, and have dared to feel their own feelings, live by values which they discover within, and express themselves in their own unique ways."
“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
^ "She Had Some Horses," a poem by Joy Harjo, published in 1983 in a volume of poetry by the same name. Not exaggerating when I say this book changed my life
“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Yes! This book took me all last summer to read (and then some), i was struggling to get into it and then one day it finally clicked and was such a pleasure the rest of the way out. Each sentence is a gem.
Ok back to say that Two in the Far North was a book I enjoyed recently and shockingly was published in the 1950s. It’s a beautiful portrait of pre-statehood Alaska. I’ve been living in that world a bit too. Nothing about it feels weird, just a lovely adventure in the woods and floodplains and tundra
I read that book years ago and loved it. I was going to grab a passage from John Haines's The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness (1977) because I LOVE it but my copy is stashed elsewhere.
My book recommendation is Stoner, by John Edward Williams. When I read it, I felt it connected me to my grandad. He’d always been witty and sharp, the smartest and most interesting man, but at the time Alzheimer’s had been with him for a while, and I missed the man I knew even when he was in the room with me. The story of the novel itself and its reception by the public is really inspiring.
Thank you for your beautiful words, Anna. I'm particularly struck by your observation that there is something zen-like about dementia, and how within tragedy and pain there can be found a certain kind of beauty.
i’m new here, and combing back through your writings as I find myself living in a new land without any community. In an effort to embody a rugged lonesome cowboy mentality I am looking to devour anything with that sentiment—I can’t wait to read My Ánatonia. you deeply inspire me!!
here is an except i’ve held dear over the years (it really took my breath away) from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston:
“She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the trees from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid. After a while she got up from where she was and went over the little garden field entire. She was seeking confirmation of the voice and vision, and everywhere she found and acknowledged answers. A personal answer for all other creations except herself. She felt an answer seeking her, but where? When? How? Oh to be a pear tree any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!”
I recently went on a solo road trip and brought a book that I thought would make people talk to me when I went out to eat alone every meal for a week (it worked, if you count multiple bartenders asking why exactly I was reading it as conversation). The book: "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck. I brought it to look smart, obviously, and also because I knew it would take a little bit more determination to get through than the romance novels sitting on my nightstand that I blow through in a day or two. Anyway, I like Steinbeck most days, love him on others, and the thing about this book that really got me was when people leave -- be it by choice or via, uh, death -- everyone just has to accept it. There is no shortage of goodwill in this story right alongside with the immense weight of hardship and unthinkable sorrow and so much of it is just sending thoughts into the ether about the people who are no longer there. Also, I liked very much that it caused many elderly diners to tell me about the first time they read it (before the dawn of the internet, too). Thanks for writing, Anna! You inspire me, as always.
Wow I love this so much. Thank you for sharing Emma. It seems so obvious but I've never thought to do this - use book as conversation-starter - especially one that many, many people have associations with. Sounds nice to meet folks this way.
"so much of it is just sending thoughts into the ether about the people who are no longer there" - good sell, too.
Reading Dream of the Red Chamber, one of China’s four great novels, written in the mid 18th century:
‘No, stupid!’ said Xiang-yun. ‘The more you say, the sillier you get. “Just a lot of Yins and Yangs” indeed! In any case, strictly speaking Yin and Yang are not two things but one and the same thing. By the time the Yang has become exhausted, it is Yin; and by the time the Yin has become exhausted, it is Yang. It isn’t a case of one of them coming to an end and then the other one growing out of nothing.’ ‘That’s too deep for me,’ said Kingfisher. ‘What sort of thing is a Yin-yang, I’d like to know? No one’s ever seen one. You just answer that, Miss. What does a Yin-yang look like?’ ‘Yin-yang is a sort of force,’ said Xiang-yun. ‘It’s the force in things that gives them their distinctive forms. For example, the sky is Yang and the earth is Yin; water is Yin and fire is Yang; the sun is Yang and the moon is Yin.’ ‘Ah yes! Now I understand,’ said Kingfisher happily. ‘That’s why astrologers call the sun the “Yang star” and the moon the “Yin star”.’
This email resonated very much with me, especially the combined subjects of the overwhelm of the internet and memory loss; I feel like I've spent so much of my teens & twenties online that I barely remember anything of certain time periods until I touch something real from that time (I started a scrapbook of little flyaway things, receipts, tickets and such, and am astounded by how much memory floods back in that are otherwise lost in the constant brain fog of too much stimulation). One of my favourite books of the pre-internet times is one I read recently, "All Quiet on the Western Front", a WWI book which is just so enormously heartfelt. Here's a favourite passage:
"From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us - mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often forever. Earth! - Earth! - Earth!"
This gave me chills. This is a book I would never think to read and now I really want to. Thank you.
Ahhg that one is a stab in the gut 💔 beautiful
I woke up this morning with a realization that substack has started to get too much for me and that I need to go back to only reading a few newsletters that I love. Yours included! This message came right on time (as they tend to do).
The pre-internet book I’m reading is the good old Artist’s Way. I feel like I’m in the 1970s when I sit by my window doing morning pages or rip photos from magazines for a collage.
I also think it’s no coincidence that film photography has taken off again over the past decade. It feels good to have to wait for something. Good work takes time.
Speaking of, I’ve been wondering how your show went! I have a vision of you standing in the gallery amidst friends and your sold out drawings, smiling because you know it’s real. Ok, I’ll stop fawning now... -Julia
Love TAW, and for what it's worth I think it meets the guidelines of "pre-internet" because it was well before the smartphone and I don't think we had email in 1992. Loved the episode of Elise Loehnen's podcast with Cameron that came out within the last few months.
Oo I’ll have to listen
I'm having similar struggles with Substack. I was off grid for a week and on my return just gathered all the unread ones in a folder. There's over 80 in there now, and yet I don't feel like I even subscribe to all that many, at least ones that post with any regularity. All this after stopping receipt of those ones by people who post EVERY DAY. 🤯
I got 9 Substack emails today. In one day. I guess I only have myself to blame, but what to do?
Whoa. That is overwhelming! It's awesome to realize there's a ton of good writing available now, given the self-publishing platform. But the flip side is that our attention can only hold so much... I toggle with turning off email notifications sometimes, which can help. What hard choices we face lolol
Ok I’m deeply embarrassed to flip to the front cover of AW and see it was published in 1992! Dang. It still gives me 1970s vibes but sorry for not following the prompt
Lovely, Anna. Here, the oft-quoted first paragraph of May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude (1973):
"BEGIN HERE. It is raining. I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my 'real' life again at last. That is what is strange – that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and 'the house and I resume old conversations.'"
I revisit this book time and time again and am comforted by her grumpiness.
I just picked this up last week! Am struck by its beauty but find it terrifying too
Wowwww! Gorgeous. Thanks for sharing.
"What if right now the best way I can honor my ancestors is to read books they would recognize?" Absolutely loved this thought. What if instead of constantly working through it and mulling over things, we found common ground to connect on? Beautiful <3 My favorite pre-Internet book is definitely Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. There's too many passages to list, but this quote is among my top 5.
“See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it. Stop sniveling,’ [the land] said. ‘Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don’t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on – can you hear me? Pass it on!”
Breathtaking! Thanks for sharing 😭
Wow. Thank you. I think I read this in school but I certainly did not appreciate it enough to remember this. Holy cow. Thank you.
I'm in the midst of reading Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934) and it's had me daydreaming about life before the internet...
"I say that my mind is occupied with these thoughts, but it is not true; it is only later, after I have crossed the Seine, after I have put behind me the carnival of lights, that I allow my mind to play with these ideas. For the moment I can think of nothing -- except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world. All along the banks the trees lean heavily over the tarnished mirror; when the wind rises and fills them with a rustling murmur they will shed a few tears and shiver as the water swirls by. I am suffocated by it. No one to whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings....
HOLY CRAP. "a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world" WHAT IS EVEN THAT SENTENCE. Wow. Thank you.
Oh my god this thread is already so rich with book excerpts. Can’t remember the last time I was excited to READ this much. Thank you for sharing about your mother, this moment, these books.
Love this so much. Feel this so much. Grateful for your willingness to say what's real, what's happening, with such clarity and aliveness. I hope you find more presence in the dog-eared pages.
The pre-internet book I'm currently re-reading is On Becoming A Person by a longtime mentor-from-afar/hero, Carl Rogers, written in 1961. I return to it often. An excerpt that might resonate:
"Watching my clients, I have come to a much better understanding of creative people. El Greco, for example, must have realized as he looked at some of his early work, that 'good painters do not paint like that.' But somehow he trusted his own experiencing of life, the process of himself, sufficiently that he could go on expressing his own unique perceptions. It was as though he could say, 'Good artists do not paint like this, but I paint like this.' Or to move to another field, Ernest Hemingway was surely aware that 'good writers do not write like this.' But fortunately he moved toward being Hemingway, being himself, rather than toward some one else's conception of a good writer. Einstein seems to have been unusually oblivious to the fact that good physicists did not think his kind of thoughts. Rather than drawing back because of his inadequate academic preparation in physics, he simply moved toward being Einstein, toward thinking his own thoughts, toward being as truly and deeply himself as he could. This is not a phenomenon which occurs only in the artist or the genius. Time and again in my clients, I have seen simple people become significant and creative in their own spheres, as they have developed more trust of the processes going on within themselves, and have dared to feel their own feelings, live by values which they discover within, and express themselves in their own unique ways."
Thank you for sharing this quote! A beautiful reminder that “good” is a false construct that keeps us small!
Thank you for this Lisa. I didn't know about this book until your comment, and so wow - yes.
AMAZING read!!! Thanks Anna 💖
I love this passage from The Catcher in the Rye:
“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
Such nice memories of the first time I read this book and how obsessed I was with it.
http://www.hanksville.org/storytellers/joy/poems/Horses.html
^ "She Had Some Horses," a poem by Joy Harjo, published in 1983 in a volume of poetry by the same name. Not exaggerating when I say this book changed my life
Can't wait, I love listening to Joy talk.
“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Yes! This book took me all last summer to read (and then some), i was struggling to get into it and then one day it finally clicked and was such a pleasure the rest of the way out. Each sentence is a gem.
Nice to see your name, and this quote. :)
Ok back to say that Two in the Far North was a book I enjoyed recently and shockingly was published in the 1950s. It’s a beautiful portrait of pre-statehood Alaska. I’ve been living in that world a bit too. Nothing about it feels weird, just a lovely adventure in the woods and floodplains and tundra
I read that book years ago and loved it. I was going to grab a passage from John Haines's The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness (1977) because I LOVE it but my copy is stashed elsewhere.
Oo I’ll have to check that out!
My book recommendation is Stoner, by John Edward Williams. When I read it, I felt it connected me to my grandad. He’d always been witty and sharp, the smartest and most interesting man, but at the time Alzheimer’s had been with him for a while, and I missed the man I knew even when he was in the room with me. The story of the novel itself and its reception by the public is really inspiring.
Thank you for this, looking into it now :)
Thank you for your beautiful words, Anna. I'm particularly struck by your observation that there is something zen-like about dementia, and how within tragedy and pain there can be found a certain kind of beauty.
Thanks for writing here and reading. It is felt.
i’m new here, and combing back through your writings as I find myself living in a new land without any community. In an effort to embody a rugged lonesome cowboy mentality I am looking to devour anything with that sentiment—I can’t wait to read My Ánatonia. you deeply inspire me!!
here is an except i’ve held dear over the years (it really took my breath away) from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston:
“She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the trees from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid. After a while she got up from where she was and went over the little garden field entire. She was seeking confirmation of the voice and vision, and everywhere she found and acknowledged answers. A personal answer for all other creations except herself. She felt an answer seeking her, but where? When? How? Oh to be a pear tree any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!”
thank you for being here, and for sharing this. This thread was one of my favorites, so many comments full of books to be devoured, like yours. :)
I recently went on a solo road trip and brought a book that I thought would make people talk to me when I went out to eat alone every meal for a week (it worked, if you count multiple bartenders asking why exactly I was reading it as conversation). The book: "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck. I brought it to look smart, obviously, and also because I knew it would take a little bit more determination to get through than the romance novels sitting on my nightstand that I blow through in a day or two. Anyway, I like Steinbeck most days, love him on others, and the thing about this book that really got me was when people leave -- be it by choice or via, uh, death -- everyone just has to accept it. There is no shortage of goodwill in this story right alongside with the immense weight of hardship and unthinkable sorrow and so much of it is just sending thoughts into the ether about the people who are no longer there. Also, I liked very much that it caused many elderly diners to tell me about the first time they read it (before the dawn of the internet, too). Thanks for writing, Anna! You inspire me, as always.
Wow I love this so much. Thank you for sharing Emma. It seems so obvious but I've never thought to do this - use book as conversation-starter - especially one that many, many people have associations with. Sounds nice to meet folks this way.
"so much of it is just sending thoughts into the ether about the people who are no longer there" - good sell, too.
Reading Dream of the Red Chamber, one of China’s four great novels, written in the mid 18th century:
‘No, stupid!’ said Xiang-yun. ‘The more you say, the sillier you get. “Just a lot of Yins and Yangs” indeed! In any case, strictly speaking Yin and Yang are not two things but one and the same thing. By the time the Yang has become exhausted, it is Yin; and by the time the Yin has become exhausted, it is Yang. It isn’t a case of one of them coming to an end and then the other one growing out of nothing.’ ‘That’s too deep for me,’ said Kingfisher. ‘What sort of thing is a Yin-yang, I’d like to know? No one’s ever seen one. You just answer that, Miss. What does a Yin-yang look like?’ ‘Yin-yang is a sort of force,’ said Xiang-yun. ‘It’s the force in things that gives them their distinctive forms. For example, the sky is Yang and the earth is Yin; water is Yin and fire is Yang; the sun is Yang and the moon is Yin.’ ‘Ah yes! Now I understand,’ said Kingfisher happily. ‘That’s why astrologers call the sun the “Yang star” and the moon the “Yin star”.’
Wow far out. Thanks for sharing :)