Author: sarahwp

FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS by Oliver Burkeman

FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS is the average human life span, and this book deals with how it is we can accept this horrifying fact. 

It’s a book about time management, but not in the usual sense, of how you can fit more into the time you have.  Rather, he says what is important is to accept that you will never do everything, and learn to find that a relief, rather than a regret.  Here he is:

. . . philosophers from Ancient Greece to the present day have taken the brevity of life to be the defining problem of human existence: we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action. 

He thinks that our usual approach to time management, which is to be as productive as possible, is essentially us running away from the great truth that no matter how hard we work, or how much we want to, we will never get round to even a tiny fraction of everything that is possible for us.  It is much better, in his view, to accept this up front:

Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather then letting them get made by default – or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.

He advises us, to ‘pay ourselves first,’ that is, do what you want to do first, and be comfortable that other things will slip (e.g., spend the first hour of the day on whatever is your most important priority). Second, he advises us to limit our ‘to-do’s, so we don’t kid ourselves we can do everything; and third, and most challengingly, to avoid our ‘middling’ priorities.  If you made a list of 1 to 25 of your priorities, he thinks you should focus on numbers 1 to 5, and then carefully avoid numbers 6 to 25, because they are the really dangerous ones – the ‘second-best’ options that could end up eating up your life. 

There is clearly much to think about in this book, but it was this observation that really struck me:

One of the puzzling lessons I have learned is that, more often than not, I do not feel like doing most of the things that need doing.  I’m not just speaking about cleaning the toilet bowl or doing my tax returns.  I’m referring to those things I genuinely desire to accomplish. 

 In his view, a lot of what feels unpleasant – for example, boredom, or procrastination- comes from the fact that we do not like to encounter our finitude.  He thinks that often when we are struggling to concentrate on something we want to do, and turn to our phone, it is because it is deeply unpleasant to face up to the fact that this thing that matters a great deal to you is now real: like, it may not be as good as you hoped, it might fail, etc etc, and that is very painful. 

However:

If you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it. 

And:

You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results

There you have it. This book certainly gave me plenty to think about, and unfortunately I seem to mostly think about it when I wake up at 3am.  Always a great time for considering your life choices. 

Side point, he refers to a fantastic time management book from 1908, called HOW TO LIVE YOUR LIFE ON TWENTY FOUR HOURS A DAY.  I loved this book in my early twenties. If you’d still like to take a go at fitting everything in, then I recommend it. 

SOMETIMES I TRIP ON HOW HAPPY WE COULD BE by Nichole Perkins

Despite the fantastic title, I did not enjoy this. I had high hopes too, because Nichole Perkins podcast THIRST AID KIT is brilliant. It examines what makes dreamboat men dreamboats. The one on Joshua Jackson (always Pacey from DAWSON’S CREEK) is revelatory. It’s rare and liberating to hear women discussing sexiness. Depressingly, their conclusion is often that x person is sexy because ‘they are a good guy’ or ‘would be a good dad.’ I would like to deny it but I kind of see it, and Pacey is a case in point. LADIES WE NEED TO BE COOLER.

This is a series of essays about Perkins’ life, mixed up with her observations on pop culture. Perhaps they just suffer by comparison to the wonderful essays I just finished by Samantha Irby, but I was kind of amazed by how boring Perkins manages to make her own life. Most people’s lives are interesting, if only because I am nosy. This really was dull. The only interesting point I can recall off the top of my head was that she had this guy where their only relationshp was him giving her head, which routinely would go on for over three hours. Perhaps I am an innocent, but . . wow, that’s a lot.

Anyway, all this detail aside (he used to pull up at her crotch, seated in a chair, as at a table), the reason it all comes off as rather bland is I suspect because she is not actually sharing anything truly vulnerable, or anything she has really struggled with. Not that anyone has to share any such thing, of course, but if you are going to write a memoir it’s kind of what you are signing up for.

MAYFLIES by Andrew O’Hagan

This book got rave reviews. Myself, I could not see it. It begins as a story of teenage boys going to a concert. I could see that it was well-written, but I found it hard to follow: it was so very, very deep in British culture, in the 1980s, and in men, that it was almost incomprehensible. I suspect the rave reviews come from older men who remember this world?

The second half of the book is about the same group of men, but thirty years on. So I hear: I didn’t get there.

BABURNAMA by Babur trans. Annette Beveridge

Here are the memoirs a 15th century Mongol warlord.  I can’t believe this actually exists. 

You might think this would be kind of bloody, and you would be right.  It is incredibly violent.  Every other page he is either sacking or being sacked.  Straightforward sample:

Those our men had brought in as prisoners were ordered to be beheaded and a pillar of heads was set up in our camp

A few pages later, after a battle, their Afghan enemies put grass between their teeth, which apparently means ‘I am your cow’ and is a sign of surrender.  In response:

Some heads of Sultans and of others were sent to Kabul with the news . . some also to Badakhshan, Qunduz and Blakh with letters of victory

It is not all beheadings.  He gives us many interesting descriptions of the peoples, animals, and landscapes he sees during this orgy of violence.  He tells us that the elephant is “an immense animal and very sagnacious” but warns us that one can eat “the corn of two strings of camels.”  He also describes his friends. How sweet is this guy:

He used to wear his tunic so very tight that to fasten the stringe he had to draw his belly in and, if he let himself out after tying them, they often tore away. 

Or this guy:

He was extremely decorous; people say he used to hide his feet even in the privacy of his family

Or this one:

He danced wonderfully well, doing one dance quite unique and seeming to be his own invention

Imagine, five centuries later, this is all that persists of you in the world.  And its more than most people get.   

Later Barbur falls in love, with a local market boy:

I could never look straight at him: how then could I make conversation and recital?  In my joy and agitation I could not thank him for coming; how was it possible for me to reproach him with going away?

You almost start to like him, partly because heis also charmingly pre-modern.  The sun, we are told, is ‘spear-high’ and he once swims with his horse ‘as far as an arrow flies.’    Then you are reminded who we are dealing with.  He meets some locals:

Snow fell ankle deep while we were on that ground; it would seem to e rare for snow to fall thereabouts, for people were much surprised. 

How charming! Villagers in their first snowfall.  Then he kills them all too.  

This makes me feel modern life not all bad after all.

DARING GREATLY by Brene Brown

Here is a famous self-help book that I decided to give a whirl. The first three chapters were kind of good, but then it got kind of repetitious. The insight is basically that we often do not reach our full potential because we are too afraid of taking a risk, and espeially the risk of what other people will think.

This is a painfully true observation. The worst part I think is that probably we are often not even aware that we are limiting ourselves. If it was conscious, it would be easier to change. So I guess we have to continually challenge ourselves to remember it. I could tell you a lot more about what’s in the book, but the idea is best expressed in the speech by Theordore Roosevelt after which it is named. If you’ve never read it, here it is, you can thank me later:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

THE PROMISE by Damon Galgut

Here is a spectacularly well-written book that I admired, but did not enjoy. It tells the story of a South African family, across four funerals, where the supposed engine is a promise made to the domestic worker to give her the deeds to the house she lives in on their property.

Let’s start with what was great. Here’s a description of the family home:

Beyond it, a diorama of white South Africa, the tin-roofed suburban bungalow made of reddish face brick, surrounded by a moat of bleached garden. Jungle gym looking lonely on a big brown lawn. Concrete birdbath, a Wendy house and a swing made from half a truck tyre. Where you, perhaps, also grew up. Where all of it began.

BOOM. Amazing, and if that does not speak to my minority I do not know what does.

The cast of this book is large, and it’s amazing how the author seamlessly moves between perspectives. He also has a lot of fun poking holes in his own illusion. One lonely woman sits with a cat on her lap, and then he tells us maybe she doesn’t; maybe he will leave her truly all alone. This is both annoying and fun.

Given this mostly seems to be compliments, I struggle a bit to tell you what I didn’t like about this book. I think, first off, it annoyed me that everyone in the book was either mean or sad. That’s just not true of real life, and it seemed kind of self-indugently despairing. Like everything is hard enough, I don’t need to deal with this ludicrously bleak world also. Omicron is quite enough right now. Also, it’s probably not fair, but this conflict about the domestic worker’s land never really got off the ground for me. It just seemed a sort of cliche attempt to make some kind of commentary (that other people have made far better) about South African inequality. Maybe he felt he couldn’t write a white domestic drama without foregrounding this issue? Maybe he is one of these old white people who mostly relates to race-based issues through the only back people they know, i.e., domestic workers? Okay, now that’s getting really unfair. I’m getting as mean as the people in this book. I blame it on Omicron.

WISE BLOOD by Flannery O’Connor

Here is a book that involves a man in a gorilla suit using an umbrella skeletron as a weapon, a hit-and-run accident that is not an accident, and some self-blinding with lye. Unsurprisingly, it is in fact a book about religion.

It’s a strange, Gothic Southern story, that I did not enjoy but some how admired for its insanity.

I guess what I took from this book is that human beings have a very high level of baseline crazy. Sometimes this comes out in belief in god, sometimes it comes out in belief in ghosts, sometimes in QAnon.

WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE by Samantha Irby

Here is the third book I have read by a vetrenarian’s receptionist in Chicago. I liked the other two but I LOVE THIS ONE. Like, get ready, because when I really like a book I like to quote from it AT LENGTH.

It’s a series of comic essays about what is a fairly difficult life. Where most people dedicate their book to a spouse, her’s is dedicated to her anti-anxiety medicine, Klonopin.

We learn about what goes on in a vet’s office. Sample

Question: Why is there a worm coming out of my dog’s penis?

Answer: That is his penis.

She is “fiercely private IRL. Which is to say that . . I never want anyone to see my actual pores or clothes.” Eventually therefore she meets the woman who will be her wife online . . on Twitter (do people meet people on Twitter?):

We moved the conversation to DM, and I really need you guys to know that it physically pains me to both have participated in something called a DM and to recount what happened in one to you now.

MWAHAHAHA. Why is this hilarious? I don’t know. She has never been with a woman before, and it is not as easy as she had thought:

I expertly slid my female hand under her bra and unhooked it with the flick of a wrist in one smooth, effortless motion. JK, FOLKS. I wrestled with that clasp like an alligator, finally resorting to the use of a chain saw and my teeth.

Eventually she agrees to move to rural Michigan with her. I love this vision of country life:

I could wake up to the sound of crowing roosters or methheads at sunrise, consume a platter of buttered carbohydrates, hitch up my overalls, and grab my watering can from the shed. That would be a dream. I’m sick of news, and buying stuff, and trying so desperately to have fun all the time.

 I think what I most admire though is the honesty of the book, even among the jokes. Here she is on being fat:

I wish that I was an emotionally healthy human without years of accumulated trauma, one who just decided to be a fat caricature of a person perched gleefully atop a mountain of doughnuts, shoving candy bar after candy bar between my teeth while cackling demonically over how much money my eventual care will cost taxpayers or whatever it is comments-section trolls always accuse fat people of doing. And I don’t need sympathy or special attention because, ultimately, who even cares? You hate me, and I hate me too. We are on the same team. I guess what I’m saying is that maybe we could all just mind our own fucking business for once, and that when you can actually see a person’s scars, maybe be a pal and don’t pick at them.

Who knew so much went on inside receptionists. Of course, so much goes on inside everyone. But we rarely get to see it