But in me haste to do the job, I was too blind to see
That a barrel full of building bricks was heavier than me

— Dubliners, The Sick Note

This post is part of a series about building a house that looks and feels traditional in New Hampshire. However, this post can be read by itself.

Designing a New Old Home series, Table of Contents

1. Beginnings — Why an “old” home, and how we came to buy land

2. Curiosity — Advice on starting

3. Research, Sketch, Collect — Essential research for home design

4. Defining Constraints — What can we do without

5. The Elements — Heating and cooling and airflow

6. Materials and Hardware — Making choices

7. Light — Designing for Light

8. Mistakes ← You are here

9. Kitchen ← next

In 2018 we built a 30x38 foot house among some overrun haying fields. Our chief design considerations were to make something that had all the qualities we loved about old houses, while remaining within a fairly limited budget. Here’s what it looks like today:

The black barn in the back is The Goose Palace

This post is a catalog of mistakes and things we wish we did differently.

Topics covered:

Mistakes of Design and Budget

Easy to Fix if We Thought of It Sooner

Finish and Lighting

Kitchen Mistakes

Logistics Mistakes

What worked well

Mistakes of Design and Budget

If I could go back in time I would have increased our budget by just a few thousand dollars to improve a few more things around the edges. If you are trying to make a truly special place to dwell for decades, the return of spending a little more is worth it.

We couldn’t realistically increase it by much, however, so many of our big decisions really were compromises. Before I get into our mistakes, it is worth mentioning a few things that were not mistakes, but would be mistakes if you were trying to copy a house design like ours, and your budget was larger.

• We could not consider many features that would make our house more interesting. There is no complex geometry and little detail. Shutters, a more refined entryway, a back porch, 3rd story dormers, and more interior carpentry (custom millwork, built-ins, etc) would all have been lovely additions.

• Distance is a luxury in house design: Quiet places to retreat and seclude yourself, even when a loud party is going on, are exceptionally nice and I would recommend building them into your design if you have the ability. We did not. We had just enough budget to build a 30x38 box. So the design lacks length and distance, and the particular nature of winding-ness that we find very appealing in some grand old houses.

• We spent a lot on windows, and love natural light, but I don’t think an intense sunny-ness everywhere is ideal. Because our house geometry is so simple, there are no secluded nooks or shadowy spaces. There are not a lot of places indoors with softer light, or variations in light.

These are (I hope) temporary mistakes. We built our house with the intention of adding on to it later, and we can improve these over time. But if at the start our budget had an extra zero, we might have built something like this or this, rather than our austere design.

Then there are sort-of budget, sort-of design flaws. For example, with no closets and a tiny mudroom and no garage, we predicted that storing bicycles would be annoying and we’d just had to accept this. But we were slightly more surprised to find that that there was no great place to store a vacuum or a baby stroller either! We simply didn’t think of those objects. So our stroller mostly sits in our front hall, and the vacuum floats around from room to room. This is not that bad, but they’re big objects that simply skipped our mind when designing the house. Of course, if we had a bigger mudroom or more space for built-in storage (or a lighter stroller that folded better), it wouldn’t be a problem at all, so these are unlikely to be an issue in other people’s designs.

Easy to Fix if We Thought of It Sooner

It’s important to remember that every decision you do not make is a decision that someone else in the process may “default” for you, and this happens at your peril, or at least your expense.

Read more

This is the first post in a new section called Rabbit Hill, where we’ll share some notes about babies, parenthood, and education.

We often get asked for baby item suggestions. Now that we have three babes I think we have a useful retrospect on what’s been worthwhile. Let’s start with the longest list, things it turns out you don’t need.

Things we never bought, or found out we didn’t need:

• Changing table - I always just laid baby down on a cloth nappy or a towel on the floor for a change.

• Moses basket - Very cute but you will use it only once or twice, to take a picture in. Mostly a baby is in your arms, and if you need to lay her down it will likely be more convenient to lay heron a blanket on the floor, couch, or bed.

• Newborn bath - Newborns don’t need baths, get them clean with a warm washcloth if there’s been a blowout, or use a gentle oil like MCT to clean behind the ears, in the neck, etc).

• Baby monitor - Most people would consider this an essential, but it simply wasn’t necessary with the way our house is laid out, and we never got one.

• White noise machine - If you have an air purifier or fan you could just turn it on if you want to try background noise.

• Diaper pail - Put nappies in your trash bin. You can use plastic grocery bags to seal them after baby begins solids, before that they are benign.

• Diaper bag - When you go out, all you really need is a couple nappies, a pack of wipes, a plastic grocery bag (to wrap up the nappy if need be), and a cloth nappy to lay baby down on -- just keep these things in a tote bag in the car.

• Baby “products” like shampoo, body wash, lotion etc - Just unnecessary! Babies don’t need anything on their delicate skin. Use MCT oil as needed. (I keep mentioning MCT because it’s pure, suitable for sensitive skin, and slightly antifungal.)

• Special baby towels/wash cloths

• Nursing pillow - Use a regular pillow

• Baby nail clippers - Regular small clippers work perfectly well

• Literally any infant toys/gyms/play mats/activity center. Around 12-18 months you can get a pikler triangle and start thinking about toys. Babies are happy to improvise.

• Baby books - seriously, you can read your baby Boethius if you want. They just want to listen to your voice at this stage. For reading, once your babe is really ready to attend, we’ll make a post on our favorite children’s books soon.

• “Learning tower” - we just use a chair. If you have a sturdy Windsor chair you can turn it around.

• Any baby specific utensils/plates/bowls - If you have a good chair like the Tripp Trapp, most food can go on the tray. They are good at using normal metal utensils surprisingly quickly.

• Sippy cup - I found it is no trouble to give the baby little sips of water from a regular drinking glass once they start solids, and then they easily get the hang of holding a glass before long.

Really essential items

• Baby carrier - this is a tough one because everyone has a different style they prefer, and I tried many before I found the one that worked comfortably for me - the Sakura Bloom Scout. Totally worth the price tag, I used it every day with my second two until they were too big for it.

• Crib - we have the IKEA Sniglar and it has been great. (Sleep recommendations, and how we used the crib along with co sleeping in another post!)

• Sleep suit - Indispensable, especially in winter. Castleware & Woolino are great brands.

• Pack of large cloth pre-fold nappies - Like the ones from Green Mountain Diaper. These are useful as mini changing blankets, and they’re thick and highly absorbent so great as a nursing cloth and burp cloth in the early days.

• Set of muslins/burp cloths for much the same reason. Sometimes you want a thick cloth like the cloth nappies I just mentioned, sometimes you want a thin drapey one. You’ll see.

• Baskets or designated drawer for “stations” with wipes, nappies, and cloths - one upstairs, one down.

• Basket for clothes - (you don’t need a dresser for baby, one side of a drawer or a basket will do). I like woven baskets because they can easily be moved and don’t look out of place in any room.

• Nose Frida with the saline spray - Buy this before the baby arrives, you do not want to be without it when baby has his first stuffy nose. The saline spray is essential to the suction working!

• MCT oil - For cleaning behind ears, neck folds etc. Natural and mildly anti-fungal. One of the best things to have around. We decant into little bottles like these.

• Plastic scrapers - Like a pack of 3 from the hardware store. Get these when you introduce solids to make cleaning easier.

• Silicon bib - any brand.

Very nice to have but non essential

• Baby Bjorn bouncer - eventually you’re going to need somewhere to put your baby down. A blanket is fine at first, but it’s nice for baby to be supported where they can see you, and mine enjoyed the gentle self propelled bouncing.

• Stroller - For the first few months the carrier feels much more natural and convenient, but if you do want to use a stroller with a newborn, consider one your car seat can attach to. In my opinion the stroller brands with the most thoughtful and ergonomic design are Nuna and Bugaboo.

• Stokke Tripp Trapp - just a really nicely designed high chair that transitions from the baby stage through toddlerhood. The removable tray is easy to clean, and removing the tray lets you push it right up against a table. When they’re a little older, the harness is removable so they can sit at the table properly.

Mainly I want you to see that the long lists the Internet will feed you of things you need are really just things brands want you to buy, and what you really need is determined by your own situation. This is what my own experience determined, and hopefully it can help you sort out your own needs.

Love,

Simi

Something I believe very strongly, mostly from observing changes in myself, is that, once you’ve shoved your own hands deep in the entrails of a building, you’ve permanently altered your entire relationship with the world.

— Kendric Tonn

Consider knowledge and contemplation to be senses, like sight or touch. They register feelings, they play upon us, they are sensual, they contribute to pleasure.

Like the other senses, it must be possible to develop them.

i.

There is a Chinese expression, to have ink in the stomach1. I love the viscerality of the metaphor. The more copiously you read, the more each text will reveal hidden details in the other texts, the more you understand the whole — of a subject, an era, a poetry, the art of storytelling or of life. There is an accumulation of depth. When this accumulation is easy to describe we call it knowledge. When it’s more difficult we might say it builds intuition, which is like the accumulated muscle-memory of memory.2 There are some things you can only grasp at long distances, with a belly full of ink.

This goes beyond reading. Kendric is right, contending with the innards of a building will change you. Trying to fix something large and physical, like a house or an engine, expands your understanding of the world. You start to notice materials in every inch of your environment, you wonder how things are made, you study more, and you start to see through walls.

Over time you grasp the difficulty in making (or repairing) these things, and it gives a different light to the world. It becomes easier to respect everything. The world is an accumulation of human sweat. The knowledge becomes one of your senses, the world becomes more gratifying, you discover new pleasures. It becomes hard to walk by a doorway such as this. It’s no longer just a doorway.

ii.

There is sometimes a temporary disenchantment that follows discovery. We meet someone new or find some new place and become infatuated. But after some time we realize that the city we longed to live in is in fact just a city, or some unattainable girl or boy - so hard to get their attention before - is not so otherworldly after all.

This delusion is often our fault. People or places exist in our minds first as a projection of our desires, and only later as the real thing. First we shed the projection, and here many people stop. But if you persist you might find that there is no such thing as “just a city”, there is an endless collection of secrets to be discovered, and the same with people. It is our fault if we crave novelty, forget detail, and then find only surface, unstudied pleasures.

iii.

Many people live as if they are having one night stands with their environment. Novelties can become awfully similar.

iiii.

After a decade of taking photos more and less, I mostly regret taking too few. I adore the accumulation of photographic memory that they provide me, they become an indispensable aid for remembering, a way to access specific months or years. They are a kind of ink in my stomach.

Of course this happens without photographs, too. Pleasures accumulate anywhere you can build attention to detail. If you love someone long enough, if you cultivate attention in each other for years, you will reap the harvest of sweet memories in common.

Some events can only be understood in the moment, but others can only really be understood long afterwards. There is a great pleasure to understanding these things in retrospect, a kind of long distance pleasure.

~ ~ ~

This post is a continuation of Viscerality

The top painting The Ponte Salario, 1775, by Hubert Robert

Kendric Tonn is an oil painter from Ohio

“harvest of sweet memories in common” — from Middlemarch

INTERVIEWER: There’s a certain esthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using good silver every day.

DIDION: Well, every day is all there is.

~ ~ ~

Pleasure comes first from the senses. The naive pleasure seeker, the pleasure dilettante, will use his senses to search out the obvious delights. Naturally he finds several. Beyond these fundamentals, however, the landscape of pleasure is more mysterious. An essential belief of mine is that one should treat pleasure as something of a skill — it can be learned, cultivated, appreciated. We can study our senses and more for the sake of pleasure. A few notes towards that end.

i

First: The modern world is in fact very pleasant. We have a thousand labor-saving devices. We are thoroughly accustomed to instant heat, cold, transportation, water, light. The elements are at our command in dials and switches. How ridiculous that must sound to most of history! How hard to believe. It matters very much that we remember and keep gratitude for these miracles.

But these miracles lead us to make unintentional tradeoffs. If we orient homes and lives solely around conveniences, we risk living more and more abstractly. It is today quite affordable to furnish an entire home instantly, but in doing so you are likely to create a realm that looks and feels quite sanitized. This is somewhat easy to see with IKEA ads:

Of course it’s not just about cost, the higher-end often welcomes even more sterility:

There has been a great atmospheric neutering. It extends beyond design of course. Today one can live in a permanently climate-controlled way if one chooses. One can travel from heated place to heated place in a pre-heated car that functions as a personal space-bubble. One could keep flip-flops on all winter, and live through summers with only the slightest notice of the heat. Modern convenience means that one can live in houses for years without so much as opening a window, and many choose to live this way.

Air conditioning is a miracle, but if we use it all summer long then we lose our visceral sense of being a part of our surroundings. When it’s hot outside you are hot. There is a pleasure in needing to dress down, in craving ice water, in having the windows open at night to hear the crickets. There is even sometimes a pleasure in the languor of an inescapable heat. More broadly there is a pleasure in comfort but also a pleasure in discomfort. They give a different shape to our spirit.

Cheap dinnerware is abundant, effectively free, as are a number of ugly things that fill up our kitchens, living rooms, bathrooms, bedrooms. It is more work to remove what is ugly than it is to let it in. It may not cost more money but it is at least more effort to seek out everyday objects that we might adore instead. How do we contend with this tradeoff? I think for nearly every aspect of life we have to ask ourselves: Do we want to see the world as heavy and intimate, or do we want to see it as convenient?

That does not mean we should give up air conditioning. We should adore its miracle of comfort. But we should be careful of the overreach. The danger of all this convenience is that one begins to live inside a very narrow band of the visceral world. I believe our surroundings exert themselves on us, gently but continuously. Everything we see and touch day to day conspires to shape our moods. When places are too antiseptic, we grow unaccustomed to noticing visceral details. We start to use less of our senses. Over time, our surface for pleasure thins.

This is easier to diagnose than it is to solve at scale. All sterile environments are alike, but all visceral ones are alive in their own way. Maybe that’s why its easier to advertise nearly full sterility, the audience will always appear wider. You have to choose what you value about the visceral world, no one else can do it for you. Perhaps I can help with some anecdotes.

ii

Joan Didion used fine silver every day because she was open to delights beyond convenience. She saw the pleasure of detail. It carried something visceral to her senses, something not trivial, that she noticed enough to cherish. To gratify our own senses we must cultivate this attention to detail. Eating a boiled egg is 6 grams of protein and 5 grams of fat. Eating a boiled egg from a nice egg cup, with a little spoon, on a picnic blanket outside is a lusty experience.

iii

One problem in living too abstractly, or too conveniently, is that you begin to think things like fine silver might only exist for special occasions. Or that luxury is a thing to be found at luxury destinations, in luxury hotels, or with specific luxury brands, and implicitly you might no longer search for ways to make your every-day life more exquisite.

I think there is a lot of luxury that we forget we can have. Probably you have encountered a version of this: I know of quite affluent people who drink mediocre coffee — not because they like it! When pressed it is because they are too busy to seek out what’s better. They cannot be bothered, somehow, to search for luxury. They do not wish to study. May this kind of idleness never find you.

People think luxury is event based or louis-vuitton or mercedes based when it is really fork based. There is more to the pleasures of the earth than what can be marketed to you. Every day is all there is based. Not only is the coffee a special miracle but the cup you drink out of can be special, what’s more it should be. It is part of the ritual of every day and you should properly respect that. It carries something to your senses, it should have your adoration. If it is not special throw it away. Beg your friend or your mother for a good cup. Buy one for your lover.

I hope you understand this goes well beyond coffee or silverware. There must be a fine silver of your own life, many of them. I cannot know what they are. But you can ask: The things you touch every single day, do they mean anything to you?

iiii

A beautiful rug that is falling apart is worth more than a pristine new rug of the now-common sterility. The new rug is not a product of beauty but of manufacturing ease. The wool rug, worn and fading, has a visceral and living beauty. People will say the old wool rug has “character”. What they mean is that it directly touches the senses. It has the thumb-print of life upon it.

v

There is a noticing to everything in your environment. Every person you meet — what do you love about the rasp of their voice? How are they dressed? What makes them beautiful? Can you really pay attention to them? The pleasure of detail is in your own concentration. The world has many versions of goosebumps.

vi

The abundance of the grocery store is a pleasure. But it is another pleasure entirely to eat no cherries until they are in season and then gorge yourself on cherries. To live near an orchard or to grow your own is more visceral still. How different is the experience of plums or peaches when you must grow them, defend them from pests and deer, test their firmness as they turn from stiff to yielding. Once in season you bring in more and more as the abundance overruns you, maybe you give some away, maybe some rot on the windowsill. The cycle of deprivation and then overabundance of harvest is inconvenient, but it is much more voluptuous. Some pleasures cannot be substituted.

vii

There are some who practice (and preach) detachment. I wish for the opposite. Where I, where I think anyone might, find the most satisfaction is in deepening attachments.

I think people would be better off if they learned to use the whole earth, not just a narrow band. All five senses. The world is a very sensual place, you know. People joke by saying “touch grass” but its much more than that. The inertia of life can lead us into an unconscious confinement, it takes some attention to get out of it.

I wish for a future that is more mossy and mysterious than anything we’ve dreamed up lately. I hope its nature displays inexhaustible fruitfulness and enchantments. Instead of striving towards some clean minimalism, we should strive to have gardens worth cultivating. You don’t have to literally keep a garden. But you have to find where you are going to lick the honey from the knife.

~ ~ ~

The first painting is Following in the Example of the Gods, by Henryk Siemiradzki, 1899

The middle painting is The Siesta, by Frederick Arthur Bridgman, 1878

The third painting is Still-Life with Crayfish, Oysters, and Fruit, by an unknown follower of Cornelis de Heem, late 1600’s or early 1700’s. Political upheaval in China circa 1640 effectively stopped imports, so the porcelain bowl would have been considered extremely valuable.

The first time I went out to Silicon Valley, or California for that matter, or anywhere at all west of New York state, was after college. A company cold called me for an interview. If you searched the internet at the time, it happened to look like I knew the most about HTML canvas, and maybe it was true.1

The company founder was surprised I had never seen the America beyond New England, so in addition to a flight and a hotel, he offered me a rental car for several days. They wanted me to fall in love I think, with something out there, without knowing exactly what that might be. It wasn’t a bad strategy.

The driving itself had a visceral effect. Abdominal, actually. Some turns in California are impossible in New Hampshire. They are too tight and too fast, as you take them you can feel your gut react, how if only there was ice, this would be it. If you are from New Hampshire, mentally the car slides right off the road. Of course there was no ice on the roads there, even though it was February back home.

I drove into San Francisco and turned around — I was too timid to park. I decided I would go in by train later. And then I drove down this lane, a kind of concrete corridor for I don’t know how long, an hour or hours. I’d never seen anything like it. It just kept going. This in particular has always stuck with me. In New Hampshire if you drive for a couple hours in most directions you can be in many different states, you pass lots and lots of forest, towns, etc. Here it was solid concrete. Of course its not unique, but to me at the time it was. Probably I had accidentally found the single worst direction one can point a car on the west coast.

I did find better roads, ones with the tight little turns and thrilling vistas. But that corridor gave me a mistaken impression of the nature of the place. Or at least, it let me see the one thing to disenchant a traveler.

It wasn’t until years later, with Simi, when we would rent a car again and drive (this time) to northern California, then into mountains south of San Francisco. That was the only time I really got to see the nature of California. It has a mystery and a distance very different from what you find in New England. Outside of the cities there is a multiplicity of skies, hills, flowers. There are these certain convulsions of lushness and absolutely sun-blasted landscapes that seem to take turns holding the upper hand. They would somehow creep into each other. There is nothing like that where I am from.

We rented a car because we wanted to see the misty Northern California, which felt pleasant to our senses of remoteness. But I also wanted to see Salinas valley, and Cannery Row, to see what Steinbeck was talking about. His writing made an impression on me, and I wanted to pick up the crumbs of what he saw, at least.

We toured, and shared in giddiness and in silence. The nature contained all the mystery and terror of the accumulated millennia of the world, and it was sweet to the touch. The beauty of the land made the concrete portions all the more strange and unsettling.

~ ~ ~

The interview went well. They took me out to dinner on a Saturday night (they drove) with about a dozen employees. I still have no idea if this is common or not, but it felt unusual. On the drive back to my hotel, they handed me an envelope with their offer.

It was much more than I was making, and I gave no decision for several days. Safely back home, I found I couldn’t accept it. I was too intimidated by the whole idea, and too unwilling to leave New Hampshire. Though it is a mysterious feeling even now to ponder just how different life would have been.

Had I gone out west I would have been, I think, much more pushed around by every whim of a zeitgeist. I think I would think very differently today. Probably I would be much richer, and have no family. Maybe I would come to not mind the concrete. Maybe none of that is true. I of course would not have met Simi.

It is difficult to know where you end and your environment begins. You are inseparable from it. You have to eat. And when you suffer a cut or even a pin prick you realize that your blood happily wants to merge with the rest of the world. There’s a thin layer that holds it back.

This is true mentally, too, isn’t it?

~ ~ ~

Here it’s quite humid outside. The crickets give a nice sound to the evening. The remaining fireflies search for one another. I am trying to finish another draft, and can’t, so I write this one. Good night,

s s

While looking over some garden inspiration at the end of March, it came to me that this might be a good year to enclose the orchard. I adore all kinds of hedges and garden walls: open space is very good, but rooms, even nooks, outdoor places with structure and privacy, these are even better.

Stone or brick walls are out of the question, but I wondered if it might be possible to make a hornbeam hedge that partly encloses the orchard, in an L-shape, with the stream and the forest on the other boundaries. Hedges were one of our first hopeful ideas when we bought the land, but (like a lot of hopeful outdoor plans) they were soon dropped as we realized the scope of outdoor work that needed to come first.

American and European (carpinus betulus) hornbeam are both a very dense wood with a nice habit, though European is preferred for hedges. They are unfussy about soil acidity, don’t mind moisture, and can tolerate shade fairly well, all three of which are necessary for this particular spot. Hornbeam grows slowly, which is somewhat a downside, but it also means the hedge maintenance won’t overwhelm me. The time will pass anyways.

As I began researching where to buy, I was dismayed to find that many wholesalers of hornbeam were sold out of some larger hedging specimens for the year. The reason for this is that many wholesalers ship their final shipment the first week of April (this is around when many retail nurseries in New Hampshire might open for the year). Other ones had huge specimens (6-7 feet tall) for $280 each, but this would mean I could only buy a few, and trucking costs would further infringe on the budget.

But I did find one nursery in Oregon that had listed 3/8” caliper (trunk measurement) hornbeam for just $3.20 each. One minor problem is that their regular season was over, they would make a shipment in early April, but without warranty. Another problem is that the minimum order is $750, which meant I would need to buy at least 240 tree saplings. This is much more than I needed or thought I could reasonably plant. And lastly they were likely to be quite small, maybe just a foot high, so it would take 5-10 years before it looks like a real hedge.

Still, if I didn’t order 240 saplings, I would forfeit my chance to get something in the ground this year. Because of the slow growth, I want as many years in the ground as possible, and the uncertain possibility of buying larger specimens next year also comes with a correspondingly larger cost. So why not try? I ordered the 240, and called a friend with a tractor to ask for some help with land prep.

My plan was simple: the tractor can rough up the L-shape, approximately 240 feet, by turning over the grass (picking it up and putting it back down). I would order 7 yards of compost, and he would lay this on top of the line. At the same time he could use a little dirt from the far field to raise a low spot by a few inches. Finally I would top-dress the planting area with 6 yards of mulch.

My plan was also untested. I assumed that by breaking the sod layer and putting down a lot of compost, it would be easy enough to stick in 240 saplings without a lot of shovel or pickaxe work for each one. I am also (present day) assuming the compost and mulch will keep them protected, to need only a little watering, and that planting directly into this compost wouldn’t burn the roots. I’ve bought compost from this local place before so I am reasonably sure it would be aged enough.

I had to do a lot of raking and some shoveling to clean up the rough tractor work, which took about five hours of labor. Then the day the hornbeam arrived, I unboxed them and soaked them in bins — they were in transit for three days and just coming out of dormancy, so this is the expected thing to do for bare root plants. After a minimum 30 minutes in the tub, I got to work.

They are spaced 2 feet apart, with a second staggered row stacked behind. This seemed like the most reasonable way to use the large number I had to work with. So effectively there is one hornbeam per foot. I probably should have spaced the two rows wider apart, but because I was planting within where the tractor did most of the work, they might be tighter than the ideal.

The work took about six or seven hours, planting and mulching, with some mulching left for day two. Some areas of the line were quick, but others required more work to ensure a prepared seedling site. But it was a reasonable amount for one person to plant in one day on prepped land. As always, now that I’ve done it, I would be faster the next time.1

Completed, it looks like very little except up close:

The specimens are good and I’m very happy with the wholesaler, Heritage Seedlings. Only a single one had damage.

Cost breakdown

240 Hornbeam — $768

UPS 3-day shipping — $260

7 yards of compost — $334

6 yards of mulch (it turned out I needed less mulch) — $285

Hiring friend with tractor — Approximately $500, I had him do some other work (moving brush and small pine trees) while here, so its hard to be precise with this cost.

So the hedge cost approximately $2,147. If I bought the 6-to-7 foot hornbeams, I would have only been able to buy ~8 plants for the same price.

~ ~ ~

I ended up using 224 saplings for the length of the hedge, ending by the forest in a pentagon shape, and giving some room for an opening in each line. With the remaining saplings I planted a circle on the other side of the field.

It might (eventually) make an interesting shape for children to hide inside of, or else a kind of sculpture for a rose or two to ramble through. But more likely if there are any problem seedlings on my hedge, I will be taking from here to replenish the line.

The final four saplings I planted farther away from the house, in a spot that I might forget about. Maybe I’ll rediscover them midsummer, or years later, when they start to grow and give more color.

~ ~ ~

see also: The Goose Palace, Everything I know about gardening, Why make something beautiful?

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing:
but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.

— Proverbs 25:2

There are a hundred things you could be doing differently that will change the future. There is always a button you can press to advance the plot. Some of these things are mysterious and will require a great search. Others simply require work.

One of the best things you can do is face this sweat willingly, joyously. Nature places before us innumerable pleasures, big and small. They are thinly veiled. Aren’t you going to seek them out?

Many pleasures of life come from contemplation that improves with age. Every smaller pleasure is compounded by wisdom. Pleasures begin with the senses, but they dwell the longest in contemplation.

Optimism and faith and imagination tend to arrive together. The pessimist is an unobservant man, mistaking lack of belief for confidence.

You cannot forecast life or forecast happiness with any certainty. Much of life’s good you stumble upon in one way or another. But I think this misleads people into thinking they somehow have no part in it. One must believe that another world is possible, then go look for it.

Introspection, desire, passion, these need to be coupled with effort. Even if it is just a tiny bit of effort every day. Passions and desires are only real if they lead to action.

It’s spring here in New Hampshire. Out the window, a thousand fat robins search through the field.

s s

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

— Dr. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 1750

It has been six years since our house was complete-enough to move in, though we are still incrementally finishing. Last year was the first summer I really turned my attention to gardening.

Improving an existing garden allows one to build upon coherence, to work within a plan, and to work slowly. Starting a garden from nothing — cutting every bed, making stone walls and level sections, selecting every plant — is a little more intimidating. If you don’t want to wait a decade, big commitments are necessary. Despite the benefits to starting early, for the first years I gave the gardens little attention beyond some sporadic experiments. I had more than enough outdoor work to do just taming the nearby land back into fields and putting together a small orchard.

But I am now ready for bigger commitments. The more I expand the gardens outward from the house, the stranger it seems not to try something ambitious. Why not lay out something so big that the design will take years, something unusually lush, mass plantings of roses and small flowers and fruit, and try to make something really beautiful?

So I am going to create a rose garden, a little stately near the house, a little sprawling as it enters the fields. I want to make it visible enough that it can become a public adornment of my town. It should start out front, close to the road.

So far (in mostly 2024) I have planted 97 rose bushes. Not 97 different kinds, I am interested in a good deal of massing, so I often plant in sets of at least 3 to give a larger appearance. They are:

And for this coming spring I have ordered 39 more, so far:

This will take some time. These and the roses that follow will take some years to reach a mature size. I really don’t know what is manageable by one person. It is an eternal conceit of civilization to build beyond one’s grasp, to find out what is possible to maintain only by doing too much. So at least I am in good company.

I expect this to take a good deal of time in building and upkeep. Big ornamental gardens are usually considered as the work of institutions, or else retired people. But I don’t want to wait until I’m elderly to contemplate and enjoy something so sweet, and a big part of the appeal is the creation of something my children will enjoy while they are still children.

I want to make a world that is full of the work of magic for them, full of beautiful places to play and find each-other. This extends beyond roses of course, to the orchard, the meadows and streams, the barns I build, and all the hidden places those things create together.

And of course I want to make a home that is full of good work and full of good work for them to do. I believe that making beautiful things matters, that the effort is worth it, and I want them to see this with their own eyes and hands.

~ ~ ~

There is an initial outlay — in addition to roses I have bought and planted over three thousand bulbs, mostly species tulips and daffodils, to say nothing of the other garden companions. And much more will be spread out over the coming years as budget and time sensibly permit. But I think that the beauty of most places is not actually proportional to the expense, rather its in the care and the selection. After all many places of magnificent budgets nonetheless have quite barren landscaping (in fact, when I visited the mansions of Newport, I was surprised how many had almost no flowers. Instead many had entirely shrub-based gardening, which I now see as characteristic of so many American homes). And in the nearby institutional rose gardens I do see — like Fuller Gardens on the New Hampshire coast, or the Boston rose garden near the fens — I confess that for all their advantages of labor and budget and machinery, they don’t strike me. They look more like chambers of specimens, rather than places to view as a whole. As if their curators decided to create some drawers instead of rooms.

As a display of hundreds of rose varieties they fulfill their mission, but I want to avoid a focus on roses without any focus on fittingness.1 These gardens have no affordance for seclusion, no use of shadows, no outdoor "rooms", and few companions. This makes them feel separate, almost antiseptic. Can careful work and planning alone make something better? Possibly that’s a delusional thought, but it’s one I want to try.

~ ~ ~

One last reason. Since ancient days people have acted on an impulse to build temples and gardens and other places of inexpressible magnificence, at whatever scale they could, from the Acropolis to the roadside shrine. Perhaps our ancestors would think it strange that we, with our unimaginable riches and comforts of the future, scarcely care to build such things. I think it no surprise that we do not find nymphs, or other creatures of pure poetry, if we do not build fountains for them to haunt. The ancient impulse has always struck me as intuitive, now I have the means to try.

I want to create something that lures the divine.

If you are a paid subscriber, you are probably already adopting a rose, so thank you.

The world is covered with a thin film of inertia. Maybe it is created by entropy, or human nature, or a magic yet-understood, or all three. Divine beings pierce it effortlessly, Let there be light is a powerful command. We can pierce this inertia too, with a little effort. In fact it seems like the more difficult part is recognizing it at all. And when we look the other way, it regrows.

~ ~ ~

There is an unseriousness about love that permeates a lot of modern media. We must all feed, however meekly, on the art around us, so this unseriousness transfers into the attitudes of people. This builds up the layer of inertia.

Part of the unseriousness comes from the idea that love is something one finds: Usually by chance, possibly by slipping into it, ideally (in movies and modern books) in the most comical and light-hearted way imaginable. Outside of media, people have accepted this frame of chance: there is heavy reliance on apps and algorithms and chance to do their matchmaking, and consequently they adopt a flippant attitude. Even the enthusiastic advice giver cannot often see beyond a few aleatory phrases, like “It all works out in the end”, “Dating is a numbers game”. These feel misleading to me, because they imply that if one keeps doing the same timid actions, or no actions at all, that love will eventually appear. It might, just as fortune might show herself to the lottery ticket purchaser, but it seems unwise to expect it. Yet I think some art coaches precisely that attitude.

This modern conception lacks responsibility and also, I think, desire. If love is found then it is not sought, or built. It is a thing that happens to you, rather than something you participate in. There is an old movie, Annie Hall (1977), where this fatalism is epitomized. It depicts a meandering romance, mostly for the sake of inserting absurdities and jokes. After one falling out, the protagonist mopes about the streets asking bystanders to explain his situation to him:

ALVY
Is it-is it something that I did?

WOMAN ON THE STREET
It’s never something you do. That's how people are. Love fades.

She moves on down the street.

ALVY
(Scratching his head)
Love fades. God, that's a depressing thought.

The scene encapsulates the attitude: Love was something found, if it starts to falter — something it does on its own! — then it can’t be helped, and things fall apart. It ascribes more intent to vague forces (or no force at all) than to one’s own actions. The movie ends on the same note, with the two separated despite Alvy wishing otherwise. The movie ends with a monologue that is practically a shrug, and he declares that despite wanting them, relationships are simply absurd and without reason. Unable to seek or build, even though he is lucky enough to fall into a relationship, he is unable to sustain it. His introspection does nothing but render him helpless.

~ ~ ~

“Let there be light.”

Life is full of chance, but this does not mean outcomes are random. Rather than living in response to chance, one should be looking for ways to guide it. Introspection and yearning ought to be coupled with action towards one’s desires. Without this action, there is no desire beyond the fleeting, and no fruit beyond happenstance. The failure mode on display in Annie Hall is immense introspection without any actioned desire at all. The protagonist is unable to pierce the inertia, and it’s no mystery that the relationship falls apart.

Love is not only found in happenstance, but grows, in the way that gardens grow. In other words, it exists primarily when someone chooses to grow it. You have to do the planning and selection and care and pruning, not once, but continuously. From yearning to bonding, love is a collection of intentional acts. If you do not treat it as such, you will find yourself in a world that feels more helpless and callous than it really is.

Some people wait on a crucial step, the madness of love, to arrive as something that happens to them, or even for them. They do not consider that it is a deliberate choice. Possibly this is poor art priming people. Or possibly it is our defensive nature — it is difficult to deliberately nurture an intense devotion, if reciprocity is so uncertain. So a layer of inertia grows.

No one can live well in your stead. It has to be your choice. You can pierce it if you want to.

s s

This is a continuation of the thoughts in quests, failure, desire.

The etching is by Ferdinand Leenhoff, after William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1883. Leenhoff inscribed “The Fight”, but Bougueru’s painting is usually titled Young Girl Defending Herself Against Cupid

Most of what we read is a summary. The news is summary, many online writers aim to summarize studies or other things they’ve read, the most popular nonfiction works tend to be summaries. In the case of history books, sometimes they are summaries of older summaries.

I worry we read too much summary. About news especially I think of Goethe: “If one has not read the newspapers for some months & then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.” It is easier than ever to slip and fall into 1,000 mentions of current events, you do not really need to go looking for that information. If something is important, gossip will bring it to your attention soon enough. And if a new and popular nonfiction book turns out to be very good, you will often gain its wisdom through a kind of social osmosis.

There exists lots of good summary, it’s mostly a question of quantity. And some of it really is compelling. Will Durant’s Story of Civilization is a giant, sweeping summary. But it is most worthwhile when read with a mind to record some threads to follow deeper, later. The work’s value is not just in the bare facts, but in presenting you several hundred doors. You may be rewarded sooner, in fact, if you pick a door and explore it for some time on your own before returning to his grand narrative. Perhaps you become so pleasantly lost that you never return to the summary.

I find it hard to imagine Leonardo da Vinci or Sherlock Holmes spending so much time with summary. I suspect careful thinkers do not gain a mastery of mystery, or attention to detail, by scrolling Reddit or listening to current event podcasts or asking “AI” to summarize anything. Instead I imagine they spend their time with primary sources, correspondence, stories, engaging with their own senses in one way or another, or some other form of exploring the world in detail.

~ ~ ~

It is an interesting feature of stories and fiction that they resist summary. You cannot read a summary of Anna Karenina and somehow stockpile its pleasures and charms. Narrative resists compression.

I think avoiding summary is even more important when writing, possibly its the first step to good writing. You are a primary source. Lots of people couch their opinions with citations, or “studies show”, or they create writing that is an attempt to shorten some portion of thought or history. But this mostly makes for less interesting writing. I think one should write as much as they can with their own empiricism, their own senses, giving the reader their own characterization of life or events.

~ ~ ~

The opposite of summary is attention to detail.

~ ~ ~

The output of Large Language Models (“AI”) is an aid to learning extremely simple things, and it is an impediment to learning anything complex or creative. The nature of the output, of summary, is speed things along. But the consequence is to avoid you having to build your own complex mental model of anything. I worry that without a complex model in one’s own mind, one may never notice complex relationships that are otherwise missed. A loss of attention to detail.

Getting an immediate answer can solve immediate problems, but if instead of a solution, you came upon a chain of reasoning, you might actually solve several future problems for yourself too. That chain of reasoning is the real learning. One of the advantages of intelligence is that its not context-free, just-in-time delivery. Good thinking builds on itself. AI, like all summary, strips context.

This has serious ramifications even for smart people. If you ask a machine to do something for you, you are at risk of not asking for what you want, but what it can do well. If what it can do well is summarize, and you rely upon the tool, you may tune your questions so that you get better answers. This looks like training a machine to do what you want, but its also training yourself to ask questions about the world in a certain way. What are the questions you are omitting?

~ ~ ~

I believe Paul. AI will punish those who are not concise. Fewer people will read them. I doubt this is a good thing, long term. The world will become less detailed and more lossy. But most of all it will punish the people that use AI to learn. Tim Urban got the gist in three minutes. Does anyone know what he missed?

Walk more slowly if you can,

ss

When I read biographies, early lives leap out the most. Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14 years old. Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, by 11. Vladimir Nabokov published his first poetry collection at 16, while still in school. Andrew Carnegie finished schooling at 12 and was 13 when he began his second job as a telegraph office boy, where he convinced his superiors to teach him the telegraph machine itself. By 16, he was the family’s mainstay of income.

Readers (and some biographers) tend to fixate on the celebrity itself, the inflection point when people achieved fame. But their early lives often contain something more revealing than their successes. Before you grasp, you have to reach. How did they learn to reach?

In my examples, the individuals were all doing from a young age as opposed to merely attending school. And while they may not have wanted to work, the work was nonetheless something that they, their families, and society felt was useful, purposeful, and appreciated. In a sense, they had useful childhoods.

Do children today have useful childhoods?

~ ~ ~

An individual’s life can continue with an inertia that will lead them on to the next year or decade. Most young people today know approximately what they are going to be doing for the first twenty-or-more years of their life: school. Post-schooling, the inertia continues. Many a modern story opens with a worker—an office worker usually—who is so inert that he scarcely notices the passage of time until he becomes blindsided by a sudden yank of reality that forces him out of this inertia. Since we do not live in stories, we have to ask: How can we make that pull ourselves?

Agency is the capacity to act. Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something different from the rigid path of events that simply happen to you. Remarkable people typically go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a telegraph message boy is one opportunity; asking how to operate the telegraph is another. He was handed the first one, but he had to ask for the second. Da Vinci had plenty of small-time commissions, but he quit them all in favor of offering his services to the Duke of Milan.

No one is asked to write a book, or start a company, or stage a play, or seek invention and excellence in the unknown. These acts are very contrary to the default script. Yet they are the resources that create the world. Imagine if Carnegie and Da Vinci were instead compelled to stay in school for 10 more years. What would have happened?

Conservation of Agency

In these old biographies I find it interesting just how early and varied the avenues were that allowed promising adolescents to pivot off-script, and do something different than everyone else. For a 13-year-old today, what is the equivalent of being a telegraph office boy where one can learn technology while contributing? What about for a 16-year-old? What is today’s equivalent of becoming Verrocchio’s studio apprentice at 14?

Where are the studios, anyway?

Modern complexity has erased some avenues for agency. After all, no boy can become a telegraph operator today. As complexity grows, sometimes stepping stone are removed. But the primary problem is not technology, it is how we have oriented the world and our expectations. A 13-year-old Steve Jobs once called Bill Hewlett—whose number was simply listed in the phone book–and received a summer job at Hewlett Packard. This would be unsurprising in Carnegie’s time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is culturally verboten today.

We have a public imagination that cannot conceive of what exactly to do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be in storage, and so they shuffle through a decade of busywork. Partly, the length of schooling has increased simply because it could—because we no longer need children to work, yet need them to do something while the adults go do theirs. 

The sad result of school’s length and primacy is that it ensures there is nothing in particular for children to do. Since the rigid framework demands a certain number of hours-in-school-seat, it precludes other options. The time sink of school is a kind of opportunity suffocation, it makes it more difficult to imagine what good opportunities might even exist for most children. And the longer we disallow children from having the agency to act on the world, the harder it becomes for them to visualize it in the first place. The result is that we have young adults who have a difficult time adjusting once their life-script changes even a little bit, or once it simply ends past college. The path is rigid, yet brittle.

Modern schooling began as a track to be left as soon as you found something worthwhile to do with your life. But it has since morphed into an attempt at systematizing as many years of a child’s life as possible, extending well into their adulthood. At the same time, school can never gratify the smartest pupils as much as either party would like, because they are charged with the education of everyone. The result is that many precocious children will spend prime years of their life quite literally waiting for other students to finish.

Mass schooling attempts a systematization of skill and knowledge transfer. This is not terrible for the average person, but results are predictably average—systems at scale must function with and cater to the lowest common denominator, and the process of standardization loses all sensitivity to context. Since everyone must do the same things, it is difficult for any student to do exceptional things. The result is alarming on its own for wasting people’s youth. But even worse, in having so many years of life monopolized, people come to inadvertently believe that skill and knowledge transfer are primarily the domain of school rather than a normal consequence of meaningful work.

The ever-longer march through school creates a bizarre barrier separating the student from reality. As a consequence, childhood consists of the age when one can intuit well how the world works at the same time one is prevented from acting upon it meaningfully. Instead of creating adolescences full of rites of passage where one attempts to master something and accept responsibility, we have made it full of waiting and fake work—for school is work. After a time, all children spot this fakeness, and all honest educators note it: teachers often say that one of the difficult parts of teaching is having to justify why the curriculum will be relevant and useful.

It is difficult to blame young adults for assuming that work is fake and meaningless if we prescribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence. When meaningful work is an adult-only activity, it is little wonder that adolescence is a period of great depression. It would be surprising if it was not. Unlike the past, where many smart children finished sooner, modern education endlessly ushers them towards an often farther and more abstract future—one so far away and abstract that some children become infected with the opposite of agency. They take on a learned helplessness and downplay that the future is a reality at all.

Higher education often fails to cure these deficiencies, and some people exit academia well into their twenties almost terrified to leave. How could we celebrate a form of learning that creates something so pathetic—the opposite of a readiness for life?

The institutions of higher and lower education have a purpose, but they are not your friend. They have no sensitivity to context. Their incentives are not the same as your incentives, and they have no interest in any individual going off-script. They ask nothing of you but your time and eventually your money, but these are not trivial things. And they will take as many of your prime years as you are willing to give them. School should be leveraged only so long as nothing else meaningful is available.

This is not the worship of employment, but an observation of fundamentals: it seems that the more you ask of people and the more you have them do, the more they grow into to the task of doing it on their own. While we shouldn’t allow children to be factory bobbin boys, no one would describe Steve Job’s summer job at 13 as his exploitation.

We should be thinking much harder about ensuring children can make meaningful contributions, and we should teach them in ways that are sensitive to the context of the real world. We are not looking for a job but opportunities for mastery: learning and practice beyond the depth one would find along the common path, which demands no such thing.

Growing Agency

It might seem like the path forward is to fundamentally change the nature of schools, de-emphasize college, increase opportunities for apprenticeships, and so on. But waiting for any kind of policy daydream is a mistake. If a system lacks imagination, it is best to supply our own. History ebbs and flows with opportunity, and we find ourselves at a fortunate time.

When television first arrived, it was hailed by some as “a university in every home.” Such an optimistic prediction didn’t quite come to pass, but the internet quietly enabled something better—forms of education broader and deeper than the university. 

User-generated content does not need the benefit of large audiences or the approval of large broadcasting companies. Students do not need permission to attend. In corners of the internet that are easy to miss, the biggest renaissance of informal skills transfer in history is happening right now. Unlike textbooks or professors, the creators of these educational materials are willing to engage with random students throughout the world, provide feedback, and even arrange meetups—often for free.

A close look at social media reveals ample opportunity for self-apprenticeship. We live in an era where a motivated 12-year-old can learn the basics of woodcraft, programming, or how to bake bread that would rival world-class bakeries. They can master nearly any mechanical system or any number of technical or artistic vocations, even if no mentor lives nearby. The limit is no longer some teacher or institution but a child’s own patience and interest, as well as the interested support of the parents.

Often the parents of precocious children do not appreciate this interest. They think a child engrossed in Minecraft is simply playing video games, instead of longing to build. It is the parent’s job to identify this motivation, and then leverage technology and their own resources to encourage something more meaningful. “He’s going to do great things one day.” In his thirties? Why not today?

We can somewhat excuse schools for only covering topics broadly. But if education matters to a parent, then they should think hard about how they can allow their child a deep venture. Parents owe it to children to furnish them with materials, time, and useful pursuits. Schools will not supply them, and the most common failure mode with parenting is probably giving children options along the same feeble lines, and responsibilities too close to what they already have at school. 

Occasionally parents might gesture towards an activity, like a lemonade stand on the sidewalk, to gratify a child’s interest. This is the archetypal poor choice: A lemonade stand does not teach the value of money but how to wait and occasionally beg. To understand business or food or hospitality, children would be better off trying to make something people really wanted. 

For a simple example, a better home craft than lemonade might be a pastry, taken seriously. Not sugar cookies or muffins, but the kind of thing that is plain for a 13-year-old to understand, harder for him to make, and very difficult to master. If a child committed to a batch a day, documenting progress, perhaps in time he would have something worth selling.

And perhaps selling these at the side of the street won’t work, but it might work selling them somewhere repeatable and meaningful, like at local soccer practice, or even taking orders on the local Facebook group. Leveraging existing technology and a supportive parent, there’s no reason a young teenager couldn’t make thousands this way while attaining mastery of something.

The art of pastry comes to my mind as an example because Pierre Hermé, one of the most famous pastry chefs and chocolatiers in the world, began as an apprentice at 14. Such an apprenticeship is admirable, but it would be a shame for us to wait around for some mentor to appear. The ultimate mentor is always the parent, and the resources are broader than ever. What can your child make today? What can he do that’s both rewarding and difficult? What can you do to facilitate such a thing? Or if you’re young enough yourself—what can you repeat until you improve?

The goal of education is to create a path to mastery or responsibility. If a child can sell the fruit of his labor, so much the better. But the essential lesson is that every difficult thing attempted acts as a multiplier on his confidence and the rest of his knowledge. Drudgery is sometimes confused with building character, and I think this is a mistake. It is building skill itself that builds self-possession. After selling thousands of dollars worth of pastries over the summer, a child does not only know that he can make pastries. He knows that he can make anything.

I think it is worth some special reflection as to why programming is now the typical industry for precocious children. In many ways, it has a low bar to entry and is something that parents still allow their children to “work at” do despite the hour-demands of systematized schooling. It is one of the few industries with an immensely permissionless culture. You don’t need an audience or patrons. You don’t have to ask anyone. You don’t have to get a building permit or any professional resources. You can just create. The advantages of this, especially for some children who are not allowed to do much else with their time, are immense. We should ask ourselves, slowly, carefully, and often: what else can be like that?

The World Is a Malleable Place

It would be desirable if there were some common formulas for instilling mastery, a series of recipes and options for every child or young adult. But so long as society is committed to treating children unseriously, the obvious apprenticeships will be few. There may be more varied options than ever for any given child, but none of them will come to him on their own. They will lie just off the path, and the child or parent will need to go looking. One reason that schools will always do poorly at finding such opportunities for children is that the very best opportunities will always be a response to local needs—a sensitivity to context is precisely the thing that systems of scale fail at producing. But both parent and child should never confuse this with a lack of options. Our era is resource-rich, especially with educational resources, but onramp poor. The legwork is up to you.

Many fairy tales and stories are about finding one’s place. The hero begins as a child full of wonder and ends up achieving mastery over the world. Visions of the future need to allow people—not just the cleverest among us, but all people—to imagine accepting a place in the world. If we fail to do this during the years of education, then we are not really educating. If we fail to allow children continuous contact with the world, we risk them coming to see their own lives as mere abstractions.

The purpose of education is to develop agency within a child. Purposeful work and achieving mastery are tools to getting there. They aren’t the results of learning and imagination, it’s the other way around—learning is simply the consequence of doing. To understand this is to understand the ecology that fosters genius and talent.

i

One belief I have is that if you wish to be virtuous you will learn to eat cereal virtuously.

The novice of virtue is tempted by dreams of heroic acts, just as the novice sculptor daydreams of palatial monuments, or other grand work. But the master sculptor is extraordinary not because he has been commissioned for monumental bronzes (which may never happen), but because he labors over every small detail.

Virtue should not be thought of as a handmaid of heroism, but instead as an undercurrent of everything one does. Day-to-day matters are more important than theoretical great acts, and failure to give them proper attention is its own cowardice. Let every small thing you do be as careful and good as it can. The virtuous person should live so well that they leave breadcrumbs of virtue everywhere.

ii

Life at times is filled by a series of casual hobbies, but this does not mean life itself is casual. One could always be looking for ways to take it more seriously.

iii

A while ago I wrote some advice for new software developers. It’s worth thinking about how it applies generally. The advice was:

1. Write what you're learning.
2. Have at least a tiny website that shows something neat.
3. Do things publicly. Have Twitter, Github, etc. Comment publicly, ideally with your real name. This forces you to be nicer, too.
4. Help other people.

These are all breadcrumbs. If you are going to work and learn (and live), it is beneficial to think about how you can leave a trail.

One aspect of life, somewhat neglected in the digital age, is the desire to see and be seen. We should not only desire that others find us, we need them to.

We need jobs, relationships, friends, and all other kinds of connections. Though it sometimes feels that these connections are assigned at random, it is never true, they are always the product of someone’s efforts. Trivially, hiding in a basement yields zero connections. Even going to the store is more fruitful. As I mentioned a few years ago, the cost of going to a cafe every single day is cheap, if it means you find your wife. Or put another way, the act of only drinking coffee at home can save some money, but can come at a non-financial cost.

You want others to find you. And when they do, you want to be able to give them something.

In the digital age, writing and photography have made this a little easier. Often a person doesn’t have to discover you at the time of creation, but at some point in the future. This is part of why I write — the interesting people I have found I did not first meet in person, but found their breadcrumbs online: blogs, projects, videos, stories, photo reels, some of them produced years before I found them. People understand the idea of a famous author’s or director’s body of work, but there is no reason this concept can’t apply to everyone in some small way. I think it does.

iiii

If you spend a lot of time online or making things, it’s good to find a way to leave these breadcrumbs. The trail of your digital self should be interesting. If you use social media, you should ensure it makes your goals, desires, projects — if not clear, at least worth stumbling upon.

“Write what you’re learning” is good advice for software developers and probably a lot of other people. If you have any hobbies where you’re learning something new, it might be good to show what you’re learning too. Think about how you can see and be seen.

Why does this matter? "Working in public" gets a lot of people jobs, and living in public gets people into relationships of all kinds. Some people, who may greatly desire more relationships, end up using social media to do nothing but whine and repeat tired political stuff. The creation of breadcrumbs is a escape route from that end.

The use of social media to share — what you are learning, what you are doing, what you have done — is a simple way to see and be seen. But it is also a way to use it virtuously. Let nothing you do be done carelessly.

iiiii

Lately among silicon-valley types there’s been interest in the idea of a “date-me doc”, a small document or webpage that is part biography and part solicitation.

I think this itself isn’t a bad thing, though it might suggest failures upstream. First, it tempts self-assessment, which often ends badly.

And conceptually, such a doc feels like it is casting a wider net, but I think it presents a very thin slice of a person in a span of time too short to digest the information meaningfully. It makes sense that people are vaguely off-put by that, it is an unusual way to present oneself. It is not a good summary of life.

The date-me doc is a desire to be found, which is not too different from dating apps (just a different audience).1 But the failure upstream is that you should build something else to be found by other than these date-specific media. I think that the best dates generally don’t come come from trying to date, but trying to exist publicly, and being found. The breadcrumbs of social media used well are more organic, presenting a larger and longer picture of a person.

So if you want to leverage social media for dating or just finding people (and I think you should) you should be thinking how you can share more of what you are like, what you love, what you want, to a wider audience. These are more important than a compact self-summary.

If you have art, or writing, or projects of any kind, you should have a small website or instagram or some other way that people can find you. Or so people who have found you can learn more (see more, “stalk”) at their leisure. And because social media affords repeated, small interactions, the digital unplanned bumping into each-other, you afford yourself something more durable than the somewhat vicious PASS/FAIL style of dating that people have come to accept.

iiiiii

So, leave breadcrumbs. Take the act seriously. What I’ve said above can’t be the only way, or the only purposes. They are just what’s come to mind right now.

(After all, how did you find me?)

With all my heart,

s s

~ ~ ~

The Hansel and Gretel illustration is from Frank Adams, 1925. Please ignore the inconvenient fact that, in the tale of Hansel and Gretel, birds eat up all of the breadcrumbs, rendering them useless. Social media is actually the magical white duck.

Hereafter, in a better world than this,
I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.

— Shakespeare

I watched The Green Ray (1986) recently, one of Eric Rohmer’s beautiful films. It is the story of a woman ostensibly looking for somewhere to go for vacation, but really looking for someone to be with. To our protagonist, an escape is not quite so good if it isn’t shared. Her friends sympathize with her goals, less so her misery, but they try their best to be helpful.

I found it interesting what the film did not affirm. In modern culture there are relationship adages stressing independence as a primary virtue, or even a precondition, such as “One needs to be happy alone before one can be happy with someone else.” No one in the film gives a care for this kind of sentiment. I don’t either, it strikes me as unreasonable, almost callous. Why shouldn’t you be unhappy alone? Nobody tells you that you need to be happy unemployed before you can find a job.

Perhaps the modern sentiment has a subtler point, that being in a relationship will not “repair” you in some fundamental way. But this leads to its own pernicious notion, that someone dissatisfied is somehow damaged. This outlook also strikes me as unreasonable. Dissatisfaction — great bouts of melancholy even — are to be expected in the tides of a normal human life. It would be ignorant of human nature to suggest that relationships do not improve us. We should yearn for them. We should mourn their absence. And we should not let such a normal human experience prevent a quest that is itself an essential part of life.

There is a good deal of implicit sentiment around relationships that troubles me, because it assumes a fundamentally defensive posture: You have to be happy first, you should date around a lot, you should reject quickly and on small pretenses, you shouldn’t take dating too seriously, etc. For some even attachment is a dirty word!1 All of this is not a way to help search for one right person, but to avoid, strangely enough, commitment. Both commitment to any one person, and commitment to the search as a quest to be taken seriously.

A while ago, this tweet stuck with me:

when I was younger, my desire for marriage and family was often considered comical or inappropriate by people I knew. I thought that this reaction would abate over time, but in fact, it's only gotten more noticeable. maybe you're not "supposed" to want it before you have it?
— obversers

I think an ethos of defensive downplaying is culturally widespread, in these particular topics and certainly others. Such an attitude raises the question: If earnestness and seriousness about some goals are considered inappropriate, how are you supposed to do them well? The attitude makes the most sense if you consider it a purely defensive notion. People avoid talk of serious goals because if they admit those goals, even to themselves, then they would have to accept that they might fail. So to avoid bruising our own tender spirits, we might claim a more carefree attitude about our searches or our destinies. That is, until we have their fruits, as if by secret action or magic, safely in our pockets.

This defensiveness is a false economy. Rejection of goals and desires leads to a downplaying of desire, and the host of emotions that go with it.

~ ~ ~

Desire is a beautiful emotion and a visceral motivator. I think you should court it with a healthy respect. Life is at once more serious and more exuberant if you do so. There is a sweetness tasted not just in success, but in enjoying the searches and quests themselves, and in maintaining a wistful imagination. The threat of failure is necessary to accept these benefits. If you cultivate only defense, you will not cultivate the others.

This cherishing of desire is what some vital people mean by optimism. They do not think about what disappointments they can avoid, but what actions they can take. Delight in romance — in the literary sense, or the physical, or something more mysterious — cannot be bought on a defensive budget. It requires an openness to desire, a willingness to work with the parts of the world we cannot directly control, and to make a virtue of curiosity. The world shall always be full of subtle connections awaiting our senses to grow sharper, or our edges softer, until we can see the possibilities to act on them. For the sake of these emotions you should be unpersuaded by the weary defensive postures.

~ ~ ~

Our protagonist ultimately succeeds, not because she reasons with her friends’ advice, nor because she becomes happy alone. She has her own silent epiphany, and sees the future she wants. It is there in front of her, with its risks and hardship. She does something more profound than become happy, she imagines happiness, and what it asks of her.

The images are all from The Green Ray, which was shot cheaply on 16mm film, in mostly natural light, which gives it an often grainy and soft feel.

If you are looking for something to watch, I must confess that The Green Ray, while a very pretty movie, is my least-favorite of Rohmer’s films. If you have never seen any of them I would instead consider My Night at Maud’s, first.

Dear friends,

There is a commonplace opinion that technology and the natural world, or that technological pursuits and natural pursuits, are at odds. An example:

I think this is a false position. But if this kind of sentiment is so often repeated, its worth thinking about why it feels true.

Technology is doing more with less. This is a definition we should not lose sight of. The wheel allows one to move more weight, or with less effort. The gas boiler allows heating with less labor than coal. Email is faster and cheaper than postal mail. There are other tradeoffs made of course, we’ll get to that.

I suspect the essential reason why people think that technology clashes with nature has little to do with technology per se, and possibly little to do with nature. Instead the trouble is that so much of what’s called technology feels frustratingly careless. Consider the category of Smart Home Devices:

We should first ask ourselves: what do any of these smart home devices have to do with the idea of Home? If you were asked to come up with words that evoked the ideal home1, I would be surprised if they described any of the objects above, in function or design.

These devices strike me as mostly careless. They often have a pretext of technology, of getting more-for-less, but I think this is a false economy. If you buy a Smart Lightbulb and have to concern yourself with device pairing, versions, updates, and buying only the same product now to match, you are making tradeoffs. You are getting more with more, you are trading your own time and effort to obtain the clever bulb.

Many modern devices (and apps) really excel at squishing tradeoffs into weird shapes. They are better thought of as little imps that sneak into homes and ask for more and more of your attention. They want to gently claw at your eyes and ears. They want to put notifications on your phone and remind you that you need to interact with them, or buy more of them, so that they might become even more convenient. This does sound miserable. This does sound contra-nature.

With enough of this stuff you are also trading away the cozier feeling of home. Possibly the convenience of some devices are worth it, but I think many technologies only have popularity because the tradeoffs made are not quite so clear as simpler technologies, like those that are merely trading money for time or physical work (like a tractor, a more efficient boiler, an airplane ticket, etc).

One machine epitomizes unusual tradeoffs: the Keurig coffee maker

Does it make coffee cheaper? No
Higher quality brew? No
Less maintenance? Also no
More ecological? Alas…
Healthier? You’re squirting boiling water through plastic
Prettier? It practically invented corporate chic — it is inviting a piece of the office lunchroom into your home
Is it faster? Yes. It is.

The Keurig machine can make one hot drink faster than most preparation methods. Along one axis it does more with less. But taken as a whole it strikes me as a strange trade — along so many axes it is a machine that does less with more. To me it exists as a kind of anti-technology.

Even when the tradeoffs are more clear, I think that technology has to feel humane and serve very human purposes to be worthwhile. Most gadgets feel careless and unwholesome and I worry that they, subconsciously, cause us to treat our homes differently. They are not viscerally pleasing, and if you have enough of that sort of thing in your home I think it lends to an air of unreality.

If people hate technology and think it clashes with nature, I find it hard to blame technology. We have careless technology because we are careless in evaluating it. We demand too little of it, or we are willing to sacrifice too much for too little in return.

I am reminded of a Tolstoy quote2 that has always struck me: “People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing—refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.” I take this advice to heart, and I think it generalizes well. If you are stuck in a mall food court with only bad food, and you are hungry, you could always just stay hungry.

~ ~ ~

I love technology, the removal of drudgery over the last 250 years is something we should all be more grateful for. It lets us appreciate nature more: we have more time, more travel, more food with less risk, less disease. It is easy to lose sight of just how much was gained so recently. Even the would-be homesteader who wants to grow their own food has had the experience completely transformed by the advent of refrigeration and freezing. It is now something people do for fun. And I think we should be grateful for the digital world, too, which after all lets me write to you in the first place, and share my own version of nature.

But I dislike gadgets. I own no TVs, internet-of-things devices, home automatons, etc. In my opinion objects should not beep or be filled with blinking LEDs. Though I built my own house, I don't own a microwave — it is simply not useful enough to justify the space or the ugliness. The stove is propane gas. I like candles. In winter we heat with firewood. Some of this is durability: these things work even when the power goes out (as it does a few times a year in this part of New Hampshire). They can do more, with less.

What is called tech — that is, what is new and digital — is not necessarily technology in any meaningful way. Often it is merely fashion. The blame cannot rest with the objects and apps, no matter how careless they are made. It is always only up to you to decide if you are getting more for less.

~ ~ ~

post script: I almost made this post entirely about heating systems through the years and tradeoffs made with each. Only the first image, the Ideal Boiler advertisement, remains of that draft. But maybe the technology, some of it quite elegant and careful, deserves its own follow-up post.

The Map is Mostly Water Office Hours are open

For about 2 days. What do you need feedback or advice on, what questions do you have, what secret trouble stirs thy breast?

Feel free to ask about house design, New Hampshire, philosophy, parenting, or anything else you want to discuss.

~ ~ ~

Some other tidings:

On my site I have written about How you might hire Software Developers when you’re far from the city. I intend to update this over time, so I wrote it there rather than as a newsletter post.

This winter I ordered several tranches of roses. 24 are already planted. 3 arrive tomorrow. And this set just shipped:

All told I hope to plant about 75 roses this year, plus companions. With a little luck and a lot of work hopefully I can report back on what it takes to make something beautiful. Though I do not expect big results this year, just a little growth. This garden occupies a large part of my thought, lately.

On my website I built an interactive map of the garden and orchard (which took a little while to program and is still unfinished). But it gives an idea of where everything is going.

Finally on Monday, for David Perell’s Write of Passage I will be giving a talk on Observation and where ideas come from. I have a plan of what to say much like the soup-maker, rolling around in the mud of a vegetable patch, has ideas of what to use for soup. But it should coalesce by tonight. If I am very happy with the talk, I will write up some notes for a post.

“It is a mistake to suppose a man makes a fortune if he knows not how to enjoy it.”

— Vauvenargues

In housing, almost every buy-vs-rent discussion concentrates on cost. Renters must consider losing out on equity and appreciation. Buyers must consider insurance, taxes, closing costs (both when buying and selling), repairs, etc. There are lengthy articles, discussions, and interactive calculators about this dilemma, but they’re fixated on an entirely economic calculus. If you are in a position to seriously consider the question (and are reasonably sure of your financial discipline and algebra skills), I think these resources are something of a distraction.

Housing is an aesthetic question as much as it is an economic one. You are not selecting a financial vehicle, but how you want to live. For instance, you might value a kind of environmental permeability — ensuring it is very easy to go indoors and outdoors dozens of times per day. Perhaps you work from home and simply want to stroll in and out of nature. Perhaps you have a dog or a child who wants to do the same. I value this greatly: the number of steps from my kitchen or my studio to bare grass and flowers should be as few as possible. Rather than travel to a park, I can open a window and hear my children in the sandbox, while I continue working, cooking, or relaxing. There is a corresponding permeability to much city life: while you may not be able to step from an apartment door into quiet greenery, you can walk to stores, cafes, parks, etc much more easily. These are both luxuries (many places have neither feature), and they carry an expense, but they are not caught in the calculus of buy-vs-rent.

Apartment living has many benefits that might be considered costly, but are often worth it. You are generally paying more than owning because you are paying someone else to assume risk. Houses also carry a cost of complexity: Many people do not want to manage their own lawns, roofs, boilers, septic systems, etc. These go beyond economic costs, they also take time and scheduling, even if you hire out every job. No calculator can input these considerations for you, you must think hard about your own desires and consider the tradeoffs yourself.

~ ~ ~

When we bought land in 2018, it had been on the market for about two years. It was judged too expensive per-acre to be worth its location or difficulties. Since we were the buyers, we of course overpaid for it, biting into our house budget. It can be difficult to not feel a little foolish if you purchase something everyone else has passed over. Possibly they know something you don’t.

With a few years of retrospect, that transaction let me realize something. Whenever I seek to get a deal (such as when furniture hunting), I often end up finding a deal. But I tend to do so by accepting something adequately disappointing. By contrast when I am excited enough to be willing to overpay, I am almost always grateful for my lapse in frugality.

If you spend your days indoors, or away from home, and home is simply a place to park a car and sleep, the land was almost certainly not worth it. We thought the land could be made worthwhile, and moreover that we would use it: we would return the scrubby forests to fields and then into gardens, we would take advantage of the village proximity by walking every day. We would make something pretty enough to be considered part of the adornment of the village. Without these desires, its just a lot for a house. With them, there’s no substitute.

There’s a quote from Burke, found in Letter to a Noble Lord:

Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue, there is, however, another and an higher economy. Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists, not in saving, but in selection.

I find this widely applicable. Cost is a variable, but it’s a mistake to consider it the only one. If you look too hard at economizing, you might start to downplay significant desires. Should you buy or rent? Do you want to build things in a garage? Do you want a pub to walk to? Do you want neighbors, lodgers, children? Do you already have a spouse? By all means look at the calculator, eventually.

But think of everything else you can, first. It shouldn’t be a short list.

Our peasants love their villages. The Romans were ardent patriots, when Rome was a mere township. When it became more powerful, their patriotism was not so keen. A city that was mistress of the world was too vast for the hearts of its citizens. Men are not made to love immensity.

— Vauvenargues (1715 - 1747)

1.

It is tempting to think of culture — and new ideas, and all the spirits of genius — as something created in big places. The common map points out only the principal cities. It is also tempting to summarize the history of the world as the product of a handful of capital cities. These sentiments are, I think, a mistake. The largest cities do amass greatness, ideas, machines, culture, etc. But the materials necessary for these are often found, and created, elsewhere. To uncover the spirits of genius, it is worth looking farther.

To suppose this may seem like the conceit of a provincial person. There is, after all, no Roman Empire without Rome. But it was to the credit of Rome — unlike less vigorous empires before or after — that she granted the honor of citizenship and the distinctions of merit so widely beyond her walls. What came from the corners of Italy?

Virgil was a native of Mantua; Horace was inclined to doubt whether he should call himself an Apulian or a Lucanian; it was in Padua that an historian was found worthy to record the majestic series of Roman victories. The patriot family of the Catos emerged from Tusculum; and the little town of Arpinum claimed the double honor of producing Marius and Cicero, the former of whom deserved, after Romulus and Camillus, to be styled the Third Founder of Rome; and the latter, after saving his country from the designs of Catiline, enabled her to contend with Athens for the palm of eloquence.

— Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Pulling at the varied threads of history, we are led from the metropolis to smaller spaces. Jazz originated in New Orleans, but it did so by stitching together blues, folk spirituals, work songs, and the lineage of polyrhythmic cadences preserved from African heritage. These ferments were not a product of the city — they emerged in more remote places. I believe this is a pattern: culture is not created in cities so much as assembled and discovered there. It is created in smaller spaces.

If we want to understand the birth of new genius, this distinction tells us a little about where we might locate our attention. But we are a ways from finding it.

2.

When we set out to create a community of technical scholars in Silicon Valley, there wasn't much here and the rest of the world looked awfully big. Now a lot of the rest of the world is here.

— Frederick Terman

Given the typical assumptions about the multiplicative effects of human capital, I find it interesting that one of these places has created four trillion-dollar companies within 10 miles, and the other has created none:

A trillion-dollar market cap is of course an arbitrary distinction. New York is no stranger to wealth. But it’s worth stopping in Palo Alto for a moment to wonder why, if the largest metropolises ought to have all the advantages in the world, the tiny suburb of a tiny city1 has been so successful at creating technology companies for decades, while New York has been a comparative failure. Population and density are benefactors to many things, but the denser cities seem uncompetitive, or even technologically stunted, compared to a few suburbs of San Francisco or San Jose.

~ ~ ~

Frederick Terman, born in Indiana in 1900, moved to Palo Alto when his father accepted a position at the relatively new Stanford University (founded in 1891). Terman determined to settle in Palo Alto himself, becoming a Stanford professor like his father, and eventually became dean of the school of engineering.

But Terman did more than settle: He encouraged his students to settle, and start companies instead of leaving for elsewhere after graduation. In 1937, David Packard and William Hewlett were the first to heed this, creating Hewlett-Packard in a garage, which is commonly considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

This might be unremarkable, if it did not create its own virtuous cycles and ultimately its own culture2, one strong enough that we see the story repeat for decades.

Many of the fathers of computing were not from, or working in, metropolises. They were largely a handful of Midwesterners — Jack Kilby (integrated circuits) was from Kansas, Robert Noyce (Intel) and many others were from Iowa — who happened to mostly congregate in sleepy California towns. Noyce became interested in the new invention of the transistor, encountering one by chance at his studies in Iowa. But attending MIT for grad school, he was dismayed to find that there wasn’t any interest in the new invention, even among faculty3. Technology, broadly speaking, was unfashionable among coastal elites at the time. Ultimately the transistor was the interest that lured Noyce to California.

3.

A few quick thoughts on this, connected but without order:

Sometimes it is difficult to see history as anything but a series of delicate portals, ones we tend to close, without ever quite identifying them. Or we do identify them, but cannot diagnose a way to open them again.

The history of these places matters, I think, if we want to identify the fledgling seats of cultural genius. It matters even more if we want to grow the new ones. It is a pastime of journalists to write monthly articles declaring cities all over the globe as the next Silicon Valley, or the “Silicon Valley of xyz industry”. But most of these mentioned cities, aside from beginning to look superficially similar, also have mostly come to share the same defects that the compelling small spaces do not (or did not).

The important aspects of these places are difficult to pin down. It is easier to hear the doors closing than to know what was on the other side. If you search for what made Silicon Valley particular, people will mention Terman, or defense funding, or Stanford, or the VC model. But they rarely mention its smallness. Though some of the hagiographies do hint at it, by mentioning facts like this: When Noyce landed at the San Francisco airport in 1956, he drove to Palo Alto that morning, found a house for sale, and signed a purchase contract before noon on the same day. He did this before he had even secured employment.

The ability to repeat that today is scarcely possible, anywhere in the US, for a number of reasons: Sellers would want proof of funds, lenders would want income guarantees (at minimum, an offer letter), inventory is low enough that buyers might wait for other offers, and of course prices are simply too high. That is a repeating pattern, it’s true for instance of Greenwich village in NYC when it was on the path to becoming a Bohemian epicenter. Rent in the early 1900s was between $7-$37 per month ($230-$1,200 adjusted for inflation), with the average $13.50 a month ($438 inflated) for a 3- or 4-room unfurnished apartment.4 Superstar cities may court talent, but a much more compelling crucible is found when there’s drop-dead rents, too.5 Greenwich Village still exists today, as one of the most expensive zip codes in the United States, and unsurprisingly it is more of a museum than a bed of living culture. A portal has closed.

~ ~ ~

Large places may be culturally successful not because they are large, but because they are capable of drawing out the exceptional from smaller places. What Rome, jazz, and Silicon Valley have in common is that they had the sensitivity to sample from the country. One has to wonder how repeatable that action is. It is supposed that Rome’s fertility was negative in ancient times, that it needed the countryside to refresh its population. Perhaps cities and the country can work well together in this regard, if they can find a way to enrich each-other. I worry that modern urbanization is a lot more one-way, and many countries are experiencing a one-time sort.

Remoteness, in some sense, seems to be an advantage. No one disagrees that people in metropolises are more fashionable. But it must also be the case that people in such places are much more concerned with mental fashion, too: spending a lot of time thinking about what everyone else thinks about. This was the problem Noyce ran into, but I think it repeats often. And I think everyone actually agrees with this sentiment, culturally. We see this repeated, at least intuitively, with culture. When the traveler wants a big experience, he goes to a big city to see big things. But when he wants an “authentic” experience, he must eschew the most well-trodden places, possibly the cities themselves, to find it. He must seek out places that have not yet been touched by “tourism”, he must find the people and places that still have remoteness — places that continue to live in a world of their own. Big places and small places each have their own insularity, but they look to very different things.

Ecologically, remote places produce rare specimens. The inverse is also true: as biomes become less remote, we tend to see biodiversity loss, sometimes rapidly. With very high connectivity, a few species—sometimes invasive—tend to dominate. I suspect this is true culturally, too. As the country becomes more connected, as culture shifts to media made elsewhere6, we may lose some of the ferment that we have relied on in the less-connected world.

As a cultural and technological locus, Silicon Valley began very small, and 80 years later it still isn’t a top-10 metro area. An amount of scale is often found alongside success, but I think it is much less necessary than commonly suggested. Terman, in his triumphant quote, notes that Now a lot of the rest of the world is here. But culturally, I think it remains successful because it retains many of the advantages, at least culturally, of smaller spaces.

If we care about any of this, we should strive to be sensitive to the sound of doors opening and closing. New doors cannot be created, but they can be grown. We can never demand significant places and culture. But if we are careful enough, we can let them grow.

Off to garden,

s s

There was joy in concentration, and the world afforded an inexhaustible wealth of projects to concentrate on. There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People slowed the spread of yellow fever; they sprayed the Isthmus of Panama puddle by puddle. Effort alone I loved. Some days I would have been happy to push a pole around a threshing floor like an ox, for the pleasure of moving the heavy stone and watching my knees rise in turn.

— Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

I find it ideal to always have more ambitions, plans, and projects than one could possibly accomplish. Aspirations — even unlikely ones, maybe especially unlikely ones — are an essential part of living well. When we are at our most ailing, we are reduced to thinking and talking only of our ailments. When we are at our most vigorous, our most alive, we think and talk of our goals and aspirations. Over long time frames, the pessimist becomes an unobservant man, and the optimist creates the world.

If you make lists of lofty goals, it can be easy to leave them to accumulate, as happens sometimes, into a mountain of to-do’s and notes and half-forgotten plans. Dreaming alone is seductive, even a little sweet, since it lacks the pain of trying. So it feels proper to prize attempts more than dreams. You should have ideals, but you cannot only love an idealized future, you must cultivate a love of effort, too. If you really want something, then the soul must make demands of the body.

I have a great regard of professional craft, but I am even more fond of amateurs — and every professional was once a person with the courage to be an amateur. I maintain a religious respect for effort, process, and the willingness to try. On these lines I think of what to do in the new year. What can I attempt that will be worthwhile, serious enough that it might end in failure? What will, as Annie Dillard said, resist effort to just the right degree, and yield to it at last? What will be spectacular if I can pull it off?

For a little while I published lists of goals around the new year (an example), but what I found is that the most interesting goals tend to be a bit slippery, temporally speaking. They get accomplished, but rarely in the year that I expect. So instead, I’d rather have a few new goals big enough to follow me through the years. The two on my mind at the start of the next year, are the creation of a rose garden, and a small setup to start making more of my own furniture. (Though I have built a barn, I have never built the smallest thing that required glue or plywood. Most of my woodworking does not rely on having a flat surface either, because I have had none.) These pursuits may not beat fruit for a year or longer — especially the garden, I have ordered over fifty bare root roses, and probably none will flower until 2025, and much of the in-between spaces will be filled with bulbs that may not be planted until late next year. I will be cultivating patience along with my effort. But I hope to have something spectacular to show you (and the whole town), eventually.

Happy New Year. I hope you find joy in effort,

s s

footnotes without numbered feet

mountain of to-do’s and notes: A note on notes. I like note-taking, both apps and paper, but there is maybe an over-reliance on them. Note taking often feels like doing something but also gives an excuse to not put forth your own thoughts or effort until you have all the pieces. Often you will never have all the pieces. Or the notes become so large they are impossible to put into another form, and all you find yourself doing is slowly adding to the pile, when you should be breaking it apart so that it becomes actionable. Sometimes the more time spent in a note-taking phase, the less supple the thinking or doing.

~ ~ ~

courage to be an amateur: I am paraphrasing a Wallace Stevens quote: “It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.”

Courage is an interesting word choice, but I think its the right one. Confidence might do, except confidence is more the result, not the process. Relatedly I know of only two ways to deliberately build confidence:

— Set aggressive goals and accomplish them

— Set aggressive goals and fail at them

Every difficult thing attempted is worthwhile. With success or failure, effort (and a little courage) gives you something vital in return.

Speak low if you speak love.

— Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing

I’m very fond of audiobooks. There is something endearing, maybe even romantic, about the act of listening. I get this same sense often in early photographs of radio listeners, that they appreciate the romance of the medium. Today our options are so much more, we possess a pocket oration of the world’s greatest texts if we want them. And that is so compelling that I’m always a little shocked when people malign audiobooks. I think they are typically snubbed because the act of putting on an audiobook feels almost too easy. And maybe it is too easy, in the sense that it is easy to press play and listen without giving it the proper attention.

My fondness may also come from the fact that I tend to read very slowly. Often I practically read to myself with a voice in my head. This I hope comes as no surprise: I think very slowly too. I circle around to things. Audiobook pacing is beneficial to me but I think it might be beneficial to everyone, if you want to really understand what you’re reading.

Listening is a skill. One you should take seriously and one that might have atrophied in recent times. I can’t prove this change, though I think we can infer it a little from changes in media — for instance movie scenes, cuts, and dialogue have all been shortened over the decades. Generally the pacing of nearly all media has quickened. Possibly the delivery of “more, faster” is the result of a too-great respect for novelty as an artistic flourish. I think these changes, and maybe others I can’t see, affect how people choose to make conversation in their daily lives, and make it shorter and faster too.

It becomes harder to practice listening as conversation takes on these shorter expectations, in terms of the back-and-forth. It becomes difficult to say much that’s meaningful or long. But you can practice this. You can practice it by trying to draw out someone in conversation, to give more than just pauses between your own sentences, to ask for the whole story. Above all you can respect the pause. This is difficult to do in groups, where anyone rushes to fill any gaps. But it's quite possible with two people to make the threads much longer. It’s especially easy if you are doing something together, such as walking, or working on something.1

And you can practice this lengthening by listening to audiobooks. If you find audiobooks hard to follow, this is all the more reason to want to practice. After all: How long did it take you to learn to read well? Keeping the thread of an uninterrupted narrative, holding your concentration and attention for it against all the other forces, this is a muscle worth stretching. You might find that over time you get better at it, you absorb much more, and it will make you a better listener elsewhere, too. If you try to listen to them on 1.5x speed you are absolutely going the wrong way.

If you have tried listening to audiobooks before but find it’s hard to pay attention, I recommend you start only with re-reading. It is hard to convince people of this but I am sure it’s true: Re-reading is often much more rewarding than reading for the first time. Still, most people have an aversion to picking up a book they’ve read before. Audiobooks however make a natural entry point for re-reading your favorite books. If you cannot guarantee perfect attention when listening to audiobooks, then using them for re-reading is simply a kind of leafing-through. Even if you zone out often, you will still gain a good deal from the retelling.

A few of my favorite audiobooks

I have listened to a number, most of them quite long and probably not for everyone. So here are just a few that I think might have broader appeal that come to mind right now. If I have time to give this more thought, I’ll make a much more complete list later to maintain.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Simon Armitage translation), Narrated by Bill Wallis. Truly exceptional narration of the famous story that I think is more appropriate to listen to than to read. Quite short, and contains both a reading of the translation and a reading in the original 14th century Middle English.

The Odyssey (Homer, Fagles translation), Narrated by Ian McKellen. Superb retelling of the oral epic. Unfortunately the production quality is poor (recorded in 1999), but Ian McKellen makes it worthwhile still, so it remains my favorite.

Heretics (G. K. Chesterton), Narrated by Philippe Duquenoy. A series of moral essays. I actually find this particular book slightly easier to listen to than to read, though it helps that Duquenoy is an excellent narrator.

Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Narrated by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Lovely performance despite not being my favorite translation. It’s long, but I’m so fond of it I’ve listened to it twice. In my opinion the most approachable and the best of the classic Russian novels.

The Measure of Her Powers: An M. F. K. Fisher Reader (M. F. K. Fisher), Narrated by Carolyn Cook. Essays from the greatest food writer of all time, narrated by someone who deeply enjoys the work. Very lovely and low-stress listen.

Right Ho, Jeeves (P. G. Wodehouse), Narrated by Jonathan Cecil. Short, funny, enjoyable if only for the lexical range and truly ridiculous use of English. This is technically book 6 of the series but possibly the best, and you don’t need to read the others to enjoy it.

Napoleon: A Life (Andrew Roberts), Narrated by John Lee. The best Napoleon biography with an excellent narrator.

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Neal Gabler), Narrated by Arthur Morey. A compelling biography just to remember what the recent past was like, how many things had to be invented to get animation off the ground, and how immense effort can create something truly exceptional. The whole book is good (I have listened to it twice), though you could also stop the book after the production of Snow White and have it stand as a compelling work on its own.

Surely I forget a dozen better books for would-be romantics of the audiobook format, but I must sleep of them for now. Good night.

s s

~ ~ ~

The photograph of radio listeners I found in the Library of Congress archives, dated 1928, a gift from the Red Cross archives.

Related reading:

Reading Well — I mention audiobooks in this too, though it is about reading more generally

The Hidden Storehouse — Giving more attention to Language

Obliquely related: Quiet Listening

“A too-great respect for novelty as an artistic flourish” — for some thoughts on novelty in art see: Sketches of Beauty

I know the houses too. As I walk along they seem to run forward in the streets to look out at me from every window, and almost to say: "Good-morning! How do you do? I am quite well, thank God, and I am to have a new storey in May," or, "How are you? I am being redecorated tomorrow"; or, "I was almost burnt down and had such a fright," and so on.

I have my favourites among them, some are dear friends; one of them intends to be treated by an architect this summer. I shall go every day on purpose to see that the operation is not a failure. God forbid! But I shall never forget an incident with a very pretty little house of a light pink colour. It was such a charming little brick house, it looked so hospitably at me, and so proudly at its ungainly neighbours, that my heart rejoiced whenever I happened to pass it. Suddenly last week I walked along the street, and when I looked at my friend I heard a plaintive, "They are painting me yellow!" The villains! The barbarians! They had spared nothing, neither columns, nor cornices, and my poor little friend was as yellow as a canary. It almost made me bilious. And to this day I have not had the courage to visit my poor disfigured friend, painted the colour of the Celestial Empire.

— Dostoyevsky, White Nights

For many years, to save money, I rented rooms in other people’s houses. Some years were with a lady who lodged me in the sky-lit attic of her Victorian home.

One summer she also housed a sculptor from Greece. On the first morning, after breakfast, this old sculptor said to me simply: “We must go to Wal Mart.” He stressed both syllables of the name. He said it in such a way that I couldn’t tell if he was pleading or stating a fact. Why? I asked. Perhaps we can find what he needed somewhere closer. Was it a toothbrush or something like that?

“We must go to Wal Mart,” he considered the words as he said them, “for atmosphere.”

Everything is an atmosphere. His accent was an atmosphere, so way his way of thinking. Later he asked me to take him to a large flea market, so he could look at all the tools and little objects. By then I understood.

~ ~ ~

I am very affected by place. Actually, I think everyone is. Landscapes, architecture, the sounds of the world — crickets, goldfinches, the nighttime chorus of frogs, cups moving in a cafe, voices, the silence of winter, horns, sirens (both kinds), department store music — these all act on us. The vista, the drop ceiling, the marble arch, candlelight, parking lot fluorescence on wet asphalt — every experience twists and turns our mood, if only a little. The right time and place can even change experiences to make a typically unpleasant sensation pleasant again. Who hasn’t found the right time to really enjoy gas station coffee? (4am, November, you are about to ascend Mt. Lafayette)

Does the ceiling matter?

Places accumulate upon us. Every thing you do or experience repeatedly can become a ritual, whether you notice or not. We have more of these unintentional rituals than we realize, and not all of them are appealing. City people sometimes strike me as especially anxious, and this is no surprise: they must always be locking doors, locking bikes, keeping a watch over their belongings in public. They are required to guard themselves in a world that is less still and more loud. They grow their arrays of defense. This defense is not without its uses! But the rituals change you.

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