No.183

Around three weeks ago the later evening hours ceased to be punctuated by the swifts, their darkly soft crescent bodies and their ecstatic screeches, their flying so high that it hurts the neck to look for too long—hurts to wonder what it might all look like from up there. The martins and a few swallows still remain, for now but not for long, and when we walk down to the river tonight they’ll be there, paying us no attention as we sit in the dust next to the water and skim stones. Sometimes you don’t know that you’re going to miss a thing terribly until you do.

The world is always saying so much and so loudly, but there seems to be less and less actual thinking going on and more and more assuming. The majority of those in positions of power seem to do little else these days but assume, and try their best to sound important, try their best to spin denial and damage into something more palatable and rose-coloured, try too hard to look the part while things are busy unravelling at ecological seams.

It’s dispiriting at best, but I think about what might be left over were you to strip away all of the pretending, the centuries of that’s just how things are done, all of the advertising and supposed advancements. What’s left is what will still mean something after all of everything else is gone, and what is left is what is often dismissed, or barely-bothered with. If it were all to go away, people would not grieve the loss of their Netflix accounts. They would, I think, not fight for their fake lawns, for their shoe collections, for their months-in-advance hairdressing appointments, for their $900 vacuum cleaners. People would be unlikely, if faced with the losing of it all, to prioritise any of the things that are currently held up as status, as success, as aspiration.

What is left after you take away everything we’ve added to the routine, beautiful matter of simply living and dying isn’t much more than who we are connected to and how we love them, along with the most basic facts of surviving and the reasons why we actually want to. There really, really isn’t much more than this, and I marvel at how complicated and how cruel we’ve managed to make it. Human eyes are designed to look at clouds, not computers, and I know which of those I would gladly sacrifice.

Two days ago I travelled down from the north of Scotland to the southwest of England, to be useful to family and enable certain things to happen. I have not done much work since arriving, but started reading a book about the sea, and picked some half-eaten strawberries from the garden in the rain, and opened and closed familiar cupboards to see if anything had changed, and made a very flat cake. In the mornings a glossy-winged rook balances on the neighbour’s TV aerial and communicates things to the early air using soft croaks and gentle mewing and other noises that I don’t have words for, likely because the sounds are too beautiful for words.

I think we are not quite willing to leave where we are, but we also know this is not somewhere we can stay. We are all so tired, we are all so fascinating, we are capable of carrying this place to somewhere kinder and slower.

WORK-RELATED NEWS:

The UK edition of Everything, Beautiful was published on September 1st, and I’m happy to have it close to home. I visited the book a few days later in an Inverness bookshop and can confirm it’s just as strange the fifth time around as it was with the first, now almost ten years ago. If anything, the fact of your thoughts sitting inside a papery object in the midst of thousands upon thousands of others available for anyone to open and peruse becomes increasingly, distinctly odd.

The book is a #1 New Release on the US version of Amazon in the category ‘Philosophy Aesthetics’, if you’re into that sort of wild accolade. In addition I’ve just discovered a fresh 3/5 star review on the UK Amazon site which is a lovely example of someone giving the e-book version a few hurried thumb-scrolls of their time, kindly declaring three years of full-time thought and work as ‘filler’, and calling my handwriting bad. I wonder if this person ever asks where their beauty comes from? I wonder if they whisper anything after night falls? I wonder whether they notice when the first acorns appear on the forest floor? Do they believe they have already figured beauty out, pinned it down behind glass?

I attempt to be unfeeling in light of this, mainly because of the things people have written to me in the days since publication which, I’m pleased to announce, have been exceedingly tender and positive. Everything, Beautiful is hard to categorise, it doesn’t look like most books, it isn’t best read with expectations of what it will be. In fact I believe each individual’s experience of it might form a sort of prophecy, or foreshadowing, of how they might choose to perceive what beauty is in this world and what that perception could mean, or impact.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

A few more images by Tami Aftab (see also newsletter No.173 from this past March) that somehow manage to align with several of the most feeling feelings of late.

“About to buy another for a friend’s 81st birthday the end of this week.”

— Someone who liked my new book