No.159

July ending, a list:

1. We drove about 1727 miles in the last three weeks; tiresome

2. In our absence, the garden grew almost unrecognisably large and things I don’t know the name of have appeared and I have decided green is a very persuasive colour

3. I’ve noticed, increasingly, how absent most people are when looking at their phones, or their computers, but most obviously this is the case with phone screens—it is as if the person is not there at all, and I do not think this is a good sort of mystery

4. A subtitle for my next book, Everything, Beautiful, was decided upon this week, but about five minutes ago I had another idea which I like better and I suppose this is me announcing my instability

5. Leaving and returning to places can provide a similar result as using crayon and paper to reveal the bark of a tree

6. It is harder to settle than it was before; do we perhaps have a finite amount of settling?

7. If you are on a call with me I will get almost entirely distracted by the light moving across the floor, or the walls, but this is not a reflection of how serious I am about the call we are having

8. I am overwhelmed by the number of interesting and unsettling and important documentaries and so I do not tend to watch them

9. For the ideal Saturday evening I present to you some red wine and a 1000-piece puzzle of a painting by A.J. Casson from 1948

10. The sun comes out

11. Really, I fear I have very little to say these days, as the world seems primarily loud and wayward and my thoughts on it are far from essential reading—almost all of the words have been said before, in this order and then in that order, and the words that we are waiting for and needing will come from beautiful unrecognisable corners, the ones that have been ignored for too long. Boats on trailers are driven past my window at weekends, which feels like a sort of desperation, and while perhaps it is foolish to long for more simplicity, more silences, I think more people would be wise to slow down, to step away from the screens they are beholden to, to remember the names for the flowers that ask for nothing and sway quietly in the summer winds

WORK-RELATED NEWS:

I was caught off guard, in that my book Close Again is available for pre-order. It wasn’t that I didn’t think this would be soon, but rather that I wasn’t ready and was therefore notified via an Instagram comment along the lines of:

“Just read your newsletter and I have pre-ordered Close Again.”

(Thank you Helen.)

To which I thought ‘Huh!’ and then ‘Wait?’ and then emailed the book’s editor to ask where I should be directing people who would like to pre-order the small book. The answer, unsurprisingly, is the publisher’s website, which contains links to the normal suspects: Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Bookshop, Books A Million, and that place which shall not be named (Amazon).

I probably don’t need to tell you this, because you are here, but if you do have a local bookshop and have interest in this small book, then local is where you should go—if you are able to. If you let them know you would like a copy, they should be able to order it in for the autumn.

And in the interest of apologising for the number of times I might mention pre-ordering between now and its publication date on October 19th: pre-orders are oddly important when it comes to a book doing well, because these numbers let bookshops and other places know that a title is somewhat anticipated, that they might wish to order copies in, and other things of that nature. (I didn’t know this until very recently, strange how one is just expected to know things sometimes.)

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

More photographs by Evelyn Dragan, whose work I first fell in love with around the time of newsletter No.137.

I particularly like the lone, thoughtful-looking slice of cake.

“Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.”

— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

The end.