The things we love become our lens for how we see
Hello, friends!
I'm writing this on Monday, President's Day; it's been a long weekend, and while I've spent most of it on necessary work (preparing taxes, argh) I've also spent some of it happily working on a book, taking notes, and just watching movies with my family.
On Friday night we watched Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which everyone enjoyed. I am not much of a Ghostbusters fan, if I'm honest, but I thought this latest movie was fun, and had a bigger heart than I anticipated. (Particularly through my grumpy lens of Stop making movies that pander to my childhood self! Since I didn't grow up loving these movies, that grumpy Jason stayed on the shelf.)
This movie led us down a rabbit hole. On Saturday, while I scanned tax forms and did math, Felicia and Squish watched the original Ghostbusters movie. I caught the tail end. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed Bill Murray. So Sunday we rewatched Groundhog Day. Every time I watch this movie, it's a little different. This time around, I'm a little more skeeved-out by the effort Phil puts into perfecting his seduction of Rita. It's pretty icky, in fact. But it's a great marker for how the character grows: He was a skeevy dude because he didn't give a shit about other people. He only cared about his own wants. So when, by the end of the movie, he's come to terms with his inescapable fate and shifted to making himself a better person, the transformation feels earned. For such a short movie (barely more than 90 minutes) it manages to pack quite a lot of the human experience in there. (Austin Kleon thinks Groundhog Day is a perfect movie for anyone who wants to be an artist.) Only when Phil transforms himself does he transform his situation. He turns the ordinary present into an extraordinary future; he stays on the bus.
I've seen Groundhog Day a dozen times, I guess. Maybe more than that. That it changes a little for me on every rewatch shouldn't surprise me.
Recently I finished reading Last Things, by Jenny Offill; while prowling through notes I've saved over the years, looking for a particular Virginia Woolf quote, I found that Offill's own piece in the New Yorker was the source. In this piece, Offill writes about returning to a book that she loves—Mrs. Dalloway—and discovering new things each time:
Each time, I have found shocks of recognition on the page, but they are always new ones, never the ones I was remembering. Instead, some forgotten facet of the story comes to light, and the feeling is always that of having blurred past something that was right in front of me.
Offill found, while writing about the book, that Virginia Woolf herself felt similarly about re-reading a book:
At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.
In her blog A Working Library, Mandy Brown wrote that returning to a beloved book turns it into a lens through which you see the whole world:
Reread a book enough times, or often enough—keep it at hand so you can flip to dog-eared pages and marked up passages here and there—and it will eventually root itself in your mind. It becomes both a reference point and a connector, a means of gathering your knowledge and experience, drawing it all together. It becomes the material through which you engage with the world.
Austin Kleon watched a lecture by the cartoonist Paul Karasik several years ago, and jotted down this thing that Karasik said:
Here’s the only thing you need to remember from this talk: ‘Study something you love to death’—I mean ‘depth’! [laughter] ‘Study something you love in depth.’ I just gave you an hour, so tonight give me 45 minutes. Spend 45 minutes tonight studying something you love. Watch the first five minutes of your favorite movie 7 times. You will notice new things.
Kleon later pitched this notion to Kevin Smokler, who makes an effort to listen to his favorite musicians' entire discography, start to finish, in order to learn new things. Smoker wrote a long piece about "listening through", and in it described his process:
I will usually listen to one album every two or three days in the afternoons during the scutt-and-boring-tasks portion of the workday. I’ll jot initial notes after the first listen then 2-3 days later revisit those notes and be rigorously honest if I was being unfair, impatient, etc. If I was doing any of those things, I listen again. If not, I scrawl a quick review to a group of friends with two goals in mind: 1. To have it be fun to read even if whomever is reading it doesn’t like the band/hasn’t heard of them. 2. To be clear in such a way that whomever is reading can hear the music even if they haven’t heard it before. My opinion is a distant third priority.
In my life, there have been a number of things I've experienced again and again. If this sort of thing is genetic, then it probably comes from my father, who has for all my life re-read books or re-watched movies, claiming all the while to have forgotten everything about them so that he can enjoy them for the first time. For much of my late teens and twenties, I re-read The Stand annually. I've read The Martian Chronicles twenty times, easy. Carl Sagan's novel Contact, and the film made from it, have become anchors for the way I see the world, as Mandy Brown suggested.
There's a particular chapter in Contact, in fact, that I thought of immediately when reading Virginia Woolf's sentiment about Hamlet. Chapter 10 of Contact, titled Precession of the Equinoxes, is a long, patient look at a discussion—often a disagreement—between three very different people: Eleanor Arroway, a scientist who has discovered a radio message from beyond our solar system; Palmer Joss, a nondenominational, agreeable spiritual leader; and Billy Jo Rankin, an evangelical Christian minister. The three meet at a Biblical research institute in California to make nice and hammer out their differences. Arroway gives the two religious figures a lesson in the scientific method; Rankin tries to trap Arroway with recitation of Bible verses and arguments about prophecies; Joss deftly demonstrates the relationships between both faith and science, frustrating the other two.
In my twenties, while sorting out my own feelings about faith and god, this chapter helped me to put into context my swirling, scattered thoughts. At one point, Arroway the scientist refers to herself as a Christian, and the others are interested to know what she means by that:
"I'm a Christian in these sense that I find Jesus Christ to be an admirable historical figure. I think the Sermon on the Mount is one of the greatest ethical statements and one of the best speeches in history. I think that 'Love your enemy' might even be the long-shot solution to the problem of nuclear war. I wish he was alive today. It would benefit everybody on the planet. But I think Jesus was only a man. A great man, a brave man, a man with insight into unpopular truths. But I don't think he was God or the son of God or the grandnephew of God."
Re-reading this chapter now, I'm struck by how fantastical it seems. Three people with such fundamental differences, having a productive and even rational discussion, seems so impossible in today's climate. Rankin, clearly meant to be the extremist in this chapter, is articulate with his point of view:
"Y'see, you scientists are too skeptical. ... You question everything, or try to. You never heard about 'Leave well enough alone,' or 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' You always want to check out if a thing is what you call 'true.' And 'true' means only empirical, sense data, things you can see and touch. There's no room for inspiration or revelation in your world. Right from the beginning you rule out of court almost everything religion is about. I mistrust the scientists because the scientists mistrust everything."
When Arroway replies, offering a lesson on the merits of skepticism and even admitting the human failures of scientists, she prefaces her whole speech by saying:
"I want you to understand that I'm not attacking anybody's belief system. As far as I'm concerned, you're entitled to any doctrine you like, even if it's demonstrably wrong. And many of the things you're saying, and that the Reverend Joss has said ... can't be dismissed instantly. It takes a little work. But let me try to explain why I think they're improbable."
Gosh, if only this was how people disagreed today, right? This book, which I genuinely love, feels more like science fantasy than science fiction simply because the right now of our world can't fathom rational discourse. Contact feels very different to me at forty-three than it did at twenty or thirty.
Mad Men is another example of something I've experienced multiple times. When the show debuted in 2007, I was twenty-eight years old and working as a creative director in a modern version of Sterling Cooper, the fictional advertising agency in the show. I remember sharing this scene with our creative department as an example of the kind of pitchwork we ought to strive for.
Now, after many rewatches, what I connect with in that scene is different. In that scene, Don Draper describes technology as "a glittering lure," and that's maybe the best way to describe the pitch that Draper gives: It's designed to activate the emotions of everyone in the room. And yet what stands out to me about the presentation, about the parade of family photos that Draper shares, is that they're all as much a fantasy as the idea that Don Draper is someone to admire. In those photos, Don Draper plays with his children, dances with his wife, is fully present with his family in a way the show never gives us. I see a man who uses his family for his own purposes, like an accessory, because he is not the man in the photos. He is incapable of being that man.
In Mad Men: Carousel, critic Matt Zoller Seitz writes about this scene:
There's Don doting on Sally. There's Betty and Don on their wedding day. Smiles and more smiles.
Don smiles at the images. He loves the images. Of course he does. He's in control of the presentation.
He controls how everyone in the room perceives them.
And he's using them to sell a product.
I wonder what Contact's tenth chapter, or this episode of Mad Men, will feel like if I return to them at fifty-five, at seventy. What will they say to me then?
In the final act of Groundhog Day, Phil has made peace with his predicament. As Oliver Burkeman wrote in his final column for The Guardian:
The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. As the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics understood, much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control – the seasoned worriers among us, anyway – is the future. We want to know, from our vantage point in the present, that things will be OK later on. But we never can. (This is why it’s wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain; it’s just that we’re currently very aware of it.)
It’s freeing to grasp that no amount of fretting will ever alter this truth. It’s still useful to make plans. But do that with the awareness that a plan is only ever a present-moment statement of intent, not a lasso thrown around the future to bring it under control. The spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti said his secret was simple: “I don’t mind what happens.” That needn’t mean not trying to make life better, for yourself or others. It just means not living each day anxiously braced to see if things work out as you hoped.
What pieces of art do you experience again and again? How have they changed as you've changed?
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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