The disorienting feeling of reading one’s own thoughts articulated by a stranger
Falling back in love with literature
Dear Friends,
I was on magic mushrooms a few months ago with a couple of friends and we were laughing hysterically. Howling. Tears streaming down our cheeks. We looked away as we cried with laughter because if we looked at each other, we would have never stopped laughing.
Weeks later, one of the friends recalled the episode and said, “I remember thinking that I must’ve looked hideous while I was laughing so hard — like my entire face was convulsing.”
I smile even as I write this because I felt exactly the same way. I am usually in control of my expressions and gestures, or at least so it feels. But at that moment, my body was out of my control; I was just along for the ride.
Milan Kundera passed away in July. For someone of my “elder millennial” generation born around 1980, Kundera was kinda like Dave Matthews — everyone loved him in high school and college and then all of a sudden pretended not to. I still love both. Or do I? I barely listen to DMB, and I hadn’t read anything by Kundera since I was in my 20s (when I read everything he wrote) — so I decided to re-read Immortality over the past few weeks.
This is embarrassing to admit, but there were a few years in my early 20s when I was very attached to the opinion that Immortality was a better novel than The Unbearable Lightness of Being.1 I must have had my justifications at the time, though I can’t remember what they were now. (Talk about unbearable!)
Whatever justifications I gave, I’m sure that the truth of the matter is that a college girlfriend introduced me to Kundera, and Immortality was the first book she gave me. Having gone to high school in a coastal town with surfer bros huddled around kegs, this was the first time that I experienced the disorienting feeling of reading one’s own thoughts and intuitions poetically articulated by a stranger.
What do I mean by that? I’ll describe a classic Kundera passage from Immortality, which I just finished re-reading last night. One of his characters, Rubens, is walking through an art museum and thinking about how none of the subjects in the paintings are smiling. Then he recalls a book of photographs of John F. Kennedy, who was smiling in every photo. Here’s an excerpt:
Rubens stood in front of Michelangelo’s David and tried to imagine that marble face laughing like Kennedy. David, that paradigm of male beauty, suddenly looked like an imbecile! Since then, he had often tried in his imagination to retouch figures in famous paintings to give them a laughing mouth; it was an interesting experiment: the grimace of laughter could ruin every painting! Imagine Mona Lisa as her barely perceptible smile turns into a laugh that reveals her teeth and gums!
And a few pages later:
But how can we explain why great painters ruled laughter out of the realm of beauty? Rubens tells himself: undoubtedly, a face is beautiful because it reveals the presence of thought, whereas at the moment of laughter, man does not think. But is that really true? Laughter is a convulsion of the face, and a convulsed person does not rule himself, he is ruled by something that is neither will nor reason. And that is why the classical sculptor did not express laughter. A human being who does not rule himself (a human being beyond reason, beyond will) cannot be considered beautiful.
And finally:
Rubens tells himself: laughter is the most democratic of all the facial expressions: we differ from one another by our immovable features, but in convulsion we are all the same. A bust of a laughing Julius Caesar is unthinkable. But American presidents depart for eternity concealed behind the democratic convulsion of laughter.
Those are precisely the kinds of thoughts that invade my mind on the daily: a little esoteric, mischievous, and unrelentingly philosophical.
Indeed, why did no one smile in paintings or photographs before WWII? Why did millennials learn how to pose just so? How did they develop “Instagram Face?” And why does Gen Z put so much effort into appearing effortless in their photos? What does it say about our psychology, society, technology, and politics?
Growing up, I made the mistake of sharing those meandering thoughts and reflections with others in casual conversation until I learned not to. I made the fundamental mistake of assuming that everyone’s mind worked just like mine.
And then I discovered Milan Kundera, whose novels made me feel less strange and alone. I guess you could say that I felt “seen.” Kundera was just the beginning. I experienced the same sensation — what Oliver Sacks erotically called “the special intercourse of writers and readers” — when I read Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Jonathan Franzen, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and many others.
Right now, I’m reading What’s Our Problem by Tim Urban and Motherhood by Sheila Heti, and I feel intimately close to both, though they are so different. Over the past 15 years, I sacrificed literature for professional productivity. I feel blessed that the intimacy and enjoyment of literature are back in my life.
A couple of weeks ago, I shared my excitement for the Portola Music Festival. Sooo much fun! I was reminded that it’s fundamentally different to see live music in community than to hear it isolated in headphones.2
put up some great photos:
The three highlights for me were Little Simz, Bonobo, and Masego. You’ve probably heard Masego’s song Tadow, but he’s a talented vocalist and saxophonist through and through. (He posted an own endearing biography on Spotify.)
20 days until Iris and I start our road trip to our new home in Oaxaca.
The last time we drove down from California to Mexico was in 2010. Iris and I had just started dating a few months earlier, and we drove down through the infinite cacti of Baja, took a ferry to Los Mochis, and continued on to Mexico City, where I moved in temporarily with
.
Plans by Death Cab for Cutie was one of the albums on my iPod that Iris and I listened to over and over again on that road trip.
Seven years earlier, in 2003, I first drove down to Monterrey, Mexico from San Diego. I had just finished college, purchased my first iPod, and loaded it up with my favorite album of the year, The Postal Service.
And so it feels fitting to see both Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service tomorrow night in Berkeley for their 25th and 20th anniversaries respectively before our big move to Oaxaca.
Wherever you are this week, I hope you’re surrounded by good music, good books, and good vibes,
David
In a similarly embarrassing vein, it felt important to share my opinion that Modest Mouse’s Building Nothing Out of Something was superior to Good News for People Who Love Bad News. Or that Kerouac’s Big Sur was better than On The Road. Like, by naming these preferences, I was sharing something deep about my inner essence. As if anybody cares. 🙈 As Rob Fleming, the narrator of High Fidelity eventually learns, “It’s not what you like but what you are like that’s important.”
By comparison, I saw Ezra Klein give a lecture at Cal last week and thought, maybe some folks are better experienced as podcasters.