Traditions and Struggles

Self-seeking for the sick and tired. Poetry is Not a Luxury. Quotes and songs.

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Clear eyes, full hearts, etc. — AJD

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I had around four different essay ideas for today, so instead of picking one direction, I’m taking the coward’s way out and doing a bullet-point rundown so I can give my brain a little space to recharge.

• Just got home from five days in Palm Springs with my family and my wife’s sister and mother. We’ve spent more than half a dozen Thanksgivings in Palm Springs in the ten-ish years Julieanne and I have been together. This year in particular made me realize how wonderful a tradition it is to be there, mainly with the same people, year in year out, because it feels like a tradition that grew entirely out of my new family, my new life. Overwhelmed by the significance of it —a gift of sobriety, if you will—I expressed my gratitude for it out loud at the turkey dinner ceremony in the hopes that we would continue to spend it in Palm Springs even though I hear there are rumblings of moving it somewhere else next year. Before sobriety, Thanksgiving was the holiday I began to treat not as a family holiday, but one where I was contemptuously away from it, oftentimes spending it far out of state or overseas to forget it even existed. But now—I’m overly sentimental, and I want every moment in Palm Springs to be photographed and blown up the size of a movie poster to hang in our home.

• On PS break, I started picking through Zadie Smith’s most recent book of essays. I loved this one, taken from a speech she gave at Kenyon College about moral confidence, fascism, and Flannery O’Connor. Still, mostly I loved the story because of this quote that she pulled from an O’Connor story: “You have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.” That’s precisely the quote I’d highlight and put in this roundup anyway, so thanks to Zadie Smith for the legwork.

• It should be noted that it’d be dishonest to call myself a Zadie Smith fan, since I have never read any of her novels. Still, I admire the brains of people who have enjoyed her books, or even of those who find her pompous but cannot deny her otherworldly writing talent. Mostly, though, I believe I’m too dumb to truly be a fan of Zadie Smith, in the same way I lack the reading comprehension and ADHD drugs necessary to appreciate George Saunders.

• But I read her last essay collection—the dreamy, doom-weary one she pumped out during Covid lockdown, called Intimations —and was excited to have enjoyed it as much as I did, thinking I had finally attained a slight uptick in intelligence that had eluded me for most of my life. Especially the story “A Character in a Wheelchair in the Vestibule,” which included this passage that put into writing some of the awful thoughts I’d carried with me my entire life. “Ever since I was a child, my only thought or insight into apocalypse, disaster, or war has been that I myself have no ‘survival instinct,’ nor any strong desire to survive, especially if what lies on the other side of survival is just me. A book like The Road is as incomprehensible to me as a Norse myth cycle in the original language. Suicide would hold out its quiet hand to me on the first day–the first hour. And not the courageous suicide of self-slaughter, but simply the passive death that occurs if you stay under the bed as they march up the stairs, or lie in the cornfield as the plane fitted with machine guns heads your way.”

• Actually, let me correct the record and state that I am trying to be self-critical and have to stop calling myself “dumb” less often. And that concludes the “Zadie Smith Report” section of this newsletter.