Good morning. We’re in autumn now, well and truly: it’s giving melancholy, it’s giving feeling-wistful-after-watching-Aftersun-at-the-cinema, it’s giving surprise strains of poetry in the sports reports on the morning radio.
People are waxing serious, thinking about how they want to live and make meaning (does two friends separately rereading Viktor Frankl make a trend?) – of conflict, of death, of new life. This week’s reads all point to that, in one way or another. It’s the existential edition.
I hope you’re enjoying your coffee, listening to the rain, maybe trying to like Serge Gainsbourg … and don’t forget to sign up for our morning and afternoon news updates during the week.
1. What would you do with your last days?
“The truth is, you don’t really know how you will react when your mortality comes swinging into view,” Tim Jonze writes. Hit with a chronic, incurable cancer in his 30s, he found himself lying on his bed playing Wordscapes.
“It was as if a giant wrecking ball was repeatedly swinging through me. For brief moments, when the ball was at its highest point, I could achieve a glimpse of normality, maybe even maintain a chat with a friend about whether Liverpool would miss Philippe Coutinho. But then the ball would come careering back through me, walloping me harder each time with the reminder: ‘You’re going to die! You’re actually going to fucking die!’”
Jonze’s existential self-portrait – from the day of diagnosis, to its ripple effects in his family life, to “the point in which the scriptwriters of our personal drama had finally jumped the shark” – is painful, honest and pretty funny. Or per my colleague’s simpler (better) description, a rollercoaster.
With an important tip for the hospital system: “A bit of knowledge can help you become a good advocate for yourself.”
How long will it take to read: 10-and-a-half minutes.
2. Paying attention to fascism
I don’t think anyone could say there’s been a shortage of commentary on Donald Trump’s effect on the contemporary political imagination – and the ways it may or may not breed fascism.
But as opinions swirl around the former president’s indictment, novelist Marilynne Robinson finds something important to say about this “pathology compounded of nostalgia and resentment”.
Notable quote: “There is nothing new about fantasies of peril or heroism. Boredom might be a factor among the fairly prosperous, especially as they enter middle age. Resentment is a stimulant. But there is something strange, even weird, in the climate we are seeing now that evades explanation in conventional terms.”
How long will it take to read: a bit less than three minutes.
(And yes, I still need to read Housekeeping – I know!)
3. Looking for meaning after the Troubles
Joe Biden’s been in Northern Ireland this week, marking 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement that brought some kind of peace after decades of violence. But as Ian Cobain writes, many in the region “say today that the Troubles have not so much been resolved, as frozen”:
“Even the most fundamental questions remain unsettled. Was it a war, or a series of crimes? Was the conflict essentially sectarian – Catholic v Protestant, nationalist against unionist – or was it a struggle between Irish republicans and the British state?
“There is little consensus over the legitimacy of political violence, the responsibility for that violence, or the motives of those involved. People cannot find a shared narrative to recall the past.”
A mounting number of people have been pursuing justice through the courts, causing “significant unease” at Britain’s Ministry of Defence. Cobain follows the case of Liam Holden, arrested at 18 for the 1972 murder of a British soldier – a murder to which he claimed he was forced, under pressure of torture, to confess.
It’s a wrenching story about a battle for answers, and who gets to “draw a line” under history.
How long will it take to read: 11-and-a-quarter minutes.
Further reading: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, about one woman’s murder by the IRA – or if you’re short on time, his extraordinary New Yorker article.
4. Solo motherhood
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in her 30s (me) must be in want of … lots of discussion about children. Do you want them? When? Who with? Why not? What if you “miss out”? But despite the looming saturation of my cultural and conversational horizons with baby chat, it’s refreshing to hear stories about less well-trod paths. Alexandra Collier decided to have a baby alone – not, as she writes, after a breakup or an epiphany, but a series of tiny, incremental moments.
Why it’s good: no amount of decision-making advice ever seems to help when you’re confronted by your own real-life choice. (I had a picture book when I was a kid called Hannah’s Great Decision, about exactly this.) But reading about the winding, entirely personal processes behind other people’s big calls is unexpectedly calming – a reminder that at the end of the day, it’s fine to do things for your own reasons. And you don’t even have to know what those are.
How long will it take to read: less than two minutes.
5. My colleague’s ‘self-help guru of choice’
Canada’s “cerebral rock star” Gabor Maté hit the spotlight last month when he diagnosed Prince Harry with ADHD. In this lovely interview with Ellie Violet Bramley, the physician and author talks about trauma, addiction, the mind-body connection (so, nothing too major) – and why his politics are irrevocably linked to his work on the psyche.
“My calling is that people are free in every realm,” he says, “so in the political realm, hence my stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict, but also in the personal realm, so that we’re not pulled like puppets on a string by our own personal dynamics, by trauma.”
Consider: Maté tells Bramley that trauma, from the Greek for “wound”, “is not what happens to you; it is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you … It is not the blow on the head, but the concussion I get.” Something to think about.
Try: according to a friend at the office, Maté’s practice of compassionate inquiry journalling is “legitimately very helpful”.
How long will it take to read: five minutes.
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