Content Nausea No. 41: Light Up Gold I/II
Light up gold was the color of something I was looking for
Welcome to the 41st edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 40 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog.
For the past few years, an item that has hovered midway on my list of New Year’s resolutions is “write more letters.” It’s something I have wanted to do for a while. One of my favorite writers of another newsletter, Will Leitch, leaves a P.O. Box address at the bottom of every issue and invites people to write. I like the idea, and whenever I reorganize my desk, I come across a stack of postcards that I’m not sure what to do with. I would like to mail all of them at some point, especially since I have graduated beyond hanging them on my walls.
But I never get around to it.
In last week’s Content Nausea, I highlighted a piece in Literary Hub by Lauren Markham on letter writing. The essay was framed around the U.S. Postal Service, which we’re hearing about more and more these days. But Markham cites a couple lines from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke in her writing, and it stuck with me.
“You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language,” Markham quotes Rilke writing to 19-year-old Franz Xaver Kappus.
I read Letters to a Young Poet this summer, and at the risk of taking too far of a leap, much of it felt relevant to the coronavirus pandemic, including Rilke’s musings on solitude, loneliness and sadness. Currently, I’m reading a book on monasticism, and there are some overarching themes, mainly how to be alone in a modern world and what it actually means when finds that solitude.
I don’t have any grand conclusions to share, but like it did when I used this newsletter construction before (and intend to use it again), it felt like a positive exercise to type up these passages again and let the words sink in through a different medium. And I wanted to share them. So here they are.
Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign and a testimony to it.
…
Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Do not write love-poems; avoid at first those forms that are too facile and commonplace: they are the most difficult, for it takes a great, full matured power to give something of your own where good and even excellent traditions come to mind in quantity. Therefore save yourself from these general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires. passing throughs and the belief in some sort of beauty. [18-19]
… for at the bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed. [23-24]
There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the feat that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as through eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything! [30]
You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be ale to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it—but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing. [34-35]
I know, your profession is hard and full of contradictions of yourself, and I foresaw your complaint and knew that it would come. Now that it has come, I cannot comfort you, I can only advise you to consider whether all professions are not like that, full of demands, full enmity against the individual, saturated as it were with the hatred of those who have found themselves mute and sullen in a humdrum duty. The situation in which you now have to live is no more heavily laden with conventions, prejudices and mistakes than all the other situations, and if there are some that feign a greater freedom, still there is non that is in itself broad and spacious and in contact with the big things of which real living consists. Only the individual who is solitary is like a thing placed under profound laws, and when he goes out into the morning that is just the beginning, or looks out into the evening that is full of happening, and if he feels what is going on there, then all status drops from him as from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of sheer life. [47]
We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the the more for us to do it. [53]
I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. for this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more,—is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was.
…
And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside. The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary. [64-65]
The future stands firm, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.
How should it not be difficult for us?
And to speak of solitude again, it becomes always clearer that this is at bottom not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accustomed to rest are taken from us, there is nothing near any more and everything far is infinitely far. [66]
Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life as much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words. [72]
Art too is only a way of living, and, however one lives, one can, unwittingly, prepare oneself for it; in all that is real one is closer to it and more nearly neighbored than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend proximity to some art, in practice belie and assail the existence of all art, as for instance the whole of journalism does and almost all criticism and three-quarters of what is called and wants to be called literature. [Ed. note: lol.] I am glad, in a word, that you have surmounted the danger of falling into this sort of thing and are somewhere in a rough reality being solitary and courageous. May the year that is at hand uphold and strengthen you in that. [78]
This post was as much for me was it was for you. Hope you’re having a good Saturday night, and I hope you have a good week.
If you want to become pen pals, let me know. I have plenty of postcards and plenty of stamps.
Some content I wrote this week
Javon Hargrave wants to hit Ben Roethlisberger.
For the first time this season, fans will watch the Eagles play.
Despite the coronavirus spread in the NFL, the Eagles are confident they’ll finish the season.
After all of it, the Eagles ended the first quarter of the NFL season in first place.
Carson Wentz was ‘gutty’ against the 49ers.
Jordan Mailata delivered when he finally got his chance and did pretty well.
Alex Singleton made a signature play against the 49ers.
Some content I listened to this week
Earlier this week, I updated the 2k20.75 playlist with some favorites from the the first three-quarters of 2020. Still got a lot of work to do:
Started to put together the 102k20 playlist, which I initially wrote as ‘102k10’ because 2010 is forever:
Content Nausea fav Yuno has a gorgeous cover of a gorgeous song, Beach House’s “Zebra” out:
I am having trouble thinking of a band that is more ‘college rock’ than Pinback. I am not sure why I was thinking about that this week:
Matt came through with the Close Lobsters rec:
Revisited this Double Grave album that I did not spend enough time with earlier this year:
Yet again, there were some real Tokyo Police Club vibes this week:
Some content I read this week
If anyone has some F. Scott Fitzgerald novels that are not The Great Gatsby and would like to mail them to me, please reply and I will send you my address (and Venmo you form media mail). This New York Review of Books piece about Fitzgerald was a great read. As someone who is attempting to use this letter as an exercise in nostalgia that could some day be monetized, I enjoy reading about nostalgia!
But Gatsby shows an America suffering less from viral modernity than from a moral cancer that is metastasizing—and which it keeps misdiagnosing. Nostalgia, derived from a Greek term meaning “homesickness,” was long considered a medical form of insanity, one that could prove fatal. That was the meaning Fitzgerald grew up with, but by 1920 nostalgia had begun to convey sentimental yearning for a lost time. Fitzgerald became America’s poet laureate of nostalgia because he understood its perils as well as its allure: nostalgia wants to falsify the past, whereas history tries to clarify it. Gatsby, the emblematic American, is destroyed by nostalgia, his dreams of reclaiming paradise shattered by the “hard malice” of Tom Buchanan’s plutocratic power. Gatsby’s incurable faith in the false promise of renewal—“Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!”—is America’s. Like Gatsby, we want to recover some idea of ourselves that we’ve lost, to return to the past and find there, intact, our own innocence. Gatsby’s “extraordinary gift for hope” is our own—and ensures we keep willfully forgetting that his great aspirations ended dead in the water.
Also, I started reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Wikipedia page and came across this great note:
Who among us?
Sam Anderson of The New York Times went to the NBA bubble and wrote about what he learned:
Another part of me, though, is not embarrassed at all. Sports, at its best, answers a deep human need. We are ravenous for meaning. We want to know that what we do matters, because lord knows there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Play is a bubble inside of which meaning is undisputed. It doesn’t matter that that bubble’s borders are arbitrary — that our games depend on byzantine rules and colorful uniforms and timers and buzzers and whistles. If anything, this makes the illusion more powerful. We have created purpose out of nothing, like gods. Inside the lines, our actions make perfect sense: Some are good and some are bad, and in the end, there is a result. Statistics are metaphysical bedrock. Something happened, and here it is: 20, 23, 7, 8. It all just depends on our collective will to believe.
Drew Magary on imaginary girlfriends for Defector.
At the time, watching it unfold in ungoverned real time, the cameras panned to Lonzo Ball of the Pelicans, who had ambled onto the court with members of the Pelicans staff. They each grabbed a ball off the rack. He stood a few feet from the basket and flicked up a shot, which missed. The assistant rebounded. He was surrounded, on the baseline, by quite a few other people—ball boys, court wipers, and so forth—who suddenly had something to do. Ball flicked up another shot, which bounced in. Then another, and another. The shots gradually became more assured, nothing but net. The camera cut away but the image was indelible: confronted with the strangeness of the situation, he retreated to the familiar gestures of repetition, routine, the consolations of seeing a ball go through the hoop; of letting go of something and then getting it back.
Penny Fractions on live music’s pause during coronavirus.
Real Life on fake crowd noise at baseball games.
An ESPN oral history of the 1995 Mariners & Ken Griffey Jr.’s mad dash to beat the Yankees. There were some good guys to remember in here. Plus, it was a great story.
An in-depth profile of MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, for Marker that takes a look at what philanthropy is in 2020 and how she could change that.
Some other content I saw or thought about this week
Speaking of the Padres, I’m already thinking about getting MLB.tv to watch them and absolutely wreck my sleep schedule next year. Could be fun! They’re another team that fits into my thesis of teams pivoting to retro branding having success soon after. It needs some more work.
I slept weird on my neck/shoulder and got woken up by the pain Monday morning. I fell back asleep and was in that weird light sleep, and I started dreaming again. In the dream, NBC’s Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth were commentating on my sleep, and they said we were seeing more injuries this season because of a lack of preseason and abnormal training camp. Weird.
Thank you for reading the 41st edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
Twice an era comes a knock at my door
Suspended in a window-crashing gaze of a poor
Spark of recognition, it's the thrill that dies first but
I can think of something worse: the curse, because
Light up gold
Was the color of something I
Was looking for
—D.G.