Fascination [🇩🇨]
This week: Edith Eger, fascination and fungi, plans, podcasts and Portugal...
Happy Friday!
And a warm welcome to everyone, especially if you’re new here. I hope you’ve been finding time to greet neighbours, share the sunshine and ogle the moon.
Above: a fossilised tree, 140 million years old. Over the past six years, I must have walked past this object hundreds of times; I only noticed its existence last week.
Fascinating details
It may feel like our days are shrinking, that our expansive social and working lives are being stolen away from us.
The reality is that our lives are now being lived in the details, and it is in the details, as any artist or scientist knows, that we find our richest rewards.
~
In Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychologist Viktor Frankl likens human suffering to gas spreading through a chamber:
[M]an’s suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.
The same metaphor, I would argue, could apply to almost any aspect of human experience, including curiosity, fascination and excitement.
But whereas suffering expands to our limits without much effort on our part, I think most of us have to work a little harder for these positive emotions to fill our chamber.
We might feel, since lockdown, that we’ve lost the richness of experience that comes from travelling up to London for the day, cycling into the country on a weekend, or hiking the Peak District for a week.
Some of us might even pang for the forbidden pleasures of formless office meetings, or fondly remember the frustration of traffic jams that held us up, once upon a time, when we had somewhere to go.
It might feel like we’ve lost something to our days and that the nights, though sleepless, can’t come soon enough.
But those lost experiences could only ever have swollen to fill a finite chamber, the finite chamber that is our destined interval of consciousness on earth.
The experiences that Newtonian physics demands must inevitably replace those that are ‘lost’ will, if we only get out of the way of ourselves, swell to fill an identical space in our soul.
The only thing we need is a little fascination for the details.
~
Rather than the broad strokes of outlandish living, rather than the transcontinental love affairs, the nights out on the dancefloor, the boozy Sunday roasts with friends and family, we choose to exist for now on a smaller scale, in among the overlooked details of our lives.
Be like the mycologist, who could happily spend a dozen lifetimes exploring the thousands of fungi that inhabit a handful of soil.
From where I stand at my desk, I can see sun-facing rooftops covered in bright yellow lichen — Xanthoria parietina (‘grows on walls’).
This week, in among the details, buried in books and podcasts and open access science papers, I learnt that lichen is not one organism, but two.
Most lichens are a mutualist symbiosis between a fungus and an alga, a collaboration that dates back hundreds of millions of years.
Long before humans discovered agriculture, fungi learned to farm algae for the energy they generate from photosynthesis.
(Side note: it’s not just agriculture we have in common; fungi are more closely related genetically to humans than they are to the algae they have domesticated — or indeed to any other plant species.)
I also learnt that lichens cover eight percent of the earth’s surface — more than is covered by tropical rainforest.
Without lichens, there might be no life on earth. They mine minerals from sheer rock and form the first soils in otherwise barren ecosystems. Lichen has been found inside lumps of granite.
Lichens have given us antibiotics, Harris tweed and, as black stone flower, garam masala.
I don’t suppose that I’ll look at that rooftop in quite the same way again. Will you?
~
All about us are the tools of enquiry — our senses, our curiosity and vast repositories of knowledge waiting to be dusted off and discovered. (I’m talking about the Internet.)
Has anyone else noticed how quiet the world is now? How ripe for observation?
That photograph at the top of the page, of the 140 million year old fossilised tree: I would never have noticed that staggering lump of palaeontology if it weren’t for the ‘boredom’ of lockdown.
There is an openness to the world right now. In our long days, we have time to notice the things that were once drowned out by the clamour of ‘business as usual’.
Rather than asking, ‘What’s on Netflix?’, we find ourselves asking instead, ‘How does the haze form, that makes this sunset so beautiful?’
Like the lichen on the rooftops opposite, everywhere we look there are questions that could seed many lifetimes of fascination, with each new discovery opening up new tunnels of exploration like the hyphae that forage and fracture to create the mycelium network that breaks up and becomes the soil beneath our feet.
Fascination is built from the combination of curiosity and imagination; given those ingredients, it is boundless. If you’re not sure, check the ingredients list on your garam masala.
~
I’m currently reading Edith Eger’s book The Choice. Like Viktor Frankl, Eger also survived the Holocaust. Like Frankl, Eger also moved to the US, also became a psychologist and also wrote a fascinating book about her experiences.
In April 1944, crammed into a cattle carriage with a hundred other Jews, destined for the gas chambers and smoke stacks of Auschwitz, Eger’s mother told her:
“Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.”
These words sustained Eger during the year of captivity and abuse that almost killed her a dozen times over.
Our self-isolation is nothing remotely like what Eger and Frankl experienced during the Second World War, but Eger’s mother’s message holds true: it’s time to fill our minds.
~
You could do a lot worse over the next few weeks than to fill your mind with either The Choice or Man’s Search for Meaning.
If you want a companion for the latter — or if you fancy a shortcut, then shuffle on over to my website, where I have picked out my favourite passages from Frankl’s book and split them over 28 days of remarkable reading.
Bafflingly, there is no Wikipedia entry for Edith Eger. An isolation activity for someone you know?
Can’t even…
These three things have helped me understand the past week.
1/ Making a plan…s
For most of my life, if I’ve had a plan at all, then one, hastily sketched in the back of my mind, has sufficed.
But the travel-based nature of my grand plan for the summer, colliding with the anti-travel nature of this global pandemic, means that for the first time in my life I’ve enjoyed pulling together multiple possibilities for the second half of the year.
What plans could I concoct for a scenario where, by July…
… everything’s ‘back to normal’?
… things aren’t quite normal, but I can still travel abroad?
… I can still travel in the UK, but not abroad?
… I can move around, but only in the local area?
… we’re still in parched isolation?
It’s nice to know that, whatever happens, there are still good options on the table.
2/ Neighbours
They’re closer than family and friends right now and I’ve been enjoying sharing the same worn out paths and patches of sundown with half-familiar faces.
3/ Podcasts
Living alone, it’s been nice to hear some talky-talky that doesn’t come from inside my own head.
Arts & Ideas episode on fungi, with Merlin Sheldrake among others (45m)
Any episode from Quickly Kevin, the 90s football nostalgia podcast (30m +)
Below the Line episode on how to monetise creativity with Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia (1h45)
And it’d be almost criminal of me to leave out Foiled. Not sure where to start? May I suggest Sir Derek Jacobi? (28m)
Full marks to…
1/ The moon and sun
Hasn’t the moon been spectacular, keeping us company on the bright nights? One of my favourite sights this week was the spectral gibbous moon rising against a cobalt sky.
The sun too has played its part, especially with the spring haze that gives soft focus to the horizon and draws the song of the birds closer. It’s like listening with headphones on.
2/ Portugal
In response to the coronavirus, Portugal has given refugees and asylum seekers full citizenship rights.
Unfortunately, this liberation will last only until June 30, so rather than full marks perhaps it’s more like a B-. But still: this move shows how easily human lives can be loosed from their imaginary chains, with the merest stroke of a pen.
3/ Everyone who’s found their way up onto a rooftop
Give us a wave!
Your neck of the woods?
It seems unlikely that our paths will cross in the near future, so I might have to change the name of this section.
Nevertheless, I do feel like I have been exploring the ‘neck of the woods’ — climbing up and into probably a dozen trees in the little copse of pine and holm oak not far from the flat.
On Wednesday, I coached a young boy on how to climb my favourite: a tricky ascent whose reward is an arboreal bench a socially distancing three metres above the still-busy coast path.
If you’ve been enjoying these newsletters, then please do the clicky-sharey thing with friends. It’s tremendously rewarding to see new people join and hopefully enjoy the words I cobble together so fastidiously every week.
Thank you and much love,
dc
CREDITS
David Charles wrote this newsletter. He publishes another newsletter about reading called Books Make Books. David is co-writer of BBC Radio Wales sitcom Foiled, and writes for The Bike Project, Forests News, Global Landscape Forum, Elevate and Thighs of Steel. He also edits books about adventure, activism and more. Reply to this email, or delve into the archive on davidcharles.info. Thank you for reading!
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