Tuesday night dinner

Seeking pure presence

“Evening” by Isabel Codrington (Creative Commons image via Manchester Art Gallery)

There’s no big essay this week, as I’m working through some bigger writing projects and nursing a serious case of election dread. To all my non-American readers, I am truly sorry we subject the entire world to this circus of horrors every four years. 

However, I had amassed a healthy list of (election-free) links and recommendations that I didn’t want to go to waste. I also wanted to share something that has been helpful at counteracting the seemingly awful and unrelenting tenor of life at the moment: film scores. 

The writer

Lauren Bravo

had a great piece in her Substack about why so many millennials stopped listening to music, and I felt thoroughly called out. If it weren’t for my husband, Dan, I might never listen to music in my day to day life. I would just mainline New York Times podcasts like my life depends on it. Which is really rather sad. 

Dan has a knack for finding songs that stir big feelings. He tells me that sad songs are one of the ways he’s able to an access his harder-to reach feelings. (Reader, that kind of emotional awareness is why I married him.) One night at dinnertime during late summer, he put on the score from the Pixar film Luca, which, if you haven’t seen, is totally underrated. Watching it feels like going on a 90 minute Italian holiday, and my son now thinks it’s hysterical when I say “Santa Margarita” in an Italian accent. 

As my son shovelled baked beans in a manner that would require extensive cleanup later, he looked up and said “Luca!” when he recognized the music. My heart caught in my throat. What otherwise would have been a totally uninspiring (and slightly aggravating) Tuesday night dinner suddenly felt transcendent and stirring, in the way all the best film scores make you feel.

It was one of those rare yet coveted moments, the kind people travel to yoga retreats and climb mountains to get: It felt totally effortless to just be here. Sitting at this shitty second-hand kitchen table, eating Tesco fish cakes, knowing that this precise moment in time — this version of my son and my imperfect yet fortunate life — will very soon be a memory I yearn for. I wanted to bottle it up.

There’s a note of melancholy that sits underneath even the most romantic or playful film scores, one that seems to say: “Pay attention! Or you might miss this fundamental truth of human existence.” So I asked Dan to make an entire playlist dedicated to this kind of Tuesday night dinner presence. (Fun fact, in the early days of Substack, we’re talking 2018, Dan had a popular newsletter called Mixtape doing just this. You can check out the archives here.) The songs are loosely based on the handful films that our child watches in repetitive yet chaotic 30 minute chunks: Big Hero Six, Luca, How to Train Your Dragon, Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse. We also just added Totoro to the rotation, which I’m really hoping sticks. 

It’s certainly not much. But a few moments of pure, effortless presence during a mundane Tuesday night dinner is kind of a miracle these days, don’t you think? 

Things I enjoyed reading

• “People are checking out of life in their 20s and 30s without reaching any profound conclusions about the point of it all.” A big, sweeping essay that really delivers. [Catherine Shannon]

• The surge in shoplifting has many causes, but it’s ultimately part of a “larger collapse of the social forces that once restrained wayward behavior.” [The Atlantic]

• Seriously, stop buying kids toys. This post totally validated my own observations of how my kid plays and interacts with the world. [Your House Machine]

• In the last decade, many millennials internalized the idea that individual action and lifestyle tweaks are meaningless; we should really focus our efforts on creating systemic change, right? But has “distancing ourselves from charity and service made the world a better place?” A really thoughtful piece that mirrors shifts in my own thinking in recent years. [Vox]

• “Time and time again I keep arriving at the same conclusion, one of the most potent frameworks we can adopt to reinforce climate-positive behavior is becoming a person of place.” I recently discovered

  Spencer R. Scott
  ’s writing and it feels like such a balm. [As If We Were Staying] 

Things I enjoyed listening to

• A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art. Listening to this is a creative kick in the pants. [Search Engine]

• I’ve been listening in admiration as Ta-Nehisi Coates has done the media rounds for his new book, The Message. It’s reminded me of the power of storytelling itself: the way a new framing or perspective can recast something that’s been trod over a million times already. As Coates said in this bizarre and controversial CBS Mornings interview: “our politics are shaped largely by writing and the stories we tell.” Two interviews worth listening to:

  • Coates on Fresh Air - Come for the interesting conversation about the blind spots of journalism, stay for when Coates starts reciting Shakespeare.

  • In conversation with Ezra Klein - In which Coates answers many of the criticisms of his book. It’s quite rare to hear someone speak with such moral clarity and conviction these days, and do so with such grace.

More village stuff

For those of you who enjoyed my post in September, How to Build a Village, I was invited on the Sustainable Minimalists podcast (which is also a Substack) to talk about it.

Relatedly, I discovered

The Auntie Bulletin

this month, which addresses this exact problem from the perspective of an Auntie, not a parent:

“Overwhelmed parents need more kin – more community to help care for their kids and give them breaks and have their backs. Lonely adults need more kin, too – more community to love and be loved by, and to provide ongoing daily connection and meaning in their lives. We need to figure out ways for the overwhelmed parents and the lonely people to find each other, get to know each other, and start to treat each other a bit like family.”

Stay tuned for more from me on this topic…

Word soup

“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we could treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely love more than life itself. I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do this.” —David Foster Wallace

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