Life is a history in the making and - that’s hard to remember, sometimes.

There’s too much news. I hate the firehose. I need the hydrant, I respect the role the hose plays, but I just like when I feel like I have some control over turning it on and off so it doesn’t get my whole life so wet.

It’s not like I’m the first person to opine this. Which is humbling. For multiple reasons.

The future may or may not look back on any of this as significant or stupid. Now might be regrettable, forgettable, enviable… and it’s almost so abstract you just want to focus on getting back to life. 

But it’s also not so abstract that it’s not worth thinking about everything we know, everything that came before, and staying aware of how it’s being presented to us. 

I ran into two familiar George Santayana books in an unlikely place. Considering most people probably aren’t reading My Heart is a Chainsaw next to historical fiction (Absalom, Absalom), science fiction (We are Legion), and whatever category Haruki Murakami is (Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World) I figure I should break down my pattern matching / circuit-shorting results. 

Mr. Holmes, the history teacher in the aforementioned horror novel with the global perspective and encouraging appreciation for the main character’s slasher genre obsession gifts us the following two quotes. Before I share them, let me also take a second to call out that Stephen Graham Jones did a beautiful thing with the Holmes character, because it nests main character Jade’s obsession with the slasher genre sit on next to a foundation a lesser author would have ignored. I deeply respect this level of fractal pattern hat-tipping.

On to the quotes, which I re-sourced out of curiosity:

I know “now” is weird. I know “now” always feels weird.

I’ve asked my parents, and grandparents. I’ve worked with lots of older, smarter people. And yes, you’re thinking it just like I am as I’m writing this, I’ve encountered lots of anti-examples here too, but that’s what further crystallizes the point.

You need contrast to see the fineness of the points. It doesn’t mean the points are truths, but it does mean they’re points you can see. Points you can feel. Your gut fills in the rest, and there’s a time and a place for your gut to be the tool you want to use.

If progress is a genuine goal, you have to retain a sense of testable truths. This gets past the gut and into your head. You’ll want this too, and again, contrast is the only way to see the points.

Not the church of science, but the philosophy of science. 

And when it comes to politics, policies, and the generally less scientific - albeit often sadly predictable - human behaviors, having a forgiving sense of skepticism and humor about this whole endeavor helps.

We can only be in the now.

That’s all I know. That I don’t know nothing’. That I feel something and thing some other things and I’m doing my best to be here and now because it will never be exactly like this ever again.

Funny enough, in the midst of all these books, my subconscious told me it was time to revisit Macbeth, too. Faulkner clearly had a moment like this, which is probably why I wanted this book in the mix. Wild to think about how that rhymes, and it makes for a fitting enough place to end, so let’s hand it to ol’ Billy to close this loop.

ps. if you want a systematic example of how to build contrast into your reading life, I wrote a set of rules for making vacation booklists