The Pleasure Principle
An essential reading list & Deb Olin Unferth on shifting your thinking
Early Monday morning, I interrupted my dad during his daily ritual at the public library, where he goes each morning to read and write, and asked him for his essential reading list.
I explained that you, dear readers, had asked (demanded!) that Papa Hédi assign us all some summer reading.
The request came after my newsletter a few weeks ago, where I wrote about the summer reading lists my father assigned me growing up—the books that shaped not only my imagination, but also, in many ways, the course of my life. But I was also thinking about this week’s guest essay, “Shifting My Thinking,” by the novelist Deb Olin Unferth, which explores how the ideas we encounter—in books, podcasts, conversations, and art—change how we see the world.
With absolutely no preparation, Papa Hédi launched into a delicious, rambling, associative list of books and writers, leaping between centuries and continents, only stopping once—when a stern but kind librarian chastised him for talking on the phone.
If only she knew the good Hédi was doing for the literary citizens of this newsletter!
The conversation continued in the corridor, branching and blooming into anecdotes and memories. There was a story about Paul Bowles—how my father met and interviewed him in Tangier. My dad had run out to buy fresh batteries for his tape recorder and, when presented with the choice of American or Moroccan batteries, he paused for a moment. In Morocco, buy Moroccan, he thought. After they finished their interview, my dad went back to his hotel, and he began replaying the tape. He made it through the opening pleasantries, into the first few questions. But after fifteen minutes, the sound started to fizzle, then dissolved into silence.
“And that was the end of that,” my dad told me.
But perhaps my favorite part of this impromptu book lecture was his parting advice.
“I try to refrain from making lists,” he told me—immediately after making a very long list. “I just enjoy books. At the end of the day, I call it the pleasure principle. Whatever gives you pleasure is going to be beneficial. If you like it, the rest will follow.”
Which, come to think of it, may be the best summer reading assignment of all.
With that, I’ll leave you with today’s funny, thoughtful, and inspiring essay by Deb Olin Unferth, author of the forthcoming, much lauded novel Earth 7, on the ideas that shift the way we see. And, by popular demand, you can find Papa Hèdi’s incomplete list of essential reads here.
A Special Journaling Club with Jon Batiste—
Our next Journaling Club is Sunday, June 14, from 1–2pm ET—and we have a very special guest joining us: Jon Batiste!
You may know Jon as a musician, composer, and performer (and as my husband), but he is also one of the most endlessly curious, wildly imaginative people I know. We’ll write together, reflect together, and (knowing Jon) there may be music. This one is not to be missed.
We’ll send the Zoom link and all the details the day before. In the meantime, save the date! This gathering is for paid subscribers, so if you’d like to join us, you can upgrade here.
If you’re wondering what Journaling Club is like, here’s how community member Rebekah described last week’s gathering: “fantastic whimsical wild fun deep instinctual.” Which sounds about right considering it involved the poetry of Gertrude Stein, an iconic letter from the artist Sol LeWitt, and this wonderful community of journalers. You can watch the replay here.
Prompt 387. Shifting My Thinking by Deb Olin Unferth
About twenty years ago, I accidentally downloaded and listened to a podcast I thought would be a chef talking about the best ways to cook chicken, but turned out to be a woman explaining calmly for an hour the experience chickens have on industrial farms—the crowding, the shortened lifespans, the lack of sunshine, life in a cage. I’d never thought deeply about animal experience before. It seemed obvious, once I considered it, that animals have consciousness: They live in communities. They have customs and languages, even dialects. They have individual personalities. Their culture is not that different from our own, I realized. I found it fairly easy to stop eating animals, and I continued on that way.
About a decade later, I picked up the novel The Overstory by Richard Powers, and I sank into an immense story about trees. I read about how trees once stretched across the Americas, a dense homeland for thousands of unique intertwined species, how forests circled the globe in their own vast civilizations and how so much of that is now gone. In interviews, Powers recommended other books about trees, and I spent a summer reading about how they communicate across the air and underground through their roots, how they support and protect one another. Many tree species raise their young in a circle around them, sheltering and training the little ones, until the mother tree dies in the center, and even then her nutrients continue to feed them.
It seemed clear—how could I have been so dull not to see it? Of course trees have a kind of consciousness, albeit very different from our own, a wide communal awareness we may never fully understand. I walked my Austin neighborhood, looking at the trees, each one planted here by human hands for human use, as ornaments, decorations, shade stations, each one vulnerable to human whim, could be cut down or cut back at any moment. Their lives were not their own. They were separated from their tribe, orphans. They might never develop a community here or share communication with the other strange lonely migrant trees around them.
Over time I extended my thinking beyond trees to all plants, and I mourned the monocultures of modern farming. Do I sound a bit nuts? Well, I didn’t throw up my hands and stop eating altogether, which might be one possible consequence of suddenly coming to believe in the consciousness of plants. And I didn’t go back to eating animals—I remain a vegan. Instead, I felt myself becoming more aware of the many ancient civilizations pulsing around me, their homes embedded within my own, and mine within theirs.
Not long ago, another set of ideas began to preoccupy me. I came upon the book Split Tooth by the Canadian Inuk improvisational throat-singer, Tanya Tagaq. It’s a collection of stories, songs, and journal entries about living as a child in a small village in the High Arctic. Late in the book, she becomes philosophical about the Northern Lights, the sky, and the ice. She ascribes a sort of agency to them I usually reserve for living beings. “Is the air more enlightened than we are?” she wonders. “Is being inanimate really a lesser state? I think not.” As I turned the pages, I felt my mind opening, once again the position of the human race shifting and decentering. I thought about how everything in existence contains some elements of life and possibly elements of consciousness. Perhaps all matter participates in consciousness in some way that I will never understand.
These are old ideas, old philosophies, I know. I’ve read about them elsewhere. But, as with the podcast, they felt newly clear to me. The difference between life and not-life grew smaller in my mind, blurrier, less important. I found myself reseeing the earth and my place in it once again. Our interconnectedness with sand and clouds became vivid.
I feel another shift in my thinking coming. It has to do with the patterns around me, with waves. I have further to go. I’m looking for the right vehicle—book, person, painting—to take me on a new journey. I’m ready.
This is your prompt:
What is something—a book, a person, a podcast, a painting—that shifted your thinking? Describe the encounter and how you changed because of it.
I’d love to hear what this prompt brought up for you. Feel free to share in the comments.
Today’s Contributor—
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of seven books, including the novels Earth 7 and Barn 8 and the story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance. Her stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, the Paris Review, Granta, and New York Times Magazine. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and has received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. A professor at the University of Texas at Austin, she teaches for the Michener Center for Writers, the New Writers Project, and directs the Pen City Writers at a south Texas penitentiary.
For anyone interested in the reading list by my dad (seen here discussing literature very professorially), I have to say: he delivered. Papa Hedi’s Incomplete List of Essential Books is less a list than a wandering tour (with plenty of commentary, of course) through centuries and continents, from ancient North Africa to Russian novels, French existentialism, the Mediterranean, and beyond.
We are on holiday in Malta. Two days ago, we took a ferry to the island of Gozo, one of the larger islands in the Maltese archipelago. The highlight of this island is the Megalithic Temples of Ggantija—the oldest free-standing monuments in the world, pre-dating Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Egypt. (How did we all not know of this place?) As we walked among the ruins, I trailed my hand across the ancient stones, imagining the people who used these structures almost six thousand years ago. I had a similar feeling to that of gazing at distant stars in the night sky—what an infinitesimal part I am in the vast passage of time and space. What can we take from experiences like this? Humility. Acceptance—of all that was, all that is, and all that will be.
Clarence lit the way to who I became-and I am so grateful-others as well-not having much to consider in a home that was not-I was blessed truly to have "Angelic" encounters-knowing now full well it could have been much worse.
Clarence was the handyman at Sunny Oaks, a hotel in the Catskill Mountains of New York where my father sent me every summer after my mother died. He knew the owner from volunteering at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Brooklyn. I loved going to the mountains, where I had little supervision and could spend my days swimming and rock climbing and nights talking to Clarence. He was from the south and came up north to Philadelphia with his wife Theola and their son Willy.
Clarence was a very religious Southern Baptist and I considered him to be my second father. Every night we would sit out near the shed on a bench near where the garbage was kept and he would tell me stories that began with “Praise the Lord”; I loved to hear him tell Bible stories and about his life down south. Once, Clarence asked Theola to comb my hair; which was unruly and unkempt. “Every little girl has to have someone have their hair real nice and you have such pretty curls” Theola took me up to the attic room where I stayed and spent what must have spent hours, combing out the knots. When she was satisfied we came back to where Clarence was sitting and I remember him saying, “ Praise the Lord, you sure are pretty.”
During the winter, I missed Clarence so much and when feeling poorly, I would cry for his comforting presence. I looked forward to seeing him every summer, and our talks sitting on the bench near the shed where the garbage cans were kept. When I was thirteen, Clarence told me that we could not sit together anymore because people would talk. “One day all this will change; Praise be the Lord” That summer Sunny Oaks lost its luster, and I never returned or saw Clarence. Again.