Category: Personals

My Job, My Life, My Blog

After my birthday dinner in November, my friends remarked, though not to me directly, that they had never seen me so happy. That really is a most extraordinary thing. I have been many things to many people, but happy? Not often. Entertaining, exciting, supportive, intense – those might fit, but not “happy.” At my worst I am depressive, moody, snappy. For people to notice, and be so shocked as to mention it to my girlfriend, must mean it was a real surprise. Indeed, the whole thing has been quite a surprise to me too.

In September, I started full time work. With Marx and Marcuse at the ready, I was so prepared to be alienated and miserable that I was completely blindsided by what actually happened. The work was interesting, my colleagues were brilliant and good fun, the company paid me well and gave generously into my pension, while allowing me great flexibility about when and where I worked. I quickly made friends with a few people in my team, and with several people from the same graduate intake as mine. I had time to meet them in the afternoons at the office café for free hot chocolate, and even hang out after work. I travelled to our headquarters in Germany a few times, and visited a power plant in the UK, walking around in a hard hat and covering my ears with a gleeful expression on my face as I tried not to be utterly overwhelmed by all the loud exciting noises.

Normally, when I go into work, I use the bus. From my family’s home, it’s a fifteen minute walk through the fields to get to the bus stop. In the mornings, the grass is slick with dew and you can smell the changing of the seasons. On the bus I read, and usually on the walk back I’ll call my girlfriend, who is just finishing off her studies at Cambridge. At home I have little enough time to sense its value, but just about enough time to make use of that knowledge and spend it well. Bizarrely, after many months of day-to-day freedom, I found myself reading far more, and far better. I even found myself writing, completing two stories late last year by getting an evening routine going. In November, I started running in the mornings too. Though I cannot say I always enjoy this, I’m glad I’m doing it.

A night or two each week I still teach a few Ukrainian refugees in the UK online as part of the charity my girlfriend and I set up. At this point, if their English isn’t good, there’s no helping them. But I have fun and so do they. On weekends I can travel to London or further afield. All told, I am managing to maintain a decent social life, given I’m not in London full time. And given I’m not in London full time, I’m able to put away a nice amount of my salary into savings.

So that is it on paper. A job that pays well, where I have a positive impact and career growth, travel and freedom, a good pension and nice colleagues. I have regular exercise, a wonderful girlfriend, a much loved social circle, some active participation in making the world a better place, and time for reading and creativity. Life is, perhaps as it’s never been before, good.

So why do I find myself asking if this is all there is to it?

We can approach the problem of our lives in at least two ways, psychologically and philosophically. I have been reading philosophical fiction, and now philosophy, for far longer than is perhaps healthy. But the main problem that we soon run into, clutching our copy of Crime and Punishment in the school medical centre while waiting for a checkup, is that Dostoevsky and his friends don’t actually have much to say to us, just yet. We may relate to questions of free will and meaning, but they are inevitably abstracted, airy – just like how we don’t really understand what it means when we read in introductions that Dostoevsky had gambling debts. All of these questions and answers about how to live our lives, even Rilke’s “live the questions for now” in his Letters to a Young Poet, require that one is actually living.

And living is an active thing. It is also a thing that requires, I think, certain life conditions. We cannot live at school, or even at university. We require a choice to live, and we require consequences. We may have to face our consequences all the time, but only rarely in the sense of consequences that last our entire lives. It was only when I was in an office with the odd fifty-year-old that I realised the impact of exercise and healthy eating can have as we age; and how undesirable the alternative is, as I watched the older colleagues shuffling around with the same kind of pace and face I’d expect at a retirement home. At school we make decisions about how we learn, in the holidays we establish good or bad habits, but it takes a great deal of wisdom to see through them all the way to their ultimate consequences. I certainly didn’t, and now I have plenty of regrets for my thousands of hours in Call of Duty matches.  

We have choices at university and school, but these are still fairly bounded. We can mess up our schoolwork and get kicked out, but this is like Sartre saying we always have a choice because we can always kill ourselves. It’s laughably irrelevant. Or rather, provided we make the decision to actually study, there’s only so much choice left. Just like, if we make the decision to fail, there’s only then a choice about how to fail. At the other end, in life, there are many more choices. Some of them rest on what’s come before – I cannot immediately become a doctor, for example. But most of them come to us with the freedom of a quest in Skyrim or any other role-playing game – we can choose whatever we want to do. Suddenly, a vastly increased weight of responsibility – for fitness of mind and body, for our social circles, for where and how we live and work and spend our time – is hurled upon us. Not everyone has to decide all of these things all at once, but the decisions come, and often sooner than we expect.

If the choices and the consequences were always there, as I now see they perhaps were, then what I mean is that once you are out of it all you can gain a wisdom you might have missed earlier. And some people miss it then too. But you’re on my blog, so probably haven’t. The wisdom is the knowledge that things you do matter. Now, at last, we can do philosophy.

It’s a bitter irony that the best times in our lives for reading philosophy, when our minds are most subtle (and supple) and our time most flexible, are inarguably the worst times for doing philosophy. Of course, I can kill a pawnbroker at any time, but as I age I am more interested in practical philosophies that will not send me to prison. I want to try Schopenhauerian ethics and annihilate my willing; I want to live the way Nietzsche’s works make us hope he does; I want to read Camus and Sartre and try it all out for myself; I want to be so religious my clothes stink of incense; I want to walk the world over with only Walt Whitman for company, looking like a tramp. Now I can start to put these things into practice.

Here is where that psychological element comes in. The problems of life that I face now are mine. If before, when I was depressed, I could often blame someone or something else directly, now I am in control. I could always say I’m not happy because I’m not doing meaningful work, or because I’m not seeing my friends enough and can’t, or because I’m not exercising. With all of those things sorted, any problem that remains – and there is one – is real. The easy solutions have been tried, now life is at hand. The diffuse problems of society and economics, these too are there in the background, but divided now from the mush of poor mental health that comes with living badly, as it were. I can see them, and I can allow myself whatever anguish they will cause – for example, when I decide to rent in London and have to deal with that mess.

So when I feel this this-is-it-ness, it’s deeper than just some unkind word taken to heart on the playground or a shut door at university where I expected an embrace. It is the world I have a problem with, and the world I must answer. The problem, it goes without saying, is that although I am doing everything I am supposed to, something is still missing. I have started thinking about death at night, and the repetition of days. “Days are where we live”, as Philip Larkin has it. And seeing my days not being right, still having some hole – that’s a problem, and one I am responsible for sorting out.

To resolve it, I can look at my life and begin tinkering with it. Should I do more writing? Maybe write to some literary magazines? Or is the running not enough? I feel disgusted with myself for eating meat still – can I finally give it up or properly cut it down? (Living at home, this is hard. When I move to Germany at the end of the month, then it will be all on me). Can I see my friends more? What about calling my brother? And so on. We approach life as if it is a PC we have built, and begin moving the wires around, occasionally adding some RAM or something else here and there, and see what works. It feels almost fun, like a game.

Then there are the stronger remedies, like the bizarre ones my Polish girlfriend gets recommended when she calls her grandparents with a slight sniffle (drinking onion syrup or placing a bulb of peeled garlic next to your pillow, to mention a few). These remedies are philosophical. Is my attitude right? Am I heeding the voice of my conscience? Or should I, on the contrary, just grab a pillow and suffocate the voice instead? Then there are wild lifestyle changes – why not try being properly Epicurean, or properly Stoic? Visit a monastery? Should I give all my money away? With these too, there’s an element of play involved. And a worth goal – our own happiness, or satisfaction, or soothed conscience, or peace. (After all, the goal is itself a question for the philosophers).

The general feeling is one of excitement. Life is real, and its problems are real, and the solutions are worth trying. Never have I felt so much joy from a cutting phrase in Weil or Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein or Weber. Like a child in a toyshop who can’t wait to get home and unbox the latest toy tractor, when I hear a cool idea I can’t wait to think it over properly, to live it, and to see whether it works. That is what explains my obsession with Wittgenstein these past few months – I am trying to live some of what he says. I’m not reading for essays anymore, not even for blog posts. (Apologies!) The sheer weightiness of my decisions, made day after day, suffocate me like a stone upon my chest. Yet at the same time, suffocation entails dizziness. And I am madly lightheaded!  

Life is so sweet when we know that this is it. Without excuses, with all responsibility heaped on, every joy is magnified. To look at a tree and run my hand over its rough bark is a pleasure I’ve never felt so richly before. I go through art galleries almost at a blind run, and then allow myself an hour before a painting that takes my breath away and reaches right through to my soul and makes it bleed. I live – more and more I am living. Even if the regrets are magnified too, because nothing now will ever replace the lost time, still I am living. Suddenly, I can say to myself “da capo” and mean it. I find myself growing strong enough to confront my regrets and my mistakes – not all of them, by any stretch – and tell them and myself that it was worthwhile. Life is good.

This insane post is an attempt to work out what I am feeling. The this-is-it-ness of life is frightening and I still do not have a solution to the thought of death. I am working on it. I am living and trying everything I can and not letting it get too much for me. Because this is the real problem and challenge of my days. One is rising and falling on a see-saw above the abyss. We can be elated, and find our excitement from the urgency and seriousness of the search, or we can be rendered miserable by the emptiness of all things as we confront the void. The latter is what happened to Tolstoy, but even he managed to get out of it. I know how he did it too – I’ve got his letters even, and I’m making notes, and maybe one day you’ll see a photo of me in one of my posts, my beard grown out and a roughhewn walking stick in hand. (Be careful though, that might be the Whitman phase!)

These thoughts and reflections, if they deserve that title, are best, I realise anyway, to have when you are not too old. I am now twenty-six, and not old by any stretch, but there are times when I do feel a bit un-young. Leaving aside the body, my memory is ever-so-slightly weaker and my ability to work with complex ideas is decreasing a bit too, from the baseline of my manic teenage years. I am not sure I could work my way through the Critique of Pure Reason anymore, even if I wanted to. Luckily, I don’t think this will be a problem.

If I had come to the realisation that I needed to change my life too late, I might have found I lacked the strength of mind and will to actually do anything. Tolstoy latched onto religion and stopped thinking. But he did a heck of a lot of thinking before he got to that point, as even his mature religious writings show. I, anyhow, have time and energy to live. To take us back to the beginning, part of that is thanks to having been very lucky in ending up with the job I did. I know that my consultant friend at Bain, or was it BCG, who is much cleverer than me and knows her Russian literature as well as I do, doesn’t have the time to do any thinking any more. That, to me, is a real waste.

Anyway, against the this-is-it-ness of things, and the void in the far distance, I am trying to keep myself excited. I hope the drama of my mental life, which is as much a part of this blog as is the stuff I read, continues to provide some interest in the years to come. And do tune in again for the inevitable update, some years hence, when I say that I have finally had a child of my own, and owing to the stress I have decided to stop thinking after all! (From what I understand, this is fairly common, though hardly deserving of condemnation.)

I did not make a post about it last year, but this one marks five years of Mostly About Stories. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of the posts. I’ve even enjoyed writing some of them!

The Death of the Black Hen

It was lucky I was at my desk or else I wouldn’t have seen them. Two foxes, big ones, and ahead of them flapping, hurtling, racing, mad as a damaged missile – the white hen. By the time I had unbolted the front door, they had had several seconds to continue their attack unimpeded. I was roaring monstrously, but far too slow to deal any damage – the foxes fled before I lay my hands on them. I chased them as far as the tall grass, but then I had to turn back.

The white hen was in the boiler room, buried in a corner with her back to the door. Perhaps she didn’t want to see her end if it was coming. Or perhaps she retained that childish notion that what she could not see, could not see her either. I picked her up and took her to the hen house, locking her in the enclosure. She was hurt, but less badly than I had thought. Her feathers littered the drive, but her attackers had not drawn blood.

I went to find the black hen.

I went through the garden, up and down the drive, and across the front lawn. I found feathers, a lot of them, on the path by the firepit. I found also the little hollow the foxes had made under the wire fence going into the undergrowth. I followed it, and as I advanced something moved ahead of me, retreated still further into the deep green darkness. But I came across a clearing covered in black feathers and I understood that I had come far too late.

Many of the pessimists whom I wrote about last week asked whether life was a good or a bad thing, all considered. One thought experiment they conducted was to ask who would be willing to live their life through again. The answer, they concluded sadly, was few of us. We may have plenty of pleasures and happiness in our time upon the earth, but when we consider the pains – grief, sorrow, illness – we find that they far outweigh the former in intensity, even if in quantity they may be evenly matched.

The girls

Our hens lived good lives. They had a huge area to roam, customers who did not insist on eggs – for neither myself nor my brother actually like them all that much – and food and water and love and warmth. Last year the smaller of the two black hens died of an illness, leaving us with just the big black one and the white one. And now the white one is all alone.

It’s funny the things that a death like this makes you think of. It’s funny really, that it can get to you at all. But I felt guilt, a lot of it, and still do in my way. Earlier that morning I had heard the hens, and I had thought then that it was simply the triumphant clucking of a successful egg-laying operation. But perhaps that had been a cry for help that I had missed.

When a friend visited, he told how all of his hens let him take them in his arms. Ours were much less affectionate. But still, you knew that they loved us. The white hen always let you stroke her if you insisted. And after the small black hen died the big black hen finally let us stroke her too.

More so than a pet, even, you feel a lot of responsibility for something like a hen. A cat or a dog has no real natural predators, at least in restive rural England. We cannot be at fault if an accident occurs because we have done our best. But with hens, it is a different matter. We could never have let them out, to begin with, we could have guarded them more carefully, and so on. Here, responsibility feels more firmly placed upon our shoulders.

Hens have personalities, you come to realise. Secretly, we’re glad that the white one survived because she is bossy boots and a real character. She is always bothering us. She comes and pecks my shins if her food is even a minute late in coming. She is always the most deranged, the wildest, and for all that the most human of the birds we had.

She survived a fox attack earlier in the year too. That was while I was away in Russia. She spent a week living in a little box on the side in the kitchen, and then went back to her business as normal. I am home alone, and boxes in the kitchen are beyond me, but I have brought her food and water, had various discussions and heart-to-hearts with her, and cleaned out her house. I even made her rice, which I was told is a particular delicacy among hens – and she ate the whole pan’s worth.

She limps now, but after a day spent hiding in the hen house, she now comes out into the larger hen run again and hobbles about. She is laying again and already talks. After the attack I was struck by how quiet she was – the only noise she made was terrible, heavy breathing. Understandable, given the circumstances, but so strange to hear coming from her when she is normally so chatty.

All this is to say that I was struck by how human she was. This is an obvious point, but still worth stating. In the relationship you have with these animals in your care they perhaps remain as animals – loved, but not quite fully human. And here the little hen was like a little child.

But the foxes were human too. This was the thing that shook me: the look in their eyes. There was something human about it, but not in any positive sense. We may, from Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox or else cute pictures on the internet, assume that all foxes are rascals with hearts of gold. Like wolves, we may secretly admire them. But these two foxes had a look of hatred, human hatred, in their eyes, mixed with what can only be described as bloodlust. They hated me because I had arrived and driven them off and in doing so had deprived them of their kill. And although I am often annoying, never have I seen that look directed at me. Never have I felt the full force of another’s desire to see hurt come to me, never until then. It is not a feeling I’d like to feel again.

The white hen will recover. She is a fighter, after all. When I was talking about the attack with our gardener, she told me a story about another house she had worked on which also had hens and also was the site of a tragedy. In this place, the hens, about twenty of them, roamed on a field with a pond in the middle. They were rescue hens, taken from battery farms – jittery, nervous, and undersized creatures who have experienced more than their fair share of suffering. But one day two foxes got into their field too, and it was a massacre. Every single hen was slaughtered, all but one. As the others were being ripped and torn apart, she had gone to the pond and flown in. She had gone against her nature out of an instinct for survival that even the battery farms had not extinguished. In a way, it’s inspiring.

Looking particularly like a white onion in this one.

Schopenhauer has a famous example to illustrate the truth of his pessimism. He notes that “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain… is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.” This is something we instinctively agree with (though as proof of pessimism it probably does not convince us), but I really felt its truth after saving the white hen. The fear, the terror of her eyes – and she had survived. How much more would the black hen have suffered, I can only guess. And all that for a tasty meal that would be forgotten soon enough. A soul extinguished for a full belly. The scales are not in balance, that’s for sure. But then again, neither the eater not the eaten is given much to philosophising. This is just nature at work.

The thought experiment, would you be willing to live your life again, is an old one. Nietzsche turned it around into a positive guide with his da capo (“let’s do it all again”) attitude, saying that the potential for eternally repeating your life should be the guide for how you live it. In the case of pessimists, they answered that we would not wish to live our lives again, and our certainty in this would only grow as we got older. Illness and grief are things the experience of which is simply too great, they argue, to let us want to see the other things. Mara Van der Lugt in her book, however, notes that the experiment uses a kind of sleight-of-hand. If asked whether we wanted to play our lives through exactly as they were, perhaps we would say no. But if we were asked whether we wanted simply to live again, then many more of us would say yes. No matter how well lived, our lives will always lack novelty to one who has already lived them. But a new life, with new pain and new joy, probably tips the scales towards life being something worth experiencing.

But still, would the hens choose to live again? Two or three years of roaming the garden, the drive, the fields, pecking at me and the ground, pestering the gardener and my mother, but ending up being literally ripped limb from limb. Would they choose that?

Our lives are unlikely to end in us being ripped limb from limb. But one thing that has stuck with me after the attack was how unnecessary violence is for us as human beings. We do not need to rely on the suffering of humans and other animals to get our food, our water, our clothing, and our shelter. That we do is simply a reflection of our generally inadequate attempts to build a better world. But still, it must be possible. Whereas for these wild foxes, at least for the moment, a reason not to eat our hens is not going to be forthcoming. All our feathered friends and we, their carers, can do is be extra vigilant.

When I went to see the white hen this most recent time, she was already racing to the door out from her hen run into the world, even with her limp. I have decided that she is no longer a symbol of a willingness to fight to live against the odds. Instead, dear readers, she is simply as thick as beans.

Three Years of Mostly About Stories – A Retrospective

Mostly About Stories is three years old, ish. I am a little proud of the number because I am good at giving up on things and I have not given up on this. I would be lying if I said writing a blog post had become a sort of habit to me. There have been weeks and weeks where I have done nothing, depleting old stores of posts. And there have been times when I have written many posts in one go, just because there was plenty to say. Until recently I had managed to post pretty much every week – it was a kind of unwritten rule with me that I would get one weekend off a month. And regardless of the machinery behind achieving that regularity, I am still chuffed about it.

Most good things come to an end, and I have to admit to myself that I need to change my approach to the blog to keep it running. That most terrible ghoul – one’s personal life – is beginning to get in the way.

This past year I finished my degree at Cambridge and after a few months dilly-dallying about in France and Switzerland and the US and Jordan, I finally got a job. Readers, I hope, will forgive me for the last part, because to the best of my knowledge there are not altogether many options for receiving money in regular and sizeable amounts other than these so-called “jobs”. Even murdering one’s relatives, a tried and tested method, is hampered by their ultimately limited numbers. And though I am not a gambler I am not interested in becoming one either.

Earlier this month I moved to Moscow to take up a job focusing on renewable energy and decarbonisation strategies in a Russian energy company. To a large extent, I am continuing my Cambridge degree by other means. The same cycle of reading, thinking, and reporting exists in both spaces. The only difference is that I now use PowerPoint instead of Word and my exams are all viva voce. My interest in making the planet a better place for all of us is a little less than my interest in great works of literature, but not insignificant either. Anyway, I believe that it would be a dereliction of my duty to others not to work in a way that has an impact on the world.

It is too soon to tell whether I will survive the job or explode like Thomas Buddenbrook. Either way, I have noticed already that I have considerably less time to read and write than I had previously, and this is a problem for the blog. One solution I considered long ago was simply to write about shorter things. In particular, given the blog’s name, I could simply write about short stories every time. This is a possibility. The shorter the work, the easier it is to dissect it, and probably the more interesting the blog post would ultimately be.

Another option is to do more generally thematic pieces, more considerations of a topic than anything else. The problem is that I am twenty-four years old and cripplingly aware that anything interesting on a topic has already been written and so I would rather not waste my readers’ time. Is there really much value in me selecting some obelisk-like word and riffing on it for a few pages? Montaigne could title an essay “on such-and-such” but can I? At school each weekend one had to write such essays – perhaps it’s a habit I should get back into. And, well, in truth much of what I write on this blog has been partly for myself and writing such essays would be good practice for me, after all.

Either way or indeed any of the other ways – more translations, more interludes into my own experiences (I liked the grape picking piece too) – I am not such a huge fan of the regular half-analytical half-descriptive half-homework-helpers half-entertainers that I have been putting out for these past three years, not anymore that is. I don’t want things to become routine and stale. But the terrible truth is that I have begun to notice repetitions in my own work. I don’t just mean the regular references to Conrad, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and so on. I am allowed to have favourites. What I mean is, I seem to be saying the same thing over and over again. Certain observations on the meaning of life and the difficulty of communication, for example, just keep coming up. And as the job and I do battle, I am only going to get more tired and more boring.

I do not like the academic criticism I have read, which is mostly soulless and dead. But there is something to be said for the highbrow prose that lives just on the edges of the academy, in fancy magazines I rarely read. Serious essays, things that require research not to make a point at a conference but as a dish requires spices – to make them a joy to consume. I read a book and maybe the introduction and write a post. This is a function of the time constraints I live in. But it forces me to rely on things inside myself, rather than stretching myself in new directions. Another option for me would be to write much less regularly, even monthly, but each time produce a properly researched piece that actually had something interesting to say.

The truth is, my first month in Moscow has been frightening. Not because of war fears and the pleasures of being treated as a migrant, though the former at least has made me lose sleep. No, what is frightening is that although I am only supposed to work from nine till six each day (and my colleagues log on half an hour later than that anyway), suddenly I find myself almost unable to read. Exhaustion, disorganisation, one can lay the blame on whatever one wants. But the situation is the same. I pick up books and put them down. The pleasure and the attention have gone. No doubt the onrush of routine and stability – because I still haven’t had a normal week yet – will help. And indeed, this past week has seen me read a little.

But from my perspective, I need Mostly About Stories to encourage my growth and development, rather than hinder them. I need it to be a place where I can follow my interests rather than one where I just repeatedly rip the surface contents of a book out in order to say the same things I’ve been saying for three years over and over again. It should not be an echo chamber for my own unchanging self. We all agree that serious literature is good because it rewards thought. My blog posts, generally written the two days after finishing a book, rarely manage to highlight that depth as well as I would like. And writing the posts often doesn’t make me think as much as I would like either.

What form the future of the blog will take I do not know. It will still mostly be about stories. But the posts will be less regular, less predictable in content and timings (though still on Mondays/Sunday evenings). The most important thing is that I would like to write about things that interest me. I would like the motivation for a piece to be not finishing a book but the thoughts that the book has occasioned within me. Three years is a long time, and I’m proud we have made it thus far. But as I am unable to complete a merger or acquisition, and refuse to outsource (though I am extremely grateful to my girlfriend, Marcelina, for helping me with proofreading and so much more) a change of pace will have to do to keep my content from getting stale. I hope you approve.

But do have your say and leave a comment on what you would like to see in posts and approach going forward. I have been really grateful for the additional engagement in my posts this year. This past year I have even had various book recommendations come my way (e.g. Anton Reiser, Riders in the Chariot), which I do note down but cannot promise in the near future to fulfil. Anyway, thank you, readers!

The numbers, for those who like them. In 2019, I had 4635 views, in 2020 I had 17960, in 2021 I had 35570. The most popular pieces continue to be those that are most useful for students – things on Benjamin, Kafka, Gogol, etc. But I am always glad to see more niche things get even a single view.

The books I enjoyed the most last year were Robinson’s Home and Sebald’s The Emigrants.