Books can be thought of as alternatives to social feeds. Whenever you go to pick up the phone to thumb through TikTok, if you have a book where your phone is, you can pick it up. Of course, the book should be interesting to you, or pleasureable in some way, to your imagination or your intellect, so you can pick it up without hesitation.

Instead of the haphazard, semi-random half-satisfaction of scrolling feeds, a book is a feed of words, strung together with great deliberation and care, edited, and packaged in one of the most elegant designs humanity has had the genius to invent. Ebooks work as well, but paper books are farther removed from social apps, so they pose less of a temptation to switch away.

I’m in the process of wading through recent research on the detrimental effects of screen time on the brain, but what I’ve seen so far has me alarmed. It seems imperative to me that I minimize the amount of time I look at screens, even as that becomes more and more difficult because of life’s increasing impediments to banishing screens from daily life.

Registering my vote to make elephants as well as octopuses into humanity 2.0; elephants are dope in (who wouldn’t want an elephant in their friend group?), and octopuses would make good librarians. Think about it: lots of arms for filing books and keeping records, brainy, and possibly introverted (I have zero evidence for the last one, it just feels like it should be true).

Unexpectedly delighted at this sinister take on the memento mori theme (sinisterly inspiring?). While technically self help, it’s really a meditation on the transience of life, and the inevitability of death. But it also exhorts you to action. It instills in you a sense of urgency.

There are distractions (TikTok), and there are distractions (Public Domain Review’s (tiny) Cryptic Crossword).

For my first stab at a cryptic crossword…it’s not going well.

EDIT: It might have helped if I read the instructions (and therefore the related essay)

Ludwig van Beethoven: I cannot hear them, but I know they are making a hash of it. What do you think? Music is… a dreadful thing. What is it? I don’t understand it. What does it mean?

Anton Felix Schindler: It – it exalts the soul.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Utter nonsense. If you hear a marching band, is your soul exalted? No, you march. If you hear a waltz, you dance. If you hear a mass, you take communion. It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer. The listener has no choice. It is like hypnotism.

(Immortal Beloved, via IMDB)

I’ve been thinking about this quote. It’s stayed with me a long time. The power of music to bring people together is also a trance-like power. Is music inherently political? If it is, then it must be similar to propaganda, putting people in a suggestible state, getting them to lower their guard. It also brings people together in a common experience.

People use music to numb their pain (physical or emotional), feel better, heal wounds, forget worries. Or they use it to let out pent up frustration, release energy. Music purges. But what is it really purging? That’s the question I’m most interested in. I think the answer (at least sometimes) is, it’s purging revolutionary potential.