Alert: If you prefer listening to reading, this blog post is available to consume in audio format via a recoding posted to the Boundary Waters Connect YouTube channel.
1.
Imagine this: it’s January 2022, and I’m headed to a monthly board meeting. We begin, as we do, by going around in a circle and answering a conversation-primer question: What’s one of your goals for the year? It was, after all, the season of resolutions.
As I had gotten busier I had been reading less and less. I could feel in my body that lacking a reading practice produced negative results; I sensed a correlation with my mental health. By January 2022 I knew it well enough to make a change, and I declared my intentions in the company of trusted colleagues and friends. I was resolved to read more, read more books.
Guess what? I did!
Along the way I noticed that people can be rather sheepish about their reading habits – or lack thereof. People seem to think there’s a right way to read.
They think there’s a right way to read a book,
and that they don’t read that way,
producing a discouraging effect.
Liberate yourself from such notions.
Read four pages at a time.
Skip sections that bore you.
Pick up a book and open to a random page,
start in the middle, or read it backward –
read word by word, or as Anne LaMott
might say, read it Bird by Bird.
By fall 2022 I was secure enough in my position back in the reading saddle that I envisioned a program through which others might join me on my journey. What was I reading? Texts like Deep Economy by Bill McKibben and Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up by Anthony Flaccavento. You see, my role as the manager of Boundary Waters Connect (BWC) has me trying to figure out how we – we, the people of this community – can grow our local economy.
(You can read more about BWC perspectives on economic development here).
I am constantly contemplating casual things like: What are our barriers to economic growth? How are we going to connect across our differences? What aspects of our lived experience or the lived experiences of others are we remiss in not addressing, or even acknowledging? How are we going to create the capacity to do the work ahead?
Frankly, I'm not capable of answering these questions alone. Add to that my compulsion for sharing reading recommendations. Thus I developed the Long-Form Reading & Discussion Group as a way to do my work in a manner that is authentic to me: putting brackets around juicy quotes, and in community with folks who opt into the conversation.
A group of 15-20 participants convened for potluck dinner twice a month, for a total of seven meetings from winter to spring. I hosted two seasons: the first in 2023 and then again in 2024. In each we read and discussed 400-some-odd pages, or generally two chapters per meeting. The material was presented in the form of a homemade anthology.
Anthology:
A book or collection of selected writings by various authors, usually in the same literary form, of the same period, or on the same subject.
Example: an anthology of modern philosophy.
From Greek “collection of poems,” or literally “gathering of flowers;” from anthológos “flower-gathering,” antho- + -logos, adjective derivative of légein “to gather, recount, say, speak.”
2.
Long-Form was a collective, a collection, a collage, a gathering,
a bouquet of flowers.
When curating the curriculum, I couldn’t not include How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell. For the first time in my life I held unbridled power to tell others what to read, and I simply had to include this fascinating book about a strangely relatable 16th century French nobleman. Though I didn’t quite yet have my thumb on the pulse of the why, exactly, I felt the need to share it.
I thought back to what it was like to read the book for the first time…
Summer 2019 was full of bright tansies and showy goldenrod and variations of northwoods yellow which will forever color the memories of my early days in foreign-feeling place. I was still working my way through the book as lemony summer tones matured into an amber autumn. Through How to Live I fell in love with Bakewell and with Montaigne, and, while I was reading it, I fell in love with Ely. I got to know them together, and now I can’t extract them from one another.
We know Ely, but who is this mysterious Montaigne? Consider allowing Bakewell to introduce you to Montaigne more completely by watching the linked video. In the video she refers to Montaigne as a pragmatic philosopher who was hailed as a guide in the art of living. Michel de Montaigne was a wine estate manager, diplomat, philosopher, and author born in 1533.
He wrote about all sorts of things – idleness, vanity, how his tastes have changed over the years, his cat, and so on. Montaigne was infinitely curious, chronically questioning, and insistent about looking at things from novel points of view. He was renowned for his relatability. He published 107 lively, revealing pieces, which he called Essays, or “tries” – a term he was the first to use in this way.
Essay:
A literary form that tries to replicate the activity of a mind.
A type of nonfiction compelled by individual expression, inquiry, opinion, wonder, and doubt.
From the Middle French essai — “a test,” “a trial,” “an experiment.”
“The equivalent of a mind in rumination, performing as if improvisationally the reception of new ideas, the discovery of unknowns, the encounter with the “other.”
(John D’Agata, The Lost Origins of the Essay)
I find I am rather fond of the essay form. I’m drawn to it as a reader and as a writer. This explains the prevalence of the essays in the aforementioned Long-Form curriculum, which you can see here and here.
Proud though I am of how the program went, and pleasurable though it was to create and facilitate, there was an obvious opportunity for improvement: the first two seasons lacked adequate editorialization. I’m here to remedy that.
Consider this the asynchronous third season of Long-Form. May it function as an extension, an expansion of the group. Through a series of blog posts throughout the year, I will present to you a bouquet, one flower at a time. My goals in doing so are as follows:
Encourage more reading. Specifically, I hope readers will engage with “long-form” content, which is to say content beyond headlines, beyond social media. Lest you not know where to start or what to read, allow me to make recommendations. I favor nonfiction, and so that is what I’ll likely be sharing here.
Help readers to learn about themselves and about each other, through the process of cross referencing each other’s diverse reactions to the same material. I imagine this will also lead to an expansion of our perspectives on economics, community, and more.
Prime our community to more fully embrace our shared responsibility to each other and to our economy. There is much thinking to be done in anticipation of strategy development, let alone collective action.
3.
So why start with How to Live? It’s a difficult question to answer. There are, perhaps, as Bakewell suggests, at least twenty answers. I like Bakewell’s Montaigne because… because life can be so tragic, you know? And the acuteness of the tragedy, it’s so sharp.
Tragedy:
A lamentable, dreadful, or fatal event or affair; calamity; disaster.
A dramatic composition, often in verse, dealing with a serious or somber theme, typically involving a great person destined to experience a downfall or utter destruction, as through a character flaw or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate or an unyielding society.
The tragic or mournful or calamitous element of drama, of literature generally, or of life.
The tragedy of it all is so real, so real, relatable, minute. It is evident that Montaigne understood tragedy as such. He was alive during a time when his homeland was dominated by an incessant, bloody, miserable civil war – the French Wars of Religion. He was alive in times of immense suffering and strife.
But even so, he made a practice of seeking awe. He did this through crafting his Essays. As Bakewell puts it, “The Essays has no great meaning, no point to make, no argument to advance.” Indeed, Montaigne “usually responded to questions with flurries of further questions and a profusion of anecdotes, often all pointing in different directions and leading to contradictory conclusions.” Rather than being the product of some great design or profound point to make, his essays were the product of paying attention.
Again, I find this relatable.
We are starting with How to Live, because I appreciate Montaigne’s cavalier attitude about reading – and everything else, for that matter. This first Long-Form season three "assignment" functions as an invitation to reframe your relationship with reading, an opportunity for me to make a disclaimer about the potentially chaotic and pointless nature of this whole exercise, and a strategy to ease readers into this conversation.
It seemed wiser to start with this relatively light hearted content,
as opposed to jumping right into Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
Ecological Economics & Political Ecology, or Pleasure Activism.
Reading How to Live helped me understand that our perspectives and philosophies have lineages that go back centuries. They are not entirely our own; they have their own ancestry. And the practice of reading philosophical texts that are self-aware of their place in that lineage could even be considered “conversing with the ancients.”
I like this book because Bakewell’s writing is strong with voice, and the Montaigne she conveys is full of personality and style. He's not afraid to be his authentic self. How to Live emphasizes that if we are going to do this work of figuring out how to live, let us do it artfully.
At first I selected chapter six as the one to share with you. It invokes contemplation of philosophy. Then I pivoted to chapter four, thinking it better to invoke contemplation of reading. In the end, however, I’ve decided that the chapter with which to begin is chapter two: How to live?
Pay attention.
4.
Attention? Actually, yes, I have been contemplating that a lot lately. I’ve been growing increasingly critical of the use of screens in our “unyielding society.” I’ve been thinking about my attention and how powerfully it has been compelled toward social media and screen-based news consumption in the last few years.
Gross.
Accordingly, my resolution for this year is
“less media, more social.”
I question the wisdom of letting my precious little brain be flooded – AMBUSHED – by the opinions of others, as presented to me by an algorithm I don’t quite understand. They say we really are what we eat; we are what we think. There’s a lot of junk out there (she said, with a cheeto in her hand).
I sense this is only the beginning of what I’ll attempt to say about "attention," and toward that we direct it (in so far as we have control over that). For now I present to you a brief excerpt from How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell:
I encourage you to do the reading, to take notes, make marginalia, and to contemplate the following questions, some inspired by the book in general, and some inspired by the attachment, specifically:
What was one of your favorite passages? Why?
Do you espouse a particular philosophy? How would you describe it?
What do you make of the assertion that this kind of reading is “conversing with the ancients”?
Do you have a place where you go to be by yourself, to “hide,” like Montaigne has in his library? (Your own listening point.)
Montaigne wrote essays to help himself guide his attention “back to the place where it belongs – here.” Do you have a practice for guiding your own attention back to yourself and the present moment?
Now I encourage you to invite a friend to do the same. May you convene over a hot cup of coffee or pot of tea. May you exchange answers to these questions. May you learn something new about yourself and your companions. And, lastly, may you consider making a comment below as a way to channel the “discussion” element of the origins of the Long-Form program. I would love to hear from you via the comments.
P.S. While I’m sharing excerpts, I certainly encourage you to secure physical copies of books from our local library, or email Jordyn to place an order via the Piragis Northwoods Company bookstore. My personal opinion is that holding physical copies of books provides the best possible reading experience. Plus, that way you can read more than the sliver that I've shared here.
One of my favorite passages: "Seneca would have approved. If you become depressed or bored in your retirement, he advised, just look around you and interest yourself in the variety and sublimity of things. Salvation lies in paying full attention to nature. Montaigne tried to do this, but he took "nature" primarily to mean the natural phenomena that lay closest to hand: himself. He began watching and questioning his own experience, and writing down what he observed."