“Kindness won’t make you rich, but it will make you whole.”
This is one of those books that I finished listening to and immediately bought a physical “Kindness won’t make you rich, but it will make you whole.”
This is one of those books that I finished listening to and immediately bought a physical copy of because I know that I will be lending it out. In a world that (especially for men) is so for “the grind” and so against emotions and taking all of life in, Jarod shows a very soft side to life in a way that really allowed and encouraged me to embrace whimsy and take things slow. I’m nearing the end of the hard part of my healing journey and reading this provided valuable insights as well as made me feel significantly less alone and less bad about the year I took borderline isolated from society. Listening to this on my walks made me feel like I had a companion beside me and facilitated some pretty happy thinking patterns (and at times made me laugh out loud because he called my past self out many times) and, for that, it is invaluable.
As Lispector said, “the divine promise of life is already being honored.” It is a blessing and a miracle that we exist and we owe it to ourselves to see the good in our lives and our selves and to live joyously, in awe of the world, the people, and the animals around us as well as in awe of ourselves.
“We must honor the world’s potential by refusing to call our search a failure before it begins.” ...more
As Milena herself says in her essay "Letters of Notable People": "We do not expect any art from letters; we expect something human." And these letterAs Milena herself says in her essay "Letters of Notable People": "We do not expect any art from letters; we expect something human." And these letters are so painfully human. There is a deep yearning I felt with the knowledge that we only have half of this correspondence. A piece of this pain is abated, while another piece is deepened with the appendices: letters from Milena to Max Brod, four of Milena's essays as discussed in the letters, and Franz Kafka's obituary, written by Milena. The appendix gives a glimpse into the woman that Milena was, specifically in regard to Franz, and adds some clarity to an already clear picture of the love they shared, though it was rarely in person. Love, in it's purest form, is not something that has a prerequisite. There were things both of them wanted that neither of them could give the other, however that did not stop them for having infinite love and affection towards the other. They respected each other's wishes and loved with as much time as they had. Something about that is especially beautiful. That understanding, that lack of blame towards the other, that "I will love you anyways, in whatever capacity our situations allow." It is infinitely more potent because it withstands so much stress. And I suppose it is infinitely more tragic too, but hopefully in another life...
This is known pretty widely as a book of yearning, and a very large part of it is so exquisitely that. However there is another part of this, that is just as raw and is where that yearning stems from. In Milena Jesenská, Kafka was understood fully for maybe the first time in his life. Is there anything as powerful as that? Is there any connection that reigns stronger? Between the yearning, there is something sacred. There is Kafka laying himself bare to someone he fully trusts and believes has the capability to fully understand him. Likewise, when reading Milena's letters to Max Brod about Kafka, we see her love, but, most importantly, we see her raw essence and, after only having a picture of her through Kafka's words, it is potent to see her own words.
Kafka is one of my top two most relatable authors, and the way he delves into alienation and isolation through metaphor is what makes him share that top spot with Lispector. I would probably feel more inclined to psychoanalyze why that is (as I have done with Lispector), but Kafka has one very important thing in common with me: our birthdays. So I will just choose to push aside that in depth analysis of both me and a long dead author who I'm probably projecting onto and say that all people born on July 3rd are just built like this. [Congratulations on your constant feeling of a wall between you and the rest of the world if you are also a July 3rd baby, you deserve it!] It is clear that Kafka's tendency towards solitude gave him incredibly deep insights about himself, allowing him to view himself through a lens that, while his distinct feeling of otherness and alienation from the rest of the world does kind of teeter on self-hatred, his remarks feel like that of a third-party observer. While these remarks do give insights on his works, the vulnerable comments he shares with Milena, those where he is truly yearning for someone to understand his soul fully and believes, even if just for a foolish second, that he will find some kind of almost-salvation in her understanding. It is no wonder she was his first translator.
These letters are a nonfiction tragedy and the realization of that bubbled up quite quickly near the end. The crux of them not being together is that Milena does not leave her husband, who she is eternally unhappy with and who constantly cheats on her (yes, she's also cheating, only with one person, but the number isn't what matters-this was to even the playing field, not indite one) and Kafka is trapped by fear and his illness. Very early on, Milena writes to Max with 100% certainty that Franz will die from his Tuberculosis because his nature is fundamentally against that of the world and he cannot adapt. I would call this tragically poetic and prophetic, however a specter of John Green is standing behind me, shaking Everything is Tuberculosis, so the logical science-y side of me will overrule the creative mystical side. That being said, the truth is that Kafka was dying of Tuberculosis when he met Milena. He survived 3 more years but he was dying. And one has to wonder how much of Milena's unwillingness to leave her husband was because of her absolute certainty that Franz would die soon. And how much of Kafka's self-abasement was due to the knowledge that, if she left her successful husband he, who had such a difficult time existing tangibly in the world, would not be fully capable of providing what she needed and then would eventually die, leaving her. So, while the love story is perhaps tragic, it is also perhaps significantly less so than it could have been because they both allowed themselves to feel the love they had for each other, even if their "marriages" (Milena's real, Franz's to fear) separated them physically.
Milena
"the only thing I could say was that next to you everything else--even if it hasn't changed in itself--disappears and turns to nothing."
"Either the world is so tiny or else we are so gigantic; in any case we fill it completely. Of whom should I be jealous?"
"You have a certain peculiarity--I believe it comes from deep inside your being, and someone else is at fault if it isn't always effective--which I have never seen in anyone else, and which I can't even imagine, although I have found it in you. It is your inability to make other people suffer. Not out of pity, but just because you can't."
"Incidentally, I have such faith in you concerning this that I don't even want any miracles to occur; I calmly entrust you to the forest, lake, and to the food, you who are miraculous by nature, violated and inviolable."
"And that's why you're right in saying we were already one and I'm not afraid of this; on the contrary, it is my only happiness and my only pride and I don't at all restrict it to the forest."
"Fortunately no congratulations are necessary, just a thank you for being on this Earth, where I wouldn't have even begun to expect you might be found."
"I keep wanting to hear a different sentence than you did, this one: 'You're mine.' And why that one in particular? It doesn't even mean love, just nearness and night."
"... that I am living for you, that I am allowed to do so, and that, in this way, I am beginning to thank you for the fact that you once stopped beside me and gave me your hand."
"And of course it's blasphemous to build so much on another person, and that's why the fear starts to converge around the foundation, but it's not so much the fear about you as the fear that such constructions are dared at all. And that's also why your lovely human face has so much of the divine (although it was probably already there to begin with.)"
"You were so good, I crouched down beside you as if it were my right, I laid my face in your hand, I was so happy, so proud, so free, so mighty, so much at home, again and again: so much at home--but in essence I remained a mere animal, just part of the forest, living in the open only by your grace. I was reading my destiny inside your eyes without knowing it (since I had forgotten everything)."
" 'If only I could take her with me!' and the counterthought: 'But can there be any darkness where she resides?' "
"Moreover, perhaps it isn't love when I say you are what I love the most--you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love."
"I'm not saying goodbye. There isn't any goodbye, unless gravity, which is lying in wait for me, pulls me down entirely. But how could it, since you are alive."
internal
"You aren't tired at all, just restless, just afraid of taking one step on this Earth teeming with pitfalls, which is why you always keep both feet in the air at once, you aren't tired, just afraid of the terrible fatigue which will follow this terrible restlessness and which may--at best--be visualized as sitting in the garden of the insane asylum behind Karlsplatz, staring into space like an idiot."
"Sometimes I feel as though I had lead weights so heavy they're bound to pull me down into the deepest sea in a minute, and anyone who wanted to grab me or even 'save' me would just let me go, not out of weakness or even desperation, but simply out of sheer annoyance."
"Everybody is so eternally alive, truly immortal, perhaps not in the direction of true immortality, but down to the depths of their immediate life. I'm so afraid of them."
"I had been looking 'over my fence,' holding myself up with just my hands, and then I fell back down, my hands completely lacerated. There must be other shared possibilities, the world is full of possibilities, only I still don't know what they are."
"Not one second of calm has been granted me; nothing has been granted me, everything must be earned, not only the present and future, but the past as well--something which is, perhaps, given every human being--this too much be earned, and this probably entails the hardest work of all."
"It's a little as if instead of just having to wash up, comb one's hair, etc.; before every walk--which is already difficult enough--a person is constantly missing everything he needs to take with him, and so each time he has to sew his clothes, make his boots, manufacture his hat, cut his walking stick, etc. Of course it's impossible to do all of that well; it may hold up for a few blocks, but then suddenly, at the Graben, for example, everything falls apart and he's left standing there naked with rags and pieces. ... I'm not saying such a man is lost, not at all, but he is lost the minute he goes to the Graben where he is a disgrace to himself and the world."
"I keep trying to convey something which cannot be conveyed, to explain something which cannot be explained, something in my bones, which can only be experienced in these same bones."
"This is neither my defect nor one of other people. It's just that I belong in the quietest quiet, that's what's right for me."
"I once envied someone very much because he was loved, well cared-for, guarded by reason and strength, and because he lay peacefully under flowers. I'm always quick to envy."
"And now my 'best regards' after all--what does it matter if they collapse at your garden gate; perhaps your strength will be all the greater."
external
"everything is exaggeration, the only truth is longing, which cannot be exaggerated."
"Perhaps their strength to love consists solely in their ability to be loved."
"One can think about someone far away and one can hold on to someone nearby; everything else is beyond human power."
Milena
Letters to Brod
"No, this whole world is and remains a riddle to him. A mystical secret. Something he cannot attain and something he holds in high regard, with a moving, pure naïveté, because it is 'good at business.' "
"But he [Franz] has never fled to any refuge, not one. He is absolutely incapable of lying, just as he is incapable of getting drunk. He lacks even the smallest refuge; he has no shelter. That is why he is exposed to everything we are protected from. He is like a naked man among the dressed. Everything he is, says, and lives cannot even be called truth; actually, it is predetermined being, being in and of itself, being with nothing added that might allow him to distort his picture of the world--whether into beauty or distress. And his asceticism is completely unheroic--hence all the greater and loftier. All 'heroism' is lying and cowardice. This is not someone who chooses asceticism as a means to an end; here is a man who is forced to be ascetic because of his terrible clairvoyance, his purity and inability to compromise."
"I have, however, an insuppressible longing, a maniacal longing for a completely different life than the one I am leading now or ever will lead, a longing for a life with a child, for a life that would be very close to the earth. And this is what probably won out over everything else inside me, over love, over my love of taking flight, over my admiration, and one again over love."
"I know he isn't resisting life, just this type of life."
Letters of Notable People
"Of course there was a Hamlet before Shakespeare and a Myshkin before Dostoyevsky, and the earth was turning before Galileo, and there was electricity before Galvani. But the world didn't know that; the world was unaware of electricity and went without it. It didn't count on it and didn't suppose it existed. Just like it didn't know a Hamlet before Shakespeare or an Onegin before Pushkin. That is the artist's possession: his exclusive worldview. His ability to see something for the first time, to see something new."
"But as long as we are not quite so perfect, as long as the statement alone does not suffice for faith and understanding, as long as we must place our fingers in the wounds, like Thomas, we have the right to convince ourselves the wounds exist, and that they are deep."
The Devil at the Hearth
"Or do you really think a home is something else and serves purposes other than protecting, protecting, and once again protecting people from the world and mainly from their own inner reflection?"
"I think it would be much more difficult to promise what can be kept, and then live up to such a promise. All fantastic talk from the depths of one's soul is only an excuse; it won't survive the first truly difficult situation that demands simply that people act with human decency."
"There are two ways to live: you can either accept your fate, make up your mind and cope with it, get to know your fate and bind yourself to its good sides and bad, to happiness and unhappiness, bravely, honestly, without bargaining, generously and humbly. Or you can seek your fate: but the search will not only consume your strength, time, illusions, instinct, and any proper, benevolent blindness; it will also consume your self-esteem. You will become poorer and poorer, because what lies ahead is always worse than what you had. Besides, seeking requires faith, and faith may require more strength than life."
Milena's Obituary for Kafka
"They [Kafka's works] are full of dry scorn and the sensitive perspective of a man who saw the world so clearly that he couldn't bear it, a man who was bound to die since he refused to make concessions or take refuge, as others do, in various fallacies of reason, or the unconscious--even the noble ones."
"All of his books paint the horror of secret misunderstandings, of innocent guilt between people. He was an artist and a man of such anxious conscious the could hear even when others, def, felt themselves secure." ...more
“I can be moved by something and not know if I want it for myself.”
everything I know about love has had the title of the quintessential “lost in yo “I can be moved by something and not know if I want it for myself.”
everything I know about love has had the title of the quintessential “lost in your 20’s” book since it’s release. We follow Dolly as she recounts her twenties through the lens of her friends and men and watch as her thoughts on love evolve from her teens until she is thirty. Dolly is a bit of a boy obsessed partier who loves her friends fiercely and it’s really entertaining to read this book as she is absolutely the queen of romanticizing her life. While I only found a few moments in this to be particularly hard hitting, this is the kind of book where the more you relate to it the better it will be.
We follow Dolly as she navigates her twenties and her fear of aging into her thirties. The non-chronological order of this memoir, while confusing at times, really showed the confusion and lostness that one feels in their twenties well. I found the balance of batshit crazy experiences and more reflective moments to be done pretty well. While there are some really fun and deeper moments, a lot of the more poignant revelatory moments didn’t hit for me. A lot of that was because I had already learned a similar thing on my own or because Dolly and I are in two very different paths so some things didn’t feel that relevant to me. While well written, a lot of revelations felt a bit surface level too. I also found the emails to be trying too hard to be funny and ended up having to skip them because I really did not enjoy them. There were some other parts that were really focused on centering men and not prioritizing friends (like making friends less important than boyfriend’s friends’ partners) when you got in relationships that Dolly took as a fact of life that I didn’t necessarily agree with. Nonetheless, this was an enjoyable read and I can see how it would resonant with others.
Even though I couldn’t connect to this most of the time, it was a really quick and enjoyable read and really fun to discuss in a group and was a great first book club pick. I enjoyed Dolly’s writing and am really intrigued to her fiction works....more
This is the messiest, most chaotic, most brutally honest and raw memoir I've ever read and I was SAT for it the whole time. Julia Fox is an icon and IThis is the messiest, most chaotic, most brutally honest and raw memoir I've ever read and I was SAT for it the whole time. Julia Fox is an icon and I love her for it. We follow her as she battles addiction her whole life, deals with neglectful parents, becomes a dominatrix, gets a few big breaks, overdoses multiple times, loses friends, survives horrendous relationships, and just keeps moving forward. It feels like watching a train wreck in slow motion, but she ends up fine in the end. Highly recommend the audiobook, read by Julia herself....more
"We are not raised to recognize wintering or to acknowledge it's inevitability, instead we tend to see it as a humiliation, something that should be "We are not raised to recognize wintering or to acknowledge it's inevitability, instead we tend to see it as a humiliation, something that should be hidden from view lest we shock the world too greatly."
This is a really comforting book about going through hardtimes and how going through rough patches is just a phase of life. It shows how we should be showing up for others and how we aren't alone in those feelings. A very nice and comforting listen. ...more
Just realized I forgot to put my review in here, so here we are a few weeks late.
“Out there, you don’t come home to regular life every night like heJust realized I forgot to put my review in here, so here we are a few weeks late.
“Out there, you don’t come home to regular life every night like here. That changes a person. There’s not so much to hold on to.”
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an incredibly raw memoir recounting Beaton’s times in the Canadian oil sands from 2005-2008. When Kate graduates from college with an arts degree and a bunch of student loan debt, she knows she can’t take a job in her desired field because of how low the pay is. Through ads on the internet and her dad’s suggestions, Kate decides to apply for a job working in the tool crib of an oil sand camp.
The camps Beaton ends up at are filled with men who make incredibly misogynistic quips at her and sexualize her 24/7. She’s the only woman who isn’t working an admin position and it’s an incredibly isolating experience. Even when she gets there she is asked by a female coworker if she has a boyfriend, when she says no (and that she isn’t interested) that coworker immediately tries to set her up with some of the men, who have already started saying some weird things to her. The graphic novel format lends itself especially well to show how these interactions affect Kate. Dealing with this harassment every day she starts to spiral a bit as she realizes that she is completely helpless and no one in power cares enough to help her. There’s this extra dehumanizing knowledge that none of these men would even look at her if they were in the outside world, she’s quite literally just a piece of meat to them – completely interchangeable. A few times this harassment goes into assault and, while it is incredibly heartbreaking to read about, Kate handles it incredibly in this format. I had to put the book down a few times because of how well the graphic novel showed how Kate was feeling both during and after as she dissociates frequently.
Besides the rampant sexism, oil sand workers deal with a lot of shit no matter their gender. Kate herself cannot afford to go home while she is there and works most holidays, completely isolating herself from her family and friends to make a livable wage and pay off her loans. Likewise, we get glimpses of the loneliness and sadness these men feel as they have no other option than to work in the oil sands to provide for their families but in doing so they can rarely see their spouses or kids. We see how a lot of them turn to drugs, specifically cocaine, to keep working in this taxing environment and how it causes safety concerns that the higher ups really don’t care about. It’s also both heartbreaking and a little concerning (for safety reasons) to see a bunch of older men who are capable but at times have no idea where they are, don’t know how to write a resume, and some barely know how to read and write. That part is extra heartbreaking for me because I see my dad, a blue-collar worker who works his ass off but will probably never be able to retire, in them. The safety conditions are also incredibly appalling and covered up. While working at one camp there are two deaths, but they are told that there have been no lost time incidents because it would be bad for the sands if they said there were any. Along with safety concerns, there is some mention of the negative effects happening primarily to the indigenous community and the environment (which Kate was told were not happening).
When Kate first decides to leave for the oil sands her mom doesn’t understand why as Kate now has a bachelor’s degree and should be able to find a better job that won’t drain her so much. When Kate explains how bachelor’s degrees don’t carry much weight (especially in the arts), her mom gets a bit upset and yells, “Well then what was it for!!” It’s one of those lines that hits a little hard because it feels so hard to justify a degree when you can’t find a well-paying job – be it the career you want to go into paying a barely livable wage or the job market sucking. Stuff like the oil sands or working an insane amount in lower paying jobs is the reality for a lot of people and it fucking sucks because it just wears you down until you’re nothing but a shell going through the motions and just trying to stay afloat. 4.5/5 ...more