”Decide what you want to think about”

How to protect a head

Dear Friend,

We have made it to March! Hooray! Spring is within grasping distance here in Paris, or even already here, depending on how positive you’re feeling.

Concurrently, the world is bizarre. Last week we were treated to three strange vignettes in the Oval Office as three different political leaders went to meet the American president. First it was the turn of President Macron, who seemed to dazzle Trump simply with the power of being French. Then it was UK PM Keir Starmer, who dazzled the US President not so much with personal charisma but with a VERY EXCITING INVITATION to meet the King.

Then there was the reception of President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, which involved much less fawning and no dazzling to speak of. As my straight-talking French friend Diane said the next day, “it looked like a Sicilian mob boss threatening the local greengrocer”.

These are abnormal times and it can often feel hard to reconcile them with the normalcy of our everyday lives. For us to process all the geopolitical change and tumult, space in our brains is required. It can feel oddly placating, for me at least, to scroll the news on my phone — it somehow gives the sense of being on top of it, or rendering it manageable as it’s sitting flat-packed in the palm of my hand. But actually I think the effect of unboundaried consumption of information, images and opinion is to create a kind of mental saturation that makes it harder to actually take in information in a coherent way.

This week I listened to an interview with Zadie Smith, an author who I write about an almost embarrassing amount in these letters. She speaks quite often about her deliberate resistance to being always online, including her choice to use a ‘dumb phone’. This particular interview was for a BBC podcast called This Cultural Life, which asks renowned artists to discuss their own influences.

Here’s what she said to the interviewer, a journalist named John Wilson, on the subject of our relationship to our phone/being online:

“I am not a political thinker, at all…I am interested in how people are thinking and over the past fifteen years my main instinct has been one of resistance to the medium they are thinking in. […] Don’t get me wrong, I like the internet – but this particular version of the internet, the social internet […] the actual algorithm is not neutral, it is ideological. And I don’t mean that it radicalises you to a particular politics, I mean it is a behaviour modification system, and I really believe that. It’s not people’s politics I object to, it’s that they’re doing all their thinking through this medium which they seem to consider neutral, and it isn’t neutral – it has colonial plans for your consciousness. It wants your brain all the time. It is funded by some of the richest people in this world, it wants your attention and it has rules of engagement.”

The interviewer puts to Smith that she is in a luxurious position of being a successful novelist, who also experienced acclaim before the age of ubiquitous smartphones, and — I’m extrapolating a bit here — before the time when partaking in a creative endeavour implied managing a corresponding project of self-packaging and self-promotion.

Smith’s answer to this reproach is quite convincing. She argues that others do not have to go as far as she has (or has been able to go) in eschewing a smartphone completely. “I just mean, let’s not wake up at 8am and take our running orders from Elon Musk,” she tells Wilson. “Decide what you want to think about.”

I have written before in these letters about my own efforts to create distance between myself and the pinball-machine-like pull of a smartphone. Previous endeavours include: deliberately buying a low-quality phone which was unpleasant to use; not looking at my phone before a certain time in the day; implementing a digital sabbath; and — perhaps the most comical — setting my iPhone in black and white because I read that it makes the machine less addictive (it does, but it also makes it basically not worth having).

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Thirty-second book club

Reader, it happened: I finally finished Germinal by Emile Zola!! Now, I am glad that I have read it, but was I glad every moment I was reading it? No, certainly not. Several hundred pages are dedicated to a long protracted labour strike in which a whole village starves, many are killed and in the end they go back to work in worse conditions than before.

I am always struck by the strident bleakness of French literature. I grew up on the moral tales and redemptive plot arcs of Dickens and Austen, and I recall the shock when I first discovered the utter devastation that the likes of Flaubert are happy to leave the reader in.

After my weeks down the mine with Zola, I read the 2018 novel Women Talking by Miriam Toews. It was this month’s book for the real-life book club I attend, the suggestion of Swedish violinist Linn. Each book club is hosted in the home of the member who suggests the book. Linn lives in a petite, charming and bohemian studio apartment in Montmartre that is very much in her image.

The lyrical book is “an imagined response to real-life events” that took place in an isolated rural Mennonite settlement in Bolivia between 2005 and 2009. Throughout those years, over a hundred women and girls who lived in the Manitoba Colony were drugged with an animal anaesthetic and raped in the night by male members of their community. Today in France, the novel undoubtedly evokes the violence inflicted upon Gisèle Pelicot, for which her husband and dozens of other men went on trial and were convicted last year.

While reading this book, I learned that Mennonites are a branch of Protestants that emerged during the Reformation in Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. Religious persecution led Mennonites to seek freedom in the ‘New World’ and today there are significant populations in South America, the US and Canada. The author Toews grew up in a Mennonite community in Canada that was less extreme than that depicted in Women Talking, where the women are not allowed to learn to read and only speak an old-fashioned form of German, meaning they cannot communicate with people outside of their community.

The subject matter is dark, but the book focuses not so much on the violence itself, but the relationship and dialogue between eight imagined women in the community as they decide, via lots of talking, what to do after the men who attacked them are arrested. Do they do nothing, stay and fight, or leave? Their conversations are intimate, philosophical, poetic, sometimes even funny. It was an excellent read, and I must say I finished it quicker than Zola.

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Thank you for reading this week’s letter! If you enjoyed it, please share it or give it a ‘like’. If you really enjoyed it, you could even consider sponsoring these letters. I would be very grateful and send you a hand-drawn card (if you want one!).

I will write soon. Have a good March until then!

Yours,

Hannah