💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 9-01.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:55:13. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Depth and Surface

A couple weeks ago I finished Fawn Parker's "What We Both Know", a very good novel that is not a happy read. It's narrated by the daughter of Baby Davidson, a CanLit darling. His mind is going. He has dementia. And as he worsens, as his daughter first helps with, then takes over his memoirs, the family's awful secrets are slowly revealed.

There's a lot in its 230 pages, but one line towards the end jumped out at me:

I've always assumed a largeness about literature. As if all lives are shaped around it just like my own. But other people have other things; they watch movies, they follow touring bands on the road.

I sat there staring at the truth of that, before finishing the book (it's pages from the end). And then I went back and read that again. It's true of course; I've been around literature my entire life, and it's very much something most people don't care about. Who reads poetry? Who buys literary fiction? A vanishingly small (and shrinking) slice of the public, at best.

But I read it again because I immediately thought of it in the context of [gestures wildly] all this. The draw of literature (and art, and good music, etc) is that there's a lot going on below the surface. That's definitely the case here, too - who finds Gemini but tech weirdos, misfits, people looking for something deliberately, one might say defiantly, different. And yet there's a tremendous depth here. There's a lot of tech talk, but a lot of other things, too. The kind of openness that comes from people knowing they're in an environment where this is encouraged.

I think of that line because it so perfectly describes where we're at now. How we spend our time. What if everyone made time for the things that aren't easy? What would the world be like if all of us were more deliberate, more intentional?

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