Several months back I read a curious, beguiling little book by Andrew Jamieson called Midlife: Humanity’s Secret Weapon. The theme is already catnip for me, ambling into my mid-fifties. But the book is also one of those gorgeous little volumes published by Notting Hill Editions: sumptuous, pocket-sized books wrapped in fabric boards with a bookmark ribbon—the sort of thing you picture the heroine setting down gently in a BBC period drama.
I confess my interest was not merely aesthetic. As cliché as it might be (what did David Foster Wallace say about clichés? They earn that status because they’re true?), I came to the book with real existential questions, and encountered it at the tail end of a season of depression (the book may have helped lift me out of it). I came looking for help. And found it, if only in a sense of recognition.
Jamieson is a therapist (of a Jungian strain) who has counseled countless people through midlife. The book is a collection of case studies and his own confessions. When he discussed “liminality”—“a state of being between two positions, a period of waiting, of limbo, of purgatory, while the psyche is reorienting”—I couldn’t stop from weeping in my plane seat. Midlife is often a period of liminality in which “the old ego-oriented life is shed,” but what we will become is not yet clear. This is the dark night of the soul. Jung himself was intrigued by Lao Tzu’s notion of “Wu Wei” to explain this, a kind of “action through non-action.” One has to endure such liminality with a kind of patience in order to see the Self that will emerge. But “the vacuum left will not be immediately filled, all of life’s pathways to the future will appear blocked and the futures seems unimaginable in every conceivable direction.” I shivered at how much this described my own experience, particularly professionally and institutionally.
But a related facet is something that has lingered with me, and is, in a sense, the impetus for this newsletter.
For Jung (I’m really not invested in any sort of Jungian orthodoxy here, just noting the source), the midlife transition is often experienced first as a stage of “ego deconstruction” which is followed by an experience of enantiodromia, a kind of flipping of one’s personality script. Specifically—and this is when the light of recognition came on for me—in midlife, perhaps especially for those with public personas, “the ego’s extroversion is questioned.” Whereas the ego used to thrive by ‘putting itself out there,’ vying for attention, success, and domination, with a kind of hyperactive pursuit—“a relentless drivenness”—this can be flipped in the midlife transition and the emergent Self wants nothing more than to hide, withdraw, retreat. As Jamieson summarizes:
Quite suddenly it is as if the ego’s fuel supply runs out and the individual becomes exhausted by all this manic activity. As the enantiodromia is activated, a longing for something less frenetic takes hold and the pendulum swing from extroversion to introversion becomes inevitable.
It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem. It’s me.
§
Retroactively, this insight helped me to understand my withdrawal from social media in the months prior. Aside from the attention-suck of it all, I had just lost all interest in The Discourse™. I increasingly felt like I had quite enough of the world in my incarnate life. I think it was Brandon Taylor, one of my favorite writers (who also has a wonderful Substack), who once commented that human beings weren’t built to absorb the deluge of opinions and confessions daily available to us via social media.
Constantly chiming in on l’affaire du jour is a helluva way to make a living, or a name for oneself. So often this amounts to artfully trading on shared outrage. “Can you believe X?! I’m outraged by the same things that outrage you, in just the same way!” And if we express our outrage cleverly, maybe we get a gig on MSNBC. (Calm down: I watch MSNBC, too. #TeamAriMelber)
No, thank you. I’ll vent with my friends on the front porch. We’ll also try to be people who attend to the sadness and heartbreak in the world in secret ways. And there are so many delicious books sitting here beside me waiting to be read. The world of social media was one well lost as I experienced the enantiodromiatic shelter of a world scaled to the Self I’m trying to become.
§
But one thing I miss, in this post-Twitter existence, is the opportunity to share some of the things I love—books, especially, but also movies and music and more. Like Plotinus’ One, for me the joy of reading and learning bubbles over into a desire to share, to expand the circle of those who might enthuse about and enjoy the same things.
On Twitter, I also enjoyed using what little platform I had to share the work of younger and emergent writers. I loved celebrating a publication day with new authors who asked me to endorse their books.
Hence this occasional newsletter. Quid Amo. What I love. A space to talk about the things I love. Expect zero hot takes. I can’t even really promise any specific focus in terms of genre or discipline, I’m afraid, since my own enthusiasms are so wanton and haphazard. Expect some philosophy, of course, but also some theology, a lot of fiction, poetry, and film. Maybe every once in a while there’ll be an essay that captures my attention—like Roger Reeves’ prophetic, heart-rending essay on Michael K. Williams and the Brooklyn he knew, “Ode to Babel.”
Or something like Marjorie Perloff’s translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks 1914-1916. Here is the young Wittgenstein, enlisted in World War I, aghast at both the horrors of war and the barbarity of his fellow soldiers and superiors. The notebooks track an intensely spiritual desire to become a different person. (Martin Pilch argues that the long dashes scribbled by Wittgenstein are a form a prayer, a kind of glossolalia of longing and desire where words can’t be mustered.) There are times when he despairs so deeply that we feel the blackhole of suicide that claimed his brother pulling him in. But then on July 29, 2016:
Yesterday I was fired at. I fell apart! I was afraid of death! I now have such a strong wish to live! And it is hard to renounce life once one is fond of it.
Why does this make me think of a Charles Wright poem? I’m thinking of “The Gospel According to Yours Truly” in Sestets:
Tell me again, Lord, how easy it all is– renounce this, Renounce that, and all is a shining– Tell me again, I'm still here, your quick-lipped and malleable boy. (Strange how the clouds bump and grind, and the underthings roll, Strange how the grasses finger and fondle each other– I renounce them, I renounce them, I renounce them. Gnarly and thin, the nothings don't change...)
I love this and know not why. Maybe I can’t renounce sharing my thoughts. But I can at least aspire to do so ex amore. I’d be delighted if you’ve be part of the community with whom I can share these enthusiasms. But I know we all have to make intentional decisions about what we do with our attention. I hope you’re able to find ways to devote it to the things you love.