When are you the expert?

Travels with Charley, October 2024

looking up in the redwoods

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches every month or two, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), what I’m wondering, and what I’m writing. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine.

Where I’m living

I recently spent a few days camping in the northern California redwoods (a dream reporting assignment). Those groves are awesome, in both senses of the word. They always remind me of a passage from Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, the grumpily yet beautifully written namesake of this newsletter:

The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. They have the mystery of ferns that disappeared a million years ago into the coal of the carboniferous era. They carry their own light and shade. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect. Respect—that's the word. One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns… One holds back speech for fear of disturbing something—what? From my earliest childhood I've felt that something was going on in the groves, something of which I was not a part. And if I had forgotten the feeling, I soon got it back.

Not that I consider myself a contender for the most slap-happy and irreverent of men, but something to work towards.

What I’m reading

I’m going to try something a bit different here and share some lines from my commonplace books on a theme. Let me know how/if this lands with you. (And if you have additional quotes on-theme, by all means, please share them.)

On that twenty-something period of choice paralysis, waiting for Real Life to begin, feeling like your life could be anything, but making a choice necessarily means it can’t become everything—

From The Anthropologists, by Ayşegül Savaş:

All this time, we were waiting. For the news of some momentous change; that we were being summoned to serve in real life; that the time for playing games was over. We lived with the abstract shape of the news, informing us that it had arrived. We lived with the imaginary shock. Maybe, I thought, it would also be a relief: Here it was, finally. Here was life itself.

I scanned abstractly through the list of things awaiting us, like probing an aching tooth, but I couldn’t bear to think specifically about any of it.

From Sean Wilsey’s More Curious, with an apt description of what it’s like to be 24:

But what I really wished it would have been is those three-in-the-mornings in a booth with a bunch of people that I really liked talking about whatever and being engaged and some beautiful woman across the room that you thought you might have something with—that’s all I really wanted from my life.

From a Sheila Heti interview in The Los Angeles Review of Books, about Motherhood:

When I was younger, I was obsessed with the idea that I couldn’t live every life—it seemed so unfair to be born only to be forced to live one narrow life. It seemed like such a stupid waste of existence, to only exist as a single person. My fears about not experiencing motherhood—and therefore not being able to write from that position—were as much about feeling that I needed to experience a kaleidoscope of human realities to know what life is, and therefore to write about it.

But the older I get, the more I feel like it’s interesting and significant that we only get to be this one person. Life seems more tragic, and poignant, and sad, and exhilarating, and odd this way. I now feel like the limitation of life is the essence of a human life. It’s not a bug in the program that we’re stuck being ourselves.

And Kenneth Koch’s classic on how you can’t have it all, actually (“You Want a Social Life, with Friends,” published in The New Yorker in 1998):

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn’t time enough, my friends–
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends–
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

If you’re interested in more of what I’m reading, or a book recommendation, check out my storefront on Bookshop. (Buying through there sends me 10 percent of the sale, which I’ll add to my donations to help kids in Gaza get medical care.)

What I’m wondering

What’s something you’re really an expert on? Narrow expertises welcome (drawing a horse, correctly identifying shitty beers by taste, underwater somersaults…)

What should I be writing about, in this newsletter and elsewhere? What kinds of stories do you want to read? What questions do you think should be reported out?

What I’m writing

For The Atlantic, I wrote about why people don’t wear hearing aids, and how important it is to get over vanity and just wear them. Share it with a dad you love.

Also for The Atlantic, I wrote about how the Notes app acts as a kind of digital scratch paper, revealing what we actually think about. I talked about this on The Colin McEnroe Show on Connecticut Public Radio, where I learned that the host also took Daily Themes, the class that introduced me to commonplace books. He hated it. (I just searched for Daily Themes and learned that Calvin Trillin shared my more positive take on the class.)

Newcomer students—those who are learning English and moved to the U.S. in the past three years—are a growing and often overlooked group, one that will reshape how we educate the next generation of Americans. For Alta Magazine, I spent some time in the classroom of Efraín Tovar in California’s Central Valley, home to refugees from across the world.

For ACLU Magazine, I wrote about students’ rights in and out of classrooms, and how they can protect themselves while speaking up.

And a very fun one: For a recent issue of The New York Times for Kids, I got to work with my genius editor Amanda on a game about making it through a school day at wacky middle schools across the country.

yours,

Charley