When do you feel nervous?
Travels with Charley, December 2024
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 writing, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine.
Where I’m living
Portland in December: very dark, very gray! I’m making it through the weeks of little light largely by reading, going to the sauna, and escaping to the sunshine (see above and below). Glad to be on the other side of the solstice.
What I’m writing
I jumped out of an airplane with some risk-loving skydivers in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. As someone who hates rollercoasters and heights, I still can’t believe I did this. Read more about the septuagenarians who jump out of planes together thousands of times in NYT Well. They’re wonderful and worth emulating, no matter your risk tolerance.
I also wrote a first-person account of the reporting experience for NYT Insider, which you can read here.
Speaking of airplanes, I got to work on a very fun, very magazine-y package that Bloomberg Businessweek did on the state of air travel in 2024. I talked to the experts (disgruntled TSA employees, longtime flight attendants, kids who fly constantly).
What I’m reading
On reading—
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small:
Beautiful things do violence to us, their viewers, by assaulting our strident sense of centrality.
Lily King, Writers & Lovers:
If I could write something as good as right there, right where that belt cinches her pinafore. It’s hard to pull my eyes from it. I don’t know why it’s so moving to me, and I could never explain. There’s a madness to beauty when you stumble on it like that.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina:
Anna read attentively but there was no pleasure in reading, no pleasure in entering into other people’s lives and adventures. She was too eager to live herself.
Adrienne Rich in What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics:
To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to work one choice and one choice only?
Tracy K. Smith on reading Lucille Clifton’s poetry manuscripts, from To Free to Captives: A Plea for the American Soul:
The life force rising like breath off paper pages. The dark smudge of oil where a thumb once lingered. The moisture droplets—water? tea? tears?—smudging a column of words so that the ink is burbled, blurred. Pages of text written in such haste that there was no time to lift up the pen, no attempt to distinguish one word from another. It is intimate. Enrapturing. An encounter in which you are allowed almost to brush knees under the table with the work’s maker. It makes you feel large, as if you, too, are held in a reciprocal regard. And also small, a mite upon the massive page of time.
And a Lucille Clifton classic to usher us into the new year:
i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me
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
When do you feel nervous? Why? What do you do to dispel the nerves?
And as always, what should I be writing about, in this newsletter and elsewhere? What questions do you think should be reported out?
yours,
Charley