Catch-up service:
Einstein, Churchill, and AI
The Great and Unfortunate Story of Jason Arday
The Last Lunch
Young Churchill
Dear Me, England
Anatomy of a ‘F*ck You’
I’ll be talking J&P at the End of the Road festival in Dorset in a couple of weeks. My event is on Sunday, do come along if you’re there.
Rattle Bag this week includes thoughts on Britain’s defence dilemma; the crazy Open AI/Hugging Face hack; why the cocaine industry is in crisis; how fish-fingers get made; the magic of Abbey Road cover; the Beatles’ funniest song; and of course Dolly.
On Thursday the rain came down in London for the first time since anyone except the elders could remember. It marked the official end of a summer which I have greatly enjoyed, not least because of a bumper reading harvest. Several of the books I read on holiday are in contention for a much-coveted spot in my end-of-year top ten. One of these was Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère, a memoir, first published in English in 2022.
Carrère has written fiction but is best known for non-fiction which mixes reporting, research, and self-disclosure. The mental and emotional journey he goes through while writing the book becomes part of the book. Yoga tells how he set out to write a book about how the practice of meditation had brought him serenity after a lifetime of struggling with depression, only to find himself experiencing a depression so severe that he ended up in a mental hospital. If that sounds dark, well yes it is, but it’s also funny and moving and hopeful.
One of the pleasures of reading Carrère is his fine-grained, psychologically subtle portraits of other people, like the murderer he wrote about in The Adversary, or the various characters he encounters while reporting on the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka (Other Lives But Mine), or the friends and lovers who float in and out of his work. At the same time, the person he is most compelled by, his greatest subject, is himself. The tension between these two demands on his attention, between his life and other lives, is central to his work.
Reading Yoga sent me back to a New Yorker profile of Carrère which came out in 2020, when the book was published in France. The journalist, Ian Parker, observes in his opening sentence that Carrère is someone who “has trained himself, against instinct, to take an interest in other people”. This becomes a theme of the piece. Hervé Clerc, Carrère’s closest male friend, who appears in his books, tells Parker, “It’s a kind of paradox. He’s very self-involved, but also very able to see the subtle character of others. He can see in me things which I don’t see myself.”
Reading this reminded me of something I once heard Tyler Cowen say on a podcast - that “introverts make the best extroverts”. I’m not sure what Tyler meant by this, but the phrase stuck with me. Here’s why I think it makes sense.
