Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

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I Think the Internet Wants to Be My Mind (reminds me of Johann Hari's Stolen Focus although they are different?) I haven’t endured such a loss, but in these words I feel the bitter apathy of Emerson’s heart. Experience should teach us something. Wisdom should be the compensation for failure and loss:“To know a little, would be worth the expense of this world.” But this grief is empty. The only thing it can teach is that it doesn’t, which is the coldest comfort. “The dearest events are summer rain,” he declares, “and we the Para coats that shed every drop.” I feel like his weakest or perhaps least memorable essays for me were the ones on Quentin Tarantino and Jerry Seinfeld, but even those had bright spots of insight here and there. When Emerson found me, I was barely lukewarm, but the result was the same. Everything I’ve written since that afternoon in Kenmore, including this book, I owe to his inspiration. “The man is only half himself,” he writes in “The Poet,”“the other half is his expression.” More than a decade ago, Emerson helped me with the first part. The second is his work in progress.

Ode to Public Benches - I'm a fan of walking around cities and sitting on their benches, drinking coffee and experiencing some of that nice ol' sonder and it turns out I'm doing right. I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Walt Whitman once told a friend. “Emerson brought me to a boil.” This is not to say I had bad teachers or went to bad schools. Some of my teachers were extraordinary, like Mr. Leventhal in eighth-grade English and Mrs. Bienkowski in twelfth-grade economics. They all, I think, sincerely wanted to teach, to pass on knowledge to their students, to help us think critically. (They couldn’t have been in it for the money.) But warped systemic incentives can prevail over the good intentions of smart and generous people. Learning is not the chief goal of most American schooling. The chief goal is turning out graduates. And those two things are not the same.While some found the speech compelling, many were scandalized by Emerson’s radical individualism. It threatened the core of their faith. For Emerson, Jesus was someone who had the courage to seek the infinite in himself, and his example should have been an inspiration for the rest of us to do the same. Instead, Christianity adopted a “vulgar tone of preaching” that commands its followers to “subordinate your nature to Christ’s nature,” that speaks of “revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.” To Emerson, everything necessary for revelation is available here and now, in nature, in us. God isn’t a “vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness.” This passage is as dreamlike and immersive as a short film by David Lynch. It captures that occasional experience we all have of waking up into our own lives, not quite knowing how we got here or where we’re going. The essay is about the difficulty of attaining an accurate perspective on life while it’s happening, about the ways our mind warps experience—so Emerson warps the reading experience in turn. “All things swim and glitter,” including his prose: Superman is Clark Kent - an exploration of one of the most recognizable characters in pop-culture that leads to the old discussion around nature vs. nurture and identity. If you’re a Nerdwriter fan, this is like a greatest hits of his channel’s thought work. Even if you have never watched one of Evan Puschak’s trailblazing video essays before, you should give this a try. You might not always see eye-to-eye with him, but you’ll always come away having learned something. Or at the very least, you’ll receive a spark of his infectious curiosity.

From Emerson, I learned two fundamental truths: first, that we learn by expressing, not by thinking, which is to say that knowledge doesn’t really exist until you can write it down. What we normally imagine as “thinking” is really just a distracted form of writing, like having a disoriented drunk at a typewriter behind your eyes. Writing sobers him up. The pen (or the word processor) lets the mind compose language into knowledge that’s far more sophisticated than what that little boozer can do on his own. This book was like 7 course meal of all desserts. As if I got a 7.5 hour YouTube video of his inner thoughts and views of the world. He mentioned at one time how the YouTube career was meant to originally be a springboard into his writing career similar to the path of John Green, which is ironic because Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed was another of my favorite reads of last year.The children's parents turned extremely pale when they heard about their offspring's narrow escape. As YouTube’s The Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak plays the polymath, posing questions and providing answers across a wide range of fields—from the power of a split diopter shot in Toy Story 4 to the political dangers of schadenfreude. Now, he brings that same insatiable curiosity and striking wit to this engaging and unpauseable essay collection. In going down into the secrets of his own mind, [a person] has descended into the secrets of all minds.... The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in cities vast find true for them also.... The deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public and universally true. Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me—neither better nor worse. So it is with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.