Highly recommended: the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show with Jia Tolentino (author of Trick Mirror, a book I’ve probably recommended more often than any other in the last few years) about parenting, pleasure, psychedelics, reading, attention, smart phones and Cocomelon. This exchange hit home, emphasis mine…
jia tolentino: And it sometimes feels to me not that we’re turning away from the mess and the wonder of real physical experience, despite the fact that it’s precious. I kind of feel something within me sometimes that it’s too precious. It’s too much, that being present is work, in a way, that it’s this rawness, and it’s this mutability. It requires this of us and a presence. That is something that I have sometimes found myself flexing away from because of all the reasons that it’s good, in a weird way. Have you ever — do you know what I mean at all?
ezra klein: I absolutely know what you mean in a million different ways. I mean, I was a kid. Why do I read? I mean, now I think it’s almost a leftover habit, but I read to escape. I read to escape my world. I read to escape my family. I read to escape things I didn’t understand. And I read obsessively, constantly, all the time, in cars, in the bathroom, anywhere.
tolentino: Totally.
klein: Because it was a socially sanctioned way to be alone.
tolentino: Right.
klein: And nobody would bother me because it was virtuous for me to be reading.