#11: Books, travel, and the end of history
Welcome, trivia seekers, to the eleventh, and most delayed issue yet, of the Curiosity Catalogue. I’m Shantanu Kishwar, your curator of interesting things.
It’s been over two months since I last wrote this. Hectic work schedules started the slip and a vicious cycle of delays ensued. I’m trying now to claw my way out of the pit of postponement. Let’s see how this goes.
The newsletter will have to change a little. Writing long essays like I used to seems unfeasible (Was I really the person who wrote 1500+ words every two weeks? How!?). Instead, I’ll send a few things your way every few weeks and try to make fun connections where I can.
And so, here’s your first issue of the new (and perhaps improved?) Curiosity Catalogue.
Of Old Books and the End of History
I’ve spent a majority of the last 8 years obsessively buying books. I started like most do, with occasional binges on Amazon and Flipkart sales. Then I got into the harder stuff - books by weight in the Engineering College in Pune, second-hand bargain hunting in Daryaganj (Delhi), scouring through old stacks at Blossoms (Bangalore), and finally, the worst of all, bougie bookshops in Delhi and Bombay.
Needless to say, I’ve spent a lot of money on books in this time. They also take an inordinate amount of space in my room. Many are proudly displayed on one large bookshelf, others a little hidden away in in a cupboard, and yet more snuck away in cartons under my bed. They’re everywhere.
The thing is, I didn’t actually read much until about 2014, well into my second year of college. A combination of my coursework, curiosity and the company I kept drove me into literature’s loving arms. I accumulated books faster than I could read (obviously), and had soon run out of shelf space in my room.
Back then, I was still discovering what I liked. Since I wasn’t sure of what I wanted to read, I bought books I thought I should read. Unsurprisingly, many remain untouched.
Now, I need less of them. There’s a chance I might be moving cities and they’d likely fill more than half the shoebox-sized room I see myself live in. So I began selling my books - even the ones I’d never read.
It wasn’t easy. Each book represented who I was when I bought it, but also who I thought I wanted to be. On Literature by Umberto Eco seemed like a book I had to own to be a serious humanities student. I bought Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace because, after Infinite Jest, I was sure everything by him would be pure gold (never mind that I didn’t fully understand Infite Jest in the first place). Don DeLillo’s and Jonathan Franzen’s books found their way to my bookshelf because their names were often spoken in the same breath as Wallace. On Hinduism by Wendy Doniger seemed necessary for me to become a specialist in Indian history and religion. That I bought physical books at all was because I dreamt of owning a great big library, as proof to myself and the world of an intellectual life lived.
But I’m not that person anymore.
My reading diet is predominantly popular non-fiction, though within that genre I’ll pick up just about anything. (I’m currently on A Strange Kind of Paradise by Sam Miller (history), In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (food writing), and The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker (a guidebook on writing)). I buy most books for my Kindle now. It makes them far easier to travel and move cities with. It’s also easier to refer back to sections in them when writing.
Reconciling with this change hasn’t been easy, because I considered all of these things fundamental to my being. I wanted that bookshelf and scoffed at the idea of trimming my collection before I was at least 65.
Recently, I came across a psychological principle that’s helped me make sense of this change. The End of History Illusion is a phenomenon wherein people assume at any given moment that they’re the final versions of themselves - that they’ll continue to be mostly as they are for the rest of their life.
This finding was borne of a simple experiment. Three psychologists asked people across ages how much they’d changed in the last five years and how much they expected to change in the next five. Uniformly, most people thought they’d developed a great deal in the last five years, but expected to be as they were in the next five. The thing is, this applied across ages. So, while 30-year olds thought they wouldn’t change much by the time they’d be 35, 35-year old respondents found they’d changed a lot since the age of 30. Essentially, everyone thought (wrongly) that they’d become who they were destined to be and planned for life accordingly.
So it was with me and my books. I bought more than I could read at any moment, believing I’d happily read them many years later. It obviously wasn’t true. At 25, I didn’t want to read what I bought when 22. I felt cluttered by the stacks that grew in my room and found a large Kindle library easier to deal with instead. And so I sold them (at a considerable discount), accepting the loss as a lesson learned.
And it’s a simple lesson that applies to a lot of things. Be wary of the commitments you make for your future and don’t be beholden to your decisions today, whether it’s the books you buy or the career you aspire to. Chances are in five years you won’t be the person you thought you would. At that time, you’ll have to bear the double burden of past choices and the life you’d rather be living. The best decisions are those that afford you the freedom to be anything future-you might want to. It also means that if you ever find yourself weighed down by past decisions, it’s okay to move on from them. It might feel like a betrayal of your past-self in that moment, but it also brings a sense of freedom. At least it has to me.
People Who Travel
In 11th grade, I discovered the wonders that were Bill Bryson’s travelogues (Down Under and Neither Here Nor There are particular favourites). In the years since, my love and standards for good travel writing have grown immensely. Unfortunately, it’s a genre I don’t think Indians have mastered. I’ve read Indian writers who profess a yearning to travel, but (and I may be wrong - do reply with any disagreements) much of their writing feels…false? Often, they sound like what they’d expect foreign writer to say if in their shoes. Their writings seem tinged with a false sense of exoticism and the need for every experience to be transcendental.
Honest travel writing is a challenge. To describe experiences evocatively while maintaining your integrity and ditching hyperbole isn’t easy. Sure, everything can sound like the BEST THING EVER!!!, but if everything’s the best, then nothing is.
I’ve found no one better at this balance than Craig Mod. Ever since I came across him in the Longform Podcast, I’ve been in awe of his craftsmanship. I don’t know how he did it, but he’s developed a writerly voice that sounds…comfortable? His newsletters read like a hot knife slicing through melting butter. You don’t need to read things twice to understand what he writes, but want to read it a hundred times over because of the way he writes.
Here, for example, is how he recounted his discovery of a centipede in his underwear one morning:
It wasn’t until I pulled my pants down to do my morning business that I saw the three-inch-long mukade centipede that had taken up residence in my underwear. Never has a man screamed and removed his pants so quickly in a tiny bathroom, change flying out of pockets everywhere, change falling in the toilet, change bouncing off the walls, urine spurting wild like a broken hose, the poor mukade curled up in a ball in the crotch of the smart-wool undies on the floor, me standing pantsless, hopping back and forth screaming CHRIST FUCK SHIT SHIT FUCK, running (still pantsless) from the toilet (no one else was staying at the inn) still screaming (wondering how long the PTSD would traumatize), grabbing a wooden walking stick from the genkan, running back to the toilet, coaxing the little bugger to curl up on the stick and plopping him safely outside where lord of all things holy and good and pure and fine and humane in the world knows the thing belongs.
Or here, where he describes vaccine side-effects:
It was like waiting for a psychedelic deliverance, like a teenager wondering if the weed was “working” or not. I got my first COVID-19 vaccine shot (Moderna) last week and knew a couple folks who were at the vaccination site with me. We texted after. “Do you feel anything?” “Anything now?” Nothing and then when I got into bed about seven hours later: chills, body aches, distinct sense of an immune system doing something immuney. Woke up in the middle of the night with my t-shirt soaked in sweat. Changed. Back asleep. Slept the sleep of guiltless babies. Woke up some eight hours later feeling … pretty good? Sore arm, a little worn, but otherwise not too bad.
His work consists almost entirely of discovering places and food on foot, and his creativity with words is matched only by his innovation in dissemination. He funds himself with a ‘membership programme’ he runs, where people can pay to support him in exchange for member-only benefits, though most of his output (multiple amazing newsletters) is free.
He’s adapted his work to modern sensibilities in clever ways. In addition to his regular newsletters, Ridgeline and Roden, he launched ‘pop-up’ newsletters that document the month-long walks he does. Clips from these journeys also make their way to his YouTube channel. With two or three such pop-ups every year, he’s effectively brought the concept of seasons to newsletters, the way you’d have with podcasts or TV shows. It seems simple (why haven’t I done that yet?), but also revolutionary (whoa, what an idea).
Factoid
Lithium’s a salt like many others in the periodic table, but it can do some amazing things. A few grams of Lithium (consumed as advised by doctors) was discovered to significantly curb the symptoms of bipolarity with minimal immediate side effects. The salt was a Godsend for patients, then. Until, that is, it was discovered to damage kidneys in the long run. This put its users in a terrible predicament - take this to make daily life at the risk kidney failure, or save your kidneys but suffer severe symptoms of bipolarity everyday.
You can listen to more about this on the Radiolab Podcast’s episode titled ‘Elements’.
That’s it for this week. I’m not too happy with this issue’s writing (sorry for any typos I’ve missed), but at this point I wanted to get something out. Infinite postponement was the unviable alternative. I hope you don’t mind this trial-and-error. If you’re new here and want to subscribe, you can do so below.
I might have more book sales in the next few weeks - you can follow me on Instagram to keep track.