The English writer Oliver Burkeman’s “Meditations for Mortals” introduces itself as a kind of handbook on how to cultivate more joy by acknowledging that “you’re never going to sort your life out.” Like his New York Times best-selling “Four Thousand Weeks,” “Meditations” aims to help readers who feel overwhelmed by the self-perpetuating demands of modern times—the growing lists of e-mails to address, books to read, places to go, and projects of self-improvement to begin—by accepting that life is finite and that so, too, is what we can do in it. Indeed, accepting its finitude is a crucial step toward sanity, freedom, and happiness. Not long ago, Burkeman spoke to us about a few books that have inspired him. His remarks have been edited and condensed.
Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World
by Hartmut Rosa
To summarize, this book is about the idea that what’s at the core of a good life, a flourishing human existence, is something that Rosa calls “resonance.” “Resonance” is just some kind of vibration or harmonization between the individual and the rest of the world. You could use lots of other metaphors, but it’s basically about being “in tune” in a certain way. And, crucially, it’s a kind of relationship to the world that involves quite a lot less control over events than we tend to think that we want, or than states and governments and bureaucracies and social institutions often to try to achieve.
Rosa points out that the whole movement of modern civilization has been toward more control over the world, and he contends that the reason modern life feels dead and empty for so many of us is because, actually, we need more non-control than modern life allows. The book is absolutely full of quite mundane examples where you’re just, like, “Oh, yes, that is exactly right!” For example, he writes that what makes the first snowfall of winter magical is the fact that you didn’t know when it was going to happen. You don’t know how long it’s going to last, and it might throw off your plans. If the first snowfall was predictable, then it would lose its enchanting quality. Today, we’re always trying to expand our reach over the world, to master it—but perhaps we don’t need to.
Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
by Janet Malcolm
This is an extraordinary book that follows the professional lives of various psychoanalysts in New York City at the turn of the nineteen-eighties. It’s a brilliant account of how ideas are expressed in life, and, also, Malcolm’s prose is just the height of what I think nonfiction ought to aspire to. Her style isn’t flowery or elaborate, but it has a quality of precise observation that immediately draws you in.
Malcolm’s subjects are very old-school, doctrinaire, rigid Freudian psychoanalysts who get involved in impossibly obscure academic debates. At the same time, they gossip and backstab and engage in feuds with each other—all these activities which really lend themselves to Freudian readings. I think there’s an awful lot to psychoanalysis, and Malcolm’s book is a funny kind of endorsement of the ideas, because, actually, they are sort of lived out in the way that these people work.