This newsletter is brought to you by my second coffee because I am tired. Everyone else I know is also ‘tired’ or ‘over it’ or both but too busy juggling homeschooling and work to complain. Any collective delusion we had some months ago - masked as blind optimism - has faded into the horizon, and any motivation to do the last five months of this year well has entirely disappeared. Or maybe I am projecting because book press is over and I’m starting a new chapter; trying to heave the blind motivation I have always had - but can’t seem to locate - with me into the fold again. So today’s newsletter is an attempt to motivate us both.
Earlier this week, I began reading The Cost Of Living by Deborah Levy. It is the second book in a three-part series serving as Levy’s memoir on writing, gender politics and philosophy. It documents Levy’s attempt to find ‘a new way of living’ at 50, after she awoke two decades into her marriage and realised it was irreparable because she didn’t want to fix it. She was living the way a good woman was supposed to, as a wife and mother, but none of it felt right. “Life falls apart,” she wrote. “We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don’t want to hold it together.” She moves out and starts a new chapter in search of a better existence. She becomes physically strong at 50, when she is supposed to be losing strength. She doesn’t write in the morning, like she always has. She writes morning and night. She has energy because she has to. She works because she must. “Freedom is never free.” she wrote. “Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”
Those final two lines have stayed with me all week, and remind me of a story David Walsh told in his book, Bone of Fact. It is the story of the Maverick Penguin. If you’re not familiar with David Walsh, he is the gambler-turned-gallery owner who is responsible for Mona in Tasmania. Pre-Mona, in the late 1990s, Walsh went to Antarctica with a group of tourists. As they explored, they stumbled across some penguin carcasses which wouldn’t usually be an odd thing to stumble upon, except for the fact the penguins had been so far inland. What penguin, in their right mind, would waddle in so far? It turns out, while penguins largely remain in colonies, sometimes the odd penguin strays hundreds of kilometres inland. They do this for good reason. Sea-level changes and unpredictable weather systems can sometimes wipe out entire penguin colonies. “If they just lived in one colony [by the sea] eventually all of them would perish. So a small percentage of penguins go off and do really random exploratory things,” wrote Walsh. “They would become extinct if there weren’t a few maverick penguins that go exploring, and most certainly perish. But a few, a very few, get very lucky indeed. The parallels with hyper-successful sports stars and entrepreneurs are compelling. I’m sure if we were able to interview the penguin colony founders they would boast of their life strategy, and their management of risk. In the penguin example, penguin society benefits from and, in fact, is dependent on maverick penguins doing weird things.”
If it weren’t for women like Levy, the story for a woman would remain largely unchanged. Society needs women like Levy to move our world forward. She is a Maverick Penguin and whether you are, I guess, depends on whether you are willing to bear the cost. And I think that is what we often forget. That to win or gain something, we often have to lose something else. Whether the loss is worn in our social life or our love life. Whether it is found in external judgement or little financial security. Going against the grain of society is always going to hurt at some point, yet society requires some of us to do it in order for all of us to move forward. We need some people to go off and do weird, exploratory things, whether that is creating Tesla or finding ‘a new way of living’. As Walsh writes: “A species will benefit when individuals within that species exhibit the most variation, without that variation destabilizing that species as a whole.” What keeps only a few of us doing it, I suppose, is the cost. The Colony Penguin isn't willing to wear it. Only the Maverick Penguin is willing to because, for them, the cost of not doing it is higher. As Levy wrote, “My marriage was the boat, and I knew that if I swam back to it, I would drown.” So if you are striving for something, remember it never comes easy. There is always a cost to feeling free. It requires losing things along the way, it requires hard work, and most of all, it requires endurance. And sometimes that requires a second coffee.
Some related (and unrelated) recommendations:
Of course, The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy. This is the second book in the series, and I will get to the first (which is mainly about writing) after this.
The brilliant Ta-Nehisi Coates guest edited the latest issue of Vanity Fair and put Breonna Taylor on the cover. Read the cover story.
This New York Times Magazine article on how the fashion industry collapsed. What happens now that we have nowhere to go? Sweatpants forever?
I was finally sucked in to the second Dirty John season on Netflix, which tells the story of Betty Broderick. If you can get through the overdramatised trailer and first episode, it becomes utterly compelling and tells a much bigger story about divorce.
It is Equal Pay Day in Australia today. The national gender pay gap currently sits at 14%, and the WGEA gender pay gap (which calculates the pay gap in the private sector and factors in things like bonuses) is more than 21%. Here is a short, simple explainer from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency on why these figures are important to understand.
Finally, A Bone Of Fact by David Walsh.
Have a great weekend, friends.
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