1. Perhaps your Instagram feed is full of burning candles, or you’ve noticed a surplus of plaid about town. Kathryn Jezer-Morton certainly has. Consider her recent article in which she takes note of the plethora of “seasonal displays of disposable petroleum-based fleece” and “manufactured-to-look-handmade mugs” and wonders, is cozy season a cry for help?
Whatever the origins of the aesthetic of coziness online might be, it started out as a feeling, not a collection of objects. The aesthetic tries to conjure the feeling, and I have two questions: How well does it succeed, and why do we want that feeling so bad?
Instagram representations of coziness are primarily about safety and comfort, but they are also about order and control. Everything in its right place. The house is cleaned, the candles lit. No unexpected intrusions can disturb the feeling. Just as important as what we see — the couch, the socks, the candle — are the things we don’t see: Mess, disorder, the unpredictable reality of the world outside.
What if our obsession with coziness has grown in step with our growing feeling of collective precariousness — economic, environmental, social? … the colder and more brutal it is in the outside world of work, social interactions, success and failure, fear and dread, the more it feels precious and delicious to be inside our lil homes.
It strikes me as a little weird that we would still feel this immense desire to be safe “inside our lil homes” after almost two years of a pandemic during which many of us have been forcibly isolated from one another. Haven’t we been inside long enough? Seems not, which indicates, I guess, that our medications of choice haven’t been working. Perhaps, as Jezer-Morton says, our increased desire to feel cozy is a response to external turmoil — heightened precarity beyond the walls of our homes. But I think it may also be flight from internal turmoil, the chaos inside our homes, inside our very selves, which might explain why a mug of piping hot cider might be deeply enjoyable for the moment (trust me, it is), but never really offers what we most need:
We all want so badly to belong somewhere, and the perfect artifacts of coziness can’t help us achieve that feeling. Collect a bunch of cozy-projecting objects and you’ll just end up working to maintain your stuff, when what you really need is for your stuff to maintain you.
2. It’s the idea that we have needs, and that we can satisfy those needs by doing x, y, or z — by purchasing whatever products display themselves in the sidebar or by shuttering ourselves against the world. I’m reminded of that Dostoevsky quote from The Brothers K:
The world says, “You have needs — satisfy them. … Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide…
This idea echoes throughout You Are Not Your Own, the new book by Alan Noble. For Noble, contrary to the messaging around us, we are not our own authorities; we do not belong to ourselves. Instead, we belong to a deeper, more interdependent order, one that we ignore at our own peril.
In a review of the book at Christianity Today, Timothy Kleiser refers back John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the epic retelling of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace; specifically, the infamous yet charismatic Satan, who bristles against limitation. By rebelling against the order of creation, Satan poses as a god himself—and ultimately persuades Eve that she and Adam can do the same.
Like Adam and Eve, we believe that accepting our creaturely limits will likewise limit our happiness, so we reject God’s authority and end up experiencing what they did: distance from God, each other, and even ourselves.
… social cancers have metastasized from that primordial lie of self-ownership. The cure, says Noble, comes from acknowledging what and whose we are: creatures who belong to our good Creator.
3. I guess Satan is in the air this week, though this may be less thrilling than it sounds. For Athwart Sam Buntz defines today’s Satanism as an overemphasis on being “self-raised,” taking the term (once again!) from Milton. A “self-raised” person “cannot fit into the established order of things [and] seeks to break it and remold it to his heart’s desire. This is an admittedly powerful and romantic point of view, though with nasty implications.”
But what Buntz notices is that, as Paradise Lost progresses, Satan “grows duller.”
By the time Paradise Lost ends, Milton’s Satan is like Dante’s Satan: boring. He is a snake with nothing to say, slithering away to eat a bunch of apples that turn into ashes in his mouth. This may explain why our increasingly “Satanic” culture has not actually become more exciting or titillating or Metal. It is merely zombified — chilled out, not heated up. It is similar to the pattern presented in Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: The White Witch lures you in with the promise of Turkish Delight and indefinite pleasure, only to leave you frozen as a statue in her garden, bored out of your gourd.
I’m reminded of an episode of PZ’s Podcast, “Transgressive Enough 4 U?” in which PZ takes note of the inevitable monotony of pushing boundaries.
I, for one, got so mesmerized, “When I Was Young,” by the narrative of art as “transgression”, as the angry denunciation of boundaries and establishments, that I failed to recognize a whole host of other expressions—and in particular, expressions of human drama that were redemptive and optimistic rather than bitter and enraged.
Not only does “transgression” begin to seem adolescent but, in Buntz’ view, deeply boring. When all you have is your self and your self-will, well, you’re not left with much:
As the desire to be “self-raised” without relation or obligation progresses in people who really believe in it, it produces art of a significantly lower quality. Or, perhaps of no quality. … The point isn’t to create something good, as the Good, the Beautiful, and the True have been abolished. The aim is just to rack up status points, likes, and dividends. This is how we see Dante’s Satan in the end: a being of quantification and automatic appetite, flapping his wings mechanically, frozen in place, unable to do anything other than chew on a few of the most famous among the damned.
4. But as all the references to Milton imply, this idea of “self-will run riot” is nothing new. In a verbose but ultimately pretty informative write-up in the Atlantic, Mark Greif considers the legacies of Thoreau and Emerson, flag-bearers of a uniquely American individualism.
People who have never read Walden know that Thoreau lived alone for two years in his late 20s in a cabin beside Walden Pond, paring life down to the necessities. Almost as many are familiar with a seeming contradiction: Thoreau went home some weekends to his parents’ house.
Today, Thoreau’s “experiment” is what the majority of young adults are expected to do — not be totally detached, but still deliberately independent. Only in the context of yore — when very few people lived alone — was Thoreau’s “self-reliance” noteworthy. Even so, we don’t abandon community as easily as some might think:
“Community was not so much declining as shifting forms.” The contours of this shift are discernible in the rise of ardent moral reforms with wider geographic range, such as abolitionism, the defense of the Cherokees, and women’s participation in the petitioning of Congress. It was as if earlier moral policing in one’s own parish — monitoring sin in oneself and in neighbors, creating tight but short-range bonds — split along two tracks. One led to individual self-improvement and self-realization, and the other to reform of “the nation” or “the people,” each mission cosmic rather than local, yet both with a communal thrust.
5. Observing a similar pattern, but in plainer language, the celebrated memoirist Mitch Albom contributed an op-ed to the Detroit Free Press. We haven’t lost our need for community and religion, Albom writes, but find them in new places, especially online. The paragraph I most appreciated is this:
God doesn’t fit inside an iPhone. But I can attest, being much closer to the end of my life than the beginning, and having seen so many people leave this earth, that in our most dire moments, in the operating rooms, the burning buildings or the echoes of flying bullets, the digital community offers no comfort, and our politics offer no protection. Who do we cry out to for help then? Twitter?
6. The internet may prove useless amidst echoes of flying bullets, but (as we like to point out on Mockingbird) it’s pretty good for jokes. Here’s what we have for humor this week. I really laughed at “God Workshops the Ten Commandments with His Holy Spirit, Jesus, Adam, and Eve.” Also: “Deadline Near Enough to Inspire Anxiety but Not Near Enough Near Enough to Inspire Action.”
The paper is now due in two weeks, which is sufficiently close for Kelly to feel an ever-growing sense of dread about it, but not close enough for her to begin working on it in any way.
At present, Kelly is starting Breaking Bad for the first time.
7. But perhaps the most delicious article of the week is all about ice cream, sort of. At Time, Taylor Harris describes “How Ice Cream Became My Own Personal Act of Resistance.”
as my anxiety disorder peaked, … [m]y eldest sister, Autumn, would pick me up from high school so I wouldn’t have to be alone and take me to Graeter’s, the other ice cream shop across town. No matter how many panic attacks I’d had that day, I could count on digging out smooth boulders of milk chocolate in a dip of mocha chip. For 10 minutes, I lived without anyone’s expectations, without any fear. I was just a girl in a car with a cup on my lap. […] What if obsessively finding delight is a way to live well sometimes? …
Gluttony is never O.K., the Pharisees of Wellness will say. Ice cream dissolves and leaves you with nothing but guilt. Legions of skinny women in yoga pants live within me, rent free. My doctors, ever so gentle, never tell me to worry about my weight but suggest I eat sweets in moderation, on account of a genetic mutation that puts me at a higher risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers.
Yes, doctor, I’m aware of my genetics. But doctor, have you ever gone skinny dipping in a French pot of churned cream, let the calories coat every hard fact and corner of your insides? What if ice cream’s superpower is acting as a sweet buffer between us and those hard things, the risks we carry? Between who we are today and who the world says we might become if we’re not careful?
Harris goes on to describe various hardships — the aftermath of the 2017 riots in Charlottesville, the pain (physical and emotional) of surgery — and the steady, gracious gift of ice cream through it all. During a personal period of illness in the pandemic, I, too, came to appreciate the life-giving power of junk food.
As I see it, this is where the buck stops on all the articles bemoaning the dangers of self-indulgence. Life is hard, and sometimes you just need a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a big spoon. It may not solve all your problems, but on a bad day, it might just be a gift.
8. A friend once said that if aliens were to touch down in Virginia in November, they would think they had arrived on an orange planet. I recall this every year as I take in the landscape, as if for the first time, with its fiery treetops of orange, yellow, red, and brown—so clangorous before quieting for the winter. The changing scenery inspired a beautiful reflection by Hannah Anderson, for Renovaré. She first describes the science of the matter, then what it reflects about the hope of Christianity:
Less daylight means the production of chlorophyll slows, which in turn initiates chemical reactions and allows the pigments underneath the green — yellow, orange, brown, and red — to dominate. Eventually photosynthesis halts altogether. The death of the leaf is certain now as cellular respiration ends, but just as certain is the fiery show before it falls to the earth to die.
That’s the facts of it anyway. But anyone who’s seen an autumn hillside knows that facts are just the beginning. After all, if the heavens declare the glory of God, if October blue skies and billowy white clouds tell forth His praise, what does it mean that the trees of the wood burst into song just before winter silences them? What does it mean that anthocyanins turn the maples red and carotenoids turn the sassafras yellow and together they paint the oaks and sycamores brown? What does it mean that the leaves summon their last breath for one last burst of charismatic praise and Pentecostal abandon?
And what does it mean that I can’t help but stop and stare?
The poets and prophets speak of trees that celebrate, trees that dance and sing and clap their hands before the Lord. They speak of trees that raise their voice and raise their limbs to the One who’s coming to set all things right. This is a strange thing and one wouldn’t believe except for the facts: Leaves are loudest just before they die. …
In Romans 8, the apostle Paul makes a strange statement: he writes that creation understands that the world is not as it should be, that it has been subjected to decay, that it “groans” with us, waiting for righteousness and redemption to reign. He writes that, just like us, it waits in hope. And a creation that can groan in hope is a creation that can praise. Trees that long for righteousness are trees that can spend their dying breath praising the One who will one day deliver them.
Strays:
- The burden of being perfect-looking.
- America’s youth are religious, but they don’t trust institutions.
- Last but at least for me not least, this is a momentous day for Taylor Swift fans, who have long recognized “All Too Well” to be her crowning masterpiece. The original was a none-too-radio-friendly near-6-minute epic, but today, the mythical and supremely dramatic 10-minute-version sees the light of day at last. Get ready to travel through time and feel your feelings:
