CxD #186 🏠 🤿
Welcome back to the land of Character by Design! I’ve missed you all and hope that your days of summer have been filled with as many cannolis and gelatos as mine have.
To paraphrase Alexandre Dumas, in “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “I’m so delighted to see you here. It makes me forget, for the moment, that all happiness is fleeting.”
1. I keep mentioning the work of Michael Pollan because he’s truly one of our most thoughtful and pleasurable writers. I therefore decided to read every single one of his books, which include the first two that I skipped. I’ve already read Omnivore’s Dilemna, Botany of Desire, Cooked, In Defense of Food, and Food Rules.
A Place of My Own is in many ways about the character of a building and the character required to build one. Pollan wanted to have his own writing cave but despite all kinds of fear and worry about being inept with tools and anything requiring manual dexterity, he decided that designing it and building it himself would give it and himself all kinds of character—literal character building opportunities if we’re being precise.
There’s lots in here about the difference between the theory of architecture and the literal ground reality of building. But above all, I was deeply inspired by the idea of making something from the floor to the roof as a means through which to slow down, focus, learn a trade, and have a project that is a means in itself, rather than (only) a means to an end.
Now I just need a little plot of land and a truck.
To be continued…
2.
Among extreme sports, free diving is uniquely menacing. It doesn’t come with the fast-paced, adrenaline-driven, aerobic activity that makes, say, surfing or base jumping seem thrilling, even reckless; instead, it calls for an endurance that leans toward the meditative. Jumping into a body of water and trying to go as deep—or as horizontally far, depending on the type of free diving—as you can before coming up for air is as much a test of fortitude as of fitness. Free divers must have the physical ability to swim in and withstand high water pressure; they also must be able to suppress the breathing reflex. Taskin is a man who appreciates the danger and recognizes the demands of the sport.
“I struggled a long time to actually find myself,” Taskin says in the documentary, alluding to his turbulent youth, which involved radical politics and the prospect of jail time. Free diving has helped him to relax. In a night scene, he’s seen in a pool, by himself, preparing for a breath-holding practice. He takes a moment to reflect, then looks at the water—the light coming from inside the pool refracts through the ripples and dances on his begoggled face. He takes several short gulps of air—a method known as lung packing that enables a diver’s lungs to hold more oxygen than they would at resting capacity—then slinks into the water.
3.
“No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.” ~Ruskin
Perfectionism = 🤮
5.
