There is an open bookshelf in a town I’ve visited almost every summer since I was born. The general consensus in this kind of affair is that you should leave one to take one. I’ll admit I’ve seldom abided by that rule under the pretense of being on holiday. There are recurring themes to my summer reads of course. One inhabitant provides endless thrillers, I boringly assume it’s a man. Balding, in his fifties, with a tan that makes his skin look like leather. Another keeps the brown wood stocked with English countryside romances. She used to have the brightest blonde hair, slept in braids to have soft waves and took a noisy red car down to the beach to dip her curls in. I like to imagine they might’ve gone to the same school at some point and exchanged books. In my teens I picked up a french copy of Dan Brown’s Da vinci code.

The previous summer I’d read another book from the same series. I’ll end up reading the entire thing in a jumbled up order over several summers as they come to me. References to the Fibonacci sequence tend to very easily impress, I further this by familiarising myself with A1Z26, Caesar cyphers, substitutions and the like. Still I remember picking up that book for an entirely different reason. Flicking through the pages a piece of paper fell out. The paper was smooth and neatly folded into a square. A love letter in the wild, for the first time in my life I had proof that it existed, and for ordinary people too. It was almost better than having one addressed to me. Now I actively look for these little pieces of life in second hand books. 

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

What I have come to love about second-hand books is not the thrift of them but the evidence. Someone else’s underlines. Someone else’s train ticket pressed flat between pages. The faint spine-crease of a passage that mattered enough to be returned to. A new book arrives like a sealed room; a used one is already breathing.

There is, too, a small and unfashionable pleasure in not being the first owner of something. It interrupts the tidy fantasy that everything meaningful must be bought new, frictionless and pristine. A lived-in book asks a different kind of attention. It reminds you that reading, like living, is cumulative, a quiet relay rather than a private performance.

I pick up the book half because it’s in French and half because it talks about November. I have a poetry collection under my arm already. This is in the wrong pile I realise, it’s a translated play. The letter that falls out is in between pages, not the usual careful cover slide. Ernest Bryll, the name is unfamiliar…but who am I kidding, I am vain in terms of book collecting, I am the reason why they stick the “signed copy” stickers in indie bookshops. Le remous de novembre. November turmoil? Rzecz Listopadowa. A November Matter or Thing. A notable play by Bryll that was analyzed by Czesław Miłosz in 1972. It was considered a, perhaps intentionally, pessimistic representation of the “oppression” of that time, often linked to the historical weight of Polish uprisings and societal stagnation. While “November” (Listopad) is often associated in Polish literature with the November Uprising and national melancholy, Bryll’s work often bridged this with religious, particularly evangelical themes.

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

The longer I spend circling second-hand shelves, the less convincing the mythology of literary success becomes. It is difficult to maintain grand illusions about the marketplace when you are holding yesterday’s hardback for two euros, its once-pristine dust jacket now softened into something almost tender. Books have afterlives. Most of them are quieter than we like to imagine.

If success for a writer is measured only in immaculate stacks of new releases — sharp-cornered, unslept-in — then the open bookshelf tells a different story entirely. It suggests that endurance might matter more than arrival. That being carried forward, hand to hand, summer to summer, is its own modest kind of victory.

I am not innocent here; I like new things as much as anyone raised inside this particular century. But there are small rewards for consuming a little less aggressively, for letting objects and sentences gather some life before they reach you. Second-hand books feel less like purchases and more like inheritances. Little proofs that attention, once given, rarely disappears completely.

Do you need a reason to write? lost art of output-less hobbies under capitalism 

“ If I could write words like leaves on an autumn forest floor, what a bonfire my letters would make. If I could speak words of water, you would drown when I said I love you.” 

Spike Milligan

I had a phase where I would obsessively cut my hair. Bangs and shags. All expertly executed with my primary school craft scissors. I still discuss my hair more than I would like to admit. But when I’m ultimately going to actually cut my hair. I know. I don’t doubt it. Whilst I aim to demystify writing as much as I can when discussing it with friends, I feel compelled to say that sometimes it is a need. It doesn’t have to be neat or readable per say, it should honestly not make sense to anyone but you as a first draft. What I find to have in common with most people who succeed at writing regularly is that you hold no real respect towards the medium you work on, and by that I mean you associate no resemblance of the sacred to it.

You get the free notebooks from your parents’ work, the scrap paper that sits on the kitchen counter for potential grocery lists, the ikea pencil you find at the bottom of the bag and then you’re good to go. You don’t need an ecosystem of notebooks, I used to write stuff on my hands to not forget them (though they did occasionally smudge, which ruined it). There is something suspiciously efficient about adulthood’s relationship to hobbies. Everything must lead somewhere, preferably somewhere monetisable, optimisable, legible on LinkedIn.

The minute you admit you do something simply because your hands itch for it, the room goes a bit quiet, like you’ve confessed to believing in fairies. Output has become the moral justification for effort. If nothing is produced, improved, or performed, the activity begins to look indulgent. But the body does not care about productivity metrics. The body cares about repetition, about friction, about the small private satisfactions of doing something badly and anyway.

“En fait, c’est pas qu’on perd notre insouciance, c’est qu’on perd la relativité à la première fois. C’est à dire que quand on a 16 ans, 17 ans et qu’on voyage: c’est une première fois, sécher les cours c’est une première fois, la première soirée, le premier amour, le premier baiser, la première rupture, le premier chagrin…Tout en fait. C’est un espèce d’ascenseur émotionnel exceptionnel. Dans l’insouciance il y a l’absence  de douleur donc la projection vers l’avenir n’est que belle en fait. Les corps et les cœurs ne sont pas encore écorchés, ils sont encore en pleine possession de leurs moyens. Donc on est positif, on a de l’envie et de l’enthousiasme. Et je pense qu’en fait, en vieillissant le plus dur c’est d’essayer de maintenir le cap de l’enthousiasme, de la curiosité, de l’allant. Et dans la mesure du possible, éviter toute forme de cynisme ou de jugement facile.”

Gilles Lellouche on the press tour for L’amour ouf 

Translation: Actually, it’s not that you lose your carelessness, it’s that you lose relativity to the firsts. That’s to say when you’re 16, 17 and you’re traveling: it’s the first time, skipping class is a first, the first party, first love, first kiss, first breakup, first heartbreak…Everything. It’s a sort of exceptional emotional rollercoaster. In carelessness there is an absence of pain, thus the projection towards the future is only beautiful. Bodies and hearts are not yet scarred; they are still fully in possession of their strength. So you’re positive, you have desire and enthusiasm. And I think actually, as you grow older the hardest part is trying to maintain that sense of enthusiasm, curiosity, forward momentum. And, as much as possible, to avoid all forms of cynicism or easy judgment.

What quietly replaces those firsts is not wisdom so much as optimisation. You learn which efforts pay off, which ones can be displayed, which ones translate into something measurable. The danger is not that we grow more cynical: it’s that we grow more strategic. We begin to pre-edit our curiosities. We choose hobbies the way investors choose portfolios: cautiously, with an eye toward return. Somewhere along the way, the useless pleasures (the ones that exist purely to absorb an afternoon) start to feel vaguely irresponsible.

There seems to be this general consensus that the seed of intellectuality lies in secondary literature only. The literature on literature, if you will. Academic? Yes, surely more than a poem, at least in the way it is packaged. My reference has always been good old George Orwell’s ‘Why I write’. I know, how boring of me. The amount of times I’ve quoted and referenced this is actually indecent. 

So, do we ‘write to taste life twice?’ In my humble opinion, I sure hope the fuck not. Some things I just need to process out loud (on paper) and bury in my shoe boxes of finished and unfinished notebooks and odd receipts. Will I ever read them again? Who knows and honestly who cares. It is the most precious archive of myself to exist in the world. Every and any remotely hash feeling I have felt has a dedicated slot of paper. Waking up the morning after that kind of thing is the strangest feeling in the world. The graveyard of verses in my notes app is undeniable clutter but it’s an infinite resource to draw from all the same. It just sits there, stubbornly private, doing the slow invisible work of metabolising a life. There is a particular freedom in knowing that most of what you make will never be seen. Not everything needs an audience to be real. In fact, some impulses only survive in low light. The pressure to publish, to share, to refine until presentable — it mostly flattens the strange early shapes of thought. First drafts are supposed to be a little feral. They are not performances; they are sightings. Evidence that something moved through you and left a mark.

“I loved my friend.

He went away from me. 

There’s nothing more to say. 

The poem ends, 

Soft as it began—

I loved my friend.” 

Langston Hughes 

Maybe this is why the idea of the “output-less hobby” feels almost subversive now. It insists that not every human impulse exists to be harvested. That some forms of attention are valuable precisely because they leave nothing behind but the person who was changed by doing them. In Fahrenheit 451, the abolition of reading began with tech companies simplifying books into summaries that you could read in five minutes. Time is money and the usual stuff, right. When people no longer engaged with the texts, they forgot how to think. Then came the book burnings. Engaging with the act of writing should have no other end goal but the act itself. No one will archive your life for you. You might entrust digital keepsakes but who’s to say they are actually more relatable? As someone who regularly goes through old boxes I can guarantee, your odds are much more promising with physical media. 

Write badly. Write often. Write like no one is waiting — because most of the time, no one is. 

Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust…. and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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