Enchantment feels like absurdity’s chiller cousin and is something I can get down with. Something I enjoyed the most about reading
book Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age is she makes no promises. There is no reductive do this and you’ll be enchanted, or if you can just answer this question and tap into enchantment you’ll be great. She isn’t giving us answers, just offering her experience. There’s an answer in the lack of one, in that most things with deep true meaning or that shift and change us do not have quick one size fits all answers.I was looking forward to reading the book. I like the topic of enchantment, I’m in a real personal essay place, but what I hadn’t counted on was how much Katherine’s journey mirrored my own in the business of tarot. I love reading tarot but the business end and having to constantly reframe it for people that tarot alone will not change their lives has worn me out. The projected hopes and desires become exhausting to hold and manage. It’s difficult because it sounds judgmental about a client here and there but really my concern is about us a people. Everyone is scared of everything all the time but desiring radical change. How exactly is that going to happen without us being clear on our own intellectual responsibility?
Now I can refer them to Katherine’s book and suggest some deeper inquiry and deep engagement with the world.
xx. A
What Katherine’s Thinking About Right Now:
I’m about to head off on holiday, and I have a pile of books waiting for me - most of them fiction, which is a break from my staple diet of memoir and social sciences. I’m packing For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie, Babel by R.F. Kuang, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, and a little poetry in the form of Alex Anaxagorou’s Heritage Aesthetics. Nobody will be expecting me to have an opinion on any of these books when I get back, so they all feel like a luxury. My reading will be my own dirty secret.
My son has recently gone gluten free, and for some reason that’s led to an obsession with gf matzos on my part - a meal is not a meal if it’s not piled on top of a matzo. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. I am mainly drinking Turkish cherry molasses mixed with soda water, and I commend this to you all. It goes well with matzos.
A fancy new cinema has opened in the town next door which has reclining seats and waiters who’ll bring a drink to your chair. I think this is the future, so I’ve taken out a membership and I’m going as often as I can. Sadly, because I usually take my son, this has mostly consisted of Marvel movies so far, which I can take or leave. But I really enjoyed Disney's Strange World - the storytelling felt so fresh and necessary. And, as a grownup, I was fascinated by Triangle of Sadness - ‘enjoyed’ feels like the wrong word.
Ep. 68 Enchantment with Katherine May