Introspection 📖💿🎥

Tuesday Trio: One book, one record, and one movie recommendation

“The life which is unexamined is not worth living.”
—Socrates, quoted in Plato’s Apology over 2,000 years ago

Hey y’all,

Today’s Tuesday Trio — one book, one record, and one movie recommendation — is on the theme of introspection.

Please feel free to send me your own recommendations related to introspection in the comments!

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📖 The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1595)

Humans say all kinds of stupid things every minute of the day, but people hold microphones up to the lips of billionaires and we have to suffer their amplified stupidity.

“If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective,” said tech billionaire Marc Andreessen on a podcast, claiming he practices “zero” levels of introspection. “Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff.”

History would like a word. I don’t recommend books as correctives (as G.C. Lichtenberg wrote, “A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out”) but for you, my dearest readers, I’d like to recommend this 431-year-old book of essays written by Michel de Montaigne.

“I myself am the subject of my book,” Montaigne wrote. I’ve spent literally years breaking bread with his man up in his tower writing down his innermost thoughts. Reading about 10 pages a day, I just finished the last of the 1,269 pages this week. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do now without my morning Montaigne to keep me off of my phone. (I highly recommend M.A. Screech’s translation. For just a little sampler, try the slim volume On Solitude.)

Montaigne wrote about so many topics — his weird upbringing, his cat, his kidney stones — but he wrote often about kings and princes and other rich, lofty people and how much he wouldn’t care to be one. “The most beautiful of lives to my liking are those which conform to the common measure,” he wrote, “human and ordinate, without miracles though and without rapture.”

And besides, “Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.”

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💿 John Lennon, Plastic Ono Band (1970)

Ian Leslie, author of John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, suggested in “Against Introspection,” that perhaps, even though most of what Andreessen says is “silly,” he may be “on to something.”  

I’m often struck by how many high achievers are unencumbered by self-reflection. To take an example close to home, I’ve read or watched countless interviews with Paul McCartney, and he is at his least interesting on the topic of Paul McCartney. It isn’t that he doesn’t have a rich inner life. It’s that he puts it into his work - into the songs. His therapist is his guitar.

This is something Walter Martin and I tried to get into in our conversation about Paul McCartney. You never really seem to know who McCartney is because you’re not even sure if he knows himself. (Answer: He’s a musician, man!)

On the other hand, you have his partner John Lennon, who seemed like he was trying to pull out his guts and twist them into songs. Earlier exhibits are Beatles songs like “Help!” or “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but nothing is as raw as Plastic Ono Band, his first post-Beatles record which came out of his experiences with primal scream. These therapy sessions were conducted by Arthur Janov, who said of Lennon at the time, “This was someone the whole world adored, and it didn't change a thing. At the center of all that fame and wealth and adulation was just a lonely little kid.” 

The artwork is a key feature of this record. I was a teenager when I got the CD of Plastic Ono Band. The front cover is clearly labeled with Lennon’s name and the title, and the back cover is a plain green background with the track listing. I probably listened to the album for a whole decade before I got my hands on the LP, which not only doesn’t have Lennon’s name or the title on the front cover, it features nothing on the back cover but a picture of Lennon as a little boy:

“Look at me / who am I supposed to be?” Lennon sings. Plastic Ono Band is the sound of one of the richest and most famous people alive trying to figure it out.