35. Modern Manners | The Gentlewoman
I found this book at my favourite German bookshop in Berlin.
Friends,
You may have heard of this wonderful magazine — the gentlewoman. This is a book by them — Modern Manners: Instructions for living fabulously well.
Some special bits from some of my favourite chapters/topics:
1. Alone
“I never got to be a hermit when I grew up. But the desire for hermitude (not a word, but it should be) has never gone away. When lockdown was announced I felt an illicit thrill: at last, permission to retreat, guilt-free. When all those lockdown poetry exchanges started up on email, the poem I always sent out was Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ — ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innnisfree, / And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; / Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, / And live alone in the bee-loud glade.’
For me the phrase ‘no man is an island’ is the stuff of nightmare.”
“There’s only one rule of private, and that’s refusal; your favourite word will have to become ‘no’. Remember how marvellous it was to say that as a toddler? No. No! It’s a verbal foot stamp. Emily Dickinson called it ‘the wildest word we consign to language.’
It’s advisable you keep your reason for absence mysterious. If you don’t feel bold enough to say you are ‘in hermitude’, you can send wistful love from your own version of the Scottish wilderness.”
2. Idle
“For most of my life I believed that ‘idleness’ and ‘virtue’ had no place in the same sentence. When I was in primary school, I would often begin my summer holidays by making a list. ‘Things To Do When I am Bored.’ My tendency to pack my schedule has only increased in adulthood.
When I attempted to explain my conflicted feelings to my therapist, she asked if I was familiar with the ‘fertile void’. I shook my head thinking she must be referring to a self-help bestseller. No, she explained, the fertile void is a concept that originates in Gestalt psychotherapy and describes a period that occurs when something big has been accomplished after hard work or struggle. With this achievement in your rear view, you find yourself both ready to reset … and profoundly unsettled. It’s a void, she said, because there is no force propelling you forwards or backwards, or anywhere. But - and this is where the fertile part comes in - this absence holds potential. If you don’t pause, my therapist counselled, you don’t experience the full benefits of that work. This space is where you intellectually and emotionally refuel.
And what I have learned is that there will always be unread emails, unchecked items on the to-do list, unreturned phone calls, non-negotiable social obligations. Like time itself, forces of busyness are unceasing. The goal is not to work until there are no such demands and then enjoy a well-earned rest. Idleness must be added to the to-do list, etched into the diary. It must be valued and prioritised in such a way that a year is considered a disappointment if it has passed without a period of doing nothing, or an achievement is considered incomplete if it is not followed by at least the briefest of voids.”