Dear friends,
It’s been a month since Shaping Life was officially born. Thank you for your welcoming and encouraging words. I feel sufficiently Rah-Rah’d 😊.
In that spirit, I’m introducing something new: a monthly “What Stayed With Me” note — a few things that caught my attention, didn’t turn into essays, but hung around in my head anyway. A passage from a book. A line from a conversation. Something I read and haven’t stopped thinking about. These are entries in my notebook, offered as a small thank you for supporting Shaping Life.
This first issue is going out to everyone, so you can see what it is. Starting next month, it becomes a gift for paying supporters only — my way of saying thank you for keeping Shaping Life going.
Talk soon,
Lou Blaser
I love Italian food and all things Italy. Florence is my favorite city in the world. That’s why I gasped when I read this BBC piece about the things one ought not to do when eating in Italy. I’m so guilty! How did I not know these things? 😂
A few pages into Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You, and this passage leapt out. Ooff. I can feel this in my bones.
“It was the one where we were all young enough to think someone smarter had the answer.”
This Joan Didion excerpt from her commencement address to the UC Riverside class of 1975 (emphasis mine):
“I'm not telling you to make the world better. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.”
Though really, the whole address is worth reading a few times over.
A secretive Silicon valley startup is trying to squash a podcast interview where the co-founder and COO talked about developing organ sacks... essentially growing non-sentient humanoid life-forms for purposes of growing and harvesting organs for implantation into human bodies (e.g., kidney replacement). My knee-jerk reaction was revulsion. “What? Organ sacks?! Where do I even begin with the ethical questions?!” But then, I started to think about the legit medical applications. People waiting for organ donations. The lives saved; the illegal black market for organ donations potentially squashed. Necessary medical testing done without endangering humans. Could there be a way to weigh my ethical questions against what’s at stake? I don’t have an answer and I’m uncomfortably sitting on a fence.
This book by Kirsten Miller had me laughing and cheering on. A hilarious novel about something quite serious and important.
Lou Blaser exchanged PowerPoint decks for essays and has yet to regret the trade. She writes Shaping Life, where she follows her curiosity through books, conversations, films, and whatever else refuses to leave her alone.
Thank you for reading. If you’re enjoying Shaping Life, consider becoming a supporting subscriber or sharing it with someone who might enjoy it too.
I'm inspired to keep my notebook of "what stayed with me." Terry Tempest Williams has a great interview with Rachel Martin on Wildcard where she talks about "paying attention". It's exactly what you are doing.
Also a big fan of both Lula Dean and Florence!