“To learn and then have occasion to practice what you have learned—is this not satisfying?” (1.1)

So starts The Analects, the collection of Confucius’ sayings compiled by his disciples. As I read through the rest of the pithy aphorisms, I kept meeting these two concepts again and again: the importance of learning and understanding what you’ve learned.

We’ve all seen different versions of his most famous saying,

It’s something we’re still worried about today. How do we cultivate our critical thinking skills with the onslaught of AI slop being served to us every day? How can we retain information better and be less reliant on Google? How do we stop the brain rot?!

So we started personal curriculums. Picked up a book for the first time in months. Started to watch some documentaries or lectures online. Moved ourselves away from short form media all with the idea of getting our attention spans back.

Considering his love for learning, I figured maybe he has the answer to all of this.

How, exactly, do we do know we learn better, Confucius? How do we know we’ve actually understood what we’ve learned? It’s a version of the question I was asking myself in July.

The Master said, “Zigong! Do you take me to be one who has come to understand through learning a wide variety of things?” 
Zigong responded, “Yes, is this not the case?” 
“It is not. I bind it all together with a single thread.”
(15.3)

So understanding something doesn’t come from learning more? By looking at different things?

I’m not sure how I feel about that. What if you can’t understand something from the first book you read? You need to go off and read more, right? Or is he saying that you can’t just learn something by learning a load of different things? That I can kind of get on board with. If you pick up a new topic and skim the initial reading you’ll only have surface level understanding rather than deep understanding. But we’re creatures of curiosity, we are hardly going to just narrow our learning to one thing…

So if understanding doesn’t come from learning more where does it come from?

Hmmm OK so reflection doesn’t help our understanding either? On first read, doesn’t this just contradict what he said earlier? Didn't he just tell us that learning without thinking is dangerous?

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For context, we are at that stage of the renovation where the costs are coming in thick and fast. All the stuff we planned for, sure, but also all the other bits that no contingency pot could have foreseen. It’s that little whisper in your ear: buy cheap, buy twice. We’re only doing this once, get the things we really want. We’ve met this voice before when wedding planning…it can get quite persuasive…

So a few upgrades and unexpected expenses later, my husband and I (and the three cats) sat down to work through where we could top up the anaemic contingency allocation.

I started with my income. From the corporate job. In it went. Then out went the usual. Mortgage. Council tax. Utilities and so on.

The balance didn’t look so bad until I added the other bits in. The London Library membership. The print media subscriptions. The exhibition tickets. The eye watering amount I spend on books. I thought last month’s spend must have been a one-off so I went back 6 months to get the average. Embarrassingly, it wasn’t a one-off. A pretty consistent spend of £200+ a month.

With the truth of my spending habits laid bare for us to see my husband, quite reasonably, asked: why are you spending so much on this stuff? There’s no way you’re reading all of this in a month. Cancel it all.

It got me thinking about Orwell’s essay Books v. Cigarettes where he argues how reading, second to the listening to the radio, is one of the cheapest hobbies we could have. And that’s exactly what I argued back. Look husband, there are worse hobbies. Far more expensive hobbies…

For the sake of this essay, I’ll put aside the rest of the ‘constructive discussion’ around his Warhammer spend in response to his ‘observation’ but begrudgingly I’ll admit he has a point.

Somewhere at the back of my mind I knew the spending was adding up. But I just kept telling myself it was on stuff that was going toward the promise I made myself at the start of this year.

To get off my phone. To reclaim my dwindling attention span and start cultivating an intellectual life for myself.

Looking at the cost of it all, why does that feel like I’ve tried to buy one?

When I look at each and every single item on that spreadsheet I wondered whether I could get some of that stuff for free.

Most of the philosophical texts I read I can access for free online. Orwell’s point is probably even more right now, even with inflation. I could literally download the whole of Plato’s works in the time it takes me to make a cuppa. Or, if I wanted to be super efficient, I could just ask AI to summarise it all for me.

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Some of these are short, others a little longer, but all will get you thinking. I've included some of my rambling thoughts here as a way to share where my head went whilst reading them.

In the spirit of sharing great writing, please leave me any essays in the comments you’d like to pass on and I’ll read them with you.

Simone Weil's The Iliad or The Poem of Force

(trans. by Mary McCarthy)

Weil’s essay starts, and ends, with her thoughts on the Greek epic Iliad. She argues that the poem is really, underneath it all, about force. About what it can do to you, how it can turn you into an object. But throughout her essay, she also highlights how the poem shows the impact of force on those who think they wield it:

She wants us, as readers, to see force as something that takes over, as something totally uncontrollable, as something that those in power are subjected to just as much as those who suffer from it.

It’s worth keeping in mind when she wrote this - right when France fell to the Nazis. So was she really writing about the poem? Or about what the power of force can do to mankind?

Because whilst I get her argument, I couldn’t stop thinking whether that just results in total absolution of blame for those who do wield it, in one way or another. Whether in control or not. There is surely a point where it becomes uncontrollable? Or is she arguing that as soon as force enters the frame that’s it? Does that mean that any agency we have over our actions is (in effect) surrendered?

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Home (Griha)

(trans. by Mohammed A. Quayum)

Hossain takes us through a series of stories, about women, in 1904, in British Bengal. A widow who has lost her house to her brother after unknowingly signing it over, a daughter who’s her family’s pride and joy, simply because she has never left the house. The wife who is confined to her quarters, surrounded by dust because no-one can see her or how she lives. All these women are trapped “like a prison” in their houses. None of them are at home in them. They have no control over who can visit them or who they can visit beyond their four walls. That is for the men to decide.

She interrupts her essay with footnotes explaining that this indictment isn’t aimed at all men. There are those that allow their wives to have freedom. To allow them to treat their houses as their home. Her quarrel is with the ones who don’t.

But that caveat in itself makes her point, doesn’t it? The small matter of you feeling safe and home in your own house is dependent on the male of the household. The way she writes these small asides emphasises how much of that is down to luck, in a way.

Yes this was written in 1904. In a highly patriarchal society. But I can’t say that some parts of her stories didn’t feel familiar. Maybe not to the Western eye but I certainly felt a slight twinge when I read about the brothers who fell out leaving the cousins no longer allowed to see each other.

Haven’t we all, no matter our cultural background, been a casualty of some sort of uncle or auntie row? The type that’s gone so deep that the cousins we used to knock about with when we were younger, the closest friends we had, are now distant Facebook friends (if that). Not invited to our weddings or any family get togethers? And when anyone actually asks what the row was about no-one can really remember? All of which will just result in more and more fractured generations of our family?

I’ve gone off piste here because her essay wasn’t about that. It was about the control men have over how a woman feels safe in her house. Although I wonder whether the family row is a demonstration of the same underlying thing? Someone else deciding who you’re allowed to know, allowed to grow up with?

Hélène Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa

(trans. by Keith and Paula Cohen)

Then the one I’d call a battle cry. I read it in one sitting last night and came out slightly breathless, which I think is the point. Cixous writes in these long unspooling sentences that pile up and interrupt themselves - constantly ending somewhere you’d least expect. It’s like reading someone who can’t get their words out fast enough. It’s urgent and it’s something everyone, readers and writers alike, should read.

Her argument, roughly: women have been driven out of writing the same way they were “driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal.” And the cruel part, she says, is that we were recruited into it. Taught to find our own bodies shameful. Taught to see each other as rivals rather than allies (“the infamous logic of antilove”, she calls it). Men have led women to hate women, she writes, to become their own enemies. Which is why nobody else can do this on our behalf. Until women describe what being a woman actually feels like, the phallocentric image of woman is the only one that will exist.

So pick up the pen, she pleads:

Her emblem for all this is the Medusa, the monster men could only face through a mirror. Look at her straight on, Cixous challenges, “she’s beautiful and she’s laughing”…hardly monstrous.

It's long, and there's some serious critique threaded through it: of psychoanalysis, of the publishing industry, of capitalism itself. She's arguing with Freud, with Lacan, with the whole male sex in parts. But it's incredibly rewarding.

Herta Müller’s Words in the Head and Words in the Sentence

(trans. by Philip Boehm)

Müller writes about that mostly imperceptible gap between the words inside our heads and the ones that escape our mouth. I’m someone who thinks as I talk (and as I write, as regular readers will have noticed). It takes a different, very conscious, part of my brain to slow down before I start blurting out exactly what I think. Because there are those times, certain meetings or conversations with those you love, that you do need to watch what you say.

Perhaps no more so than when you’re being interrogated, where every word (and even the tone in which the word is spoken) is analysed within an inch of its intent:

She’s writing about her experience under interrogation by the Romanian secret police here, but I think there’s some universality behind what she’s saying. We all know a version of this. On the speaking side but also on the receiving end. How often are we listening to someone and thinking, you’re not saying what you’re really thinking. Or when we are the one speaking, choosing the words so carefully we end up losing all meaning behind what we wanted to say.

If you’re like me you’ll preface those times with “I’m choosing my words carefully,” which, I suppose, announces the gap out loud. And now I’m thinking about it I wonder whether that ends up not only putting more pressure on you, as the speaker, but also maybe…more suspicion from the listener?

Wisława Szymborska’s The Poet and the World

(trans. by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)

And to end, something that isn’t technically an essay. It’s the lecture Wisława Szymborska gave on accepting her 1996 Nobel Prize, but it reads like an essay. Her subject is inspiration.

If Newton had never said it, she points out, the apples would just have been lunch.

That little phrase may be “small, but it flies on mighty wings” allowing us deeper into exploring our own curiosity. She’s not the first to advocate for humility. Socrates, most famously, told everyone he knew nothing and made that the starting point of all real inquiry. Yet, we still (myself included) continue to treat not knowing as a failure of our intellect. As if admitting our ignorance shows the world the limit of our capabilities, when actually it’s where real thinking starts.

So what do ospreys have to do with philosophy? Well, out of all of Confucius’ short sayings collected in The Analects, it was this one that sparked an afternoon’s rabbit hole:

All of the translations I had open on my desk were telling me that the Cry of the Osprey was, for Confucius, the exemplar of human emotional restraint.

I of course started with listening to that cry but was left slightly confused. It’s hardly a sound you’d describe as joyful or sorrowful. Come to think of it, I’m not sure what sound could be both?

But actually that was the wrong way in to understanding what he was going on about. Confucius was talking about one of the most famous Chinese poems, the one that’s at the start of the oldest surviving collection of Chinese poetry, The Odes.

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My immediate response was: absolutely.

Philosophical texts (especially the ancient ones) are challenging enough (in my opinion) to read with all the abstract language. A good introduction can act as a bit of a guide.

First, it can help with context. Most philosophers are responding to something. Whether that’s something that’s happening politically or socially, with that background a lot of the inward pondering starts to make sense. Like how you get a lot more out of reading Arendt when you know she’d fled Nazi Germany and spent years stateless.

Take Confucius, the current subject of my philosophy self-study. Reading The Analects cold, he just sounds incoherent until you understand what he was looking at politically, slightly dismayed, trying to work out where things had gone wrong.

Same with Buddhism. Understanding that the Buddha was responding to the two schools of thought on how to live (the ritualistic life of the Vedas as against Jain asceticism) allows you to understand why the Buddhist philosophy is considered the middle path. It was a reaction. A very literal one. The Buddha constantly refers to why those two ways of living, ways of thinking, don’t work - in his opinion.

So going straight into a philosophical text without that sort of context is, in my view, depriving you of a lot of critical depth and understanding.

Second, a really good introduction can help with some of the concepts which can, at times, feel quite abstract. I really struggled with Plato’s forms. I had to re-read the introduction to Phaedo many times to try and get my head around it. I ended up reading so many secondary texts around it to try and find something that put the concept into plain language. Without doing that, I think I would’ve ended up skipping over those pages in Phaedo and then, when I got to The Republic, I would have had no idea what he was going on about.

Having the basic framing of the key concepts really helps when you read them how they were meant to be read (I accept that I’m reading English translations of ancient languages which is arguably not how they were meant to be read…).

So I felt completely justified in my response.

Until I thought about it afterwards.

There are those kind of introductions which are really unhelpful. Full of padding, reading like some of my GCSE coursework: here’s everything I know about this subject, whether you asked for it or not. I couldn’t tell you how many times I read about Plato’s family in the introductions to his dialogues. It just wasn’t relevant. Why waste my time reading that?

Then there are other types of introductions which give you a verdict. That tell you exactly what the thinker, or the author, was saying and what you should take from it.

Great. Now I can’t shake your conclusion on the text I’m reading. Particularly frustrating when the original text is meant to be open-ended. Now I’m looking for the ways to discredit your conclusion rather than coming up with my own.

Nowhere is this more frustrating than with fiction. Like in Wuthering Heights, being told that Nelly is an unreliable narrator makes me mistrust her from the start. Can I not come to that conclusion myself?

There’s also the spoilers that introductions to the classics, in particular, are full of. That’s enough of a reason to skip past them as a first time reader. But it’s also who writes most of them. They tend to be written for people who’ve already read the book, by scholars or fellow writers who have a long-standing admiration for the text. They litter quotes throughout so that you not only have the general premise of the book, the interpretation, some critical analysis, but you also have some selections of the most “interesting” writing within it. As if you can’t decide that for yourself.

It’s at this point in the essay you’d usually get a “so this is your foolproof guide to when you should and shouldn’t read an introduction” but I can’t write that because I have no idea!

There are times I read it and regret it. Then other times I skip it and then get to about a third of the way through the book and start thinking I have no idea what’s going on. The Upanishads is a really good example of that. I was so sure I’d get it that when I realised I absolutely had no idea what on earth the whole you’ll never find the self business was all about, off I went, with my tail between my legs, back to the introduction and found myself somewhere between glad I’d checked and annoyed I hadn’t stayed with it a little longer.

Thankfully, some publishers have started putting a warning at the front of their introductions telling first-time readers to come back to it once they’ve finished the text, which I think is one of the kindest things a publisher can do for a reader. It admits that the introduction is criticism and it’s going to affect your reading. Though it is a strange thing to have at the front of the book…maybe those kinds of introductions should be at the back? Kind of like how the Norton Critical Editions organise their books. Full text at the start. Then context. Then criticism. It’s one of the reasons why I much prefer the Norton edition over the Penguins or the Oxfords!

So maybe I was wrong to have commented so fast with “absolutely”. There isn’t a one size fits all approach because not all introductions are the same. It depends entirely on what kind of introduction you've been given, and you can't tell which until you're in it.

Which is a problem with the books, not with the readers.

Perhaps we should start a petition. Tell publishers that we want the context, but not the verdict. Pop the critique at the back of the book, and give us the ability to form our own conclusions on the book before reading someone else’s?

Anyone with me?

Now I’ve read it, I can see why it splits people. But what I haven’t yet figured out is whether that’s because of the style or because of its content…or both?!

But before I launch into my initial thoughts on the book, let me back up and get back to what this post is supposed to be!

For those of you who are reading along with us, below you’ll find the key themes of the book worth following and for Members, the full Reading Companion Guide with further themes and more is attached below as a downloadable PDF, as usual.

A note for Members: this month, taking on your suggestions, I’ve recommended a handful of poems to pair with this month’s read as a way to critically analyse some of the deeper themes in the Reading Guide over in our Members’ chat. It’s the first time I’ll be pairing fiction with poetry, I’m really glad you suggested it!

Reading Guide: Key Themes

If you’re reading along with us this month, here are the key themes I suggest keeping an eye on as you read through the book:

Rumour: This whole book centres around a rumour. One which the protagonist can’t seem to shake off no matter how inaccurate it is. Follow how that rumour starts and begins to take a life of its own. Does the protagonist accept the fate of the rumour? And for the keen eyed amongst you, what other rumour is happening in the background? What impact does that second rumour have on the one directly involving the protagonist?

The Unnamed: Everything and everyone is unnamed in this book (well, apart from one name that gets dropped very near the end!). What do you think the author is asking us, as readers, to take from that narrative style? Does the absence of names make the novel braver? Or safer?

Reading while walking: Something for us book-lovers here, write down each of the books the protagonist is reading or has read. Do you think there’s a theme within her choices? If so, what do you think she’s looking for in those stories?

Harm: There’s an undeniable fear of what the milkman is capable of. What harm he could cause. But, as you’re reading, hasn’t some harm already happened through the threat of it? Follow how that threat impacts the protagonist both psychologically and physically.

Reading Together

We are reading the book together on Fable and will meet online on 5 September 2026 at 12pm (London time) to discuss in detail. You can RSVP here.

Reading with more depth

If you’d like to read Milkman with more critical curiosity and depth, the Studio Shelf+ Reading Companion Guide (downloadable below) is designed to help you with just that. It includes:

• further themes to annotate and follow across the novel, ones that allow us to analyse the book a bit more

• reflective journaling prompts that will get us thinking

• a creative exercise inspired by the novel (which I’m hoping we’ll share in the Members’ chat like we did for The Narrow Road to the Deep North)

• further reading recommendations for critical depth and/or if you enjoyed the style and substance of the novel

• as mentioned above this month’s paired reading which we will be using to help guide our close reading of the book and discussing over in the Members’ chat ahead of our online meet.

It’s designed for you to scribble all over as you read or come back to after you’ve finished.

Initial Thoughts

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As you do on your anniversary, we spent the evening reminiscing with a particular focus on how we even became part of a whole. For us, it was purely by accident. Neither of us were looking for a relationship. We found each other at a time when we both wanted to spend time “working on ourselves”.

What utter BS now I think about it. But we hear it all the time, don’t we?

Don’t get into a relationship until you’ve found yourself!

Understand your values, your habits, the things you want to find in another person before you start looking! Do you want someone with the same interests or completely different ones? But when does love really ever work like that? Love unpermitted until it’s passed some pre-qualification test. A test fully centred around who we think we are. If we know that, we can know who we want to come along for the ride of life.

It’s not just our relationships we arrange around our idea of our self. I did a law degree because some personality test at school told me I’d be a perfect lawyer thanks to my analytical mind and strong sense of ethics.

According to another personality test, this time in the corporate world, I have a fiery red personality that just likes to get shit done. So now, my entire team look at me and think well, that explains it all.

Don’t even get me started on the love languages thing. Apparently mine is acts of service. I can see how that’s right at the office but I’m not sure I subscribe to it at home. Obviously coming home to a clean kitchen, fed cats, and dinner on the table wouldn’t go amiss but reducing the way I receive and give love to what I do for you and what you do for me? If that’s really true…then that’s a sorry state of affairs.

That’s why I’ve found those kinds of personality tests so reductive. I can never understand how after a set of some random questions a computer can define me and all my intricacies.

Which then got me thinking about that self again.

These tests would have you think that you’re a fixed self based on a set of responses to a set number of questions. There you are. That’s who you are. Ta dah!

But are we really one self? A fixed self? If so, then my work persona has a lot to answer for in my personal relationships.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been overthinking this concept of the self as I’ve explored the philosophies of the Axial Age. I’ve seen the Upanishads ask us to strip everything we aren’t until we arrive at atman, the self underneath which, it turns out, is the same in all living things. Then Buddhism which does the same thing by looking inward but instead finds nothing. No fixed self to point at.

They’re opposite conclusions, sure, but they share a method of turning our attention inward to go looking for a self. Both of them assume that if a self is to be found, or to be exposed as an illusion, it’s somewhere inside of us.

I found both to be quite abstract even as a daily journaler. The pages I write are probably the most introspective thing I do, but I don’t think (if I ever looked through them) I would find anything about my self. I mean the self on its own. Pages and pages of it are full of my relationships because so many of my daily joys and anxieties come from interactions with others. I don’t think I’d ever be able to differentiate a self that stands by itself, away from all that.

Which is probably why, when I visited Confucius as the next phase in my philosophy self-study, I felt I’d finally found a philosophical account of the self I could relate to (there’s a pun here…I’ll leave you to decide if it was intended…).

Confucius was famously concerned with how to be a better person. For him, to be able to understand that, we need to look beyond our inward self and look outward. To how we show up in our daily interactions, with other people.

For example, when he’s asked what is goodness, he simply responds “love others”.

How profound, you’re probably thinking…but read more of his teachings in The Analects (the collection of his sayings) and a theme keeps coming up. Goodness and how to be a good person, is in how you conduct yourself.

Importantly, Confucius recognised that this conduct thing can’t just be a copy and paste applied across all your different relationships. Take this passage, from one of Confucius' disciples:

He has more than one test on how he shows up for others and they’re not the same. Which I think emphasises one of the foundations of Confucius’ philosophy: we are different selves to different people. Which has to be right. The version of me that’s effective in the corporate job wouldn’t make the best wife, or a decent friend. Because each role is genuinely asking something different of me.

When I first read The Analects months ago, I thought Confucius was suggesting that we are a product of our relationships but now, on this re-read, I don’t think that’s it. I think he’s saying our selves are made in our relationships rather than by them, and to me there’s a real difference.

Made by would mean our selves are the output. We are what other people made of us. But that can't be right…I can be the friend who doesn't reply for three weeks and then sends a voice note apologising for being a bad friend. Nobody made me that bad friend. I did. Made in, on my reading, would be that the relationship is the workshop. It’s where the self comes into being, but you’re still doing the work.

I get that none of this fits with our current narrative of you are who you are or one of my personal faves, be true to yourself (what does that even mean?!). But doesn’t all of that assume there’s a fixed complete self waiting to be discovered - one that must be protected from other people?

If Confucius is right (and I really do think he has something here) then, according to him, as soon as we accept we have different selves then we can actually start getting good at being those different selves. That’s how we can become a better person. When the name of that version of the self (say, the self as a friend) matches up with the conduct of that self (being a good friend).

All of this got me thinking about loneliness.

If the self is cultivated in relationships with others, but there are no relationships to cultivate it in, how do we find that version or versions of our self that we arrange our entire lives around?

This was one of those things I spent way too long overthinking because I assumed the answer was pretty bleak. I started with running the thought to its natural conclusion…if you have no relationships in which to make the self then does the self just not become a thing? Is the lonely person just on pause?

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For those that do the daily commute, or had the pleasure of travelling on any part of the London Underground, you’re probably wondering how on earth I can call the experience of being rocked around whilst navigating those screeching sounds plus the incessant notifications of “this line is down” or “that line has no step free access” peace and quiet.

But, genuinely, for me, it was.

Perhaps it’s the city dweller in me, but those sounds become so familiar that they all end up like white noise. It’s as if my ears automatically know when to tune out at that very specific spot between Highbury & Islington and King’s Cross where it feels and sounds like the Vic line is at top speed. Tune out, yes, but always aware of whereabouts I was which is a very helpful intuitive tool when you’re on your way back after a few.

But the ability to block out majority of those decibels, I think, is the only way…

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AD | This post is sponsored by Routledge Classics to celebrate their 25th anniversary and introduce their books to new readers.

All opinions and marginalia are mine.

I don’t know when it happened, but I’ve stopped living for the weekend. The weekend has now become a time for recovery.

Time to recharge the social and mental batteries depleted by the corporate grind.

No longer do I crawl to Friday knowing I have a hedonistic weekend of fun ahead of me. The weekend that makes the late nights throughout the week worth it. No. Now it’s all about responsibilities. Bills. Family commitments.

It just feels like life is simply happening all around me. Without me living any of it.

My husband and I had our first date night in about 6 months. I saw my best mate for the first time this year, last week. Shameful.

As I sit there scrolling through Instagram watching the stories of other people living their “best lives” that feeling of life passing me by just gets worse. Then I start feeling guilty. Li…

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My feeds are full of manifest this, let go of that, a whole bunch of instructions to capitalise on this awe-inspiring celestial event.

I’m not really into all of that…manifestation is something that I’ve never really got my head around. So instead of charging up some moon water, I decided to go down a rabbit hole about eclipses. What they are and what they’ve meant to us over the years.

Of course now we know that a solar eclipse is where the Earth, Moon and Sun line up in space - the Moon sliding between us and the Sun, its shadow falling across the Earth and momentarily blocking out the light.

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This had me wondering whether my Big Summer Read project of reading two translations at the same time put me in the minority. Should I add the audiobook to the project too?

I had other questions, of course.

Happily, Spotify's Books Editor, Roshni Radia, was willing to take them, so I emailed her a list. This is me sharing the five key takeaways …

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Not sure if anyone else is attempting this year’s longlist…I’m certainly going to give it a go but I’ll also be reading, alongside you all, our next book club read (by a very close margin!): Milkman by Anna Burns

Each month is built around our live online discussion at the end of the month. In the run up, you can expect:

Free members:

• A reading guide with suggested themes to follow.

• Our dedicated Fable chat, where we talk through the book as we read - first impressions, favourite passages, the core themes, anything that starting to niggle at you in one way or another!

Paid members get all of the above, plus:

• A downloadable Studio Shelf+ Reading Companion which includes deeper themes to follow, journaling prompts, a creative exercise, a playlist (if the text inspires me enough!) and - most importantly - further reading recommendations. This is a cur…

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The first touches its side and declares the elephant is a wall. The second finds a tusk: a spear, clearly. The third gets hold of the trunk and describes it as a snake. The fourth wraps his arms around a leg and announces that they are all fools, because the elephant is a tree. The fifth catches an ear and feels a fan. The sixth grabs the tail and can’t understand what everyone is so worked up about. It’s a rope.

In some ways they’re all right. And in others they’re all wrong.

It’s only those who can see the elephant as a whole that can see it for what it really is.

But unless you’re seeing it as a whole, how would you know?

Bear with me on this - because there is a philosophical angle to this, I promise. To explain that, I need to backtrack a bit.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve spent a lot of time with ancient Indian philosophy. I met the Upanishads, the ancient Vedic philosophy that suggests everything - including our selves - is linked to a permanent and unchanging reality, Brahman.

I then met Buddhism which says the complete opposite - everything is impermanent. There is no unchanging something underneath it all…there isn't even a self.

As I’ve reflected over the weeks, I’ve realised this whole argument is once I’ve met before with the ancient Greeks. Heraclitus with his everything is in flux (you can’t step into the same river twice thing) and Parmenides with change is just an illusion and of course, Plato and his eternal and unchanging Forms that we only see mere replicas of.

So regardless of which side of the world you were on, it seems we were all wondering whether reality was something that’s constantly changing, or if it’s fixed?

Then, for the first time in my self-study, I met a philosophy that said both can be right. Reality, it says, is both permanent and impermanent at once. This philosophy belongs to the Jains, whose tradition steps in at around the same time as Buddhism - both part of a wider movement of wandering renouncers who had walked away from the Vedic world of ritual and priestly authority of the Upanishads. The name for this line of thought is anekantavada: many-sidedness.

The Jains, famous for their asceticism, said to the Upanishads and the Buddhists: you're both wrong (but also kinda right). Reality is many-sided. Every real thing persists and changes, and both descriptions are true…from where each speaker stands.

Context? Taking other people’s views into account? How refreshing! Today, it feels like I can’t move for the hot takes both on social but also mainstream media. It’s like we’ve forgotten how to hold two viewpoints at the same time with respect and curiosity. Instead, we must be right, and they must be wrong. We hold onto our views so tight that we barely give room for any level of discourse.

So I closed my self-study journal pretty pleased with getting my head around this philosophical concept. That night, I was talking about it with a mate over dinner and she asked: hold on, if everyone is kinda right and kinda wrong, does that mean nothing can be wholly wrong? Or wholly right?

Fair point.

It got me thinking…if that is the natural progression of that philosophical thought then how can any of us make a decision, a quick one at that, if we have to consider all viewpoints? How could we make any sort of judgement on anything? This very much feels like a one way ticket to analysis paralysis…

I don’t know about you, but I overthink decisions at the best of times and I’m the worst at making quick decisions (you can ask my husband about that…I’ve had nearly a year to plan the interior design of my house renovation and I haven’t even started).

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From genuinely believing football was finally coming home and then realising, with crushing familiarity, it absolutely wasn’t…to navigating the longest heatwave I can remember, this month has already been a month of summers.

July’s been busier than usual both professionally and personally. The house renovation works have started in earnest (I’m living in perpetual dust), I’ve spent my weekends wandering around at least one exhibition, and I’ve read - my gosh, have I read this month.

So here we are, my July faves and for members, the golden nugget essays and podcasts that got me thinking.

Favourite exhibition

As you can probably tell from my recent posts, I've been to a few this month, but by far my favourite has to be the Tate's Frida: The Making of an Icon. Room by room you're met with her brush with surrealism (a categorisation she never accepted), her journey to accept her body after her accident, all the things that made her her until, right at the end, you're met with a room of fandom. A whole catalogue of things people have made commercialising her image.

I left the exhibition feeling a tad uneasy. I don’t know if it was the combination of the nude photographs Julien Levy took of her (which for some reason I found voyeuristic) or the entire room of paintings and notes explaining how Frida resisted Breton’s attempts to fold her into his band of surrealists. She was painting her own reality, not dreams and that “boxing in” of her talent, in my view, missed the point of her art completely. Or was it that finale? The commercialisation of her face with all the other things that went before it seemed to say to me that this exhibition was all about Frida, but not as she’d choose to be known.

It did, however, spark a bit of a rabbit hole I'm currently burrowing into, which will likely surface as a commonplace post (coming soon!).

Favourite essays

from Substack

’s “You Don’t Know Yourself Until You’ve Met Yourself In a Book” is the perfect essay to read over your Sunday coffee. The author suggests that every bookshelf is, in some way, an autobiography. How we meet versions of ourselves in the characters we love and the ones we hate (perhaps especially those).

What I can't quite decide is which way round it goes. Did those characters show me things that were already in me, or did I take things from them and decide, over time, that they were mine?

Finally, one of you recently put me onto ’s Substack and I. AM. OBSESSED.

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That’s the very basic premise of The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch but it’s so much more than that. Murdoch, philosopher and novelist, has packed so much into this novel that it’s actually quite difficult to know where to begin. Having read it for our book club, prepared a reading guide, discussed it with you over on Fable and at our monthly chat, I’m still struggling with what specific line I want to take with this review.

I could start with how we paired this book with Shakespeare’s The Tempest because, on the surface, we have everything Shakespeare created. A famous theatre director, Charles Arrowby, leaves London at the height of his career and shuts himself in a damp house on a cliff to write his memoirs and eat somewhat disturbing concoctions he calls meals. Theatre, he keeps telling us, is magic:

Yet he leaves it all behind, in a way like how Prospero renounces his magic as he leaves his island. Except Murdoch’s play is in reverse. Prospero gives up his magic to rejoin his kingdom. Charles gives up the world and discovers he can’t - and won’t - stop being a magician.

All of his friends are cast into roles, he directs scenes and in a way, with the kidnap (and yes, it really is in my view very much a kidnap!), he conjures up his own storm.

But for me, the loudest thing I noticed was how philosophical the novel is. How Murdoch in one way or another weaves in her philosophy throughout Charles’ self-justifications. Every terrible thing he does seems to be wrapped up in some sort of philosophical argument and most of the time, they kind of work, leaving us (as readers) sympathetic towards him.

Take how she treats love in the novel. Charles tells us early on he’s no womaniser, but we see through various reappearances of his love interests that couldn’t be further from the truth. Two of these prior conquests are utterly mad with love for him. One who is willing to give up a comfortable life she’s finally made for herself after the tumult that was her relationship with Charles just so she can be around him, to nurture him, even though she knows he won’t love her the way she loves him.

Then there’s Rosina, who is utterly unhinged. Violent with rage at the thought of Charles settling down with anyone other than her, she depicts the very love-as-madness Socrates describes in Plato’s Phaedrus. And if we know Murdoch we know she is a huge Platonist. In the Phaedrus, Socrates gives two speeches on love: in the first he argues that love is a madness and the lover is a danger to be avoided, then, taking it all back, he argues that this same madness can actually be a divine gift, the best thing that can happen to a soul. Murdoch gives us both speeches in this book. Rosina is the warning and Charles is convinced he's the divine case, that his madness over Hartley is the kind that ennobles. But is he actually in love with Hartley, or with the version of who he was when they were in love, way back when he was good?

The philosophical question of the good, what it is, how to be it, permeates throughout her story. Murdoch famously suggested that goodness was mostly a matter of seeing - looking at another person accurately, letting them be real, without your own ego getting in the way. She once wrote,

I see that philosophy playing out with Charles although he may well be the fattest, most relentless ego she could have ever created. He talks about goodness endlessly. He genuinely believes he's pursuing it. But, despite clocking the colour of the sea, the grooves in the rocks beside it, he doesn’t see a single person in front of him for who they are. Hartley is his saviour yet he believes he’s hers. She begs him to let her go back home but he’s convinced she just needs time to see that what he can offer her is safety when in reality it’s the complete opposite. I wonder whether that’s Murdoch's whole argument played out as farce: you can want to be good with your entire being and still fail at the first hurdle: if you can’t notice that other people exist outside your own ego then you’re on a hiding to nothing.

Underneath it all, away from Plato and the good, this novel, for me, was Murdoch thinking about the impermanence of life. Charles knows he’s ageing, he knows everyone else around him is too. He’s obsessed with it. Everyone around him is attached to him in one way or another and he himself is attached to the idea of Hartley, to the idea that she will make him good. That in some way, if he can get that image back, he will have beaten time itself.

But his life keeps showing him that no matter how hard you try, things never stay still. People age, they die suddenly and without meaning, the sea outside his window constantly changes. But he keeps clinging on, harder, to life. Maybe that's the real madness in this novel.

Studio Shelf: Vote for our next read!

We shortlisted our next read to this eclectic bunch. Let me know which one you think we should read next!

• Last Orders by Graham Swift: four men drive a friend’s ashes from Bermondsey to Margate - that’s the book. It won the Booker in 1996 for what it does in that one car journey. Sounds like it will be quite a ride!

• Milkman by Anna Burns: I’ve heard this one is difficult. Most of the people I know who have read it either DNF’d it after page 40 or thought it was the best Booker winner in decades. Should we find out which camp we’re in? The blurb itself sounds rather intriguing: “In this unnamed city…To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous…”

• Something to Answer For by P.H. Newby: This was the first book to ever win the Booker back in 1969 but has any of us heard of it? It follows an Englishman who turns up in Port Said during the Suez Crisis to help a dead friend’s widow, takes a blow to the head, and after that he can’t quite trust what he remembers. Unreliable narrator? Check! Mystery? Check!

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I was at the Hayward Gallery viewing Anish Kapoor’s latest exhibition. I’d been through the rooms of Vantablack and was now staring at his huge installation, Ha Makom,

As I was staring into the doorway (was it a doorway?) at the top, a group of tourists were talking about Kapoor, his use of Vantablack and how that sparked the pettiest feud in the art industry I’d ever heard of which involves the story of the pinkest pink. With my ears perked up, I decided to shimmy my way into the conversation to hear the story.

It goes like this.

Around a decade ago, Anish Kapoor acquired the exclusive rights to use Vantablack, the darkest material on earth - the blackest black. It’s not a colour in the traditional sense, it’s actually a coating of microscopic carbon tubes that trap light. Light goes in, bounces around between them, and almost none of it ever comes back out1. When you stare at it your eyes can’t work out the depth of what you’re looking at and if you have two objects covered in Vantablack the smaller object just disappears into the bigger one - the light (the thing we use to read the shape of an object) just folds into a dark void.

Standing in front of Kapoor’s use of it in his sculptures made me feel really uneasy.

I couldn’t work out whether he’d carved out holes in the wall that just seemed to go on forever or whether he just coated an area of the wall with it.

Sorry, back to the story. So he acquires this material for his exclusive use. That annoys a lot of the art world. Quite a lot. One particular artist, Stuart Semple, became so incensed by the fact he wasn’t able to use it that he went on to create the pinkest pink.

He made it available to everyone in the world for an affordable price…except Kapoor2. When you clicked to buy it, you were met with the following statement3 to confirm:

Anyway, Kapoor got hold of it and posted this to Instagram:

Hilarious. We all had a giggle and shook each other’s hands, said how lovely to have met each other during the exhibition and went our separate ways.

I didn't go far. I sat back down to contemplate this huge red thing again and figured no wonder he has it in 99.9% of his sculptures. If you’ve got the exclusive rights to it you’re going to have to use it in everything, right?

But what got me thinking was the concept of anyone owning a colour. I genuinely thought colour was fair game - available to everyone, who knew that it could be protected? That’s what inspired this fortnight’s commonplace page: can you actually own a colour and if so, who owns what.

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Regular readers know I’ve been self-studying philosophy. I’ve been doing it for about a year now and yet…I’m still in the BCE, still with ancient philosophy. It’s taken me a year to travel from origin myths to Confucius (via Plato of course). At this rate, according to my limited mathematical skills, I’ll be meeting Descartes somewhere around 2029, Kant somewhere near my late 40s and if I’m lucky, I’ll be shaking hands with the 20th century at around the time I draw down my pension (if one exists by then of course).

When I originally planned out the curriculum, I was planning on spending a month with each thinker which roughly would’ve taken me a year to get right through to the modern day. That was simply naïve. How could I possibly spend just a month with Plato? With the Upanishads? The intention, then, was to read the key ideas from each thinker and move on. But how would I know what those key ideas are without reading the pmajority of them? I’m designing this myself - I don’t know what to include or exclude…I was finding out on the way. So I kept re-designing, adding more and more sub-phases.

As I stared at the current version (v4 in case you were wondering) last week, it got me thinking about whether I’d gone about this all wrong. Not the why, the why I’m self-studying philosophy hasn't changed a bit since last year but it’s more the how. Because, on reflection, the honest reason that I’m still in the ancient world is that it’s taken me a lot longer to grasp certain ideas than I’d expected. There were whole weeks I’d lost down to primary texts, secondary texts, YouTube explainers (don’t get me started on the difficulty of finding a decent podcast that actually adds value) and still didn’t understand what I was studying.

But then again, I don’t think all of this “delay” has been down to a lack of intellect on my part. Some of my dithering has been because I’ve really enjoyed an idea and wanted to stay with it longer, really get into the detail of it. Take the weeks (*months) I spent with Plato’s Republic. How could I not? It’s considered the foundational text of political philosophy. How could I just spend one week on it?

Curiosity got the better of me and I went looking at structured curriculums, the ones from Oxford, Warwick and other undergrad courses just to see how I may have designed things differently, as an academic institution would have done.

I realised there was a stark difference in how I’d set up my curriculum (and kept evolving it) to what I would have read had I formally studied it. Broadly, academic institutions arrange their teaching around ideas, or better yet, problems. Logic, epistemology, free will, ethics. I’ve not done that. I’ve organised my study around thinkers. Maybe that was a really stupid thing to have done. Design a curriculum without looking at how it's traditionally taught.

There was method behind what now appears to be a bit of madness. I had understood philosophy as one big conversation. This thinker arguing or agreeing with those before them. So I figured I’d follow the train of thought. Right from the start to where we are now. As I was looking at this, I realised I’d taken a pretty “legal” approach to this. Look at what led to a precedent, then the dissenting voices, then the cases that cemented the law into precedent.

Was that the wrong thing to do? Have I lost something by not following the traditional approach?

I hope not! When I was looking into it, I saw that whilst majority of these courses touch on Plato, they don’t spend a significant amount of time with someone who most consider the foundational western thinker. Then, unless you have enrolled in what looks like optional modules, you’d be lucky to meet any non-Western thinker at all. That’s not me saying my curriculum is better. Far from it. It’s just that I have a specific aim. To really understand philosophy from as many diverse voices as possible.

The student in us all

I know I’m not the only one out here self-studying something. Aside from the personal curriculum boom, we’ve always wanted to expand our knowledge whether that’s learning fluency in that language we promised we’d keep going with after school, or say skiing, or knitting, or (in my husband's case) coding.

Learning something now is more within our grasp than ever. We have all the information and resources at our fingertips - more so than any other time. That really opens the capacity and access to learn so much. We don’t have to find the small mortgage to go to university or the time to sit in a classroom, we can learn on our commute to our full time job, on the weekend in the garden or on that 3 hour round trip to the in-laws.

But…is accessibility the same thing as understanding? Is there a trade off to how easy it all appears to be?

With the classroom, we have a guide. A teacher who can structure what we’re going to learn, for how long, and how our understanding of what we are learning is assessed. Without that, how do we know whether we’ve understood things correctly?

And if we can't know that, then can we really teach ourselves anything at all?

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I went off on one in that post about the phrase itself and all the five-books-to-become-disgustingly-well-read posts that came with it. I asked, in that piece, when exactly you’d know you had arrived at disgustingly well-read status. Whether there was a summit or some sort of certificate you could wave around chest puffed.

Well. Brace yourselves, because it seems someone somewhere heard me*. There is now a set of services you can pay for to give you the exact aesthetic of a disgustingly well-read person.

Today, in Berlin, you can actually pay someone to batter a book within an inch of its life (coffee stains and all) to give the appearance of it being well-read. Disgustingly so.

Then there are the various sellers across Etsy where you can also get a perfectly annotated, colour-coded, tabbed-up book.

How perfect that would be. Get it battered first then run it through the conveyor belt of annotation and you now have the perfect prop for your instagram page, eh?

Then there was something one of you told me. You went to a book club focussing on the classics. At least half of the room hadn't read the book, they just googled the summary. Presumably through AI but then again, Wikipedia can give you a good summary of most classics.

What. The. Actual. Eff. Is. Going. On.

When did reading become so serious that it needed to be outsourced?

Taxes, I get. Who wants to understand the intricacies of the dark art that is HMRC “guidance”. Cleaning I get - time is money and some of us just aren’t as thorough as a good skilled cleaner is. I get all of that. They’re jobs, right - jobs that other far more skilled people can do to free up our precious and heavily limited time to do the things that give us pleasure.

But reading was supposed to be one of the things we were freeing the time up for. A leisure activity, to be enjoyed as a genuinely pleasurable pastime.

I actually think the book club thing bothers me the most, probably because it goes beyond just a bought aesthetic. These people gave up an entire evening to sit in a room and discuss a book they hadn’t even read. Why? Have book clubs become a place for performance now? A place traditionally held for genuine exploration, where you could have your assumptions challenged and see things in a book that you missed? I’m honestly really at a loss as to why you’d bother wasting your time.

Those of you who are active in our book club know I love a slow and intimate read, that I suggest themes to annotate and further reading in the guides. I even posted last week about how to book journal (well, how I do it anyway). If any of that is suggesting that each and every book needs to be analysed to the point that reading stops becoming a pleasure, let me make a very public declaration:

Some books can just be picked up, inhaled and forgotten about. Not every one needs to be annotated. Some books’ entire purpose is to give you that escape - whether that be to a faraway magical realm, a romance, or a good murder mystery.

There are plenty of books on my shelves that I’ve read completely free of annotation - not one measly tab. Not one note in the margins. And that’s fine. I don’t measure my reading by how many of my books look well-read. To be honest, I don’t measure it at all. Because it’s a hobby.

Take my copy of The Da Vinci Code. For all its faults it got me out of a seriously long book slump precisely because it didn’t need a lot of analysis. I could take it at face value knowing that I would have more pleasure out of the read if I didn’t take it too seriously. It did the job, it got me back into reading about a decade ago. But it’s probably the last book you’d want pictured on the shelf of a “disgustingly well-read” person.

Perhaps that’s why you don’t see those types of books available for annotation on Etsy. It’s the hard ones - the Dostoevsky, the Dickens - the ones everyone says they’ve read but probably DNF’d around page 30.

And before anyone says reading has only recently become aestheticised enough to prompt these services, let me call back another rant** - reading has always been an aesthetic. We’ve always pretended to read books we haven’t (admit it…you know you have) as some sort of social signal. But, for whatever reason, these services have bothered me more than anyone pretending to have read a book. Probably because there’s an air of commercialisation to them…

Anyway. Enough ranting. Drop your easy-to-read, no-need-to-annotate recommendations in the comments - I need some palate cleansers this summer!

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*I’m aware that my little Substack note itself didn’t prompt these services…it’s called artistic escalation (or a little bit of spice)

** I promise my Substack is more than just my rants but if that’s your thing, you can expect at least a monthly one!

For someone who has designed a personal philosophy curriculum specifically to explore beyond the usual male and western centric philosophies we see compressed in those neat little explainer videos or in majority of the books in the philosophy section of Waterstones, it’s been a really frustrating gap.

The women who almost speak

It’s not that I haven’t met any women. I have. Well, sort of.

In Plato's Symposium, the philosophical high point belongs to Diotima - the woman who taught Socrates "the ways of Love". Except every word of hers is spoken through Socrates, and most scholars doubt she existed at all.

Aspasia is another, this time a woman who absolutely did exist. She was the intellectual companion of Pericles, the statesman who led Athens through its golden age, and she had a reputation as the woman who taught him to speak. Yet in Plato's Menexenus, her words (a funeral oration, the speech Athens staged to honour its war dead) are once again told through Socrates.

It makes you wonder whether Plato respected the women he uses for his most philosophical moments or whether they’re mere literary devices. The women give the words, the philosophy, yet the men deliver them. It’s one of the reasons I doubt whether Plato really was the first feminist (as some like to claim).

The Upanishads got closer. Gargi Vachaknavi, a philosopher in her own right, debates Yajnavalkya (a highly celebrated sage) in open court on the nature of ultimate reality. He warns her head will fall off if she keeps asking questions. She carries on anyway (a girl after my own heart). Her reward is one of the most famous answers in the Upanishads: that everything in existence rests on one indestructible reality, Brahman. Maitreyi, Yajnavalkya’s wife, later asks him what’s the one thing worth knowing before he abandons the household for a life of renunciation. Her reward: that we never really love the people and things we love - we love the self we experience through them. Real women, probably. Named women, certainly. But (and this is my reading - you’re welcome to argue with me in the comments!) both dialogues exist to display his brilliance. The women ask the questions and give the challenge but the man supplies the wisdom implying the philosophical hero in the text is him.

Then I opened the Therigatha, as part of my self-study into Buddhist philosophy.

The first anthology

Routinely described as the world's first anthology of women's literature, it holds 73 poems of the therīs, the first Buddhist women, composed across roughly three centuries with the earliest poem possibly existing within living memory of the Buddha himself. The poems describe each woman's journey out of suffering and her delight at seeing the world for what the Buddha said it was all along: impermanent and unreliable. These are poems of arrival. Each woman tells you, in a handful of lines, what their life was like before that liberation and what it’s like after.

For example, take this poem from a woman named as “Sumangala’s Mother”*:

Free, I am free!
How glad I am to be free
from my pestle.
My cooking pot seems
worthless to me. 
And I can't even bear
to look at his sun-umbrella...
my husband disgusts me!
So I destroy greed and hate
with a sizzle. 
And I am the same woman
who goes to the foot of a tree
and says to herself, 
"Ah, happiness,"
and meditate with happiness.

Then there’s Kisagotami who went mad with grief over the death of her young child. The tradition tells the story of how she carried her dead child knocking on house after house looking for a cure until she was directed to the Buddha. He told her to go “and bring a white mustard seed from a house where no one has died.*” Convinced this was going to save her son, she went off asking all around only to realise there was no such house.

The poem that was perhaps one of the strangest and most arresting things I’ve read this year comes from Ambapali, the most celebrated courtesan of her age, who spends her poem cataloguing her own aged body, feature by feature. My hair was once like this; now it’s completely different. My eyes were once like this; now they aren’t. What’s so powerful about it is that there’s no self-pity anywhere in it. It reminded me a little of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian but this was perhaps just that little bit more visceral: a woman performing an autopsy on her own beauty, calmly, in real time.

Every Buddhist text I'd read before this one teaches its philosophy. But the Therigatha shows that teaching in action, to an extent. Kisagotami learned that suffering is universal. Ambapali realises nothing in life is permanent. Most of the poems end with the acknowledgement that the women are now “quenched and cool*” - a nod to their burning fire of desire, now completely extinguished.

But the more I read them, the more I kept wondering whether reading the Therigatha as lived philosophy, as teaching in action, is a bit of a stretch.

Liberation from what, exactly?

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Over the past couple of months, I’ve been lucky enough to go to some of the best exhibitions in London. It’s one of the best things about London. There is genuinely always something to see every day. You can hit the big galleries or you can duck into the smaller ones in Mayfair and spend an afternoon indulging in all forms of different art.

I’m no purist when it comes to exhibitions. I don’t read everything, I don’t even look at everything. Sometimes (actually most of the time) I feel too overwhelmed by it all. So I like to follow the general arc of the story the curator is telling me through their placement of key pieces. If the other ancillary pieces placed next to those anchor pieces catch my eye I will for sure spend some time looking at it.

I don’t know if that’s something about the amount of information I’m being asked to take in or my attention span but it’s how I approach every exhibition and now that I’m thinking about it, shopping. I can’t think of anything worse than going around every single rack of clothing to see if anything catches my eye, I walk in do the cursory loop around have a look at the pieces that catch my eye and then bounce.

My husband is the complete opposite. He has to look at everything. Read everything. Which makes him the best (and worst) person to go to an exhibition with. He's also the slowest reader known to man. He'll hate me for saying that, but it's true. So there I am, having sped through the first room, and he's still on the first piece of art.

In the moment it's maddening, because I want to move on and see what else is there. But the way he slows me down is exactly why I keep dragging him with me. He gets me to see things I miss in my hurry to take it all in. He forces the conversation on the tube home about the piece he makes me stand in front of for 20 minutes.

He constantly reminds me about the need to “slow look”. Something he’s recently researched. Apparently, the average person gives a piece of art less than 30 seconds before wandering off. To be fair…I do give it more than that but wouldn’t want to be tested with a stopwatch. When I think about it, 30 seconds to look at a piece of art someone has spent months on is a bit insulting, isn’t it? So I know he isn’t slow, he’s intentionally taking it all in (partly out of respect but also to actually look at it) and forcing me to do the same.

Thing is, that ability for us to take our time has recently been put under some serious pressure.

No longer are we able to just linger in front of a piece of art and slowly read the blurb next to it. And it’s all because of the other people at the exhibition.

When did people stop having awareness of others around them?

I don’t just mean in the usual London way because, even though we are a miserable bunch of people, we are still acutely aware of the need to contort our bodies on the central line at rush hour to allow one more person and their dog on the tube home.

I’m talking specifically about exhibitions.

It feels like nowadays people come to take a picture of the art or take a picture of themselves in front of the art. I’m not sure whether they’ve taken the 30 seconds to have a conversation with the art but I’m absolutely certain it takes about 10x that for them to get their angle right. And tough sh*t for anyone who wants to actually see the art without them in the way.

This, dear reader, is the first part of my rant (yes, there are two parts to it…strap in).

What has happened to exhibition etiquette?

There is, in my mind, a very clear code of conduct when you go to an exhibition. You stand a respectable distance from the piece you're looking at, so several others around you can also take it in or read the blurb.

If you do want a picture in front of the art, you usually look around you and see whether that moment is the right moment to do it. Or you wait. You wait until there isn’t a huge crowd of people behind you. That’s just what you do, right?

Apparently not. Now, we must wait for not just one picture but the ten at different angles with different expressions, some with fingers pointing to it, some without.

And before anyone tells me I'm being precious about this, think about how ridiculous it is trying to actually see the Mona Lisa now. You’d be lucky to clock eyes with her through the forest of arms and phones.

Not only does this just double the time it takes my slower-than-average-reader husband to soak up whatever it is that has caught his eye but it also ruins the entire experience.

Then there's the flash. Guys. Can we please get a grip on this. When I went to the Schiaparelli exhibition there were two visitors who would not stop using their flash, despite being asked by the very patient staff not to do so. But they just ignored the warnings and carried on, without a care.

Allow me to plant both feet firmly on my soap box for a moment here.

Yes, I know some conservators will now say a single flash off your phone probably isn't doing much damage. Fine. But hundreds and thousands of flashes probably will, right? Galleries light these rooms to somewhere around 50 - 150 lux, sometimes lower for anything delicate, specifically to keep total light exposure down over years and years of visitors. Every unnecessary flash is you personally adding to a total someone has spent a lot of time trying to keep low. It's like the flash photographers out there decided the rules don't apply to them.

The other thing is the curators of special exhibitions will have spent ages agonising over the lighting choices. Popping on your flash just cuts across all that skill and effort.

This all sounds like I don’t take photos of pieces that catch my eye. Of course I do. Sometimes I snap it because I want to research it more. Sometimes I snap it for inspiration, for a post here or for a commonplace post. But I'd like to think I've got enough awareness of the people around me to do it subtly. To allow the other people who have paid good money and given up their time to stand in front of the same piece of art as me, the room to do so.

No matter how good the angle, or the lighting on my phone it just doesn’t have the same impact as standing in front of it. If any of you have read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing you’ll know what I’m talking about here. How the second you reproduce an image, its meaning splits into smaller, cheaper meanings.

There’s something unique about standing in front of a painting that your phone just can’t replicate. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as an “aura”, something to do with the fact that a piece of art exists in one specific place, at a specific time, and you actually have to go and stand in front of it to get any of that. Something my husband probably understands more than most.

So merrily snapping with or without your flash holds you and everyone around you away from that aura.

Please, fellow exhibition visitors, can we let ourselves (and those around us) get a little bit of that aura.

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