The Freakishly Strong Base
At a fundamental level, I tell stories of people and place. Almost always more than one, weaving them together like so many strands of DNA.
In the end, if I’ve done my job, the reader is able to see the interconnectedness in things that don’t seem like they have any business connecting at all.
In this essay, the ties that bind John McPhee, Morgan Housel, glaciers, and compound interest.
I. Guns, Germs, and Steel
I had an acute illness in 2020. Things got dicey for a minute. Acute is obviously better than chronic, but I had a fright nonetheless. On my back in a hospital bed type stuff.
That is a curious position for anyone to be in. My self-talk at the time was something like - well if you weren’t willing to take the lesson before, you certainly are now.
You’re forced, in almost every way, to go back to basics. Perhaps you know the feeling.
When you finally see the sunrise and come out of the all-business phase, you start to consider the why of it all and how to make sure it never happens again. It’s in that phase where you begin to consider your principles, and work backwards from there.
You realize, perhaps with a Haig-Brownian smirk, that it’s always been about the basics and how foolish we are to complicate our lives unnecessarily.
I had developed imbalances. Imbalances I couldn’t see. Hard-charging, always moving, ignoring the signs my body was giving me, convinced that at 28 I was immortal.
How foolish.
Unsurprisingly, I was led back to my bookshelf. To my bookwormian sentimentality. I decided I would start the healing process by re-reading the people & place canon. Not the English literature canon - agreed upon by the eggheads in academia. The canon that each one of us needs to find for ourselves, after years - maybe decades - of reading, re-reading, and writing.
For me it’s work like Sapiens, The Wayfinders, Dirt, The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life, Four Thousand Weeks, A Cook’s Tour, The Laws of Human Nature, Mastery, Boomerang, and Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Back to basics. Foundational thinking. First principles stuff.
What was I hoping to find there? A sense of balance and simplicity, maybe. A vision of the big picture.
As mysteriously as anything that happens to us in moments like this - I happened on a piece of writing that would become very important to me. Not a book - an essay - The Freakishly Strong Base.
II. The Freakishly Strong Base
Housel’s essay is about the curious case of compound interest. I wrote about it earlier this year.
Small things eventually compound into big things, if allowed to do so. Compounding takes time.
He paints the picture using glaciers and ice age science. The prevailing narrative, for a time, was that an ice age is the result of long winters that stack ice on the earth until everything is covered in it.
It turns out, the culprit is actually mild summers that never quite get warm enough to melt last years build up.
The leftover ice base makes it easier for snow to accumulate the following winter, which increases the odds of snow sticking around in the following summer, which attracts even more accumulation the following winter. Perpetual snow reflects more of the sun’s rays, which exacerbates cooling, which brings more snowfall, and on and on. - Housel
It’s an example of the size and scale of what can be built on top of a strong foundation.
…there are times when you have to relentlessly leave something that looks small alone so it has a chance of compounding into something big…Build a reputation through small, consistent acts. That’s where everything huge begins. - Housel
In the writing world, there are few who have built a foundation of work like John McPhee.
III. John McPhee
Bookworms are a curious folk. A sub-culture, to be sure. We all consider one another, and know intuitively that others like us exist, but we hold that thought in the back of our minds. I think that’s because bookwormian behaviour is, naturally, solitary. At least most of the time. Reading isn’t a team sport. We form bookclubs and talk to our leather-bound-brethren but, in the end, we’re alone. We buy the book alone. We crack the spine alone. We read the foreword alone. We finish the book alone. We sit there and try to process what just happened to us alone and we put it back on its sacred shelf alone.
And so it makes sense to me that we don’t have posters on our walls of our heroes and heroines the way that sports fanatics do. LeBron James is getting far more square footage on the walls of teenagers than J.K. Rowling is, but they are equals to us inkfingers. We idolize them the same way.
But it’s different for us, somehow. We feel like we know them, because they’ve exposed themselves entirely. The ink is their blood and the pages are time.
The pantheon for me is reasonably clear. It’s J.K Rowling, John McPhee, Tony Bourdain, Joan Didion, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Greene, and Michael Lewis.
The Mt. Rushmore of writing.
In my world, the name John McPhee has an almost mythic ring to it. As if you’re talking about Zeus or Dumbledore. A very old, unassuming Zeus. Maybe Dumbledore works better here. Either way he earned the moniker and he earned the mythology.
John is in his 90s and is about to publish Tabula Rasa - book 32. In the McPhee canon there is, sans-surprise, a Pulitzer winner - Annals of the Former World.
The first McPhee I read was Coming Into the Country and it floored me. John has all of it. When I feel stuck and want to crush my complacency - I read John McPhee. The masters have already done the thing - it’s up to us to know when to bow.
John got his dream job in his early 30s - staff writer for The New Yorker. He sold his first piece to the publication at 31 and Bill Shawn knew what he had. A few more freelance essays and the magazine extended its hand and welcomed McPhee into New Yorker folklore.
All of John’s books started as essays for the magazine. It’s the perfect strategy. A freakishly strong base. John has a question about the world, or an idea, that becomes a commissioned essay, that then gets published and makes contact with the real-world, percolating in the ether. All of us feel a special connection to certain stories and to certain questions. When he encounters an essay that needs more squeeze - he turns it into a long-form project and writes a book.
We should count ourselves as the lucky ones.
IV. Back to Basics
So what’s the point here?
Back to basics.
To our gifts and our life’s work. To first principles and the fundamentals. Finding beauty, strength, and a freakishly strong base there. Without the compulsion to conform or chase the zeitgeist. The work out there is not your work. Your work is in here. You’ll know it when you see it.
See you at the bookshelf.
“For this Alaskan river, on the other hand, the sixteenth century has not yet ended, nor the fifteenth, nor the fifth. The river flows, as it has since immemorial time, in balance with itself.” - John McPhee
See you on the path.
MG