On No Longer Trying to Be Clever

Homecoming Diary (Day 9) with several gifts and a request

Setting up the YouTube livestream at Mill Hill Unitarian Chapel, 14 February 2023.

“Why did it take you so long to write a book?” Lydia Catterall asked me, part-way through the wonderful evening of conversation we had, three weeks ago tonight, with an audience at Mill Hill Unitarian Chapel in Leeds.

“I think it took me this long to stop trying to be clever,” I told her.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have relapses. And trying to be clever is no obstacle in itself to writing books, so if I had been better at it, I might have a string of clever books to my name. But my heart wasn’t in it, and I have a hard time finishing anything that lacks heart, and so the books I might have written in my twenties and thirties were left mercifully unfinished.

It was Valentine’s night when we had that conversation, which may be why it had so much heart in it. Earlier in the day, I’d been walking through Newcastle city centre, listening to the playlist Lydia had made while reading the book. One of the tracks that jumped out at me was the work of her partner, the theologian and songwriter David Benjamin Blower. So I asked if David would be up for playing it live, and that’s how we opened the evening.

Song is older than speech. Music slips past our cleverness and gets straight to the core. If you want to open a space into which people will bring more of themselves than usually shows up in a lecture theatre or a seminar room, then nothing works like starting with a song. Churches know all about this, as do most human traditions of the sacred.

Lydia reports in her newsletter that she’s heard from several groups of friends who are planning to get together and watch the recording of our conversation, then have a conversation of their own over cups of tea, which is great to know, and – as she writes – true to the spirit of the event:

Dougald’s whole tour has been built on relationship; moving from old home to old friend to new city and different context. And, in each landing, planting seeds and tending roots, thickening what’s there before taking a thread of it to the next place and sewing a loose, tangled web. I had a message from a mutual friend, hosting Dougald on another day, to say it felt like he had a ‘growing tail of light’; a shooting star gathering dust.

I love that image – and it feels true to the experience of those weeks on tour.

You can watch the whole conversation with Lydia and the audience on YouTube, and maybe even invite some friends over to watch it with you:

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I have one other invitation to make today.

By now, I know that many of you have had the chance to read At Work in the Ruins, and my publisher points out that – like it or not – Amazon plays an important part in how readers find books these days. Whether or not you bought your copy through Amazon, you can post a review there, and this will help others decide whether the book is for them.

Should you feel so moved, then, I would invite you to write a few lines about the book and post it as an Amazon review. (Here’s the US page for the book, here’s the UK page and here’s the Swedish page.)

Another thought: if you’d like to help the book on its way into the world, you could bring it to the attention of your nearest public library, or school or university library, and request that they add it to their shelves.

Thanks to all of you who have already been in touch to share your experience of reading or listening to the book, and to tell me how you have begun to share it with others.

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With that request made, I have two further gifts to offer.

Yesterday,

Rhyd Wildermuth

published the latest instalment in his essay series, The Mysteria. He calls this piece “The ‘Death’ of Christianity”, a matter over which readers might not expect Rhyd – as a self-declared pagan – to feel much sorrow. But these are strange days:

In a conversation I had in Paris a few weeks ago, shivering in the cold outside a bar with Dougald Hine, I found myself saying something whose truth surprised me. We’d been talking about

Paul Kingsnorth

’s idea of “wild Christianity,” one I’m rather fond of. At some point, in light of my recognition of Christianity’s receding power, I’d said to Dougald: “if the Christians ever went back to the wilds, I’d defend them with my life.”

Those words haunted me as I walked back to my hotel that night, and then when I traveled back to Luxembourg, and then all the days since then. I’d been trying to understand why I’d said it, what I’d meant, and how—with everything I know about Christian history—I’d still want to see Christianity do well.

I’ll have more to say myself about these themes in the weeks and months ahead, but in the meantime, I commend Rhyd’s essay to you:

The Mysteria, Part 5: The "Death" of Christianity

Finally, I’ve taken part in all kinds of interviews and podcasts already this year, and I’ll try to drip-feed these into my posts over the weeks ahead. One of my favourite conversations was with

Chris Christou

in Oaxaca for his podcast, The End of Tourism. I mentioned this before in a letter to paid subscribers, but it’s worth sharing with all of you. Not least because Chris knew Gustavo Esteva, the Mexican activist and “deprofessionalised intellectual” who I write about in the chapter on “How to Give Up”. You can listen to our conversation here.

If you have a gift for putting words together and passing exams, then the kind of education this leads into will tend to train you in being clever. Such cleverness can be a shield behind which to hide. You can get praise for the sophistication and shininess of your shield. It can take years – decades – to learn to trust that you don’t need it, that there is more power to be found in vulnerability. And if you’re lucky, having learned this lesson, you can find ways to put all the stuff you learned through your education into the service of something more worthwhile than cleverness.

DH