Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

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Now this beloved author digs deep into her own generative process to share her wisdom and unique perspective about creativity. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as the colossal chisel of Phidias, or the trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. Over the years, he has learned that being an artist isn’t about your specific output, it’s about your relationship to the world. We learn exactly what our world wants from us, so we can appease it and get back to the stuff we really want to do, like Super Mario Bros. Certainly worth reading if you enjoy essay collections, consume a lot of books, and need something new, and with moderate expectations, it’ll be a nice relaxing time.

In going down into the secrets of his own mind, [a person] has descended into the secrets of all minds…. Evan Puschak in his first published book, an essay collection, brings something deeply relatable to this art form. The key point is that in universes such as Gibson's The Sprawl, the inhabitants lead meaningless lives in a world controlled by massive corporations therefore they have access to a special kind of freedom - they escaped the arduous process of assigning one's life a certain meaning and are free to do as they please. Of all institutions, it’s the Church that receives Emerson’s harshest rebuke, in the famous “Divinity School Address” of 1838.If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me—neither better nor worse. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

The path splintered after you finally landed a job, but when I was young that seemed a lifetime away. The rest of the essays varied, the one on Superman reading to me like a guy's take on Superman, and I didn't finish the one on Seinfeld--I tried twice to watch some of the show, but both times got to where this loud, boring guy mansplained at the top of his lungs to a captive audience and I flipped the channel both times. With this and John Green’s “The Anthropocene Reviewed,” some of my favorite books I’ve read in the past two years have been essay collections. I did not agree with everything Puschak put forth but he had me looking at things in a different way. By the end, exposing someone’s address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn’t know who it was.We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. Everything I’ve written since that afternoon in Kenmore, including this book, I owe to his inspiration. A conversion from video essays to actual written essays was a natural leap for him to make and it's exactly what he did with his ever sharp and utterly personal debut collection Escape Into Meaning.

His writing style is much better served by the spoken, visual medium of video essays than it is by this long-form format.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. In high school, everything matters: tests, papers, homework, participation—all of it contributes to your grade, which contributes to your GPA.