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

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Generally speaking, these are not the usual essays you read or academically analyze (I might be biased because whenever I hear the word "essay", what comes first in my mind is academic essays that I needed to analyze and interpret during college). For me, it felt more like... blog posts? They are enjoyable to read, and some became my absolute favorite as I agreed with everything he said in those particular essays (plus he cited some of my favorite authors, so yeay!) In going down into the secrets of his own mind, [a person] has descended into the secrets of all minds…. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in cities vast find true for them also…. The deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public and universally true. Esta oración no es una traducción de la original. Este barrio es insoportable, la única salida es mudarnos. I also enjoyed the first essay, which explores education vs. enthusiasm for learning. 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. I tried reading the essay but nothing engaged me in the opening graphs, so I moved on. I feel like his weakest or perhaps least memorable essays for me were the ones on Quentin Tarantino and Jerry Seinfeld, but even those had bright spots of insight here and there.

When Emerson found me, I was barely lukewarm, but the result was the same. Everything I’ve written since that afternoon in Kenmore, including this book, I owe to his inspiration. “The man is only half himself,” he writes in “The Poet,”“the other half is his expression.” More than a decade ago, Emerson helped me with the first part. The second is his work in progress. There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth, they are all creatures of a given temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never pass: but we look at them, they seem alive and we presume there is impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse; in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Producer, editor, and writer behind the highly addictive, informative, and popular YouTube channel The Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak presents an unconventional and whip-smart essay collection about topics as varied as Superman, politics, and public benches. O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s... I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I won’t hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints.

Escape into Meaning

From Tarantino to the nature of friendship, Woolf to the modest, overlooked public bench, Evan Puschak has written a passionate, perceptive tribute to, well, everything. You'll want to see the world as he does: full of unexpected connections, possibilities, and delight." — Hua Hsu, author of Stay True: A Memoir From the Publisher I haven’t endured such a loss, but in these words I feel the bitter apathy of Emerson’s heart. Experience should teach us something. Wisdom should be the compensation for failure and loss:“To know a little, would be worth the expense of this world.” But this grief is empty. The only thing it can teach is that it doesn’t, which is the coldest comfort. “The dearest events are summer rain,” he declares, “and we the Para coats that shed every drop.” Puschak has a very succinct and eloquent way with his arguments and his research is always impeccable. He’s also a rare sort of philosopher these days in that he doesn’t want to just analyze the external things he’s most passionate about or wants to hold accountable in society, he wants to analyze and hold himself accountable as well.

While some found the speech compelling, many were scandalized by Emerson’s radical individualism. It threatened the core of their faith. For Emerson, Jesus was someone who had the courage to seek the infinite in himself, and his example should have been an inspiration for the rest of us to do the same. Instead, Christianity adopted a “vulgar tone of preaching” that commands its followers to “subordinate your nature to Christ’s nature,” that speaks of “revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.” To Emerson, everything necessary for revelation is available here and now, in nature, in us. God isn’t a “vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness.”

From Emerson, I learned two fundamental truths: first, that we learn by expressing, not by thinking, which is to say that knowledge doesn’t really exist until you can write it down. What we normally imagine as “thinking” is really just a distracted form of writing, like having a disoriented drunk at a typewriter behind your eyes. Writing sobers him up. The pen (or the word processor) lets the mind compose language into knowledge that’s far more sophisticated than what that little boozer can do on his own. This passage is as dreamlike and immersive as a short film by David Lynch. It captures that occasional experience we all have of waking up into our own lives, not quite knowing how we got here or where we’re going. The essay is about the difficulty of attaining an accurate perspective on life while it’s happening, about the ways our mind warps experience—so Emerson warps the reading experience in turn. “All things swim and glitter,” including his prose: If you’re a Nerdwriter fan, this is like a greatest hits of his channel’s thought work. Even if you have never watched one of Evan Puschak’s trailblazing video essays before, you should give this a try. You might not always see eye-to-eye with him, but you’ll always come away having learned something. Or at the very least, you’ll receive a spark of his infectious curiosity.

Producer, editor, and writer behind the highly addictive, informative, and popular YouTube channel The Nerdwriter , Evan Puschak presents “a brilliant, wide-ranging essay collection that explores meaning and how we make it with the thoughtfulness and open-hearted generosity that have long been hallmarks of Puschak’s writing” (John Green, New York Times bestselling author). It’s amazing how different a class becomes when you’re not spending all your time scrawling notes, trying to sort out what will or won’t be relevant to some future exam. I recommend it. Take nothing to class but yourself. Listen, ask questions, absorb, have fun. When the test comes, try your best. All you need is a D not to fail out of college. (DISCLAIMER: Do not take this course of action if you are studying the aforementioned law or medicine, or have an interest in going to grad school of any kind. Study for the tests, take the notes, have as little fun as possible.) I got a lot out of these 5 essays (50% is a good ratio) and the other 5 are ok as well, but not as appealing to me. Ode to Public Benches - I'm a fan of walking around cities and sitting on their benches, drinking coffee and experiencing some of that nice ol' sonder and it turns out I'm doing right.

Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

When Emerson found me, I was barely lukewarm, but the result was the same. Everything I’ve written since that afternoon in Kenmore, including this book, I owe to his inspiration. “The man is only half himself,” he writes in “The Poet,” “the other half is his expression.” More than a decade ago, Emerson helped me with the first part. The second is his work in progress. After opening with confusion and tragedy, Emerson goes on to explore the things that mediate our experience of reality. Mood is one, the “many colored lenses” that distort what we see. Another is temperament, some blend of genetics and environment that shapes our choices and “shuts us in a prison we cannot see”:

If watching Nerdwriter videos on YouTube feels like having a life-affirming conversation about art with a super smart, self-taught friend, reading Escape Into Meaning feels like opening a portal inside that friend's mind and uncovering his inner world. A brilliant, wide-ranging essay collection that explores meaning and how we make it with the thoughtfulness and open-hearted generosity that have long been hallmarks of Puschak's writing." —John Green, New York Times bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed Take, for example, “Experience,” which attempts to describe the feeling of being alive. What predominates, in this often pessimistic essay, is a sense of confusion, and he begins by dropping us into that feeling:The more Emerson I read, the more my own thinking seemed murky and confused. The more it seemed like my decisions and beliefs were based on a hodgepodge of old, drifting thought-fragments, corrupted after years without reflection. A paragraph of Emerson’s was more complete than my entire belief system. His essays snowballed into towering monuments of self-expression, poetic and staggeringly lucid.