the most visible place
time-logging experiments
I have this problem: if I can’t see an object, it’s hard for me to remember that it exists. I wear and re-wear the clothes at the tops of my drawers, forget to eat food underneath or behind things in the fridge, and lose track of items if I don’t put them in highly visible places (phone on top of my bag; rent check covering my keyboard).
I also have lots of books. This creates a harrowing situation on my nightstand. Because, when I get a new book or want to remember one I’ve forgotten, the nightstand is the most visible place.
In January, I decided to take a picture of my excessive nightstand on the twelfth of every month, to see how my reading changed over the course of 2023. Here are the results:
Spot-the-differences was fun. (What happened to my coaster in March?) But looking through the photos surprised me, because what stuck out most were the things that didn’t change. Six books have been quietly occupying the same spot since January: War and Peace, Villette (pages out, lots of flags), Keywords, In the Desert of Desire, a book of word searches, and a blank book I got in England (the spine says The ABCs of Love in Dutch). Even books that did move sometimes stayed in the same place for a month or two. I didn’t read many of these books. Most of what I read this year doesn’t appear at all. I thought I was documenting a visual timeline of my year-in-reading. Instead, the pictures represent something more gradual and much slower.
I looked around and noticed how many other objects have been steady all year. My desk. Shelving. The couch. The lamp among the nightstand books: the lamp had a reading light, lost a reading light, and gained a new reading light, but otherwise? Stayed put.
It’s a fast world—that’s nothing new. But it’s also a slow world. You can put a book down and there it will sit, for as long as time allows. I imagined standing with my back to the ocean, letting waves hit my knees as they rolled in and out. That’s what it’s like: the rush of the world going by as I stand still.
The ocean-image gives me a peaceful feeling. Change happens in every moment, but not always the obvious, big-picture kind. It’s more gradual, much slower. A different wave hits your knees each time.
This is related to a topic I’ve been circling through several twelfths-of-the-month, one that hasn’t come together for an essay. Something about “inner life” or “private life.” I think a key way of reaching escape velocity is to give attention to private things: the tangible realities of the place where my body actually exists. A parquet floor. A white bowl of blueberries. And inner things: following my thoughts as I work out ideas, small conversations I have with friends, what moves me, what doesn’t, the cycle of energy during a single day. Twitter’s dead but my nightstand doesn’t care. Large language models can’t predict text for my notebooks.
The nightstand experiment turned out to be a reminder to slow down amid the various round-ups, wrapped lists, and ten-bests. My “2023 books” list is fun to revisit, but it doesn’t give me the same feeling as these twelve pictures. From these, I get a calm and intimate sense of time passing. I hope to bring this into 2024.
(a parenthetical update: escape velocity posts will continue to be occasional because I’m focusing on fiction and reading. if you’d like to keep up my with my writing, my website is the best place: birdbyrocket.com)
PS: here’s a favorite pic from this year:
