Reader's Digest: October 19, 2024

It’s been a while since I wrote about my online reading. In part, that’s because I’ve had less time to keep up with the magazines I like, in part because I’ve been unusually hard to entertain—

in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent.

I hesitate to borrow this description, from the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, since it immediately precedes his nervous breakdown, risking hyperbole—or manifestation.

The idea of “manifesting” is like Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit: you can see it two ways, as practical self-assertion or as magic. It invokes the perforation of life’s fabric by mysterious powers whose operation is always ambiguous—open to interpretation through natural causes. In that way, it has an affinity with what Clayton Purdom, in the LARB, calls “weird nonfiction”:

creative work that presents itself as journalism o…