The Things We Share

At the end of the summer, I spent a weekend away with a group of friends. The conversation turned to music and how valuable it is to have friends who introduce you to new music, broadening your horizons and sparking conversations about what you’ve heard. That evening, I said that you should share what you find with the friends and creatives around you, and that this newsletter is my way of doing exactly that. We listened to music for the rest of the night, and at some point, a friend played me a track I had never heard before. It has stayed with me ever since.

Reflecting on the summer, I realised that almost everything that has stayed with me was introduced to me by someone else. A friend, an author, an artist who left work on a beach for strangers to find, and a scientist who spent two hours thinking out loud. This edition is me passing those things on.

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Marc Romboy – Counting Comets

The track is ‘Counting Comets’ by Marc Romboy, released on Bedrock in 2016. I have played it many times since that evening, and it has done what a real discovery does: reminded me of the beauty of music. Few things feed my curiosity like new music. I wrote about this before in The Shape of Curiosity. What the weekend added was the other half of it. A discovery grows when you share it and talk about it, and a track means more when you know who introduced you to it.

Jon Foreman: Sculpt the World

Jon Foreman is a land artist from Pembrokeshire, Wales. He arranges stones on beaches, sorted by size and colour, into circles, lines, and gradients. Then the tide comes in and takes the work back. He photographs the work, and the photograph is all that remains. In the May edition, I wrote about Hannsjörg Voth, who built a spiral of loam knowing it would erode. Like Voth, Foreman embraces the idea of impermanence, leaving his creations on public beaches where passers-by may discover them during their brief existence. It is this generosity that stays with me: creating something and giving it to the tide.

Carlien Cavens, ‘De trip van je leven’

De Trip van je Leven (The Trip of Your Life) by Carlien Cavens is a Dutch-language book about psychedelics, written for people who have never set foot in that world. I have been familiar with it for years, and I still read this book with great pleasure. It clearly and calmly explains what these substances do, what the research says and how to approach them responsibly, taking the health side seriously. If you are curious but don’t know where to begin, this is the book I would recommend. For now, it only exists in Dutch. I have written about this subject myself in Translating an Altered State, and I discussed the science with Zeus Tipado on the Studio Notes podcast.

David Sinclair on Modern Wisdom

The longest thing I listened to this summer was Chris Williamson’s conversation with David Sinclair, the Harvard geneticist behind the information theory of ageing. In a nutshell, his idea is that ageing is the loss of information, the pattern that tells your cells who they are, and that this pattern can be repaired. His lab has reversed blindness in old mice, and the first human trials are underway. He even says out loud that the first person to reach 150 may already be alive. I found it a fascinating two hours. I also noticed the connection with the essay I sent last week about a coin that reminds me that it could all end today. I think the two belong together. Whether the horizon is tomorrow or a century away, the conclusion is the same: the hours are what matter.

Four things, four people who passed them on. The friend with the track, the artist on the beach, the writer opening a door and the scientist thinking ahead. Keep passing things on to each other. That’s how everything in this edition reached me.

What has stayed with you this summer? Hit reply — I read every message myself.

— Bastiaan

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