Do you enjoy reading essays? The last essay-style book that I loved was This is One Way to Dance by Sejal Shah and now I bring you another one in this new year – Aimlessness by Tom Lutz is a fascinating collection of essays about the concept of aimlessness. This is one of my favorite reads of 2020: Tom Lutz’s writing was mesmerizing, as if I was hearing someone talk. His thoughts flowed so well together and I could see the individual points as well as the collage that he built in this work. Take a look at the synopsis below and dive right into my thoughts.
Our culture values striving, purpose, achievement, and accumulation. This book asks us to get sidetracked along the way. It praises aimlessness as a source of creativity and an alternative to the demand for linear, efficient, instrumentalist thinking and productivity.
Aimlessness collects ideas and stories from around the world that value indirection, wandering, getting lost, waiting, meandering, lingering, sitting, laying about, daydreaming, and other ways to be open to possibility, chaos, and multiplicity. Tom Lutz considers aimlessness as a fundamental human proclivity and method, one that has been vilified by modern industrial societies but celebrated by many religious traditions, philosophers, writers, and artists. He roams a circular path that snakes and forks down sideroads, traipsing through modernist art, nomadic life, slacker comedies, drugs, travel, nirvana, and oblivion. The book is structured as a recursive, disjunctive spiral of short sections, a collage of narrative, anecdotal, analytic, and lyrical passages–intended to be read aimlessly, to wind up someplace unexpected.
Content Notes: None.
Thoughts on Aimlessness
What is aimlessness? A commonly used definition is “without aim or purpose : not having a goal or purpose”. The 26 essays in the book touch on numerous sides of aimlessness – it’s bad rep in society, its philosophical understanding by famous thinkers like Nietzsche, it’s manifestation in history by nomads and conquerors like Genghis Khan,… I have never seen a concept analyzed from so many dimensions in this one short book (this book is about 180 pages).
Lutz’s ideas in Aimlessness are so distinct and yet form a brilliant picture together – some of the book is a bit meta in the fact that it analyzes the aimlessness of essays through an essay. His analysis of the concept of aimlessness, how it manifests in poetry, essays, novels, death, love and how everything builds a collage with so much room for interpretation… I’m blown away by these concepts and this outlook! All I want to do is to learn more. I want to elaborate on two of my many takeaways from this book:
On Ideas
In any discourse, where it is public or private, people are bound to have conflicting ideas. What matters is how willing one is to listen to the other person and present their own arguments in an approachable manner. You might want to convince someone that your own position is the correct one but to do that, you have to be willing to listen to the other person’s ideas and this is something that does not come naturally to all of us. I was reading 12 rules for life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan Peterson on the weekend and he had a whole chapter dedicated to conversations and how the best way to tackle such situations is to learn to rephrase the opposing person’s argument in a succinct manner before presenting your own.
I mention Peterson here because Lutz starts Aimlessness with three succinct disclaimers about the concept of aimlessness and the ideas behind the book. (I will be sure to add them here once I have the finished copy of the book as reviewers are not allowed to quote from the advanced readers copy without checking the published version.) His second disclaimer related to the difference between learning about a theory and advocating for it. This applies not just to debate-like settings but also our readings in general – just like we don’t like every book we read, reading about a topic is not the same as believing in it 100% and getting everyone on board with it.
Reading to challenge oneself is a good practice – pick any worldview or philosophy, whether political or social, you do not know much about or disagree with and learn about that. And remember to not jump to the conclusion that someone who talks about the opposing view is married to it. Maybe they are learning, just like you are.
On Aimlessness in Reading
As an avid reader, I am always interested to learn more about reading. Back in 2019, I did a series of articles on getting to know the reader in me but Aimlessness added a new dimension to my understanding of reading – Within the pages of the novel are multiple paths that readers can choose to pursue. Let’s say you and I are both reading Lord of the Rings. I am reading it for fun, enjoying the journey, but as a writer, you are studying the book for its writing, world building and character arcs. We are both reading the same book and yet we will take different things away from it. Next time we reread the book, we will still be able to learn new things from it.
I don’t often come into reading with a review mindset. It was really easy to read every book that way when I first started book blogging but now, a couple years down the road, I just know that whatever is important to me in a book will stick with me. I will automatically pick it up. My brain will wander and my mind will get lost in the world of the book, but I will keep what I need from it at that time.
For example, I had finished writing my review for The Paris Library when I picked up The Nightingale. The only connection between the books was that they are both set in World War II but the opening sentences in The Nightingale jumped out at me and made me think of The Paris Library. That is the reason why I ended up quoting it in that review. I did not pick up The Nightingale with the aim to find a quote – I just happened to. And is that not aimlessness at its best? 🙂
Aimlessness is a book for readers who like to ponder ideas in philosophy, literature and intellectual endeavors like movies, films and more. This is a meta analysis of the works that we engage in as readers and consumers, giving us insight into ourselves as readers. The concepts in this book were amazing and I am sure I will come back to it as I engage in more complex works. Though I did not explain the connection between aimlessness and collages, I thought of House of Leaves and its unique format and I hope to analyze the concept of aimlessness in that book in my review in the future.
** Aimlessness is out today, January 5th 2021, according to NetGalley. Though I have added the Amazon links below, it might be a few weeks before it’s available in all countries (the Canadian release date seems to be the 26th). Be sure to check your local library and request the book through them. **
Amazon Print
Amazon Kindle
What are your thoughts on the concept of aimlessness?
Many thanks to the publisher, Columbia University Press, for providing me a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
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