A few years ago, as I understand it, at intersections in some parts of The Netherlands, they started painting instructions for cyclists on the road rather than on signposts. Why? Because at a light everyone is looking down at their phone.
That’s a version of “the up and down of it.”
Here’s another. I look “up” to Martin Luther King Jr, though I hope I look to the man who threatened the whole fabric of America rather than “just” the sanitized dreamer who often gets celebrated now.
To be slaves to our phones such that we need to rework infrastructure is a problem, as is making King a gentle saint whose true message we tend to ignore.
We look down when we should be looking straight ahead and we look up when we should be looking straight ahead too.
So ‘the up and down of it’ is thus my phrase for our back and forth of judging something, of where we put it--it, our phones, it, a man of bravery and moral vision--on the grid of everything.
This newsletter is called “Today, or Someday Like It” to suggest both the particular and the timelessness of those political or “in the news” subjects I intended to write about here.
But this newsletter sits on the grid of everything too and, nearly two months into daily writing, I have been thinking other co-coordinates are required to navigate the up and down of the other subjects (Amsterdam, aesthetics, school, etc.) I return to here, to say nothing of how those subjects might be plotted near one another.
The up and down of it--it, “Today, or Someday Like It”--will, in other words, require some additional and corollary titles.
A note on these tomorrow.