Bring Your Own Sieve

 

A Note From the Margins

I have never been particularly good at staying in one intellectual lane.

Give me enough time and one question will become five. A song sends me looking into the life of the person who wrote it. A novel raises a question about human nature. History wanders into theology, theology bumps into science, science opens a door into philosophy and suddenly I am standing somewhere I had absolutely no intention of going when I started.

I like it there.

I read widely, listen widely, watch widely and wonder about almost everything. I can be fascinated by Jane Austen and quantum physics, Tchaikovsky and hip-hop, old theology and modern psychology, sometimes within the same afternoon. I don't experience those things as competing interests. They are different windows looking out on the same enormous world.

But there is a complication.

I have often hesitated to recommend a book, film, song, podcast, artist or thinker that has given me something valuable, because recommendations have a funny way of becoming endorsements.

“I found something worthwhile here” is not the same thing as “I agree with everything here.”

The Roxbury Incident

I learned this lesson the embarrassing way.

Years ago, I watched A Night at the Roxbury and thought it was hilarious. Apparently, whatever internal filtering system I possess was working overtime, because what remained in my memory was basically Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan, ridiculous suits, head-bobbing and “What Is Love?”

So naturally, I recommended it to my mother-in-law.

At some point later, I watched it again.

I was horrified.

I had apparently edited the entire thing in my head. This time I was hyper-aware of every crass joke, every sexual reference, every moment I had somehow allowed to sail peacefully through my consciousness without leaving so much as a forwarding address.

And all I could think was:

I TOLD MY MOTHER-IN-LAW TO WATCH THIS.

I wanted to melt away into the furniture and cease being a person who had ever expressed an opinion about cinema.

That experience taught me something about the way I consume things. I filter almost automatically. I can love a book without loving every idea in it, find something profound in a song whose worldview I don't share or laugh myself stupid at a movie while apparently deleting half of it from my permanent record.

The trouble is, when I recommend something, I can't send my filter along with it.

And that has made me much more cautious about recommendations.

Not because I think we should only encounter things that are perfectly clean, perfectly true or perfectly aligned with what we already believe. Quite the opposite. Some of the most interesting things I've learned have come from sources I disagreed with substantially.

I just think we have to bring our own sieve.

When wheat is sifted, the purpose isn't to become preoccupied with the chaff. The purpose is to keep the grain. That's how I want to approach the things I encounter. Take what is true, beautiful, useful, challenging or worth pondering, and let the rest gently blow away.

Marginalia is, in part, my sieve made visible.

These are the notes I make in the margins of a curious life: things I've noticed, questioned, loved, challenged, connected, or simply found interesting enough to follow a little farther.

There will be books and music here, history and science, culture and memory. There will also be poetry and stories, because sometimes following a thread doesn't lead to an answer. Sometimes it leads to something that didn't exist before.

That's not a flaw in the organizational system.

That is the organizational system.

And nothing I write about here comes with an implied instruction that you must see it exactly as I do. If I tell you a book changed the way I thought about something, I'm not handing you my conclusions along with the book.

I'm showing you something I found in the wheat.

Bring your own sieve.

Let's see where the threads lead.