resonance

There are a few books I’ve read, over the past few years, which have really helped me to make sense of the present moment’s general, awful strangeness. Peter Pomerantsev’s This is Not Propaganda (2019), Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (2019), James Bridle’s Ways of Being (2023) and, most recently, Hartmut Rosa’s The Uncontrollability of the World (2020). These are not particularly “easy” books, and they are not comforting reads either, but for one reason or another, each of these authors, and each of these titles, has made me think a little differently, prompted a welcome shift in my perspectives, and, curiously, granted me a little courage to look the present moment in the face, take heart, and then move on.

I thought about Hartmut Rosa’s work recently, when Tom and I were out looking at the night sky, at nearby Dunaverty, during the planetary alignment at the end of last month. Rosa’s thesis is that the relentless drive to bring just a little more of the world within our reach; our ability to have everything available to us, at all times, all at once; and our desire to encounter what is beyond our bounded selves via measurable, controllable “peak” experiences, has, in the twenty-first century, resulted in an alienation more profound than that which separated workers from the fruits of their own labour in the rapidly industrialising economies of the nineteenth-century west. In socio-economic landscapes of measurable outcomes, in algorithmically determined digital environments, in the infinite scroll of contemporary consumer culture, where the promise of offline “retreat” is sought, bought and sold, our experience of what is beyond ourselves has become overwhelmingly instrumental and transactional. Rarely, Rosa argues, do we simply open ourselves to experiencing the world as a place of chance, joy and wonder.

But the world is wonderful, Rosa argues, and to encounter it as such, you have to let go of the desire to always bring it within reach or control it. You might turn on the radio, and hear some music that hasn’t been selected for you by an algorithm, which completely stops you in your tracks – as I did a few weeks ago, when I encountered an extraordinary live recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing a Chopin Mazurka on Radio 3. You might head out, on a completely ordinary errand, to a completely ordinary place and see something of genuine beauty, that just fills your day with joy, like the young boy I saw gazing at a rainbow in the car park of Campbeltown’s Tesco. You might go for a walk, exchange words for a few minutes with a stranger about the incredible beauty of the morning, and then carry on your separate ways, both of you altered, just a little, by your meeting. You could head out, of an evening, with no purpose other than to enjoy the glorious sight of Venus, hovering above the horizon, brightly shining in the gathering darkness over Ireland.

I’ve been burbling about Hartmut Rosa for a while, and when Tom asked me why on earth I was so animated about this book, and I explained it to him in terms similar to those above, he looked at me rather skeptically and said that it all sounded “a bit heavy.” You might well feel the same. But I challenge you to go outside, on a clear night; a night perhaps, when you can see Mars, Jupiter, and Venus all hanging out in the firmament together, and not experience some wonder, some amazement, some feelings of groundedness and connection.

Such sensations — what Rosa would call “resonant” feelings – are dynamic, transformative, and utterly human. This resonance stands in radical opposition to the feelings of overwhelm, consternation – or, in recent weeks, sheer horror – at what is currently happening in some parts of the contemporary, increasingly inhuman-seeming, world. Why not go outside, on a clear winter’s night, and give it a try.