‘Life is bursting with wonder,’ writes Oliver Burkeman. I am reading his book, Four Thousand Weeks. I’m only a few pages in and already I adore it. Already, I feel a tiny bit better about almost everything.
Burkeman is a writer I’ve admired for a long time. I’ve read both his previous books, more than once. I come circling back to him, often and often, because he is so madly reassuring.
You’ll find writers like that, in your life, and I think all of us should hold fast to them. They might not actually be the best and most brilliant writers, but they are the ones who feel like old friends. And we all need old friends.
I do think Burkeman is a very good writer indeed, although that’s not really the point. He does that intensely clever thing of producing excellent prose whilst making it seem like nothing. He is not writing writing. He is addressing the reader very directly, with affection and humour and exactly the correct degree of self-deprecation. And so I feel comforted and amused and not alone.
When he makes statements like ‘life is bursting with wonder’ I hear him and believe him and I don’t think that a gushing, slightly phoney charlatan is trying to sell me something. (Some of the life-is-wonder people are patently putting it on, and I don’t trust them. Burkeman says it straightforwardly and you know he means it.)
The other thing about the writers who feel like friends is that they’ll be different for everyone. I have heard one highly respected professor say that if he could give his students only a single piece of advice, it would be to read Marcus Aurelius every morning. Someone else might go everywhere with a dog-eared copy of Mary Oliver’s poems in their pocket - or Keats or Yeats or Browning or Brooke. The lovely Donna Ashworth is starting to take her place at the top table of writers-as-friends.
In other words, you’ll all have your own. The point is, I think, to know who they are and to keep them with you. Then, every so often, when you need a dose of sunshine, or some encouragement, or the feeling that you have not been abandoned in an uncaring universe, you can pick them up and smile and be grateful.