Simon Sarris

Sarris's manifesto on how to actually read: read mostly fiction; read slowly; read in a voice in your head; let very good books layer over your reality "like a fresh coat of moss." Reading, he argues, is letting another person model the world for you — an act of intimacy with the dead and absent. He warns that book clubs and reading-the-same-things-as-everyone-else may dilute the effect, and encourages the reader to seek out the excellent works from across cultures and centuries.

A rewrite of Sarris's 2021 essay The Most Precious Resource Is Agency. He argues that the early lives of the great — Leonardo apprenticed to Verrocchio at 14, Walt Disney delivering papers at 11, Nabokov publishing poetry at 16, Andrew Carnegie supporting his family by 16 — all share a common feature: they were doing useful, appreciated work, not merely attending school. Today's children, locked into a 20-year inertia of pure schooling, have lost the "useful childhood" that produced reach. Includes practical recommendations for parents.

Sparked by Eric Rohmer's 1986 film The Green Ray — about a woman ostensibly looking for somewhere to go on vacation but really looking for someone to be with — Sarris attacks the modern adage that "you need to be happy alone before you can be happy with someone else." Dissatisfaction, melancholy, and unmet yearning are not signs you are damaged; they are the normal tide of a human life. We are improved by relationships; we should yearn for them; we should mourn their absence. A defence of desire against defensive postures.

Sarris sets the reader in the dark corner of a pub and produces a pile of old photographs — meditations, in image and prose, on impermanence, attention, and the value of unrepeatable things. The argument running underneath is Chestertonian: tear down the irreplaceable too quickly and you discover only afterwards what it actually was for. A gentle case for conservation — of buildings, customs, friendships, selves — by way of looking carefully at what is breakable.

Explores a set of criteria for 'careful technology'—tools that are repairable, small-scale, and do not disrupt community or family relationships.

A thoughtful reflection on parenting essentials, contrasting the minimalist needs of a baby with the consumerist culture surrounding modern childcare.