Surface

I recently noticed a proliferation of guides on ‘how to be more interesting’ and ‘how to live a more intentional life’ and other such topics symptomatic of a populace searching for a shaft of meaning while hopelessly mired in Sisyphean necessities and pointless cultural drivel, and it led me to reflect on the characteristics people I consider particularly interesting/intentional have in common.

It might be useful to disambiguate interesting into superficial and fundamental flavours, in the tradition of Fitzgerald’s passage on what it is to be a personality and what it is to be a personage (although admittedly both intensity of presence and density of achievement, following his definition, are somewhat superficial in a sense).

Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on — I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done.1

One path to being superficially interesting lies in channelling some combination of beauty and enigma, mysterious and mercurial tendencies seated on well-angled collarbones. The reptilian base of the mind is willing to grant quite a lot of leeway to lend the good-looking a halo of interior complexity, to transmute the subtle intoxication of imagined entanglements with perfectly proportioned limbs into constructing an eidolon.2

Another path to superficial interest comes from the circumstances of having interesting, or at least out-of-the-ordinary, context. Mixed parentage, trans-continental upbringing, eclectic mix of formative experiences.

Perhaps I should also discuss (on a related tangent) that to be perceived as interesting and to be interesting are not entirely aligned, and it is possible to achieve the former without brushing against the substance of the latter (in the exact same manner religion and spirituality are quite distinct, even antipodal), but then I’d really be digressing.

Assuming that the median reader for this piece is someone raised in a suburb, embedded in a typical family, of well-above-average yet not reliably breathtaking appearance, working a laptop job, with no notable deviances from the doldrums of modernity up their sleeves, neither of the above paths holds much promise.

Fortunately, the one feature of the interesting people I had in mind while writing this piece has nothing to do with context or with appearance.

Sanctum

The principal cause for the texture their souls possess, overshadowing any of the rest, was hinted at in the title: all of them have some mundane thing or the other that they pursue devotionally, as if it were their personal path to heaven.

I don’t mean anything as prosaic as saying that they are religious, or particularly committed to their job, or that their profession is their true calling (although this is often the case). I mean that there is an activity or a basket of activities that they engage in with a seriousness that an unsuspecting outsider might, in witnessing, assume that they have intruded voyeuristically upon a sacred ritual. These people take the spotlight of their attention and tighten it to a sub-atomic focal point, generating a perceptual intensity that briefly makes the world vanish from view and pauses the flicker of the stars.

I’m not particularly good at conveying the difference between doing things and doing them with spiritual seriousness/intensity, because the latter can be one of those things that it is possible to go through a whole life without encountering, or recognising, but I hope some examples will help.

I’m thinking of the friend with a custom car (all the bells and whistles, he explained, the first time I hopped in and admired the ride) who speeds up and down ————3 highways like a Kamikaze pilot to wind down when he’s not working at the ER. The acquaintance who listens to music on a domestic stack of Funktion-One speakers in absolute silence and solitude, as if hosting a Sufi ritual for one. The Libyan neighbour who trains at the gym like a gladiator preparing for mortal combat, while wearing comically large clothes to conceal all the muscle underneath. There is a meditative quality to their private pastime and a life-or-death intensity in their execution.

I have in mind someone who channels that kind of rigour towards her baking and to staging her movie nights (she has an unerring ability to predict all the Oscar winners). Another towards yoga. A former classmate towards daily walks, studying the passage of trains and collecting stones. Others bring this passionate excess towards their research, to art, to code, or to experience in general. Each morning they rise as if a jihad had been called on existence itself. They seem alive.

There is usually little to no practical, utilitarian lens served by the ritual. Several people I met in Berlin partied like it was their purpose. A spiritual purpose, even if it looked like a reenactment of Sodom and Gomorrah. Going to church on Sunday they say, before a three-day bender in a Brutalist bunker. They queued up (alone) at the club in preparation for a pilgrimage to a different dimension. In a more cerebral (but not necessarily more profound) light, some people read like mediaeval monks tasked with deciphering scripture. There is a habit, a setting, a system to it all. Some write as if they were transcribing the polyphonic song of all the Muses at once. My mother, for an example from closer to the heart, prepares chai each afternoon with a sequence of carefully calibrated steps as if the Prophet (or at least the Queen) is expected at home.

Even in my weakest example, of speed, I think the relationship between man and machine on display as the odometer inched past 200 km/h and the streetlights began to blur had something of the divine to it. The hyper-flow state, the one that lies beyond the flow.

There is a certain attitude, an overwhelming force of will, that people I find interesting are capable of bringing to bear upon the object of their contemplation. A limitless curiosity. They aren’t interesting because of the specific activities they do (a mistake people sometimes make, shopping for spare time activities based on the reputation of the other attendees), but because that level of depth and commitment for purely intrinsic, individual, self-derived joys scaffolds all the thoughts racing through their cortices. An internal motivation, a transcendental orientation.

I hope I didn’t make it sound like hobbies are a competitive sport, and the people I find interesting are the ones winning. Of course, the people I thought of tend to be highly developed at the things that they pursue, casual or abstract as those pursuits may be. They are also excellent at the other things they do, as some corollary to possessing and training the capacity to galvanise the attentional mechanisms of the mind.

But the quality is merely a byproduct of their obsession, the single-minded focus, the reverential stance, and some natural resonance between the activity of choice and the harmony of their spirit. There is never a race, a match, a score; mindless competition pervades society already, it never permeates the sanctum.

It is possible to be obsessive about a sports team or a television show or a pop star; politics or religion; status or making money; or any of a number of things that dominate public attention. But that (dare I say) misdirected obsession lacks the prerequisites that the spiritual frame demands. The focus isn’t personal, has too much of the social to it; in prayer, even in mass congregation, a man stands alone before God. I would argue that the central function of the aforementioned circus and spectacle, of distraction, is to tear away from the populace its innate ability to engage in private communion, to brush against a higher purpose while honing a craft. Of deriving some simple, sublime pleasure from the execution of a task well done.4

Sacrilege

Increasingly, I find myself thinking that in my desire to share more of what I make, things that perhaps should form the foundation for my own solipsistic spiritualism, there is an element of sacrilege. The practice decays as it optimises for publicity, as it ends up as fodder for the feed. A cutting excerpt from Schopenhauer comes to mind:

A man who tried to live on the generosity of his Muses, I mean on his poetic gifts, seems to me somewhat to resemble a girl who lives on her charms. Both profane for base profit what ought to be the free gift of their innermost being. Both are liable to become exhausted and both usually come to a shameful end. So do not degrade your Muse to a whore.5

In essence, I think some people are fundamentally interesting because the aperture of their eyes and the refractive index of their mind have, through sustained effort, developed the power to turn a mote of dust to an entire universe of boundless potentiality. To know them, and to be engaged by them, is to be transported for a spell into internal models of reality more coherent than reality itself.