Another weekend has mercifully arrived, and it’s time to look at what has been lighting me up, and lighting my way this week.
My re-read of Wilkie Au and Noreen Cannnon Au’s The Discerning Heart (2006) has continued this week. It was an interesting chapter to be reading at this moment in history. It still assumes a modernist world, one dominated by reason, facts, and science to the exclusion of all else. And so it insists on the importance of feelings and emotions as a counter-balance to that. This is one hundred per cent true, but we’re in such a different place now, in which facts and science are being subsumed almost entirely by the tyranny of emotions and feelings. It made me think of some of Jung’s ideas about how the world wars were a lashing out of Europe’s long-subsumed violence, and only reinforced my belief that he was to a great degree on to something in his diagnosis of the human condition. The key in all this seems to be never championing one extreme over another, but in finding balance and creative tension between opposing tendencies.
For much of the week, my reading was more in the background — fun but not really impacting my broader thought world. But the past couple days I’ve been reading two books that have definitely made me think. One is a new memoir from Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days (2025), in which she reflects on the sudden death of her husband in 2019. Books on loss and love always get me thinking (and feeling) in big ways; for the most part I left just feeling amazed at their marriage. We hear so many stories about marriages that don’t work, it’s a bit jarring to read of one that really seemed to have been a true partnership and meeting of hearts and minds. Then I picked up what I thought was just going to be a cheesy queer romance as an emotional pick-me-up, Tal Bauer’s You & Me (2022). But, while it’s definitely delivering on the romance vibes, this is really a beautiful story about a dad trying to rebuild his relationship with his teenage son. Having had a difficult relationship with my dad for a number of years, this plot really hit me in the feels, and made me think once again about just how we’re all just doing the best we can with the limited tools in our toolbox. (And it also made me grateful again for books like The Discerning Heart, for adding tools to the emotional and spiritual toolbox!)
My music listening this week largely solidified my favourite new albums from January, so there was lots of Max McNown, Victoria Canal, and young friend. So far the early February releases haven’t excited me too much. Speaking of music, I really enjoyed the discourse surrounding last Sunday’s Grammy Awards. I grew up loving awards shows, and it never mattered whether I knew the media being awarded or not. But the discourse surrounding them — and especially the Grammys — over the past decade or so has just gotten really tiring and un-fun. (Case in point, the mud-slinging surrounding this year’s Oscars best picture nominees!) But somehow it seems everyone left this year’s Grammys pretty much happy with the winners, and the consensus was that even big names who didn’t win any awards, like Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift, still left as winners — the former for just being effortlessly cool and for avoiding being caught up in the toxic narrative soup that would have arisen had her album beaten Beyoncé’s for album of the year; the latter for fulfilling her role as hype-woman-in-chief for other artists and for avoiding any cringe, self-imposed over-exposure. Congrats to all the winners (who I’m sure are reading this… ) and especially the one and only Beyoncé, whose album Cowboy Carter was my ‘best’ of 2024, even if it wasn’t my favourite.
So what’s lighting you up this week?
Matthew Root 