#HereBelowBooks champions books for readers whose journeys don’t map neatly onto well-worn paths.
We curate beautiful, ambitious writing and foster good-faith conversations about the subversive work of being human.
Curious. Restless. Paying attention.
—Lisa Ann Cockrel, reader, conversation-starter, gatherer, champion of sentences that sing, and editorial director for #HereBelowBooks
And perhaps good theology doesn’t always look up, but looks around. And maybe humanism — including its most secular forms — can be rightly regarded as a devotional project around which all people of good faith — believers and unbelievers and everyone in between — can gather.
I hear in that a few different ideas. One of them is the reminder that in Robinson’s Christian tradition, God not only created the material world — he decided to take on a body and become human out of love for his creation.
The cover of a book (my book): THE INTERNET WILL DIE, AND SO WILL YOU.
Just one more byte It’s possible that to store is entirely the wrong verb. Maybe it ought to be to attend, to give our digital lives the same attention we are called to give our physical ones. Attention, as a noun, comes to us through Latin and French, and, from those languages, carries the sense of to stretch toward, as though my brain, pinned behind my skull, might reach out, feel the tight restriction of muscle as it grasps at the world. But, by and large, attention words point in- ward, not out. We attract it and call it. We can gather it like wheat in a field or draw it up like water from a well. Always, though, attention moves from the world into us—except when it’s to be minted and spent. “Pay attention,” we say, as though it is a com- modity, bought, sold, and traded by brokers. The digital world both beleaguers and demands our attention. The quality of our focus and the metaphors we surround it with have diminished even as we’re asked to spend more of it. I’ve felt it, lately, in the very medium of the book, which rests ever more uneasily in my hands, though I’ve published two, including this one. I’ve read, I would guess, a couple thousand books in my life. It’s harder now, harder than ever. And as it’s grown harder, it’s grown more meaningful, those acts of attentional resistance, as straightforward as reading a book for pleasure—a refutation of market logic, a proletarian revolution in even the word attention, not something I pay for and sell on an open market but, instead, something I stretch toward.
“Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live, our ability to perceive them is lost,” Garth Greenwell writes in his novel Small Rain, “and maybe that’s the value of poetry, there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequency of certain poems.” Greenwell advances an argument best advanced in literature, in fiction or poetry, buttressed as it is by the logic of allusion. This logic stands in stark contrast to the totalizing, seductive logic of instrumentalism, which would have us see everything, every act and artifact, as for something else. Reading under instrumentalism is pointless at worst and a form of self- betterment at best—merely a way to refill the coffers of attention before spending it again. Greenwell argues for poetry, for reading, for all those many varied noninstrumental activities that demand this “unmixed attention,” to use the philosopher Simone Weil’s language, which are a species of prayer. I mean this in the same way Weil does—in the best and truest sense of the word: prayer not as an attempt to change the world, but as a chance to attune ourselves to a greater will, one that asks of us, Be more human.
The logo of Here Below: Books for the Subversive Work of Being Human
Presenting THE INTERNET WILL DIE, AND SO WILL YOU, out in September from @herebelow.bsky.social, a new imprint doing awesome things.
Here's the cover, a lil' excerpt, and the tagline of the press: "Books for the subversive work of being human."
herebelowbooks.com/978080288542...
Q: What does “Here Below” mean?
A: Our name was inspired by a line from Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam where she writes, “With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.” [Continued in the comments] #HereBelowBooks
We’ve been busy assembling something worth your attention. 👀
First titles coming soon. #HereBelowBooks
Our logo comes from a simple practice: learning how to look.
Artist Corita Kent once sent students into the world with empty slides—small frames meant to help them notice what usually goes unseen.
The lesson: attention makes the ordinary extraordinary.
#HereBelowBooks begins there.
Pay attention. Something beautiful is taking shape. #HereBelowBooks
