Started and stopped reading: All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld 📚

Doubt I’ll pick it back up. I enjoyed the Commonweal interview with Rothfeld — at least I think I did; I’m only ever half paying attention to podcasts.

I think very often of a quote from one of CS Lewis’s essays, (wonderfully read by Ralph Cosham here):

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority.…The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other, the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow, is a prosaic barbarian.

Add minimalist tendencies to equality I suppose that’s what I expected to find — a praise for excess over minimalism and equality. But if that’s what Rothfeld is doing, it’s absolutely nothing like Lewis. The first essay not only shows no sign of Lewis’s sentiment, but seems to lack any sense of satisfaction or reverence at all.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I found no indication that this would improve through the book. And I’m too slow a reader to find out