John Dickerson's Navel Gazing: The Power of Four Numbers

John Dickerson
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Hello everyone. Welcome to episode four of Naval Casing season one. I'm John Dickerson. The entry that starts today's episode is 1016. It's from notebook 75, page 8, September 2021.

Thats it, 1016. And wed like to thank you for listening on our next episode. Four random letters read aloud I kid this entry is found in the tight terrain of just a few pages of notebook entries that weve been looking at in the first three episodes of this series of navel gazing. I almost called it Nasal Gazing, which is an entirely different podcast. Its more proboscis forward.

Though the collection of notebooks fills, boxes were sticking to this narrow territory. This entry is the one after those about our dog George that oriented our last episode. We wont always go in order. Well zoom from entry to entry soon enough, pinballing through time, but im sticking to the chronology for now. There is a benefit in being forced to make meaning out of chronological order, forcing yourself to look longer than you might otherwise have.

That is the topic for this finding. Wonder through noticing longer.

So far, the notebook entries from this period in the fall of 2021 have given us only things that are not there. Our sun's interruptions, ears of corn, the early morning rattle of dog's leash. 1016, a single four digit number embedded in no surrounding context in the notebook, signifies the opposite, a new arrival in our life. You see, during this period, we were moving apartments. The living room in which this story started was not going to be our living room for much longer.

The sideboard, known for its ability to withstand a late afternoon arrow on a Sunday would be hauled a dozen blocks north and a few avenues east across the west side of New York to catch whatever it was that might come through the window on Columbus Avenue. So this period of transition in our life was not just theoretical or psychological. Our collection of carbon and atoms would be transitioning to a new physical space, the small ballet we all learned to get in and out of, the spaces where we nest would disappear and be replaced by a new set of practiced movements that structure our days. You might think a few blocks was no big change. But as EB White pointed out in his famous essay about New York City, in New York, every few blocks is a whole new neighborhood.

1016 was not our new apartment number. It was the combination for the four dials on the temporary lockbox that held the key to our new apartment. Fixed on the bars of our brownstone, gray, black, the size of a paperback. This was a vital number. Without 1016 and would not have been able to let the movers in.

I might have missed a deadline, locked out from my computer I'd left inside. That was then, the fall of 2021. We've lived in the apartment now for almost three years now. The lockbox is just for emergency. When I go running without my keys, or if were out of town and the guy replacing the drywall from the leak needs to get in, maybe one day a dog walker will use it.

Weve changed the four dial combination many times from 1016 to the numbers that we already know. Weve used the familiar numbers in our family kit, the address of our first house in Washington, the address of our second house in Washington, the last four numbers of a credit card we had for a long time. The pin number on all the family devices, which is the first pin number I was ever assigned by a bank, the first American bank in Washington, DC, a bank with the first ATM I ever saw, a bank that doesn't exist anymore. The lockbox, gray, bulbous, like a thousand others imprisoned on bars in New York, has taken on our flavor by being cycled through the four digit numbers that we carry along with us in our family. The 1016 written in the notebook had no association with me or my family.

That's why I had to write it down. It might mean something if we showed it to our landlord who came up with the number 1016. Maybe that was the house he grew up in. Or perhaps it has some other pride of place in his cavern of memory. He's Italian.

I wonder if numbers have a different flavor in different languages. Ten is one number that does. In French. Dixette dix huit, dies neuf, ten, 710, 810, nine. In English, we have individual words for those numbers.

In French, the ten is more centered in those other numbers. Day by day, in my memory, the number 1016, and why it's there at all in the notebook, attenuates it is open to the four winds of heaven and is on a journey out of town on that route where we send useless information on the road to total forgetting. 1016 will live with the other numbers I've forgotten. The floor of my office at 60 minutes that I'd press automatically on the elevator panel for the two years I worked there. My SAT scores, the combination to my high school gym locker, the phone number at the house where I lived with my dad during high school.

This despite my fathers best efforts to make phone numbers easy. Dad prided himself on getting the phone company to give him phone numbers that were easy to remember. I dont quite know how he managed this. Who has an in at the phone company? The phone company is impervious to charm and wheedling.

Nevertheless, at one point his phone number was, and this is not the actual number, but very close to it. 222 22 24.

My father used to fall asleep in his chair in the library, mouth open like there was a fishhook in it. Its one of my strongest early memories. And on his lamp was a yellow legal pad full of numbers that he had been totaling up before he dozed off. As a little kid, I assumed that this was what business entailed, a lot of writing down of numbers with a pencil and figuring them out in some way. When I was older and learned about his financial troubles, I realized that this nightly exercise of totaling up numbers was an effort to make his accounts add up.

Often flirting with going broke, he was doing the math again and again, hoping the numbers would work out. Finding out where you stand, seeing what it all adds up to, maybe a little obsessively so. My version of that is this podcast. I suppose tomorrow the 1016 in this entry will mean even less than it did the day before by some small measure of forgetting, some couple of brain cells that will be ordered away by the shop steward to serve some other purpose. If thats how brain cells work, soon seeing 1016 wont prompt any recollection at all.

Was it the building number of some meeting I had? How soon will that level of forgetting take place? If I hadnt looked back at this book for this project, how many days would have had to pass before I would have treated this number as totally meaningless, like the meaningless numbers in earlier notebooks. This entrys final role would have been as head scratching ephemera for my executors to pass over, if they even opened up this notebook in the stack of notebooks at all. But now we have rescued 1016 from obscurity, you and I.

Congratulations team. Now what do we do? Shall we assay forth? I'm assaying that word in that funny way because while this is an essay, we are going to approach the verb form of the word, which comes from the french verb essay, which is to attempt we're channeling Michel de Montaigne to again the 16th century french essayist who is credited with creating the form of the essay and who approached the writing of them with this mindset of attempt. So we will attempt, and as the songwriter Josh Ritter would say, let's see where the night takes us at the moment.

I think the story of 1016 is a story about attention, what we attend to in the moment, what we attend to in the past, the habits of attending, improving attention in the moment, is something were all trying to do. Have you retained your attention so far in the period since I started yammering? Maybe this episode is a self help exercise for both of us. I will try to keep your attention. Dancing bears, a kung fu fight, attractive young people parading past in feats of exertion.

And you will try to keep your focus narrowed and stick with me through what appears at this moment to just be a big graduate seminar on a basic number written in an old book.

If youre paying attention to something, does that mean you have to stay fixed on the thing itself, or can you pay attention to the thoughts? The thing invites are both a form of attention. 1016 makes me think, for example, of math. Mathematics, or math is the study of numbers and how they are related to each other and to the real world. Well, that is what were trying to figure out with this entry, the relation to the real world.

But at the moment, what I mean is math class, 7th grade, I was not a very good student. Parents getting a divorce, attention issues buffeted by the cultural forces of the 1970s, which included the idea that somehow trousers needed more room in the ankles. Disco, too, had its baleful effects. Anyway, in math class one day, I raised my hand and tried to offer an answer to a problem we were discussing in class. I was trying to participate that I thought was the right thing to do in math class, the teacher, a bearded fellow who sang campfire songs, said about my earnest answer, that's like me asking, what color is this blackboard?

And you answering fast. Oh dear. I did not point out that the blackboard to which the teacher with his groovy 1970s beard was referring to in this riposte was not black, but green. It's been 42 years and I've still not forgotten that teacher's name, that's for sure. That's probably not healthy.

It's definitely not healthy. Huh. So now 1016 has invited a review of my ego. Why cant I move on from this story instead of having fresh molar crushing rage at that teacher whose name I am not telling you in some great achievement of restraint. Lets wish that teacher well and move on if we can.

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This episode is brought to you by audible, the destination for thrilling audio entertainment. Entertainment like in the woods by Tana French, which I found a notebook entry about with a line, rabbits flounce on ancient graves. The ancient graves are the archaeological dig that opens up that story. The whole book has a bunch of archaeological digs in different ways. Detective work is an archaeological dig.

I've also been listening to one of the original thrillers, Shakespeare's Richard III. So I have those actors circling in my head as I circle Central park. And I've been checking out also words in music, which is just for audible. It's only available on audible, and it's musical artists like Snoop Dogg, George Clinton, common Jeff Tweedy talking about their work, which is a big favorite topic of mine. Audible members can keep one title a month from the entire catalog.

New members can try audible now for 30 days. Free. Visit audible.com navelgazing or text navelgazing to 500 500. That's audible.com navelgazing or text navelgazing to 500 500 to try audible free for 30 days. Navel gazing is sponsored by field notes.

And of course it is, because field notes have been in my back pocket for years and years, and I'm pulling out the one that's in there right now, which has a cover that is like a spirograph. It's designed by full circle press, but whenever I've pulled it out to write in it, people say, is that a spirograph from our childhood and our designs on a rainy day? But my other favorite thing about field notes is the quote that is at the heart of it, which is I'm not writing it down to remember it later. I'm writing it down to remember it now. This is a phrase from the Field Notes mission statement, and it's always struck me as sort of theologically at the center of this project, which is that this notebook and this process keeps you in the moment.

It's not something for later. It's a way of living your life now. So visit fieldnotesbrand.com and save 10% on your first order by using the coupon code. Gazing this episode is brought to you by FX's the Veil starring Elizabeth Moss, FX's the Veil is an international spy thriller that follows two women as they play a deadly game of truth and lies on the road from Istanbul to Paris and London. One woman has a secret, and the other has a mission to reveal it before thousands of lives are lost.

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John Dickerson
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The lifespan of 1016, which passed from vital information to one more meaningless banana peel, lofted on the heap of dead memories, also reminds me of the story of James Howells.

In 2013, James Howells, a welshman, placed a hard drive containing 8000 bitcoins in a black garbage bag during a fit of tidying. An ex partner, thinking it was trash and trying to be helpful, took the bag to the local dump. The cryptocurrency on the hard drive, valued at around 230 million, was then nestled somewhere in the vast heap between the banana peels, lager cans and empty biscuit tins. As of this recording, James has been in a ten year battle to search through the dump to see if he can find the hard drive and retrieve his fortune off of it. The local town council will not allow him to rummage through the landfill to find the hard drive.

They said it would have negative environmental consequences. If they lift the legal gate, James will employ robot dogs, guided by artificial intelligence to sift the garbage looking for the drive, which, if it's still working, will be a treasure to wrap him in. High thread count sheets, lamborghinis, and piles of ready pate and caviar. A very meaningful set of numbers for James. Encased in garbage, the least meaningful stuff.

Howells hard drive is indistinguishable from the worn out sneakers and cracked flower pot. It doesnt gleam like a diamond in the noonday sun. What gives it value is an agreement with other people about the numbers on that hard drive. Looking through these notebooks wont pave before me a golden road of financial security. It might very well be a landfill of the past, but the contents do gain value by common assent.

In the same way, even a single number like 1016, its up to the writer, the storyteller, to give it that value and for you, the listener, to agree to it. 1016, jewel or Banana peel? Let us essay forth some more. You still with me at the moment? We are engaged in something called slow looking.

Staring at one thing for a long time and letting it give up meanings to see takes time. That's what Georgia O'Keeffe wrote. I came to this quote, or rediscovered it, he adds in haste, suggesting he once had a breadth of knowledge that contained such information. In one of the last rooms at the main exhibit of the O'Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, the room had been separated off from the rest of the exhibit and contained a single painting. It was one of her later ones.

Flat lines, black sea, blue horizon, white and gray clouds, then blue sky again. A plaque on the wall instructed viewers to stay and look slowly, be intentional, cycle through responses to feel the transference between the intention of the artist and what you were feeling, to attend not to just what was before you, but what you carried with you into that room. The beholders share that portion of art which is brought to the work by the audience. I learned about the idea of beholders share from the artist Jeff Koons he was quoting the art historian Ernst Gombrich, who proposed that when individuals encounter art, they bring with them their prior knowledge and experiences, which actively shape their interpretation and response to the artwork. If as a viewer, you are given a share in artwork, you should spend it wisely, slowly.

It pays honorable to the artist, but it also allows you to be your full self in the presence of the art, which is the whole reason we go to museums, after all, to scoot ourselves in front of an act of creativity, to let it draw things from us. I should note that Ernst Gombrich, the art historian that Koons referred to, wrote something called a little history of the world, which we used to listen to on audiobook with the kids again and again. If you have kids or you just want to learn about the history of the world, get yourself a copy. It's wonderful. Jennifer Roberts, who teaches art history at Harvard University, requires her students, as an initial assignment, to go to the museum and look at a single piece of art for 3 hours.

The exercise encourages students to slow down in order to recognize all of the different ways we can make meaning if we slow down. As DH Lawrence wrote, an act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer. The novelist Christine Colson worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 25 years. One of her novels, it's called one woman show, is written entirely in museum wall labels. She wrote many such labels for the Met to presumably guide patrons to information about the work they were looking at.

But in her interviews about the book, she told people when they go to museums, don't read the wall labels. Everything you need to notice, she says, truly, magically notice, you bring with you. Just spend time and it will be revealed, like looking at the number 1016 and somehow having four dumb numbers transport you back to the very first notebook in this collection.

Notebook one, page 54 June 1990 Magna Carta 1215 at Salisbury Girls skipping the haunch of venison Chris I wrote these four entries on a tour through England with the other students in my summer program my junior year in college. They were written at Salisbury Cathedral, which has one of the four surviving original copies of the Magna Carta. The haunch of venison is where we had lunch after the visit. The Chris of that entry is Christine Colson, to whom I just referred. So consideration of 1016 has now led us to an act of time travel as well.

Now lets not go too far. Staring at 1016 is hardly the same as taking in a Georgia Okeeffe painting. The unexamined life may not be worth living, as Aristotle said, but he also said, stop trying to find meaning in the bottom of your soup bowl, Francis. Its one of his lesser known quotes. Obviously theres always the danger of excessive self absorption, but let me make the opposite case, the case for attending to the small a lot more than youd ever think you would want to.

Even if there is no deep intrinsic benefit in slow looking at a specific thing like four numbers, there is a benefit to the attempt to the practice, to moving through the world with something a little more than light. Regard slow looking is a skill, a craft. Like any craft, it must be worked at in small pieces. You don't practice violin by playing a concerto again and again and again. You perform finger exercise, frequent exercise that builds the capacity for the greatness of playing the concerto.

So there is value at aiming your attention at the ephemera of our life. Look at what we've already uncovered, memories an ego as hard as an acorn shell, a brain that offered an acorn shell as a metaphor for irrepressible ego. Weve also, just moments ago, engaged in an examination of practice and a reminder of the benefits of practice. For me, looking at these old writings enlivens the memory. But its not just about the past.

In the present it awakens dormant sensations and enlivens the associative patterns in the brain, which keep firing even when youve stopped long looking at a particular thing. You put down your book and then you're a noticer out in the world. You attend, and your imagination has been goosed when you're doing the attending. I can't really show you this with my observations directly, because what I observed after this process and how it affected the movements of my brain are hard to translate. It'll sound like I just took a bong hit if I describe how thinking of numbers affected my thinking about the take a number machine built into the wall at Murrays Sturgeon shop, like 1016.

Whatever number that machine stamped out when you pulled the red lever meant a great deal for a short, sharp period of time. It meant you had a right to your package of Nova before the pushy guy leaning on the glass who smelled of garlic and onions. They dont use the box anymore, and probably havent since the days of the New York magazine covers about the wonders of bagels and lox. Like the faded cover above the door at Murrays, the take a number box is of such sturdy construction, far more robust than what youd expect would be needed to slip out a little piece of paper. Its all rivets and heavy steel.

It must have been forged at some factory full of banging where you had to wear hard toed boots. Sometimes ill say im not going to do something and then ill do it anyway. Like describe the dull grey take a number box at Murrays anyway. Try it out. Look at something for 15 minutes, let your brain associate, create, jump and jolly, and then roll that noggin out into the world and see what you notice.

This practice sharpens the attention. Skill tunes it. Practice is a tricky thing. We dont do it enough on the skills we want to improve, like playing the guitar or tennis. But also we don't think broadly enough about the things we do in our lives that would benefit from practicing critical thinking.

For example, that skill requires constant attention to weed out our biases, to keep us on guard, to seek out diverse sources and not fool ourselves. That we know something when we don't really have it all figured out. You don't just have critical thinking skills and then stop or tune them as the byproduct of other work. You have to build critical thinking as a practice. And Aristotle did have something to say about we are what we repeatedly do.

Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Another case id like to make. Becoming a better noticer or a long looker is also its own reward, because it makes you grateful. I learned this from Jason Isbel, the singer songwriter who I interviewed in the fall of 2023. I got to make another record at some point.

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I need. So you start looking, you know, and then after a while, you figure out, oh, this is serving more than just work. You know, this is. This is making me a happier person, because there is no end to the things you can be grateful for. Now, for a lot of people, there's no end to suffering, but there's, all the beautiful things are still there, you know, you might not have access to them, but if you do, you should itemize them and make sure you notice as much as humanly possible.

John Dickerson
So is songwriting an act of gratitude for you? Yeah. Yeah. 100%. 100%, yeah.

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Because it's about being aware, noticing things that other people don't notice. That's the real trick. And when you do that, you become grateful for those things automatically. A favorite story of mine, of attention, born of constraints, is the story of Xavier de Maistre, a young french officer sentenced to confinement in his room for six weeks in the spring of 1790. As punishment for dueling, he whittled away the time writing a travelogue of his trip around the room, the couch, the bed, and so on a journey.

John Dickerson
Around my room is the name of the book. Clever title. Alain de Botton wrote the introduction, and he wrote that in the writing, de Maistre discovered, the pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination. Could you handle 42 days confined to your room? The sole cause of mans unhappiness, Pascal wrote, is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

The scientists have had a go at this. In a 2014 study, scientists found that many human volunteers in their study preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Of course, there are those who would like to be left alone to administer shocks to themselves, but that's an entirely other, different kind of podcast altogether. If we're going to practice our noticing and truly notice this entry, this 1016 scrawled hastily on a page, we must integrate all of our senses. Holding it up to my nose, I smell the honey vanilla, the fecund black earth tilled by hand.

No machine here, the metallic wind in my nose from the river, and other assorted bullshit, I might say, if I had completely lost my mind. I did not notice any of those things. Holding a notebook to your nose holds little reward. I made this up to prove a point. If you were only lightly listening and squandering your attention off somewhere else while I was talking and my swearing awakened your sleeping ears, dont attribute the immediately previous piffle to earnest.

A saying I was a saying gibberish. The reason I gibberish, though, is that figuring out what to attend to also means not going too far. Attention is not just indiscriminate frothing when you attend, youre also practicing how not to attend to things, in this case, not spending time imagining sensory impulses that arent there. Because what were regarding is simply ink on a page. Writing about Eb White, his stepson Roger angel, the great writer for the New Yorker who wrote the introduction to White's one man's meat, wrote this about him.

He said, because White is such a prime noticer, it is a while before a reader becomes aware of how much he has chosen to leave out of the book. This is true of life and any good work we're called on to look at what the artist puts in and also what has been left out. The capacity to attend has many different switches and settings. You have to know how to set the dials, which is what that noticing practice is about learning how to set the dials. When I was younger, I remember being tethered to the whipsaw of hyper focused attentiveness that was much more of a hindrance than it was a help.

It was the product of Christmas Eve attention panic. When I was in my teens, I would wait until the day before Christmas to buy presents for my family. My brother, who was five years older than me, would come home from college and the two of us would hit the mall hard to try to buy my three sisters, mom and dad, and a few other people their individual presents. This was a very bad way to buy Christmas presents. The lines were long on Christmas Eve.

The stocks were low. It's also not, strictly speaking, very thoughtful.

Waiting so long created a sense of panic that shrunk the world and caused undifferentiated high attention. The clock was ticking. I had to buy presents in the panic to buy something. The mind sorts everything that comes through your retina as a possible gift you can purchase to settle your obligation. You see a snow shovel, and immediately your mind is halfway down the road to convincing you that mom might really benefit from a quality snow shovel.

Dad has always wanted an orange. Why not guacamole scented candle for the baby? Does anyone give a stop sign for Christmas anymore?

We want to know how to refine that kind of attention, knowing how to apply our attention with discernment as the other boundary to the correction required, to becoming more attentive. And on that note about restraint, I am compelled to exercise a little of it by bringing this episode to a close. But before we do, I want to make a wild claim for this notebook entry, which on its own is among the least significant. I mean, it's just four numbers, wholly context free, and all alone this number, which was teetering on becoming entirely forgotten. But it has led me to this conclusion.

Noticing is the antidote. Well, maybe not the antidote, but at least the cure to shrinking two important goiters, attention attacks and the lack of gratitude. Our lives are thin, like butter scraped over too much bread from constant interruption, which perforates us when we are allowed to pause for a moment. The revelation we have is that all the noise and agitation has put us in a condition where we never feel like we're in one place. We're always vibrating.

We live in the shallows, noticing fights that if we are wired by evolution to seek sensation and novelty, then we should hijack this part of our wiring and think of long looking noticing as novel because it is so different than the constant push that rockets us along the surface of days. Gratitude. I ground in what Jason Isbel said. Noticing, being aware, wakes us up to the beauty, soul wonder that's all around us. That's what I try to carry through the day when I notice to be a noticer of gratitude with the panic that I had on Christmas Eve, searching for presents to be hungry for gratitude, beauty, wonder, and soul.

To be intentional about those things, as if you had it outlined for you in a memo of how to spend your minutes. Could you write such a memo? What would it read like? This is the subject of our next essay. I look forward to spinning through the notebooks with you in future episodes of navel gazing.

And I hope between now and then, you get a chance to do some long looking, some close attending to find a zest for the common objects in life. Let me know how it turns out. Our email is navelgazingpodcastmail.com dot this has been episode four of season one of navel gazing, or as the mimes call it.

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This episode is brought to you by FX is the veil starring Elizabeth Moss, Ethics is the Veil is an international spy thriller that follows two women as they play a deadly game of truth and lies on the road from Istanbul to Paris and London. One woman has a secret, and the other has a mission to reveal it before thousands of lives are lost. FX is the veil premieres April 30 only on Hulu.

John Dickerson
Navel gazing is produced by Shayna Roth. Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio at Slate. Our theme music is by the band Plastic Mary. Remember, send us a note@navelgazingpodcastmail.com. And let us know your thoughts.

If you're a wild noticer out in the world, a mopey parent or a note, or the can of an oat taker, I'd love to hear from you. I'm John Dickerson. Talk to you next week.

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I'm Dalia Lithwick, and I'm host of Amicus, Slate's podcast about the law and the US Supreme Court. We are shifting into high gear, coming at you weekly with the context you need to understand the rapidly changing legal landscape, the many trials of Donald J. Trump, judicial ethics arguments and opinions. At SCOTUS, we are tackling the big legal news with clarity and insight every single week. New amicus episodes every Saturday.

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John Dickerson's Navel Gazing: The Power of Four Numbers

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2: Reflections on Memory

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