The Comfort Book - Matt Haig Page 0,26

because I watched it on a day I felt terrible and it gave me a better place to exist.

The Great Escape. Because it shows that you can cope with any situation so long as you are building a tunnel out of it.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Because it exudes a golden fireside glow and makes us remember that we can live forever inside a freeze-frame if it is a good enough moment (see also the end of The 400 Blows and The Breakfast Club).

E.T. Because you become a child again when you watch it.

It’s a Wonderful Life. Because it makes you realize your existence has unseen value.

The Peanut Butter Falcon. Because it shows the redemptive power of friendship.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002 version). Because this swashbuckling adventure is the definition of escapism.

Pretty in Pink. Because it has the greatest pop soundtrack in the history of cinema.

Ray . Because well-crafted biopics are always inspiring, especially when the subject is Ray Charles.

My Neighbor Totoro. Because Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece is a film about the power of wonder and magic to comfort us through traumatic times.

Harvey . Because it is James Stewart talking to an invisible rabbit.

Breaking Away . Because it is a highly underrated film about cycling that I watched when I was feeling low and found solace in its gentle comedy and drama.

Any Mission Impossible movie. Because there is something comforting about watching Tom Cruise risk his life to defy the laws of Newtonian physics.

The Sound of Music. Because it shows how love and music and joy can’t be suppressed by the darkest forces in history.

Bringing Up Baby . Because of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and because, despite being released in 1938, it remains one of the funniest films ever made.

Toy Story 2. Because it is the greatest and most emotional and consoling Pixar movie, for Jessie’s story alone.

Stand by Me. Because despite being a film about a search for a dead body, it is a celebration of youth and friendship and life.

Mary Poppins. Because it is Mary Poppins.

Negative capability

The poet John Keats coined the phrase “negative capability”: meaning when someone “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It’s about embracing a kind of vulnerability.

For Keats, Shakespeare was the person who embodied this concept perfectly, as he created work that was full of a beauty that was incomplete and ambiguous and allowed for many possible meanings.

Keats never heard Miles Davis play, but maybe he’d have recognized negative capability in his music. “Don’t play what’s there,” the musician famously said. “Play what’s not there.”

Negative capability is about the space beyond what we know, which we should be prepared to reach if we want to find beauty.

“With a great poet,” wrote Keats, the most Zen of the Romantics, “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

Keats’s use of negative capability was primarily about art, but it was later adopted by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who gave it a more psychological and existential slant. For Bion, negative capability was about being able to think intuitively, outside of memory and desire. “Discard your memory,” he implored. “Discard the future tense of your desire; forget . . . both what you knew and what you want, to leave space for a new idea.”

A new idea.

I love that. It’s like the Zen Buddhist concept of satori, of enlightenment through submission, something reached through a quest into the uncertainties of our own nature. That is where freedom lives. In the possibility of a new way of thinking. And it is easier to get there if we keep open and ambiguous and alert to the fluidity of the moment.

Maybe we only exist because of some cosmic negative capability that conjured the universe into being out of the void.

It is okay not to know everything. It might be better and wiser not to know everything, or at least to avoid thinking we know everything, because then we are freer from habitual thinking. But sure, it takes a vulnerability to enter a place of total openness, and maybe a new and deeper understanding of comfort.

I always remember once, years ago, doing a workout video where the instructor bellowed an order, midway through a static squat, to “get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” Now, it may be a bit of a reach to equate advice offered in a workout to negative capability and Zen Buddhism, but I feel we reach a higher kind of comfort, a closer union with who we