Plain Life
On thinking, feeling and deciding
These days, it’s easy to get the impression that people are really very anxious. Who? you ask. Well, people you hear about. People who tell you they are. Friends. Lovers. Acquaintances. Colleagues. The Youth. The term is around and people are applying it to themselves, or having it applied to them, willy-nilly.
What would it mean to be able to live a plain life? Would a plain life just be an unambitious one – a drab or routine life, without colour, variation, unknowing or luck? Or would a plain life be one in which we’d fret slightly less, suspect ourselves less, and thus listen to ourselves and others in new ways? We may not need to do more and be more – in the quiet spaces already within us, lurking in the interstices of our days and conversations, there are ways and choreographies to nurture a plainer, saner, odder, less reactive and therefore less terrifying life.
In Plain Life, Antonia Pont questions our thinking about capacities, virtue, envy, wanting, love and kindness – suggesting that it might be fine, more than enough, indeed so much, to live a plain life.
‘Read this precise, wild and tender offering, and be sure to ask yourself how you feel after ... Plain Life is challenging and generous.’ – Debra Dank
‘Fizzing with energy and ideas, Plain Life is a practical, philosophical heart to heart with your most spirited friend. Alain de Botton for hot anti-capitalists.’ – Briohny Doyle
‘Deeply alert to the challenges of our times, and extraordinarily well read, Antonia Pont delivers us a handbook for life that is politically radical, refreshingly intellectual, and wholly attentive to embodiment and being. Informed and informing, it is a seriously joyful tour de force.’ – Julienne van Loon
Antonia Pont is Associate Professor in Writing, Literature and Culture at Deakin University, Australia. She publishes poetry, fiction and essays as well as theoretical work across writing, literature, philosophy and the creative arts. Her research is concerned with time, habit, ethical capacity, thought, movement and transformation. She is the author of The Memory Library (Spineless Wonders, 2024), A Philosophy of Practising (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and a co-author of Practising with Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Her collection of poetry You Will Not Know in Advance What You’ll Feel was published in 2019. She is the founder of Vijnana Yoga Australia (2009-), where she continues to practise, teach and lead retreats. Her essays have an international following, and have appeared in Lit Hub, The Lifted Brow, Antithesis, Meanjin and Overland.
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