In shared air
A review of On Breathing by Jamieson Webster
I have to say I almost gave up on On Breathing several times. But what I kept noticing, after closing the book, was how the idea of breath worked on me, unaware. It didn’t announce itself; it just kept showing up. My conscious mind wasn’t really absorbing much while I read, but my unconscious clearly resonated. It’s as if the book doesn’t so much argue a point as it quietly rearranges your attention while you’re not looking.
I keep circling back to Webster’s insistence that “freedom is separation as well as connection to others.” It unsettles the way we might normally imagine freedom—as though it were a solitary project. She calls the individual a kind of propaganda, keeping us trapped in the forgetting of our shared air. I try to remember this when the people closest to me annoy me precisely because of their closeness, and frustrate me at the same time because of our distance. There’s no perfect measure of closeness or separation; Eros, Webster reminds us, always causes mischief. But perhaps mischief is the point. Connection is not tidy. I enjoyed the reminder that our freedom and our dependence are not enemies.
Threaded through the book is a quiet feminism: “women are our containers of grief, our silent breathless screamers.” It’s a line that lingers, a reminder that breath is never neutral, that the politics of who gets to breathe freely—literally and metaphorically—are gendered as well as personal.
Then there are the moments that veer towards the mystical: the baby Anna whose mother speaks her into breathing, the woman who softens her scoliosis through careful breathing exercises. Yet I was a bit disappointed in how surface-level these case studies felt; for instance Katharina Schoh’s “cure” is well known to have involved more than breath alone,1 and it verged on irresponsible to suggest otherwise. Still, these stories point to something real: the quietly transformative power of intentional breath.
Jamieson Webster never lets the magic eclipse the plain mechanics. The way our developing speech as a species put us at a unique risk of constantly choking to death, the unrelenting rate at which we must breathe, and the hiccup as the vestige of amphibians crossing from water to air. However magical the effects of good breath, it is still a physical process, one we can imagine being otherwise—and so perhaps we can also imagine it being better: less frequent, less fraught. I like that the book can hold both views at once, the mystical and the biological, without forcing a conclusion.
Another strand that stayed with me was the link between breath and lack. Webster explores the idea that the feeling of difficulty breathing can become the idea that one is lacking something. I find this compelling: that to lack air is to lack everything, and to lose anything can feel like a small suffocation. It captures the weird experience of knowing you can breathe fine yet feeling out of air, a bodily metaphor for grief and deprivation.
Webster writes that “as a species we really cannot gauge what is too much and not enough.” Everyone now feels they are falling short of the enjoyment they could and should be having. This idea of the “right amount” has been on my mind elsewhere—most recently while reading Butter—and I think it is lost in a culture that wants us to maximise something, usually surface-level enjoyment. Coming back to the breath is a way of coming back to the chaos underneath, to find balance and to live with the ambivalence of the world rather than hiding from it.
I admire is that Webster never tries to be tidy. She doesn’t hand us a manual for better breathing or a single grand thesis. Breath—like intimacy, like freedom—isn’t something you can spreadsheet into submission. If there is such a thing as the “right amount,” it is always shifting, always ambiguous.
This isn’t a book I’d hand to someone looking for a straightforward argument about mindfulness or a how-to on respiratory health. It’s for a reader willing to wander, to sit with half-formed thoughts and let them slowly become something, or be lost to time. If you like a book that lingers long after you’ve stopped reading, one that invites you to notice the air itself and the people sharing it with you, On Breathing rewards the patience.