If you let someone – or a platform of someones – shrink your view of the world and hold you in place, it’s all going to look very sad and flat, and you’ll start going around saying things that make others think the world is very sad and flat, and that the best you can do is withdraw. You can quickly become part of what holds people in place, manipulated into depriving others of their agency.
You are such a very, very good writer: "Resisting this pressure is how style is born." This piece was worth waiting eight months for. THANK YOU as always.
Nathan, First, something trivial: check "the banality their lives" > "the banality of their lives"?
Second: your essays always make me return to writing. Whether it's any good or not is personally unimportant. You give it a dignity that is hard to resist, that regardless of how difficult it is, of how excruciatingly conscious one is of every word, its style, its authenticity, you keep trying.
Third: Your discussion of Heti and your specific comment: "anyone’s time can be shattered into space, that you too can be dispersed and rendered discontinuous with yourself and with others," makes me question the idea of meaning being context-dependent. Loosed from any context, aren't we constructing our own to give her words meaning?
#4: I'd love to read an essay of yours on your comment "it was time to begin drinking coffee." What did you mean by "it was time"? Where did that prompt come from? I have a brother who begins every day with a fully sugared regular Coke. The horrors! My other two brothers and I always start the day with coffee. We learned from our parents. But my brother Dan somehow never felt "it was time" he started drinking coffee.
#5: The "will." You write: "Style is art’s version of agency, or the will – a concept that seems of crucial importance in an increasingly totalitarian society." Agreed, to the extent that passivity results in becoming subject to totalitarianism. But there are many who consciously, willingly, enthusiastically approve of the horrors you list in the "Things are heavier now" paragraph. Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph des Willens," proclaimed that will was a critical element in totalitarianism. To reject this, the slippery concept of morality, ethics must seemingly enter somewhere here to further constrain the will. Will to do good, will to do harm, however one wants to define those things.
#6. Yes. Totally agree that we must not be consumed by the dialog of evil that is click bait on the internet. The world has much good to offer. And we should click on those stories, and not just cat videos, that reinforce this view, without losing perspective on the evil that is indeed part of the human genome.
I remember that January. I was working on what I'd hoped would be one of my best works, a treatise on seven (different) days of heartbreak, whimsically inter-folded with characters like the pirate Barnabus, a talking squirrel, the god Janus, and so on. It never got finished. That beginning was so good and I reread it every few years to confirm that it was good, but there are still three days yet to complete, and I think I'm out of fresh heartbreaks, being a married old crone and all.
But I remember that warm January day, and I remember going for a walk in the sunshine and melt in just a hoodie, down Lyndale from the apartment I then shared with your now husband. Wait, though, wasn't that 2006 or 2007? More than fifteen years ago. Perhaps we are remembering different Januaries.
And I remember your trip out to the desert, because that link of ancient chain you brought me is one of my most treasured possessions. It is often featured in my jewelry photography.
Trying to not let my world become small and flat, out here.
You are such a very, very good writer: "Resisting this pressure is how style is born." This piece was worth waiting eight months for. THANK YOU as always.
Nathan, First, something trivial: check "the banality their lives" > "the banality of their lives"?
Second: your essays always make me return to writing. Whether it's any good or not is personally unimportant. You give it a dignity that is hard to resist, that regardless of how difficult it is, of how excruciatingly conscious one is of every word, its style, its authenticity, you keep trying.
Third: Your discussion of Heti and your specific comment: "anyone’s time can be shattered into space, that you too can be dispersed and rendered discontinuous with yourself and with others," makes me question the idea of meaning being context-dependent. Loosed from any context, aren't we constructing our own to give her words meaning?
#4: I'd love to read an essay of yours on your comment "it was time to begin drinking coffee." What did you mean by "it was time"? Where did that prompt come from? I have a brother who begins every day with a fully sugared regular Coke. The horrors! My other two brothers and I always start the day with coffee. We learned from our parents. But my brother Dan somehow never felt "it was time" he started drinking coffee.
#5: The "will." You write: "Style is art’s version of agency, or the will – a concept that seems of crucial importance in an increasingly totalitarian society." Agreed, to the extent that passivity results in becoming subject to totalitarianism. But there are many who consciously, willingly, enthusiastically approve of the horrors you list in the "Things are heavier now" paragraph. Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph des Willens," proclaimed that will was a critical element in totalitarianism. To reject this, the slippery concept of morality, ethics must seemingly enter somewhere here to further constrain the will. Will to do good, will to do harm, however one wants to define those things.
#6. Yes. Totally agree that we must not be consumed by the dialog of evil that is click bait on the internet. The world has much good to offer. And we should click on those stories, and not just cat videos, that reinforce this view, without losing perspective on the evil that is indeed part of the human genome.
I remember that January. I was working on what I'd hoped would be one of my best works, a treatise on seven (different) days of heartbreak, whimsically inter-folded with characters like the pirate Barnabus, a talking squirrel, the god Janus, and so on. It never got finished. That beginning was so good and I reread it every few years to confirm that it was good, but there are still three days yet to complete, and I think I'm out of fresh heartbreaks, being a married old crone and all.
But I remember that warm January day, and I remember going for a walk in the sunshine and melt in just a hoodie, down Lyndale from the apartment I then shared with your now husband. Wait, though, wasn't that 2006 or 2007? More than fifteen years ago. Perhaps we are remembering different Januaries.
And I remember your trip out to the desert, because that link of ancient chain you brought me is one of my most treasured possessions. It is often featured in my jewelry photography.
Trying to not let my world become small and flat, out here.