My nose opens—ah!
Pollen, amused at my hope,
closes it again.
****
I breathe through both sides—
a sweet vernal luxury
briefly permitted.
****
Nasal liberty—
brief, fragile, and under siege,
falls to the grasses.
****
Benadryl bargain:
air in the nose, sandbags in
the skull and eyelids.
Orwell supposedly said that by fifty every man has the face he deserves. Well, I can only say that my face has often deserved a better lawyer. It has been accused of rudeness, anger, stupidity, muteness, and God knows what else, when mostly it was just idling in neutral while I thought about something unrelated. One friend from high school later told me he had been afraid of me before we knew each other because I looked mean. A woman in the warehouse once said that she initially thought I didn’t like her — “or anybody, really” — before deciding that I was actually really funny. This is the problem with faces. The impressions they give are halfway around the room before our personalities even make an introduction.
Zen asks you to show your “original face,” the one you had before your parents were born. I have never known what to do with that koan, but I thought of it the other day when Melissa came up to me at the gym and said, “I just wanted to tell you, your face looks like my face.” For a moment, this was bewildering, and I had no idea where the conversation was going. A black woman, a white man: in what possible sense? “Is it the beard?” I asked, then immediately wondered whether I had accidentally implied that she looked masculine, or, God forbid, a little hirsute. But she laughed. “No, you look very serious, but I bet you’re lowkey funny.” I agreed that this was so. She said she’s the same way: she also looks very aloof and reserved, and often gets accused of looking stuck-up, though I knew from experience that she’s very friendly, just quiet.
That may be as good as it gets: not seeing my original face before I was born, but having someone else see my face before the assumptions build around it.
This prejudice about the authority of written stories soon extended to cultures that could write them. Humanity’s story of itself was rent in two at the moment of writing’s invention. Time was divided into “history,” after writing, and “prehistory,” before writing. Places were divided into “civilized,” with writing, and “uncivilized,” without writing. The word illiterate became a pejorative, and people who could write wrote to aggrandize the importance of writing. Writing became a form of supremacy. We know a lot about the achievements of written cultures because they were written, and little about the achievements of oral cultures because they were not. History may or may not be written by victors, but it is certainly written by those who can write.
— Kevin Ashton, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art
Much of what we call history is only the well-lit portion of the scene. Documents serve as the streetlight underneath which we search for the keys to the past, even if we dropped them somewhere else. This isn’t foolish; one can only use the sources that exist. But it should make us more modest. The dead did not all have equal access to posterity. Some left inscriptions, contracts, chronicles, and confessions. Others left tools, bones, songs, habits, and descendants. We know real things, but not evenly, not innocently, and not without distortion. Whole lives disappear because nobody wrote them down.
Try to render one ordinary day of your own life into prose while doing justice to it. Not the linear summary version — “I went to work, answered emails, ate lunch, came home” — but the day as it was actually lived: the stale taste in your mouth when you woke, the quality of the light on the kitchen counter, the half-formed worry that dissolved before you could name it, the happiness you felt over a passing memory, the song fragment that repeated itself for no reason, the smell of dust and cardboard, the precise texture of fatigue at 3:40 in the afternoon. Try to preserve not only what happened, but how it happened: the simultaneity, the pre-verbal awareness, the moods that overlapped without resolving into themes. Even Proust would need hundreds of pages and would still be falsifying by arrangement. Language does not record experience; it embalms selected portions of it.
Then consider the cheerful confidence with which we say things like “the Middle Ages believed,” “the Greeks thought,” “Victorian society was,” or “humanity before writing.” We cannot adequately narrate one day in our own life, but we will summarize five centuries over coffee. Of course we must generalize. Thought would be impossible without compression. But every such sentence should carry a small skull-and-crossbones label: contents under extreme pressure. The archive is partial, the witnesses are peculiar, the survivors are self-selecting, and the writers have already arranged the scenery before we entered. It is comic once you see it. We cannot fit one afternoon into language without losing most of it, but we confidently pour millennia through a funnel and call the residue history.
Being a member of the species of stories increases this complication of signaling by several orders of magnitude. There was a time, many tens of thousands of years ago, when every individual discovered a great deal of what they knew, perhaps even most of what they knew, directly, using their own senses. But as we evolved into the species of stories, the proportion of knowledge we gained by being told, that came via the hearsay of the senses and perceptions of others, increased and kept increasing with every new storytelling technology, so that today almost everything we know comes indirectly from other people’s stories, and almost nothing we know comes directly from our senses.
— Kevin Ashton, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art
Most of what we call being informed is only knowing which strangers we currently trust. That isn’t shameful; it’s the condition of living in a complex civilization. But it is a poor foundation for the daily manufacture of righteous fury. If pressed hard enough — “How do you know? Did you see it? Did you measure it? Did you read the primary documents? Do you understand the institutional incentives?” — most certainties quickly reduce themselves to a more modest stance: someone I trust said so, and for now I believe him. Perfectly reasonable as a working rule. Thin gruel, however, for a casus belli.
That’s the absurdity of political news as middle-class recreational combat. The average participant is not a statesman, intelligence analyst, economist, epidemiologist, military planner, or local official. He is a person on a couch with a glowing rectangle, absorbing accounts of events he did not witness, in places he will not visit, involving institutions he cannot influence, interpreted by people whose incentives he barely understands. Then he turns around and treats this tissue of hearsay as grounds for moral aggression against neighbors, relatives, strangers, and former friends.
This is probably why so many political arguments become so feral so quickly. It is not because the combatants know so much, but because, somewhere below the performance, they suspect how little they know. The dissenter reminds us that our knowledge is secondhand, provisional, tribal, leased rather than owned. So we answer not with proportion but with force. We beat down the external opponent to quiet the internal skeptic.
One reason we never learn from experience is because most of the things we are wrong about do not kill us, bankrupt us, or even greatly inconvenience us. They merely embarrass us. Luckily, we are talented custodians of our own reputation. We forget our pratfalls, sand down their edges, or build them into a new legend of ourselves: yes, I was wrong, but only because I was too trusting, too generous, too open-minded; and in any case, my willingness to admit error now proves the very integrity that my error seemed to call into question. As Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil, ““I have done that,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that,” says my pride, and remains implacable. Eventually memory gives in.”
Montaigne has not had another real friend since La Boétie’s death, and in the chapter “Upon Some Verses of Virgil” he laments the decline of his sex drive. These two kinds of contact undoubtedly give rise to more feverish displays of feeling, more intense sensations, because they involve interaction with other people—but they are also more fleeting and unpredictable, and more prone to interruption. Reading, however, offers the twin advantages of patience and permanence.
This parallel between love, friendship, and reading, which compose a sort of gradation, might seem shocking. We might think Montaigne is telling us that reading, which requires solitude, is superior to any relationship involving another person, which are merely diversions that take us away from ourselves. Books, then, would make better friends or lovers than real people. But before we jump to this conclusion, we should remember that Montaigne never sees life as anything but a dialectic between the self and others. Though the rarity of friendship and the fleeting nature of love may drive us to favor the refuge of books, reading will inevitably lead us toward other people.
— Antoine Compagnon, A Summer with Montaigne: On the Art of Living Well
One of the minor twists of the bookish life is discovering how much of one’s sociability has been outsourced to the dead. Books are, in some ways, surrogate friendships. They allow us to extract the interesting thought, the beautiful image, the memorable turn of phrase, without having to submit to the inconveniences of the human source: moods, obligations, misunderstandings, demands upon time. The author never calls at the wrong hour. The essayist never sulks because you have neglected him. Montaigne, unlike most friends, is always exactly where I left him.
And yet reading does not leave us sealed inside ourselves. The private pleasure almost immediately becomes a social impulse. A line wants to be quoted. A thought wants to be voiced. A discovery wants to be proselytized. The book gives us something friendship once gave more freely: matter for conversation, the feeling of another mind moving in sync with our own. Reading is solitude that keeps trying to become company.
My personal Platonic ideal of friendship probably existed for only a few months, from April to July of 1991. My friend Erin and I had been classmates since 1989; by then I had graduated, while she was still a sophomore. She could not drive yet. The internet, for us, did not exist. So we talked on the phone every two or three days, often for hours. There were no awkward attempts at romance. We were simply content to talk about everything under the sun, in the way that only kids can do. That was the whole arrangement, and its perfection lay partly in its innocence.
Adulthood rarely grants friendship such open pasture. Spouses, children, and work take the lion’s share of our time, and multiple friends are forced to divvy up whatever crumbs of attention remain. So books become faithful companions not because they are better than people, but because they are more available than people. They wait without grievance. They resume without complaint. They give us, in a diminished but reliable form, the old pleasure of a voice on the line and nowhere else to be.
Why didn’t the liberals and businessmen see it coming?
That question has bothered many students of revolutionary movements. Revolutions never succeed without the support of wealthy, liberal, educated society. Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies.
…Though some liberals recognized their differences from the radicals, most acted like intelligentsia wannabes who were unwilling to acknowledge, even to themselves, that their values were essentially different. Socialized to regard anything conservative as reprehensible—and still worse, as a social faux pas—they contrived ways to justify radical intolerance and violence as forced, understandable, and noble. They had to, since the fundamental emotional premise of liberalism—hostility to those ignorant, bigoted, morally depraved people on the right—almost always proved more compelling than professed intellectual commitments.
Casting “unworthy, furtive glances at who liked what,” Berdyaev observed, these liberals illustrated how “moral cowardice develops, while love of truth and intellectual daring are extinguished.” Captivated by public opinion, they signed petitions they did not agree with and excused heinous acts, always observing the rule: Better to side with people a mile to one’s left than be associated with anyone an inch to one’s right.
I thought of this nearly-six-year-old article after seeing this contemptible display from the New York Times in defense of “microlooting,” or “petty theft,” as most of us know it. Piker, as we’ve noted before, is a typical millionaire Marxist who wants to, like, burn down the system, maaan, the same system that lucratively rewarded his uselessness, and Tolentino, a New Yorker writer, is sitting pretty herself. This is the essence of the luxury belief: danger outsourced downward, righteousness retained upward. One suspects that if the dialectic ever wandered onto their own property — if someone decided to “microloot” the mansion, the brownstone, or the NYT building — the revolutionary mist would clear instantly and the old bourgeois nouns would come marching back in full uniform: trespass, theft, violation, police.
And then there is the Times, kneeling obligingly beside all this like a butler holding the tray. Disaffected radicals will always exist. Every society produces its crop of nihilists and vigilantes looking for a theory to excuse their impulses. The truly pathetic part is the abasement of a prestige institution that once at least pretended to maintain a distinction between public seriousness and fashionable degeneracy. Here the paper of record goes slumming, treating antisocial behavior as a kind of righteous Les Misérables cosplay for people with real estate portfolios. Theft becomes “microlooting.” Assassination becomes “understandable anger.” A lawyerly joke is offered at the end to imply that the speaker’s official disavowal of violence should not be mistaken for his actual sympathies.
This is how exhausted liberalism advertises its decay, by aestheticizing it, joking about it, flirting with it, and assuring itself that all this blood talk is only a game played among civilized people. But the history Morson described is precisely the history of people who assumed the same thing. Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess now seems almost endearingly innocent by comparison. She was at least pretending at rustic simplicity. These people are pretending at revolutionary virtue. Piker, with all the intellectual depth of the retarded stoner he is at heart, pronounces UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson guilty of “social murder,” which makes his actual murder, like, just a difference of degree when you think about it, maaan.
Apocryphal Mark Twain cautioned against arguing with idiots, who will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. The danger of equating every distant harm, every bureaucratic cruelty, every structural injustice to the moral equivalent of murder is that literal murder gains camouflage, prestige, and finally primacy; the real thing drags its metaphoric rivals down and beats them through sheer experience. An imbecile like Piker isn’t going to kill anyone, of course. He’s too comfortable and lazy. But he and his idiot enablers will do all they can to clear the way for people who aren’t playing games. The conceit of parlor radicals is that they can abolish moral distinctions in language without abolishing them in life. They think “murder” can remain a clever metaphor in their hands. But once everything oppressive is promoted to murder, real murder enters the room with a terrible advantage: it is the only participant not speaking figuratively. The word-game ends where the firing squad begins.
Substack can no longer lay claim to being “New Media” when they have turned their platform over to the most prominent partisan voices of old media personalities from the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC. If Substack wants to become the platform of the media it helped destroy in the first place, that’s certainly their choice.
However, what made Substack special in the beginning, and what made it thrive, was that it was a model that stood up to those very same institutions, which have largely been discredited by dwindling audiences and a lack of credibility. It didn’t cave to pressure and accusations of being a transphobic platform that also gladly hosted Neo Nazis. Now, Substack is throwing lavish invite-only parties for those very same people.
The frontier is attractive precisely because it is rough, disreputable, under-monetized, and therefore not yet swarmed by credentialed strivers. Once it becomes viable as a career ladder, the ladder-climbers arrive. They bring their audiences, their habits, their jargon, their little status games, and soon enough the “independent” space starts looking suspiciously like the thing people fled. Put enough institutional people in a room, and before long they will rebuild the institution they just left.
If you want to write like a blogger and be paid like a professional writer, you have created a honeypot for professional writers, many of whom spent years inside the very prestige system that made blogging feel necessary in the first place. Success invites imitation; monetization invites management; management invites hierarchy; hierarchy invites the old court culture back in through a side door. The more a platform wants legitimacy, the less it can preserve the amateur freedom that made it lively.
You wish to be paid. You wish to be read by thousands. Then you are already lost. For the man who writes with one eye on his income and the other on his audience will soon have no eye left for the truth. Again, I say unto thee: if any aspiring writer hate not his paymaster, and editor, and audience, and reputation, yea, and his very hope of influence also, he cannot be a worthy blogger.
Of course, it is not quite fair to use Ms. Oates as the representative figure of the novelist, despite the high regard in which she is held by eminent book-bloggers. Still, I have to admit that novels and I have never been especially intimate. I’ve made a good-faith effort, but I just find most fiction boring. I understand the case for it in theory: life, with all its muddle, can be clarified and heightened through imagined scenes, characters, and dilemmas. Some people are reached most deeply by dramatization. They need to see a conflict embodied in characters, stretched across time. But in practice, others get more out of Montaigne, Hazlitt, Lamb, Epstein, journals, letters, and conversation than they ever will from a shelf of novels. They may even get more from paying close attention to actual people over the years than from reading three hundred pages about an invented family in decline.
I guess my mind is drawn less to simulated lives than to clarified perception. I’m not especially interested in the machinery of plot, scene, and character; I want the point, the insight itself. Not abstraction, exactly — I’m not trying to come off as an autistic logical positivist — but thought compressed into memorable form. A good aphorism, fragment, or familiar essay does not ask you to submit to a whole invented apparatus. It says: here, look at this. Have you noticed it too? Give me a mind in direct contact with life, observing and reflecting, over an invented world any day.
The fact that a quite considerable number of people do seem to find “social problems” their recreation and their hobby as well as their exacting responsibility is cited by some as the one sign of health in our sick world, but why on earth this should be so I cannot see. A healthy individual does not spend most of his life examining treatments and regimens. When a man does do that we say that he is either a hypochondriac or an invalid—not that he is leading the good life for which man was obviously intended. In fact we usually wonder why he finds it worthwhile to keep alive and, for that matter, so, often, does he. Why should the case of the body politic be so different? Wouldn’t a really healthy citizen in a really healthy country be as unaware of the government as a healthy man is unaware of his physiology? The healthy citizen might get an annual check-up, but he would not consider comparative blood pressures and the latest remedies for constipation the only subjects which a serious man considered worth talking about. And however sick society may be it seems to me that we ought at least not lose sight of what health would be like. We ought not have as our ideal the state of universal hypochondria.
— Joseph Wood Krutch, If You Don’t Mind My Saying So: Essays on Man and Nature
****
Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the terms ‘civic duty,’ ‘solidarity,’ ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me. I’m offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to me, that I should find them worthwhile and even meaningful.
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a reformer. A reformer is a man who sees the world’s superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills. A doctor tries to bring a sick body into conformity with a normal, healthy body, but we don’t know what’s healthy or sick in the social sphere.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
****
Not a ‘malicious’ person — i.e. suffering from seeing suffering, — yet my heart immediately hardens towards anyone who speculates about my compassion — or who wants to achieve his ends by invoking Justice, Humanity, etc. So much so that, even when his entreaties to the Idols are well-founded, — I take up position on the side of Injustice and entrench myself in my dislike for this playacting, of which I’ve seen many an example. This explains my attitude over the ’cause célèbre.’
For invoking Humanity doesn’t make you a man. — — I knew these men as free from any human or writers’ weaknesses — and in this particular case I saw them inflamed or inflaming others for a cause.
— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1
Perhaps what disappeared with the familiar essay was not merely a form, not merely even an attitude, but a whole subject matter. For the familiar essay affords what is probably the bets method of discussing those subjects which are neither obviously momentous nor merely silly. And, since no really good life is composed exclusively of problems and farce, either the reading of most people today does not actually concern itself with some of the most important aspects of their lives or those lives are impoverished to a degree which the members of any really civilized society would find it difficult to understand. Just as genuine conversation—by which I mean something distinguishable from disputation, lamentation, and joke-telling—has tended to disappear from social gatherings, so anything comparable to it has tended to disappear from the printed page.
— Joseph Wood Krutch, If You Don’t Mind My Saying So: Essays on Man and Nature
In a postcard to his friend Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche excitedly told him of his discovery of Spinoza: “I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor!” I feel similarly upon reading the essays of Krutch. It’s as if I took a literary 23andMe test and discovered a surprising ancestor up the family tree: “Ah! So this is where I got the compact-reflective gene, the mild irony, the distrust of windy prose, the urge to extract a general truth from some small domestic scene.”
I already knew the appeal of the familiar essay, but if I ever encountered Krutch’s name in connection with it, I don’t remember it. This excerpt is from “No Essays, Please!” from 1951, decades before my parents had ever contrived to publish the first edition of me. Even then, he saw the form being displaced by prose that wanted to look objective, topical, expert, and journalistically “real,” rather than reflective, personal, and literary — the exact complaint I’ve recently made myself about nonfiction. Robert Atwan, in the introduction to The Best American Essays 2012, levels the same charge, saying that the “memoir, autobiographical essay, and confessional narrative” had become the major compositional models. “The nineteenth-century essayist could ruminate on jealousy by citing Othello and other relevant literary or historical works and sprinkling personal observations on human behavior into the mix. The modern essayist covering the same topic would be obligated to include findings and research from the latest journals of psychology and psychoanalysis, along with interview quotations from mental health professionals.” It’s no different in 2026. That’s why the form is left to lowly bloggers; there’s no money or prestige in it.
It’s rather reassuring to be reminded that the things we love have been “dying” for decades, if not longer. If near-death is itself a kind of stasis, we can just go on doing what we do. Of course, “dying” is often just the ceremonial status announcement made by people who have stopped paying attention. A form can be socially marginal, commercially unfashionable, institutionally unsupported, and still very much alive in the only sense that matters: people still doing it well, other people still recognizing the spark when they see it. Some poor devil in 2074 will probably be sighing over the lost age when people still wrote real posts on strange little personal websites, with blogrolls and comment sections inhabited by twelve faithful eccentrics. He will lament the disappearance of authentic longform in an age of neural mood-casts or whatever hellish nonsense they have by then. Meanwhile, the thing itself will still be going on somewhere, half-buried, as usual.
I set it down as a fact that if all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.
— Pascal, Pensées
Holmes is referring to the recent reporting on Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, an AI model it says is unusually strong at cybersecurity tasks — i.e. it can hack into almost anything. Anthropic says it is limiting access for now rather than releasing it broadly, though I think we’ve all seen enough movies to guess how that’s gonna go. Anyway, her tweet is melodramatic, but everyone instantly understands the horror it suggests: search history, cloud photos, private messages, old usernames, medical records, bookmarks, drafts, forgotten accounts — all the digital sediment of a life suddenly dredged up and dragged into public view. We have already seen lesser versions of this often enough. A stray remark from years ago is dug up and treated as a character indictment. One offensive post becomes the loose thread that unravels a person’s name, job, location, hobbies, and history before a jeering crowd. Real life used to let most foolishness die where it was spoken. The internet stores it, indexes it, and waits.
A recent Substack post about a woman reading her boyfriend’s ChatGPT logs shows the same problem from the other side. There the threat was not some AI super-sleuth prying open the vault. It was plain old human suspicion. She went looking and found what she was never meant to read: not a record of prostitutes buried in the backyard, but his private ambivalence toward her. Many people in relationships have silently pondered the Kinks’ eternal question of whether to stay or to go. In this instance, his fatal mistake was to commit these doubts to digital text, rather than let them remain inchoate thoughts in the privacy of his own skull. Naturally, the relationship was ruined. This is what snooping does. It takes passing thoughts, bad moods, ugly drafts, and momentary resentments and preserves them like fossils. We talk as though the great danger is that machines may someday expose all our secrets against our will. But there is a demand side to this too. More and more, people want that power over others. They want to inspect first and trust later. They want reassurance by surveillance. And once you start down that road, nothing will ever be enough.
The old dystopias understood the point without any help from Silicon Valley. Bentham’s Panopticon and Orwell’s 1984 both take for granted that a world without privacy would be hellish. Human beings need locked doors, unsent letters, private notebooks, tact, silence, and the mercy of forgetting. They need room for thoughts that are not yet judgments, moods that pass, stupidity that can be outgrown. So yes, let’s be wary of building tools that can hang all of our dirty laundry in the public square. But let’s also be wary of the part of ourselves that longs to peek through the keyhole. Not everything that can be known should be known.
“Sam Altman is, like, evil as shit.”
“This should be a nightly occurrence.”
“All I can say is I’m disappointed that they didn’t train their aim.”
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
These were just some of the messages on Reddit and social media in the hours after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was attacked. The point, in all of them, was the same: Altman had it coming.
On Friday, April 10, at 3:45 a.m., Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco home while Altman, his husband, and his baby were asleep. It set the exterior gate on fire.
Moreno-Gama, 20, then allegedly drove to OpenAI’s headquarters and struck the glass doors of OpenAI’s offices, threatening to “to burn it down and kill anyone inside,” according to a complaint filed in San Francisco. The complaint says he was holding a three-part anti-artificial intelligence manifesto that, according to the federal criminal complaint, “discussed the purported risk AI poses to humanity” and his intention to kill Altman, and listed several other AI executives and their addresses.
****
Occupy set the sage for Bernie and Luigi. Bernie set the stage for Mamdani, who set the stage for waves of DSA candidates hopefully sweeping future politics. Luigi set the stage for warehouse fires plus the Molotov aimed at Altman’s house. Actions lead to further actions down the line. (I’m thinking about to what degree it’s possible to push simultaneously from within and from outside the system.)
****
The entire day, in all the desolation of its scattered and dull clouds, was filled with the news of revolution. Such reports, true or false, always fill me with a peculiar discomfort, a mixture of disdain and physical nausea. It galls my intelligence when someone imagines that things will change by shaking them up. Violence of whatever sort has always been, for me, a flagrant form of human stupidity. All revolutionaries, for that matter, are stupid, as are all reformers to a lesser extent — lesser because they’re less troublesome.
Revolutionary or reformer — the error is the same. Unable to dominate and reform his own attitude towards life, which is everything, or his own being, which is almost everything, he flees, devoting himself to modifying others and the outside world. Every revolutionary and reformer is a fugitive. To fight for change is to be incapable of changing oneself. To reform is to be beyond repair.
A sensitive and honest-minded man, if he’s concerned about evil and justice in the world, will naturally begin his campaign against them by eliminating them at their nearest source: his own person. This task will take his entire life.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
For some reason or other, I’m alone in the office. Although this dawns on me suddenly, I had already vaguely sensed it. In some corner of my consciousness I’d felt a great sigh of relief, a deeper breathing with different lungs.
This is one of the strangest sensations that the fortuity of encounters and absences can bring: that of finding ourselves alone in a place that is normally full of people and noise, or that belongs to someone else. We suddenly have a feeling of absolute ownership, of vast and effortless dominion, and – as I said – of relief and serenity.
How good it feels to be completely alone! To be able to talk to ourselves out loud, to walk around without being looked at, to lean back in an undisturbed reverie! Every house becomes an open field, every room has the breadth of a farm.
The usual sounds are all strange, as if they belonged to a nearby but independent universe. We are kings at last. This is what we all truly long to be, and the most plebeian among us perhaps more ardently than those full of false gold. For a moment we are the universe’s pensioners, recipients of a steady income, with no needs and no worries.
Ah, but in those footsteps climbing the stairs I recognize someone who’s coming here, someone who will interrupt my amused solitude. My implicit empire is about to be invaded by barbarians.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
One of the minor pleasures in my life is to be alone in a building before or after hours. It’s not quite what John Koenig named kenopsia, though. That word gets at the eerie afterimage of human activity, the sadness or uncanniness of a place gone empty. What Pessoa describes is something better: the relief of finding oneself alone in a place normally full of other people, noise, and demands. Not abandonment, then, but reprieve.
I know this feeling best in the warehouse before the day begins. I love to get there before the rest of my crew. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to be the first one in the entire building. No forklifts zooming past, no trailers beeping their way back to the dock, no deliveries needing signatures, no questions. The whole apparatus of work is present, but dormant. It’s like a Twilight Zone episode where someone has pressed pause on reality, only the pause has not affected me. I alone am left moving through the stillness, thinking my thoughts, enjoying a freedom so slight that it almost sounds silly. Other people complain that the empty building is spooky, or even haunted, but I’ve never felt it. I feel like I’m hovering above the day, just observing.
And then, inevitably, the spell is broken by some expected sound: the metal door rolling up, an engine coughing to life, footsteps, a voice. The republic resumes. My brief monarchy is over. But this, too, is part of the pleasure. If it lasted, it would become just another condition of life. What makes it sweet is that it is only an intermission, a little pocket of unclaimed time and space, gone too soon, but soon to return.
The conquerors enslave the conquered, who in turn begin to shape and color the secret dreams and the culture of their masters. The diabolical prisoners’ cage is occupied first by the sadist who designed it. The Duke of Alva ends a career of legendary terror by being breast-fed. English colonels would stamp round India for years, snorting with contempt, and return home to join the Theosophical Society. In large American cities so many people are in a hurry and drive automobiles that traffic in the congested streets goes into slow motion. In England so many people want to live on the edge of the countryside that miles and miles of it disappear into the city. Both whole communities and individuals turn their back on some pitfall and hurry off to land in another, rather deeper. Just when Man thinks he can do everything, he finds himself helpless in the clutch of some unknown force. And in this ironic principle, which appears to govern so much of our lives, I find delight. Even when it comes close and hurts, the delight is still there. “The Old So-and-So!” I mutter admiringly, from that part of me which must be immortal and invulnerable.
— J.B. Priestley, Delight: Taking Pleasure in the Small Things in Life
Priestley calls it the ironic principle, but I prefer to think of it as the trickster god who loves us and wants us to be amused. Just when man is most convinced he has mastered events, secured his dignity, and arranged the world to his liking, he sits on a whoopee cushion or slips on a patch of black ice. One trap escaped, another entered; one boast uttered, one humiliation prepared. Reality will not let us remain pompous for long. Priestley’s genius is to greet this with delight instead of resentment. That may be as good a definition of wisdom as any: to feel the pain, but also to get the joke.
I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.
— Lichtenberg, The Waste Books
There is something reassuring about this comparison. No one keeps a journal of every sandwich he has ever eaten, nor feels like a fraud because he cannot produce, on demand, a vivid summary of his lunch from seventeen Tuesdays ago. The proof of those meals is not in recollection but in result: in one’s frame, one’s energy, one’s general ability to keep moving through the world without keeling over. Books, however, flatter our vanity in a different way. Since they are made of words, and words seem as though they ought to remain neatly available for quotation, we feel a vague shame when they sink below the level of conscious recall. We imagine that a properly educated man should carry thousands of volumes around in his head like a sort of ambulatory Library of Congress.
But that would be less a cultivated mind than a case of intellectual constipation. One does not want one’s books sitting there undigested, bloating the system. Better that they be broken down and metabolized into taste, judgment, instinct, a sharpened nose for the profound and the fraudulent. And for the minority of books whose exact contents one really does want at hand, there are always sticky tabs and the useful dim memory that “Lichtenberg had something good on this; I should go pull that down again.” Alfred North Whitehead said that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” The protein you consume doesn’t need to be monitored; its effects appear once you’re under a heavy squat bar. I have around 2,000 books on my shelves, and for at least 1,950 of them, I probably couldn’t tell you anything more informative than what you could read on the back cover. But I’ve metabolized them in some form or another; their effects appear once I sit down to write on a particular topic. Suddenly, it turns out that I remember more than I knew.
Discovering once again how small the world is. Clever young monkeys can jeer their heads off, but the rest of us, who know that the world is full of howling dark wildernesses and so want to feel cozy for a while, rightly persist in being delighted by this discovery. The man in the smoke room visited the same specialist that we did. The widow we met in Egypt is the cousin of the woman at the next table. Our boys must have gone to the same school. We must have been in San Francisco about the same time. What—do you know him? Why, of course, they used to live next door to us. Not old Billy Smith? How disgusted the young are at this kind of talk, and how delighted we old codgers are! And quite right too. For we know that just beyond the curtains, shaking a little no doubt with all our triumphant cries, are night, black as the grave, and the east wind and Siberia and the Okhotsk Sea and the endless wastes of the North Pacific; that in East Asia alone are a thousand million strangers and idols with three eyes and eight arms; that half a mile from the banks of the Amazon is the jungle nobody knows, probably with spiders the size of kittens; that any small lighted space, loud with friendly talk, is almost a miracle; and that we grow old and our wounds ache and too often when we cannot sleep we remember the dead… Why then, your brother must have been there when my uncle was there. How extraordinary! It just shows one, doesn’t it, what a small place….
— J.B. Priestley, Delight: Taking Pleasure in the Small Things in Life
This book was, well, a delight. It is personal without being confessional, thoughtful without being academic, and elevated without becoming windy. This essay, one of my favorites, has a complete internal architecture. Here, he starts with something utterly ordinary — small talk about what a small world it is. Then, without strain, we drift into the grand and faintly ominous: night, distance, wilderness, the dead, the unknowable vastness outside the lamplit room. Just as quickly, we’re back again: friendly talk in a small lit space becomes a fragile human achievement against forbidding immensity.
It is compressed without feeling compressed. A lot of short prose feels pinched, as if the writer has been aggressively pruning. This does not. It feels like something that grew to exactly the right size. He gives you social observation, generational comedy, metaphysical backdrop, and a humane conclusion in barely more space than many people now waste clearing their throats. Nothing is labored. Nothing is announced. The thought unfolds as though it were simply the most natural thing in the world, and still includes some poetic flourishes.
I often wonder why such a seemingly-perfect genre ever fell out of fashion, leaving aside the nature of fashion itself being the pursuit of novelty for its own sake. My guess is that a few things worked against it. First, the professionalization of nonfiction. More and more prose came to justify itself either as scholarship, journalism, or expertise. That pushes writing toward citations, studies, frameworks, credentials, methodology, documented exhaustiveness. That’s hostile to the familiar essay, which depends on a cultivated person being allowed to say, in effect, “Here is a human observation; see whether it rings true.” Second, the collapse of the old generalist middlebrow audience. A writer like Priestley could assume a fairly broad common world: educated but non-specialist readers, patient enough for reflection, not yet broken into a thousand subcultures and algorithmic niches. Once that world fades, the prose either migrates upward into academia or downward into more marketable forms.
The modern cult of identity has also hurt it. The older familiar essay often says, “Here is something one notices about life”; the newer mode often says, “Here is what it is like to be me, specifically, under my conditions.” It is clear, for example, just from context, that Priestley is a white Englishman of a certain generation, but he is not really the star of his own show. If he mentions his own characteristics, it’s often in a self-deprecating manner. His personal details are only like a finger pointing to the moon of his larger theme. The older essayist says, “Come look at this with me.” The newer one too often says, “Come look at me looking at this.”
The older style depends on tact. It leaves things implicit. It trusts the reader to make the second and third inference. Our culture increasingly distrusts implication. Writers are prodded to explain, label, position, caveat, and signal their framework, lest anyone miss the point or misread the moral valence. Of course, I’m sure there was plenty of windy, pompous, dead mid-century prose too. What survives is the good stuff. But the good stuff really does represent a lost norm: the belief that a civilized person, writing clearly out of ordinary experience, could illuminate something general without turning the piece into either a dissertation or a confession.
