Letter - April 26, 2025
It’s been a while since my last letter. I was quite consistent from 2021 to 2023. Their purpose was twofold: to report on my activities and thoughts while hard at work on long essays, and to give impressions as to the state of my mind. I return to them now with a sense of urgency, to address the underlying issues of my critical practice and my engagement with other palpable issues that concern us all. I have renamed the column “A Writer’s Letters” because that’s what they are, the notes and thoughts that occur in-between essays that nonetheless have a relevance to who I am and what I consider to be important.
Like many people today of a certain age, I am grasping for a meaningful life in the midst of what seems to be the dissolution of the liberal age. Things seem very dark right now. So that when I hear even the most minute voice calling out in the wilderness, I’m going to glom on to its meaning. The other night I was scrolling through reels on my phone, and I came upon an interview by an MSNBC host with someone named Ryan Holliday who has written a bunch of best-selling books on the virtues of Stoicism. He and his wife own an independent bookshop called The Painted Porch just outside Austin, Texas. He’s very much a mouthpiece for Stoicism, and he often makes references to figures out of Classical antiquity like Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius. He’s written books like “Discipline Is Destiny” and “The Obstacle Is The Way” and has a YouTube channel called The Daily Stoic.
According to Wikipedia: “Stoicism teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions; the philosophy holds that becoming a clear and unbiased thinker allows one to understand the universal reason. Stoicism's primary aspect involves improving the individual's ethical and moral well-being.” Now certainly, logic can’t be everything to us. It’s important to feel strongly about what we believe, but logic (or logic-sense as a Stoic might call it), can guide us. This kind of thinking pulls me back to my youthful interest in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Pragmatism and the range of romantic to logical thinking in the novels of Hermann Hesse. One of the main Stoic beliefs is to live in accordance with Nature. Whether this means outside nature or inner nature is of little relevance. To pursue only those sensible and controllable aspects of our own lives is the point. For me, it’s to follow my native inclinations, and lead with my strengths.
As a writer, I want to remain dedicated to my favorite subjects, and the discipline required to continuously push the envelope. But I also want to engage with ideas, with knowledge, and even with culture at a higher level. This represents a real challenge. I will ultimately achieve a small portion of this by tackling tougher subjects, heroes like Joseph Beuys, or larger thematic subjects like the formality of line, or impressions of mortality. Maybe I need to write stories again, not just essays. There are many ways in which truth can be realized. I have been trying to achieve something more than mere criticism in a series of articles on a single artist, the photographer Nolan Preece. I’ve written my way through his life, with three articles so far, and a fourth and final article now in progress. Looking back I can see the process was worthwhile though I also see how it can be improved. I want to bring the same intensity to writing about every aspect of the artistic life, and even the parts of it that are not specifically creative but connect to other dimensions of what it means to be human. I’m reading more mainstream journalism and trying to learn from it.
There will be more posts about books, especially older ones from my collection in a series called “Off The Shelf” and there will be more posts in my New York Diary section, which is a cumulative love letter to my home city and its myriad possible experiences, while also telling the story of my own life. There will be more posts in Retrospection, plumbing my deep memories of the art scene back to the Eighties, and including studio visits as well.
See you on The Other Side of the Desk!
David