A Letter to the Reader

A few months ago, when I first wrote this letter, I described this place as a notebook left open on a desk.

I still like that image.

But I think I understand the notebook differently now.

At the time, I was thinking mostly about retreat: about getting away from the speed of the feed, the endless demand to react, the strange pressure of modern life to immediately have an opinion about everything. I wanted somewhere quieter. Somewhere thought could remain unfinished long enough to become something more honest.

I still want that. But over the last several months, I have also found myself moving more deeply into the world rather than away from it.

I have been writing more, speaking more, making videos, giving lectures, reading closely, arguing with myself, revisiting old ideas, discovering new ones, and becoming increasingly interested in the strange distance between what we experience and what we are capable of articulating about that experience.

More and more, I think that distance is where much of life happens.

The inward life is not an escape from the world. It is the place where the world is interpreted.

Everything passes through it eventually: music, grief, ambition, love, politics, literature, memory, resentment, beauty, failure, faith. The question is whether we allow those things enough time inside of us to become meaning—or whether we simply return them to the world as reaction.

I have become particularly interested in attention. Close reading has become increasingly important to me because I have started to believe that it is not merely something we do to literature. It is a way of moving through the world.

Perhaps that is what much of my work has quietly been circling all along. The books, essays, criticism, lectures, poems, cultural arguments—even the seemingly unrelated subjects I find myself wandering into—are all part of the same attempt to understand what lies beneath the obvious explanation.

I am less interested these days in having a perfectly unified philosophy than I am in developing a way of seeing. There are thinkers I return to constantly. Jung. Plato. Campbell. People who were willing to wander beyond the boundaries of their disciplines because the questions they were asking were larger than any single discipline could contain.

I find myself increasingly sympathetic to that wandering.

There are times when psychology explains something beautifully until literature explains it better. There are places where philosophy takes us until art has to carry us the rest of the way. There are experiences that criticism can describe but only poetry can approach. And so this site has become less of an archive than I originally imagined.

It is becoming a workshop. A place where ideas are allowed to meet one another before I know exactly what they will become. I am becoming more comfortable with that. One of the peculiar demands of public life is the expectation that we present ourselves as completed people: fixed opinions, fixed identities, fixed beliefs, a clean explanation for who we are and why we believe what we believe. But I don't think a serious inner life works that way.

A person should be permitted to encounter something that changes them. So I no longer think of this place simply as somewhere to escape the noise. I think of it as somewhere to bring things after encountering the noise. And perhaps, eventually, to return them to the world in a form that contains more care than when they arrived.

Because the older I get, the less interested I am in appearing certain and the more interested I am in learning how to see. And then, when something finally becomes clear enough, to share it.

So the notebook remains open. There are simply more pages in it now. And if something here causes you to look again at something you thought you already understood, then these pages have done what I hoped they might.