Welcome back to Desk Notes. After a relaxing, productive summer, I’m eager to return to a consistent publishing schedule. Desk Notes began in September 2020, this is issue 234, and I have more ideas today than I did before I began four years ago. Right now there’s a backlog of longer essays, some musings, reviews, personal narratives, along with at least a few diatribes that I’m impatient to send.
Longtime readers know that this introduction is already a little unusual. I would much rather send essays without preambles and avoid any throat clearing—either you’re excited to read my essays, and that’s great and revealing of your noble character, or the essays aren’t for you, and that’s theoretically okay too. Today, however, I’d like to highlight two principles that are key to my thinking after the summer break:
First, I prefer to send fewer but more substantial essays. This isn’t the ideal decision for growth, but it is the better decision for quality. Just under three thousand people receive these weekly essays now, and I’d like to believe that readers subscribe because they want writing that is deliberate, thoughtful, and that at least attempts to be literary, rather than simply ephemeral and intended to trigger more views. If the option is between two slapdash, cursory essays and one longer, reflective essay, my preference is for the latter.
So, with Desk Notes, the goal is to sidestep the endless stream, to focus on essays that I consider novel, intriguing, and worth your time. Whether I meet that standard for you is, of course, a completely different subject. But I’d much rather fail while sending original writing then fail at a halfhearted effort to keep up with what’s trendy. Perhaps there’s a bit of hubris in writing with the intention of crafting sentences that can be reread—but I’ve never been accused of humility.
The second principle in this slightly obnoxious preamble involves paying subscribers. I greatly appreciate the support of paying subscribers and I want to ensure that they’re receiving valuable issues. There will still be public issues, but I am going to increase the amount that paid subscribers receive. So if you want to read every issue—and the alternative sounds dreadful—the best way is to upgrade to a paid subscription.
Next week’s issue won’t come with an introduction. We’ll be back to an essay that starts abruptly and assumes that you’re here for the subject, whether that’s a diatribe or narrative or review. I hope that you’ll stick around and that you enjoy my work. Thank you, as always, for reading.
A Morning Walk
On some days I take a walk just after I wake, and now that it is the late summer there’s occasionally a little dew on the ground, a lingering sense of the cooler nighttime air, even when the day already feels hot and intense and oppressive. In these moments I feel a looming sense of change, almost a foreboding, an awareness that the hottest days of the year have come to an end. I don’t need my watch during these times because the morning has its own tint, a golden color that arrives with the sun and that polishes my walk with its glow.
Perhaps I am, in some ways, a crepuscular animal, appreciative of the quiet, meditative sounds that linger in this period of transition from night to day. There’s delight, I find, in witnessing how that golden color ignites the world around me, the trees, the buildings, even my own skin, though this is a liminal space that’s so easy to miss. This isn’t the nighttime city, a city that often feels spooky, perilous, and hushed, full of shadows and distant sounds that I can’t identify; nor is this the midday city, a city that’s often brash, loud, and overwhelming, full of diesel trucks and car horns and passing stereos. It is a middling, transitionary period, when the cool nighttime air enters my lungs while the sharp daytime sun hits my skin, almost as if I’m standing in a doorway, having not quite left the darkened room that’s behind, having not quite entered the bright room that’s ahead.
I see a few cars, some runners, but the city is mid-yawn, mid-stretch, a little groggy, still brewing its coffee. From the street I begin to hear the sounds that houses make when they wake. The running water, the scraping plates, the muffled voices that float from open windows. I hear slammed doors and alarm clocks and dogs barking. At dawn, these are ignition sounds, birthing cries, hints of the incoming crescendo.
Although I often end up walking past remnants from the night. A lost sock. A broken bottle. A spatter of food. In the sunshine, in the crisp, clear air, these artifacts appear out of place, as residue from a different world, now shriveling underneath the early dawn glare, somehow intruding on the peaceful façade of the day. All the leftover items contain, in my mind, a sense of mystery. They’ve crossed a threshold and now deteriorate in the sunshine. Every pack of cigarettes and every ripped but mostly clean tee-shirt possesses some nighttime story, a nighttime story that trespasses onto the morning.
Even though I am walking in a city, I sometimes spot an animal along the sidewalk, a small bird or squirrel, posed in a way that forces me to wonder, first, whether I’m about to startle it awake, whether it will attack, until I realize as I come closer that this animal didn’t survive the long night. This sight usually comes with a slight ache—not exactly sadness, not exactly glumness, as it is after all perfectly natural and the eventual fate that we all share, but the moment still arrives with a sensation that’s akin to pity. That sensation lingers as I walk past the animal, stepping nearer to the creature than it would have ever allowed me to step while it lived, although, soon enough, the morning bright and open and fresh, I forget what I’ve passed.
But I soon discard the sensation of seeing that squirrel, jettisoning it behind me while I walk, not exactly with confidence that what I’m doing is correct, but simply as a reflex, as the only way I know how to proceed. New sights emerge and capture my attention, the aggressive, spirited chirps of early-morning birds, the light but swift footsteps of a jogger getting closer.
If I concentrate in these moments, I realize how little that I choose, that so much of the emotional cascade of my day, the sensations that I believe shape me into a distinct, individual person, come from sources that I don’t control: the sunlight strikes my skin and feels, somehow, as part of me, warming my body, severing the barrier between the internal and external; the dog that barks from inside a neighbor’s house, its growl reverberating through the air and tickling the bones in my eardrums, seems both distant and not; the small animal, a mere carcass on the sidewalk, bypassed with just a single step, a sight that intrudes and then lingers in my mind and that even influences my walk.
Part of living, it seems, of surviving as a person in the world, demands that I insist on a boundary between what’s me and what’s beyond me, with my skin the rather shaky borderline that marks the division. While I walk, I’m responsive, reactive, reflexive, yes, to the chaotic environment that surrounds me, but that all comes with my instinct to push back: just like a toddler, I need to test the borders of my environment, securing my identity as distinct. I sense how my emotions are stirred by the rising sun, by the breeze against my skin, by the softest touch, by the way in which I feel agony when someone whom I love feels pain—although I’m still desperate to defend what’s me, to uphold something, anything, you must understand, that’s separate and distinct and that feels autonomous.
I’m bombarded by perceptions while I walk in the mornings, the staccato car horns in my ears and uneven sidewalk cracks underneath my feet and blinding sun in my eyes, all of it washing over me, a warm bath of sensation, it triggers excitement, curiosity, boredom, joy, frustration, tedium, distraction. To be subsumed by this barrage is akin to losing my own identity, it feels like I’ve shrunk on the sidewalk, that I’ve been pushed aside and am captive to the haphazard experiences that I meet in the world; yet I can’t help but think that this same loss of individuality is one of the most beautiful parts of life. Isn’t this same permeability necessary for love? Isn’t it wondrous to have your own sensations subsumed by another’s sensations? Isn’t it necessary to be receptive, to be open to the spasm that erupts when you hear a laugh, or a cry? Of course it is overpowering, even paralyzing, too, and perhaps a good life requires that you allow yourself the full spectrum of emotions without being engulfed, forever expanding the feeling of selfhood until there’s nothing left to give.
In philosophy there’s the concept of the expanding circle, which is a useful device for examining moral progress in our contemporary world, as we’ve gone from caring, exclusively, about our kin and tribe to now caring about much larger circles: our city, our nation, our species, even, for many people, other species. To spend just a moment in contemplation of how far the concept of empathy has spread—to soldiers in rival armies, to people that you’ll never meet, to the dead squirrel on the sidewalk—shows how much humanity has already expanded this circle. I find this concept both useful and uplifting, although it does conceal one troublesome detail for those people that you love, because love is a word that must exclude, it must discriminate, for the word to contain its potency. Your capacity to love, if you expand your love too much, begins to weaken, for it leaves you a tad speechless when you’re searching for the right word while looking into an individual person’s eyes.
Because I’ve just woke, the world does feel crisper during my walks, there’s a freshness to the mornings that can be staggering, a smell and taste that’s distinct: I want to absorb these moments and feel them within my body but I don’t want to be overwhelmed. I want to be receptive, to inhale the air, to notice that nighttime has passed and that the day has begun, while I stroll during these moments of transition. There is, I think, beauty in the entropy of these transitions, in how not everything comes along to the next stage. I stand in the doorway, a liminal space, partly in one room, partly in another, for at least one more day. I want closeness, I want to feel others, I want to experience the sensations of the world as they affect my mood, but I want to clearly state that I’m distinct, too, that I’m an individual, that there’s a line where I begin and where everything else must end.
We have our interiority and our exteriority, and I guess the trick is learning how to balance the two in this world. Welcome back, Charles, and I’m glad you’ll be leaning into literary, thoughtful, longer pieces. They’re far more enjoyable than the clickbait and superficial musings found elsewhere online.
Welcome back, and what a banger way to begin. THere is so much here, and what feels most momentous is that you write as if we are next to you, pacing you in this hyper-present moment. As always, you've provided much to think on - thank you.