There’s a cemetery on my computer. It’s hidden behind a few other folders, and it’s a little disheveled, unfortunately, not exactly maintained nor ordered in the way that I prefer. But I don’t linger when I visit: I enter, find some space, and entomb a few more words.
Because the truth is that everything I write involves a little death. Passages that I kill, ideas that I slaughter, the lines extracted from my final drafts. When a sentence is rewritten, when it’s refined, that’s perfectly fine and feels good, but when it’s excised because it doesn’t quite fit—that’s a bit harder to accept.
To be clear: these murders are almost certainly justified. The words might be good, the passages might be pleasing, but they don’t have a place. A witty or artful line doesn’t mean much if it’s discordant with the page—just as even the most eloquent soloist still needs to harmonize with the rest of the orchestra. What’s tricky is that if you consider writing as thinking—which you should—then these extracts are lost thoughts, they’re ideas that have been birthed but haven’t found a home.
And perhaps that points toward the misleading description of cemetery, as, in some ways, the file is more like an orphanage—a place for words that don’t yet have a home. So, today, for a change, I bring you a collection of forgotten, misguided, and simply lost passages. Everything that follows was cut from an essay that I’ve written for Desk Notes in the last year. These were passages or single lines that I happened to appreciate, they sounded right to my ear—feel free to picture a sense of smug satisfaction—but they didn’t fit on the page.
They weren’t meant to appear together, of course, and I’m not exactly sure how they’ll look in a stuttering, machine-gun format, adjacent to ideas that don’t relate. Yet I’ve decided to arrange them, lined up against the wall, one after another. What’s troubling, however, is that there are still more forgotten passages, or a lot more actually, which didn’t even make the cut here.
At least productivity has the added benefit of ensuring that you feel the depths of failure at a faster pace.
To fiddle with narrative games all day long is akin to the photographer who struggles to capture a landscape and ends up spending the entire sunset playing with buttons on the camera.
Sometimes I think it’s important that the president lies because it proves that we have a representative government.
A slogan in a one-party state, or a placard that sits in the front garden of every home like an endemic weed, isn’t intended to persuade, or convince, it is to show alliance.
As a child, I loathed child-friendly places. I am no longer a child but I still have the same opinion.
What’s notable about cheap entertainment, however, is that there’s one requirement for its creation, just one aspect that remains true regardless of the medium—the assurance that the enjoyment won’t be disturbed by a stumble into a confrontation with the unpredictable. The rules of the game are clear: anything at all can happen, within a spectrum of experience that is safely and comfortably narrow.
So when you’re resting and comfortable at home, your partner has an affair across the city in a hotel, and is also, incidentally, quite comfortable if not so restful.
There's a divide between those who prefer speaking in front of strangers and those who prefer speaking in front of friends.
Political movements either focus on what they're for or what they're against—and only very rarely can they answer both of those questions.
Because so many people write about mimetic desire, I doubt my own desire to write about mimetic desire.
What’s difficult about the culture becoming stupider is that it becomes exceedingly difficult to be condescending.
The playground fights of childhood never really end, though the setting does change. There will always be conflicts and mistakes and disparities—and they’ll always be people who have the impulse to immediately yell for a parent.
I’ve never understood why painters spend money on the boring colors.
The word social even has the peculiar trait of frequently describing its opposite: from social isolation to social anxiety to, in our contemporary oxymoron, social distancing. Even when the word is used in its more exalted sense, the connotation is that what’s social is imposed, directed, or managed: social responsibility, social hierarchy, social behavior, social norms, social identity.
One curious feature of our times is that even the winners feel like they’re losing, even those at the pinnacle of the culture feel like they’re the counterculture.
It seems like most people have a dream that if they're killed the news will report that they were assassinated rather than murdered.
When a timid person decides to make a declaration, when they finally, at long last, after all this time, decide to speak, it often erupts in a way that's abrasive.
In life, I’ve learned, it is important to have people to blame when things go amiss.
Most people achieve their goals and feel empty. One benefit of failing to achieve your goals is you get to feel empty with a reason.
About ten percent of Italian films seem to include scenes where characters wait, pointlessly, for unarrived trains, looking forsaken while standing in abandoned stations that burst with grasses, weeds, budding trees—although any extended stay in Southern Italy will tell you that ten percent is too low.
#15 really resonates.
Your graveyard of discarded words reminds me of my photo file of brilliant but discordant painting passages. During my oil painting days, sometimes I’d fall in love with an area of the painting—but it didn’t work with the whole. So, before scraping and painting anew, I often snapped photos. I saved them on my computer for future reference. As for your entertaining list: Number 3 made me laugh out loud at its truth. I nodded in agreement at number 5–I preferred the woods and solitude to crowds and amusement park rides. Number 10 on mimetic desire made me think of Cormac McCarthy, who definitely marched to his own drummer. He lived for many years in near poverty to pursue his art, rarely gave interviews, and refused to do well-paying lectures or speeches because his books spoke for themselves. In today’s ocean of derivative offerings and AI authored content, McCarthy’s individualism and artistic integrity inspire.