cathedrals of meaning

effort worth pursuing

Reading, 1944, Oil, Richter

There are new construction sites bursting like weeds across the city. Half built things. Monstrous, wiry, and unfinished. Backbones that might turn into buildings and might have people live and wake up and argue and love each other in them. For now, it’s all scaffolding. It’s no good to measure time by how much tape or timber goes up or down, just as it’s no good to measure time in San Francisco by the weather. Years have passed and I feel the same. The sun on my face, the slight chill. That first stupor I had when I came to the city. A vague yet intense desire, sharp and painful within me.

One day the building across the street will be complete and we’ll forget the ugliness of the structure that once accommodated its assembly. It will always have just existed. We’ll forget the architect’s eyes on the blueprint, the toil of the workers on the roof, banging away at the material, or the cool days that slid into earlier and earlier velvet darkness by November.

This is true of all long projects, all sequences of meaningful relationships. In hindsight it was a foregone conclusion. The actual reality is that at some points the endeavor might’ve been fragile, flawed, lost in translation. We didn’t keep track of the slow accumulation of moments. Then there it was suddenly: this beautiful, self-evident thing.

*

You once told me you wanted to make a cathedral of work: something sacred and ambitious, beyond what was rapid and consumable. When you said work you didn’t mean a job, you meant the work of your life. What you wanted to give back into the world. Progress toward this goal takes a long time, perhaps a whole life. It might take years for latent effort to produce anything of significance.

The other thing it requires is self-knowledge. What’s worth devotion? You’ll have to work strenuously for so long, tolerate maddening amounts of uncertainty. The internal quest has to become its own form of salvation.

Effort beyond convenience is the unspoken heart of every story of invention. I’ve begun to see everything as a spillage of immense human exertion. The railroads and personal computers, turbines and textiles, the gardens that are tended to by unseen hands. Accidents are few and far between. Most of what we see is invisible effort rendered visible.

I often return to this passage from Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood

There was joy in concentration, and the world afforded an inexhaustible wealth of projects to concentrate on. There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People slowed the spread of yellow fever; they sprayed the Isthmus of Panama puddle by puddle. Effort alone I loved. Some days I would have been happy to push a pole around a threshing floor like an ox, for the pleasure of moving the heavy stone and watching my knees rise in turn.

The quality of effort itself has to bear its own meaning. I think about this often with writing, with my job. Both are extremely illiquid pursuits. There’s no feedback in between act 1 and the curtain closing. There’s no way to know if what I’m doing matters or leads anywhere. There’s no progression except against my own bar of standard or quality. Outputs never correlate perfectly to raw material.

That’s okay. I ascertained a while ago that this is the type of uncertainty I’m happy to contend with.

To be comfortable with ‘useless devotion’ means caring about the details because they matter to me: Re-arrange the sentences until they feel harmonious. Spend three forsaken hours on a cold email. Read everything an author has ever written on the internet. Put the scaffolding up. Take it down plank by plank. What matters to me is when I see the finished product of my life, I know in my heart that the bones were good.

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Held my 2nd meetup in San Francisco last week on top of Alta Plaza Park. Was a fun time! Some photos below, shoutout to all those who came.

Essays

• On a defense for process and intentionality (R. Horning)

• On poet Czeslaw Milosz’ exile in San Francisco (

  Linnesby-Maria
  )

• On the influence of furniture on love (

  Adam Tooze
  )

• On the necessity of worldly enchantment (

  L. M. Sacasas
  )

• On the non-weirdness of the spiritual

Does it really make a great difference to us in what rooms we live, whether we clothe them with chintz or with velvet, whether they are hard or padded? That it makes a difference in some ways, is obvious. These things affect our pleasure and our convenience. But do they do more than this? Do they suggest to us thoughts and feelings and occupations? (Influence of Furniture on Love)

Substacks (always finding such incredible quality writing on here)

• The Line of Beauty substack by

  Dhananjay Jagannathan
  and
  Țara Isabella Burton
  ; beauty as an aim in living a life well

• Internal Exile by

  Rob Horning
  ; razor smart commentary on the nature of attention and intention in the world of language models/technology

• Woman of Letters by

  Naomi Kanakia
  ; delightful critical essays about the Great Books and the literary world, and she also publishes novellas

• Writing Fiction after Girard by

  Trevor Cribben Merrill
  ; writing after mimesis requires a new sort of imagination

Books

• I finished A Gesture Life by Chang Rae Lee this week. Complex and haunting. Beautiful prose, but god was it sorrowful.

• I started Stephen Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday.

Fashion (?)

• Maybe or maybe not a brief new section as I have a particular style but wouldn’t call myself a fashion queen. I’m working on it. With black friday swiftly approaching, I’m eyeing the Breda sale. Lisa Says Gah has the cutest baby tees. The best deal for perfumes is getting the sephora perfume sampler for $90 and then redeeming a full size - I like the Jo Malone English Pear perfume for the workweek. I really like the substack Magasin for fashion inspo. Also,

  Viv Chen
  from the Molehill does great fashion commentary.

• I’m looking for a super soft faux fur coat… oh and red/black mary janes.

French Song of the Week

This one feels like it should be a background track in a dimly amber-lit wine bar