Writer's Diary
2/27/26
It seems like the more peaceful my life becomes, the more my dreams at night feel the need to look back at the near past and run simulations, as if to confirm that the past is really the past, the ghosts are really the ghosts. Which is understandable, I guess, but I would prefer it if my dreams would relax a little bit, explore different, non-anxious modalities.
LINK: Doomers re opens tomorrow—tix are cheap—Manhattan
As the new year begins and younger people come to the plays, say those born around 2004 or 2005, I realize that, from now on, going forward, there’s a non-fungible difference between casts of mind and the way those minds receive and interpret fiction; brains are different; social codes and psychological modes are very different than they used to be 15 years ago when I started writing.1
As an artist, you learn to be amenable and congenial. But no one suspects the meanness, the nastiness of your art, the sulfuric acid of truth is contained within. It’s ready to spill out and wash over the room. People just find it suspicious. They sense there’s a philosophy behind it, an intelligence. And they don’t like that.
Why do outliers get so consistently punished by inliers?
The great artist or writer might not have any Instagram followers or any clout. Chances are they probably don’t. So to measure the world the way we do is really to fundamentally exclude purists and non-self-promoters. It’s the worst filter imaginable.
In a hundred years, if there’s a better version of civilization, they’ll wonder why wealthy people gave almost no money to the construction of great art or architecture or literature during this century, the way they did during the Renaissance, with far fewer resources.
If anything can convince me that elites know there’s some kind of doomsday up ahead, some cataclysmic event, it’s the lack of transcendental construction, the lack of aspiration. It’s as if someone knows it will all be wiped out in a flood and therefore not worth it (and that almost, that’s more consoling than the idea that they’re just not doing it out of true philistinism and putrefaction of the soul).
What the past six months have shown me, really, is that loyalty makes a person truly wealthy—to be surrounded by kind, decent people who care without expecting narcissistic returns is to be a rich man.
Somatic amnesia: people are forgetting that they even have bodies; they’re just hands that somehow extend toward the screen.
I usually see myself having no audience at all in the future, in a future where my way of thinking and speaking has passed entirely out of common parlance. It’s really not hard to extrapolate from the present and think: will there be anyone at some point? Even if AI doesn’t move an inch forward, even if nothing dramatic changes about the future, even if things just stay the way they are now, will there be anyone? Over time, I don’t know. There wouldn’t be many.
I, Carnegie, am press’d to rear in stone
Long cloisters vaulted high for mortal mind,
Where, through the silver mists by Avon blown,
Some patient youth new sovereignty might find.
Yet in the dark I hear the anarch’s tread,
The furtive match that courts the public flame;
I see war’s iron womb bring forth her dead,
And cannon mock at dome and learning’s name.
Alexandria’s glory fed the fire;
Her scrolls, once stars, lay trampled into soot.
Pergamum’s towers sank in wrath entire,
Their wisdom ground to dust beneath the foot.
When riot yoked with iron rules the breath,
I build but stone made testament to death.