Front Matter
In which I try to explain what this little gazette is for
“If I am not quite right here, I am less wrong than before.”
-Henry David Thoreau, journal entry of July 6, 1845, Walden Pond
A little more than a decade ago, when I was in college, I started a blog. I wrote about literature, politics, my life. It was a pleasant enterprise that kept me writing regularly. At the time, I was contributing essays and book reviews to various publications with some frequency, and it seemed to me that those more formal pieces were improved by the hours I devoted to the blog, which served as a kind of literary batting cage. Over time, to my gratification, the site found a small but engaged readership.
Then I joined the Obama Administration as a speechwriter, and the powers that be suggested to me that it would perhaps be prudent to delete the blog, the publishing of one's own opinions being pretty much antithetical to the anonymous business of political speechwriting. Strictly speaking, I didn't have to shutter the blog, but it seemed like a natural time to do so. It had become an irregular concern, and there is a point at which one regrets having one's more youthful opinions, however benign, pasted on the internet for all to see. Moreover, blogging, once a rich internet genre, had begun to wither. So I bade my old site farewell and devoted my pen to helping other people figure out what they wanted to say, and how they wanted to say it.
I don’t regret that decision, but it did mark the beginning of a period during which my own writing went dormant. After several years of penning speeches, I decided to go law school. I kept up my journal and occasionally attempted a short story, but I was mostly writing legal briefs, and I was mostly okay with this. I often felt a certain relief at no longer trying to get my thoughts onto the page for an audience. Our world is so noisy, with so many voices pouring in from so many channels, that holding one's tongue has at many points in the last decade struck me as an endangered virtue.
But in the last year or so, I’ve begun to want to use my voice again—in part, I think, because the times feel so unsettled. As our democracy ails, it seems to me more important than ever to voice one’s thoughts. I have no illusions that anything I write here will change minds or thaw hearts; rather, I simply feel that it is important to exercise the right to say something, especially if that something comes from a mind that at least attempts to think for itself, and from a heart that strives to remain open and surprisable.
Yet this newsletter is not merely a First Amendment project. My previous blog was full of youthful energy and abandon. I’m a little older now, and hopefully a little wiser. I’ve done a lot of unexpressed thinking in the last decade, and I want to rejoin the conversation about the American literature and culture that so fascinates, enrages, and inspires me each day. I plan to post semi-regularly, perhaps twice a month, usually about what I’m reading, which is typically some work of American history or political culture or literature. I hope to clarify my own thoughts, to better understand what inspires my admiration or ire; I further hope that by doing so, I’ll occasionally stimulate the thoughts of others.
Once upon a time, I did this work all of the time; now, out of practice, I feel like I’m starting anew, which is both terrifying and exciting. I suspect I have something worthwhile to say, but the proof will be in the experiment, and the experiment is uncertain. I hope you’ll join me in thinking through this bewildering moment in the history of our beautiful, bizarre, heartbreaking nation.
As this post’s epigraph reveals, my mission statement for this project (and the title for this newsletter) comes from Thoreau’s journal. Thoreau has long been a touchstone for me, but he’s lately become even more important to my thinking. He fiercely criticized his nation—for its imperialism, its consumerism, its reckless spoliation of the natural world—but he never rejected it. On the contrary: he loved his nation, and he believed that criticizing it was one of the highest forms of expressing that love.
At the same time, as the above quote suggests, Thoreau, for all his Transcendentalist enthusiasm, remained basically humble about the elusiveness of truth. Like most of the thinkers who have mattered most to me—Montaigne, Lincoln, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., come to mind—he knew that no conclusion was final, and that the story of mankind’s progress, so much as it has made any, is not one of ever-increasing triumph, but of occasionally having the good fortune to be less wrong than before. That is the hope that underlies this project.
Thanks for joining.