A Letter to My Younger Self on Life, Art, and What Really Matters
Becoming an artist meant learning to create for myself, not anyone else
Dear Frank,
Your elder self is charging into winter. To be more exact, it’s the hours that charge forward; I follow, slower and less certain. When the time comes, you’ll find me less a comet and more like Riley, the chocolate Lab retriever who lives next door. Gray-muzzled and slightly stiff, she still—charmingly, to me—strains at the leash when pointed toward the park, splendor and lavatory calling like sirens.
You may be tempted to dismiss this letter as the product of old age. Careful with that. (And for god’s sake, avoid the word “curmudgeon”—if not for my sake, then yours.) Ad hominem arguments—as your wonderful college teacher, Barbara Struck, will explain to you—aren’t arguments at all. They’re just another tired way of trying to win (something you’ll want far more than is good for you, by the way). But as Maynard Keynes noted—in perhaps the only valid axiom ever articulated by an economist — winning is something nobody does, not in the long run. And for us human types the long run isn’t long at all.
So, in the spirit of winter reflection, gray and late, I offer you the following 14 thoughts, their order unrelated to their relative…
