life isn’t for anything, that it doesn’t mean anything, that the hurt hurts too much and the joy gives too little. But in the shade of the ginkgo tree, I’m able to feel, if only in moments, why I am here—that I am here to pay attention. I am here to love and to be loved, and to know and to not know. And most of all, I am here to be. To be not just

Thinking about that passage now, I’m reminded of Gertrude Stein’s essay “What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” where she writes about the challenges of making art in the twentieth century. “The

I like to look at Leonov’s drawing when I am exhausted by despair and drudgery, or when I feel the weight of longing and fear pressing in on my chest.

We also don’t know why we make art. William Faulkner said that the work of an artist is “to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before,” but it also involves creating out of the materials of the Earth something which did not exist before—turning graphite into a drawing, or marble into a sculpture, or wood

That’s okay. He’ll have a different song. You probably have a different one, too. I hope it carries you to places you need to visit without asking you to stay in them. I give “New Partner” five stars.

But for now I’m just looking up at that tree, thinking about how it turned air and water and sunshine into wood and bark and leaves, and I realize that I am in the vast, dark shade of this immense tree. I

I don’t want to give in to despair; I don’t want to take refuge in the detached ridicule of emotion. I don’t want to be cool if cool means being cold to or distant from the reality of experience.

Despair isn’t very productive. That’s the problem with it. Like a replicating virus, all despair can make is more of itself. If playing What’s Even the Point made me a more committed advocate for justice or environmental protection, I’d be all for it. But the white light of despair instead renders me inert and apathetic. I struggle to do anything.

I’ve often wished—especially when I was younger—that my work was better, that it rose to the level of genius, that I could write well enough to make something worth remembering. But I think that way of imagining art might make individuals too important. Maybe in the end art and life are more like the world’s largest ball of paint. You carefully