On Standards

Essay 20

This past year has been about defending my standards, assuming beauty and being right. Asking for symmetry, asking for quality, and moving fast on when they weren’t found. I have seen a pattern internally — cast it outward as a spell on cities and hallways, websites and hairdos, work and correspondence and calendar. It’s a kind of personal feng shui, a Bach-envied arrangement, so things fall into your order and stand in taste.

I’ve asked more of people this time: some presence, some knowledge, some love. Envelopes get returned. I’ve tried not to make concessions, few concessions survive in a world unnavigable without pattern, recurring, defended by little conductors like me.

People try to sin making quantitative and not qualitative compromises. You think being mature means making “five important tradeoffs”, and end up skipping feasible ones and sacrificing things that can’t be sacrificed. What I use my taste as is a shield, what I say with it is that I know which feasts are unmovable, that in the heat of the moment, in love and in business, I’ll want to give up some things that I can’t. That some things — they are in a pattern — are ours whether we want them or not; the double helixes of your life.