Why the name?
I stumbled on this phrase while reading Kyle Chayka’s book, Longing for Less1, as he describes the fifteen concrete works created by the artist Donald Judd, housed in the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. These crude industrial structures — 2.5 x 2.5 x 5 meter concrete cubes — will age in place, and “as climate change intensifies it’s more than conceivable that the boxes will outlast the life around them,” Chayka writes. Their survival “as ruins” drew my attention to how we, as individuals and communities, survive in similar form: changed — sometimes harmed, often strengthened — by the world, even as we are degraded by time and circumstance. Through it all, though, we can remain sentinels: products of what we’ve seen and, with any luck, capable of relaying what we’ve learned.
What are we doing here?
In the age of distraction, some of our most vital (and unsettled) questions — What is the ‘good life’? How do we find purpose in a technologically-sophisticated future? How are we changed by the world around us? — are often jettisoned in light of the sensational stories of our present day. This thread of the newsletter explores some of these age-old questions in light of contemporary culture and politics. Through a series of interwoven review essays, this newsletter is an attempt to break the habits of headline-chasing and to surface insights from the past and why they matter for tomorrow.
Highly recommended. A great meditation on minimalism in our age of consumerism.