I’ve been in very regular contact with my friend Kate because we are working on a fun music and food project together. Kate also has a brilliant newsletter that I follow closely on Substack called “soft leaves,” and I mentioned to her how I was delinquent in my updates here. She kindly noted that every time I write, it seems like I am weaving together multiple threads - and to my delight, this week, something clicked into place as I was walking out of my neighborhood used bookstore. I love writing very much because it does feel like the medium that allows me to take hold of all the inspirations that swirl in my head. I hope you enjoy this one, and leave me a note if you do.
Thursday night, I was on a mission. I proclaimed to the bemused bookstore employee that I was hunting for a Roget Thesaurus from before 1960. Soon, we were both on our knees, dusting off covers and scanning for dates, delighted by my friend Martine’s fun fact that Roget’s Thesaurus was organized by categorical concept, rather than alphabetically. Roget believed that language was thought, and words were symbols of ideas. His Thesaurus organization allowed for “the mind of the reader [to be opened to] a whole vista of collateral ideas.” Imagine that – the entirety of the English language as one contiguous idea, every word contained amidst terraced umbrellas with the goal of being as specific as possible. Even that structure itself was so inspiring that I was not only hunting for a third edition copy, but also, for what I really mean.
The March Thesaurus states that “the definition of a word is an idea, a solid intellectual center; the emotions which have been felt with it rise in memory with it, and give it an aureole, a halo, a nimbus, a glory, spheres of radiance.” This relationship between specificity – exactly what we mean – and abstraction – the halo of “not-quite” – has fascinated me for a long time. Are words really the precise representation of how we feel? Is what we mean more of an association between three contiguous entries? Much of my wandering musing rests on these questions, especially as they relate to the strengths of different artistic mediums, and, the expansion that occurs when we consider them in parallel: how might we break from each realm’s limitations into something that encapsulates an entire sphere of radiance.
This winter, I taught a lecture class at Juilliard’s Preparatory Division, which is a high school aged music training program within the college. The course focused on helping young players find their artistic voice by considering language. The five sessions explored text as a tool to get specific about their ideas, and we considered the history of the text-music balance, as well as how to musically implement the mechanics of meaning making. The goal of musical performance is not necessarily to transfer a precise idea from one brain to another, but at the very least, revel in the clarity of one’s own communicative intentions, smoothed over by sound. To me, that attempt to always get closer to what you mean, to how you might say it, is the wonder of art. And I love the reality that we will never get there – that everything is an attempt easily obliterated by that ever-elusive yet endlessly understood feeling in our guts. To keep seeking guidance from other mediums that favor a different radius will forever invigorate me.
Every spring, a few high school students find my information online and call me to ask for advice about career, colleges, or balancing a music and academic path. Perhaps it’s a sign of my own maturing, but for the past five years, the questions have almost catapulted into the absurd. One student this year outlined a thought spiral that went along the lines of, “if I go to this school, and study both this and that, and then fall off the relevance train, then I will never get that job.” I couldn’t help but laugh because I deeply understand that anxiety, but the further I get from high school, the more truly irrelevant my advice feels in their inevitably far-flung paths. The end of high school is this moment of laser focus, but we adults have tasted the lie that is thinking we can ever know where we will end up. Really, we are just opening the thesaurus, putting a finger down on a word, trying it out for measure, and then letting it glide in search of something that feels a little better.
Recently, I spoke to a chef I admire who expressed how she refused to let the difficulty of the industry stop her from trying innumerable things. She said that letting perfection consume you will lead nowhere. Because, really, nobody cares. Not in a dismissive way, but in a liberating one. Assuming we train in culinary for decades, or play flute for twenty years in my case, we have this arsenal of niche knowledge beyond most people’s everyday understanding of what we do. The majority won’t be able to tell the difference between a 99 and a 100. And it’s not to alienate anyone or to say that seeking 100 is not worth it, but that if you let the 1 point take up far more space than it deserves, you’ll forget that everyone has a different halo. There will be so many people you’ll never reach, who you’ll close yourself off from and never get to share with. That first step in experimenting is often about having something that excites you, testing it, and taking it upon yourself to find the proper way to express it so that people are brought along with you. Perfection and laser focus, in that context, feel restrictive.
It took me aback when this chef proposed a collaboration and then within days, had already spun up a plan for execution. As someone who is used to polishing and polishing, I felt an anxiety creep in, but I’ve come to recognize it, and how to put it back to sleep. I thought of the students who never go to their classmates’ concerts, or who never sign up for casual open mics because they hole up in practice rooms telling themselves they will share when they are ready. From the vantage point of Roget’s Thesaurus, knowing our exact word from the very beginning and assuming that we can chip away without looking up and around, is what stops us from ever getting anywhere exciting.
Life is this wild winding path, and we are all hopping from halo to halo, pushing any boundaries as much as we can muster. I find myself thinking about how my favorite cookbooks are often organized this way – by concept, technique, influence – and I imagine my dream book. How beautiful if a cookbook could hold all that I feel when I come home from the market with the perfect finds: one experiment sparks the next. I talk to a friend who is working on mushroom-ifying classic dishes, and suddenly I’m making a katsu pom pom. Then when I’m doing that, I remember that smart lentil ragu recipe whose leftovers become a hearty soup. The next day, when I stop by my favorite shop, I pick up this fennel pollen I’ve lusted after and then I’m dreaming of ten different roasts. We try and we learn and we juxtapose, and even as we feel that we are veering off path, wasting time, wandering – we are really getting closer and closer to that feeling of ourselves.
All we have to do is keep turning the page.
Really appreciated this one, Annie. I think a lot about what you said around the transition between high school and "adulthood". Specifically, when you wrote "we adults have tasted the lie that is thinking we can ever know where we will end up." I wonder sometimes about whether or not life circumstance allows for this type of liberated understanding of what adulthood can be. I feel that there are many people, actually, who actually can and do know exactly where they'll end up. Are they happy or satisfied or even aware? I don't know. I also love the idea of life as a thesaurus, but who gets to take advantage of the Roget-style litany of themes and who is stuck with the limits of thesaurus.com? Just something on which I'm noodling. Thanks, as always, for writing.