[Taming] is an act too often neglected, it means to establish ties. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.
— The fox, from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince
Love is not consolation. It is light.
— Simone Weil
My favorite subject during my undergraduate studies at Stanford was art history. To me, the discipline was self-indulgent in the best way: an intent practice in seeing, through which every aspect of human history and experience unfolds.
Museum visits were regular, to the Cantor and Anderson on campus, Pace Gallery in downtown Palo Alto (now closed), and SFMOMA, the de Young, and Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Amidst technocratic Silicon Valley, there was something profoundly moving (and quietly extravagant) about standing in front of a painting for half an hour to examine every detail on the canvas, a portal to another world. Through art, I delighted in seeing beauty—of the human experience—in its most ineffable form, the aha moments, the punctum, the breathtaking, uplifting, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpses into the wondrous world that makes feel so small in your own being, and all the more awestruck for it. Such is the light of life.
Over the course of my art historical studies, I indulged with great zeal in subjects of seemingly no utility (how decadent!): love, desire, and fashion history under the brilliant Professor Emanuele Lugli (read his recent Vanity Fair piece on the White Lotus here), wounding and healing in Periclean Athens with Professor Jody Maxmin, modernism in Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian-inspired shift dress, and the transience of time through vanitas in 16th century Dutch still-lifes. These are the Stanford classes I think back to the most today.
After graduation, I ended up working in technology investing in midtown Manhattan (much drabber than California). Thankfully, I got to continue living and sharing life together with Alex, my Stanford sweetheart. Between investment memos and cap tables, the ways I now discover and experience beauty have become more expansive: catching sunrise over the East River, finding the perfect rattan console table for the apartment’s living room, painting abstract dreamscapes on giant canvases, encountering Tillmans at MoMA and Hopper at the Whitney, savoring a meticulously assembled meal, dancing to João Gilberto late into the evening…
When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets
In this spirit, taming the light is:
A personal practice in seeing: in the grand and the minute, the extraordinary in the ordinary - to keep my eyes and heart open, to seek and embrace beauty, to connect with the greater light beyond myself
A collection of marginalia on mediums of beauty: painting, photography, interior design, jazz, and fashion (in no particular order) - which are really mediums of love, and bring me marvelous delight
I hope to share new ways of seeing, feeling, loving, and remembering along the way. Thank you for joining me.
