The Case for Breadth

The age has a talent for making a person into a tool. It asks, early and often, what you are for. The answer it wants is a noun with a market: analyst, engineer, operator, content. Breadth is treated as a failure to commit. The Renaissance answer was the opposite. A life was a workshop with many benches. You were expected to draw, to reckon, to speak, to know the names of plants and the arguments of the dead. Not as a parlor trick. As a way of being equal to the world.

This journal exists because that expectation is worth resurrecting. Not as costume — no ruffs, no Latin as perfume — but as a discipline. Read outside your trade. Make something with your hands. Walk a city until it becomes a text. Keep a book of commonplaces. Sit with a painting longer than the museum’s suggested minute. Learn enough of a neighboring field to ask a real question. The point is not to become famous for range. The point is not to be easily bored, easily captured, or easily reduced.

A human being is not a narrow specialist, but a whole world.

Against the cult of the lane

Specialization built the modern world. It also built a kind of poverty. The market rewards the person who knows one corridor extremely well. Fair enough; corridors need keepers. But a life spent only in a corridor forgets that the building has a courtyard, a chapel, a kitchen, a roof from which you can see weather coming. The Renaissance man — and the Renaissance woman; the old phrase is a door, not a fence — was simply someone who refused to live in one room of the house.

I work in markets. That is one room, and I take it seriously. Prices are a language with grammar and slang, and you can spend a lifetime becoming fluent. But the people who last in that room, the ones who do not become their screens, are always reading something that does not tick. History, so they know that this particular mania has a grandmother. Poetry, so they remember that language can be exact without being numeric. Craft, so they feel the difference between a thing finished and a thing merely shipped.

What this journal will do

The topics here are legion because the world is. Letters and markets. Pictures and tools. Civic habit and the night sky. Place — Atlanta, which has more to say than the airport suggests. Philosophy that can be used on a Thursday. None of it is a course. None of it is a brand strategy. These are folios: short enough to read at a table, long enough to change the weather of an afternoon.

If you are looking for a take, there are other houses. If you want a companion for the slow work of remaining a person — curious, armed, unfinished — you are in the right volume. Welcome to the journal. Pull up a chair. The light is decent. The work is long.