Audience of (n)one
You have lived up to the present floating and tossing about; come away into the harbour and die. You have devoted your life to the light: devote what remains to obscurity. It is impossible to give up your pursuits if you do not give up their fruits. Renounce all concern for name and glory. There is the risk that the radiance of your former deeds may still cast too much light upon you and pursue you right into your lair. Among other gratifications give up the one which comes from other people’s approval. As for your learned intelligence, do not worry about that: it will not lose its effect if you yourself are improved by it. Remember the man who was asked why he toiled so hard at an art which few could ever know about: “For me a few are enough; one is enough; having none is enough.” He spoke the truth. You and one companion are audience enough for each other; so are you for yourself. For you, let the crowd be one, and one be a crowd. It is a vile ambition in one’s retreat to want to extract glory from one’s idleness. We must do like the beasts and scuff out our tracks at the entrance to our lairs. You should no longer be concerned with what the world says of you but with what you say to yourself. Withdraw into yourself, but first prepare yourself to welcome yourself there. It would be madness to entrust yourself to yourself, if you did not know how to govern yourself. There are ways of failing in solitude as in society. Make yourself into a man in whose sight you would not care to walk awry; feel shame for yourself and respect for yourself,—“observentur species honestae animo” [let your mind dwell on examples of honour —Cicero]; until you do, always imagine that you are with Cato, Phocion and Aristides, in whose sight the very madmen would hide their faults; make them recorders of your inmost thoughts, which, going astray, will be set right again out of reverence for them. —On Solitude
This feels like a line I should reflect on, pin on my wall, and take seriously. Feels particularly urgent, as the shift from Substack to my own website feels one towards solitude, but not fully committing to it. The fact that I call this "semi" public means it sits between two worlds. If I wanted true solitude, I would "scuff out the tracks" so the beasts can't get into the lair. I do have a vision for a labyrinthine website, where most visitors can't access most works.
But I find myself unable to commit to this, as if "writing in public" is unquestionably engrained in me. My uncle, who used to share a blog with his writing and photography, told me, after not publishing much for 10 years, that he made the philosophical decision to keep his work private, and to more so focus on the art of relationships. Instead of downloading thoughts onto paper for strangers to read, he focuses on the live interchange between two people.
It also feels irresponsible to retire now, to retreat into a cave of intellect, character, and creativity. As noble as that is, it's coming from Montaigne who (at age 37) had the financial luxury of secluding in his tower (another example of a philosophy as a rationalization of your circumstance). I am far from decades of financial security to support my wife and daughter, and so I very much need to operate in public.
I need to better articulate why I write in public the first place. To build off Didion's reasons for a private notebook—writing freezes what the wind of conversation would blow away, letting me see myself and my past selves, our assumptions and aspirations, fears and blindspots—a public notebook invites others into my process of evolution. By reading and talking to friends on the ideas of my rumination, they bring other unlocking perspectives.
Philosophy is a social endeavor. It's in the name: "friendship of wisdom." So then why does this Montaigne quote (where he paraphrases Seneca, Epicurius, and Cicero) resonate so hard? The risk is that by exposing yourself to the public, you position yourself to build status from the crowd. It's inevitable. Social networks are in the game of brokering status and making it explicit, giving you quantified follower counts and metrics per post. And so if you get fixated on scale and reputation and validation, your lack or wane or love of it, you risk missing the point: the work itself, the cultivation of character, the opinions of your imaginary heroes.
And so split infrastructure helps me resolve this tension. On my website I write for an audience of (n)one: if it's not for myself, it's for a single person, perhaps one relevant to the topic at hand, whether it's a close friend, a historical figure, or my great great grandchild who will one day scan a QR code on my tombstone to stumble upon the musings of an ancestor. On Substack though, I do write for the crowd. But so long as my personal writing practice is strong, then I will bring myself to the crowd, and not bend towards favor or fortune or trends or whatever. I think Emerson got the synthesis right: to retain the sweetness of solitude amidst the conformity of the crowd.