There’s a Radiolab episode that lives rent-free in my head. It’s about a composer named David Lang who was commissioned to write music for a room, the Salle des Départs, in a French hospital where families say goodbye to people who have just died.
The thing that struck me deeply about this episode is how much conviction, passion, care, and thought went into it. He wrote the piece for voices and cellos in a way that made it impossible for any human to perform, because he didn’t want it sung live in a room that is all about death. He refused to let it loop, because he wanted the music to make its contribution and then let the silence sink in.
The Salle des Départs is the thing you only make if you’ve thought deeply about the question for a long time, long enough that the answer is already in you when the project shows up. This has been the standard of care I strive for. Whether I get there is another question. When that much thinking goes into something, you’re not really doing it for anyone to notice, at least I never have. The reward is mostly private, and at best you’re making it for the small number of people who will catch and appreciate it.
What scares me though is that the people consuming the work don’t seem to mind. Most of what gets made now is celebrated, and the difference doesn’t register. You can prompt your way to something that resembles care, and that resemblance is increasingly all anyone is asking for. You can get to the shape of a considered decision without having considered anything at all, and from the outside, increasingly, those things look the same. The people making the work know the difference, but more and more people receiving it don’t.
I’m not against the tools. I use them, and I am genuinely faster now in ways I couldn’t have imagined a few years or even months ago. But the part of the work I care about most is the part that happens before I open anything. The walks, the showers, the half-finished thought that comes back three days later with the missing piece attached. None of that lives in a prompt, and none of it can. It is the only place I have ever produced anything I was remotely proud of.
Maybe that’s the quiet thing I’m sad about. Not that the tools exist or that the floor is the highest it’s ever been. Just that the slow accumulated way of arriving at a real point of view is becoming optional, and once something becomes optional, fewer people do it. I hope I’m wrong, and that there are people right now sitting with a question they only get to answer later in life, like David did.
The Salle des Départs is still there, in a hospital in Garches. Someone I will never meet is probably sitting in that room right now with someone they loved. The music is playing or not playing. Somebody thought about all of that, and they thought about it for a very long time.