The Emperor Has No Clothes

and maybe it's for the best.

This is the Sunday Letter on a Tuesday. Because it’s that kind of week.

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This morning, I was passing through Union Square to procure a parcel of fresh, human-grade, nutritionally dense food for my dog who eats better than I do, when I saw something disturbing.

It was the Climate Clock, an 80-foot-wide LED sculpture detailing the amount of time left to reach zero emissions and prevent the worst effects of climate change from becoming irreversible. I’ve glimpsed it countless times over the years (including as the backdrop for the performance by Cheeseball Man). But this hit different.

As of this writing, there are 4 years, 364 days, 3 hours, 15 minutes, and 37 seconds to make a radical transition off fossil fuels.

DELAY = DENIAL, it flashed in blaring orange caps. WE MUST ACT IN TIME. It was — I am careful not to mince words here — losing its shit.

Four stories beneath it, life continued unphased. Someone ate a vanilla soft serve ice cream cone. Another trudged down the sidewalk, arms laden with shopping bags. Countless others gazed into their phones.

The clock flipped back to countdown mode.

My mind flashed to the final lines of “The Hollow Men.”

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

*

By now you’ve surely heard that Biden will not be seeking reelection and that Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominee. Though the announcement had been teased for days, the news felt no less momentous.

“I know this election cycle has largely been a shit show, but it feels…exciting?” a friend ventured. This friend counts skydiving as a hobby, so it’s possible their definition of excitement differs from the average bear’s. Still, I share the sentiment.

Excitement is what we call it when anxiety dresses in hope. In the best of times, it motivates and unites us. We cling to it, as the polls and the pundits profess to have a crystal ball right down to that last agonizing moment.

The thing about excitement, which we cannot lose sight of, is that it is infectious and strengthens when shared.

For that matter, so is hope.

*

Last weekend, my husband Teddy and I visited friends at their home in East Hampton, where our lunchtime outing took us past the newish outpost of The Row (NYTimes).

Typically, this is the kind of retail experience I avoid at all costs. I tend to eschew any environment where I (or anyone, for that matter) may be treated like the hoi polloi — footwear scrutinized, grubby fingerprints discouraged from making contact with the merchandise. I am also intimidated by gallery-style minimalism — white clothing, white carpets, white furniture — as though my presence will spontaneously manifest a large, lidless coffee that I have no choice but to spill. But there is courage in numbers, and there were four of us. And the writer in me will never refuse an opportunity to observe, well, anything. So, in we went.

We stopped in front of a small rack of clothing. “Let’s guess the prices,” my friend whispered, glancing at the tag on a simple crew neck sweater. We took turns petting it, marveling at its plushness.

“Ummm…two thousand?” her husband ventured.

“Eighteen hundred.” I said.

A smile spread across her face. We were off. “Thirty-five hundred.”

Teddy turned to me, eyes wide, like he’d just been led into a deranged fun house, which in a way I supposed he had. “What is this place?” he whispered, inspiring a spike of jealousy he had no prior knowledge of the $900 jelly sandals that apparently break just by looking at them. I promised to explain once we’d left.

The game continued for a $550 cotton tee, a structured leather bag the price of a midsize sedan, and some sort of see-through kimono that costs more than this newsletter earned last year.

No one gave us the side-eye, but no one acknowledged us, either. A zero-sum retail experience. We exited the store unscathed.

*

Later that evening, I was getting ready for bed when I heard Teddy exclaiming from the other room.

“No way! No way.”

“What?” I called, through a mouthful of toothpaste.  

“The Row sells rubber beach flip flops for six hundred and fifty dollars. And they’re sold out!”

At the time, I happened to be reading this post about how the quality of clothing (and its subsequent lifespan) has vastly deteriorated. The average American buys more than ever, while the earth is being destroyed. The worse we feel, the more we consume, landfills filling faster than the gaping void inside.

Again, I won’t mince words when I say, what a shit show.

Everywhere I look, there are widening chasms.

Between prices.
And parties.
And people.

Somewhere between quiet luxury and loud politics, I was reminded of the folktale The Emperor’s New Clothes, where a vain emperor is sold a wardrobe of invisible garments and parades naked before his subjects. There are at least a half dozen parallels I can draw to this moment — hucksters, grifters, outsized egos, flip-floppers, greed, materialism run amok…

The last few weeks have felt akin to watching the emperor — two of them, as it were — parading naked through the square. It’s an eyeful, for sure, and more than we bargained for. Yet as in the folktale, perhaps a truth has emerged. Disillusionment can be a scary thing. It can also be a wake-up call.

The emperor has no clothes, and maybe it’s for the best. When you strip it all away — the smoke, the mirrors, the pomp, the circumstance, the posturing, the politics — you’re left with what actually matters. Ideals. People. Possibilities. Hope, against a ticking clock.

*

I collect hands.

Not in a Hannibal Lecter way (although apparently, he’s been promoted to national treasure), but rather as inspired iconography. I have hands made of plaster and iron and porcelain and brass. They hold and gesture and reach and grasp. They remind me that everything we see — everything the light touches, Simba, at least in modern society — was built by human touch.

The laws and the legends. The streets and systems. The texts we hold dear. The cures and innovations. The speeches and plans and skyscrapers and stock markets. The pretense. The $550 cotton tees.

All of it, dreamt and enacted by people just like us.

When I picture the end of the world, which I try not to do too often, my mind always ends up in the same place. After a tour of art and architecture and literature and wildlife, I arrive at the image of hands. Hands grasping other hands, holding tight to what is dear.

In recent days, I have heard apathy. And fear. And frustration. And heartbreak. I’ve heard overwhelm, and felt it, too.

Maybe we’re all waiting to wake up in some Aaron Sorkin universe, rife with treacly melodramas and an annual Christmas episode sure to bring a tear to the eye. Maybe we’re hoping that someone older and wiser, or younger and more energetic — anyone, really — will step in and right this ship.  

So, I must ask: Why not us?

More than anything, we want to believe that we matter — that we are seen and heard, our needs accounted for, our liberties protected. And while I am well aware of the immensity of the systems at play, our volume and our fervor are still within our control.

Hands translate excitement into action. They connect. They build bridges. They unite. They write beautiful music and provocative comments and fiery manifestos. They set the world ablaze, and they build it back anew.

When I picture the end of the world, which I try not to do too often, this is where I settle. Bolstered by the hope that the same hands that shape this land are also the ones that can save it.

Whatever the coming days may bring, remember: Power not only rests in our hands; it originates from them.

TL;DR: God making a human. As painted by a human. Because everything around us was made by humans. Like you. Like me. Let’s do this.

Card of the Week

Here is this week’s card for the collective, as well as some thoughts to carry into the days ahead. As most modern readers will tell you, the tarot is not about fortunetelling, nor is it about neat, definitive answers. The cards are simply one path to reflection, a way of better knowing ourselves and others through universal themes. If this reading resonates with you, great! And if not, no worries. Take whatever may be helpful and leave the rest.

Pagan Otherworlds Tarot by Uusi

There are times when life as we know it seems like a big scheme. We’re sold a narrative that the point is to amass “enough” — wealth, stuff, praise, experiences — as though we’ll be given a prize for it at the end.

These days, many people act like there’ll be some kind of bonus for broadcasting it as we go.

And yet, the quest for fulfillment rarely mirrors this.

The top regrets of people on their deathbeds are, “I wish I’d had the courage to let myself express my feelings,” followed by “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard,” and — more than any other — “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

Nary a word about money or possessions. But more than one mention of courage.

This card carries a PSA about the valuable skill that is recognizing prosperity in plain sight. Often, we live with more than enough, yet focus on whatever we think is lacking. With the help of societal messaging, we can easily trick ourselves into thinking we “need” more. Perhaps if we just do more, earn more, buy more, we’ll feel better. Perhaps if we can just change ourselves, we’ll outsmart our anxiety and finally find satisfaction.

The Ten of Pentacles has a message: You are enough.

Already. Right now.

It’s that simple, and that profound.

While we’re at it, a warm shower is enough. Soft bedding. A cold glass of drinking water. Dappled sunlight dancing on the wall. Warm chocolate chip cookies. The company of an animal. The end of a good book.

The iconic Smith-Waite deck, with art by Pamela Colman Smith

Prosperity comes in all forms, and is all around us. The trick has less to do with hustling or hoarding than it does with simply noticing.

There is an anecdote I think of often, from a commencement speech once given by Anna Quindlen, which became the basis for the little book A Short Guide to a Happy Life:

“I found one of my best teachers on the boardwalk at Coney Island...He and I sat on the edge of the wooden supports, dangling our feet over the side, and he told me about his schedule, panhandling the boulevard when the summer crowds were gone, sleeping in a church when the temperature went below freezing, hiding from the police amid the Tilt-A-Whirl and the other seasonal rides.

But he told me that most of the time he stayed on the boardwalk, facing the water, just the way we were sitting now, even when it got cold and he had to wear his newspapers after he read them. And I asked him why. Why didn’t he go to one of the shelters? Why didn’t he check himself into the hospital for detox?

And he stared out at the ocean and said, ‘Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view.’”

If you were to ask one hundred people to close their eyes and make a wish, it would result in a hundred different wishes. Even within a common language, words carry different meanings, shaded by our experiences. Terms like value, abundance, and success will change from place to place, from person to person. But the Ten of Pentacles teaches us that what matters is the mindset behind them.

Abundance as a noun is relative. Abundance as a feeling is not.