The Brooklyn Rail

Having followed Edmund de Waal’s work as both a writer and an artist ever since the publication of his memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010), and Atemwende, his first exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in 2013, I’ve come to realize how Edmund has managed to maintain a remarkable balance between on one hand the making, and on the other hand the writing.

While thinking of the organon of this improbable and hard-won unity of the making and the writing—one being a form of aesthetic irrationality, guided by autonomously spontaneous impulses, and the other aesthetic theory that yields to other heteronomous forces—I was once again reminded that the objectivation of a work of art often renounces the realism of certain events, even though the dependency on the depiction of life itself is totally necessary. In our current time when language is being simplified, reduced to spoon-fed comprehension, we find refuge in poetry as a means to mediate living legacies of the past, which may haunt us in different subtle and unsubtle degrees in different times and contexts. In an age of specialization, which implies less sensitivity to things that lie beyond our own colony of comfort, the greatest challenge remains: how to distill time for self-contemplation and self-reflection in the midst of an ever-changing world, dictated by speed, technology, and violence. On occasion of his most recent exhibition this must be the place at Gagosian Gallery, I was able to sit down with Edmund for a lengthy conversation about his practice, the making and the writing, among other subjects of his deep interest. The following is an edited version for your reading pleasure.

Phong H. Bui (Rail): There have been countless materials regarding your biography, either in written form in your books, for example, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010), The White Road: Journey into Obsession (2015) or in spoken arrangements in public, such as conversations or lectures, all of which are a beguiling blend of history and memoir. For one, as it seems to me, is inseparable from the other as your own creation of nonfiction. Which is to say unlike someone like Robert Graves who considered himself a poet and his occupation, writer; when asked how he was able to keep the two activities as one simultaneous condition, he answered, “I breed pedigree dogs to feed my cats.” The dogs were his prose, the cats his poetry. What are your thoughts on these concurrent activities?

Edmund de Waal: The reality is that they don’t exist as separate practices for me. When I’m writing, I’m making texts, constructing them in a very tactile measure, from a sentence, a phrase, a paragraph leading to a page, a chapter, then a book. For me, words are very powerful for they are objects that have a weight, among other significant implications. Language needs to be made in the same way I make my art, my pottery, ceramics, and then bringing them together with other materials is very similar to constructing a poem. For instance, in this show, there are six untitled Letters to Amherst (2023), which refer to Emily Dickinson’s birth home in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she lived all her life. They’re porcelain vessels, arranged among other fragments of porcelain that have scatterings of words on them, which for me I’m writing back to her while listening to her poems and making artwork at the same time. So, there is no separation between the pedigree dogs and the cats. I really am one person.

Rail: It’s problematic that in western metaphysical dualism we must choose one over the other.

de Waal: I agree. There’s no inherent hierarchy if you’re a potter, as I am. I’m very mindful of pottery being the most eccentric but humble among the crafts. It’s only after many decades that pot-making has finally carved out a place within the spectrum of the arts, whereas being a writer has always been esteemed from the beginning. This is to say I don’t make pots or write to explain what I’m doing at all, yet they are absolutely entwined.

Rail: In the spirit of Isaiah Berlin’s famous 1953 essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which he later confessed was intended to be an intellectual game, yet everybody in academia took it seriously. As we remember the hedgehog was an intellectual or artistic personality or temperament for whom everything is conceived of and judged by one single perspective, as opposed to the fox, for whom the world cannot be boiled down to one singular point of view. In our art community, we can propose that artists like Bob Ryman, Agnes Martin, or Bernd and Hilla Becher were classic hedgehogs, whereas Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois or Jack Whitten were classic foxes. I once asked Richard Serra whether he is a hedgehog or a fox. His response was, “I can’t see myself in those terms; what do you think?”

de Waal: Very clever!

Rail: Richard had accused me of being too much of a detective [laughs]. Still, my question to you is, knowing that you began making pots when you were five years old, which was your first epiphany, when did you in fact discover that writing was equally essential to your practice?

de Waal: I remember sitting down at the wheel, throwing my first pot, then feeling this strange, transformational moment of something inert becoming alive. Then it becomes a vessel, having an inside as well as an outside. I go back the next week, and I glaze my first pot white, and then I keep going back for this somatic experience between my hands and my body, which continues into decades of apprenticeships and training. I’ve been making pots for fifty-five years of my sixty, coming up on sixty years.

Rail: I enjoyed listening to your conversation with Theaster Gates about your shared interests, from having admirations for Indigenous makers and forbears to recognizing the limitations of ceramic and pottery as a medium, given the exquisite training and discipline that you both received in Japan, as well as possibilities to expand into some forms of aesthetic morality in regard to both the personal and public realm. Again, when did the writing become an equally invested interest and practice?

de Waal: Oh yes, making my first pot was an absolute epiphany. It was an epiphany in having true pleasure during the act of making, yet at the same time I was totally submitted to this deep curiosity of not knowing what I was making. I’d say there was no epiphany about my writing. It was rather a gradual and slow process that led to my realization that the act of writing was on an equal term as making pottery, partly because I grew up in a family of writers. And due to the complex history of my family, I always felt a need to find meaning through writing, so I started to study literature. I became a poet, a failed poet at first, but gradually I did become a poet.

Rail: In thinking of your sitting on the uncomfortable chair by the potter wheel making your pots, I can’t help but think of my friend the late painter/art historian Andrew Forge’s excellent book The Last Flowers of Manet (1986), which brought together the sixteen flower paintings made in the last months of his life, as he died of a body-wasting disease referred to as Gangrene at the age of fifty-one. They were modest in size: some were no more than 12 by 9 inches; some were 22 by 13 3/4 inches. We can only imagine he painted them on a chair and an easel by his bed, and each painting was made as a response to a visit. Each bouquet is the trace of a departed visitor, for each was made into another life, a picture, before it withers away. The way I read it, as I’d just recently seen Roses, Oeillets, Pensees (Flowers in a Crystal Vase) at the National Gallery in DC, is how could he manage to mediate his own death and the death of the flower, as there must have been an imminent sense of an ending, a closing of a curve, while at the same time, Manet was fully aware that he must fight it off with the directness of his painterly verve, where each brush stroke must be alive with his on-the-spot responsive that binds everything together, from the looking, the making, and the overall feeling in totality. As you have long been fascinated with the concepts of still-life, time, and silence, to what degree do you think they’re all present when you make your work?

de Waal: Still life isn’t at all “dead nature,” as the French punitive term had suggested. Still life is about us embracing everyday objects, everyday things. It’s as though we’re looking at the overlooked. Be it lemons, oranges in a Francisco de Zurbarán painting, a basket of strawberries in Chardin, a bouquet of flowers in Manet, or say bottles in Morandi’s case, these everyday objects, these vessels, were given a kind of leisurely attentiveness which allows them to have a presence in a world that is endlessly moving at high velocity, endlessly changing on the edge of change even. And so, by instilling any of those everyday objects, as Zurbarán, Chardin, Manet, or Morandi did, for they were all thinking deeply about time, and time is about mortality, as it is an iterative action, it kept taking them back again and again and again to a particular moment.

Rail: And the same experience is applied to us, the viewer, when we look at those paintings.

de Waal: Indeed. I’ve been thinking about how and why Morandi’s paintings are so powerful, partly because of decades spent looking at the same group of objects, bottles, jars, jugs, boxes, and vases in his atelier.

Rail: With complete solitude and identical goals for each day, which I can only imagine he accepted with no more and no less of an expectation of his daily routine.

de Waal: Yes, and in doing so, he’s similar in many ways to Wallace Stevens for their deep metaphysical approach to very simple things, bringing them to life in the world. For me, they’re very similar to Stevens’s first collections of poems in Harmonium (published at the age of forty-four in 1923), and his last collection of poems in The Palm at the End of the Mind (published posthumously by his daughter Holly Stevens in 1967). Those poems seem to maintain a certain distance to the imagination: something which can lose its vitality when it ceases to correspond to what is real. They’re the most significant poems for me, partly because I love their sense of expansion.

Rail: Into abstraction as Stevens, like his colleagues, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and others, was looking at modern art, especially cubism, and so on.

de Waal: Exactly. I share similar affinities to Joseph Brodsky for different reasons, one being his ability to excavate the feeling of being in two places at the same time, you know, being always elsewhere in exile. I remember being at his reading at the 92nd Street Y when I first came to New York, at the age of seventeen, which was so overwhelming. I bought his book, A Part of Speech, right after the reading, which I still carry with me. In fact, when I was working in Venice on my library of exile project Tales of Exile in 2019, Brodsky haunted that entire project and my whole stay in Venice. Of course, there was a living connection to Osip Mandelstam, who along with his wife Nadezhda, were sent to an internal labor camp where he died at the age of forty-seven.

Rail: Well, in addition to both being Jewish, Brodsky, too, was sent to a labor camp in the Arctic Circle, for the same reason. As we all remember during a trial, a judge asked him, “Who made you a poet?” Brodsky’s response was, “Who made me a member of the human race?” Then he delivered the blow, “I think it was God.”

De Waal: It’s beautiful, for Anna Akhmatova, after everything that she lived through in her own life, stood up and put her hand on Brodsky’s shoulder, as she did for others against Joseph Stalin who was afraid of freethinkers such as poets. There has been this profound kinship and affinity among poets across generations, which I feel deeply during the course and thereafter of my library of exile project, dating from Ovid to Brodsky, as one poet looks back to another poet from the past who’s had a particular way of shaping one experience, while putting his or her hand forward reaching for another experience. It’s the same with pottery, making a vessel—one hand reaching back while the other reaches forward.

Rail: As you often spoke in avoidance of melancholy and nostalgia, which in parts are related to memory, especially in the context of solitude–what we might call melancholic solitude: a condition that requires a self-imposed exile inwardly, to mediate the in-between space that lies between life and death, that would transform into a blissful state. Is this the reason why you admire Wallace Stevens, and Emily Dickinson, for similar aspirations?

de Waal: Yes, which is also the reason why I’m so drawn to elegy. In fact, several of these new works are elegies in black. They are attempts to remember particular people or places that have been lost. I was also at the same time quite aware of how one can make an elegy without nostalgia, without melancholy, without sentimentality. As we all know, elegy is a really hard art, partly because it’s an attempt to walk alongside something or someone who’s been lost in a truthful way, and hold part of that memory, then bringing it forward into the present and into the future. And that is not nostalgia, as nostalgia is sickly and sentimental, and it destroys the thing elegy loves. So, I wrote The Hare with Amber Eyes which traced the beginning of my family’s history from Odesa to Vienna, then Paris in the nineteenth century, and, more recently, Letters to Camondo about my Paris family through a series of imagined letters to Moïse de Camondo.

Rail: Whose family of Sephardic Jews (from Constantinople and Venice) was introduced in The Hare with Amber Eyes. And Moïse de Camondo who, like your great-great uncle Charles Ephrussi, a banker and art collector, was subjected to intense antisemitism starting with the Dreyfus Affair in France that spread across Europe, then Nazi Germany.

de Waal: Exactly. As you can imagine, it’s quite a horrific history, yet I’m trying to create a pathway in writing this irreconcilable loss and pain without it being sentimental, nostalgic, or melancholic, then again making it a proper and sustaining elegy. And that’s something I have the feeling you have gone through in your own experiences.

Rail: Yes, but not the same intensity of loss as you and your family have gone through.

de Waal: As you know, writing is a remarkably immersive act that can take you and let you discover things about yourself, and how you see and relate to the world, past, present, and even future. And you know that it’s never good enough. It’s never good enough.

Rail: Someone asked Oscar Wilde, “What did you do today, Oscar?” and he said, “I wrote today.” The man continued, “What did you write?” “Well, I put down a comma in the morning, and took it out in the afternoon.” All serious writers find it just as difficult as we do. I assume the same applies when you’re making your pots.

de Waal: Yes, but thank God there are pleasures amid these endless difficulties. There’s this beautiful new book of essays Homo Irrealis by André Aciman, in which he references irrealis moods, which are moods of conditions where everything is possible. They’re moods that permit us to explore what time means to us since we can’t always grasp life in the present. They’re indeed moods of being in writing, being in making.

Rail: And once you surrender to that space, you suspend your own judgment.

de Waal: Yes, there is a suspension of judgment. But it’s not for very long. It’s temporal, but as you know, in both writing and in making, there is this moment of closure. For me, as a person who works with clay as material, I need to put what I made into a kiln to be fired, and once they’re taken out, they’re alchemically changed, which gives me another opportunity to see them. And then there’s a decision to make, whether they should survive or not. It’s an essential editing process, quite like what gets printed in publication. Once something is printed, you can no longer make revisions. For instance, I spent seven years writing The Hare with Amber Eyes, which required lots of traveling to different places, talking to different people, studying and researching related materials from various archives, finding gaps inside and all that needed to be filled in, and so on. When the book was finally published in 2010, I had a solo exhibition at Cristea Roberts Gallery (formerly Alan Cristea Gallery) in London, which was the first time I’d ever used vitrines. I suddenly realized that in writing a book about diaspora, while trying to make sense of who I am in the world, by bringing various members of my family who had been scattered around the world, as well as the family’s objects together, is the same as putting my vessels of various sizes in vitrines of different configurations.  

Rail: As you’re providing context from which the contents can be better understood.

de Waal: Yes, there was this moment of congruence in both my writing and my making objects, even though I felt like I was holding cogs in my hands as they were moving in different directions, and I realized at that moment onward that things can take me in different and complicated therapies. And they have.

Rail: Can we assume that you found your mature and true voice in 2010 at the age of thirty-six?

de Waal: It’s relatively late but yes, after having taught and written academic books, 2010 was the moment of great clarity.

Rail: Again, I’ll refrain from asking similar questions that have been asked about your family history. However, I’d like to ask only one in context: since we’d just now spoke of Manet’s last flowers, I’d like to share one charming story about your great uncle Charles Ephrussi, who commissioned Manet to paint the now-famous A Bundle of Asparagus, an 1880 oil painting, for 800 francs. However, upon receiving the work he was delighted and gave Manet 1,000 francs instead, which prompted Manet to paint a smaller second work, now known as A Sprig of Asparagus, and send it to your uncle as a gift with a note reading, “There was one missing in your bundle.”

de Waal: Isn’t it charming? Doesn’t that also tell you so much about Charles?

Rail: Definitely. It’s charming and touching at the same time indeed. At any rate, do you in general agree that still-life, like landscape painting as a form, not just as a genre, in fact gave birth to abstraction?

de Waal: Because still life is already abstracted, as a viewer you’re already within the zone of metaphysical, whereas portraiture is so profoundly tied to the personality and identity of the sitter, and the same can be said of mythological and religious paintings where the main purpose is to convey the story, however complex the story may or may not be. So yes, I absolutely agree with you. And that’s why Proust is so captivated by shadow. Proust is the great abstractor in his prose.

Rail: Which never failed to capture the essence of things, as in say his timeless essay on Chardin.

de Waal:  …which repositioned the ordinariness of the everyday objects in such a specific space that in turn elevates them with such dignity and empathy. I’d say it’s a profound expansion of the everyday, which is a kind of spirituality.  

Rail: Which in fact depends so much on the silence of the space in-between the objects, the interval that holds them as one unified structure together.

de Waal: The interval is like silence in music, and at times it punctuates a space between words in a poem. In my work, the interval is how each object relates to one another. And the more it accumulates, the greater subtlety the aura of the work exudes.

Rail: Which recalls again how in Dickinson’s poetry, one always feels this tremendous mysterious silence, air-tight, and hermetically sealed as the so-called solitude of space between her images at times convey. I wonder whether you arrange your objects in a similar spirit. 

de Waal: Yes, this is again something we had intimated before, for not everything has to be eligible to be understood. Dickinson’s spaces in her work are full of gaps, as there are spaces between my objects, which are intended to adapt to different environments as you can see how they’re arranged differently in each work in this exhibition.

Rail: How would you describe your sense of repetition? I mean the premise of repetition in the East has always been about how we repeat certain words to get rid of ourselves, as opposed to, in the West, the way we repeat in order to amplify the uniqueness of our individual selves. 

de Waal: I’ve been aware of this tension for a long time, especially having spent time in Japan on a one-year scholarship in 1990, and I’ve just recently written an essay on repetition for Hiroshi Sugimoto’s forthcoming exhibition Time Machine at the Hayward Gallery (October 11, 2023–January 7, 2024) in London, and an essay on the temple of Thousand-Armed Kannon in Kyoto. I was brought up in cathedrals chanting away with endless repetition of prayers and songs, repetition after repetition. I should mention that I’d read as much as I could on philosophy in the East, as well as having paid visits to Tibet and China. And so that idea of repetition as a spiritual discipline is very profound for me. And it is different from walking into a huge Carl Andre exhibition [laughter].

Rail: And Judd. 

de Waal: Yes, where repetition is architectonic, and it’s about spatial and somatic control and all sorts of wonderful attributes about….

Rail: …object-ness.

de Waal: Exactly. So in brief my understanding of repetition comes very much more out of the East’s spiritual traditions, which is about pacing yourself in the world, and discovering difference through repeating similar actions. It’s a ritual that perpetuates itself in deep meditation rather than expecting an end-result each time you repeat something.

Rail: I love the term spiritual discipline, which means different things when it migrates to different cultures. How Buddhism is practiced in India is different in China, Japan, Korea, then Thailand, and Vietnam, and so on. At any rate, to return to your attraction to elegy, what are your thoughts? What John Milton once declared, “Innocence, once lost, can never be regained. Darkness, once gazed upon, can never be lost.” 

de Waal: The truth is I’ve seen too much in the world to want to recapture innocence. And the things that I write about and the places that I go, and the histories that I’ve had to excavate and continue to excavate. And, indeed, the library that I made, the library of exile, is all about people in the diaspora. I’d never have dreamt of recapturing something that was once an idealized utopia, for it would require so much time and energy to be fully present in that space to look for what was once innocence. This body of work, on the contrary, is titled this must be the place. There are seven huge black heavy benches. They’re made of extremely old bits of the earth, namely Kilkenny black marble from Ireland, which I fashioned so that they are places to sit, and to touch, and into them I have cut these insertions. I have taken pieces of very, very thin silver and written texts, scratched into the silver, and then erased them and wrote again, and then folded them up and put them in like they’re a letter or prayer, pushed into the tiny crack of the stone.

Rail: Like the Wailing Wall at the Old City in Jerusalem.

de Waal: Yes, as they do similarly in every other culture, singing and prayers in the temples in Japan, Tibet, Nepal, and elsewhere as places, spaces to pause and be present.

Rail: Since you’ve mentioned in the past your urge not to be identified with specific color, any color, I was thinking of Malevich’s paintings, particularly his 1915 Black Square. And one can say of course that Ad Reinhardt undertook black as a color and square as a format in his further exploration, and Robert Ryman did the same with white.

de Waal: I think I’m a phobe of these whites and these blacks, for in my kiln room I always see the hundreds and hundreds of different black glazes, hundreds of different white and celadon glazes that have these different textures, different opacities, different translucencies, different densities in the world. And each has an extraordinarily sophisticated beautiful spectrum that goes deep into the cultures of Korea and China and Japan. Simply amazing. I only have a brief life to investigate some of them. For a while now, I’ve been working with this set of black glazes which allows me to look at shadows, which are like intervals as we just spoke about earlier. For me, these are shadow captures, they are places between places where shadows congregate. Some have gold in them so they can catch sunlight, and they change because that gold aura that you see in the gold on the porcelain is future-tint. It changes. So, you think of Morandi in Bologna, you know, in the afternoon as the north light changes, and he had to paint another painting because the shadows and the dust have changed again. When I’m putting these different white pots in, I am feeling my way into how light changes, and that means that I don’t particularly want to pick up blue or yellow glazes and start investigating them in my seventh decade. I’m very, very excited by these new discoveries, especially silver, and to see how they are bringing in light and shadow.

Rail: How would you at this point describe your sense of scale, Edmund, specifically regarding this body of work?

de Waal: This installation, like most others in the past, is intended to be as intimate as I could make it, where only one person can stand in front of each individual work, which is akin to a huge, opened book, a folio for their hopefully slow viewing pleasure. There are two big diptychs: almost home (2023), and a part of speech (2023), both of which were inspired by Joseph Brodsky’s collected poems volume from 1965–78, A Part of Speech. Both are like an opened huge Bible, which is measured over 7 feet by 6 feet, containing a variety of materials, from porcelain, silver, Cor-ten steel to aluminum, tin, and glass. Yet, the scale of the objects within them are the scale of your hands. As always, I’ve been trying to impart this sense of touch and intimacy from my hands to the viewer’s hands, be it holding a cup or a stack of bowls, because we know every culture would understand what a stack of bowls is.

Rail: When you unstack them on the table for a meal, then restack them to be cleaned afterward. I should add that we human beings have been making ceramics for at least 26,000 years. And as everyday objects, as well as artifacts, they have played an important role in archaeology for understanding culture and technology, plus the behavior of various peoples of the past.

de Waal: All of which is about nurturing. That’s what vessels are. They’ve always been about holding something and passing it on. This history of passing objects from one generation to the next generation is like a form of literature, a book or a poem.

Rail:  As you once wrote, “You take an object from your pocket and put it down in front of you and you start. You begin to tell a story.” I was thinking of the concept of how to survive one’s own story, one’s own history. On one hand, the object from one’s pocket, whatever it may be, a pen, a piece of paper, a netsuke, etc., can be interpreted as “A book is like a garden carried in a pocket.” On the other hand, many of us who believe in the power of negative capability would agree also with what Joyce wrote in Ulysses, “The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.” My question is: can a made object alone tell the history of a person as well as being thought of as a healing agent?

de Waal: I can only speak from my own experience: if a work of art was a form of healing, if it had worked as healing, I would have stopped making my own work a long time ago. There’s always this gap between the attempt to make something out of a profoundly fragile material and knowing it’s bound to break at some point. Which is what I’ve been doing, as I always felt the attempt to make something out of nothing, be it an essay, a book, or a work of art, then sharing them to other human beings, especially when it deeply relates to my own complex history—one that has built on this perpetual exile of vulnerability and struggle. And yes, as difficult as it is, the desire to know more of my family history by walking alongside them and being present, even briefly as time permits, is thrilling because each attempt makes me feel alive, in knowing I can return where I had started from the beginning each day, and yes, with the hope that I can be as present as I was yesterday.

Rail: Can you share with us how this exhibit was conceived? For example, I noticed there were three white pieces with three shelves, identical in size, voices and instruments I and II (both 2023), only one of which, nostos (2023), includes black vessels, as I first walked in in the front room.

de Waal: Yes, that’s right.

 Rail: Then in entering the big room, I felt like a black gothic cathedral, for there were five pieces with five shelves, identical in size, installed on one wall; two black diptychs with nine shelves, almost home and a part of speech, installed in two opposite walls, which to me anchored the whole space, for the remaining wall installed two extended vertical pieces with twelve shelves leaning late and being there, and it was evening all afternoon (both 2023); and lastly on the floor sat five sculptures, entitled this must be the place I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII (2023), all of which are the same height and width, but not length. And likewise with their top surfaces. Ah, I should not forget the five white pieces with two shelves, Letters to Amherst I, II, III, IV, V, and VI (2023), again identical in size in the back room.

de Waal: The spacing between the objects in each work, as well as the pacing of the space in between each work in a particular space are what and how I need to provide in context of each specific environment. In this specific space, as you’ve just described, one of the three white pieces, namely nostos, has black vessels in it as a subtle indication leading straight into the gothic cathedral-like room with the nine black works. And then at the end in the third room, which feels like a chapel, for I include white and gold pieces in all the remaining five of Letters to Amherst. In thinking over the last three years of how this exhibition would materialize, and two years of production, I wanted myself as the maker and the viewer to move through these three rooms together, and I was interested in how the light carries throughout the experience. Some of my previous exhibits were deliberately dense and congested, while others were very spare and austere. I should also mention that all the wall pieces are installed quite low.

Rail: As I notice for a 5-foot 1 inch’s person, it’s perfect for my eye-level.

de Waal: Which was intentional, as I wanted each piece to relate to each viewer’s torso, which also requires them to bend down a bit to look at it. Similarly, a part of the planning of this whole exhibition was by making these sculptures where you can sit, these stone benches in the middle of the space are just trying to make people slow down. [Laughs] You know, it’s my life’s work, Phong, to try to slow myself down and maybe slow the viewers down too.

Rail: It’s a Sisyphean task from here to eternity, as Albert Camus had proposed Sisyphus being either the absurd hero in his volume The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), who loved life so much that he had to be condemned to an eternity of futile and hopeless labor, or else commit suicide.

de Waal: In knowing there’s no end to this cycle, I’d take the first option. Because everything one makes is a call and response to the world. I’ll be ready to start all over again. Even if I fail at it miserably, as I fail on answering you again and again, it would be worthy of such Sisyphean labor. [Laughter]