On Living

An essay on the importance of making life beautiful and bearable — for ourselves and for one another. Living, here, is treated as a shared responsibility rather than a private project: the quality of one life conditions the lives around it, and to make one's own existence more beautiful and bearable is quietly to do the same for others. It is among the most humane and direct of the On——ing essays, less concerned with mechanism than with the daily ethics of coherence. Its argument is simple and demanding at once: that beauty and bearability are things we owe, and things we make together.

Of all the essays in the series, this is the one that most sounds like a direct address to the reader, and it is meant to. Its argument is short and demanding: that making a life beautiful and bearable is not a private luxury but something we owe one another, because the quality of any one life conditions the lives around it.

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