'Thinker' has a new name

Allow me to explain myself.

The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Thinker is getting a new name. It will now be called Walking Away.

The content will be by-and-large the same. We’ll finish Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations together. We’ll move on to another work of philosophy (I am leaning heavily toward the Tao Te Ching), and those posts will remain free. Paywalled essays on topics of interest will come out every week, ideally. I’ll be sending another post today about the Meditations, and paid supporters should get a new essay early next week.

If you’re interested in reading about why I’m making the change, keep reading after this brief musical interlude.

Thinker, as a name, is not particularly good. I came up with it very quickly, when I decided to launch a newsletter. Naming things is difficult, however, as anyone who has launched a business will tell you. I have a few rules: short is better than long, puns are never acceptable, and literary references cannot be too obvious.

Thinker followed those rules, at least. But it fails as a name for a pretty simple reason: it doesn’t tell you what the newsletter is actually about, and it does not even capture the spirit of the project. Contrast that with a few newsletters that tell you what they are or capture the spirit of the project: Story Club with George Saunders (it does exactly what it says on the tin), Notes from the Middleground (a simple literary reference, but a good description of the author’s perspective), The Audacity (not descriptive, but recognizable to the sort of audience Roxane Gay writers for), The Fifth Column (an old political reference that seems to capture the podcast’s spirit), Drinks with Broads (a good use of irony in titling).

Thinker has started to feel bland and, even worse, a bit pretentious. Bland pretension, a deadly combination.

Since I haven’t been happy with the name for a little awhile, I’ve been thinking of new ones. Thinking Small was one of them, which I do think captures the spirit of the project, but I might want to save that phrase for later. My old newsletter, scrubbed from the internet, was called A Very Different Benedict, which is an allusion to Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue that I quite like. But that may be too obscure for a newsletter. I’ve long wanted to title a project A Consuming Fire, but the Biblical reference does not quite work for this, and I don’t know if the spirit of newsletter is quite so…all-consuming.

So I started to think about my favorite writers and, in particular, why I love them so much. Ursula K. Le Guin, Wendell Berry, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sts Athanasius, Augustine, and Benedict, Frederick Douglass, Alasdair MacIntyre, Epictetus, and the like. And I realized that in these writers there is a unifying theme: a belief that a better world is possible, that we can even try to live it out if we try hard enough.

And that brings us to Walking Away.

As readers who support me financially might know, I am a lover of Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,’ but I also love the rest of her short fiction. ‘The Day Before the Revolution,’ now published in the same volume, is another worthy piece. In the preface to that second piece, Le Guin calls the character Odo, whose memory haunts The Dispossessed, one who walked away from Omelas. Not in reality, of course — there is no Omelas, even in Le Guin’s fictional worlds. It is a utopian in the truest sense, a no-place. But Odo can be characterized as such because she walked away from a world built on cruelty and tried to build a better one.

This all sounds awfully political. I can promise you that very little politics is going to creep into this newsletter. To get too involved in ordinary politics is to not walk away. Instead, you end up rolling around in the mud.

That said, in a broader sense of the term, this newsletter has always been about politics. I like to say that the politics I am interested in is the sort of politics that takes place within a family: the art of living together. This can generalize, of course, but the family is a good model for this. The various members of the family need to learn the art (not the science) of getting along. This is the sort of politics Odo writes about when she describes the social organism. It’s the sort of politics Frederick Douglass had to think about when he tried to envision an end to slavery. It’s the mode of thought that MacIntyre has in mind when he writes of the need for another, albeit very different, St Benedict.

But of course, thinking about politics in this way should also turn you inward. If you’re interested in living together, in getting along, then you need to do a lot of thinking about yourself. Raising a child also requires understanding, and bettering, yourself. Being a good husband (if I could be called a good one) required understanding my own flaws and at least trying to correct them.

As I pursued these lines of thought, I started to see why Walking Away made sense as a name for the newsletter. Readers of this newsletter, I would gather, define success in a very different way than most of the world. (We also define success in ways that differ from each other, I’m sure.) Some of us are walking toward a place that is hard to imagine — but, like those who walk away from Omelas, we seem to know where we are going. Even if it doesn’t exist.

Thanks for walking with me.