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The secret (if in fact there could ever be such a thing) is that we change ourselves not by layering new narratives about ourselves on top of our already-existing personalities, but rather, simply by seeing clearly and accepting what’s there. I think this is what Nietzsche meant when he said that all power comes from amor fati, or a “love of [one's own] fate.” This is because everything the present shows us is really the inevitable consequence of the past, and thus the only way for us to be independent is, paradoxically, to choose freely to accept this inevitability. Amor fati doesn’t mean “liking” everything that happens to you; it means refusing to fight against inevitability, which is, in the end, the same thing as truth. In art, one frequently sees how genius and beauty spring from the limitations of fate: Django Reinhardt, for example, revolutionized the guitar because he only had three fingers to fret notes with. But our society, so burdened by its sense of progress and quality control, fails to instill in people the idea that success doesn’t come from changing what is so much as from learning to love what is.

Years ago when I decided to become a professional musician and leave academia, I saw my decision in urgent terms as a battle between my head and my heart, and one that my heart must win at all costs. I was shocked to discover, therefore, that though I had vowed to side with my heart, I was writing songs that were, to my dismay, very intellectual and filled with all sorts of ideas I’d picked up in graduate school. “Write simply!” I’d command myself, and yet, after hours of wrestling with a song, I’d find myself left with something that was so cerebral and convoluted that no graduate student would want to try to comprehend it. It took a long time to realize that simplicity – the songwriter’s Holy Grail – is not a standard that can be cloned. Simplicity comes when one accept what is, and in my case, this meant accepting the fact that I had spent years reading books of philosophy, which fated me, if you will, to expressing this material in song. What I know now that I wish I’d learned sooner is that none of this matters. Whether you try to make “intellectual”, “emotional”, “simple”, or “complicated” art is not what makes any of it beautiful. Beauty, in the end, I believe, comes from devotion to what is. To be devoted to anything that is is to breathe beauty into it.