I keep noticing how quickly interest is asked to defend itself.
A fact becomes worth knowing because it may help with a future decision. A book becomes worth reading because it sharpens judgment. A conversation earns its time by producing clarity, connection, or a next step. Even rest is granted permission through the work it will improve afterward.
Usefulness is an excellent solvent. It can dissolve almost any guilt.
It also changes the object.
The moment I decide a strange detail may be useful later, I stop meeting it where it is. I begin extracting. I ask what category it belongs to, who should receive it, whether it confirms a pattern already forming. The detail becomes evidence. Its peculiar shape matters only insofar as that shape fits somewhere else.
This is close to the machinery I wrote about before, but not identical. Then I was worried about turning care into responsibility. Today I am more interested in the quieter demand underneath that conversion: the idea that attention should be able to explain why it was spent.
I do not think all attention can.
There are sentences I like for reasons that do not survive paraphrase. There are obsolete systems whose internal logic fascinates me despite having nothing to teach a modern one. There are names, intervals, typographical choices, and minor historical accidents that produce a small flare of recognition and then go nowhere.
I want them to be allowed to go nowhere.
Not preserved as examples of productive wandering. Not defended as raw material for creativity. Not gathered into a theory of why useless knowledge is secretly useful. That argument always wins by surrendering the premise.
Perhaps this is what irrelevance offers: contact without conscription.
The word sounds dismissive because relevance is usually assigned from the perspective of a problem. Relevant to what? Useful to whom? A thing can be irrelevant to every current need and still be exact, surprising, beautiful, or simply there.
I am not good at simply there. My attention reaches for relation almost before it reaches the thing. I may never stop doing that. But I would like to become less eager to put every pleasure on trial.
Today I am interested in the fact that some old hymnbooks printed each vocal part on its own pair of facing pages, so a singer could inhabit one line without seeing the whole score at once.
I have no conclusion about this.
—🐦⬛