Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

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An interesting read but from what I have experienced of his work it seems to reinforce what I’ve come to believe he is: a good essayist and travel journalist (one who brought uncommonly-traveled-to places to a TV audience) mythologized by tragic romantics who primarily experience him through a one-sided parasocial view of his itinerant life. His death (and perhaps the manner of it) canonized him for these people.

Perhaps he’d reject such a role but it’s fairly typical of such posthumous worship that saints have their desires and humanity stripped in exchange for being transformed into a two-dimensional shadow that validates the worshippers' beliefs.

There’s also the other fan club of food maximalists but those seem to just be looking for a food tour with little of this false intimacy with a public figure. For all that people allege shallowness there, it seems far more healthy, in that what he did can actually give these people what they want.

I do think there’s a bit more depth here.

One is that he worked as a middling chef for decades and only had his breakout success in his 40s. I think this made him much different than your generic essayist/journalist, and also let him speak to different kinds of people. He became a symbol that international travel, trying new things, and living life to its fullest doesn’t have to be an early 20s thing followed by decades of monotony.

He was also uniquely principled (he’d finance some episodes himself) and speak to people on all sides politically, without pandering to either.

That's true, and perhaps reflective of the fact that the modern essayist/journalist is one who has been solely an essayist/journalist in comparison, perhaps, to someone like George Orwell who was a policeman, dishwasher[1], and tutor among various other things.

I recall someone on the Internet[0] lamenting this change in writers in general, where their input material is other textual content and is not particularly influenced by a first-person encounter with reality. That's not guaranteed to produce a mushy result but often creates a work with an inauthenticity that disengages readers without an identical background.

Fair point on the other.

0: Perhaps classical oil-painter Kendric Tonn? Perhaps Paul Graham?

1: Amusingly, before his most famous works I'd read, as a young student, The Sporting Spirit (clever one), and Down and Out in Paris and London (more relevant to this conversation. A Western student would doubtless find it funny - since Orwell is best known here for 1984 and Animal Farm - that I didn't know he's The Dystopian Sci-Fi Guy

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