In partnership with
“The Search for an Inn” (1861), Charles François Daubigny
Everyone who worked at New York Magazine in the 2000s has a wonderful story to tell about John Homans, the brilliant and beloved features editor. A craggy, towering Wasp with a delightfully foul mouth and a knack for bringing out the best in his writers, he helped make New York what it was in the Caroline Miller and Adam Moss eras. This memorial they published after his death, in 2020, from bowel cancer, is full of great anecdotes, but I like Ariel Kaminer’s best:
As others have noted, John presented to the world as a caricature of straight New England multigenerational Ivy League privilege. But he was the most insistently off-kilter, uncharacterizable presence. He was so good at destabilizing expectations — in a story he was editing, but most vividly of all in a conversation you were trying to navigate — that there was nothing to do but accept defeat, acknowledge his superior skills, and laugh at your own feeble attempts.
As a manager, and also as an inveterate gossip, he would absorb vast amounts of shit: the whiny complaints and peevish resentments that fill the air ducts of an industry built on fragile, outsize egos. He would dutifully reassure whoever was generating it that yes, okay, it would all get worked out somehow. And then when that person was an inch out of earshot, he would turn to whoever was standing next to him and, with a laugh, declare: “Drama!”
He found the drama, like literally everything else in the world, amusing. “Good sport!” he’d say, both a knowing send-up of a Hemingway-era stuffed-shirt editor and an accurate expression of his view on the world. It was all good sport. He had a dauntingly huge brain and could arm wrestle with any of the celebrated intellectuals he sometimes assigned articles about, but earnest he could not do.
I like this because it gets to the heart of why I had no relationship whatsoever with Homans during my time at New York, from 2001 to 2004. His mode of communication was always deeply ironic, but so was mine, and yet our ironies were never calibrated. We didn’t talk much—he being one of the top dogs, me being a lowly copy editor—but when we did, we talked past each other, as if in different languages, or with fully non-overlapping sets of cultural references. This isn’t a criticism. It’s just how it was. We didn’t get each other, we couldn’t get each other.
But there is one thing he said that has stuck in my head for more than 20 years now. It was in the early minutes of a Monday morning full-staff editorial meeting, when people were chatting about their weekends, and Homans announced—or at least it felt like an announcement—that he’d run 10 miles on Sunday, from his Noho home out into Queens. I’ll butcher the precise quote, but he said something like, “It’s good to be able to run 10 miles” or “It means something to run 10 miles” or “Everyone should get to run 10 miles.” I’m sure it was far cleverer than that, but time has eroded the precise diction from my memory.
In any case, this off-hand remark lodged within me. I was running back then, but was still new to it, so the idea of 10 miles as a meaningful marker—of ability, of accomplishment, of masculinity even—fascinated me. Could I do that? Did I need to do it? Was there some secret wisdom lying on the other side of the 10-mile line? Was this what separated a genius like Homans from an inconsistent striver like me?
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Fast-forward to today: Nearly every Sunday for roughly the past 15 years, I’ve run at least 10 miles. Sometimes I’ve done it on Saturday. Sometimes, like when I’ve been training for a marathon, the run has been more than twice as long. Occasionally, I’ve run on trails, but mostly it’s been on roads and sidewalks, through and around Prospect Park and the Brooklyn and Manhattan waterfronts. I’ve done it in the rain and when it was 80 degrees out and when the streets were covered in snow. But wherever and whenever I’ve run on the weekend, 10 miles has remained my minimum goal.
For some of you, that may sound like a lot. For others, an easily surpassed baseline. I’ve felt both ways myself. It never stays stable.
We should acknowledge, though, that “10 miles” is an arbitrary figure. It appears to be a marker of achievement only because we use a base-10 number system, and we use base-10 most likely because we (generally) have 10 fingers. Had evolution gone a different way, I’d be running 12 miles every weekend. Or 8 miles. Or I could have selected another arbitrary number: 90 or 100 minutes, say, or—more to my liking—99 minutes or 9.876 miles or 12.34 miles.
But those just don’t work the same way as 10 miles, nor were they presented the way I so intensely but vaguely remember Homans presenting his achievement. The other numbers just don’t stick. Homans’s words were a meme in the classic sense: the compact packaging of an idea such that it becomes durable and easily transmissible. Ten miles means something. Now it’s in your head, too.
I’m trying to think of other such memes—beliefs, really—that might be stuck in my head. Ideas I’ve accepted and relied on for decades without ever questioning whether they have any basis in reality. The Internet has catalog after catalog of such ideas, often presented as “Lies my parents told me”: we love you and your siblings equally, give respect to get respect, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, everything will be all right. To me, those are too cliché to bother with—cynical and boring to even repeat.
Ah, here’s one: In my early teens, I told my parents I wanted to start lifting weights; they responded by saying it would hurt my growth to lift before age 16. Now I blame them for my never having any upper-body strength! Unfortunately, though, they have no memory of ever saying this to me, so my guilt attack doesn’t really land.
Most likely, the memes that define my internal outlook are buried so deeply that—with the exception of I Believe in Luck—they can no longer be turned into simple phrases. In sum, they constitute my ethos, whatever that happens to be. This experiment, Trying!, could be seen as an attempt to render it into words. Lots and lots of words.
For a while, I told myself that every few years, I should systematically examine my core beliefs, subjecting them to some kind of rigorous assault of logic in order to see whether they held up, or whether I would still cling to them. I like the idea of certainty, of knowing with confidence that I do believe the things I believe, but to achieve that requires the acceptance of doubt: Those tenets may not be valid, or their meaning may have waned. I have to ask myself, at regular intervals, if I still am who I once was.
I probably am. Those who’ve known me since the twentieth century still recognize me, and though I like to imagine I’ve grown and changed, anyone can draw a continuous line from then-me to now-me. My consistency, even amid the upheavals of life and travel and family, defines me. I might put on the mask of risk and rupture, but underneath I’m steady, an agglomeration of ideas and words, some my own, others inherited, adopted, incorporated.
And so I will keep running my 10 miles every weekend, preserving the most minor of a great editor’s thoughts in my body as I continue my quest to find out what those miles might mean. If I ever get an answer, I’ll let you know. 🪨🪨🪨
