To someone who taught the world how to be alive
Why do you love Anthony Bourdain so much?
To me, Anthony Bourdain is a romantic ideal. A rose that never quite blooms, a world that never fully materializes.
Tony is an example of what it means to shed the burden of today. A man societally isolated yet humanistically harmonious. Yes, harmonious—that’s the word. He aligned himself with the frequencies of what this all really means and made an effort to embody it.
Tony wasn’t perfect. The clown killed himself and the circus ended early. But that’s not the Anthony Bourdain we knew. You have to lose in order to love, and to love this human experience as violently as Tony did takes something from you each time. Passion is a sword. To be alive is to flirt with death.
Without Tony, what would pho mean on a stool in Saigon? What would that street food with your best friend amount to? In every American bookstore, there’s a boy with the same aloof gratitude and wanderlust, just roaming around. Where would he be without Tony? Because in all of us, when you squint, when you sit down and are able to just be with yourself… there’s a very light echo of him. Every once in a while, we embody what Tony was supposed to be. A life full of adventure and genuine connection, truly seeing the people before us and fully basking in the richness that has always been around us. When we free ourselves from the world and choose to be here, just here. Nothing more.
Tony is Tony because he knew what it meant to be alive. He saw it and chose to live it. He reminds us that in everything, there is an unserious lightness about the world. He reminds us that there is a thread that connects us all. He reminds us that life is best served slow. No matter how war-torn, how hateful, how rich or poor… we are all cuts of meat, not too strange to each other, not too different no matter how you chop us up.
You, me, and this bowl of food. You, me, and the motorcycles passing by. You, me and each brush stroke on the canvas of this moment. We’re the gallery goers, with the privilege and perspective to see the fullness of humanity. How we choose to live and color each of our moments all add up to this human experience. You and me, we can embody a moment where strife and anger and power and conflict do not exist… for those are the matters of men. Right here: you, me, and this bowl of food… we are the matter of boys.