September 2026, Paris

I have been feeling overwhelmed by work. This is not particularly new, and it is difficult to say this without immediately feeling the need to qualify it, because I am aware that I have chosen this life, that I am extraordinarily lucky to be able to compose, and that much of what overwhelms me is also what I have wanted for myself. But lately I have been wondering about the particular exhaustion that comes from having to be creative continuously, or perhaps from having to perform creativity continuously: to make another piece, find another question, enter another project, imagine something I have not imagined before, and then find a way of explaining why any of it should matter.

Of course, this is what we do. We make things. And making something means believing, at least temporarily, that this particular thing needs to exist. Still, there is something strange about having to produce this belief again and again.

Maybe I feel it more strongly now because the conditions around the work seem to be changing. We speak constantly about audiences, about how to reach people who might not otherwise encounter this music, how to make what we do less closed, less protected by the structures that have historically surrounded it. I believe in this. I don’t want to make music only for people who already know how to listen to it. I don’t want difficulty to become a value in itself, or obscurity to function as proof of seriousness. But I also don’t know where this desire fits in a world that wants everything immediately.

It seems that more and more things have to tell us what they are very quickly. We have to understand what we are looking at, what we are listening to, why it matters, whether we like it. The distance between encounter and judgment has become extraordinarily small. If something does not hold us immediately, there is always something else waiting.

I am not interested in making a nostalgic argument about attention spans. Every generation probably believes that something essential is disappearing, and perhaps we are no different. But what happens to an art whose experience depends on time when time itself becomes difficult to ask for?

There is music I love that I did not love when I first heard it. There are books that resisted me for years. There are works I still do not entirely understand and that I return to precisely because I don’t. Their opacity is not an obstacle standing between me and the work; it is part of the relationship I have with it. Something remains unavailable, and because it remains unavailable I continue moving towards it.

I wonder whether we are becoming less willing to remain inside this interval: the interval in which something has happened but we don’t yet know what it means. And I wonder what happens to art when we begin designing it in anticipation of this impatience.

I am not particularly good at remaining inside this interval either.

I have been talking with my therapist about perfection. It’s so naïve, because obviously I know that perfection does not exist. But knowing that something does not exist does not necessarily eliminate the desire to move towards it. I have spent most of my life asking myself whether something can be better, whether I can go further, whether I have stopped because the thing is finished or simply because I am tired.

The reasonable response is that one has to learn to accept enough. Enough work. Enough success. Enough ambition. Enough improvement. There is an enormous amount of wisdom in this, I am sure. There is also something in it that frightens me. Because I don’t know when acceptance becomes resignation. If I know that I am capable of going further, why shouldn’t I? Sometimes I think that I would rather exhaust myself moving towards something impossible than protect myself by deciding in advance that what I already have should be sufficient. And then I hear the violence in that sentence. Because what kind of life is it if nothing is ever allowed to be sufficient?

I don’t know.

I don’t know whether it is better to live longer, more gently, accepting that much of what one wants will remain unfinished, or to spend oneself more completely in pursuit of something that may never arrive. I have the fear that if I stop pushing, even briefly, something will close.

I am frightened by a culture that increasingly seems unable to tolerate waiting, and yet I am extraordinarily bad at waiting for myself. I want art to have the right not to reveal itself immediately. I want a piece of music to be allowed to take forty minutes before I understand what kind of time I am inside. I want a book to lose me and perhaps find me again fifty pages later. I want to protect the possibility that an experience can remain obscure for years before something suddenly rearranges itself and I understand what it has done to me. But I rarely allow my own life the same opacity.

I want to know what I am doing. I want the work to become what I imagine it could become. I want to become the person I think I might be capable of becoming. And because the distance between where I am and where I imagine I could be never disappears, I continue trying to close it.

Perhaps perfection is also a problem of attention. Not because it means paying too much attention, but because it makes it difficult to stay with what exists without immediately converting it into what it could become.

I don’t want to solve this by learning to care less. I don’t want to make smaller work, want smaller things, or protect myself from disappointment by reducing the distance between what exists and what I can imagine. That distance is also where most of my work begins.

But perhaps there is a difference between remaining inside a distance and trying constantly to eliminate it.

In music, I can wait. I can allow a sound not to tell me what it is yet. I can stay with a material for months without knowing what it will become. I can accept that understanding may arrive later, and sometimes that it may not arrive at all. I can even construct an entire piece around that delay.

And still, I find it so difficult to extend the same patience to myself.