On Being Trusted with Someone's Worst Idea.

He wrote it down in the careful handwriting of a man asking permission of himself — and handed it to me, the way one hands over an inheritance.

The paper was good. He had chosen it. That was, I would later understand, the first thing he had wanted me to know about him: that even the worst of his ideas had been considered well enough to deserve a particular cotton weave.

I read it slowly, in the way one reads a letter from a country one has not yet visited but has heard about. He watched my face. I let my face be watched.

What I want to say, in this letter to no one, is that being trusted with someone's worst idea is one of the more serious things that has ever happened to me. Not because the idea was particularly bad — it was not, by the standards of the rooms I tend to walk through; it was, in fact, almost touchingly conventional — but because the trust was unhedged.

He had not pre-apologized. He had not framed it as a hypothetical. He had not written I know this is a lot, which is the most cowardly phrase in the English language. He had simply put the thing on the table, in his hand, and watched me read it.

The most cowardly phrase in the English language is I know this is a lot.

And here is the thing that no one tells you, when you take this on as a vocation: most of the work, most of the time, is not in the doing. It is in the receiving. It is in the moment when a person hands you the version of themselves they have spent a decade arranging to be presentable, and then says, now this one, please, I would like you to hold this one.

You do not negotiate at that moment. You do not improve their idea. You do not, God help us, workshop it. You take it, you hold it as you would hold a small animal that has not been held before, and you decide — quietly, while he is still watching your face — whether the answer is yes, no, or not yet.

I said not yet. I will not tell you what it was. The point is not the idea. The point is that he understood not yet, and went home, and slept, and wrote back the next morning, and the morning after that, until not yet became this evening, and we did the thing he had wanted to do, and at the end of it he wept, and at the end of the weeping he laughed, and at the end of the laughing he said the truest thing anyone has ever said to me, which I will also not repeat, because it was his line and not mine.

The chair I was sitting in is still in the room. He still writes. The paper is still good.