My friend Peter Foges wrote a wonderful, short blog, “It Girls,” on Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks for Lapham’s Quarterly. My comment reads as follows:

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Dear Peter,

“Let no man be called happy before his death.” Thus Solon.

But then what of Garbo and Louise Brooks? What of these after the end of celebrity? The first question raised by this remarkable piece is whether a life well-lived can only be assessed after it is over. Were these successful lives, after all?

Then there is the question of art, of course. For Garbo, art disgusts, it repulses, it traps and narrows. But life without art? Even narrower.

Yet for Brooks, it seems, the art of writing about oneself, the art of confession may forgive, if only slightly, the little things. If the whole damn thing was not ultimately worth it, still it may not have all been for naught.

Andrew