Not always on purpose. Sometimes it happens through grief, sometimes through guilt, sometimes through memory polished over years until you can’t separate the woman from the life she lived.

Irish literature is full of mothers who feel larger than the room around them. Tender and terrifying at once. Self-sacrificing and impossible. Women holding families together while everyone else wandered off into poetry, politics, war, drink, religion, or silence.

Joyce, who couldn’t make anything emotionally simple, gives us:

“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.”

— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A tender certainty delivered in Joyce’s usual language of grime, doubt, and human ruin.

Beckett offers less comfort:

“I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now.”

— Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Motherhood as room, as inheritance, as absence, as bad furniture you somehow still live among.

Yeats gives us the labour of it:

“I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow / Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow.”

— W. B. Yeats, “The Song of the Old Mother”

No halo. No soft focus. Just the fire, the scrubbing, the baking, the sweeping, an old body keeping the world from going cold.

And Wilde, who knew every family resemblance was both joke and sentence:

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”

— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

A cruel line. A brilliant one. Probably quoted at an Irish funeral after the third drink.

What these writers understood is that mothers are rarely remembered cleanly by the people who knew them best. They get remembered as human beings. Complicated. Funny. Sharp. Tired. Beautiful in flashes. Sometimes overwhelming, sometimes lonely, sometimes the only stable thing in a house that was otherwise falling apart.

The best writing about mothers refuses to behave. It won’t make them saints. It won’t reduce them to sacrifice. It leaves fingerprints on the page.

Not perfect women. Real ones. The kind who survive literature because they survived life first.

The trouble with Harry is that he isn’t evil in any usable sense of the word. Villains announce themselves and make refusal easy; one can decline a villain the way one declines an oyster of suspicious provenance. Harry is charming, funny, observant, and occasionally right in ways that are difficult to forgive him for. He corrupts in the manner of a brilliant tutor — by making the wrong answer sound more interesting than the right one.

On a first reading, it’s tempting to mistake him for Wilde’s mouthpiece. Harry doesn’t simply enjoy ideas; he enjoys watching what ideas do to people, particularly beautiful and impressionable people who haven’t yet learned to defend themselves. He treats other lives the way certain hostesses treat their gardens: with great enthusiasm, no expertise, and a serene indifference to what dies.

The sentence is the trap. Harry’s gift is for making bad ideas sound inevitable, the way certain melodies make you forget you didn’t choose to start humming them. He takes selfishness, vanity, and aesthetic detachment and dresses them so beautifully you find yourself nodding before you’ve decided whether to agree. His cruelties arrive gift-wrapped, often in better paper than his compliments. His sentences sound discovered rather than prepared, which is, of course, the surest sign of preparation.

What makes him more than a stylish nihilist is that he understands something the novel’s other characters miss. People are often starving for permission to become larger, stranger, less obedient versions of themselves. Dorian’s tragedy is not that he wants this; it’s that Harry’s version of permission comes without any corresponding sense of what to do with it. Harry hands him the key to the cabinet and forgets to mention that some of the bottles are poison — though one suspects, reading carefully, that he did not forget at all.

Still, the hunger Harry names is real, and it runs through the whole novel. It’s the hunger to become more fully yourself before the world talks you out of it, the hunger most people quietly abandon somewhere in their twenties in exchange for being practical and respectable and no longer embarrassing. Respectability is the consolation prize life hands out to those who failed to be interesting, and most of us accept it with relief. Harry is wrong about almost everything, but he is right that a life entirely without aesthetic risk becomes a small one, and that small lives, however virtuous, make for very dull biographies.

The line gets truer the longer you live with it, which is its cruelty. That he said it out loud before you noticed is its mercy.

Wilde gives him the best lines for a reason. Harry is what happens when intelligence and taste are unmoored from any sense of obligation to other people — a condition that produces excellent conversation and very poor friendships. He’s seductive precisely because the alternative, caring carefully and creating honestly and accepting that beauty and ethics sometimes pull in different directions, is harder and less quotable. The novel doesn’t endorse him. But it doesn’t pretend he’s easy to dismiss, either, and neither should we. The most we can do is read him with our eyes open, which is, admittedly, what he would want.

Since 2020, life has been full for all the right reasons. There was a business to raise and a family to run. A morning coffee asking, “Who will you be today?” And a nightcap reminding you not to ruin the mystery.

There is some comfort in not becoming one thing. Some people seem to know exactly who they are, while the rest of us keep things interesting.

The artistic life, at least, never asked for that kind of certainty.

It leaves room for the strange thrill of finding someone new and realizing, within a few lines or a single image, that they have something honest to say.

That feeling is hard to replace, like a thrift-store miracle: your hand on something half-buried, strange, and somehow waiting just for you to find it.

That was always part of the joy of The Esthetic Apostle. We were never trying to build a polished little machine. We wanted to bring real work from real people into the same room and see what happened.

So much of what we see is artificial, interchangeable, algorithmic. Everything must be optimized for the machine.

Is the machine in the room with us right now?

Yes, and we’re okay with that. We are still an online magazine. The trouble is not that the machine exists. The trouble is mistaking its sorting for taste.

The Esthetic Apostle is returning because we miss our community. We miss discovering both known and unknown artists. We miss bringing together poetry, stories, essays, paintings, photographs, and strange little pieces of people’s lives from around the world.

This Esthetic Apostle is for people who make things without waiting to fit the mold. The single mom painting with her kids. The retiree with a lifetime of wisdom. The outsider who captures the world in a way no one else could.

It is for people with grit and love for what they do.

It is not for closed minds. Of any kind.

We are looking for honesty, vulnerability, and originality. We are looking for work with fingerprints on it. Work that has not had all the pain edited out of it. Work that reminds us there is a person on the other side.

We are not coming back because we have everything figured out. We are coming back because we believe in what we do.

And because there are still artists and writers out there making things worth finding.

If this letter does anything, let it help you pull something out of the drawer, off the hard drive, out of the notes app. Finish it. Ruin it. Save it. Share it before it talks itself out of being seen.