He was the odd combination, a literary man in the professional kitchen, at home with reading George Orwell, and in his writing on the order of literary criticism, along with getting out of his creative shell to talk, up close and personal, sharing ribald jokes with all walks of kitchen life.  He made thoughtful television that never failed to draw interest and attention and a satisfaction found in few places beyond Ken Burns.  His hybrid quality speak of our times, when talent and intelligence must take unconventional paths to find comfort in a life of hardship, for times when the innate character of the human being does not fit into the jobs the new economy provides.

He figured out the template, that of the classic writer, a person reflective and inward looking out, being out in the world with adventure.  He did it better than all of us, with far greater courage and willingness for the weariness of travel and risk and adventure...   Food and writing, dining and travel, in a considered and thoughtful fashion, written down and recorded as close to the actual experience you could get.  (None could blame him from a shift, in degrees, from writing to television;  he still wrote his own show.)

One in the restaurant business might have observed, that the ingrained experience of the stresses of each shift he had done as chef might have eventually made those other kinds of stresses, of travel and lonely hotel rooms, as ordinary, eventually toothless, a cause for humor, grist for the mill at least once one had a drink in front of him.  He must, and probably out of habit, put up with a lot of stresses, all along.  Restaurant people, nor anyone else for that matter, don't like to admit that the stress can catch up with you.

He, in his travels and culinary adventure, combined the literary, the thoughtful, with all the wonderful and immediate experience that everyone who's ever worked in a restaurant might know, the joy of good dining.

But so deep and fair to walks of life, an adept at cutting through bullshit, with a critical eye toward popular culture, broad as Dostoevsky (think about that) in his vision if not in literary verbosity, that, inevitably, deep down in the gut, one began to worry about him.  Tolstoy embraced the whole, and he hid his guns from himself.  Bourdain was never lacking when finding words to understand a culture, an encounter, a dinner with fellow beings and chefs and their families.

And as with the great Russians who walked in life, it is not too difficult to place Bourdain's work under the same overarching sense, really, of faith, into which all things fit in, the kind of thing we see in The Brothers Karamazov, or the grounding of the endurance behind Notes From the Dead House.  Bourdain might have placed his faith, conversationally, in other things, too snarky, and a New York realist without time for such things, to personally admit any religiosity, as might happen with the cynicism that enables fame.  Yet, he was an embracer of the Old School, wherever he might find it.  At least to this writer and his own peculiar perspective, too sensitive to long push it upon others in any insistent way, a believer in us all getting along, and keeping the dreamy silliness of his own faith private, more or less.

The man was well-read, in a liberal arts way, while having the courage to enter Culinary Institute of America after a year or so at Vassar.  He could reference Conrad and the classics, Fellini, a whole body of culture quite beyond that of American popular tradition.  He was a being endowed with all the characters of literature.

If he had such grace and kindness and hospitality, all of in on visceral level, a friend to so many, one had to wonder,  where did it come from, out of what deep pocket of private hell did he then grow above, making a phoenix out of the ashes of the previous.   What had he seen, what darkness did he come out of, to forget, that he had good will ambassador friendship for all people in all situations.


And one knew it himself intimately.  The need for quiet, for obscurity, for a walk in the woods while going to work to exorcise the demons, and then, even miserable, then setting up, getting everything in the bar ready to go, and then, after a staff meal, writing down the specials for the night on a little pad of handcut paper that fit in the breast pocket of your boring Brooks Brothers clean shirt which had been carefully folded in a legal pad notepad on the way to work on a bicycle, next to a ballpoint Parker Jotter pen.  What was darkness and drudgery and a sense of absolute uselessness, of rolling the heavy stone up toward the top of the long steep hill and then it rolling back down again and again, no retirement fund, and health insurance going up, and with each year a new need to do better... The stone will be pushed up toward the hill again.  All that became the most marvelous vessel of true hospitality, humor, candor, charisma... The basis of a way to read people, to get them, to interact, all of which brought a deep joy and a sense of well-being, a sense of no small accomplishment toward insuring peace would continue to reign in the world of good will and in there with present understanding and enactment of the great Tocquevillian Democracy of elbows and words rubbed in bars.

So much of what he said...  so true, so balanced, so relevant, so valid.

One of the days before I knew, I made a tea of muddled lime, sea salt, turmeric, and when I stirred the cup, as green tea steeped, the perfect yin and yang, the perfect image of the swirl of the universe in my cup.   And seeing that, one can only know that all in the great balance, good and bad, positive and evil, left and right, positive and negative, clockwise, counterclockwise, moon, sun, night day, drunk or sober, male female, mom, son, dad, daughter, brother, sister, intellectual, workman, all comes to some balance, and that is the only way I can now understand all that has been very positive, and helpful, a model, a way forward, even as he himself took  great risk of the jump into candid uncertainty and a new kind of being in the weeds, there would be an end, and the end has come to reckoning for this man, Anthony Bourdain.


"I've had a lot of good friends for a week," he said, speaking of his travels, as remembered now by Bill Buford on CNN's tribute that night.  That is the restaurant business itself, he would have known.  People pass through, and you are the spiritual as well as the physical messenger of the best friendliness has to offer. there at the center of the act of dining.  Many were his friends, but as great as friendship as he was, one wonders of his way of doing things, did he really have a match, a close intimate friend to reach mutually in good company beyond the frills of good blue cheese and port, of local rabbit stew and ramps, local wines....

Always first with the good spirit.  And now he has left this world without any of us really ever getting good interview of all his science, all his science fiction.  What a character, what a man.  He left us with a final answer.

Which is that no one can ever know another person.  All we can do is try.




Afterword:

Of course one had hoped he'd come to DC.  He'd sit at my bar briefly, have provencal vegetable soup, crusty boneless pigs feet, sweetbreads, veal cheeks, cassoulet, a good glass of Burgundy, an Isle Flottante for dessert.  He'd note that I too had some honorable literary attempt.  And I would reply that early work, just not focussed enough on what counts, tales of work.   We would have tasted a Pinot from the Loire.  A Languedoc, a Marcillac, a Madiran, a Morgon, a Clos des Mouches, a Bouche du Rhone iconoclastic red..


The report on him, and how he might have acted the last few days of his life.  Going beyond Thursday dinner, not showing up...  "He'd put everything into the shoot...  And then he'd go back to his room and isolate himself."  On an exhausting schedule, and, probably, too good a sport about it, too much susceptible to having a drink then, when he arrived.

And there was also what he had written earlier, or said in interview, or perhaps on his show (see, his natural skill, coming out of his being a real person), about even working as hard as he did, executive chef of Les Halles in New York, he was in debt, could not pay for health insurance, that when he was in the time of writing the mass of work that because Kitchen Confidential, first seen as an article in The New Yorker, he was a very worried person as far as normal concerns of rent, etc.

It could be argued that this form of life, a reader stuck in--imagine--a kitchen in New York City, was a perfect background for the pace of his television work, works of endurance, ease, personal pain, energy, exhaustion.