David Martin Darst – 50th Reunion Essay

David Martin Darst

41 Midwood Road

Greenwich, CT 06830-3807

dmdarst@gmail.com

212-988-9213

Education: Yale BA, 1969; Harvard MBA, 1971

Career: Goldman Sachs: NY, 19 years, Zürich, 6 years; Morgan Stanley MD and Chief Investment Strategist, 20 years; CNBC Financial Markets Contributor, 19 years; teaching for nine years at Yale College, Yale School of Management, and Harvard Business School; adjunct lecturing at Columbia, Wharton, NYU, and Stuyvesant H.S.

Avocations: 11 NYC Marathons; five NYC triathlons; author of 13 books (several best sellers; translated into 11 languages); travel: all 50 states, all 13 Canadian provinces and territories, all 7 continents, and 121 countries; Member of the Advisory Board, Black Rock Arts Foundation and Investment Committee of the Phi Beta Kappa Foundation.

College: Morse

I love writing. I love the feeling of building up and getting ready to write, with all the postponings of the beginning, the procrastinating, the doing anything else but writing. Cleaning the bathtub. Working on taxes. Writing letters, anything else but what cries out to be written.

I love the act of writing. I love arranging my talismanic writing objects around me. I love getting the writing space just so. I love finally putting down one sentence on paper, another, then another. I love reading over what I’ve written, liking it, not liking it, making changes, adding, deleting.

I love the physical process of writing. I love using my favorite kind of pen on my favorite kind of paper, filling up the pages as completely as possible, with the slimmest of margins all the way around. I love handwriting. I love my own handwriting. I love getting so caught up in the act of writing that I take short breaths and lose track of time.

I love seeing the world as a child and writing about it, in wonder, awe, worship, amazement, astonishment. I love waking up thinking about writing. I love climbing steps thinking about writing. I love lying there, drifting off to sleep with sentences swirling around me. I love dreaming about writing.

I love imagining through writing what it feels like to be you, and I love trying to make you know through writing what it feels like to be me. I love the backward-and-forward progress of working on a phrase, a passage, a paragraph, a page, a period.

I love trying through writing, to perceive, to personify, to project, to passionify, to provoke, to purify, to pierce, to permeate, to penetrate, to personalize, to participate, to preserve.

I love writing’s ability to put me and you and others into orbit, to push the limits of consciousness, to ponder true meanings, to establish whole branching networks of possibility and persuasion and potential.

I love the way writing plays with words and sounds.

I love being obsessed with time and the role of literature and writing in attempting to arrest time, to capture time, to savor time, to appreciate time, to float on the downstream flow of time and simultaneously to fight and swim upstream against the unceasing current of time. Writing allows this, makes this happen, permits it, animates it, reifies it.

This writing is the bringing of the weather, feeling the closeness of the moon, applying sunblock for the stars’ nighttime rays. This writing is thinking of how there must be a way to store up the blazing 1:00 p.m.to 4:00 p.m. heat of a peak summer’s day and use it later to warm you at night, chasing away the hibernal boreal shivering.

This writing invites you, cajoles you, urges you, begs you, entreats you, implores you, blandishes you to figure out connections waiting to be discovered and coaxed from their hiding place. This writing incites you to forge your own linkages.

This writing searches for quantum entanglement and superposition of states across the entire universe.