Accidental renaissance

I saw a photo on twitter the other day. It was part of a tweet thread entitled: “Photos that look like paintings”. There was one that completely moved me. It’s the photo of Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” in a night club¹ in New York City. Not knowing the history of the photo, I admit my first reaction was one of nostalgia. I knew the gravitas of Billie’s voice and naively imagined how incredible it would have been to be sitting in nightclub in Greenwich Village in the 30s listening to a generational talent croon her heart out not 5 feet from you. But beyond that there was clearly something profound in the emotion of the photo.

A few days after, I was interviewing a potential lead engineer to join our team. My teammate and I got together after the call and both agreed that there was something missing from the candidate’s answers. Every answer was seemingly “correct” and backed up by knowledge and expertise of his craft. But the delivery felt formulaic. Almost ai generated. They lacked emotion. Emotion that comes from experience on the other side of hardship.

Coincidentally, the next day, I was re-watching the movie “The Intern” and there’s a scene where De Niro and Anne Hathaway share their appreciation for Billie Holiday. “She can transport you”. This reminded me of the photo I saw and decided to look it up. I stumbled upon a Reddit thread called /r/AccidentalRenaissance, and learned of the real story behind this photo, the origins of the poem that became the lyrics to the song, and the pain and injustice Billie endured and the courage it took just to sing this song.

Some art moves you and you don’t know why. Some people’s stories and experience resonate differently, or convince you that the knowledge they’ve gained comes from a place or experience that given the choice, they would rather not have endured.

Jeremy Giffon, in his interview on Invest Like the Best ², talks about binaries of people, and one that resonated with me is whether someone is Before or After their fall, and everyone is one of the two. I love this binary framing and find it deeply insightful to the question of why certain people, art, music, has the capacity to move you more than others. Why certain people have the capacity to take on enormous risk and shape their world. I believe it’s the wisdom that comes out the other side of hardship. The unfortunate paradox being that if you asked Billie Holiday, or the war veteran, or my Zeda Leo if they are glad they went through the suffering they did, the answer would of course be no. But it’s precisely those experiences that made them.