Start with the ending: Anthony Bourdain

At an ending, we can go back to a beginning.

Rereading Anthony Bourdain’s early piece in The New Yorker this morning, as his body lies in a morgue in a building in France, it’s hardly a balm to soothe the factor of his suicide but it is a window into a moment that for him must have been exhilarating. First flush of new freedom, realizing that the words worked, that his new work, words, could in fact become his reality — you can detect these movements and changes underway in his article, back in 1999.

Bourdain was on a mission to write himself out of the kitchen — a world that was killing him by degrees — and he completed that quest in his lifetime. In our culinary times, his was perhaps the greatest first act that was actually a second act that we’ll ever know. We can celebrate his life in this way.

We rooted for him. There was something about Bourdain that was an antidote to toxic masculine behaviors, to toxic celebrity and toxic power: he wasn't perfect, but he said so, and he said the right things at critical times. His rise and his sustaining momentum, his transformation of the programs from exuberant look-at-me-travel television to a serious pan-cultural investigation of why it’s so hard to stop fucking up as a planet … his new relationships and loves, watching his on-screen chemistry with Asia Argento coming to life — it was hard not to root for him.

Losing him is significant; he was an armor for our currently fragile cultural conscience. I wish he could have written himself out of the kitchen this time.

It is good to look back and read his first piece again. The world was just opening to Bourdain's voice. We were fortunate for it: humane; empathetic; precocious; he wore his heroes on his sleeve; he was good.