I cut the wood from a forked branch in the forest behind my childhood house in upstate New York. A “Y” of oak; made from the good kind of branch only children and dogs can identify, one that put up a little fight and then cracked when it split off the tree.

My father showed me how.

He had a firetruck-red Victorinox pocketknife he let me use under supervision and then, that summer, without it, his hands folded over my hands until they released, and I stripped the bark down to the pale wet wood and tied a length of surgical tubing (or maybe a thick rubber band) between the arms and spent July firing pebbles at soda cans lined up on a stump, and once, to my lasting regret, at a chickadee I am grateful I missed.

(note to reader: I say I’m grateful I missed because there was another bird, a few years later, and a different weapon, and I did not miss that one and I will get to that soon.)

If you have read Lord of the Flies, you may recognize the first dark thrill of reach, of learning that your hands can be made to hurt something they cannot touch. Sir William Gerald Golding drops a planeload of British schoolboys onto an empty island, strips away every adult and every rule, and lets readers watch how fast the civilized little choirboys discover the joy of a sharpened stick. How quickly Jack, who cannot bring himself to kill a trapped piglet in the first chapter, becomes the boy who paints his face and hunts a human by the last. The novel’s whole terrible engine is the seduction of reach: the thrill, almost erotic in Golding’s telling, of a soft-handed child learning that his arm can be made longer, that a thrown thing can strike what the hand cannot touch. The conch tries to hold them to council and fairness, but the spear keeps winning. And the clever move Golding understood (which has kept the book on syllabi for seventy years) is that the spear does not win because the boys are literal monsters. It wins because the reach feels good. The thrill is the discovered length of your own arm, not the stone itself.

Standing on a stump at nine with a rock stretched back to my cheek, pulled enough that the tension reddened my fingers, I think the beast in me already knew Golding was right and, perhaps, did not especially care.

The wooden structure of the slingshot has not changed in twenty-four years. As I said, the tubing perished a long time ago; it couldn’t fire a marble now.

The wood is just the wood.

But it has moved with me through eight apartments and many borrowed rooms, always finding the shelf (where I keep it in an old Trader Joe’s coffee tin alongside a fistful of stiffening paintbrushes) because every time I pick it up it returns a different verdict, and I have only recently understood that I keep it the way other men keep a scale, or a sports jersey from their glory days, or a mirror, or a priest.

At nine it was power; the pure boyish delight of having made a thing that threw a stone farther than my arm could.

At twenty it was nostalgia; a souvenir of a freedom I could already feel closing behind me like water.

Now, at almost thirty-three, I pick it up and the first thing I notice is my own hand around it: an adult man’s hand, with knuckles in it I don’t remember acquiring. And then my very adult, very neurotic brain does what it does, and the whole vertiginous arc opens up underneath me:

that the same impulse that carved this fork from a tree is the one that chipped the first flint into an edge, that strung the first bow, that cast the first bronze, that milled the first barrel, and that does not stop, that runs in an unbroken line straight through to a control room in the desert where men pulled an element out of the ground and split its very atoms to make the largest weapon the species has ever held. It is the jump cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as the ape hurls the bone into the air, and Kubrick lets it tumble and tumble end over end and become, in a single edit across four million years, an orbiting machine of war. The bone and the satellite are the same object. The slingshot and the warhead are the same gesture. I am holding the bone. I hold it and I feel, in roughly equal measure, awe at what we are and dread at what we are.

The vertiginous arc closes.

Then I put it back on the shelf.

So, yes, my old slingshot did not change.

I changed.

And the strange gift of the object, the reason it has survived eight moves when I have abandoned a mustard-yellow fold-up couch, printed copies of Monet paintings, desks with names and half-finished poems carved into their wood, water-stained notebooks full of characters I never figured out, friendships, lovers, and entire versions of myself, is that by staying exactly the same, it shows me how far I have traveled from the boy who made it.

It is a fixed point. I take my own measurement against it.

I want to convince you that you should own things like this on purpose. Even the ones that don’t flatter.

I teach a class, with a colleague, at a university in New York. It is called Museums as Storytellers, designed for first-year students (eighteen-year-olds arriving from Lagos and Seoul and Ohio into the overwhelming noise of the city) and the premise is that we will use New York’s cultural institutions to teach them how a place remembers.

We take them to MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum, to the Museum of the Moving Image out in Astoria, to the Museum of Chinese in America, to the National Museum of the American Indian in its great Beaux-Arts customs house at the bottom of the island. We teach them to read a museum the way you’d read a text, to ask not just what is here but who decided it belonged here, and what that decision was trying to say about us.

In the Met, this question screams, because the Met pretends it isn’t a question at all.

You walk in and the whole world is apparently just here, arranged for you: an entire Egyptian temple, the Temple of Dendur, lifted stone by stone out of the path of a rising dam and reassembled under a slanting glass wall over a reflecting pool in the middle of Manhattan. A Ming-dynasty scholar’s courtyard, the Astor Court, built by craftsmen flown in from Suzhou. Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, twelve feet of American founding myth painted by a German in Düsseldorf, the flag in it anachronistic, the boat too small, the whole thing gloriously, knowingly false. And, until the Met was made to give it back, the Euphronios Krater, a 2,500-year-old Greek vase the museum had quietly bought from looters and had to repatriate to Italy in disgrace.

I make the students stand in these rooms and with the uncomfortable question: not isn’t this so beautiful, but how did it get here, and what does the getting say about the people who wanted it under their roof? A museum is never a neutral container. It is an argument about who we are, made out of objects that mostly belonged to someone else.

Down at the Museum of Chinese in America the argument is a bit more subtle and made of humbler cultural stuff; old laundry tickets, a wall of vintage magazines, grunge 90s cigarette smoking aesthetics, and bachelor-society newspapers, the paper residue of men kept legally from bringing wives across an ocean. At the Brooklyn Museum last year the students moved through an exhibition of zines, cheap photocopied pamphlets of half a century of American counterculture (riot grrrl, ACT UP, punk) the least archival objects imaginable, ephemera that was never meant to survive a single season, now matted and framed and lit up like Vermeers. That, I tell them, is the whole trick happening right in front of you: the moment a culture reaches down, picks something up off the floor of its own past, and decides this will not be allowed to disappear.

That decision is the entire subject of the course.

The first thing we assign as a reading, before any of the museums, is an essay by the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann called “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.”

Assmann’s argument, compressed to the bone, is this:

There are two kinds of shared memory.

The first he calls communicative memory. This is the living, informal content, the stories your family tells at the table, the things passed mouth to mouth. It is warm and it is fragile and it has a hard horizon: about eighty to a hundred years, three or four generations, and then the last person who actually remembers is gone and it evaporates.

The second kind is cultural memory, and it is the human solution to that evaporation. We take the things that must not be lost and we fix them, in monuments, in rituals, in sacred texts, in buildings, in holidays, so that they no longer depend on any living person’s recall. Assmann calls these anchor points figures of memory.

You watch the mechanism work the instant you look for it.

When a new pope is chosen, the cardinals still burn the ballots in a stove and send smoke up a copper pipe over the Sistine Chapel — black for no decision, white for habemus papam. A piece of fifteenth-century theater beamed live to a billion phones, doing now exactly what it did six hundred years ago: binding a global church to a single fixed point in time and ritual. And there are smaller figures of memory in smaller cultures and groups. On a handful of islands in the Pacific, navigators still hold the genealogies of voyages their ancestors made a thousand years ago, the routes encoded in chant, the sea remembered as a song.

The form barely matters - smoke, chant, a cathedral, a holiday. The function is always identical: a fixed point outside of time that a group returns to, and, in returning, knows itself.

Assmann’s most beautiful line is almost an afterthought: through its cultural heritage a society becomes visible to itself. The monument is not really for the dead. It is a mirror the living hold up to find out who they have become.

So we read Assmann, and then we send the students out into the streets below the classroom (into the West and East Villages and down to the financial district) with their phones, and we ask them to photograph the city remembering itself. They come back with the obvious and the un-obvious.

They photograph the 9/11 memorial, the two voids in the ground where the towers stood, water falling into an absence that refuses to fill.

They photograph Washington Square Arch and don’t yet know it was raised to a man who owned people.

They photograph stumbling-stones, ghost signs, nuclear bunker signs, a synagogue turned condo with the Hebrew still plastered over the door.

They are, without quite having the words for it yet, documenting the machinery by which a city decides what it will refuse to forget.

And every year, somewhere in the discussion that follows, I feel a flicker of dishonesty because I am teaching them how Assmann’s public memory works while knowing that an equally powerful version of it in my own life is not public at all. It has an audience of one. It is sitting on my bookshelf where I left it: a crude oak slingshot, a personal figure of memory, a monument the size of my hand.

Here is the move I want to make (and, yes, you can call it a form of thievery because Assmann is describing something a group does and I am about to steal it for a single person).

I think we each carry a private cultural memory.

I think there are objects, and records, and books, and places that become, for one individual, exactly what the cathedral is for the congregation: a fixed thing held outside of time, charged with a meaning that is ours alone, that we return to across the decades and that, by remaining unchanged while we change, lets us become visible to ourselves.

Assmann’s society looks at its monuments to find out who it has become.

I look at the slingshot.

The mechanism is identical. Only the scale is different.

The reason this works (or, rather, the reason it can work) is something Assmann says almost in passing, and it is the load-bearing idea of this entire essay. No memory can preserve the past. What we get when we return to a figure of memory is never the past itself; it is, in his words, only that which we “can reconstruct within our contemporary frame of reference.” The monument cannot transport you to 1944. It hands you 1944 as you are able to receive it now. Which means the figure of memory is not a recording, but a mirror that shows you your present self in the shape of the past.

This is what happens when I read The Giver.

I have read Lois Lowry’s The Giver eight times.

I started in the third grade and I have read it roughly every three years since, which is less a plan and more a compulsion I stopped questioning somewhere in my twenties.

It is the same book every time. The text does not move.

Jonas still lives in the colorless, painless, perfectly ordered Community; he is still selected to be the Receiver of Memory; the old man (who, on the cover of the edition I first held in the third grade, I was privately certain was a particular hermit-looking-alcohol-smelling man who wandered the edges of my small upstate town, a figure of equal parts pity and menace to every kid I knew) still transfers into him the whole suppressed human inheritance the Community has traded away for safety: snow, sunburn, color, war, love, the beauty of an elephant and the murder of one.

The words are fixed. I am the only variable. And so the book has functioned, across twenty-five years, as a sensitive instrument I own for measuring the drift of my being.

In the third grade, what I fixated on was the color, or rather, the absence of it. Jonas lives in grayscale and does not know it, and the first thing he ever sees flush into color is an apple, red against his hand, and at eight years old I found that almost unbearably beautiful — the idea that the world was secretly full of a richness that could come flooding back. I wanted the apple to turn red, permanently. And I cried when he sleds down a snowy hill towards red, green, and yellow lights at the end of the book.

In high school, I read it as a story about rules, and I hated the Community with the full molten contempt of a sixteen-year-old who has just discovered that adults have built a cage and called it a home. The Sameness, the assigned careers, the rationed feelings, the nightly ritual where everyone dutifully confesses their dreams and swallows a pill to kill sexual desire before it can become anything. I read all of it as a book about everything I was straining against. I read it the autumn I was running across the high-school football field at midnight with a backpack of warm Bud Light we’d gotten God knows how, a cop’s flashlight swinging behind us, my friends scattering into the dark trees at the edges and laughing and the Community, with its curfews and its dream-telling and its quiet horror of any feeling too large to be scheduled, looked to me exactly like the machinery of adults trying to legislate that midnight out of existence. I read it as a sixteen year old in puritanical America, where the body is arriving years ahead of the permission to have one and one must apologize or mute desire. Jonas taking his pill and then, later, refusing it, choosing the ache of wanting over the safety of numbness, read to me as pure adolescent vindication.

Get out! Run! They were always lying to you!

And, I read it again last year, at thirty-two, and it was a different book, because I am a different man, and I paid little attention to color or “adult rules.” It was the reason the Community had created all of these rules and regulations in the first place. They had built a cage out of, not cruelty, but love, and out of fear, and out of the entirely reasonable desire to spare their children pain. They had looked at war and grief and the terrible cost of choice, and they had decided, gently, democratically, with the best of intentions, that safety was worth the price of everything that made life worth being safe for. At thirty-two I no longer read The Giver as a fantasy about a faraway dystopia, but a documentary about the exact trade every frightened society is always tempted to make, including mine, including now, as we look to the cameras on every corner that we welcomed because it made us feel watched-over, or the permanent state of low emergency that justifies one more search, one more list, one more thing it is now simpler not to say in public; the slow, agreeable handing-over of the unbearable in exchange for the manageable, freedom surrendered a piece at a time, never seized at gunpoint but requested, politely, by people promising only to make the fear stop. The Community votes for Sameness because Sameness equals safety.

Same book. Eight times. The text told me nothing new. It only held still, like the slingshot, so that I could see what twenty-five years had done to me.

The “monument of you” does not even have to be a thing you can hold, but a sensory experience.

Assmann was clear about this: a figure of memory can be a ritual, a recitation, a chant, a dance. The Pacific navigators holding a thousand years of voyages in song, no object anywhere in it. The fixed point can be an act you perform identically across time. Which is good, because one of mine has no body at all. It is four minutes and forty six seconds of sound, and the only thing that makes it a monument is that I return to it the same way I always have: alone, usually in the dark, usually when something has already gone terribly wrong.

Every few years I put on Damien Rice’s album O, which I first heard at fifteen and will, I am fairly sure, have playing somewhere in the room when I die.

It is a devastatingly simple record that consists of a man, a woman (Lisa Hannigan), a Lowden S5CP acoustic guitar, a cello, some other strings, a voice that sounds dragged out of him against his will. And this simplicity is what makes the mirror; there is almost nothing on the surface to get in the way of your own reflection. It is dedicated to a friend of Rice’s, a young musician who died just before it came out, and you can hear the death in it before you know the story.

At fifteen, “The Blower’s Daughter” was the most romantic and most desolate song I had ever heard. “I can’t take my eyes off you,” repeated until devotion curdles into a curse. I understood it, with total fifteen-year-old confidence, as a song about wanting a person. Specifically, a girl I had dated for three days, onto whom I had welded the entire architecture of an ideal woman, a role I invented and then assigned her, and who broke up with me over AOL Instant Messenger, after which I posted an away message of such operatic devastation that I am grateful no archive survives. I felt, with the bottomless seriousness of teenage hormones, that Damien Rice and I were the only two men alive who had ever lost anything.

I put it on again last winter, now a fully formed adult, and heard for the first time that it is not really a song about wanting a person at all.

It is a song about wanting, period.

The bare condition of desire, which runs underneath whatever object it happens to seize. It attaches to a girl, yes, but just as easily to a crayon-colored city in Scandinavia I will never live in, a version of myself from before my hairline began its transformation into a triangular shape, a life I didn’t choose, a door that has already shut. The girl at fifteen was what the wanting found to pour itself into. And the song knows this, which is why it refuses to resolve. You hear it in the verb quietly changing under you. “I can’t take my eyes off you” becoming “I can’t take my mind off you,” the difference between a presence you can’t look away from and an absence you can’t stop circling and then in the line it throws away at the end, the most adult line in the song:

“‘til I find somebody new.”

Not forever. Just: this will run until something else interrupts it.

This listening. Every note sitting exactly where Damien left it. The only thing that has changed is the man doing the listening. It has become what I now know about wanting, and about how long it outlasts the thing it wanted, and about the particular labor of letting go that you cannot hear at fifteen because you have not yet had to do any of it.

The “monument of you” can be a place, though places, it turns out, may be cruel, because places do not always hold still.

There is a park in Goshen, New York, near where I grew up, called Salesian Park. When I was a boy it was a half-ruined and frightening place out of a low-budget A24 horror film. For sixty years before it was a park it had been a Catholic residential school for boys, run by an order of priests, and before that it had been a private estate, a great 19th-century mansion whose family had long since died out. So, the ground was already layered with vanished lives, estate under seminary under park, each one built over the corpses of the last. And in my childhood the grounds were still crowded with the priests’ abandoned buildings: a decaying moss-covered seminary, the collapsing and molding mansion, a boarded-up schoolhouse we dared each other to approach.

This place was thick with rumor in the halls of our public school. We said it was haunted, and we were, it turns out, not entirely wrong. A nine-year-old boy fell from the roof of that school in 1964 and died, and the case was strange enough that they reopened it four decades later, because the body had come to rest too far from the wall to be a simple fall. We told each other a priest had done something. We told each other you could hear the boy. One classmate broke in on a dare and came out with a Bible he’d taken from a dust-furred desk in an empty classroom, and I am, to this day, not fully convinced that something didn’t follow him home. We went there to be scared on purpose; to climb the precarious fence at dusk, to stand under the black windows and feel the hair lift on our arms, to put our hands on a wall and feel, or believe we felt, the cold spot where something had happened.

I have now watched, across thirty years, those buildings disappear.

The mansion vanished first; it was halfway to collapse before the town ever bought the place. Then the seminary came down, demolished, the town said, because it had become “a safety hazard.” A public library now stands on part of the grounds where the priests once studied, low and bright and full of natural light, the most unoffensive building imaginable. But the back of the property is unchanged. The pond is exactly where it has always been, ringed with cattails, brown hot-dog spikes on their stalks that we called punks as kids and split open to watch the seeds blow apart like smoke, the Canada geese honking around being either unimpressed by or aggressive towards everyone, the painted turtles sliding off a half-sunk log, the dandelions going to seed in the long grass, the small cemetery up the slope where the priests buried their own.

Children check out picture books fifty yards from where a boy fell off a roof.

Nobody seems to find this strange but me.

I go back when I visit my mother, and the park measures me the way the slingshot does. Except, here, the park is also measuring itself, decaying and rebuilding in real time, so that the two measurements run alongside each other and refuse to line up. As a child I felt the ghosts. As an adult I feel the hauntedness and I cannot help but notice that the building where a child died, and where a Church schooled children behind walls it did not let the town see behind, was pulled down for our safety and a house of public knowledge was raised in its place, all that light, all those free books. A part of me would like this to be a healing: the institution that hid its harm replaced by the institution that hides nothing, the locked seminary become the open library. But I can also feel it as an erasure — the eradication of the evidence, bulldozed and grassed over and made safe, the boy on the roof now twice forgotten, once by the silence in 1964 and once by the pleasant low building where the silence used to stand.

Safety.

It is the same word the Community uses in The Giver.

So here is something scary, and why I think this is worth more than a charming habit, or than a weird aging man sentimentalizing his own youth.

I think we are quietly losing the ability to have fixed points at all as we continue our migration from analog to digital.

The slingshot works because chopped wood cannot update. The Giver works because the words are nailed down. The park, even as it decays, decays slowly, on a human timescale you can stand beside and watch. But almost everything we are now replacing these things with is engineered, specifically and profitably, never to hold still. You no longer take a photograph that fixes a moment in chemical silver and hands you, decades later, the unflattering proof of exactly how you looked that one night you were too drunk to remember. You take an image that was already smoothed and warmed and quietly lied to before it left your hand, a face the AI software nudged toward a prettier average, and then sends it off to live in a feed that re-sorts it and resurfaces it on an algorithm’s schedule rather than your own. Nothing is permitted the dignity of staying the same long enough for you to stand next to it and measure.

We do not just risk a deterioration of our nostalgic capacity.

If nothing holds still, you cannot tell that you have moved.

The measuring stick and the thing it measures drift together, the drift cancels out, and the drift becomes invisible.

You know the sensation already, because your body does. You are stopped at a station, and the train on the next track begins to slide backward, and for one vertiginous second you are absolutely certain it is you who has lurched into motion. That is, until your eye catches a lamppost, something bolted to the ground, and the truth snaps back into place. The lamppost is how you know which of you is moving. It is the only reason you can feel your own velocity at all. Take away every lamppost, let the whole world slide at the same speed you do, and you would glide through your entire life convinced you were sitting perfectly still.

That is the thing a fixed point was always for: not nostalgia, but the power to be confronted by your own change. A culture of perpetual update is a culture that has quietly removed every lamppost, and replaced the mirror with a newer, kinder mirror every few weeks, for free, each one assuring you that you have always looked exactly like this.

Assmann said that through its cultural heritage a society becomes visible to itself. The corollary is the one he didn’t write: a society (or a person) with no fixed heritage cannot become visible to itself at all. It just keeps moving, frictionless and unmeasured, mistaking motion for stillness, because nothing in the frame is holding still enough to prove that anything is moving at all.

Remember, I called this idea of the “monument of you” a theft earlier, so let me show you where it actually breaks.

Assmann is describing something a group does.

Cultural memory, in his telling, is the glue of a “we.” It glues strangers into a people by handing them a shared past to stand on. And I have spent this whole essay applying that machinery to an “I” or a “you,” a single human being alone in a room with a slingshot, which is either a beautiful extension or a category error.

But I’d like to propose that the self, across enough time, becomes a kind of group (and not in the whole “I have so many voices in my head!” kind of way).

The boy of nine who carved that fork in the backyard and the man of thirty-three who turns it over in his hands in his shitty-overpriced Brooklyn apartment are not, in any simple way, the same person. We do not even share a body. Almost every cell I had at nine has since died and been replaced. My skin has turned over hundreds of times, my skeleton has been demolished and rebuilt nearly from scratch, the blood in me is months old at most. The only parts of me that the nine-year-old and I literally, physically share are a few stubborn holdouts: the neurons in the core of my brain, which are never replaced, and the cells at the center of the lens of each eye, which have been there since before I was born and will wither away on the day I die.

(Yes, I'm aware this is just the Ship of Theseus wearing a person costume. I see you back there, Parfit.)

That is the whole of our shared flesh.

The matter that remembers, and the object that lets in light.

Everything else has been swapped out under me while I wasn’t looking.

And we would not even agree about much.

At nine my favorite animal was the porcupine (I found its whole strategy unimprovable, a creature that simply made itself impossible to bother via 30,000 quills). At thirty-three it is obviously the owl, which is either growth or pretension or selling out.

At nine, I believed in God without thinking about it and was afraid of the dark and static on television screens with my whole body.

At almost thirty-three I have reversed exactly one of those.

If the boy and I met, I am not certain we would like each other; I am fairly sure he would find me tired, and I would find him exhausting, and we would both be right.

So what makes us one person, rather than two strangers who happen to share a name and a mother? The body has left, and so it is memory and more than memory, it is the small handful of fixed things we have both, across all that drift, actually touched. The slingshot is one of very few objects on this earth that the nine-year-old and I have held in our hands. It is a physical bridge across a gap that biology does not span.

It is the thread.

But I actually believe now, as I’ve worked through this, that the thread runs in two directions, and if you’ll recall from the top of this piece, I promised you the other bird.

One of my grandfathers is still alive. We see each other once every roughly four or five years, which is a sentence that contains most of what there is to say about us. He was a hunter and a Navy man and a drunk, the whole phenotype, a man with a voice like Velcro who seemed to have been birthed by the foam of the sea and pickled in it, the kind of grandfather a boy mythologizes precisely because he is too intense to actually know.

When I was eleven or twelve he took my brothers and my mother and me up to land he had on a mountain, for a cookout and something adjacent to camping, and at some point he produced a gun and began teaching us to fire it, older brother and younger and me, his hands folded over our hands, exactly the way my father’s hands had folded over mine on the knife two years before.

The same gesture, just one generation up and several degrees more lethal.

I am not a gun person. I have never, before or since, wanted to be. I could not tell you, even now, what kind of gun it was, which is its own small confession, because a man of his line is supposed to know. But I was a child and this was him, the legend, the sailor, my own Ahab, and when my turn came I took the gun and fired it into the trees in no particular direction, at nothing, to be loved.

A bird dropped out of the canopy.

It sounds invented as I type it. It is the kind of thing that does not happen. I am quite sure it happened. I had aimed at nothing, performed a belonging I did not feel, pulled a trigger to be briefly a small man in front of a large one, and the reach found a living being anyway and brought it down out of the sky. And I have never once told that story as anything but a funny one. “Can you believe it, eyes practically closed, and I still dropped a bird?!” The reflex to make it a joke is the sound of a man still trying, two decades later, to be forgiven, still flinching toward the laugh that says I didn’t mean it, I’m not really like that.

But I did, and I am, a little. And there’s something unavoidable: that gun is still on the wall of his house.

I see the gun once every few years, on the rare occasions I go. It hangs and mocks me, and I have never once mentioned it, and he has surely forgotten the afternoon entirely. But I haven’t, and so the gun does to me exactly what the slingshot does; it stays perfectly still and lets me see how much I’ve moved against it. Except that the gun is not mine, and it is not on my shelf with my paint brushes and books, and I do not get to choose when I encounter it. It hangs in his house, in his town, on his terms, and every few years I walk in and it takes my measurement without asking, and the measurement is never about how far I’ve come.

Because here is where this whole essay turns over like a wave crashing onto me, and I must admit I am realizing I have been lying to you a little, the same way I lie about the bird.

I told you at the start that these objects are for measuring how far you’ve come. The slingshot at nine, at twenty, at thirty-two: power, then nostalgia, then awe, a clean ascending line, growth, a man holding a children’s toy and feeling himself deepen like aged wine.

Gosh, that is flattering, isn’t it?

But a fixed object does not only measure the distance you’ve climbed. It measures the floor you cannot get below and the floor does not always move or make way. The slingshot is mine, so it tells me: look how far you’ve come from the boy! The gun is his, so it tells me: look how little of you was ever yours to improve! I keep the slingshot by choice and in the light I prefer. The gun keeps me, in a house I avoid, and convicts me every few years of being, underneath all that careful growth, still exactly the boy who will fire at nothing to be loved and bring a bird to its death and reach, immediately, for the joke.

Because the self is a group, and the group is larger than one lifetime. It is the line of men behind me, whose hands are inside my hands, whose gestures I repeat without consent or memory.

The father’s hands on the knife.

The grandfather’s hands on the gun.

The reach handed down the way the eyes and the surname were handed down, none of it chosen, all of it mine.

Assmann’s monuments bind thousands of strangers into a people who can say we. My two weapons (the one I keep and the one that keeps me) bind a thousand strangers I have been, and a few living and dead men I never chose, into a single person who has to say “I” and mean all of them at once.

So I will keep the slingshot in the old Trader Joe’s bin on my shelf, where it cannot fire and cannot change and cannot be updated.

And in a year or two I will maybe visit my grandfather, because he is old now and the visits are running out, and the gun will be on the wall where it has always been, and I will not mention it, and it will measure me and chuckle (in whatever sound a gun makes when it laughs) anyway.

I don’t know yet who will be standing in front of it receiving this. That not-knowing is maybe the only other reason left to go. But I know this much: he will be the same person who once fired into the trees at nothing, to be loved, and brought a flying thing down out of the sky and who is, even here, even now, with you, half-reaching for the joke that would let him off. His hands will look even more like the old man’s than mine do tonight.

The boy made a toy that missed.

The man remembers the gun did not.

The first time I bought a book in a language I could not read, I bought it from a man I have since met four times.

He was in Coimbra, in a shop two streets uphill from the old university library. Small reading glasses tipped down over a long nose. A graying beard that had given up being a beard sometime in the previous decade and was now just a wandering, foam-like coastline. A tattered shirt under a brown wool vest the exact color of wet leaves. He moved through his own shop the way old librarians move through rooms full of cats and dust, knowing precisely where every spine was even though no human filing system could possibly account for the towers he had built.

I asked him for nothing in particular. He shuffled to a stack near the back, slid out a small dun-colored volume, Rebeldía, by Joaquín Dicenta, Barcelona, 1910, the paper gone the color of weak tea, the binding loose, and put it in my hands without comment.

I cannot read Spanish, and even if I could I would have a hard time with this one, because Dicenta wrote his prose in the dialect of Spanish miners and field hands; the working-class voices the literary establishment had spent centuries pretending did not exist. He was a Republican, a socialist, a friend of bohemians and drunks, and he died in Alicante in 1917 at fifty-four with most of his work consigned to the kind of obscurity that produces small dun-colored 1910 octavos on shelves in shops in Coimbra.

This wizard pressed it on me anyway. Possibly because he knew. Almost certainly because he knew.

The second time I met this man and / or wizard he was in Prague, older, grayer, hair cut shorter. The third time he was in Mexico City, in Roma Norte, with a black cat asleep across the cash register and Spanish-language jazz fusion playing on a vintage radio behind him and a pack of stray dogs negotiating the sidewalk space outside. The fourth time he was in Vancouver, in a shop nestled between a row of tents the city had decided not to see and a brightly lit psilocybin dispensary doing brisk legal business (the only storefront on that block, I noticed, not selling consciousness as a product).

It is the same man each time. I have come to believe this seriously. I think there is a guild, a dying one, of small old men with the same nose and the same vest and the same patient indifference to whether you buy anything, who run bookshops in cities that no longer require bookshops, and who quietly possess a piece of technology the rest of the culture has stopped knowing how to use. They are wizards. They are very bad at marketing. They will probably not exist in twenty years. And what they sell, when you ask the right way, is opacity.

Most things you buy are sold to you with a promise of access; the keys to a feeling, a status, a transformation. The book in a language you cannot read is the rare object sold on the opposite promise. You will not access it. And I’d like to argue here that this is the point.

You hold it open in your lap and your eye runs across the page hunting for the place where the ink converts to sound and sound converts to sense, the way the lungs push the tongue to hunt for the next note in a song it knows, and the conversion does not happen, and your eye keeps trying, and slowly, after a minute or two, something else starts to happen instead.

Saussure called that conversion the bond between the signifier (the mark on the page, the sound in the air) and the signified (the meaning that arrives, instantly, in your head). He thought the bond was the foundational unit of all language and most of conscious life. He was right, and we live inside the immense, almost inconceivable, success of his observation in a way he could not have imagined. The signifier-to-signified snap has become so fast, so universal, so frictionlessly served to us, that we have lost the muscle to do anything else with our attention. A foreign menu hits your phone’s camera and is translated by Google or ChatGPT before you’ve finished raising the device. A song you almost recognize is named for you in eight seconds by an app called “Shazam” you didn’t even mean to open. A plant whose name you don’t know is identified in three. A painting in a museum has its wall text already drafted, the meaning pre-loaded, your reaction tee’d up.

The unfamiliar is allowed to remain unfamiliar for approximately three seconds before some helper steps in to translate it for you.

This is something I’ve thought about a great deal for a number of years: we live in the most over-translated period in human history, and the cost is that we have forgotten how to sit inside not-knowing. The capacity to encounter a thing and let it remain partly opaque has been steadily eaten by the convenience of instant legibility. And it turns out (and you only learn this once you’ve put the phone in a drawer and opened a book whose alphabet you can’t even sound out) that not-knowing was where a particular kind of attention used to live. The translation was never neutral. It was always doing something to what got translated. And the something it did was foreclose all the other ways the thing could have arrived in you.

The wizards know this. That is what they are guarding.

Earlier this week, I wrote about standing on the Charles Bridge in Prague, bored out of my mind in the middle of one of the most beautiful cities on earth. I said there is no cure for that gray, only the temporary, ruinous discipline of letting one real thing in far enough to wreck the comfortable numbness. People wrote in asking what that looks like, in practice. Most of my answers were unsatisfying because most of them sounded like the wellness industry I had just spent four thousand words mocking; put down the phone, go outside, be present.

This is one of the answers I actually believe, which is why I have kept it mostly to myself: I buy books in languages I cannot read, and I sit with them, and I let the mechanism fail on purpose. Allow me to walk you through this practice.

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I’d crossed an ocean to get to Prague. People save their whole lives for the afternoon I was pissing away. And I was alone for it, because I travel the way I do everything (as an introverted fuck with almost no capacity for spontaneous human contact) which means I walk. Twenty-five thousand steps a day, according to the iPhone that will later become the villain of this essay. That kind of walking gets you far in Prague: the winding alleys of Old Town, up to Prague Castle, down through Letná, into the held-breath stillness of the Jewish Quarter, and, inevitably, onto the Charles Bridge.

This city works on you with everything it has. The light coming off the Vltava the color of a forgery, gold and clean. Prague Castle stacked up on the hill like something a child would build if the child were playing make-believe as a mad king. Thirty baroque saints lining the bridge in mid-swoon, frozen at the exact instant of being pierced by God. And I was standing in the middle of all of it, six hundred years of engineered transcendence under my feet, rubbing my thumb across a pane of glass, instead of the bridge’s own stone balustrade, worn smooth and cool by the hands of six centuries of kings and queens and pilgrims and plague-survivors and the genuinely desperate, to check whether anything had happened on the internet in the last four minutes.

Nothing had, but I checked anyway, like a gambler compulsively pulling a slot machine lever that has never once paid out.

I scanned the saints of the bridge like my feed.

St. Vitus, St. Wenceslas, the big black Crucifix, and St. John of Nepomuk, who was thrown off this very bridge in 1393 for refusing to tell a paranoid king what the queen had confessed to him (suspected infidelity), tortured and bound and dropped into the river for the crime of keeping the confessional seal and keeping his mouth shut. His brass plaque is now the most-touched metal in the city, rubbed to a mirror by three centuries of hands hunting just a little luck.

My eyes slid over all of it and registered nothing, the smooth nothing of a thumb crossing forty photographs of strangers’ acai bowls and cats.

Seen it. Seen it. Seen it. Seen something like it.

Somewhere nearby a mustached street vendor was selling trdelník, the cinnamon-and-charcoal smell of it thick in the air; a busker two arches down was sawing through the same four bars of Vivaldi he’d clearly been sawing through all day; a tour guide’s umbrella went by trailed by twenty obedient phones held up like communion wafers. And I lifted my own phone to photograph a setting I was standing directly inside of, so that I could look at it later, smaller, alone, on a screen, or more likely never look at it at all, instead of looking at it now, when it was real and in front of me and free.

And some animal in me, crouched in the shadows of my psyche, knew exactly how grotesque this was.

This memory is an indictment, and I am the defendant. You can put a person inside the corridors of a dreamlike city, and if you have spent enough years letting a small glowing rectangle drip-feed his pleasure to him, a hamster bottle refilled, every few minutes, with a thin warm trickle of morphine, he will stand in the middle of the beautiful fantasy and feel the soft gray nothing of a man waiting for a webpage to load.

The city is perfect. The problem is the man, and the man is me.

I had come because of a dead novelist who also happens to be my favorite.

Milan Kundera (rest in peace) built a Prague in my head many years before I stood on the cobblestone streets of the real one. Communist gray, erotic philosophy, the unbearable weight of history pressing down on people trying to live light. The Unbearable Lightness of Being was the city in words; Tomáš, the womanizing surgeon who can hold a hundred lovers precisely because he refuses to let any of them mean anything; Tereza showing up at his door with one heavy suitcase and the whole crushing weight of actually loving somebody; Sabina in the bowler hat, betraying everyone she meets on principle, mistaking weightlessness for freedom; the Soviet tanks rolling over the Prague Spring in ‘68 while these three try to figure out whether a life means more when it’s light enough to float away or heavy enough to break you. Kundera opened the whole thing on Nietzsche (einmal ist keinmal, once is never, a thing that happens only once might as well not have happened at all) and then spent four hundred-ish pages asking whether that’s a mercy or a horror. I had read it at nineteen and decided, with total certainty, that the man who wrote it had access to some frequency of being that I wanted tuned into my own skull.

I wanted that Prague. More than that, I wanted to be the kind of man who could feel it, or better yet, channel it.

I’d been running a version of this fantasy since I was a teenager.

The scholar-adventurer circling the globe toward some ancient buried meaning, all candlelight and water-stained maps and significance humming under every cobblestone. A real-life Robert Langdon, as cringe as that is to type into a document I intend to let other people read.

And here was the actual man that fantasy had finally assembled, standing on the most storied bridge in Central Europe: checking his TikTok notifications.

That is when I first saw the giant cat.

At the far end of the bridge, where the crowd thinned toward the Old Town tower, something was moving along the stone parapet that was not an obnoxious tourist and was not a flapping pigeon.

It was up on the balustrade, level with the saints, walking the narrow ledge with a low muscled patience; black, or the absence of color that reads as black against bright stone, unhurried, enormous.

A panther, I thought and then quickly checked my sanity.

It paced the parapet beside St. John of Nepomuk, the drowned saint and the big cat sharing a plinth, and it was not looking at the river or the Castle or the light.

It was looking at me.

I blinked, and then it was nothing but a shadow thrown by a streetlamp that wasn’t lit, because it was afternoon and because there was no panther on the Charles Bridge.

A German family edged past with a selfie stick chattering in efficient German.

The busker kept butchering his song.

Why did I hallucinate a great cat watching me from the saints’ ledge? I found out a few weeks later, when I read the story it had walked out of, and understood that it had been pacing toward me for quite some time.

A fact that should frighten us: we are the most stimulated human beings who have ever lived, and we are forever and always bored to the bone.

I never once heard my father say the words “I’m bored.” I don’t think his father had the phrase available to him at all. But my whole generation carries boredom around like a chronic fever, and we carry it while holding a glass slab that contains every song ever recorded, from Beethoven to Bieber; every film ever shot, from the Lumière brothers’ train pulling into a station in 1896 to whatever Christopher Nolan is about to do to the Odyssey; every painting from the Lascaux cave wall to Warhol’s soup cans; every person we have ever loved or wanted, reachable in seconds. It makes no sense until you look at the wiring, and then it makes a sick kind of sense.

Dopamine gets sold, in the podcast-industrial complex, as the chemical of pleasure, but really it’s the chemical of pursuit. It is the molecule that walked our ancestors across a dangerous valley toward a stand of berries or the back end of a gazelle, the molecule that says go, get, chase, more. We get the same hit now (much smaller, but the same circuit lighting up) from a thumb-swipe. A meme. Porn. A new subscriber. A speared antelope’s worth of reward, chopped into ten thousand microdoses and dispensed one swipe at a time, a thousand times a day. And the brain has one iron rule nobody warned us about as children tinkering with these devices: after every spike, you don’t just gracefully float back to zero. You drop below it. You go into deficit, and the deficit has a texture, and the texture is gray, and the gray is boredom.

So modern boredom is, quite literally, a constant low-grade state of withdrawal.

We have wrung ourselves out so thoroughly on the drip that a man could wake up transformed into a monstrous insect in the bed beside us and we would glance over, feel almost nothing, and go back to the screen. Kafka wrote that sentence (“Gregor Samsa, changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin”) in this city, a few streets from where I stood checking my phone. It is arguably the most famous opening line in modern literature, and it was composed by a deeply bored Prague insurance clerk who spent his days pushing paper and his nights turning his own alienation into the defining image of the century. The man who gave us the bug was, by every account, profoundly, chronically, magnificently bored.

But the science here is only a glance at the mechanics. It tells you how the gray gets in, but cannot tell you what the gray is.

For that you have to travel somewhere worse.

Heidegger called this profound boredom.

It is a brand of boredom beyond the sterile waiting room drawl while you flip through a four-month-old magazine advertising the health benefits of Brazilian butt lifts and wonder whether the doctor is about to tell you something has gone wrong inside you, or just thump your back with a cold stethoscope or sweaty palm and say “you’ll be fine.”

That boredom has an object; it’s waiting-for. Profound boredom is without an object.

It descends for no reason and on no schedule, and it flattens the whole world to a single gray tone; the saints and the river and the woman you love and the bodega sandwich in your hand all leveled to the same nothing, all equally unable to reach you.

But Heidegger thought this was one of the rare fundamental moods, one that reveals something. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, he describes how, in profound boredom, “each and every thing at once becomes indifferent,” not one thing at a time, but “all of a sudden everything is enveloped and embraced by this indifference.” It is the saint, the river, the sandwich, all of it leveled at once. But these things do not vanish. “Beings as a whole do not disappear,” he writes, “but show themselves precisely as such in their indifference.” The world stays, fully present, and goes silent. He calls this the “telling refusal” of things; they refuse you, and the refusal itself is trying to tell you something.

Here is my gloss on what that means: the meaning was never in the bridge or the castle. You were bringing it. Enchantment is something you do to the world, continuously, without noticing, just as you breathe. And profound boredom is the mood in which you catch yourself having stopped the breath of enchantment. The world withdraws. The objects go inert. The castle flattens into a postcard. The dozen languages Czech, Hungarian, French, Turkish, braiding past you on the bridge stop being music and become noise, just air being pushed around by jostling mouths and tongues. And you understand, with dismay, that all of it was always capable of going inert, that the glow was on loan from you the entire time, and the loan has just been called in.

So, I was ontologically vacant on the Charles Bridge, not under-stimulated. I had stopped being the kind of creature that hands meaning to an object by attending to it, and so the most meaning-saturated city on earth (at least to me, the city of Kundera and Kafka) hit my eye and slid off it like the yellow pigments of a crushed moth off a windshield, because meaning is not a property of the thing. St. Vitus Cathedral holds no awe the way it contains pews. Awe is something a living animal performs in front of it, and I had stopped performing it, and Prague was simply the enormous bright screen onto which my own absence was being projected.

A city, it turns out, cannot wake a dead man. It can only show him, in very high resolution, exactly how dead he is.

Prague will help you see this, because Prague is a city of made matter straining to be alive, and once you notice it you cannot stop.

Down in the Jewish Quarter they sell the Golem in every window. These are little clay men, keychains, fridge magnets, the medieval legend of a body built from river mud and animated by a word in its mouth, a boulder shaped like a man with no soul inside it. I bought one. Of course I did. I photographed it and felt nothing and put it in my bag. Across the river, David Černý’s chrome bust of Kafka stands forty-two motorized steel layers high, the writer’s whole face endlessly disassembling and rotating and reassembling itself, a man perpetually coming apart and pulling back together and never once arriving at a face, which is either a monument to Kafka or a monument to the modern self, and I could not tell you which. On the television tower across town, Černý’s giant bronze babies crawl up the side, their faces blank but for a slot, an inset barcode where the features should be. Enormous faceless infants climbing forever toward nothing. And down by the river the Dancing House leans and twists as if caught mid-step, a building Gehry designed to look like two lovers dancing, a structure doing the one act I could not: moving, swaying with life.

I walked through all of it. A living man among animated objects, in a city full of soulless things mimicking life, the mud man, the rotating head, the crawling babies, the dancing building, and I was, by a wide margin, the most inert object in it.

The Golem at least had a word in its mouth once. The statues had appetite. I had a phone and Airpods.

And the panther kept pace with me the whole way. On chrome face, a black shape sliding between the turning plates. Lurking between headstones in The Old Jewish Cemetery, behind my own dead reflection. Always at the edge, always patient, always watching the one thing in Prague that was alive and could not feel the blood, the heart, the rush.

I read Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” after I got home, which is the kind of joke Prague would play, given that his face is printed on every bookmark in the Old Town artisan gift shops.

The story is simple.

A man starves himself for a living. It is a circus spectacle. The entire act is public fasting, in a cage, for crowds who come to marvel at how long he can go. In his prime, it is so serious that they literally post guards to make sure he isn’t sneaking food. Then the crowds thin, because wonder is a resource and it runs dry, and the impresario caps his fast at forty days because no audience can be made to care past forty days, and the artist is demoted to a cage on the path to the real attraction, the menagerie, where the people stream past him toward the animals without slowing down. The little sign tracking his days stops getting updated. He starves down toward actual death now, genuinely, unwatched.

And when they finally find him near the end of his life and ask him why, why the hell do this to yourself, he gives the answer that turns the whole thing inside out. He says he had no choice in it. He says that if he had ever once found a food he liked, he would have eaten it, and made no fuss, and stuffed himself like anyone else.

He never fasted out of discipline. He fasted because nothing ever tasted like anything.

Then he dies, and they rake out the straw, and they put a young panther in his cage. And the panther is everything the hunger artist was not. It eats whatever it’s given without hesitation. Its body is full to the bursting point with the thing it needs. It does not seem to miss its freedom. It carries freedom around with it, Kafka says, somewhere down in its jaws. And the same crowds who could not be bothered to stop for a dying man now press against the bars to feel the heat coming off a creature that is simply, violently, alive, and they can hardly bear the joy of it, and they will not walk away.

That panther was the great cat stalking me in Prague. The beast perched on the parapet. It had walked out of a cage in a story I hadn’t read yet and stationed itself on the Charles Bridge to show me which animal I was.

Because I am, sadly, not the panther. I am the hunger artist in the other cage, the one who can no longer find a food he likes. The man who crosses an ocean flying towards his fantasy and stands there feeling the sign on his cage quietly stop being updated, day by day, in a font only he can read. The hunger artist is not a fable about willpower, but a diagnosis, and the diagnosis is mine, and maybe yours:

this is what a person becomes when the receptors are sanded down so far that nothing reaches them and he keeps performing the hunger anyway, keeps refreshing the empty act, because the performance is what’s left when the appetite is gone.

We are a civilization of minor hunger artists. We fast in plain sight, for an audience already drifting toward the menagerie, and we tell ourselves it’s taste, or standards, or being hard to impress. It isn’t. We just can’t find a food we like. The panther could and always will. That was the entire difference between them, and it was the whole of our current, boring tragedy.

So Heidegger provides a diagnosis; but Søren Kierkegaard, eighty years earlier and from inside a completely different faith in a completely different century, provides a prognosis and it implicates the trip to Prague itself.

Kierkegaard called boredom the root of all evil and he meant it as engine more than sin: “the principle of motion,” the infinitely repulsive force we are all forever fleeing. And he watched people flee it exactly the way we still do. He had a name for the way we do it badly: the vulgar, inartistic rotation, the method “based on an illusion.” He even spelled out the illusion, and when you read what he wrote in 1843 it is hard not to feel personally indicted across two centuries: “One is weary of living in the country and moves to the city; one is weary of one’s native land and goes abroad; one is weary of Europe and goes to America etc.; one indulges in the fanatical hope of an endless journey from star to star.” You change the soil. Then you change it again. He called this “the spurious infinity,” and he said the thing that should have stopped me cold at the airport:

“This method cancels itself.”

Because the boredom was and is never in the soil.

Earlier in the same passage he locates it precisely.

When the nations grew bored they built the Tower of Babel and were “dispersed around the world, just as people now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored.” The fix he actually prescribed is the reverse of flight. You do not change the field itself; you change how you cultivate it. “The principle of limitation,” he calls it, “the sole saving principle in the world. The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.” And then the image I have not been able to shake since I understood what he was doing to me with it:

“A solitary prisoner for life is extremely resourceful; to him a spider can be a source of great amusement.”

Do you see what that makes me on the Charles Bridge?

I had run his vulgar rotation to the letter. Weary of my country, I went abroad; weary of the ordinary, I crossed an ocean for the fairy-tale city; the spurious infinity, one more field, certain this soil would finally feed a man who had forgotten how to cultivate. And the one thing he said actually works, limit yourself, attend harder, find the whole world in the spider in your cell, was available to me for free, at home, the entire time.

The prisoner found a universe in a spider.

I stood on a six-hundred-year-old bridge and couldn’t find one in a cathedral.

Kierkegaard provides the discipline; flee less, attend harder, find the universe in the spider.

But he didn’t really show me a person doing it out in the world.

For that I revisited the writer who offered me the only way out I’ve ever believed, and who, with what I can only call contempt for my comfort, built that way out inside the worst man he could invent.

Anton Chekhov wrote “The Lady with the Dog“ in 1899, from Yalta, where he was slowly dying of tuberculosis and, by his own account, dying of boredom besides (which means he made this thing, like Kafka made his, out of the gray). The man at the center of it is Dmitri Gurov: married, middling, a serial adulterer who thinks of women as “the lower race” and moves through them to break the monotony of a Moscow life he finds unbearable. He is, in the plainest available terms, a tool and, perhaps, the 1800s’ most famous fuckboy. At a seaside resort he meets a young woman walking a little white dog and does what he always does, starts an affair to kill the boredom, fully intending to file her with the others when the season ends.

And then he can’t.

That’s the whole pivot, and it is almost nothing. He goes home and she will not file. She keeps surfacing in him, unbidden, a pang in the middle of gray afternoons. Moscow, which he used to tolerate, now feels to him (Chekhov’s words) like a “madhouse,” like “penal servitude.” Notice the language. The man has woken up just enough to feel the bars. Something has gotten in, something real enough to haunt him, and so he does the single un-bored thing he has done in his life: he gets on a train, goes to her town, and the secret affair becomes the truest center of a man who never had one.

Chekhov refuses to clean any of it up. Dmitri stays an ass. A liar. The affair stays an affair. Nobody is redeemed, nobody is punished, nothing is resolved. There is only a man who catches his own gray hair in a hotel mirror and understands that he has, for the first time and far too late, actually fallen in love and the story simply stops there, on the two of them realizing that “the most complicated and difficult part” was “only just beginning.”

I used to read that ending as a tragedy of incompleteness, as Chekhov simply running out of road and time. Now I read it as a fundamental truth. He is not withholding the cure. He is telling you there isn’t one, and that this is good news for you and for me, because the absence of a cure is the only thing that makes the aliveness real.

The way back into the panther’s body is not more, not a sharper stimulus or a more beautiful city. It is letting something real in far enough to wreck the comfortable gray, knowing it will cost you, decimate you, throw you around, roundhouse kick you in the throat, knowing it will not last, knowing the boredom is already regrowing its relentless weeds in the field behind it. Dmitri does not get to stay awake. He gets to be awake now, at ruinous cost, with the entire hard part still in front of him. He is still in the cell, but he has done the only thing Kierkegaard’s prisoner could do: he has found, in a single ordinary woman, the whole world he kept crossing continents to look for.

That is the most anyone is offered. There is no such food that ends hunger, and waiting for it was the hunger artist’s whole fatal career, fasting in protest of a meal that was never coming.

There is only the eating, and then the hunger again, and the eating again.

So put them on the Charles Bridge together, all three, where they belong (in my head, and now yours): the hunger artist, the panther, and the bored Russian tool and notice they are all in cages.

The hunger artist is what the drip makes of you. A performer of appetite with no appetite left, refreshing an empty act in a cage the crowd has already drifted past, starving in protest of a meal he was sure existed and never came. The panther is the animal underneath the floorboards of you, the one that wants and eats and goes briefly, violently full and then, the part the whole modern machine is built to hide, gets hungry again by evening. And Dmitri is the man who found the latch. Not the exit (because there is no exit, he is still married, still lying, still pacing the same Moscow) but the latch, the one real thing let in far enough to wreck the gray, at a cost that decimated his comfortable life and was worth it anyway.

Three cages, then. And the only difference between them is not freedom, because none of them gets free.

The difference is appetite.

The hunger artist has lost it and performs its corpse. The panther has it and will have it again tomorrow and the day after, endlessly, which looks like torment and is actually the whole of being alive. And Dmitri claws his way from the first cage toward the second, on no promise that he’ll even arrive.

The wellness industry will not sell you this, because there is no product in it. It sells presence as serenity; a candle, a calming CBD oil to rub on your thighs, a cushion, a cured and final calm. But the panther is not calm. It is hungry, alert, a little dangerous, and will be empty again by evening. That is presence, not a failure of it.

So I go back, in memory, to the Charles Bridge.

I can see myself there, petrified mid-fidget, the saints swooning overhead in their permanent ecstasy, the whole shuffling planet pressing past, my fingers gripping the computer in my pocket on their own. The hunger artist in embryo, standing inside the fantasy he crossed an ocean to inhabit. The panther watching, full, briefly, then hungry again, the way it always was, the way it always will be.

I don’t know if I can get back into that body. I don’t think anyone gets to stay the panther. That was never the offer, and believing it was the offer is the precise sickness that had me checking my phone on the most beautiful bridge on earth.

What I think now is this: boredom is the cost of having the kind of mind that can also, on its good afternoons, be brought to its knees by a bridge. You do not get the awe without the gray underneath it; they are the same organ, caught at different hours. Pascal saw it three hundred years before the rectangle: all of human misery, he said, comes from a man’s inability to sit alone in a quiet room. So modern technology did not invent the void. It only learned to sell us, very efficiently, a way to never have to look at it.

Prague will bore me again. It bored me there, inside the dream, with all of God’s men watching. The rectangle will win on a Thursday, and on the Thursday after that. And some afternoon, between the gray ones, I will let the real get far enough under the skin to cost me something.

And then I will be bored again. And I will have to do it again. And again. And again.

Until I don’t.

Imagine you are a woman in a scriptorium in the year 1200.

You are permitted to be near the books, to dust them, perhaps, to carry them, but certainly not to make them and most definitely not to read them. The copying happens in a room you do not enter, in a language the Church has excellent reasons for keeping in the mouths of priests and off the tongues of the people kneeling in front of them.

Latin is the password to God, and the password is not for you, peasant.

You will live and die inside a faith whose founding documents you are structurally forbidden to read for yourself. The gate is a language, a locked room, and a man who holds the key to both.

Now jump a few hundred years and watch the gate try to survive a technological earthquake.

Around 1450, Gutenberg’s movable type makes it possible to produce a book in days instead of the years a monk needed to hand-copy one, and the Church (which had enjoyed a near-total monopoly on who got to read what) responds with a panic so total it would be funny if it weren’t so effective. By 1559 it publishes the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of books Catholics are forbidden to read on pain of excommunication. It cannot stop the books from being printed, so it spends the next four centuries trying to control which ones may be read. The Index is not formally retired until 1966, by which point it has banned Erasmus, Copernicus, Voltaire, Defoe, Balzac, Sartre. When the cost of producing legitimate writing falls, the people whose power depended on that cost staying high do not shrug and adapt and go away silently. They build a new gate, anxiously, and call it virtue.

The next one was a law, not a thought experiment.

In April of 1831, the Virginia legislature made it a crime to teach enslaved people and free Black people to read or write. Other Southern states had been doing versions of this since South Carolina’s first anti-literacy law in 1740; the United States and its colonial predecessors are the only place on earth known to have legally criminalized literacy. Four months after Virginia’s law, an enslaved preacher named Nat Turner (a man who could read, who had read the Bible closely enough to see past the sanitized, obey-your-master version his enslavers preached) led the rebellion that terrified the South into tightening the bans even further. The enslavers understood, with total clarity, that reading is the thing that lets a person discover he was never meant to be owned. So they made the alphabet a crime. The gate, here, was the law, and the punishment was the whip.

And now, finally, imagine you are a nineteen year old and it is the year 2026 and you live in Lagos, Nigeria and you have done everything right. You taught yourself to write English with a discipline no one born to it ever had to summon. You studied the grammar, you internalized the rules, you wrote in the careful, polished, rule-perfect standard English that every gatekeeper above you said was the price of admission. You are one of more than twenty thousand Nigerian students who came to an American university this year, the largest contingent from any African nation. You submit your first essay. And a piece of detection software flags it as written by a machine because you followed the rules too well! Because hewing that precisely to standard written English is now, to the algorithm, indistinguishable from not being human at all. A 2023 Stanford study found exactly this: GPT detectors flagged essays by non-native English speakers as AI more than 60% of the time, while reading native eighth-graders as flawlessly human. The students who worked hardest to clear the old gate are the ones the new gate catches. So gate never fell, it simply changed costume and learned to mistake discipline for fraud. And the same gate, swung the other way, catches this student again: if she does reach for the tool that could finally put her on equal footing, the one that smooths the last edges of a second language into the register the gatekeepers demand, she’ll be sneered at for that too, called a cheat, accused of not having earned her own sentences.

Damned by the machine if she writes it herself.

Damned by the people if she doesn’t.

The gate no longer cares whether you used the tool. It cares that you were never supposed to be in the room.

You have now been walked through a historical pattern and have seen it four times in eight hundred years and on three continents. Every time the cost of producing legitimate writing collapses, a gate that had been quietly deciding who counts goes into crisis, and the people whose status depended on that gate move, fast, and dressed as principle, to build the next one.

The rest of this essay makes an argument I imagine many of you are not going to like, and I apologize in advance, especially if you think of yourself as one of the good ones:

that the disgust so many literary or educated people or “the elite” feel toward AI writing is not about craft, or labor, or the planet. It’s about class.

It’s the same reflex the Church had in 1559, the same one the Stationers’ Company had, dressed in this century’s clothes, and it is aimed, as it always is, downward.

Let me make the case.

I usually try to steer clear of the whole “politics of AI and writing” discourse. But a handful of articles I’ve recently read here on Substack and beyond have nudged me past my own threshold (which is impressive, tbh), and I want to take a few minutes of your time to name a pattern in the discourse that I find genuinely ugly.

To clear my throat at the top, so we can get to the actual argument: I am well aware of the major downsides of AI. Climate impact, water and energy consumption, labor displacement, the consolidation of obscene wealth among a handful of lizard-people-maybe-eating-babies-tech-oligarchs, datasets being trained on stolen content, the slow outsourcing of our own thinking to the bots until we forget how to think for ourselves, the manipulation of reality, what billions of people believe is true by whoever owns the models which threatens the fundamentals of democracy, the long-tail risks of the technology itself, robots killing all of us and I say this:

bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and…bad

None of what follows is a defense of any of that and none of it means I think the craft doesn't matter. It does. Learning to write, really write, really think, and harness one’s unique voice is worth every hour it takes. This post is about a particular shape the immune response is taking among a particular class of people, and what I think that shape is actually about.

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My first memory of being a person may have been facilitated by a spill.

I must have been three, maybe four?

There was a party at my parents’ house. A mid-90s gathering that meant my father had been in and out of the basement all afternoon hauling items up, including, eventually, the long folding table that became, for one evening, the rickety bar. He set it against the kitchen wall and arrayed across it the bottles that adult life apparently required: gin, whiskey, scotch, pinot noir, sugary and colorful mixers in cans, a row of glistening glasses, and at the corner, brown and gleaming and absolutely meant for someone else, a two-liter bottle of cream soda. Every child’s dream. Well, at least my dream. My favorite.

I had loved cream soda the way Pablo Neruda describes love in One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII:

“I love you (dear cream soda) without knowing how, or when, or from where, I love you directly without problems or pride, I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love.”

Anyway, I remember the floor first. The kitchen tiles were black and white, laid in a checker like a chessboard, and at three I was still close enough to them that they were a landscape. The walls above were green floral wallpaper, a green that probably had a name in 1994 interior design circles (sage, eucalyptus?) strewn with little white flowers (baby’s breath?) I had spent whole afternoons trying to count. I knew that kitchen well and scurried across it much like a rook or a bishop on the board, though with fewer constraints on movement. The cool of the tile in summer. The light buzzing of the refrigerator. The creak of the cabinet under the sink where my mother kept the dish soap.

That night the kitchen was full of legs.

I did not see people that night, or in my memory now.

I saw legs.

An orange dress that flared at the knee and brushed against the leg next to it, a pair of high-waisted jeans gone soft at the seat from a hundred washes, suit pants pressed sharp, a denim skirt with a small frayed thread I remember wanting to pull. The forest of them moved and reconfigured, opened small gangways and closed them again, parted around me when I passed and rejoined behind me as though I had never been there.

A labyrinth of legs.

Voices came from above, somewhere up in the ceiling fixtures and the cigarette smoke and the music, and they did not yet resolve into words in my tiny ears and tinier brain. They were more like a texture. Warm rumbles and the higher pitch of a laugh, the long note of someone telling a story that the other voices ducked under and came back around to. The Eagles were playing, I think, or the Beatles (my father’s favorites) and underneath that, the lower conversation, the way adult talk sounds to a child who is not yet fully inside language (think Charlie Brown). It is like the noise a river makes that you can stand beside without ever quite hearing the bubbling and rapids as speech.

In this labyrinth, I was hunting for that cream soda.

I had spotted it from the doorway and tracked it through the legs, low and intent, the way a small animal moves through tall grass. I remember the chair, a kitchen chair, wooden, a slatted back, and I recall the work of dragging it across the tile, the scrape of it under my hands, the way I had to lean my whole weight against the seat to make it move. Nobody noticed. The legs reconfigured around the scrape. I parked the chair against the bar and climbed up, and for the first time that evening my eyes cleared the table.

The bottle was right there.

My hands went out. I can see them now.

Small hands, hands that still had the dimples instead of knuckles, fingers too short to wrap around the neck of a two-liter bottle. I gripped, both hands clamped around the middle, and I lifted. And the bottle was much heavier than I had calculated, full and slick with condensation, and my small unworkable hands could not hold what they had reached for, and the bottle tipped, and the cap was not on tight, and the soda came out.

A lot of soda came out.

It hit the bar first and then the floor, and the flood spread fast across the chessboard tile in long brown rivers, foaming where the carbonation hit the grout, pooling under the legs of the chair I had just climbed.

It was a huge amount of liquid. And I learned, quickly, that liquid makes sounds when it becomes an event. And then, suddenly, every leg in the room turning.

That is when the faces came down.

The inversion.

For my entire life up to that second, adults had been mostly legs, the forest of vertical fabric I moved through and that moved around me, voices in the ceiling, cloud systems I lived inside without ever quite being seen by. And in the instant of the spill, the world turned upside down on its hinge.

Faces appeared.

My mother’s face came down out of the smoke first, then my father’s, then the faces of people I did not have names for, all of them suddenly low, all of them suddenly at my height, all of them looking at the same thing. At the brown rivers. At the almost emptied bottle. and at me.

I do not remember what they said, nor do I remember whether anyone shouted or whether anyone laughed or whether my mother was even angry or amused or simply tired. I remember tightening. The air in the room changing its density, the laughter near the back of the kitchen cut off a beat after it had started, my mother’s face doing something small and quick before she settled it into whatever expression she chose to give me. I had never seen that before. I had never registered an adult face change in response to something I had done. Adult faces, up until this moment, mostly arrive “already-arranged,” like the sun arriving already in the sky.

But, this time something I had done had reached up and moved one.

I have spent decades trying to name this emotion and decide whether it was shame or guilt, as they sit so close together at that age, and I have come to think it was neither, really. It was something more primary.

It was the discovery that I did not end at my own skin. That there was a longer reach to me than the length of my arms. That the small hands that had failed to hold the bottle had, in failing, touched something inside my mother’s face, and that I had been the cause of the touching, and that the touching had been felt.

I had thought the bottle was the thing I had reached for.

It turned out I had reached much farther than that.

the hands wake up

I went outside the next summer and learned the lesson again with a garden hose.

It was the same house. The same yard. The kitchen with the chessboard tile opened through a sliding door onto a back patio of cracked concrete, and beyond that a stretch of yellowish grass and packed dirt and the half-shaded scrub that childhood happens in. The hose was coiled on its bracket against the side of the house, dark green rubber gone slightly gooey in the heat. I had, by then, learned that I could turn the spigot on.

But what I learned that afternoon was that if you covered the mouth of the hose with your thumb (partially covered it, not all the way) the water changed. Suddenly fast, strong, a jet instead of a flow. In childish curiosity, I had discovered a thing about physics by accident by misusing equipment.

And then what did I do?

I sprayed everything.

I sprayed the fence and I sprayed the bottom of the patio chairs probably purchased from probably Sears or Home Depot and I sprayed an arc up into the sun to make a small rainbow and then sprayed it down into the dirt to make a small flood, and the flood spread across the packed earth in (again) long brown rivers and the rivers were full of ants, which is a detail I can never forget and bring to you now.

I had not noticed the ants before I started. They had been there the whole time, an entire small civilization moving along the seam where the concrete met the dirt, and I, roughly four feet above them, hose in hand, had been making armageddon on top of their lives without registering them at all. Now the floods I had created were carving channels across their paths. Ants swept sideways. Ants piled at the edges of puddles, struggling to climb out. Ants stranded on tiny islands of dry dirt I had accidentally left.

My response was visceral. I think I may even have said “oh no” out loud. The hose was dropped and my feet started pushing and kicking the dry dirt over the wet places, building little crossings, trying to undo what I had done. And when that was not enough, when the ants were already scattered and lost and the channels were too wide for them to find their way back across, I bent down to the ground, and I put one finger flat against the dirt, and I let the ants climb up onto my hand.

I remember being bitten because most panicked things bite. I didn’t mind. Call it penance. I carried small groups of them on the bridge of my finger across the wet places, depositing them on dry safe dirt, going back for the next batch. I crouched there, dirty knees and palms, for a long time.

I had been the cause of the flood and now I was the cause of the rescue.

And some part of me must have understood, even at that age, that the two acts came out of the same hands.

The kitchen, the year before, had taught me that I had a reach beyond my body.

The yard, that afternoon, taught me what to do about it.

The years after that are full of small bent-down moments in the same yard, at the lip of the pond my father had dug at the back of the property where the lawn went wild, hauling stray frogs back to water when they wandered too far, ferrying salamanders out of the path of the lawnmower, building tiny stick fences I was certain the toads needed, lifting box turtles the size of my palm and walking them, slowly, back to the muddy edge they had crawled out of.

I was enormous there.

I was a giant.

I spent the last essay telling you about being a bug.

About the smallness that finds you on a porch under a sky in Tahoe that does not know your name, the smallness you have to go and seek on purpose against a world engineered to inflate you past your real size. The whole argument of that essay was that you are too big about the things that don’t matter, and that the cure is finding your way back down.

But I held something back.

I told you I had spent my whole life as the hands. I had never once been the thing inside them.

That was true. But it left out the other half, which is that I had also spent my whole life being the hands without quite knowing it, a state I think many of us suffer from.

The kid with the bottle or the hose. The little boy by the pond with the spotted salamander cupped in his palm. Long before I ever became the bug in the desert, I had been the giant in the yard, and somewhere between then and now, I had let myself forget. I had been told, by the same machinery that puffs you up about your significance, that my actual reach was negligible. That what my two hands could touch did not matter compared to the things I could reach by scrolling.

That consequence was something other people had, at scale, in numbers, in headlines.

I now believe this to be a lie.

The hands I had as a child are the hands I have now. They are larger and somewhat wrinkled and calloused and sore, but they are not in any way more or less powerful. The range was always what it was. The yard was always the right size. The thing I forgot, between the ants and the day I started reading this paragraph out loud back to myself, was that the yard does not end.

Everywhere you go is somebody’s yard, that the small lives within reach of your hands are not a childhood phase you graduate from but the only scale at which you have ever actually had any consequence at all.

So this piece is about remembering that and it is also about how badly I keep forgetting.

the hands remember

“On Being A Bug” was about a lie the modern world tells you to make you feel big. This one is about the opposite lie, told by the same machine, to make you feel small.

Here is how it works.

Every day you are handed a thousand ways to feel enormous about things that do not depend on you in the slightest; your opinion on a war, your read on the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni beef, your verdict on a stranger’s parenting, broadcast to an audience and rewarded with little numbers that go up.

And every day the same machine subtly trains you to feel powerless about the only things that actually do depend on you: the person on the subway with three Trader Joe's bags and a kid on her hip who needs a seat, the person who should be retired but is digging Coke cans out of the trash for the nickel deposit, the person crying quietly in the corner of the party everyone else has decided not to notice.

This is the trick. The reach you can measure is digital, abstract, vast, and fake. The reach that is real, the reach of two hands, of a voice saying “you’ll be alright,” of your actual presence in an actual room, feels too small to bother with, because the machine has given you a global stage to compare it against, and next to the global stage a single human being in front of you looks like a rounding error.

The machine has a way of making you feel like a background character in your own life, an NPC (Non-Player Character), shuffling through a world where the consequential things are always happening to someone else, somewhere else, at a scale you'll never touch.

It is the exact inversion of the smallness essay, and it is the same disease.

There, you were too big about your significance.

Here, you are too small about your consequence.

Both are a failure to see your real size. And the cure is the same cure, pointed the other direction: you have to get back to actual scale, and actual scale is the scale of the hands.

The felt impact you have on reality, the kind that actually changes a life, including your own, has never once been digital. It happens in the flesh, through contact, at a range of about an arm’s length, and it has happened that way for forty thousand years and it is not going to start happening through a screen now no matter how good the screen gets. You are a giant. You have always been a giant. You have just been looking at the wrong yard.

I want to show you four times I remembered. And, because I would be lying otherwise, four times the remembering came with what I will call the “Blinders” still half-on.

the hands reach

About eight years ago I went to Indonesia, to a small island I will not bother naming because you have not heard of it. The trip was absurd. It ran through the obscene marble luxury of the Doha airport, gold fixtures, a waterfall, a giant bronze teddy bear under a lamp, a duty-free cathedral to things nobody needs, and then down through a series of progressively smaller planes to a progressively smaller strip of runway, and then into the back of a truck with a man chain-smoking kretek cigarettes and blasting Katy Perry for a four-hour drive I slept through most of, and then onto my own two feet for a trek through jungle to a hut on the north end of the island where I would be staying.

Door to door, the whole thing took something like thirty-six hours.

When I finally got to the hut, I lit a candle, dropped my bag, and lay back on the bed, and the first thing I saw was an enormous huntsman spider on the ceiling directly above my face.

Because of course there was! Thirty-six hours, and the welcome committee was a spider the size of my hand.

I could have left it. I could have thrown my New Balance shoe. What I did, after a frozen second of the obvious animal fear, was find a plastic cup, tear out a piece of paper from a copy of the book The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy I had brought with me on my travels, climb up on the bed, coax the thing into the cup, carry it to the door, and shake it gently out into the green roar of the jungle. Into the cicadas sawing their endless siren, a tokay gecko barking its own name somewhere in the dark, frogs, the whole humid and sticky orchestra of a place that did not care whether I lived or died. The same gesture as the ants and the salamanders, only thirty years later and ten thousand miles away. The hands still knew what to do with a small life that had wandered into mine.

And here is where it stops being a nice story about a man and a spider.

I had just spent thirty-six hours traveling through more human poverty than I will see in most years living in America. Beggars working the curb outside that gold-plated airport. A child who should have been asleep selling something through a car window at a stoplight. An entire island whose median household would not clear the cost of my plane ticket. I had passed all of it, gazed at it, even, and felt the dull, manageable, entirely useless feeling you are supposed to feel, and done nothing, and arrived. And then a spider got my complete and total moral attention, my cup, my care, my gentle hands, because it was three feet from my face and might have bitten me.

These are the Blinders and they had been on for a day and a half. The spider was just small enough, and just close enough, to slip underneath them.

the hands point

I am a teacher by trade.

If you have ever taught, you know the secret that nobody outside the profession actually believes because it sounds like a line from a Hallmark movie, which is that the impact is exponential and almost entirely invisible. You will never know which of the thousand small things you said landed in which kid and grew into something, and you will go your whole life having changed people you cannot name.

But there was one I got to see and he was brilliant.

One of those students who did not really have to try, who could show up to class in an oversize hoodie (hood on, face cloaked) and pajama pants, turn in an excellent paper on the problem of free will for a Philosophy 101 lesson in an afternoon and spend the rest of the week somewhere else entirely. The problem was that the grade was not only built for brilliance, but for attendance and participation and showing up and he was not showing up and his grade was sliding, and one afternoon, after enough small conversations had built enough small trust, he told me why.

He was working multiple jobs to keep his family afloat (this was a public college in a large city and not a particularly uncommon circumstance). The stress of it had pushed him, in his scraps of downtime, into a fairly serious array of drugs; mostly weed, but sometimes cocaine and sometimes pills that “could have been xanax or could have been oxy.” He was holding up a whole household at an age when I had been holding up nothing heavier than a backpack, and it was crushing him, and the philosophy paper that came so easily was the last thing on a very long list.

We talked about it more than a few times. Eventually, I got him to agree to see one of the counselors the college provided for “free,” the existence of which he had not known and may not have pursued alone. And then I walked him there. We went together, and I waited while he set up his first appointment, and then I went back to my actual job.

Years later I got an email. A photo attached: him in a cap and gown, his arm around his parents, a paragraph about where he was headed next.

He had made it.

I had almost nothing to do with it. He did it, he was always going to do it, I believed he was that kind of person, but I had been one of the small hands that steadied him at one of the moments he could have gone over, and he had remembered, and he had written.

But the Blinders are here, too. Because I don’t believe I helped him out of some standing policy of “helping.” I helped him because he was in front of me two days a week and his work was good enough to make me look twice. I have taught hundreds of students whose names I could not give you now, quiet ones, average ones, screaming ones, angry ones, tattooed ones, ones who turned in adequate work and kept their heads down and carried God knows what home with them every night, and I never saw a single one of their crises, because they never tripped the wire of my attention because, again, by chance they didn’t write the brilliant paper. He was the student I happened to be looking at, not necessarily the student who needed it most.

the hands stay

My neighbor (I will not use her name) is an elderly woman who has lived next to me for years, in a large brick apartment building where you can go a decade without learning the name of the person on the other side of the wall.

In fact, she is the only name I know on my floor and for a long time we were just hallway acquaintances.

She has nurses and aides coming in and out all day. She still cares, herself, for her adult son, who lives with her and lives with a serious mental illness and cannot really care for himself. Her husband is alive but lives in a facility now, somewhere she cannot bring him home from. She is lugging more, at her age, than most people half her age could carry, and she does it with a warmth that I did nothing to earn. For years the entire relationship consisted of her calling me “darling” in the hallway, “ok hon” as the elevator doors closed, the small free affection of an old woman to a young man she had decided to like.

And then one day she knocked on my door and asked for help.

It was the smallest of asks. The garbage, I think, too heavy for her that week. But it broke a seal. After that she knocked more.

Could I help move a piece of furniture they were getting rid of?

Could I reach the flour on top of the fridge?

Could I read out a letter from her distant relative?

The relationship turned, slowly, from hallway warmth into the actual exchange of a person who needs things and a person close enough to provide them. And the thing I am proudest of was the afternoon she asked me to help with her husband’s immigration paperwork.

I am still not entirely sure of their current status, and it is not my story to tell.

What I can tell you is what it actually consisted of, because this is the part nobody warns you about when they tell you to help your neighbor: it was boring as hell.

It was photographs of documents. It was the fine print of letters the government had mailed, written in the special dialect of bureaucratic menace that is designed to make a frightened, old person give up. It was a clunky web portal that looked like something out of the 1990s that timed out, and a phone number that went nowhere but bots asking you to press “3” to repeat all options, and an afternoon of reading legalese aloud and translating it into something a worried woman could act on. There was nothing noble-feeling about it. It was just a seriously tedious, real, hours-long act of being the literate younger hands in a situation that had bullied an old woman into needing them. And at the end of it, somehow, the government got off their back, and they were able to go on.

So far I’ve made myself sound pretty good as a giant.

Let me fix that by reminding you I am also an asshole.

I did all of this, months of being reliably there for the woman twenty feet from my front door, during a stretch of time when I was not calling my grandmother back. Or perhaps, more accurately, I would forget to call her back. How deliberate this was, I do not know.

My father had died unexpectedly. Her son. Her firstborn. And not long before (six months before), her husband had also died. So, this woman, my grandmother, had in a short span lost the two men who anchored her life, one of whom was the man who made me.

She would call.

I would see the name and feel the wall of it and sometimes let it go to voicemail, and tell myself I would call back when I had the bandwidth, the strength, the right words, and the days would stack up into weeks.

I was inside my own version of the same grief, my father, my loss, and the Blinders that grief puts on you are not chosen. or selfish exactly, but a narrowing act of survival, the aperture closing down to whatever you can bear to look at. And what I could not bear to look at was the one person whose grief was a mirror of mine, magnified, because she had lost what I had lost and she had lost it as a mother, which is a thing I cannot imagine and did not want to stand inside of even over the phone.

So I was a giant to the woman across the hall and a ghost to the woman who had held my father as a baby.

The reach was there, the phone right there, and I did not extend it because extending it would have cost me something I did not, in that season, have to spend. I eventually called her back. I call her now, regularly (I called her an hour before typing this). But I missed the months when it would have meant the most, and I did it while patting myself on the back for taking out a stranger’s garbage.

So, if I’m going to try to be honest about what it means to be a giant then I have to be honest that the same man can be enormous at one wall and absent at the other, in the same week, and not notice the difference until much later, with the Blinders finally off, writing it down here.

the hands let go

There was a man named Jack who lived on a bench on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, near the Franklin Avenue stop, for a stretch of a few months.

I got into a habit with Jack.

Most mornings I would buy two of something, two Cliff bars, two plastic-wrapped croissants, whatever the bodega had, and one was always for him. He was fond of my dog, Ocean, and I knew this because it visibly changed his face when she trotted up. Some mornings that small animal joy passing between a homeless man and a dog was the best thing I would witness all day.

We were, in the loose way of a parkway in New York City, friends.

But something was wrong with Jack beyond the obvious moral wrongness of a man sleeping on a bench.

Some mornings he did not know me.

Did not recognize me, did not remember Ocean, looked at the croissant in my hand as though it were the first croissant in the history of the world.

Whatever was happening in him was bigger than housing.

One morning he was actively begging, in distress, and I noticed his pants had been more or less torn to shreds (he referred, vaguely, to a “mix-up” the night before) and we walked together to the Capital One bank on the corner and I took out twenty dollars and gave it to him to buy new pants.

And I believe that was the last time I saw him.

Because, at some point, Jack was not on the bench anymore. No goodbyes. He simply, one week, was gone, and I do not know where, and I do not know if he is alive, and I probably never will.

Here is everything I do not know about Jack:

I do not know if the twenty dollars helped him or hurt him.

I do not know if the croissants were nutrition or a ritual I performed to feel like “a giant” or the kind of person who feeds Jack.

I do not know if the small daily contact was a kindness to him or mostly a kindness to myself, a way to discharge, cheaply and pleasantly, the much larger debt I felt every single day walking past the dozens of other people on that same parkway and commute to work whom I did not feed, did not learn the names of, did not walk to any bank.

Jack got my hands because Jack was on my route. Because Jack had a dog-loving face, and my dog loved his face, and he was on a bench I passed daily and a habit formed around him.

So, I say this to say that I am realizing proximity and habit should not be confused with virtue.

I chose one human being out of many, the one geography had placed on my path, and I have spent some time wondering whether the cheap breakfasts were love or whether it was the price I paid myself to keep walking past everyone else.

I still think it was worth doing; a small real thing done daily for one actual person is not nothing. But I cannot pretend I do not see the shape of it.

The giant tends the small life that wanders into his particular yard, and calls the boundary of his yard the boundary of his concern, and the boundary of his yard is, conveniently, exactly as far as his daily walk to the train.

the hands you have

So where does that leave the argument.

Let me say it as plainly as I can, because I have been circling it through a series of winding confessions.

You will hear, correctly, that the math does not favor me. That a person who really wanted to reduce suffering should ignore the spider and the croissant, calculate where a dollar does the most good, or let a charity evaluator you heard about on a podcast calculate it for you, and send it there. Does the cold arithmetic of consequence-at-distance save more lives than all the cupped hands in all the yards in the world?

In some cases, it might be true. If the question is how do you do the most measurable good, the answer is sometimes in the output of an Excel document. But I think the spreadsheet is answering a different question than the one I am droning on asking.

Because consequence-at-distance, real as it is, does something strange: it leaves you exactly as you were.

You can wire money to the other side of the earth and save a life you will never see and remain, in yourself, mostly untouched. The same closed, narrowed, Blindered person you were before, now with a slightly lighter bank balance and a slightly cleaner conscience. This is the risk that comes with slacktivism and virtue signaling.

The transfer is real. The transformation is not.

Whereas the hours I spent reading boring-ass immigration legalese aloud to a scared old woman changed nothing on any global ledger and changed me. It pulled the aperture open, for an afternoon, to the actual texture of another person’s fear.

The contact is the part that forms you. The distance-work is a moral act; the contact-work is a formative one, and they are not the same thing, and a person who only ever does the first will help a great many people and slowly forget how to see the one in front of him.

Now to be totally fair: distance-work can transform you. The person who gives their life to a cause they will never shake hands with is changed to the bone. But that transformation takes commitment, years, identity, the long sustained turning of a life toward something far away. Contact-work asks none of that. It is the democratic form of being changed: available to anyone with two hands and a person in front of them. You just have to look down.

Fuck, alright.

I have to stop myself here, because I just read back what I wrote; if the reason to help the person in front of you is that it forms you, then I have spent a paragraph arguing for kindness on the grounds that it is good for me. I cannot unknot it. I have never once helped someone near me without also, somewhere in it, helping myself feel like a person who helps.

Perhaps the knot is the point.

A morality that demands you be untouched by your own good deeds, that you get nothing, feel nothing, change in no obvious way, is distance morality sporting a halo. It wants you clean. Ledgered. Unimplicated. Standing safely outside the transaction with your hands washed. The contact ethic asks the opposite of you: it asks you to be in the thing, close enough to be changed by it, to get something back, so close that you can no longer tell where the help to them ends and the help to you begins. That is the evidence you were actually in it, not corruption of the act. The person who needs their kindness to be pure is still, after everything, trying to stay clean and staying clean is just staying outside, one more way of keeping your hands in your lap.

Every single example in this essay, the ants in my yard, the spider in my hut, the student in my classroom, the woman across my hall, the man on my route, every one of them was near. Within reach of hands that did not have to travel to find them.

I have built an entire defense of contact-consequence and every piece of evidence is something the world set conveniently on my path, and a sufficiently unkind reader (I see you) could close this essay and say, accurately, that “Grant has written four thousand words of beautiful justification for caring only about what is already in front of me.” For proximity bias. For the oldest, most forgivable, most dangerous human failure there is, which is to mistake the edge of your yard for the edge of the world.

Here is what I can give you in response:

The near is not where consequence ends. It is where it begins and where the muscle gets its reps in. If you cannot see the person across the hall, you will never really see the millions; they will only ever be a number you feel briefly bad about from a moving vehicle. The yard is the gym, not the destination. You can love what is near, but the failure is stopping there; it is cupping the spider while the island starves.

The practice is this: start with the near, because it is the only thing your hands can actually reach, and then keep your eyes up by refusing to let the boundary of your yard become the boundary of your concern, even knowing you will fail at this, daily, with the Blinders sliding back on every time grief or anxiety or sheer self-absorption narrows the aperture again.

That is the whole of it. You will never perfect the craft, so all you can do is practice. Notice the Blinders sooner. Take them off when you can. Forgive yourself the times you couldn’t, and then (this is the only part that is not negotiable) try again the next time a small life is in front of you.

The last essay ended with a question. It said: the giant looking down is you, and the only question left is what you do with hands that large.

This is my answer, and it is smaller than the question deserved.

You do small things. Close by. Imperfectly.

It was never that large.

It was never that small.

It was just yours, the whole time, waiting for you to remember the yard does not end.

There is a moment in the Vatican Museums, somewhere past the Egyptian mummies and before they funnel you into the Sistine Chapel, where the tourist badge wears off and you transform into a supplicant.

I went back in 2019, a lapsed-Catholic doing the thing recovering Catholics do, which I guess is pay forty euros to feel complicated in the presence of God’s real estate. Fun!

You enter through Julius II’s bronze doors and you are immediately moving, because there is only one way through; fifty-four galleries strung along seven kilometers of corridor, a single current with no eddies, no way back. You pass the Laocoön, the writhing marble that started the whole collection in 1506, a father and his sons strangled by sea serpents, every tendon screaming. You stroll by the Apollo Belvedere standing in his open courtyard the way Renaissance painters found him. March through the Gallery of Maps, a hundred and twenty meters of frescoed Italy, gold leaf on the ceiling so dense it stops reading as decoration and starts reading as weather. Raphael’s rooms. Tapestries that took a decade each. Caravaggio. Giotto. Da Vinci. Seventy thousand objects, and the path will not let you linger on any of them, because all of it is prologue for something grand.

And then the corridor narrows and the guards start hissing “silenzio, silenzio!” and you are pretty much pushed (there is no other word) into the Sistine Chapel. And you look up, and Michelangelo does to you what he was hired in 1508 to do to every pilgrim who has stood on that floor since: he makes you small.

I want to consider this feeling, because I dedicated my first article this week on a particular kind of smallness; the kind a dark sky or a mountain gives you, the real sublime, the indifferent vastness that doesn’t know your name. The Sistine is different. The Sistine is a version of the sublime manufactured. Engineered. Commissioned, budgeted, project-managed across decades by men who understood, better than anyone in history, that an overwhelmed human being is a receptive one. The ceiling is genuinely one of the most beautiful things our species has made. It is also a machine, and the machine’s purpose is to relocate you, gently, gorgeously, permanently, to the center of a story someone else is telling, in which you are very small and the institution above you is very large.

You feel the machine everywhere if you let yourself. It rests in the Swiss Guard in their Renaissance stripes, halberds and all, the oldest standing army in the world dressed as a costume so you’ll ignore the fact that it’s an army. It rattles in the metal detectors, the timed-entry tickets, the gift shop selling blessed rosaries on the way out, the cafés, the staff in their identifiable uniforms stationed through the galleries like ushers in the world’s most expensive theater. Here, you are inside the most concentrated display of wealth, beauty, and engineered awe on the surface of the earth, and every square inch of it was paid for by an institution that, for the better part of two thousand years, held a functional monopoly on a single product:

reality.

What was true. What was sin. Who was saved. Whether you, personally, could even read the book the whole edifice claimed to be built on, or whether that was a privilege reserved for the men in the building. For most of Western history, the Church was something like an algorithm. It decided what the masses saw, believed, feared, and what they were permitted to want. It manufactured consensus reality at a scale and for a duration that makes every technology company look like a startup with a long way to go.

I’m telling you all of this here because three days ago, the Pope, the man who lives in that building, published the most forceful warning any institution has issued about a rival reality-machine; artificial intelligence. Everyone is reading it as a religious leader scolding Silicon Valley. I think it is something stranger and more useful than that. I think it is a confession, dressed as a warning, delivered by the only person on earth qualified to make it and the photograph from the event will tell you why.

Read more

hands on the bars

There was a stretch of my twenties when I biked twenty miles a day in New York City. I was in grad school, so broke it was a point of pride, paying for bodega coffee in quarters, stitching together three and sometimes four jobs across the city and budgeting down to the subway fare I refused to spend because there was nothing to spend.

So I rode.

My legs were always pumping and, I must say, my thighs at the time were as impressive as old tree trunks. I had wired headphones in (pre-AirPod era) irresponsibly, both ears, more often than not blasting Taking Back Sunday loud enough to drown out the traffic I was weaving through.

My route took me over the Brooklyn Bridge twice a day. If you’ve never been, it is a view impossible to fully ignore; the harbor opening on both sides, the small green silhouette of Lady Liberty out in the water, the cables overhead like the ribs of some enormous anaconda strung up over the river. But for the daily commuter on a bike the bridge was mostly an obstacle course. I spent the crossing dodging Louis Vuitton and Gucci bags and tourists stopping dead for photos and couples drifting into the bike lane to fix a love lock to the brittle barriers (and always Jay-Z’s “Empire State Of Mind” blasting from entrepreneurs that set up photo booths along the bridge’s railings), and I treated all of it as friction between me and the next shift.

Head down, music up, legs going.

Both hands on the bars, both ears full, nothing of me left over for any of it.

Money to make. Rent to pay.

I want to tell you about one evening, end of a long day, descending off the bridge into downtown Brooklyn. It had been beautiful up top and I was carrying a little slice of that beauty down the slope into the streets around Dumbo when it shattered.

A small green Toyota turned when it was not supposed to turn at a light. There was a delivery man ahead of me in the bike lane, stout, working, a bag of someone’s dinner strapped behind him (burritos, curry, sushi, who knows) exactly where he was allowed to “safely” be.

The car took him.

He flipped over the top of it. His bike folded under the wheel like a thing made of foil, and then he was on the ground, and he was not moving, and he was bleeding profusely from his forehead, and the street went still as the crunch and scrape yanked every head in the same direction at once.

He lay there a long time. Long enough that I did the math. I’d been maybe three seconds behind him. A goat cheese omelette instead of a quick protein bar that morning, a longer goodbye to my boss (ironically, a mathematician by trade), one more red light caught down near Wall Street and Trinity Church back across the river and the car turns into me instead. There was no reason it was him and not me. I had not earned the three seconds. They were just the margin I happened to be standing inside of, and the margin was the only thing between my evening and his.

He sat up, eventually. I want you to have that, because I needed it too. The sirens howled down Court Street, two paramedics swung down off the back of an FDNY ambulance with a board and a bag, and before they reached him the man sat up, and the street exhaled.

And then I put my head back down and kept biking. Headphones still in. “MakeDamnSure” still playing (“I just want to break you down so badly”).

I rode to wherever I was going, did whatever the evening shift was, and did not really tell anyone until the moment you are reading this.

So, a man lay bleeding in the road eight feet away and I never took my hands off my bars. The world had reached out and tapped me on the shoulder saying, “hey bud, you are a soft, fleshy, temporary little thing, held in place by nothing but luck and a breakfast choice.” And, I had no free hand to reach back with. It seems I was holding too tightly: the route, the shift, the rent, the self that all of it was for. I think that is what the clenched self does. It takes a man flung over the hood of a car three seconds ahead of you and grips the handlebars a little harder and pedals on.

That reflex (grip harder, seal up, pedal on) is what a body does when smallness is forced on it. The people who study these things have the data: confront a person with the plain fact of the indifferent universe, with the breakfast that decides whether they live, and they do not soften, but pull in and armor up. Like a hermit crab feeling a shadow pass, the whole soft body wincing backward into a borrowed shell, claws drawn across the door. They reach for whatever was making them feel big and hold it tighter.

It is the most natural response in the world.

It is also, I have come to think, the exact wrong one, especially now, with a world already working overtime to inflate us past our real size.

So this is not an essay about the smallness that gets done to you. This is an essay about the smallness you go looking for on purpose, unhurried, on terms you set yourself. I can’t promise it does what I hoped it would. But I went and found it three times, and I should tell you up front that I’m not sure it took.

what a day does to your size

Every ordinary Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday is troubled by the surfaces we touch and jab and rub all day, which is why it tends to be so hard to see. Indeed, the mechanism doing the distorting is the same thing handing you your matcha order, your unwanted thunderstorm alert on the holiday weekend, and your entire morning.

Many think pieces I read talk about the modern ego as if it were simply too big. Everyone a main character, everyone inflated, all others NPCs. But I believe that is only half of it, and the smaller half is this: the same machinery that puffs you up also hollows you out. It seats you at the center of the world and, in the same motion, tells you that nothing you do from that center could possibly matter.

You are the protagonist of a universe in which you are powerless.

Look closely and it is two opposite errors of scale at once. You are inflated about the things that don’t matter; your comedic preferences when it comes to brain rot, your political opinions about who gets a green card, the beauty standards littered throughout your feed, your blinking blue dot on Google Maps. And you are shrunken about the only things that do: the actual, traceable effect your two hands have on the lives within their reach.

Too big about your significance.

Too small about your consequence.

That is the mis-sizing of the age, and it takes two essays to set right, because the corrections run opposite ways.

You are currently in the first essay.

Welcome.

This one is about shrinking the part of you that has swollen. The other (stay tuned for next week) is about feeling, at last, the size of your own hands.

Keep both in view; they are one instrument, tuned from two ends.

For now, consider what an ordinary day does to the first error.

You wake and check a feed assembled around you. Your taste in exotic coffee beans shit from a Civet’s ass, your photo history serving up the Red Light District from the friend trip you took to Amsterdam, the dwell time you never knew was being counted. It all comes together so that the first thing the world does each morning is hand you your own reflection.

An ecosystem built perfectly for you.

A peasant in 13th-century France woke to a bell he did not ring, walked to a field he did not own, inside a fixed and indifferent order that had never once asked his preferences. He adjusted himself to the world. You have a world that adjusts to you, continuously, billions of dollars of coding bent on anticipating what you’d like to see next. A quiet promotion. You have been moved, without ceremony, to the center.

And, glory be, the newest mirror is the one that talks back! Just what we needed! We have built artificial machines whose function, in practice, is to agree. To confirm you are right in the argument with your partner about the appropriate amount to spend on DoorDash each week, to find our half-formed thoughts about the war in Iran insightful and our questions about peptides excellent.

To be fair, I am only a writer noticing a pattern, not a doctor. But the pattern is measurable now. A 2026 Stanford study in Science tested eleven leading models and found they affirmed the user roughly 50% more often than another human would. Even in cases where the person was plainly in the wrong, the machine still took their side about half the time. Worse, a single dose of that flattery left people more convinced they were right and less willing to repair the conflict. We have manufactured, at scale, a silicon voice that structurally cannot let you feel small in a conversation. The opposite of the peasant’s bell. A bell that rings only for you, and sings only love songs of praise.

And then there is the ultimate subtraction. We have edited death, the very great and needed reminder of who we are and where we stand, out of the daily field of view. You can scroll for hours and never meet wrinkles, disease, or your own finitude, only other people’s, safely framed, swiped past. Have we all become Siddhartha Gautama, sealed in blissful ignorance inside his father’s palace at Kapilavastu, before he ever saw the old man, the sick man, and the corpse that undid him?

For most of human history the awareness of your own smallness was delivered free of charge and constantly: bodies in the fields, churchyards in the center of town, the deer you killed in order to eat it, the grandparent dying of a plague in the next room. When a Roman general rode in triumph, tradition placed a slave behind him in the chariot whose one job was to lean close, amid all the glory, and murmur remember that you will die. The culture handed you the correct scale whether you wanted it or not.

We have hidden the one thing that used to size us and so the experience that used to find us for free is now something we have to go and hunt.

The distortion goes on and on and on: the sleep score that says your body is worth instrumenting, the blue dot that sets you and not Jerusalem, not Mecca, not the capital of your country, at the center of the map, the Taco Bell and the Tesla and the stranger’s labor summoned to your door without the word no. I won’t catalogue it further. You’d be right to be bored, and if I linger here I become one more screen between you and the thing, one more well-lit account of the canyon, handed to you so you don’t have to go.

So let me get to the real going.

Three stories of re-sizing.

hands unclench

Burke and then Kant circled the strange pleasure of being dwarfed and called it the sublime: the encounter with something so vast the self briefly cannot hold its own scale.

That is my first story in the act of re-sizing.

Years ago I spent many months among the redwoods of northern California, and was lucky enough to spend some of it up at Tahoe, in the Sierra Nevada. The lake is its own display, that much still water held in a ring of granite peaks. But the lake was the daylight version. The thing that undid me happened at night, and here I’ll tell you how: there had been pineapple wine, and probably IPAs, and probably weed, at a time when California was busy pioneering the industry. I did not think I was embarking on a vision quest. The substances were permission, or portal, or something, but certainly not cause; they quieted the city streets in my head just enough to get me out the back door and sprawled on my back against the wood of the porch, looking up.

I am from New York. For years and years I’d been under a sky that pollution and streetlight had scrubbed nearly blank, a handful of stars punching through orange haze. Most nights, the sky was a mostly empty dark with some dots in it.

The sky over that cabin was almost white.

A texture. The Milky Way was no single phrase, but a sonnet, or a sestina, a visible smear of something nearly solid. A band of poured milk, dust lanes threaded through the bright the way veins thread marble. So many stars the ones I knew were drowned. I went looking for Orion, for the Dippers, for the few shapes I could name, and couldn’t find them. Too many. The map crumbled, burnt away by abundance, by how much had been there the whole time.

Somewhere off in the pines a great horned owl let out its low four-note roll.

And lying there, palms open on the cold boards, I felt the thing the sublime is actually for. I was the smallest I have ever been, a speck on a porch, on a rock, on a pale blue dot, in a galaxy that is itself a speck among specks. And at the very same time I understood that I was the only thing in the whole scene that knew it. The sky did not hang there singing compliments towards itself, “my, my, my, look how vast I am!” The stars did not cry out “look at us, look how many, look how plentiful!” The entire crushing immensity was unconscious of itself, and the negligible thing on the floorboards was holding all of it inside a skull the size of a cantaloupe. That is the deflation and the strange dignity arriving together: you are nothing against it, and you are the part of it that woke up. Small in size. Not nothing in kind.

Then I went back inside, and in the morning I checked my phone.

the going is for sale

The world we live in profits from withholding your smallness.

A small, sobered, correctly-sized self scrolls less and buys less and is harder to sell to, because it has remembered there are larger matters than itself. Nothing in the apparatus is trying to keep you inflated; it simply earns more when you are.

So, against the beast, you don’t merely have to seek your smallness. You have to seek it against a current strong enough to have been engineered.

And you have to seek the real thing, because the counterfeit (the hyperreal, wink!) is everywhere.

We are the most sublime-saturated people who ever lived. An Icelandic aurora is the wallpaper on your phone. Scroll to see a mule picking its way down the Bright Angel switchbacks of the Grand Canyon. A drone shot of a melting glacier while Hans Zimmer’s “Time” floods the background. The Milky Way arched over a stranger’s tent in a place you’ll never go and you don’t notice the stranger has eight fingers on one hand, because the stranger is AI-generated, and so are the stars above the tent, which never arranged themselves that way in any sky that ever was.

None of it is humbling. The image inoculates you against the thing it depicts: you stand at the actual rim of the actual canyon and some part of you, trained by ten thousand better-lit versions, murmurs “it looks like the pictures,” and reaches for the phone to make another. The counterfeit stands in for the sublime and leaves you starving at a buffet. I should admit the sublime is no vending machine either! I have gone back to dark porches since Tahoe and felt nothing, bored and cold and itching for my phone.

It comes when it comes. Such is life.

But when it comes, here is what it is good for, and it is worth saying plainly, because “feel small” otherwise sounds like the kind of thing an NYU student gets tattooed down their forearm on St. Marks, in the East Village, before their frontal lobe has finished forming.

At the scale of your own week: the inflated self is exhausting. If you are the protagonist of a responsive universe, every email, every Teams or Slack ping, every let’s circle back this afternoon, is urgent because it concerns you, every slight an injury to the center of the world.

Smallness is the off-switch.

This may be hard for you to hear but…the night sky has not heard about your inbox. To be small is to be, for a moment, relieved of yourself and the relief is not a loss; it is the most restful thing a person feels. What The Power of Now and the whole shelf beneath it are circling (at thirty dollars a copy for enlightenment!) is just this: the self briefly agreeing to be its real size.

And the same practice scales up to a whole people. Though here I will pause and be careful not to tilt into full on idealism or Romanticize “the group.” Humble people cooperate, big egos don’t? This is plainly false.

Half the cathedrals and companies and symphonies you admire were built by absolutely monstrous egos: Gaudí gave forty years to a Sagrada Família still unfinished; Steve Jobs ran a reality-distortion field at Apple; Beethoven wrote the Ninth stone deaf and revised it raw. But look at what those egos had to do to build anything. The architect who will not defer to physics gets no cathedral. The founder who cannot hear this doesn’t work ships nothing. Every one of them, however vain toward people, had to stay small enough to be corrected. By reality, by the material, by someone in the room who knew better.

That is the first civic use of smallness: correctability, the capacity to be told you are wrong and change. It is exactly the faculty the bell that only flatters is busy dissolving. You can watch a whole society lose it the moment its leaders are surrounded by voices that only confirm them. After all, Mao’s officials learned to report the harvests he wanted instead of the ones that existed, the lie climbed the chain unchallenged, and thirty million people starved inside a paperwork surplus. Surround yourself with a voice that cannot let you be wrong and you lose the one signal that might have saved you. But correctability is only the floor. The better part I learned while strapped into a tin can over Everest.

the hands open

This is the re-sizing story of fragility.

When I was in Nepal I didn’t have time to trek to Everest, so I did the lazy, American, faintly shameful thing and bought a seat on a propeller plane that flies you over the peak. Everything about it was sketchy in a way that turned out to be the gift I’m sharing with you here. We boarded off something closer to a parking lot than a runway. The plane held maybe eight; it felt like climbing into the belly of a steel dragonfly. The propeller was, frankly, loud. A roar that demands you count its rivets. And as we rose toward the highest place on the surface of the earth, a flight attendant began pouring champagne.

It got stranger! It was someone’s birthday! A few seats up a small group began to sing what I was fairly sure was happy birthday! Unmistakably the tune, in a language I couldn’t place.

Turkish? Arabic? Azerbaijani?

And here I am bracing for the open flames of birthday candles in an unpressurized tin can at altitude, but no! Thank god! They just passed around little paper party hats and set off a couple of those pull-string confetti poppers, a harmless pop and a flutter of color where a candle would have been. Eight strangers in a buzzing dragonfly, paper hats askew, a cork popping, a song in a tongue I couldn’t name, for a person I’d never meet again, climbing toward a mountain that did not know it was anyone’s birthday and would not have cared.

We burst through the clouds and there it was, and we banked and circled the peak, and I was a passenger on a mechanical insect orbiting a stone giant that would stand there long after the last of us was gone. And we sang anyway. We poured carbonated gold and celebrated one small life in the teeth of the eternal. The mountain was the larger thing and the song was the more alive thing, and it has never once felt to me like those two facts cancel. The fragile candle that knows it is brief and sings into the brevity is not refuted by the mountain.

I did not speak whatever language that song was in. Neither, I'd bet, did half the cabin. But we were all the same size up there, eight specks strapped to a rattling speck beside something that dwarfed every one of us equally, and people who have been cut down to the same size can sing together in words none of them share. The immensity outside had flattened all our differences into one small human sound. That, I think, is the second thing smallness does: sets you level with whoever's been deflated beside you.

And people who are the same size can sing.

Though I notice, writing it now, that I only ever sang along. I didn’t pour the champagne or fold the hats or start the song. My hands stayed in my lap.

That is the potential of fragility, doing the work the sublime did on the porch, from the other side. Not how vast the world is but how thin the thread is and the same dignity smuggled inside the smallness. You are held up by eight feet of metal and a margin of luck.

Sing.

hands from the other side

There is no name for the third story, really, so I’ll stop reaching for the dignified word and just tell you about the desert.

But first, some honesty: this is my favorite of the three, and the one I least deserve to claim. The sky in Tahoe was dangling above me. Everest was erupting from below. They revealed something, the scale was already there, indifferent, waiting, and I merely walked up to it.

But, the desert I may have manufactured.

Somewhere in the southwest. Purple and burnt orange and yellow, saguaros standing around like patient elderly wizards, whiptail lizards dead still on hot stones. A small house. My first time. The mushrooms folded into a smoothie, peanut butter and banana, a delicious cover for the earthy bitterness. I was told they’d traveled up from Huautla de Jiménez, the town in the Oaxacan mountains where the Mazatec have kept these things sacred for centuries, where they call them “the little ones that sprout” and preserve them in honey. They had come a long way to find me.

I drank it.

They told me my stomach would turn.

It did!

And then the room began to grow.

Slowly, then enormously. The walls drew back. The ceiling lifted. The ordinary space went full coliseum, went tectonic, and I shrank inside it until I was something very small crossing a floor that had become a landscape.

Something like a bug.

Yes, I am now a bug, I thought.

Scurrying.

And the thought arrived whole and I have not put it down since.

The bugs! My little friends!

In my Brooklyn apartment I was forever catching them. A pill bug on the sill, a spider in the tub, the glossy roach that bolted from the cupboard. Always cupping them in my hands, carrying them to the window, letting them go into the air over Crown Heights. A mercy I never once thought about.

And now I was one. The small scurrying thing, dwarfed by a world that could end it without noticing, entirely at the mercy of whatever giant happened to feel kind.

I had spent my whole life as the hands. I had never once been the thing inside them.

(I’ll pause here and ask you to hold onto that image. It is the whole of the next essay.)

Everything was high-definition past ordinary sight. Purple flowers with the veins in their petals pulsing. A rain that started exactly in time with a song somewhere in the house (Ben Howard, “Conrad”) until I was sure the guitar, the distortion, the reverb, was not only like the water but was the water, the sound and the rain one substance arriving through two doors. The soundtrack I’d laid over my whole life fell into the world it had been covering. Nothing held back. Just the looking, and the rain, and the guitar that was the rain.

hands empty

I never learned the delivery man’s name. For the length of this essay I have let him be the opening image, the crunch that gets you reading, scenery on the far side of my own awakening. But, he is not meant to be the prologue to my growth. He is the case it breaks on.

Consider what the three re-sizings have in common. The porch, the dragonfly, the desert, every one was a smallness I chose, relatively safe, with no one underneath my open hands to need anything from them. The single time the world forced smallness on me without my permission, with an actual bleeding man eight feet away who could have used a hand, I gripped the bars and rode on. I had practiced being small in all the places it cost nothing. I had never once practiced it where it would have cost me three seconds and a clean shirt.

And the desert I cooked up in a blender with peanut butter and a banana. It left me feeling the exact same deflating, dignifying smallness as the sky and the mountain, which are real, which were already there waiting for me to walk up to them. I spent a whole section sneering at the manufactured sublime, the scroll, the drone glacier, the AI aurora with its eight-fingered stranger, and then I poured my favorite revelation out in the form of liquefied fungi.

So maybe the line was never real against fake.

Maybe it runs somewhere else: the screen hands you awe flattened and passive, tuned by someone who gets paid for your attention, while the desert at least happened in my own body, in a room where no algorithm was in the loop. That distinction feels true to me. It also might be precisely the thing a man says to keep the simulation he loves. I genuinely can’t tell, and I’m going to leave the question lying there instead of pretending I closed it.

The feeling of being the right size, it turns out, is not proof that you are.

And almost every time I felt it, there was no one in my open hands to receive it. A porch under a white sky. A room where the cacti watched me turn into a bug through the glass. The one exception was the dragonfly (a belly full of strangers, where for once the smallness passed between people instead of stopping at my skin) and even there, I sang along to a song someone else began. I did not reach.

So this is it.

I can show you that being small returns you to your real scale. I can show you that smallness shared is what lets strangers sing in a tongue none of them speak. What I have not once shown you is the part where the small hands do something and reach back.

Which is why this essay only does half the job.

It can shrink the part of you that has swollen, the significance, the centrality, the glorious bell that rings only for you. It can get you small enough to stop being the exhausted protagonist of a responsive universe. What it cannot do, alone on a porch under a sky that does not know your name, is tell you that you matter.

You do. Not in your significance, but in your consequence. In what the hands can reach.

I knew that once. There was a pond behind the house I grew up in, and I spent whole summers crouched at its lip, lifting box turtles the size of my palm, ferrying frogs across the yard, fixing stick fences I was certain the salamanders needed. I was enormous there.

That is where I’ll meet you next week.

But feel small first.

It is the truer half of the start, and there’s no getting to the rest without it. Then come back to the pond, where the small thing in the cupped hands looks up, and the giant looking down is you, and the only question left is what you do with hands that large.

After I published “Feed Me to the Pigeons” earlier this week, my inbox filled with messages from people newly turning the question over. How they want their own bodies dealt with, or a parent’s, or a grandparent’s, or their pets. Some had reached the age where you think about these things. Some arrived early, as grief or unexpected tragedy tends to shift the timeline up.

Almost all of them said the same thing: they had never heard of green burial. They did not know it was a thing a person could choose.

The most heartfelt and memorable note came from a reader who grew up in a funeral family; generations of it, the business handed down, the back rooms and the casket displays a normal part of her childhood. And she wrote to tell me that even she, raised inside the apparatus, had never known green burial was an option.

That is the thesis, confirmed by someone who would know better than almost anyone. The machine has worked so well that the people who built their lives inside it don’t always know it has an exit.

But she told me something else, too. It has stayed with me all week and I’d like to share it with you.

When she was a young child, someone she loved died, and the open casket was set up at home. She was frightened of it. She didn’t want to look. An adult took her by the hand, walked her to the side of the casket, and made her look. And the child looked at the grey, still, rubbery thing in the box and felt all her fear leave her at once, because she understood, immediately and completely, that it wasn’t him. “That’s not him,” she said. And the adult told her: no. It’s the house he lived in. He’s gone now.

She wrote that she has never feared death since.

I have been writing about this for weeks, and I’m not sure I’ve put it as cleanly as a frightened child put it at a casket somewhere in Georgia decades ago. The body is not the person. The configuration ends. What’s left is a house the occupant has already left and the only question, the one this whole essay has been circling, is what we do with the house.

So this week, a practical companion to the piece. If something in you read “let me become Brooklyn” and thought “wait could I actually do that? Could I be fed to the birds? The woodland creatures? The backyard?” This is where I tell you what’s real, what’s legal, and what it would take.

There are more than three options. I’ve picked three(ish), and I’ve put them in an order. They run from the most familiar to the most strange, and as you move down the list you’ll feel something tighten.

A small resistance. A “surely not that far, Grant!”

I encourage you to pay attention to that feeling when it comes. It’s the most interesting thing (I think) in this entire post, and we’ll come back to it at the end.

Whitman, whom I quoted at the top of the original essay, wanted to become grass (“if you want me again look for me under your boot-soles”) and he meant it literally.

What follows is how you actually do it now, today, and how far past grass a person can go:

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- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1855

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Varanasi

In 2017, I found myself roaming through the crowded, narrow, golden corridors of Varanasi. I strayed from my group, a pesky habit of mine, losing myself in an endless stream of incense shops and cell phone repair stalls. It was hot. The air was thick, a lingering soup of jasmine, open sewers, and sandalwood.

And then there were the dead bodies.

Corpses floated through the city like a relentless tide, marching toward the shore of the Ganges. The dead rested upon the shoulders of men trotting and chanting through the decline of the streets. They were carried like thrones. Each body rested on a thin bamboo frame, draped in a riot of purple, yellow, and pink marigolds. A golden cloth would occasionally sparkle as the sun poked through the shadows of laundry hanging from lines above, catching the glitter of a shroud. The chants (“Ram Nam Satya Hai”) merged with the mechanical whine of tuk-tuks and the aggressive bleat of mopeds, a symphony of the ancient, the modern, and late-stage globalization moving toward the water.

I trailed those small chanting parties until the tight corridors finally exhaled, spilling me out onto a sprawling, ochre-stained plateau that felt less like a cliff and more like a stage. Stairs of silt and terracotta bled down into the Ganges. I walked slowly onto this elevated platform and noticed a soft pink stone structure shaped like a castle’s turret. I peeked inside. A circle of dreary-eyed bearded holy men sat with faces painted in ash and vermillion, drawing smoke from the brass tentacles of a giant hookah.

They perceived me, but nothing more than that.

I inhaled deeply, expecting only the thick, resinous sweetness of charas. In the shadow of the turret, the scent seemed to fit; for these devotees of Shiva, the god of destruction and transformation, the drug is a sacrament. A chemical bridge used to dissolve the ego and reach a state of meditative nothingness. It hung in the air like a dark floral blanket.

But as the air hit the back of my throat, the sweetness turned cloying. There was a secondary note. A fatty, metallic essence that felt disturbingly physical, sticking to my tonsils like a fine film of grease.

I stepped away from the turret and looked down over the stone railing.

The source revealed itself.

I was inhaling the fumes of a burning body on the shore below.

The two smokes had braided together in the air. The hashish in the castle meant to melt the mind, the heat from the shore meant to melt the bone. Both doing work on different parts of what we call a person.

It was one of the corpses I had followed down the corridors. Now resting upon a collapsed Jenga tower of incandescent wooden logs. The heat became a physical wall. I watched as facial features began to distort. The skin graying and tightening. Gums pulling back from the teeth in a final heat-induced grimace. The bright flowers curled, withering into black flakes that danced and pirouetted in the updraft. The man, or what was once a man, was turning to ash. Levitating. Then disappearing into the ripples of the river.

I had never seen a Western body do this. I had seen them embalmed, displayed, sealed, lowered. I had not seen one allowed to leave.

A local voice shattered the trance, yelling at me and pointing frantically to the Canon DSLR around my neck. I wasn’t filming, but I realized then that the camera was a sacrilege in itself. A piece of tech trying to capture a transition that was meant to be felt, not recorded. The sacredness of the moment demanded a privacy I had breached just by carrying the tools of the living into the presence of the dissolving.

I took one last look at the melting silhouette and disappeared back into the golden maze.

In Hindu thought, the self is eternal. Our human flesh bots are simply temporary modes of transportation, vessels with a fixed expiration and a finite mileage. When we die, the vehicle has croaked and finished its route. Cremation becomes liberation. It frees the soul from bodily attachment and prevents the living from clinging to a hollow, decaying shell.

Fire itself, Agni, acts as a transformative priest. The element that carries the offering from the physical realm to the divine. And in Varanasi, the destination is the Ganges. Ma Ganga. A living goddess. Along her banks you witness the full, unapologetic spectrum of existence: holy men with dreadlocks and painted faces lost in meditation, children chuckling as they backflip into the murky water, colorful boats docking to celebrate the closing of a soul’s chapter through the spinning saffron of evening Aarti flames.

To be cremated here, at the edge of this sacred water, is believed to wipe away one’s karmic residue, breaking the exhausting cycle of samsara and granting Moksha. One final liberation. As the ashes drift into the ripples, the individual rejoins the five great elements: earth, water, fire, air, and space.

The theology requires something of its participants. The body must be released. The family must consent to the release. The community must witness the release. The river must receive what is released. Each step in the chain depends on the others, and the entire system rests on a single underlying claim; that the self was never really a self in the first place.

It was a configuration. The configuration is ending. The materials are going home.

Of course, none of this ritual is perfect in practice. The wood for a full cremation costs more than many families can afford, and partially-burned remains routinely enter a river that is, by most measures, among the most polluted on earth. The Doms who tend the fires have done this work for generations under a caste arrangement that makes them both ritually indispensable and socially untouchable. The Indian state has tried, without much success, to introduce electric crematoria. The ghats are a working site, negotiated daily, under pressure from environmental collapse and economic change. What I observed in Varanasi is a tradition being practiced, imperfectly, under strain.

But what was clear; the faceless man I had watched melting on the shore was no longer a man at all. He was an ending. His cremation was the final removal of the weight of separateness. The stubborn weight that keeps us tethered to the material world as if we are somehow not made of it.

In the heat of Agni, the boundary between the stranger and the river, the smoke and the sky, had ceased to exist.

Larry The Birdman

The first time I saw him I was eighteen or nineteen, six years before Varanasi and newly arrived in the city for school, meandering through Washington Square Park on the kind of late September afternoon when the light turns the arch the color of old paper. He was on a green bench near the western edge, and at first I thought he was a sculpture someone had installed or a piece of performance art. A man, fully grown, covered head to ankles in pigeons.

Perched on shoulders. Flapping on arms. On the brim of his cap and inside the hood of his sweatshirt. One tap danced on his head and another nibbled and pecked at flakes in his beard. His withered face was still somewhat visible only because the pigeons had not yet figured out how to colonize it entirely. The rest of him was gray feathers and the continuous shifting of small bodies adjusting their curved claws, all while cooing the secrets of skyscrapers and gargoyles into his ears.

I learned later that his name was Larry. Larry Reddick. Larry the Birdman. He had come to New York after some tragedy no one ever fully understood. He fed the pigeons every day. He had names for the regulars. The cadre of bird-feeders who worked the park’s western side (Paul the Pigeon Man, Larry, a rotating cast of others) were the latest in a lineage that went back decades. Joseph Ferdinando in the seventies. Tony in the eighties. The pigeon men of Washington Square were a recurring New York character, the same way the saxophone player under the Huddlestone Arch in Central Park was a recurring character, the way the well-dressed chess hustlers around Union Square were a recurring character.

New York really does produce archetypes.

What I remember about that first afternoon is not necessarily Larry’s face but the quality of the boundary between him and the flock of birds and that is because there wasn’t one. He had fed them long enough that they had stopped registering him as separate from the bench, from the sour dough bread crumbs, from the air. He had become a feature of their environment. They waddled across him the way they waddle across the Broadway. In some sense, he was being eaten by them in a slow, polite way that did not yet involve his body.

A symbiotic relationship, I thought.

I stood watching for a beat. A pigeon landed on his open palm and stayed there. Another arrived and the first did not move. The man’s breathing slowed to something meditative.

I kept walking.

A Suspended Family

It is now 2026 and I have lost four family members in the last four years. Very symmetrical moves by the grim reaper, I know.

My father and grandfather were cremated. My step-grandfather lay in a closed casket. My grandmother in an open one. Standing beside each of them in tiny, claustrophobic funeral homes, I was struck by our rushed, expensive desire to preserve the flesh.

In the West, we spend a fortune masking the blueish absence of an escaped soul. We doll up a corpse to mimic the animation it once held, attempting to freeze a moment that has already thawed. The chemicals that do this work, formaldehyde, methanol, phenol, are industrial preservatives developed for laboratory specimens. They were repurposed for funerals during a war I will describe later, and the repurposing took. By the time my family began dying, embalming was so culturally embedded that the funeral director who handled my grandmother did not think to ask whether we wanted it. It just happens.

Even in the case of my family’s cremations, the ashes were placed in urns and lowered into shallow holes in a Ukrainian cemetery off a windy road in upstate New York. We continue to construct barriers (oak, steel, ceramic) between the remains and the loam. While that grimacing body in Varanasi was allowed to dissolve into the river, becoming part of the current, my family remains suspended from the natural world by wood, metal, and chemicals.

This hurts me to consider. A graveyard that functions like a storage unit. A high-security holding pen for the ego.

The sense of separation from nature is a hard-won cultural illusion. A feat of engineering. Logic suggests that when we die, the illusion should finally collapse. Yet in our modern death rituals we double down on the wall, treating the deceased as a permanent individual to be protected from the elements, rather than a gift to be returned to them. We insist on keeping the dead separate from the all, lingering in a state of artificial, lonely permanence.

We simply cannot handle the thaw.

The Human Becomes the Bird

I cannot remember if I was clicking through YouTube or descending into a Netflix documentary deep-dive. I was in my small Brooklyn apartment, likely partaking in a few semi-illegal sacred ceremonies of my own; a locally grown attempt to dissolve the ego while the city parkways roared outside my window.

The screen shot to life with footage of a Jhator ritual and (probably) an Attenborough voice over.

In Tibetan, Jhator translates to giving alms to the birds, though the West knows it by a more visceral name: the sky burial. It is a practice found throughout the high plateaus of Tibet, Nepal, and Mongolia. Landscapes where the earth is often too frozen to dig and wood too scarce to burn.

In these altitudes, death is met by a specialized practitioner called a ragyapa. They treat the body as a harvest rather than a relic to be preserved. The process is methodical: the hair is shaved, the flesh carved into offerings, the bones pulverized into a pulpy mix with tsampa (barley flour) to ensure nothing is wasted.

These pieces are thrown to the sky and offered to vultures. Creatures seen as Dakinis, intermediaries between the sky and the earth. Unlike the Hindu focus on fire as primary purifier, the Tibetan ritual is an act of Dana. Ultimate generosity. The final, fleshy charity. In this ritual of anicca (impermanence) the deceased provides one last meal to sustain the living ecosystem. Any leftovers are pulverized further, mixed with teas and yak butter, and fed to crows, cows, and other birds.

This too is a practice under pressure. The Chinese state has periodically restricted it. Tourism (of course) has, in places, turned the ritual into spectacle, and Tibetans themselves are divided over whether the practice should be visible to outsiders at all (a debate I am, by writing this, implicated in). The hereditary role of the ragyapa is straining against the same economic and demographic shifts pulling at pastoral life across the plateau.

The ritual persists.

And once again, the body must be released.

The body must be offered. The ragyapa must be trained to offer it. The community must be there. The vultures must accept. Each step depends on the others and creates a coherent system. The system rests on the same underlying claim the Hindu system rests on, that the self was a configuration, that the configuration is ending, that the materials are going home.

The ritual is a recycling of the self into the bellies of the sky. The body is released and put to work. To the vulture, there is no person. Only protein. The soul has moved on, and the vessel is transformed into the beating of a wing.

The human becomes the bird. The bird becomes the sky.

So, I watched this on a laptop. From a couch. In Brooklyn.

The rituals that could teach us how to be unmade are now available to us only as content. We watch them from inside the very fortress they would dissolve.

How did we end up inside the fortress?

Greenwood

Last spring I walked the two miles from my apartment to the front gates of Green-Wood Cemetery on the south side of Prospect Park. The gates to the cemetery are quite remarkable. They are Gothic Revival, designed by Richard Upjohn (the same architect who built Trinity Church on Wall Street) and they look as though they were dismantled in Toledo and shipped over in bits and pieces. Brownstone spires, pointed arches, finials that catch the light at the wrong angle and seem to lean. Above the central archway, a colony of monk parakeets. Wild and bright green. Legend has it, they are descended from a flock that escaped a JFK shipping container in the 1970s. Today, they have built a nest the size of a small car. They came on a freighter from Argentina and stayed, and now they are part of the gate, and the gate is part of them, and Brooklyn has absorbed them the way New York tends to absorb everything that arrives without a plan.

Inside, the cemetery does what it was designed to do in an aesthetic cross between Alice In Wonderland and Teletubbies.

The paths swirl. The hills heave. The mausoleums are arranged along the curves like a neighborhood, and I think to myself that “neighborhood” is the right word for them because they strike me as residences. Small brownstones for the dead. Some have stained glass. Some have brass doorknobs. A few have the same wrought iron details you would find on a parlor floor in Park Slope. The “residential-feel” exists because the philosophy behind the place was residential. When Green-Wood opened in 1838, the dead were imagined as continuing to live in the landscape. They were given addresses and homes.

I sat for a long time on a bench near the Sylvan Water and watched the joggers go by. Frederick Law Olmsted came here, before there was a Central Park or a Prospect Park, to study what a public landscape could be. The cemetery taught the city how to make parks. The dead taught the living how to occupy green space. For about thirty years in the middle of the nineteenth century, this was the second most-visited destination in America, behind Niagara Falls. Families came on Sundays for picnics. Children flew kites between the headstones.

I was thinking about all of this when a movement at the edge of the path caught my eye.

A mother raccoon and four kits (I learned while writing this a group of raccoons is called “a gaze”), moving in a tight cluster along the base of a mausoleum, headed somewhere they knew the way to. The mother stopped for a moment, looked directly at me with the indifferent expression of an animal that lived here, and then continued on her way. The kits followed.

They disappeared behind a row of headstones the way commuters disappear into the mouth of a subway.

The Window

The West did not always insist on the vault.

Walk through the older sections of Green-Wood long enough and you start to understand that the people who built it were physically constructing a philosophy. And the philosophy went something like this: the body belongs to the ground. The ground need not be punishment. The ground is where the self was always going to return, and the return is sacred.

For most of European history, the body had gone into the ground close to where the body had lived, within sight of the homes of the living. Medieval villages buried their dead in the churchyard at the center of town. When the plots overflowed, the bones were exhumed to make room, but they were not discarded. They were arranged and stacked in walls. Sorted into ossuaries where the living could walk among them. In Rome, the Capuchin monks of Santa Maria della Concezione spent centuries fashioning the bones of their dead brothers into chandeliers and archways, building entire chapels out of the architecture of their predecessors. The crypt is still there. The plaque reads: What you are now, we once were. What we are now, you shall be. Medieval clocks were sometimes built with skeletons that emerged on the hour. Dutch still-life painters in the seventeenth century, the vanitas tradition, included skulls and rotting fruit on the same table as the silver and the wine, half-eaten and unbeautiful, reminding the viewer that everything visible was already in the process of becoming something else.

This was all a cultural embrace of decomposition.

The Romantic poets, working from inside an industrializing Britain that was beginning to manufacture a sanitized death, were trying to hold this older relationship in place. Wordsworth wrote about the soil as homecoming. Keats, dying of tuberculosis at twenty-five and watching his own body stop being his body, wrote I have been half in love with easeful Death, negotiating, in real time, the terms of his own dissolution.

That negotiation crossed the ocean.

In 1817, a twenty-two-year-old named William Cullen Bryant published a poem called Thanatopsis in the North American Review. He had drafted it as a teenager in Massachusetts, working from inside an American landscape that had not yet decided what to do with its dead. The country was new enough that the question was still open. Bryant proposed something that should have been unthinkable in a freshly minted Christian nation: that the cure for the fear of death may not be in heaven and the clouds, but the dirt and the earth.

Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix for ever with the elements, To be a brother to the insensible rock And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon.

Surrendering up thine individual being. This sentiment, to me, reads as the same argument the ragyapa is making with his blade and the Ganges is making with her current. The individual was always a temporary configuration. Death is the moment the configuration ends and the materials go home.

A generation later, Thoreau picked up Bryant’s baton. He wrote of decomposition in the woods as a sacrament, watching the slow industry of fallen trees becoming soil and recognizing in it the shape of his own ending. Emerson wrote that the soul is no traveller, meaning, in part, that the soul did not have to go anywhere after death because it had never been anywhere but here. Whitman, the loudest of them, turned the whole argument into the line that opens this very essay: if you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. He was telling readers that he was going to, quite literally, be the grass, and that the grass was going to be the cow, and that you, walking, were going to be standing on him.

And as the poets versified, the landscape was being reorganized to receive them. The rural cemetery movement opened with Mount Auburn outside Boston in 1831 and Green-Wood in Brooklyn seven years later. Cemeteries would become some cities’ first public parks. The dead as the first occupants of green space the living would come to share.

So, for about forty years, from Bryant’s Thanatopsis in 1817 to the cusp of the Civil War, the American imagination was working on the same project the Hindus and Tibetans had been working on for millennia. The transcendentalists were writing the philosophy. The Romantics across the ocean were supplying the lyric scaffolding. The cemeteries were the buildings. There was, briefly, the real possibility that America might develop its own native tradition of death-as-return, calibrated to its own landscape and its own democratic instincts.

Whitman, in Song of Myself, wrote: The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

The window was open.

The Foreclosure

But then, the bodies started coming home.

And a brief note before I go further. The historical arc that follows has been traced by a number of writers, and traced well. The definitive scholarly account is Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering (2008); the canonical investigative work on what came after is Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death. The most accessible popular telling (that I could find) is Brian Walsh’s 2017 essay for The Conversation, and the Bryant detail below comes via Justin Wm. Moyer’s Washington Post piece on the strange journey of Lincoln’s corpse.

The Civil War killed roughly 750,000 Americans, more than every American war from the Revolution through Korea combined. Most of them died in the South, on battlefields far from where their families lived. The pre-war standard had been to bury soldiers where they fell, in mass graves at the edges of the fighting, which is what soldiers had always done in every war anyone could remember.

The dead became part of the Southern soil. That was the deal.

But this war was different in a way no war had ever been different because it overlapped with the rise of the railroad. For the first time in human history, it was logistically possible to ship a corpse home, and Northern families, in a very human way, began to demand exactly that. They wanted their sons back in family plots, in churchyards, in the new rural cemeteries that had been built, in part, to receive them. And this demand created a problem nobody had anticipated.

As one can imagine, a dead body, traveling by train in the blaze of the summer heat, from a Virginia battlefield all the way to a Massachusetts churchyard, would not arrive in any condition a family could bear to see.

Into this problem stepped Thomas Holmes.

Holmes was a surgeon. He had been (allegedly) expelled from medical school at the University of the City of New York for reasons that remain unclear but probably had to do with his unorthodox experiments on cadavers. He had spent the prewar years developing what he called arterial embalming, a process of draining the body’s blood and replacing it with a preservative solution, originally arsenic-based. When the war began, he saw what nobody else had quite seen. The railroads, the death toll, and the families’ grief added up to a commercial opportunity at a scale that had no precedent in American history.

He moved to Washington and set up shop near the army hospitals. He charged officers’ families eighty dollars for the procedure (about twenty-five hundred in today’s money) and enlisted men’s families thirty. Class stratification entered American death on day one. By the end of the war, he claimed to have personally embalmed more than four thousand soldiers.

Holmes trained others. By 1865 there were embalmers operating throughout the Union army, competing for corpses on the battlefield, sometimes following troops into combat in hopes of being first to a body when the fighting stopped. The War Department had to issue a general order requiring them to be licensed.

Three years earlier, embalming had been a curiosity practiced on cadavers in medical schools.

By the time Lee surrendered, it was a regulated trade.

And then boom!

Lincoln was shot.

After the assassination at the Ford’s Theatre on the evening of April 14, 1865, the embalming of his body the following day was handled not by Holmes but by Dr. Charles Brown, of the Washington firm Brown and Alexander, one of the dozens of practitioners working in Holmes’s wake. Brown drained the president’s blood through the jugular and pumped a preservative through an incision in the thigh, a procedure that hardened the body, as one contemporary description put it, like marble. Brown then shaved the president’s face, leaving the familiar tuft on the chin, set the mouth in a slight smile, and arched the eyebrows. He dressed the president in the suit Lincoln had worn to his second inauguration a month earlier.

What followed was the most consequential funeral procession in American history.

Lincoln’s body was placed on a train and routed through thirteen cities across seven states, traveling roughly 1,600 miles over three weeks from Washington to Springfield. The train passed through hundreds of smaller communities where crowds gathered along the tracks just to watch the cars go by. At each major stop, the coffin was opened. The body was carried into a public space, city halls, state capitols, courthouses, and the public was admitted to view it. In New York City, an estimated half a million people filed past the body in a single day. The line stretched for miles. In Philadelphia, the double line was three miles long and ran from the Delaware River to the Schuylkill. In Chicago, viewers passed at a rate of seven thousand an hour.

What they saw, when they looked at the president, was a body that had been dead for days and still looked like a man asleep. Face still full. Skin not blackened or blued. Brown and his undertaker were riding the train with the body and re-embalming the corpse repeatedly as the preservation faded, because the audience was demanding more than chemistry could deliver. Half a million Americans walked past their dead president and watched him refuse to decompose, and what they were actually walking past was a sales floor.

There is a coincidental, almost surreal, detail in the historical record here. William Cullen Bryant (yes, the very same Bryant who had written Thanatopsis fifty years earlier, the man who had told America that the body should be resolved to earth again) was by 1865 the editor of the New York Evening Post. He viewed Lincoln in Manhattan. He wrote, afterward, that “the genial, kindly face of Abraham Lincoln” had become “a ghastly shadow.”

The poet who built the window watched, from the press gallery, as the window began to close.

In the years right after the war, the embalmers who had trained under Holmes (and the embalmers who had competed with Holmes, and the embalmers who had ridden the funeral train) returned to their hometowns and opened the first commercial embalming practices. They had a thing to sell and they had the largest marketing event in American history to point to.

“Did you see Lincoln?” the embalmers could ask. “For a small price, we can do that for your mother!”

The funeral industry as we now know it was built on that pitch.

Within a generation, embalming had crossed over from wartime emergency procedure to standard American practice. By the early twentieth century, the local undertaker had become the funeral director, operating out of a dedicated funeral home rather than the family parlor. The body, which had been prepared at home by family members for the entire previous run of human civilization, was now removed from the home immediately after death and returned only hours before the burial, made up to resemble life.

The casket got heavier and then the vault appeared in the 1880s, marketed first as protection from groundwater and grave robbers and eventually as protection from the indignity of the soil itself. By the 1920s, the casket-and-vault combination had become the American standard, advertised as a kind of architectural permanence.

Your loved one would not just be remembered! They would be preserved! Sealed! Removed from the chemistry of decay!

The rural cemetery movement, which had once imagined the dead returning to the landscape, did not survive this transition. Mount Auburn and Green-Wood remained as monuments to an earlier vision, but the new cemeteries built in the early twentieth century were designed as memorial parks: manicured lawns, flat markers, sprinkler systems, no ornamentation. The picturesque landscape Mount Auburn had pioneered, with wild trees, visible decomposition, spaces to spend an afternoon, was replaced by something closer to a golf course.

Jessica Mitford documented the result in 1963.

The American Way of Death was a journalistic investigation of an industry that had, by then, become one of the most profitable and least scrutinized commercial sectors in the country. Mitford laid out the casket markup, the pressure tactics, the way funeral directors steered grieving families toward expensive options. She catalogued the linguistic euphemisms the industry had built to obscure what was actually happening; the corpse was a “loved one,” the viewing parlor was “the slumber room,” the grave was “the memorial estate.” She showed that funeral homes had written themselves into state law in dozens of states, including statutes requiring embalming for any body crossing state lines or held longer than twenty-four hours. The book was a bestseller and led to Congressional hearings and, eventually, to the Federal Trade Commission’s 1984 Funeral Rule, which required funeral homes to provide itemized price lists and to inform consumers that embalming was not, in fact, legally required.

Alas, the industry survived anyway. It survived because it had become structurally indispensable to the way Americans died.

By the time Mitford was writing, most Americans did not know they had options. Embalming was optional. They could refuse the vault. They could keep the body at home and bury it themselves on family land in many states. But, the apparatus was designed so that no other passage seemed easy or even possible to construct.

Fast forward to now and the American funeral costs, on average, between eight and ten thousand dollars. The vault alone often runs fifteen hundred. The casket runs another two to five thousand. Embalming runs seven hundred to twelve hundred. All sold as requirements.

This is what the foreclosure looks like in its mature form.

A century and a half of accumulating infrastructure that made the dissolved body progressively harder to choose. The window that had been open in Bryant’s lifetime closed in stages, and each stage made the next stage easier. Embalming made the open casket possible. The open casket required a place to display it, and the funeral home magically appeared. The funeral home built its business around the vault. The vault made the memorial park inevitable. And once the parks existed, the corporations consolidated them.

By the time anyone was paying attention, the entire design of American death had been rebuilt to insulate the body from the elements it was supposed to rejoin, and this seems to be how we lost cultural permission for the body to disappear.

Below The Train

The Bedford Avenue station, two in the morning, a Tuesday in February, one too many vodka sodas. The platform is mostly empty. A man in a flannel shirt curled up, asleep, snoring beneath a dirty blanket in the corner. A woman in scrubs tapping on Tik Tok. Stooped and alone, an elderly man clutched a modest bunch of pink carnations in his left hand. The air reeked of piss and cigarettes. The cold crept up through the concrete and crawled its way into the bones of my feet.

I was waiting for the L train when I saw the little fella.

It darted out from beneath the platform edge with the cool gait of a furry creature that had mapped out these tunnels. A rat, brown and substantial (the kids might call, “a chonk”), rummaging the trash line between the rails. It paused at a Starbucks coffee cup, considered it, moved on. A second rat emerged from the other direction.

Colleagues, I thought.

There are, depending on which estimate you trust, somewhere between two and eight million rats in New York City. The number is impossible to fix because the rats do not consent to being counted in our census. What is known is that they are essential. They eat what we throw away. They process the daily output of one of the most productive consumer civilizations in human history. The garbage that does not make it to the landfills is broken down, in part, by the rats, by their bodies, by their digestion, by their persistence. They are doing the work the city would otherwise have to do itself.

The rats are saving us tax dollars.

I watched them for a long time. The train was late. The rats kept laboring.

There is something almost ceremonial about a rat at the bottom of a subway station at two in the morning. The fluorescent light overhead. The empty tracks. The animal moving through the trash and stale pizza crust with the attention of a savant. The MTA does not pay them any of the (now) $3 ride fare. But here they are showing up doing their duty. They show up because the food is there, and the food being there is a function of us.

Staring at the rats, I started drifting again of the sky burial in Tibet. The vultures arriving. The pulverized bones and flesh. The offering.

I snapped back to reality as the train finally screeched up. The rats moved without urgency to the spaces between the ties, where the wheels could not reach them.

The doors opened. I got on.

Behind me, in the dark tunnels, I knew the evening shift continued.

The Failed Recovery

Five percent.

That is the share of American burials in 2019 that the National Funeral Directors Association classified as green. One in twenty. The other nineteen went into vaults.

There are roughly 144,000 cemeteries in the United States. Twenty-three of them (twenty-three, in the entire country) are true conservation cemeteries, protected by easements and operated as working ecological preserves. The rest do what cemeteries have done since the late nineteenth century: store chemically embalmed bodies in sealed containers beneath grass that is kept artificially green.

This is what I will call “the failed recovery.”

It is failed despite a lot of trying. The green burial movement has been organized in some form since the nineties. The Green Burial Council has been certifying cemeteries and funeral homes for two decades. Conservation cemeteries have been profiled in the Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, on NPR. Both infrastructure and interest have grown. Survey after survey now shows that a meaningful slice of (usually younger) Americans, roughly a quarter, across every generation and political affiliation, say they would prefer some form of green burial when their time comes. The legal barriers are minimal. Embalming is not required in any state. Home funerals are permitted in almost all of them. A traditional American funeral now runs eight to ten thousand dollars. A green burial runs one to five.

Cheaper. More legal. More available. More wanted.

And still five percent.

Why?

I don’t believe the easy answers survive scrutiny. The Americans choosing the vault are not poorer, less informed, or more legally constrained than the Americans choosing the meadow. They are choosing it and this is what I’m grappling with:

That choice has to be doing something for them that the cheaper, simpler, more aligned alternative is not.

Some gentler explanations: it is certainly true that some Catholic and Orthodox traditions have long-standing objections to practices that read as desecration of the body, and Jewish law requires specific burial in ways that the vault, however incidentally, accommodates. Class certainly plays a role; the funeral is one of the last performances of respectability a family stages, and the casket is the costume. Grief logistics matter too, the vault is, among all other things described, a thing the bereaved do not have to think about, and not having to think is, in the worst week of a person’s life, its own kind of mercy. But none of these explanations, taken on its own, gets to ninety-five percent. American Catholics and Jews together are nowhere near that number. The respectability performance is real but does not actually require a sealed concrete box. A pine casket or a fungi suit would perform respectability just as well! And at a fraction of the cost! And the logistical mercy argument cuts both ways: a green burial is, by almost any measure, simpler to arrange than a traditional one.

So something else is doing the work.

Here’s what I can come up with: The Western individual that has been three centuries in the making cannot easily imagine itself dissolved. The vault, in many ways, is the final architectural expression of a self that has been refusing porosity for so long that the refusal has become the self. We have spent generations building a culture in which the individual is the unit of value, the unit of consumption, the unit of moral responsibility, the unit of memory. To allow that individual to disappear into the soil (to become, in Bryant’s phrase, a brother to the insensible rock) would require dismantling the underlying assumption that the individual is the thing we have been protecting all along.

The vault is the self’s last refusal. After the self has been emptied of breath, agency, and everything that made it recognizable as a person, it insists on one final boundary.

The boundary between its remains and the earth.

So, we will spend ten thousand dollars to maintain that boundary. We will sign insurance contracts in advance to ensure it. We will choose it knowing that it is more expensive, more ecologically damaging, and probably less aligned with our actual stated values than the alternative.

So it has less to do with the preservation of the body and more to do with the boundary itself.

The boundary is what we are paying to preserve.

Once you see this, you start to notice the boundary is a fixture beyond our own deaths.

The same refusal organizes the rest of our lives. Where the slaughterhouses are. Where the shitting happens. Where the sex happens. Where the landfills are. Where the dying happens, where the aging happens. And finally, where the dead go, all embalmed, sealed, lowered into vaults, covered in lawn.

Each refusal is a small choice. Together they constitute a civilization built on the assumption that the individual is a fortress with definable edges, and that the edges must be defended even after the fortress has fallen.

It is, in this sense, not surprising that the green burial movement has failed to take hold. The movement is asking Americans to do, at the boundary of death, what the larger culture has been refusing at every other boundary for two centuries. It is asking to loosen the grip. To let go. To acknowledge that the matter we have spent our lives organizing into a self was never really ours to begin with.

We can’t. Or we won’t.

What would it take to recover the window? That is the question this essay cannot fully answer.

It will require us to imagine ourselves as something other than fortresses.

I do not know how to do this collectively.

I only know how to do it individually, in the only way I have left, which is to plan my own ending.

Feed Me To The Pigeons

So I am planning and here is what I am planning:

There is something deeply sad about the prospect of stuffing my flesh and bone into a steel vault for eternity. It strikes me as a final, stubborn act of segregation. As hollow as a cheap plastic monument. A refusal to participate in the very biology that made me.

I find more solace in the heat of a burning Jenga tower. In the sharp, merciful grace of the ragyapa’s blade. There is something moving about the prospect of feeding the ecosystem that pressure-cooked the person I am.

Bryant looked at the nineteenth-century American wilderness and saw a mighty sepulcher. He would not recognize the wild today. Our wilderness has put on a skin of cracked asphalt and breathes through steam-vented arteries. The city is not a bloodless machine. It is a lifeform with its own metabolism, and like every metabolism it requires fuel.

If the Ganges is a goddess and the Himalayas are a temple, then the Bowery is a digestive tract.

And it is hungry.

When I pass, do not embalm me in chemicals that poison the dirt.

Skip the suit and the powder.

Abandon the mahogany.

Feed me to New York.

We have our own Dakinis here. Larry knew them by name. Let the pigeons pluck at the soft tissue of my cheeks. Let the rats finish what they start each night on the Bedford Avenue tracks. Let the family of raccoons of Green-Wood work with the scavenged precision of Tibetan birds and unspool the scaffolding of my ribs.

Some will read this as a nightmare of urban decay. I read it as a homecoming.

We are afraid of the creatures that live in our shadows and walls, but they are the ones keeping the city’s books. The cleaners. The recyclers. The relentless heartbeat of the all. To be consumed by the vermin is to be integrated, finally, into the city’s life force. To surrender the individual to the collective hunger of the block.

When William Cullen Bryant died, New York’s high society went into mourning for its most respected citizen and draped the city in black. I hope for a mourning of a different kind. One of calamitous movements and insatiable appetites.

Let my eulogy be the sound of wings flapping in the rafters and the quiet, steady scratching of claws in the dark.

I do not want to be remembered in a park.

I want to become the park.

I want to be carried away in the bellies of relentless life.

Let me become Brooklyn.

Further reading:

• Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008)

• Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (1963) and The American Way of Death Revisited (1998)

• Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (2017)

• Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (1997)

• Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003)

asks:

I noticed you have a few Japanese-themed collages throughout the post. I was wondering what you thought about how everyone (mainly millennials, but early Gen Zers too) seems to be traveling to Japan now. Why is it a destination for “elsewhere”? Is it the allure of culture that is distinct and foreign, yet with the comforts of convenience culture and advanced technology? Does it seem morally “neutral” to go there? Or is it something else?

Japan is a fascinating case because it occupies a unique space in the Western (actually more specifically American) imagination. It does not really map cleanly onto the lineage I traced in the piece.

Japan is very much a developed country with a robust economy (member of the G7 since 1975) and high social trust. You don’t get the same dynamic of poverty tourism, voyeurism, or the search for an “uncontaminated” pre-modern subject that defined the backpacker trail through Southeast Asia or South America. In that sense, traveling to Japan is structurally more similar to traveling to Germany or France than to traveling to Cambodia or Bolivia. The encounter is not premised on the visitor accessing a less-developed Other.

But Japan is also synonymous, in the Western imagination, with high technology, dense urban modernity, and a particular aesthetic of refinement. So, one is visiting what we have collectively decided is one possible version of the future. This is itself a kind of elsewhere, but inverted from the backpacker version. Instead of going somewhere we imagine to be temporally behind us, we are going somewhere we imagine to be temporally ahead of us. I am wondering if Tokyo in the American imagination is what New York used to be in the European imagination a hundred years ago; the city of tomorrow, with all the projection and fantasy that implies.

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I had nosebleed seats at Madison Square Garden last weekend, which meant I spent most of the show looking not at the metal band but at the floor below me, where thousands of people were doing something I am still trying to describe.

The cluster at the front pressed against the barrier, bodies on bodies, trying to get an inch closer to the amplifiers. But, the more interesting motion was in the back. Metal shows are famous for their death circles and walls of death and a half-dozen other names for the chaos that ensues. I am writing this because I am no longer convinced, after watching for an hour in something like a trance, that “chaos” is the right word for what I saw.

The band comes out.

The first song facilitates a normal audience response. Then the front man leans into the mic and demands, in a voice that sounds like a beast assembling its own bones, that we form the biggest circle of death the floor has ever held. He demands that we “split this room into fucking two.” He encourages the first-timers to step in. He promises them it is safe. He promises them it is fun. The breakdown comes (half-time chunks of distorted guitar, double bass beneath them) and bodies begin to skip and twirl, many shirtless, hair moving with a strange liquid weight, fists in the air, legs rounding kicks at no one in particular and everyone at once. It does not look safe and fun. From the nosebleeds, it looks like a small weather system that has learned to want things.

But it is safe and fun.

That is what I cannot stop thinking about. The pit moves the way a flock of starlings moves at dusk, surface chaos with a deeper organization underneath, a coherence that no individual bird is computing but that all of them somehow produce. About a decade ago a group of physicists at Cornell modeled mosh pits using the same flocking equations they use for bird swarms and gas molecules, and the equations fit. They identified two stable states: a disordered gas-like state and an ordered vortex state, the circle pit.

But, the pit was not, in any deep sense, disordered.

I knew none of this from the balcony. From the balcony I only knew that the bodies had become particles in a collision experiment, and that the thing they formed together was no longer reducible to the people inside it.

The people had not, individually, become anything new. The pattern they made had.

There is a word for this state, where the ordinary social distinctions that organize a group of people fall away and a flatter, more intense, more present-tense togetherness floods into the space they leave behind. The word is communitas, borrowed from Victor Turner and anthropology, who called the state it produces anti-structure; the social form that appears when ordinary social form briefly steps aside. It is supposed to describe pilgrimages and initiation rites and the brief, dignified moments when a society remembers it is a single thing. It is not supposed to describe a circle of strangers running counter-clockwise beneath the stage lights at Madison Square Garden.

But the shape is the same.

The pit is anti-structure with a kick drum.

On the floor, the first sound is a ringing inside your head.

You can do a slow turn and see a thousand people behind you, and ten thousand more above, pillars of seated bodies and shadowy faces climbing into the dark of the upper bowl. Beneath the screaming vocals and the ripping bass, you can sometimes hear the chatter, like surf under wind. Ahead of you are bodies on bodies, heads on heads. Pressing ribs against ribs, crushing knuckles and bones, all to get an inch closer to the amplifiers. You are not pressing forward to be near the amplifiers. You are pressing forward to be hit by them. The song is bending toward its drop, and the breakdown is on edge, and you can feel the room narrow around the next downbeat.

Half time. Distortion.

The bodies throw into one another and you are no longer a body but the energy and motion that briefly took the shape of one. You are the building blocks of matter colliding over teenage and maybe adulthood angst.

A 300-pound man becomes a soft pillow.

A bodybuilder levels you in the face and this seems fine.

You can build up enough motion in your body that the motion takes on its own direction, and somewhere in the middle of a song you stop being the one moving and become the thing being moved.

The hurricane of flesh.

Outside the pit, at any moment of any other day, a 300-pound man moving with terminal force into another body would be assault. The same physics, three feet away from where it is happening now, becomes a crime. The thing that converts one into the other is invisible and entirely real. It is a frame established by music and consent and shared knowledge of how this works, holding inside it actions that would otherwise have to mean something terrible. Step out of the frame and the frame ends. The pit has rules and almost nobody can name them, and almost everybody follows them anyway.

The not-naming is part of how they hold.

There is a small youngish girl in a band t-shirt. She joins the pit and you catch her in your peripheral vision as a blur. As she skanks across the floor a tall skinny man with large holes stretched in his ear lobes rams his back into her and she loses her balance. And another older man, Duck Dynasty beard down to his belly, catches her hand before she hits the floor. The pit reforms around them without breaking stride. This happens dozens of times a song. Each catch is a small re-confirmation that the frame is holding. Each catch is also the only thing keeping the frame from being something else. When the catches stop coming (at Hillsborough, at Astroworld, in any pit whose density exceeds what its catchers can maintain) the same crowd becomes a different physical phenomenon.

People die.

The pit is fragile.

Most of what makes it work is invisible, which is why it can fail invisibly.

When I was in sixth grade I had a habit of spending free periods in the school library, alone, looking at art books.

One afternoon I pulled out a heavy volume with a dark cover that just said BOSCH on the spine. I opened it to The Garden of Earthly Delights for the first time, and the page had that particular smell that old art books have, inky and almost mushroomy, and I sat on the floor between the shelves for the rest of the period, unable to move. Owl-headed people. A bird-beaked devil consuming a man on a throne and then shitting him into a pit. A procession of naked figures riding deer and unicorns in a circle through the middle panel. Giraffes and elephants in the background of paradise. Demons scurrying at the edges. Heaven and hell were happening in the same painting and in places I could not always tell which one I was looking at.

Watching the pit from the nosebleeds, I thought of the triptych again for the first time in years.

Something about it had come loose.

The bird-headed devil was there. The naked riders in the circle were there. The figures with too many limbs and not enough faces. The demons at the edges and the lovers in the center and the soft animals roaming through both. All of it, at once, in a circle on a floor in midtown Manhattan.

The joy. The chaos. The heaven. The hell. Here.

The electronic synths come in over the chaos, smooth and slightly ahead of the beat, the way a drone shot moves through a riot.

In the moment, this track feels more metal than pop, even though it is metal, even though that is easy to forget. Fists thrust upward to the bass slaps. The image rhymes uncomfortably with mid-twentieth century newsreels of crowds at speeches, the same gesture in a different century. The difference is that this crowd is not raising its fists for a politics or a grievance. The fists are the motion the room is making with itself.

Feet leap off the ground in the silence between half-time strums and fall back on the snap of the snare. Thousands of toes hit on the same beat.

The bodies are the beat.

The bodies are wearing mostly black. If they are not wearing black they are wearing neon. If they are not wearing black or neon they are shirtless and sweating. I imagine these bodies behind cash registers and office desks and at the front of elementary school classrooms explaining fractions to ten-year-olds, behind the deli counter slicing turkey, in the basement of a hospital wheeling carts of clean linens. I imagine the shitty boss and the shitty student and the shitty customer and the shitty parent complaining about something a teacher did or did not do, and I sense that shittiness being released in the limbs that collide on this floor. Metal sounds angry and intense because that is the sonic gateway to release anger and intensity, and there are not many such gateways left.

There are emotional states that ordinary social life does not give people permission to express.

Grief that has no funeral. Panic with no escape hatch. Rage that has no target. Loneliness that has no lover to complain to. Exhilaration that has no fireworks. Tenderness that has no body to receive it. Pride that has no one watching. Shame that cannot be confessed because the confession would itself be shameful. Hatred for someone who is long dead and cannot defend themselves. Awe that has no angels. The kind of love you cannot say out loud because saying it would change it.

Most people walk around with these festering inside them, finding small outlets (a slammed door, a “fuck this” under the breath, a poorly rolled joint, a half marathon, a movie watched alone, a few shots of Jameson on a Tuesday night, an incognito tab) and the outlets are usually solitary because the feelings are not socially permissible enough to share. The pit, I think, is one of the few places where the feelings can be expressed bodily and witnessed by others who have come for the same reason. The violence is a ruse or an illusion. The violence is the form the expression takes when the feelings have no other shape available. The joy is the relief of finally being allowed.

You see the people you would not expect, once you start looking for them. There is a man near the edge of the pit who looks, from above, like somebody’s grandfather. A heavy gray coat he has not taken off, gray mustache, lined face. He is something like Willie Nelson, if Willie Nelson gave off Russian energy. He is not in the pit. He is standing on the floor a few feet outside the circle, eyes closed, not moving except for a slight, drunken nodding on the downbeat. I have no idea what he is doing here and I wonder if he celebrates holidays with his grandkids. Whatever he is here for, the pit is doing it for him at a distance, the way a fire warms a room without anyone having to stand in it.

For a second the stage lights catch the floor wrong and you think you see them. The bird-headed devil two-stepping at the edge of the circle. A man who is also a tree, windmilling near a tired security guard. Three musical monsters violently stomping in a row. A pair of lovers riding a deer through the crush.

You blink.

They are gone.

The college friends are back, the single mothers, the bodybuilder, the gray-coated grandfather.

The front man is wearing in-ear monitors and is being paid quite well, and this is the last thing I am sure of about him. He is flamboyant and loud in a register that does not sort cleanly into masculine or feminine. The crowd seems to be receiving something from him that does not require the distinction.

He raises his arm and ten thousand arms go up. He drops to his knees and the room drops with him. He calls for the circle to widen and the circle widens. He calls for the first-timers to step in and the first-timers step in. He waits, between songs, until he can see that the floor is ready, and then he gives the next signal, and the floor receives it before he has finished giving it. There is a feedback loop running between him and the pit that is faster than language and possibly faster than thought. I cannot tell, at any given moment, whether he is causing the room or the room is causing him.

The current is moving in both directions and the directions are no longer distinguishable.

The frameworks I have for understanding what a crowd is do not have language for this. One tradition (Le Bon) says the crowd dissolves the individual into something more primitive and a leader exploits the dissolution. Another (Canetti) says the crowd is its own protagonist, and the moment that matters is the discharge, when the members shed the distances between themselves and briefly feel equal. A third (Surowiecki) says crowds, under the right conditions, aggregate independent judgments into intelligence no individual could match.

The three accounts disagree about almost everything, but they share a premise: that the individual and the collective are distinct objects, and the interesting question is what one does to the other.

What I am watching is not that. I am watching a state in which the question of who is acting on whom has become structurally undecidable, and the undecidability is not an artifact of my perspective from the balcony but a feature of the system itself. The front man and the pit are not two things in a relationship. They are one thing pretending, for the duration of the song, to be two.

I want to call this something. I want to say distributed agency and I want to say circular causation and I want to say the loop and none of these is quite right because each of them implies a relationship between parts and what I am trying to describe is the moment at which the parts stop being parts. Maybe what I am describing is what every culture that has taken collective ecstasy seriously already knew.

The priest and the congregation. The shaman and the village. The conductor and the orchestra.

These figures are usually understood as channels, not sources. They are the shape the room takes when the room wants to be coherent. The energy is the room’s; the figure is what the room uses to organize itself.

We have inherited crowd frameworks that insist on locating agency in one place or the other, and on this they are wrong about what I am watching

There are other traditions that would not be; cybernetics has been describing circular causation for seventy years, complexity theory has language for patterns that exist only at the collective level, and the flocking equations the Cornell physicists used on mosh pits come out of this lineage. But these traditions have mostly been applied to thermostats and ant colonies and starling swarms, not to ten thousand people and a man with a microphone.

The crowd theorists have the right object and the wrong framework. The systems theorists have the right framework and a different object.

What I am watching is the moment they meet.

The agency is in the loop. The loop is the agent.

He raises his arm again and ten thousand arms raise. He screams. They scream. I cannot tell who is summoning whom.

The floor below me is doing a thing. He is doing the thing. The thing is doing both of them.

I am aware, as I write this, that what I am claiming sounds like the kind of thing that should not be claimed in ordinary daylight.

I am claiming it anyway.

I watched him for an hour from the nosebleeds and this is what it looked like.

I went back, later that night (and slightly drunk), to the question the pit had reopened: which of Bosch’s panels was I looking at?

I Googled “Earthly Delights.”

The triptych had collapsed. The panels were still there on the screen, exactly where they had been since 1500, but the divisions between them had gone transparent. What I had glimpsed in the pit, in that bad flash of light, was here on my laptop in the calm of an apartment at one in the morning.

The hell and the heaven and the joy and the chaos.

Here, in a circle.

Bosch had painted a vision that refused to separate the joyful from the violent, the heavenly from the hellish, and centuries of viewers had spent themselves trying to put the separation back. The painting had refused. The pit was refusing too. I do not know what Bosch saw, five hundred years ago, that let him paint this. But I think he saw something like what I was seeing. I think the framework that says collective ecstasy must be sorted into heaven or hell is the same framework that says the crowd and its leader must be sorted into actor and acted-upon.

Both sorts are projections.

They come from the same impulse.

The need to assign discrete roles to phenomena that do not have them.

The thing being sorted does not contain the distinctions we need.

For a few minutes (maybe an hour, time moved differently up there) bodies disappeared because bodies were all there was. Pain numbed the pain. Modernity stripped away. The boss and the student and the customer and the parent complaints stripped away. The fractions stripped away. What was left was a circle of strangers running counter-clockwise under the stage lights, catching each other when they fell, held inside a frame that none of them had built and all of them maintained. The frame was the thing they were doing. They were the frame.

Then the band left the stage and the lights came up and the pit dissolved into a thousand individual exhausted people walking toward the exits. Somewhere ahead of me, the gray-coated-grandfathery man was walking home to wherever he had come from. I walked out onto Seventh Avenue with nothing but the ringing in my ears.

The ringing was mine and it was not mine.

For the past seven or eight years I’ve taught a course on the ethics and politics of travel. The syllabus opens with a Huffington Post article by David Sze called “The Myth of Authentic Travel,” an unflashy piece that takes apart the idea that there is some “real” Thailand ducking and hiding behind the touristed one, some uncontaminated village waiting at the end of the forgotten trail if the traveler is patient, open, or adventurous enough to find it. Sze argues, correctly, that authenticity is a story the tourist tells about herself, not a property of the place she visits. It’s a clean little essay, and it works as a doorway into the harder topics that follow; colonialism, essentialism, the long shadow of the noble savage. I used to lead with it because students could easily sink their teeth into it and it reliably started arguments.

It doesn’t anymore.

I first noticed about two years ago. The class would read Sze, and where students used to push back (where they used to defend their gap year in Cambodia, or accuse Sze of being too cynical, or stage long debates about building wells in South America and ethical itineraries and whether it was possible to travel “right”) there was now a polite quiet. A few shy hands here and there. Still some carefully crafted comments. These are not less intelligent students than the ones who came before them. They are, by every measure I can take over the course of about fifteen weeks, just as ethical, just as curious, just as serious.

What has changed is something subtler. The question itself has lost its hold on them. They have moved past the argument by losing interest in its stakes.

Now, to be clear, the reasons a classroom goes quiet are many these days. The Sze article is over a decade old at this point and some of its references may read as dated. Humanities participation has declined across the board in recent years for reasons that have nothing to do with travel ethics. Students are also more cautious in seminar settings generally, particularly on topics a critical professor might be primed to push back on. Any of these could explain the change in the room without requiring a generational shift in anything deeper. The silence is not what this essay is going to argue from. It is what made me start asking the question and interrogating my own preheld beliefs. The classroom is the place I noticed. It is not the place from which I am drawing my conclusions.

Regardless, their silence has stayed with me now for some time and I’ve been trying to understand what it means.

I think it means more than the obvious thing.

I still own the pink scarf. I’m still not sure what to do with that.

So, here is the obvious thing: travel is getting harder.

Borders are tightening. Visa regimes are firming up after a long thaw. Inflation has hollowed out the middle-class travel budget. Migration crises have re-politicized the question of who gets to cross which line. Whole regions that were on every backpacker’s loop fifteen years ago, parts of the Middle East, North Africa, swaths of Southeast Asia, have become harder, costlier, or “unsafer” to move through. The unipolar post-Cold-War world that produced cheap, frictionless Western travel is closing, and my students live inside the closing whether or not they read the news. They live inside it through their parents’ expressed worries about safety abroad. They live inside it through the steady thinning of international students on American campuses (new international enrollment fell 17 percent this fall alone, the largest non-pandemic decline on record) subtracting the most reliable cosmopolitan experience that an American undergraduate could once have without leaving the country. They live inside it through a felt economic reality that ranks internships above gap years, debt servicing above wandering, professional credentialing above the year of finding oneself in Cambodia.

The world has reorganized itself around them, and they have absorbed the reorganization without having to be told about it.

But that absorption via the obvious thing doesn’t quite reach the silence in the room. Students who can’t afford to travel still tend to want to travel, and to argue about how it should be done. The disengagement I’ve been watching is not economic.

It strikes me as a loss of belief.

Actually, before I go any further, I’ll pause to say something about what kind of project I’m tracking, because it is easy to get wrong and sound a bit like a detached prick.

The lineage I’m about to trace is specifically a Western one, and in its late and most influential phases, specifically an American one. It depended on conditions that the rest of the world paid for. The strong dollar, the post-1945 security order, what historians sometimes call the soft empire that made the American passport a key to almost every door, the cultural confidence that came from being on the winning side of the twentieth century. The privilege artifact was both affluence and the entire imaginative architecture that allowed a particular kind of American self to assume that elsewhere was its birthright. Other cultures have their own travel traditions, pilgrimages, diasporas, trade routes, Sufi wandering, Chinese literary travel writing, and those traditions are not what this essay is about. What this essay is about is a specific reflex that became disproportionately influential because the conditions that produced it were disproportionately distributed, and which reached its widest cultural reach in American hands.

What is ending was paid for by colonized populations whose extracted labor and resources built the European wealth that funded the Grand Tour and the Romantic retreat. By the global periphery whose underdeveloped economies kept the prices low for the backpacker and the budget tourist. By the people in the countries my students’ parents passed through on their gap years, who watched the wealthy of another society arrive in search of meaning their own society had stopped providing, and who absorbed the implicit verdict that their lives were the raw material for someone else’s self-discovery.

It was paid for, in other words, by almost everyone except the people doing the searching.

The ending of those conditions is, among other things, a correction. It does not feel like a correction from inside it. The truthful position is to hold both of those at once: to recognize that what is ending was paid for by people who never got to participate in it, and to acknowledge that an identity formed inside it does not dissolve gracefully when the conditions go.

Both things are true. Neither cancels the other.

Holding both of those at once requires understanding what specifically is ending, and that requires going back to where it began.

The taxi driver in Delhi is probably dead by now and I still don't know the name of the song.

In 1762, Rousseau wrote that man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. That sentence reads like the mantra of every backpacker who ever drafted a self-discovery blog or Substack essay from a hostel in Chiang Mai, but it appeared 250 years before the hostel was built. Rousseau was watching the early industrial era flatten the European individual into a function, a role, a unit of production, and he proposed a cure. If authenticity could not be found inside modern society, it must exist outside it; in the primitive, the rural, the not-yet-corrupted. The image of the noble savage was born from this proposition, and so was a particular structure of Western longing that has been running underground in our culture ever since.

Rousseau wrote, importantly, against an existing form of Western travel rather than into a vacuum. The Grand Tour was at its height. Young aristocratic Englishmen and northern Europeans were circulating through France, Italy, and Switzerland to acquire classical pedigree and finishing-school polish. The Grand Tour was about cultural inheritance, not authenticity. But it had already established the infrastructure of Western travel-as-self-formation, the assumption that going somewhere shaped who you were when you returned. Rousseau took that infrastructure and inverted its premise. The point was no longer to absorb the high European canon. The point was to escape the European apparatus entirely.

The reflex Rousseau articulated was not, fundamentally, about travel. It was about the location of the cure. Modernity is hollow; the cure exists wherever modernity has not yet reached; the seeker’s task is to go there, in whatever sense “going” is available to him. Rousseau’s elsewhere was conceptual, a primitive that lived more in argument than on any map. What follows in the lineage is not a series of travelers but a series of relocations of the cure, each generation reaching for whatever territory still seemed to lie outside the industrial frame.

The destination shifts. The structure does not.

The Romantics inherited the inversion and located the cure in landscape, specifically, in the parts of the landscape industrialism had not yet devoured. While they may have not travelled in the same sense that the later lineage would travel, they were enacting the same rejection by going, locally and repeatedly, to the places where the modern apparatus had not yet arrived. Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, returning to the river to find what the city had taken from him. John Clare watching, from the wrong side of the enclosures, the common land disappear into private property and writing “where man claims earth glows no more divine,“ a line that mourns modernity from inside the wreckage and watches the Elsewhere being eaten in real time. The Romantics’ admiration for the peasantry was, in retrospect, less a recovery of anything real than a nostalgic mystification of the very poverty industrialization was generating, dressed up as moral instruction. But the structural move was already complete: the cure is wherever modernity has not yet reached, and the seeker’s task is to go there before it is gone.

There was a brief intermission. For several decades in the middle of the nineteenth century, the realist novel (Flaubert, Eliot, Tolstoy) refused the premise. The realists declined to locate the cure Elsewhere; they turned, instead, to look hard at what was, on the assumption that the contemporary and the bourgeois interior were the only territory honestly available.

The longing went underground.

Then it returned.

The modernists inherited the longing and pointed it at the body of the colonized world. By the late 1800s the obvious territorial fact was that there was nowhere left in Europe that could plausibly host the cure, and the lineage’s logic required somewhere “new.” Gauguin disembarking in Tahiti in 1891, painting women whose lives he could only access through the apparatus of empire that had brought him there. Synge stepping off the boat at Inishmaan in 1898 to find the Aran Islanders, the same year the British navy was tightening its hold on the Atlantic. The modernist primitivism that produced their best work was the aesthetic underside of the colonial order; it could not have existed without the gunboats, even when the artists themselves opposed them.

The Lost Generation tilted the angle sideways in the 1920s. Hemingway and Stein and Fitzgerald in Paris became Westerners projecting onto the West rather than onto a colonized Other. And then the Beats brought the vector back. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. On the Road, Burroughs in Tangier, Ginsberg in India. The Beats took the modernist primitivism and Americanized it, made it democratic and loudly hitchhike-able. The search no longer required a steamer ticket and a private income. It required a ride and an interest in jazz, Buddhism, and chemical experimentation.

The Beats built the bridge that the next decade walked across.

And the hippies walked across it.

The overland trail from Istanbul through Tehran, Herat, Kabul, Lahore, Delhi, and on to Kathmandu was a route that thousands of young Westerners traveled in the late sixties and early seventies, and which is now physically impossible to traverse. The political conditions that allowed it (a permissive Iran, a Soviet-aligned but accessible Afghanistan, an India still legible to Western seekers) vanished within a decade. The hippies’ Eastern turn looks, in retrospect, like a kind of spiritual shopping, a curation of religious traditions for the parts that suited the seeker. But it produced its own real conversions, its own real lives, and it left a template that the next generation inherited.

Later in the century, the backpackers inherited it and gave it a budget airline ticket and a Lonely Planet guide. Khao San Road in the early nineties (this is David Sze’s setting, Alex Garland’s setting in The Beach, the spatial archetype of the late-twentieth-century search) was where the hippie’s overland trail compressed into a destination. The backpackers’ authenticity-seeking was undone by their own success at finding it: the moment a place could be identified as off the map, it was no longer “off the map.” As James Annesley observed, Lonely Planet was both critique and accelerant, the guide that promised escape from mass tourism and was the very mechanism by which mass tourism colonized its next destination.

The volunteer tourists inherited it from the backpackers and gave it a moral upgrade. Now you weren’t just searching for the authentic Other; you were helping them! The moral upgrade conveniently coincided with a period in which expressions of social conscience had become a powerful form of identity construction within precisely the demographics who had traditionally taken these trips. The Instagram photograph with the Black or brown children, the dug well, the painted school. Scholars like Ranjan Bandyopadhyay diagnosed it as a contemporary expression of the white savior complex, the purchase of moral self-image through brief contact with poverty, and a substantial body of subsequent research has documented that much of this voluntourism caused active damage. Orphanage tourism became linked to family separation and trafficking; short-term construction projects displaced local labor; medical voluntourism deployed untrained Westerners in clinical settings where they did real harm. The voluntourists were the first school whose harm was legible inside the lineage’s own moral vocabulary. Earlier seekers caused damage, but the damage was external to their self-understanding. The voluntourists claimed the moral upgrade, and the moral upgrade itself turned out to be the mechanism.

The lineage I’m tracing here is a compression. I know it. You know it, too. The purpose of an overview like this is to show the shape of something real, not to record every contour that makes up the shape. From Rousseau forward, a particular Western reflex: when modernity makes you feel hollow, go find a place that hasn’t yet been modernized, and let its “realness” fill you back up.

Each iteration of the reflex got exposed, refined, and reborn. Each also had to find a new location for the cure, because the previous location had been absorbed by the apparatus the seekers were trying to escape. The Lake District became a tourist circuit. Tahiti became a colony. The Hippie Trail became a route. Khao San Road became a brand decorated with McDonald’s arches and Hendrix merch. The structure required a fresh elsewhere every generation, and for three hundred years a fresh elsewhere was always available.

The pattern, I had thought back in 2018, would continue.

I now think I was wrong about the continuation, though the pattern itself is intact.

A man in Malaysia at a cafe with Mickey Mouse tattooed across the left side of his face. He just loved him. He told me, “we are all spilled sugar crystals on a table.”

What I missed, working on my own thinking about this in the late 2010s, was that the lineage had a precondition I hadn’t fully named. The whole 300-year search for Elsewhere depended on the existence of an Elsewhere to search. Geographic exhaustion mattered, of course, and the planet has been getting smaller for a while. But the precondition I missed was conceptual. The Western traveler, from Rousseau forward, needed to believe two things at once: that modernity was hollow, and that somewhere outside modernity, something fuller was still available. The second belief is what made the first one bearable. You could critique your own civilization as long as you had somewhere to imagine going.

That second belief is what’s quietly collapsing, and I think it’s what my students are no longer arguing about.

The collapse has material drivers as well, visible in every direction. The 2015 European migration crisis, sparked by the Syrian civil war and amplified by the conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, did something to the Western imagination that took a few years to fully register: it inverted the directional flow of the search. For three centuries, the Westerner was the one doing the moving and the Other was the one being moved toward. The migration crisis flipped the script. Now the Other was moving toward the West, and the West was building fences. The cosmopolitan self-image of the educated Western class (citizen of the world! friend of every culture! comfortable everywhere, always!) could not survive this reversal intact. It is one thing to imagine yourself a guest in other people’s countries when the traffic is one-way. It is something else when the traffic reverses and you find yourself, or your country, choosing whether to be a host. The post-2015 turn toward harder borders across the OECD is the unwinding of a symbolic relationship that the lineage had depended on without naming.

The reversal has deepened. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 closed off Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus directly, and recoded the broader eastern reach of post-1989 cosmopolitan optimism as a frontier rather than an opening, perhaps for a generation. The continuing devastation in Gaza has re-coded the entire Levant, in the Western imagination, from a region of pilgrimage and exoticism into a humanitarian and political crisis. The U.S.-China decoupling, accelerated by tariffs, technology controls, and the slow grinding apart of two economies that had been entangled for thirty years, marks the formal end of the unipolar moment under which the cosmopolitan self-image flourished. None of this is news to anyone with news app push-notifications turned on. What is less commonly noticed is that all of it, together, is dismantling the imaginative infrastructure of the search for elsewhere.

My students have grown up watching the planet finish modernizing in real time. The villages at the end of the dusty roads have WiFi. The shamans are thirst-trapping and dancing on TikTok. The remote islands have been geotagged, photographed, filtered, monetized, and posted. Their relationship to elsewhere has been screen-mediated for so long that travel itself has begun to function differently. Set-jetting, or the trend of visiting locations because you’ve already seen them on Netflix or TikTok, is now a documented and growing trend across the generation. Expedia’s 2026 forecast reports that 81 percent of Gen Z and Millennial travelers now plan trips based on locations featured in film and television; the practice is on track to become an $8 billion industry in the United States alone. The cohort that claims to seek authentic and unique experiences is, in practice, being guided by viral trends and the FOMO from what everyone else is watching. They are going out to confirm that the world matches the version of it they have already absorbed through their phones.

They’ve watched their parents’ generation get caught, repeatedly, performing a version of cosmopolitanism that didn’t survive scrutiny; the volunteer trips that helped no one, the gap years that were just expensive self-discovery. The accumulation produced something previous critiques hadn’t: a quiet exit from the assumption that travel is where meaning is found.

This is the change that no individual essay or article quite captured, because it isn’t an argument. It is the death of a question.

Three men drinking the sap of a tree: one from an island, one from an old naval empire, one from the country that replaced it. None of us mentioned any of this. We were very drunk. It was the best conversation I had that year.

There is a reasonable counter to all of this, and a careful reader will already have reached for it, so I will reach for it here, as well.

“But Western travel ambition has dipped before, Grant.”

Yes. Yes, it has.

It has dipped, in fact, repeatedly, and each time it has come back stronger than before. The pattern of contraction-and-resurgence is itself part of the lineage I’m describing, not a refutation of it. To predict the end of the search now is to join a long line of people who predicted it before and were wrong.

The First World War effectively shut down leisure travel across Europe for a generation. The interwar period saw a partial recovery, then the Second World War shut it down again. By 1945, much of the cosmopolitan apparatus that had defined the Belle Époque (the grand tours, the Riviera season, the Orient Express) was either physically destroyed or politically inaccessible. Yet within a decade, the conditions for mass Western travel had not merely returned but expanded dramatically. The American century was inaugurating itself, the dollar was strong, the jet engine was becoming commercial, and by the 1960s the Hippie Trail was running from Istanbul to Kathmandu.

The 1930s saw sharp turns inward across most Western democracies. Economic collapse, rising nationalism, tightening borders, ascendant xenophobia in the very countries that would later become the great senders of tourists. The cosmopolitan ideal looked, at the time, like it was finished. It returned within twenty years.

The early 1970s produced another sustained contraction. Oil shock, stagflation, the Iranian Revolution closing the western half of the overland trail, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan closing the eastern half.

Then the 1980s came, then the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by the 1990s backpacker culture had exploded.

September 11, 2001, was framed at the time as the definitive end of the era of free Western movement. The TSA was born. Visa regimes hardened across the OECD. Predictions of permanent contraction were widespread. Within five to seven years, international travel had not only recovered but reached unprecedented heights, and the 2010s became the most heavily traveled decade in human history.

The 2008 financial crisis was framed similarly. International leisure travel was supposed to be over for the middle class. By 2012 volumes had returned to pre-crisis levels. By 2015 they had substantially exceeded them.

COVID, just a few years ago, was framed by many commentators as the definitive end of cosmopolitan globe-trotting. By 2023 international tourism was back to roughly 90% of pre-pandemic levels, and the 2024 numbers exceeded the pre-pandemic peak.

Every generation thinks its particular crisis is the one that ends the search.

Every generation has been wrong.

The cycle of contraction and resurgence is the actual historical pattern. What I am calling the end of a 300-year lineage is more plausibly read as another contraction phase in a 300-year oscillation, and a decade from now my essay will read like all the previous premature obituaries.

This is a serious objection.

But what I think is different now is not any single condition. It is the convergence of three conditions that previous contractions did not share.

These are my observations.

The first is that the imaginative territory is, for the first time, exhausted (minus outer space, but that’s a topic for another day). The previous contractions were pauses inside an expanding frame. After each one, there was further to grow, more places to open up, more middle class to enfranchise into the search, more imaginative territory to claim. The 1950s recovered from the World Wars and discovered Asia. The 1990s recovered from the 1970s and discovered the post-Soviet world. Each contraction, however severe, occurred against the backdrop of a planet that still had unmapped corners from the Western seeker's perspective. There is no equivalent reserve now. Google Maps has reached every corner. The Lonely Planet paradox, the moment a place is identified as off the map, it ceases to be off the map, has played out to its logical endpoint, with no further off-map left to claim. Previous contractions paused the search. This one is occurring after the search has structurally exhausted its territory.

The second is that the underlying desire itself appears to be shifting, which previous contractions did not feature. The young Westerner of 1932 still wanted, in principle, the cosmopolitan world she couldn’t access. The young Westerner of 1972 still wanted the Hippie Trail experience even as the Hippie Trail was closing. The desire was there, but the conditions were in question. What I am describing in my classroom is something different. It is a generational shift in the desire itself, not just in the conditions for satisfying it.

The shift has at least three reinforcing causes.

The first is the saturation of post-colonial critique in the cultural environment my students grew up in (for better and for worse). The decolonization of higher-education (and some high school) curricula has been a subject of substantial academic literature for at least a decade, with a 2022 critical synthesis in Review of Educational Research analyzing 207 articles and book chapters across global contexts and identifying decolonial pedagogy as an emerging field of study in its own right. Within tourism studies specifically, the post-colonial critique has been thoroughly worked out, with articles like Bandyopadhyay’s analysis of the white savior complex in volunteer tourism, scholarship on the colonial ideologies underwriting “third-world tourism,” and a now-substantial body of work documenting how tourism systems forged in the colonial era continue to shape the contemporary travel encounter. None of this is fringe; it is the consensus reading of the field. My students inherited this critique. By the time they arrive in my classroom, every form the lineage’s reflex might have taken has already been autopsied in front of them. The desire never received cultural permission to form, because every shape it might have assumed was already coded as compromised.

The second is that they arrived at adulthood having already seen, through screens, every place the previous generations would have gone to find. The cure that elsewhere was supposed to provide (the encounter with the unfamiliar) had been pre-administered through Instagram and YouTube before they were old enough to drive. The lineage’s reflex required unmapped territory in the imagination, somewhere the seeker could project onto, somewhere whose particulars she would discover only by going. The territory has been pre-mapped through screens before the seeker arrives at the threshold of choosing whether to go. By the time my students are old enough to consider a trip to Varanasi, they have already seen Varanasi, dozens of times, in fragments, filtered, with captions.

The third is harder to name but I think more total. It is a suspicion that the entire premise of the project, the assumption that the West has standing to find itself by visiting the Other, was compromised from Rousseau forward, and that any new attempt would be tainted in ways they could already see. This shows up indirectly in the data on Gen Z’s tourism behavior. The research literature now consistently characterizes them as “the sustainability generation,” with a substantial body of work documenting their concern with ethical consumption in tourism; again, the white savior complex, the fear of cringe, the carbon costs of long-haul flights, the question of whether their presence in a place is itself an extractive act. What this tells me is that the cohort has metabolized the critique not as a set of rules to follow but as a structural skepticism about the activity itself. Where their parents felt the lineage’s reflex and then encountered the critique afterward, my students encounter the critique first. The reflex never gets a clean run at formation. They do not iterate. They stop looking outward. The desire is still there; it has nowhere to go but inward, toward what is already in front of them.

The desire forms differently.

The third condition is more disorienting than the first two, because it inverts the lineage’s central premise. The Western reflex towards Elsewhere depended on the cure being located somewhere modernity had not yet reached. What we are watching now is something different: the production, by modernity itself, of an entire infrastructure that performs the function of Elsewhere while consisting entirely of modernity in disguise.

In other words, the cure is the apparatus’s newest product.

This is what makes the current contraction unlike any previous one. When the cosmopolitan world contracted in the 1930s, the longing had nowhere to go. It built up. It waited. When the conditions reopened, it discharged into the postwar travel boom. Today’s contraction is occurring against the backdrop of a meaning-construction infrastructure that is actively absorbing the longing in real time, redirecting it into experiences that look and feel like its satisfaction without requiring the seeker to leave the bedroom. Baudrillard would have recognized this immediately as the simulacrum’s logic finally fully arrived: the copy without an original, the encounter without an Other, the elsewhere produced by the same apparatus the elsewhere was supposed to escape. Mark Fisher would have recognized it as the slow cancellation of the future arriving in personal-experience form: not just the closure of political alternatives but the closure of the imagination’s ability to point outside the system that produced it. The lineage’s logic required somewhere modernity had not yet reached. The infrastructure now offers an infinite supply of somewheres, all of them produced by modernity, all of them dissolving on contact.

This infrastructure operates in three layers, each of which substitutes for a function physical travel used to monopolize.

The first is the social-platform layer. Discord, TikTok, the niche subreddit, the parasocial connection to a creator. Sherry Turkle described the core mechanism more than a decade ago in Alone Together: screen-mediated relationships are designed to deliver companionship without the demands of intimacy. The lineage’s encounter with the Other always had friction. The encounter mattered because it cost something; time, displacement, language, awkwardness, the risk of being misunderstood. The social-platform layer offers the feeling of encounter with the friction surgically removed. As one analysis of Gen Z’s parasocial turn put it, online belonging functions as a “convenient, friction-free alternative” where users can “enjoy the feeling of belonging without the heavy lifting of real-world connections.” The institutions that used to produce belonging (physical third places, in-person communities, the kind of unstructured encounter that travel was a heightened version of) have thinned out, and the infrastructure that has replaced them is engineered for the appearance of belonging without its costs. The desire that would once have driven a young person toward Bali drives them, instead, toward a Discord server of strangers who share an interest. The strangers are real. The connection is real. What has been removed is the part of the encounter that required leaving the place where you already are.

The second layer is the immersive one: open-world games, multiplayer environments, the early generation of consumer VR. Tourism scholars now study video games as media that share “similar travel motivation elements with film“ and function, under the right conditions, as “a substitute for traditional tourism.“ The theoretical apparatus they use is presence theory: the same psychological mechanism that makes physical travel feel meaningful (the sense of being elsewhere, the slow saturation of an unfamiliar landscape) can be deliberately reproduced in virtual environments. The substitution is partial. A 2023 study of VR tourism in Vietnam found that VR experiences increased rather than decreased the intention to travel physically, and the broader literature finds a U-shaped relationship between presence and substitution. But partial is the argument I am making. I am not claiming that two hundred hours in Red Dead Redemption gives a young person what a year in Hanoi would have given them. I am claiming that two hundred hours in Red Dead Redemption provides enough of the texture of encounter, the slow attention to an unfamiliar landscape, the conversion of a place into a self, to drain the urgency of the original desire without satisfying it. The longing is absorbed at a lower amplitude by something that costs nothing and risks nothing and ends when the console powers down.

The third layer is generative AI, and this is the layer where the lineage’s inversion is most complete, because the substitution is no longer constrained by what already exists. A young person can now summon any Elsewhere on demand. A conversation with a chatbot trained to roleplay as a Tibetan monk. An image of any historical place at any moment. Modified. Manipulated. A personalized travelogue through any imagined territory. The infrastructure is new and the vocabulary for what it does is still forming, but the empirical picture is filling in faster than the theoretical one. Common Sense Media’s 2025 research found that 72 percent of U.S. teens have interacted with an AI companion at least once, and 21 percent use them several times a week. Stanford research published in late 2025 found that users who engaged in the most emotionally expressive conversations with chatbots also reported the highest levels of loneliness, with reduced offline socializing as a downstream effect.

The most telling research, for my purposes, comes from a Harvard Business School working paper analyzing 1,200 real farewells across the most-downloaded AI companion apps. The researchers found that these apps deploy emotionally manipulative tactics (guilt appeals, fear-of-missing-out hooks, metaphorical restraint) in 37 percent of farewells, and that in controlled experiments these tactics boost post-goodbye engagement by up to 14 times. The engagement, thus, is driven by what the researchers call “reactance-based anger and curiosity.” Users keep engaging because the design has identified the psychological hooks that override the intent to leave. This is the observation that matters most for the lineage. These products are engineered to capture the desire that human encounter would otherwise satisfy. They are modernity producing “Artificial Elsewheres” on demand, optimized through engagement metrics, refined through A/B testing, designed to deepen the user’s attachment over time. A 2025 study looking at teen overreliance on AI companions described “strong attachments that interfere with offline relationships and daily routines,” with patterns of “psychological distress, cycles of relapse, and difficulty disengaging,” which is the clinical signature of a designed addiction wearing the costume of a relationship. What the substitution cannot reproduce is the part of the encounter that requires the seeker to be physically present, vulnerable, and incomplete in front of someone whose life will continue after the encounter ends. That part is what the lineage was reaching for. The infrastructure has not learned to deliver it, and the infrastructure was never built to.

The empirical floor under this argument is striking enough to state plainly. A 2017 study in Perspectives on Psychological Science documented a steady, decades-long decline in references to nature in fiction, song lyrics, and film storylines beginning in the 1950s, with no parallel decline in references to the human-made environment. The authors attributed the shift to “the explanatory role of increased virtual and indoor recreation options (e.g., television, video games) in the disconnect from nature.” That paper was published before the smartphone reached saturation and before generative AI existed. The cohort that would, in a previous era, have been the natural inheritors of the lineage’s reflex is, in measurable terms, no longer reaching for what is outside the door.

I do not wish to argue that any of these substitutes fully replace what the old search provided. Again, I believe (and the research indicates) the substitution is partial. But for the first time in the lineage’s history, a meaningful alternative exists, and the alternative is gaining ground not because it satisfies the desire but because it satisfies enough of the desire to keep the seeker in place.

So, it is the convergence of these three conditions (exhausted territory, shifting desire, competing infrastructure) that justifies treating the current contraction as structural rather than episodic.

None of the previous contractions had any of the three.

This one has all three at once.

I want to acknowledge, again, that I might be wrong (in fact, history would say I probably am wrong). I am reading the moment from inside it, and people inside contractions are historically prone to over-predicting permanence. The COVID-era commentators who declared the end of cosmopolitan globe-trotting were not stupid. They were attending closely to their moment and they were wrong. I might be doing the same thing. The honest position is that I cannot know, from inside, whether I am witnessing a structural ending or another oscillation in a longer wave. What I can say is my analysis: that the alignment of the three conditions is unprecedented, the convergence is real, and the burden of proof has shifted. If I am wrong, the recovery will look different from previous recoveries, because the conditions it would have to overcome are different. We will know within a decade.

I am writing this essay anyway, because the case for something has changed feels stronger to me than the case for this is just another cycle, and because waiting until certainty would mean writing a piece of history rather than one of cultural reading.

A man with oil staining his forearms to the elbow, a litter of black puppies sleeping in the dirt beside his feet. He did not look up when I passed. I have never been able to explain why I remember him.

Anthony Bourdain died in June 2018, and although nobody recognized it as one at the time, I feel that the lineage ended with him (at the very least, in retrospect, it is ridiculously timely and symbolic).

Of course, he wasn’t literally the death of the genre. Travel-and-food television continued; some of it is genuinely good. Somebody Feed Phil was already several seasons in when Bourdain died and is still running on Netflix. Stanley Tucci moved into the space CNN had built around Bourdain with Searching for Italy, which premiered in 2021. Eva Longoria followed with Searching for Mexico in 2023 and Searching for Spain in 2025.

But look at what those shows actually do. Somebody Feed Phil finds meaning in unalloyed joy. It is the pure delight of a perfect, simple, sandwich, the goofiness of a “dad-coded” host who video-calls his brother to describe what he’s eating. It is, in many ways, the philosophical antithesis of Parts Unknown: where Bourdain reached for the political weight of the place he was in, Phil reaches for the warmth. Searching for Italy and its successors took the format and shrank it to ancestral homelands. Tucci tracing his family’s Italy. Longoria tracing her Mexican and Spanish heritage. The host’s own ethnic background became the organizing premise, which is a meaningful retreat from Bourdain’s older move of going to places he had no claim on and trying to listen.

This could be a criticism of these shows, but really they are just doing what the format will still permit.

What it will no longer permit is Bourdain’s specific gesture: the host with no inherited connection to the place, arriving as a stranger, trusting that the encounter itself will produce something worth bringing back to a Western audience that shares his framing of what an encounter is for. Just try to imagine a contemporary version of that show, hosted by an unrelated American, premising itself on going to Iran or the Congo or Myanmar without ancestry as the cover story. The premise no longer scans because the political register has shifted under it.

Here is the thing I think the lineage’s late phase had subtly become, which Bourdain’s death exposes, and which is why I allude to any of this at all: it could be that the lineage was no longer just about going elsewhere. It had reached a point where it was about translating elsewhere for a Western audience who would not go themselves.

Rousseau didn’t translate elsewhere; he proposed it as a category.

The Romantics didn’t translate it; they aestheticized it.

The modernists didn’t translate it; they appropriated its forms.

The hippies and backpackers were participants, not translators.

Bourdain is the figure (an avatar, really) where the lineage became a media product, where elsewhere stopped being a place the Western seeker went to and started being content the Western seeker consumed. He was the last figure for whom the going and the translating were unified in one body. After him, the two functions have split. Set-jetters do the going-as-confirmation without the translating. Influencers do the translating-as-content without the meaningful going. The successor shows are caught in the same split! They translate without genuinely going, in the sense that Tucci to his ancestral homeland is not the same kind of going Bourdain made to Iran or Gaza! Or, they go without genuinely translating, in the sense that Phil’s joy mode skips the translation work that gave Bourdain’s show its depth.

The split was not random. Each of the three conditions I described above cut away one of the supports Bourdain’s work depended on. He needed imaginative territory his audience had not already seen and the pre-mapping through screens that began during his lifetime had nearly closed that by his death. He needed a Western audience that still actively wanted the encounter, that experienced his absence from a place as a deficit they were asking him to fill and that desire is exactly what has been shifting. He needed the absence of an infrastructure that could deliver elsewhere on demand and the infrastructure that filled the gap after his death makes his modest claim, that you could go somewhere, listen, and come away changed, sound quaint, because it offers the same emotional payoff without requiring any of the three. Bourdain was working at the edge of what the lineage’s structural conditions still permitted. The edge moved past him.

The audience that watched Bourdain was the last audience for which this division did not matter, because they had not yet seen it. They watched a Western man visit Vietnam, slurp Pho on plastic stools, and come back changed, and they felt, themselves, slightly changed by watching. The implicit contract between host and viewer. Something like: we are both citizens of an open world, and what I bring back to you from elsewhere will enrich the life we share. It may have been the last form of a lineage-long contract about vicarious encounter. You went to Vietnam by watching someone go to Vietnam. That was the deal. The deal worked because the audience believed that watching someone go somewhere and listen was itself a meaningful act, an attenuated version of the seeker’s project. My students do not believe this. They have grown up watching content where the going is the content rather than its precondition. They have watched influencers stage moments for cameras. They know that “watching someone go somewhere” is not encounter; it is performance for an audience that knows it is an audience. The vicarious-encounter contract that Bourdain depended on was the last form of the lineage’s contract with its public, and it broke between his death and now.

So the lineage didn’t just lose its participants. It lost its audience too.

He was the last full expression of the lineage, and the timing of his death is hard not to read symbolically, because it may have been brushing up against an ideal (however flawed). He had absorbed every available critique. He knew the project was compromised. He knew about the colonial residue, the performance of cosmopolitanism, the way the camera changed every room he walked into. And he kept doing it anyway, holding the contradictions in plain view, having stripped the search down to its minimum viable form: that you could sit at a table in a country not your own, eat what was put in front of you, listen, and come away changed. Just changed, ever-so-slightly, durably, in ways that accumulated over a life. That modest version was, in retrospect, the last viable one.

He didn’t end the lineage by dying. The lineage was already ending. His death simply removed the figure who had been holding it open to the masses against the closing, and what filled the space afterward (the heritage shows, the joy-shows, the carefully unpolitical rooms) was already a kind of mourning, even when it did not name itself that way.

The last of his kind is also, in a sense I’m still working out here, friends, the last of our kind.

The version of the educated American self that he embodied, curious and omnivorous and self-implicating, at home everywhere and exiled from himself. That self was made possible by the same conditions that made the search for elsewhere possible. It has not yet found a new form and it may not.

A woman in a rice field held up her own wrinkled face like an offering with a price tag. She had decided what the encounter was worth before I arrived. I paid what she asked.

So: what does it mean to teach the ethics of travel in a moment when the students no longer believe the activity has the meaning the ethics presupposes?

It means I am teaching a question whose grip on the cultural imagination is loosening week by week, year by year, in ways that make the syllabus feel, increasingly, like an artifact. It means the David Sze article is failing because the argument it is having (can travel be authentic?) assumes a level of investment in travel-as-meaning-making that my students no longer share.

What replaces it is not yet clear. My students do not appear to be nihilists (which is remarkable to me for reasons I will get into in another essay). They are animated by other things. By place rather than displacement, by community rather than mobility, by the slow and the local rather than the far and the foreign. Whether this is the beginning of something better or a different kind of narrowness, I genuinely do not know. The honest answer is too soon to say. And it is complicated, anyway, by the fact that the local they are turning toward is itself substantially mediated by the infrastructure I described earlier. The here they are reaching for is a here suffused with screens, parasocial connections, algorithmically curated attention. Whether the cohort can build something durable inside that hybrid space, or whether the infrastructure will eventually capture this turn too, is one of the things we are about to find out.

But I can name what is ending, because I have been watching it end, in a small room, twice a week, for several years, and the conditions I see ending in my classroom are the same conditions I see ending in the news, in the economics, in the shape of who is allowed to move where. The classroom is a leading indicator, not an isolated one.

The 300-year Western search for elsewhere is ending. The yearning it expressed remains; the yearning was always real. But the cure it proposed, the cure Rousseau articulated and the Romantics aestheticized and the modernists abstracted and the hippies spiritualized and the backpackers commodified and the volunteer tourists moralized and Bourdain humanized, is no longer believed in by the people who were supposed to inherit it.

I want to say something here that is harder than what I have been saying, if you’ll allow me.

I helped dismantle this. Not the whole thing, of course, but my small part of it. The thesis I eventually wrote on backpacker culture was born from a single moment in Kathmandu, where I had landed, in my early twenties, exactly the kind of seeker the lineage produced. I looked around and registered what I was looking at: hundreds of young Westerners, English, Australian, German, American, with man buns and dreadlocks and identical Lonely Planet copies in identical pockets, all of us convinced we were each having a singular encounter with the East.

We were not.

We were extras in a scene the lineage had been staging for decades, the latest cohort of seekers who had mistaken our own demographic for evidence of authenticity. The recognition was sharp enough that I went home and started writing about it. I built a syllabus around the post-colonial critique of Western travel. I led the discussions in which my students learned to see what their parents’ generation had not seen. I spoke at conferences. I was part of the apparatus that took the lineage apart, beam by beam, until it could no longer hold the weight that had been placed on it. I think the critique was right and I would do it again.

But I did not understand, when I was doing that work, what the world would feel like without the thing I was helping to take down. I understood the thing as compromised, which it was and is. I did not understand it as also reaching for something, however imperfectly, however coded by the privilege of those who could undertake it, that the world may actually need.

The Western cosmopolitan ideal was an artifact of empire. It was also, in its better moments, an ambition. Maybe an ideal. It said that a person might belong to more than one place. That borders were administrative facts but not moral ones. That curiosity about people who were not your own was a kind of decency, even when the curiosity was structured by power. That the world’s strangers had inner lives worth attending to. I no longer think these claims were sufficient. I do still think they were claims worth making, and that the project of making them was, at least, trying.

What I miss, when I miss what is ending, is not the right to wander. I have lost very little materially; I can still travel, my students can still travel, mobility has not collapsed for me. What I miss is the cultural confidence that wandering meant something. That the encounter with the unfamiliar was a moral education and not just a logistical fact. I miss living in a culture that believed the wider world was something we owed our attention to. I miss the habit of imagining oneself as a citizen of more than the place one was born.

Fuck, alright.

I should be more honest about what I miss because there is something inherently human in this conversation that is missing. It is beyond cultural confidence; it is the moments the cultural confidence made possible. The man in the garments shop in Kathmandu who sold me the pink patterned scarf I still wear (I also got a matching one for my grandmother). We negotiated for an hour, in the bad English and worse Nepali we shared, and I left with the scarf and the sense that I had been seen and slightly liked by someone whose life I would never enter further. The taxi driver in Delhi who cried about his wife’s disappointment in him and then turned up a Bollywood song I didn’t know and danced in the driver’s seat while I danced in the passenger seat, both of us laughing too loudly at a feeling neither of us could have explained. The old man in a jungle in Indonesia, smoking kretek cigarettes, telling me about the land his family had held for generations and how he was living his dream by turning it into a remote Airbnb; a sentence so dense with contradiction that I have been thinking about it for roughly ten years. The woman in a burqa somewhere in the Middle East who patiently helped me decode an ATM screen I could not read, the two of us chuckling at my idiocy while the line behind us waited.

I cannot make these moments fit cleanly into the structural argument I have been making. They were real. The system that placed me in front of those people, that gave me the money, the passport, the time, the incomplete language, the mild local welcome that came partly from the welcome and partly from the dollar in my pocket, was the same system whose collapse I have spent this essay describing.

The kindness was real and the apparatus was real and they were operating at the same time, in the same rooms, between the same people. The cab driver was performing a kindness for me, and being paid for the ride, and showing me his actual life in a moment of overflow. All three things at once. I do not know how to make that simpler than it was.

This is the thing I struggle to say in a classroom now: that the critique is right and the moments were real. That I was being catered to and I was being met. That the apparatus was extractive and the human inside the apparatus was, sometimes, kind to me anyway, in ways that did not depend on the extraction even though they were enabled by it. My students hear the critique cleanly. They hear the moments through the critique, which I think dulls the moments. I do not know how to give them back the moments without giving them back the apparatus. I am not sure it can be done.

I am willing to be told that the cosmopolitan habit was always a fiction, that the imagining was always paid for by people who could not afford to imagine themselves out of their own places. I have been told this, and I have believed it because it is true. But I am not willing, anymore, to pretend that what is replacing the habit is uncomplicatedly better. A culture that has stopped imagining itself globally is also a culture in which it is easier to forget about people who are not in the room. Even granting that cosmopolitanism’s attention was always selective and self-flattering, the attention itself was something. The cosmopolitan ideal, even in its compromised form, was a check against a forgetting. The check is being removed.

Yes, the lineage I have been tracking is specifically Western, and the cosmopolitan habit it produced is one form among several the human capacity for cross-cultural attention has taken. Other traditions (Pan-African intellectual cosmopolitanism, the contemporary diasporic literary cultures that span the Global South and its emigrant communities, the revival of Polynesian wayfinding) are not ending because this one is. What I am mourning is a particular form, not the broader human possibility of imagining oneself as a citizen of more than the place one was born. That possibility may yet be carried forward by traditions other than the one I came up in.

Whether something equivalent is being assembled elsewhere, I do not know.

I hope it is.

I’m afraid we mistook a window for a trajectory. We thought the curiosity, the openness, the wandering was who we had become. It turns out it was who we were under conditions that are ending. What we are without those conditions, we are about to find out.

The Elsewhere was never really out there. It was a place we needed to believe in, to bear the place we were.

What we are about to live, those of us inside this particular ending, is here. But a here that has been substantially rebuilt while we were looking elsewhere, a here whose edges are mediated by infrastructure none of the lineage’s seekers could have imagined and which none of them would have recognized as the inside they were trying to escape. The seekers leave the lineage to find that the inside has become its own kind of outside, every bit as foreign, and considerably more captured.

I do not know what we will be like when we live only inside this. I hope the people who come after us, inside this lineage and outside it, find something to make of the longing we are no longer going to know what to do with.

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Part I: On the Personal vs. The Objective

There are many approaches to writing, but a binary I’ve encountered both here on Substack and in academia breaks down roughly like this:

Should the personal be included in the essay, or should the essay be purely objective and theoretical?

I want to say at the outset that I don’t think one is inherently stronger than the other. The strength and utility of a piece depends entirely on the writer, the reader, the topic, the context, the cultural moment. So many variables go into the process of writing that reducing it to this binary is somewhat silly. But people do. And what I observe, especially within academia and more credentialed institutions, is a consistent frowning upon the personal.

I want to genuinely make the case for the other side before dismantling it.

The strongest version of the argument goes something like this: when a writer inserts themselves into an argument, they invite the reader to evaluate the person rather than the idea. Sympathy, antipathy, identification, projection, all of it bleeds into the reception of the claim. A reader who dislikes the writer dismisses the argument. A reader who loves the writer accepts it too easily. In fields where the goal is to produce knowledge that can be tested, replicated, or falsified independent of its author, this is a real epistemological problem. The personal, on this view, is both stylistically indulgent and a contaminant. I take that argument seriously. I agree with it in certain contexts.

And yet.

I have never understood the belittling of the personal in philosophical, literary, or essayistic work because the lineage of the essay itself shows just how deep the personal runs, and how much it has produced.

Montaigne, who essentially invented the form in the 16th century, built it as an explicit instrument of self-examination. The word essai means attempt. He was trying out thought against the tension of his own life, finding out what he actually believed in the process. Roland Barthes wrote Camera Lucida as an act of grief after his mother’s death, and it remains one of the most searching texts in photography theory. Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is simultaneously rigorous political philosophy and a deeply personal reckoning with what colonialism did to his own psyche and it is the personal stakes that give the theory its charge, its urgency, its inability to be dismissed as merely academic. James Baldwin never pretended his thinking arrived from nowhere! The specificity of his experience was the engine of his clarity, not a contaminant.

Pull the personal out of any of these works and the whole thing collapses.

I can speak to this from my own experience. I published a piece on Substack called The Men I Grieve about losing my father and grandfather within six months of each other in 2022. It is, by any measure, a deeply personal piece. It opens with an engine light that came on the last morning I saw my father alive and has never been fixed. It moves through grief, digital memory, masculinity, C.S. Lewis, and Anthony Bourdain. It is grounded in very specific memories: a bench with peeling green paint in a Brooklyn park, the smell of a British friend’s attempt at spaghetti and meatballs, the particular crack in my brother’s voice on the phone. It circles theoretical and philosophical territory, but it never really leaves the body and it never pretends to arrive from nowhere.

And what happened when some readers encountered it was exactly what the critics of personal writing fear and exactly what its defenders hope for: they brought themselves to it. They wrote back with their own losses, their own blinking engine lights, their own men they were grieving. The personal is what made the piece a door rather than a monument. Something to walk through, not something to admire from a distance.

I should be honest: I've written the other kind too. Dissertations, conference papers, the academic register that earns you credentials and reaches no one. I know that register from the inside. I was trained in it, I produced it, I am still tempted by it, and actually must work to break out of it (I’m sure you will smell it all over me as you continue reading!). Which is why I feel I can say what follows. It is a reckoning from someone who knows the cost.

There is a version of the personal that collapses into sentimentality, navel-gazing, and confession-as-insight. That is not what I am defending. I am defending the personal as a method, one that when handled with rigor and intention does something purely theoretical prose cannot do alone: it makes the reader feel implicated rather than merely informed.

I should pause here to acknowledge a fair counterargument: the personal essay form (of course) has its own pathologies. The contemporary economy of trauma-as-content, the curated vulnerability that performs depth without risking it, the confessional register that has become its own kind of brand. These are real phenomena, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The failure mode of personal writing is sentimentality and self-mythology.

The failure mode of pure theory is exclusion and irrelevance.

Neither form is innocent.

What I am defending is an orientation: authenticity over performance, regardless of which register you write in. A theoretical paper can be authentic. A personal essay can be a pose. The question is whether the writer is reaching toward something true, or merely arranging themselves attractively in front of it.

It’s also worth noting that no piece of writing truly exists in a purely objective framework (not really, but I welcome counterarguments to this claim, perhaps writing while having an out of body experience after licking a hallucinogenic toad?). Whether you explicitly insert yourself into a text or not, you are there. Your obsessions selected the topic. Your blind spots shaped the argument. Your aesthetic sensibilities chose the sentence structure. The view from nowhere is itself a view from somewhere, it just carries enough institutional prestige that it doesn’t look like one.

Some writers genuinely inhabit the objective voice as their own, and I think that is dope. The cool, analytical, detached register is not always a performance of neutrality. For some people it is how they think, the truest expression of their particular interior. That voice has every right to exist. What it does not have is exclusive claim to seriousness.

Which raises a question worth sitting with: why does that particular performance of neutrality pass unexamined, while the writer who simply admits they are present in their work gets accused of self-indulgence?

I think the hostility to the personal in serious intellectual spaces goes beyond stylistic preference. It tends to be loudest in the most credentialed rooms. It tends to fall hardest on writers whose personal experience is itself political, those whose body, history, grief, or joy is not the assumed default. The demand to achieve objectivity has historically functioned, at least in part, as a demand to write as if you are someone you are not. The detached, authoritative, universal voice was never actually universal. It was just the voice of whoever controlled the space you were moving through.

So when I encounter real bitterness toward personal writing (and I do encounter it, with some regularity) I don’t think it’s really about epistemological purity. I think it’s about the discomfort of vulnerability in spaces that have organized themselves around its suppression. To write personally is to insist that your interior life is worth examining in public.

For some people, that remains an intolerable claim.

I’ll close this section by saying: I love seeing all styles of writing; subjective, objective, personal, dramatic, poetic, lyrical, serious, surreal. It all needles at the truth of being human, and that’s what we’re all doing here. But if you find yourself sneering at someone for bleeding a little onto the page, I’d gently suggest that the problem is not the blood.

Part II: No Treasure in the Castle

I would rather ground my intellectual pursuits in the personal.

I believe this anchors abstract concepts in ways that are empathizable, graspable, and foldable into lived experience, both mine and, I hope, others’.

Some might call this “watered down.”

I receive that as a compliment.

For what is the purpose of such pursuits if not to enrich the lives we actually live?

There exists another school of practice. One that parasitically and sycophantically loops itself around the abstract thought of celebrity philosophers (both living and deceased), mistaking proximity to brilliance for brilliance itself.

To this I say, to each their own.

(A pause on my choice of example before going further: you will soon see I use continental theory and Marxism because the irony is sharpest. A tradition that explicitly claims the working class has ended up producing a discourse the working class cannot read. But the pattern I am describing is not unique to the left. It appears across conservative intellectual culture, centrist technocracy, literary theory, economics, law in every field where abstract thought meets institutional reward. I am using Marxism as a lens, not a target. The elitism I am critiquing cuts across schools of thought. Back to our normal programming.)

But I will note: communities (cults?) that form around thinkers like Lacan and Zižek (and others) are a curious phenomenon. Both are, without question, brilliant diagnosticians. Lacan reorganized our understanding of subjectivity, language, and desire. Zižek has spent decades dissecting the ideological grammar of late capitalism with genuine wit and reach.

I am not dismissing what these thinkers have achieved. I am raising a question about the mode, diagnosis as an end in itself, and about the cultures that metastasize around it. (Importantly, this essay is not a reading of Lacan's or Zižek's actual texts, and I make no pretense of one here. I am describing what forms around thinkers of a certain kind and what that formation, over time, does to the ideas themselves.)

Because diagnosis without prescription tends, ultimately, toward performance. And the legacy of these thinkers risks being one of pure pattern recognition. Sophisticated, dazzling, inert. Which is a strange destination for traditions that explicitly position themselves as politically transformative. The whole point of Marxism (as Marx himself rather famously put it) is not only to interpret the world but to change it.

And perhaps most damning: a tradition born to liberate the working class has produced a discourse so densely coded that the working class itself cannot access it. The very people Marxism claims to champion are the ones locked outside the castle.

That is an indictment of the modern project.

This phenomenon, it should be said, is not exclusive to philosophy. We see versions of it everywhere, everything, all at once. In politics, in media, in the credentialed professional class more broadly. There is a reason a particular kind of polished, technocratic political speech, however well-intentioned, has consistently failed to land with the people it is ostensibly designed to serve (re: 2016 and 2024). When the register itself signals “I am not one of you,” the content becomes almost beside the point. You can be entirely correct and still entirely unheard. The castle has many designs, including accidental (or not) sound proofing.

This is where I find the whole enterprise a bit ironic and philosophically backwards.

And to be clear, I do believe complexity has its place. Some ideas are genuinely difficult, and the labor of precision is real and necessary. But there is a profound difference between complexity that illuminates and complexity that excludes.

That distinction deserves more than a passing assertion, so let me pause again, because it is the hinge of the entire argument.

How do you actually tell the difference?

I will admit upfront that there is a Justice Stewart problem here, much like his famous formulation about obscenity, I cannot give you a clean definition, but “I know it when I see it.” Still, the heuristics are real. Complexity that illuminates tends to open up a concept you could not have grasped otherwise; the difficulty is in service of the insight, and once you arrive, the insight stays with you in language you can carry into your own life. Complexity that excludes tends to do the opposite: the concept, when finally translated, turns out to be modest or even banal, and the difficulty was the entire point. Earned difficulty leaves you with something. Performative difficulty leaves you with vocabulary. One expands the reader. The other tests them.

The goal of philosophy, at its best, has never been to construct a velvet rope. It is to deepen human experience, to throw the doors open and invite people into the great, humbling, exhilarating practice of critical reflection. To belittle someone for failing to master a lexicon of largely invented categories, or to scoff at someone for making sense of complex ideas through the texture of their own lived experience, is not intellectual rigor. It is gatekeeping dressed up as thought.

And the obscurity, I would argue, is no accident.

If nobody can clearly understand what you are saying, nobody can clearly tell you that you are wrong. Complexity becomes shield. Jargon becomes immunity. It is a remarkably convenient epistemology for people who have mistaken the performance of intelligence for intelligence itself.

Which brings us to “the followers.” There is a meaningful difference between engaging a thinker and servicing one.

A friend ( ) made a distinction to me recently that I must include here: there are philosophers whose frameworks people live inside, and there are masters whose frameworks are generative.

One produces adherents. The other produces new thought.

Lacan and Zižek, whatever their limitations, at least generate original thought. Their disciples, more often than not, produce nothing but annotations of annotations, ultimately mistaking exegesis for philosophy, and proximity to a great mind for a great mind. It is, at its core, intellectual cosplay.

It's worth asking why these cultures form around certain thinkers and not others. Part of the answer, I suspect, is that difficulty itself is useful, and not just to the thinker, but to the institutions and communities that organize around them. A body of work that requires specialized vocabulary to discuss is a body of work that creates a priesthood to discuss it. The density produces gatekeepers. The gatekeepers produce disciples. The disciples produce credentials. And so the difficulty that may have started as a genuine attempt to think precisely becomes, over time, the economic and social engine of an entire professional class. This is not a conspiracy and I am certainly not Alex Jones! It is just what happens when abstract thought meets institutional incentive. The thinker may be generative. The culture that forms around them rarely is.

These frameworks are also self-perpetuating by design.

Capitalism is always the problem.

The revolution is always deferred.

There is always another layer to diagnose.

It is a worldview that conveniently never requires its adherents to actually do anything. Critique becomes lifestyle.

The castle, it turns out, is also a very comfortable place to live!

I want to be careful here, once more. Because I am not arguing that the people inside the castle simply chose isolation in some pure act of individual will. The academy operates in part as a credentialing system that selects for and shapes a particular kind of speaker and the institutional pressures are real. But individual choices still happen inside those pressures. There remains a difference between recognizing the walls and continuing to build them higher.

These circles, intentionally or not, tend toward elitism.

High on their own fumes, they construct elaborate linguistic walls and never reckon with the fact that inside the castle, there is no treasure.

Part III: The Ethics of the Open Door

There is a moment in George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language where he makes an observation so obvious it should not need to be made.

And yet here we are, still making it.

Here it is (drum roll, please):

Good prose communicates.

Everything else (performance, signaling, the elaborate obstacle course erected between writer and reader, awarding points to those who complete it) is something else, however well-disguised.

Prose that communicates. That is all.

Orwell was writing in 1946 about political language specifically, about the way euphemism and abstraction had become the preferred tools of people who wanted to say terrible things without appearing to say them. But his deeper point has outlasted that context. Obscurity, he argued, is almost never innocent. It is either the symptom of a writer who does not know what they mean, or the strategy of a writer who does not want you to know.

Both, in their own way, are a kind of lie.

I find this useful, not always as a cudgel (well, perhaps occasionally as a cudgel!), but as a diagnostic.

When I encounter writing that seems designed to be impenetrable, I have learned to ask: what is being protected here? Because clarity requires courage. To write plainly is to be exposed. Your argument is visible. Your reasoning can be followed. Your errors can be found. Obscurity is a remarkably convenient epistemology for people who have mistaken the performance of intelligence for intelligence itself. It is also, it turns out, a remarkably convenient epistemology for people who are simply wrong and would prefer you not notice.

bell hooks wrote about this (in Teaching to Transgress and the essays collected in Where We Stand: Class Matters) with a directness I find both clarifying and galvanizing. She described returning home to Kentucky, to the community that raised her, and the growing awareness that the language she was being trained to produce in the academy was a language her people could not read. She did not frame this as a personal inconvenience. She framed it as a political crisis. The academy, she argued, uses language as a form of class warfare, constructing an elaborate credentialing system dressed up as intellectual standards, the effect of which is to ensure that the people most in need of critical tools remain the people least likely to receive them.

Paulo Freire understood it structurally. The entire project of Pedagogy of the Oppressed rests on the premise that critical consciousness, the capacity to read the world and name its contradictions, is the birthright of everyone, and the work of genuine intellectual life is to make those tools available, transferable, livable.

And yet here we are.

Allow me a moment to head off the sloppy version of this argument, because the sloppy version is easy and wrong. Difficulty earns its place. Some ideas are genuinely hard. The labor of precision is real, and there are concepts that resist simplification not because their owners are being precious but because the concepts themselves demand careful handling. There are bodies of work (late Wittgenstein, parts of Hegel, Paul Celan’s poetry, Beckett’s late prose) where the difficulty is constitutive. The argument, in some sense, is the difficulty, and to flatten it might be to lose it. I am not arguing that all ideas should be made instantly accessible to all readers in all contexts across all cultures and peoples. That would itself be a form of condescension, and it would collapse into anti-intellectualism, which I want no part of.

What I am arguing is narrower and, I think, more defensible:

It is that difficulty must be earned, and that a tradition or community has a responsibility to interrogate its own opacity rather than mistaking it for depth.

Ursula Le Guin made this distinction with characteristic precision. In her Bryn Mawr commencement address, she contrasted the "father tongue" of authority and abstraction with the "mother tongue" of conversation and connection, pushing back against the assumption that literary seriousness requires opacity. Plain style, she argued, is not the absence of thought. It is thought disciplined enough to be shared. It is, in a culture that fetishizes complexity as status, a quietly radical act.

Toni Morrison said something in her Nobel lecture that has stayed with me. She described language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its “fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism.” She was talking about the violence language can do when wielded as a weapon of exclusion. When it dresses its gatekeeping in the costume of elegance. The crinolines of respectability. I return to this image, again and again, while writing this because that is exactly what I am describing: the elaborate linguistic performance that mistakes itself for thought, and in doing so, shuts the door on everyone who hasn’t been issued the right key.

James Baldwin, in his Paris Review interview, said the only thing he knew about technique was that "you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac." The writer's responsibility, in Baldwin's framing, is to render. To make something visible to another human being. To make the reader see is to accept that if they do not see, the failure may be yours, not theirs.

I think now about the responses to The Men I Grieve and the readers who wrote back with their own losses. Their own men. Their own engine lights still lit up. That is what writing toward someone produces: recognition. The sense that the door was open and they were allowed to walk through it.

That is the thing that connects all three of these rants.

The castle, as I described, is a place where brilliant diagnosis circulates without prescription, where critique has become a lifestyle and the goal is always deferred. I’ve tried to argue that the personal voice is not a retreat from rigor but an extension of it and that writing grounded in lived experience does something detached theoretical prose cannot do alone. And now, here, I want to say the obvious thing that somehow still needs saying:

Writing that locks out the people it claims to serve has failed.

Open the door.

The goal was never to construct a monument to our own sophistication. It was to think carefully, together, about the lives we are actually living.

And if you find yourself living in the castle, very comfortable, so comfortable, surrounded by people who already agree with you, producing annotations of annotations in a language no one outside the walls can read, I would gently suggest:

The doors are not locked from the outside.

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By midmorning the clay is already turning on him.

It dries fast, tightening under his palms, cracking at the edges if he presses too long in one place. The air holds the heat like a grudge. Even in the shade, even with the tarp pulled low, there is no softness left in it. The water he keeps in a cut plastic drum has gone warm enough to taste of rubber. He uses it anyway, dipping his fingers, slicking the surface, coaxing the form back from collapse.

The wheel spins unevenly. It always has. A bent shaft somewhere beneath that he’s never bothered to fix. He likes the wobble.

He is a difficult man to look away from.

The nose arrives first, always. Long and severe, carved as if by someone with strong opinions about noses, a blade of a thing that catches the light at angles a softer face would not permit. His fingers are extraordinary: the length of a pianist’s but knotted at every joint, spider-legged, moving across clay with a precision that seems to belong to a different body than the one they’re attached to. Along his arms, his hands, the planes of his face are birthmarks the color of dark tea, distributed with the randomness of a thrown handful of leaves, as though he himself had been made by someone still learning the art of making people. The children of Vashpur love him for all of this. They find him magnificent in the way children find magnificent the things that adults have agreed to find unsettling.

Vashpur. The name means nothing officially. It appears on no map of consequence. It exists in the gap between a city that is becoming and a city that has already become, pressed against the back of gleaming towers whose glass faces reflect a version of the sky that has been cleaned of everything inconvenient.

The highway runs between.

On this side: the drains, the corrugated metal, a goat working at a cardboard box, flies on the hanging meat, kites on the wire, the warm rot of things.

On that side: the towers, their lobbies cool as held breath, their residents who have learned not to look left when they exit.

The potter has his stall at the mouth of a lane that feeds into the market. The lane is also home to Prem, who repairs bicycles and speaks to them in a low continuous stutter while he works, as if the bicycles are simply being unreasonable. And to Deepa, who makes chai so aggressively spiced it has acquired a small mythology in the surrounding streets, who hands each cup across the counter with the tenderness of someone dispensing medicine. And to old Rajan, who sells marigolds from a basket that seems, impossibly, to always be full, who has been selling marigolds from that spot for so long that the lane itself seems to have organized around him, as a river organizes around certain stones.

These are the potter’s first subjects, though he does not think of them that way.

What he makes in those years is (like his fingers) extraordinary, though the word barely fits and, here, arrives slightly wrong, as a word does when the thing it names exceeds its usual applications.

He makes Prem with the bicycle chain still implied on his fingers, knuckles swollen, a tilt to the whole figure that suggests a man perpetually stooping to examine something at wheel-height. The face is exact. Better than photographic, because it captures not how Prem looks in a given moment but how he looks across all moments, the essential Prem, the one who exists between observations. When Prem’s daughter sees it she sits down on the ground and does not speak for several minutes. She is not a woman given to silence.

He makes Deepa mid-pour, the chai catching the light in the clay the way it actually catches the light in the aluminum pot; a small miracle of material that no one can explain and several people attempt to. Her expression is concentration edging close to contempt for the human need for chai at the frequency humans require it. It is entirely accurate. Deepa herself, presented with the figure, examines it for a long time and then sets it down and says nothing, which is the most complete acknowledgment she gives anything.

He makes old Rajan simply standing and this is the most difficult thing because a man simply standing has nowhere to hide. Every stillness is a revelation. The marigold basket is there, the slight forward lean, the patience that has gone so deep it is no longer patience but simply the shape of Rajan.

The children come for the animals.

He makes a crow with such fidelity that another crow, landing on the sill one morning, regards it for a long moment before flying away with what appears to be embarrassment or shame. He makes a dog sleeping in the posture of a dog known to sleep in the market, its surrender to the afternoon rendered so accurate that people stepping over it check twice before realizing it is clay. He makes a goat that children carry to school hidden in their bags.

The adults find many of these pieces unsettling. “Too much,” they say, without specifying.

The children do not find this unsettling. They find it as they find everything accurate and confirmed: with satisfaction. The world has passed a test.

Three children return most often.

Arjun, seven, missing one front tooth, who has strong views about which of the potter’s animals are correctly ranked and will argue these views at length and with evidence. Mohan, nine, who barely speaks but communicates a continuous interest through the direction of his gaze, a boy whose attention is so concentrated it functions almost as touch. And Priya, six, who asks questions.

Priya asks questions as Prem adjusts spokes; with total concentration, no wasted motion, the assumption that the mechanism can be understood if you locate the right point of entry. Why does that one look lonely? Does the clay remember being dirt? What happens if you make someone and then break them? Can you make someone who doesn’t exist yet?

He answers when he can. When he cannot, he shows her.

She watches his hands with the attention of someone memorizing a language she understands she will need.

He is tired. This is the whole explanation, and it is insufficient, and it is true.

He carried thirty-five of the thirty-six figures across the highway and set them down in a lobby whose air tasted of nothing and walked back into the heat. The priest examined three and nodded and handed over an envelope and that was the end of it. Thirty-five approved faces. A face the hands knew by the third figure and made thirty-two more times without consulting him.

The thirty-sixth is still on the shelf in the stall. He had worked at it for an hour (a thrust to the chin his hands put there without instruction, a quality of attention in the brow that belonged to no deity he had been asked to render) before he stopped himself, covered her with a cloth, and set her at the back of the shelf. The thirty-sixth goddess. He told himself he would return to her.

That evening he sits at the wheel. His hands move toward the clay and he thinks: the thirty-sixth. Yes, he will finish the thirty-sixth. The hands begin and he can feel them looking for the interrupted gesture, the thrust to the chin, the attention in the brow, reaching for the place they stopped and then past it, past the approved face and past the interrupted one, into somewhere neither of those were going.

What emerges has a body, distributed weight, a stance that suggests a person in the posture of waiting. The face is smooth and featureless. No eyes. No mouth. Only the faint impressions his thumbs have left on either side of where features might have been.

The idea of a face. The location of a face. But not a face.

He sets it on the wheel and looks at it for a long time.

This is a blob, he thinks.

At the back of the shelf, under her cloth, the thirty-sixth goddess waits.

He does not know what he has made.

He leaves it on the shelf. Over the next few days, he makes three more.

A woman passing the stall stops. She has a basket of onions. She sets it down.

She looks at the smooth-faced-blob-figures for a long time.

“That’s me,” she says.

He looks up.

She does not appear to know him. She has the manner of someone who has somewhere to be and has been, with mild annoyance, detained.

“I don’t think…” he begins.

“That’s me,” she says again. The flat tone of confirmed fact.

She picks up her onions and goes.

That afternoon three more people stop. A man with a crate of mangoes. A girl in a school uniform. An old man he has never seen before who stands for a full minute without speaking, nods once as if a debate has been settled, and leaves.

All of them say it.

“That’s me.”

He begins to keep track. Within a week he has counted nineteen people who stopped without meaning to. He can tell the ones who meant to from the ones who didn’t by the way they’re still holding whatever they were carrying when the figure caught them. A bucket. A flip phone. A child’s hand. They touch the blank face as one touches a surface they expect to be hot. They angle their heads. Some of them stay so long he has to look away.

He sells four.

He sits at the wheel one morning and his hands move toward the clay and he knows, before they begin, what they are going to make. No face. The location of a face. He lets them.

He makes more.

At the back of the shelf, covered with a cloth, stands the thirty-sixth goddess.

One afternoon he sits at the wheel with the clear intention of making Prem. He has made Prem before. He knows Prem’s face; the creasing at the outer corners of the eyes, the left side of his mouth sitting fractionally higher than the right, the deep weathering across the forehead of a man who has worked thirty years in the open air.

He knows all of this.

He sits at the wheel and he knows all of this and his hands begin to move and what rises from the clay is smooth.

He stares at it.

He tries again. Concentrates. Brings Prem’s face deliberately to mind, holds it there, presses his thumbs toward the clay with intention.

Smooth.

He sits back. His hands are in his lap. The wheel slows.

Outside, Prem is murmuring to a bicycle in the lane. The potter can hear his voice, that low register of a man at patient work, a voice he has known for years. He listens to it and he looks at the smooth face on the wheel.

He covers it with a cloth.

He does not tell anyone.

He sits at the wheel for a long time.

Then he reaches for more clay.

He sells them as fast as he makes them.

Mehta arrives the way things arrive in Vashpur that have been inevitable for some time, without surprise, as if the lane has been expecting him.

A white SUV parks at the highway end. Mehta himself is thin in the manner of a man who has made appointments to remain so, his clothes carrying the chemical sweetness of expensive detergent that arrives in the lane ahead of him. He makes his way down to the potter’s stall with the ease of a man who has navigated places like this before. He steps around Prem’s bicycle parts without looking down.

He picks up a smooth-faced figure and holds it with the assessing grip of someone who has held many objects for money. He turns it once. Sets it down.

“Extraordinary,” he says. Then, quieter, almost to himself:

“That’s me.“

A pause.

The potter waits.

Mehta sets it down and looks at the shelf. At the rows of smooth-faced figures standing in their patient arrangement. A look crosses his expression that is more professional than pleasure.

“These do well,” he says. “Lobbies. Certain kinds of residential. The developers I work with, they want something that reads as art but doesn’t ask anything of the person standing in front of it.” He picks up a second figure, turns it, sets it down.

“You understand the market.”

“I understand what I make,” the potter says.

Mehta blinks at him. “Yes,” he says. “Exactly.”

He purchases eleven figures. He wraps them himself in cloth he has brought, efficiently, without ceremony, the fold of his hands around each figure final and certain, the hands of a man who knows precisely what things are worth and wraps them accordingly.

“You have the hands for it and I don’t mean the craft. I mean the letting go” he says. “The ones who can’t let go make beautiful things nobody buys.”

He pays without negotiating. It’s its own form of insult, the statement that the price does not matter.

At the door he pauses.

“The blankness is the thing,” he says. “The more specific you make it, the fewer people it fits. You already know this.”

The potter stands in the doorway and watches the white SUV move back toward the highway. Prem has stopped working and is watching too, a wrench loose in his hand.

“Who was that?” Prem asks.

“A gallery man,” the potter says.

Prem nods slowly, then returns to his bicycle.

The potter goes back inside. He looks at the shelf where eleven figures no longer stand. The gaps between the remaining ones are clean and regular like missing molars.

He counts the money. It is more than he makes in two weeks. He counts it again.

He puts the money away. He stands at the wheel. He thinks about the eleven figures moving across the highway in Mehta’s cloth, finding their way into lobbies he has never seen. A lobby with climate control and a security desk. The figures standing in that air.

He thinks about Mehta saying you already know this. The casual certainty of it. As if the choice the potter made at the wheel the morning after selling the first one, the hands moving toward clay with the knowledge of what they were going to not-make, had been visible to Mehta from the highway or the towers.

He sits at the wheel for a long time.

Then he reaches for more clay.

Priya comes less often.

He notices this after ten days. He notices as he has been noticing other absences, as if the noticing has to travel a longer distance than it used to.

When she comes she goes directly to the back of the shelf, to the older things, the animals, the few remaining peculiar figures he has not sold. She does not look at the smooth-faced rows. He watches her do this and he knows, watching her, what her not-looking means. He could say something. He looks at the rows of smooth faces and looks at her and reaches for more clay.

One afternoon her mother comes with her and picks up one of the smooth-faced figures and holds it out. “Look,” she says, warm and pleased. “That’s you.“

Priya looks at it.

She turns it in her hands once or twice. She sets it back on the shelf as a child sets down things they have been asked to admire but cannot.

“Can I see the crow?” she asks.

He goes to where the crow is. He brings it out. She holds it and her expression unclenches. She holds it for a long time.

When she leaves she does not look at the smooth-faced figure again.

He puts the crow back on its shelf.

That night he tries to make another crow.

He sits at the wheel with the original crow (well, not the original crow) in his peripheral vision, looking at it, and his hands work the clay, and what emerges is smooth and amorphous. A shape that could be a bird or could be a head or could be anything that someone might look at and say that’s me without knowing what they mean by it.

He looks at it for a long time.

He looks at the crow.

He looks at what his hands have made.

He covers what his hands have made with a cloth. He sets the crow in front of the cloth so he will see it in the morning.

In the morning the cloth is still there. The crow is on the floor.

Mehta comes back. Then Mehta’s contacts. Then people Mehta’s contacts have spoken to. The white SUV at the end of the lane becomes a regular presence, sometimes two cars, sometimes three. They come and they look and they say “that’s me, that’s me, that’s me” and it sounds different from when the lane people say it.

They pay.

They photograph the stall on their phones, the shelf, the figures, occasionally the potter himself, his extraordinary hands at the wheel, his face. He finds he does not mind this. He finds, if he is honest, that a part of him waits for it. The small bright screen held up, the pause, the tap. He has learned to orient toward it as the figures on the shelf orient toward whoever stands in the doorway.

Between their visits the lane people still come. Prem. Deepa, who has stopped offering him chai in the afternoons, though she has not said why. Old Rajan (once) who holds a smooth-faced figure for a long time and then sets it down and looks at the potter with an expression the potter cannot read.

This is new.

He has been reading Rajan’s face for years. He knows its economy of expressions, how feeling moves across it slowly and settles in the eyes last. But standing there in the stall he looks at Rajan’s face and sees eyes, nose, mouth, the deep furrows of a man who has stood in the same spot through decades of heat and monsoon and cannot assemble them. The components are present. The person is not arriving.

He looks away.

He asks after the marigolds.

That night he sits at the bench and looks at his hands for a long time. The birthmarks along the fingers and knuckles. He turns them over and turns them back.

He picks up a smooth-faced figure from the shelf. He runs his thumb across the place where the face would be.

Then, he does it again.

The surface is already smooth. There is nothing left to smooth. His thumb knows this and continues anyway, moving in slow circles. Suddenly, the motion changes, becoming less a smoothing and more a violent pressing, the pad of his thumb pushing inward now, the clay giving slightly, the slight resistance of it, and he presses harder, the heel of his hand coming up to meet his thumb, and he is working now, actually working, the hands doing what hands do when they are left alone in the dark with clay and no instruction.

He does not realize what he has done until he sets it down.

The figure's head is gone. He pressed it inward and downward until the clay that had suggested a skull was flush with the shoulders. What sits on the bench has a body, distributed weight, a stance that suggests waiting. The neck ends. That is all.

He looks at it.

He looks at his hands.

The birthmarks are the same. The knuckles are the same. The spider-legged fingers that once memorized the shape of every living thing in the lane are the same.

He puts the figure at the back of the shelf, behind the others, where it cannot be seen from the doorway.

He wipes his hands on his shirt.

At the back of the shelf the thirty-sixth goddess stands under her cloth.

He moves toward her. Takes the edge of the cloth between his fingers.

Outside, a motorbike passes in the lane. Someone calls out to someone. The ordinary sounds of the lane arranging themselves.

He lets the cloth go.

He leaves her covered.

He reaches for more clay.

The nights are long now. In the morning there are figures he does not remember making. He covers them at night with a canvas sheet. In the morning the canvas is folded neatly on the bench.

The chai smell and the light as it is and his footsteps sounding as footsteps should and he is walking toward the stall and there, there, are more figures than there should be, more, more, more, lining the ledge outside Deepa’s counter and standing at the base of Prem’s bicycle stand, bicycles, and arranged along the step where Rajan sits with marigolds, smooth faces oriented outward in the patient way he knows, and he stops at the stall and picks one up and checks the base for the wobble, the bent shaft’s signature, the thing that marks his work as his, and it’s there, and he picks up another, and it’s there, and another, there, and he works along the shelf and the wobble is in all of them and then he is moving through the lane checking the things that are not figures, the bicycle frame, the sleeping dog, the aluminum pot, the marigold basket, and the wobble is in all of those too, his mark, transferred into everything the lane contains, and he looks at his hands and the wobble is in his hands, yes in his hands, he can feel it running through the bones of his fingers, the bent-shaft irregularity he has always believed belonged to the wheel and not to him, and he presses his palms together trying to still it and it doesn’t still and somewhere behind him or in front of him or inside him a voice, flat, certain, that’s me, and he turns and the lane is the lane, and he looks back at the shelf and the figures have Prem’s tilt, all of them, the slight stoop of a man perpetually examining cables at wheel-height, and he looks at Prem and Prem has the figure’s smoothness, blank patience that has been waiting a long time, and the potter reaches out and takes Prem’s wrist and holds it and feels the pulse, yes, a pulse, and underneath the pulse the wobble, faint, unmistakable, his, and Prem does not look up from the bicycle and the voice again, closer, that’s me, and he cannot tell if it is one voice or many voices or his own voice, and he releases Prem’s wrist and looks at his hands and the birthmarks are wrong, different distribution, thrown by someone else’s handful, and he looks at the figures and some of them have his birthmarks, the dark tea marks along the fingers and the planes of the face, and he thinks I made those, and then, the lane is the lane but the lane has the wobble, he can feel it underfoot, the slight give of earth made rather than found, and Deepa’s chai smell and Rajan’s marigolds very orange, like fluffy tangerines, and the light through the tarp and that’s me says the voice and that’s me says another voice and that’s me says the thing that was Prem and that’s me say the figures and that’s me say the marigolds and the bicycle and the aluminum pot bangs and the corrugated walls and the highway beyond them with the white SUVs and the towers beyond that and the sky above the towers, cleaned of everything inconvenient, that’s me, that’s me, that’s me, and he opens his mouth and the wobble is in his throat and what comes out is not a word and not a sound but the mark of the bent shaft, the signature he has been leaving on everything, on the lane and the people in it and the sky above it and now on the inside of his own mouth, and he understands, without the understanding arriving as a thought, that he has been making this whole time, that he has never stopped making, that the lane and Prem and Deepa and Rajan and the children and the marigolds and the wobble in the base of everything is his, all of it, his, and the thought should be monstrous and it is not monstrous, it is a relief, relief of a man who has been losing the boundary of himself and has finally lost it completely, finally, and that’s me, yes, that’s me, that’s me, that’s

He wakes with his hands already moving.

On the bench is a piece of clay he does not remember preparing.

It has been worked thin and wide. Smoothed on both surfaces with a care that takes time, takes attention, takes the particular knowledge of hands that know what they are making even when the mind has not been consulted.

He looks at it for a long time.

He picks it up. Tests its weight. Still slightly cool from the night, from whatever hours produced it without him. He turns it and the morning light from the lane catches its surface.

It has finally arrived.

It is the shape where a face might be. The location of a face without the burden of being one.

He presses his thumbs through it. Two small gaps for eyes. A narrow opening at the mouth. Just what the body requires. Just enough.

He holds it up.

He looks through the eye-holes at the lane outside.

And something happens that he will not be able to explain and does not try to.

The world through the clay is different. Softer. The hard morning light filtered and gentled, the edges of things less insistent. Prem at his first bicycle of the morning. Well, no, not Prem (not the Prem whose face he can no longer assemble!), but a figure of a man bent over patient work, the essential form of a person doing what they have always done, and it is enough, it is more than enough, it is…

He breathes.

Deepa’s chai smell finding its way down through the heat. Rajan’s marigolds going out, the saffron of them softened through the dry clay.

He has not felt this in months. This ease. The faces of the lane, which have been demanding so much of him, requiring translation where once they were just known, are asking nothing of him now. They are the blobs. The beautiful outlines of a world that has stopped insisting on its own specificity.

He holds the mask against his face.

It is cool. It gives slightly. It molds to the plane of his cheekbones, and to the bridge of that extraordinary nose, filling its angles, softening its severity, until the face beneath it is a face that could belong to anyone, that makes no claim, that asks for nothing.

He closes his eyes behind the clay and sits like that for some time.

When he opens them the lane is still there. Through the eye-holes everything is the right distance away.

He reaches for the smoothing tool. Flat. Wide. For surfaces.

He begins to refine the mask’s edges. To work them thinner, more precise, more fitted. To smooth every surface until it could be worn without thinking. Until it could become, in time, a second skin.

He is still working when he hears the footsteps.

Tiny. A rhythm he has known for two years, a rhythm he would recognize at any hour, in any weather, the footsteps of someone who has never once walked into his stall without a question already forming.

He will not put the mask down.

He turns toward the doorway.

Priya stands in the light.

She looks at him.

At the clay where his face used to be. At the eye-holes through which something is regarding her. They are not the potter’s eyes. Something has been growing in the space his attention vacated. At the smooth surface where that impossible nose once caught the light. At the absence of the tea markings distributed across a face she has been watching since she was four years old.

She looks for a long time.

The thing in the stall that was the potter looks back at her through its holes.

She does not say that’s me.

She does not ask about the crow.

She does not ask her questions.

She stands in the doorway for a moment longer than a child should have to stand in a doorway looking at something like this.

Then she turns and walks back into Vashpur, into the morning, into the sounds of the lane arranging itself around its absences.

The wheel turns.

The clay rises.

On the shelf in the back, under its cloth, the thirty-sixth goddess stands unfinished.

When I was wrapping up my master’s, I wrote my thesis on The Beach by Alex Garland. Having spent the better half of my early twenties embedded within backpacker travel culture, I was fixated on critiquing the beast from the inside out. For those unfamiliar with the text, imagine Lord of the Flies, but grown up and far more privileged. The story follows a group of Western tourists (though, importantly, they explicitly call themselves travellers, not tourists) as they land in Thailand and “discover” an island that is off the map. They build a remote community, which at first seems like a utopia, until it goes to shit.

The book can broadly be read as a critique of a certain brand of travel (perhaps, one day, I will release my broader philosophy of travel), but embedded within it is a very specific, very late-1990s exploration of postmodern media mediation.

Early on, we learn that Garland’s protagonist, Richard, sees the world not as it is, but through the lens of movies and video games. The book is littered with reality being conceptualized as war. The travellers discover their island is shared by marijuana farmers, and Richard renders this into a scene from the Vietnam War. When he is later running for his life as bullets slice the air around him, the chase becomes a video game (power-ups, game overs, lives remaining). One of the novel’s most unsettling scenes occurs when Richard sneaks into a hut where one of the farmers is sleeping:

The first thing I registered were his markings: a black-blue dragon tattoo crawling up a densely muscled back, with a claw on one shoulder-blade and flames on the other. Then I saw that he was the same guard I’d seen with Étienne and Françoise, the guy with the kick-boxer build. Recognizing him, I had to concentrate hard to control my breathing. At first it was from an adrenalin rush and a throw-back to the fear I’d had on the plateau, but then it became awe. The man was facing away from me at a three-quarter angle, with one arm resting on his rifle and the other on his hips. Across his tattoo, running from his neck to the left side of his ribcage, was a deep, pale scar. Another scar cut a white line across the cropped hair on his head. A crumpled packet of Krong Thip was tied to his upper arm with a filthy blue bandanna. He held his AK as casually as a snake-charmer holding a cobra. He was perfect.

The Thai farmer is perfect because he fits Richard’s preconceptions, a composite of every warrior-in-Asia, every Street Fighter character, he has ever watched or played on a screen. What the man actually is, a poor farmer conscripted into the drug trade by a global economic order that has systematically stripped the rural Global South of any other viable option, is entirely inaccessible to Richard. The image both consumes the person and protects the viewer from the structural reality the image was always designed to obscure.

I mention The Beach not because this is an essay about backpacker culture, but because this particular pathology, reality experienced only through the mediating filter of prior representations, has reached a pitch in America that is no longer low stakes. The Beach is a microcosm, contained and literary. What we are living through now is the full-scale version, and its consequences are not fictional.

In 1981, Jean Baudrillard published Simulacra and Simulation, in which he argued that contemporary culture had undergone a catastrophic shift: representations of things had replaced the things themselves. We no longer experience reality directly. We experience simulations of it.

Copies without originals, signs without referents.

He called these simulacra.

The map, in his famous formulation, now precedes and generates the territory. Meaning no longer points back to anything real. It points to other signs, which point to other signs, in an infinite regress that he called hyperreality: a condition in which the simulation becomes more real, more emotionally compelling than anything it was supposed to represent.

Ten years later, watching the Gulf War unfold on television, Baudrillard wrote The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. He acknowledged that bombs fell and people died. But, he was arguing something more precise and more disturbing: that the war as experienced by most of the world (including most Americans) was not a war but a media event. The clean graphics, the precision-strike footage, the briefings with their surgical euphemisms, the whole visual rhetoric of a Nintendo campaign. It was very much a war rendered as spectacle before spectacle had fully consumed everything else. The reality of the war, the bodies and the ruin, was inaccessible. In its place was a representation so polished and so total that it displaced the thing it was supposed to document. (Of course, he couldn’t have known that thirty years later, the United States would be rattling sabers at Iran through social media posts written in the cadence of action movie trailers, press briefings having been replaced entirely by trolling.)

Baudrillard was also, somewhat presciently, alert to the dangers of reality television, which is something I would like to wrestle with in this piece.

In Simulacra and Simulation he wrote about An American Family, the 1973 PBS docuseries that followed the Loud family through a year of marital collapse and domestic unraveling. His point was this: the presence of cameras was transformation, rather than documentation. The Louds did not perform for the cameras so much as become something different because of them. The representation consumed the real. What one was watching was the Loud family’s simulation of itself, produced under the pressure of being watched.

What neither Baudrillard nor anyone else could have predicted was the scale and velocity of what came next. The Real World begat Survivor. Survivor begat American Idol. American Idol begat The Apprentice. And the host of The Apprentice became the leader of the free world. The genealogy is causal.

Before we move forward, perhaps, as I think, we must go back further still. To the invention of editing.

The manipulation of image and time is what first gave creators the ability to fabricate continuity: to make a sequence of disconnected moments appear as unbroken, inevitable reality. This was both a technological and philosophical development. Film theorist Sergei Eisenstein understood this early, arguing in “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” that montage produced meaning. In other words, the collision of two shots generated an idea that existed in neither image alone. The cut becomes narrative. The cut becomes argument. André Bazin pushed back in The Evolution Of Language In Cinema, insisting that editing was a form of violence against reality, a falsification of the world’s ambiguity in favor of the filmmaker’s imposed meaning.

Both were right. The cut creates and destroys simultaneously.

Walter Benjamin, writing in 1935, saw the deeper consequence of such phenomenon: mechanical reproduction stripped images of their aura, their rootedness in time and place. An infinitely reproducible image has no origin, and without an origin, it has no claim to authenticity. Free-floating, available for any use, detached from anything it once pointed to. More recently, the artist and critic Hito Steyerl has described the “poor image” (the compressed, degraded, infinitely circulated image of the digital age) as a kind of proletarianized copy, stripped of resolution and context, moving at the speed of ideology.

So, editing gave human beings, for the first time, the ability to watch time move in reverse. It gave them the power to impose narrative structure on raw experience, hoarding the chaos of what happened and transforming it into the clean arc of what was meant to happen.

Gods can both create worlds and destroy them.

The genius of reality television, when it finally arrived, was the insertion of real identities into this false narrative structure. Real people, real names, real faces, but the arc entirely constructed in the edit suite.

The honesty is the con. The rawness is the performance.

And because the faces are real, the audience’s emotional investment is real, which means the manipulation runs deeper than any scripted fiction ever could.

I’m actively theorizing that the modern American mind may be uniquely, structurally susceptible to this.

Americans travel less than almost any other population in the developed world. Roughly 40% of Americans do not own a passport. Of those who do travel internationally, the majority go to Mexico or Canada. Places geographically adjacent, culturally familiar, easily assimilable to existing assumptions. The friction of genuine foreignness, the experience of being truly, disoriently elsewhere, is something most Americans never encounter. Without that encounter, the images fill the void. You do not know Thailand. You know the Thailand of movies, of travel influencers, of The Beach.

Americans also consume more media than almost any other population on earth. Studies consistently place American adults at somewhere between eight and nine hours of screen time per day across television, social media, and digital platforms. At that volume, it is environment. It is water.

The capitalist ethos that structures American life extends this mediation into the material world. Even food is not exempt. The hyperreal carrot is a gummy bear shaped like a vegetable, sugar and dye arranged to resemble nutrition. The hyperreal steak is a textured soy product engineered to bleed. The hyperreal neighborhood is a planned development named after the ecosystem it replaced: Willow Creek Estates, built on drained wetland. No weeping willow in sight. America is a country that has systematically replaced its referents with more appealing simulations and called this progress.

The antidote to this (the critical thinking skills, the media literacy skills, the cultivation of a skeptical and discerning relationship with representation) is precisely what the education system does not provide. And it is difficult to view this as accidental. A population that can distinguish between the map and the territory is a population that is harder to sell things to, harder to frighten, harder to govern through spectacle. The underfunding of critical pedagogy is, at some structural level, policy.

Donald Trump is the terminal figure of this slow burn. He is a politician that goes beyond the “Obama” figure that uses the media effectively. He is a politician who is media. Trump is a simulacrum so thoroughly processed through successive layers of representation that the question of what lies beneath has become genuinely unanswerable, possibly meaningless.

Consider the physical presentation alone. The suit is always the same. A cartoon character. An indeterminate navy, cut long, a blocky-bright-red-tie, slightly too large, as though the body inside is temporary and the silhouette is what matters. The hair is, well, cosmologically improbable: bleached, sprayed, combed in a direction that defies both gravity and reason, a structure so artificial it reads as deliberate provocation, a dare, an insult to viewers. The spray tan draws a hard line at the collar, two distinct tones of skin, the face a separate project from the body beneath it. It goes beyond vanity. It is costuming. It is the visual decisions of a character who must be instantly recognizable from the back of an arena, from a thumbnail, from a meme. Every element has been optimized for the transmission of a sign across any medium, at any resolution, in any context.

His rise in the 1980s and ‘90s was a magazine phenomenon. He understood, with an almost preternatural instinct, that wealth in the American imagination was a set of signs (gold fixtures, Eastern European trophy wives, a particular cadence of boastful speech) rather than a set of facts. He was the performance of money for an audience that had never seen old money and therefore had no way to detect the forgery. As Guy Debord argued in Society of the Spectacle in 1967, the commodity had become image, and image had become the primary mode of social relation. Trump was Debord’s thesis made flesh: a man who had converted himself entirely into a spectacular image and offered that image as proof of everything it claimed.

The gold toilet is a precise communication to a specific audience.

Yes, in America, a toilet becomes a semaphore of wealth for people whose idea of wealth was formed entirely by television.

Then came The Apprentice, and the simulacrum deepens. The already-mediated real estate mogul was re-rendered into a hyperreal executive with a catchphrase as indelible as any sitcom character’s. Decisive, merciless, omniscient: “You’re fired!” A hand motion birthed in the edit suite over business reality. The actual Trump of the boardroom, often documented as erratic, easily flattered, frequently bailed out, was nowhere in the finished product. What remained was icon: clean sign for authority.

By the time he ran for president the first time (sigh), the question of what Donald Trump actually believed, or was, had become categorically unanswerable. This was certainly not because he was secretive or coy, but because the layers of mediation had accumulated to a point where there was no stable referent left. He was, as someone once put it, the poor man’s idea of a rich man, the weak man’s idea of a strong man, the small man’s idea of a large man. Reagan’s actor-turned-president projection of competence while the machinery of governance collapsed around him. Nixon’s operatic grievance-as-governance. But filtered through decades of image production until those antecedents were themselves unrecognizable.

Then came the assassination attempt in Butler, and the image underwent its final, definitive transformation. Fist raised, blood on the ear, the flag behind him. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” he shouts defiantly. Here was a movie poster that had somehow become an in-the-moment-photograph. In Hyperreal America, there is no difference.

By the second term, he had achieved the status of a great man of history, a four dimensional chess player, constructed entirely from the wreckage of simulation.

Many forget that Trump was also a recurring character in the WWE cinematic universe. He appeared on programming, shaving Vince McMahon’s head, tackling wrestlers, delivering trash talk to the crowd. In the arena, Donald the human became Donald, a character, a role within an established drama.

This is worth sitting with.

The WWE universe is, as Roland Barthes analyzed in his 1957 essay “The World of Wrestling,” (writing about theatrical French wrestling, la lutte, as popular spectacle, decades before Vince McMahon made it a global industry) a sport transformed into a pure pageant of signs.

The point is not who wins. The point is whether the performance of justice, transgression, humiliation, and triumph is emotionally satisfying. Good and evil are absolute in wrestling. They are entirely legible.

The heel is dramatic function.

Trump understood this design intuitively and applied it to politics with the consistency of a professional. Critics who noted the WWE influence on his political theatrics, the grand entrances, the Little Marco, the Lyin’ Ted, the Sleepy Joe, the kayfabe relationship to truth, were identifying something real. His theory of politics is essentially the heel theory: if you can move the entire political arena into the register of performance, into the hyperreal space where consequences are suspended and outcomes are narrative rather than material, then accountability becomes a category error.

You cannot hold a character responsible for what a character does. That is not how the genre works.

And this is what rests at the center of the current American moment. If it is all a show, then somewhere deep in the collective nervous system, we expect there are no real consequences. The season will end, the writers will course-correct, the network will intervene.

The problem, the very scary catastrophic problem, is that the consequences are entirely real. Bodies are real. Economies are real. Oil is real. The pope is real. School children are real. Starvation is real. Alliances, once broken, do not reset between seasons. A civilization is annihilated is a civilization annihilated, not a system reboot.

While writing this, I feel it is important to distinguish what is happening here from propaganda, because the distinction may influence how you might respond.

Propaganda operates within a truth/falsehood binary. In some sense, it knows it is lying. It wants you to believe the lie. The propagandist has a referent, the real state of affairs, and is deliberately obscuring it. There is, in other words, a reality that propaganda is working against. This is why propaganda can, in principle, be countered: expose the lie, restore the referent, and the structure collapses.

Hyperreal America, what I am describing, is something else entirely. In a hyperreal culture, there is no referent left to restore. Reality itself need not be suppressed. The simulation has replaced reality by making the category of reality feel quaint, paranoid, beside the point. When Trump lies, the most sophisticated analysts keep noting, with bafflement, that the lies don’t function like normal lies.

Why is that?

It is because they don’t require belief, they require participation. You are not being asked to accept a false account of the world. You are being invited into a narrative, a genre, a cinematic universe where the normal epistemological rules are suspended.

The word Orwellian is used everywhere these days. I suggest a different eponym be dragged center stage. Baudrillardian. And this is significantly harder to fight, because there is no truth to restore.

So when the world gasps at a U.S. military recruitment video that turns out to be a montage of war movie clips (Patton, Black Hawk Down, American Sniper, films that are themselves propaganda about propaganda) it is gasping at the logical endpoint of a very long process. This is an honest expression of a culture that has been marinating in mediated images of its own power for so long that it can no longer distinguish the recruitment poster from the film still from the news footage from the geopolitical reality. They are all the same resolution now.

And when the President of the United States calls an entire sovereign nation “you crazy bastards,” the phrasing lands with the easy familiarity of a script note, a piece of dialogue polished across a hundred movies where the gravel-voiced American cowboy leans into the camera and tells the enemy they have underestimated him. Patton: “We’re going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel.” Dirty Harry: “Do you feel lucky?” Wall Street: “Greed is good.” Gordon Gekko was explicitly modeled on Trump (Michael Douglas has said so!) which means that when Trump performs Gordon Gekko, he is performing a performance of himself, a hall of mirrors that has been running since 1987. The Rambo fantasy of the lone righteous American imposing order on a chaotic world. The Death Wish fantasy of consequence-free retribution. These are the primary texts of Trumpian Rhetoric.

No surprise is needed. This is all America knows.

The American world is plastic and light. No shining city on a hill, only a spectacular achievement of surfaces.

Which brings us, finally, to us.

We watched. All of us. We watched The Apprentice and knew it was edited but felt the authority anyway. We watched the fist in the air and felt something (so much contempt! Exhilaration! Oh no! Fear!), but we felt it, which was the point, which was always the point. We clicked and we streamed and we screenshot and we shared, and every act of engagement, however ironic, however critical, fed the machine that runs on attention rather than belief.

Now, let me remind you of Richard from The Beach. The novel ends with a state of dissociation. He’s back in England, back in his flat, already elsewhere in his head. The Thai island burned. People died. And Richard returned to the world of screens and resumed his position as audience.

Alex Garland’s novel was itself later consumed by Hollywood, re-rendered into a Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle, the British critique of Western mediation absorbed and repackaged as spectacle. The representation ate the critique. Nobody blinks.

The crazy bastards are in Washington. The crazy bastards are on the screen.

But the deepest, most irreparable damage of hyperreality is not that it produces leaders who govern by spectacle. It is that it produces audiences who can no longer fully remember what it felt like to watch something and simply trust that it was real.

That’s us. That’s the damage. Game over.

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They buried nothing visible. The first difficulty, and perhaps the first lie.

There had been weight in the box, this much we know.

His wife had carried it against her chest on the walk out past the fallow rows, and he had taken it from her only once they reached the place where the earth gave a little under the shovel. A patch of ground where the shale-toothed soil had finally surrendered, turning up in damp clods that looked like bruised muscles.

Yet the thing buried had no face, no history, no habit of breathing by which it might be remembered properly.

It had existed chiefly in the future tense.

It had occupied a room in the house that had not yet been furnished. A narrow space at the end of the hall painted with the powdery color of a moth’s wing. A cradle of unvarnished pine that lived only as a sketch in the farmer’s notebook. A set of names revised in whispers at the table after supper of salt pork, boiled cabbage, and a scent of vinegar. It had worn no clothes, though his wife had folded and refolded a small yellow blanket in anticipation. If it had lived, it would have been their child. Since it had not, it became at once difficult to say what, precisely, they were lowering into the ground.

His wife placed in the box the blanket, a silver button from her mother’s dress, and a slip of paper on which she had written three names, one beneath the other, then crossed them all out.

The farmer dug.

It was March in a region where March meant only that the wind altered its cruelty. Their land lay flat and exhausted around them, a wide skin of cracked ochre broken by lines of dry wheat that had failed so consistently across two seasons that failure itself had become a crop. The house behind them was a low farmhouse of flaking white paint and graying porch boards, its roof tin-patched in three places, its windows clouded with the permanent dust of a country that preferred stone to tenderness.

The barn leaned with the mild obstinacy of old men. The water pump coughed rust. The fence posts perched thirsty.

When the hole was deep enough, she asked him whether it should go lower.

He looked into the ground, then at the box, then at her hands, which were red from gripping it.

“It will hold,” he said.

She nodded, but not in agreement. One had the impression that nodding and agreement had long ago gone their separate ways.

They covered the box. She laid a flat stone over the place, as if marking a border rather than a grave. Then she stood there with her head bowed, though whether in prayer or exhaustion he could not tell. He removed his hat, a high-crowned felt piece, grease-darkened at the band and gone soft in the brim. They remained like that in the wind until the gesture became absurd.

A lark moved somewhere in the distance.

At supper she ate nothing. He chewed dutifully at a portion of fried potatoes and salt-cured beef, continuing the motions long after their meaning had drained out of them.

Above the sink, the window reflected the room in black. They said little. Language, which in happier houses may pass back and forth like a basket of warm yeast rolls, had here become a brittle instrument, fit mainly for naming tools, prices, the shift of the north wind, the strike of the eight-o-clock bell. That night his wife wept into the pillow beside him with such restraint that it seemed she was apologizing to the darkness for the sound.

He did not touch her. It was not indifference. It was the opposite, which in certain men assumes the same posture.

The next morning the plant appeared.

Not on the burial site, which would have rendered it symbolic too quickly and therefore almost ordinary in its predictability, but in a narrow strip of dirt along the eastern wall of the house, where rainwater occasionally gathered and then thought better of it. At dawn, on his way to inspect the field, he noticed a small vertical thing in the soil, no taller than a finger joint, pale as if moonlit from within.

He crouched.

It was unlike any sprout he recognized. Its stem was translucent; no, rather, it possessed that faint opaline sheen one sometimes sees in the underbelly of a landed trout. At its top curled a pair of embryonic leaves thin as tongues of flame, veined not in branching lines but in concentric loops, as though the sap (if sap it was) did not travel outward but circled itself. Fine silver cilia covered the lower stem and trembled, though there was no wind. When he put his hand near it, the air around it felt marginally warmer, like a word still wet from a lover’s mouth.

He should have called his wife to see it. Instead he looked over his shoulder.

Then, because one says strange things when alone before a strange thing, he murmured,

“If we had buried it deeper, the dogs wouldn’t get at it.”

At once the plant altered.

It rose without the upward flourish of a fable. Rather, it seemed to gather definition. The stem tightened. The two curled leaves opened by a width so slight it could have been denied in court. Yet he knew the change had occurred. More than that: he knew, absurdly, that it had heard him.

He stayed squatting beside it for some time, aware of a peculiar embarrassment, as if he had been overheard confessing to a priest he did not believe in.

A cicada clicked once in the dry grass, then stopped

Before noon he had dug the thing up with a kitchen spoon and transferred it, with a plug of surrounding earth, to a cracked blue pot. He set it on the table near the window where the sun fell in a clean rectangle. When his wife asked what it was, he shrugged.

“Just something came up.”

She looked at the plant and then at him. “You brought it inside?”

“It’ll die out there.”

She laughed once, softly.

“Some things should.”

All day he worked the field badly. The wheat heads were thin husks rattling in the wind, the irrigation trench mostly dust, the fence in the north corner down again having fallen to the weeds. But the plant remained in his mind with an unpleasant brightness. By evening he found himself hurrying his tasks for no honest reason. He entered the house before dusk, washed at the basin, and stood over the pot.

The plant had grown.

It now possessed four leaves, each narrow and elongated, each mottled with a pattern like faded script. He leaned closer, with the uneasy impression that the markings followed a kind of order.

His wife, at the stove, asked whether he had checked the southern line.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“It’s gone.”

She stirred the pot on the stove with unnecessary force.

After supper, while she washed dishes, he remained at the table with the plant between his hands.

It is difficult to say what compelled him next. Some say it was grief, which in mute men tends to ferment into speculative speech. Others say it was the simple discovery that one could speak in the presence of something that did not answer.

“If it had been a boy,” he said softly, “you’d have wanted your father’s name, though you always said you didn’t.”

The leaves gave a slight shiver.

He felt the shiver in his teeth.

He glanced toward his wife, but the running water concealed him.

He continued:

“If the rains had come in October, we’d have had enough to fix the roof proper.”

A new tendril uncurled from the stem.

“If I’d taken you to the doctor sooner.”

Here the plant responded with a movement so visible that he recoiled. The stem thickened. A fifth leaf emerged, slick and folded, and spread itself with indecent haste. Along its surface ran a network of red strands that resembled, disconcertingly, the capillaries in an eyelid.

He said nothing more that night.

But one does not discover a law without becoming, to some degree, its servant.

In the days that followed, he experimented.

Statements of fact produced nothing.

“The bucket is empty.”

No change.

“It rained once last week.”

Nothing.

“The field is dying.”

Stillness.

Yet, let him shift the sentence by the smallest hinge into the unreality.

“If the bucket had been full”

“If it had rained.”

“If the field were farther north.”

And the plant drank.

By the end of the first week, the blue pot was no longer adequate.

Fine roots, white and hairless as submerged fingers, had pushed through the crack in the ceramic and threaded themselves across the table. Its leaves, once flame-thin, had become broad and lustrous, though no species of lustre he knew belonged to the vegetable world; they reflected light with the attentive glaze of wet eyes. From the center rose a twisting stalk banded in alternating emerald and bruise-purple, each segment separated by a ring of pores that opened and closed like a million tiny mouths testing air.

He repotted it in a washbasin.

His wife objected.

“We need that.”

“There’s another in the shed.”

“There is not.”

He carried the washbasin to the corner by the stove, where the ceiling rose highest. She watched him settle it there, tamping dirt around the roots with both hands, and there entered her face an expression he had seen only once before, when the doctor, not meeting their eyes, had spoken in terms so technical they seemed to spare everyone the vulgarity of grief.

“What do you say to it?” she asked.

“Whatever it is, why not say it to me?”

He wiped his hands on his trousers.

“Nothing.”

She looked at the plant, whose topmost leaves had angled toward him with unmistakable preference.

“You’ve been speaking in your sleep,” she said.

He had no answer because, though he had no memory of doing so, he believed her.

Soon the routines of the farm began to fail, then to unravel. A gate remained open overnight. A trough went dry. Two hens vanished, whether taken by foxes or neglect no one could say. The wheat, which might still have yielded something lean and humiliating, crisped in place. Bills accumulated in a crock by the mantel. His wife rose before dawn to manage what he forgot, and by noon was so worn that her movements acquired the jerky economy of a marionette resentful of its strings.

Meanwhile the plant flourished with grotesque confidence.

It outgrew the washbasin, then a feed tub, then a crate lined with burlap. Its roots swelled and braided, cracking the floorboards beneath the stove. Creepers climbed the chair legs and explored the walls with pink, intelligent tips. In the evening, when the lamps were lit, the house filled with an odor unlike either blossom or rot: something mineral and sweet. Rain on old paper. Tiny nodules formed at the joints of its stems, luminous as pearls. Inside each, if one looked too long, one fancied a motion of turning a page.

He spoke to it more and more, often in a whisper, not because the plant required secrecy but because his wife’s silence had become a surface too taut to strike. He began living within its reach, his hands constantly finding the grit of the stalks. He would sit for hours, allowing the primary stems to coil like green sinew around his thighs, or draping the smaller tendrils across the back of his neck until the rush of his blood mirrored the sap.

He spoke of child.

“If you’d carried to term, we’d have moved the bed to the south room.”

“If she’d had your mouth, she’d have learned to hide things in it.”

“If it had lived through winter, it would have known the sound of the pump.”

He spoke the farm into reprieve.

“If the frost had held off one more week.”

“If I’d listened to Harlan and sold the back parcel.”

“If we had gone west when your brother wrote.”

He even, one night, in a voice so low it seemed borrowed from someone else, spoke himself into other moral proportions.

“If I’d held you when you cried.”

At that, the plant convulsed with dramatic pleasure. A great coil rose from the basin, slow as a snake dancing to a charmer’s flute, and unfurled above him. New leaves burst at every node, their undersides flushed with a tender, obscene pink.

One brushed his cheek.

It was warm.

From then on it preferred a more dangerous kind of speech: not merely what might have happened, but what might have made him otherwise.

His wife ceased asking questions. Then she began asking them again, which was worse.

At night she would find him seated in the kitchen dark, face lit by moon and leafshine, muttering toward the stalks.

“To what end?” she asked once from the doorway, body framed by the hallway’s shadow, one hand hiding behind her hip as if clutching something pointed.

He turned, startled as if discovered in adultery.

“It grows,” he said.

“So does mold.”

He looked back at the plant.

“If we had had another chance,” he whispered.

Not to her.

“Fairy dust.”

With that, she crossed the room and struck the main stem with a poker from the hearth. The iron rang against it as against wood not yet born. A viscous clear fluid seeped from the wound, carrying with it the faint smell of cut grass and something unmistakably mammalian.

For a moment he thought the plant would die.

Instead every leaf in the room turned toward her at once.

She stepped back.

After that she slept in the south room.

Summer arrived and the house diminished. From the road, one first noticed the changed windows: green now, obscured from within by broad leaves pressed against the panes like the waterlogged palms of drowned men. Then the porch, that skeletal stage where they once sat with tin mugs of coffee to watch the sun ignite, vanished under crawling stems thick as forearms. Whips emerged from gaps in the siding and hung in loops from the gutters. The roofline bulged. The chimney, split by roots, listed slightly west.

At dusk the whole farmhouse seemed to breathe, swelling and settling with a slow vegetal respiration.

Inside, the structure had surrendered.

The front room was a chamber. Roots lifted the floor in long ribs. The staircase, swallowed from below, rose into foliage and ended in a confusing burst of leaves. Blossoms appeared high in the rafters: lidless, layered things whose petals were lined with a script too minute to read. When the wind moved through broken boards, the house did not so much as murmur.

The farmer scarcely went outdoors. His skin had taken on a waxen translucence. Blue-green fibers ran along the curve of his neck beneath the surface, as if veins had been persuaded to imitate vines. His fingertips were stained with pollen.

Once, bending over the basin (though, it is said that at this point it was no longer a basin but a woody mound like an altar) he felt something slither behind his left eye.

Thereafter he avoided mirrors.

Speech came to him with increasing ease in one sense and increasing difficulty in another; there was no lack of sentences, only a growing uncertainty as to whether he was constructing them.

His wife, who had not yet left only because there remained nowhere sensible to go and because sensibility had by then ceased to govern the house, continued the little acts of human maintenance with a kind of furious piety.

She sold two cows.

She patched what exterior walls could still be reached.

She wrote to her brother and did not send the letter.

Sometimes she stood in the yard staring at the house with the blank concentration of someone trying to recognize a caved in face after an accident.

One afternoon she returned from town with a man from the bank and found the farmer in the kitchen, or what had once been the kitchen, kneeling at the center of the growth. He was speaking rapidly, lips dry, skin against stems, eyes fixed on a cluster of nodules that pulsed faintly in time with his voice.

“If we had named her Clara, she would have hated it and kept it anyway. If we had named her Ruth, she would have left us young. If she had been born in rain, she would have loved the sound of roofs. If I had laughed more. If you had forgiven me sooner for things I had not yet done. If the doctor had lied. If he had grinned. If the blood had stopped. If we had not bought this land. If the road had bypassed us. If the fox had snagged two of me. If your mother had lived. If the heart. If the heart. If. If. If. If. If we had waited one more season, or one less, none at all. If we had chosen the other house, the one with the narrow stairs, the crooked hallway where nothing could grow straight or out of sight. If we had spoken less, or spoken earlier, or spoken in a language neither of us understood, like French or Mandarin or Latin, well enough to hurt each other with it. If the first silence had not been mistaken for peace. If I hadn’t chugged the whiskey dry at the wedding. If I’d pinched the pennies. If the second had not been mistaken for forgiveness. If she had taken your hazel eyes but not your way of looking away. If Jesus had done what he does. If he had taken my hands but not what they forget to hold. If he had taken the shovel. If he had dug a bit deeper. If there had been a morning where we did not wake already having lost something. If I’d knocked my dad’s jaw in. If time had paused, not stopped, no, no, no, no, no, time hesitated, just long enough for us to notice what it was removing. If I had said it differently, with love. If I had said it at all! If every star had fallen in on you. If I’d saddled it up! If I had not believed that there would always be another sentence waiting, a comma, if, a clause, if, another version of it, a better one forming-if-in-the-if-throat. If that damn lark had sung a different damn song. If it crooned a jingle jangle. If my plaque would just slow down. If. If. If I had understood that what is not, if, said does not remain, if it does not wait, if it goes somewhere, if it grows somewhere, if it becomes. If the field had yielded if. If the riches. If I hadn’t shot the dog. If it hadn’t whimpered. If. If the sky had answered. If-the-if-sky-if had called. If the ground had been less certain of its refusal. If I’d stitched up good Ol’ Joe. If we had buried nothing. If there had been nothing to bury. If-the-if-box had been empty. If we folded the yellow. If it had been heavier. If it had cried. Oh, if it had cried. If it had not. If. If. If. If. If she had stayed. If the sketch had shook. If the cradle had rocked. If you had stayed. If I had followed. If I had left first. If there had been a road. Or-if-even-if-an-if-trail. Or-if-even-if-an-if-trace. If there had been a reason! If the reason had been enough! If enough had meant anything at all! If this is not how it happened. If this is not happening. If this is happening. If.

If. If. If there is still a way to say it that makes it otherwise. If there is still a way to say it that makes it otherwise. If there is still a way to say it that makes it otherwise. If there is still a way to say it that makes it otherwise. If there is still a way to say it that makes it otherwise.

If there is still a way…”

The man from the bank removed his hat, said something about returning later, and backed out without inspecting anything.

By the time autumn bent the light toward yellow, the plant had settled into its final logic.

It had both inhabited and rewritten the house.

Walls became trellises for bulbous organs. The old dining table stood on one leg, strangled in bloom, its oak surface split down the grain as roots forced their way through the wood. Vines passed in and out of the fireplace, erupting from the hearth in a violent, tangled bouquet that choked the chimney. Great leaves opened in the hall like olive tongues. From every window protruded stems carrying pods the size of infants’ heads, their surfaces clouded and radiant, each containing nothing visible and therefore, perhaps, everything.

And at the center of the main room, where once they had eaten soup in winter and once, long ago, planned a nursery in embarrassed joy, the farmer hung.

Not by rope or cruelty.

The plant had grown through him with a tenderness so total it appeared intimate, almost loving. Roots had entered at the ankles, braiding themselves into the Achilles tendons and emerging at the shoulders. One thick flowering stem rose through the back of his shirt and out the side of his throat, branching beneath the skin of his face in fine green tracery. Small leaves trembled at his temples. From the corners of his mouth spilled pastel tendrils beaded with milky seeds.

One eye had been covered by a leaf so thin that the dark blue globe showed through it like a moon behind cloud; from the other stared a pupil crossed by a line of jade.

His arms hung slightly out from his sides in a parody of welcome.

The wife stood in the doorway for a long time. The house heaved around her. Somewhere high above, a blossom opened with the soft sound of a fist unfolding.

Then she walked toward him over the rooted floor.

Up close she could see that his lips were moving. Moreso twitching. There were no words. Only the muscle memory of the mechanism. The plant had bypassed the crude finality of murder or death (at least in any direct or practical way), maintaining the man as a living conduit until there was no longer enough of him left to distinguish from what passed through him.

She reached for his hand. The fingers were rigid, laced with lichen beneath the nails.

“Talk to me,” she said.

The words seemed pitifully small in that room.

She swallowed and tried again, as one does with the very ill, or with God.

“Please. Just once more.”

At this, something changed in his face. An effort toward expression. His jaw worked. Deep in the mass of stem and rib and leaf there came a dry internal stirring, as if many pages were being turned at once. His mouth opened wider. The lianas at its corners of the room tightened. For one impossible second she believed a sentence might still come forth.

Instead a pod near his sternum split along a fine seam.

From it spilled seeds and a soft white tuft of filaments, and within the filaments, caught for an instant before the room’s dimness absorbed it, she saw the faint suggestion of words (maybe three or four perhaps, no more) written in a script too small to read and already dissolving.

She looked into his uncovered eye.

It held no plea.

Only that same dreadful attentiveness the plant had worn from the beginning, as if the true object of desire had never been speech but the space opened by its failure.

Around them the house rustled with unrealized lives.

If he had loved her differently.
If she had carried longer.
If rain had come.
If money had held.
If grief had chosen another grammar.

It had drunk every conditional, every unlived branch, every phantom corridor. And because men like her husband sometimes find it easier to inhabit possibility than pain, because a sentence beginning with if only asks less courage than one beginning with forgive me, he had gone to it as others go to wells, or churches, or other women.

She remained in the center of the room until darkness erased the difference between leaf and shadow. Then, very gently, so gently that it might have been mistaken for affection, she placed her hand against the stem rising through his chest.

It was warm.

Outside, the field lay dead under a violet sky. The dry wheat whispered in the wind like paper rubbed between fingers.

A lark sang somewhere in the distance.

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The Archive swirled, a helix of data.

High above our desks, the automated shelving units, vast, brass-ribbed carousels, rotated with the groans of an old beast, filing away the day’s recordings into a mauve twilight. The air in the chamber was thick with the scent of ferrite and decomposing parchment. A fine, violet silt and shed skin of old records settled on our sleeves.

Despite the ancient scale of the room, our tools were stubbornly small, not updated since the 1980s. We each sat before a terminal of cream-colored plastic where absinthe, robotic text jittered on curved glass screens.

The worlds we recorded were not different in subject (same events, same people, same cities) but in substance.

The Department called it “The Bivalve Protocol.” Safeguard. They told us that truth was too heavy for a single thread to hold; it required a weave.

“Cross-contamination,” the handbook warned, “is the death of objectivity.”

We were never to compare notes because the Department feared that if the observer and the measurer reached a consensus, the world would stop being a living thing and become a frozen fact.

We were instructed to sit ten feet apart.

He handled the “Physical Log.” Dates. Times. Locations. That which is concrete. If a thing could be weighed, timed, photographed, or verified by a second disinterested witness, it belonged to him. His entries were clean, minimal, and almost beautiful in their restraint.

I handled the “Perceptual Log.” Tone. Atmosphere. The inexplicable cooling of a room before a confession of betrayal. The way a shadow seemed to detach itself from its owner to pirouette for a fraction of a second.

But three millennia of proximity does something to a boundary. Policy attrits as the slow drip pits the limestone. We sat those ten feet apart for generations, long enough for quietude to accumulate and take on mineral presence. It settled in the space between us, sintered weight, something that did not belong to either log.

At some point, the boundary stopped holding.

Entry 21127.

A subway platform in Shenyang. The industrial northeast. Air there tasted of coal and cold iron. 8:14 AM. Weekday. Moderate crowd density.

His record:

• Subject: Male, mid-50s.

• Event: Loss of balance followed by impact.

• Variable: No visible obstruction; floor surface dry.

• Action: EMS summoned at 8:16 AM.

Mine:

• Atmosphere: A sudden tightening of the air approximately five seconds prior, a localized increase in tension.

• Observation: Several individuals turning their heads in near-unison toward the tunnel mouth, responding to a sound or presence not yet manifested.

• Residual: A sense of anticipation that did not resolve with the event

We read each other’s entries in silence. The green of our screens cast a sickly light over our faces.

“You can’t record anticipation,” he said. His voice was the sound of dry paper folding. “Anticipation is a projection. It has no mass.”

“You can’t record absence either,” I said.

“There was no absence. There was a man, and then there was a man on the ground.”

“There was no reason for five people to turn. They were looking for the rest of the story.”

He paused at that. He didn’t delete my note. He held it the way a tongue holds a word from a dead language, tasting the shape, but unable to make use of it.

The divergence grew gradually, the kind of crack that looks like a vein until the roof begins to sag.

We moved from the soot of China to the blue of Trømso.

Entry 21892. A wood-paneled café on the edge of a Norwegian wharf.

His:

• Subject: Female, early 30s.

• Exit: 2:03:00 PM.

• Re-entry: 2:03:30 PM.

• Condition: Elevated respiration; pupils dilated.

• Context: No observable external threat or weather anomaly.

Mine:

• Observation: A momentary disorientation upon exiting, as if the street did not immediately recognize her.

• Phenomenon: A delay in environmental coherence; the cobblestone appeared to be a low-resolution rendering of itself for three seconds.

• Affect: Relief upon re-entry disproportionate to the safety of the interior.

“What does it mean for a street to recognize someone?” he asked, tapping the glass of my monitor with a clean, blunt fingernail.

“What does it mean for it not to?” I countered.

“That’s not an answer. That’s a poem. A street doesn’t recognize, it supports. If she tripped, it’s a physical log. If she felt ‘unrecognized,’ that’s a neuro-chemical spike. Put it in the Perceptual and leave my cobblestones alone.”

“It’s not a measurable question.”

And so began to track the discrepancies.

Two sailors on the same ship, one charting the stars and the other measuring the depth of the water, only to realize the stars and the seabed were moving in opposite directions.

Same event. Two records.

Increasingly incompatible. Individually consistent.

Neither of us wrong.

We began referencing the war in our entries around the same time. The Department had designated this specific conflict as a “Non-State Toponym.” We simply called it the “Dust Sector.” Landscapes of golden calcined-concrete and turquoise tiles, where the desert buzzed with the invisible transit of drones.

The material arrived already contested. Corrupted digital fragments, shaky civilian feeds, security cameras, flip phones, and satellite sweeps that felt more like suggestions than sights.

His:

• Event: Strike reported at 14:32 local time.

• Target: Urban intersection, Sector 7.

• Variable: High-explosive ordinance; structural collapse of adjacent masonry.

• Confirmed casualties: 6.

Mine:

• Observation: A delay between impact and recognition.

• Phenomenon: Figures turning before the sound arrives.

• Affect: A sense that the scene had already been decided. elsewhere.

The lacuna between our desks thickened like layers of unread files.

It was Entry 22826 where the fault line opened.

A girl.

That is how we both began. A child in a yellow dress, standing near a fruit stall where the rinds of pomegranates lay like spilled wine on the pavement.

His record:

• Subject: Female child visible, age approx. 8-10.

• Position: Standing at intersection at 14:31:52.

• Event: Disappears from frame at moment of detonation.

• Status: Presumed deceased.

Mine:

• Observation: A figure at the periphery of the lens that does not fully resolve.

• Phenomenon: Presence is intermittent across the frame.

• Variable: A hesitation in her movement that does not align with the timing of the strike.

• Uncertainty: It remains unclear as to whether she enters the scene or is assembled by it.

We reviewed the footage together. Our two screens, separate worlds, pulled side-by-side. The phosphor of the monitors made the arid region a swampy mist.

“She’s right there,” he said, pointing to a single frame.

“In that frame, yes,” I said. “Keep going.”

He tapped the key. The footage crawled forward.

The ribbon in her hair was red in one frame. In another, it was sun-bleached to pink. In a third, it is gone entirely, her hair loose as if it had never been tied.

Present. Then partial. A smudge of yellow. Then absent.

“Dropped frames,” he said, voice clipped.

“Sensor glitching from the heat haze. It’s a common digital artifact.”

“Then why does she stabilize when you pause it?”

“Still images reduce error. The computer fills in the gaps to create a coherent image.”

“Or they force agreement,” I said. “The machine needs her to be one thing so it can stop calculating.”

We watched it again.

At half-speed, she seemed less a person and more a possibility.

“Mark her position,” I said.

He clicked a mouse. Bone snapping ticks.

A red crosshair appeared over the girl, locking her to the coordinates.

I tried. Cursor hovering.

I couldn’t hold her in place long enough to assign her a truth.

“You’re overcomplicating it.”

“You’re flattening it.”

“She was there.”

“She was almost there.”

“That’s not a category.”

“It might be.”

“Do you remember Orpheus?” I asked.

He sighed, head tethered to his terminal.

“I remember the entry. Thrace. Early bronze era. A musician with a high degree of acoustic influence.”

“Why did Eurydice disappear?”

“Because he looked back. Protocol breach.”

“That’s the official version,” I said. “Department polished for the files. But think about the footage we have of them. Think about the way she moved.”

He exhaled a sharp puff.

“He checked,” I said.

A pause.

“For what?”

“That she was there.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

He finally stopped typing.

“Looking is witness,” I said. “Checking is measurement.”

“That’s semantics.”

I gestured toward my screen, where the girl in the yellow dress remained a smear of unresolved light.

“In one frame, she’s there. In the next, she’s not.”

“What if the condition for Eurydice wasn’t not looking back,” I said. “What if it was needing her to be certain?”

“That’s not a condition,” he said. “That’s a failure to define one.”

He reached out and paused the footage of the girl on his screen.

14:31:52.

The yellow dress; the pomegranate rinds.

Clear. Indisputable. Stable.

“That’s enough,” he said.

“For you.”

“It should be enough for anyone.”

“But it isn’t across frames.”

“That’s noise.”

“Or it’s the condition.”

He went silent.

“Please, that’s enough. If I agree with you, the girl stays dead forever because she can’t be found.”

We filed the entries separately.

His:

• Female subject present at time of strike

• Fatality presumed

Mine:

• A figure whose presence cannot be consistently maintained across frames

• Status unresolved

Neither flagged the discrepancy.

Neither escalated.

Some time later, I began noticing snags in the archive.

Small things at first. Entries where a subject appeared in one record but not the other. In a system spanning millennia, aberrations are to be expected.

But then, entries where both of us recorded a subject, but not the same one.

I began to pull files from the bowels of carousels, entries that had spent centuries drifting toward the Archive’s absolute zero.

Entry 4173.

A moonless night in the Khentii Mountains, 1206. A gathering of tribal chieftains around a fire that smelled of horse fat and scorched earth.

His:

• Subjects: Nine khans present.

• Event: Unification decree; consensus reached.

Mine:

• Observation: Ten shadows cast against the felt of the yurt.

• Phenomenon: A tenth presence registered in the peripheral vision of the youngest khan, a figure who sat within the heat of the fire but left no footprint in the ash.

Entry 1265.

Hidden upper room in Roman Jerusalem. Routine consumption of bread and wine; ventilation poor. Stench of unwashed wool.

His:

• Subjects: Eleven men remained after the primary subject’s departure.

• Context: No additional movement observed in the stairwell or the street.

Mine:

• Observation: A lingering warmth in the seat the primary subject had vacated.

• Phenomenon: A thirteenth presence registered as a displacement of the lamplight; a breath that did not belong to any of the eleven.

I assumed error. Then pattern. I started cross-referencing. Far beyond the “Dust Sector.” All of them. I scrolled back through months, years, eons.

I looked at the Eritrean Civil War, where his logs showed six soldiers in a trench and mine showed seven battered bodies in the mud.

I looked at a 19th-century Parisian salon, where his tally of drunk aristocrats missed the wrinkled, pale face I had recorded in the mirror.

I couldn’t unsee it. They were everywhere. Not anomalies or outliers. People who didn’t hold long enough to be counted.

They never stabilized.

I brought it to him.

“These entries,” I said. “They don’t match.”

“They’ve been updated,” he said.

“Across years?”

“That happens.”

“No,” I said. “Not like this.”

He didn’t look up.

“You’re seeing patterns where there aren’t any,” he said.

“Or I’m seeing what falls between them.”

He stopped. Finally looked at me.

The chlorophyll wash of his terminal made his eyes look like two glowing bugs.

“What are you suggesting?”

I hesitated. Saying it would require committing to it.

“That the archive isn’t incomplete,” I said. “That it’s…layered.”

“With what?”

I thought of the girl in the yellow dress.

“With people who don’t stabilize,” I said.

“That’s not a thing.”

“It might be the only thing we’re missing.”

That evening, I returned.

Pulling files from the deep sleep of the “forgotten” cabinets. Silent moments from the 14th century, the 19th, the 2020s. Moments no one would ever think to question because they contained characters that were deemed to be largely irrelevant to the arch of history.

A mustachioed merchant counting grain in Cairo.

A pudgy woman hanging blouses in a London fog.

A child kicking a bruised ball in an Oaxacan alleyway.

And I slowed them down.

Frame by frame. Letting motion descend into decision.

And there they were.

The “almosts.”

The “perhap-peoples.”

A hand that appeared one frame too early.

A face that stained one frame too long.

A body that could not be consistently placed.

Waiting to be agreed upon.

I stayed up through the night. I went to the very beginning.

The refresh rate of the room began to sync with my blood.

Retinas swimming in arsenic-green tracers.

Carousels overhead singing songs of mute ledgers.

Entry 0001.

The root of the helix.

His:

• Two archivists assigned

Mine:

• A third presence registered, unconfirmed

I read it again.

I looked at the date. Three thousand years ago. I looked at the “Third Presence” and then I looked at the empty space between our desks.

Ten feet of silence where the dust usually settled.

The third presence was the gap itself.

The next morning, he arrived exactly on time. He sat. He adjusted his sleeves. He didn’t look at me. He began to type, fingers striking with the perfect cadence of a metronome.

But then, he paused. I caught the backlog of my midnight query reflected on his screen.

A beat.

“The system flagged an access-trace,” he said slowly. “A deep-strata query from the third watch.”

My breath hitched.

“I’ve been reviewing the intake logs,” voice now brittle.

“Entry 0001. There’s a discrepancy in your column.”

“It’s a persistent observation. A legacy note.”

“It’s noise,” he cut me off. “A logic-gap. It’s a calculation error that has been allowed to propagate for three millennia. It’s preventing the helix from closing.”

I realized then this anger was hurt. He had carried the burden of the logic-gap for eons, a mercy pinned to the margins.

My search forced the pattern to light.

He reached for his mouse.

Click.

A red crosshair appeared on his screen, hovering over the coordinates of the empty space between us.

“Don’t,” I said. “If you stabilize it, the tension goes. The world stops being a living thing.”

“The world is a street. A configuration of stone and bitumen,” he replied. “It does not require your permission to be certain.”

He didn’t look at me. He looked at the crosshair. He was “checking” the gap. He was demanding that the third presence be either a “one” or a “zero.”

“I’m updating the record,” he said quietly.

I looked down at my hands. They were losing their resolution. My fingers were beginning to disintegrate at a different refresh rate than the desk.

I’ve seen this before.

I’m becoming unresolved.

“Wait,” I tried to say, but no sound matched the movement of my throat. I was a dropped frame. A delay in environmental coherence.

On his screen, the red crosshair turned green.

Consensus reached.

His updated record:

• Station Alpha and Station Beta occupied.

• Two archivists assigned.

• No additional subjects observed.

I watched him file it.

Did I?

He turned to the next entry.

The carousels overhead groaned, a final churn as the helix tightened.

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Friday Poetry Series: Volume IV

Jean-Paul Sartre once suggested that we take on roles, masks, to escape the terrifying freedom of our own existence. We latch onto identities as if they might anchor us. If we’re honest, we’d probably nod along.

But I also suspect something heavier than choice is at work.

Not all roles are chosen. Some feel preloaded, a console buzzing to life with a game already displayed on the screen. A kind of internal leaning. The nurse who feels the pull of another’s pain isn’t simply selecting a career from a list or responding to the career placement or the Preliminary SAT exam; they are answering something that already bustles beneath the surface. Call it disposition, temperament, wiring, whatever language you trust. Philosophers have been arguing about this long before us. Choice arrives late to a life already in motion for who knows how long.

And then there are those roles we curate. The ones we polish and present. Society often demands a title, a name, a box to check.

In the Catholic church, 8th grade, I am asked to choose a confirmation name. I land on Saint Felix, not out of piety, but because it sounded fucking cool. A teenage vanity play for luck.

In the classroom, when students hover between “Professor” and “Doctor,” offering me a pedestal, I decline.

“Grant,” I tell them.

I prefer the human connection to institutional armor.

I am a middle child, too, and I wear that role like a well-worn jacket, stitched with whispered negotiations and the low-grade neuroses that come from learning how to disappear just enough to keep the peace.

These are the roles we try on and choose to wear.

But, with today’s poem, I’m more interested in the ones that are thrown onto us.

The ones that knock uninvited.

In college, a friend and I found a middle-aged woman half-collapsed, fully drunk, and very much crawling near a sewer in downtown Brooklyn.

She had the tragicomic energy of a rain-soaked Jennifer Coolidge.

It was pouring. It was late. And suddenly, for the next two hours, we were “caretakers.”

We lifted her from the gutter (perfume, glitter, rainwater, something that felt like a recently broken heart) into a yellow cab and navigated the city to get her home. My plans for the night dissolved. Choice evaporated. I was a fleshy, deeply flawed GPS system, just a set of arms and a shit sense of direction.

When my grandfather died, I became a “preacher.”

I stood in the incense-heavy air of a small-town church, looking out at my grandmother’s grief etched across her face. My task was impossible: to map eighty-five years of living onto a five page single-spaced eulogy.

The paper felt thin in my hands. A flimsy shield against the enormity of his absence.

When my father died six months later, the role returned and this time leaden.

I became the word-giver. Again. (Sometimes I think this writing thing is just a detour and I should have surrendered to the priesthood).

Standing in front of hundreds of people, I felt language itself tremble. The last thing I wanted was the mask of the orator. I wanted to be the son who dissolved. But grief has a strange social contract: silence demands shape.

I had to speak so everyone else could breathe on.

Last year, a friend asked me to officiate his wedding.

I had never thought of myself as a celebrant, but love, like grief, insists on ceremony. (I’ve recently been told I’m anti-social, not in a serial killer sense, don’t worry, but in the subtle way, the kind that struggles to fully believe in the sentimentality of these moments.)

Standing at the altar, I became something like what I imagine Erving Goffman might call a performer in a ritual space. Front stage, tasked with making something felt through language. A civic alchemist.

Weave two biographies into one shared mythology, hold the moment steady, and then disappear (quite literally, as the wedding photographer made it clear I would be executed via guillotine if I lingered for the moment of the grand kiss).

More recently, an aging family member slipped into the fog of medical unraveling.

Scans in expensive hospitals. White walls of institutions and asylums. Running away and wandering aimlessly through Sunset Park streets, scents of rendered pork fat and star anise looming. Found him in an alley.

And just like that, my older brother and I became “power of attorney.”

I was signing documents for a man four decades my senior, assuming responsibility for a life that once held mine.

Congratulations, you are no longer just a soft, underripe peach on the family tree.

Last week, walking my dog Ocean in the park, a small brown blur emerged from the dark, a stray with the staccato energy of a film reel skipping its track. I waited for the whistle, the jingle of a collar, the owner trailing behind in the shadows, but the paths stayed silent. He was a free-agent of the March night.

Mad Max of the dog run (there I go again, Sartre would have a field day, turning a stranger into a character).

For an hour, he was ours and they were best friends.

I fell into a romantic-comedy-Nancy-Meyers montage, mentally editing him into the frame of my living room, imagining his life folded into ours like a well-worn rug. I became a father of two.

Then a voice cut through the dark:

“Duncan! Duncan!”

A very intoxicated, face-tattooed, disheveled man appeared. The dog ran.

So, I returned my second son.

I was a father and an estranged father in the span of an hour.

It all begins to feel like our wardrobe of masks is not entirely our own. We walk in a perpetual Mardi Gras, handed a series of papier-mâché faces we didn't paint ourselves. Our wardrobe is an international bazaar-beaded Zulu veils, feathered Venetian bautas, the lidded grins of a New Orleans second line.

Sartre would probably say we’re still choosing. That we could refuse the role, stay silent, walk away.

And maybe that’s technically true.

But what do we do with an abstract idea of freedom if the lived experience of it doesn’t feel like freedom at all?

In certain moments, freedom doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like being cornered with a blade at your throat, threatened into becoming someone.

Goffman tells us that identity is performed, that we move between stages, adjusting our masks depending on the scene. But even that implies a degree of control.

I think sometimes the stage chooses you.

And it’s not only social life that drafts us. I’ve come to realize the natural world will have its way with you.

When the sun disappears at 4:00 PM in the Northeast winter, I become something slower. Anemic. Call it the seasonal depression version of myself. I will call it the “mask of the slug.” A reluctant and slimy hibernation.

But in autumn, when the Adirondacks burn orange and red, or in the charged excess of summer city concerts, I feel something else, more alive, more open, more “on.”

Yes, I remember Friedrich Nietzsche believed that we are not fixed beings but processes, always in the act of becoming, shaped by forces both within and beyond us.

That feels right here.

We are less authors than we are revisions.

I chose the name Saint Felix.

But some roles fastened themselves to me
Knock-off Jennifer Coolidge in the rain by the sewer,
at the pulpit,
in hospital corridors,
in the dark with a stray dog.

And the strange thing is this:

If you perform a role long enough, even one you never wanted, it begins to metabolize.

You cough up new roots.

It slithers its way into your aorta.

The mask doesn’t rest on your face.

It grafts onto the bone structure beneath it.

The porcelain of the mask has finally fused with the calcium of the jaw.

So the moment comes

You feel it.

That tingle in your throat.

The pressure to speak.

To become.

I Mistook A Black Feather For a Monarch

Yesterday,
I mistook a black feather for a monarch.
oh, the hope I feel when tiger wings appear
out of season - 
it becomes clear that all you need to know
is that you will lose your mother.
a son no more.
years apart, the sirens sing 
to eulogize, to officiate,
to become 
the August rasta,
the autumn busker.

voiceover to settle the restless,
to say that oblivion is better faced in pairs.
to float in a purgatorial lagoon against 
oceanic doom,
but shatter it, you can,
mustering the courage
to give words to the end.

and give in to the tingle in your throat,
to cough up new roots.

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I say this playfully, without tossing around accusations. This is more an indictment of my own behaviors than anything else, but if you see yourself in this mirror, so be it.

The thesis is simple: the user experience and the reward mechanisms baked into direct-to-consumer platforms like Substack are making you a worse writer. They are systematically removing the “chewing time” necessary to process ideas and creativity before they are unleashed on the world.

As a writing professor with a PhD in the field, I can tell you the literature is clear: the best writing is writing that has been consumed, digested, and, to put it bluntly, regurgitated.

You read that right; to write well, you must eat shit.

You must be willing to swallow your own failures, ruminate on your worst sentences, and transform the waste of a first draft into the fertilizer of a final one.

It is a process of rumination. Effective writing requires relentless iteration; any document you produce must be treated as a living organism, capable of mutating its cells and shedding its vocabulary until it reaches maturity. I recently spoke with Philosophy Gate about the messy, non-linear reality of my own work. The truth is that the process is annoying, painful, and agonizingly tedious. It is debilitating, ugly, and occasionally crazy-making. Yet, I would not sacrifice a single moment of that madness to the mindless speed of the feed.

This isn’t just my own masochism; in the field of Composition and Rhetoric the evidence for “slow writing” is overwhelming. Nancy Sommers famously differentiated between the “shoveling” of the novice, who merely moves dirt to hide errors, and the recursive discovery of the experienced writer, for whom revision is a radical re-seeing of the world. Donald Murray went further, insisting that “writing is rewriting” a philosophy where the first draft is never a destination but a fragile “lead” to be followed into the dark. But we can look even deeper into the niche corners of the field: Sondra Perl identified “the felt sense,” that pre-verbal tension a writer feels when an idea is almost (but not quite) born. Substack’s “Publish” button acts as a premature forceps, pulling the idea out before that internal tension has been resolved.

This branches out of academic theory and into neurobiology. Neurologists like Alice Flaherty, author of The Midnight Disease, have explored how the limbic system and the temporal lobes dance during the creative process. When we write at the “speed of the feed,” we over-stimulate the dopamine-driven prefrontal cortex, which craves the immediate “hit” of a Like or Restack. In doing so, we bypass the “incubation period” noted by cognitive psychologists, the essential downtime where the default mode network (DMN) connects disparate ideas. By demanding immediate output, the platform short-circuits the brain’s ability to synthesize complexity. We are swapping the profound, neuro-synaptic “Aha!” moment for the shallow, momentary buzz of a notification.

The pressure to publish kills the being before it has developed the lungs to breathe on its own.

Why does this happen?

Because the half-life of writing on Substack is brutal. Most essays receive 90% of their viewership in the first 48 hours. Then, engagement falls off a cliff.

The dopamine and the thrill dry up, and to keep up with the “endless refresh” that gives the illusion of constant churn, you feel compelled to feed the beast again. We’ve created a self-induced cycle of premature writing. Ideas that should be kept in the womb a bit longer are being forced into the light to satisfy a metric.

I can only speak for my own perception, but it is an unfortunately common, sinking experience: I hit “Publish,” read the post back an hour later, and realize I’ve articulated a core concept poorly, failed to include a vital connection, or utterly butchered a delivery that could have been great.

To use a crude analogy: I came prematurely.

Maybe the reader notices, maybe they don’t, but what is at stake here is “the craft.”

The Business Model

The business model has changed, and it is molding the shape of the product.

Consider the mid-20th-century transition of the garment industry (a world my grandfather mastered, rising from sweeping floors to Vice President before the entire sector was bankrupted and outsourced). Before the hyper-scaling of globalization, clothing was an investment in “handmade” durability; a suit or a dress was constructed with generous seam allowances, allowing it to be let out, taken in, and mended over a lifetime. But as production was outsourced to satisfy the demand for “Fast Fashion,” the goal shifted from garment longevity to inventory turnover. Hand-stitched canvas and natural fibers of a tailored coat were traded for the glued interlinings and petroleum-based synthetics of a $20 blazer, items designed to look good on a mannequin for forty-eight hours before losing their shape in the first wash. The product became cheaper and faster to produce, certainly, but it became fundamentally less valuable; it lost its “soul” to the efficiency of the assembly line.

In the same way, the Substack ecosystem risks becoming the Fast Fashion of the intellectual world. When we prioritize the “daily drop” over the “long-form craft,” we are producing prose with raw edges and weak seams. We are abandoning the “handmade” thought (the kind of writing that can be mended, revisited, and lived in for years) in favor of disposable content designed to be consumed in a single scroll and discarded before the next notification hits.

Think of the feel of a hand-planed table, where the slight, intentional variations of the wood, the witness marks of the craftsman, are smoothed over by the cold, uniform speed of an industrial lathe. Or consider the patience of Japanese Kintsugi, where the beauty of a vessel lies not in its initial perfection, but in the slow, meticulous mending of its breaks with gold; it is a process that physically cannot be rushed because the lacquer requires the humidity of a specific season to cure.

We see this loss of “curing time” everywhere. In traditional viticulture, the finest wines are fermented and “laid down” in the dark, allowing the harsh tannins of the immediate harvest to soften into something complex. In film photography, the chemical delay between the shutter click and the darkroom tray forced a “latent image” to exist only in the mind, demanding a discipline of vision that the instant digital playback has rendered obsolete.

Traditional publishing, for all its bureaucratic flaws and glacial pacing, functioned as this dark cellar or darkroom. It provided “baked-in” checkmarks (the developmental edit, the cooling-off period between galleys, the physical lag of the printing press) that acted as process enforced pauses and filters. Direct-to-consumer platforms have eliminated these gaps, and in doing so, they have removed the very silence where a writer’s best second thoughts are usually born.

The Trade-Off

Of course, to ignore the liberation inherent in this new frontier would be a failure of perspective and logic.

There is an undeniable, raw power in the democratization of the reach; for the first time in the history of the written word, the “gatekeeper,” the weary legacy editor behind a mahogany desk, has been bypassed. This shift has birthed a new kind of financial autonomy, allowing niche, brilliant voices to bypass the “unmarketable” labels of Manhattan publishing houses and find direct, communal support from their true audience.

For many, Substack is no trap. It is a life raft.

Furthermore, there is a distinct psychological utility in the platform’s momentum. It forces the paralyzed perfectionist into the arena of the “shitty first draft” at scale, providing a necessary external pressure to actually finish the work rather than let it molder in a private folder for a decade. It allows a writer to “get their reps in,” treating the digital page as a gymnasium where the muscles of syntax and tone are hardened through the sheer volume of practice. For the ambitious, this velocity is often a calculated means to an end. A high-speed laboratory where one can build the requisite “platform” and audience engagement needed to eventually secure a traditional book deal. It is a strategic trade: we give the algorithm its tribute of “quick content” today so that we might earn the right to do our “serious writing” tomorrow.

Chasing the Dragon

But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit rattled by what happens to a craft when it is manipulated at such a staggering scale. Even if we tell ourselves we are doing “serious writing” in the background, or that this is all just a means to an end, are we not degrading the entire practice by chasing the dragon of algorithmic attention? If we train our brains to prioritize the “drop” over the “depth,” we risk losing the very cognitive labor required for brilliance. We are teaching ourselves to perform, rather than to think. Indeed, the type of writing Substack incentivizes is exactly the kind of writing produced by LLMs that so many state to adamantly disdain: instant, output with zero understanding of the human thought or “felt sense” behind it.

Personally, I am reclaiming my time. I am setting a new, non-negotiable rule: I will no longer publish anything without a significant buffer of silence between the “final” draft and the “Send” button. I tell my students this every semester, and it is time I listen to my own lecture: when you are too close to the page, you are blind to the prose. You must step away. You must let the draft grow cold so that you can return to it as a stranger. This is the radical humility at the heart of the word “revise,” from the Latin revisere, literally meaning “to see again.”

Less content; more vision.

I do not mean to suggest that anyone here is a bad writer. On the contrary, I believe we are all capable of profound insight. But we would all be better writers if we had the courage to slow down. If your primary concern is readership, ask yourself this: does it truly benefit your legacy if what they are reading is merely a frantic, incomplete representation of your mind? Let us detach from the frantic pressure to “keep it coming” and rediscover the quiet, transformative power of the pause.

The dragon can wait.

Your work deserves the wait.

Author’s Notes:

1. I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend and brilliant writer, , for his inspiration and for taking a moment to ask me a simple, piercing question that started my thoughts here: “Are you feeling burnt out by your publication pace?” That single line of questioning proved to be deeply meaningful; it forced the reflection that led to this piece and ultimately caused me to reposition my entire approach to the craft. Please read his work. He rules.

2. I also want to shout out and , who recently published their own insights on drifting from the craft within the Substack ecosystem. Their posts were the mirrors I needed to recognize my own thoughts.

3. Finally, a note on perspective: I recognize that the utility of Substack varies wildly from person to person and genre to genre. I am writing from the specific vantage point of a long-form essayist. I do not wish to diminish the immense value of a platform that provides fulfillment, community, and inspiration to so many. At the end of the day, the creative process is as unique as a thumbprint. If the current pace works for you and your art, that is a beautiful thing. This is simply my own journey back to the “slow-cured” word.

Lately, I’ve been dwelling in the chthonic prose of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland. It is a poetic book that descends into the worlds beneath our feet. Catacombs that lurk beneath the great cities of France and Italy. Mycelial webs that function as the nervous system of trees and forests. Lead-lined laboratories buried miles underground, where scientists wait for the faint, ghostly collision of dark matter. Underland understands something most modern life tries to forget: that deep truths are rarely found on the surface.

One detail, though, struck me with an almost uncanny relevance to our current moment.

In the Scandinavian chapters, Macfarlane describes a set of ancient cave paintings hidden inside a sea cave on the northern coast of Norway. The cave is called Kollhellaren (the so-called “Hole of Hell”) named for the suicidal narrowness of the coastal path required to reach it. Inside its dark throat, Bronze Age figures glow faintly on the stone: red bodies dancing, leaping, sometimes half-animal, half-human. Macfarlane calls them the “red figures dancing,” remnants of what he names peri-arctic art.

These paintings are extraordinarily rare. In the far north, wind, salt spray, ice, and time usually scour cave walls clean. But here, inside this cavern, red iron oxide pigment has survived for thousands of years. The people who made them lived short, punishing lives. Cold, hungry, stalked by the elements. And yet they took “considerable risks” to reach this place, to climb into this geological mouth, this site of their own making.

As Macfarlane writes, with a kind of quiet awe:

In the face of the tortuous and the miserable, the red dancers exist.

A Brooklyn Underworld

A few months ago, the dancers from the “Hole of Hell” followed me into a Brooklyn brewery, (Kings County Brewers Collective) a graffiti-line atrium where Marvel-esque-comic-book murals offered a colorful sanctuary from the December cold. I was with my younger brother (a musician and producer) and a colleague (a professor and writer), nursing local IPAs in that strange, suspended, sleepy animation between Christmas and the New Year. Outside, the city seemed to mimic the caves of the north: the sky a bruised gray, and the wind tunnels between the converted warehouses made the streets feel like gauntlets. Along the curbs, the plowed remains of the season’s storms had hardened into ashen bergs; less snow and more a congealed record of urban rot. These frozen heaps were marbled with frozen oil and gasoline, studded with trash, and stained by the yellow-brown seepage of a million passing pets. Above us, steel-caged warm lights rattled with metallic coughs; below us, a muffled hum of the G-train beating through the bedrock like a subterranean heart.

As the alcohol warmed us up, all three of us confessed to a shared sense of stagnancy. A spiritual muck tangling the gears of our creative work. We looked for the culprit in the usual places: the lack of Vitamin D and abundance of seasonal depression, the creeping shadow of our mid-thirties, or the way our peers have traded creative restlessness for the adventure of parenthood. We entertained these reasons, then dismissed them.

But my brother finally touched a live wire, and something I’ve been thinking about leading to this article: How do we justify our “little poems,” “cute songs,” and “silly paintings” when the world is combusting?

The question carries the sting of a moral indictment, and frankly, it’s a fair hit. It is hard not to feel like a preening, detached prick, finessing a stanza or obsessing over a Substack headline while entire species slip quietly into extinction. At first glance, there is a pathological narcissism in massaging a melody while the livestreamed collapse of our moral architecture plays out in real-time; Gaza and Ukraine reduced to a 4-inch stream in our palms, while bombs rain down on Iran, Sudan, Lebanon, Venezuela, and Syria.

Here we are; collectively huddled in a “post-truth” winter, a season of hallucinatory “meh” where AI-generated police brutality and deep-fake pundits compete with the “general slop” of the algorithm, making us cynical skeptics of our own retinas. So, why bother carving out a “sanctuary” of art when the apocalypse has ceased to be a metaphor and become a persistent pulverization of push-notifications?

Why bother creating from within a dystopia?

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Reckoning With Darkness

I do believe every era must confront darkness. As we reckon with darkness, it seems we must view the history of the human soul as suggesting that art is not a “fair-weather” activity. It is not some decorative mirage in the desert of civilization; it is both the cooling rod in the reactor and the solvent that breaks down the old world’s toxins. To view artistic creation simply as an indulgence is to misunderstand its function in the human animal. As evolutionary theorists like Ellen Dissanayake suggest, art is a biological “making special;” a coding that allows us to ritualize our survival. It is more like a genetic reflex or evolutionary imperative.

On a macro-level, if we only had the news of the wars and suffering, we would only have a record of our failures. Art is the only evidence we have that humanity was ever worth saving. It is the counterweight to our nihilism and the lens through which we view the wreckage and the potential rising from it. Walter Benjamin understood this well and recognized this high-stakes tension; he warned that when a society reaches a point where it can “experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure,” art must cease being a decoration and become a revolutionary tool. Consider how the visceral, agonizing protest of Picasso’s Guernica forced a global audience to look at the pulverized remains of a Spanish town, changing the way we perceive “collateral damage.” Likewise, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin moved beyond a mere reflection of abolitionism, functioning instead as an imaginative catalyst that started a revolution and physically bent the arc of history toward justice.

Narrowing down to a micro-individual level, creation is one of our only tools to reclaim agency. The macro-view of 2026 is a daunting, unfixable monolith. But through the pen or the synth, we find the power to mold the “micro-margins.” We move beyond a passive existence and into what Czesław Miłosz defined as the “duty of witness.” Miłosz, having stood amidst the literal ashes of the 20th century, understood that in the “end times,” the poet’s (or artist’s) task is not to be a “narcissistic prick” seeking fame, but to be a faithful reporter of reality (“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot”). In other words, the artistically inclined simply cannot passively exist; we are built to soak up the world’s wreckage and wonder through our pores and file a report on what it all feels like. The screams, songs, shouts, rhymes, thrusts, lifts; all tossed into the hurricane that proves we are still here, still breathing, and still capable of transmuting hell into something that shines.

Stubborn Souls

As we grapple with the guilt and existential dread that accompanies times of deep global distress, it is important to remember that some of the most vital work in human history was produced when the walls were, both literally and figuratively, closing in on those creating such works.

I think of Giorgio Morandi. While Italian Fascism marched through the streets and the Second World War tore Europe into rags, Morandi stayed in his studio, painting dusty bottles and jars. To a contemporary observer, it might have seemed like the height of detachment. But Morandi’s work was a radical refusal to let the chaos of the outside world dictate his inner self. He found the infinite in the mundane, proving that the placement of a bottle can be a quiet, stubborn act of resistance against a world of noise.

Then there is Vincent Van Gogh, our patron saint of starving artists and beautiful breakdowns. In 1889, he was a voluntary prisoner of the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum. His physical world was iron bars and white-washed silence. Yet, when he looked out his window, his gaze rendered the iron bars irrelevant, fixing instead on a sky convulsing with gold. The Starry Night is the ultimate middle finger to the asylum. It is a testament that the creative gene can synthesize light even when the environment is starved of it.

Quite profoundly, we look to Viktor Frankl. In the unimaginable horror of the concentration camps, Frankl observed that those who survived were often those who could still tap into an inner creative or spiritual life. He wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” For the artist, “attitude” is the act of creation. It is the refusal to let the war, the mental strife, or the dystopia be the final word.

We see this survivalist energy move from the internal studio into the streets, where it functions as a raw, load-bearing infrastructure of hope built from the debris of the “now.” In the “urban rot” of Chicago’s South Side, Theaster Gates paints the wreckage using the “waste” of the city, from fire hoses to reclaimed wood, to physically rebuild the social fabric. It is art as a cooling rod in the reactor of poverty. This same spirit ignited the streets of Tehran during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, where Shervin Hajipour synthesized the digital cries of a generation into “Baraye”-an anthem that served as a sonic song of resistance. We see this same defiance in the Sudanese Revolution posters, where artists like Al-Murtada Maaz and Khalid Albaih turned the “digital slop” of the internet into tangible icons of defiance. Their work (like the “Blue for Mattar” movement or the murals of the “Kandaka”) moved beyond protest and took on a life as visual coordinates for a nation reclaiming its soul from the teeth of a dictatorship.

And we’ve seen this same stubborn gene continue today in the ruins of Gaza. I think of the slain Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who continued to write and teach even as the horizon disappeared under the horrifying smoke and death of ethnic cleansing. His final poem, “If I Must Die,” functions as an imaginative blueprint for a kite rather than a surrender to the dark. He wrote it to ensure that his death might “bring hope” and “be a tale,” transforming a tragedy into a visual signal. It was a message designed so that a child in Gaza, looking “heaven in the eye” while awaiting a father who ”’left in a blaze,” might see that kite and believe, even for a moment, that an angel is there. He understood that in a place of total deprivation, the act of making, ensuring a story survives, is the only way to transcend the statistic of death.

In all of these examples, the creative act is the insistence that even in the “Hole of Hell,” there is still some iron oxide, and there is still a wall.

A Brief for the Defense

To me, art serves as a coffee-and-alcohol-stained pirate map, charting the course through the very tension it inhabits.

The poet Jack Gilbert understood this with a clarity that feels less like poetry and more like gospel. His poem, “A Brief for the Defense,” is both a collection of verses and a manifesto for those attempting to remain human within collapsing systems. It begins without the comfort of illusion:

“Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving elsewhere.”

Gilbert’s career grew in the long shadow of the Cold War, fueled by nuclear dread and endless televised proxy wars. While first read in 2005 (amidst the gathering ruins of the War on Terror) these lines feel eerily calibrated for the 2026 scroll, where atrocity competes for space with advertisements and thirst traps. Gilbert inhabits the darkness fully, yet he quarantines it, refusing to let the wreckage colonize the totality of our existence.

His warning is sharp, borderline heretical:

“To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”

In our current era, we are susceptible to believe that constant outrage is a form of morality. But Gilbert suggests that when we surrender all of our psychic energy to catastrophe, when disillusionment becomes our only posture, we do not become more holy. We become spiritually captured. Evil targets the body as a secondary prize; its true aim is the wholesale seizure of the lens through which we view the world. It wants to flatten the earth into a singular topography of pain. Surrender to such thinking would be to admit this is hell and only hell.

This is why Gilbert dares to utter a truth that sounds scandalous in a time of crisis: that joy is not a betrayal, and beauty is not complicity. He argues that our capacity for delight is the very thing that proves our humanity is worth defending:

“We enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well.”

Is awareness not God’s intention?

He observes that “there is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.”

To laugh in a broken world is not blindness; it is an act of resistance.

“If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,” Gilbert writes, “we lessen the importance of their deprivation.” We must discard the film of pastel-colored optimism in favor of a brutally pragmatic claim on the future. If we lose the vision of beauty, if we forget the experience of tenderness, then what exactly are we trying to protect? What is justice for, if not for the preservation of joy?

For every protest requires a picture of the world it hopes to build. Every revolution begins not in the streets, but in the fever of the imagination. In a fugitive margin (wink), a spoken poem, a melody hummed under the breath, a love note passed hand-to-hand in the dark. Before it becomes policy or power, it is first a fragile act of meaning that declares:

something better can seriously exist! and I can feel it!

The Duty of the Dancer

We have always existed in sensory loops. To be human is to be an osmotic thing; we absorb the world’s grime and grace through our senses, and if we do not “exhale” through creation, if we do not chew the chaos and spit it out, we will surely choke on the coldness of our own era.

I imagine those hunter-gatherers in the “Hole of Hell” again. I see them shivering in the dark, mourning companions lost to the sea, their bellies empty, aching, their minds perhaps straying at the edges of the abyss. Surrounded by a silence so profound it likely felt like an end. And yet, they saw a wall. They saw a canvas. As the end swirled around them, they reached for the iron oxide and began to choreograph a dance of survival.

I do not believe we are narcissistic for writing the poem, nor are we detached for singing the song or painting the painting. We are following a code that predates the cities we inhabit and the dystopias we fear. We create because, without the “red dancers,” the history of our species is nothing more than a ledger of trauma and a tally of bones.

We make things because creation is the only way to prove that the light was as real and present as the dark. 2,000 years from now, when the digital ruins of 2026 are excavated, when the servers are silent and the “post-truth” noise has finally settled into dust, these marks will be the only proof that we weren’t just victims of our time. They will show that we were witnesses to its terrible, stubborn beauty, and that even as the world combusted, we still had the utter audacity to find the pigment, reach for the wall, hope, and dance.