There’s only one clocktower on this street, with two clocks, and they each show different times. Andy walks with me, shortening his strides to match my pace.

“You don’t have to come in,” I say when we reach the office.

“I’ll come in,” Andy says.

The waiting room is encouragingly empty. We’ve only been there for a minute when a gray-haired woman in scrubs enters the room, clipboard in hand. She calls my name, drawing it out like I’m a lost dog.

“I’ll wait,” Andy says.

“It’ll stress me out to think of you waiting,” I say.

I turn away and the nurse leads me down a hall. She asks if I need the bathroom. I lie and say no. Her accent is heavy and unplaceable. We enter a closet-sized room containing only one chair. I sit down and flex my bladder experimentally.

The nurse stands before my chair, stooped at eye level. I could balance a glass of water on her back.

She asks for my name and birthdate, cross-checking my responses with the form on her clipboard. “Lamm,” she repeats. “Where is that from?”

“Germany,” I tell her, even though it’s not from anywhere. I just made it up a few years ago when I decided to change my name.

“Guten Tag,” she says. It takes me a moment to recognize the words through her accent. She swabs my arm with an alcohol pad. “Jesus loves you,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say.

“In German,” she says. “You’re German?”

“Oh,” I say, thinking hard. “Jesus liebt dich?”

“Jesus liebt dich,” she repeats, inserting a needle into a vein in my arm. “I won’t remember that. You can open your fist now.”

Dark blood spools out of me into a thin plastic tube, and it feels too late to clarify things.

“I was there in ‘95,” she says. “I did a semester in Berlin.”

She thinks for a long moment.

My blood waits suspended between containers.

I wonder about her other patients, other tasks. The door is closed. We’ve been in here a while.

“Can I take your jewelry?” she says, gesturing to my neck. “We don’t have much time.”

It seems like we have a lot of time. She opens the door and the time rushes out like air. I undo the clasp and hold the necklace in my palm. She looks at it. The cross looks up at her, its single diamond like a baby tooth. She lets the door close again.

“You’re a believer,” she says. She looks into my face with fragile hope. “Jesus Christ?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Jesus Christ?” she says.

“Yes,” I say.

“Jesus liebt dich,” she says.

“Nice,” I say. “You remembered.”

“My name is Maria,” she says. She already knows my name. “I went back in a dream once.”

I think for a moment, then realize what she meant. “To Germany?” I say.

“July 12, 2007. I dreamt I was on my way to a fellowship meeting, wearing a long green dress.” She gestures with both hands down the length of her brief body. “A dream,” she reiterates.

I ask her why she remembers the date.

“Some German festival or holiday. For Martin Luther King?”

“Martin Luther,” I say.

“King,” she supplies.

“But why do you remember it?” I ask again. There’s a new urgency in my tone that has nothing to do with the brain scan, the co-pay, my mother’s disease. It’s the urgency I feel in church when the music begins and I can’t find the right hymnal page.

“There was a man,” Maria says, her voice like something handed to me under a table. “A Christian man.” She pauses, closing her eyes.

I think of Andy, the first time he took me to church, how his fingers found the Holy Water automatically as he walked in. How I followed blindly, my hands dry.

Suddenly I can feel July 12, 2007 taking up space in the room, like another channel of reality. When I was a kid, the TV had a feature that let you watch two channels simultaneously: one at full size and one in a little square in the corner of the screen. That way you could monitor the football while watching a movie. Maybe July 12, 2007 is like that for Maria, playing on mute through the decades.

There is a silence that might go a hundred different directions.

I am about to ask about the man when Maria speaks.

“Listen,” Maria says.

I am listening so hard, fighting to hold onto every word.

“This contrast fluid they give you, it goes into your brain. So you have to eat brain-cleansing foods tonight. Radish, big-leaf celery, turmeric. No Chinese restaurants.”

“No,” I agree.

“It’s not healthy. When Giuliani was mayor, he took them to court.”

“Wow,” I say.

“It’s good you go to church,” Maria says. But I don’t go to church. Or, I go occasionally. I get anxious on Saturday nights, stay up too late, and miss the bells. I wake up refreshed but guilty, like I’ve gotten fat off stolen food.

Andy’s church is a big, neglected building in deep Brooklyn. Gilding and granite, stained glass and hand-painted murals, largely empty pews. I sing and he accompanies the choir on a baby grand, looking too good for a Sunday morning.

The songs take up space in our brains, but we hardly feel it. Andy once taught me that the simplest way to understand chord progressions is to write them out as Roman numerals. In the key of A, for example, an A chord becomes I.

“I had a vision at church once,” Maria says, looking up at the drop ceiling. “A huge bottle of B-Complex floating in the air, spinning like a globe. You know B-Complex?”

“Sure,” I say, thinking of the alphabetized vitamin shelves at CVS. I never know what I’m supposed to take. When my mom was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, she bought vitamins and expensive powders and medicinal teas, but she didn’t change anything else, didn’t quit drinking or start exercising, just layered holistic health on top of holistic unhealth, and nothing came of it.

I don’t talk to my mom anymore. But I drink all those same powders and teas. I swallow my bitterness. I pay for it.

“You can’t get B-Complex anymore,” Maria says. “Big Pharma shut it down because it was too effective at treating Covid.”

I give a neutral nod, wanting to share my own theories but not wanting to prolong the conversation. On Saturday nights when Andy’s asleep, I take the radio into the bathroom and listen to the after-hours conservative show. I sit on the plastic toilet lid and learn about UFO sightings, government plots. “We have all the information,” a man named Lionel yells into the microphone. “So why aren’t we doing anything?”

“Your mother is still in Germany?” Maria asks.

“No,” I say. “She’s over here now.” My mother is from Connecticut, of Jewish descent, and as far as I know has only visited Germany once, for the museums.

“Too bad,” Maria says. “In your country she could get stem cells.”

I was in middle school when my mom was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. I didn’t know what it was then. I didn’t ask. I thought it would become obvious over time, as my mother went in for scans and experimental treatments, as her brain and body declined. I worried I had it too, but how would I tell? My mother’s illness was subtle but debilitating, marked by vague pain, fatigue, disorientation. It could only be described concretely with one phrase: “Lesions on the brain.”

You can’t see your own brain. You can’t even feel it. I started to think I had the lesions. It’s a detail that would make sense somehow, like a missing page of a manuscript. But I put off the scan for years, during which the lesions have either grown or remained imaginary. Now I imagine them eating my thoughts, munching me down to a wilted core of basic functionality.

The first time I heard the word “lesion” was on Law & Order, which my mom used to watch while folding laundry. “The victim had lesions on her neck.” Even then, I was too sensitive for gunfights and pedophilia and fish-netted bodies floating down the East River. All those lesions. Now, I can’t even watch the news. “These people need God,” Andy says when we walk past posters for violent movies. It’s strange to imagine him existing, unseen, for the first three decades of my life, like a latent disease.

An MRI technician arrives to take me to the exam room. I’m wearing a gown that exposes my back. “Can I take your form?” Maria calls out to me as I leave the room.

“Where?” I ask.

“Home,” Maria says, which feels illegal. She leans in closer, putting a hand on my arm. “If you could get stem cells for cheap,” she whispers, “would you do it?”

“I don’t know,” I say honestly.

In the exam room, I lie down on a narrow plastic bed and look up at the drop ceiling. Some of the tiles have been replaced by an illuminated photo of palm trees. Instead of white foam, there are green leaves and brown coconuts and slivers of blue sky. Through the doorway, I can hear Maria talking with her next patient. “It’s hard here,” she says, “But the alternative is worse.”

With a mechanical buzz, my body slides into a truck-sized machine. Red lasers shine down on my face. I close my eyes against them. The magnetism passes through me, making my brain visible. I want to think flattering thoughts now, lesion-proof thoughts. I want my brain to be a dimpled thigh made beautiful in low light. I think about Andy. I think about us praying in my tiny studio apartment: pre-meal blessings, signs of the cross over microwaved beans, burnt kale, wet pasta. “This meal would cost $40 at a restaurant,” Andy says, and believes it.

I imagine us praying for a clean scan, a healthy brain, a long life. I imagine it working.

In my early twenties, I fell in with a group of Evangelical Christians in rural Georgia. We were young, adjusting to new freedoms, unsure whether to use them. I’d already lost my virginity. I worked overtime to compensate, reading the memoirs of repentant monks, memorizing hymns, hearing testimony from my new friends. In the evening, we hung around the living room of their big communal house and discussed the big questions. My New York friends never discussed the big questions. In the City, if you brought up death, purity, sin, you’d get only a dismissive laugh. These were questions we’d put to bed ages ago, in adolescent diaries and slumber party whispers. So what were the answers? No one knew, maybe not even the believers. But at least the believers were still asking.

I moved back to New York and gradually lost touch with the Evangelicals. In my last phone call with one of them, I confessed my doubts. All these months and still I could not honestly call myself a believer. There was a heat wave in New York and the block seemed oddly quiet, stunned like a slapped cheek. I looked up at the blazing blue sky and tried to merge my vague sense of The Divine with the highly specific personage of Jesus Christ. It didn’t work. I felt betrayed. I had taken a leap of faith but found nothing to support me on the other side. My friend was unconvinced. “If your heart is truly open to God,” he said, “God will find a way in. He doesn’t waste an opportunity.”

The machine turns off and my body slides back out into the room. I look up and see palm trees on the ceiling. This is an old photo, I can tell. They don’t print photos like this anymore. It’s a photo from a time before my mother was diagnosed, before my brain knew love or Christ or damage. It’s a windless day on the beach in a world without pain or age or Andy. It’s a tropical wonder in a grid of flat foam, a dream in the corner of a life. It’s not something I would ever choose.

Subscribe now

But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head.
And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent in its bed.
He sent the flint stones flying, but the pony kept his feet. 
And the man from Snowy River never shifted in his seat. […] 
On a dim and distant hillside the wild horses racing yet.
And the man from Snowy River on their heels. 
— The Man from Snowy River, Banjo Paterson, 1890

I was losing the pretty one. She was pulling ahead and away and almost past any influence and understanding I ever had of her. Ahead of me, below the cliffs, the glittering pale ocean and bright sky seemed to fold itself up toward me, out of any perspective, with the impossible logic of a painting by Matisse. For you, the pretty one, the horsewoman, all jeans and boots, had said, back in the muddy yard, as she assigned the dozen tourists to the waiting animals. On that day I had been desperately in search of omen and benediction—any hint of affection or adoration. That night I was scheduled to fly from Reykjavik to Los Angeles to meet up with the person I was seeing, and dreaming of marrying, in order to meet her circle of friends. I wanted them to like me. And so I took the pretty one to heart. And she was pretty. From her shoulders, what on a person you would call the nape of a neck, sprang an impossible mane: so thick, shaggy, glittering, the horsehair falling eighteen inches or more down her sides, wiry and silky all at once, and in so many colors: chocolate, coffee, honey, brass, copper, butter, gold.

Icelandics live longer than any other horses. They are all head, neck, and forequarters. They are tough and fast and sure-footed. They are the size of ponies, but there is nothing mild or diminutive or domestic about them. Visibly powerful and soft-eyed in a fay kind of way that’s almost sinister, they look like fairy tale illustrations of horses. They descend from a genetic bottleneck of the animals brought over on longboats in the century between about 850 and 950 CE—hardy animals in the manner of today’s Shetland and Connemara ponies, animals from islands and high places. There’s a theory that—by way of Kievan Rus and the Silk Roads—Icelandics closely incarnate the horses with which the Mongolians conquered their known world from Central Asia, where wild horses were first domesticated six thousand years ago. In the Icelandic Sagas the first named Icelandic is called Skalm, meaning sword-like. She was a living link to Sleipnir, the god Odin’s gray eight-legged steed. The name means the slippery one. Born of a union between the stallion Svaoilfari, meaning the unlucky traveler, and the god Loki incarnating himself as a mare. On Sleipnir—and in much tradition only on Sleipnir—Odin was able to travel between worlds, back and forth between life and the afterlife. And through the sky.

Icelandic horses are famous for possessing, in addition to the usual trots and canters and gallops, an additional gear called the flugskei∂, the flying pace, in which a complex kinetic and physiological magic makes the horse feel to its rider entirely motionless, even while moving at extraordinary speed.

It was at this flying pace that I was losing the horse out from under me.

The particular magic that, all my life, I had sometimes glimpsed in my father—the humor and glamor and even hauteur inside his cultivated placidity and his long working hours and business trips—was more accessible in his twin sisters. When I was seven years old, I lived for a while with the older sister, Marie, on her land outside of Canberra, Australia. When I was thirteen years old, I lived for a while with the younger sister, Lucie, on her land outside of Bogotá, Colombia. Everything I don’t long to change about myself—everything I was hoping those strangers in Los Angeles might perceive—dates from these two times and places.

My earliest memories of horses are of shoveling their sweet and barley-smelling feed pellets into buckets, in a big open-sided, corrugated steel and fiberglass shed. Marie had some kind of mean streak that was connected, at that time, to her boredom—and, I would work out later, to her feeling, at that time, of captivity. She liked to see what would happen. In the far paddock there was a tall and unruly horse, dark as a nightmare, that needed relocating from one field to another. Marie asked me to get on my bicycle and ride into the animal’s left side field of view. Which, she said, would help her steer the black horse through a series of gates, across some red dirt drives. Maybe she wanted me to feel like I was a part of things; maybe she wanted me outdoors; maybe she wanted to see what would happen. As I bicycled into its view, the horse spooked, ran, reared—a living thunderhead coming at me. I pedaled away, fell and bled onto the red dirt. A dog went crazy with animal delight at my falling and running. It was all claws and teeth, and it added to my cuts and scratches. Marie eventually corralled the horse. I had never until that moment been so physically afraid. Nobody noticed. Confounded by the experience, I stayed out of Marie’s line of sight for days. Years later she would divorce herself out of that hard place, and years after that she would tell me vaguely about her own year that followed that departure, when she had pretty much nothing—except eventually a new horse whose board she paid for with shifts driving taxis. When I first arrived on Marie’s property, I’d imagined my bicycle to be analogous to all her horses—it too had a saddle, the handlebars like the reins or the horse’s own ears, the front wheel like its heavy head—but after that moment the bicycle was embarrassing, tinselly, a tiny parody of all that beastly majesty.

Lucie’s land was a flower farm. Alstroemerias and roses. Green in its valley and forested and soft and lush where Marie’s—all ghostly white-barked eucalypts and black scorched gums—had been dry and stark and open to an infinite sky. Weekend after weekend, Lucie would send me up onto the back of Chocolate, the most placid of all horses, cocoa-colored, gray-muzzled, who had already by then seemingly lived forever, been the teacher of generations of cousins. Lucie, like her brother my father, knew how to recede: at first she would ride alongside on her high-stepping pale horse with its concave Arabian head; then she would only saddle up Chocolate and send me alone up and down the long drive. Then—a vagueness and a drift of interest that was also sufficiently a vote of confidence—she would leave the saddling to me and a farmhand. Forty or fewer weekends, forty or fewer rides in all. The drive was a kilometer or so through the long vault of tree canopies; the ride was back and forth from the farmhouse gate, curving and dipping out of line of sight from the house, to the main gate to the highway with its fast and colorful village-to-village buses. The trick was to shift through the gears—walk to trot to canter to gallop. It was like doing laps in an Olympic pool. When eventually I could reliably shift, with only the hint of a touch of the outer edges of my hands, below the pinky fingers, along Chocolate’s bristly shoulders, from the jostle of the trot to the smooth roll of the canter, I noticed that this was the greatest happiness I had ever known. Because I was so lonely I chose to take the infinite patience of the animal personally, as if it was there with me in some kind of unspoken conspiracy. Now it seems to me that all the children who rode Chocolate must have, to her, simply been the same one child. This sensation of tacit intimacy is the dream that horse riding encourages—of collaborative communion without language toward an inscrutable inhuman intelligence and a companionate vessel of life force and a far higher power. In other words, prayer.

When our mind compels us to speak of our soul, one of my spiritual teachers remarked many years later, we mean our body. We mean the twin being into which we are incarnate, whose independent interest in living and whose understanding of the means of life, by being constant and intricate, will always exceed our own. There is an education about our bodies to be found in the intelligence of animals.

Back home in my suburban public high school—its two thousand students; its dour red brick and its fake-Colonial white trim and its bright fluorescent ceilings and its chain link; its quadrangle hard and factional in a way that made me think of every prison yard on every cop and detective show I had ever watched on television after school—I tried one time to get back in the saddle. The school in some kind of aspirational affiliation with a nearby private academy ran a muddy green van on weekends out to its riding school. And if you joined the riding club you could go. There were prim whitewashed fences and tidy hedges. It was early spring—dew and mist. When I got there, they didn’t have enough gear—helmets and boots and tack—for everyone, and as the newest arrival of lowest rank I spent the next two hours waiting, in the parking lot by the barns, locked inside the van. It had been socially almost impossible as a boy to join that club because in that time and place there was something exclusively feminine about riding—unicorns and jodhpurs and horse girls—that invited bullying. I never tried again.

Until Iceland. It had been a work trip, a week of chaperoning college students not much younger than myself to look at hyperborean landscapes and Nordic architecture. It was the second week of March, still icy on that island. I had an extra useless day at the end of the itinerary, before a long overnight series of connections to California. I’d sat in the lobby of my dingy hotel late in the evening before—tired and restless with dread and hope—and not known what to do with myself until I picked up one of those colorful printed pamphlets of local activities and businesses that even in the age of the internet seem to survive in a certain kind of hotel lobby. I left a telephone message for their van to pick me up very early the next day. At the time, I wasn’t sure why I did that. Proud, I chose the advanced group. Looking back, I understand that I had, to myself, something to prove.

When the van pulled up to the barns I was relieved somehow that it didn’t seem all that slick—it all had the look of an extra business improvised onto inherited acreage—or even especially safe. There was a gratifying wildness to it. Everything had the jury-rigged look I remembered from working farms: loops of blue nylon rope as latches on gates, the stirrups for the tourists’ horses not fine leatherwork and ironwork but crude and heavy hand-made loops of heavy welded steel. I had been preemptively embarrassed that it was going to be some kind of dude ranch for city folk, or a cloying seaside pony ride out of a storybook British childhood. Everyone know how to ride? the horsewoman briskly asked as we stood in the cold and windswept yard. Nobody said no. Good. The horses know the way better than you, she said, keep your hands loose and low. Don’t cut into their mouths. The dozen animals spun around placidly as each tourist was boosted onto their backs. The ascent to their backs was a spiral. I was up and onto the pretty one. We went single-file out into the wilderness.

Ten years after that long flight to Los Angeles, I used to fly to San Francisco. By that time, my father was twenty years into his Parkinson’s disease, the neurological disorder that first paralyzes or involuntarily animates the body, and then progressively steals the mind. His neurologist was blunt: There’s no cure. But it’s very well-researched. The drugs are amazing. We want to maximize quality of life and we want the body to die before the brain takes the mind into the late stage psychosis. The drugs were amazing. He endured. But by the time of my visits to him in his facility, on a ridge at the tail of the Sierras overlooking the Bay from the heights of Oakland, he was far diminished. He spoke less and less. He walked not at all. The facility, in its red brick and chain link and fluorescent lights, and in its uncanny cheer laid over an ineffable and ubiquitous atmosphere of fury, reminded me precisely of my high school. The staff didn’t like it when you opened the windows. Everything was very clean.

One consequence of my dad’s disease, in combination with sitting alone in his room all the time, was a retreat into a private world—hallucinations, conversations with people who weren’t there. I remember overhearing him talking in that room to the high school versions of Lucie and Marie. He was persuading them he was old enough to come along with them to a party. So I tried to give him experiences of the world outside. Tactile and empirical evidence of the wild world as it was. There was a hippie spice and herb apothecary down on Shattuck Avenue, so I would stop on my way uphill and buy him a brown paper bag of cloves to smell. Here, I would think toward him, is something from the earth. At his previous facility back on the East Coast—even more red brick, even more ambience of violence—I had figured out that if I could dress him for outdoors and lift him into his wheelchair and then get that wheelchair across many curbs and down certain side roads and trails without sidewalks, I could steer him through a gap in a low stone wall into the back of an arboretum that a local university maintained for their research deliberately in a state resembling wildness, a simulated primeval forest. It was a little like making it into Narnia.

Pushing him those long distances in the wheelchair, over pine needles and broken ground, was like riding a horse. Just as sitting on the back of a horse exactly positions your field of view above and behind the field of view of the animal, aligns your spine with its spine, your eyes with its eyes, so does pushing a wheelchair align you with the person in the chair. You are looking at the nape of their neck. You are seeing, but not quite, what they see. You and they are moving exactly at the same pace, but not in the same way. You and they are in some kind of unspoken conspiracy that you hope is communion.

There was no simulated primeval forest near the Oakland facility. No local Eden. I had searched. There was a strip mall and an office park, a six lane surface road, following the line of the top of the ridge, that felt like a highway. Everything was made for cars. If you wanted to take a resident outdoors you were supposed to take them down a narrow ramp past the parking lot into a prim paved and fenced courtyard—no smoking—that felt like the quadrangle at my high school, and from which, if you were seated in a wheelchair, you could not see the view down to Bay and the distant Golden Gate. After many visits, I finally pushed him East: away from that notional view, away from the grounds of the facility and across those six lanes and downhill, to the back of the ridge. I had no idea what was over there. I was surprised to find, in some kind of surprising arroyo of wilderness that in a West Coast way had pushed deep into the exurban landscape, a horse ranch.

There was a dappled meadow where the horses grazed. There was a kind of yard, open to the sides under a high corrugated roof, not so different from the shed where I had shoveled the barley-smelling feed pellets for Marie. As at her farm, there was the smell of eucalyptus trees. Everything was in those colors I came to associate with that time: the trees a dark piney green or else the faded gray green of the eucalyptus, the tall grasses bleached a golden yellow. In the yard you could see riding lessons, the student rider doing loops and figure eights while the instructor stood holding a long stick or a parabola of rope. Suddenly seeing the big glossy animals with their flickering and muscular sides was, after the parking lots, the strip mall, the six lanes of the surface road, was, even from fifty feet away, like returning to your senses. Witnessing those animals was like welcoming messengers from another world. My dad sat up and attended. He observed them conscientiously. His gaze followed them as they walked around in steady ellipses. After that, visit after visit, we went back and back and back. We would stop at the point where the asphalt gave way to the dirt road, about fifty feet away and twenty feet uphill from the gates to the meadows on one side of the dirt road, and the training yard on the other. At this threshold I could leave the chair’s wheels on the asphalt but take my dad’s feet off of their footrests and sometimes also out of their shoes and place them in the dirt and he could with what remained of his physical ability, push his feet with discernible pleasure into its yielding surface and scuff them back and forth as from a distance we watched the horses below.

The last time we stopped to do that—which was also my last visit with him before the very last one—one of the instructors, a horsewoman, all jeans and boots just like the one in Iceland, noticed us from that distance. She had been riding at speed, languid, leaning far back in the saddle, one-underhanded hand scooped around the reins, with absolute grace. She dismounted and looped the reins of her animal around one of those dark and green trees that were like giant bonsai, and she walked slowly up toward us, with that cowboy walk of John Wayne. Far behind her in the meadow, the half dozen horses were placid, the twirling of their ears and the slow rising and lowering of their heads as they grazed almost the only motion, under the rustling eucalyptus. For the most part, when I pushed my dad around the world in those times, strangers were kind. Folded into his chair he had the strange charisma of a baby bundled into its stroller. I thought, maybe she’ll invite us to take a closer look. I thought—more wildly and more desperately and more insanely—maybe she will tell us about some program where we can get him up on horseback. She stopped at ten feet away. She stood with her arms folded and said, can I help you? Suddenly she reminded me of a cop. It’s a nice spot, I said. Looking more closely at her face I could see flicker across it familiar micro-expressions of disgust and horror. This was the other, rarer, reaction of strangers—to my dad’s hunched and twisted and visibly ravaged body with its uncanny combination of stillness and motion—that I had also come to recognize. He’s not allowed here, she said. His wheelchair is scaring the horses.

I could have argued the point. We were on a public right of way. The horses far behind her did not seem scared. I remembered how back on Marie’s farm my shiny little bicycle—not so different from a wheelchair—had maybe maybe maybe sparkled in the sunlight so as to spook the black mare. Horses could startle and stampede at something so small and so strange, I knew. So what she said, even as I knew it to be untrue in that moment, was not unfounded in possibility. She was afraid of something. But it was not fear on her face but disgust. The revulsion in her expression was something I knew myself to have felt—intrusively, unexpectedly, suddenly—at the spectacle of my dad’s body at stray moments, even as I had come to know it so well in the familiar routines of carrying and cleaning. When because I couldn’t bathe all of him, I just washed his feet with hot water in a heavy old porcelain salad bowl. There at the threshold between the asphalt and the dirt, my dad wasn’t attending to the content of the speech between me and the horsewoman—he was looking past her at the horses—but I knew that something instinctive and atavistic and animal in him would attune to the tone and tenor of whatever exchange the woman and I would get into. And would spook him. And that the emotional valence of that spooking would stay unresolved and perseverated in him for hours or days. I cannot lose control of this, I thought. Thank you, I said warmly and loudly and across my dad’s right ear, as if she had just made some kind of generous offer. Thank you so much! I put my body between him and her, my back to her, blocking her from his line of sight, and busied myself with putting on his shoes and putting his feet into their footrests, not so different from getting them into stirrups. I brought my eyes down into his line of sight to meet his. I prayed peace into him. Dad, I said, Are you ready to go?

I cannot lose her, I thought. I had already lost her. The pretty one, even right there below me, was, with me, beyond all communion. The wilderness of Iceland had been as sudden as the wilderness of that arroyo snaking its way toward the strip mall. As soon as we lost sight of the homestead we might have been on another planet. Because there were no trees, and in the strange northern sunlight, the faraway seemed distant and the distant faraway. The horses had surefootedly and methodically held their narrow lines, traversing hillsides so steep they were almost cliffs, above conical valleys that were the mouths of old volcanoes, they I could never have managed on foot. The ride had been long and bright. Scintillating wind on my face and hands. I had been blissed out by the pretty one’s precision, by the green land and the blue sky. When it happened I had been gazing lazily across the valley over my right shoulder at a pack of wild horses that were just starting to run—their heads suddenly high, their manes and tails unfurled straight out behind them like banners—on the steep hillside opposite. Faster and faster, they ran. Ahead of us, where the hillsides converged and the valley narrowed, the torrent of wild horses was suddenly all around us and with us and in us, and it became us—disillusioning us from any false distinction between wild and tame; over there and right here; consensus reality and psychosis; immanent and the transcendent. Everything moved ever faster as the two hillsides converged and all the horses ran shoulder to shoulder, mane to tail, and all sped up into the speed of the wild stampede. Here, at last, the flying pace.

If you’ve been in a car crash or a burning place, or even in smaller binds and disasters, you know how this works. Everything moves very quickly and also you have a lot of time to think. I saw a tourist just ahead of me fall out of the saddle and go under the horses. Afterward I heard someone say that their hip bones had been shattered. I saw another tourist dragged along, seemingly insensate, her ankle held in the steel loop of her stirrup. At the flying pace there was even above this violence a simultaneous sensation of placidity—it was instead the landscape of cliffs and hillsides and the strangely near horizon of the distant ocean that moved around us at impossible speed. There was no stopping anything. I have, I had time to think, to get off this horse. I have to do it gracefully. Her name was Josta—short for Jóarrstathir. Which meant the dwelling place of the horse warrior.

I remembered some Sunday afternoon, just before that time I spent at Marie’s land, in which my father—it felt like a visit even though it was his home as much as mine—had tried to show me how to ride that same little bicycle that had spooked the black mare. He didn’t succeed. I just watched him. On his own bike—an ancient and heavy and monumental green Raleigh—he had a nimble and gymnastic and European and old-fashioned and glamorous way of dismounting: a bella figura gesture of placing all the weight on the right pedal, straightening the right leg that held that weight to its fullest vertical, and—bicycle still at speed—lowering his spine to the horizontal, then raising the left leg to extend the line of the spine, and bringing it down across the centerline of the bike so it was free and next to the right, even as the right was still on the pedal. That left foot would hit the ground running—and then, off its pedal, the right—and dashing beside it he would gradually slow the pace of the bike itself.

I have never been able to do that on a bicycle, before or since. But caught in the stampede I was able to recall and recreate the procedure, there with Jóarrstathir. First I let her have her head—meaning first no tension, and then no hands, on the reins—just a trace of communication by touch through the knees, my right hand on her right shoulder. Then my left foot reaching for the ground between my right foot and her right side, and running by the time I lifted my right foot out of the stirrup. Then I was running beside her for an endless instant in a pocket of space between her and the wild horses. And then she was running, with the rest of them, far away. Leaving me in sudden silence and retching breath. I remember slipping down her side—my fingertips spread and light on her body to keep me oriented in space and time, smoothly with the whorling grain of the hair; touching her right hip with my left hip, her right shoulder with my left shoulder; my left toes reaching as long and delicately as if they had learned something from the horse’s own. Animal from animal. I was in congruent motion with her and even—and only in that moment of mutual departure—one in being. It all went faster than the time it has taken you to read this. But you know how time works. When I remember my life the longest years—the graded and measured years at that high school, the sanitary and clinical years at hospitals and facilities with my father—all accordion down in their repetitive way to nothing. The brief times that I lived on Marie’s land, and on Lucie’s land; and with the woman from Los Angeles—those times now billow out like banners and those days become longer than years.

Eternity, as the teaching goes, is not later. I suspect that by the moment of my death the time I spent sliding across and down Josta’s side, from hip to shoulder, there in the heart of the stampede among the wild horses, there at the dwelling place of the horse warrior as she pulled away into the further valley—as even in that very moment I was full and fully conscious of the hope simultaneous with fear of becoming and being someone in whom a beloved and her friends could see magic hidden even from myself, that hope and fear that had driven me to spend the useless extra day trying to ride a horse through a wilderness—will seem to have lasted as long as all the rest of my life. Hope that I could be that someone. Fear because if I could be, then all impossible things—including of course the moment of my death—might be possible.

Sometimes—say, a wedding day—all of life moves under you at the flying pace. Other times—say, my hundred identical walks to and through the supermarket during the two years of covid lockdowns in Manhattan that I like so many spent alone and unassisted—will collapse into nothing. My single achievement during that enduringly isolating time was to, on those supermarket walks, recite and memorize the first twelve lines of The Man from Snowy River. This is the canonical exemplar of folk Australian cowboy poetry written in 1890 by the irresistibly named Banjo Paterson. Whatever fog that the virus settled then onto my brain today already steals the words back. The hero of the ballad, the man from Snowy River, is an undersized rider on an undersized horse, who after being rejected by them joins a posse of the local country’s finest riders to retrieve a thoroughbred colt—offspring of the champion Regret—that had escaped to join the local wild horses. In legend, long after the end of the poem, the man from Snowy River dies at 33. In the action of the poem, this horse warrior finds his true dwelling place, which is far past the faltering posse and at the center of those wild horses’ stampede—down a steep stony valley, his own horse, “blood from hip to shoulder with the spur.” From which place, he, “alone and unassisted brought them back.” I think about him—the slippery one, the unlucky traveler—leaving and returning across that valley dividing wilderness and homecoming, mortality and divinity: a god between worlds.

Subscribe now

At long last, the final installment of Tolstoy’s spiritual autobiography, A Confession. You can read the previous installments here:

1 - In which Tolstoy recalls his childhood religion, and eventually turns to unbelief…

2 - In which Tolstoy grapples with despair, and an unsatisfying search for meaning….

3 - Tolstoy on the brink of suicide.

4 - Tolstoy explores science, philosophy, and the limits of reason…

5 - Tolstoy finds faith anew, but still struggles….

Like the historical Cluny Abbey, it is our mission to curate both forward-looking, spiritually significant new writing, and to bring what’s best from the past into our digital age. If you have any favorite old writing that you think is worth re-upping, we’d love to hear from you at journal@cluny.org.

XV

How often I envied the peasants their illiteracy and lack of learning! Those statements in the creeds which to me were evident absurdities, for them contained nothing false; they could accept them and could believe in the truth—the truth I believed in. Only to me, unhappy man, was it clear that with truth falsehood was interwoven by finest threads, and that I could not accept it in that form.

So I lived for about three years. At first, when I was only slightly associated with truth as a catechumen and was only scenting out what seemed to me clearest, these encounters struck me less. When I did not understand anything, I said, “It is my fault, I am sinful”; but the more I became imbued with the truths I was learning, the more they became the basis of my life, the more oppressive and the more painful became these encounters and the sharper became the line between what I did not understand because I was not able to understand it, and what could not be understood except by lying to oneself.

In spite of my doubts and sufferings I still clung to the Orthodox Church. But questions of life arose which had to be decided; and the decision of these questions by the Church—contrary to the very basis of the belief by which I lived—obliged me at last to renounce communion with Orthodoxy as impossible. These questions were: first the relation of the Orthodox Eastern Church to other Churches—to the Catholics, and to the so-called sectarians. At that time, in consequence of my interest in religion, I came into touch with believers of various faiths: Catholics, Protestants, Old-Believers, Molokáns, and others. And I met among them many men of lofty morals who were truly religious. I wished to be a brother to them. And what happened? That teaching which promised to unite all in one faith and love—that very teaching, in the person of its best representatives, told me that these men were all living a lie; that what gave them their power of life was a temptation of the devil; and that we alone possessed the only possible truth. And I saw that all who do not profess an identical faith with themselves are considered by the Orthodox to be heretics, just as the Catholics and others consider the Orthodox to be heretics. And I saw that the Orthodox (though they try to hide this) regard with hostility all who do not express their faith by the same external symbols and words as themselves; and this is naturally so: first, because the assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth, is the most cruel thing one man can say to another; and secondly, because a man loving his children and brothers cannot help being hostile to those who wish to pervert his children and brothers to a false belief. And that hostility is increased in proportion to one’s greater knowledge of theology. And to me who considered that truth lay in union by love, it became self-evident that theology was itself destroying what it ought to produce.

This offense is so obvious to us educated people who have lived in countries where various religions are professed and have seen the contempt, self-assurance, and invincible contradiction with which Catholics behave to the Orthodox and to the Protestants, and the Orthodox to Catholics and Protestants, and the Protestants to the two others, and the similar attitude of Old-Believers, Páshkovites (Russian Evangelicals), Shakers, and all religions—that the very obviousness of the temptation at first perplexes us. One says to oneself: it is impossible that it is so simple and that people do not see that if two assertions are mutually contradictory, then neither of them has the sole truth which faith should possess.

There is something else here, there must be some explanation. I thought there was, and sought that explanation and read all I could on the subject, and consulted all whom I could. And no one gave me any explanation, except the one which causes the Súmsky Hussars to consider the Súmsky Hussars the best regiment in the world, and the Yellow Uhlans to consider that the best regiment in the world is the Yellow Uhlans. The ecclesiastics of all the different creeds, through their best representatives, told me nothing but that they believed themselves to have the truth and the others to be in error, and that all they could do was to pray for them. I went to archimandrites, bishops, elders, monks of the strictest orders, and asked them; but none of them made any attempt to explain the matter to me except one man, who explained it all and explained it so that I never asked anyone any more about it. I said that for every unbeliever turning to a belief (and all our young generation are in a position to do so) the question that presents itself first is, why is truth not in Lutheranism nor in Catholicism, but in Orthodoxy? Educated in the high school he cannot help knowing—what the peasants do not know—that the Protestants and Catholics equally affirm that their faith is the only true one. Historical evidence, twisted by each religion in its own favor, is insufficient. Is it not possible, said I, to understand the teaching in a loftier way, so that from its height the differences should disappear, as they do for one who believes truly? Can we not go further along a path like the one we are following with the Old-Believers? They emphasize the fact that they have a differently shaped cross and different alleluias and a different procession round the altar. We reply: You believe in the Nicene Creed, in the seven sacraments, and so do we. Let us hold to that, and in other matters do as you please. We have united with them by placing the essentials of faith above the unessentials. Now with the Catholics can we not say: You believe in so and so and in so and so, which are the chief things, and as for the Filioque clause and the Pope—do as you please. Can we not say the same to the Protestants, uniting with them in what is most important?

My interlocutor agreed with my thoughts, but told me that such concessions would bring reproach on the spiritual authorities for deserting the faith of our forefathers, and this would produce a schism; and the vocation of the spiritual authorities is to safeguard in all its purity the Greco-Russian Orthodox faith inherited from our forefathers.

And I understood it all. I am seeking a faith, the power of life; and they are seeking the best way to fulfill in the eyes of men certain human obligations. And they fulfill them in a human way. However much they may talk of their pity for their erring brethren, and of addressing prayers for them to the throne of the Almighty—to carry out human purposes violence is necessary, and it has always been applied and is and will be applied. If of two religions each considers itself true and the other false, then men desiring to attract others to the truth will preach their own doctrine. And if a false teaching is preached to the inexperienced sons of their Church—which has the truth—then that Church cannot but burn the books and remove the man who is misleading its sons. What is to be done with a sectarian—burning, in the opinion of the Orthodox, with the fire of false doctrine—who in the most important affair of life, in faith, misleads the sons of the Church? What can be done with him except to cut off his head or to incarcerate him? Under the Tsar Aléxis Mikháylovich people were burned at the stake, that is to say, the severest method of punishment of the time was applied, and in our day also the severest method of punishment is applied—detention in solitary confinement.

And I turned my attention to what is done in the name of religion and was horrified, and I almost entirely abjured Orthodoxy.

The second question was with regard to war and executions.

At that time Russia was at war. And Russians, in the name of Christian love, began to kill their fellow men. It was impossible not to think about this, and not to see that killing is an evil repugnant to the first principles of any faith. Yet prayers were said in the churches for the success of our arms, and the teachers of the Faith acknowledged killing to be an act resulting from the Faith. And besides the murders during the war, I saw, during the disturbances which followed the war, Church dignitaries and teachers and monks of the lesser and stricter orders who approved the killing of helpless, erring youths. And I took note of all that is done by men who profess Christianity, and I was horrified.

XVI

And I ceased to doubt, and became fully convinced that not all was true in the religion I had joined. Formerly I should have said that it was all false, but I could not say so now. The whole of the people possessed a knowledge of the truth, for otherwise they could not have lived. Moreover, that knowledge was accessible to me, for I had felt it and had lived by it. But I no longer doubted that there was also falsehood in it. And all that had previously repelled me now presented itself vividly before me. And though I saw that among the peasants there was a smaller admixture of the lies that repelled me than among the representatives of the Church, I still saw that in the people’s belief also falsehood was mingled with the truth.

But where did the truth and where did the falsehood come from? Both the falsehood and the truth were contained in the so-called holy tradition and in the Scriptures. Both the falsehood and the truth had been handed down by what is called the Church.

And whether I liked or not, I was brought to the study and investigation of these writings and traditions—which till now I had been so afraid to investigate.

And I turned to the examination of that same theology which I had once rejected with such contempt as unnecessary. Formerly it seemed to me a series of unnecessary absurdities, when on all sides I was surrounded by manifestations of life which seemed to me clear and full of sense; now I should have been glad to throw away what would not enter a healthy head, but I had nowhere to turn to. On this teaching religious doctrine rests, or at least with it the only knowledge of the meaning of life that I have found is inseparably connected. However wild it may seem to my firm old mind, it was the only hope of salvation. It had to be carefully, attentively examined in order to understand it, and not even to understand it as I understand the propositions of science: I do not seek that, nor can I seek it, knowing the special character of religious knowledge. I shall not seek the explanation of everything. I know that the explanation of everything, like the commencement of everything, must be concealed in infinity. But I wish to understand in a way which will bring me to what is inevitably inexplicable. I wish to recognize anything that is inexplicable as being so not because the demands of my reason are wrong (they are right, and apart from them I can understand nothing), but because I recognize the limits of my intellect. I wish to understand in such a way that everything that is inexplicable shall present itself to me as being necessarily inexplicable, and not as being something I am under an arbitrary obligation to believe.

That there is truth in the teaching is to me indubitable, but it is also certain that there is falsehood in it, and I must find what is true and what is false, and must disentangle the one from the other. I am setting to work upon this task. What of falsehood I have found in the teaching and what I have found of truth, and to what conclusions I came, will form the following parts of this work, which if it be worth it and if anyone wants it, will probably some day be printed somewhere.

1879.

Afterword

The foregoing was written by me some three years ago, and will be printed.

Now, a few days ago, when revising it and returning to the line of thought and to the feelings I had when I was living through it all, I had a dream. This dream expressed in condensed form all that I had experienced and described, and I think therefore that, for those who have understood me, a description of this dream will refresh and elucidate and unify what has been set forth at such length in the foregoing pages. The dream was this:

I saw that I was lying on a bed. I was neither comfortable nor uncomfortable: I was lying on my back. But I began to consider how, and on what, I was lying—a question which had not till then occurred to me. And observing my bed, I saw I was lying on plaited string supports attached to its sides: my feet were resting on one such support, my calves on another, and my legs felt uncomfortable. I seemed to know that those supports were movable, and with a movement of my foot I pushed away the furthest of them at my feet—it seemed to me that it would be more comfortable so. But I pushed it away too far and wished to reach it again with my foot, and that movement caused the next support under my calves to slip away also, so that my legs hung in the air. I made a movement with my whole body to adjust myself, fully convinced that I could do so at once; but the movement caused the other supports under me to slip and to become entangled, and I saw that matters were going quite wrong: the whole of the lower part of my body slipped and hung down, though my feet did not reach the ground. I was holding on only by the upper part of my back, and not only did it become uncomfortable but I was even frightened. And then only did I ask myself about something that had not before occurred to me. I asked myself: Where am I and what am I lying on? and I began to look around, and first of all to look down in the direction which my body was hanging and whither I felt I must soon fall. I looked down and did not believe my eyes. I was not only at a height comparable to the height of the highest towers or mountains, but at a height such as I could never have imagined.

I could not even make out whether I saw anything there below, in that bottomless abyss over which I was hanging and whither I was being drawn. My heart contracted, and I experienced horror. To look thither was terrible. If I looked thither I felt that I should at once slip from the last support and perish. And I did not look. But not to look was still worse, for I thought of what would happen to me directly if I fell from the last support. And I felt that from fear I was losing my last supports, and that my back was slowly slipping lower and lower. Another moment and I should drop off. And then it occurred to me that this cannot be real. It is a dream. Wake up!

I try to arouse myself but cannot do so. What am I to do? What am I to do? I ask myself, and look upwards. Above, there is also an infinite space. I look into the immensity of sky and try to forget about the immensity below, and I really do forget it. The immensity below repels and frightens me; the immensity above attracts and strengthens me. I am still supported above the abyss by the last supports that have not yet slipped from under me; I know that I am hanging, but I look only upwards and my fear passes. As happens in dreams, a voice says: “Notice this, this is it!” And I look more and more into the infinite above me and feel that I am becoming calm. I remember all that has happened, and remember how it all happened; how I moved my legs, how I hung down, how frightened I was, and how I was saved from fear by looking upwards. And I ask myself: Well, and now am I not hanging just the same? And I do not so much look round as experience with my whole body the point of support on which I am held. I see that I no longer hang as if about to fall, but am firmly held. I ask myself how I am held: I feel about, look round, and see that under me, under the middle of my body, there is one support, and that when I look upwards I lie on it in the position of securest balance, and that it alone gave me support before. And then, as happens in dreams, I imagined the mechanism by means of which I was held; a very natural, intelligible, and sure means, though to one awake that mechanism has no sense. I was even surprised in my dream that I had not understood it sooner. It appeared that at my head there was a pillar, and the security of that slender pillar was undoubted though there was nothing to support it. From the pillar a loop hung very ingeniously and yet simply, and if one lay with the middle of one’s body in that loop and looked up, there could be no question of falling. This was all clear to me, and I was glad and tranquil. And it seemed as if someone said to me: “See that you remember.”

And I awoke.

Subscribe now

We continue our serialization of Tolstoy’s spiritual autobiography, A Confession. Below is part five of six. You can read the previous installments here:

1 / 2 / 3 / 4.

XII

The consciousness of the error in reasonable knowledge helped me to free myself from the temptation of idle reasoning. The conviction that knowledge of truth can only be found by living led me to doubt the rightness of my life; but I was saved only by the fact that I was able to tear myself from my exclusiveness and to see the real life of the plain working people, and to understand that it alone is real life. I understood that if I wish to understand life and its meaning, I must not live the life of a parasite, but must live a real life, and—taking the meaning given to live by real humanity and merging myself in that life—verify it.

During that time this is what happened to me. During that whole year, when I was asking myself almost every moment whether I should not end matters with a noose or a bullet—all that time, together with the course of thought and observation about which I have spoken, my heart was oppressed with a painful feeling, which I can only describe as a search for God.

I say that that search for God was not reasoning, but a feeling, because that search proceeded not from the course of my thoughts—it was even directly contrary to them—but proceeded from the heart. It was a feeling of fear, orphanage, isolation in a strange land, and a hope of help from someone.

Though I was quite convinced of the impossibility of proving the existence of a Deity (Kant had shown, and I quite understood him, that it could not be proved), I yet sought for God, hoped that I should find Him, and from old habit addressed prayers to that which I sought but had not found. I went over in my mind the arguments of Kant and Schopenhauer showing the impossibility of proving the existence of a God, and I began to verify those arguments and to refute them.

Cause, said I to myself, is not a category of thought such as Time and Space. If I exist, there must be some cause for it, and a cause of causes. And that first cause of all is what men have called “God.” And I paused on that thought, and tried with all my being to recognize the presence of that cause. And as soon as I acknowledged that there is a force in whose power I am, I at once felt that I could live. But I asked myself: What is that cause, that force? How am I to think of it? What are my relations to that which I call “God”? And only the familiar replies occurred to me: “He is the Creator and Preserver.” This reply did not satisfy me, and I felt I was losing within me what I needed for my life. I became terrified and began to pray to Him whom I sought, that He should help me. But the more I prayed the more apparent it became to me that He did not hear me, and that there was no one to whom to address myself. And with despair in my heart that there is no God at all, I said: “Lord, have mercy, save me! Lord, teach me!” But no one had mercy on me, and I felt that my life was coming to a standstill.

But again and again, from various sides, I returned to the same conclusion: that I could not have come into the world without any cause or reason or meaning; I could not be such a fledgling fallen from its nest as I felt myself to be. Or, granting that I be such, lying on my back crying in the high grass, even then I cry because I know that a mother has borne me within her, has hatched me, warmed me, fed me, and loved me. Where is she—that mother? If I have been deserted, who has deserted me? I cannot hide from myself that someone bore me, loving me. Who was that someone? Again “God”? He knows and sees my searching, my despair, and my struggle.

“He exists,” said I to myself. And I had only for an instant to admit that, and at once life rose within me, and I felt the possibility and joy of being. But again, from the admission of the existence of a God I went on to seek my relation with Him; and again I imagined that God—our Creator in Three Persons who sent His Son, the Savior—and again that God, detached from the world and from me, melted like a block of ice, melted before my eyes, and again nothing remained, and again the spring of life dried up within me, and I despaired and felt that I had nothing to do but to kill myself. And the worst of all was, that I felt I could not do it.

Not twice or three times, but tens and hundreds of times, I reached those conditions, first of joy and animation, and then of despair and consciousness of the impossibility of living.

I remember that it was in early spring: I was alone in the wood listening to its sounds. I listened and thought ever of the same thing, as I had constantly done during those last three years. I was again seeking God.

“Very well, there is no God,” said I to myself; “there is no one who is not my imagination but a reality like my whole life. He does not exist, and no miracles can prove His existence, because the miracles would be my imagination, besides being irrational.

“But my perception of God, of Him whom I seek,” I asked myself, “where has that perception come from?” And again at this thought the glad waves of life rose within me. All that was around me came to life and received a meaning. But my joy did not last long. My mind continued its work.

“The conception of God is not God,” said I to myself. “The conception is what takes place within me. The conception of God is something I can evoke or can refrain from evoking in myself. That is not what I seek. I seek that without which there can be no life.” And again all around me and within me began to die, and again I wished to kill myself.

But then I turned my gaze upon myself, on what went on within me, and I remembered all those cessations of life and reanimations that recurred within me hundreds of times. I remembered that I only lived at those times when I believed in God. As it was before, so it was now; I need only be aware of God to live; I need only forget Him, or disbelieve Him, and I died.

What is this animation and dying? I do not live when I lose belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live, really live, only when I feel Him and seek Him. “What more do you seek?” exclaimed a voice within me. “This is He. He is that without which one cannot live. To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.”

“Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God.” And more than ever before, all within me and around me lit up, and the light did not again abandon me.

And I was saved from suicide. When and how this change occurred I could not say. As imperceptibly and gradually the force of life in me had been destroyed and I had reached the impossibility of living, a cessation of life and the necessity of suicide, so imperceptibly and gradually did that force of life return to me. And strange to say the strength of life which returned to me was not new, but quite old—the same that had borne me along in my earliest days.

I quite returned to what belonged to my earliest childhood and youth. I returned to the belief in that Will which produced me and desires something of me. I returned to the belief that the chief and only aim of my life is to be better, i.e. to live in accord with that Will. And I returned to the belief that I can find the expression of that Will in what humanity, in the distant past hidden from, has produced for its guidance: that is to say, I returned to a belief in God, in moral perfection, and in a tradition transmitting the meaning of life. There was only this difference, that then all this was accepted unconsciously, while now I knew that without it I could not live.

What happened to me was something like this: I was put into a boat (I do not remember when) and pushed off from an unknown shore, shown the direction of the opposite shore, had oars put into my unpracticed hands, and was left alone. I rowed as best I could and moved forward; but the further I advanced towards the middle of the stream the more rapid grew the current bearing me away from my goal and the more frequently did I encounter others, like myself, borne away by the stream. There were a few rowers who continued to row, there were others who had abandoned their oars; there were large boats and immense vessels full of people. Some struggled against the current, others yielded to it. And the further I went the more, seeing the progress down the current of all those who were adrift, I forgot the direction given me. In the very center of the stream, amid the crowd of boats and vessels which were being borne down stream, I quite lost my direction and abandoned my oars. Around me on all sides, with mirth and rejoicing, people with sails and oars were borne down the stream, assuring me and each other that no other direction was possible. And I believed them and floated with them. And I was carried far; so far that I heard the roar of the rapids in which I must be shattered, and I saw boats shattered in them. And I recollected myself. I was long unable to understand what had happened to me. I saw before me nothing but destruction, towards which I was rushing and which I feared. I saw no safety anywhere and did not know what to do; but, looking back, I perceived innumerable boats which unceasingly and strenuously pushed across the stream, and I remembered about the shore, the oars, and the direction, and began to pull back upwards against the stream and towards the shore.

That shore was God; that direction was tradition; the oars were the freedom given me to pull for the shore and unite with God. And so the force of life was renewed in me and I again began to live.

XIII

I turned from the life of our circle, acknowledging that ours is not life but a simulation of life—that the conditions of superfluity in which we live deprive us of the possibility of understanding life, and that in order to understand life I must understand not an exceptional life such as ours, who are parasites on life, but the life of the simple laboring folk—those who make life—and the meaning which they attribute to it. The simplest laboring people around me were the Russian people, and I turned to them and to the meaning of life which they give. That meaning, if one can put it into words, was as follows: Every man has come into this world by the will of God. And God has so made man that every man can destroy his soul or save it. The aim of man in life is to save his soul, and to save his soul he must live “godly” and to live “godly” he must renounce all the pleasures of life, must labor, humble himself, suffer, and be merciful. That meaning the people obtain from the whole teaching of faith transmitted to them by their pastors and by the traditions that live among the people. This meaning was clear to me and near to my heart. But together with this meaning of the popular faith of our non-sectarian folk, among whom I live, much was inseparably bound up that revolted me and seemed to me inexplicable: sacraments, Church services, fasts, and the adoration of relics and icons. The people cannot separate the one from the other, nor could I. And strange as much of what entered into the faith of these people was to me, I accepted everything, and attended the services, knelt morning and evening in prayer, fasted, and prepared to receive the Eucharist: and at first my reason did not resist anything. The very things that had formerly seemed to me impossible did not now evoke in me any opposition.

My relations to faith before and after were quite different. Formerly life itself seemed to me full of meaning and faith presented itself as the arbitrary assertion of propositions to me quite unnecessary, unreasonable, and disconnected from life. I then asked myself what meaning those propositions had and, convinced that they had none, I rejected them. Now on the contrary I knew firmly that my life otherwise has, and can have, no meaning, and the articles of faith were far from presenting themselves to me as unnecessary—on the contrary I had been led by indubitable experience to the conviction that only these propositions presented by faith give life a meaning. Formerly I looked on them as on some quite unnecessary gibberish, but now, if I did not understand them, I yet knew that they had a meaning, and I said to myself that I must learn to understand them.

I argued as follows, telling myself that the knowledge of faith flows, like all humanity with its reason, from a mysterious source. That source is God, the origin both of the human body and the human reason. As my body has descended to me from God, so also has my reason and my understanding of life, and consequently the various stages of the development of that understanding of life cannot be false. All that people sincerely believe in must be true; it may be differently expressed but it cannot be a lie, and therefore if it presents itself to me as a lie, that only means that I have not understood it. Furthermore I said to myself, the essence of every faith consists in its giving life a meaning which death does not destroy. Naturally for a faith to be able to reply to the questions of a king dying in luxury, of an old slave tormented by overwork, of an unreasoning child, of a wise old man, of a half-witted old woman, of a young and happy wife, of a youth tormented by passions, of all people in the most varied conditions of life and education—if there is one reply to the one eternal question of life: “Why do I live and what will result from my life?”—the reply, though one in its essence, must be endlessly varied in its presentation; and the more it is one, the more true and profound it is, the more strange and deformed must it naturally appear in its attempted expression, conformably to the education and position of each person. But this argument, justifying in my eyes the queerness of much on the ritual side of religion, did not suffice to allow me in the one great affair of life—religion—to do things which seemed to me questionable. With all my soul I wished to be in a position to mingle with the people, fulfilling the ritual side of their religion; but I could not do it. I felt that I should lie to myself and mock at what was sacred to me, were I to do so. At this point, however, our new Russian theological writers came to my rescue.

According to the explanation these theologians gave, the fundamental dogma of our faith is the infallibility of the Church. From the admission of that dogma follows inevitably the truth of all that is professed by the Church. The Church as an assembly of true believers united by love and therefore possessed of true knowledge became the basis of my belief. I told myself that divine truth cannot be accessible to a separate individual; it is revealed only to the whole assembly of people united by love. To attain truth one must not separate, and in order not to separate one must love and must endure things one may not agree with.

Truth reveals itself to love, and if you do not submit to the rites of the Church you transgress against love; and by transgressing against love you deprive yourself of the possibility of recognizing the truth. I did not then see the sophistry contained in this argument. I did not see that union in love may give the greatest love, but certainly cannot give us divine truth expressed in the definite words of the Nicene Creed. I also did not perceive that love cannot make a certain expression of truth an obligatory condition of union. I did not then see these mistakes in the argument and thanks to it was able to accept and perform all the rites of the Orthodox Church without understanding most of them. I then tried with all the strength of my soul to avoid all arguments and contradictions, and tried to explain as reasonably as possible the Church statements I encountered.

When fulfilling the rites of the Church I humbled my reason and submitted to the tradition possessed by all humanity. I united myself with my forefathers: the father, mother, and grandparents I loved. They and all my predecessors believed and lived, and they produced me. I united myself also with the millions of the common people whom I respected. Moreover, those actions had nothing bad in themselves (“bad” I considered the indulgence of one’s desires). When rising early for Church services I knew I was doing well, if only because I was sacrificing my bodily ease to humble my mental pride, for the sake of union with my ancestors and contemporaries, and for the sake of finding the meaning of life. It was the same with my preparations to receive Communion, and with the daily reading of prayers with genuflections, and also with the observance of all the fasts. However insignificant these sacrifices might be I made them for the sake of something good. I fasted, prepared for Communion, and observed the fixed hours of prayer at home and in church. During Church service I attended to every word, and gave them a meaning whenever I could. In the Mass the most important words for me were: “Let us love one another in conformity!” The further words, “In unity we believe in the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost,” I passed by, because I could not understand them.

XIV

It was then so necessary for me to believe in order to live that I unconsciously concealed from myself the contradictions and obscurities of theology. But this reading of meanings into the rites had its limits. If the chief words in the prayer for the Emperor became more and more clear to me, if I found some explanation for the words “and remembering our Sovereign Most-Holy Mother of God and all the Saints, ourselves and one another, we give our whole life to Christ our God,” if I explained to myself the frequent repetition of prayers for the Tsar and his relations by the fact that they are more exposed to temptations than other people and therefore are more in need of being prayed for—the prayers about subduing our enemies and evil under our feet (even if one tried to say that sin was the enemy prayed against), these and other prayers, such as the “cherubic song” and the whole sacrament of oblation, or “the chosen warriors,” etc.—quite two-thirds of all the services—either remained completely incomprehensible or, when I forced an explanation into them, made me feel that I was lying, thereby quite destroying my relation to God and depriving me of all possibility of belief.

I felt the same about the celebration of the chief holidays. To remember the Sabbath, that is to devote one day to God, was something I could understand. But the chief holiday was in commemoration of the Resurrection, the reality of which I could not picture to myself or understand. And that name of “Resurrection” was also given the weekly holiday. And on those days the Sacrament of the Eucharist was administered, which was quite unintelligible to me. The rest of the twelve great holidays, except Christmas, commemorated miracles—the things I tried not to think about in order not to deny: the Ascension, Pentecost, Epiphany, the Feast of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin, etc. At the celebration of these holidays, feeling that importance was being attributed to the very things that to me presented a negative importance, I either devised tranquillizing explanations or shut my eyes in order not to see what tempted me.

Most of all this happened to me when taking part in the most usual Sacraments, which are considered the most important: baptism and communion. There I encountered not incomprehensible but fully comprehensible doings: doings which seemed to me to lead into temptation, and I was in a dilemma—whether to lie or to reject them.

Never shall I forget the painful feeling I experienced the day I received the Eucharist for the first time after many years. The service, confession, and prayers were quite intelligible and produced in me a glad consciousness that the meaning of life was being revealed to me. The Communion itself I explained as an act performed in remembrance of Christ, and indicating a purification from sin and the full acceptance of Christ’s teaching. If that explanation was artificial I did not notice its artificiality: so happy was I at humbling and abasing myself before the priest—a simple, timid country clergyman—turning all the dirt out of my soul and confessing my vices, so glad was I to merge in thought with the humility of the fathers who wrote the prayers of the office, so glad was I of union with all who have believed and now believe, that I did not notice the artificiality of my explanation. But when I approached the altar gates, and the priest made me say that I believed that what I was about to swallow was truly flesh and blood, I felt a pain in my heart: it was not merely a false note, it was a cruel demand made by someone or other who evidently had never known what faith is.

I now permit myself to say that it was a cruel demand, but I did not then think so: only it was indescribably painful to me. I was no longer in the position in which I had been in youth when I thought all in life was clear; I had indeed come to faith because, apart from faith, I had found nothing, certainly nothing, except destruction; therefore to throw away that faith was impossible and I submitted. And I found in my soul a feeling which helped me to endure it. This was the feeling of self-abasement and humility. I humbled myself, swallowed that flesh and blood without any blasphemous feelings and with a wish to believe. But the blow had been struck and, knowing what awaited me, I could not go a second time.

I continued to fulfill the rites of the Church and still believed that the doctrine I was following contained the truth, when something happened to me which I now understand but which then seemed strange.

I was listening to the conversation of an illiterate peasant, a pilgrim, about God, faith, life, and salvation, when a knowledge of faith revealed itself to me. I drew near to the people, listening to their opinions of life and faith, and I understood the truth more and more. So also was it when I read the Lives of Holy Men, which became my favorite books. Putting aside the miracles and regarding them as fables illustrating thoughts, this reading revealed to me life’s meaning. There were the lives of Makarius the Great, the story of Buddha, there were the words of St. John Chrysostom, and there were the stories of the traveller in the well, the monk who found some gold, and of Peter the publican. There were stories of the martyrs, all announcing that death does not exclude life, and there were the stories of ignorant, stupid men, who knew nothing of the teaching of the Church but who yet were saved.

But as soon as I met learned believers or took up their books, doubt of myself, dissatisfaction, and exasperated disputation were roused within me, and I felt that the more I entered into the meaning of these men’s speech, the more I went astray from truth and approached an abyss.

Subscribe now

We continue our serialization of Tolstoy’s spiritual autobiography, A Confession. Below is part four of six. You can read the other installments here — 1, 2, 3.

A contradiction arose from which there were two exits. Either that which I called reason was not so rational as I supposed, or that which seemed to me irrational was not so irrational as I supposed. And I began to verify the line of argument of my rational knowledge.

Verifying the line of argument of rational knowledge I found it quite correct. The conclusion that life is nothing was inevitable; but I noticed a mistake. The mistake lay in this, that my reasoning was not in accord with the question I had put. The question was: “Why should I live, that is to say, what real, permanent result will come out of my illusory transitory life—what meaning has my finite existence in this infinite world?” And to reply to that question I had studied life.

The solution of all the possible questions of life could evidently not satisfy me, for my question, simple as it at first appeared, included a demand for an explanation of the finite in terms of the infinite, and vice versa.

I asked: “What is the meaning of my life, beyond time, cause, and space?” And I replied to quite another question: “What is the meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?” With the result that, after long efforts of thought, the answer I reached was: “None.”

In my reasonings I constantly compared (nor could I do otherwise) the finite with the finite, and the infinite with the infinite; but for that reason I reached the inevitable result: force is force, matter is matter, will is will, the infinite is the infinite, nothing is nothing—and that was all that could result.

It was something like what happens in mathematics, when thinking to solve an equation, we find we are working on an identity. The line of reasoning is correct, but results in the answer that a equals a, or x equals x, or 0 equals 0. The same thing happened with my reasoning in relation to the question of the meaning of my life. The replies given by all science to that question only result in—identity.

And really, strictly scientific knowledge—that knowledge which begins, as Descartes’s did, with complete doubt about everything—rejects all knowledge admitted on faith and builds everything afresh on the laws of reason and experience, and cannot give any other reply to the question of life than that which I obtained: an indefinite reply. Only at first had it seemed to me that knowledge had given a positive reply—the reply of Schopenhauer: that life has no meaning and is an evil. But on examining the matter I understood that the reply is not positive, it was only my feeling that so expressed it. Strictly expressed, as it is by the Brahmins and by Solomon and Schopenhauer, the reply is merely indefinite, or an identity: 0 equals 0, life is nothing. So that philosophic knowledge denies nothing, but only replies that the question cannot be solved by it—that for it the solution remains indefinite.

Having understood this, I understood that it was not possible to seek in rational knowledge for a reply to my question, and that the reply given by rational knowledge is a mere indication that a reply can only be obtained by a different statement of the question and only when the relation of the finite to the infinite is included in the question. And I understood that, however irrational and distorted might be the replies given by faith, they have this advantage, that they introduce into every answer a relation between the finite and the infinite, without which there can be no solution.

In whatever way I stated the question, that relation appeared in the answer. How am I to live?—According to the law of God. What real result will come of my life?—Eternal torment or eternal bliss. What meaning has life that death does not destroy?—Union with the eternal God: heaven.

So that besides rational knowledge, which had seemed to me the only knowledge, I was inevitably brought to acknowledge that all live humanity has another irrational knowledge—faith which makes it possible to live. Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before, but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life, and that consequently it makes life possible. Reasonable knowledge had brought me to acknowledge that life is senseless—my life had come to a halt and I wished to destroy myself. Looking around on the whole of mankind I saw that people live and declare that they know the meaning of life. I looked at myself—I had lived as long as I knew a meaning of life. As to others so also to me faith had given a meaning to life and had made life possible.

Looking again at people of other lands, at my contemporaries and at their predecessors, I saw the same thing. Where there is life, there since man began faith has made life possible for him, and the chief outline of that faith is everywhere and always identical.

Whatever the faith may be, and whatever answers it may give, and to whomsoever it gives them, every such answer gives to the finite existence of man an infinite meaning, a meaning not destroyed by sufferings, deprivations, or death. This means that only in faith can we find for life a meaning and a possibility. What, then, is this faith? And I understood that faith is not merely “the evidence of things not seen”, and is not a revelation (that defines only one of the indications of faith), is not the relation of man to God (one has first to define faith and then God, and not define faith through God); it is not only agreement with what has been told one (as faith is most usually supposed to be), but faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live.

And I recalled the whole course of my mental labour and was horrified. It was now clear to me that for man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite. Such an explanation I had had; but as long as I believed in the finite I did not need the explanation, and I began to verify it by reason. And in the light of reason the whole of my former explanation flew to atoms. But a time came when I ceased to believe in the finite. And then I began to build up on rational foundations, out of what I knew, an explanation which would give a meaning to life; but nothing could I build. Together with the best human intellects I reached the result that 0 equals 0, and was much astonished at that conclusion, though nothing else could have resulted.

What was I doing when I sought an answer in the experimental sciences? I wished to know why I live, and for this purpose studied all that is outside me. Evidently I might learn much, but nothing of what I needed.

What was I doing when I sought an answer in philosophical knowledge? I was studying the thoughts of those who had found themselves in the same position as I, lacking a reply to the question, “Why do I live?” Evidently I could learn nothing but what I knew myself, namely that nothing can be known.

What am I?—A part of the infinite. In those few words lies the whole problem.

Is it possible that humanity has only put that question to itself since yesterday? And can no one before me have set himself that question—a question so simple, and one that springs to the tongue of every wise child?

Surely that question has been asked since man began; and naturally for the solution of that question since man began it has been equally insufficient to compare the finite with the finite and the infinite with the infinite, and since man began the relation of the finite to the infinite has been sought out and expressed.

All these conceptions in which the finite has been adjusted to the infinite and a meaning found for life—the conception of God, of will, of goodness—we submit to logical examination. And all those conceptions fail to stand reason’s criticism.

Were it not so terrible it would be ludicrous with what pride and self-satisfaction we, like children, pull the watch to pieces, take out the spring, make a toy of it, and are then surprised that the watch does not go.

A solution of the contradiction between the finite and the infinite, and such a reply to the question of life as will make it possible to live, is necessary and precious. And that is the only solution which we find everywhere, always, and among all peoples: a solution descending from times in which we lose sight of the life of man, a solution so difficult that we can compose nothing like it—and this solution we light-heartedly destroy in order again to set the same question, which is natural to everyone and to which we have no answer.

The conception of an infinite god, the divinity of the soul, the connection of human affairs with God, the unity and existence of the soul, man’s conception of moral goodness and evil—are conceptions formulated in the hidden infinity of human thought, they are those conceptions without which neither life nor I should exist; yet rejecting all that labour of the whole of humanity, I wished to remake it afresh myself and in my own manner.

I did not then think like that, but the germs of these thoughts were already in me. I understood, in the first place, that my position with Schopenhauer and Solomon, notwithstanding our wisdom, was stupid: we see that life is an evil and yet continue to live. That is evidently stupid, for if life is senseless and I am so fond of what is reasonable, it should be destroyed, and then there would be no one to challenge it. Secondly, I understood that all one’s reasonings turned in a vicious circle like a wheel out of gear with its pinion. However much and however well we may reason we cannot obtain a reply to the question; and 0 will always equal 0, and therefore our path is probably erroneous. Thirdly, I began to understand that in the replies given by faith is stored up the deepest human wisdom and that I had no right to deny them on the ground of reason, and that those answers are the only ones which reply to life’s question.

X

I understood this, but it made matters no better for me. I was now ready to accept any faith if only it did not demand of me a direct denial of reason—which would be a falsehood. And I studied Buddhism and Islam from books, and most of all I studied Christianity both from books and from the people around me.

Naturally I first of all turned to the Orthodox of my circle, to people who were learned: to Church theologians, monks, to theologians of the newest shade, and even to Evangelicals who profess salvation by belief in the Redemption. And I seized on these believers and questioned them as to their beliefs and their understanding of the meaning of life.

But though I made all possible concessions, and avoided all disputes, I could not accept the faith of these people. I saw that what they gave out as their faith did not explain the meaning of life but obscured it, and that they themselves affirm their belief not to answer that question of life which brought me to faith, but for some other aims alien to me.

I remember the painful feeling of fear of being thrown back into my former state of despair, after the hope I often and often experienced in my intercourse with these people.

The more fully they explained to me their doctrines, the more clearly did I perceive their error and realized that my hope of finding in their belief an explanation of the meaning of life was vain.

It was not that in their doctrines they mixed many unnecessary and unreasonable things with the Christian truths that had always been near to me: that was not what repelled me. I was repelled by the fact that these people’s lives were like my own, with only this difference—that such a life did not correspond to the principles they expounded in their teachings. I clearly felt that they deceived themselves and that they, like myself, found no other meaning in life than to live while life lasts, taking all one’s hands can seize. I saw this because if they had had a meaning which destroyed the fear of loss, suffering, and death, they would not have feared these things. But they, these believers of our circle, just like myself, living in sufficiency and superfluity, tried to increase or preserve them, feared privations, suffering, and death, and just like myself and all of us unbelievers, lived to satisfy their desires, and lived just as badly, if not worse, than the unbelievers.

No arguments could convince me of the truth of their faith. Only deeds which showed that they saw a meaning in life making what was so dreadful to me—poverty, sickness, and death—not dreadful to them, could convince me. And such deeds I did not see among the various believers in our circle. On the contrary, I saw such deeds done^[1] by people of our circle who were the most unbelieving, but never by our so-called believers.

And I understood that the belief of these people was not the faith I sought, and that their faith is not a real faith but an epicurean consolation in life.

I understood that that faith may perhaps serve, if not for a consolation at least for some distraction for a repentant Solomon on his death-bed, but it cannot serve for the great majority of mankind, who are called on not to amuse themselves while consuming the labour of others but to create life.

For all humanity to be able to live, and continue to live attributing a meaning to life, they, those milliards, must have a different, a real, knowledge of faith. Indeed, it was not the fact that we, with Solomon and Schopenhauer, did not kill ourselves that convinced me of the existence of faith, but the fact that those milliards of people have lived and are living, and have borne Solomon and us on the current of their lives.

And I began to draw near to the believers among the poor, simple, unlettered folk: pilgrims, monks, sectarians, and peasants. The faith of these common people was the same Christian faith as was professed by the pseudo-believers of our circle. Among them, too, I found a great deal of superstition mixed with the Christian truths; but the difference was that the superstitions of the believers of our circle were quite unnecessary to them and were not in conformity with their lives, being merely a kind of epicurean diversion; but the superstitions of the believers among the labouring masses conformed so with their lives that it was impossible to imagine them to oneself without those superstitions, which were a necessary condition of their life. The whole life of believers in our circle was a contradiction of their faith, but the whole life of the working-folk believers was a confirmation of the meaning of life which their faith gave them. And I began to look well into the life and faith of these people, and the more I considered it the more I became convinced that they have a real faith which is a necessity to them and alone gives their life a meaning and makes it possible for them to live. In contrast with what I had seen in our circle—where life without faith is possible and where hardly one in a thousand acknowledges himself to be a believer—among them there is hardly one unbeliever in a thousand. In contrast with what I had seen in our circle, where the whole of life is passed in idleness, amusement, and dissatisfaction, I saw that the whole life of these people was passed in heavy labour, and that they were content with life. In contradistinction to the way in which people of our circle oppose fate and complain of it on account of deprivations and sufferings, these people accepted illness and sorrow without any perplexity or opposition, and with a quiet and firm conviction that all is good. In contradistinction to us, who the wiser we are the less we understand the meaning of life, and see some evil irony in the fact that we suffer and die, these folk live and suffer, and they approach death and suffering with tranquillity and in most cases gladly. In contrast to the fact that a tranquil death, a death without horror and despair, is a very rare exception in our circle, a troubled, rebellious, and unhappy death is the rarest exception among the people. And such people, lacking all that for us and for Solomon is the only good of life and yet experiencing the greatest happiness, are a great multitude. I looked more widely around me. I considered the life of the enormous mass of the people in the past and the present. And of such people, understanding the meaning of life and able to live and to die, I saw not two or three, or tens, but hundreds, thousands, and millions. And they all—endlessly different in their manners, minds, education, and position, as they were—all alike, in complete contrast to my ignorance, knew the meaning of life and death, laboured quietly, endured deprivations and sufferings, and lived and died seeing therein not vanity but good.

And I learnt to love these people. The more I came to know their life, the life of those who are living and of others who are dead of whom I read and heard, the more I loved them and the easier it became for me to live. So I went on for about two years, and a change took place in me which had long been preparing and the promise of which had always been in me. It came about that the life of our circle, the rich and learned, not merely became distasteful to me, but lost all meaning in my eyes. All our actions, discussions, science and art, presented itself to me in a new light. I understood that it is all merely self-indulgence, and that to find a meaning in it is impossible; while the life of the whole labouring people, the whole of mankind who produce life, appeared to me in its true significance. I understood that that is life itself, and that the meaning given to that life is true: and I accepted it.

XI

And remembering how those very beliefs had repelled me and had seemed meaningless when professed by people whose lives conflicted with them, and how these same beliefs attracted me and seemed reasonable when I saw that people lived in accord with them, I understood why I had then rejected those beliefs and found them meaningless, yet now accepted them and found them full of meaning. I understood that I had erred, and why I erred. I had erred not so much because I thought incorrectly as because I lived badly. I understood that it was not an error in my thought that had hid truth from me so much as my life itself in the exceptional conditions of epicurean gratification of desires in which I passed it. I understood that my question as to what my life is, and the answer—an evil—was quite correct. The only mistake was that the answer referred only to my life, while I had referred it to life in general. I asked myself what my life is, and got the reply: An evil and an absurdity. And really my life—a life of indulgence of desires—was senseless and evil, and therefore the reply, “Life is evil and an absurdity,” referred only to my life, but not to human life in general. I understood the truth which I afterwards found in the Gospels, “that men loved darkness rather than the light, for their works were evil. For everyone that doeth ill hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest his works should be reproved.” I perceived that to understand the meaning of life it is necessary first that life should not be meaningless and evil, then we can apply reason to explain it. I understood why I had so long wandered round so evident a truth, and that if one is to think and speak of the life of mankind, one must think and speak of that life and not of the life of some of life’s parasites. That truth was always as true as that two and two are four, but I had not acknowledged it, because on admitting two and two to be four I had also to admit that I was bad; and to feel myself to be good was for me more important and necessary than for two and two to be four. I came to love good people, hated myself, and confessed the truth. Now all became clear to me.

What if an executioner passing his whole life in torturing people and cutting off their heads, or a hopeless drunkard, or a madman settled for life in a dark room which he has fouled and imagines that he would perish if he left—what if he asked himself: “What is life?” Evidently he could get no other reply to that question than that life is the greatest evil, and the madman’s answer would be perfectly correct, but only as applied to himself. What if I am such a madman? What if all we rich and leisured people are such madmen? and I understood that we really are such madmen. I at any rate was certainly such.

And indeed a bird is so made that it must fly, collect food, and build a nest, and when I see that a bird does this I have pleasure in its joy. A goat, a hare, and a wolf are so made that they must feed themselves, and must breed and feed their family, and when they do so I feel firmly assured that they are happy and that their life is a reasonable one. Then what should a man do? He too should produce his living as the animals do, but with this difference, that he will perish if he does it alone; he must obtain it not for himself but for all. And when he does that, I have a firm assurance that he is happy and that his life is reasonable. But what had I done during the whole thirty years of my responsible life? Far from producing sustenance for all, I did not even produce it for myself. I lived as a parasite, and on asking myself, what is the use of my life? I got the reply: “No use.” If the meaning of human life lies in supporting it, how could I—who for thirty years had been engaged not on supporting life but on destroying it in myself and in others—how could I obtain any other answer than that my life was senseless and an evil? ... It was both senseless and evil.

The life of the world endures by someone’s will—by the life of the whole world and by our lives someone fulfils his purpose. To hope to understand the meaning of that will one must first perform it by doing what is wanted of us. But if I will not do what is wanted of me, I shall never understand what is wanted of me, and still less what is wanted of us all and of the whole world.

If a naked, hungry beggar has been taken from the cross-roads, brought into a building belonging to a beautiful establishment, fed, supplied with drink, and obliged to move a handle up and down, evidently, before discussing why he was taken, why he should move the handle, and whether the whole establishment is reasonably arranged—the beggar should first of all move the handle. If he moves the handle he will understand that it works a pump, that the pump draws water and that the water irrigates the garden beds; then he will be taken from the pumping station to another place where he will gather fruits and will enter into the joy of his master, and, passing from lower to higher work, will understand more and more of the arrangements of the establishment, and taking part in it will never think of asking why he is there, and will certainly not reproach the master.

So those who do his will, the simple, unlearned working folk, whom we regard as cattle, do not reproach the master; but we, the wise, eat the master’s food but do not do what the master wishes, and instead of doing it sit in a circle and discuss: “Why should that handle be moved? Isn’t it stupid?” So we have decided. We have decided that the master is stupid, or does not exist, and that we are wise, only we feel that we are quite useless and that we must somehow do away with ourselves.

Subscribe now

We continue our serialization of Tolstoy’s spiritual autobiography, A Confession. Below is part three of six. If you haven’t yet, you can read part one here, and part two here.

*

VII

Not finding an explanation in science I began to seek for it in life, hoping to find it among the people around me. And I began to observe how the people around me—people like myself—lived, and what their attitude was to this question which had brought me to despair.

And this is what I found among people who were in the same position as myself as regards education and manner of life.

I found that for people of my circle there were four ways out of the terrible position in which we are all placed.

The first was that of ignorance. It consists in not knowing, not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity. People of this sort have not yet understood that question of life which presented itself to Schopenhauer, Solomon, and Buddha. They see neither the dragon that awaits them nor the mice gnawing the shrub by which they are hanging, and they lick the drops of honey. But they lick those drops of honey only for a while: something will turn their attention to the dragon and the mice, and there will be an end to their licking. From them I had nothing to learn—one cannot cease to know what one does know.

The second way out is epicureanism. It consists, while knowing the hopelessness of life, in making use meanwhile of the advantages one has, disregarding the dragon and the mice, and licking the honey in the best way, especially if there is much of it within reach. Solomon expresses this way out thus: “Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: and that this should accompany him in his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun.

“Therefore eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine with a merry heart ... Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity ... for this is thy portion in life and in thy labours which thou takest under the sun ... Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is not work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

That is the way in which the majority of people of our circle make life possible for themselves. Their circumstances furnish them with more of welfare than of hardship, and their moral dullness makes it possible for them to forget that the advantage of their position is accidental, and that not everyone can have a thousand wives and palaces like Solomon, that for everyone who has a thousand wives there are a thousand without a wife, and that for each palace there are a thousand people who have to build it in the sweat of their brows; and that the accident that has today made me a Solomon may tomorrow make me a Solomon’s slave. The dullness of these peoples’ imaginations enables them to forget the things that gave Buddha no peace—the inevitability of sickness, old age, and death, which today or tomorrow will destroy all these pleasures.

So think and feel the majority of people of our day and our manner of life. The fact that some of these people declare the dullness of their thoughts and imaginations to be a philosophy, which they call Positive, does not remove them, in my opinion, from the ranks of those who, to avoid seeing the question, lick the honey. I could not imitate these people; not having their dullness of imagination I could not artificially produce it in myself. I could not tear my eyes from the mice and the dragon, as no vital man can after he has once seen them.

The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and an absurdity. A few exceptionally strong and consistent people act so. Having understood the stupidity of the joke that has been played on them, and having understood that it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are means: a rope round one’s neck, water, a knife to stick into one’s heart, or the trains on the railways; and the number of those of our circle who act in this way becomes greater and greater, and for the most part they act so at the best time of their life, when the strength of their mind is in full bloom and few habits degrading to the mind have as yet been acquired.

I saw that this was the worthiest way of escape and I wished to adopt it.

The fourth way out is that of weakness. It consists in seeing the truth of the situation and yet clinging to life, knowing in advance that nothing can come of it. People of this kind know that death is better than life, but not having the strength to act rationally—to end the deception quickly and kill themselves—they seem to wait for something. This is the escape of weakness, for if I know what is best and it is within my power, why not yield to what is best? ... I found myself in that category.

So people of my class evade the terrible contradiction in four ways. Strain my attention as I would, I saw no way except those four. One way was not to understand that life is senseless, vanity, and an evil, and that it is better not to live. I could not help knowing this, and when I once knew it could not shut my eyes to it. The second way was to use life such as it is without thinking of the future. And I could not do that. I, like Sakya Muni, could not ride out hunting when I knew that old age, suffering, and death exist. My imagination was too vivid. Nor could I rejoice in the momentary accidents that for an instant threw pleasure to my lot. The third way, having understood that life is evil and stupid, was to end it by killing oneself. I understood that, but somehow still did not kill myself. The fourth way was to live like Solomon and Schopenhauer—knowing that life is a stupid joke played upon us, and still to go on living, washing oneself, dressing, dining, talking, and even writing books. This was to me repulsive and tormenting, but I remained in that position.

I see now that if I did not kill myself it was due to some dim consciousness of the invalidity of my thoughts. However convincing and indubitable appeared to me the sequence of my thoughts and of those of the wise that have brought us to the admission of the senselessness of life, there remained in me a vague doubt of the justice of my conclusion.

It was like this: I, my reason, have acknowledged that life is senseless. If there is nothing higher than reason (and there is not: nothing can prove that there is), then reason is the creator of life for me. If reason did not exist there would be for me no life. How can reason deny life when it is the creator of life? Or to put it the other way: were there no life, my reason would not exist; therefore reason is life’s son. Life is all. Reason is its fruit yet reason rejects life itself! I felt that there was something wrong here.

Life is a senseless evil, that is certain, said I to myself. Yet I have lived and am still living, and all mankind lived and lives. How is that? Why does it live, when it is possible not to live? Is it that only I and Schopenhauer are wise enough to understand the senselessness and evil of life?

The reasoning showing the vanity of life is not so difficult, and has long been familiar to the very simplest folk; yet they have lived and still live. How is it they all live and never think of doubting the reasonableness of life?

My knowledge, confirmed by the wisdom of the sages, has shown me that everything on earth—organic and inorganic—is all most cleverly arranged—only my own position is stupid. And those fools—the enormous masses of people—know nothing about how everything organic and inorganic in the world is arranged; but they live, and it seems to them that their life is very wisely arranged! ...

And it struck me: “But what if there is something I do not yet know? Ignorance behaves just in that way. Ignorance always says just what I am saying. When it does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid. Indeed, it appears that there is a whole humanity that lived and lives as if it understood the meaning of its life, for without understanding it it could not live; but I say that all this life is senseless and that I cannot live.

“Nothing prevents our denying life by suicide. Well then, kill yourself, and you won’t discuss. If life displeases you, kill yourself! You live, and cannot understand the meaning of life—then finish it, and do not fool about in life, saying and writing that you do not understand it. You have come into good company where people are contented and know what they are doing; if you find it dull and repulsive—go away!”

Indeed, what are we who are convinced of the necessity of suicide yet do not decide to commit it, but the weakest, most inconsistent, and to put it plainly, the stupidest of men, fussing about with our own stupidity as a fool fusses about with a painted hussy? For our wisdom, however indubitable it may be, has not given us the knowledge of the meaning of our life. But all mankind who sustain life—millions of them—do not doubt the meaning of life.

Indeed, from the most distant time of which I know anything, when life began, people have lived knowing the argument about the vanity of life which has shown me its senselessness, and yet they lived attributing some meaning to it.

From the time when any life began among men they had that meaning of life, and they led that life which has descended to me. All that is in me and around me, all, corporeal and incorporeal, is the fruit of their knowledge of life. Those very instruments of thought with which I consider this life and condemn it were all devised not by me but by them. I myself was born, taught, and brought up thanks to them. They dug out the iron, taught us to cut down the forests, tamed the cows and horses, taught us to sow corn and to live together, organized our life, and taught me to think and speak. And I, their product, fed, supplied with drink, taught by them, thinking with their thoughts and words, have argued that they are an absurdity! “There is something wrong,” said I to myself. “I have blundered somewhere.” But it was a long time before I could find out where the mistake was.

VIII

All these doubts, which I am now able to express more or less systematically, I could not then have expressed. I then only felt that however logically inevitable were my conclusions concerning the vanity of life, confirmed as they were by the greatest thinkers, there was something not right about them. Whether it was in the reasoning itself or in the statement of the question I did not know—I only felt that the conclusion was rationally convincing, but that that was insufficient. All these conclusions could not so convince me as to make me do what followed from my reasoning, that is to say, kill myself. And I should have told an untruth had I, without killing myself, said that reason had brought me to the point I had reached. Reason worked, but something else was also working which I can only call a consciousness of life. A force was working which compelled me to turn my attention to this and not to that; and it was this force which extricated me from my desperate situation and turned my mind in quite another direction. This force compelled me to turn my attention to the fact that I and a few hundred similar people are not the whole of mankind, and that I did not yet know the life of mankind.

Looking at the narrow circle of my equals, I saw only people who had not understood the question, or who had understood it and drowned it in life’s intoxication, or had understood it and ended their lives, or had understood it and yet from weakness were living out their desperate life. And I saw no others. It seemed to me that that narrow circle of rich, learned, and leisured people to which I belonged formed the whole of humanity, and that those milliards of others who have lived and are living were cattle of some sort—not real people.

Strange, incredibly incomprehensible as it now seems to me that I could, while reasoning about life, overlook the whole life of mankind that surrounded me on all sides; that I could to such a degree blunder so absurdly as to think that my life, and Solomon’s and Schopenhauer’s, is the real, normal life, and that the life of the milliards is a circumstance undeserving of attention—strange as this now is to me, I see that so it was. In the delusion of my pride of intellect it seemed to me so indubitable that I and Solomon and Schopenhauer had stated the question so truly and exactly that nothing else was possible—so indubitable did it seem that all those milliards consisted of men who had not yet arrived at an apprehension of all the profundity of the question—that I sought for the meaning of my life without it once occurring to me to ask: “But what meaning is and has been given to their lives by all the milliards of common folk who live and have lived in the world?”

I long lived in this state of lunacy, which, in fact if not in words, is particularly characteristic of us very liberal and learned people. But thanks either to the strange physical affection I have for the real laboring people, which compelled me to understand them and to see that they are not so stupid as we suppose, or thanks to the sincerity of my conviction that I could know nothing beyond the fact that the best I could do was to hang myself, at any rate I instinctively felt that if I wished to live and understand the meaning of life, I must seek this meaning not among those who have lost it and wish to kill themselves, but among those milliards of the past and the present who make life and who support the burden of their own lives and of ours also. And I considered the enormous masses of those simple, unlearned, and poor people who have lived and are living and I saw something quite different. I saw that, with rare exceptions, all those milliards who have lived and are living do not fit into my divisions, and that I could not class them as not understanding the question, for they themselves state it and reply to it with extraordinary clearness. Nor could I consider them epicureans, for their life consists more of privations and sufferings than of enjoyments. Still less could I consider them as irrationally dragging on a meaningless existence, for every act of their life, as well as death itself, is explained by them. To kill themselves they consider the greatest evil. It appeared that all mankind had a knowledge, unacknowledged and despised by me, of the meaning of life. It appeared that reasonable knowledge does not give the meaning of life, but excludes life: while the meaning attributed to life by milliards of people, by all humanity, rests on some despised pseudo-knowledge.

Rational knowledge, presented by the learned and wise, denies the meaning of life, but the enormous masses of men, the whole of mankind, receive that meaning in irrational knowledge. And that irrational knowledge is faith, that very thing which I could not but reject. It is God, One in Three; the creation in six days; the devils and angels, and all the rest that I cannot accept as long as I retain my reason.

My position was terrible. I knew I could find nothing along the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life; and there—in faith—was nothing but a denial of reason, which was yet more impossible for me than a denial of life. From rational knowledge it appeared that life is an evil, people know this and it is in their power to end life; yet they lived and still live, and I myself live, though I have long known that life is senseless and an evil. By faith it appears that in order to understand the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which alone a meaning is required.

Subscribe now

We continue our serialization of Tolstoy’s spiritual autobiography, A Confession. Below is part II of VI. If you haven’t yet, you can read Part I here.

IV

My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfill my desires I should not have known what to ask.

If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guessed of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. I had as it were lived, lived, and walked, walked, till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing ahead of me but destruction.

It was impossible to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death—complete annihilation.

It had come to this, that I, a healthy, fortunate man, felt I could no longer live: some irresistible power impelled me to rid myself one way or other of life. I cannot say I wished to kill myself. The power which drew me away from life was stronger, fuller, and more widespread than any mere wish. It was a force similar to the former striving to live, only in a contrary direction. All my strength drew me away from life.

The thought of self-destruction now came to me as naturally as thoughts of how to improve my life had come formerly. And it was so seductive that I had to be cunning with myself lest I should carry it out too hastily. I did not wish to hurry, because I wanted to use all efforts to disentangle the matter.

“If I cannot unravel matters, there will always be time.” And it was then that I, a man favored by fortune, hid a cord from myself lest I should hang myself from the crosspiece of the partition in my room where I undressed alone every evening, and I ceased to go out shooting with a gun lest I should be tempted by so easy a way of ending my life. I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

And all this befell me at a time when all around me I had what is considered complete good fortune. I was not yet fifty; I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved, good children, and a large estate which without much effort on my part improved and increased. I was respected by my relations and acquaintances more than at any previous time. I was praised by others and without much self-deception could consider that my name was famous.

And far from being insane or mentally diseased, I enjoyed on the contrary a strength of mind and body such as I have seldom met with among men of my kind; physically I could keep up with the peasants at mowing, and mentally I could work for eight and ten hours at a stretch without experiencing any ill results from such exertion. And in this situation I came to this—that I could not live, and, fearing death, had to employ cunning with myself to avoid taking my own life.

My mental condition presented itself to me in this way: my life is a stupid and spiteful joke someone has played on me. Though I did not acknowledge a “someone” who created me, yet such a presentation—that someone had played an evil and stupid joke on me by placing me in the world—was the form of expression that suggested itself most naturally to me.

Involuntarily it appeared to me that there, somewhere, was someone who amused himself by watching how I lived for thirty or forty years: learning, developing, maturing in body and mind, and how, having with matured mental powers reached the summit of life from which it all lay before me, I stood on that summit—like an arch-fool—seeing clearly that there is nothing in life, and that there has been and will be nothing. And he was amused. …

But whether that “someone” laughing at me existed or not, I was none the better off. I could give no reasonable meaning to any single action or to my whole life. I was only surprised that I could have avoided understanding this from the very beginning—it has been so long known to all. To-day or to-morrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms.

Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort? … How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.

There is an Eastern fable, told long ago, of a traveller overtaken on a plain by an enraged beast. Escaping from the beast he gets into a dry well, but sees at the bottom of the well a dragon that has opened its jaws to swallow him. And the unfortunate man, not daring to climb out lest he should be destroyed by the enraged beast, and not daring to leap to the bottom of the well lest he should be eaten by the dragon, seizes a twig growing in a crack in the well and clings to it.

His hands are growing weaker and he feels he will soon have to resign himself to the destruction that awaits him above or below, but still he clings on. Then he sees that two mice, a black one and a white one, go regularly round and round the stem of the twig to which he is clinging and gnaw at it. And soon the twig itself will snap and he will fall into the dragon’s jaws.

The traveller sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish; but while still hanging he looks around, sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the twig, reaches them with his tongue and licks them. So I too clung to the twig of life, knowing that the dragon of death was inevitably awaiting me, ready to tear me to pieces; and I could not understand why I had fallen into such torment.

I tried to lick the honey which formerly consoled me, but the honey no longer gave me pleasure, and the white and black mice of day and night gnawed at the branch by which I hung. I saw the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tasted sweet. I only saw the unescapable dragon and the mice, and I could not tear my gaze from them. and this is not a fable but the real unanswerable truth intelligible to all.

The deception of the joys of life which formerly allayed my terror of the dragon now no longer deceived me. No matter how often I may be told, “You cannot understand the meaning of life so do not think about it, but live,” I can no longer do it: I have already done it too long. I cannot now help seeing day and night going round and bringing me to death. That is all I see, for that alone is true. All else is false.

The two drops of honey which diverted my eyes from the cruel truth longer than the rest: my love of family, and of writing—art as I called it—were no longer sweet to me.

“Family” … said I to myself. But my family—wife and children—are also human. They are placed just as I am: they must either live in a lie or see the terrible truth. Why should they live? Why should I love them, guard them, bring them up, or watch them? That they may come to the despair that I feel, or else be stupid? Loving them, I cannot hide the truth from them: each step in knowledge leads them to the truth. And the truth is death.

“Art, poetry?” … Under the influence of success and the praise of men, I had long assured myself that this was a thing one could do though death was drawing near—death which destroys all things, including my work and its remembrance; but soon I saw that that too was a fraud. It was plain to me that art is an adornment of life, an allurement to life.

But life had lost its attraction for me, so how could I attract others? As long as I was not living my own life but was borne on the waves of some other life—as long as I believed that life had a meaning, though one I could not express—the reflection of life in poetry and art of all kinds afforded me pleasure: it was pleasant to look at life in the mirror of art.

But when I began to seek the meaning of life and felt the necessity of living my own life, that mirror became for me unnecessary, superfluous, ridiculous, or painful. I could no longer soothe myself with what I now saw in the mirror, namely, that my position was stupid and desperate. It was all very well to enjoy the sight when in the depth of my soul I believed that my life had a meaning. Then the play of lights—comic, tragic, touching, beautiful, and terrible—in life amused me.

No sweetness of honey could be sweet to me when I saw the dragon and saw the mice gnawing away my support.

Nor was that all. Had I simply understood that life had no meaning I could have borne it quietly, knowing that that was my lot. But I could not satisfy myself with that. Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road. He knows that each step he takes confuses him more and more, but still he cannot help rushing about.

It was indeed terrible. And to rid myself of the terror I wished to kill myself. I experienced terror at what awaited me—knew that that terror was even worse than the position I was in, but still I could not patiently await the end. However convincing the argument might be that in any case some vessel in my heart would give way, or something would burst and all would be over, I could not patiently await that end.

The horror of darkness was too great, and I wished to free myself from it as quickly as possible by noose or bullet. that was the feeling which drew me most strongly towards suicide.

V

“But perhaps I have overlooked something, or misunderstood something?” said I to myself several times. “It cannot be that this condition of despair is natural to man!” And I sought for an explanation of these problems in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I sought painfully and long, not from idle curiosity or listlessly, but painfully and persistently day and night—sought as a perishing man seeks for safety—and I found nothing.

I sought in all the sciences, but far from finding what I wanted, became convinced that all who like myself had sought in knowledge for the meaning of life had found nothing. And not only had they found nothing, but they had plainly acknowledged that the very thing which made me despair—namely the senselessness of life—is the one indubitable thing man can know.

I sought everywhere; and thanks to a life spent in learning, and thanks also to my relations with the scholarly world, I had access to scientists and scholars in all branches of knowledge, and they readily showed me all their knowledge, not only in books but also in conversation, so that I had at my disposal all that science has to say on this question of life.

I was long unable to believe that it gives no other reply to life’s questions than that which it actually does give. It long seemed to me, when I saw the important and serious air with which science announces its conclusions which have nothing in common with the real questions of human life, that there was something I had not understood.

I long was timid before science, and it seemed to me that the lack of conformity between the answers and my questions arose not by the fault of science but from my ignorance, but the matter was for me not a game or an amusement but one of life and death, and I was involuntarily brought to the conviction that my questions were the only legitimate ones, forming the basis of all knowledge, and that I with my questions was not to blame, but science if it pretends to reply to those questions.

My question—that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide—was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: “What will come of what I am doing to-day or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?”

Differently expressed, the question is: “Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?” It can also be expressed thus: “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”

To this one question, variously expressed, I sought an answer in science. And I found that in relation to that question all human knowledge is divided as it were into two opposite hemispheres at the ends of which are two poles: the one a negative and the other a positive; but that neither at the one nor the other pole is there an answer to life’s questions.

The one series of sciences seems not to recognize the question, but replies clearly and exactly to its own independent questions: that is the series of experimental sciences, and at the extreme end of it stands mathematics. The other series of sciences recognizes the question, but does not answer it; that is the series of abstract sciences, and at the extreme end of it stands metaphysics.

From early youth I had been interested in the abstract sciences, but later the mathematical and natural sciences attracted me, and until I put my question definitely to myself, until that question had itself grown up within me urgently demanding a decision, I contented myself with those counterfeit answers which science gives.

Now in the experimental sphere I said to myself: “Everything develops and differentiates itself, moving towards complexity and perfection, and there are laws directing this movement. You are a part of the whole. Having learnt as far as possible the whole, and having learnt the law of evolution, you will understand also your place in the whole and will know yourself.” Ashamed as I am to confess it, there was a time when I seemed satisfied with that.

It was just the time when I was myself becoming more complex and was developing. My muscles were growing and strengthening, my memory was being enriched, my capacity to think and understand was increasing, I was growing and developing; and feeling this growth in myself it was natural for me to think that such was the universal law in which I should find the solution of the question of my life. But a time came when the growth within me ceased.

I felt that I was not developing, but fading, my muscles were weakening, my teeth falling out, and I saw that the law not only did not explain anything to me, but that there never had been or could be such a law, and that I had taken for a law what I had found in myself at a certain period of my life.

I regarded the definition of that law more strictly, and it became clear to me that there could be no law of endless development; it became clear that to say, “in infinite space and time everything develops, becomes more perfect and more complex, is differentiated,” is to say nothing at all. These are all words with no meaning, for in the infinite there is neither complex nor simple, neither forward nor backward, nor better or worse.

Above all, my personal question, “What am I with my desires?” remained quite unanswered. And I understood that those sciences are very interesting and attractive, but that they are exact and clear in inverse proportion to their applicability to the question of life: the less their applicability to the question of life, the more exact and clear they are, while the more they try to reply to the question of life, the more obscure and unattractive they become.

If one turns to the division of sciences which attempt to reply to the questions of life—to physiology, psychology, biology, sociology—one encounters an appalling poverty of thought, the greatest obscurity, a quite unjustifiable pretension to solve irrelevant questions, and a continual contradiction of each authority by others and even by himself.

If one turns to the branches of science which are not concerned with the solution of the questions of life, but which reply to their own special scientific questions, one is enraptured by the power of man’s mind, but one knows in advance that they give no reply to life’s questions. Those sciences simply ignore life’s questions.

They say: “To the question of what you are and why you live we have no reply, and are not occupied with that; but if you want to know the laws of light, of chemical combinations, the laws of development of organisms, if you want to know the laws of bodies and their form, and the relation of numbers and quantities, if you want to know the laws of your mind, to all that we have clear, exact and unquestionable replies.”

In general the relation of the experimental sciences to life’s question may be expressed thus: Question: “Why do I live?” Answer: “In infinite space, in infinite time, infinitely small particles change their forms in infinite complexity, and when you have understood the laws of those mutations of form you will understand why you live on the earth.”

Then in the sphere of abstract science I said to myself: “All humanity lives and develops on the basis of spiritual principles and ideals which guide it. Those ideals are expressed in religions, in sciences, in arts, in forms of government. Those ideals become more and more elevated, and humanity advances to its highest welfare.

I am part of humanity, and therefore my vocation is to forward the recognition and the realization of the ideals of humanity.” And at the time of my weak-mindedness I was satisfied with that; but as soon as the question of life presented itself clearly to me, those theories immediately crumbled away.

Not to speak of the unscrupulous obscurity with which those sciences announce conclusions formed on the study of a small part of mankind as general conclusions; not to speak of the mutual contradictions of different adherents of this view as to what are the ideals of humanity; the strangeness, not to say stupidity, of the theory consists in the fact that in order to reply to the question facing each man: “What am I?” or “Why do I live?” or “What must I do?” one has first to decide the question: “What is the life of the whole?” (which is to him unknown and of which he is acquainted with one tiny part in one minute period of time).

To understand what he is, man must first understand all this mysterious humanity, consisting of people such as himself who do not understand one another.

I have to confess that there was a time when I believed this. It was the time when I had my own favorite ideals justifying my own caprices, and I was trying to devise a theory which would allow one to consider my caprices as the law of humanity. But as soon as the question of life arose in my soul in full clearness that reply at once flew to dust.

And I understood that as in the experimental sciences there are real sciences, and semi-sciences which try to give answers to questions beyond their competence, so in this sphere there is a whole series of most diffused sciences which try to reply to irrelevant questions. Semi-sciences of that kind, the juridical and the social-historical, endeavor to solve the questions of a man’s life by pretending to decide, each in its own way, the question of the life of all humanity.

But as in the sphere of man’s experimental knowledge one who sincerely inquires how he is to live cannot be satisfied with the reply—"Study in endless space the mutations, infinite in time and in complexity, of innumerable atoms, and then you will understand your life”—so also a sincere man cannot be satisfied with the reply: “Study the whole life of humanity of which we cannot know either the beginning or the end, of which we do not even know a small part, and then you will understand your own life.” And like the experimental semi-sciences, so these other semi-sciences are the more filled with obscurities, inexactitudes, stupidities, and contradictions, the further they diverge from the real problems.

The problem of experimental science is the sequence of cause and effect in material phenomena. It is only necessary for experimental science to introduce the question of a final cause for it to become nonsensical. The problem of abstract science is the recognition of the primordial essence of life. It is only necessary to introduce the investigation of consequential phenomena (such as social and historical phenomena) and it also becomes nonsensical.

Experimental science only then gives positive knowledge and displays the greatness of the human mind when it does not introduce into its investigations the question of an ultimate cause. And, on the contrary, abstract science is only then science and displays the greatness of the human mind when it puts quite aside questions relating to the consequential causes of phenomena and regards man solely in relation to an ultimate cause.

Such in this realm of science—forming the pole of the sphere—is metaphysics or philosophy. That science states the question clearly: “What am I, and what is the universe? And why do I exist, and why does the universe exist?” And since it has existed it has always replied in the same way.

Whether the philosopher calls the essence of life existing within me, and in all that exists, by the name of “idea,” or “substance,” or “spirit,” or “will,” he says one and the same thing: that this essence exists and that I am of that same essence; but why it is he does not know, and does not say, if he is an exact thinker. I ask: “Why should this essence exist? What results from the fact that it is and will be?” … And philosophy not merely does not reply, but is itself only asking that question.

And if it is real philosophy all its labor lies merely in trying to put that question clearly. And if it keeps firmly to its task it cannot reply to the question otherwise than thus: “What am I, and what is the universe?” “All and nothing”; and to the question “Why?” by “I do not know.”

So that however I may turn these replies of philosophy, I can never obtain anything like an answer—and not because, as in the clear experimental sphere, the reply does not relate to my question, but because here, though all the mental work is directed just to my question, there is no answer, but instead of an answer one gets the same question, only in a complex form.

VI

In my search for answers to life’s questions I experienced just what is felt by a man lost in a forest.

He reaches a glade, climbs a tree, and clearly sees the limitless distance, but sees that his home is not and cannot be there; then he goes into the dark wood and sees the darkness, but there also his home is not.

So I wandered in that wood of human knowledge, amid the gleams of mathematical and experimental science which showed me clear horizons, but in a direction where there could be no home, and also amid the darkness of the abstract sciences where I was immersed in deeper gloom the further I went, and where I finally convinced myself that there was, and could be, no exit.

Yielding myself to the bright side of knowledge, I understood that I was only diverting my gaze from the question. However alluringly clear those horizons which opened out before me might be, however alluring it might be to immerse oneself in the limitless expanse of those sciences, I already understood that the clearer they were the less they met my need and the less they applied to my question.

“I know,” said I to myself, “what science so persistently tries to discover, and along that road there is no reply to the question as to the meaning of my life.” In the abstract sphere I understood that notwithstanding the fact, or just because of the fact, that the direct aim of science is to reply to my question, there is no reply but that which I have myself already given: “What is the meaning of my life?” “There is none.” Or: “What will come of my life?” “Nothing.” Or: “Why does everything exist that exists, and why do I exist?” “Because it exists.”

Inquiring for one region of human knowledge, I received an innumerable quantity of exact replies concerning matters about which I had not asked: about the chemical constituents of the stars, about the movement of the sun towards the constellation Hercules, about the origin of species and of man, about the forms of infinitely minute imponderable particles of ether; but in this sphere of knowledge the only answer to my question, “What is the meaning of my life?” was: “You are what you call your ‘life’; you are a transitory, casual cohesion of particles.

The mutual interactions and changes of these particles produce in you what you call your ‘life’. That cohesion will last some time; afterwards the interaction of these particles will cease and what you call ‘life’ will cease, and so will all your questions. You are an accidentally united little lump of something. That little lump ferments. The little lump calls that fermenting its ‘life.’

The lump will disintegrate and there will be an end of the fermenting and of all the questions.” So answers the clear side of science and cannot answer otherwise if it strictly follows its principles.

From such a reply one sees that the reply does not answer the question. I want to know the meaning of my life, but that it is a fragment of the infinite, far from giving it a meaning destroys its every possible meaning. The obscure compromises which that side of experimental exact science makes with abstract science when it says that the meaning of life consists in development and in co-operation with development, owing to their inexactness and obscurity cannot be considered as replies.

The other side of science—the abstract side—when it holds strictly to its principles, replying directly to the question, always replies, and in all ages has replied, in one and the same way: “The world is something infinite and incomprehensible. Human life is an incomprehensible part of that incomprehensible ‘all’.” Again I exclude all those compromises between abstract and experimental sciences which supply the whole ballast of the semi-sciences called juridical, political, and historical.

In those semi-sciences the conception of development and progress is again wrongly introduced, only with this difference, that there it was the development of everything while here it is the development of the life of mankind. The error is there as before: development and progress in infinity can have no aim or direction, and, as far as my question is concerned, no answer is given.

In truly abstract science, namely in genuine philosophy—not in that which Schopenhauer calls “professorial philosophy” which serves only to classify all existing phenomena in new philosophic categories and to call them by new names—where the philosopher does not lose sight of the essential question, the reply is always one and the same—the reply given by Socrates, Schopenhauer, Solomon, and Buddha.

“We approach truth only inasmuch as we depart from life,” said Socrates when preparing for death. For what do we, who love truth, strive after in life? To free ourselves from the body, and from all the evil that is caused by the life of the body! If so, then how can we fail to be glad when death comes to us?

“The wise man seeks death all his life and therefore death is not terrible to him.”

And Schopenhauer says:

“Having recognized the inmost essence of the world as will, and all its phenomena—from the unconscious working of the obscure forces of Nature up to the completely conscious action of man—as only the objectivity of that will, we shall in no way avoid the conclusion that together with the voluntary renunciation and self-destruction of the will all those phenomena also disappear, that constant striving and effort without aim or rest on all the stages of objectivity in which and through which the world exists; the diversity of successive forms will disappear, and together with the form all the manifestations of will, with its most universal forms, space and time, and finally its most fundamental form—subject and object.

Without will there is no concept and no world. Before us, certainly, nothing remains. But what resists this transition into annihilation, our nature, is only that same wish to live—Wille zum Leben—which forms ourselves as well as our world. That we are so afraid of annihilation or, what is the same thing, that we so wish to live, merely means that we are ourselves nothing else but this desire to live, and know nothing but it.

And so what remains after the complete annihilation of the will, for us who are so full of the will, is, of course, nothing; but on the other hand, for those in whom the will has turned and renounced itself, this so real world of ours with all its suns and milky way is nothing.”

“Vanity of vanities,” says Solomon—"vanity of vanities—all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. … The thing that hath been, is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. I the Preacher was King over Israel in Jerusalem. And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. …

I communed with my own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me over Jerusalem: yea, my heart hath great experience of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

I said in my heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure: and behold this also is vanity. I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it? I sought in my heart how to cheer my flesh with wine, and while my heart was guided by wisdom, to lay hold on folly, till I might see what it was good for the sons of men that they should do under heaven the number of the days of their life.

I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards: I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruits: I made me pools of water, to water therefrom the forest where trees were reared: I got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of herds and flocks above all that were before me in Jerusalem: I gathered me also silver and gold and the peculiar treasure from kings and from the provinces: I got me men singers and women singers; and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments and that of all sorts.

So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem: also my wisdom remained with me. And whatever mine eyes desired I kept not from them. I withheld not my heart from any joy. … Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had labored to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit from them under the sun. And I turned myself to behold wisdom, and madness, and folly. …

But I perceived that one event happeneth to them all. Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me, and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool.

Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Yea, I hated all my labor which I had taken under the sun: seeing that I must leave it unto the man that shall be after me. … For what hath man of all his labor, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath labored under the sun? For all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief; yea, even in the night his heart taketh no rest. This is also vanity.

Man is not blessed with security that he should eat and drink and cheer his soul from his own labor. … All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked; to the good and to the evil: to the clean and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath.

This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one event unto all; yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead. For him that is among the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.

Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.”

So said Solomon, or whoever wrote those words.

And this is what the Indian wisdom tells:

Sakya Muni, a young, happy prince, from whom the existence of sickness, old age, and death had been hidden, went out to drive and saw a terrible old man, toothless and slobbering.

The prince, from whom till then old age had been concealed, was amazed, and asked his driver what it was, and how that man had come to such a wretched and disgusting condition, and when he learnt that this was the common fate of all men, that the same thing inevitably awaited him—the young prince—he could not continue his drive, but gave orders to go home, that he might consider this fact. So he shut himself up alone and considered it.

And he probably devised some consolation for himself, for he subsequently again went out to drive, feeling merry and happy. But this time he saw a sick man. He saw an emaciated, livid, trembling man with dim eyes. The prince, from whom sickness had been concealed, stopped and asked what this was.

And when he learnt that this was sickness, to which all men are liable, and that he himself—a healthy and happy prince—might himself fall ill to-morrow, he again was in no mood to enjoy himself but gave orders to drive home, and again sought some solace, and probably found it, for he drove out a third time for pleasure. But this third time he saw another new sight: he saw men carrying something. “What is that?” “A dead man.” “What does dead mean?” asked the prince.

He was told that to become dead means to become like that man. The prince approached the corpse, uncovered it, and looked at it. “What will happen to him now?” asked the prince. He was told that the corpse would be buried in the ground.

“Why?” “Because he will certainly not return to life, and will only produce a stench and worms.” “And is that the fate of all men? Will the same thing happen to me? Will they bury me, and shall I cause a stench and be eaten by worms?” “Yes.” “Home! I shall not drive out for pleasure, and never will so drive out again!”

And Sakya Muni could find no consolation in life, and decided that life is the greatest of evils; and he devoted all the strength of his soul to free himself from it, and to free others; and to do this so that, even after death, life shall not be renewed any more but be completely destroyed at its very roots. So speaks all the wisdom of India.

These are the direct replies that human wisdom gives when it replies to life’s question.

“The life of the body is an evil and a lie. Therefore the destruction of the life of the body is a blessing, and we should desire it,” says Socrates.

“Life is that which should not be—an evil; and the passage into Nothingness is the only good in life,” says Schopenhauer.

“All that is in the world—folly and wisdom and riches and poverty and mirth and grief—is vanity and emptiness. Man dies and nothing is left of him. And that is stupid,” says Solomon.

“To live in the consciousness of the inevitability of suffering, of becoming enfeebled, of old age and of death, is impossible—we must free ourselves from life, from all possible life,” says Buddha.

And what these strong minds said has been said and thought and felt by millions upon millions of people like them. And I have thought it and felt it.

So my wandering among the sciences, far from freeing me from my despair, only strengthened it. One kind of knowledge did not reply to life’s question, the other kind replied directly confirming my despair, indicating not that the result at which I had arrived was the fruit of error or of a diseased state of my mind, but on the contrary that I had thought correctly, and that my thoughts coincided with the conclusions of the most powerful of human minds.

It is no good deceiving oneself. It is all vanity! Happy is he who has not been born: death is better than life, and one must free oneself from life.

Subscribe now

Tolstoy’s spiritual autobiography, A Confession, is one of his great, but lesser-read, works. Written in 1879-80 (and translated here by Aylmer Maude), it shows Tolstoy at the height of his fame—after having published War and Peace and Anna Karenina—grappling with the meaninglessness of his life and success, and asking: Why should I live? The book is an eerily resonant portrait of the kind of existential disquietude that many face now, and a powerful example of earnest spiritual seeking and hard-won faith.

We will serialize the books in six parts. Below, is Part I. - Jordan Castro

PART I

I

I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it in childhood and throughout my boyhood and youth. But when I abandoned the second course of the university at the age of eighteen I no longer believed any of the things I had been taught.

Judging by certain memories, I never seriously believed them, but had merely relied on what I was taught and on what was professed by the grown-up people around me, and that reliance was very unstable.

I remember that before I was eleven a grammar school pupil, Vladimir Milyutin (long since dead), visited us one Sunday and announced as the latest novelty a discovery made at his school. This discovery was that there is no God and that all we are taught about Him is a mere invention (this was in 1838). I remember how interested my elder brothers were in this information.

They called me to their council and we all, I remember, became very animated, and accepted it as something very interesting and quite possible.

I remember also that when my elder brother, Dmitriy, who was then at the university, suddenly, in the passionate way natural to him, devoted himself to religion and began to attend all the Church services, to fast and to lead a pure and moral life, we all—even our elders—unceasingly held him up to ridicule and for some unknown reason called him “Noah.”

I remember that Musin-Pushkin, the then Curator of Kazan University, when inviting us to dance at his home, ironically persuaded my brother (who was declining the invitation) by the argument that even David danced before the Ark. I sympathized with these jokes made by my elders, and drew from them the conclusion that though it is necessary to learn the catechism and go to church, one must not take such things too seriously.

I remember also that I read Voltaire when I was very young, and that his raillery, far from shocking me, amused me very much.

My lapse from faith occurred as is usual among people on our level of education. In most cases, I think, it happens thus: a man lives like everybody else, on the basis of principles not merely having nothing in common with religious doctrine, but generally opposed to it; religious doctrine does not play a part in life, in intercourse with others it is never encountered, and in a man’s own life he never has to reckon with it. Religious doctrine is professed far away from life and independently of it.

If it is encountered, it is only as an external phenomenon disconnected from life.

Then as now, it was and is quite impossible to judge by a man’s life and conduct whether he is a believer or not. If there be a difference between a man who publicly professes orthodoxy and one who denies it, the difference is not in favor of the former. Then as now, the public profession and confession of orthodoxy was chiefly met with among people who were dull and cruel and who considered themselves very important.

Ability, honesty, reliability, good-nature and moral conduct, were often met with among unbelievers.

The schools teach the catechism and send the pupils to church, and government officials must produce certificates of having received communion. But a man of our circle who has finished his education and is not in the government service may even now (and formerly it was still easier for him to do so) live for ten or twenty years without once remembering that he is living among Christians and is himself reckoned a member of the Orthodox Christian Church.

So that, now as formerly, religious doctrine, accepted on trust and supported by external pressure, thaws away gradually under the influence of knowledge and experience of life which conflict with it, and a man very often lives on, imagining that he still holds intact the religious doctrine imparted to him in childhood whereas in fact not a trace of it remains.

S., a clever and truthful man, once told me the story of how he ceased to believe. On a hunting expedition, when he was already twenty-six, he once, at the place where they put up for the night, knelt down in the evening to pray—a habit retained from childhood. His elder brother, who was at the hunt with him, was lying on some hay and watching him. When S. had finished and was settling down for the night, his brother said to him: “So you still do that?”

They said nothing more to one another. But from that day S. ceased to say his prayers or go to church. And now he has not prayed, received communion, or gone to church, for thirty years. And this not because he knows his brother’s convictions and has joined him in them, nor because he has decided anything in his own soul, but simply because the word spoken by his brother was like the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own weight.

The word only showed that where he thought there was faith, in reality there had long been an empty space, and that therefore the utterance of words and the making of signs of the cross and genuflections while praying were quite senseless actions. Becoming conscious of their senselessness he could not continue them.

So it has been and is, I think, with the great majority of people. I am speaking of people of our educational level who are sincere with themselves, and not of those who make the profession of faith a means of attaining worldly aims.

Such people are the most fundamental infidels, for if faith is for them a means of attaining any worldly aims, then certainly it is not faith. These people of our education are so placed that the light of knowledge and life has caused an artificial erection to melt away, and they have either already noticed this and swept its place clear, or they have not yet noticed it.

The religious doctrine taught me from childhood disappeared in me as in others, but with this difference, that as from the age of fifteen I began to read philosophical works, my rejection of the doctrine became a conscious one at a very early age. From the time I was sixteen I ceased to say my prayers and ceased to go to church or to fast of my own volition. I did not believe what had been taught me in childhood but I believed in something. What it was I believed in I could not at all have said.

I believed in a God, or rather I did not deny God—but I could not have said what sort of God. Neither did I deny Christ and his teaching, but what his teaching consisted in I again could not have said.

Looking back on that time, I now see clearly that my faith—my only real faith—that which apart from my animal instincts gave impulse to my life—was a belief in perfecting myself. But in what this perfecting consisted and what its object was, I could not have said.

I tried to perfect myself mentally—I studied everything I could, anything life threw in my way; I tried to perfect my will, I drew up rules I tried to follow; I perfected myself physically, cultivating my strength and agility by all sorts of exercises, and accustoming myself to endurance and patience by all kinds of privations. And all this I considered to be the pursuit of perfection.

The beginning of it all was of course moral perfection, but that was soon replaced by perfection in general: by the desire to be better not in my own eyes or those of God but in the eyes of other people. And very soon this effort again changed into a desire to be stronger than others: to be more famous, more important and richer than others.

II

Some day I will narrate the touching and instructive history of my life during those ten years of my youth. I think very many people have had a like experience. With all my soul I wished to be good, but I was young, passionate and alone, completely alone when I sought goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and ridicule, but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was praised and encouraged.

Ambition, love of power, covetousness, lasciviousness, pride, anger, and revenge—were all respected.

Yielding to those passions I became like the grown-up folk and felt that they approved of me. The kind aunt with whom I lived, herself the purest of beings, always told me that there was nothing she so desired for me as that I should have relations with a married woman: “Rien ne forme un jeune homme, comme une liaison avec une femme comme il faut. (Nothing so forms a young man as an intimacy with a woman of good breeding.)” Another happiness she desired for me was that I should become an aide-de-camp, and if possible aide-de-camp to the Emperor.

But the greatest happiness of all would be that I should marry a very rich girl and so become possessed of as many serfs as possible.

I cannot think of those years without horror, loathing and heartache. I killed men in war and challenged men to duels in order to kill them. I lost at cards, consumed the labour of the peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder—there was no crime I did not commit, and in spite of that people praised my conduct and my contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively moral man.

So I lived for ten years.

During that time I began to write from vanity, covetousness, and pride. In my writings I did the same as in my life. To get fame and money, for the sake of which I wrote, it was necessary to hide the good and to display the evil. And I did so. How often in my writings I contrived to hide under the guise of indifference, or even of banter, those strivings of mine towards goodness which gave meaning to my life! And I succeeded in this and was praised.

At twenty-six years of age I returned to Petersburg after the war, and met the writers. They received me as one of themselves and flattered me. And before I had time to look round I had adopted the views on life of the set of authors I had come among, and these views completely obliterated all my former strivings to improve—they furnished a theory which justified the dissoluteness of my life.

The view of life of these people, my comrades in authorship, consisted in this: that life in general goes on developing, and in this development we—men of thought—have the chief part; and among men of thought it is we—artists and poets—who have the greatest influence. Our vocation is to teach mankind. And lest the simple question should suggest itself: What do I know, and what can I teach? it was explained in this theory that this need not be known, and that the artist and poet teach unconsciously.

I was considered an admirable artist and poet, and therefore it was very natural for me to adopt this theory. I, artist and poet, wrote and taught without myself knowing what. For this I was paid money; I had excellent food, lodging, women, and society; and I had fame, which showed that what I taught was very good.

This faith in the meaning of poetry and in the development of life was a religion, and I was one of its priests. To be its priest was very pleasant and profitable. And I lived a considerable time in this faith without doubting its validity. But in the second and still more in the third year of this life I began to doubt the infallibility of this religion and to examine it. My first cause of doubt was that I began to notice that the priests of this religion were not all in accord among themselves.

Some said: We are the best and most useful teachers; we teach what is needed, but the others teach wrongly. Others said: No! we are the real teachers, and you teach wrongly. And they disputed, quarrelled, abused, cheated, and tricked one another. There were also many among us who did not care who was right and who was wrong, but were simply bent on attaining their covetous aims by means of this activity of ours. All this obliged me to doubt the validity of our creed.

Moreover, having begun to doubt the truth of the authors’ creed itself, I also began to observe its priests more attentively, and I became convinced that almost all the priests of that religion, the writers, were immoral, and for the most part men of bad, worthless character, much inferior to those whom I had met in my former dissipated and military life; but they were self-confident and self-satisfied as only those can be who are quite holy or who do not know what holiness is.

These people revolted me, I became revolting to myself, and I realized that that faith was a fraud.

But strange to say, though I understood this fraud and renounced it, yet I did not renounce the rank these people gave me: the rank of artist, poet, and teacher. I naïvely imagined that I was a poet and artist and could teach everybody without myself knowing what I was teaching, and I acted accordingly.

From my intimacy with these men I acquired a new vice: abnormally developed pride and an insane assurance that it was my vocation to teach men, without knowing what.

To remember that time, and my own state of mind and that of those men (though there are thousands like them today), is sad and terrible and ludicrous, and arouses exactly the feeling one experiences in a lunatic asylum.

We were all then convinced that it was necessary for us to speak, write, and print as quickly as possible and as much as possible, and that it was all wanted for the good of humanity. And thousands of us, contradicting and abusing one another, all printed and wrote—teaching others.

And without noticing that we knew nothing, and that to the simplest of life’s questions: What is good and what is evil? we did not know how to reply, we all talked at the same time, not listening to one another, sometimes seconding and praising one another in order to be seconded and praised in turn, sometimes getting angry with one another—just as in a lunatic asylum.

Thousands of workmen labored to the extreme limit of their strength day and night, setting the type and printing millions of words which the post carried all over Russia, and we still went on teaching and could in no way find time to teach enough, and were always angry that sufficient attention was not paid us.

It was terribly strange, but is now quite comprehensible. Our real innermost concern was to get as much money and praise as possible. To gain that end we could do nothing except write books and papers. So we did that. But in order to do such useless work and to feel assured that we were very important people we required a theory justifying our activity. And so among us this theory was devised: “All that exists is reasonable. All that exists develops. And it all develops by means of Culture.

And Culture is measured by the circulation of books and newspapers. And we are paid money and are respected because we write books and newspapers, and therefore we are the most useful and the best of men.” This theory would have been all very well if we had been unanimous, but as every thought expressed by one of us was always met by a diametrically opposite thought expressed by another, we ought to have been driven to reflection.

But we ignored this; people paid us money and those on our side praised us, so each of us considered himself justified.

It is now clear to me that this was just as in a lunatic asylum; but then I only dimly suspected this, and like all lunatics, simply called all men lunatics except myself.

III

So I lived, abandoning myself to this insanity for another six years, till my marriage. During that time I went abroad. Life in Europe and my acquaintance with leading and learned Europeans confirmed me yet more in the faith of striving after perfection in which I believed, for I found the same faith among them. That faith took with me the common form it assumes with the majority of educated people of our day. It was expressed by the word “progress.”

It then appeared to me that this word meant something. I did not as yet understand that, being tormented (like every vital man) by the question how it is best for me to live, in my answer, “Live in conformity with progress,” I was like a man in a boat who when carried along by wind and waves should reply to what for him is the chief and only question, “whither to steer,” by saying, “We are being carried somewhere.”

I did not then notice this. Only occasionally—not by reason but by instinct—I revolted against this superstition so common in our day, by which people hide from themselves their lack of understanding of life. … So, for instance, during my stay in Paris, the sight of an execution revealed to me the instability of my superstitious belief in progress.

When I saw the head part from the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I.

Another instance of a realization that the superstitious belief in progress is insufficient as a guide to life, was my brother’s death. Wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more than a year, and died painfully, not understanding why he had lived and still less why he had to die. No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these questions during his slow and painful dying.

But these were only rare instances of doubt, and I actually continued to live professing a faith only in progress. “Everything evolves and I evolve with it: and why it is that I evolve with all things will be known some day.” So I ought to have formulated my faith at that time.

On returning from abroad I settled in the country and chanced to occupy myself with peasant schools. This work was particularly to my taste because in it I had not to face the falsity which had become obvious to me and stared me in the face when I tried to teach people by literary means. Here also I acted in the name of progress, but I already regarded progress itself critically.

I said to myself: “In some of its developments progress has proceeded wrongly, and with primitive peasant children one must deal in a spirit of perfect freedom, letting them choose what path of progress they please.” In reality I was ever revolving round one and the same insoluble problem, which was: How to teach without knowing what to teach.

In the higher spheres of literary activity I had realized that one could not teach without knowing what, for I saw that people all taught differently, and by quarreling among themselves only succeeded in hiding their ignorance from one another. But here, with peasant children, I thought to evade this difficulty by letting them learn what they liked.

It amuses me now when I remember how I shuffled in trying to satisfy my desire to teach, while in the depth of my soul I knew very well that I could not teach anything needful for I did not know what was needful. After spending a year at school work I went abroad a second time to discover how to teach others while myself knowing nothing.

And it seemed to me that I had learnt this abroad, and in the year of the peasants’ emancipation (1861) I returned to Russia armed with all this wisdom, and having become an Arbiter I began to teach, both the uneducated peasants in schools and the educated classes through a magazine I published. Things appeared to be going well, but I felt I was not quite sound mentally and that matters could not long continue in that way.

And I should perhaps then have come to the state of despair I reached fifteen years later had there not been one side of life still unexplored by me which promised me happiness: that was my marriage.

For a year I busied myself with arbitration work, the schools, and the magazine; and I became so worn out—as a result especially of my mental confusion—and so hard was my struggle as Arbiter, so obscure the results of my activity in the schools, so repulsive my shuffling in the magazine (which always amounted to one and the same thing: a desire to teach everybody and to hide the fact that I did not know what to teach), that I fell ill, mentally rather than physically, threw up everything, and went away to the Bashkírs in the steppes, to breathe fresh air, drink kumys, and live a merely animal life.

Returning from there I married. The new conditions of happy family life completely diverted me from all search for the general meaning of life. My whole life was centred at that time in my family, wife and children, and therefore in care to increase our means of livelihood. My striving after self-perfection, for which I had already substituted a striving for perfection in general, i.e. progress, was now again replaced by the effort simply to secure the best possible conditions for myself and my family.

So another fifteen years passed.

In spite of the fact that I now regarded authorship as of no importance, I still continued to write during those fifteen years. I had already tasted the temptation of authorship—the temptation of immense monetary rewards and applause for my insignificant work—and I devoted myself to it as a means of improving my material position and of stifling in my soul all questions as to the meaning of my own life or life in general.

I wrote: teaching what was for me the only truth, namely, that one should live so as to have the best for oneself and one’s family.

So I lived; but five years ago something very strange began to happen to me. At first I experienced moments of perplexity and arrest of life, as though I did not know what to do or how to live; and I felt lost and became dejected. But this passed, and I went on living as before. Then these moments of perplexity began to recur oftener and oftener, and always in the same form. They were always expressed by the questions: What is it for? What does it lead to?

At first it seemed to me that these were aimless and irrelevant questions. I thought that it was all well known, and that if I should ever wish to deal with the solution it would not cost me much effort; just at present I had no time for it, but when I wanted to I should be able to find the answer. The questions however began to repeat themselves frequently, and to demand replies more and more insistently; and like drops of ink always falling on one place they ran together into one black blot.

Then occurred what happens to everyone sickening with a mortal internal disease. At first trivial signs of indisposition appear to which the sick man pays no attention; then these signs reappear more and more often and merge into one uninterrupted period of suffering. The suffering increases and, before the sick man can look round, what he took for a mere indisposition has already become more important to him than anything else in the world—it is death!

That was what happened to me. I understood that it was no casual indisposition but something very important, and that if these questions constantly repeated themselves they would have to be answered. And I tried to answer them.

The questions seemed such stupid, simple, childish ones; but as soon as I touched them and tried to solve them I at once became convinced, first, that they are not childish and stupid but the most important and profound of life’s questions; and secondly that, try as I would, I could not solve them. Before occupying myself with my Samára estate, the education of my son, or the writing of a book, I had to know why I was doing it. As long as I did not know why, I could do nothing and could not live.

Amid the thoughts of estate management which greatly occupied me at that time, the question would suddenly occur: “Well, you will have 6,000 desyatínas of land in Samára Government and 300 horses, and what then?” … And I was quite disconcerted and did not know what to think.

Or when considering plans for the education of my children, I would say to myself: “What for?” Or when considering how the peasants might become prosperous, I would suddenly say to myself: “But what does it matter to me?” Or when thinking of the fame my works would bring me, I would say to myself, “Very well; you will be more famous than Gógol or Púshkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or than all the writers in the world—and what of it?” And I could find no reply at all.

The questions would not wait, they had to be answered at once, and if I did not answer them it was impossible to live. But there was no answer.

I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.

Subscribe now

Last year, I developed the unexpected habit of blessing my phone. I now do this ritual any time I answer a call, send a text, or enter the drooling state of the scroll. I do it even if I’m not feeling particularly grateful for my device, because blessing isn’t a way of worshipping technology—what many people are already, unknowingly doing—but the opposite: a method for transforming a false icon into a portal of possibility.

I do not make a habit of blessing many things in my life, nor do I have a clear definition of the word bless, which I think of intuitively, unrelated to any specific spiritual doctrine. For me, a blessing is a concentrated feeling, an intensified internal attention. When I do it, I’m not asking for anything or hoping for an outcome; I’m just opening a space in my mind that, in my daily life, stays closed. After years of experimenting with many varieties of meditation and prayer, this is my best explanation of the phenomenon. To explain it under further scrutiny would betray its central mystery, which I don’t want to do, because mystery is the nectar of my life. The important thing is, I know a blessing when I feel it, and it feels good.

In the case of the phone, I began to notice that it had become a source of fiery, negative intensity in the world around me, and when I decided to quell this feeling, my natural response was a blessing. Some of this intensity came from within me, in the form of compulsion. It’s a feeling I’ve endured with many things: food, people, and art—none of which are inherently corrupt, all of which can be addictive, and any of which might seem like a natural recipient of a blessing.

But that was just the fingernail of the problem. Most of the conflict with this technology came from my community. Wherever I went, people cursed their phones. It was seeming fashionable to feel angsty about screen technology, even if you and everyone you knew used it constantly. I think people feel obligated to complain, as if it were their small, futile resistance to the phone’s tyranny over our lives.

Amongst my milieu, the phone became a villain, the leading culprit for asocial behavior, bullying, stupidity, depression, ADHD, totalitarianism, cancer, and climate change. In an interview on the Louisiana channel, the artist Cecily Brown said, “The phone is obviously the death of art and culture.”

This is the Promethean tale of the evil phone, and while it contains validity, I am bored of it. For one thing, it’s worth noting that this story is told most emphatically by people who have lived two lives: before and after phones. We who have seen across that divide are profoundly aware of our new phone reality. The past and future wrestle inside of us, and we can hardly stand it.

Those born later—the native-phone generations—will likely let go of this struggle. When I was young, my parents wrung their hands over my TV time, believing its screen would melt my eyes and brain. Before that, electricity, radio, cars and books all inspired similar debates. Before that, Plato believed writing would destroy our minds—now it is the standard measure of academic intelligence. Civilization was flawed long before any of these technologies and it will continue to be long after they are obsolete.

But for a moment, imagine the phone is irredeemably evil. It’s been corrupted by corporations and governments. It’s eroding away our thoughts, feelings, desires, and human connection. Humanity’s downfall is in our pocket. If these dangers are all true, then a blessing seems more necessary than ever. Turning a blind eye to such an enormous threat and defenestrating the phone—this would be an act of fear and cowardice.

Of course, I too feel some disgust and unease about the smartphone, but where I used to complain, I now harness these feelings in my blessing. As Matthew said in the Bible, “Bless those that curse you, do good to those that hate you.” For real change, we must find the sacred inside of the phone’s darkness. This is how we become a more mindful steward of our technology.

Consider the philosophy of Tantra, a word that translates to “technology.” In Tantric Hinduism, all the traditional sins—sex, red meat, alcohol, morbidity—become tools for connecting to God. Instead of avoiding sex, bring such a high quality of attention to the act that it becomes prayer. Instead of abstaining from alcohol and drugs, imbibe intoxicants until you master their slippery ways. Instead of ignoring death, live in a graveyard and drink from the skull of a corpse, as is practiced by the monastic order of the Aghori.

If the phone is now a symbol for the profane, it is also a profound site of the sacred. The act of real power is to transform it into something that can support us. The crucifix was once a symbol for pain and wickedness, but the Christians turned it into an engine for divinity. Praying to the crucifix is not an endorsement of torture or cross-makers, but an act of love. Every path leads to grace when you walk it correctly.

When I bless my phone, I take a brief moment of pause before my mind drops into cellular fixation. I begin by opening up what I want to feel—gratitude, empathy—and I just stay with it for a moment. Then I remind myself of this object’s miraculous capabilities, complicated potential, and even the dubious radiation it emits. Now, I keep a folded swatch of electromagnetic-blocking faraday fabric in my bag, placed between my body and the phone, as a sign that I acknowledge and respect its volatile energy.

Yet, with all its threats in mind, I have still decided that the phone improves my life more than it impairs it. I’m not getting rid of it, and when I look around, it seems that most of the detractors have come to the same conclusion.

Still, the story of the sinful phone now lives in my blood, forever keeping me weary and vigilant against its charisma. This might be a good thing, but in what ways has the guilty weight of this narrative prevented me from using my phone well?

What happens when we refer to the phone as an extension of ourselves while simultaneously condemning it? After all, this is the device that I use to speak to my favorite people, to look at pictures of my daughter, to make and orchestrate various forms of art—all the things I care most about in life. Worse yet, if we believe the phone as a site of all the monstrosities in culture—social media, news headlines, porn—do we all turn more monstrous when we enter its blue-lit space? The way dark, sordid bars give people permission to do what broad daylight does not.

We spend hours stroking our phones, showing them the kind of attention that babies and pets usually receive. In moments of suffering, we are thankful for whatever relief they give us, through a meme or message or music. We crave this kind of intimate phone time. It puts our mind into the standby state of beta, which is as necessary as delta (sleep), gamma (insight), theta (meditation) or alpha (daydream).

Yet many categorize this time as distraction, which is one of the greatest sins in neoliberal capitalism, where a human’s value is defined by our productivity. Personally, I need distraction. As an artist, I discover inspiration through aimlessly following pleasure. Of course, I have experienced acedia, lost in the apathy of unfocused exploration, but mostly, distraction has served me well.

As a child I used the encyclopedia for this purpose, and my parents encouraged my hours of turning pages. Despite Plato, they believed the book to be a beneficial technology. But now, the same activity on our phone—clicking through the hyperlinks of Wikipedia—is perceived as a waste of time. Flipping through dusty crates in an old record store is a romantic way to spend an afternoon, but discovering the strange, unheard corners of Spotify is culturally vapid.

I’m saying all of this not to defend the phone, nor to encourage phone use—especially not for children—but to point out the ways in which our narrative of the phone colors all its activities, regardless of what they might be.

I began blessing my phone in the fall, and in the winter, I lost my home, my art studio and everything I owned in the Los Angeles fires. I evacuated my house with an armload of objects, one of which was my phone, and in many ways, it saved me.

Over the following months, the amount of generosity and kindness that poured through that device was, next to my family, the greatest source of love in my life. Of course, it wasn’t the phone loving me, it was the people—and yet, I cannot think of a real-world analog for the mobile’s flavor of human connection. In the pits of my post-fire darkness, I would have been exhausted by a queue of well-wishers at my doorstep; but receiving texts, emails, and calls was the ideal form of passive communication for that moment. I could respond at the lugubrious pace of disaster recovery, without licking a stamp or even looking presentable.

I do believe that blessing my phone made some of this possible. It allowed me to scrape away a little plaque of phone sin and perceive the support I needed in a time of despair. Because of that, I now have palpable experiences I can call upon to uphold my ritual.

Since then, the feelings in my blessing are deeper and easier to access. The whole process has become increasingly natural, almost reflexive. Sometimes, I’m not even aware I’m doing it. Over time, perhaps the phone (or any object of a blessing) becomes irrelevant and my habit becomes an orientation toward the world. That sounds like a nice outcome.

So far, this practice has helped to keep me in a state of astonishment with the phone. As someone who lived in pre-phone reality, I still regard this device as some kind of bizarre magic, and I’d like to hold onto that disbelief. Any one of us is lucky to own what billions of people cannot. We are wielders of power and we should hold ourselves accountable for using it well.

The Buddhists emphasize that we live through right action, right speech, and right view. These values are not just for easy days, but are most useful in the times of overwhelm or mundanity. If we find ourselves thoughtless and reactive with our devices in hand, then we are in a ripe state for contemplation. If the phone is our new window into reality, then through it we can revere everything.

Subscribe now

Part I. Literary Materialism

1.

I was tired of disliking myself. I was drinking too much, smoking too much pot, watching too much porn, not exercising enough. My bad habits—so normal as to be made fun of on sitcoms and to constitute the neurotic weight of many bro-comedies—were somehow more shameful than serious addictions. Why couldn’t I be a coke addict or weirdly addicted to taking LSD? I had taken a lot of mushrooms up to this point in my life, after all. But no, my habitual excesses were incredibly common, only adding to my sense of shame—not even in my neurotic tendencies was I unique. It was 2008, my mid-twenties. Externally, I probably didn’t appear to have any terrible problems, but a deep dissatisfaction and anxiety percolated beneath my living. I felt like I was in a frustrating meeting about workplace policies, but I couldn’t leave until the meeting was over, and that meeting was life in its entirety.

I was doing a post-doc at East Tennessee State University, which meant teaching two composition classes and two literature surveys, four classes per semester, making just above the poverty-line. My girlfriend lived three hours away, over the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Spartanburg, SC. I had spent the years after high school getting three degrees, becoming increasingly distanced from physical life, no money in the bank. I was learning to be a writer. The town felt appropriate: Long-abandoned by industry, the empty mill buildings of downtown were barred or used as flophouses, homeless moving through the streets beneath the stunning backdrop of the Blue Ridge. It was staggering to witness such natural beauty juxtaposed with human dilapidation. A general sense of poverty was everywhere.

I read a lot, though more slowly than others. I related to some. In “The Visiting Privilege,” a story by Joy Williams, a character says, “We all live in a meaningless world. That’s it, okay.” Yes, I thought. Josef K in Kafka’s The Trial has no idea what he’s on trial for, and by the end of the book he dies “Like a dog!” Right, I thought. Dogs! Frederick Barthelme was my teacher, a big bear of a man with an enormous intellect and weird humor. He once closed the blinds in his office, aimed a desk lamp at my face, and interrogated me as part of an advising process—Who are you? he asked. What do you want?

Uh, I think I have to take this Modernism class, I said.

Hmm, he said. But why are you here?

He seemed the one gentle, wise writer I admired.

But I couldn’t see things clearly. Something glitched in my brain. The stories I read, when placed atop reality, didn’t line up, everything just off, double-imaged, like a child’s tracing of a photo that, once-lifted, never gets aligned again.

Another misalignment: My reality seemed meaningless, a superficial landscape of pure entertainment built upon actual life, like a palimpsest made not to better navigate the world but to become more confused by it. This vision—a low-level understanding aching behind my more conscious lived experience—infected everything I saw and did: When I ate McDonald’s, I saw that McDonald’s was entertainment for my mouth; when I went to the movies, I saw that movies were entertainment for my eyes; when I listened to music, I saw that music was entertainment for my ears; when I sat like a dim creature in my apartment watching porn, a story I was working on open in another browser, I saw that porn was entertainment for my body; pot and alcohol were entertainment for my soul, and literature was entertainment for my intellect and emotions1.

I disliked my own desire to be constantly entertained, and I disliked the way our culture preyed on this desire, making me desire more. I disliked that literature was tied into this. But what was below it? The desire for more desire? My wanting seemed the source of everything I did, and within literature I saw only more vain wanting, vain striving to be entertained, as well as thoroughly approved of, albeit in some higher or more transcendent form.

America was a place where we were free to be entrapped by our own wanting. Weirdly, we all seemed okay with this: We were little cave-dwellers, afraid to step into the daylight, amused by shadows cast by screens. We wanted to be entertained, and then be approved of, applauded for our good tastes and interesting takes. It wasn’t simply that we were a materialistic culture. We were beyond materialistic. We were meta-materialistic. Objects of desire existed in our minds before we got them in real life—the screen was a kind of limbo for desire—whether that was a burger or a publication or sex or a vacation. We were turning ourselves into commodities. Branding was just coming into being. One had a brand. Was a brand. Identity was now on sale. With our screens, we commodified who we were: Staring at ourselves staring at others staring at us. In doing so, our souls had atrophied, restricted within rigid ideas of ourselves, gazing out from within, dumbstruck by the god of selfhood in its myriad forms, no longer seeing what was actually there. Just stuff. Our self, another thing in a world of things. I began to grow suspicious of my work: Was it any different than a Marvel movie? Was it any different, in the final sum, than McDonald’s? Was it just another commodity masquerading as “art”? Wasn’t literature, like everything else, focused on the author, the ego, the small self?

I wanted something else, though I couldn’t say what. Writers reported on times, places, worldviews, personal and historical events, broken society and cultures, the internet, social media, attention spans, religions, identity, oppression, wars, politics. A lot of writers wrote as though thwarted desire represented the whole sad truth in this new godless world. But how these troubles were actually handled was not the focus of these books. That wasn’t art—that was therapy.

Instead, things happened—artfully, comically, tragically, many of these books seemed to say—and then more things happened, and a character persevered in the face of it all, and it was all weird and confusing, desires being thwarted or realized, but grace or understanding, if it got in there, was there only through longing, or sometimes only through prose-style. More than anything else, writers passed down aesthetic sensibilities. I had never read a book of literature that could be applied directly to a life situation. That was my brain glitch—what was writing for again?

Aside from a few, most writers wanted fame: I saw the tendency in myself and had heard it openly from others. Williams, McCarthy, DeLillo were judges, looking out, purveying, above their creations like God, preaching that things were a particular version of ill, but they offered no remedies, as they weren’t really preachers. They were artists. William Gass, who explicitly suggested that a writer is to their work as God is to creation, seemed more like a constructor of consciousness, but his consciousnesses—wonderfully verbal and poetic and literate—were so attuned to art that you sometimes had to wonder where life went, if art subsumed it.

I read the existentialists, Nietzsche and Sartre in particular. Sartre explained that life was purposeless: People were free to give it any meaning they chose, a concept that seemed freeing at first. We were free to choose whatever we wanted. In this way, French Fries had enormous power—wanting erased meaninglessness. Unless you looked too closely.

2.

I wasn’t always anxious and depressed, I should note. A cycle had started, sometime in college, in which I went from neutral, okay, pleasantly moving through the world with all the common minor irritations and annoyances, to descending into a pit where everything seemed dead. During 2008, the descent periods got longer. Pleasant moments were gone quickly, the world back to grey and murky. A hangover occasionally graced me with a mind and body that was so foreign that I felt emptied out—my thinking and feeling stopped, a thing I sought—and I was able to see the world again without interference, as if from a new reference point, just to the side and behind my head, outside me. Then, the feeling would pass and I would feel like shit, until I smoked or drank or wrote or jerked off again—ultimately making me feel even more sick and wrong and creaturely. I cycled through dullness, pleasure, fantasy, escape, anxiety, self-consciousness, a sense that something was wrong with me, and then depression, meaninglessness—all within the space of a few hours. Generally, however, my being felt fixed, permanent. That is what depression really is—the never-ending sense that things don’t change, can’t change. This depression and its attendant anxiety seemed to be who I was. Some other part of me struggled against this notion, which only amplified it.

In class one day, after thinking I’d taught Emily Dickinson well, feeling that the students were engaged, all of us contributing to an elucidation of her work, a student who’d been having mental health problems stayed after, and asked me why I kept teaching depressing poems. He was visibly irritated, a weird energy coming off him, hair wild, clothes hanging loosely off his body. He smelled. I was vaguely repulsed and didn’t know what to say. Go see your counselor, I thought, ugly and cruel, immediately annoyed at myself for thinking it, but the thought hung there, like a moon in front of my vision. I told him it was a survey class, we had only spent two days on Dickinson, and we were finished now. Normally, when students asked questions, I said, Good question, but now, I was stuck in defensiveness and irritation. Dickinson has a sense of humor, I tried to offer. It just seems so hopeless and pointless, he said. How are you okay? I was surprised again. He was thin, small. I wanted to reach out and straighten his glasses. But his eyes wanted something, they were looking at me. I could see he was looking for help.

How had I missed this? Still, I remained guarded, defensive, and didn’t know what to say. Was he messing with me? Pot made me self-conscious in those days, and I felt as though everyone had a window into my inner life. Could he see that I was actually nervous teaching the class, unsure whether what I was saying about Dickinson was true, helpful, or even interesting? Was he actually pitying me?

It's a survey class, I told him again, I’m sort of teaching what I have to teach. His eyes looked too wide, white all the way around them. If there were things he didn’t want to read, he could try to research the authors first, and I’d give him alternative choices. He nodded but his face dropped. A week later, he dropped the class.

3.

When I wasn’t teaching, I read online a lot, but I stayed very far from the scene. I suspect this was a combination of low self-esteem and arrogance, as well as a growing sense that I was spending too much time online. I wanted what I felt were very basic, reasonable things: To become a good writer, moderately well-known and have a career. These desires would create the final version of who I was to be—that’s not exactly how I was thinking, of course—the sense was there, but it was beneath actual thought, like a program running in the background of my consciousness. While these wants seemed reasonable, I felt them intensely: I really wanted them, though I had no clear idea why I wanted them. In place of success or money, I had somehow chosen to value this—probably a basic mimetic desire, though who I was mimicking I couldn’t say. And the new online literary scene exacerbated this. Or my watching exacerbated it. I watched this new online world blossoming, with both interest (and validation when I liked a particular writer) and vague disdain. People were connecting online, this was true, but they were also showing off, getting seen. I felt an aversion to it, but I also disliked that I wasn’t a part of it, and was too cowardly to really try to be. Or maybe I sensed that it was bad for me. Whatever the case, I was jealous, and I saw that I was losing some unspoken battle.

In order to quell this uneasy, unceasing thinking, I did some hiking in East Tennessee, but the vast views of the river valley below instilled no awe. I wanted awe. Where was the awe? John Muir said that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to the entire Universe.” I searched for the hitch but couldn’t find it. Everything I grabbed onto was just itself. The mountain felt like a dead stone. The trees were also dead—part of Buffalo Mountain had burned, the tree stumps charred. The clouds in the sky were not my clouds. The town below, in the valley, could have been filled with aliens. Winter was everywhere, grey and dirty. The picturesque town with rolling hills, old southern houses, walled in by the Blue Ridge Mountains, felt overly, irritatingly quaint.

My apartment was part of an old house, sectioned into four small flats. The wood floor was dark and beautiful and slick, and I would sometimes run and slide on it in socks like in that one Tom Cruise movie, feeling a little joy. Except for the two classes a day I taught, and hanging out with my girlfriend on the weekends, I saw no one. I read journals, online and in print, and tried to write in what I viewed as their styles: “Take a look at our issues to see what we like” almost every journal advised. I wrote, wanting and waiting. When publication arrived, I was happy for a moment, then it was gone. Nothing seemed to happen—there was no sense of anything changing, no sense of drama or action, no plot to my life, just repetitive days spent looking at my email wondering when something might occur.

Just when I thought my creative life should be flourishing, it was not. The stories I wrote all felt false to me. I’d think about how I kept trying to sound like myself, but I had no idea what I sounded like. Did I know how to sound like myself? Did I even know how to listen to myself? Was my problem that I listened to myself way too much? This manner of thinking made me awkward and unclear and self-conscious in person. Hovering beneath all this was the multiform belief—built out of stories, reading, classes, teachers—that I should be well-known for my writing. But how? And why? Why should I play the attention-seeking game that everyone was playing, desiring, weirdly, themselves? When high, this seemed horrific, a terrible aspect of my personality staring back at me. When not high, it receded into the background, not that big of a deal.

4.

Then, in midwinter, I got sick. It lasted a week. Aches through my legs, a vibrating, humming illness in my back, horrible fever, sweating, freezing, coughing on my futon with the dirty sheets. I stumbled to my classrooms, put notes on the doors: Dr. Rossi’s Classes Cancelled. I put the note on the wrong door and received an email from my chair that I needed to come see her. I didn’t eat for two days.

On the worst night, in which I hallucinated someone breaking into my apartment, I thought the illness might never end. The dark walls of my bedroom flashed red and blue, as though police were outside, though there were no police cars on the street. Snow fell in coned lamplights. Someone banged on my door in the vestibule of the house. I shouted, There’s someone here. The banging continued. You can’t come in, I yelled. I’m sick. Stay away. There is someone here. I am here. The banging didn’t stop for hours. I began to cry and rolled over on my futon, eyes shut, trying to sleep. I dreamed of writing prose that wouldn’t end. Words from a thousand mouths closed in around me, a cacophony of voices. It was frightening—I wanted it all to turn off, the constant stream of thoughts, the constant wanting, the constant desire for recognition, I was so sick of making stories up.

When the fever broke the next morning, I was starving. I ate chicken noodle soup from a can. It tasted better than anything I’d ever eaten. My energy began to return. I realized the banging had been my neighbor from the basement, an artist and hippie-type, dreads and dirty clothes, a white kid, who’d been installing some kind of art project, hammering and battering away, making a light show. He was out on the driveway now, early morning, working again, cigarette dangling from his lips. I saw the sunrise for the first time in what felt like forever, cresting over Buffalo Mountain. I felt wiped clean, empty, personless. The sunrise was beautiful. I was grateful for it. The sun’s rays felt as though they were prying open long-closed parts of my heart. I wrote a story that began, "If I lived in a hut, a lot of my problems would be solved.” The feeling of personlessness, identitylessness, lasted the day. People seemed friendlier. I felt freed from something, but by the next day I was back, able again to see nothing but myself.

5.

In 2009, in midsummer, I moved away from East Tennessee to be with my girlfriend in a small town in South Carolina. It’s warmer here, she argued. We have friends. She was right, and anyway, she had a good job. I took adjunct work at what amounted to a community college. That first semester, I taught out of one of several trailers that were converted into four classrooms. The floors were warped or poorly constructed, uneven, and sometimes I tripped—the ball of my foot jamming into a higher part of the floor—when walking to the other side of the room. Students came to class reeking of weed. Some wanted to learn to write, and I did my best to help them. Most of them just needed the credit to move on and get their nursing degree, start making money. That made sense to me.

My girlfriend and I lived in a little townhouse that had one bathroom, one bedroom, and a room in the back big enough for a ping pong table. There was a bamboo grove in the backyard that I liked. We had five cats, a German Shepard, and any number of strays my girlfriend found at the time. The most expensive thing we owned was a Dyson Animal vacuum. My girlfriend held a rescued baby raccoon like a newborn. It drank milk from a bottle using its human-seeming hands, clutching the nipple. My girlfriend was the most gentle person I’d ever known, but we still fought like we were both insane when we got drunk. She threw a potholder at me, I threw a burrito—I’d find dried beans, pieces of lettuce, a shard of shredded cheese every once in a while stuck to the wall or on the back of a dining chair. The future didn’t exist. We did what people did: We worked, looked forward to Thursday night, drank, looked forward to Friday night, drank, looked forward to Saturday, drank and did drugs. It was the last years of our twenties. One night, drunk and irritated, I went for a walk late at night. Before I knew what was happening, I was running down the sidewalk of our neighborhood—I was trying to get away. I was trying to get away from myself.

Months passed like this. Then, in early 2010, I began playing soccer again because my girlfriend was playing. Just come out one time, she said. It’ll be fun. You’re good. I said I wasn’t sure, it had been a long time, but eventually I agreed. I had given up the sport when I was ten or eleven to pursue basketball. Then in high school, I switched to track. There’s a brute fact to racing, animal strength and speed, and I had some of that, but only up to a point. But with soccer, my lean frame, easy quickness, basic intelligence, and subtle athleticism had an outlet—I got good with the ball at my feet and was nearly impossible to stop in the midfield. Over the next fifteen years, my wife and I would play pickup soccer with the most eclectic group of people I’d ever been around: Immigrants from Mexico, Bolivia, Spain, Columbia (legal and illegal), white kids on the local high school teams, people from the nearby soccer club, refugees from Nigeria. This wasn’t the pontificated and performative diversity of university culture that I sat through in meetings as an adjunct. Nor was it the theoretical post-colonial world—this was just people. It was amazing. My being a teacher or even the hint of my being a writer didn’t matter. There were no questions, as at the gallery openings, the readings, the conferences, like, So, what kind of fiction do you write? Oh, are you an author? Who are you reading? Where do you teach? Questions that I hated, and which I knew I had to reciprocate: How would you describe your poems? Oh, you’re a visual artist as well? Art was not at the forefront of these events; identity was.

On the soccer field, everything was different. Only playing good soccer mattered, and, for the first time in my adult life, I wanted to do only what mattered.

Part II. First the Physical, then the Spiritual Body

1.

During the summer of 2010, my physicality returned with an intensity I couldn’t have predicted. Writing began to fall into the background of my life, on the far horizon, distant and small and barely glimpsed, like a rabbit at the edge of the woods, nibbling grasses. Rather than going to openings and readings, I worked out more. When I played soccer, I wasn’t a name, wasn’t a writer, wasn’t even Alan—I was the ball at my feet looking for the next pass, a quick ball to the top of the box, one-timed back to me on my right foot, slotted into the left corner of the net. A game felt more real than literary life, which itself had come to feel like a game. And my self, which I had disliked, I began to feel gentle toward again.

In the mornings, I taught classes to mostly bored students in that awful trailer, then, in the afternoon, I went and did soccer workouts, typically three or four days a week. You’re way too into this, my girlfriend, newly my wife, said. I found a wall, a field, and trained. I would do sprints, dribbling skills through cones, fartleks with the ball at my feet, juggle, pass to myself off the wall three hundred times, take two hundred shots hitting spots I marked on the wall, right foot, left foot. I could see where the ball would go and make it happen in reality, as though there was a simulated game in my mind occurring just before the physical action—there was a mechanism in my mind that would slow games down in important moments, a freeze-frame button. I couldn’t see writing, I couldn’t really see my life, but I had an ability to see a soccer field. During workouts, I taught my body to get extremely tired, then go even harder. I came home feeling as though my mind had dissolved in my skin, and I was just a body walking through the world, thoughtless and happy.

One day on the field, after a pickup game, I got a drink of water. I was drenched in sweat, a hot and humid summer day. My face and arms were sunburned. My legs buzzed. There was a bruise on my thigh from a hard tackle, which had led to a testy moment with another player. Alan, stop, my girlfriend said right after the tackle, when I’d made a feint, passed the defender with the ball on my right foot, and he tackled me from behind. Don’t, she said, coming between me and this other guy. I pointed in his face, yelled, I beat you. You were beaten. I felt vaguely like Darth Vader. You didn’t beat shit, the other player yelled back, grabbing my hand and tossing it away.

On the side of the field, game over, I still felt the hum of the confrontation. The grass was scorched brown. People were talking, drinking water or Gatorade, laughing, eating bananas, and the hum of life around me felt warm, pleasant. There’d just been another argument in the game, as well—a call someone questioned—but it felt good. It was alive, real in a specific way. Things were not meaningless. They were not meaningful, either. They were something else. At the edge of the field, tulip trees swayed in the wind, and above them, white cumulus clouds moved gently in the blue sky. The sky looked back at me. I was momentarily stuck there—where was I?

2.

Soccer had naturally curbed my drinking, smoking, and porn use. I realized those things were in the way, and they had lessened simply because my focus had changed. But suddenly I wanted them gone. I didn’t even want them gone, something in me just shouted: STOP. It felt as though there was no choice to be made. It was made already.

Instead of reading another book about Buddhism, which I had been doing intermittently for years, trying and failing to meditate on my own, I watched a Youtube video of a monk named Yuttadhammo. He was from Canada, moved to Thailand, wore the saffron robes, had a shaved head, lived as simply as possible, and taught on Youtube. I purposely sought out what I believed was the most original form of Buddhism, Theravadin, which focuses on individual liberation, the arhat principle. That if one meditates enough, lets go of thoughts and emotions, learns to see through and beyond desires and aversions, stills and quiets the mind, meets life with a balanced clear-headedness, eventually the practitioner experiences the cessation of suffering. In the Theravadin tradition, meditation had a goal: Calm the mind in order to develop insight into its workings, in order to be free of clinging and aversion. I learned the tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, meditating with the labeling technique: If I had thoughts, I labeled them “thoughts”; if I had emotions, I labeled them accordingly—“anger, anger,” “fear, fear”—then let them go.

I went to a local temple, met a small, shy Cambodian monk, who gave me the Paticcasamuppada, Dependent Origination. I did Vipassana practice for about six months. It wasn’t the case for me that I couldn’t meditate right away: I was able to do it immediately. I quickly went from five minutes, to ten, to fifteen, to twenty-five, to thirty-five, often meditating for up to an hour, just sitting in our guest bedroom alone, moving from my forehead down to my throat, hovering at my chest, moving to my navel, and expanding into a resonance like an unending bell, rippling from my center and out. I loved meditating. It was as though my body and mind had been starved of it, had missed it, even though I’d never done it before. Boredom was even interesting.

But before long, the whole thing began to feel claustrophobic. I seemed to be doing more in meditation than outside it. I was so busy, always checking my thoughts, almost looking for them to arise, always working on letting them go, like writing stuff down on a to-do list that I’d already done so that I could cross the things on the list off. I felt I was clinging to the thoughts because of how often I was noticing them. Or, because I was more intent on labeling, I wasn’t seeing them clearly, too hung up on getting the technique correct. In other words, insight meditation felt too rigid, too distanced from life. Everything I did was becoming conceptualized: I am opening the door now, let it go; I am entering my car, let it go; I am having thoughts about dinner, let it go; I am having sexual thoughts, let them go. Vipassana practice over-tuned my awareness. Shut up, I began to think—not unlike the STOP which had brought me there.

Likewise, Yuttadhammo, this online teacher, began to seem strange: There was a dullness about him. Though the Cambodian monk I had met was kind, gentle, he too seemed far away, cloistered even when present with me. Both of them seemed less composed than asleep, less present than being watchful of being present, like they were constantly going, I’m present now, no now, no no, now. On his Youtube channel, Yuttadhammo frequently appeared tired or bored. He answered questions haltingly. This person asks, he’d read, his computer screen reflected in his rectangular glasses, blocking his eyeballs, making him seem android-like, how do you know when you get somewhere in meditation? He would take a long moment, and then, as if picking his words up from the bottom of a well, or decoding an ancient scroll, say something like, There are many ways to know you’re getting somewhere in meditation. Many things will not hold your interest anymore. Yeah, I thought, like being alive. I was viewing a version of spirituality that drained one of vitality. Yuttadhammo’s skin was pale, wan. There was no energy in him and very little humor. Those rectangular glasses and the bad lighting of some far away temple rooms in Thailand made him look like a computer programmer who’d been imprisoned by Buddhists. Then, the Cambodian monk who I’d been learning from absconded, disappeared from the local temple in the middle of the night. What happened? I asked a friend who knew all the monks at the temple, and who had been a monk himself. No one knows, he said. A week later, my friend got a text: It was a picture of the little monk. He was smiling, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, living in a houseboat in Baja.

3.

In fall of 2011, I was still playing soccer, still teaching, but writing had been replaced with my interest in Buddhism, which had begun in 2002. I had taken a class senior year to satisfy my philosophy minor. The class was called “Eastern Philosophy.” I took it on a whim. A friend of mine said I would like it, and though I had no idea why he had said that or what Eastern philosophy was, I signed up.

A wild-eyed, bushy-haired professor spoke differently than other profs, dressed differently, had us do yoga and meditate, and stressed that, whereas Western philosophy was the philosophy of thinking, eastern religions were focused on the body and the mind together. There was no mind-body dualism here. When we eventually made it to Buddhism, I had the distinct sense that I knew it all already: A person was not a separate essence, identity, or soul in the world—which was similar to what Sartre had said—but was no-self, an integrated part of all existence. You couldn’t separate individual beings out like we did in the west. This made intuitive sense to me. What was a tree, for instance. Was it just a tree? Was it separate from the dirt it grew in, the fungus, the insects, the water it sucked from the ground, or the sunlight that photosynthesized it? Everything felt alive and awake in a way I had never known before. But then the class ended.

I had understood the concepts and ideas, but didn’t develop a practice until nearly ten years later. Then after having practiced Theravada-style insight meditation for six months, I knew it was time to look again. Was I supposed to be meditating and letting go of things, or was I trying to hold on and get to something, the big goal, the arhat ideal? I was confused. How could you let go and try to get somewhere at the same time? I looked into Tibetan Buddhism but disliked the aesthetic even more than I disliked the chintzy Theravadin dressings. I dabbled with Transcendental Meditation, but when the price tag came up, I walked away. Then I began reading about Zen, and its meditation practice, zazen. “Zazen is the direct expression of your true nature,” I read in Dogen. Zazen is practice without a goal. Why? Because everything is inherently perfect, the world is undefiled, completely incorruptible. A being is a manifestation of universal energy, of change, the dance of life and death.

The practice of letting go suddenly made more sense. Meditation was not getting somewhere, it was the STOP I had experienced already, and it was why I hated the internet, why I so disliked the attention culture, why I was so sick of entertainment, why I’d been disliking myself: None of that was me. Of course you couldn’t get enlightenment. You could only realize you were already enlightened. Bodhidharma visits China to spread a form of Buddhism, Emperor Wu brings him in for an audience. When the Emperor asks Bodhidharma who stands before him, Bodhidharma answers, I don’t know. When the Emperor then asks what is the highest meaning of the holy truths, Bodhidharma says, Vast emptiness, nothing holy. I looked up pictures of zendos online. Black zafus—round cushions—atop square zabutons—flat mats upon tatami flooring. Upright bodies in dark robes, heads angled down, doing nothing. I looked up calligraphy and recalled I had read Ryokan. I read him again:

One narrow path surrounded by a dense forest;
On all sides, mountains lie in darkness.
The autumn leaves have already fallen.
No rain, but still the rocks are dark with moss.
Returning to my hermitage along a way known to few,
Carrying a basket of fresh mushrooms
And a jar of pure water from the temple well.

There were koans too, hundreds of mysterious stories meant to illuminate the original ground, the luminous mind of being—the vast emptiness—from which all things arise. Enlightenment was practice; practice was enlightenment. This was not self-improvement; it was clarifying the mind, dropping self, and practicing reality. It was finding a hermitage of the mind within reality. I would try Zen Buddhism.

4.

With no teachers in the area, I found one through the internet in Japan, a man who ran an online zendo. I poured myself into studying: I read many books, all directed by my teacher. And my teacher taught me zazen. The body should be upright, but not rigid; the mind should be focused, but not overly so, open and aware; the eyes, which we kept open, should not be focused on one point, but should take in the whole room, symbolic of panoramic awareness, as if gazing at the snow-capped peaks of distant mountains.; thoughts should be let go, like they were clouds; when we got caught by thoughts, we returned to just this, seeing the space between thoughts, but also seeing through thoughts—what is beyond thought? We practiced Dogen’s phrase “dropping body-and-mind”, the zazen of relaxing into spacious awareness, relieving oneself of a fixed, rigid identity, letting both body and mind dissolve on the ground of meditation, into the original primordial mind. This could only be done by sitting, sometimes for decades. It began with moving from boredom to what Chogyam Trungpa called “cool boredom,” a sense that nothing has to be done and yet everything is totally refreshing. You can never understand what this really means through language.

Zen was a philosophy of action. Meditation was an action. Buddhism was a philosophy of action. The action was that of the self undoing the self through the self. It was consciousness watching consciousness through consciousness until the entire structure—the intricately fabricated psychological self which was housed in an equally intricate and seductive materiality—wore itself out, dropped away, or was totally flipped inside out.

A heater clicked on, rain fell outside the window, on greening plants and trees, a cat arrived in my lap, left again, warmth there. Sometimes I would sit for an hour or more. My mind and body, after an initial struggle, would settle into the present moment, and expand. Sometimes the wall would become transparent. An intense energy would fill me, the dimensions of my body would become less recognizable. Sometimes this was terrifying. It felt as though I’d dissolve into the world. When that began to happen, I would remain there, on that boundary, until something released, and the dissolving did happen, but I was still there. Scattered energy would coalesce down my spine. The room would feel as though it was inside me, and thoughts would arise from the void.

One afternoon, my girlfriend and I went to picnic at some shoals. It was a late summer day. We played in the water, ate a snack, hiked around the woods, and eventually, as it became late afternoon, I decided to meditate in the flowing shoals. I sat on a rock, my legs in the water. My girlfriend lay on the rock behind. The water gurgled and flowed, and the sky began to slowly darken. The warm air cooled. Clouds moved beyond an old brick mill building, the shell of a building, just the walls up, windows and interior long gone. The moon rose full and yellow in the empty window of one of those buildings. The water flowed and babbled and gurgled. The moon rose higher. I couldn’t tell if the moon was in my mind or if my mind was touching the moon. Everything was pristine, as though made new.

I studied, sat, played soccer, studied, sat, played soccer. My days became more ordered. My wife told me I was like a different person, always in a good mood, more present with her, more attentive. The nagging self-consciousness, the sense that things were dead, had slowly evaporated and then reversed. She began to meditate with me. At the same time, I alienated people: A close friend was upset. I wasn’t hanging out anymore. In a cheap Mexican place, we ate chips and talked and he said I was breaking his heart. I was cold, distant. He used the word selfish over and over. He was right, in a way. It was the kind of selfishness, I hoped, that would lead toward selflessness.

Months passed and practice deepened. I paid attention. I entered the living room after meditating. My girlfriend was sitting on the sofa, petting one of our cats. A lamp was on. Our German Shepherd was lying on the floor. He looked up at me. It was 2012, summer. My girlfriend was no longer my girlfriend: She was my wife, and I was her husband. Time vanished. The house was contained by the heat. The heat itself was given by the tilt of the Earth’s axis, its orientation to the sun. The sun moved through the galaxy in the same way the planet moved around the sun. The galaxy floated through space. I sat down next to my wife, floating in the galaxy beside the galaxy of her mind. The two galaxies touched. The room was small, contained in vastness, and my awareness of that vastness had returned. I wasn’t thinking of what I needed to do, of what should happen next, of what tomorrow would look like, of how I was being, or how I shouldn’t be being. It felt impossibly, amazingly rare to be sitting there, reading with her, the cat, the dog. Everything—even inanimate objects—seemed alive and were worthy of gratitude.

I began to read with interest: Mary Gaitskill, then David Foster Wallace, then Thomas Bernhard, then Lydia Davis, then Nicholson Baker. I could see what they were accessing, and suddenly, without trying to, I wrote a story. I paid no attention to how I wrote it. I didn’t try to write something perfect, as I’d been doing; I no longer wanted to write a perfect story, I just allowed myself to trust what I could now see: My own mind, how it worked, how it grabbed onto things, how it wanted a drink to feel better, how it wanted to smoke to escape, how it wanted porn, how it got frustrated, how it wanted a name and attention for itself, how it wanted to be praised for its creativity or thought impressive for its suffering, how it tried to grab and grab at beauty and make it its own. How all these things distanced me from life, how it all arose from emptiness. I felt awake and open. The story was picked up a few weeks later and went on to win a Pushcart Prize. Later, I wrote a story about the Canadian monk I had watched on Youtube.

In these new stories, I finally saw the expression that I had longed to know but never allowed myself to: A prose style of representational consciousness, the mind struggling with its awareness of itself, struggling with wakefulness, struggling with what it was. I also saw how my little viewpoint would be different, had always been different, but now I had a way to express it, and that expression—in its own very small way—would be both an offshoot and a response to tradition. It was what had been happening to me in East Tennessee and the years leading up to it—I just couldn’t see it. I was constantly grasping and repulsed by that grasping, trying to be no one and someone at once—I was spiritually confused, resisting everything, flipping from mind state to mind state, completely unaware. I had taken writing—something that had initially felt spiritual—and had turned it into an egotistical game. I had taken my deepest desire and had made it a materialistic and selfish concern.

Chogyam Trungpa called this attitude of taking something sacred and making it an egoistic desire, spiritual materialism: “No matter what the practice or teaching, ego loves to wait in ambush to appropriate spirituality for its own survival and gain.” All along, my mind and body had been talking, letting me know that I was out of alignment, that my wanting was perverted. And my coping with the problem—escaping it, not facing it—exacerbated it. Now though, my wish to live in a mountain hut was being fulfilled, but the hut was metaphorical—it was zazen, the hermitage of the larger world—and for the first time, my problems were not really mine, they were constructions of the mind, of the self.

A friend told me that the end of this essay should focus on a kind of forgiveness. I agree that some sense of tenderness is necessary, here, as we’re coming to a conclusion, but in Zen we practice atonement: All my past harmful karma, born of beginningless greed, anger, and ignorance, through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. In this avowing, there’s presence: Looking at the self not as a victim of culture or circumstances, even circumstances that may be truly nightmarish, and admitting our own play, our own neurosis, our own theatre of mind, which we’ve mistaken for reality. And in that avowing, in that knowing, entering into the present, and understanding that suffering can be the rich ground of insight. Samsara is nirvana. Our suffering is something to be grateful for, for the path it provides. Our suffering isn’t what we think. The present isn’t what we think, either. Its vastness is so totally terrifying, and its peace is so horrifyingly total, that even when we believe we’re “being present” we’re actually not. There are too many subtle gradations of ego: Watching oneself playing the game of being meditatively present; watching oneself watching how nice it feels to be present; watching oneself being a person who focuses on being present. Then watching what’s watching, aware of awareness itself until the idea of forgiveness shifts to gratitude—and for my friend’s note, I’m grateful. It brought me here.

In the proceeding fifteen years, I have practiced various forms of meditation, but I mostly sit zazen. All the old traps in my conditioned mind have arisen over and over again. In the name of selflessness I have become more selfish, and my wife and I nearly divorced. Our old relationship had to die so a new one would be born. Our child got a blood disorder, and we felt pain and guilt and sadness. My aunt, who loved literature and made me feel that writing was worthwhile, died of Covid unexpectedly. My books were published and barely paid attention to—painful at first, but then nothing to worry about. I wore a walking boot for months due to soccer injuries. My wife nearly died from a rare infection. But amidst all that, I had found a path.

In the koan, Bodhidharma’s first disciple asks him to put his mind at rest. Some of us also want our minds put to rest, but we can play a little game where we are free of ego and restful, when actually that itself is just another subtler form of ego-deception. We can log out of the attention-economy and still play the game. We can turn off our screens and still play the game. We can write essays like this one and still play the game. We can become literary figures with interesting things to say about society, culture and self and suffering and still play the game. We can immerse ourselves so thoroughly in our suffering that we feel we are it, that we are somehow more accomplished because of this fact, seeing reality fully, but still just playing a little game. Bodhidharma tells the disciple to bring him his mind. Then Bodhidharma will put it to rest. The disciple goes into meditation, looking for his mind. He looks and looks for his mind. After many days, he returns to Bodhidharma and says, I have searched for my mind exhaustively and cannot find it anywhere. Bodhidharma replies, There, I have finished putting it to rest for you.

He opened the door in a company sweatshirt. I noted the ominous suffix “.ai” in the URL printed across the chest. I set my bags down and two cats scampered up to nose my ankles. There were rows of recessed white ceiling lights. The decor consisted of fantasy memorabilia and a Taylor Swift poster. “Can I have something to eat?” I asked, opening the fridge to find only condiments and creatine powder. He suggested pasta.

I sat on the fleece-blanketed couch and ate my meal, dying for salt and a dimmer switch, wondering how I might later purge my tights of tabby hair. I let the man talk. It turned out that he was still working at the tech company. “They made me CEO,” he said with either false modesty or genuinely sheepishness

“Remind me what your company does again?” I asked.

“The good kind of AI,” he said. I tried to think of what that might be. Automated vaccine distribution? Advanced cancer diagnostics? Facial recognition for sexual predators on the loose?

“Customer service emails,” he clarified.

The guest room turned out to be the living room. I cursed myself for buying my own fantasies. Would I always be at the mercy of rich men with poor taste?

He was my ex-friend’s ex-boyfriend. We’d met once, years before. He’d encouraged me, on my first night in Paris, to order a plate of duck innards. I spent the ensuing week in the bathroom.

Now he was single, and I'd been promised a spare room. Time had been kind to me and made me a business traveler, if not in class then in attitude. I was, in other words, visiting France to co-author an article with notable anti-tech activist Logan Lane.

The first thing I ever knew about Logan was how her bedroom looked. There was that unforgettable picture of her in The New York Times, black-clad and leaning against a wall of Twombly-esque scribbles. “Oh yeah,” she said absent-mindedly when I brought up the photo.

Logan was the Gen-Z ambassador of the growing neo-Luddite movement and a rare walker-of-the-walk, with no social media accounts to speak of, not even a personal website. And though she was sullen-faced in her portrait, she was high-spirited and excitable over the phone: we had spoken for five minutes before she invited me to Paris.

I met Logan at Gare de l’Est, where we bought sandwiches and boarded a regional train to a small village, Seine-Port, that had made international headlines the previous year for banning the use of smartphones in public. In the months since I’d first heard of Seine-Port, it hadn't left my mind. In a city of screen-locked eyes and bud-filled ears, I had adopted Seine-Port as my mental refuge. “There’s always Seine-Port,” I would think when someone on the bus started watching TikTok on full volume. “This would never happen in Seine-Port,” I’d think when I noticed that a hot guy was wearing an Apple watch. In Seine-Port, I imagined, the young men didn’t know the time. They gathered in jovial clusters throughout the town square, drinking little coffees and aperitifs, intermittently slapping their palms down on wet tables and shouting high-spirited Europeanisms like “Bah non!” In Seine-Port, a young woman, not necessarily myself, though similar in appearance, would cross the square, walking with exaggerated hip movements, her chin held high, tongue loaded with rebuffs. “Not today, Jean-Baptiste,” she’d call out, and the young men would shout in unison, like the cast of West Side Story, “But when?” And the young woman would carry on walking, her footsteps landing like a hundred leather-soled slaps in the face.

But there were no young people in Seine-Port. There were, however, smartphones. Logan and I spent the day interviewing locals who could not comprehend why we had come. “The smartphone ban,” we repeated, emphatically, in both French and English. “Don’t worry,” they reassured us, “you can use your smartphones wherever you like.” Logan and I returned to Paris heavy with eclairs and doom. At the train station, we went our separate ways.

I came home to an empty apartment, the tech founder having traveled to another province for a sci-fi convention. I ate a baguette in his bed while looking at my laptop. Surely there were better ways to spend a Parisian evening. I closed the laptop, glanced disinterestedly at my copy of Amusing Ourselves to Death, then opened my laptop to read blog posts. I hated the screen, hated what it did to me, hated my haters for calling me out for it, and hated myself for running home at the end of the day to open my laptop with the excitement of a person undressing before sex. Then the infernal cycle of checks: Gmail, iMessage, Whatsapp, Proton Mail, Substack, Twitter, Instagram. When there’s nothing good, I take a dip in the spam folder. When there’s nothing good, I feel terrible.

But how could I stop? I had made a career of anti-tech activism, staked my reputation on my past-tense triumph over tech-addiction, and still I lived for a new email. Could it be that there was truly no way out?

“Let’s move here,” one of us said at some point, the way every American does on a weeklong trip to Paris. Was it Logan’s idea or mine? The idea quickly became shared, its dimensions codified through manic discussion: we would move to Paris, get rid of our computers, and spend a year typewriting a book of essays about the experience. Euphoric with twin-flame neo-Luddism, we drew up checklists and timelines in our journals. Soon everything was set, decided, perfect, the only snag being the money. I made my money publishing writing online, and Logan made hers at a campus job. Obviously, she would drop out for the project. We contacted an anti-tech investor and, on a hastily-arranged Zoom call later that same night, we were astounded to hear our own pitch emerge from our mouths air-tight and fully-formed, the lines traded off in perfect repartee, as if we’d rehearsed them. “I’m sold,” the investor interrupted us to say. “You don’t have to keep convincing me.”

We went out to a bar and celebrated over glasses of sparkling water. “Everything is happening,” we said. It was like being in love, or pregnant. It was the last night of our trip, but it wasn’t really over, this wasn’t goodbye, we would be back so soon, the months would whizz by in a flurry of phone calls and broken leases and airline tickets and all the gestures of looming change that simultaneously diminish and elevate daily life, making it an exquisite prelude to the Real Thing.

Logan returned to college, and I to my brown-carpeted sublet in London. I began to share my news with the world. I sent emails to my UK agent, and my US agent, and my editors at four different news outlets. I posted on social media and racked up tens of thousands of likes. To my immense satisfaction and vindication, the world was just as enthused as I was: the editors wanted articles, the agents wanted a formal pitch, the audience wanted a front row seat to the spectacle. Only my close friends seemed skeptical. “You’re moving to Paris?” they said. “I got a grant,” I retorted. For once, someone else was orchestrating my instability.

“I’m stressing about what to do this summer and fall,” Logan emailed a few days later. As with any idea hatched with a new acquaintance in an unfamiliar environment, the logic of our plan was difficult to access in retrospect. But while I was free to extend the delusion, Logan was constrained by pre-existing obligations, in a fixed place, on a fixed timetable—she was majoring in Russian language and literature. My life, on the other hand, was unmoored; a collapsible, tent-like structure.

“You don’t have to take the semester off,” I wrote back. “You could just come for the summer.”

Logan agreed, and I relayed this update to the investor. “Logan wants to prioritize school, so she can’t commit to the Paris plan,” I wrote in an email. “But she’s totally fine with me going ahead.” I also sent him an itemized budget for the project, researched down to the cost of a Parisian subway ticket.

“I’m happy to support your project,” he wrote back, “but I would prefer we all wait until you find an accomplice.”

This sounded like a reasonable demand. I sent a list of methods for procuring an accomplice. The investor was not satisfied. He wanted more. “I think a 5 or 6 Luddite group house would be the ideal,” he wrote back.

“I’m not sure I could get a bunch of notable Luddites to drop their lives and come live with me,” I said.

Logan chimed in again with a brief but enthusiastic email about joining the house over the summer. This did nothing to soothe the investor’s mounting skepticism. “I would want all 3 of us to feel 10/10," he said. Investors tended to think in numbers. I countered this with dubious, desperate pronouncements: “I could definitely get some famous people,” I wrote. “The New Yorker would eat this up.”

His interest was reignited: “I like this all but where?” He liked it! All of it—I wasn’t sure whether this referred to my ideas or his own, but either way the future was wide open and fully-funded. I browsed real estate websites. I bragged to friends. I bought a trench coat and a book of French short stories, and mentally charged them to a business account.

But then the investor circled back: he would fund the project only on the condition that it took place in DC. With resignation, I forced myself to envision my European fantasy playing out in America’s stone-faced capital—a descent I found nearly, but not entirely, impossible to accept. There was, after all, money on the table.

But then, in the last line of the very same email, he performed a spiritual Heimlich Maneuver: “NYC would probably be best.”

I wondered why I hadn’t thought of New York to begin with. New York! The land of literature! The seat of all culture! New York was the dream. Paris had clouded my judgment. Paris was romantic, to be sure, but it wasn’t relevant. Even if I succeeded at low-tech life in Paris, the haters would only dismiss my findings as anecdotal, circumstantial, an uncontrolled experiment that could never be replicated.

And the haters were already in full force. While I’d been nailing down funding, the public tide had turned against me and my project. What at first had been lauded as a whimsical and harmless caprice was now deemed guilty of the ultimate internet offense: privilege.

“Nice, if you are privileged enough to do so!” one commenter wrote.

“I read your note and am just amazed at the level of privilege you need to reach to write it.”

“Stubborn and so privileged.”

“It is impossible to discuss this without mentioning privilege.”

I sat back as the commenters debated amongst themselves which precise privileges I possessed. “Able-bodied” was invoked a few times.

“She does seem like she might have some financial privilege she is not mentioning in her experiment,” someone wrote.

“I’m a librarian…and, well, I’m paid like a librarian, so I’ve never had the funds to do something like this so fearlessly. Be gracious to those who will make your adventure possible.” I was eager to hear how this librarian would make my adventure possible.

“You’re young, female, with substantial cash.” I liked the idea of “substantial cash.” When would it arrive? And when it did, would I be able to use it to pay off my credit card loans, or the $4,000 I owed to a German psychiatric hospital? Or would I be forced to spend it on project expenses like postage stamps?

The investor’s emails once again cooled. “Sorry for the slow response.” He professed a willingness to “hop on the phone,” but failed to suggest a suitable time. When a meeting was finally set, I revised the budget to accommodate a variety of potential directions. I now knew better than to grow attached to an idea.

The day of our call, I was attending the ARC conference at London’s neighborhood-sized ExCel Center. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is a right-wing organization co-founded by Jordan Peterson, and an acquaintance of mine was running the afterparty. I thought it would be rude to attend an afterparty without having attended the main event, so I sent an email to ARC requesting a press pass.

My plan was to lampoon the conference, to pen a takedown that would appear in a mid-level magazine, expertly scratching the liberal itch for moral high ground. Determined to look the part of the professional journalist—someone with an alarm clock and boundaries who wrote exclusively in the third-person—I threw together a pantsuit, the jacket of which appeared to match the slacks at a distance greater than 20 feet.

Immediately upon arrival, I made accidental eye contact with another journalist who crossed the twenty foot barrier and gave me a once-over at close range. “What exactly are you writing?” he asked.

“An article,” I said. “About the conference.”

“What’s your angle, though?”

“The New Yorker,” I said quickly. “I mean, politics.”

He looked amused by my distress. “It’s the hair,” he said, gesturing to my bleached streaks. “You look like a lib.”

I fled to the auditorium, where David Brooks was giving a talk on conservative values. The people on either side of me were looking at their phones. I watched one of them type out a text to his employee: “You got it, bro.” A woman scrolled through a list of conference attendees, only looking up to cheer when Brooks mentioned God. I was listening hard to the speech, trying to pluck out a few damning lines for my article, but Brooks was infuriatingly measured, and I reluctantly admitted to myself that I agreed with everything he said.

Even the later speeches, with their cheesy slogans—“Woke men are weak men!”—and farcical attempts at rousing the audience—“With great power comes great responsibility!”—spurred at least a few bullet points in the notebook that now no longer had journalistic pretensions. A few hours into the conference, I was whooping at an octogenarian theologian who quoted Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” It occurred to me then, for the first time, that anti-tech activism was in a sense conservative. Both reflected a longing to return to an earlier, superior age. Once I’d drawn the connection, I was shocked I hadn’t seen it before.

Lunch was free, even for the libs. I consumed a feminine portion of sautéed vegetables then left for my call with the investor. The internet was weak, or perhaps overburdened by all the international visitors. I ran up and down the escalators in my fake suit, seeking a stable connection, looking like a Dickensian street urchin scrabbling after a coin on a string.

I sat down in a corner of the lobby. The atmosphere was less than ideal, highly-trafficked, loud and echoey, but maybe this would make me seem industrious, important, like the type of person who has to “carve out time” for a meeting.

I didn’t have headphones, so I held my laptop up to my head to hear what the investor was saying. The first few minutes were devoted to updates and pleasantries. The connection cut out a few times but I didn’t mention it, for fear of seeming unprofessional. When he asked me about my recent work I tried to impress him with a string of media acronyms: NBC, NPR, NYT.

“Look,” he said finally, “I just don’t think press is the way.”

“Sure,” I said, diplomatically. “But also I get emails every day from people who ditched their smartphones.”

“They’re lying,” he said. I would've collapsed but I was already on the floor.

He wanted to prioritize, he said, local community building over national media coverage projects. I might have argued that large-scale initiatives can inspire small-scale change but there was no point in arguing now. I just wanted the call to end. For the rest of it, I tried to project a sort of scrappy, imperturbable optimism—“Funding be damned, I’ll find a way!”—while waiting until I could cry in private.

But there was no privacy to be had at the ARC conference, where thousands of suited men and high-heeled women swirled about conference tables and event halls, exchanging business cards and insider knowledge and let-me-pick-your-brain’s. I remained seated on the floor for a long time after the call ended, trying to accept my new financial situation, which was in fact no different than my old financial situation, but nonetheless seemed markedly worse for the withdrawal of hope.

The lunch service ended, the dessert trays disappeared while I sat there. The feminine vegetables had not satisfied me, and my mounting hunger, unnecessary though it was—I had enough money for a sandwich—rendered my financial state bodily and therefore unignorable.

When I opened my laptop again, I found that the investor had sent an email. “Nice chatting earlier.” There was an attachment labeled “confidential.” It turned out to be a 174-page draft of his novel. “No rush,” he wrote.

The afterparty was confusing for me. I felt a moral duty not to enjoy myself, so that I might guiltlessly recount the story later on to my liberal associates. In fact, I could not help but enjoy myself. There were two dance floors, each of which appeared bumpin’ in its own special way. A life-sized zebra statue presided over us like a political metaphor. The wall mirrors multiplied our bodies, casting our every gesture as pre-ordained, eternal. The gender ratio was firmly in my favor, and my dress—a modest but flattering black sheath—withstood the appraisals it received from men whose conservative values superseded, in priority if not ferocity, their libidos. A few of these men took me aside and expressed pleasure at encountering a woman in a conservative space. “We need more of you,” they said. It felt so nice to be needed.

When the bouncers kicked everyone out after midnight, I found myself waiting for a cab with a crew of graduate students visiting from Oxford. Their patter was difficult to follow, invoking as it did a cast of thinkers absent from my Connecticut Liberal Arts College curriculum, but their impressions were funny enough to transcend context. I laughed at abstruse Hitler references all the way to the hotel, then issued a bashful apology to the driver as I exited the vehicle.

In an upper-story hotel room, my new friends drank red wine and ridiculed me, deconstructing my character, my sobriety, my ethnic background. It felt great, like a violent back rub that works out all the knots. Encouraged by their attention, I summoned the nerve to weigh in on gender politics. “I think it’s time we accept that the emancipation of women has been net-negative for society,” I said, in a statement that won me the approval I’d been seeking all night. “She’s clever,” one of them noted, as if unlocking a door. Suddenly, the Far Right was the Old West, a glittering frontier, a land rich in soil and possibility, a fresh slate, lawless and unhistoried, free for the taking. But even in the chummy, bantering fold of a wine-drunk conclave at four in the morning, I could not shake the feeling that no settlement would ever be richer, fresher, freer than perpetual motion.

At daybreak, I walked to the station. It was February and not even my conservative dress could keep me warm. My new friends were already tucked up in their hotel beds. Were they really my friends? I tried to imagine them at my birthday party, mingling with my left-wing friends. Was I just like a pet dog, devoted to the person who'd most recently patted my head? I was too indiscriminate, too impressionable to ever pick a side. So nothing had changed: I had no money and no allegiance. In other words, I had a choice. This, I knew, was a privilege.

Subscribe now

Most people would say that the walking was the hardest part—we covered 103 miles and ascended 32,000 feet as we looped through France, Italy, and Switzerland—and the walking was certainly taxing. At altitudes over 8000 feet, my heart fluttered like a frantic bird, and I gulped at the inadequate air without ever getting enough of it. Our legs were sore, and we were furiously hungry. But the looking was even more strenuous than the walking. I’d trained for the hike, but nothing could have prepared me for the almost intolerable onslaught of beauty. My looking was a net, and precious things kept slipping through.

The rhythm was simple. We woke, we walked, we looked, we slept; we woke, we walked, we looked, we slept. We did it over and over, occasionally stopping to eat cheese and bread, only sometimes showering, for a total of ten days. Autumn was encroaching, making uneven inroads, and the days themselves were violently unalike—some swaddled in cloud, some searing with sun, and once at the top of a col there were great slashing gusts of snow. We walked across lush valleys and clambered over ledges where nothing grew. One morning we saw a herd of ibex daintily crossing an outcropping. Cows nosed the grass, producing stinking pats of shit, making doleful expressions. We dipped down into villages where the houses had wooden shutters and then climbed back up into the rocks and the mist. There was mud, clots of it clinging to our shoes, and puffs of reddish dust. The wind was so wild at a particularly exposed point that it ripped the rainproof cover off my pack and swirled it out of my hands. Light glinted off the crinkled blue ice of the glaciers. Light faded, light sharpened and scoured, light burned our skin and cracked our lips. In a rare sunless hour there was an improbably perfect rainbow. Yet no matter how different the days were, the rhythm of waking, walking, looking, and sleeping persisted. It was the eternal form of our lives, simple and ceaseless. Never mind that we had spent years prior doing lesser things. Perhaps from now on we would only ever do this.

The feathery purple flowers called Fireweed. The furrows of creased black rock. What else? Monstrous slugs longer than my hand. Moving white dots, which were sheep. Deep green scoops, which were valleys. What else? Time both slowing and hastening, above all taking on a distinctive texture. Annihilating bouts of dreamless sleep. The rose of the sun rising and pinking the mountains. What else? Above all, the imperviousness of everything to our awe.

“The process of disenchantment is irreversible,” the philosopher Charles Taylor wrote in 2011, reprising his customary lament. Taylor is the foremost contemporary proponent of a familiar story, which comes to us by way of the sociologist Max Weber (who wrote of Entzauberung, literally de-magicking, and was himself riffing on the poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, who wrote of Entgötterung, literally de-divinization). The story goes something like this. Once, the world was enchanted; then, because of some combination of Cartesian philosophy and Enlightenment-era science and industrial advances, in short because of that unstable and sprawling phenomenon so clumsily subsumed under the term “modernity,” it was drained of its magic. Religion, too, was an agent of disenchantment, albeit a slow and partial one. The world in which each tree or river was inhabited by a spirit or a nymph was gradually supplanted by a more orderly world of demons and angels, then by a yet more orderly world of stringent monotheism, and finally by the sterility of secularism. Now, the story concludes, we are confined to a universe of dead matter.

According to Taylor, the enchanted world had two primary features. First, it was “filled with spirits and moral forces, and…these forces impinged on human beings.” In addition to the usual workings of cause and effect, there were magical emanations—spells and curses that blessed or doomed us at a distance, auras that acted on us without touching us. Hauntings were common; there were portents and talismans and evil eyes. Second, meaning inhered in the world, not merely in its observers. It was not a product of human operations but a property of reality. “Power resided in things,” Taylor writes. A flower or a rock—these meant something, regardless of what we thought about them, regardless of whether we thought about them at all. But now that the old enchantments have become irrecoverable, now that bodies are constellations of atoms and mountains are heaps of molecules, meaning is an external imposition.

There are learned objections to Taylor's story, and to their number I wish to add an objection of a looser sort. I suppose I might call it a spiritual objection, a failure of fundamental recognition. Taylor writes gloomily, “the combination of Weberian rationalization and post-Galilean science, with the accompanying decline of religion, has left us with a world deprived of meaning, and offering no consolation.” What, I wonder, is he talking about? The world itself is a refutation. It is nothing but consolation. It is so much more beautiful than it has to be.

Even the desiccating explanations provided by modern science are not all that deflating. For how much do we really learn when we discover that one event causes another, that Mont Blanc was created by the clash of tectonic plates, that glaciers gouged out the valleys? Schopenhauer writes, “the connection between cause and effect is really just as mysterious as any connection imagined to hold between a magic incantation and the spirit it seems to conjure up.” He is right.

But more importantly, there are things that explanation could not ruin, even if it were not quite so occult. As Bruce Robbins puts it, “perhaps meaning is something that one simply cannot not have.” A small thing like modernity could hardly eliminate it. The world has always had other ideas. Everywhere there are little rips in the dull fabric of the usual. No amount of knowledge about the Alps could disenchant them. In fact, learning about them is only a futile attempt to access them more completely, to do something with their immensity, to make it bearable or at least transform it into the sort of thing we can touch.

We mutter to babies that we want to eat them up, but we settle for holding them; the mountains are too big to hold, so we Google their names and learn that to the left of Mont Blanc is Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey, one of the most grueling peaks to climb, first summitted by Henry Seymour King in 1885, and to its right is Mont Maudit, literally “cursed mountain,” itself a stronghold of dark magic. But knowing this does nothing to diminish the massif. How could it?

In fact, knowing this doesn’t do much of anything at all, besides help us pass the idle hours when we sit after dinner waiting to walk again. By the time we are looping back down into the towns back up into the gnarled rock, the names of things no longer matter. The names of things are only empty casings. What could they ruin? They are so flimsy beside these peaks as sheer and enduring as spires.

Subscribe now

The doctors diagnosed her with cancer and gave her six months to live. Hodgkin’s Disease. Stage III lymphoma. She was a fifty-six-year-old waitress, a widow with two adult sons, and she owned a little house with a garden out back. She was able to walk to work.

This was Cleveland, Oklahoma. 1966.

You go to the doctor with a chest cold and after a few visits he says, “In 180 days, the cancer that’s spreading to both sides of your diaphragm will have scorched through your body.”

You’re supposed to do what—buy your coffin and pick out a grave?

Because, that’s exactly what she did, my Great-Aunt Oma. No one had seen her so focused. She sold her house to pay funeral expenses and divided the remaining money between her sons, checked herself into the nursing home while the cancer was finishing her. She purchased her casket from the Chapman Funeral Home, bought the burial plot next to her mother who’d died of lymphoma in ’63, just down from her father who’d succumbed to it eighteen months before.

Ida Mae Fox: 1886-1963.
Andrew Jackson Fox: 1886-1964.

Oma Crosson Fox: 1909-, her headstone said, because she bought that too, had it carved with her name and date of birth, had it planted on the burial plot. All she had to do was die.

Sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes what comes for you is so horrid, you wrap your arms around it like a friend. Or a family member—which had been the most important thing to Oma, especially in that summer of ’66 when she was waiting around to die.

She didn’t, of course. Her cancer went into remission and she lived another twenty years.

They were good years. She kept her room at the nursing home, using it like most people use hotels, checking in now and then for a rest. She mostly lived with her sons or siblings, traveling back and forth between them, a permanent visitor. She was one of nine children.

She would stay with my grandmother a few times a year, her youngest sister. I remember her coming down to the ranch, a sweet woman, but very nervous, always anxious to move on. You got that sense about her. She still loved her family, but she’d made other commitments. She always had Kleenexes in her hands. She’d squeeze them into hard white balls.

On Memorial Day the family would gather to decorate the graves. There was a long row of Foxes in Woodland Cemetery: my great-grandparents and their eldest daughter Grace; their son Freddie, who’d died of tetanus when he was only seven:

                                                     Fred J. SON OF
                                                     A.J. & IDA FOX
                                                     NOV. 26, 1914
                                                     NOV. 15, 1921

I’d help my grandparents lay wreaths and flowers on the marble, listen to my kinfolks tell stories: my Great-Uncle Leroy or my Great-Aunt Lorraine. My Great-Aunt Margaret or her sister, Louise.

At some point we noticed Oma had drifted away from us. She’d be standing off by herself, very calm, no balls of Kleenex. Just standing there, studying her tombstone, only four numbers shy of completion, a short woman who never seemed to age—her hair in perfect blonde curls, skin smooth as Bible paper—staring down at that patch of prairie earth she had dedicated herself to years before.

Subscribe now

It was the local train. It made every stop. It was unromantic: all fluorescent lights and plastic panels and hard polyester seats. This was sometime during college. The train had turned out to be the cheapest way to get from Christmas with my mother and father in Geneva to a flight, departing the day after tomorrow from London, back across the Atlantic to Boston. I was in a window seat on the right-hand, northern side. It was midwinter, mid-afternoon, the sky already faded enough that the projected reflections of those fluorescent lights seemed to hover in the gray skies above the passing fields.

As my carriage pulled into the next of so many stations, big and small, fifty miles southwest of Paris, the view was unprepossessing—a spartan steel canopy over an empty platform, a prim little railway hotel with small lace-curtained windows and plastic flowers out front, a lonely parking lot. But the name on the sign was one to conjure with: Chartres. Oh, I thought, surely there isn’t more than one Chartres. But, I thought, you didn’t see any spires from far away. But, I thought, you weren’t looking.

Then the doors on the platform opened. The cool misty air found its way inside. The doors remained open. Spontaneity comes with difficulty, if you’ve had a certain kind of childhood. An inscrutable sequence of electronic bells sounded outside. My backpack was somehow still on my shoulders because, hours ago, I’d simply sat down with it on, too tired for the additional physical procedure of its removal, and just uncomfortable enough, mile after mile, for me to not do anything about it. I sat there, vaguely waiting for the doors to close again. You might never have another chance to see it, I thought. From scripture, I thought, we know not the hour. It’s been here for a thousand years, I thought, so it will be here for another thousand years. Even if you yourself won’t. You will have another chance, I thought. Probably that railway hotel has a room, I thought, probably it doesn’t. Get up, I thought. Go, I thought as I stayed in my seat, go.

The Cathédrale Notre Dame-de-Chartres is the cathedral of cathedrals. This is because it is the quintessentially cathedral-shaped cathedral—the stereotype and archetype of its kind. It has two narrow spires, as pointy as witches’ hats and some four hundred feet tall, above its front façade. It measures the same dimension—four hundred feet—in length. It has very tall walls, a hundred feet high, with very large stained glass windows, facing each other across a very narrow nave whose fifty-foot width was determined by the old Romanesque church on whose foundation it was raised. Notice the simplicity of these ratios: four to one, two to one, one to one.

The building’s longstanding purpose is to house a rectangle of white silk called the sancta camisa, believed by some Catholics to have been worn by the Virgin Mary as she gave birth to Jesus. A gift to Charlemagne from Byzantium, it had been found by a methodical empress who had traveled to the Land of Israel around the year 300 and collected artifacts willfully attested to by local oral history and vernacular archaeology. The camisa is called a secondary relic: not the primary holy body itself, but something that touched it, which, since the Virgin ascended undying to heaven, is as close as you get.

The Cathedral at Chartres also went up wondrously. By the standards of its time—and even of ours—it was built with astonishing speed: well within a generation, mostly between the years 1194 and 1225. This gives it, for all its vast scale, a rare coherence and a quality of instantaneity. It is visibly something undertaken swiftly, deftly, methodically, comprehensively. It is complete unto itself. It typifies what architectural historians call the High Gothic—the deeply articulated and corrugated formal style, all vertical ribs and spikes and niches and pinnacles, that is now doubly familiar in the developed West as the direct template for the Gothic Revival of the 19th Century. When you go for the first time, you will feel that you have been there before.

During that Gothic Revival, between around 1840 and 1860, the architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was assigned with restoring and reconstructing Notre Dame de Paris. Though of greater ecclesiastical importance than Chartres, Notre Dame is an architecturally lesser building: it’s more visibly a shaggy bricolage from the different eras of the centuries-spanning period of its construction. Its squat and foursquare 200-foot towers never got their witches’ hats. In contrast, Chartres especially interested le-Duc because its rapid construction happened at the exact midpoint—and, by 19th century tastes, the stylistic apogee—of that very long time it took to build Notre Dame. So le-Duc used Chartres as a template. His post-Romantic approach was what we would today call pastiche or even kitsch: not to revert and reboot Notre Dame to resemble itself exactly as it was at any precise point in its past, but to make it as he felt it should be, as it ought to have been, and so as it could and should yet become. A stern distinction between the factual and fantastical did not especially need to be made. Those sulky chin-in-hand gargoyles on the postcards and that thrillingly attenuated spire at the intersection of transept and narthex were his inventions. In this way Notre Dame, as we have lately known it, is a modern building, manufactured with steam, iron and a self-conscious and willful anachronism in which High Gothic and Gothic Revival were, across their 600 intervening years, collapsed into each other.

You know about the fire. One of the things cathedrals do, when they’re not busy lasting forever, is burn down. The 2019 fire that burned down about a third of the physical structure of Notre Dame—recall the spectacle of le-Duc’s iron spire descending along its own vertical axis into a Miltonian maelstrom of flame—occasioned the last five years of rapid reconstruction. As with fact and fantasy for le-Duc, the distinction between the building and rebuilding of cathedrals, both so long in their undertaking, can be a matter of merely scholastic and pedantic distinction. But with the cathedral’s reopening this December, the fact of Notre Dame’s remaking is clear—maybe all too clear. A high-tech latex compound was applied to all the stone interior surfaces, which, when pulled from it like dried wood glue from a child’s hands, removed not only the char of the fire but all the previous centuries’ dirt and wax and wood smoke and incense. Everything is neat and tidy. “It feels like it was built yesterday,” said Adrien Willeme, a mason who worked on the rebuilding, to the Associated Press, “like it’s just been born.”

I don’t know how to feel about this. Resurrection is, to be sure, gratifyingly consistent with Catholicism. To attend Mass is to witness the same singular man constantly and simultaneously at the hours of his death and resurrection and on the day of his birth, across their intervening 33 years and three days—and also at the end of days—all collapsed into each other. In life we are in death. A 1936 book by modern Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier—about the promise of newness as found in the United States of America, and especially its skyscrapers—reminded its readers that antiquity was not an original quality of revered monuments, but one acquired over time. The book was released in America, right after World War Two, as When the Cathedrals were White. To see Notre Dame now—and again—in white makes it easier to console oneself that, along with a ruined planet, we shall bequeath to our descendants in the year 2725 at least a serviceable church in France. To be sure, from a practical and technical point of view, it would have been strange and complicated to restore Notre Dame not to some state of newness, not to a simulacrum of its high-resolution appearance in 1319, but to its moodier appearance in 2019. When you lose a third of your cathedral by fire into water into ashes, maybe submission to reason dictates that your only option for restoration is something that risks such uncanny novelty.

And yet. What, if not strange and complicated, should cathedrals be? What do we lose when we make old places new? Would it have been more interesting—more correct, even—to take the appearance of Notre Dame precisely back to 2019, even if that meant reproducing with Viollet-le-Duc-like artifice the visual effects of half a millennium of candle smoke? I know I would like to go back precisely to a point in time in 2019—to right before the pandemic that hit Paris so hard, a few weeks after that plague’s first European spark in Italy—and try to start again.

Notre Dame itself presented Parisians with a preview of such dilemmas, after an energetically-efficient cleansing of its exterior undertaken between 1991 and 1999—in anticipation of the millennium, an important year for Christians. That cleansing, like a too-close shave, turned the old and gray facade back to a peachy and uncanny yellow-pink. It no longer reproduced in real-life grisaille the famous black and white photographs of itself on Saturday August 26th, 1944, battered and bruised and sooty indeed, snipers on its parapets, at the famous Liberation Mass. The real had been detached from the apparent. Or was it the other way around? The famous front façade has since that scouring weathered with unanticipated speed—from peach toward champagne and ivory and even, in some lights, back into a birch-bark gray—which rapidity is asserted by some to be evidence of the damage, for all the illusions of restoration, done by removing the outermost layers from the stone. We can choose more mystically to believe that this is evidence of the insistent passage of the past into the present—ever more urgently with our attempts to repress it.

The same is unlikely to happen again to Notre Dame’s now-gleaming interior, in our age of cold diode glare and artisanal low-emissions beeswax. Now, at least in the images I’ve seen online, Notre Dame doesn’t much look like Notre Dame—as I still know and carry it inside myself from various visits: as an almost homely glimmer of glass and brass against a surprisingly intimate twilight of dark stone and workmanlike woodwork, against a jumble of susurrating crowds. Now, it looks more like the version of Notre Dame that you might see in such a video game as Assassin’s Creed, or as would be conjured by images excreted from the early simulated intelligence interfaces of late 2023 and early 2024, all oversaturated color and screen-like luminosity. Cheap mimesis. Tinselly beauty. Self-soothing stimulus. All digitally remastered for our mediated attention economy. The grimmest analysis would be that, however collectively unconsciously, we have rebuilt the real cathedral in that graven image.

Chartres Cathedral, which though it had long been doing just fine compared to Notre Dame, underwent in 2016 and 2017 an ostensible restoration that changed it unalterably and beyond all recognition. Walls the color of ebony became the color of ivory. A statue known for centuries as the Black Madonna came out white. Up went new-old detailing—gaudy or glorious, depending on your taste—in lapis lazuli and gold leaf. The main thing lost forever was the effect of the colored windows—their unique tincture called Chartres Blue—as startling galaxies of light and color against the eternal nocturnal abyssal darkness of the rest of the interior. By 2017, against the new bright walls, the windows faltered and became pale and watery, and even seemingly opaque, more eyelid than eye. Thus, strangely, the whole felt smaller and flatter: not a mysteriously unenclosed-feeling expanse attended by hovering galactic luminosities, but merely a high narrow bright box.

Many hated it. The restoration architect was quoted in the New York Times, with an utterly French combination of performative egalitarian piety and ancien-regime hauteur, saying, “I’m very democratic but the public is not competent to judge.” His idea had been to run it back to just how it would have appeared to our ancestors on the day it opened—presumably it was meant to present before those ancients an earthly paradise. The world made new. But our modern eyes will never be medieval eyes. We cannot now see even with 2016 eyes, with 2019 eyes, with this morning’s eyes. Or with the eyes of a world to come. Even if Chartres is now materially exactly as it was eight hundred years ago, it can never again to anyone now or ever living look as it once did. Precisely within the judgement of a public is where any place can be said most to exist. Maybe the truest cathedral, the one to restore and return to, is one that approximates most closely to a preponderance of collective memory shared by all the living and the dead who have passed through it across the centuries: the incarnation that would best be recognized by all those souls. This would be a building a little more beat up than the one that was presented on day one, its newness seen by only one generation. The very beginning of anything is rarely its state of perfection. To argue for an endless stabilization of the conditions of the first day would be to say—falsely—that any place is begotten only by its designers, and not also made, day by day, by those who dwell in it, over time, as it becomes itself.

A Cathedral in Time. That’s the turn of phrase famously coined in 1951 by the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, an actual professor of mysticism, to convey the spirit of the Jewish Sabbath: to relate how Jews—having been denied access by twenty centuries of Empires, from the Roman to the British, to the precise volume of space around which their land-based spiritual practice has since the Bronze Age been centered, the Temple and the Temple Mount; and denied in diaspora any other reliable contract to land and property—were able instead to find space in time. But not in mere endurance: “The sabbath is to time what the temple and tabernacle are to space. The sabbath is a cathedral in time. On the seventh day we experience in time what the tabernacle and temple represented as spaces which is eternal life, God in complete creation.” What makes this an observation of such compound glory is that a cathedral in space is of course also always already a cathedral in time: long in its becoming; long in its being, and yet its appearance always gradually or suddenly changing—with the cultural signification of its forms and signs in a constant state of resignification. There is no going back. When I was sitting in frantic lassitude in that train—electronic bells ringing, mechanical doors open—I was trying simultaneously to convince myself of the ephemeral and the eternal. To believe in the power of now and yet to have faith in forever. The river runs into the sea. The sea is never full. In the end both outcomes turned out to be true: Chartres is gone. Chartres is here. Chartres is preserved. Chartres is destroyed.

Yet, reader, it was so much better before. That’s why I’m glad that at the last minute I made it off the train, even as the sliding doors were closing behind me, bumping hard into my backpack. I walked up through the cold and unlovely town and into the cathedral. I saw it. I managed to steal at least this much out of time. In my memory, at that odd hour and in that unfashionable season, I was there alone. It was all I had dared hope and nothing I had ever expected. As an architect I’ve made some pilgrimages to sacred spaces—Hagia Sophia, architect Glenn Murcutt’s Australian Islamic Center in Melbourne, Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, the Holy Sepulcher, Fenway Park—and like Viollet-le-Duc at Chartres, I’ve methodically mapped their designs and effects. But nothing has been like that was. Perhaps precisely because I was so unprepared that day for ecstasy, it was able to find me there. I don’t know how to tell you about it—other than that somehow when I imagine the sublime and inhuman mammalian joy of being a humpback whale suspended infinitely in a warm ocean, abyss above and abyss below, shafts of light evincing lysergically from the quicksilver of the waves seen from the other side—which I have been trying to do since at the age of three when I first heard a recording of whalesong—I conceive that it must be something like what being in that cathedral was like on that day, for me.

Maybe you, like me, were made in college to read Raymond Carver’s canonical 1981 short story Cathedral. The protagonist, inspired by a late night television documentary that they’re watching and hearing while smoking a late night joint, draws a picture of a cathedral for a not-especially-welcome house guest who is blind. The ballpoint pen inscribing palpably deep into a paper grocery bag, the unseeing man’s hands resting on and following the seeing man’s hands as he draws. The end of the story is that the protagonist draws the cathedral with his eyes closed, and that even when the blind guest invites him to reopen them and tell him what the drawing looks like, he keeps them closed. The final lines: “‘Well,’ he said, ‘Are you looking?’ My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. ‘It’s really something,’ I said.” That’s what being inside Chartres that day was like. I was in my life. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. I’m glad that, at least once, I got to know how that felt. I hope, but doubt, that I will get to feel it again.

It’s hard to know what faith is. For much of my life I have thought of it as a defensible legerdemain in service of organized religion’s useful worldly project of compelling ethical behavior. Around the time that Chartres was completed, the meaning of the word shifted over in English from mere fidelity—loyalty, trustworthiness, devotion—to this slightly other thing that is beyond belief: “neither the submission of reason,” to paraphrase the sturdy formulation of the 19th century polymath poet Mathew Arnold, who wrote this down around the same time Viollet-le-Duc was remaking Notre Dame, “nor acceptance of what reason cannot reach. [But] the being able to cleave to a power of goodness appealing to our real self, not to our apparent self.” More and more I think of faith as a specific experience of presence in absence, and so as a variety of something described by another word that the word rather resembles: grief. Perhaps especially of the harder forms of grief: of the anticipatory grief that continually prepares us for abandonment, by death or other means, by the one we love. A variety of the complicated grief that is immune to any sequential procession—a passion that cannot be mapped onto any orderly stations of the cross. Because I was too preemptively embarrassed to ask in my sub-schoolboy French, I never found out, at the town of Chartres, if there was room at that inn. I had spent all of the long dusk inside the cathedral and when I went back out into the world the sky was blue-black. Even enclosed by that blue-black I could also still see in all things the Chartres Blue. I spent most of that night sitting on the platform under yellow sodium lights, and just got on the next train when it finally came. That morning I arrived at Paris and killed time before the final train to London by going to Notre Dame and buying a wooden rosary that I put in my backpack and have since transferred to every bag that I’ve ever taken onto an airplane. My own sancta camisa, this artifact consistently stops the planes from falling out of the sky.

The only useful action in the world that my time inside Chartres Cathedral compelled in me—the only being able to cleave to the power of goodness appealing to the real and not the apparent—that I can attribute to that moment of space and time, came years later. It was during a brief and unprecedented road trip with my father. He was driving a rented car from London to Geneva in what turned out to be the last of the very many business trips that he loved, and the last time he was able to safely drive. He had for a long time been subject to the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease, the immobilizing and grueling neurological condition that advances not gradually but in successive plummets and plateaus. We were just before the plummet that would lead to the last and lowest plateau. But we didn’t consciously know it yet. My presence in the passenger seat was his only concession then to frailty. He had a sense of dutifulness and orderliness that meant he liked carrying out a task once undertaken, without diversion. The caprice and chaos in my upbringing were—mostly—a matter of his absence. After we pulled back onto the highway from a roadside lunch—quintessential—of steak frites, I saw the spires of Amiens Cathedral swing up over the horizon. Amiens was, like Chartres just a hundred miles to the south and just a generation earlier, built at speed, between 1220 and 1270. It’s the largest cathedral in France. It looks uncannily like the child of gracile Chartres and robust Notre Dame, but grown so big that the latter would fit inside it twice over. It contains an object said to be the head of John the Baptist. I remembered Chartres. So I asked my dad if he’d ever been to Amiens. A devout Catholic and an architect himself, and so on lifelong pilgrimage to all ancient churches and all modern buildings of note, he had seemingly been everywhere. His legendary first date with my mother had been to see a cathedral in England, and for the rest of her life she made fun of him for having brought heavy Navy surplus binoculars with which to closely inspect the tectonics of the ceiling. You were supposed, she would say, to be looking at me. But to my surprise he hadn’t been to Amiens. To what turned out to be that one last church. Dad, I said, we could go, we could make a detour. But we need to get to Paris, he said. But dad, I said, nobody is waiting for us in Paris except us. That made him laugh—a victory. Suddenly I had given him the feeling that he could get away with something. Why not, he said, well why not. I’m easy. By the time we got to the cathedral it was about to close. We stood at a small wooden side door—one of those small doors inside a big door that you see in very big and very old buildings—still open. My dad with his charm which he never much directed at me, with his perfect French which I never much otherwise heard, with his guileless curiosity about strangers and his uncanny ability to draw grace from the habitually graceless, moved the formerly closed-faced gatekeeper to let us inside for a few minutes. The threshold of the door-within-a-door proved too high for him to step over. So I stepped inside on my own. But I didn’t let go of his hand, which I’d been holding to try to steady him across. He didn’t mind. Him standing three feet outside of the cathedral and me standing three feet inside it. Our arms fully extended, my left hand holding his right, above the threshold. Six feet apart. To my right I see across the transept to some luminous windows. To my left I see him framed and silhouetted in the pale outline of the doorway that was like a rectangle of white silk. Someone begins testing the organ. There were blasts of chromatic but unmusical sound that were terrifying and sad and funny. There was eternal life, God in complete creation. My dad died a few years later, a few years before the pandemic. He died old but also, after seeing my mother and the only person he had lived for die before him, he died hard. I am now none the wiser. I haven’t understood how to be without him. When I ask myself where he is, I answer myself that it’s just like this: I’m right here, with you and everyone else living, just inside the cathedral, and he’s right there, just outside the cathedral. It’s really something.

Subscribe now

Mary said unto them: Ask me not concerning this mystery. If I should begin to tell you, fire will issue forth out of my mouth and consume all the world. - The Apocryphal Gospel of Bartholomew

Oct 23

I’m in Rome for one week, for two Cluny Institute events. The first, which Luke organized, is a private discussion of Sir Francis Bacon’s 17th century utopian text New Atlantis; the second, the next night, is a literary reading at a bilingual bookstore.

Haven’t slept in 36 hours.

Oct 24

On Vicolo di Montevecchio, the buildings stick out of the ground like teeth or graves. Rain cuts against my window. It’s gray outside, and dark in my apartment; when I exit, the door opens out into an even darker hall, which leads to a balcony overlooking what I initially think is a roofed lobby, but is actually a triangular courtyard which opens up to the sky, and rain falls here too, into plant holders with no plants, just dirt and scraggly stems. I turn back down the hall and descend the stone steps. The automatic light doesn’t turn on as I feel my way down—8am; 2am where my wife Nicolette is—alone, to drink the canned Starbucks drink I bought the night before, and smoke a cigarette.

Outside, the cramped buildings and roads feel oppressive; they rise and unfurl mysteriously; the sky leaks into my head; a hunched man passes carrying a rainbow umbrella.

The rainbow umbrella is there—the raw materials are in front of me and on some level I perceive them—but my cognition unifies the object in my mind: umbrella—handle—hunchback—don’t make eye contact—rainbow—street. Time collapses into the rainbow umbrella, which stretches into the past and future and lands in my head, full of sludgy thoughts that I haphazardly consider turning into insights for the book discussion in three days.

Curling around a corner, vaguely preparing for my event—and understanding in some abstract way that I’m in Rome and shouldn’t spend all my time indoors—I look up at some buildings and try to consciously experience history. Science was an anti-intellectual response to rationality, I think, lazily recalling a line from Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, which I scroll-read on the plane, to prepare for the discussion: Modern science was not concerned with lofty idealized reflections, or the rigid, looped reason of the Scholastic philosophers, but could be summed up in a sentence William James wrote in a letter to his brother Henry James: “I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts.”

I look up and try to feel history. I try to feel history through irreducible and stubborn facts. Old building; wet cobblestone… I think about the “hard problem” of consciousness; Francis Bacon’s inductive method—which I learned more about from talking to the voice option on ChatGPT in my car a week ago—doesn’t adequately deal with the difficulty of subjective experience…

I retreat to my apartment. I turn the lock. I go inside.

The sun comes out and I am a person again. Open windows. Open blinds. I am worming up from somewhere inside of my body and toward my face. Pushups. Emails. My apartment has a library with a rolling ladder, spiral staircase, a giant hinged window that opens to a free-standing porcelain bath, visible from the living room. Missing N. Drink water. Stretch.

Walking down crowded streets in the sun. And it’s pretty!

Listening to Sabrina Carpenter…

Sun punctuates the space between the buildings. Little rivulets like silvery thoughts running through cracked cobblestone. I text Walt, in Vienna, some Trakl…

More pious, you know the meaning of the dark years,
Coolness and autumn in lonely rooms;
And shining steps ring out in holy blueness.

…At lunch with Claire and Rome, Rome throws her pasta onto the ground but sucks on lime wedges. Tomorrow is her birthday; Rome is turning one in Rome. Luke—the founder of Cluny, and Rome’s dad—is at an A.I. conference at the Vatican. Initially, Luke had asked the organizers if I could attend, but they wouldn’t let me, and now I’m grateful for being spared the certain torture, and for Claire inviting me to lunch. Without N’s eyes to see through, my life tends to become small—I tell Claire that I want to try to stay out of the apartment for a little.

There is scaffolding on the Fountain of the Four Rivers. There is scaffolding on the Church of Sant’Agnese in Agone. There is scaffolding on the Palazzo Pamphili. There is scaffolding on the Fontana del Moro. There is scaffolding on the Fountain of Neptune. The “jubilee” is coming up, which happens every twenty-five years and brings in tens of thousands of tourists. The theme this year is “hope.”

The Caravaggios have been replaced by posters of the Caravaggios. A metallic labyrinth rises high around me in the near-dark; people pray in the pews.

Rome, on Claire’s shoulders, points around at the skulls and Baroque sculptures in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi and says “Boo.”

Catherine texts me that I need to make sure the barber is 60+ years old, otherwise they’ll give me a “fade.” I imagine meeting Bishop Barron with a “fade.” I text Walt about the “fade” dilemma, and make a joke about getting a line shaved through my eyebrow; he reminds me that he used to have a line through his eyebrow…

When I arrive, the shop is empty, and an elderly man, maybe 5’5”, opens the door in a red suit.

We keep repeating “normale” to each other, then suddenly he starts mumbling “Morti Americani, morti Americani,” making the scissor-cutting motion with his hand that’s not holding the scissors. I look up how to say “good” in Italian on my phone and say “bene.” I keep saying “mm, mm, bene,” and smiling—then he walks away.

While he’s gone, I Google “morti Americani Italian to English.”

“Morti Americani” means “American deaths”...

Laying on the couch with laptop propped on legs, scroll-reading The Rosicrucian Enlightenment by Francis Yates, starting to feel a little “zany”—the creeping sense that I am entering “schizo” territory—and I understand why “respectable” people don’t go down this rabbit hole. I take some notes…

Oct 25

Woke feeling like I’d been hit by a train; stumble around; drink a Starbucks canned coffee then sit down at a cafe and drink a Cappuccino—walk back to Airbnb—briefly worried I might faint…

At the apartment, I look over my Whitehead notes to try to memorize some quotes.

• “The function of reason is to promote the art of life”

• the art of life = to live, to live satisfactorily, to live better

• “Philosophy builds cathedrals before the builder moves a stone, and destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches.”

Walk to Chiostro del Bramante. Garish neon sign in entrance hall:

BE AFRAID OF
THE ENORMITY OF
THE POSSIBLE.

In a room with bright pink and orange and blue and green walls with yellow flowers and white angels painted on them, I drink a latte and read that Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and the first part of Don Quixote were both published in 1605. There are resonances, I think, between the Baconian project and the novel: just as Bacon’s scientific method begins with concrete particulars and infers general principles from there, writing a novel also begins with concrete particulars and allows general principles to emerge. Just as Bacon’s thought progresses past the closed system of Scholastic logic, the novel progresses past the closed form of the poem and the epic. Modern science, like the novel, engages with the open-endedness of things, and deals with the world in a state of becoming, as opposed to dealing with totalizing coherence and unity; both share an ongoing commitment to discovery, and a fundamental kind of openness…

Openness leaves room for the unexpected—for grace. It’s the same, I think, as interacting with a person. One may have abstract ideas about people as such, or a specific type of person, but once you’re interacting with an actual individual person you have to engage with the real person in front of you, to let their personhood unfold freely, without cramming them into an abstraction and killing all possibility for surprise… Whatever broader problems might arise from this concrete-particular-orientation toward the world, or whatever technical problems exist in it from the start, it’s a necessary corrective for stifling, stagnant closed-loopedness...

Ideologically-imposed abstractions—in science, literature, or life—kill unexpectedness… Becoming… The life of life….

Oct 26

Coordinating with event planner and photographer and Luke. Coordinating with Walt and Honor, who are reading at the bookstore with me, and planning to arrive at my apartment while I’m at the first event… Some chaos related to my keys.

We meet at the gate outside the Swiss Guards’ Barracks then enter the courtyard, and Andreas takes us to a room and shows us paintings by a Swiss Guard who learned how to paint while holed up there during war, then across the courtyard again into basement full of weapons and armor—six-pound helmets that caused guards to pass out, engraved with saints and crosses (there was a scandal when they made the new, much lighter helmets with 3D printing); medieval spiked bats and rods, seven-feet tall, with triangle-shaped blades that “killed people instantly”; mannequins in striped outfits that balloon down the arms and get tight at the wrists; crossbows and swords; dozens of guns. He shows us the “flame swords,” which the Swiss Guards beheaded people with hundreds of years ago. The flame swords have bulbous edges, and look like clouds.

In the dining hall there is a spread of pizzas, nuts, chips, beer, private label Swiss Guards wine, orange juice, and water, and Andy tells me and David that in 1989, he got a job selling jewelry in the middle of the mall outside of Philadelphia. He took a training course for the job, in Michigan, where he lived, then was sent to Pennsylvania, but he was only given 48 hours to make living arrangements after getting hired, so when he got to Pennsylvania, he had nowhere to stay, and he met an older woman who immediately took him in and made him baked goods.

I point at what I think is the most beautiful panel on the painted walls around us—a pastoral scene of a young boy with two baby goats and a ram—then excuse myself to go out into the courtyard, where I briefly pray.

Liz Lev, an art historian and one of the most renowned tour guides in Rome, hands out the pamphlets she made for a brief presentation about New Atlantis and the art at the Vatican, and begins her presentation, starting with the Hall of Maps…….

On the walk to the book discussion, up a narrow brick walkway on a hill next to the road, we reach a wide open area, and pass Saint Peter’s Basilica as the sun sets orange and almost hazy, like the beginning of a Miramax film—when I FaceTimed my dad earlier, he had said my surroundings looked like I was “in a Jason Bourne movie”—and Brett tells me about a documentary he made about UFOs: he understands why, when people look too closely at the subject, it makes them feel disturbed—government cover-ups, questions about unsettling multidimensional realities, encounters with difficult-to-explain phenomena. I tell him that, in Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Fr. Seraphim Rose makes the case that the encounters with these beings are real—there are thousands of accounts of people encountering similar things—but it’s an interpretive problem, not a factual one…

We walk across a roof, which stretches straight then opens out, toward the room where the discussion will take place; two guys in collars lounge on recliners, reading; I look down at St. Peter’s Basilica now, down at the tops of buildings, hundreds of them like the inside of a mouth in a Bosch painting, some wide-faced creature, jaw unhinged.

After we get drinks and take our seats, Luke gives a brief introduction about Cluny—this event, our first, represents Cluny’s multidisciplinary efforts, and desire to be a nexus point for siloed disciplines, to lay the groundwork for a dynamic cultural exchange and renewal. He introduces Peter, who’s leading the discussion, then explains the proceedings for the evening.

Spread out on plush couches, arranged hexagonally across the well-lit room, we go around and introduce ourselves: a physicist, an art historian, an entrepreneur, an undergraduate, a cartoonist, a journalist, professors, a priest...

I’m drinking Coke Zero and have a Mango-flavored Lucy nicotine pouch in my lip. Behind the couches, the server fusses with some coffee, stacking lightly-clanging mugs—pedestrian familiar movements fuse with what is turning out to be an unexpectedly dark reading of the text—A priest busts into the room and yells “Hey!” then retreats…

[redacted]

[redacted]

In the apocryphal Gospel of Bartholomew, the apostles ask Mary to reveal the mystery of how she gave birth to Jesus. Then, “Mary said unto them: Ask me not concerning this mystery. If I should begin to tell you, fire will issue forth out of my mouth and consume all the world.” The apostles don’t accept her answer, and ask her again. Mary says no. They ask again. Mary says no. Eventually, the apostles wear her down and she gives them strange instructions: She tells Peter to sit at her right hand, and put his hand under her armpit; she tells Andrew to sit at her left hand and put his hand under her left armpit; she tells John to “hold together [her] bosom,” and Bartholomew to put his knee into her back, “lest when I begin to speak my bones be loosed from one another.”

Mary starts to tell the story, and soon fire begins to shoot from her mouth. Jesus appears and tells her, “Utter not this mystery, or this day my whole creation will come to an end.”

Later, when Bartholomew asks Jesus if they can tell everyone about the mysteries, Jesus says, “as many as can contain them shall have a part in them.” There is something about revelation, I say, that is dangerous.

The glass door swings open and a man rushes in, face red, black and red vestments flapping. It’s the final day of the “Synod on Synodality” in the Catholic church, and he is coming from the Vatican. “I’m Bishop Barron,” he says, “sit down, sit down.” The group remains standing, then sits after he sits.

[redacted]

[redacted]

After the 2.5hr book discussion, Luke ends with a quote from Girard. “More than ever, I am convinced that history has a meaning, and that its meaning is terrifying.”

[redacted]

We walk in the dark night to the restaurant. Hummus with orange-marinated octopus and olive oil. Local pork roasted over coals. The sound of my chewing echoes in my eardrums; when I swallow, I notice little crunches reverberating around the table… Crispy pork rind…Pasta dish with cheese and bacon. Roasted lamb with rosemary potatoes. Particle physics, supersymmetry, dark matter, extra dimensions, quantum mechanics, politics—when people talk about AI, they sound like AI. On the walk back with Luke, the air is crisp, and the streets feel wider than before.

On the phone, N tells me about icon-painting—she’s painting Saint Anna and baby Mary—and about the barn dance she went to with Valeria. The woman who runs the BNB where she’s staying seemed “Lynchian,” another in a long string of strange encounters she’s had recently, in the wake of her parents’ house burning down, which, the weekend prior, included a woman running up to N and my brother outside of an alpaca farm, and telling them to turn their car off, because it made too much noise; she came to the farm because she had PTSD, she told them, and, not knowing anything about N’s parents’ situation, talked to them for an hour about how her whole family died in fires...

Later, while trying to sleep, Walt turns on the audiobook of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Walt and Honor keep talking over the audiobook. I tell them to be quiet and Honor says “Jordan the type of guy to say ‘SHUT UPPPP GUYSSS’ at a sleepover.”

Oct 27

I lay on the ground at Almost Corner Bookstore, head on a dirty rolled-up rug, and fall asleep for a minute; it’s 6PM, the reading starts at 6:30PM. Jahan puts grapes and chips on the counter; I wander around with Honor and eat pizza, which they snip with scissors before giving to us; the bookstore gets packed. Honor reads some poems which she wrote with AI “when AI was still fun”...

Ugliness is a feeling so ripe
BMI 18 so hungry
So I bit the apple
It was bussin’
Now I’m nothing

Outside, I tell the Italian translator and Gabriel that I can’t hang, and me and Walt go back to the apartment to watch the Bills game and Trump’s speech at Madison Square Garden. Honor comes back with a furry cat figurine and presses a button and the cat starts making noises and dancing.

Oct 28

Gabriel says that in Britain, there is less of a distinction between literary works and popular books, because in Britain they don’t have a culture of literary magazines associated with University programs.

He’s writing a novel about a descent into occultism, Rosicrucianism—it’s 600 pages; he’s cutting it down.

Oct 29

I drop some bags off at Luke’s and walk thirty minutes to the skull church. I put on headphones for the audio tour, then remove them when the voice becomes upsettingly theatrical. I pass the museum, stopping to look at a Caravaggio painting, and enter the crypts, full of skulls and bones of monks, organized into artistic arrangements, stacked on top of each other, bone on bone.

One version of the story, a placard reads, is that some Capuchin monks took refuge in Rome in 1793, during the Reign of Terror in France, so that they wouldn’t be beheaded by the revolutionaries, and were confined to the crypts; someone got permission to arrange all the bones of the monks in the cemetery, so that he could rest among the dead. Another version is that a criminal was taken in by the monks, and created the skull art during his long period of atonement. The work, the placard says, is “a work of grotesque and hermetic genius,” “monk patience”—“a man of ardent faith almost joking with death and joyfully thinking of Resurrection.”

I’m the only person there alone, and the only male, the rest are pairs of women, dressed in black and gray, taking pictures and videos on their phones. Confronted with hundreds of bones, it’s difficult to feel a sense of spiritual significance; the bones seem fake, like Halloween decorations; music plays through speakers; the reality of death isn’t present—only the sense that these monks, or whoever made these crypts, could never have imagined that their bodies would be made into spectacles for people to photograph, crudely captured and flattened into an Instagram post.

I try to adopt a reverent disposition, but the gates preventing me from getting close, the music, the headphones around my neck, all contribute to a sense of artifice that abstracts my immediate reality even as I perceive it. Eternity and history reach forward through time, but are tamped down due to technology. Even the tortured expression on one of the skulls only passively registers in me—I perceive it as “soyface”—and I mechanically take out my phone and take pictures and post…

Outside of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, sitting on the steps and texting friends, a small, bespeckled man with a belly taps my shoulder and asks me in broken English where I’m from. “Ohio,” I say. “Ohioooo,” he says, smiling and fidgeting. “I thought,” he says, “I thought—ehh—I thought.” He touches my hand, where I have a tattoo of an asterisk. “Egypt. Egypt?”

I look up at him.

“Did, ehh, did ehh you see the Bernini?” he continues.

“I did,” I say.

“Come,” he says, motioning toward the door.

“I already saw it,” I say.

“Come, come,” he says, eagerly, like an impatient child, and so I go.

He takes me to the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and begins describing the scene, in language I can only understand with difficulty; something about the painted audiences on either side of the statue, a theater; something about “ecstasy” and Jesus.

The man motions for me to join him standing in a nave further away from the sculpture. He’s whispering, and keeps telling me to “come closer,” as he describes the ceiling fresco, which is obscured by scaffolding, until we’re standing with our bodies lightly touching and he’s whispering into my ear. I feel his breath on my cheek. Is he trying to steal my phone? I think. My wallet? I step away.

He takes me through a tight hall in the dark, behind the altar, looking back to make sure I’m close behind, and turns on the lights in a large, hidden room with massive paintings on each wall. He puts his finger to his lips, then whispers a mix of English and Italian. He scoots closer and I can feel his backside rubbing on my leg—is he going to rob me?—I turn my torso, mindful of my belongings, understanding nothing except “angel” and “Caravaggio” and “student” and “Michelangelo.” The man is panting, and he keeps turning to me and saying “You like?” as I look at the towering paintings and step away from him and say “Yes, bene.”

He beckons me toward a small staircase, maybe three stairs, and we crouch so as not to bump our heads. We turn around the corner and up another small step and we’re behind the altar. He tells me, I think, that we’re standing near a relic of some kind, and he’s whispering and pointing up toward a golden crown. When I look up, he’s saying “Jesus” through heavy breaths, and I notice that he’s rubbing on me again, shifting his hips back and forth; I have nowhere to move; the walls are too tight to turn and I can’t see behind me; I look up at the golden crown and he bends forward and touches a strip of gold—meant to simulate light bursting down—pressing into me; panting; I turn my hips so that he isn’t grazing my crotch—now he’s grazing my phone—and he keeps putting his finger to his lips, and suddenly I think I’m aware of what’s happening.

I gently push him forward, then back away. I crouch and hesitate, then turn and descend the stairs, down into the room with the paintings.

I stand at a distance from him; his eyebrows raised, forehead sweaty, pointing up at the painting which is triple his height. “Caravaggio,” he says again, pointing. “You like?”

He starts into more explanation, and as I take another look around he presses into me again and rubs. I’m frozen, completely unable to move or think clearly, and I turn my hips again; why am I standing here?; I map out the way we came and realize I’m not sure how we got there; there are three doors that lead out of the room; maybe he’s just standing so close because he has to whisper?; I step back and try to see if he’s swaying his hips when he’s not touching me; I point to the door and say “I have to go.” He says, “You like?” with a nervous, agitated expression. “I have to go,” I say again. He raises his eyebrows, and I wonder if he’s going to ask me for money, or somehow trap me in the room with giant paintings, but then he turns his back to me and silently leads me into the dark hall, then out into the church.

Oct 30

At the airport, looking out a large window at a cluster of trees which leads to the Tyrrhenian Sea, Luke tells me that we’re looking at the shore near where St. Augustine had his mystical experience, standing there with his mother. I stare at the path where the green trees part—the path stretches backward and forward in time—my head, I think, is the meeting place of time, which has entered different heads across space for millennia—St. Augustine’s head collapses into my head through the trees and the water and Luke—and I’m staring at a single cloud above the water with my arms folded, distantly considering the head that reached outside of time, in 387 AD, to briefly touch that “region of inexhaustible plenty”—that realm which infuses time with an eternal, churning character—one which can only be experienced in a particular personhood, and which can only be redeemed in history.

The airport is bustling around me. The cloud is still.

Subscribe now

This spring, I applied to compete on a British TV show. Having read accounts of reality TV casting, I was prepared for multiple grueling rounds of taped interviews. The first interview was a phone call, which lasted five minutes, and centered on my visa status. At the end of the call, I was told that I’d been cast. I had envisioned the casting process as an opportunity to determine, once and for all, whether or not I was objectively interesting. Now I might never know.

The show, now in its twelfth season, is essentially a speed-painting challenge. Participants are given four hours to paint a celebrity. I had a month between the casting and the shoot, and I spent that month devising an increasingly brutal, aggressively anti-social training regimen. I woke up at four a.m. each day and biked to my art studio, where I timed myself painting portraits. Sometimes I painted with my non-dominant hand, in case of injury.

Meanwhile, the production team was fleshing out my backstory, emailing me questionnaires about my childhood. The first question was about my parents. “I’m happy to talk about my family on air,” I wrote in response, “but it’s probably a pretty bleak topic for this sort of show.” This bleakness seemed to inform the rest of my answers. A list of childhood hobbies read: “Crying, journaling in my closet.” My attitude toward competition: “I’m not competitive.” I am surprised they allowed me to proceed.

Weeks passed, and the anxiety dreams got worse. Every night, I dreamt I was on TV, and in the dreams I was charmless, unable to hold anyone’s attention. I slept poorly, and the exhaustion combined with all the studio hours made my whole body a repetitive strain injury. I kept telling myself that I should be grateful for this opportunity. I was living out someone’s dream life, maybe even my own. And then I got an email from my father’s girlfriend telling me that he was in the intensive care unit.

I didn’t see my father much as a child. He divorced my mother shortly after I was born, moved an hour away, and he and his new wife became involved in a pyramid scheme until she was arrested, and my father somehow evaded prosecution.

Despite the FBI raids and the trials and retrials and my stepmother’s years of imprisonment, my father seemed to be enjoying his new bachelorhood. He played in a jazz band. He dated younger women. He traveled to see the World Cup. He organized a college reunion. He was beloved, revered in my hometown. “I adore your father,” strangers would tell me. “He officiated my wedding.” “He used to come to my restaurant all the time.” “He’s my son’s godfather.” I would relay the connections to my father with pride, but my father never had any memory of these people. His charisma was a one way street. He had always meant more to the world than the world had ever meant to him. He was magnetic and unreachable, like someone on TV.

I called my father’s girlfriend a dozen times but she didn’t pick up. I called the hospital but they wouldn’t tell me anything because I wasn’t listed as a family member. A clerical oversight that was difficult to not interpret symbolically. “Please just tell me if he’s alive,” I begged, and the nurse told me quietly that he was alive but unconscious. “I’m not in the business of making predictions,” she said. “But you should probably get on a plane.”

I looked up flights. I sat. I thought. I sent an email to my father’s girlfriend telling her that I would appear on TV the following week and asking whether he would survive that long.

I painted more and refreshed my email. Around lunchtime, I wondered if my father might already be dead. I decided that if he was, I would go ahead with the filming. Why rush home just to visit a corpse? And wouldn’t my father want me to appear on TV? Wouldn’t he understand? “This is the biggest opportunity of my life,” I kept telling people, as if I had more than one father.

It wasn’t even that big of an opportunity. 72 artists would appear on this season alone. If you were a portrait painter in the UK, odds are you would appear on the show at some point. Besides, I was only guaranteed one episode, which I would have to win in order to advance. The odds of winning that first round were one in ten. None of the artists would get paid.

I got the news that my father was awake. I called. His words were difficult to make out. There were long, wheezy pauses. “Sorry I’m not very interesting,” he said. Then he fell asleep while I sat in my studio, listening to him breathe.

My dad was the most interesting person I’d ever met. Distance rendered him godlike. “You worship him,” my mother said once, disdainfully. He worshiped me back. “My favorite daughter,” he said. His other two daughters, from an earlier marriage, hadn’t spoken to him in decades. I was the winner by default.

The night before the shoot, I didn’t sleep. I worried I would never sleep again. I worried my father would never wake up.

In the morning, I took a taxi to a formerly grand arts center, where I was led past gilded murals and mosaics to a windowless green room, handed a vegan breakfast box and kept under close scrutiny by a team of headset-wearing production assistants. “This is the biggest opportunity of your life,” I reminded myself.

The main set was cold and lit by panels of white fluorescence, like a blindingly overcast winter day. I began to set up my palette but was interrupted by a cameraman who wanted to film me squeezing paint. This would be the rhythm of the day—natural gestures interrupted, modified, reenacted for the cameras.

When the celebrity guest entered the room, we clapped and cheered even though we did not know who this person was—they were later introduced to the studio audience as a non-binary indigenous fashion designer. I tried to smile but couldn’t, because I had developed a facial tremor that made it difficult to control my expressions.

The studio audience filed in and the timer was set. As I raced through a preliminary sketch, I was observed not only by artists, judges, minor celebrities, cameramen, and production assistants, but also by a hundred strangers whose running commentary was fully audible to me. It goes without saying that no great work of art has ever been produced in such an environment.

I erased and redrew the head, moved the hands up and down the canvas until it was blurred with erasure. Every few minutes, a roving camera crew came by for an update. “How do you think it’s going so far?” the woman asked. “Fine,” I said, trying to somehow continue working while also smiling at the camera lens. “Can you answer the question as a complete sentence?” she said. “I think it’s going fine so far,” I said.

The interview concluded and, although my sketch remained underdeveloped, I charged ahead with color. Just as I was gaining confidence, a man came to escort me outside for headshots. I stood in the winter wind, holding one of my earlier paintings. My hair kept flying across my face, and I didn’t have an extra arm to adjust it. The timer was still going. I ran back inside. Then it was time for lunch. A previous contestant had advised me that you didn’t need to take the full lunch break. You just needed to swallow food. I walked to the green room with the other artists, swallowed food, and returned to the set.

Back at my easel, I discovered the same bad painting I’d left a few minutes earlier. There was a static camera above my workstation recording my entire process. I could already picture the expert who would watch my episode and think, “This woman is an absolute idiot, blending her paints with Gamsol instead of linseed oil.” The temperature seemed to be dropping. My skin hardened and a male production assistant came by to suggest I arrange my hair so that it covered my nipples. I put a sweater on, only to be told to remove it for visual continuity.

The rest of the artists returned, and time passed, and periodic breaks were announced. I only paused once, to check my email in case my dad was dead. Otherwise, I stayed in the zone.

By the final hour, when the judges were making their rounds, my painting was looking better, and I felt a tentative relief at having done all that was asked of me: trained hard, showed up on time, ate my lunch, and completed a painting. I was rewarded with cryptic feedback.

“What’s left for the rest of the afternoon?” one of the judges asked.

I wasn’t sure. I gestured at the background, which was still white. Maybe I should fill it in?

“It’s up to you,” the judge replied before walking away, trailed by a camera.

In the final minutes, I decided to fill in the background, which I’d left blank until then. I filled it with pink paint. Then I set down my brush. I was satisfied. It was all over. I could sleep now. I could die. My dad could die. I surveyed the other paintings. One of them was excellent. Had I known I would compete against this particular artist, I would’ve bailed on the show a week earlier, flown home to see my dad, and spared myself the public humiliation.

We waited in a hallway while the judges deliberated. An acquaintance of mine in the studio audience texted me to say that the judges didn’t like my background. Then we were ushered back in for the announcement. There would be three artists on the shortlist. Two names were called. My facial muscles twitched. I looked for my acquaintance in the crowd, as if a guy from my monthly writer’s meetup could save me. There was a long pause before the third and final name, the host’s mouth hanging open, and I waited to hear the other girl’s name, but instead I heard my own. The cameras all swiveled toward me and, for the first time that day, my reaction was genuine.

We went back into the hallway and waited for the winner to be chosen. I decided that if I didn’t win, I would fly home in the morning, and then at the hospital, maybe I wouldn’t outright lie, but I might allow everyone to think that I had chosen to quit the TV show instead of getting eliminated. “It’s just TV,” I might say. “Being here is what matters.”

The judges called us in to hear the results. I stood on stage beside the other two shortlisted artists while cameras and lights were adjusted around us. The studio audience went quiet, and I wondered if they already knew who was going to win. To distract myself, I imagined my arrival at the hospital, my father alive and awake to greet me. “My favorite daughter,” he would say, and this time I would take it at face value, and I would tell him something profound, something that would change everything between us. “We don’t have to be interesting,” I would say. “We just have to be here for each other.” We’d always failed on that count, but maybe we would get another chance, except we wouldn’t, because I’d won.

When they announced my name, my acquaintance rushed to the stage and hugged me. “They’re going to think you’re my boyfriend,” I said into his ear, forgetting that my mic was still on. Everyone cheered, as they’d been instructed to. “Big smiles,” one of the cameramen shouted, “Keep the applause going.” They would edit out his audio in post. The clapping tapered off. I left the stage. “Woah, sorry, I’m just,” I stuttered to the waiting camera crew, my eyes wide with shock. I pressed one hand tightly over my skull, as if to keep my brain from falling out. “Oh my God,” I gasped. I sounded like a person on TV.

There were no cameras at the airline counter where I cried and begged for a last-minute ticket; there were no cameras on the plane or in the taxi; there were no cameras at the hospital where I sat by my father’s bedside, holding his unconscious hand and whispering, “I’m here now, Dad. You can go if you’re ready.” There were no cameras when I left for a leisurely lunch, nor when I returned that afternoon to find him dead. There were no cameras in Connecticut. There had been cameras everywhere in London, on tripods, ceiling mounts, cranes, shoulders. Cameras in the hands of the audience. Hours and hours of footage, shot from every angle, preserved for posterity, broadcast to millions, footage of me missing the biggest opportunity of my life.

Subscribe now

It was the evening after Election Day and I was speed-walking—while sedated— through JFK to catch a plane to San Francisco. Speedwalking while sedated is comically disorienting; I felt like one of those cartoon characters whose bottom half is a spinning wheel while the top half remains motionless.

I was drugged for dull medical reasons. Also, and annoyingly, I wasn’t drugged quite enough. The sedatives scared me—they are the kind with alarmingly well-researched brain-liquifying qualities—and so I’d taken a tiny fraction of the indicated dose. And I still felt like my brain was changing texture! It was worrisome. I’m too old to be incorporating new modes of self-destruction.

The gate was located as far as possible from the security line, at the actual terminus of Terminal 4. By the time I got to the jet bridge I’d walked a mile and my neck was kinked from mishandling the weight of a carry-on bag containing: 13 books, 4 pairs shoes, 3 notepads, 1 laptop, 1 transparent lime-green cardigan, 1 toothbrush, 5 pairs socks, 2 sweaters, 2 shirts, 0 pairs underwear (forgotten), 1 mini container of conditioner but no shampoo (forgotten), and no hairbrush (also forgotten.)

I was last to board. There had been an issue with my ticket. Originally I’d booked my daughter as a “lap infant” on the trip. Later, for various reasons, it seemed better to leave her at home with her father, so I called the airline and explained the situation. They promised to detach (their word) the baby from the ticket. But the detachment didn’t take, so at the airport I found myself answering at every checkpoint the question of why my daughter was missing. 

She isn’t missing, I kept saying. It was hopeless: any administrative irregularity that sits at the intersection of “children” and “crossing state lines” is met with impassable suspicion. Not being good at formal logic, I couldn’t find the words to differentiate “missing” from “intentionally and innocently absent.”

Eventually I got through—each successive agent caved out of boredom—and was seated on the plane. Safely, soundly. And my seat was in an emergency exit row, how wonderful! Except— a flight attendant soon came along to explain that I couldn’t sit in the emergency exit row because I had a baby with me. I explained one last time that there was no baby, only me. The flight attendant glanced around—to make sure I wasn’t hiding my child in the seatback pocket?—and retreated with an air of being unconvinced but with better things to do.

As the plane taxied my neighbor rotated 45º in his seat and struck up a chat. He worked in the wine business and had downloaded the new Sally Rooney novel to read but was having trouble getting into it. It wasn’t as easygoing as her earlier books, he said. When I’d had enough of chatting I retrieved a book of my own—a book called The Right to Oblivion— and placed it prominently in my lap, title facing up, at which my neighbor laughed and went his separate mental way. The plane mustered itself into the sky.

The Right to Oblivion had been emitting oppressive static from my bag. The author, Lowry Pressly, is trained in philosophy. An area of personal shame is that I’m a bigot when it comes to contemporary academic philosophy. No matter how important I consider the work as a cultural product, its actual expression often strikes my generalist brain as exhaustingly contingent and mired. This attitude—the defensive crouch—is not a good way to navigate a field! Pressly’s book was the centerpiece of the Make Molly Read Philosophy Again campaign strategy. 

It starts with privacy. Pressly argues that the parameters of the privacy discourse have been sinisterly captured by those who would wish to diminish or exploit it, and that we’ve wasted a lot of time quibbling over e.g. surveillance while unwittingly relying on e.g. Mark Zuckerberg’s terms. I’m synopsizing crudely. Pressly’s conception of privacy is both capacious and utilitarian; he fashions it as a tool we might use to preserve the precious condition of oblivion. Oblivion: a holy space of the unknown that is “resistant to articulation and discovery”—a space that is essential to maintain in ourselves and the world if we are to survive with any measure of joy, freedom, depth.

Right around the moment I was wondering whether my consciousness of privacy had been built on a lie, the plane hit turbulence. “Flight attendants take your jump seats,” said the pilot, and there was a subtle shift in cabin pressure as 400 passengers simultaneously tensed their jaws. My neighbor sighed and put away his Kindle; he had just managed to get into the Sally Rooney. Suitcases banged, bathroom doors flapped. My puny sedative had worn off. Turbulence turns a plane into a frightened congregation: there is nothing to do but sit in rows and abide the force of mystery. Mid-air jostling might be the perfect stage for an encounter with Oblivion. 

In order to get through it I decided I would flout the standard advice and focus my thoughts on the destination rather than the journey. San Francisco: the place where I’d grown up. San Francisco, a city of microclimates, clinker brick, invasive plants, massage parlors, streets named after milkmen and felons, casual barbarity. A place where it wasn’t uncommon to pass someone splayed on the pavement and find oneself unsure whether the person was alive or dead—a fact that, if you went by Frank Norris, was as true in 1900 as in 2024. And to all this a new epigraph could be added, perhaps: San Francisco, the epicenter of the Great Oblivion Heist of the 20th Century. 

Twenty minutes later the jolts petered out. “I make this trip twice a month,” my neighbor said, his face red with irritation. “That shit happens every time over Colorado.” He picked up his Kindle and attempted to re-enter the quiet kitchens and tidy bedrooms of Sally Rooney. I picked up my book with the idea—an idea propelled by decades of reading—that if I couldn’t accomplish the thing under discussion, at least I could learn more about it. The pilot came on to tell us we were through the weather. There was a collective exhalation and stampede-to-the-bathroom. I was glad my daughter hadn’t been present for the turbulence but confident that she would have been fine, yes, absolutely fine. 

Subscribe now

Last year, at a Panera-catered “new faculty appreciation” luncheon, the Dean of my college told me—as I folded my hands across my seven-months-pregnant belly—that I should look for long-term academic employment elsewhere. My research and practice was not centered enough on “AI” and “emerging technology” to fit within the institution; they wanted someone with more of an explicit emphasis on tech. My work in publishing, writing, web-design—and even my reproductive state—couldn’t possibly be separated from these things, but, more than any other effects AI may have on humanity in the future, this is one of the main effects now: people feel compelled to talk about it, and it’s a good way for sclerotic institutions to feel like they’re keeping up with the times. I smiled, thanked him, and left with an M&M cookie. 

Earlier this month, at the recommendation of a colleague, I registered to attend a Zoom seminar that boasted a discussion on “the future of design education and academia.” As the Zoom window expanded, I was met with a looping Pornhub threesome montage next to a side-screen grid of six or so designers front-facing the camera. The hosts clicked around, grunting and gasping as the camera cut to new angles and positions. I opened my department group chat and texted my colleagues OH NO. DO NOT JOIN THE CALL. The colleague who recommended the talk echoed me: DO NOT LOG IN! SOMEONE Hacked their Zoom.

The hosts spoke to each other saying things like:

I think it’s you. 

Wait. Oh wait. No. 

This type of thing happened all the time during Covid. So annoying.

Who is *bot-generated-username*? 

It was a long two minutes before someone finally had the sense to end the call. 

A few hours later, a nearby university, who employs one of the guest speakers, posted a carousel of screenshots on their Instagram page from the talk, which had apparently reconvened. The description read Thanks to our Program Director ************** for an amazing panel discussion on the future of design education & academia today! 🚀

I tried to follow up with the panel about what happened, and received no reply. 

The way this talk was handled reminded me that technology, for all its promise of connection and innovation, can have real and tangible repercussions if we’re not careful—it illuminates our fundamental responsibility to one another.

In “A Rant about Technology,” Ursula K. Le Guin says that technology is how a society copes with physical reality. That it is the active human interface with the material world. Technology is also a spoon. Technology is also language. Yet, I am shocked when AI does not stop Outlook Messenger from bursting confetti across my desktop in response to the Congratulations reply I receive when HR misreads my email about both adding and removing our late son from my health insurance.  

As a 6th grader in a Dallas suburb, I attended a school assembly where a traveling speaker talked to us about sex. He said that sex was like fire. It was a life force. The discovery of fire sparked a massive advance of civilization. He told us that if we were not careful with fire, if we did not watch it closely and respect the power that it held, we could burn down a whole village. He told us to start a fire someday, but only with someone who you trusted to tend to it while you slept. I believe now that this same sort of diligence must also be extended to our use of technology. 

This year I experienced many technological interventions to my body, as many do when they become pregnant. Of all the new ways to be measured and monitored, my favorite was when my sister-in-law, due just a few weeks before me, guessed my midsection's exact circumference with a piece of string. My least favorite was the transvaginal ultrasound. My OB in Virginia had a sort of nonchalance and slapstick humor to him that initially made me feel comfortable in his office. The temperature changed during my nine week appointment when he, quite unexpectedly, shook the ultrasound wand inside of me (with vigor!) in an attempt to wake the baby for the pictures. He mutter-yelled Move little bugger. Move! I looked to the nurse witness, who looked forward at the door. We received a letter in December that his practice would be closing in April. We received another at the end of summer telling us that he had died.

During this same pregnancy, another doctor does imaging on me, externally. With the wand in his hand in the almost pitch black room he tells us that there are two small and one moderate-sized holes in our son’s heart and that he will need to be rushed to surgery as soon as he is born. I am still fully reclined and covered in gel. He tells us to come back in two weeks. On his walk out of the room he hands us an information pamphlet where he drew on the back two versions of the human heart—one normal, one our situation. 

Because of this experience, we transfer care to Massachusetts, where my husband’s family lives and works in the medical field. We navigate this with someone who is known as “The worldwide head of second opinion.” At the new hospital the gel is cleared off my belly each time. I cry in the ultrasound room as the video of the baby in my belly is labeled “practice breathing.” The sonographer walks us to a conference room where we’re met with cardiac specialists, social workers and obstetrics. Our meetings are prefaced with This is going to be a hard conversation and when we stand up to leave the room, we are encouraged to take the entire box of tissues with us. Someone even goes to the cupboard to get us a new box, of superior quality and softness. 

We are told that we may not get to meet him, but we do. The windowless OR looks perfectly encapsulated in pure even daylight. We have a team of thirty people and everyone knows the choreography. The anesthesiologist tells me that I may feel a shock of sorts before she administers a liquid into my spine. I am beaming. I feel strong and I wait for the shock. I squeal. The staff echos my laughter when I tell them that it feels like I sat on a firecracker. They had not heard that one before. The team yells out Happy Birthday Henry! as he is lifted from my abdominal cavity, screaming and alive. The anesthesiologist tells us with urgency to touch him and she guides our hands to meet his head through the dividing screen. I keep my fingers at the place he fogged the plastic as he is carried away to receive care. 

While my layers are being stitched up, my husband notices that the TVs near the ceiling are screening the surgery from above. When a nurse sees him watching, they switch off the monitors. The birth was photographed by our social worker, who printed and laminated the images. A whole stack is waiting for us in our room on the meal tray when we return.

When I see him next, there is a whole room dedicated to beating his heart. I am wheeled to his side and told not to worry about the beeping, it is just an indication of a new switch to flip. That it is not as time sensitive as it sounds. Henry wraps his hand around my finger, then around the beak of his woodpecker Jellycat. He is on a high platform and adorned in wires and tubing like some sort of cybernetic king. One part of the room-machine spins constantly. It whirls and re-oxygenates the donor blood that has exited him in a slightly less vibrant shade of red than what entered. 

He fights for two days. On his third, when he chooses peace, it is the quietest room I have ever endured. The cardiologist encloses us with the curtain and lets us stay as long as we can.  

We have a mass in Henry’s name. Afterward, family comes over. They bring food and two new pink babies. I hold my niece and keep checking that my hair does not wrap around her fingers. Our dog screams in the face of the two-year-old cousin, who seems completely unaffected. He says “dog” and pats him. He points to the angel on the mantle and says “Amen.” We set up a small box in the living room with photographs printed out from the hospital. As his mother, I feel protective of his image. I do not want people to look at him on their phones. I want to be in control of how he is seen in his corporeal form. I want people to sit on the couch and hold him, looking together at the same time and passing him around as they would any other baby. I become upset when I log in to Facebook for the first time in years, to sell a lamp, and see that some of our pictures from the hospital were posted to the family’s facebook group. I stew on this for a while, then release it when my husband reminds me about when they were posted, his first good day on the ECMO machine. We were two proud normal parents. They were asking the family for prayers. 

During the next three months, I look at his pictures for fifteen minutes every three hours to trigger a milk letdown. I imagine kissing his head and can still taste his baptismal holy water on my lips. Smell the perfumed oil. I nurse a small machine all summer and a refrigerated car comes by to pick up the milk that will be processed, divided, and sent off to babies I will never know. My husband wakes up in the middle of the night to wash the flanges, label the bags, and place them in the freezer. At home, we keep a white noise machine of the ocean waves playing in the bedroom at all times. We have done this for years, but I only just now am paying attention to it. When my dog unplugs it, I notice its absence.

Earlier this spring my department chair threw me a baby shower. My students ate cupcakes and giggled as we failed to answer baby related pop-culture trivia from the 80’s. At the end of summer I send them a sad email to thank them for their patience last year and I ask for it again. This fall I sit in class with them, smiling as laughter bubbles from the corners of their mouths in response to the recording I play of Richard Brautigan reciting this poem:  

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

I took part in another Zoom call this week. Henry’s cord blood was collected for research and after five months, the results came back. They were able to find the exact single gene mutation that caused his condition, and explained everything. They assured us that it was not our well water, or the time I had a fever for 15 minutes, or leptospirosis from cat-sitting, or that I ate an underdone yolk. The doctors said that with the variation he had, they were surprised that he was able to make it to two days old. My friend Mary texted me a message her late father used to say about heaven. 

We are there before we’re born and God asks us if we want to come down to Earth even though it will be painful and hard. Seems Henry wanted badly to be yours and to meet you if only for a single shining day. 

Neither my husband nor I carry this gene. And the doctors tell us that the same thing is unlikely to repeat. They clear us to try again this year. 

Lately, my husband and I have been watching a lot of TV together. Football when we’re grading so we don’t have to see the Patriots lose. And movies at night. There is a scene in the film Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson where frogs begin falling from the sky. They drop to the pavement violently, cars crash, and there is a little boy sitting in a library at a desk looking out the window cracking a half smile in wonder. Shadows of amphibious bodies cast on the wall behind him as he says out loud This happens. This is something that happens. 

Subscribe now

I used to go to the mall to use the internet. Until a few months ago, I would leave my apartment after dinner, carry my laptop five minutes down the road to the Kingsland Shopping Center, and squat on the dirty linoleum floor outside Costa Coffee, one hand balancing my laptop on my knees, the other hand typing out email replies letter by letter. Passersby would yell comments at me as I squatted; I looked ridiculous. Internet access was a humiliation ritual. If it lasted longer than it needed to, it might inflict physical and psychological damage. But hadn’t it always been this way?

My generation was the first to be granted unsupervised and unlimited access to the internet during adolescence. At fourteen, I was already displaying my nude body on ChatRoulette, dispensing marital wisdom on Reddit. By fifteen, I would make the first of three posts on the subreddit r/amiugly, a forum that encourages strangers to evaluate each other’s attractiveness, despite having never seen each other smile, speak, cross a room, or rotate in three-dimensional space. 15/f and curious what people think, I wrote. I've never been a popular girl and I don't get much attention from guys. My teeth are kind of wonky but I'm getting Invisalign tomorrow. I would make another post the following year, then again at eighteen, to see if I’d gotten any prettier. I sought feedback in other ways too, on other platforms. I posted photos, drawings, collages, songs, videos. I wanted so badly for something to take off, go viral, launch me into notoriety. Finally, the drawings did, and by my early twenties I was an art influencer with nearly two hundred thousand Instagram followers.

The peak of my influence was also the peak of my misery. Famous people say that a lot. I wasn’t famous, I just posted drawings of baby animals. I posted captions like, Which is your favorite? 1-10. I posed with pen packs and got paid for it. I spent all day with my phone, partly out of professional duty—I needed not only validation, but income—and partly out of compulsion. I had to check. Don’t check, I would tell myself. Just wait five minutes, then you can check. Two minutes would pass. Well, now you’re spending all this time thinking about checking. Might as well just check then move on with your day. So I would check. 

A few more years and my mind wasn’t suited for much else. I was anorexic and had no friends; I was absolutely killing it online. I had developed all these health issues and begun posting hospital selfies, crying selfies, depressive bathtub selfies. I was sick and sad. I’m fangirling, a girl said when she recognized me on the subway. I’m spiraling, I thought. I posted a YouTube video of myself speaking directly into the camera for half an hour, describing how social media had destroyed my life. That same day, I deactivated my Instagram account. I had started to downgrade, a process that would tank my stats and save my life.

• 

When I first conceived of writing an anti-smartphone pamphlet, my technology use was at the low extreme of what’s possible within the context of a city. My phone was a Nokia 3210, the iconic seafoam plastic brick that’s now old enough to order a beer. I had shifted my income source from print sales on social media, to illustration commissions brokered by an agency. Most days I would draw in my rented art studio until dinner, then visit friends, read books, look at old diary entries, make up songs, stretch on the floor, clean my room. Once I'd gotten rid of my smartphone, it was easy to make good choices. As such, I maintained my low-tech lifestyle effortlessly—that is, until I started to talk about it. 

I'm working on a pamphlet titled “You Don't Need a Smartphone,” I tweeted in July of this year. [It] explains the logistics of downgrading to reclaim attention & time. Topics include maps, messaging, photography, banking & more. I was not working on any such pamphlet. I just wanted to know if there would be enough interest to justify a bunch of unpaid labor. Thirty thousand likes later, my inbox was packed with demands to read, review, and publish this nonexistent pamphlet. I spent the next few weeks negotiating with publishers, emailing with my agent, and flirting with older academics at literary events, hoping to manipulate my way into a six-figure book deal. How much of it have you written so far? the publishers wanted to know. I threw out numbers: ten thousand words when I was feeling confident; five thousand when I hadn’t slept well. The real number was zero. But the ideas, I thought, were fully-formed: downgrading was all I thought about.

I finally settled on a two-prong publishing plan: first, to release a short pamphlet with an online platform that would help with publicity; second, to pitch a book-length version to a countercultural publisher. Satisfied with my plan, I took my laptop to the coffee shop—I actually went inside this time—and wrote five thousand words in one sitting. If I could maintain that pace for another day or two, cut down the draft, polish it up a bit—I’d be set in no time. That’s when the emails started.

The emails were benign at first. The team at the platform that was to release my pamphlet wanted to check in with me to establish a timeline, calculate printing costs, plan a launch event. I hoped these emails might function as a sort of friendly encouragement, sort of like those hand-drawn signs people hold up along a marathon course, except that the signs would say things like, Great to see this project coming together, and Thanks so much for being flexible. My job was simply to bring my laptop to the coffee shop and type out my anti-tech sentiments. I could do this. And all the while, friendly emails would be popping up in the corner of my screen to cheer me on.

Over the next two months, the team would send over four hundred emails. I couldn’t possibly keep up with them all. I didn’t understand what anyone was talking about. ROS meant “run of show,” and STD meant “save the date.” The tone turned brisk and professional, with the occasional sprinkle of encouragement—We’re so close to the finish line! You’ve done amazing work so far!—which only served to let me know that my declining mental state was apparent to everyone. I started sleeping with my laptop next to my pillow. I stopped sleeping. I showed up to Zoom meetings late, wearing a satin nightgown. The team had to send a series of emails, calls, texts, and Google invites over the course of days just to elicit a single, belated reply from me. The replies I did send usually contained a line saying, Sorry I missed this. I missed a lot of things, the biggest one being my life.

When had I stopped idling away the days, gluing scraps of paper into my diary, picking at my toenails, looking out my window at dogs? I now had internet access at home. I was replying to emails late at night. I was active on social media again, promoting the forthcoming pamphlet and getting called every possible epithet from Puritan to Nazi to plain old loser. My dumb phone, previously a quaint and harmless novelty object, had been co-opted by the PR team as a conduit for urgent reminders. Its little beeps, which used to signal greetings from various friends, now signaled urgent interruptions to my meals and walks and bedtime rituals. We still need you to review the Google doc, I read on a monochrome screen the size of a butter slice. Are you able to send out the rest of the press emails tonight? Time was running out, the deadline rapidly approaching. It didn’t matter that we had set it.

Up until then, I could count on one hand the number of Zoom calls I’d attended. Now, I was spending entire days toggling between Zoom meetings, documents, emails, and design files, in service of an anti-tech message. In a sense, I was beautifully illustrating my own point: tech overuse was turning me back into  the anxious, insecure, hummingbird-brained person who had, at fifteen, asked the internet if she was ugly. In another sense, I had sacrificed myself to the cause. I had died on this hill, only to find that the hill was composed of other bodies.

Fine, I thought, Let everyone keep their smartphones. Wouldn’t it be easier to live in seclusion than to try and convince society to meet my standards? I left the city. I moved to a small town in New Hampshire. The traffic noise went away but the emails persisted. I'll have a play-by-play final ROS to share out to this group by 10 a.m. tomorrow, one email read. Would love your eyes on it to make sure we maintain the re-enchantment factor.  Most people, I knew, could receive such emails without then contemplating legal action and/or suicide. But what if I was the canary in the digital coal mine? I fantasized about more extreme downgrades: living without electricity, shitting in a dirt hole, communicating only via letters. The intensity of this crisis was difficult to communicate to the well-meaning, sympathetic, yet ultimately email-greedy members of my Manhattan-based media and PR teams.

In the final stretch of the project, some of these team members seemed to forget that I did not, in fact, have a smartphone. The pamphlet was titled “You Don’t Need a Smartphone,” and it was about how I didn’t have a smartphone, how no one should have a smartphone, and how we should all get rid of our smartphones.. But still, I started receiving SMS notifications that someone had emphasized my message. Emojis showed up as empty squares; photos were too small to see. My phone sorted group chats into individual text threads, so I had to read each member’s contributions separately, then weave them all together in my mind to form a cohesive narrative. Downgrading started to feel like an obstacle, and not the goal.

What I’m describing is not out of the ordinary, as far as these things go. There was no plot against me—although in my darkest moments I felt like a new pledge in the basement of the PR frat house, forced to drink my own piss or brand myself with an iron or something. But this is simply how the industry works. We planned like crazy, promoted like crazy, and it paid off: the launch was well-attended, the pamphlet sold well, and I did a number of interviews with media outlets. Everyone did their job. They wanted to make me feel important, and I did feel important: what better evidence than a full inbox, a ringing phone, a sleepless night, a round of revisions, a to-do list that never ends?

•

We’re so inspired by you, I was told in one of my first video calls with the team. I thought this meant everyone was going to get rid of their smartphones. I thought this meant everyone would log off, or at least cut back. But logging off can always wait. There’s no urgency to idleness. Why not be idle tomorrow, once you’ve finished everything you have to do today? You will never get a midnight text reminding you to do nothing. You will never get a calendar invite to do nothing. You will never program a spreadsheet to log your idleness. Idleness doesn't have your number.

I tried to shape my idleness into something tangible, shove it into a padded mailer, ship it around the world. I was trying to sell something I no longer owned. I was panicking about peace, shouting about quiet, emailing about disconnection, working to end work, fighting screen time with more screen time. 

I wanted the world to stop, and I wouldn't stop until it did.

Subscribe now

At a party earlier this summer an editor maneuvered me into falsely claiming I’d read a book I hadn’t read. Most of the time, when someone asks you if you’ve read something you haven’t, you can just nod and they’ll go on. It’s a form of politeness. They’re talking, this book has occurred to them, it’s important to the flow of their thought, and so they just automatically ask if you’ve read it and you nod politely and they go on. If people were scrupulously honest about which books they’d read, conversations at literary gatherings would become impossible. 

But the editor didn’t go on.

“And how would you describe that book?” he asked.

The small crowd around us looked at me expectantly.

“Describe it?” I was stalling for time. I was trying to remember the front cover.

The editor gazed at me through his glasses with fine, clear eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m just trying to find the words. You must know what I mean, it’s just so…”

He stopped. Everyone was staring at me. I felt a prickle of sweat along my scalp.

“It’s kind of hard to talk about,” I stammered.

“Try,” he said. “Please.”

“Yes,” said a woman from behind me. “Try.”

There are people behind me, I thought in a panic. I fought the urge to turn around.

“It’s a very good…” I said, praying that he’d finish my sentence.

He looked at me kindly, mercilessly.

“A very good?”

At this point I could sense, in my peripheral vision, people’s expressions beginning to change. End this, I told myself. End this now.

“It’s a good way of thinking about death,” I blurted out. 

My answer seemed to disappoint everyone. The conversation deflated, and slowly, the crowd dispersed. Upon my return home, I vowed to read the book, which had been sitting on my shelf for years. I discovered it was excellent, a small masterpiece of critical writing. But it was also deformed by a basic mistake.

TJ Clark, in his book The Sight of Death, assumes that he knows about death. Clark assumes that death is the end. This assumption isn’t his private error: It is not hyperbole to say that this assumption is the most basic requirement for entry into the high culture of our time. Our culture believes that life is a length of brightly colored material, under which—nothing.

In asking me about this book, the editor might have been wondering if I had something to say against this assumption, something that might expose the mistake on which the edifice of contemporary high culture is built. People with a sense of the achievements of the past are more or less constantly asking themselves why our own culture seems doomed to triviality; why nearly every work of visual art produced over the past forty years, hanging in one of our prestigious museums, is utterly trivial. Moving from the 17^th century galleries to the contemporary galleries is like falling into a pit of nothingness. Ascending the staircase from the past to the present is like descending into hell.

In the book, Clark writes about Poussin’s “Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake,” in which a man is running, his eyes angled down and to the left, looking at a man killed by a snake. The running man, seeing death, looks dead. After finishing Clark’s book, I went to look at the Poussins that hang in the Cleveland Museum of Art, next door to my office. The CMA has three Poussins. Two of them are relatively early paintings which have experienced significant decay. The third is in good condition, and was created in the 1640’s, the apex of the artist’s career—“The Holy Family on the Steps.” 

As soon as I saw it, I realized that if TJ Clark had written his book about this painting, instead of the painting about the man killed by the snake, what I’d said to the editor at the party would have been correct. “It’s a good way of thinking about death.” Because the picture isn’t about death. It tells us that death isn’t particularly important or even interesting. The painting is an image of undeath. 

How do I, not having died, know this? Because the painting taught me. 

The closer I studied it, the more I realized what the painting was teaching me. It cast its colors and shapes like fishing lines into me, pulling out the materials with which it would perform its lesson. 

*

When I was young I was afraid that life would end. Now, I am disturbed by its unendingness, and in particular at the way it doesn’t end. Half-asleep in bed at 11pm, three or four weeks pass through my mind—it’s summer—four weeks of summer days— pink and grey skies, leaves moving in the wind, heat—and for a moment, the finger of my right hand, trailing off the bed, index finger extended—my finger pushes through the vaporous surfaces of those days and I touch the hard unyielding stone surface of time itself. 

You can do this when time starts to move fast enough. My father told me time starts speeding up when you turn thirty. I’m 48. When you’re young, you’re focused on the things, the people, the scenes. When you’re young that’s all there is. But that isn’t all there is. And when time goes fast enough you can actually reach down and touch it.

It’s shocking. The feel of it. Smooth unbroken neutral cold substance.

Don’t take this on faith. If you are over thirty, observe yourself how fast the days go. You can get a whole month in your mind at once. You couldn’t do this when you were twenty, could you? A whole month at once. Can you get 28 or 30 separate things in your mind at once? No. But these 28 days are not 28 separate things. They are one thing. 

What is it like, the color of those days evaporating over the raw stuff of time itself? 

Smoke rising from stone. A cloud of colored smoke over stone.

It’s tempting to flee from this perspective, this insight, perhaps the sole certain insight granted by age. Tempting to flee back into the color, back to the living bodies. But stay with it for a moment longer. 

Sometimes, contemplating the sheer speed of time, it is as if I were looking at a pillar. I’m very small, the pillar is very tall.

If I were a painter, and were to paint this feeling, it would look like one of Giorgio De Chirico’s surrealist paintings from the 20th century—a fragment, a stutter of architecture in a space filled with smoky color, over a ground that records the disappearance of human shapes.

In De Chirico’s paintings we see the long shadows of unseen personages cast under lone arches. Broken aqueducts. Single pillars. These forms correspond to the insight I received on my bed, trailing my index finger through the stream of days and touching—with a shock—the cold shaped stone substance of time itself. 

But in Poussin’s painting, the architecture does not stutter. It coheres. And the personages aren’t shadows. They’re complete, shining in bright light. The architecture forms the background supporting a central group of figures—the Holy Family. This group of figures itself takes an architectural shape—the oldest shape known to the west—a pyramid. 

Poussin has borrowed the pyramidal shape Renaissance masters gave to their holy figures, but nothing in Leonardo or Raphael prepares you for this pyramid. It is wider, flatter, sharper. In Raphael, a group of colored bodies resembles a pyramid. The group of people at first just look like a group of people. It is as if Raphael shows us the process by which the mind discerns geometrical order behind the visible world. He displays a deductive process. And it is best to think of his pyramids in terms of geometry, as neutral mathematical shapes.

But Poussin’s pyramid is a building. No one could look at “The Holy Family on the Steps” and see a group of people. We see a pyramid made out of bodies. This is not an order underneath the textures of ordinary experience, but above them. Made of them. 

A pile of boards does not have a house behind it. The house has the boards behind it. The painting doesn’t show us what’s behind our world. It shows us what our world is for, it shows us the things that our world, our lives, are behind. Super realism. 

What Poussin shows us is not something any individual could imagine. De Chirico and I, working only with our solitary selves, can reach down through the rush of ephemeral ordinary experience and touch bits of the unknown architecture of time.

What Poussin shows us is that time is a coherent structure. Time is a building on which a pyramidal human family rises.

The painting also has something to teach us about nature. Three natural entities survive the transition between the world of ordinary human existence and the realm of undeath. The first and most important is the sky. 

When I look out my window as I write this, I see a lawn, a forest of trees, all in bloom here in the middle of summer. And above that I see the sky, light blue, with a few white clouds.

When I lie in my bed half-asleep, and weeks of past time rush by me, I see the slow evaporation of the colored smoke that the trees and lawn are made out of, and of human bodies, but I do not see the color of the sky. The sky is a different kind of thing, and its color—a light blue—occurs relatively rarely in nature, and then mostly in things related to the sky, like birds or certain eyes. 

Emily Dickinson uses the color blue to signal the approach of a state beyond death. As when she describes the buzzing of the fly she hears when she passes out of life. 

“Blue uncertain stumbling buzz.”

The blue sky in “The Holy Family on the Steps” could very well be the sky I am looking at from my office window right now.

As part of the process of learning undeath from the painting, I take a photograph of the sky as it appears from my office window. I then print it on a color printer and cut out a small length. I print out a reproduction of the “Holy Family on the Steps” and I paste the photograph of the sky from my office over the rectangle of sky in the painting. 

The painting doesn’t change. 

Then I try pasting small cut-outs from photographs of Greek and Roman architecture over similarly-shaped pieces of architecture from the painting. This ruins it. Pasting pictures of my face and the faces of people I know or famous people over the faces of the Holy Figures is even worse. It gives the painting a distinctly demonic look.

What does this teach me? That the sky is a part of nature that is in some basic sense out of nature. At the end of my book Gamelife, written long before I encountered “The Holy Family on the Steps,” I wrote this sentence: “When I die, I will remember the color of the sky.” This is a fragment, a stutter. But Poussin’s painting confirms its essential accuracy, while placing it in its correct position in the complete and coherent order of undeath.

Now I ask: How does the sky relate to the architecture? Look at the steps. They lead directly to the sky. The sky is part of this super-real architecture; the ideal building integrates the real sky. 

So Plato was wrong. We do not live in a false and illusory world, underneath which is an enduring world. Our world is a kind of mosaic, composed of pieces of transience and pieces of eternity. This fact is what makes art possible. Poussin can give us certainty about undeath by activating the genuine experiences of undeath that stutter through our life.

Another piece of nature is the fountain, or, more precisely, a stone basin from which a few drops are falling onto the stone pavement. It is a lesson about time. It is not a lesson that can be rendered verbally. It must be experienced through attention to the absolute silence and stillness of the architecture, the figures, the sky, and the plants. Attend to this silence and stillness. And then notice how, at the far corner of the space, a few drops of water are falling. 

The drops when they fall sound on the stone pavement. Can I understand how sound renders silence perfect? How a movement creates motionlessness? How still-falling drops make a stillness? I can.

*

The painting begins its last lesson through the form of the family. I did not understand how the form of the family reveals a different shape of time until I became a father. That is, until my family extended both before and after me. 

Mary and the infant Jesus form the apex of the pyramid. The light is strongest here.

Prior to becoming a father, I existed all at once. Like a single drop spilling over the rim of the urn in the painting. My existence was characterized by a sort of looseness, an untetheredness, a singularity. What did it feel like? Like falling. 

After becoming a father, part of me, maybe most of me, isn’t here, isn’t in me. I am something that a photograph can’t capture. I extend in both temporal directions. I extend in bodily shapes that bear only attenuated similarities to the form of me that can be captured by a photo.

When I was in New York at the party—where I was manipulated by the editor’s kindness and respect for my wisdom into lying about reading the TJ Clark book—I did a Zoom call with my wife and daughter. And when the image of my family flashed into being on the screen before me, it was like a circuit being closed. As if one of my limbs, having fallen asleep, suddenly woke into tingling life. Looking at my daughter’s beaming face, at the excitement of her eyes, traveling over the background, probing the depths of my hotel room—I didn’t feel happy, exactly. The feelings that mattered weren’t in me, weren’t in my body. They were in hers.

I enjoyed the resumption of my being across three hundred miles of space, through the days and hours of my physical absence, when her thoughts and movements had traced out esoteric designs on playgrounds, in preschool classrooms. When the screen went dark at the end of the call I didn’t feel lonely. What the bathroom mirror showed as I brushed my teeth was just a point on an arc—other points glimmered in the past, in other parts of the present, in the future.

Thinking of the way I inhabited time before becoming a father, and instructed by “The Holy Family on the Steps,” I am struck by the watery quality of this prior existence.

I floated in the air. I had no intrinsic connections. And this, I think, was why I was so afraid of death, why I overemphasized its significance. Death is the kind of thing that can make a significant difference to one who floats—isolated, moment-by-moment—in the air.

And I am thinking now—the painting is making me think now—of the decision to have a child. It is a decision that can only be made by faith. From the far side of the decision, the transformation of the very nature of time, the altering of one’s being, is not really imaginable. It can’t be taken into account. The philosopher L.A. Paul calls this kind of thing a “transformative experience.” It presents a challenge to our culture’s submission of life to free individual choice.

Before becoming a parent, you can take into account the sleeplessness, the boredom, the expense, the restrictions that parenthood involves. But you can’t take account of the reorientation of the self in time, the way these disturbances will come to seem, not as a warping of one’s entire being, but as drops of water falling, in the corner of a space, deepening an essential stillness.    

I think the painting now is teaching me a lesson about faith, a lesson that can only be learned from the perspective of certainty.

*

I start typing an email to the editor who, with sublime unconscious esoteric Machiavellian kindness and manipulation, got me to read the TJ Clark book. When I start typing the email I fully intend to tell him how I’d lied about reading the book, about how my lie had been a gate through which grace entered, about how I’d read the book for the first time, and what it had led me to.

This, after twenty minutes of typing and deleting, is what I finally sent:

Dear Lorin, Just a brief note of thanks for leading back to TJ Clark's Sight of Death which I haven't looked at in many years. It truly is an unreal masterpiece! Best, Michael

I am conscious of having failed. I re-read the email with humility. I promise myself that I will write about this, write the truth, and then send this into the world, and send it to him. 

*

Now at last I am looking at Mary’s eyes. Her eyes are dark. Poussin has captured something essential about vision. I think this might be the only truly accurate and certain representation of vision in a painting. Her eyes are not positive, they are not objects. 

Mary’s eyes are open doors or gates or hollows, and the angle of her vision shows what they open to, what they receive. The perfection of her face reveals something of the condition of reception.

But look at the angle of her vision. 

Mary is not looking at the steps. She’s not looking at Jesus, or at John the Baptist. She isn’t looking at us. She isn’t looking up either, which would be a symbol--a symbol of transcendence or of heaven. Her gaze exits the picture plane.

I am looking around my office now. I am looking at my daughter. With my eyes half-closed, on the meditation cushion, I feel for the angle at which vision comes loose from the world, from this moment. 

When I am half-asleep and time speeds up faster and now whole years and even decades pass under my trailing finger, I am turning my neck slightly in the half-dream. I am pushing my finger down at an angle.

I’m always looking for it now. 

I turn my thoughts into words and push them down, at an angle, through you who read this, through days and years and decades. 

Searching for what I am now certain is there.

Subscribe now