Orbis Tertius — Field Notes

The instrument that ends the encounter

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I caught myself highlighting Buber’s I and Thou and understood, too late, that the highlighting was the very thing he was warning me about. To mark the sentence is to turn the You back into an It, to convert a moment of presence into something “describable, analyzable, classifiable.” My instrument for holding the encounter is exactly what ends it. This belongs next to the older note that I keep a journal to let my thoughts pass, which makes my main tool for letting go also a machine for holding on.

Nostalgia for the present

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Fall Out Boy’s remake of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is worse than Billy Joel’s, and the reason is instructive. Joel stood inside each year and named it as it came; the remake stands in 2023 and looks back, and it fills its list with celebrities where the original named history. A song about the relentless present became a song about nostalgia for it, and you can hear the difference as a kind of hollowness.

Talking past the problem of evil

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Job holds up his hands and says the problem of evil is not ours to solve, it is God’s alone. The young hear a cop-out and are right that it resolves nothing. The old would say it doesn’t have to, because the question was never on the register the young are hearing it on. Two people can argue the problem of evil forever without noticing that one of them is asking an intellectual question and the other is making a spiritual gesture, and no answer ever crosses between the two.

The export metaphor

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The federal government ordered an AI model shut off for all foreign nationals, including the ones inside the country, under export controls. But how is software exported? Do commodities get “exported” to the workers who build them? The law reaches for a physical metaphor, a thing crossing a border, to govern something that doesn’t cross and isn’t a thing.

Where a science first stood

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Ecology, as an American science, is supposed to have been born at the Indiana Dunes, where a man walked inland from the beach and noticed the ground growing older as he went—modern agriculture, then glaciers, then the deep geologic past, the whole sequence laid out as a walk you could take in an afternoon. A discipline started because a landscape happened to be arranged like a timeline. I want to know how much of what a science becomes is set by the accident of where it first stood.

What 3-D is for

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Everything in an animated film is cared for except its third dimension. Each frame of design is deliberate, the palette, the light, the impossible colors of a depicted imagination, and then the 3-D is bolted on and adds nothing but spectacle and, to my eye, subtracts. My mother pays extra for it because she likes an “extra something” at the cinema. I have never been able to see what the something is. It may be the one element of the form that exists purely to be sold.

Composition and essay

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I recently heard a story where someone described being made, as a schoolboy, to write a “composition” for discipline. When did we start saying “essay” instead? An essay is a kind of composition, not a synonym for it; the older word held music and painting and argument all in one hand, and somewhere we narrowed our language to a specific kind prose.

Two kinds of magic

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Media magic and actual magic have almost nothing to do with each other. On screen a hand or a wand glows and a will is enacted: pure fantasy, closer to Marvel and Star Wars than anyone admits. Real magic—apotropaic or sympathetic or ceremonial—belongs to horror, not fantasy. But the movies get one thing right, which is that you enter the magical realm by passage: Diagon Alley set diagonally to our world, the door into Halloweentown, always a threshold and often a psychopomp, a Hagrid, to walk you across. That part is true to life. The opening of the imaginal really does feel like finding a thing that was hidden in plain sight.

The planetary temperaments

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The old planetary temperaments (mercurial, saturnine, jovial, martial, venusian) name something that modern words can’t reach. “Warm,” “intellectual,” “morose,” “caring”: each of these names a part of a part of a part. The celestial vocabulary names the whole disposition at once, and I can’t tell whether that’s because the ancients saw more clearly or because a scheme that hands everything to seven gods is bound to feel complete.

The monument as a sentence

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Even small towns in Tunisia mark their roundabouts with symbols of what they are: Tabarka, a mermaid and a saxophone; Testour, pomegranates; Beja, a white stork; and Kram, of all things, a drone strike. Each is a small public argument about what the place is for. Few places in the US are read that way, though the people in my suburb joke, half in earnest, about erecting a statue of the mayor on the new roundabout. The monument is a sentence a town writes about itself, and we have decided ours should say nothing.