Orbis Tertius

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.

On Dealing with the Dead

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I picked up Alain Mabanckou’s Dealing with the Dead on a whim. I was browsing the “new” stack at my public library, and—reading the description—saw that it takes place in Pointe-Noire, where Mabanckou is from.

This wouldn’t have meant much to me had I not had a good friend, Franck, who is also from Pointe-Noire. I met him in Tunis, where he once worked with my fiancée; to this day, he is her best friend. He studied there and worked in marketing for a small consulting firm that advised Francophone Sub-Saharan states on management. The largest contracts came from Niger, though there were others in Benin, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, and elsewhere.

What struck me about Franck is how thoughtful he is: considerate toward everyone, and fundamentally “humanist” in an ethical sense. He also works like nobody I’ve ever met, and it is to my discredit that I have not seen him since he returned to Pointe-Noire during a period of racial tensions in Tunisia.

Had I never met Franck, I likely would not have picked this up. But I wanted a sense of where he is from, as literature renders it—and Mabanckou gives precisely that.

What stands out first is how Mabanckou tells a story. He introduces characters in passing, then unspools their backstories in extensive detail, one thing jumping to the next. The signifiers of Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa are here in full force: the diasporic executive based in France who returns to Brazzaville for a high civil-service post, only to be outrun by political events; the possibly-real cases of black magic infecting the larger society, up to the level of ministerial decision-making; the nostalgia and contention over Cabinda, the Angolan exclave wedged between Congo-Brazza and Congo-Kinshasa; an evangelical minister with a cult of personality who becomes a black nationalist after witnessing racial violence in the United States.

All of this is carried, of all things, by a narrator who is himself dead and has fallen in love with a dead woman. Most of the lives we take in, in fact, are recounted by people who are themselves dead.

It amounts to a full cross-section of a society, and Mabanckou is relentless in critiquing it. He takes no hostages: the one figure spared is the protagonist’s grandmother—and even that likely says more about Mabanckou than about the society he builds for us.

I read this slowly, stopping and continuing as I needed to, and Dealing with the Dead is better for it than read straight through.

My only real question is about translation. Helen Stevenson’s is superb, and yet I wonder whether a work like this can be translated at all. The style and structure seem to live almost exclusively in the French spoken in Pointe-Noire: the spelling errors on the tombstone, the run-ons and words blending together into a new whole.

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.

Deep time as fairyland

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Dinosaurs have stopped being creatures of the past. Watch enough popular film and you would file them in a bestiary beside elves and trolls and giants: Dino Island, King Kong, Jurassic Park, even Transformers, each treating them as beings from “elsewhere” rather than from “before.” Nothing in the way we picture them registers that they went extinct sixty-five million years ago. Deep time turns out to be as unreachable to the imagination as fairyland, and so we reach for them with the same grammar.

An excess of correctness

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

For nearly a year, residents and two governments have argued over a strip of overgrown bushes swallowing a sidewalk, and every party is technically correct: the road runs through the resident’s own parcel, the easement stops at the sidewalk, the plants past it are the owner’s to keep. So nothing is done, not from neglect but from an excess of correctness. It is the precise inverse of the tragedy of the commons: there, shared ownership ruins the thing because no one is responsible; here, the ownership is so perfectly divided that responsibility dissolves and the bushes win. It is a small comedy of state illegibility, and it reads like a colonial cable.

July 2026

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

What did you stay up too late thinking about?

The imaginal. Not imagination in the sense of the made-up, but Ibn Arabi’s alam al-khayāl, the realm Corbin insisted we mistranslate every time we reach for the word “imaginary.” I stayed up over the two examples Ibn Arabi returns to: the mirror and the dream.

Where, exactly, is the image in a mirror? Not in the glass, not quite in the eye, and yet undeniably there, present and ungraspable at once. That is the signature of the barzakh, the isthmus where the two seas meet, the one place a thing is permitted to be neither existent nor non-existent. What kept me up was the consequence: that my imagination is not the imaginal realm but my window onto it, the eye of the heart, which is why writing has always felt like it comes from elsewhere.

What are you preparing for?

The fall, still, and something I did not expect to be preparing for: my own body. I start teaching French in August, and the first real test came this month. I built a café activity for the teen center where I volunteer and ran it, and the kids read words they had never seen, mispronounced them, laughed, and tried again, which is the whole of what I want a classroom to be. That went well.

What are you building or fixing?

For half the month I was building to keep from feeling.

I submitted an academic article I had circled for a year, on fascist and colonial radio in interwar Tunisia; I took this website to a full build; I recovered nearly two thousand old book reviews I had given up as lost, a whole reading life handed back through a service I thought I had deleted; and I wired my home systems together. All of it good work.

What I still cannot fix is rest. I “rest” by doing something on a screen, and my body reads it as low-grade stress and tells me so. I do not yet know what real rest looks like.

What surprised you?

What helped me was the body and, of all people, my father. He told me he had seen as early as junior high that I was wired differently, and hearing my own childhood handed back to me in a truer shape did something no argument could.

And then it was physical, all of it: two hours of yard work that left my arms shaking and felt good; a haircut; teaching a room, which turns out to be as much body as mind; a walk in a forest preserve where two owls called across the woods in the middle of the day and one flew from its tree as I passed; a beach on Lake Michigan where I mistook the far smokestacks of Gary for a Mediterranean hill.

On Good Advice

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The author of this book, Craig, and I have a strange background.

In January, I began attending my father’s men’s ministry at a local church because the topic of discussion was other religions, and I was curious how the church approached it and I wanted to learn what other people have to say. While there, the pastor had a sign-up sheet for a coffee ministry, which was meant to put men in contact with one another to meet each month and grow spiritually. I was placed with Craig, who is not a regular attendee at the church, but participates in book discussions there.

After meeting at a local café and opening with a bit of small-talk, we hit it off and bonded over some heterodox views that don’t seem to be shared by many other people—whether at the church or in the local community. We meet once per month to catch up, check on one another, and have stimulating discussions.

Last month, Craig mentioned to me that he had written a book, which was based on short, weekly pieces of advice for the students at the middle school at which he worked. He showed me a copy of it and asked if I’d like to read it. Naturally, I said, “Of course!” and brought it home with me.

I made my way through the book slowly, a few sections at a time, usually no more than four or five, each of which are a page or two long, and I was really impressed. Perhaps the most satisfying thing is that I could see Craig saying exactly what was written in my mind’s eye. It had been published some 21 years ago, but he is still recognizably the same person (and I’m someone who seriously questions whether people ever remain consistent over time!). In fact, many of the references he makes today are the same he was relying on at the time of his writing. Just today, he asked me if I had heard the story of the wealthy millionaire who met the Mexican fisherman. My answer was now, “Yes! It’s right here!”

The book, in some ways, is a sort of diary. Craig is a lot like me, in that he is really bad at taking other people’s advice. If someone gives us advice, there is no certainty at all that we’ll follow it. On the contrary, people like us tend to do things our own way, until we learn some lesson that teaches us why the advice existed in the first place. This book is a collection of experiences and reflections that walk us through some of his insights through an experiential lens.

I think one downside of this book is that those who most need Craig’s advice are those who are least likely to take it (although they would do well to write their own collection of Good Advice!). But, I think this problem is mitigated by the fact that his text is not a set of instructions that tell people what to do and not to do. Instead, his choice of stories illustrates why, which is what I think separates good good advice from bad good advice. If someone were to tell me, “Put your coat on in winter,” there’s no guarantee that I’ll listen to them. After all, I was the kid who wore shorts when it was 18 degrees outside. However, once I froze, I learned my lesson. This text is, then, a way for readers to vicariously experience these things for themselves.

I think that Craig’s most willing readers will be those who have had similar experiences to him: they’ll feel recognized and laugh to themselves, “Oh! Someone else went through that, too? I thought I was the only one.” This was precisely what I did as I read through the book, and I found it a beneficial read as a result.

On the Elements of Typographic Style

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style is both a pleasure to hold and slow work to read—an aesthetic object and a demanding book at once.

The first thing I noticed on picking it up was the quality of the paper. The colophon states that the “paper is Glatfelter Laid, made at the Spring Grove Mill in Pennsylvania. It is of archival quality and acid-free.” I wish all books were printed on materials like it. You can see the texture on the page, and it is so soft in my hands.

The second thing any reader will notice is that the book is designed in ways that few others are. It should go without saying that a book on typographic design ought to be typographically well-designed, but Bringhurst’s goes well above and beyond. Take the dimensions of a single leaf, which by my own measurement come to 5.5" wide by 9" tall. As a ratio, that is about 1:1.6—a hair over Bringhurst’s golden 1:1.618. By his “chromatic scale of page proportions,” it lands squarely on the sixth, about midway between its major and minor. The outer margins sit at 1.25 inches, the top margin at 3/4 of an inch, and the bottom margin, under the page number, at 1.25 inches again.

All this is to say that the book was made with remarkable attention to detail, and that, more than anything, is what makes it a pleasure.

The sections fall into classic categories—among them “grand design,” “rhythm and proportion,” “harmony and counterpoint,” “shaping the page,” and “grooming the font.”

When I began, I expected the book to be about fonts above all. My thinking was that typography was effectively about what letters look like, and I was thrilled to learn about picas and ems, ratios and axes, serifs and apertures, and the hundreds of thousands of characters that never fit onto the Anglophone North American QWERTY keyboard.

Each time I read a chapter, I would find myself opening LibreOffice Writer—or, if I was on a work project at the office, Microsoft Word. I would poke at the kerning and the character spacing, nudging the small caps until they sat just right, so my own pages might look as carefully made as the words on them. I’m not sure I can stand another moment of monocultural Cambria, Calibri, or Times New Roman.

I’ve found that my preferred fonts for professional documents are Spectral for headings and Inria Sans for body text, with touches of Iosevka Etoile for tabular information (phone numbers, metadata, and so on). When writing long-form texts, I invert the general style and use a serif for the body and unserifed type for the headings, as you can see on this website. I’ve also learned that Spectral, for instance, needs to breathe more than some other typefaces, so I’ve played with whitespace to see how it all fits together. It’s only a shame that everything I’ve written to date has been printed on lower-quality paper with standard Epson or Canon toners.

One of Bringhurst’s greatest strengths is how opinionated he is. He has serious taste, and no patience for anyone who hasn’t taken the time to cultivate their own. I get the sense his own favorites run to Baskerville and Palatino. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, to his eye, mostly an error; he has little affection for Baroque or Rococo faces either, and none at all for Times New Roman, Helvetica, or anything you might find in a newspaper. To his credit, he admires Futura and a few geometric unserifed faces—something I paid close attention to, since the headings on this site are set in a descendant of Futura. He respects a handful of contemporary typographers too, above all Hermann Zapf and Robert Slimbach, whose Minion Pro sets the book itself.

He pays close attention to kerning and ligatures, and reveres the early printers on two counts: for treating italic as a partner to roman type rather than a mere slant of it, and for the continuity they kept between manuscript hands and the first typefaces. Revivals of old faces get special attention—some he eviscerates, others earn his deepest respect.

More than anything else, his appendices are a gold mine: a glossary of characters, a glossary of terms (worth a second bookmark, for when you forget what a humanist axis or a lachrymal terminal or a swash is—as I did, numerous times), and indices of designers and foundries. I found myself thumbing through them far more often than the final chapter, “Prowling the Specimen Books,” which elaborates on a few dozen of his preferred typefaces.

I read this book slowly, and I’m glad I did. It is the kind of book you read once through, then return to as a reference whenever you need it. There is so much here that there’s little chance of holding it all, but I do feel it helped me develop—even incrementally—my own sense of taste.

Typography, done well, is invisible, and yet it fundamentally shapes our relationship to whatever we read.

On In Praise of Shadows

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Lately, I’ve been thinking about music and my relationship to it. I’ve found, over the years, that lyrics are nowhere near as important to me as they are to some other people. In fact, it’s an odd day when I notice them at all. So, I tend to listen much more often to instrumental music.

On Saturday, I put on a few different albums and playlists, all of which relied exclusively on lyrics as ambiance. That is, the words themselves meant very little. As I nodded along to songs that I’ve listened to in the past, I caught myself wondering what I liked about them. These songs were maximalist drift phonk, and my taste has drifted so far from it as to be—effectively—unrecognizable today. As I considered what made some music work, I began to notice one thing that I had hardly noticed before: the brief silences, the rests, the gaps.

It occurred to me that I ought to read Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, which I had seen mentioned time and time again. Even so, I never took the time to pick it up and read it, until now.

I read his brief essay in one sitting before bed, and it made things fall into place that now seem obvious but I was unable to articulate in the past.

In brief, In Praise of Shadows is a non-fiction piece on aesthetics. Tanizaki approaches the subject through the lens of Japanese culture, and what separates it from the West. Throughout the text, he argues that Western society celebrates light, definition, and polish. Everything is visible, and that which is beautiful must be seen.

Tanizaki’s stance pushes back against the “Western” view, instead suggesting that the gaps are far more important than the thing in itself and the bulk of his attention falls on design. Take something like miso soup, for instance. On its face, and given a clear container, it has a cloudy-transparent, brothy color. It is neither unappetizing nor appetizing. But, change the conditions surrounding the dish—a dark container, a candlelit room in evening—and our affective relationship to it changes in its entirety.

He goes on to argue that a very large part of Japanese aesthetics take seriously that the condition in which they will be experienced is one of darkness. Widespread electrical lighting has transformed it, in the negative. While the “Westerner” changes conditions to match his or her aesthetics, the Japanese—like many other peoples—have changed their aesthetics to match conditions, and this has affected the “national character.” So, while the Westerner polishes silverware and other metal goods, the Japanese allow them to develop a patina as a sign of character.

While Tanizaki’s stark division of national classifications is something that I take to be incorrect, his praise of the “gaps” matches my own aesthetic taste. Like him—and more than ninety years after his piece was written—I think closely about electrical lighting and what it does. As far as I’m concerned, there is little worse than overhead, fluorescent lighting (he has an aside where he complains about neon lighting—I’m thankful he never had to see today’s lights!). In contrast, the finest-lit spaces are those with subtle touches of ambient lighting: properly placed lamps, warm tones, a refusal of total radiance. What makes ambient lighting so beautiful is—precisely—the shadows it produces.

Once I began to notice the quiet places, the pauses, the gaps, the rests, the empty spaces, I came to see that a great deal of what we call “design” is merely a way of framing that open space. Think about the room I’m sitting in right now. When I look around, I see walls, a desk, some cabinets, a bookshelf, a lamp, chairs, and a few other things. When I take a closer look, I see that the things I just mentioned are actually the exception. In fact, most of the space is filled by what appears to be “nothing.” And, when I take a third look, I see the shadows: the light coming through the window causes my stapler to develop a literal shadow; my east-facing wall, as I write this, has a large window, but it hardly gets any light at all. The patio door, on the west wall, is made of glass, and it receives light, pushing a shadow out from the refrigerator, and the skylight in the center of the kitchen adds more light.

The whole thing is beautiful because of its shadows.

What makes Tanizaki’s work especially powerful is that he approaches his topic through the senses: when he discusses sushi (salmon on persimmon leaves), I can’t help but taste its subtle flavors in my own mouth; when he describes blackened teeth or dark-green lipstick, I can see them too; when he discusses wood and paper, I feel my fingertips running along the texture.

While so many works run on abstraction, this one does not—it forces the reader to experience what he experiences.

This essay is less one to read than one to think with, and I suspect I’ll come back to it again and again.

On the Garden of Truth

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The first thing I had ever read by Seyyed Hossein Nasr was The Study Qur’an, of which he was the editor-in-chief. My understanding is that he wrote the bulk of the commentary, although many co-contributors worked alongside him. Moreover, his edition included a number of thematic essays, including some that he had written himself. The thing that struck me most about Nasr was his perennialism: the idea that all religious traditions come from one source. At the same time, he is not a relativist. On the contrary, he believes that God has given humanity a message, numerous times, and that the message is frequently corrupted. So, he welcomes Christianity, and Judaism, and Buddhism, and Hinduism, and even animism, but he does not think that all religious traditions are the same.

In my experience, many who seek out mystical traditions look to receive the benefits of the spiritual life without any of the obligations that come with it. That is, they’re willing to—perhaps—become an ascetic, spend their time reflecting and seeking out oneness with God, but leaving to the wayside various religious prohibitions and ethical demands. Once more, Nasr says, this is mistaken. Mystical traditions (the esoteric) without embodied engagement with God’s revealed world (the exoteric) is nothing at all.

These two stances define Nasr’s approach to Sufism, and the text is all the more powerful for it. In fact, Nasr is firm: one cannot be a dilettante playing with mystical traditions without digging and participating in the entire tradition.

To situate his book, Nasr argues that much of the world is currently in the midst of a spiritual crisis. While the West is particularly badly afflicted by it, it is by no means alone. In fact, the Islamic world also struggles under the weight of Western modernity and its two wings: secularism and reformism (which most of us today call “fundamentalism”). Western science has, ostensibly, done away with spiritual ontologies and metaphysics and, in the process, taken away the deeper spiritual values of meaning and ethics, which are best approached in relation to the divine. Reformism has responded to this challenge by seeking to wipe away entire religious traditions—whether Muslim (as in the case of Salafis) or Christian (as in the case of the many groups that we in the US do not name under one umbrella but persist all the same). Both are wrong, Nasr attests. There is immense benefit in the millennia-long religious traditions that we pretend no longer matter. The spirit of the age—scientistic secularism—is unable to answer questions of meaning and why we exist in the world at all.

However, a turn to the Bible, or the Qur’an, or any other religious text, leaves us wanting. This is because there is something deeper, the Divine, Ultimate Reality, which takes significant work to achieve. Nasr, like many Sufis, calls the Divine Reality “the Garden of Truth.” One does not just wake up one day in the Garden of Truth. On the contrary, it takes significant work with ethical behavior. It also requires adherence to shari’a, which often gets translated as “Islamic law” but is something I think is more sophisticated than that: it is all about ethics.

The reality hidden within the Garden of Truth can be stated simply: all is one, and all is God. However, this is not pantheism. God is not all things in some sort of pluralistic way. Instead, God emanates downward, transforming in the process. Yet, underneath it all, all is One: tawhid.

This all sounds very abstract, and it is. This is how I—as virtually all of my readers—know that I have not entered the Garden of Truth. This Divine Reality is not something to be known cognitively, it runs deeper than that, and there are three clusters of behaviors that must be taken to reach it: knowledge, love, and goodness.

The “knowledge” that Nasr speaks of is not something that can be learned in books. Instead, it can only be learned through an old-fashioned process that seems to have fallen entirely out of use: gnosis. I have trouble defining gnosis, but I do believe I understand the general sense of it. Take, for example, advice that you’ve heard all of your life, and that you know is good advice, but you are still unable to take it. It sounds like a cliché, as it’s repeated over and over again. However, eventually, after you make certain errors or learn certain lessons, it clicks. Now, it becomes learned as something experiential and affective. Now, imagine further, that the knowledge runs much deeper than the mundane: it is as if the veil over reality has been torn. This, according to my understanding, is gnosis. Early Christians wrote extensively about it, as did Neoplatonic pagans, and Muslims across the history of the tradition. It is something fundamental that we have happened to lose.

“Love” is the second component, and it refers to sincere, deep love of both those around you and God. In fact, these two cannot be separated, as those around you are God. By loving the world—not always the harms within, but creation itself—you express love of God. This is something that I find particularly challenging. It is also what I speak about, in various places on this website, when I refer to “attention as prayer” and “attention as love.” It is the direct pathway to God.

Finally, there is “goodness.” This is, once more, not something abstract. This refers to taking actions to help other people, charitably, without expecting anything in return. This is the deep, ethical life that we are asked to embody in every moment of what we do. Bring no harm, but do not bend where the Divine is at stake. God asks us to stand strong, be patient, be kind, be loving, and love—through action—those around us. This is what we are all called to do.

Sufism is a tradition that runs in stages, mirroring the emanation of God from oneness to plurality (which, of course, cannot really be separated). Where the Divine Reality emanates down to us, we are called to emanate upward to God to enter the Garden. Making things more challenging, it is incredibly hard to do so without being initiated into a chain of transmission that traces its way back to the Prophet Muhammad through Ali. These figures carry a divine power, baraka, that can be granted to sincere, faithful students in turn.

The final chapter deals with the persistence of Sufism and its challenges, namely secularism and reformism. But, Nasr also speaks positively of the cultural imprint that Sufism has made on the world, especially through poetry and music, all while shrines of saints—wali—continue to attract millions of followers per year.

To speak frankly, my first connections to Sufism took place precisely through these emanations. I first encountered it through a liberal arts course that I took in my first year of university: I had to read Rumi alongside Plato’s Symposium and reflect on the way the two texts dealt with beauty. While I hardly understood a thing, it was a tradition that I kept coming back to, regardless of my avowed religious stance at any given moment. My connection to Sufism deepened in Tunisia, where I listened to hadhra concerts, entered zaouia, and attended lectures on topics like the Shadhiliyya.

Before long, I began having strange dreams: the numinous (theophany?) through being confronted by rams atop Jebel Ennahli, a visit by Sidi Béchir (whose shrine is in Mateur) on a subway line, prayers where I repeat the fatiha over and over. I do not yet know what these signs mean, but I do feel called to this tradition. I would like to find a teacher, somehow, but I do not know how, or where. My understanding—which may be mistaken—is that adherents do not find teachers, the teachers find you.

So, I search. But, I also wait, as al-Khidr calls us to do.

On Solaris

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Solaris is mentioned perennially in online discussions; each time I look through book recommendations spoken about in Sci-Fi circles, Lem’s short novel is one that is constantly referenced. Moreover, the movie is frequently referenced as a masterpiece, although my understanding is that Lem was not particularly fond of it.

I came to the work expecting something in line with the material so prominent during the “classic” age of Sci-Fi: intergalactic heroism, conquest of the universe, attempts to make sense of the Second World War and the larger technological age which ran on both sides of it.

However, from the first pages, I found that I was being brought into something a little bit different. The book begins on a near-earth space station, gives us a brief glimpse of travel and a sense of the universe’s scale (“I could not recognize a single constellation; in this region of the galaxy the sky was unfamiliar to me”). But instead of heroism, the first chapter leaves us unsettled.

Upon protagonist Kelvin’s arrival at the station on Solaris (the planet that consumes the bulk of the text), it is clear that there is something wrong. The man who Kelvin was excited to meet, his mentor, is dead. The man who Kelvin does meet, Snow, is uneasy and jumpy. By the close of the first chapter, Lem already had produced a fundamental tonal shift: the book thematically will not engage closely with colonization as such, it will not engage with adventure, or heroism, or anything else in that neighborhood. Lem’s novel is, instead, a testimony of a haunting.

Typically, the science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s was written with a triumphalist bent: humanity, from this vantage point, has conquered the most intractable scientific issues, and it has led to its total success. Problems persist, sure, but they’re problems of human psychology, sociology, relational dynamics. In other words, the problems are a reflection of humanity, not about the universe, as such.

Lem inverts this. Solaris is also a book about human psychological dynamics, but it is not in the least bit triumphalist. On the contrary, Lem provides us with a remarkable window into the scientific debates of the age: Kelvin recounts them, he thumbs through books that cover them, the characters discuss them. Rather than triumph, the characters are left baffled. Scientists have been studying Solaris for well over a century, and they do not understand a single thing. They understand that the planet, somehow, is alive: the first indication was that Solaris broke the laws of physics by maintaining a consistent orbit in a binary system. Regardless of how long they persist in trying to “make contact,” they make no ground.

Lem is explicit in his critique of scientific triumphalism and argues that it is instead a new coat for classic colonialism:

We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don’t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us—that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence—then we don’t like it anymore.

In spite of his correct analysis (the paragraph above is his dialogue), I came to hate Snow over the course of the book. He spends every moment scientizing the most remarkable place in the galaxy. Each time something occurs, he refuses to take what it is for what it is. Instead, we receive examinations of neutrons and arguments that what occurs to the characters is, somehow and incredulously, not real. That is, they are real, but they aren’t real in a way that is knowable to the characters. This may be so, objectively speaking, but it doesn’t matter. It misses the entire point. Some things need to be accepted as they are, and characters are unwilling to do so.

Most alarmingly to the characters, they have visitors: ostensibly, a person that encapsulates his greatest shame. We only see glimpses of the “visitor” for the other two inhabitants of the station (Snow and Sartorius), but we spend a great deal of time with Rheya, who killed herself with a hypodermic injection after a period of conflict, where Kelvin had left her.

Kelvin’s first instinct upon discovering Rheya is revulsion: he quickly concludes that she is not “his” Rheya, and attempts to kill her by launching her into space, all while he questions his own sanity. However, she returns, remembering nothing about that. One of the most touching developments of the book is Rheya and Kelvin’s relationship. The book is not about their love as such, but love as a window into alterity. On these grounds, Solaris is incredibly strong: Rheya and Kelvin, through the bulk of the book, do not fully contact, regardless of how hard they try. Yet, they come close enough, and Kelvin comes to understand Solarist Rheya as different—and separate—from Terran Rheya, and Rheya herself concludes the same: she does not want to be a mere memory of someone that Kelvin once knew and who she had nothing to do with. Instead, she wants to be accepted and loved on her own terms.

This raises questions about how we love. I love my fiancée deeply, and it would be a fundamental error, of the deepest sort, to assume that she is today as she was when we first met in 2023. In that case, I would be loving the image of her without loving her. Moreover, Lem forces us to ask what it means to love another person beyond that which is reflected back to us. He leaves the question unresolved and I think he might question whether it is possible at all, whether any contact at all is feasible. Even so, we do all that we can, to get close enough, while recognizing that it may not matter at all if we connect perfectly. It doesn’t take perfection to love, to care for others, and to do our best. But, at the same time, we’d be lying to ourselves if we believe that we could fully know another person—or ourselves: Kelvin himself does not know what exists underneath his conscious mind, and he fears it.

Lem spends a great deal of time on the geology of Solaris and, more importantly, how other people interpret it. There are attempts at trying to make sense of it all, but each time, there is some unbridgeable chasm that may not be crossed.

Interestingly, even discussions of the planet itself are a mirror. A mimoid is described as “resembl[ing] a town,” the planet is described as an “ocean,” and the characters describe “clouds” and “waves” and other phenomena that seem to parallel Earth. Yet, these concepts themselves are false metaphors: anthropocentric projections on a planet that has effectively nothing in common with Earth. The geological structures and scientific languages are themselves metaphors that do not map properly onto Solaris. This is troubling, as the only concepts that we have to work with are human ones, and human language does not travel to that which is truly and ontologically inhuman.

One anecdote, on schoolchildren on field trip to learn a bit about hydrological (if that is the correct word) forms on Solaris:

A group of schoolchildren visiting the Solarist Institute in Aden were making their way through the main hall of the library and looking at the racks of microfilm that occupied the entire left-hand side of the hall. The guide explained that among phenomena immortalized by the image, these centered fragmentary glimpses of symmetriads long since vanished—not single shots, but whole reels, more than ninety thousand of them!

One plump schoolgirl (she looked about fifteen, peering inquisitively over her spectacles) abruptly asked: “And what is it for?”

In the ensuing embarrassed silence, the school mistress was content to dart a reproving look at her wayward pupil. Among the Solarists whose job was to act as guides (I was one of them), no one would produce an answer.

Is this not true to life! What does it all mean, anyways? “Be quick, don’t ask such things—have you no manners?” Any attempt to respond is sophomoric at best, and we have to sit with our own discomfort.

While the text has something in common with cosmic horror—the smallness, and narrowness, of our existence being so small and futile that it leaves us shaking, or even mad—it leaves us more with a sense of wonder about the nature of the universe than fear. This is not Piranesi’s house, complicated and wondrous, but also knowable. Solaris presents a feast of wonder with the recognition that it is, and necessarily must be, incomprehensible to us.

Lem does not shy away from this: he presents the image of an imperfect but present god, a god that is, but is unknowable to us because he is neither the flawed anthropomorphic god of classical myth nor the omnipotent but beneficent god of Abrahamic traditions nor the multiplicity of Vedic traditions. Instead, the very fact of a god that is is itself incomprehensible to us.

The most beautiful image, at the end of the book, is Kelvin sitting on an island in the sea, reaching out to touch a wave. It enveloped his hand, without ever touching him. No contact. The message of the book in a single, beautifully written image.

I’ve been sitting with this book for two weeks without having been able to write about it, simply because I find myself thinking about it all the time. At the time I completed the book, I felt grief. As I completed the penultimate chapter: I felt like crying. There was something about the book that touched me, and I cannot identify what it was. I felt that I was in conversation with Solaris, not Lem, and one of the most stimulating conversations of my life was coming to an end. At the same time, the entire text was affectively beautiful, and I did not want it to end.

More than anything, this is the manual on alterity. Consumed as fast-paced, voyeuristic adventure, a reader will gain nothing. Digested as a philosophical treatise on the nature of our existence, it has everything.

Art needed its scarcity

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Music in every store, a screen on every wall, the whole archive of recorded art available at all times for nothing, and I’m not sure we gained more than we lost. Art needed its scarcity; the context was part of the work. When everything is always available, what disappears is not access. It’s occasion.

Censorship to surveillance

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

When a state can’t stop an idea from spreading, it stops punishing the idea and starts punishing the actions. Censorship gives way to surveillance. The transition point is worth studying, because we’re living inside one.

Inshallah

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

“Inshallah” is not “I hope so,” and it is not “maybe.” It is an appeal made with no expectation that what is asked for will arrive, a whole theology folded into one word that the closest English keeps flattening into a hedge. Some words don’t survive the crossing; what arrives on the other side is a tourist’s version of the thought.

June 2026

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

What did you stay up too late thinking about?

Menocchio, the sixteenth-century miller from Friuli who read a handful of books badly and built a whole cosmology out of cheese and worms. The question that started the night was why Borges loved Cervantes, and it ended with me certain Borges would have loved Menocchio more; he couldn’t have invented a better character. Then, the recursion set in. What would Menocchio have made of a story about Borges reading Menocchio? What would Borges have made of Menocchio reading Borges reading Menocchio? Misreading is the generative part; that’s what the miller knew, and what Borges built a career on. I lay in bed laughing about this, alone, until nearly two in the morning. My alarm was set for seven.

What are you preparing for?

August, mostly. I start teaching French in the fall, and a school year is 180 lesson plans; I want every one of them chosen on purpose: no PowerPoint unless the lesson needs a PowerPoint, no worksheet pulled off the internet in someone else’s voice. I registered for an AP institute this summer, and I’m building a café activity for the teen center where I volunteer, four stations: Paris, Montréal, Dakar, Tunis, and students have to order in a language they barely know. The point is that French isn’t France. The other point, the one I won’t say out loud to them, is that everyone has a comfort zone they can’t see until something pushes them past its edge. And underneath all of it: my fiancée and I are getting married this summer. Everything else on this page is what I do while I wait. The wants with longer horizons live on a someday page.

What is the institution teaching you?

I wrote on the hills page that institutions are alive. This spring, I’ve been learning what that means from the inside. An institution is an organism, and what kills one isn’t turnover; every cell in a body can be replaced and the body goes on living. It dies when the system connecting the cells fails, and then it’s dead even while individual organs keep working. What follows from this is less comfortable: institutional memory is the soul of the thing, and memory only survives in writing. Spoken knowledge can be revised, denied, or simply lost the day one person retires. The written record is the only continuity an institution actually has.

What are you building or fixing?

Building: this site, slowly, pages that have been stubs since April are getting their first real prose. Two essays in first draft, one on Piranesi and one on Gilead, which turn out to be the same thing: what attention costs, and what it gives back. And a comparative dataset on township government in Chicago’s south suburbs, because I went looking for the scholarly literature on townships and found there mostly isn’t any: political science skipped it, history skipped it, and a form of government older than the state of Illinois sits essentially unstudied. Fixing: the engine. My analytical motor has no off switch; it runs until the fuel is gone or something drags it away, and, when it has no real problem to work on, it invents one. I’m trying to teach it to idle.

What surprised you?

That the best day of the month was the one I didn’t want. My mother wanted to kayak on Memorial Day; I find kayaking slow, and I went because she loves it. Paddling up the Des Plaines, I watched a snake cross the water ahead of me, deer standing in a clearing, a turtle on a log doing exactly what I was doing, sitting in the sun. I pulled small shells off the riverbed and wondered what had lived in them. The way back downstream needed almost no paddling, and for a long stretch I thought about nearly nothing, which has no precedent this year. Somewhere on the water, I felt I understood the difference between attention and grasping: a thought can roll past without being caught, and it isn’t lost. Or, if it is lost, that’s fine, too. The river didn’t need me to have ideas about it.

Naturalization and belonging

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

France spent decades trying to manufacture loyalty with naturalization papers. It never worked. The gap between legal status and belonging may not be bridgeable by law, which is a problem if law is the only tool you have.

No fascist international

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

There is no fascist international. Fascists are nationalists, which means they compete with one another for the same territory; in 1930s Tunisia, French and Italian fascists fought in the streets. The ideology is fissile by nature, and that may be the most useful thing about it.

Propaganda by vernacular

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Propaganda doesn’t win by ideology; it wins by vernacular. Fascist radio conquered North African audiences in the 1930s by broadcasting popular music in colloquial Arabic, while the French countered with formal bulletins nobody wanted to hear. Replace radio with the platforms of your choice.

A book with a friend

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A book with a friend who self-published one two decades ago and wants to write another. About what, neither of us knows. That might be the right way to start.

Menocchio and Borges

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A sixteenth-century miller misreads a handful of books and builds a cosmology out of cheese and worms. Borges would have loved him. But what would Menocchio have made of Borges? And what would either have made of a story about Borges reading Menocchio reading Borges? I stayed up too late one night laughing at this, and I’m still not convinced it isn’t a real piece of fiction.

Proust and memory

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Do I experience memory the way Proust describes because that’s how memory works, or because I read Proust? More generally: how much of inner life is downstream of the books that claim to describe it?

The township grid

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The townships of the Midwest are six-mile squares surveyed onto the prairie before any settler arrived. In New England, communities formed first and drew their boundaries afterward; here, the box came first and the people were poured in. Most polities are abstractions drawn around something real. A township is something real that grew inside an abstraction, and I’d like to know what difference that makes.

God in two forms

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Why does God appear in only two forms across human history: as a person, or as nothing at all? Anthropomorphism or absence. Almost nobody worships something in between.

Holding on by letting go

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I keep a journal precisely to set my thoughts down so they can pass, which makes my main instrument for letting go also a machine for holding on.

A limiter I can’t out-think

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I want a technology limiter I can’t out-think. Every system I build to constrain myself fails the same way: I built it, so I can dismantle it. A constraint that survives contact with its own designer may be impossible. That’s what makes it interesting.

Attention to a forest

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

If attention is a form of prayer, what is being attended to when I give it to a forest? Theophany through other people is one claim. Whether nature counts is a different one, and I can’t settle it.

Betty Boop

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Betty Boop. A sex symbol who is also a cartoon, still sold at roadside cafés to people whose grandparents weren’t born when she was drawn. I stood in front of a statue of her and realized I have no idea what she is. Somebody must.

Prophecy and Jonah

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Classical Hebrew prophecy was not meant to come true. Jonah grieves because Nineveh survives. What if prophecy doesn’t predict the future, but names the moment when it can still be changed?

Route 66 as merchandise

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Route 66 is a road that exists mostly as merchandise. At the giant green statue in Wilmington I met a Polish family and a biker crew from Tennessee, and neither group was driving Route 66; they’d stopped in on their way to something else. The brand outlived the road. I can’t decide what that means.

What makes a slow film good

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

What makes a slow film good? The same hour that drags in one movie is the entire point of another. Making interiority watchable is a craft with rules, and I don’t know what they are.

Irrational, not atypical

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

“Atypical” is not the bad version of “typical”; it is just a neutral other. But “irrational” is the bad version of “rational”: it has no content of its own, only a negation, with a moral charge smuggled in beneath it. There is no respectable place to stand outside reason, because the language built the only exit as an insult.

Paul never met Jesus

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Paul never met Jesus. The men who did (James, Peter, John) opposed him, and his version won anyway. Either history is contingent, or that is what providence looks like from inside.