Orbis Tertius — Library

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.

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.

On Piranesi

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Piranesi is a remarkable text. I had been meaning to read it for quite some time, but I kept putting it off. I’d heard, many times, that it would likely resonate with me, but I didn’t really know what it was, and I’d prioritized other books, and I hadn’t taken nearly as much time to read this year as in the previous few. When I finished Gilead, I decided this would be the next best bet, suspecting it would be lighter and move a bit quicker, without really knowing what it was.

Piranesi was a pleasant surprise. On its surface, the book is about a man in a labyrinth. But as the reader makes their way through the first section, we’re left with the gnawing feeling that the labyrinth is not of our world at all. The narrator, Piranesi (who asserts that “as far as I can remember it is not my name”), finds a leaf in the tides beneath “the House” and speculates on whether trees exist. With Piranesi, the plot is almost beside the point. There is a compelling narrative, but the power of the book lies wholly in the narrator’s engagement with the world around him. He thinks of himself as a scientist, in the pre-modern sense: the world is not made of inert matter, it is vital, it is alive. The House, though made entirely of stone, has a will that it exerts over its inhabitants: Piranesi and his companion, the Other; the birds that share the main level with them; the fish that swim the depths beneath the labyrinth. At no point does Piranesi see the House as a place of malice; one refrain of the text is instead: “the Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”

Moreover, the House is timeless. As I began to read, I thought it was meant to take place in the mid- to late eighteenth century, in his journal, Piranesi capitalizes nouns mid-sentence, as had been done previously, though not following the early-1700s practice of capitalizing every noun (like German), with some adjectives capitalized too. It’s unclear where this comes from, but the textual conventions sit alongside commodities like multivitamins, colorful plastic bowls, cardboard boxes, and modern sneakers, which appear in the list of gifts the Other has provided to Piranesi. Piranesi is particularly attentive in his writing habits, which are a lot like mine. He writes by hand, filling notebooks and cross-referencing them with an additional notebook he uses as an index. While my own practice lacks an index (it’s chronological, not thematic), his discussion of writing matches mine, and his statement as to why is especially telling: “I write down what I observe in my notebooks. I do this for two reasons. The first is that Writing inculcates habits of precision and carefulness. The second is to preserve whatever knowledge I possess for you, the Sixteenth Person.” In fact, his attentiveness extends far beyond his writing: he notes everything: he annotates the tides, which he memorizes; he remembers each statue that lines the halls; he remembers exact pathways through a labyrinth that extends some twenty kilometers from the center; he pays attention to the birds, communicating with them; he refuses to disturb the birds’ nests until the chicks have grown; and he finds beauty in fallen stones, which provide an opening that lets him fish (nutrition!) and collect seaweed (fuel for warm fires!). Stumbling on the remains of the dead, of which he finds thirteen, he takes care of them, bringing offerings and ensuring that they are at peace. He enumerates fifteen people who have ever lived in the world: the Other and he are the only two alive, and the youngest remains belonged to a girl of about seven.

Susanna Clarke’s attention to small detail is enough to draw the reader in closely, but the book is at its greatest when it deals with themes, which are fed by the very attention Clarke cultivates. The intellectual stakes are held around the immanence/transcendence dialectic. Midway through we learn of an anthropologist, Laurence Arne-Sayles, and his acolytes. Arne-Sayles is an outsider academic, and his thesis can be stated simply: premodern, and especially prehistoric, peoples lived a vitalist ontology; the world of these peoples was not cognitive; it must be taken literally. Let me give an example. We all know how premodern peoples inhabited a world of spirits and divinities, believing the world teemed with life beyond the material, biological, and physical, the spiritual world a basic fact of existence. We tend to think of this as wholly about the way these peoples saw the world: when a coincidence occurred, they believed it was a message, or a gift, from God, the cosmos, or any number of lesser divinities. That, in itself, isn’t controversial; most of us recognize that this was once the case, and that such a way of thinking has been lost. Arne-Sayles pushes the argument further, saying that premodern “vitalist” spirituality (my term, I don’t know what else to call it) is not merely a cognitive phenomenon but an actual fact of existence we are no longer able to recognize. Because we no longer see it, the world itself has stopped responding to us; or, alternatively, we might read it as the world pushing back.

Such a view today would be considered irrational, superstitious, even anti-intellectual, and the same is true within the novel. Arne-Sayles resorts to increasingly eccentric means of accessing the power of the spiritual world, ultimately turning to the remains of the first-century Celtic king (chieftain?) Addedomarus and to ceremonial magic. Over time he concludes that this is hardly necessary: all that is required to touch that vital thing flowing through the world is a childlike sense of wonder. And so he reaches the labyrinth, a world outside our own. Nobody believes Arne-Sayles except his students, and escalating scandals dog the professor and his acolytes: the kidnapping of a man, the disappearance of another, four years in prison, homosexuality at a time when it was unacceptable, and so on. Eventually he spends years in prison for crimes the police only know the surface of, and nobody really believes in the labyrinth’s existence, despite one student filming it and a kidnapped victim speaking extensively of it. This reveal also changes our understanding of the remains of the seven-year-old girl Piranesi treats with such care: was she kidnapped? was she murdered? what happened to her?

The Other, we learn, was one of Arne-Sayles’s students, Dr. Valentine Ketterley. While Arne-Sayles moved on from his initial research, Ketterley continued his search for “the Great and Secret Knowledge,” relying wholly on ceremonial magic to access it. Initially Piranesi helps him, but he soon concludes that there is no such thing as the Great and Secret Knowledge: all of the knowledge in the world is right in front of him, waiting to be studied and analyzed. The big question in all of this is: who is Piranesi, anyway? How did he get to the labyrinth? Well, he’s Matthew Rose Sorensen, a journalist who had begun investigating Arne-Sayles and his students. Meeting Ketterley at his home, just across from Battersea Park in London, Sorensen is brought to the House and made to conduct research on the place for Ketterley’s own ends, and as time passes he forgets himself, and Piranesi emerges, a new man permanently tied to the existence of the House. While the reveal that Piranesi is actually Rose Sorensen is a major plot turn that moves the story along, it doesn’t actually affect the big question the novel is asking: to what extent is Arne-Sayles correct?

When we see the world through Piranesi’s eyes, we’re left with the sense that he is absolutely, in every way, correct. Piranesi’s world is vital, the House is alive, the statues do protect him from negative emotions as he reads old journal entries he’s forgotten, the birds do leave messages for him. All of this, from his subjectivity, is wholly true. Where Matthew Rose Sorensen was a modern rationalist, Piranesi relies on a vitalist ontology. What the book does not answer (and cannot answer, given that it’s written from one man’s perspective) is whether Piranesi’s or Rose Sorensen’s view of the world is objectively true. But what Clarke does remarkably well is force us to leave the question open, to take seriously that there are alien worldviews fundamentally different from ours. This is no small task, and the question is fundamental to epistemology as such. It is also not neatly a temporal question: many people around the world continue to believe in djinn, kami, nature spirits, and a truly immanent world. From my standpoint, the idea of the divine as either transcendent or non-existent seems to be the exception for humanity as a whole across the long durée. What, then, does it mean for us to take this seriously? What does it change? These are open questions that neither I nor anyone else has been able to resolve.

I want to leave this essay with a final note on identity. Even after Piranesi remembers his identity as Rose Sorensen, Rose Sorensen does not return. According to Piranesi’s interpretation, he is decidedly not Rose Sorensen; instead, Rose Sorensen awakens, in anguish, when he sees his name, and afterward continues to sleep. In Piranesi’s words:

Then the House in its Mercy had caused him to fall asleep (which was by far the best thing for him) and it had placed him inside me. But the sight of his name written in pebbles in the Twenty-Fourth vestibule had caused him to stir uneasily and the revelation of what the Other had done had only made matters worse. I worried in case he woke up completely and his anguish began all over again. I placed my hand on my chest. Hush now! I said, Do not be afraid. You are safe. Go back to sleep. I will take care of us both.

I think we all understand what it means to forget (perhaps intentionally) difficult and even hostile experiences. Normally we associate this with trauma, and we tend to think of it as the production of a fragmented self. Piranesi does not do that. Instead, we see a layered self. When “Piranesi” re-enters the world we know at the end of the text, the person who inhabits it is neither Piranesi nor Rose Sorensen: it is someone else entirely, who goes unnamed. The narrator refers to both Piranesi and Rose Sorensen living inside, although Rose Sorensen remains dormant while Piranesi responds with agency:

Piranesi has a strong dislike of money. Piranesi wants to say: But I need the thing you have, so why don’t you just give it to me? And then when I have something you need, I will just give it to you. This would be a simpler system and much better.

This is a humane way of thinking about trauma. The response is not something to be undone, but to be protected. There is nothing to treat here, no pathology, no major issue. We grieve for Matthew Rose Sorensen’s fate, but we know that he is protected by the “him” (Piranesi) who emerged instead, and we know that Piranesi is housed in a third man, protected but not patronized. Piranesi forces us to sit with how we might see the world, over how we do see it. Sometimes it’s necessary to remember, quite simply, that “the Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”

On Gilead

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The Christianity found in Gilead is hardly recognizable from our vantage point in the second quarter of the twenty-first century. It is something different, almost unrecognizable, almost alien. In fact, it is not one Christianity but two, or perhaps even three. While “grace” is a word commonly used in Christian contexts, it appears here somewhat differently.

On its face, this book is a series of writings by an aging Congregationalist minister, John Ames, addressed to his young son. The primary conflict within the text is Ames’s attitude toward his namesake, Jack Boughton (“John Ames” Boughton). We see Ames respond to the world attentively and with care; he has a profound patience for just about everyone around him, with one exception: Jack. Jack is, in fact, the prodigal son. He has made a series of costly errors, and the narrator takes them personally. For instance, Jack had a child out of wedlock and then proceeded to abandon both the child and her mother to abject poverty, leaving his daughter to die prematurely. This is especially painful to John Ames, who lost his own wife and child years (decades?) before, and cannot fathom somebody doing so willingly. The bulk of the book is spent on Ames’s reflections, his attempts to reconcile his own history with the actions of the son of his best friend. And eventually he does so: the prodigal son returns, now with a wife and child who are markedly different. They are Black, in the 1950s, in Missouri (his wife is from Memphis, deep in the Jim Crow South).

The choice to place Jack Boughton’s life in St. Louis is no accident: Marilynne Robinson sets him there as a foil to John Ames’s own history. Ames’s grandfather was a free-soiler, aiding John Brown in his fight (in Kansas) against Missouri in the years leading up to the American Civil War, and the people of Iowa in the text are primarily descended from these free-soilers. While the grandfather’s cause was noble, he too lacked the grace that we see in twenty-first-century evangelical Christianity. This is interesting, because in my view his cause was noble, and just. We might ask, “What did this justice cost, if it made him lose the value of grace?” And yet the question is very difficult to answer ethically: what good is grace when it is an excuse for defending the enslavement of an entire people? Gilead does not answer this question, and it is obvious that Robinson, too, is totally sympathetic toward Ames’s grandfather. Yet Ames’s father is quite different; the excessive zeal of mid-nineteenth-century abolitionism fell through, and what emerged was a moderate, liberal, pacifist twentieth-century Protestantism. But what does the pacifism cost? It is one thing to defend pacifism with regard to conflict between rival imperial powers, as Ames’s father did in the wake of the First World War; it is a wholly different thing to defend a pacifism that quietly looks away from enslavement and genocide. John Ames, our narrator, has a different set of intellectual influences than his father and grandfather: he reads Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Reinhold Niebuhr, men whose theology was fundamentally defined by the Second World War and Germany’s simultaneous genocide of Europe’s Jews. How do we sit with this? Can we at all?

There is also the historical issue, specific to the prairie. Iowa, like Kansas, was settled primarily by free-soilers and abolitionists. Yet by the time the novel takes place in the 1950s, Jack Boughton is unable to discuss his marriage to a Black woman or his mixed-race son out of fear that they will be received badly, and that he will be received badly. The only person he is able to tell is his old minister, John Ames, near the conclusion of the book. This only becomes clear when you read the current conditions, that is, the postwar conditions that count as “contemporary” in the text, alongside John Ames’s historical storytelling. What happened, and why isn’t the United States able to reconcile itself with what it has done to African Americans? How is it that the most racially radical region of the country became a bastion of nearly pietist conservatism? Robinson, as with everything else, leaves the question open.

Robinson’s great achievement, beyond storytelling and character development, is the style and tone of her writing. Through John Ames, she writes short, heavily Anglo-Saxon sentences, reaching for Latinate terms only when absolutely necessary, and it’s a challenge to find a paragraph without serious hedging. Rather than a sign of weakness or uncertainty, I suspect it’s best to read these sentences in terms of epistemological humility. The text, taken together, is deeply reflective, thoughtful, and unlike anything I had ever read before. If I could write like this, I could consider my life, as a whole, a success.

The most interesting passage in the entire book brings together race, meandering reflection, dry humor, and the characteristic personality of the plains; if you have a copy, I encourage you to check out pages 56–60; it’s remarkable and worth reading in its entirety, and unfortunately too long to place here.

On What Moves the Dead

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0600

A note: this gives away key plot points and endings.

I picked up What Moves the Dead because I wanted to join a local book club and this was their next read. T. Kingfisher is a popular author, but I’d never read her before. Wow, I was impressed. The premise is simple: how might we expand, or re-read, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”? I’d always read Poe’s story through the lens of a newfound American identity, with the House of Usher standing for European states and systems, a way for Poe to needle the European aristocracies and say that, illustrious past or not, their days are numbered and there’s no way forward for them; both Roderick and Madeline are destined to die along with their house, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Kingfisher does something quite different. As in Poe, Madeline is on the verge of death and Roderick suffers from an “illness of the nerves,” but instead of a harrowing gothic tale about social systems, Kingfisher gives us a story about possession. Possession stories always fascinate me; they’re a way of talking about human agency in a wondrous, awe-some, or grotesque register, and here, rather than ghosts or demons, Madeline is possessed by a fungus that grew in a tarn.

Kingfisher’s note to the reader at the end is eye-opening: she was fascinated by how often Poe mentions mushrooms, which is striking given how short the original story is, and she set out to combine his mushrooms with recent advances in mycology. Growing up, I thought of mushrooms as lifeforms like plants; they had a stem, and in my young mind they were something like miniature bushes or trees; I knew other fungi existed, mostly lichen and mold, but I’d never even considered that yeast was a fungus. Recent mycology points to fungi being wholly unlike plants and animals: they live in colonies, their cells are largely undifferentiated (no “brain” or “heart” or “skin” cells), many reproduce asexually from a single parent, the spores identical to it, and they communicate through chemical signals and come in many forms. If you limit your idea of life to animals, plants, and single cells, fungi look weird, alien, which makes them great material for cosmic horror. I wouldn’t quite call Kingfisher’s book cosmic horror, but it draws heavily on the Weird tradition (so often symbolized by the tentacle; cephalopods seem alien to us too, even though they’re animals), and it forces us to the realization that reality is far stranger and more terrifying than we ever thought.

The world has enough flesh to be immersive despite the book’s brevity. Through well-placed exposition from the narrator, Alex Easton, and conversations with other characters, we learn a lot, but this isn’t world-building from scratch; learning about Gallacia and Ruravia is more like learning about actually-existing places through realistic novels or journalism. It’s as if I read a travel editorial by a Bulgarian author: they might complain about a few things, but it isn’t much more than ordinary griping, and I might find it odd that the writer mentions how the rabbits walk funny, but my eyes would keep drifting across the page without a second thought. It’s interesting in terms of genre, too; I saw it marketed as “dark fantasy,” but it’s much better described as weird horror. There were moments in the last act, reading late at night, when I felt genuinely frightened, and the fear came less from the events than from the vibe: wispy hyphae, breathy hollow laughter, jagged locomotion, a wholly “xeno” image. My trouble with novels like this is that, instead of taking for granted that they’re fiction, I really do wonder, what if the world were like that? what if this were true? Call it an overactive imagination, but that’s how I read, and read this way the novel offers a horrifying view of reality. What else might we not know?

The story is structured as a classic mystery, dropping clues for us to piece together, and I figured it out fairly early, around page 90, when Easton goes hunting for a hare; there’s enough here that a reader will feel proud to have solved it, but it could have used more misdirection, since if you paid attention it was all quite clear. What really impressed me was Kingfisher’s attention to detail. The clues are tied back into the mystery beautifully; when Madeline’s “other” sleepwalks, it has trouble pronouncing certain sounds, and we learn at the end that the fungus had to learn to talk, since fungi don’t communicate the way humans do. Madeline’s dialogue:

“One,” she said. “Two … thhhhreee … ‘our … ‘ive … sixsss …” She paused as if thinking. “Se’en … eight … nnnine … te-uhn.” She looked at me. “Goooood?”

Earlier she’d had trouble with “M” sounds, so the fungus can’t pronounce “F,” “V,” or “M,” all labial consonants, in fact all the labial consonants that would have appeared in alter-Madeline’s sentences. Kingfisher’s choice of which sounds the fungus finds difficult is highly logical; there’s nothing random about it, and I’m not sure I could have pulled that off myself. Detail like that is what makes What Moves the Dead so alive. The ending was satisfying, though I had mixed feelings about finishing, simply because I wanted to spend more time in the constructions of her imagination. It’s an excellent introduction to her work, and you can be sure I’ll be reading more of her.

On Wintering

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Have we lost sight of one of the things that most guide our lives, the seasons? It’s easy to think so. As I write this, it’s a cool 40°F (5°C) outside; it isn’t as cold as the frigid Midwestern winter, but it’s low enough that I’d suffer if I were out too long without a good coat and gloves. It’s 9:25 at night, awfully late to be writing given that I have no fire; my office is lit by artificial electricity and kept at room temperature, and if it weren’t for the occasional draft, I’d hardly know from inside my house that it’s winter at all. And yet the seasons go on affecting us, Katherine May argues in her hybrid memoir. We live two kinds of season at once: the planetary seasons each year, and the seasons our lives pass through. May charts her most recent winter (one of many) by drawing on the world outdoors, asking what we can learn from how others experience winter. She recounts Samhain, which inaugurates the winter, and saunas, saints, and the solstice; she plunges into the English Channel in February, weighs homeschooling her son, and engages the more-than-human world, with an especially interesting chapter on how bees survive the winter; we tend to think of them as hard workers or egalitarians, but the larger lesson is in staying warm under hostile conditions.

May’s winter, like mine, began with a series of health crises. First her husband came down with appendicitis, and she feared she might lose him; then she herself fell ill, took time off from her university, and ultimately left the position over the course of the winter. The funny thing about trying to avoid the seasonal cycles is that, like it or not, they make sure we hear them, in May’s case, it seems to me, through an intense burnout. Her retreat gave her the chance to slow down and ground herself in the larger world, to unload the burden she’d been carrying and return to the needs she’d long neglected. Modern “life” has a way of impeding the very fundamentals we need to survive: connection, rest, presence, and, perhaps most of all, a sense of peace. Wintering came at the right moment; it was released in 2020, but May had gone through her own winter the year before, so the book became a roadmap for thousands navigating an increasingly difficult time.

Though I found the Covid-19 pandemic a hard stretch of personal isolation, it in no way resembled what I went through later. In late December 2022, like May’s husband, I came down with intense stomach pains. At first the doctor feared hepatitis; my blood work showed astronomically high liver readings, and a second round of tests an inflamed pancreas, but that wasn’t it: after a visit to the radiologist, I was sent to the hospital for emergency surgery, my gallbladder in the process of melting down. The surgery went well, with no immediate complications, but for weeks and months afterward I felt uncharacteristically weak, with spells of dizziness, sudden shooting pains through my face, and an inability to engage with the world. A dietician gave me a food plan and supplements that made no difference, and at the second appointment it was clear there was an absorption issue, so I was sent to a gastroenterologist for an endoscopy and colonoscopy. They found chronic gastritis, stretches of inflammation in my colon, and a fungal infection in my esophagus, and after a triple dose of antibiotics and a course of antifungals I gradually recovered over months. Even so, my life was riddled with major setbacks, culminating in my departure from a PhD program, and my belief that things would soon improve turned out to be an illusion; the whole multi-crisis launched me into an identity crisis that took me more than a year to get through. Altogether, my deepest winter lasted more than a year and a half. Things are better now; in spite of the weather outdoors, my internal world feels like a flourishing spring.

I wish I’d read Wintering sooner, though I’m not sure I’d have been ready for it. Like May, I had to unload some of the heaviest burdens in my life and, in the open space that left, learn to re-inhabit myself; now, in spring, I can look at my values, goals, and aspirations with more sober, intentional eyes. In the depths of winter I felt as though I were walking through the most savage blizzard, unable to see in front of me or behind, lost deep in a boreal forest. The storm has let up some; flowers are beginning to bloom, and I hear a few bees buzzing, and I’m glad they made it through the season with me. May’s book wasn’t a roadmap for me the way it was for so many others, but it was endlessly validating, to look at another person, whom I don’t know personally, and be able to say, “Oh, you went through this too?”, and to learn about her experience, let me put my own in perspective; when the next winter comes, I can pray it won’t be as bad as the last and brace myself accordingly. To anyone going through their own personal winter right now: you are not alone. What you feel now will pass, but you have to give it time; as hard as it is to see, the other side is waiting for you; you don’t know where you’re going yet, but you’re in the process of becoming.

Winter isn’t a period of death; it’s a period of transformation. St. John of the Cross spoke of the “dark night of the soul”; the alchemists spoke of the nigredo, the blackening, as the fundamental moment of transmutation; Hades, or Pluto, is associated with winter, desolation, and the afterlife, and is also responsible for transformation; astrologically, Pluto transforms. The flora and fauna seem to fade in winter, but they too are transforming. That message, transformation, lies at the heart of Wintering. If you feel like you’re in the thick of it, take some time to walk with Katherine May; she’ll guide you softly and help you make better sense of what you’re going through. And even if your life isn’t in a winter right now, she offers a map to help you prepare for when winter, inevitably, comes again.