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.

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.

Orbis Tertius — Now

July 2026

What did you stay up too late thinking about?

What are you preparing for?

What are you building or fixing?

What surprised you?

June 2026

What did you stay up too late thinking about?

What are you preparing for?

What is the institution teaching you?

What are you building or fixing?

What surprised you?