December 31, 2025.

I just finished watching the Stranger Things finale, and while this is not a post about the show, I do want to take a minute to appreciate the Duffer Brothers and the ten years of great storytelling they have given us. Now, maybe the show hasn’t been for you, or maybe you liked some parts of it more than others. Maybe you have some critiques or whatever. Still, anyone who has ever told or tried to tell a story knows how difficult it is. So, kudos to them and everyone involved with the show for giving us a decade-long life in the upside-down.

When the show ended, and I wiped away the tears as David Bowie’s Heroes blasted through the speakers in my dark room, I realized the beginning and ending of Stranger Things also bookend the ten years of my twenties. Ten years is a long time if you think about it, and yet, on the other side of the decade, it feels so short, as if I blinked and it was over.

But anyway, I am sure we all feel this way. And I’m sure I’ll blink again, and I’ll be forty. Did a new show start this year that will bookend my thirties?

Stranger Things is a show about friendship and sacrifice and love and growing up and acceptance and monsters and goodness and choices and storytelling and on and on and on. It is a show about grief, about loss, about the passage of time. It is a show about the boon and the bane of being human and everything that it entails.

Life is hard, in general, as we all can agree. Some have it much worse, and some have it much better. But no matter who it is, every single one of us goes through some sort of pain, either physical or emotional or both, that is the cost of life. And it feels like the last few years have made life more painful and more uncertain. There are days when it all feels quite hopeless, not just because of the world around but also because of everything that the touch of time takes away from us: flowers that dry and die, greying hair and wrinkling skin, friends we don’t talk to anymore and lovers we lost as the music faded away. Maybe that’s why the nostalgia of a show like Stranger Things has a pull on us, at least on me, a feeling of loss for a world that never quite existed yet had a sense of comfort and certainty in it.

But I hope as we enter into a new year, as futile as that may sound, between all the resolutions and anti-resolutions and goals and whatnot, we could all live with more acceptance. Acceptance of our humanity, our limitations. More importantly, acceptance of each other. I do hope the next year is one of hope and positivity and joy and community, that it is a year where, if nothing else, we are able to understand each other a little more, or at least make an attempt to do so. As Celine says in Before Sunrise, “The answer must be in the attempt.”

Writing all this feels quite pointless, in the grand scheme of things. But I am reminded of Markus Zusak’s novel The Book Thief and one particular sentence in it: “I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”

Words have power, and so does their absence. And so here is an attempt, a few words into the digital ether. If nothing else, maybe it’ll become another data point to influence the Algorithms and LLMs that seem to control so much of our attention now.

I remember thinking and saying, “This will be my year” at the beginning of 2020, and we all know how that went. Maybe I had jinxed it? Do with that information what you will. But anyway, here’s to another year. And I hope the next one is better.

Not sure how to end this, so I’ll just let David Bowie play you out…

*Potential Spoiler Alert: This post may or may not contain minor-ish spoilers for My Struggle Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard. But don’t let that stop you from reading this!*

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How I discovered Knausgaard

A few years ago, I wrote a post about Haruki Murakami’s book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running on my blog. When I shared it with a few people, someone asked me if I knew about Knausgaard.

Unsure whether Knausgaard was a person or a thing, and too embarrassed to ask, I googled the word and discovered he was a writer.

Something about my writing in that post had caught the person’s eye. It had a Knausgaardian sensibility. I asked why this person thought my writing reminded him of Knausgaard.

It was the focus on the mundanity of everyday life and everyday events, he told me.

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian author who shot to literary fame around 2010, first in Norway and then worldwide, through his nearly 3600-page 6-part novel titled My Struggle. If the name reminds you of another book by a certain early 20th-century German, you will be correct. Knausgaard named his book, intentionally, similar to Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf. This was one of the major controversies that surrounded the book when it first came out, and I can imagine it must have also led to a lot of publicity.

Another controversy that surrounded him was Knausgaard’s blending of fact and fiction and the invisible line between them. My Struggle is an autobiographical novel focused on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s life and uses the actual names of all the people in his life, which, as one can imagine, did not go down well with the people. I think one of Knausgaard’s uncles sued him, or tried to sue him. The others, most likely, were not happy either.

But this boldness, which some might also call recklessness, is also what made the novel a great work of contemporary literature. Knausgaard played with the novel’s form precisely because he wanted to write something exceptional in an art form that has been around for centuries.

“[On literature] That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called ‘writing.’ Writing is more about destroying than creating.” — Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle Book 1

Minor personal aside, though: I think if you’re born with a name like Karl Ove Knausgaard, you are meant to become famous in some way or another. The name feels just too grand to die in obscurity. But I digress…

I bought the first book in the series a couple of years ago and read about a hundred pages before I abandoned it. I don’t quite remember why I didn’t finish it, because from what I remember, I was enjoying reading it. Maybe I got distracted by another book at the time, or fell into a sudden slump, or maybe the everydayness of life distracted me. But anyway, I had forgotten about it, and my copy kept getting buried deeper and deeper under the ever-increasing pile of unread books.

Until about a year ago, when I read an essay titled, Scraping training data for your mind, by , in which he talked about Knausgaard’s Struggle.

Knausgaard, when still in his twenties and struggling to become a writer, was told by a friend that his writing felt empty, to put it simply. Knausgaard didn’t write anything for about 2 years, then read all of Proust’s 7-part novel In Search Of Lost Time, then went on to not write anything again for 2 years, until a publisher gave him a shot because why not, and he wrote a novel in a year or so, a novel which had a Proustian sensibility to it. That novel became Knausgaard’s first published novel.

I think it was this story that got me even more interested in Knausgaard and the lore surrounding My Struggle. Readers of this blog—Substack?—will know that I myself have been trying to write my first novel for the past few years. Readers will also know that I have been quite unsuccessful in writing it so far. The writing, according to my own recent review of it, feels empty, a pointless need for self-expression that I might have outgrown.

So then one day I thought, what if I do what Knausgaard did? What if I also drown myself in a long reading project, and then, as I emerge from the deep dark waters, maybe some new neural connections in my brain will lead to an improved writing craft? The idea, the thought, did not feel entirely stupid.

And so I thought, let’s go for it—let me read the entire 6-book 3600-page series called My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

But not only that, let me also read what inspired Knausgaard: Maybe, just maybe, I should read Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time? I mean, why not? ’s essay, no one told me about proust, certainly makes you want to read it. But we’ll see what happens…

So that’s my preamble, an introduction, of sorts, to how I ended up reading this book.

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And now, about the book.

Book 1 of My Struggle is split into two parts of Knausgaard’s life: One part about his teenage years and his teenage adventures living in Norway, and the other part about his late 20s, almost 30, where he is dealing with the news of his father’s death.

But throughout the book, throughout the two phases of Karl Ove’s life, the book deals primarily with the relationship between Karl Ove and his father.

When I say Karl Ove, I’m talking about Karl Ove the character in the book, and not Karl Ove the real person who wrote the book. Because even though the novel is autobiographical, it is still a novel. It is still placed in the fiction section of the bookstore. And so, since I don’t know Karl Ove the writer, I don’t want to make any assumptions about him and certainly do not feel either qualified or interested in commenting on his character or judging his life choices. But the character in the novel, Karl Ove, I feel comfortable judging. Case in point:

“Clothes off, water on, steaming hot, over my head, down my body. Should I beat off? No, for Christ’s sake, Dad’s dead.” — Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle Book 1

If you read the novel, you will judge him too. Because he is not a hero. He is not someone you can idealize. He is a flawed character—which is the best kind of character, isn’t it?—that is dealing with many different strands of emotions and issues all through the years, sometimes all at the same time: art, relationships, marriage, family, friends, and so on.

“As I sit here writing this, I recognize that more than thirty years have passed. In the window before me I can vaguely make out the reflection of my face. Apart from one eye, which is glistening, and the area immediately beneath, which dimly reflects a little light, the whole of the left side is in shadow. Two deep furrows divide my forehead, one deep furrow intersects each cheek, all of them as if filled with darkness, and with the eyes staring and serious, and the corners of the mouth drooping, it is impossible not to consider this face gloomy. What has engraved itself in my face? Today is the twenty-seventh of February. The time is 11:43 p.m. I, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was born in December 1968, and at the time of writing I am thirty-nine years old. I have three children – Vanja, Heidi, and John – and am in my second marriage, to Linda Boström Knausgaard. All four are asleep in the rooms around me, in an apartment in Malmö, where we have lived for a year and a half.” — Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle Book 1

In the teenage years, you see Karl Ove’s father as a dominating man who seems not to like Karl Ove much, but then you see other times when he seems to be trying to make an effort to get closer to Karl Ove. In one scene early in the novel, you see how Karl Ove tries to calculate where and how his father might be sitting in the living room at night and what mood he might be in so that Karl Ove could go tell his father about a face he saw in the water that day.

In his adulthood, though—thirty years old, married, about to have his first book published—as he learns of his father’s death, you can see the conflicted emotions Karl Ove feels. You see him disliking, even hating, his father. There is a moment when he feels happy and relieved that his father has died. But at the same time, you see him crying endlessly as he and his brother clean the house where their father died. You see the anger and pity he feels about the way his father had died and the way he had lived his last few years: cut off from all family, divorced, unemployed, alcoholic, living in isolation in his mother’s, Karl Ove’s grandmother’s, house, who had found him dead in a chair.

“My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.” — Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle Book 1

This novel is an exploration of a relationship, primarily—a book a son wrote about his father and the complicated relationship they had, not only until the death of the father but beyond. With that as the scaffold, the book explores the world, people in that world, and art created by those people, with meandering thoughts and philosophies Karl Ove has in between the mundane events of his daily life.

Reading Knausgaard’s writing feels like the reader is in the room with the characters. He has a penchant for describing the most mundane events with such beauty and pace that the page comes alive in front of you. You are not simply reading a story; you are living in the story. You are not just reading about characters, you are there with the characters, seeing and feeling everything they see and feel, seeing and feeling everything they do.

Many pages in the first half of the book are dedicated to a single night where a teenage Karl Ove tries to smuggle some bottles of beer with his friend to a party on New Year’s Eve that a girl he likes had thrown. In the second half of the book, many pages are dedicated to the act of Karl Ove cleaning the house left in squalor by his father, his grandmother still living in it, and the prose endlessly goes into a detailed act of cleaning, and drinking, and driving and funeral arrangements, and seeing the alcoholic father’s cold dead body, and seeing the squalid state of the still-alive-but-senile grandmother.

“The table lay under a film of water; the seat covers were dark with moisture. Plastic bottles lying on their sides on the brick floor were dotted with raindrops. The bottlenecks reminded me of muzzles, as if they were small cannons with their barrels pointing in all directions. Raindrops hung in clusters along the underside of the wrought-iron fence. Now and then one let go and fell onto the wall beneath with an almost imperceptible plop. That Dad had been here only three days ago was hard to believe.” — Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle Book 1

For some people, it is this detailed prose that is a criticism of Knausgaard’s writing. For most people who have read and enjoyed his writing, though, it is precisely this kind of prose that feels a joy to read. Reading Knausgaard reminded me of Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, especially the second movie in the series: Before Sunset.

In an interview for the movie, Richard Linklater recalls talking to Ethan Hawke while making the movie—Hawke, unsure about what they were making, tells Linklater that they might be making a really boring movie because all they seem to be doing is sitting and talking and walking and talking. And Linklater tells Hawke that he has been watching them talk for hours, days, and he hasn’t been bored even for a second. Those who have watched the trilogy and have loved it know what Linklater was talking about.

I feel something similar about Knausgaard’s My Struggle, at least so far. I have only read the first book in the series.

In the book, Knausgaard talks about the ambition he felt for writing something exceptional one day. The book sold over half a million copies in Norway by the early 2010s, a country with a population of about 5 million people, and it has been translated into over 30 languages. He did succeed in his ambition. And so far, nearly 500 pages in, I am enjoying the ride. Only 3000 more pages to go…

“I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive. And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape. Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I … do what? Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bathe them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others, and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs, and cupboards.” — Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle Book 1

In this space between us,

Between you and me, I see

Stories unfold and secrets bared,

And I see the words unsaid, lingering

On the gentle tips of our lips

And the space between them.

I see you see me see you,

In the 6-inch space held tightly

In our hands, warping time and space,

Yet hands remain unheld

And fingers untouched.

Two hearts in different places

Echoing across empty spaces,

Inching closer week by week,

Bit by bit, as words spill

From our wanting lips.

And as you let out your secrets

And I let out mine,

Godlessly I pray—

For distance to become touch.

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This post is part of an ongoing project. It is the diary of a book—a log of the process of writing a debut novel as I write it. You can read more about it here.

On September 1, 2025, I started work on the proper first draft—Draft #1—of the novel codenamed Project Morpheus. In Entry #1 (September 1, 2025), I defined my goal for this first draft:

Finish Draft #1 in 75 days, including today. Have Draft #1 complete by November 14, 2025. In terms of word count, draft should have 70,000 words, split into ten chapters, each chapter would have roughly 7,000 words.
This is just for some intial structure. It is much less scary to focus on one chapter and 7,000 words than it is to focus on 1 book and 70,000 words.
Structure will be fixed and improved in next iterations/drafts, but some intial scaffolding is necessary. So then, with each chapter, goal is to simply finish that chapter. Not to worry about the book.

Main goal for this draft—Draft #1—is to get the full story down on the page. From beginning to end.

On Day 1, I compiled all my notes and previous drafts from various places into a single place. On Day 2 and Day 3, I read through the previous partial drafts (one I had written in 2023 and one I had written in 2024), which was a harrowing experience. Before I go into that, it was interesting to see how much the story and the ideas had changed over time. What I am writing now has almost nothing in common with the original story idea, except the theme of the novel.

Now, about that harrowing experience: When I read through the 2023 draft, it was quite depressing to see how bad it was—the writing, the dialogue, all of it. I guess, if I’m being generous, I could say there were some decent parts, but overall it was pretty bad. “Good to get bad writing out of my system though,” I wrote in Entry #2.

Fortunately, when I read the 2024 draft the next day, the writing and the story were much better (it was a low bar, but still), which made me hopeful—if the direction is right, then ultimately, with each draft, I could make the writing and the story better.

From Entry #2 (September 2, 2025):
From ’s newsletter, , talking about a quote by John Cage: True meaning of discipline is to give yourself over to a project rather than expecting to get something from it.

On September 4, 2025, I finally started writing the new Draft #1, and the words just flowed. From Entry #4: “The voice, the tone, feels very different compared to previous drafts. Not sure if it is any good. But at least the words are there.”

With each day, it got harder to write, but I made sure to sit down and write at least something each day, just so I don’t break the chain for these 75 days. On Day 6, I wrote just one sentence before bed. The hardest part is to sit down and start, especially the beginning of a chapter or a scene.

On Day 7 (Entry #7), I came across this snippet of David Foster Wallace’s interview with Charlie Rose, where he talked about David Lynch, Blue Velvet, and creating from your true, authentic, and uninhibited self:

Also from Entry #7: “Write now, edit later.”

The act of maintaining this journal, writing in it—pen and paper—before writing the book each day, makes it a much better process and helps reduce, at least manage, my anxieties, insecurities, and fears. A big part of writing is spending a lot of time in solitude, alone with my thoughts, which means to write more and to write better, I really need to reduce the amount of news and online content I consume.

I am also finding this ongoing series of essays on writing a novel by really insightful:

• How to Start a Novel

• How to Work On A Novel

• How to Keep Writing a Novel

From Entry #5 (September 5, 2025):
Came across a quote today: “How odd, I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”—David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Until next time,

YJ

This post is part of an ongoing project. It is the diary of a book—a log of the process of writing a debut novel as I write it. You can read more about it here.

Here is the diary of a book and it will be interesting to see how it works out.1

In the summer of 2021, a few weeks out of graduate school2, I had an idea for a novel—my debut novel. Since then, I have been thinking about it, learning how to write a novel, improving my writing craft, jotting down notes and ideas about the story as they have come to me. The notes are spread across different notebooks and different softwares and different Post-it notes. Since that summer, I have written and re-written and re-re-written over 60,000 words, most of which I have ended up ultimately discarding. In the last 16 months, those words have sat untouched in my Scrivener draft. I can make many excuses, but the truth, the undeniable truth, is that I have been afraid of those words. The fear of my words not being good enough has paralyzed the novel, my hands, my thoughts. But the dream persists.

Recently, I came across a quote from James Clear: “It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it.”

And so I feel compelled to either finish the novel that I started years ago, and take it to its conclusion, or to give up the dream of writing entirely.

In the summer of 1938, John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath in a burst of creative intensity. While writing it, he kept a daily journal, published posthumously as Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, in which he kept track of his writing progress and process. He challenged himself to finish the novel in 100 days3—writing five days a week. On October 26, 1938, in entry #100, he writes: “Finished this day—and I hope to God it’s good.”

I want to, at least attempt to, push myself in a similar way. And so I have created this project: The Journals Of A Debut Novel—in which I intend to keep track of my progress in writing my first novel and documenting the journey it takes.

I don’t want to reveal the name of the novel yet, primarily because I don’t know for sure if I have the name yet, but for convenience, I have given the project a codename: PROJECT MORPHEUS.

Since I don’t want to spam your inbox with emails, I will send out the updates weekly or fortnightly, or maybe monthly (still undecided, although feel free to tell me what you think). Each update will have a log of what work I did on the novel, the number of words written, general thoughts I might have had while writing it on the process of writing, things I learn along the way about writing and reading, etc. I don’t think I will talk much about the specifics of the characters and the story, since I would prefer not to give out spoilers, and since I don’t know what will happen with this book in the end. It might end up being a bad book. It might never see the light of day. Nonetheless, I hope these journals will still provide some value to me and to you.

“Every book seems the struggle of a whole life. And then, when it is done — pouf. Never happened. Best thing is to get the words down every day. And it is time to start now.” — John Steinbeck, Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath

Until next time,
YJ

If you don’t want these updates but would like to still receive other posts from me, you can turn them on/off in your newsletter settings by going to your.substack.com/account.

For more context about Steinbeck’s Working Days, I recommend reading Maria Popova’s post on The Marginalian4.

“Some sirens were screaming over and over, fire trucks and police cars and ambulances, those urgent noises that remind us that someone is always burning or breaking a law or having their body give up and if it is not you yet who is burning or breaking or falling apart, then you can be sure that it soon will be, that soon the sirens will come for you but you will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.” — Nobody Is Ever Missing, by Catherine Lacey

I think about death every time I take a flight. As the plane rises and the pilot swerves it to get on the invisible highway, I fear this might be it—the final destination! It is only once the plane breaks the cloud barrier and the pilot tells me to relax via the static-y microphone that I finally take a breath. The same fear takes over me as the plane gets close to the ground—I blast Eminem’s Mockingbird in my over-the-ear noise-canceling headphones and clutch either my phone or the armrest(s) until the tires hit the ground and the plane slows down enough; I always peek through the window and watch the air brakes at the edge of the metal wings struggle against the wind as the plane tries to slow down. Then at some point on the runway, after all the thud-ing and skid-ing are done with, I feel a sense of safety and control. I become my normal self again. The anxiety disappears and I turn off the airplane mode on my phone and I tell people I am still alive and life resumes.

Occasionally—often—I feel a similar anxiety when I look at the growing piles of unread books in my room. Then I buy more books; each time I visit the bookstore close to my house because the bookstore is also a cafe and so I tell myself I’m only going for the coffee and not the books, but, of course, coffee is never just coffee and so I come home with more books. Then I tell myself that’s it, no more books because the pile of books is now even taller, but, of course, I come home some days and see more books arrive from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Bookshop.org or some other place that also lets me buy books on the internet with a few clicks without any supervision. The pile grows even taller, so tall that I have to start a new pile next to all the other piles piling, and I feel the way I feel before the tires hit the runway and the air brakes fight the wind—

And yet, I am here. Alive and breathing and reading and writing and doing all the things that can be done. And yet, life is still transient for us all; so we hope that at least our work and the work of others will last the test of time. We are obsessed with preservation—the preservation of knowledge: as books and as code1 and as seeds2, and yet we all know how it all ends.

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There is a word in Japanese—tsundoku, which roughly translates to the act of acquiring books and letting them pile up in the house without reading them, hoping to read them later. Another word to describe it is antilibrary by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I suppose that is what I am doing. And I suppose I am not the only one who has been going through this problem, if one can call this a problem, even. After all, it is merely the preservation of knowledge, stockpiling in my apartment.

I don’t know if others feel the anxiety that I feel. Or if that is a rarer phenomenon? Maybe the anxiety isn’t so much about the unread books but instead about the idea of preservation itself.

Our species has always been obsessed with the idea of preservation—preservation of knowledge in great ancient libraries, preservation of seeds in the Arctic for our eventual apocalyptic future, preservation of code, even, for a different kind of apocalyptic future. We want to send humanity to Mars and beyond for the preservation of our species and all the evolutionary code embedded in our genes. We want to invent technologies to deflect Earth-ending asteroids, which won’t really end Earth anyway, just anything living on it.

But to what end?

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” said the king, and another king destroyed Alexandria. One day, Vesuvius came alive and destroyed an entire people, burying them under molten rock, preserving death itself as a final act of its life.

But we quote too much from the past. And we think too much about the future. We spend too little time in the present, always rushing, rushing, rushing. Rushing through the streets, rushing through work and rushing through leisure, rushing through reading and pleasure. But it isn’t information we really need; rather, we need more contemplation. It is the act of sitting with the text, spending hours, even days, with the thoughts of another writer, having a conversation through time and space, that fills us mentally and intellectually, even spiritually3.

And yet all this preservation will eventually go in vain—the seeds in Norway and the code in the Arctic and the libraries and the archives, our collective memories and shared history, all of it. Because we forget. We keep forgetting. We are not separate from nature, from the other animals and the plants and the water and the air. We are merely a part of the system; forms of carbon obsessed with creating our own forms of silicon, playing dice with god, with the universe, yearning to become our own gods, if only we could create a new life form and terraform planets and mine asteroids.

But again, to what end?

The sun is getting brighter, and in a billion years, it will become so bright that all the oceans on Earth will boil. It will become brighter and larger and brighter and larger as a Red Giant, engulfing Mercury and Venus, maybe even Earth. It will be a Red Giant for a long time, but then it will shrink down, eventually becoming a White Dwarf, incredibly dense and the size of the Earth, and will contain the planets that it swallowed.

In the end, we will all become a part of this White Dwarf, with all the unread books piled up, all of us, all our stories, our kindness, our rage, our cruelty, our vanity, our legacy, our posterity, and our past. There is no permanent. No future anyway. There is only now.

So, then, in this urgency—which isn’t really an urgency, because no matter how much we read, in the end, there will always be something left—how can we read and what can we read? Accepting our inevitable deaths, and the deaths of the planets, accepting our finitude, what can we do about tsundoku?

Doris Lessing, I suppose, can provide some words of comfort to our—my—anxiety:
“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”

The Sun is growing bigger and brighter. The Red Giant is coming! The White Dwarf is coming! We—our material comforts, our knowledge, our stories, our memories, our kindness, our cruelty—will all be preserved in the death of the star that gives us life.

Now is the only time. So feel free to read what you want to. Let the books pile up. Read the book that announces itself to you in this moment. The others will wait; preserved until it’s the right time for them.

“The few others on the bridge were smug and safe under umbrellas and it was clearer to me than it had ever been that all there is on earth is the eternal now and nothing else. I had heard, in the past, lots of people say that, say that nothing exists except the present moment, that nothing has ever happened, that no one is here or not here, that no object is more than its action in a moment, and if all this business about the present moment is true, and I am still inclined to believe that it is true, then all I was at that moment was a set of senses held captive in a wet body in wet clothes in the piss of a cloud, stranded on the center of a bridge and I was just that and nothing else, and the past, the recent past, and the less recent past were not a part of me, just something gathered around me, an audience for what I would do next.” — Nobody Is Ever Missing, by Catherine Lacey

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Muffled voices surrounded me, the smell of coffee permeated the air, a distant song from a distant memory played in a distant speaker somewhere, people populated the place, the place just a sunset away from shuttering for the day. And there I sat, in the middle of it all, frozen, lost, in time and in thought, as I watched lips—moving and still, dry and glossed—of women and men sat across different tables. I was lost in the past, memory after memory taking over me. I could see them all like a film projected on a theater screen.

Despite all the life it contained, the town was frozen in time for me. The apartment next to the church where I was first broken, the bookshop patio where I had put my pieces together, the park next to the sandwich shop where I broke someone else, they all reminded me of a time better than today. A past I had lived already. Days bygone. Time had done its thing, its unwavering duty. How could it do that to me? I felt cheated, almost as if the attack was personal, a vendetta against me.

Because I now saw the wrinkles on my face in the morning mirror. Because I now felt the pain in my back and the weirdness in my legs. Because I now felt the resentment, the anger, the loneliness. I cursed time. I cursed the sun and the night. I cursed them all for being what they were, for doing the only thing they were meant to do—the sun for burning bright, the night for the solace it brought, the time for simply passing.

And it passed, and it chipped away at my parts, parts of my life, parts I clung on to, parts I didn’t want to let go. Time rusted the metal in the chair, rotted the wood in the park swing, hollowed the bones in my body. Slowly, atom by atom, cell by cell. They say life leads to more life as cells multiply, replicate. But I had seen the truth, unwillingly. That life leads itself to death, with each multiplication, with each replication. Time, itself boundless, bounds our life, bookending it on both ends. Every day I have less of it, every day there is less of me.

In time, as I sat there surrounded by all those bounded lives, I would be frozen in today in someone else’s life—in someone else’s memory of the town, of the time. I wonder if they watch me the way I watch them, if they look at my still dry lips and blinking eyes, as they get lost in their own past. Doesn’t matter. The town had become a mausoleum of memories—frozen, rotting, rusting—until the end of days and the end of me.

In case you missed it, here are some older works for your consideration:

Recently, I also really enjoyed ’s essay about her experience reading Proust. I highly recommend it!

personal canon

no one told me about proust

In 2022, I decided to spend the year reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. At the time, I knew nothing about Proust…

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a year ago · 1491 likes · 146 comments · Celine Nguyen

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In a 2022 interview with the Louisiana Channel, a non-profit website based at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, poet and author Ocean Vuong says, “I think no one saves us in this world, but people give us the tools so that we can transform towards our own rescue. And I think that is true of poems. We write them, and they're good enough, and then we let them go. Part of the act of writing is abandonment.”

I often wonder how much of myself I should reveal in my writing. Should I exist in my essays, or should my essays exist entirely outside of me? When I write, I think more of me bleeds into my fiction than my non-fiction. In that sense, fiction seems truer than non-fiction.

Lately, I’ve been reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book The Song of the Cell. He talks about how each human consists of trillions of cells—37 trillion cells, by an estimate. Each cell has its own structure, its boundary, and its function. Yet each cell exists in a community—a neighborhood—of other cells. Each cell has its own identity—its phenotype—that’s partially defined by its genes and proteins but also its location within that community. Each cell exists alone yet also exists in a network of all the other cells. It has its own identity, yet it can’t quite exist without the other cells in its community.

It doesn’t seem like a stretch to extend this fact of cell biology as a metaphor to the macro level—human beings and our communities.

Much like the single cells that we are comprised of, we humans also behave in a similar way. We have our own structure and function and boundaries, yet we exist within a community—different levels of community even—a hierarchy of neighborhoods, much like single cells. I am a person, and I exist within my neighborhood—physically—then I exist within my family and my friend circle and my work circle, within my religion, within my country, within this planet and this species.

I exist on a time scale within the context of my history, the history of my ancestors, and the history of humanity.

If I am a single minuscule entity within this hierarchical context, how much of me exists within me? When I say “I,” who am I referring to? What percentage of me is actually me?

We are all creations of our contexts. And yet, unsure of my own existence within me, I fear revealing that minuscule part of me to you.

Fiction seems to provide a mask, a pseudo reality, in which the facts might be twisted and hallucinatory, but the emotions might not.

I hide behind that mask and watch you watch me as I reveal myself to you—a stranger. I suppose that is what all writers do. That is what all artists do.

I am most honest, most myself, in my fake stories, in my fiction. In fiction, I am lying, of course. Everything is a creation of my imagination—neurons firing in my brain, conducting their sole purpose coded in their DNA. Yet, it is where I am most honest. I’m wearing a mask that shows you my real identity. And even when I try to hide, my being permeates through the matter of my words.

“Wasn’t it great back when a writer said ‘I’ and you knew they were lying?”—Benjamín Labatut

It isn’t a matter of some unrelenting need for self-expression. It is out of a sense of sacredness that writing and art contain; there exists some sort of untold vow between the writer and the writing.

Often, I think, what is the point of writing anyway?

Every time I write something, or make an attempt at it, there is a part of me that constantly questions the entire exercise. It seems like an exercise in futility. In effect, my brain then is working on two problems simultaneously: One that of the writing itself and the other of justifying the mere act of writing—not the quality of it but the reason for its existence. The same thing is happening right now as I finish this sentence.

I can’t justify it, not yet. I don’t have the words for it. Yet, I write. Yet, I lie. Yet, I reveal myself and hide myself. I abandon myself.

I am reminded of John Greene’s essay Auld Lang Syne in his book The Anthropocene Reviewed: “And between now and then, we are here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” I repeat the same mantra in my head as I piece together haphazard sentences.

Is it a tool, writing? Is that what this is about? Is this whole enterprise a mere attempt at saving myself? Poetry, music, paintings, books, and everything else, every attempt made by someone to say something—are we all simply building tools of survival that we share among ourselves? Do I write to give myself the tools to survive? Is it a form of therapy to save us from the demons that live in all our heads?

Maybe.

In this essay—is this an essay?—there is a lot of me. So many “I”s. It is not fiction, as you can tell.

And so I must confess—everything I have written so far, everything you have read here, is a lie. And I’m just watching you trying to watch me as I hide behind my many masks, existing within the context of my confines.

*All illustrations from Down-Adown-Derry by Walter De La Mare (Illustrations by Dorothy P. Lathrop) [Internet Archive]

*Music in the voiceover from Musopen - The Complete Chopin Collection by Aaron Dunn

In this essay: the myth of Prometheus and Pandora → Benjamín Labatut’s book The MANIAC, a fictional biography → Labatut’s life and his thoughts on fiction and writing → John von Neumann, genius, and madness of scientific endeavors → AlphaGo defeating the world Go champion and some thoughts on artificial intelligence as envisioned by John von Neumann.

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Prometheus and Pandora

Zeus charged two brothers—Prometheus and Epimetheus—with the task of populating the world with humans.

Prometheus created the first humans—men. Wanting them to be warm on a cold rock, against Zeus’s warnings, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to men. Enraged, Zeus punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock for eternity where he would be attacked by a huge eagle every day.

But Zeus didn’t stop there. He ordered Hephaestus to mold the first woman—Pandora—and demanded that she be perpetually curious about all things.

Epimetheus fell in love with Pandora and they got married. With Zeus’s permission, they lived on Earth. Perhaps as a parting gift, Zeus gave Pandora a box and told her never to open it. But curiosity was in Pandora’s nature, so one day she opened the box, and cruelty, hatred, and despair escaped into the world until she slammed the box shut. Only one thing remained under the lid of that box—hope.

In a world of men who wielded the fire of the gods, in a world filled with evil and despair, one must wonder why hope remained locked in Pandora’s box. Did it give the only woman on Earth the power to save man from himself by releasing hope in their darkest hour? I like to think so. After all, we live in a world made by men driven to madness in pursuit of rationality.

We killed God and replaced him with reason

Benjamín Labatut, the writer of The MANIAC and When We Cease To Understand The World, told Sam Leith in an interview for The Guardian, “Dreaming of a secular paradise we killed God and replaced him with reason—but humankind is never gonna rid itself of its impulse towards apotheosis; we’re driven by this thirst for the absolute that’s cooked into our minds. Every nymph and every god we slayed brought us more power…and more despair. It just cast a bigger darkness on the world. You turn your eyes towards the light and you’re blinded: by AI, by tech, by going to the stars. And you turn around and you see the sort of Lovecraftian demons that are welling up from within us.”

In Labatut’s book The MANIAC, Eugene Wigner says of John von Neumann, “It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress, there is no cure.”

“You cannot step outside of the paradise and then step back in,” Labatut told the actress Natalie Portman when she interviewed him on her Instagram for her book club. The fire cannot be returned, and neither can hatred, despair, and cruelty. The path of technological progress we have been on in the past century—and this one—is fraught with dangers of our own making, spearheaded by a few men of unmatched genius, men that seem like aliens walking among us mortals, men like John von Neumann—maniacs on their quest to create a world of their imagination, no matter the personal cost.

This is the story Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC tells—a tale of three men, maniacs in their own ways, rebuilding our reality.

Labatut’s fiction, facts, and the blurry line in-between

In her New Yorker review of When We Cease To Understand The World, Ruth Franklin writes, "Is it responsible for a fiction writer, or a writer of history, to pay so little attention to the line between the two?”

The two she refers to are the facts and the fiction in Labatut’s stories. The MANIAC, just like his previous book, is based on real characters and their real stories. It is 95% facts, as Labatut would say. But the rest 5% is fiction, and that blurry—often impossible to detect—line is what Franklin calls questionable, nightmarish even.

Labatut takes the story of John von Neumann and skillfully distorts his biography, blending fact and fiction, to convey the darkness at the heart of the story.

In his interview with Sam Leith, Labatut said, "I’m not a serious thinker. I’m a writer: that’s very different. I think a writer’s intelligence has to be alive, has to be incomplete. It has to carry contradiction. It has to be sort of haphazard and amateur.”

The shape of stories

In writing The MANIAC, Labatut lets the research guide the structure, voices, and perspectives. He tries to include as little fiction as possible. Research guides the tone of the story—a found material sort of approach. In his interview with Adam Dalva for Literary Hub, he talks about walking around listening to the people in his book for a couple of years. In the book, he writes about von Neumann’s daughter carrying a piece of graph paper in her pocket. When Adam Dalva reached out to Marina von Neumann Whitman—von Neumann’s daughter—to ask her about it, she found it uncanny that Labatut knew such specific details about her life.

“I don’t worry much about the shapes of the stories; it is all about research; I try to find things. To me, finding some other person’s phrase is more important than coming up with it myself. It is the part that I enjoy. In that sense, writing has become more akin to walking and picking stuff above the ground,” said Labatut in an interview with the Louisiana Channel.

“I get as close as I can to reality, and then step back. What are the stranger meanings that are coming through? What things didn’t happen but should’ve happened? I’m doing an exercise in apocryphalism,” Labatut told Adam Dalva.

"While I am researching it, it will determine many things. I am not just looking for data, I am looking for the shape of the story, and that's got to do with what is available. For example, in certain texts, there are scraps of information, lesser-known characters, and people who left no mark on history. Then I must create fiction around it, but the heart of the story is something that comes out of the research. So, to me, it is more akin to looking at the world than to thinking about it," he says.

To Labatut, writing and fiction are sacred endeavors. He isn’t a fan of the novel as a form, he doesn’t care much for self-expression. To him, writing is a much more sacred thing. Fiction is a human tool, he says, that we developed to give reality a human shape, to construct meaning, and to understand what is presented to us. Fiction is not something writers do but are just professionals at it. Many writers have lost their connection to it, according to Labatut.

Labatut is interested in exploring realms beyond self-expression. He wants to write about things that can’t be written about. He is interested in genius, in melding literature and science, to construct a new perspective of our reality.

Literature and science

In an interview, he said, “Literature and science are two of the ways in which we build our sense of the world. Literature is like an older crazy sister of science because it is disorganized. It is not tied down to any set of ideas of the truth so that it can consider anything, and in that sense, it has a freedom that science can’t aspire to. I think of literature as a science that really cares about experiments, you can consider the wildest ideas, and you can play with theories that are wrong, that are delirious and insane.”

He goes on: “Literature has no power at all, and because of that, it is very precious because we can play with ideas that contradict self-evident meanings in the world, and that is a great source of beauty and inspiration. It is a great source of fun, too…You are never just looking at a flower. You look at a flower and have an emotional tone and are contaminated by your other senses, memories biting at you. It is very hard to give any measure about what it feels like to be alive from moment to moment. It is not realism. Our experience of the world is not realistic at all. It is hallucinatory. That is kind of what literature should mirror.”

But what is it that he is trying to do with his fiction? What moves him to explore and write about something?

“We live in a world that is bigger than us. It can be terrifying, but it is also inspiring. We cannot survive without mysteries. Mysteries are more important than truth. Writing should give access to the world and at the same time darken it for you so that it becomes mysterious again.”

“You should be moved by what you are investigating. You should be moved by the world and transmit that. That feeling you get when you perceive or bump into something hard to believe or so beautiful that it is hard to put into words. Fascination lies at the root of everything that I try to do. The world is becoming so that it is very hard to feel fascinated. We are dulled down.“

In his review for The New York Times, Tom McCarthy wonders why not simply write a book of non-fiction. What does MANIAC and the writer behind it gain by shrouding the facts in the guise of fiction?

Finally, realizing it doesn’t really matter, McCarthy writes, “At its best, as in the stunning opening sequence reconstructing the murder-suicide of the physicist Paul Ehrenfest and his disabled son, or in the final section’s gripping account of a computer defeating the world’s best human Go player, you just throw your hands up and think, Who cares what discourse label we assign to this stuff? It’s great.”

Even Ruth Franklin had to concede. While reading When We Cease To Understand The World, at a certain point, she stopped compulsively Googling the facts, simply allowing the story—Labatut’s fiction—to flow and take over.

The MAD Science

The MANIAC opens with a short narrative about an Austrian physicist, Paul Ehrenfest, a friend of Einstein, living in the Netherlands during an uncertain time in the early 1930s. It has no connection to the story of John von Neumann other than the utter irrationality of logic and the fine line between reason and madness.

In 1933, Ehrenfest, afraid of the consequences of the rise of the Nazis in Germany, traveled to the institution for children with Down syndrome where his 15-year-old son lived and killed him. The harrowing sequence ends with Ehrenfest killing himself.

In his review of The MANIAC for The Atlantic, Adam Kirsch wrote, “In Labatut’s telling, Ehrenfest’s act was a premonition not just of Nazi crimes, but of the terrifying development of modern science. He could think of no better way to keep his son ‘safe from the strange new rationality that was beginning to take shape all round them, a profoundly inhuman form of intelligence that was completely indifferent to mankind’s deepest needs.’”

The majority of The MANIAC takes us through the life of the Hungarian-born polymath John (János) von Neumann—the smartest man who ever lived. Hans Bethe—winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967—once said of von Neumann, “I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann’s does not indicate a species superior to that of man.”

An alien among us

János von Neumann was an alien among Prometheus’s mortal men. In the book, we never see his own perspective, but instead see his life and his impact on the world through the lens of others around him: friends, family, enemies, and admirers.

“A single narrator has too much authority…Monsters and gods should not be given a voice,” Labatut said in an interview with Adam Dalva when asked about why he didn’t provide von Neumann’s perspective.

John von Neumann was born in Budapest in 1903, emigrating to the US in 1930 driven by fear of the same enemy as Ehrenfest. He consulted on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos that led to the apocalyptic mushroom clouds in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a pioneer in mathematics, quantum physics, game theory, cellular automata, digital computers, and many more domains. The first computer in Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1952 was based on the von Neumann architecture; the computer was called the MANIAC: Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer. The full name was devised later to fit the acronym, and the acronym was devised to fit the man. The two MANIACs—the man and the machine—played a crucial role in the creation of the Hydrogen Bomb.

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John von Neumann died in 1957. Cancer, they said, possibly due to radiation exposure at Los Alamos. By then, he had been one of the American government’s most valued advisers on nuclear weapons and strategy, his name forever chained to the machine and the ideas he created.

In his Atlantic review, Adam Kirsch writes, “Even as the novel trains its focus on von Neumann, however, its structure keeps him at a distance; he is not a person we come to know so much as a problem we need to solve. The problem, all of the narrators agree, is that his genius was exhilarating and frightening in equal measure. ‘What he could do. It was so rare and beautiful that to watch him was to weep,’ his math tutor says. ‘Yes, I saw that, but I also saw something else. A sinister, machinelike intelligence that lacked the restraints that bind the rest of us.’”

Mad dreams of reason

Talking about a painting by Francisco Goya, Ruth Franklin in her New Yorker review points to the phrase: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.”

She contemplates the true meaning of this phrase, “The picture is often taken as Goya’s assertion of faith in Enlightenment values, in the ability of logical thought and empirical observation to sweep away the darkness of superstition. But there is a catch: sueño, the Spanish word for ‘sleep,’ can also be translated as ‘dream.’ What if the monsters are present not because reason isn’t awake to fend them off but because reason, in its slumber, actively generates them? If monsters can exist not despite reason but as a consequence of it, then perhaps we’re not as safe in the rational world—the land of logic and science—as we thought.”

In his book When We Cease To Understand The World, Labatut talks about a chemist in 1782 who mixed Prussian blue with sulphuric acid to produce the poison hydrogen cyanide which, in the formulation known as Zyklon B, led its residue on the bricks of Auschwitz, “coating them with that same brilliant shade of blue.”

The world of logic and science, inhabited by geniuses perpetually in the discovery of the universe’s secrets, has led to a world hellbent on destroying itself. There is an all-consuming ever-present tension in the world between madness and rationality that keeps the machine running: Mutually Assured Destruction.

In his New York Times review, Tom McCarthy writes about the relationship between reason and madness in the book, “Almost all the scientists populating the book are mad, their desire to understand, to grasp the core of things invariably wedded to an uncontrollable mania; even their scrupulously observed reason, their mode of logic elevated to religion, is framed as a form of madness.”

In the book, when a character asks von Neumann how he can be so cavalier about the consequences of the hydrogen bomb, von Neumann casually answers, “I’m thinking about something much more important than bombs, my dear. I’m thinking about computers.”

What’s at the bottom of the jar?

In a chapter narrated by Eugene Wigner, von Neumann and he end up discussing the Pandora’s box. Von Neumann asks Wigner if he knew what had remained inside the box after she had opened it and let out all the evils into the world.

Von Neumann says, “Right there, at the bottom of the jar—because it was a large urn or a jar, you know, not a box at all—right there, waiting quietly and obediently was Elpis, which most people like to regard as the daimona of hope and counterpart to Moros, the spirit of doom, but to me, a better and more precise translation of her name and of her nature would be our concept of expectation. Because we don’t know what comes after evil, do we? And sometimes the deadliest things, those that hold enough power to destroy us, can become, given time, the instruments of our salvation.”

When Wigner asks him why the gods would let out all the hurts, pains, illnesses, and inquiries to roam free while keeping hope trapped behind the lid of the jar, von Neumann winks and says, “…because they know things that we can never know.”

Labatut suggests the way to live in a world that doesn’t make sense is to hold the contradictions and paradoxes in our hands. We can have all the power in the world, all the reason and logic, and yet suffer like a madman. Melancholy often accompanies deep thought and we simply have to make peace with the human condition.

Giving humanity some hope from the madness of genius, Tom McCarthy writes, “In a wonderfully counterintuitive volte-face, though, Labatut has Morgenstern end his MAD deliberations by pointing out that humans are not perfect poker players. They are irrational, a fact that, while instigating ‘the ungovernable chaos that we see all around us,’ is also a ‘mercy’ that saves us, ‘a strange angel that protects us from the mad dreams of reason.’”

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The writer behind The MANIAC

“It doesn’t matter how successful you become in South America,” Benjamín Labatut tells Adam Dalva, “you’re never going to live off literature. You go into it knowing that it’s a failed enterprise.”

Benjamín Labatut was born in the Netherlands and lived there until he was two years old. He went back to Chile and lived there until he was eight, then moved back to the Netherlands until he was about 15- or 16-years-old. His family moved a lot and he moved with them, growing up halfway between Chile and the Netherlands, speaking English. “So I’m not really Chilean; definitely not Dutch,” he says in the same interview.

Labatut is interested in science, in singularities, and in mad scientists. According to Sam Leith, “The characters to whom Labatut is attracted are those who pursued these discoveries, at the cost of their peace of mind and often their sanity.”

Even though Labatut conveys complex ideas of science and mathematics in his books, he himself, in his own words, “cannot teach my 12-year-old daughter simple mathematics.” To him, a writer’s mind works with sympathy, not with understanding.

He talks about a “deep personal crisis” he went through at the age of 30, something that “damaged a part of my brain that can enjoy the games of narrative.” In his interview with Sam Leith, he elaborates, “The people I admire the most in every field have this wondrous ability to let their unconscious bleed into what they do. I really think that the highest form of intelligence is possession from outside. I knew that I didn’t have that, so I did a bunch of very irresponsible things trying to kickstart that…It was catastrophic for me in many ways, but it also helped pave a personal path to writing.”

Labatut was a “nothing journalist” for almost two decades, refused promotions to focus on writing, had lunch by himself every day for 17 years, not accepting any invitations, eventually realizing that literature, for him, required a sort of certain “controlled psychosis.”

Most novels are boring. What then, interests him in fiction?

When it comes to fiction and novels, Labatut isn’t a fan of most fiction. There are few writers whose work Labatut enjoys: Pascal Quignard, Roberto Calasso, W.G. Sebald, and Eliot Weinberger. To him, fiction is not about character or voice or self-expression. What then, interests him in fiction?

“What fascinates me most is things that remain mysterious, things that are unsolved,” he says to Sam Leith. “I’m interested in ideas. I think so much of writing doesn’t have to do with ideas. It has to do with, you know, the vicissitudes of our character. Those things bore me to death. I haven’t been able to read a novel in more than a decade, probably.”

“In every single chapter of that part,” he elaborates on The MANIAC’s structure, “I am thinking that there’s an idea I have to get across. I’m trying to get people to be turned on by the crisis in the foundation of mathematics. I’m trying to get people to feel the horror and beauty of the first nuclear approach.”

They’re not important to me!

He’s not interested in capturing a voice: “They’re not important to me! If you’re in London, you go out there, you listen to a bunch of voices around you. Just record them and imitate them! That’s not difficult! I don’t understand why there’s all this crazy, ’Oh, we captured this.’ What is difficult is for any of those characters to say something interesting!”

In an email to Adam Dalva, Labatut wrote, "The only thing I find striking about myself (and I’m not at all proud of this, but I have to admit to it openly) is how many books I simply detest.”

On the topic of autofiction, Labatut said, “I think Bolaño said it best, right? If you’re a mass murderer, or, like, a detective in Mexico City, if you run guns with Rambo, then please, please go ahead and autofiction. If you are the world’s best-paid sex worker, then autofiction.”

“But, but…voice, character, feelings, love, friendship, career—haven’t these been the basic stuff of fiction since its 19th-century heyday?” Sam Leith fought back.

Finally, Labatut conceded, “If the writing is great, it doesn’t matter…OK. I’m just not that good of a writer—so I have to write about interesting things. If I was a prose writer, if I was a stylist, sure: I’d tell them who I had sex with and what I had for breakfast. But because I have never considered myself to be that good, I have to write about the most profound and confounding things out there.”

A dying poet who taught Labatut to write

Labatut is quite a mysterious person himself, making sure to keep his profile low. He lives in Chile and has written a few books but most of his previous work is in Spanish and can be quite difficult to find. When Adam Dalva went out in search of Labatut’s earlier books, he found it almost impossible to find his first two books. When Ruth Franklin tried to Google Labatut, she found sparse personal information, a few interviews, and some references for the book but not much else.

The intriguing figures Labatut writes about are also present in his own life, one of whom played a big part in his writing journey—teaching Labatut to write.

When Labatut started writing, his friends sent him to an “old man, a dying poet,” Samir Nazal. He tells the story to Adam Dalva, “I walked into his apartment, and he had a long unkempt beard and was covered in cigarette burns…when he died, he’d never published a word. He had these containers with everything he had written. They were in Tupperware because it rained in his apartment. And I see him in dreams. I see him in hallucinations. Without the old man, I don’t think I would’ve ever written.”

Fact and fiction

On Labatut’s fiction—one where fact and fiction are interspersed—Ruth Franklin asked: “If fiction and fact are indistinguishable in any meaningful way, how are we to find language for those things we know to be true?”

She wondered if it is responsible for a fiction writer, or a writer of history, to pay so little attention to the line between the two. A central idea in Labatut’s fiction is, as Adam Kirsch puts it, “the moral corruption at the core of modern science.”

Is there a moral corruption in the blurry boundary Labatut draws between fact and fiction?

“If we cannot grasp the past or the present (not to mention the future) with any degree of clarity,” Ruth Franklin writes, “then fiction becomes as plausible as history as a method for describing the actions and events of people’s lives.”

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Who should we hear?

In his interview with Brain Greene, Labatut is asked about a similar dilemma, "In your book, should we hear Eugene Wigner as saying that or should I hear Benjamín Labatut saying that?”

Labatut responds (edited for clarity): “Well both because they’re mixed, because reality is mixed. I mean, I understand again our need to separate things out is important, but I am a writer of fiction so I don’t need to explain myself in that way because I say very openly and I say it all the time. I write fiction but the problem is that it’s like 95% non-fiction right? But just that 5%…something that I think a lot about is that we never ever interact with reality without putting extra layers of meaning onto it. A chair is never just a chair. Or no matter what I say to you, no matter what my meaning might be intended to be, of course, you’re going to filter it through your entire experience. That’s one of the frailties of the human experience…Nietzsche had this wonderful sense that if you wanted to get at the truth first you had to cover the truth and that’s what books do. You put a veil on things so that you can see them again and science is sort of ripping off the masks.”

In an interview with the Louisiana Channel, Labatut talks about fiction, “Anything that comes out of a writer is fiction. In non-fiction, they are really kind of naïve. Fiction is something that is not appreciated for what it is. It is not the making up of a story; it doesn't have to do with imagination. Fiction is a tool, it is a human tool we developed to give reality a human shape to understand what is presented to us, and that goes on at all levels; it is part of perception. There is a large part of fiction in perception itself; it is not just stories. It goes on all the time; we just don't notice that it is going on.”

Labatut is fascinated by singularities, the things that lie outside the regular order. “One of the things that I get angry about is this modern depreciation of the word genius. As if everybody were the same and it is not like that at all: One of the great things about being human is how different we are. And there are these outliers, men and women, that really seem to come from another world. They suffer for it too. Because it is very dangerous to suddenly discover something new about ourselves, going a step beyond.”

Labatut tries to find himself in others, in books and papers and “shitty blog posts.” He wants to write about things you cannot write about, somehow “disease creeps into everything” he writes.

“How can you get something bigger than yourself to come through? You have to become porous and let the world come through you,” he says.

Ruth Franklin wonders about the obsession with obsession when thinking about Labatut’s “deep personal crisis” he faced when he was 30. “…Labatut’s cautionary tale of great minds unhinged by staring into the abyss may, like Goya’s etching, have a second interpretation that mirrors the more obvious one. Can it be that contemplating such questions is as dangerous as not contemplating them?”

But Labatut wants people to remain focused on his work rather than his personal life, as he tells Adam Dalva, “The less they know the better.” Then adding, a flash of glee in his eyes maybe, “And I’m such an interesting person. You have no idea.”

Move 37 and the Hand of God

In an interview with the Louisiana Channel, Labatut says, “We have to think about God more than we do. Not believe in God but think about God. Gods in general, not just that one. Belief is the death of thought.”

The third part in Labatut’s The MANIAC tells the story of DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI system beating the world’s top Go player in 2016, solving a computational problem that most people believed was still decades away. It brings the story of geniuses like Demis Hassabis and Lee Sedol and pits the human genius against the genius of machines, the same machines that von Neumann envisioned decades ago.

In 2016, as DeepMind’s AlphaGo competed against the world Go champion Lee Sedol, it made a move that sent shockwaves through the world of Go—a move that made no sense, a move that no Go player would ever make or had ever made in 3000 years of Go’s documented history. The move came to be known as Move 37.

Lee Sedol was playing a 5-match competition against AlphaGo and had already lost the first game to the AI system. Even though Sedol had lost, the general consensus was that AlphaGo had gotten lucky and Sedol hadn’t played his signature offense style of Go. But when AlphaGo played Move 37, it changed things; it changed the belief that AI can’t be creative and that it can only spit out what it has seen in its training data. With Move 37, AlphaGo crossed that line. It was making a creative move that made no sense to anyone, not even the 9-Dan Go champion of the world. In that one move, it was almost as if AI had defeated all of humanity. Perhaps we had reached the next step in evolution.

Sedol lost the third game as well. There were no ground-shattering moves by any of the two players. AlphaGo had won as if it was playing against an amateur.

To me, it is the game 4 that is most interesting. After 3 hours into the game, Sedol made a move that no one understood. The commentators thought it was a stupid move. Perhaps Sedol had really lost it.

But then, something fascinating happened. In the control room, AlphaGo’s probability of winning the game dropped from 70% to 20%. It started making moves that felt random—like a deer caught in the headlights. With each move, AlphaGo made its position worse. After a few moves, it slowly dawned on the commentators and professionals watching the match that Sedol had achieved something amazing.

Sedol had played his own version of Move 37, in a way. He had found a chink in AlphaGo’s armor and attacked it right where it would hurt the most. It was a gambit but a considered one. AlphaGo lost that game. AI lost a game, after a long battle, to human genius and creativity.

Even though Sedol lost the 5th game, it didn’t matter. Lee Sedol had shown that even when AI systems become unbeatable they remain vulnerable. There is hope for the future. He proved that humans are more than just training data and an algorithm, that the best of humanity can still stun the system, and can still win if only it perseveres. The move that Sedol had played? It was called, aptly, the Hand of God.

A symbiotic co-evolutionary loop

Both AlphaGo’s Move 37 and Lee Sedol’s Hand of God demonstrate that AI and humanity are in a symbiotic co-evolutionary loop. As AI systems get better and unlock more of our understanding of the workings of the human brain and become better at tasks than humans, humans can learn and evolve from competing with these systems, the same way the AI systems learn and improve from their experience with humans: co-evolutionary reinforcement learning.

“Facing each other, Lee and the computer had managed to stray beyond the limits of Go, casting a new and terrible beauty, a logic more powerful than reason that will send ripples far and wide.”

“When future historians look back at our time and try to pin down the first glimmer of a true artificial intelligence, they may well find it in a single move during the second game between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo,” writes Labatut about Move 37.

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A Promethean bargain

We live on a giant rock filled with molten lava floating in the middle of nothingness. In the 1940s, the American Prometheus, along with some of the greatest minds on the planet, gave us the tools to destroy ourselves: the Atomic Bomb. A few years later, some of those same geniuses, with the help of John Von Neumann’s MANIAC, gave us the Hydrogen Bomb: a bomb 100x more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima.

Yet here we all are, still alive and well, ignoring the MAD world we live in. We’re living through similar times today and the search for AGI is perhaps our version of the same Promethean bargain. Few geniuses, still in search of what the likes of Turing and von Neumann had started, playing with fire. All we mortals can do is hope they don’t burn the whole world down like that test in Los Alamos could have.

In his interview with Sam Leith, Labatut talks about language and mathematics: “When you have a mathematical system that can run language, you have the two most powerful things we have developed as a species working together: mathematics and language. I think that we are absolutely on the verge of something, if not past the verge. I think that the first AI catastrophe, because of the way things are going, massive corporations racing to the bottom, is probably inevitable…It’s been, what—since quantum mechanics and modern relativity—100 years? One hundred years after Christ was nailed on a cross, you start to get the Gospels. That’s where we are.”

For all the progress in AI, Labatut does think—rightfully so—that names like DALL-E and ChatGPT are “such shit names…which makes me sad. These people don’t have what von Neumann had, that is, the breadth of culture. They’re not reading the Vedas like Oppenheimer. It’s a world that’s tiktok-ing its way to annihilation.”

In his review, Adam Kirsch writes about the tragic arc of The MANIAC: “Enhrenfest dreaded the emergence of an inhuman intelligence, von Neumann made that emergence possible, and now Lee sees it taking place in front of him.”

For progress, there is no cure

A few years after that game with AlphaGo, when Lee Sedol retired from the game of Go, he said, “I thought I was the best, or at least one of the best. But then artificial intelligence put the final nail in my coffin. It is simply unbeatable. In that situation, it doesn’t matter how much you try. I don’t see the point…AlphaGo did not beat me, it crushed me…Even if I become the best that the world has ever seen, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”

To Sedol, Go was not just a game, it was a way of understanding the world in all of its puzzling complexities and unfathomable intricacies: “If someone was somehow capable of fully understanding Go, and by that I mean not just the positions of the stones and the way they relate to one another but the hidden, almost imperceptible patterns that lie beneath its ever-changing formations, I believe it would be the same as peering into the mind of God.”

But there is a chink in the armor. The Hand of God showed us that. Are we really at the cusp of something world-altering? Are we really tiktok-ing our way to annihilation with the machines that we are obsessed with creating? Are the geniuses aware of the danger of their inventions or are they so enamored by the thrill of scientific discovery that they simply do not care?

“For progress, there is no cure,” says Labatut, channeling something von Neumann had once said, “but remember it is us who do these things. So we can find ways to use technology. Technology and science are indifferent. It is up to humans.”

In Labatut’s book, von Neumann on his deathbed gave his parting vision for AI and consciousness:

The hope under the lid of the jar

In an interview with the Louisiana Channel, Labatut talks about beauty, “Beauty is the most important thing there is. I think the truth is completely secondary. Life and beauty are completely intertwined, and we don’t realize it. We don’t understand that it is something that was here before us. We are just interacting with some of its versions. It is not just in the flowers but also beneath the ground, in the dirt; it is everywhere. It is the universe being in love with itself.”

In the madness of human ingenuity, we once created the atom bomb and decimated entire cities. Who is to say we won’t be capable of doing the same—something worse—with the inventions that we are pursuing? “In the long term,” Labatut suggests, “it may be humanity that has to submit.”

Perhaps Labatut is right. Maybe we will all, in the end, lead ourselves to our own destruction, machines we built willing us into submission. Or maybe there is still some hope? Maybe there is more to us humans than simply logic and reason, madness and irrationality.

After his final defeat against AlphaGo and years before he retired, Lee Sedol shared some words of hope and optimism: “I don’t necessarily think that AlphaGo is superior to me. I believe that there is still more that human beings can do against artificial intelligence. I feel regret, because there is more that I could have shown. Go is a game that you enjoy, whether you are an amateur or a professional. Enjoyment is the essence of Go. And AlphaGo is very strong, but it cannot know that essence. My defeat is not mankind’s defeat. I think that these games clearly showed my own weaknesses, not humanity’s weakness.”

We are living in the world of John von Neumann. As Adam Kirsch writes, “When science is inhumane, humanity has the right to take its revenge.” If only Pandora could open her jar once again and save men from the fire.

References

This essay would not be possible without the brilliant work of others mentioned below.

1. The Smartest Man Who Ever Lived, by Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic. (Link to article)

2. ‘People say my book gave them a panic attack’: When We Cease to Understand the World author Benjamín Labatut, by Sam Leith in The Guardian (Link to article)

3. Benjamín Labatut Will Not Be Profiled, by Adam Dalva in Literary Hub (Link to article)

4. A Cautionary Tale About Science Raises Uncomfortable Questions About Fiction, by Ruth Franklin in The New Yorker (Link to article)

5. The Miracle and Madness of Science That Changed the World, by Tom McCarthy in The New York Times (Link to article)

6. A Brief History of the Mind in the Machine: John von Neumann, the Inception of AI, and How the Limits of Logic Can Liberate Us, by Maria Popova in The Marginalian (Link to article)

7. Louisiana Channel interview #1 (Link to YouTube)

8. Louisiana Channel interview #2 (Link to YouTube)

9. The World's Smartest Mind: Exploring the Extremes of Thought with Benjamin Labatut, interviewed by Brian Greene for the World Science Festival (Link to YouTube)

10. Natalie Portman’s interview for her book club (Link to Instagram)

11. Pandora’s Box: The Myth Behind the Popular Idiom, by Rittika Dhar in History Cooperative (Link to article)

Writer’s note: If you liked this essay, please share and/or click the like button. In this algorithmic world of von Neumann, that helps a lot :)

Fingers tapping on the cold metal railing, heart beating like raging waves, I stood there. I felt the warmth of the soft sun against my cheek and the spring breeze through my hair. My eyes were fixed on the street below, longing to see just her.

I was early, of course. My mother always told me, and she claimed her mother told her, one can never be on time so it’s better to be early. My mother’s mother was dead. Always had been. Always will be. The habit, on the other hand, was alive.

I checked my watch. Nine-ten. She was late. Maybe she wouldn’t come after all, in which case, I could hurl myself off the cliff conveniently.

The storm in my chest raged on. Any louder and my heart would pop out of my chest. Who could blame this fool though? After all, it had been five years since—

“What if she doesn’t show up?” I whispered.

More people flowed through the street now. Each face was the same as any to me yet each story was different. Isn’t that what life was? A story, a drama, and I was the hero of mine. Of course, I had no idea what story I was living. As clueless as I was a year ago, and the year before that, and let’s be honest, every year before that.

Twenty-five years of utter cluelessness. There were times when I wondered if it was even worth it. If I could simply end it, would time cease to exist and so would I? People think they would end up in heaven or hell or be incarnated in a different life. My father thought so and so did my mother, bless her heart. I don’t know what my mother’s mother thought. She had always been dead. She was still dead. I thought it was all a bunch of bull, not that it mattered what I thought. Who cared what a twenty-something-old jobless loner had to say about God? Certainly not me.

With a jolt I got pulled out of my thoughts. A skinny little girl had slammed an arm of her bicycle into my arm. She stopped, finding her balance she looked at me. Her guilty eyes asked for permission to leave. I gave her a gentle encouraging smile as I rubbed my arm where the bicycle had met me. In an instant, she forgot about the whole affair and took off, her two braided ponytails rising out of her tiny head like two fountains out of a pond.

Still massaging my arm I looked at the vast valley in front of me, an entire city flooded it like algae in a stagnant pond. I looked at the rising mountains beyond the city, jagged scars covering most of them. They were once covered with lush green trees until they started blowing up the mountains for whatever treasures they blew up mountains for. Who needed trees anyway?

Now I wasn’t too sentimental about the place, this or any other for that matter. I mean, you’ve got to live somewhere. Places were just that. Pieces of land filled with people breathing because they have to. All places were the same. The same people filled up the same streets and the same buildings. The only thing different? The names. I know I shouldn’t be so indifferent about such things. But we feel what we feel.

There was a sadness within me, deep where no one but me could reach it yet constantly crawling up, insidiously, to pull me down and apart. A sadness that I didn’t quite understand. A sadness that became a certain kind of loneliness. A sadness that just sat there, perpetually, purposelessly—

There she was! Slowly zigzagging her way through the moving crowd, like a clownfish swimming against the current. The same cold breeze sifted through her dark curly hair. Her eyes, oh her eyes, hiding behind those sunglasses, searching for me. She had a small backpack resting gently on her back, tiny pink and green petals sprinkled across her blue sundress.

She was on the street below me and walked past where I was standing above her. She kept walking, searching for me. I stood there frozen, lost. My eyes followed her. I might have forgotten how to breathe.

I snapped out of my trance and started to follow her slowly. We had decided to meet at the fork where the two roads converged. That morning, my eyes fixated on her, my body navigated on its own, a million thoughts racing through my mind, the storm raging on and on in my chest. Years of longing. Pining. It had all led to this moment.

She reached the spot and stopped, still searching for me. I slowed down, adding distance between myself and the moment I had been waiting for years. Gently, I tapped her on her shoulder. She turned. And for the first time, I looked at her. Her perfect eyes. Her perfect hair. Her perfect everything. I saw her, just her, and everyone else disappeared. Time stood frozen, and so did I.

We both smiled. Words ceased to exist and my mind was blank. The storm that had been raging had passed and the waves were still. In that one still moment an eternity had passed.

One word broke the silence, the illusion, and everything faded.

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One can spend years—even the whole of life—searching for purpose and meaning and happiness in this world, not realizing the more he tries to catch them the more they elude him. What makes matters worse is our time is finite and the end is unpredictable.

Here’s a liberating truth, Oliver Burkeman writes in his book Four Thousand Weeks: “what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.” He continues:

“In other words, you almost certainly won’t put a dent in the universe.

[…]

Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can.”

There is a certain sense of relief—even joy—in the realization that nothing we ever do will really matter in the grand scheme of things. The universe itself will keep going until everything ceases to exist. For me, everything will cease to exist when I do.

This is not an invitation to nihilism but instead to consideration of what matters: that we are here because we are here. “We,” not “I.” We exist in a world where invisible threads connect us all—threads stretching across time such that we find ourselves connected to everyone that came before us, their actions still vibrating across time making us merely the current chapter in the book of the history of the universe. It does not matter to the universe what we do but it matters, to whatever extent, what we do to and with other people. What some individuals did in the past—Napolean, Cleopatra, Kepler, Galileo, Aristotle, Einstein, Jane Austen, Marie Curie, Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Emily Dickinson—impacts us even today. But even the people that we don’t remember, the ones who didn’t leave an indelible mark on human history, mattered to the ones around them and us in ways we can’t imagine.

James Baldwin once wrote, “I think all of our voyages drive us there; for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.”

What we do matters in the sense that our actions are a vote in favor of what kind of world we want to create now that we find ourselves living in one. The infinite choices we face within our finite time force us to search for the right way to live. We find ourselves asking for meaning and purpose, perpetually in the pursuit of happiness.

But the reality is that there is nothing we can do or achieve that will make us happy. There is no becoming happy, there is only being happy.

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the horrors of concentration camps, losing his family to those same horrors, wrote in his book Yes To Life: In Spite of Everything, a collection of lectures he gave in 1946:

“The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.”

One can’t become happy, as if it’s a destination to reach, one can only ever be happy. Oliver Burkeman writes, echoing a central insight from the ancient Chinese religion of Taoism, “The wise man is like a tree that bends instead of breaking in the wind, or water that flows around obstacles in its path. Things just are the way they are, such metaphors suggest, no matter how vigorously you might wish they weren’t—and your only hope of exercising any real influence over the world is to work with that fact, instead of against it.”

Carl Jung, advising someone on how to live life, wrote in a letter, “the individual path is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other.” All one can do is the next right thing, whatever that may be in that moment, and each individual has to create his own path. A sentiment echoed by the 13th-century poet Rumi, “When setting out on a journey, do not seek advice from those who have never left home.”

“There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives,” writes Maria Popova in her book Figuring. “How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?”

James Hollis, a Jungian analyst in conversation with Oliver Burkeman warns against living a life devoid of meaning—whatever meaning is to you:

“If you’re not living a purposeful life or a life that you find meaningful, then for heaven’s sake, change it—for the simple reason that you’re not here forever. Don’t put off until retirement to go back and pick up the pieces of your life you left behind, because you may not reach retirement, or you may find yourself dealing with physical infirmity and so forth.”

The same finitude of our lives that scares and worries us is what gives anything meaning, forcing upon us a sense of urgency without which we would find ourselves in a state of intellectual—even physical—slumber forever. Meaning, much like happiness, cannot be found but can only be created. Each of us—within the context of our limitations and our moment in time and place—has to define our own meaning and purpose.

“Any finite life—even the best one you could possibly imagine—is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility. The only real question about all this finitude is whether we're willing to confront it or not."—Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

There is no better physical manifestation of the passage of time than your passport and credit cards expiring. Years—five, ten—simply gone with the wind. I’m not a teenager anymore, I realize as my plasticity gives way to rigidity, or so I am told.

“What horrifies me most,” wrote Sylvia Plath in her journals, “is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.” Tragically, Plath never lived long enough to fade into “an indifferent middle age.” If she had, she would have bloomed into it instead—if only. I’m afraid I share Plath’s fears as I approach the age she never grew past.

Growing old is scary yet none of us want to die young. Death scares us all yet life derives its meaning from its finitude. In his moral essay On The Shortness of Life, the stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most extravagant.”

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it,” wrote Seneca. Never has this been truer than in the algorithmic doomscrolling era of the 21st century—a time when the Oxford word of the year is declared as “brain rot.” Rising rates of depression, declining rates of attention, and an entire generation being labeled “anxious”—one look around and it is hard to deny something must have gone very wrong in the past decade.

Recently, I was reading David Lipsky’s 2010 book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. The book is a transcript of an extended interview of Wallace that Lipsky took in 1995 during a 5-day road trip on the last leg of Wallace’s book tour for his famous novel Infinite Jest.

“I’m not saying there’s something sinister or horrible or wrong with entertainment,” Wallace told Lipsky. “I’m saying it’s—I’m saying it’s a continuum. And if the book’s about anything, it’s about the question of why am I watching so much shit? It’s not about the shit; it’s about me. Why am I doing it?”

[…]

“You know, why are we—and by ‘we’ I mean people like you and me: mostly white, upper middle class or upper class, obscenely well educated, doing really interesting jobs, sitting in really expensive chairs, watching the best, you know, watching the most sophisticated electronic equipment money can buy—why do we feel empty and unhappy?”

In 1995, Wallace pretty much summed up our current state of mental and social decline. Here is an excerpt from the book where he talks, almost prophetically, about the impact of television on society and what the internet would lead us to if we are careless in its usage:

“I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It's a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn't require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can't see me. And, and, they're there for me, and I can, I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive. The problem is it's also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I've gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there's also, there's something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we've all got to figure out how to be together in the same room. And so TV is like candy in that it's more pleasurable and easier than the real food. But it also doesn't have any of the nourishment of real food. And the thing, what the book is supposed to be about is, What has happened to us, that I'm now willing—and I do this too—that I'm willing to derive enormous amounts of my sense of community and awareness of other people, from television? But I'm not willing to undergo the stress and awkwardness and potential shit of dealing with real people. And that as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like—I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail, and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, at a certain point, we're gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.”

Unfortunately for us all, Wallace was right—technology did get better and it got much easier and convenient and pleasurable to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Spending time on social media and the internet has become the “main staple of our diet” and we are all the worse for it.

I remember being in middle school, an entire lifetime ago or so it seems, and absolutely bingeing on books, Harry Potter specifically. I would read all day and all night, sometimes 12 hours straight, until dawn, until I could no longer keep my eyes open. I am sure many people who are reading this feel the same. I remember being in high school, what seems like just yesterday, and being lost in writing poetry.

Then, sometime in college, I lost my love for reading. It was a slow death. The more self-help books I read to help my then-self, the less joy I found in reading until one day I stopped entirely. Read enough badly written self-help cash-grab and one is sure to forget the joy a good book can bring.

It was sometime in my mid-twenties that I decided to become a reader again. Thousands of feet in the air, as I flew across the world in a tin cylinder, legs cramped in the charitable economy seat and body crammed in the middle seat between two older gentlemen who would not relinquish the armrests, I found my love for reading in the beautiful prose of Charles Dickens.

“Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has Great Expectation,” said Mr. Jaggers notifying Pip of his turning fortunes as I flew across the Atlantic ocean. It was love at first sight: with Dickens, with Pip, heck even with the cold-hearted Estella.

There I was, a reader again. I found company in Dickens and Donna Tartt, in Anthony Doerr and Dostoevsky, in Amy Tan and Tolstoy, in Min-Jin Lee and Murakami. As I read more, I started to write more. As I wrote more, I started to post more on the internet. It was an innocuous desire to share my thoughts and my words and find a community of people who thought like me, wrote like me, and liked me for my words. I didn’t realize at the time how easy it was to slip and fall into the validation trap—a constant “look at me” while running on the content treadmill. Soon, it felt like I was simply feeding the machinery, selling vulnerability to strangers for a shot of cheap validation.

Feeling like a fraud, I started reading less again. I wrote less. I scrolled more. My relationship with reading and writing became unhealthy and unsustainable as soon as the algorithmic incentives of social media and the internet started dictating the content and the cadence of my work. The feedback structure of the internet means eventually I end up tying my self-worth to the number of views and likes my writing gets—how many eyeballs see the words I write and how many fingers hit the little digital heart as a way of telling me “you’re doing great, buddy.” And I, an addict searching for his next hit of ego gratification, stand up high on a pedestal like Ozymandius and shout, “Look at my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

In this post-Wallace world, we find ourselves in the middle of a neverending stream of look-at-me-and-I’ll-look-at-you. All of us, willingly or unwillingly, have become part of the content treadmill—producers and consumers—selling our lives to the algorithms. We might as well attach a “For Sale“ sign to each of our lives.

While there is beauty in having the ability to see different minds and different lives that are on display across the globe—never before was a different lifestyle, a different culture, and a different way of thinking so easily accessible—harm ensues when that becomes an infinite stream pouring out of a 6-inch window in our hands, served by faceless algorithms that seem to know us better than we know ourselves, tracking our every move in exchange for a few tasteless cookies. When everything I consume is novel, the novelty of the entire experience wears off.

On many days, spending so much time in the digital world, I am left wondering what I did that day in my actual—IRL—life. Even though I spent so much time with these people on the internet, why do I still feel so alone and lonely sitting in my dark room in front of this bright screen?

David Foster Wallace was right. He could see even pre-Y2K what the world was headed toward. He was afraid of what TVs would do to us but what happens when that TV runs 24x7 with endless programming served algorithmically directly to everyone right in their hands? What happens when it’s not just Hollywood that gets to create the shows but everybody everywhere can create their own shows and serve them to the neverending feeds all at once? What happens when all those people are given incentives, monetary and dopaminergic, for endlessly turning their lives into content? What happens when Big Tech decides to take all of that user-generated content and feed it into AI algorithms (the morality and legality of which is gray at best) that can then create endless feeds of more content for the people, served based on their interests, right into the same glowing screens, possibly even more advanced screens built right into their glasses? How about putting people in an entirely digital environment for a few thousand dollars so they can forget about the real world? One might ask, out of curiosity, what about people and friends and human relationships? Who cares! Why not just give them digital avatars so everyone can simply hang out in virtual worlds? How about digital friends hanging from their necks in a wi-fi-enabled locket that they can talk to instead of talking to people around them? Who wants to meet in person anyway? Who even needs human beings if your entire being could be digitized? Isn’t that a much better world? An entire world merely alive to maximize shareholder value as it devalues the existence of the human.

There’s a deep discontent in living a life that is constantly pushed into content generation and optimization. While the internet has brought on powerful tools leading to many opportunities, because the changes have happened at such a rapid pace, we have been left behind. We could not evolve at the pace of the technological evolution. “Now, if I don't develop some machinery for being able to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure,” Wallace said to Lipsky in 1995, “and allow myself to go out and, you know, grocery shop and pay the rent? I don't know about you, but I'm gonna have to leave the planet.”

We need to educate ourselves and prepare ourselves, somehow build that “machinery in our guts” Wallace talked about decades ago so that we can handle this new world we find ourselves in. With the global deterioration of mental health, including my own to be frank, it feels utterly essential to do so.

I don’t have the answers. I don’t have the tools. At this moment, all I can do is separate my self-worth from the view count and do things without the need for the algorithm’s validation. I can live a life without feeling the compulsion to share everything about it on the internet. Maybe it’s just me and most other people are better equipped to deal with all this. And if not, if you find yourself struggling like me, all I can do is wish you good luck and if you have any strategies or advice, I’m all ears.

If everyone creates then who keeps the world running? If no one creates then what's the point of keeping the lights on? What is this weird needy symbiotic relationship between the ones who create and the ones who consume?

Yet, here I am. Writing all this and putting it on the internet for you to read, hoping you'll agree and like what I'm writing—my ideas, my words. The irony is not lost on me. But what then is the alternative? To pull the plug entirely and to hell with all things online? I don't want to want the validation from you yet I know I want it, otherwise I'd be writing this in my journal. A writer needs a reader, just as a reader needs a writer—another symbiotic, almost parasitic, relationship at play, producers and consumers.

How do we—I—create a better relationship with creation? Is there a sustainable way to create art for art’s sake and to share it with the world without wanting to leave this planet?

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Sunday evening. Empty sky. Cool wind blows away the autumn leaves in mini tornadoes that falter right before they can rise up. Piano plays in my ears as I stand outside my apartment overlooking the street. A dog barks somewhere, a cat astray elsewhere. Flickering lights line the dim streets. Dying stars in an empty space. Ambulances going off all around. An empty world filled with people. Empty people filled with—

Empty? No.

People filled with dreams. Not the ones that descend upon us at night. No. Dreams that live within us when we’re awake. Dreams that drive us forward and backward and sideways and freeze us. Dreams that everyone around us tells us are too stupid to keep alive. Dreams that were supposed to be cremated the day we turned 18 or 21 or 25 or whenever we were supposed to grow up. The sacrifice of adulthood. The fool’s errand. Those dreams—the ones that sustain us. 

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we torture ourselves clinging to these dreams as the world, time, pulls it away from us? Pull apart a thin cotton cloth and see the fibers tear away slowly. That is what we do to ourselves. Why? 

Seb and his jazz club. Mia and her acting. We’re all in our own la la lands, dreams buried deep within, dreams worn on our sleeves. Music. Movies. Novels. Paintings. Art of some kind. All art is useless1; all art important. 

I look at the trees around me, barely green. Bare. Brown. Below, green shrubs still green. Leaves waltzing in the chill breeze. Photosynthesis—keeping life alive. Did the leaves ever dream? Did they give up on their own dreams just so they could do their boring jobs of keeping us all alive? Is that the meaning of their lives? One life, grounded, keeping all the rest of life alive as we waste away our days. 

What is this trick then? Why do we suffer? Why do we keep these painful dreams alive? Is it the dreams that keep us alive? 

The piano in my ears plays Mia and Sebastian’s theme over and over and over and over. The same street under the same sky on the same night. Stationary. The same wind playing with the same leaves. Moving. It is all the same. In these few minutes, the world has changed. Hasn’t it? A different world, same. What a mess these dreams.2 

A death row inmate without a God

“Show me something real,” Hancock said to Moss. “Tell me something true.” 

Phillip Hancock, 59, was a death row inmate in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Devin Moss was his chaplain, a spiritual care advisor who had been working with Hancock for a year. On November 30, 2023, at 10 A.M., Hancock was to be executed via lethal injection. Without faith—an atheist—he was trying to find meaning in his life and in his death, trying to make sense of death without God.

Hancock grew up religious in Oklahoma City, not devout but a believer. He went to a Methodist church with his parents and attended Baptist Bible School in the summer. He cared for his little brother who suffered from cerebral palsy. He and his mother had escaped from his physically abusive father. In a car salvage lot near the church he visited with his parents, he and his friends would often smoke weed and cigarettes. The toughness of his childhood, the unfairness of it all, sometimes made him question his faith—the crucifix ever-present in his bedroom. 

In April 2001, Hancock killed two men, J and L. J had been supplying drugs to Hancock’s then-girlfriend, which led to an argument between the three men. In self-defense, as Hancock claimed, he shot the two men with a gun he had wrested away from J. Hancock evaded capture for a year until being booked for a different charge.

In 2004, Hancock was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. He entered the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, a place where more than 200 people have been executed since 1915. It is where Tom Joad had been incarcerated after being convicted of homicide in self-defense, in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. While Tom Joad got out, Phillip Hancock had no such luck. 

In prison, as missionaries started paying him visits, Hancock turned to books as a way to understand his situation. He wanted to read, learn, and debate, which is what he did with the others in the prison, arguing with empathy with his proselytizing visitors. As time went on, his faith turned to dust. Whatever the messengers of faith were selling, he wasn’t buying. 

“I decided, it makes more sense to me to hate a God that does not exist than to be slave to one. The weight of the world came off of me. Because I wasn’t concerned about this maniacal, narcissistic, omnicidal psychopath,” said Hancock. His appeal of his death sentence was denied by a court in 2007.

As Emma Goldberg writes in the NYT article, Hancock’s atheism led him to a difficult question: What could sustain him day by day—through rage and grief and fear of his looming execution—without faith in a power mightier than the people who had decided to end his life? 

A suicidal man and a little girl

In 1877, Fyodor Dostoevsky published a short story in his monthly journal, A Writer’s Diary. The story was called “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” and dealt with a suicidal narrator discovering the meaning of life in a dream. 

It began with the protagonist meandering through the gloomy streets of St. Petersburg as he slowly slipped into nihilism. Feeling the “terrible anguish” of the apparent meaninglessness of life, he contemplated committing suicide as he looked at the lone star in the night sky. 

Suddenly, a little girl of about eight, dressed in destitute clothing, grabbed him by his arm and begged for help. But he shooed her away and returned to his room which he shared with a drunken old captain. He fell deep into thought in his miserable room—the room that barely had anything, but it had a drawer and the drawer had a gun, an “excellent gun” he had bought two months ago—and found himself haunted by the little girl’s image.

“I should certainly have shot myself, but for that little girl,” he thought. 

He felt a moral dilemma: If someone hit him, he would feel pain; just as if something pitiful happened, he would feel pity; and if he felt pity for the child, then he should’ve helped the child, just like he would’ve before he fell into his current state of despair.

“Why did I not help the little girl, then?” He asked himself.

Because when the little girl was pulling at him, a question arose before him, making him angry.

“If I had already made up my mind that I would put an end to myself to-night, then now more than ever before everything in the world should be all the same to me. Why was it that I felt it was not all the same to me, and pitied the little girl?”

He wondered why he felt pity and shame at all if he was going to kill himself anyway. If soon he would cease to exist, why then did anything matter to him at all? 

This existential thinking excited him, saving his life. 

“One strange consideration suddenly presented itself to me. If I had previously lived on the moon or in Mars, and I had there been dishonored and disgraced so utterly that one can only imagine it sometimes in a dream or a nightmare, and if I afterwards found myself on earth and still preserved a consciousness of what I had done on the other planet, and if I knew besides that I would never by any chance return, then, if I were to look at the moon from the earth—would it be all the same to me or not? Would I feel any shame for my action or not?” 

“The questions were idle and useless, for the revolver was already lying before me, and I knew with all my being that this thing would happen for certain: but the questions excited me to rage. I could not die now, without having solved this first. In a word, that little girl saved me, for my questions made me postpone pulling the trigger.”

Leo Tolstoy and his existential crisis

Two years after Anna Karenina—his fame and legacy already cemented—Leo Tolstoy wrote about his existential crisis in his memoir A Confession. He fell into a deep spiritual crisis, a depression he likened to a serious physical illness that made him contemplate suicide and the meaning of life.

He lost all passion for his work, and all meaning in his fame which he once so longed for. Afraid he might take his own life, he stopped going out shooting with his gun. How could he go on living? He asked in deep anguish.

“One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid,” he confessed in his memoir.

He thought he could simply bear out his existence if he could be certain that life had no inherent meaning but he couldn’t do so. He felt like a man lost in the woods, rushing to find a way out but only further confusing himself—the more he tried to find a way out, the more lost he found himself. The only final way out, it seemed, was to kill himself.

Yet he found the question to be quite simple, “the simplest of questions,” a question without an answer to which one could not continue living. 

“‘What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?’ Differently expressed, the question is: ‘Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?’ It can also be expressed thus: ‘Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?’”

Paralyzed by this simple question, he searched for answers, first in science then in philosophy, both of which disappointed him—for science asked its own questions and answered those without worrying about his questions, and philosophy merely asked the same questions in more complex forms without giving any answers. 

“Why does everything exist that exists, and why do I exist?” Tolstoy asked himself, then answered his own question, “Because it exists.”

An atheist chaplain

Devin Moss, 11 years younger than Hancock, had a religious upbringing in Idaho, going to a private Christian school. But Moss had always been a curious person, questioning others about the practicality of biblical tales.

After high school, he joined the Marines, and took Catholic confirmation classes during boot camp as an excuse to evade his drill sergeants. He then enrolled in a film degree program at the University of Texas at Austin where he wrote scripts about existentialism. He studied philosophy, eventually realizing that existentialists made more sense to him than the Christian teachings of his youth. Eventually, he no longer believed in God but still looked for “a sense of spiritual purpose.” 

Moss started a podcast on spirituality and death called “The Adventures of Memento Mori” where one guest, a Buddhist chaplain, told him he’d make a good chaplain.

Moss enrolled at a theological school in Chicago in 2019 in a new program for humanists, then did a residency as a chaplain at a New York hospital. He graduated in 2022.

Unsure what he could do as an atheist chaplain, his path intersected with that of an atheist death row inmate from Oklahoma: Philip Hancock. 

Hancock wanted a chaplain who did not believe in God and his lawyers reached out to the American Humanist Association. 

In early 2023, Devin Moss wrote in a letter to Philip Hancock: “Hello sir. How are you doing? It would be an honor to be by your side in spiritual support for these next months—be it a prayer, meditation, an existential ponder, a cry and even a joke. I want you to know that you are not alone.”

During one of their first calls, Hancock presented his existential dilemma to Moss.

“I want more than anything to believe in something other than this. I just can’t do it though, lacking evidence,” said the inmate to the chaplain.

Yes to life

“Let us imagine a man who has been sentenced to death and, a few hours before his execution, has been told he is free to decide on the menu for his last meal. The guard comes into his cell and asks him what he wants to eat, offers him all kinds of delicacies; but the man rejects all his suggestions. He thinks to himself that it is quite irrelevant whether he stuffs good food into the stomach of his organism or not, as in a few hours it will be a corpse. And even the feelings of pleasure that could still be felt in the organism’s cerebral ganglia seem pointless in view of the fact that in two hours they will be destroyed forever.”

The above is a passage from Viktor Frankl’s book Yes To Life: In Spite of Everything, a collection of lectures he gave in 1946—eleven months after he was liberated from a labor camp in Nazi Germany. Frankl was a psychiatrist who spent 3 years in concentration camps, losing his father, his mother, his brother, and his wife to the horrors of those camps.

In spite of this, he writes—

“The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.”

The day of execution  

On November 30, 2023, Philip Hancock was pronounced dead at 11:29 in the morning. Fourteen minutes ago, he had been given a lethal injection: a three-drug cocktail of midazolam for sedation, vecuronium bromide to halt respiration, and potassium chloride to stop the heart. During those fourteen minutes, Devin Moss stood at his feet telling his slowly dying friend, “You are loved. You are not alone,” over and over and over. 

The night before his death, Hancock was brought his last meal: white meat from Kentucky Fried Chicken. Hancock had asked for dark meat. 

Driving under the gray Oklahoma skies, Moss arrived at the prison at 7:35 in the morning. The Governor had denied clemency that morning despite the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board’s ruling in favor of granting clemency to Hancock.

Moss still wondered what he could offer Hancock. For the two men, there was no God, no hell or heaven, no prayer or salvation. As a chaplain, all he could offer was his company, his presence to the man being crucified.

Emma Goldberg writes in the New York Times article, “There is an adage that says there are no atheists in foxholes—even skeptics will pray when facing death.”

“It’s well known that people that really believe, that really have faith, die better,” Moss had said. “How can we help people die better that don’t have supernatural faith?”  

Moments before the execution, as Hancock laid tightly strapped to a gurney in the tiny chamber, Moss rested his hand on Hancock’s knee, and recited from his notebook, “We call the spirit of humanity into this space. Let love fill our hearts. We ask that in transition into peaceful oblivion that Phil feels that love, and although this is his journey that he is not alone. We invoke the power of peace, strength, grace and surrender. Amen.”

A wakeful dream

In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, as Dostoevsky’s suicidal protagonist sat thinking about the little girl that had saved his life—merely by the act of asking for help which he did not provide yet felt pity for the girl and shame at his apathetic self—he fell into a strange, almost psychedelic, sleep. 

He dreamed of taking his revolver and pointing it at his heart. He waited for a second. Two seconds. Then pulled the trigger.

He felt no pain but everything in him felt convulsed and everything around him suddenly extinguished. “I became as though blind and numb, and I lay on my back on something hard,” he said.

He was surrounded by noise but couldn’t make any himself. Suddenly, a break. He realized he was being carried in a closed coffin. As the coffin swung, he came to a breaking realization: he was dead.

“I know it and do not doubt it; I cannot see nor move, yet at the same time I feel and think. But I am soon reconciled to that, and as usual in a dream I accept the reality without question,” said the Ridiculous Man.

Soon he was buried in the ground. Alone, he stayed there still for a while; a while being hours or days, there was no way to tell. 

Suddenly, a drop of water fell on his closed left eye, then another, and another. Every minute a drop fell and all of a sudden, his heart filled with a deep indignation, and then he felt pain. Physical pain in his heart. 

“It’s my wound,” he thought. “It’s where I shot myself. The bullet is there.”

“And all the while the water dripped straight on to my closed eye. Suddenly, I cried out, not with a voice for I was motionless, but with all my being, to the arbiter of all that was being done to me.”

“Whosoever thou art, if thou art, and if there exists a purpose more intelligent than the things which are now taking place, let it be present here also. But if thou dost take vengeance upon me for my foolish suicide, then know, by the indecency and absurdity of further existence, that no torture whatever that may befall me, can ever be compared to the contempt which I will silently feel, even through millions of years of martyrdom,” he cried out. 

Deep silence. Another drop fell. Then, the grave opened.

Four ways to live without meaning 

Tolstoy, deeply depressed, failed by both science and philosophy in his quest to find answers to his existential despair, turned desperately to spirituality. 

He wondered how others in his social circle dealt with the existential anguish of their conscious beings and found four strategies that at best helped manage the hopelessness but none resolved the deeper question. 

The first strategy was that of ignorance. He writes, “It consists in not knowing, not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity. From [people of this sort] I had nothing to learn—one cannot cease to know what one does know.”

The second strategy was epicureanism—to make use of the advantages one had while knowing the hopelessness of life, by “disregarding the dragon and the mice, and licking the honey in the best way, especially if there is much of it within reach.” That was the way, Tolstoy felt, most people in his circle lived. They had more advantages than hardships and their lack of morality allowed them to forget their privileges were merely accidental. “The accident that has today made me a Solomon may tomorrow make me a Solomon’s slave,” Tolstoy wrote in A Confession. He realized that such people forgot that the tides of fortune eventually turn and the pleasures of today still lead to sickness and death. 

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

The fourth category of people, which Tolstoy found himself in, used a strategy of weakness; clinging to life despite being aware of the reality of the misery. He felt that people in this category knew that death was better than life but didn’t have the strength to act rationally and simply end their lives, to end the deception, seemingly waiting for something. “The fourth way was to live like Solomon and Schopenhauer—knowing that life is a stupid joke played upon us, and still to go on living, washing oneself, dressing, dining, talking, and even writing books,” he wrote. 

In his book Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, Frankl presented a thought experiment comparing the game of life to the game of chess. If a chess player, faced with a chess problem she cannot solve, chooses to simply hurl the pieces off the chess board, does that solve the chess problem? It does not. 

Analogously, such is the behavior of the suicide, he wrote: to throw life away as a solution to the insolvable problem of life was to merely flout the rules of the game of life. 

Frankl writes, “The suicide also flouts the rules of the game of life; these rules do not require us to win at all costs, but they do demand from us that we never give up the fight.”

Tolstoy—tormented and repulsed as he found himself in the fourth category—wondered why he hadn’t yet killed himself. He realized that a part of him questioned his own ideas on the hopelessness and meaninglessness of life. 

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

God has nothing to do with this

“Where my enemies at?” Hancock said jokingly during his last words before the cocktail of death coursed through his body. “I don’t want anyone out there crying for me. You, Sue—I don’t want you doing that,” Hancock said. Sue Hosch was an anti-death penalty activist who had become friends with Hancock.

To the other witnesses in the room, which included the families of the two victims and the state’s attorney general, he said one final time that he had acted in self-defense and still hoped to be exonerated after his death.

After Hancock’s death, as the finality of the moment hit Moss, he murmured an involuntary prayer, praying for a better set of cards for whatever it was that came next for his departed friend. 

The families of the victims said they hoped Hancock had gotten “his soul right” with God before his death. They were grateful for the justice God’s will had brought. 

Moss sat in his car and began crying as the Oklahoma skies pummeled rain down on the morbid land of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. 

At one moment in the past, in an outrage, Hancock had said to Moss, “The good Christians are going to strap me to a crucifix and put a nail in my vein? Do they really think that their God approves of them?”

Moss and Hosch wrote letters to Hancock and threw them into a fire in place of a funeral. There was no funeral.

In his final message to his friend, Moss had originally written “spirit of the divine.” He chose to cross out “of the divine” before he delivered his final words to him. That day, as he drove away in the rain, he said, “God has nothing to do with this.” 

There is but one solution

In her 1826 novel, The Last Man, Mary Shelley wrote, “There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.” 

She had written the novel during a period in her life when she saw the deaths of three of her children as well as the death of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had drowned in a boating accident.

James Baldwin once wrote, “I think all of our voyages drive us there; for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.”

Two atheists in the foxhole

In February 2023, Philip Hancock—the death row inmate—said to his atheist chaplain, Devin Moss, “I tend to get adrenaline rushes when I think about this because I’m so angry. They’ve stolen my life from me.”

During his time in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, Hancock found comfort in poetry and songs. 

“If it comes down to it, I’m maintaining my dignity. I’ll make them ashamed to be scared when it’s their turn to die. They’ll say, ‘We’ve got to hold our heads high, like Hancock,’” Hancock said to Moss. Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” was one of Hancock’s favorites.

During their time together—mostly over the phone—Hancock and Moss discussed childhood stories, philosophy, and biblical tales. Was Hancock the class clown? What did the Buddhists think? Discussions of Cain and Abel. 

Wondering what it was that Hancock was seeking, Moss asked him once, “Why did you feel it was necessary to get a spiritual care adviser for this part of your life?”

Hancock’s initial motive was simple—that Moss would be able to be in the execution chamber, he explained, due to a 2022 Supreme Court ruling that allowed the presence of spiritual care advisers during a death row inmate’s execution. Hancock wanted someone next to him to ensure nothing went wrong during his execution. 

In the New York Times article, Emma Goldberg writes, “He talked worriedly about Oklahoma’s 2014 botched execution of Clayton Lockett, who after his injections began to writhe, declaring that his body felt like it was ‘on fire.’ He had a heart attack in the execution chamber.”

He wanted him next to him, Hancock told Moss. “I like you man. You’re a nice person. I think you’re sincere,” he told Moss over the phone.

Hancock had found his sense of purpose in his battle for clemency and survival. “I’m not done yet, like I said—I love life. I’m going to fight to the bitter end of this,” he said. 

Moss started visiting Hancock in person in July, where they sat for hours in the visitation room along with Sue Hosch—the anti-death penalty activist who had become Hancock’s friend. 

Hancock was touched that Moss had flown from Brooklyn to McAlester to visit him; their laughter felt more genuine to them when they sat inches apart from each other. 

The situation became clearer to Moss as to what he was offering—Hancock did not believe in God but he did believe in what people can do for each other. This relationship with Hancock was what Moss was offering.

In August, Moss decided to move to Oklahoma so he could spend more time with Hancock in prison. 

“Hey Devin, man, you’re blowing me away. You’re showing me something I haven’t seen from—I don’t recall anybody really coming through like this,” said the inmate to the chaplain.

They would often talk about the legal case as Hancock and his lawyers prepared for a clemency hearing before the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board. They presented new evidence that Hancock had acted in self-defense: testimony from Hancock’s ex-girlfriend that she had asked J to “take care of” Hancock. 

Despite much opposition from the state, the board still voted, 3-2, to recommend clemency but the final decision rested with the Governor. 

Two years before the board’s recommendation, the Governor had said that he claimed every square inch of Oklahoma for Jesus Christ. The Governor had until the hour of the execution to stop it.

Tolstoy and the simple folk

After questioning his own nihilism, still searching for answers, Tolstoy found hope in the “very simplest folk.” He wondered how most people—simple people outside of his intellectual circle—lived lives and never questioned the absurdity of life. 

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

He questioned his own ignorance, suddenly realizing the fact there might be something he didn’t know. He realized that there was an entire humanity that had lived and still lived as if it understood the meaning of life, “for without understanding it could not live; but I say that all this life is senseless and that I cannot live.” 

Further questioning himself and his thinking, he asked what he had never asked before: “But what meaning is and has been given to their lives by all the milliards of common folk who live and have lived in the world?”

Tolstoy realized that if he wished to understand the meaning of life, he was not going to find the answers from people who had lost all meaning and were off killing themselves, but instead from the billions of people who still lived, and who had lived before, that “support the burden of their own lives and of ours also.”

He realized that the billions of “simple, unlearned, and poor” people did not fit into his four categories. 

“I could not class them as not understanding the question, for they themselves state it and reply to it with extraordinary clearness. Nor could I consider them epicureans, for their life consists more of privations and sufferings than of enjoyments. Still less could I consider them as irrationally dragging on a meaningless existence, for every act of their life, as well as death itself, is explained by them. To kill themselves they consider the greatest evil.”

It appeared to him that all of such humanity already had some “pseudo knowledge” of the meaning of life which remained unacknowledged, even despised, to his rational mind. 

Two Russians discover the meaning of life

As the protagonist’s grave opened in Dostoevsky’s The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, he found himself taken by some dark being. They were in space, in deep darkness, far from the earth. After an unquantifiable amount of time, the protagonist saw the sun and an overwhelming emotion took over him. 

The protagonist narrated, “A sweet and moving delight echoed rapturously through my soul. The dear power of light, of that same light which had given me birth, touched my heart and revived it, and I felt life, the old life, for the first time since my death.”

He found himself in a different world that looked like Earth but was full of light and full of happy people. 

“Oh, instantly, at the first glimpse of their faces I understood everything, everything!” He exclaimed. 

Tolstoy, in his meditations on life, realized the answer was to be found in faith. Faith, not religion, not God. Just faith. He understood that faith was irrational knowledge and that to accept the idea of faith was to reject the rational mind. But if rationality was rejected then what was the purpose of meaning since it was the rational mind that required a meaning to live?

“My position was terrible. I knew I could find nothing along the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life; and there—in faith—was nothing but a denial of reason, which was yet more impossible for me than a denial of life,” he wrote. 

He found himself stuck in a contradiction: Either what he called reason was not as rational as he thought, or what he called irrational was not as irrational as he thought. 

“Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before, but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life, and that consequently it makes life possible,” said Tolstoy.

He went on, “In contrast with what I had seen in our circle, where the whole of life is passed in idleness, amusement, and dissatisfaction, I saw that the whole life of these people was passed in heavy labour, and that they were content with life. In contradistinction to the way in which people of our circle oppose fate and complain of it on account of deprivations and sufferings, these people accepted illness and sorrow without any perplexity or opposition, and with a quiet and firm conviction that all is good,” he wrote comparing the intellectual minds of his circle to the “simple folk” that lived life and found meaning in faith. 

Tolstoy realized that if he wished to understand life and its meaning, then he “must not live the life of a parasite,” but instead live a real life, and—“taking the meaning given to live by real humanity and merging myself in that life”—verify it.

In his book Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, Viktor Frankl wrote, “It is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life—it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us—we are the ones who are questioned! We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential ‘life questions.’”

As Dostoevsky’s protagonist slipped out of his dream at dawn, he felt renewed with a newfound gratitude for life. “Rapture, ineffable rapture exalted all my being,” he wept as he arose. 

He had realized the meaning of life in his dream, that everyone—from the wisest man to the lowest murderer—aspired to a singular shared goal. In his dream, he had seen the truth that all men on earth can be beautiful and happy, and that evil could not be the normal condition of man. 

He proclaimed again and again that he did not merely invent this truth but actually saw it. He had seen what had been true all along. And the truth was simple: “The one thing is—love thy neighbor as thyself—that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.”

What is real? What is true?

During the time they knew each other, Moss would often ask Hancock questions he himself had been trying to figure out as a chaplain, like where humans should find their moral compass. 

Hancock would come to the same realization as Mary Shelley’s protagonist and Dostoevsky’s protagonist, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That’s it in a nutshell. That’s it.” God had nothing to do with it. 

Once, when Moss asked Hancock what he thought happened when a person died, Hancock replied, “Nonexistence didn’t bother me before I existed. I don’t think it’s going to bother me after I’m dead.”

On November 30, 2023, in the tiny execution chamber, Devin Moss, as a chaplain and as a friend, concluded his final message to Philip Hancock with—

“In the beginning of this, when I asked what you really wanted out of a spiritual care adviser, it was Philippians Chapter 4. Show me something real, show me something true.” 

“What is real is that you are loved. What is true is you are not alone,” said the chaplain, his final words to the inmate.

Sources & Further Readings

• Article: An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmate’s Final Hours, by Emma Goldberg (The New York Times, 2024).

• Short Story: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

• Book: A Confession, by Leo Tolstoy.

• Book: Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, by Viktor E. Frankl.

• Blog: The Marginalian, by Maria Popova. [especially, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy]

I will soon turn 30 and one thought keeps crossing my mind: Fitzgerald published Great Gatsby when he was 29 and Donna Tartt published Secret History when she was 29 so what the heck am I doing with my life?

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Let’s rewind. 2…5…10-ish years. In high school—class 12—I tried writing my first novel. I wrote roughly 2 chapters before abandoning it for another potential masterpiece, two chapters in and I scrapped that as well. The next few years, I spent writing poetry—bad poetry I would be embarrassed to show anyone now—mostly as a way to cope with my life. It was a period of my life with some major life events that turned life upside down several times over. It was poetry as journaling. I liked expressing my feelings and the screams in my head as short stanzas. Rhyming words, finding metaphors and similes and alliterations, made emotional expression bearable. The turbulence in my head and heart made sense as a sonnet.

During all those years, I never thought of becoming a writer. To me, a writer was not a real thing. It was not something one could become. Books merely existed it seemed. No, I was the kid that wanted to go make movies. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight was my obsession for years and I still watch it now and then. I wanted to make movies like him. That dream stayed with me for several years, until like most dreams, it got stashed in the dark soggy basement storage somewhere in the back.

Still, I wrote all those years. I wrote poetry, I wrote articles—online and in my notebooks. I wrote about technology, about movies, about machine learning, about books, about my feelings. This, I did for most of my twenties. No one read, of course. Just me.

I wrote because I truly enjoyed it. I wrote because it brought me comfort. There was something in my brain, my DNA perhaps, that loved words and expressing myself in them. Words. Sentences. Paragraphs. Punctuations as ornaments. I just found them beautiful—written words. 

It was not until 2020—the year of the pandemic, the global blip in our collective memories—around my birthday that something stashed deep within me revealed itself to me. Stuck inside the house for months, looking at the world merely through windows and digital screens, it happened. A sudden insight, a revelation. I proclaimed to the empty room, “Of course! I want to be a writer. That’s what I want to do with my life!”

A few years have passed since that day. I didn’t act on that proclamation for almost a year. I was in a foreign country on a student visa and student debt which when combined is a great motivator to find a real job. And so I did find one, an engineer, of course. It took another year for me to take writing more seriously and to act on it.

Since then, I have read many books on writing, I have taken almost all writerly classes on Masterclass. Many times I have considered going for an MFA program but never did. I think I’m a much better writer today than I was ten years ago yet nowhere near the skill level I want to reach. It has taken me ten years to get close to finding my true self, my own voice, yet I’m as far from it as I have traveled so far.

In the summer of 2021, wandering aimlessly through the city, I got the idea for my first novel. It took me 1.5 years to actually start writing it, to write the first sentence. I have been working on it for the past 1.5 years, on and off, never quite happy with my words. I have removed as many words, even more, as I have currently sitting in my draft. Tens of thousands of darlings killed.

I started this Substack about 2 months ago on a whim. I might have been on the verge of giving up writing completely, discouraged by the fact that no one read anything I wrote, but memory can seldom be trusted. I posted an essay I had been working on since 2022—almost two years—sporadically. It was about failure, about Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces. I had spent a solid 50 hours on it—reading, researching, writing, editing. 

Then, for the first time in my life, someone wanted to pay me for my writing. On my Substack, I don’t have the paid option enabled but I do have the pledge option enabled. Someone read my essay, pledging $150 to me after reading it. Out of respect for their privacy, I won’t mention their name but if you are reading this, once again, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

After ten years of writing, finally, someone had considered my writing worthy enough to be willing to pay for it. Writers write for themselves but writers also write to be read. There is no writer without a reader. 

(Forgive the cheesiness of the journal entry; it was an emotional day.)

Looking back at it all, I feel this was the first phase of my journey; the first act, if you will—going from bad poetry and pithy listicles to long-form essays and first drafts of fiction novels. It only took a decade of my life and a lot of self-doubt, aching heart, and tearful eyes. What comes next? Act 2, perhaps. But with it—

Crippling anxiety. Fear of failure. Imposter syndrome. Feelings of complete incompetency and inadequacy as I read brilliant words of those much more skilled than me in this craft. All of which leads me to creative impotence, manifesting as procrastination. Wasted time: days, months, years. Suffering within.

At this point, I feel a responsibility to make something clear. Truthfully clear. I have been very fortunate in my life. I am aware that it is very easy to lose sight of the many privileges life has granted me. The mere ability to express my thoughts and push them out on this platform is a luxury in itself. One has to simply take a look around to see how bad things can get in life. As I sit here in my air-conditioned apartment writing this on an $1800 computer, bombs, disease, and famine ravage other parts of the same world—true suffering.

Yet, maybe it is okay to acknowledge ones individual suffering while also acknowledging the societal suffering, even if doing so feels utterly selfish. 

In this selfish reflection, I ask myself what is it that stops me? Why do I go to bed without having written, without having put down words that are waiting eagerly—excitedly—to be born, to be borne out of me? 

Let’s be done with the easy targets first: the distractions of the modern world. Social media. Technology. Phones. Instant access to everything and round-the-clock connectivity. We live in a world where everyone has a megaphone in their pocket and we’re all hooked directly into the Matrix. Is it any wonder that in a world filled with so much distraction, so much noise, I find it almost impossible to listen to my own voice? So much input, so much to process constantly, that there is no time to find my thoughts circling in my own head. There is no time to be bored and to think—damn this technological age. Damn the Anthropocene!

How do you get quiet enough to listen to your own heartbeat?

Next, fear; fear of being judged by people I know—friends, family, coworkers—and people I don’t know. There is a certain vulnerability that comes with writing for an audience, even if the audience consists of just one person—me. Good writing is honest writing. Honesty leads to vulnerability; vulnerability to fear of getting hurt. This fear—of being judged—stopped me from sharing my writing with the people I had known for a long time. It took me a better part of my twenties to be honest enough, vulnerable enough, brave enough, to share it with my family and friends. And life has been better since. My writing is not a secret anymore; it is not something to be hidden from people I love. It is a part of me, a huge part. I know now that there is no me without writing. 

And that is an entirely another level of vulnerability. If my self-worth and my being are tied to my writing—this craft that I love—then what happens if my writing is only good in my head? What if the words, the sentences, that I’m cobbling together are actually shit? What if I’m overestimating myself? There is a statistically non-zero chance that I have no writing talent whatsoever. That I’m simply living in my head. What if? Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe it is true that I have no talent. How then do I survive? One mindset shift I had to make was to start thinking of writing as a craft, not art. Art is elusive, more connected to inherent talent, something you either have or not, but craft can be learned and improved, like learning any skill. Is this true? I don’t know. But I do know that if I could simply chisel away at my sentences then maybe someday I could write a good sentence. And if I could write one good sentence, then I could write more. In the end, maybe I could write the truest sentence I know, as Hemingway put it. 

There is a problem though in chasing this one true sentence. A hurdle in my journey: the search for perfection. The want, the need, the yearning to make perfect things and to only share things with the world that have been perfected. Perfect doesn’t exist—not in this world. We are all humans and all art is a human creation. One thing we humans are not is perfect. How then can imperfect beings create perfect things? It is not possible. It is our imperfections, our flaws that make us shine. And so it goes for our art as well. There is perfection in the imperfection itself. It took me a long time to make peace with this reality. 

What gives me the right to write? I ask myself. There are others out there who are much better than I am at the art and the craft of writing, better than me in their words and their philosophies. They have better, more important, things to say about the world and human nature, and they can say those things in beautiful language, in a language full of grace, language as beautiful as a summer valley full of blooming flowers. How do I compete with them? Therein lies the problem in my thinking. Writing is not a zero-sum game. Others don’t have to lose for me to win. There is no winning. There is only writing and sharing what’s written. There is no need to tear down someone else’s building, someone else’s work. Writers can help others build—be happy in another writer’s success, for now, we have another great book to relish. And writing, literature especially, is better with intertextuality—writers carrying other writers forward in time with them. 

How else would Homer and Shakespeare survive if not for other writers willing to carry their works with them through the centuries? 

There are times when someone calls my writing a hobby. A hobby? My writing is not a hobby. It is the plasma in my blood, the oxygen in my lungs. That’s what writing is to me even though it is relegated to evenings and weekends after my real job that actually pays the bills. Trying to sail in two boats at once is not easy, not for me and not for anyone, and anyone who has tried knows—there are sharks below, deep dark waters, frothy water ready to swallow me whole the moment I fall.

Here’s an axiom for writers: Writing—creativity in general—is simply hard. It is a difficult, almost insane, thing to be doing with ones time. People who write do it because they must else they will perish, maybe not physically but intellectually and spiritually. People who write do it because they absolutely love doing it—building kaleidoscopes out of words. They love turning thoughts into written words, creating collages and mirages in the minds of the readers. 

When E. B. White would sit down to write the few hundred words he needed to write for the “Notes and Comment” page for The New Yorker, he would write in “hesitant bursts” with long silences in between. Hours would go by. Even after he mailed the final draft, after hours of excruciating editing, he would find himself unsatisfied. “It isn’t good enough,” he said sometimes as Roger Angell describes in the foreword to the 4^th edition of The Elements of Style, “I wish it were better.” Angell writes, “Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time.” That is the axiom of writing.

Through the years, I have struggled with justifying my need to write to myself. Does the world need another writer? In a world already inundated with hot takes and pithy opinions of anyone with access to the internet, do I need to throw my hat in the ring? Am I providing value to the world? Or simply adding more noise to an already noisy world merely for my need to feel validated? Am I a net positive to the world, to this civilization, to this enduring project of humanity? Or am I taking something away from it? 

What do I have that needs telling? I ask myself over and over. What can I contribute? Should I write merely for the sake of writing? Or should I only write if I have something important to tell the world? We’re all in search of meaning as if the mere act of birth must have imbued us all with an inherent purpose—a life’s task. 

To some extent, writing gives my life a sense of purpose and meaning. And I have tried giving it up. There have been periods in my life when I have tried to give it up and do the practical thing but those periods have been the unhappiest periods of my life. Without writing, without my words, I have felt lost in this big mad world. 

I want my words to make people feel. I want to make you feel happy and sad, angry and calm, hopeful and sorrowful. I want to write great works with beautiful language. I want to make you feel the way Dickens and Murakami make me feel. I want to write something that stands the test of time. Something good. I know there is a huge gap between where my writing is and where I want it to be but if I could just keep going then someday I can get there, or at least closer to it. But in the meantime, throughout that journey, I also just want to write—for myself—selfishly. 

I will soon turn 30 and one thought keeps crossing my mind: Fitzgerald published Great Gatsby when he was 29 and Donna Tartt published Secret History when she was 29 so what the heck am I doing with my life?

I… I am just trying to write.

(Writer’s Note: The title of this essay is inspired by this brilliant YouTube video by Savannah Brown. Go check it out. It’s wonderful!)

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You’re 18, maybe 20 years old, full of hope and optimism about what all you could become; filmmakers and entrepreneurs and astronauts. Boundless dreams that you think, if only things could go a certain way, and if you could just get enough time and resources, you might be able to turn into reality. You’re ready to fight the world and whoever stands in your way; escape the dogma and all. And yes, all that hope is accompanied by self-doubt. Maybe you’re just not that good. But so what? you think. It’s just a skill and you’re fired up to learn. You’re ready to work hard and improve and maybe then you’ll reach your dreams. Easy, right?

Years go by. And you find yourself in the same boat you were years ago, going wherever the wind is taking you. A bit lost and slowly losing that hope you used to have. Bit by bit. You start to feel as if the world is against you. The odds are against you. You feel stuck in an unfamiliar maze and have no idea how to get out of it. Days turn to months which turn to years. You see the others sailing past you, the ones with ambition and a sense of direction. They’re succeeding in their lives. At least, it looks like it. Money and cars and houses and spouses, looks like they’re getting it all.

And you? You’re still in the maze. Stuck. Feeling claustrophobic. Slowly suffocating. The dreams you had have been buried by now under years of dust gathering as you try to live a life that was never really your own.

And slowly, life gets away from you.

You’re 30 or 40 or 50 years old. Full of despair and a pessimistic outlook on the world. You feel as if it’s never going to happen for you. That you’re doomed to a life of disappointment that fills you with resentment and regret. You can almost feel the bitterness on your tongue, the acid in your gut.

Then one day, you see a flicker of that old dream. Just a spark, and then it all comes back. All at once. The dread in your heart. The tears in your eyes. The weight on your chest. The only dream you’ve ever had, the one that you had forgotten long ago. It is back now. You can see it clearly as you dust off the years of buildup. You’re older, running a race that was never really your own. But it’s here now, that dream. And you realize you have a chance but only if you’re brave enough to take it; brave enough to take the chance to tell your own story.

What do you do?

Writer’s Note: This is quite different from my typical writing here. It is a short story-ish that I wrote a while ago. I would love to hear your feedback (Feel free to comment, DM, or email) :)

Billy slept in his bed, his mother asleep in the next room. The air was cool outside his window and the moon was nowhere to be found. His room was swallowed in darkness, but a darker figure stood beside him, towering over his bedside. 

Tall and slender, he stood motionless, his eyes fixed on Billy’s calm face, the one kids have when they’re peacefully asleep. A dark cloak covered him, except for his face, merely skin and bones, pale as moonlight if only the moon was out. 

Slowly, he removed a small book that fit nicely in his palm. The book was brown and black and red and orange, all colors mixed as if the bottles of paint that contained them had been knocked over carelessly. It had no name, no markings on its cover, as if intentionally kept blank to avoid eyes that need to be avoided.

He opened a page in the middle, and waited, calmly, for Billy’s dreams. After all, he was the Dream Catcher. 

“Who are you?”

The Dream Catcher’s eyes went wide, and white, the black in them no longer there. Impossible. An eternity of dreamcatching, an infinite number of dreams caught, and never in his existence had he seen something like this. 

This night, he could not feel Billy waking up, like he normally would. There were no dreams, the Dream Catcher had been waiting. How then? He did not know what to do. This was not something that happened, ever.

 “I am the Dream Catcher,” he said, nonchalantly, not wanting to show his shock.

Billy sat upright in his bed, his legs under his warm blanket. He did not scream. He did not fear. Something was not right in this night.

Minutes had passed. Both looked at each other, none spoke a word. Then, the Dream Catcher spoke, slight irritation in his voice.

“You should not be awake.”

“You should not be in my room,” Billy said, instantly. It was a fair point. 

“It is my duty to be in this room. I am in every room, all at once, every night.”

“It’s not nice to be in people’s rooms without their permission. Mama said so just last week when I sneaked into Rosy’s room when she was in the kitchen with her mom.”

“I see. But such rules do not apply to me. I must be in people’s rooms if I am to do my work.”

“What is your work?”

“I take your dreams, the good and the bad, and put them away.”

“All of my dreams?”

“Yes,” he hesitated, then went on matter-of-factly, “Well, most of them anyways. And not just yours.“

Billy sat there, pondering. It was a lot for a 12-year-old boy. He would’ve liked to ask his mother about all this, but Billy knew this was no matter for grown-ups. He could’ve asked his father, but he was an adult too, not to mention, Billy had never seen him or talked to him. We simply didn’t talk about him in the Maynard household. 

The Dream Catcher carefully walked over to the window. He looked out into the moonless night, deep in his thoughts. He did not know what to do. There was no one to tell, to ask. No master puppeteer or manager to report to. He was alone, forever bound to do this. He wasn’t a genie that came out of a bottle. He was simply there, like the creation of the Universe. 

Billy was looking at the Dream Catcher, and thinking what would happen if his mother walked into his room. That, Billy thought, would not be ideal. Grown-ups did not respond well to ghostlike figures. Then, he spotted a small book poking out of one of Dream Catcher’s pockets.

“What is that?” he asked.

“What is what?” the Dream Catcher said without looking at him. 

“That little book.”

“Something you’re not supposed to see.” He pushed it deeper into his pocket with one bony finger.

“But I already saw it.”

The Dream Catcher sighed. He was stuck in a situation he did not know how to get out of. Might as well entertain the boy’s curiosity, he thought.

He turned and walked over to the other side of the room where Billy’s small desk sat. He wrapped his long fingers around the neck of the wooden chair, slowly dragged it across the floor, and took a seat next to Billy. Gracefully, he pulled out his diary and flipped through the pages.

“This…is my diary. The book of all dreams, all that have ever been dreamed but not that are yet to be dreamed.”

“You mean, most. Because some dreams escape you? Because you’re not great at your job?” Billy said with an innocent smirk, if smirks could ever be innocent.

“Yes. Most dreams. But…”

“Can I see it?” Billy cut him off. 

The Dream Catcher stared at Billy, his eyes intense. He had never been asked this question, ever. Well, no one had ever had a conversation with him before. 

But this was a line not to be crossed. The Dream Catcher knew this.

“I’m afraid not. That cannot be.”

“Why?”

“Because it cannot. No whys and why nots. Some lines are not to be crossed.”

There were no more questions. The two sat there, quietly, until Billy was asleep and the Dream Catcher had missed many dreams of many people. The morning came and the Dream Catcher was nowhere to be found when Billy woke up. The chair sat still where the Dream Catcher had sat.

A few nights went by. Billy would doze off waiting for the Dream Catcher. He had briefly thought of mentioning it to his mother over breakfast one morning, but the toast had burnt and Billy had dropped a glass bowl, and so he thought better of it.

It was a fortnight later, Mrs. Maynard was working late. 

The moon was full and bright, its pale light coming through the window and gently filling up Billy’s room. 

Billy was deep asleep when a cold, skinny finger poked him in the center of his forehead. Another gentle poke and then another one. Nothing.

The Dream Catcher hesitated. Perhaps, this was a bad idea. He should leave, he thought. Forget this whole matter and go back to catching dreams, like he did each night.

But, how had the boy woken up without his knowledge? The matter was too important, too tricky, too personal. 

He gave Billy’s head another gentle, hesitating poke. Then, exasperated, one final poke, without hesitation or gentleness. Two eyes stared back at him. 

It was fair to say that both felt a touch of relief.

“You’re back,” said Billy, rubbing his eyes.

“Matters remain unresolved. And I do not like that,” said the Dream Catcher, taking a seat like he had a fortnight before. 

“Are you here to show me your diary?” Billy smiled.

“I am here to ask you. How did you wake up without my knowledge? Such a thing is not possible.”

“Aren’t you the expert? You tell me.”

“If I could tell you, I would not be here now, would I?”

“Asking a 12-year-old doesn’t seem like the smartest idea, does it?”

The Dream Catcher sighed. 

“Don’t you have like some expert or like a Master Dream Catcher that you could go ask? Or maybe another one of you?”

“Another one of me? A Master Dream Catcher?” the Dream Catcher felt insulted, his patience thinning. “There is no another one of me, boy. There is no master Dream Catcher, unless you’re referring to me! I am the master and the grandmaster. I am not just a Dream Catcher. I am THE DREAM CATCHER!!!”

The thin man in the dark cloak was on his feet. His eyes had turned black, the white in them had disappeared. You could tell he was angry. And so could Billy.

“Gee, I’m sorry. Don’t take it so personal. I was just asking.”

The Dream Catcher sighed, rubbing his temple gently. “I know. I apologize. I am not used to talking to mortals. I am not used to talking at all.”

Silence. 

“Can I ask you a question?” Billy asked. He had been wanting to ask the Dream Catcher this question as soon as he had woken up the morning after that first night. It had been weighing on him since and it was the reason he had wanted the Dream Catcher to return.

“Yes, you may ask. I cannot stop you. But I cannot guarantee an answer.”

Billy nodded.

“Why do I…” Billy hesitated. He wanted to be careful with his words. “What dreams do I see? I never remember any, ever. Other kids tell me their dreams. At least the parts they remember. But… I never remember any at all. Do I even dream? Do you always catch all my dreams?”

The Dream Catcher sat in his seat, quiet like a meditating monk. He knew the answer, of course. But he looked at Billy’s innocent eyes and hesitated. 

Silence followed silence, until it didn’t.

“Do you know why I catch the dreams mortals dream, Billy?” It was the first time he said Billy’s name.

Billy shook his head.

“Because mortal minds would get too heavy if they remembered all their dreams. My own mind would get too heavy, and I am not even a mortal being. Not like you, anyways. That is why I put the dreams in my diary. And the diary is what gets heavy. Not my mind and not yours. Reality is hard enough for you mortals, dreams would only sink you further.”

“But as I said before, I am not perfect. Sometimes, I miss dreams. Little pieces. Those pieces are what people remember, some good, some nightmares. Sometimes, a dream is so deep that even if I catch it, it may have left an imprint on a mind. Like gashes on a stone left by the flowing water of a river. You can take all the water out but one look at the stones and you can tell there once flowed a river.”

“Do you understand all this, Billy?”

Billy nodded. 

“You do dream, Billy. I cannot tell you the dreams you dream. That, I’m afraid is forbidden. But rest assured, you do dream. It may be that the dreams are not deep enough to leave an imprint on your mind, or it may be that the dreams are so deep that your sleeping mind buries them away, hiding them from your waking mind. Which one it is, I am no one to say.”

But the Dream Catcher, of course, knew which one it was. He had always known, for he knew all dreams that had ever been dreamed. Some secrets are best left untouched, he thought.

“I shall leave now. I will return with a solution to our problem.”

The Dream Catcher stood up, and started toward the window. He stood in the window, the moonlight making his face paler. 

“On second thought, perhaps it might be best to simply forget all about this matter. If you can promise to keep it a secret. And you shall never see me again,” the Dream Catcher said, his eyes fixed on the moon.

Billy remained silent. He didn’t want the Dream Catcher to go away. There was something else weighing on Billy’s mind. A dream. 

“Very well, then,” the Dream Catcher said, “I will return tomorrow night. You have until then to think. If you can promise, that would be the end of our problem. But remember, a promise is not to be taken lightly.”

And then the Dream Catcher was gone, leaving Billy in his room, alone.

The next morning, Billy sat in the kitchen. It was a Sunday morning, and the Maynard household made waffles every Sunday morning.

Billy sat looking at the plate of chocolate chip waffles in front of him. But his mind had been somewhere else all morning. The waffles lay there, untouched. 

“What happened, dear? Why so quiet today? Aren’t you hungry?” said Mrs. Maynard. She brought her own plate of chocolate chip waffles, and a cup of black coffee with a little bit of cream, to the table and sat across Billy. 

The faint sunlight filtered through the square window next to them, kissing them softly on one side of their faces. 

“Oh umm. Nothing. Just a bit sleepy, I guess,” Billy lied. Now, Billy could be a good liar, but his mother could always tell, as is the nature of mothers. 

“Well, it’s good for a change. Now I know what people mean by a quiet Sunday morning.” She smiled. She had always had a beautiful smile. 

Billy gave a half-hearted smile. This concerned Mrs. Maynard.

“Billy, what is it, dear? Did something happen at school?” she reached across the table and put her hands on top of Billy’s. 

“Can I ask you a question, Mom?” Billy asked, avoiding his mother’s anxious brown eyes.

Billy had never asked his mother this before. Usually, he simply asked questions.

“Oh, kiddo. Of course, you can.” 

“You won’t be mad? Promise?”

“Of course not, you know that.”

“Promise?”

“Pinky promise,” she said with a reassuring smile.

The kitchen lay silent for a few seconds, then Billy asked a question that had never been asked in the Maynard household. It was an unwritten rule, for as long as Billy could remember. Not only that, Billy had never even thought about it before. Not until the night he had met the Dream Catcher.

“Where is Dad?” the silence broke. And then filled the house again, just as quickly.

Mrs. Maynard sat frozen. The air was knocked out of her lungs. Her heart might as well have stopped pumping blood through her body. 

They never talked about Billy’s dad, as if he had never existed. 

It might have been a few minutes before she started to breathe and could feel her heart beat again. 

“You’ve never asked me that before, Billy,” she said, her voice heavy. 

“I know.”

“Why then? Why today?”

“I…” Billy considered telling her the truth. The truth was simple and honest. But Billy felt he could not be honest, not today, not about this. He did not understand it himself, not entirely, why he had asked his mother about his father. Why after all those years? He could not understand it, and so he thought his mother would not understand it either. What could have been simple and honest, was now simply dishonest. “I just…Rosy has a dad. And Jack. And everyone at school. I thought maybe I…” his voice trailed off. 

“Billy, I…” Mrs. Maynard herself doubted if she should choose the truth or the lie. The truth was honest but not simple. And so she chose the truth. “I don’t remember, Billy.”

“You don’t remember?”

“Years ago, when you were little, there was an incident. I don’t remember what it was just like I don’t remember when it was exactly just like I don’t remember anything before it. It’s almost like a forgotten dream.”

“There was a time when I tried to remember but after a while, I gave up. I had you to worry about and take care of. So that’s what I did. It’s why we don’t know anybody except a few people in this town. I don’t remember any of it.”

“It’s as if one day, out of nowhere, it was just you and me, and this town. So I just lived with it. And that is all there is to it.”

Mrs. Maynard’s eyes welled with tears that flowed down her cheeks like an autumn rain, the faded scars in her heart turned back into bleeding wounds. 

Billy walked over to his mother. “I’m sorry, mom. I will never ask about him again. Please don’t cry.”

No other words were spoken that morning. Billy hugged his mother, hoping his tears might ease her pain somehow. Her pain hurt him like it was his own. It was Billy and his mother in this world, in this small town, and it had always been that way, for as long as he could remember. He did not want to hurt her. No more questions.

Not to her, at least.

The moon shone even brighter the next night. The wind was strong and the leaves held onto the trees like a child holds onto her mother’s hand in a crowded street. Billy sat on his bed, waiting, his legs dangling from the edge of the bed facing the window. The wooden chair sat in front of him, empty. Until it wasn’t.

A tall figure sat in front of him, his dark cloak touched the floor. 

The cloak was dark, not black. Black is a color, like any other color, and you could tell black. But the cloak could not be black, it was as if it didn’t have any color at all. It was absent of all color. Like gazing into a black hole at the edge of the Universe.

“Evening, Billy,” said the Dream Catcher, a slight smile on his face for the briefest of moments. He did not want to believe it, not yet, but it felt nice talking to someone.

“Evening, Dreamcatcher?” Billy said, unsure if that was his actual name. “Is that your real name?”

“Real name? Are there not real names, Billy?” the Dream Catcher asked calmly.

“I guess there are. Like Rosy isn’t her real name. It’s Rose but we all call her Rosy.”

“Rosy is a nice name. And she has nice dreams, I would know. And yes, you can call me the Dream Catcher. The only one.”

“Did your mom give you that name?”

The Dream Catcher wasn’t sure if it was a genuine question or if he was being mocked by a 12-year-old kid. He scratched his eyebrow.

“I gave it to myself,” he said at last, hoping that would end the discussion.

It did.

Then, the Dream Catcher asked, “Now, the matter at hand. Have you given any thought to my question last night?”

“Yes, I have given some thought to the matter at hand,” Billy said, imitating the Dream Catcher. 

“Do not mock me, kid.”

“You are too serious, Dream Catcher. And can we give you a different name? Like a nickname? Your name feels weird to say out loud. And to be honest with you, it’s not even a proper name. It’s more like a job title.”

The Dream Catcher realized it was going to be another long night. He had hoped for a quick resolution. A fool’s hope. He liked his mortal contact a bit less now. 

“I would prefer if you don’t,” he said at last. 

“Maybe we could call you Dreamy. Or Catchy! No, that’s no good.”

The Dream Catcher buried his face in his hands. 

“Alright, fine. I’ll keep calling you the Dream Catcher.” Billy said, seeing his ideas weren’t being appreciated. 

“Thank you,” said the Dream Catcher, “Now can we get back to what’s important. Do you, Billy Maynard, swear on your dreams and on your mind, sleeping and waking, to never reveal me to anyone, ever. You are not to mention my name, not my existence, not our tryst. You are to forget me like all your dreams. Do you promise?”

“I promise…” Billy started. The Dream Catcher’s lips started to curl into a slight smile. “But first, I have a wish. Or a condition let’s say, since you’re not a Genie.” Billy finished. 

The smile on the Dream Catcher’s face disappeared just as quickly as it had come. He could just show Billy all his dreams, all at once, and make him lose his mind. He hadn’t done it in the last few hundred years. It was an option, though. No, he couldn’t do it to a kid, he thought. That would be too cruel. He could simply take Billy with him. But he wondered if Billy would ever stop talking. He wanted to avoid a fate where someone would call him ‘Catchy’. So he dropped that thought as well. 

At a loss for options, he finally said. “What is the condition?”

“Not so fast. Do you, the Dream Catcher, lord of all dreams that have been dreamed but not of the dreams that will be dreamed, because you lack imagination, swear on your neversleeping mind, and that diary you love so much, that once you hear my condition, you will not hesitate but grant me that wish?” Billy said, standing on his bed, again imitating the Dream Catcher. 

“I do not swear any such swears, kid.” The Dream Catcher said, calmly and casually.

“Bummer.”

“But, I can swear that I will give it fair consideration once I hear it. If it seems reasonable, I might grant you your wish.”

“That seems kind of wishy-washy to me.”

“That is all you can get.”

Billy considered it for a moment. Then, told the Dream Catcher his condition.

“Absolutely not!” The Dream Catcher blasted. 

“Oh come on.”

“I cannot and shall not give you my diary. It is not to be toyed with. The price is too high.”

Of course, Billy had known this. There was no way he would get his diary. Then he told the Dream Catcher his real condition.

“I have a question I need to ask. And if you give me an honest answer, I swear I will never reveal your name or existence to anyone.”

“The question being?” The Dream Catcher did not want to be tricked. 

“No. No more games, Dream Catcher. A swear for a swear. Do you swear you will answer honestly?” Billy asked, his voice serious and strong.

The Dream Catcher took a moment. There were truths and there were half-truths and omitted truths. He did not need to lie. He agreed.

“I swear. But remember, one question. No more. No less.”

“Can you tell me anything about…” Billy caught himself. That was the wrong way to phrase the question. He could not waste his one chance. 

“Tell me about my dad,” he said.

“That…is not a question. You must ask a question,” said the Dream Catcher.

Billy stood there, thinking and trying to phrase his question properly. He thought of loopholes that might be used against him. Then, he asked.

“Do I ever dream about my dad?”

The Dream Catcher was somewhat relieved. He knew the answer, the truth. But, the Dream Catcher also knew the truth had a steep price. So, he lied, or chose an omitted truth. It was a moral gray area at best. 

“No,” was all he said.

“Okay,” said Billy, disappointed. 

“A swear for a swear,” said the Dream Catcher.

“That is true. But…”

“No, but. No if, kid. A swear for a swear!”

“What is the price of a lie?” asked Billy. The Dream Catcher hesitated. He felt the scales tip slowly out of his favor.

“If a swear is broken, if a lie is told, the price is high. The one who has been wronged shall name the price,” he said. 

Billy let the words sink in. “You lied to me.”

“There is no ground for your claim.” He smiled knowingly.

“Is that so?”

The Dream Catcher looked puzzled.

“I saw him. The night I woke up. The night I saw you the first time. I saw my dad.”

The Dream Catcher’s eyes went dark and he was up on his feet. “Impossible! Do not lie to me, kid! You don’t know what I am capable of!!” The Dream Catcher was furious.

“I’m not lying!”

“You don’t even remember your dreams. You don’t remember any of your dreams. You said so yourself.”

“And I was honest. Until that night. It is the only dream I remember as if it’s the only dream I have ever dreamed. At first, I did not realize it was my father. I saw a man in my dream. It was almost as if it was a memory. But I realized over the last few days, it had to be my father. I just know!”

“You lie!” the Dream Catcher pulled Billy by the collar of his t-shirt and Billy’s feet dangled above the floor of his room. The moonlight formed a shadow of their figures on the wall across. They both stood in front of the window. Well, the Dream Catcher stood while Billy hung in the air, held by the Dream Catcher’s hands. 

“I’M NOT LYING!!!” Billy shouted, loud enough to wake his mother and all the mothers in the neighborhood. But nothing happened. Nobody woke up.

Billy did not try to wriggle his way out and he did not try to fight. He stared directly into the Dream Catcher’s dark and hollow eyes. The Dream Catcher was furious and so was Billy.

This was his chance, his only chance, to know the truth about his father. He knew he could never ask his mother again and if not her, then who? The cloaked figure in his room was his only chance. 

He needed the answers. 

The Dream Catcher saw the resolve in Billy’s eyes. He knew those eyes could not lie. Liars are easy to tell, he thought. He put him down and straightened Billy’s clothes, and his hair. He held him by his shoulders, his grip firm yet gentle. 

 “I did not see you dream that night. There was no dream. Not that night,” he said, his voice calm.

“But I saw it. I saw my father. I have never seen him, not even a picture. But I know it was him. And then I woke up and saw you.”

“This…is most interesting. A hidden dream. This has never happened before. Not in decades. Not in centuries. Not in forever.”

“Can dreams be hidden from you?”

“They cannot. That is why this intrigues me. That is why we must fear.”

“We?” If Billy had no fear before, it was slowly finding its way to him.

“Yes, we. It is your dream, hidden from me. That binds us in this. Tell me what the dream was.”

“I…I don’t remember the dream. Not exactly. I just remember the face of the man. That is all I remember.”

“The rest of it must be buried deep within you, then.”

“Or my mind could have erased it?”

“Let’s hope it’s the first one.”

“Why?”

The Dream Catcher looked at the moon. He took a deep breath, the cool air filled up his lungs, if he had lungs. He held the air within him, and closed his eyes. He stood there, motionless. Billy looked at him, closely for the first time.

He could see the Dream Catcher’s skin. Flawless. But something was different about it. His hair moved slowly with the breeze, almost as if they were floating in water, and so did his cloak. He saw a cut on the Dream Catcher’s temple and one on his left cheek, close to the eye. It was the first time he noticed them. They must have faded a long time ago, maybe centuries ago, but just a hint remained. Almost invisible. 

The Dream Catcher released his breath and came to life. He looked at Billy. A sadness filled his eyes, more pity than sadness. There was only one way out of this. And he pitied it had to be this beautiful twelve year old boy. Billy looked at the Dream Catcher’s eyes. He must have sensed the sadness and the pity because a strong fear gripped him like a rope, tightening around his body.

“There is only one way, I’m afraid,” said the Dream Catcher, finally.

Billy stood silent. It was his turn to be motionless. 

Slowly, gracefully, the Dream Catcher pulled out his diary from his pocket. He took Billy’s hand in his own and placed it on top of the diary. The diary of all dreams, of many colors and as old as the Dream Catcher, lay between the Dream Catcher’s palm and Billy’s palm. The diary, that held all dreams that had ever been dreamed. Except for one dream. Billy’s dream. The only hidden dream that must be found. 

Then Billy heard a smooth voice, a voice that sounded almost hollow, a voice he knew to be of the dark-cloaked figure. 

“We must unearth the dream from within you. We must find it. And for that, we must go into my diary.”

The moonlight flowed through the same window. The curtains fluttered in the cool breeze. But there was no one in the room now. Not anymore. Billy was no longer in the world of mortals. He was in the Dream Catcher’s diary.

In 1889, W. B. Yeats, now considered one of the most influential poets of the 20^th century, met Maud Gonne. Yeats was 24 years old, Maud 18 months younger than him. Smitten, he proposed to her. Maud rejected him. Over the next few years, he proposed several more times, each time facing rejection from this unrequited love he so pined for. The love that he would carry with him for several decades. 

At one point, Yeats confessed to Maud that he wasn’t happy without her, to which she replied, “Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness, and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.” 

8 years after Yeats’ death, a Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, wrote his masterpiece in 1947. “Do not go gentle into that good night” was first published in 1951, just two years before Dylan drank himself into a coma while visiting New York City, his chronic chest illness exacerbated by the burst of air pollution in the city. He died on November 9, 1953. When his wife arrived at the hospital, she flew into a drunken rage and had to be put into a straightjacket and committed to a private psychiatric rehab facility. 

“‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is a rapturous ode to the unassailable tenacity of the human spirit,” writes Maria Popova on her wonderfully timeless blog, The Marginalian.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

This “unassailable tenacity of the human spirit” seems to be under attack lately by another creation borne out of human ingenuity: Artificial Intelligence or AI. If you have not been living in an igloo in the Arctic wilderness for the past year or so, then you must have heard about AI and the seemingly techno-optimistic promises of the tech industry regarding how AI (and eventually Artificial General Intelligence or AGI) will be the benevolent savior of all humanity (or the malevolent destroyer, depending on who you ask).

Obviously, there are questions about Large Language Models and their suitability toward achieving the goal of AGI, questions about the singularity,  questions about the ethical and social impact of AI over the global society, about the impact of such models on climate change and resource allocation. There are also questions about anthropomorphizing AI technologies. But, let us put all these concerns aside for now. 

In this essay, I want to focus on a very specific issue, which is AI art. Or, AI and art. In the past two years, there has been a rise in offerings by the tech industry that sell a seemingly innocuous yet insidious dream to us. Tools that reduce the artistic process to a few sentences being entered into a text box and an algorithm generating art for us to use and enjoy and marvel at. With a few sentences, we can instantly generate novels, poetry, paintings, and videos using tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, DALL-E, and others. How easy and simple, right? It has never been easier to create art. Not just easier, but faster as well. The entire process has been optimized. We can achieve peak productivity. On demand. So what’s the problem? 

When we name outputs of a probabilistic model as “art,” we are at risk of reducing human creation and suffering to a state of data processing. 

This is where it becomes important to make the distinction between art and content. And between the people who make art and the ones who make content. The distinction is important, yet we somehow miss this in most conversations on this topic. 

I think intuitively we know the difference. No one would ever call the Mona Lisa content, just like no one would call Homer’s Odyssey content. Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List would never be branded as content. Shakespeare’s plays are not content. Yeats’ poetry is not content. 

Yet, there are a lot of people who do create content daily. Whether it is photographers doing photoshoots for a travel agency, or copywriters writing blog posts for companies, or influencers creating videos on different social media platforms. Intuitively, we know what is content and what is art when we see it. But somewhere along the way, we forgot to make this distinction. 

It is beneficial for content creators perhaps to be able to optimize their workflows. To be able to quickly generate some graphics for an ad company, to be quickly able to write a 1000-word article for a company blog. The more they can accomplish quickly, the more they can earn. These generative AI products become tools to optimize their productivity in their jobs. All is good. 

But artists, on the other hand, do not want to optimize their productivity. They have different motivations. They think differently about their art form, about their craft. To them, it is not about making deadlines, not necessarily. But instead, about taking time with the process itself.

One group is not better than the other. The two groups simply have different motivations. In many cases, the same person might be part of both groups at different times. A writer might be working on her novel, her art, while also working as a freelance copywriter to pay the bills, her content. And she would feel differently about AI and its use depending on what she is working on. But again, making that distinction is important. But left to their own devices, companies will blur this distinction if that means higher profits.

Art is not about optimization. There is a certain “humanness” in art that cannot simply be replicated by an algorithm. Art and humanity are interconnected. Being human is not just a function of inputs and outputs.

Being human is to contend with the reality of death. We live our lives with the impending doom of death yet we live a life filled with various emotions. We feel love and hate, joy and grief. We suffer and we see suffering around us. We feel. And our art is borne out of those feelings, be it rational, illogical, or esoteric feelings.

When Edward Hopper paints the Nighthawks in the lightless loneliness of New York City during World War 2, that loneliness is reflected in his art. When Yeats writes about his love in his poems, his heartbreak carries over to his words. When we expose ourselves to these artworks, be it paintings or novels or poetry or movies or music, they resonate with us because, at a fundamental level, we know that the artist must have felt the same emotions we are feeling at that moment. We are two consciousnesses suspended in two different moments in time and space, having a conversation. We both know that we are human. 

Anything generated using AI, no matter how objectively good or subjectively beautiful, is devoid of all meaning and emotion. AI never had to lose a loved one. It never had to struggle with anxiety nor did it ever have to question its self-worth. AI has no regrets, no compassion. There is no suffering in AI, something humanity has been facing since the beginning. 

That is why, I believe, there is no such thing as AI art because if it is generated by AI, it is not art. It is a piece of text, image, or video. It is content. And it is important to make this distinction because art is a deeply human endeavor. If we forget this, we might forget entirely what it means to be human.  

Why do we feel what we feel when writers bare their hearts and souls into their writings? When Sylvia Plath writes about the fig tree in The Bell Jar, when William Wordsworth writes about daffodils, when Dickens writes about human relationships and morality in his Victorian stories, or when Rumi writes “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?” every reader feels what the writer felt in that moment.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar 

In his wonderful and poignant book, Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar writes beautifully about language.

“I have heard people say smell is the sense most attached to memory, but for me it is always language, if language can be thought of as a sense, which of course it can be. Compared to even the dullest dog humans can smell nothing. But compare us with—what?— a monkey who can say "apple" with her hands?—and we are the gods of language, everything else just chirping and burping. And how fitting, too, that our superpower as a species, the source of our divinity, stems from such a broken invention.
It was invented, of course, language. The first baby didn't come out speaking Farsi or Arabic or English or anything. We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqi and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an officer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong.”

Language, a human invention, is an imperfect tool that allows us to communicate with each other, to scream at each other, to laugh with each other. It is imperfect just like its creators. Imperfections in art become a feature, not a bug because we see ourselves in it. The imperfections arise from us and dissolve within our creations. There is beauty in our imperfections and our transient nature.

As Fitzgerald wrote, “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

In a 2022 interview with the Louisiana Channel, a non-profit website based at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, poet and author Ocean Vuong says, “When I write, I feel much larger than the limits of my body. There is a mystery you tap into that is much bigger. And the poem becomes just a glimpse into what you reveal to yourself.”

To him, poetry gives us power, a way for us to deal with the uncertainty of our lives, and to save ourselves. He says, “I think no one saves us in this world, but people give us the tools so that we can transform towards our own rescue. And I think that is true of poems. We write them, and they're good enough, and then we let them go. Part of the act of writing is abandonment.”

“Art is where what we survive survives,” Akbar writes in Martyr! And I think it perfectly encapsulates the humanity and the human need in and of art. 

“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs,” writes Anthony Doerr in All The Light We Cannot See. Such is the beauty of art. 

Am I simply romanticizing art and humanity? Maybe. 

But is that really a bad thing? We want to find beauty. We are not mere productivity machines stuck in an endless optimization algorithm. Life, and humanity, are not just about shareholder value and efficiency and productivity. It is about breathing, about beauty, about sunrises and sunsets, about the smell of soft mud after rain, about love and grief, about joy, about death.

I feel I do have an obligation to say a few words in support of AI, lest our future overlords take offense at this essay which will ultimately end up being ingested by some AI algorithm somewhere. 

AI is a tool. It is a piece of software to be used. It is not inherently bad, just like a hammer is not inherently bad. A hammer does not replace the human hand, it is a tool that is to be wielded to make certain tasks easier. 

AI is used in many different domains today to improve our lives. It is used to predict weather patterns with higher accuracy which can save many lives, and lets us decide a few days in advance if Sunday would be a good day to wear that new suede jacket outside. It is used to optimize energy usage in data centers that power the internet to make them more efficient and save energy. It is used in computational biology to identify cells in human tissue so we can better understand their properties, which can help improve our understanding of disease and aging. It is used to identify contrails with satellite imagery so we can better understand air pollution caused by flights. It is being used to unravel the mysteries of damaged papyrus scrolls from Pompeii that were buried when Vesuvius exploded centuries ago. The list goes on but this list should not include the creation of art. And that is a choice we collectively have to make. 

Here’s Nick Cave talking about ChatGPT creating a song.  “Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.”

We all suffer in our own ways. Art helps us understand our suffering. At the very least, art enables us to make a feeble attempt at making sense of our sufferings.

Here is Nick Cave again, since no one has said it better.

“ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter’ you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier,’ is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.
ChatGPT’s intent is to eliminate the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself. Why strive?, it contends. Why bother with the artistic process and its accompanying trials? Why shouldn’t we make it ‘faster and easier?’
[…]
As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides. Nature reminds us of this constantly. The world is often cast as a purely malignant place, but still the joy of creation exerts itself, and as the sun rises upon the struggle of the day, the Great Crested Grebe dances upon the water. It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.”

What do we lose when we let AI create art? We lose a part of our humanness. And ultimately, when all art becomes a mere commodity, we lose ourselves, banished on this floating rock without any beauty, only to be swallowed by a dying star one day. The choice rests with us. 

There is a popular story, as Alan Light recounts in his wonderful book “The Holy or The Broken,” about a meeting between Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. In the mid-1980s, Dylan and Cohen were having coffee at a cafe in Paris. Admiring each other’s work, Dylan asked Cohen about a song of his, then largely unknown, and how long it took him to write it. Cohen responded, “A couple of years,” which he later said was probably a lie. It had taken him more than a couple of years. Then, Cohen asked Dylan about one of his songs, “I and I,” and how long it took Dylan to write it. Dylan’s response? “Fifteen minutes.” This brief interaction is a great example of a striking difference between two types of artists: conceptual innovators and experimental innovators.

The song that Cohen mentioned, which took him “a couple of years” to write, was “Hallelujah”. It is a song you have most likely heard, either the original or one of the countless covers. Maybe you watched Jeff Buckley sing it in a YouTube video (which currently has over 200 million views). Maybe you came across this song in passing and just didn’t know what it’s called. If you don’t know this song, or can’t remember it (although I find it hard to believe), then please do me a favor. Go listen to it right now before reading the rest of this essay, or while reading it. Listen to Leonard Cohen’s version, John Cale’s version, Rufus Wainwright’s version, and Jeff Buckley’s version. Each version is as beautiful as the other, although Buckley’s version transcends them all. But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to the 1980s.

It took Cohen over four years to write Hallelujah. It was a process filled with agony, writing over eighty verses, stuck in a cycle of writing and discarding. In one of the interviews Cohen gave later in his life, he talks about this torment.

“The trouble — it’s not the world’s trouble, and it’s a tiny trouble, I don’t want you to think that this is a significant trouble — my tiny trouble is that before I can discard a verse, I have to write it. I have to work on it, and I have to polish it and bring it to as close to finished as I can. It’s only then that I can discard it.”

In 1984, Leonard Cohen and John Lissauer, his producer on the album Various Positions, which included Hallelujah, took the record to Walter Yetnikoff, the president of CBS Records at the time. Cohen and Lissauer were excited and confident. As Lissauer recalls, “Man, we’re on top of this. This is gonna be the breakthrough.” Yetnikoff’s response?

“What is this? This isn’t pop music. We’re not releasing it. This is a disaster.”

I can imagine the heartbreak Cohen and Lissauer must have felt. I can also imagine Cohen singing, 

“I've heard there was a secret chord,
That David played, and it pleased the Lord,
But you don't really care for music, do ya?”

Ultimately, Various Positions did release in 1984, thanks to the independent label PVC Records. The album, in fact, was not the breakthrough. And Hallelujah, the first song on the LP’s second side, went unnoticed. Nobody cared. It seemed Hallelujah was fated for a quick extinction and would disappear into the void like most music, like a ‘broken Hallelujah’.

For several years after its disappointing release, Cohen kept working on Hallelujah like a sculptor, chiseling away at it. By some accounts, he may have written fifteen pages of verses, constantly adding and removing and modifying, trying to crack the code. In one rendition, he made it longer and darker, making it less spiritual and more sexual, ending it with the cold pessimism of a very broken hallelujah. The song seemed uncrackable. Until John Cale stumbled upon it.

In 1991, the French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles assembled a tribute album of Cohen’s works. There was Nick Cave’s cover of “Tower of Song” and the Pixies’ cover of “I Can’t Forget” among many others. Nestled between that beauty, gently resting and waiting to be discovered, was a budding Hallelujah by John Cale. Cale was a fan of Cohen’s music and saw Cohen perform Hallelujah in New York once. He loved the song so much that he asked Cohen to send him the lyrics. As Cale recounts, “I had one of those old fax machines. I went out to dinner and my floor was covered in paper.” Cohen had sent him close to fifteen pages full of verses.

Cale reworked the song, piecing together the spiritual and the sexual, balancing the faith in God with tragic romance, ending the song on a broken hallelujah. Hallelujah, while still years away from its eventual success, was a step closer to it with Cale’s version. While some artists started covering the song, it still remained oblivious to the audiences at large. But one person, a young artist, took notice, and it would change the trajectory of this song and Cohen’s life.

In 1992, a young artist by the name of Jeff Buckley was cat-sitting for a friend, Janine Nichols, while she was out of town for a few days with her family. Going through some records, he found Hallelujah, John Cale’s version. He started doing a rendition of Hallelujah as part of his set wherever he played and soon it became his signature. With each performance, Buckley reworked the song, playing with its feel and emotion, searching for the perfect Hallelujah. “It was the perfect song for Jeff Buckley”, recalled Steve Berkowitz, an A&R executive at Columbia Records in 1992, “because of his voice but also because of how he looked singing it. It’s a song that begins with King David, and Jeff kind of looked like Michelangelo’s David. And when he sang it, it was as if a Renaissance painting had come to life.”

As Buckley’s popularity grew, he was signed by Columbia Records to make his debut album. While Buckley and his producer tinkered with many songs, debating what should end up on the album, there was one song that had solidified its position on the track list: Buckley’s Hallelujah. Constantly reshaping it, Buckley must have recorded twenty versions of the song for his debut album, Grace. It seemed he had finally cracked the code and the song, which started its journey almost fifteen years ago, would finally attain the success it so deserved. In 1994, Grace was released amid a lot of hype but flopped. It received some limited success outside of the US but Hallelujah remained abandoned. Nobody paid any attention to it. While the song had achieved perfection under Buckley, it seems genius is not always recognized. It remained, even after fifteen years, largely forgotten. Sometimes, it is simply the wrong time for a work of art and it needs a bit more time. And sometimes, genius is simply denied by the gatekeepers.

Around 1961, a charming young writer and professor from New Orleans was drafted into the US military to serve in Puerto Rico, teaching English to Spanish-speaking recruits. John Kennedy Toole, motivated by his desire to get a private office, quickly climbed the ranks and attained the rank of sergeant within a year. Toole had borrowed a typewriter from his friend, David Kubach. Late at night, Toole typed away at his typewriter, working on a novel: a comic story of Ignatius J. Reilly and his tirade against everything and everyone in the world, set in New Orleans. “A Confederacy of Dunces” is the funniest novel I have ever read, and it was almost lost to us. A work of genius that was denied a life.

After receiving a hardship discharge from the military in 1963, Toole returned home to New Orleans and started teaching at Dominican College. He stopped writing for a while, especially after falling into severe depression after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but ultimately completed the novel in 1964. He submitted the manuscript to the publisher Simon and Schuster, where it reached the desk of Robert Gottlieb, a young but influential editor at the time. Gottlieb was also responsible for the publication of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” although not all stories have a happy ending.

Robert Gottlieb and Toole were mired in a correspondence that lasted several years, with neither satisfied with the other. Toole wanted to publish his novel as he had written it. Gottlieb had some issues with the novel which he saw as crucial points that needed to be revised, in addition to one big issue. Gottlieb felt that while the novel was funny, it didn’t have any meaning. According to him, it wasn’t really about anything. As Gottlieb wrote in one of his letters to Toole, “What must happen is that they [various threads in the book] must be strong and meaningful all the way through…In other words, there must be a point to everything you have in the book, a real point, not just amusingness that's forced to figure itself out.”

Ultimately, Toole grew weary of Gottlieb’s demands and asked him to return the manuscript as he couldn’t see a way forward. As Toole wrote to Gottlieb, “Aside from a few deletions, I don't think I could really do much to the book now—and of course even with revisions you might not be satisfied.” Toole was devastated. Gottlieb suggested Toole write something else, but Toole believed in his novel. He simply could not give up on the book. In a letter to Gottlieb, he said, “I don't want to throw these characters away. In other words, I'm going to work on the book again. I haven't been able to look at the manuscript since I got it back, but since something of my soul is in the thing, I can't let it rot without trying.”

In one of his last letters to Toole, Gottlieb encouraged Toole to revise the novel and if he did so, Gottlieb would consider it. He would “read, reread, edit, perhaps publish, generally cope, until you are fed up with me. What more can I say?” At the end of this years-long ordeal, Toole was so heartbroken that he ceased work on his novel. In the years since, many people have studied Toole’s life and Gottlieb’s role in it. 

In 2012, Cory MacLauchlin wrote a book on Toole’s life called “Butterfly in the Typewriter.” It makes a strong case for Gottlieb’s unfair and flawed handling of Toole’s manuscript. Gottlieb essentially failed to understand what Dunces was and never gave it a fair shot. He was looking for something that didn’t exist, a version of Dunces that had an inherent meaning to it. Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David like to say that Seinfeld, probably the biggest TV sitcom that ran on NBC from the late 80s to mid 90s, was a show about nothing. What if NBC had said, “Yes it’s funny. But it needs to have inherent meaning. Not just episodic comedy, but it needs to be meaningful all the way through?” If that had happened, Seinfeld would never have seen the light of day.

“Butterfly in the Typewriter” also makes the case that Gottlieb never knew himself what he specifically wanted Toole to do. He had some criticisms but as a whole, he didn’t understand what he wanted Dunces to be. Was it supposed to be a literary work that may not sell very well but would be critically acclaimed, or was it supposed to be a book that sold well irrespective of what the literary scholars thought of it? As the noted Toole scholar Jane Bethune comments, “He [Gottlieb] just said, it needs more work, it needs more work. And as an artist I don’t think that Toole was ready to do that. Nor should he have because what he had was a gem, a masterpiece. And he knew it. But the authority figure didn’t know it and asked him to do something else with it – which would have destroyed it.”

Leslie Marsh at the University of British Columbia wrote a review of “Butterfly in the Typewriter,” in which she takes Gottlieb’s criticisms of Dunces, and addresses all of them, stating, “Had Gottlieb grasped the notion of the picaresque, the vulgar demand for meaning would be redundant.” In Butterfly, MacLauchlin writes, “From this vast parade, Toole selected, merged, refined, and wove characters together with all the absurdities that form the human condition.” If you have read Dunces, you know that few books have such an eclectic mix of characters, each better (and more outrageously a dunce) than the previous. 

In her review, Leslie Marsh perfectly states the importance of editors and the tightly interwoven relationship between a writer and an editor. “Exceptional writers need exceptional editors: how different would the world’s intellectual landscape have been were it not for the insight and foresight of Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor? Whatever the flaws of Confederacy they do not detract from the palpable quality of the writing, the authenticity of the voice and the sheer delight millions of readers from many countries and all walks of life, have derived from reading it. Confederacy was a promissory note for greatness that came perilously close to oblivion.”

In 1969, at the age of 31, and about five years after finishing “A Confederacy of Dunces,” Toole committed suicide. He had driven to Biloxi, Mississippi, and killed himself by running a garden hose from the exhaust pipe in through the window of his car. The devastation he had felt after the constant rejection of his novel led to a life that had slowly started to fall apart over the years. Once a charming and witty professor, Toole had become increasingly withdrawn over the years. His brilliant, yet denied, work of art would remain atop an armoire in his room for several years, lost to all, slowly gathering dust.

In his book “The Holy or The Broken,” Alan Light writes, “If Leonard Cohen was the author of ‘Hallelujah’ and John Cale was its editor, Jeff Buckley was the song’s ultimate performer. A decade after its original recording, the song had found its defining voice and the Grace recording would essentially become the version against which future versions would be measured.” 

Between 1994, the year Grace came out, and 1997, Leonard Cohen had gained more popularity, with artists like Elton John and U2 covering his songs, and Columbia Records releasing many tribute and compilation albums. Cohen himself had removed himself from the world and was spending his years in a Zen monastery at Mt. Baldy in California. Meanwhile, Buckley had spent his years touring and working on a new record. Then, it all changed.

In 1997, Buckley and his friend impulsively decided to go for a swim in the Wolf River, a tributary of the Mississippi, a spot Buckley had previously visited. In the darkness of the night, Buckley went in swimming, singing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”, and disappeared. Six days later, his body was found by a passing riverboat. At the age of thirty, his star only ascending in popularity, his ambitious dreams still unachieved, Buckley had drowned and left the world. 

I remember stumbling across Buckley’s Hallelujah on YouTube several years ago when I was still an undergraduate student. I thought Buckley’s version was the original. I remember being mesmerized by the song, Buckley’s voice, and his guitar. I listened to it all the time. While researching for this essay, I listened to over 10 different renditions of Hallelujah by different artists, but nothing comes close to Buckley’s version. It holds you and doesn’t let go of you. Maybe I love it because his version feels full of angsty sadness, the feeling you get when you hate that you love someone you can’t have. It is the Hallelujah of a broken heart, a lover in pain unable to move on.

Propelled by the mystique behind Buckley’s sudden death, a plethora of covers started to pop up. In 2001, the soundtrack for the first Shrek movie included Hallelujah. While the movie itself had John Cale’s version, the soundtrack had a new rendition by Rufus Wainwright. Shrek became a global phenomenon and Hallelujah became the Shrek Song! This was followed by a tribute video MTV did for the victims of 9/11 which included Hallelujah as the background track. As the years passed, Hallelujah became one of the most covered songs of all time, popping up in movies and TV shows whenever there was a need for a sad and heartfelt song. 

In 2004, Buckley’s version was included at number 259 in Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Cohen had come down from Mt. Baldy to create more music (partly motivated by an artist’s never-ending thirst and partly by his manager swindling him out of most of his money). In 2009, Cohen gave a performance of Hallelujah at Coachella in California, a festival dominated by, as Alan Light puts it, “tens of thousands of young, jaded Americans.” Cohen was in his 70s by then. His performance transfixed the audience, who joined him in singing and cheered him, to his surprise. Touched by the recognition by an audience he had not expected, with genuine surprise on his face, he took off his fedora, put it to his chest, and nodded in appreciation as his eyes filled with tears. John Lissauer was right in 1984, “This is gonna be the breakthrough…Hallelujah just jumped out at you.” After 2 decades, Cohen’s art was recognized. Cohen, Cale, and Buckley had perfected the secret chord. Hallelujah was in its full glory, with no signs of slowing down.

A few years after John Kennedy Toole’s death, his mother found a manuscript atop an armoire in his room. She started sending it to publishers, believing in her son’s talent and hoping his work would be finally recognized. Over five years, she sent it to seven different publishers, each time facing rejection. In 1976, she started trying to get in touch with Walker Percy, the writer of “The Moviegoer,” who had recently started teaching at Loyola University of New Orleans. After many unsuccessful attempts, one day she went to his office and forced herself in, demanding he read the manuscript or she wouldn’t leave. 

“A Confederacy of Dunces” was published, in its original form as Toole had intended, in 1980. Walker Percy had championed the effort and had made sure that it remained true to its original form. In the foreword to the published novel, Percy writes, “While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown to me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it is a great novel, she said.”

Percy caved and took the manuscript from Toole’s mother. He had hoped to read a few pages, decide it was bad enough, and return it to the mother. In this case, he read on and on, unable to stop. As Percy writes, “First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.”

In 1981, “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, over 15 years after Toole had first finished it, a decade after his tragic death. His genius, denied by the gatekeepers, had finally found recognition. When I was writing this essay, I had my copy of Dunces on the table at a cafe I had been working out of, when a man, likely in his fifties and the look of a professor, walked past me and noticed the book. He said, “That is the funniest book I have ever read,” and walked away to order his coffee at the counter. I am sure many people who have read Toole’s masterpiece would have the same reaction.

On his podcast, Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell presents his theory on two types of artists: conceptual innovators and experimental innovators. Conceptual innovators create their best work early on in their careers. They plan precisely, then execute, often leading to great art and early success, like Picasso and Bob Dylan. Experimental innovators, on the other hand, are slow innovators. They often go through an arduous process of trial and error, perpetually unsatisfied with their work. To these artists, art is elusive, like Cezanne and Leonard Cohen. I think there is a third type, one that is simply denied recognition by the gatekeepers.

Genius is fragile. Success, even more so. One has to wonder how many songs have been written that didn’t have a Jeff Buckley to rescue them from obsolescence. How many manuscripts and artworks lay in forgotten places, lost to us and future generations? I can’t help but feel that the success of an artist, and more importantly, the success of a work of art depends highly on happenstance. Whether we call it luck, or fate, or destiny, or chance, there is certainly some randomness to success and greatness, and if so, then failure for an artist need not always feel final. Perhaps all that’s needed is more time for the work to find its true form. Or maybe it just needs a different gatekeeper, someone who would see the work for what it truly is. What can the artist do? Keep chiseling away at her craft, and say Hallelujah!

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Hey there. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything. Even longer since I’ve shared anything that I’ve written. I’ve been reading. Working. Breathing. 

But, this isn’t about writing. It is about life. Selfishly, it is about my life. Although I have found that talking about my life generally leads back to me talking about writing, both stuck together in an endless tug-of-war. When I thought of the title “A love of life”, I inevitably thought of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society enthusiastically talking about his love for life and poetry and art and creativity. Then I realized how over the years, I have kind of, sort of, just maybe, lost this love a little bit, slowly, gradually, suddenly. Hence, the slight change in the title “or lack thereof”.

I’m not trying to be sentimental or sensational. Not trying to make mountains out of a molehill or whatever that saying is. I realize things could have been a lot worse and the world is full of catastrophe and unfairness and calamity and whatnot. I realize my privileges and my fortunes and I am grateful for all of it. I also realize how easy it is for it all to come to a stop, with nothing but silence remaining and then, not even that. Yet, I can’t help but feel a certain lack of…enthusiasm(?) about life. About things and about people and places and art and everything that surrounds us. I’m not sad. I’m not depressed, not in the clinical sense of the word and not in the lousy throwaway sense of the word that people sometimes use either. I just don’t feel excited about life. A lack of enthusiasm is all there is, pervading every facet of my life.

I’m not really sure when it started. As I foreshadowed, the answer to my plight comes back to, you guessed it right: writing. Or more generally, creativity. At some point, I stopped allowing myself to be creative. Maybe it’s an age thing. As we grow older, we tend to talk ourselves into believing that our childhood dreams, which seemed perfectly reasonable at the time and perfectly achievable, are no longer so. That there is only one place for those dreams to exist and that place is in the past, where they should remain forever, frozen in time, never to be rekindled. I always thought I would be immune to this adult cynicism and skepticism, but I have made the mistake of thinking the laws of nature don’t apply to me. That I’m some exception, not the norm. I have found that the optimism of adolescence is slowly replaced by the practicality of adulthood.

I recently stumbled upon a TED Talk by Ethan Hawke where he said something that really struck a chord with me. A nail in the coffin, an arrow to the heart if you will. Here’s what he said.

“You know, a lot of people really struggle to give themselves permission to be creative. And reasonably so. I mean, we're all a little suspect of our own talent…Because I think that most of us really want to offer the world something of quality, something that the world will consider good or important. And that’s really the enemy because it’s not up to us whether what we do is any good…We know this, the time of our life is so short and how we spend it, are we spending it doing something what’s important to us? Most of us not.”

I think this has been my problem. Something that’s been holding me back, in writing and in life. Ambition without direction is a hellish place to be in and that’s where I have been most of my twenties. And it has really risen out of this desire to do something important, to create something good and meaningful and useful. Something that the world would consider, at the very least, not a waste of time. Yet it is true that the work I do and the things I create or can create and should create, their importance or goodness isn’t something I can evaluate before I do it. 

“There is no path till you walk it, and you have to be willing to play the fool,” says Ethan Hawke. Haruki Murakami says something similar when he talks about whether his work will be considered great or not. It’s not up to him, he says, and the only way to judge the greatness or even goodness of his work is through time. Great work stands the test of time. And only time gets to judge it. Not us mortals. All we can do, all I can do, is give myself permission to be a fool and to be creative, juggling between creatively foolish and foolishly creative.

In his book The Anthropocene Reviewed, author John Green writes, “There’s something deep within me, something intensely fragile, that is terrified of turning itself to the world. I’m scared to even write this down, because I worry that having confessed this fragility, you now know where to punch. I know that if I am hit where I am earnest, I will never recover…But I want to be earnest, even if it is embarrassing.”

I am always in awe of writers and artists and people who are able to bare their souls in front of this world. A world that is ready to punch them where it hurts the most. Perhaps that is why we all wear masks. Every morning we put on an armor so we don’t expose our true selves, our naked selves. We hide our quirks and our eccentricities. We hide what makes us different and unique. We try to act “normal” in a world that wants to pretend everyone is the same: two eyes and a hat on a broomstick. And that leads to a problem. A problem of dishonesty, or at least a lack of honesty. We all are, myself included, dishonest with the people around us and with ourselves. We spend so much time pretending to be someone we are not, that we start believing the lie ourselves and forget our true selves. The mask becomes our real face, our real face gets buried underneath nowhere to be found. 

We are constantly surrounded by other people’s opinions and ideas, family, friends, coworkers, bosses, teachers, gurus, leaders, YouTubers, celebrities, books. In a world so full of noise, it’s almost impossible to listen to ourselves. Who we are becomes an amalgamation of all the voices of the external world. I fear of losing all original thought, what’s innate within me, and only reacting to what’s outside. This is what, I suspect, leads to a life that lacks love for it and enthusiasm for it. And the only way to get it back is to drop the mask. To be honest. And genuine and vulnerable and exposed. “To be earnest, even if it is embarrassing.”

Giving ourselves permission to be creative, in whatever it is that we do, and the permission to fail and look stupid. Being honest in our endeavors, both with others and with ourselves. These are the two basic yet essential requirements for life, happiness, meaning, creativity, and art.

I am slowly trying to be honest with myself and the people around me, slowly trying to remove the armor, as scary as that is. Slowly trying to give myself permission to be creative and to be a fool. There’s a really high likelihood that I might fail, as is the case with any important journey. I want to be honest and I want that to be reflected in my writing, my art, and my life. As Neil Gaiman says, “All fiction has to be as honest as you can make it.” This is true of fiction, and I believe, this is true of all art and all of life. Perhaps then, maybe, just maybe, I will find my lost love for art and for life. And if not, well, what else is there to do?

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— 

It gives a lovely light!

— Edna St. Vincent Millay