The theatre has often been called a whore, meaning its art is impure, but today this is true in another sense—whores take the money and then go short on the pleasure. -Peter Brook

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I recently reread part of Peter Brook’s theatrical didactic The Empty Space, a set of lectures on the performing arts first published in 1968. My worn copy, lifted from the venerable shelves of Magers & Quinn and pre-loved by someone named “J. Kornutsky.” The book divides theater into a neat four-part taxonomy. Theater can be deadly, holy, rough, or immediate. It could even contain all four in one show. I confess I’ve never made it past his lecture on the holy theater, or as he more helpfully labels it, the theater of the invisible-made-visible. Instead, I mostly reread his discussion of the deadly theater. His largest, most labored, and first lecture on the performing arts uses all 41 of its pages to punctiliously elaborate all the ways that theater fails.

No form escapes Brooks’ volcanic analysis. His critique shows no partiality, spares no dilettante’s favored charm. He roughs up musicals, operas, modernist theater, and of course, classical theater (by which he means Shakespeare). In fact, he has a special castigation for Shakespeare.

Of course nowhere does the Deadly Theatre install itself so securely, so comfortably and so slyly as in the works of William Shakespeare. We see his plays done by good actors in what seems like the proper way—they look lively and colourful, there is music and everyone is all dressed up, just as they are supposed to be in the best of classical theatres. Yet secretly we find it excruciatingly boring -- and in our hearts we either blame Shakespeare, or theatre as such, or even ourselves. To make matters worse there is always a deadly spectator, who for special reasons enjoys a lack of intensity and even a lack of entertainment, such as the scholar who emerges from routine performances of the classics smiling because nothing has distracted him from trying over and confirming his pet theories to himself, whilst reciting his favourite lines under his breath. In his heart he sincerely wants a theatre that is nobler-than-life and he confuses a sort of intellectual satisfaction with the true experience for which he craves. Unfortunately, he lends the weight of his authority to dullness and so the Deadly Theatre goes on its way.

A few things struck me in my last reading of this passage. First, the name gives the game away. The deadly theater isn’t alive, not fully. (Brooks tells us later that the “deadly theater isn’t dead,” meaning that it could find its vitality at any moment.) Deadly theater is “excruciatingly boring.” Deadly theater appeals to scholars who can’t bear an encounter with the real, or to people who think they ought to enjoy the classics but can’t summon any real enjoyment thereof. Deadly theater has no power to change or transform.

Second, Brooks describes the deadly theater as sly. It comfortably finds its way into productions of Shakespeare, those that might be put on by experienced and lively actors (or perhaps by well-funded-local-arts-endowments type theaters). These productions are sly because the familiarity and social circumstance that surrounds these productions makes them deadly. There’s expectation. There is an abundance of the type of social neediness that kills true art. The swarming crowds need the obvious, they need something to talk about over cocktails after. But the size of the crowd is just one risk factor. Insidiously, the deadly theater is frequently found in Shakespeare because Shakespearean drama has such obvious merit and deep humanity. Everyone wants to encounter its historic substance. But vitality is in short supply and actors are its least-desired customers. In part, the deadly theater abounds because the demand for excellence is bottlenecked on the supply-side.

Yet, a third thing to notice is the deadly spectator. The one for whom the deadly theater’s lack of life is exactly the point. The deadly spectator doesn’t want to encounter anything. An encounter is the thing that threatens to change him. Because truth, aliveness, vitality, whatever you want to call it, demands that you change.1 Of course, you don’t have to change. You can ignore truth’s demands. But the encounter forces one to the crossroad. The deadly spectator knows this and will do anything to delay his appointment with fate’s fork.

But the fourth thing to notice, and this is really the point, is the phrase “nobler-than-life.” Brooks unpacks this, somewhat unsatisfactorily, a little bit later: “Audiences crave for something in the theatre that they can term ‘better’ than life and for this reason are open to confuse culture, or the trappings of culture, with something they do not know, but sense obscurely could exist.”

Brooks elides a fuller explanation of what he means by nobler-than-life. Yet, don’t we all have a finely tuned sense for something that should exist, yet doesn’t, that would satisfy us? Doesn’t every party, every mountaintop, every sun-drenched beachhead, (here I must warn you, I’m about to become a little rhapsodic) reek of burning whiskey? Of drink that barely slakes even as it gratuitously provokes our thirst? There are moments in life that leave us desperate for more. These moments are what I imagine that Brooks means when he throws out the concept of nobler-than-life.

This idea of the nobler-than-life is interesting to me because it’s strange how theater can have the possibility of conjuring up such a thing. By definition, it is a bunch of adults using their imaginations to play pretend.

But can there be more than playing pretend?

What would a real Shakespearean do? How would he play a classic drama? Fortunately, in 1979 British director Philip Casson took it upon himself to employ the Royal Shakespeare Company in a direct-to-ITV film adaptation of Macbeth, starring an iron Sir Ian McKellen as Macbeth.2

McKellen, age forty, is wretched and commanding. His portrayal of the famous Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow soliloquy should be etched in stone. When I watch it I feel a vibration from the small of my back to the base of my skull.

Macbeth is tense and readying for war when he hears Lady Macbeth’s cry. He inquires of his servant, “wherefore was that cry?” He is undisturbed, terse, and almost annoyed that his intense focus is interrupted. “The queen, my Lord, is dead,” replies his servant. Macbeth, restlessly gloving his left hand, slows on the word “dead.” He suddenly develops a macabre self-possession.

Then the soliloquy begins. “She should have died hereafter,” he says with grave measure, “there would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.” Each syllable of “tomorrow” rolls out like distant thunder. McKellen slips silence between each line. Saying as much with nothing as he does with his words. There is even a singular rhythm to how he states the last line: “signifying no-thing.” I can’t quite replicate it and I have tried a dozen times! Breath for breath this soliloquy is one of the greats.

Every moment screams nobler-than-life. Here he is, the ascendant Macbeth suddenly brought low. In that movement lays the drama. The soliloquy, by Shakespeare’s brilliance, seems to simply appear out of thin air as naturally as mist on a spring morning. But it is not just in the words. It can’t be, as Peter Brooks helpfully articulates:

With Shakespeare we hear or read the same advice—‘Play what is written’. But what is written? Certain ciphers on paper. Shakespeare’s words are records of the words that he wanted to be spoken, words issuing as sounds from people’s mouths, with pitch, pause, rhythm and gesture as part of their meaning. A word does not start as a word—it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behavior which dictate the need for expression.

The nobler-than-life feeling that McKellen masterfully evokes is not a product of simply reading the play. There is an impulse at its beginning, an impulse to which McKellen is acutely attuned. This impulse was just an inkling in Shakespeare’s imagination, something grander than the quotidian humdrum of Stratford-upon-Avon. And across centuries McKellen rediscovers this sacred impulse. How could this be described as anything but spiritual? Isn’t this just communion?

I think back to a passage authored by Federico Garcia Lorca, in his essay Juego y Teoria del Duende:

Once, the Andalusian ‘Flamenco singer’ Pastora Pavon, La Niña de Los Peines, sombre Spanish genius, equal in power of fancy to Goya or Rafael el Gallo, was singing in a little tavern in Cadiz. She played with her voice of shadows, with her voice of beaten tin, with her mossy voice, she tangled it in her hair, or soaked it in manzanilla or abandoned it to dark distant briars. But, there was nothing there: it was useless. The audience remained silent.

In the room was Ignacio Espeleta, handsome as a Roman tortoise, who was once asked: ‘Why don’t you work?’ and who replied with a smile worthy of Argantonius: ‘How should I work, if I’m from Cadiz?’

In the room was Elvira, fiery aristocrat, whore from Seville, descended in line from Soledad Vargos, who in ‘30 didn’t wish to marry with a Rothschild, because he wasn’t her equal in blood. In the room were the Floridas, whom people think are butchers, but who in reality are millennial priests who still sacrifice bulls to Geryon, and in the corner was that formidable breeder of bulls, Don Pablo Murube, with the look of a Cretan mask. Pastora Pavon finished her song in silence. Only, a little man, one of those dancing midgets who leap up suddenly from behind brandy bottles, sarcastically, in a very soft voice, said: ‘Viva, Paris!’ as if to say: ‘Here ability is not important, nor technique, nor skill. What matters here is something other.’
Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes with the same rhythm as the Negroes of the Antilles in their rite, huddled before the statue of Santa Bárbara.

La Niña de Los Peines had to tear apart her voice, because she knew experts were listening, who demanded not form but the marrow of form, pure music with a body lean enough to float on air. She had to rob herself of skill and safety: that is to say, banish her Muse, and be helpless, so her duende might come, and deign to struggle with her at close quarters. And how she sang! Her voice no longer at play, her voice a jet of blood, worthy of her pain and her sincerity, opened like a ten-fingered hand as in the feet, nailed there but storm-filled, of a Christ by Juan de Juni.

I apologize for the long quotation, but each paragraph reeks of nobler-than-life and I couldn’t help myself. In this passage are duende and the muse: two contrasting spirits at play with the artist. La Niña de Los Peines first sings with the muse, and her form is perfect. But she has a tough crowd looking for blood. She must banish the muse to summon duende. The duende is symbolic of the struggle, of pushing beyond the reasonable into the self-sacrificing.

I bring up this passage because it so helpfully illustrates the spiritual resonance needed between an artist and his audience. Perhaps it is only a metaphor, perhaps not. But the crowd sought duende and no muse could do. La Niña de Los Peines could not connect with her audience without channeling the right kind of spirit.

But McKellen’s performance is slightly different, though no less spiritual in my reading. There is a fittingness, or sense of definition, or a sense of resolution to McKellen’s Macbeth. La Niña de Los Peines had to destroy her voice and technique to access the duende. She had to access the duende to move the crowd. But McKellen’s technique is like some mind-meld with Shakespeare himself, McKellen just is Macbeth in the soliloquy. The crowd may see it or the crowd may not see it. It would be a shame for McKellen to give such a performance before a crowd of deadly specators, for everything would be perfect and nobody would care. But his performance is real whether the crowd sees it or not.

This, I think, is the key. There is a reality, through imagination, through his connection to the past, that exists regardless of whether it is recognized. There is something to be changed by in the same way that McKellen seems to have been changed by his own encounter with the play.

“This is all well and good Geoff,” you might say. “How does this affect my life?” Great question, one that I would ask if I were in your chair. The nobler-than-life feeling is real, it happens to us sometimes. On mountaintops and sun-drenched beachheads, yes. But also when we don’t expect it. Can we learn to recognize it?

On the Turkey River, near Elkader, Iowa. I was on the beach with a couple of friends gossiping by the fire. In the center of the narrow river was an anchored rowboat with blinking neon string lights that lit up the small chalk-cliff on its opposite side. On a small stage up-beach, a man from California played his guitar pretty badly. But that was okay, he was just background music while we waited for the headliner to take the main stage. There were about eighty of us spread out on the venue, an unlikely tall-grass prairie reserve run by a guy named Gary. When most people think of Iowa they think of cornfields. That is pretty much right, Iowa is 85% cornfield by square footage, but here we’re close to the thalweg of a river valley paradise.

Every year Gary runs a series of bluegrass festivals on the land, mostly small and local affairs. People would camp out and pass around bottles of bourbon. Although my friend Kelsey found out about these in a roundabout way: her friend from Rochester had a friend who was in a band who played Turkey River and posted about it on Instagram. So that’s how these city folk ended up in such an unexpected place.

So anyways, a wind started to rush through the valley. It was soft at first, but then began to roar, in what had been a windless night. It must have been the dead of night among the trees, because one started to see things once one had heard them. In this case, the spirits seemed to whisper of lightning and thunder.

There was an abrupt rustling of people packing: guitars and beers and chairs and soon my friends and I were huddled in one of our tents while rain assaulted us and found ingress along an unsewn seam. It was the worst kind of rain. The kind that was hot as it fell, so that in the summer heat your sweat couldn’t help you. And the wind! It was like a clarion calling right in your ear.

I was in a tent with eight other people and sweat and heat and Bush’s baked beans for dinner. I couldn’t have been more happy to be there and I wouldn’t have wished to be anywhere else.

I’ve hit on a lot of conceptual pieces. The deadly theater and the deadly spectator, duende and muse, nobler-than-lifeness, and the spiritual resonance between artist and audience. But all these bits and bobs are mental scaffolding for real experiences. Moments where I feel outside of time and space. As if I’m connected to others in an immediate way. Sometimes it is everyone around me, sometimes it is just one person on the other side of the room. Often I’m unsure if it is just me who feels like that or if someone else feels it too.

Such an experience, like the Turkey River, when expressed as a story comes out a little like overcooked syrup. It’s too sweet, too thick. It wasn’t like that! It was something less than what I said, but in a way that made it feel more real! It wasn’t profound, it was more normal than most things could ever dream of being. It was nobler-than-life.

But mostly it just was.

1. I know that it is good to share knowledge. When you know things, pass it on.

2. I know that Solzhenitsyn is right when he says that the purpose of life is to mature the soul. It’s a tragedy to live life without growing and changing.

3. I know that people vary in quality. Part of maturity is discovering what traits actually make someone good.

4. I know that capacity for action is one of the three traits that, when unified, cause all good things. The other two are thoughtful reflection and desire for truth.

5. I know that you cannot pursue maturity directly. Maturity comes as the result of a life of action.

6. I know that decomposing your thinking is a superpower. People naturally join concepts based on how they encounter them, whether or not they have a genuine relationship. For example, you might think that to start a business you need a business plan, a revenue model, an office, and business cards. These are all things that most businesses have. But those don’t make a business, they make business easier. What makes a business is selling goods or services. This is much easier than getting an office.

7. I know that when forming a new habit, you must also form auxiliary habits that support the end behavior. For example: If I wish to workout 3x/week, I must also protect my sleep schedule and eat better. When you’re attempting to convince yourself to go to sleep at a reasonable time, it helps to remember the end goal: looking hot.

8. I know that when you develop a skill with some degree of seriousness, you will quickly surpass the level at which other amateurs can give you good advice. Make sure that you don’t mistake this for having achieved expertise.

9. I also know that when you reach this first peak in a skill or a practice, the thing that will take you to the next level is often the thing that scares you the most.

10. I know that perceptions of impossibility are often lies. The exception to this is relationships.

11. I know that when solving a problem, the solution that feels the most difficult is usually the one that has the best shot at working.

12. I know that perception of difficulty is often wrong and usually related to social or psychological factors as opposed to actual difficulty. The easiest and most effective solution to many problems is having an honest conversation or sending an honest message/email. However, these are often perceived as being more difficult than they truly are.

13. I know that when you confront someone, you should take their side. This doesn’t mean you should let them off the hook. It does mean that you should hold them accountable from their own perspective. Deliver the confrontation as if you were their better nature asking them to be the good person that you know they are.

14. I know that demons are real and are best dealt with by rebuking them in the name of Jesus Christ.

15. I know that if you find it difficult to be vulnerable with others, this means that you should constantly do so in small ways. Exposure therapy is the only one that works.

16. I know that when making choices, every choice made closes some doors.

17. I also know that action begets choices. When you do stuff, more opportunities arise. Sometimes the opportunities that arise are entirely different than what you had hoped for. You should try them anyways.

18. I know that not making a choice is like closing all doors and double-locking them for extra safety.

19. I know that small talk is the best part of a conversation, even though I’m bad at it.

20. I know that attention is the most precious mental resource that any one of us has, and you should be extreme in your efforts to protect it.

21. I know that there is a tight balance between giving grace to oneself and expecting excellence of oneself. Paradoxically, when one is able to give oneself proper grace, excellence is the natural consequence. Unfortunately, “proper grace” is actually hard to understand or grab hold of. It is far easier to just let yourself go.

22. I know that it is easy to sustain hallucinations about reality. So fail hard and fail often.

23. I know that many endeavors can be sustained by sheer ambition or grit. But it is better if they are sustained by love. Unfortunately, love is more difficult to cultivate than ambition or grit.

24. I know that desperation is good for you after the fact.

25. I know that listening to Motown is a surefire way to have a good workout.

Format copied from and who collectively know 75 more things than I do.

2025 is the year that I took seriously the idea that reading should change my life. 2025 is also the year that I realized I can’t read everything if I’m busy changing my life. My mind is always busy, I have a hundred questions racing through at any given moment. Every question has a hundred books that could answer it. But in any given year I will only read eight to twelve books total. I have learned that I can’t answer every question. Instead, I am committing to answering the most important questions in my life with the best books that I can find and the greatest quality of attention that I can muster.

With greatness as my only criteria, I will preface by saying that I’ve gone through a couple of fads over the course of the year. The first was wrestling with paganism versus Christianity (see “Great Books” is for Losers, The Birth of Comedy, and Vital Signs). The second was falling into the rationalist/Effective Altruism rabbit hole (see On Sincerity, On Agency, Synaptic Plasticity and the Memory Hypothesis, and Secrets of the Great Families). These are both symptoms of a new conviction: that philosophy is vitally important to proper Christian faith. I keep thinking back to this line from Schmemann’s For the Life of the World: “Of what life do we speak, what life do we preach, proclaim and announce when, as Christians, we profess that Christ died for the life of the world?” That question can only be answered when philosophy and theology are married. So, with that in mind, here are ten essays and five books that just might change my life in 2026.

Essays

1. On Sincerity by Joe Carlsmith

On Sincerity is about the art of living. Joe Carlsmith, a philosopher who works on AI alignment at Anthropic, spends this essay defining his disposition towards the world using the word “sincerity.” It is all at once rational, beautiful, and full of heart. In his vision of the good life, truth-seeking, integrity, agency, and seriousness are all married in one concept. I have reread this essay maybe four or five times and it keeps on giving.

2. “Great Books” is for Losers by Alex Petkas

A polemic against “Great Books”? Apostasy! However, Petkas raised this key idea for me in this straightforward article (that I’ve reread many times): reading books is for the purpose of imitating greatness.

3. The Birth of Comedy by Susannah Black Roberts

Pagan revivalism is rebuffed in this tour de force of an essay by Susannah Black Roberts. What draws me in is not her conclusion so much as her method. A lover of great literature, she draws on her sweeping knowledge of the ancient world to build an imaginative case for Christianity over and against the old gods. If this article piques your interest, a natural companion is Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World.

4. Confessions of an Irreligious Christian by David Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart’s “Irreligious Christianity” is compelling for me. Not because I hold the same disposition, but because it is an honest rendering of certain kind of Christian. Discussing ways of believing (outside of the norm) is fraught because it often seems like there are right and wrong ways of confessing the faith. Says Hart, “I am a thoroughly secular man who happens to believe that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead.” Imagine saying that in a Baptist church!

5. Vital Signs by Tara Isabella Burton

We continue on our anti-paganism arc with Tara Isabella Burton, this time taking the form of a critique against the Vitalist Right: Bronze Age Pervert, Curtis Yarvin and the like. For Burton, Christianity triumphs over vitalism because it recognizes the divine in all things. This is true, but I don’t rank this essay higher is because I think she misses the real dichotomy of paganism/vitalism and Christianity: that for the Christian, greatness and self-transcendence comes from finding your place in God’s cosmos. The Christian story is bigger than the pagan story because it recognizes greatness in both the prince and the peasant.

6. Reading Historic Theology Like an Adult by Jake Meador

Jake Meador with a characteristically sensible take on how to approach reading history. While his subject is historic theology, really, this is how one should approach all reading. The purpose of reading is to enter into a conversation, not to try and categorize belief. This one is very short, just go read it.

7. On Agency by Henrik Karlsson

This is a closer look at one of the core ideas from On Sincerity. For Karlsson, agency is about finding a way forward when the obvious answers don’t work. What I appreciate about this essay is the disposition that Henrik has towards agency. He is not brash or bold, but gentle and contemplative. We have similar coming-of-age stories, and I also relate to his anecdote about “bundling” his thinking. Ultimately, his rational approach to agency has deeply affected how I approach work.

8. Synaptic Plasticity and the Memory Hypothesis by John V

This essay reminded me that the world is strange. It begins with cannibal cultism in South America, shifts gears to “heart transplants cause personality changes,” before finally revealing the objective: convincing you that cellular memory is real. I like this essay for two reasons. First, it is delightfully well constructed. It hooks you with the absurd and then deftly sweeps you along into technical science before you have a chance to click away. Two, it is written by a scientist on a topic that is interesting for his field, yet written with the “laity” in mind. Reader beware, it is long. However, if faced by a lazy Sunday afternoon and a cup of coffee, you’ll find no better companion for an hour or so.

9. The McPhee Method by James Somers

This is a practical guide to writing “fact pieces.” That is, journalism. Real journalism is an art form that must be learned in the field, and can only be judged by the quality of its practitioners war stories. However, if one is just setting out, this is as good a guide as you’ll find. I read this in order to become a better marketer, but I think it is helping me become a better person. According to Somers:

When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me. That’s because everything I perceive will unconsciously engage on its way in with the substance of my preoccupation. A preoccupation, in that sense, is a hell of a useful thing for a mind.

As a bonus, James Somers also includes a lovely interlude about his custom org-mode setup (if you know, you know).

10. Secrets of the Great Families by Scott Alexander

Scott Alexander systematically attempts to answer a simple question: why do some families produce incredible talent over multiple generations? He begins by discarding the two obvious answers, privilege and genetics, so that he can find a deeper truth about what talent really is. This essay made it onto the list because I really like Alexander’s earnest and straightforward method of approaching the question. I read it as a personal call to repentance: for my too-scattered methods of tackling difficult questions.

Books

1. On Writing Well by William Zinsser

After having been told by someone that I respect that I was phoning it in with my writing, I went back to one of the classics. Fresh is the word that comes to mind when reading Zinsser. He offers that kind of timeless advice that is so clear, so obvious, that you can’t help but feel stupid for not already living by it.

2. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

I like this book for secondary reasons. It is a well-written piece of journalistic non-fiction, that is true. But really, I like this book because it would have been easy for the sophisticated Mr. Capote to write about the town of Holcomb, Kansas, and the malcontent killers with aristocratic distance. Instead, he chooses to bless his subjects with a kind of grace through this prosaic novel. It is gorgeous, just stunningly gorgeous.

3. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This is the kind of book that I know I’ll need to read again in about five years. McCarthy has a deep understanding of the brokenness of humanity, and therefore I think this book could be a lifelong companion. McCarthy’s prose is less precise than Capote’s but no less impressive. I want to hang his sentences like photographs on my bedroom wall.

4. The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

This book is about virtue. Well, sort of. It’s a book about running a tech company and taking it from six-weeks-left of cash flow to a $1.6b exit. It’s about finding winning moves when it seems like there are none. It’s about honor and treating people with dignity while inspiring them to perform at their best. It’s about how to fire a loyal friend who helped found your startup. Read this book review by John Psmith for a deeper exposition of why this is a unique business memoir.

5. Word Made Fresh by Abram Van Engen

I led a reading group on this book over the summer that was one of the more heartwarming experiences I had in 2025. Nearly 20 people signed up to read a book of poetic commentary, many of whom had little or no experience with poetry. This book is an excellent introduction to reading poetry, providing practical advice, a number of excellent poems, commentary, and a theological framework for art appreciation. It is tight and well-structured, although its theological exposition is lacking in depth. This is made up for by Van Engen’s sincerity and purpose: he really wants you to love poetry. More importantly, he takes the fraught pseudo-intellectualism out of the practice and grounds it in a concept of play. Poetry is playing with words the way a child plays with toys. If you’ve never loved poetry but are curious to try, start here.

Reflecting on this year of reading has left me satisfied. I did not read everything that I wanted. But everything that I read has left an impact on me. I give this list to you with the hope that some item contained herein will leave you likewise impacted. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Imagine that you are a sincere (though absentminded) scientist in a forest-green lab coat. You begin an open-ended experiment with a Petri dish that has been seeded with a vast diversity of microorganisms. These microorganisms are all adapted to different environments and you are changing the conditions of the Petri dish every so often. You vary and add new kinds nutrients, vary the temperature, and add different substrates, etcetera. But, because you are a little absentminded, you do so haphazardly, without purposefulness. You are very attentive to the actions you take, reacting immediately if things take a turn for the worse, but otherwise you don’t take any pains to record what you’ve added or how the organisms in the dish are adapting to changing conditions.

The Petri dish becomes a totally different ecosystem. Then, you discover by accident that this hodgepodge array of chemicals and organisms produces a wonderful medicine that cures cancer. This is a joyous discovery! Yet, you are unable to replicate the exact conditions of the Petri dish, and so you retain your single sample. It is able to produce a lot of benefit for you: you save your Aunt Sally from Stage IV lung cancer. However, it turns out that this Petri dish is incredibly complex and it will take years or perhaps even decades to replicate. This is a tragedy: if only you had been a little less absentminded! How many lives could you have saved?

The question behind this morality tale: what makes knowledge valuable? It should go without saying that knowledge isn’t physically real. I know what makes a spoon valuable: it helps me eat soup. Can knowledge help me eat soup? Well, yes, obviously. It requires knowledge to understand that the spoon is useful for eating soup and to understand the mechanics underlying that utility. This illustrates the central point: knowledge is valuable when it alters behavior in a positive manner.1

Returning to the Petri dish, did you (the sincere and absentminded scientist in a forest-green lab coat) produce knowledge or value? You produced value, but not knowledge. You did a thing in the realm of the physical (i.e. made a very interesting Petri dish), and doing things in the realm of the physical is nearly always valuable2. However, because you did not capture the knowledge, the valuable Petri dish cannot be replicated.

Let’s zoom into the idea of capturing knowledge (also called “learning”). What does that even mean? It means committing the knowledge to memory so that it can be retrieved at a later time. Retrieval is core to learning. What would it mean to say that you know Shakespeare but be unable to produce any meaningful facts about him, like where he lived and what he did? Recognizing the name Shakespeare is not the same as knowing Shakespeare. Knowing implies that the name is connected to a sphere of meaningful information in your mind, it means that you have a mental map of who Shakespeare was and what he did and what it means. Building this mental map requires the ability to retrieve a lot of information, hence retrieval being essential to learning.

In the case of our morality tale, what should the scientist have done differently in order to “learn”? Well, he/she/they should probably have taken notes.

Part 2: In Which Geoff Discovers That Taking Notes Is Basically Mandatory for Adult Life

The question that spurred this essay arose because I am the scientist from the morality tale. When I was in undergrad, I remembered everything. It is strange to look back on it, but I really didn’t need notes. I had a really good memory. I also designated most things that were not school or League of Legends as “not important to remember” (such as birthdays or writing my Mom a card).

I am not this person anymore. Two reasons: one, I think my memory may have actually gotten worse, not sure. Two, my life has gotten more complex and my Mom is less forgiving when I don’t write her a card for various occasions. The strategies for retrieval that used to work no longer work. They really haven’t for quite some time, but new habits form slowly.

This summer, on the excellent Hacker News forum, I discovered the Zettelkasten method through an essay titled The Scam Called “You Don’t Have to Remember Anything” by Sascha. The focal quote of the essay:

Culturally, it is increasingly the case that the first step is to go online, search for the desired end result of a thinking process instead of engaging in learning. This means that we are using the internet less and less to our advantage, because we have less and less prior knowledge: We detrain ourselves out of the ability to access the quality of the information and turn it into actual knowledge.

I love this quote although it requires a little bit of exposition. Here’s one objection that you could make: why is it wrong to circumvent learning by using X technology for retrieval (where X is Google Search, ChatGPT, Alexa etc.)? Why does it actually matter that I practice retrieval and analytical/critical thinking skills, when the answer can be summarized or delivered to me, wrapped all nice in a bow? Or perhaps another objection: how exactly does using a chat bot detrain me out of the ability to turn information into knowledge? Wouldn’t the use of Google Search or AI, by giving me access to nearly unlimited information, complete my knowledge?

To these objections, Sascha provides two answers further down: if you engage with information superficially, you will not integrate it with other stuff that you know, meaning it will not become knowledge. Second, if you do not retain information, you will not have enough context to evaluate the truth of “deep knowledge.” Because there are varying degrees of knowledge. You can understand stuff in high resolution or in low resolution. You can have “surface” knowledge or “deep” knowledge. In order to evaluate the truth of deep knowledge, you need to be able to compare and synthesize knowledge that is closer to the surface. If somebody tells you that they have a blue apple, you first need to know that apples are typically green or red in order to be surprised.

The more knowledge that you have, the better equipped you are to acquire more knowledge3. This proposition led me to consider the necessity of note taking and to the adoption of Zettelkasten as a formal method. To which I can only say, its tremendously improved the quality of my thinking and writing4. Taking up the practice of note taking has done two things for me: it has helped me to remember stuff and it has helped me to integrate the stuff that I know into a more coherent whole.

Back to Value

But let’s return to value. Knowledge is valuable when it meaningfully alters behavior. You can take all the notes that you want, but until you connect that knowledge with concrete actions or habits, there is no value gained. You must learn how to implement and must not become trapped in implementation details. There are a million ways to design a note taking system. The one that drives value is the one you can form habits around.5

I almost feel bad writing an essay that contains such trivial insights. None of this is groundbreaking stuff. In fact, everything I’ve written so far is something that I’ve vaguely “known” since elementary school. These insights are encoded in some of the common aphorisms of education:

• “Practice makes perfect”

• “The more you read, the more you know”

• “Knowledge is power”

• “Slow and steady wins the race”

Yet there is a world of difference between vaguely knowing something and really knowing something. It has only been in the last year or so that the importance of systematically developing knowledge has become real to me. I’ve always loved learning, but the way that I’ve approached it has been driven by unguided curiosity. Wandering around haphazardly from subject to subject, novelty taking the place of integration. Which isn’t to say that I never went deep; I have a tendency to become obsessive when I’m nerding out. But after abandoning a topic I would fail to integrate what I’d learned with the rest of my knowledge and so would quickly lose the benefit thereof.

But that was an unserious approach to learning, childish in the wrong kind of way. It was “knowledge as diversion.” Learning to keep myself occupied, not learning to change my life (in both senses of that sentence). Until, finally, it hit me: if “knowledge is power,” why would I treat it like a fidget spinner?

Some additional essays that have really inspired my thinking on this topic:

• On Sincerity by Joe Carlsmith

• “Great Books” is for Losers by Alex Petkas

• On Agency by Henrik Karlsson

• Surely you can be serious by Adam Mastroianni

Accompaniment and sincerity are two concepts that I've pillaged from very different sources. Accompaniment comes from the book How to Know A Person by David Brooks; it is the quality of being able to be with someone or something. To attune oneself to something outside of oneself. Sincerity comes from On Sincerity by Joe Carl Smith. Sincerity is more of an internal posture towards the world, wrapped up with a few qualities. It is agency directed towards values; it is a high quality of attention dedicated to truth.

What draws these two concepts together is that they both hinge on "quality of attention." They employ this quality of attention towards opposite ends. Accompaniment by definition transcends the self. Sincerity is largely an internal disposition, though it drives behavior that effects others and the world.

I've been drawn to sincerity as a guiding concept in recent months. It's led me to good things, but also to a weightiness of the soul. Joe Carl Smith associates sincerity very heavily with seriousness, which he associates with a type of "depth." Since he's a rationalist, he has a very hard time trying to describe what he means.

Relatedly: sincerity, for me, connotes depth, heartfeltness, and vulnerability–but staple-clipping need not. Yudkowsky writes about having “something to protect.” Does that just mean: “having a utility function”? Nero can have that. So too the flippant socialite, the detached ironist, the casual troll. The ontology of utility functions does not, itself, make any immediate room for a “depth vs. shallowness” dimension on which preferences can vary.

And yet it feels like we need such a dimension. Relative to other ways of arranging your soul, sincerity seems uniquely at odds with “fucking around.” It sees something important, in a way that even coherent preferences and harmonious self-government need not imply. It’s not that sincerity need be grave, or dour. But something is not a joke, or a game. 1

What he's describing as "depth vs. shallowness" is really just the real moral order of the universe. That there really is a way things ought to be, and while Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns may both have internal clarity about his values and be fully devoting a high quality of attention to his fiddle, he is still blind to the moral wreckage outside his window which makes him fundamentally unserious.

Having some spiritual or moral weight is a good thing, it lends itself to the exercise of power. Paraphrasing the Guanzi, "When a person’s virtue is not equal to his position, all will suffer." But although Joe Carl Smith is careful to point out that sincerity doesn't have to be dour, this kind of sincere reckoning with moral reality very easily does lead to a sense of severity. Severity is maybe the only rational response to a clear-eyed assessment of a broken world. At least if one only assesses the broken parts.

But that can't be all there is, right? The example of accompaniment that David Brooks gives in How to Know a Person is a story from Loren Eiseley, an American naturalist. You see, Loren was near the Platte River in Nebraska when the sudden urge to float came upon him.

A childhood near-death experience had given him a permanent fear of water, and the Platte, while shallow, does have its swirls, holes, and patches of quicksand, so the thought of floating in it came wrapped in fear, nervousness, and exhilaration. Still, he lay on his back on the water and began to drift, savoring the sensation of it, asking, What does it feel like to be a river?2

Loren is present, fully bringing his attention to the moment. There's rushing water that brings him back to childhood fears. The thrill of removing his clothes to float, the exhilaration of getting away with something while on the job. The courage of overcoming his mild trepidation. This is an unserious yet wholesome moment. "What does it feel like to be a river?" I don't know, let's float and find out! This moment of simple accompaniment opens him up to goodness in a way that a self-serious utilitarian operating with total sincerity simply may not be.

This will likely grow into a larger essay, but I think that the idea of accompaniment is the yin to sincerity's yang. The sincerity that Joe Carl Smith speaks of has to be cultivated together with this kind of accompaniment, or it becomes imbalanced and too utilitarian. In either state, one is attempting to bring the fullness of their being and attention to all moments of their lives. The distinction between the two is simply their objective: either changing the world (sincerity) or attuning oneself to the world (accompaniment).

Lightness and weightiness are both necessary responses to the world. I don't yet have a good understanding of lightness. That's where I wish to explore next. I think there's a connection between true levity and self-emptying love. Even as I try hard to work it out and achieve understanding, I'm trying even harder to remember this: it doesn't matter if you understand it, it matters that you are it.

This is fantastic advice and it has served me well for years. However, with the benefit of experience and a little more familiarity with my own particular failings, I want to add a further clarification to the phrase. I've learned that prototyping isn't physics. Not every action has a reaction. But reactions are what matter. Reactions give you feedback and feedback is what moves prototyping forward.

An example of action without reaction, in my life, is going to the gym. It is a good thing, a necessary thing, but it will leave no impact on anyone but me. An example of the opposite, action with reaction, could be making a pot of coffee for my roommates in the morning. This action necessarily involves other people, they can reject my coffee or they can accept it. I'll be calling this "output" for the rest of this article. When the action that you're taking opens up an opportunity for acceptance or rejection from another person, you're producing output. Bias to output means structuring your life so that you are producing output quickly.

The most common way that I fail to move forward is by reversing the order of my priorities. When I was writing down goals for my literary life, I wrote the following:

1. Research MFA Programs

2. Pitch Magazines

3. Post on Substack

Viewing this list through the framework of bias to output, I've put all my "action without reaction" at the top. "Research MFA Programs," that's a precursor to a precursor to output. After the research, I would apply. After applying, I may or may not get accepted. After getting accepted, then I would finally start outputting. "Pitch Magazines," while this is good in theory, often editors don't have time to respond to pitches. This is action that puts me in a position to receive a reaction. But due to the logistical constraints of responding to thousands of inquiries, I actually won't get many reactions.

Posting on Substack is the action that I can take that guarantees I will receive reactions to my writing. It's pure output. I tell myself that what I care about is writing and thinking clearly. If that is true, why would I waste time doing anything except putting my writing into the hands of other people? Theory and planning can't take me where I'm going. I need to generate work and put it in a position to receive reactions.

The distinction between bias to action and bias to output is likely already addressed in Designing Your Life. I haven't picked it up in a few years and can't find my copy to verify. Yet, for me, the pull to inner life is so strong that I need to make this distinction. Action without reaction is easy. It seems like I'm moving forward, it feels good. But spinning your tires while your car is suspended won't get you anywhere. The rubber has to meet the road.

I knew I liked tea before I wrote that tedious paragraph. But crucially, I wasn't thinking until I wrote it. You can know something without thinking about it; I'm not sure I've ever thought about why I like tea over water. So, should I think about it? I spent three minutes coming up with that explanation. If I kept thinking, I bet I could make up even more reasons! Does having a reason for preferring tea affect my life? Maybe, if my reasons are contingent. Say, for example, that I liked beer more than wine because beer is cheaper. But then the price of beer increases due to a surprise tax enacted through the lobbying of a vindictive cabal of vintners. I should reevaluate my preference for beer, as my reason for holding that preference is no longer valid. Thinking through my reason will change my preference.

I wish I could deeply consider every aspect of my life. Yet, I sure don't have time for that. Also, thinking is hard, I'd very much like to avoid it if possible. Turns out, a good mechanism for avoiding thought is asking yourself: are my reasons contingent on external forces? If your reasons aren't contingent on external forces, but on internal facts (such as, I like the taste, in the case of tea), then don't think about it too much! Yay, hard work avoided. Yet still, there are times when you're called upon to defend your preferences. What if I prefer beer to wine for reasons of taste and texture? Some dork is still gonna prod me about it at the bar. I won't be able to defend myself unless I think about it. "I like bubbles," I'll say. Then the dork will reply, "but some wines are sparkling!" To which I'll then say, "yeah but I like the taste of fermented grain." I'll spare the rest of what is sure to be an unbearably boring dialogue. The point is, we will eventually distill the thought until we have found the irreducible truth of why I like beer.

The irreducible truth: that's where thinking propels us. There are some select questions that orbit my mind regularly, what is the meaning of this life, when will I die, will I be okay with it when I do. To divide and measure these questions, that's hard enough. To find the irreducible truth? I don't even know what that would mean. Simultaneously, in every step, the finish line moves and my feet sink into the mud. Even in this paragraph, I stutter as I try to break the question apart. Maybe we should start here: what was the meaning of this week?

I interviewed a grad student at UMN five days ago. Listening to the recording, I was stricken to realize that I'm not a clear speaker. Um's, ah's, and like's creeping into my speech. But what really embarrassed me was a terrible vocal habit: I verbally affirm every sentence my counterpart says. The transcript is broken into a thousand pieces, with me saying "yeah" every other sentence. Yet in the moment, the encouragement facilitated the interview. Despite the fact that my questions were imprecise, and the student I was speaking with speaks English as a second language, we communicated very well.

Turning speech into text transforms the language. It's not new to say that writing is thinking. It is also not new to say that good writing is rewriting. Good writing is cutting and extending. Not only removing the extraneous ah's and um's that pepper my thinking, but imaginatively driving forward those thoughts that were cut short. Every first draft is a jumble of ideas, most of which are dead ends. The essence of editing is finding those thoughts that turn into fructuous trees, dutifully fertilizing and watering, watching to see what buds.

But conversations are about communicating. Conversations are about vibes. Every word is laden with meanings private to each speaker. We circle around each other in beautiful, but individual dances. A good conversation is about goading each other on. Half of it is just responding to body language. The words become prods, poking at faces and posture. There's leading and following, there's sculpting and forming.

I learned a lot about this grad students life. In the back and forth afterwards over email, I kept asking him if he thought the way I presented him was accurate. I think that he liked the way I portrayed him. But the words on the page are far different than the man I spoke with.

What comes out of a conversation is often nowhere close to the irreducible truth. Usually, I leave more confused than I started. Conversations are artifacts of two minds attempting to come to consensus. This is orthogonal to finding the irreducible truth.

The point of the book The Little Prince is that love is proportional to the time spent with something. The titular Prince has a rose on his home planet who he loves. His rose is beloved because it is his, and it is his because he had spent much time caring for her. The tautology of love is that it is love. Love becomes more true by loving.

What I mean is this, each time you pass over a thought it is deepened and extended. The quality of a nascent thought is low. But like a rose it will blossom when attended. Conversely, things can become more loved by being thought about. Falling in love is like anxiety: the beloved/anxious thought orbits the mind in ever shortening arcs. But things are more true when they lead you outside of yourself. I can't defend this assumption (yet). Anxiety is a thought deepened inwards, love is a thought deepened outwards. Sometimes you mistake anxiety for love because it has the appearance of romance (for anyone who knows me, I'm not talking about anyone I've dated in the last year).

To find the irreducible truth, you must externalize. What is solid when it is outside of yourself? What is hollow and gives way under force?

Loving is two things. First, it is observing the beloved. That is, becoming aware of the facets of their being: their vocabulary, habits, memories, and behaviors. Second, it is submitting to love's force which orders all the dislocated facets of your own being. This second action is by nature constructive, however, I'm sure that timber doesn't feel good as nails drive through it. Ordering doesn't imply ordinate/subordinate relationships. Reason has nothing to do with it. Its dimensions are time and faithfulness: gravitating facets that would never naturally come together, until they fuse.

Love is less about finding irreducible truth and more about becoming coherent. There is a sense of reduction, each part should distill to its simplest form. That is not the main work. People have many potentials, yet, the course of life is becoming a particular person. Loving relationships discern where each part of your personhood goes and how each part should relate to the others. You are you because of the communities that you've been in. They (all of the other particular people within the community) make demands on you by nature of their being. The love of the community makes you a particular person, as opposed to a bundle of potentials.

Love is less about finding irreducible truth and more about becoming coherent. Some truths require wholeness. It may be that you can be reduced to your singular facets. Each of those pieces being their own truth about you. But the you that you are: that is not reducible, it only exists in the coherency wrought by love.

Cluny Journal

Considering the Martyrs

Considering the Martyrs…

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a year ago · 24 likes · Scott Cairns

This post is a response to the poem Considering the Martyrs by poet Scott Cairn, which you can read with the link above.

Let us consider the poem's formal qualities. It is 13 lines long. Each line oscillates between 9-15 syllables in length. There is no metrical pattern, or if there is, it is beyond my ken. There is no rhyme scheme. There is rhythm. The meter in the first few lines is satisfying! The consonance 'works.' The first line is 't,' 's,' and 'th' sounds. The second line morphs into 'l' sounds by the end, though the stressed 'b' and 'c' are welcome and satisfying breaks. Line 7 is even in iambic hexameter, and although there is no apparent reason for it, it still makes for a rewarding rollick.

Although not broken into stanzas formally, the poem is broken into three sections: lines 1-3, lines 4-9, and lines 10-13. The final section is "enjambed," beginning in the last four syllables of line 9 ("Being no saint"). The first section is a question, punctuated by the unnecessary observation that "One can only guess." The next two sections begin with the anaphora "Being no saint, I nonetheless suppose." Although, one wonders whether Cairns actually does any supposing at all. We'll come back to this point, I think it points to the crux of why this poem doesn't work.

Thanks for sticking with me so far. Poetic architecture is often boring and this poem is no maverick. It's bland free verse carried rhythmically by its haphazard consonance. Much like Eminem doesn't hate trap, I don't hate free verse. And I don't want to seem mad but in fact much contemporary free verse doesn't make interesting use of the form. The form typically carries its momentum through repetition that breaks at critical symbolic moments. This poem is generally void of interesting imagery, but that aside, when the rhythm does break, it is at the most boring moments of the poem. Line 3 ends with the silly observation that "One can only guess." It breaks the consonance of nice 'f' and 'w' sounds with four very different sounds in a row (approximant, fricative, vowel, fricative). The only sound that ties the four words together is the 'n,' but this is not enough. It pulls all momentum from the section. Which could work, if the phrase "One can only guess" had an impact that made it worth stopping all the momentum. But, like, seriously? It's such a banal observation. Obviously you can only guess, the martyrs all died. That's why they are martyrs. What's your point?

Moving on: Line 6 stops the momentum again to transition to a set of imagined memories. This makes sense to me, the memories are the core imagery of the poem. Yet, lines 4-5 take a lot of air just to bring us into those memories. Is it really necessary to spend 2 lines pontificating about not being a saint? I also question the use of the words "come" and "view" together. These transitions lines should breeze by, they aren't interesting. "Come" and "view" don't work, but if you replace "come" with "move," all of a sudden the line's momentum picks up. Additionally, the anaphora does little more than waste time and breath. "Being no saint, I nonetheless suppose." Sure. Like, who cares Cairns? You have the right to imagine things even though you're not a saint. Do you think you need to acknowledge that? Do you think that you're making some bold movement to imagine something that a saint might have thought?

I could spend another four paragraphs analyzing the rest of the poem from a craft perspective, but I'll suffice to say that the poem on a technical level is fine but not good. The poem isn't a failure because of the poetry. It's a failure because of Cairns' lack of imagination. Do we really think the martyrs are imagining their mum's unrushed embrace in their last moments? Seriously? "A clouded evening sky opening to reveal its countless messages of light." The memories that Cairns' imagines the martyrs to be recollecting as they die are weird. They're weird because they do not account for what I'll call the "facts of martyrdom." That is, the the physical movements, feelings, and circumstances leading up to the martyrs' deaths.

Cairns only vaguely alludes to what I'm calling the facts of martyrdom in lines 1-3. Throats are slashed and saints are burned and drowned alive. In 2.5 lines he mentions 4 methods of murder. Each could be its own stanza! He leaves too much to my own imagination. It is his job as poet to build a blood-curdling scene in order for the emotional stakes to be raised. He does not. Instead, he breezes through several methods of execution, expecting the reader to fill in the grisly details. I, of course, am happy to oblige, but it leaves the rest of his poem ironically lifeless. Martyrdom is of flesh and blood. Martyrdom is being raided by secret police in the dead of night. It is trial in a kangaroo court. It is feeling the hair stand up on the back of your neck as a steel blade raises to draw your blood. It is your burning flesh stinging your nostrils. It is lungs compressing as your oxygen depletes and you asphyxiate. We can begin to imagine the martyrs in their fullness by experiencing small pieces of their pain. Hold a match to the hairs on your arm and smell the acrid burn. Hold your breath until you can feel your heartbeat in your ears. The next time you cut yourself with a paring knife while making dinner, remember and make use of that pain. How much more is the physical pain of soul and body being separated. In these physical moments, we can begin to imagine the pain of the martyrs. The distance between us and them begins to close.

Yet, after reading this poem, I feel numbed. "A father's gentle hand, a mother's warm, unrushed / embrace." If Cairns actually tried to imaginatively live in a world of martyrdom, I don't think he would have chosen such undramatic memories. This poem really doesn't help me to participate in the grisliness of its subject matter. It holds martyrdom at arms length, almost afraid of it. The poem lacks a gravitas equal to its subject. There's little else to say. Good poetry moves you. It should stir, deep in your gut, emotion and imagination.

Such an accomplished poet should have more chutzpah. Cairns toed to the edge of the cross and pulled back. Which is in fact, exactly what is missing. The cross-shaped hole in the center of this poem begs for attention: why isn't this poem about the martyrs meeting Christ in his martyrdom? The conclusion of this poem doesn't quite bring us there. "I nonetheless suppose that all these recollections / prove but incremental, preparatory visions leading / to one surpassing revelation of The One within Whom / their now unceasing journey will commence." Shouldn't this poem have ended with some tender vision of Christ crucified? Shouldn't the martyrs in their last moments see with Stephen the glory of God breaking through the heavens with Christ at his side? Shouldn't we see within ourselves our lack of conviction and be encouraged to strive for such submission to the Lord's will? Instead we get saints recalling warm evening skies. Blech.

I don’t know how to live my life between contemplation and the need to Get Things Done. I don’t want to do stuff, I just want to be. I don’t have the American habit of judging myself by productivity. I’ve always been lazy. I tell people all the time that the only thing I really want to do is sit in a hammock by a lake and read and take naps. They nod and say “oh that’s wonderful.” And then get mad at me when I actually mean it.

The desert came to me in my hermitage. Love in the form of the scripture gave itself to me and I am grateful. I left and am now back home. There is a kitchen and a bathroom to clean and I am letting down my housemates by not doing my chores. I am starting a business and my attention is now pulled taught between two different jobs. There’s always more life admin to do. More calendar events to schedule, more items to tick off the checklist, more books to read, more people to meet. The desert is within me but I don’t think I can love it except when I’m there. It’s more like a reminder of what I don’t possess than a hope that keeps my feet underneath me.

Prayer is the fundamental act of being a creature. I believe it. I think I’ve experienced it. Prayer makes us human. Reaching out to God with our being. Perhaps it is through words, but it could also be becoming aware for a moment of reality. Falling through the mundane into some heavenly realm while still being a part of Earth. It’s easy to seek it out and miss it entirely. There was no lightning on my silent retreat, no rushing wind. I want to take great care not to sentimentalize or oversell it. But just having a room in which to pray. This did much to ease my anxious mind.

This is the moment where I will betray how deeply American I am: I do not know how to go to the desert without being a consumer. Of course, I went to a non-profit retreat center. A retreat center. ACK. Why do I have so little imagination? Doesn’t the true hermit just go out into desert and trust in our Lord to provide? Do I really believe in God? Do I really have a heart of poverty? (Silly question, I very obviously do not.)

There are obligations one has to family, neighbor, nation. I don’t really care for them to be honest. But I’m not sure I have the call (or maybe courage? Does it make a difference?) to leave them either. Actually I know for a fact I shouldn’t leave them. How do I find God in the place to which I’ve been called, when it seems so easy to find him elsewhere? Oh Christ, let my heart be smaller and emptier.

Shall I sing a litany of winter horrors? Days crawl past without a glimpse of the sun. Sleep is an impossibility. One feels like a wrung out dish towel. I have entered the stage of winter where I am more like a chalk police outline than a human. And for what?

For what do I bear this suffering? To reside in the state that bore me? Every year I tell myself: this is the year I move to Miami. I will become one with the beach. I will drink fruity cocktails at stupid parties and dance to music spun by 40-year-old DJs in Hawaiian shirts.

But for what do I stay? I've read a little of Wendell Berry. I like him. He talks about roots. What it means to have a home that is somewhere, not just anywhere. I was born in Minnesota, and hope against hope that I die here too. I have visions of a rooted life. Of having kids and grandkids that grow up within 12 miles of where I was born. BUT! An important detail that is often overlooked in such pastoral/homesteader/organic farm/radically rooted-type fantasies is that one might grow up in Minnesota, where Minnesota Winter qua Minnesota Winter is deeply contradictory to human flourishing.

This is a serious question: am I just going to cede half of my years on God's green earth to despair and misery?

Every Minnesotan says it a hundred times every winter. It's not the cold, it's the dark that get you. And it is fully true. The cold really isn't that bad. The snow is even a little beautiful. But the sun goes down at 4:00 p.m. and it doesn't rise again until 8:00 a.m. the next day. That's sixteen hours of darkness. Two thirds of one's day are dim as Hades. It's all we really talk about in winter. It's not the cold, it's the darkness. Yes, yes, we all already know it and we can't wait to say it to every new transplant who finds themselves deadened by that truth.

The doldrums of winter have arrived and there is no comfort in cross-country skiing or ice skating or tubing. There are only mild days that blur with the sharp edges of black midnight. I feel like a dish towel wrung out and hung on a frozen clothesline. The nights where one stays in begin to pile up like dirty heaps of snow on a parking lot curb. One obnoxiously clings to a drying Christmas tree, the last night the cold and snow and darkness felt reasonable.

I wrote the above sentences a few weeks ago now and didn't know how to finish it. I think I have an idea now. The sun has come out. It always does. I was sipping on some coffee a couple days ago now, and it was 7:00 a.m., and the sun was shining in my eyes so I had to squint a little bit as the light filtered through the pine tree outside my window. There were some shadows waving back at me on the table; discrete and external to me. From my high-top stool they seemed a little silly in their fluttering motion.

The question first arose for me through reading an Episcopal priest's reflections on MAiD in Canada. It was, and still remains mostly, an intellectual question for me. Nobody close to me has died in the last six years. But death seems to be orbiting by me in ever shortening arcs year by year: in my neighborhood, Church, extended circles of friends. It won't be long again until it strikes near me, or just strikes me.

For the last month the question has begun coming up again in conversations I am having. When should one just let go? For now, I'll leave aside the hardest parts of that question. The parts that ask: how do you surrender someone dear one into God's loving arms? How do you repair a hole that has ripped into your world? How do you empty yourself of that which was to prepare for that which may happen again? But still honor your memories, a shared life that is no more?

Instead I want to focus on the simple, logical question of: is there a there a point at which suffering becomes so great that it becomes preferable to die?

I don't think so. The argument itself is simple to sketch, starting from Christian premises or materialist premises. It hinges on this statement: existence is infinitely better than non-existence. I think this is defensible as a Christian or as an atheist.

The atheist case is easier to make. What's the probability that consciousness exists at all in this universe? What's the probability that your consciousness exists? The odds of your existence are so astronomically small, and as best as we can tell this is the only time it will exist (though conceivably, it could exist again), why would you ever shorten this already short existence? Even an existence of pure suffering and terror is infinitely more valuable than non-existence because existence is rare and it will eventually end. Non-existence doesn’t end, therefore it isn’t rare or valuable. Suffering is incidental to the question of existence and non-existence. Existence is so improbable it is always to be preferred, even if it’s an objectively terrible existence.

Of course, it's not morally wrong to cut short your existence, it's just stupid and irrational under these conditions. I’d be super interested in hearing any refutations of this point. It seems self-evident to me, but I might be overlooking something.

The Christian case becomes mildly more complicated because now you're dealing with eternal souls. Existence doesn't end after death, it just changes forms. It becomes more complex because for the Christian who believes in a traditional doctrine of hell, you now must separate people into two ontological categories: those destined to hell and those destined to heaven. For the folks destined to hell, it is always preferable to prolong their existence on Earth because it increases the likelihood that their ways will be reformed and they will then become destined to heaven. Whatever suffering you experience on Earth is infinitely preferable to the eternal conscious torment of hell, simply because hell doesn't end. But what about the believer who is destined for heaven? Couldn't it be merciful to simply end their suffering on Earth and surrender them into the loving arms of Christ?

I don't think so. This is something I've been thinking through as I test and weigh apokatastasis as a possibility. Apokatastasis is the belief that all souls may eventually be delivered from hell. There is biblical basis for this, thank you for asking, Romans 11:32, Acts 3:21, 1 Peter 3:18-20. Also the words of Jesus in the gospel of John that I can't find right now. But the point is, in light of the possibility of heaven, does our question change? Is there a level of Earthly suffering where it makes more sense to kill the soul destined for heaven in order to alleviate pain? No.

This is because the joy of heaven is both infinite and eternal. When your soul takes its flight to the joy eternal, you will never experience suffering again. The Christian case takes an entirely different path from the materialist position: suffering becomes rare and valuable. If you consider the weight of eternity, what is 10, 20, 30, 80 years of earthly suffering compared to eternity? And in fact, if we believe that our lives on Earth will have meaning in eternity: what could we miss in eternity if we cut short our experience of suffering on Earth? It may seem like I'm arguing that we should seek out suffering, but that's not true. Joy is self-evidently good and needs no defense; I'm only advocating that we don't write off suffering as something only to be avoided.

At this point I could make the argument that suffering is good because it is a rare state of existence that will not exist again in the future bliss. I will not make that argument because I don't think it's that helpful for you know, actually living your life well. Instead, Christians should look to the life of Christ as the model. God became man and freely received all the joy and suffering that human life had to offer until his time was complete. So also should every follower of Christ freely accept every joy and suffering that becomes a part of their story.

There are much harder questions left to answer. A 1,000-word blog post isn't the place. How do I accept suffering? How do I suffer well? The answers to these questions cannot be found in propositional logic. In my life right now, I am entering a season of joy. I'm going to put away all the questions of suffering for another time.

May God's peace be upon you.

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The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

In the genre of close readings, you typically begin by beginning with a pronouncement of what the poem is, and then break it down section by section. Often, you'll reference letters by the author, the authors own interpretation of their work, popular audience reactions to the work, critical reactions, etcetera. I have done no research on Robert Frost, I do not intend to either. This will not be a close reading as much as it is just a meditation on a cool poem. As this poem is very famous and widely read in school curricula, I assume you've already read it and sort of understand what it is getting at. Begin!

I am frustrated with this poem. It offers me sympathy, and a wry acknowledgement of how we justify our own experiences in life by fixing them into a narrative. It tells me where I am going. "I shall be telling this with a sigh...I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." It tells me that this, essentially, is a lie: "And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black." These are both true in my case, whatever I choose I will commit to fully. In fact, I already believe providence has led me to this choice. That God is making me choose something, to which he will work out the rest. Coming to this place has already been a work of humbly receiving.

"And looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth." I have looked down both as far as I can, which is not too far. "Then took the other, as just as fair," he takes the other out of an impulse. "Because it was grassy and wanted wear; though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same," as if, for a moment this second path looked more free, only on a second glance to realize it was the same. This is not to say each path is equal, only that equally they seem to satisfy the requirements of the traveler. And I, I see each path as very different in where they will lead, still see each as equally valuable.

"I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." This sarcastic acknowledgement of the ego is true of me too. The agentic "I", as if by making this decision the speaker has changed the course of fate. But in life, it seems rather that fate only gives you the illusion of choice in presenting you options. Yes, of course, each road is actually different. But if each is as just as fair, your choice makes very little difference in making your life valuable. You will live some interesting path one way or the other. This of course, by nature, means that one should wish to live both. But one cannot, one can only choose to live one particular kind of valuable experience.

The ending lays bare our egotistical need to be in control. The decision doesn't really matter. If it did, it would be an easy decision. It would be easy because there would be a difference in value between the options. You would just choose the path with the higher expected value. Fascinating insight, isn't it. The only hard decisions are the ones whose options don't have wildly different expected values. Once we have picked a choice, assuming of course that there were two equally good choices, we feel that we must pretend like we saw some light in the darkness that guided is into our choice. We made this good outcome happen by making a good choice at a critical time. Really, the outcome was going to be good either way. There was never any (meaningful) agency to begin with.

The lore behind this poem is that Robert Frost wrote it to make fun of his friend Edward Thomas who was famously indecisive. He could never make a damn choice. Frost didn't mean it all that seriously. It has become a classic because of its accidental brilliance. He simply received from his friend some essence of his soul, and repurposed it into a poem to give back as a gift to him. Perhaps this is the illustration of how we ought to approach decisions. We can only ever receive the conditions under which we can make a choice, and by making a choice we are giving back those conditions to whatever has placed them. It seems to me that the only real danger is never making a choice. Perhaps there is an exploration of agency and value waiting to be written as a response to this poem?

Maybe you do not actually want to read poetry. Maybe you clicked this link by accident, or somebody sent it to you by text and you didn't really read the URL before tapping it. Perhaps you hate poetry and you searched up on Google "How to Read Poetry" so you could leave hateful comments. If this is the case, I regret to inform you that the article assumes you want to read poetry.

Okay, you are still here. This means that you believe that you want to read poetry. I think it is likely that you feel that you ought to enjoy reading poetry because you see yourself as a particular type of person. Or perhaps, you think that by reading poetry you might become a different person. A better person! Or at the very least, not the person that you are that doesn't read poetry. Yikes!

Lesson number one, don't read poetry because you feel like you should read poetry. Don't read poetry because it seems like a cozy upper-middle class type activity to engage in over Christmas break. Go bake cookies or something.

Still here? Okay. That is good, I am glad. I am happy to inform you that the article assumes that you want to read poetry, and you are in the right place.

2. Reading poetry should either be: fun, joyful, or fill the existential need of your soul.

Really it is kind of stupid to be writing this essay. Why does anyone read a novel? Because they like novels. It is an optional activity. Reading poetry is the same. You do it because you like it. Don't like poetry? Great, stop reading it. I would suggest trying pickleball, or rock climbing, or scuba diving, or baking cookies.

Okay, but you want to like poetry but sometimes it seems like a dizzying dance of words on the page? Ah, I see, those damn poets are at it again. The reason I read poetry is because it is fun. It gives me joy. And often, it fills the existential need of my soul. I guess, a little bit, that saying that poetry should be fun is like saying that weight training should be fun. It is fun, but saying it is fun can give the wrong impression.

I guess I'm not really asking you to find poetry fun (at first!), I'm asking you to find it serious. But also don't take it too seriously! It's type 2 fun. The kind of fun that while you're in it you are gritting your teeth and telling your partner (who took you on a nearly vertical hike up 3,000 feet of rock) that yes, I really am fine, stop asking, and also I resent that you seem to think that I am not fine. But then afterwards you feel a little pride telling the story at a party the next week and can laugh about how not okay you were. But it is also type 1 fun. The kind of fun that is your three-year-old niece running full speed across the kitchen and slamming into an open cabinet door. The kind of fun that makes her cry. You are also crying but from laughing at her pain.

Okay, I will use an actually useful metaphor now. Reading poetry is a little bit like learning a new language. You start by mapping the words of the new language onto words in a language that you already know. Fromage = cheese. Then you try to get a handle on subject-verb-object order, maybe learn how to conjugate verbs in different tenses. That is the easy part. Then, you must try to inhabit the mind of a French person. You need to know the culture, the history, the food, the dances, the mythology. Because language is just a set of rule-bound sounds that somehow capture a shared world of things that actually exist somewhere out there in France. French, the language, really is only for capturing the sea-spray of the Mediterranean on Croissant that sits on a beach-side table at a small cafe. If I have never seen that scene before, how could I even think of saying that I actually "know French"? Yet, in some mysterious way, by knowing French (the language) I can know something about the French and France. Even though I've never been!

Anyways, you love poetry the same way you love anything else: by spending time with her. Take poetry out for a fun night on the town sometime. If you don't like the way she complains about the waiter break up with her, it was nice while it lasted. If you find she gets you like nobody else ever has, maybe put a ring on it.

3. Why Does Nobody Ever Write: "How to Read a Novel"?

Mostly because novels aren't written by annoying twats. Well, some of them are, and those special people get MacArthur grants. The actual reason is that mostly, we never grow out of stories. When you're a kid poetry, novel, movie, and music all blend together in a cacophony of lovely sounds and symbols. Children's media really does fuse together all genres! Beautifully! As we get older, music becomes music, and movies become movies, and books become books. Poor poetry gets forgotten about, except for that one class in school that you kind of hated. That poetry was weird, the lines didn't make any sense. It didn't rhyme either.

The poet Kim Addonizio has a simple system for thinking about poetry: surprise, music, detail, sufficient thought, syntax, wholeness, and mystery. AHHHH that's too many things. Lucky for you, you are already familiar with these things. This is how you judge all art. The movies you watch, the music you listen to. You want to be surprised by it, you want it to sing to you. You want it to have incisive insight into something you don't understand. You want it to feel whole. You want to be able to unravel it without its luster dissolving.

Poetry is annoying because you are not familiar with the form. This is natural. If you had not been watching movies since you were born you would find them confusing and hard to follow. But since you have been watching them since forever, you understand the rules of how they work, and the director and the writer and the actors all know this. They skip steps, and you skip right along with them because everybody knows how to skip right along with them. Poems are the same, they were written for people who read poetry. You are not someone who reads poetry. To become someone who can read poetry, you must read poetry.

4. What Then Shall I Read?

Where should you start? Well, you could start with that collection of poetry that somebody bought you this last Christmas which had you Googling "How to Read Poetry" within five minutes. But if that's too hard (which, lets face it, it probably is), you could start with Shakespeare's sonnets. It's a boring suggestion, but its a safe one. Because they're damn good, but also pretty approachable.

Sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. //

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. //

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. //

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long. //

The poem above is one of the poems that made me fall in love with poetry. It's also a poem about love. And how a young person loves an older person without reservation as the elder approaches death. What makes this poem special? Well, I think there are three reasons why. First, it is a sonnet. Second, it sounds cool. Third, it helps me understand something about love I didn't know before.

What does it mean that this poem is a sonnet? It means that it follows a very specific form: there are quatrains, followed by a couplet. Let me explain:

• Stanza = one section of a poem.

• Quatrain = a stanza of four lines that rhyme.

• Couplet = a stanza of two lines that rhyme.

Does it matter that you know the names of these things? No, but also yes. It does not matter for your enjoyment of the poem that you understand what things are called. But if you want to be able to talk about poetry with other people who read poetry, it is important to know the terms.

However, I don't want to rest too much on the form of the poem. Form matters because repetition legitimizes, when you know roughly how a poem is supposed to sound then your brain isn't so focused on understanding what is being said but focuses more on what is meant. This is why I like Shakespeare's sonnets. They are all sonnets! They all sound pretty similar, when you read a lot of the same form over and over, the form begins to dissolve and instead what the poet is trying to say comes to the front.

What do I mean when I say it sounds cool? Poetry, at its core, is supposed to capture your interest on an aesthetic level as well as a rational level. When you read a poem out loud the sound of it on your tongue should feel good. "That time of year thou mayst in me behold", feel the way that it bounces from the tip of your tongue. The "T" sounds hold this line at the front of your mouth, until at the very last word, "behold", suddenly your tongue shifts to the up and back in your mouth. This strikes me as very pleasant. Say the line a few times, what do you notice about it as a shape in your mouth? The aesthetic of a poem lies partially in its imagery, but also in large part is a function of how it feels in your mouth and on your tongue. Poems are made of stanzas and stanzas are made of lines and lines are made of words. Words have a shape when you say them. Poets are very often obsessed with the shapes of these words, and how these shapes form a coherent whole.

How a poem sounds is a key part of what makes poetry fun. Poetry is an ancient form of art that began as an oral form. People just memorized, told, and retold poems over and over again. Poetry must be able to stand up to that kind of abrasion. Words that feel out of place when said out loud will be replaced by better words. So, naturally, poems should be satisfying to say out loud. This is what is meant when people talk about the "music" of poetry.

Last, but not least, this poem helps me understand something about love that I did not understand before.

5. This Poem Helps Me Understand Something About Love that I Did Not Understand Before

This is the section that I've been dreading writing. Because it's very hard to write about why a poem teaches you something. Poetry teaches you indirectly. Good poems just give you data about the world, somebody's perception of what has happened or is happening. From this data, you can draw conclusions. Poems are, in some sense, experiments in being human.

I want to go through the poem line by line, but this post is already too long and I can tell you're bored. I'll speak in broad brush strokes. In the first four lines of the poem (the first quatrain), the narrator is creating the setting of the poem. It's situated in the time between fall and winter, as the leaves have fallen and the birds have already gone south. There's no snow yet, but it is coming. This is a metaphor for the narrator, set up in the first line: "thou mayst in me behold...Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

The next stanza makes the metaphor more emphatic. "In me thou see'st the twilight of such day", and in the next two lines twilight is quickly giving way to night, which is "death's second self that seals up all in rest." The narrator is moving quickly, he is in the twilight of his life and night (which is death) is at the door.

The third stanza makes the point yet again, but with a different inflection. "In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire", a fire which is now being extinguished by the ashes it has created. It reinforces the point that the narrator is at the end of life, but it is also telling us something about the nature of life. That we consume ourselves, that our bodies use up our youth until we are old all of a sudden. This is a little different than the metaphors of the first two stanzas, which are driven by the march of time (night slowly overtaking day, fall changing to winter, natural processes that are irreversible and move forward at a fixed rate). Fire is dynamic and multivariate, it may burn brighter but consume its fuel faster. It could also burn more slowly, and stay alight for longer. This stanza emphasizes a different aspect of aging, not its physical inevitability but its spiritual contingency--more to say on this but I'll leave that for another time.

If the first three quatrains are the setup, then the couplet is the punchline. It is not a metaphor like the three stanzas above it, it is just a succinct statement. But its meaning lands more forcefully because of the beautiful metaphors before it. "This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long." In other words, you see all these aspects of how I (the narrator) am aging, and yet you love me anyways, and this makes your love more true. One could say that statement alone and understand the point of the poem. But because of The Rest Of The Poem before that final line, we (the readers) internalize it in a special way.

What this poem taught me about love is small and simple: that love could be strengthened by death's impending visit. That could be unpacked in so many different ways, but I think that also is another post. But this revelation was new to me when I read this poem for the first time eight years ago. It is a revelation I come back to frequently, because it is not reinforced by a lot of culture or media. This poem leaves many questions and implications on the table. How does a younger person love an older person? How does an older person love a younger person? How do you actually love someone as they are dying? These are questions that can only be answered by living. Or by wrestling imaginatively with the poem (more on that in another post). It helps with these kinds of questions to see someone else's active wrestling. Poetry is one way that the wrestling can be expressed.

6. Love and Its Discontents

Reading poetry is an act of imagination as much as it is an act of receiving. Yes, you receive a set of words and a world to inhabit from the author. But reviving that world from dead words on a page is its own act of creation, albeit within some tight boundaries. Fundamentally it is the same action as writing, just much easier. You cannot imagine faculties that you have not cultivated in real life. Being a good reader is as much a task of learning how to live as it is learning how to read. But learning how to read makes learning how to live easier. It is a mutually reinforcing system.

My final lesson, in this paragraph, I will not say much about. Books could be written about this. But in the action of reviving the poem from its desiccated status as words on a screenpage, you gain the opportunity to imagine it differently and to put it next to every other thing that you've read. You can stack it next to a memory from your life and see if it compares. You can disagree with the author. Or you can say "Yes! Yes! I finally have words to give to this experience." Poetry should become alive to you, as if the author were sitting across from you in a coffee shop; you were just chatting about life; the words on the page tumbled out of them as naturally as water off a fall.

If you learn to read poetry, you will open up new worlds of learning. These new worlds of learning will allow you to access new faculties of emotion, rationality, and perception. By becoming the kind of person that reads poetry, you will become the kind of person that lives better, and hopefully loves life more.