Canon

A canon is usually a list of the best things someone has read. This one isn’t. It is a record of what stayed — the concepts that outlived the books that carried them, the ones I catch myself using years later whether or not I remember choosing them. Formation is not the same as admiration: some of what follows I argue against more than I agree with. But arguing with something for years is its own kind of formation, maybe the deepest kind.

The list is grouped by territory. Each entry tries to name not what the work says, but what it left.

The Weird and the Fantastic

Jorge Luis Borges. The constant. Labyrinths brought back something I had been chasing since childhood: the sense that a book could be a trapdoor. What stayed is his metaphysics disguised as fiction — that all people are all other people, that a library can be a universe, that a map can devour its territory. The machines in my house are named out of his stories. He is less an author I read than a country I live in.

Arthur Machen, “The White People.” An argument about good and evil, hidden in a horror story. Most of what we call morality is mundane — etiquette with consequences. Real sanctity and real sorcery are both numinous, both breaches in the world, and they differ only in their direction. What stayed: the supernatural is not the opposite of the ethical but its far end.

Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows.” Two men in a canoe on the Danube, and a place where the membrane between worlds runs thin. What stayed is the in-between itself — the image of a landscape that is neither here nor there, and the humility appropriate to crossing it.

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi. The character I recognize most in all of fiction: he researches, he investigates, he keeps a journal with a cross-referenced index. But what stayed is how he meets his world — not interrogating it, receiving it. The House gives him everything and he answers with gratitude. I read it as a manual for a way of knowing I am still learning.

Ted Chiang. Stories in which the form is the argument — an idea pursued all the way to its consequence, with the human cost never out of view. What stayed: proof that rigor and tenderness are not opposites.

China Miéville, The City and the City. Two cities occupy the same streets, and the citizens of each are trained from birth to unsee the other. What stayed is that this is not fantasy. Unseeing is a discipline we all practice daily; the novel just gives it a name and a police force.

Stanisław Lem, Solaris. The newest entry — I finished it days before writing this page. An ocean that thinks, and a century of scientists who fail to understand it because they keep looking for themselves in it. What stayed: contact is not comprehension. Some things can be met but not known, and the meeting is still worth everything.

Theory

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things and Discipline and Punish. The Order of Things begins with a passage from Borges — a Chinese encyclopedia whose categories are impossible — and Foucault admits the whole book came out of the laughter that passage caused him. That is the concept that stayed: the categories we think with are historical, they could have been otherwise, and we cannot see our own any better than the centuries before us saw theirs. Discipline and Punish added the institutional half: power does not only repress; it produces — subjects, categories, kinds of people — and it does its deepest work by making people visible. I was trained as a historian of colonial administration — police reports, surveillance files, the archive as an instrument of rule — and I work inside an institution now. Both books read differently from the inside.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism. I read it in a graduate seminar in 2018, and it reorganized more of my thinking than anything else from those years. The concept that stayed: there is no outside. Capitalism is not a system we look at; it is the water we swim in, and even our fantasies of escape are part of it. I have spent years debating whether that is actually true — whether transcendence is possible — and the debate itself is the formation. Fisher is also the writer who taught me that depression can be read culturally, and not only clinically.

Nick Land. In the canon to be fought. Land takes the same premise as Fisher — capital as an inhuman process with its own agenda — and, instead of mourning it, worships it. I read him at the bottom of a hard period, and I keep him here as the position that must be answered. A canon that contains only friends isn’t a canon; it’s a comfort.

Vincent Bevins, If We Burn. A history of the protest decade — 2010 to 2020, the largest mass mobilizations in human history, and almost nothing to show for them. I lived in Tunisia in the years after its revolution and saw the aftermath firsthand. What stayed: spontaneity is not a strategy. Horizontal energy without organization loses, every time, to people who have done the boring work of building structures.

Philosophy

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. An emperor’s private notebook that reads like the diary of an ordinary person trying to figure things out. What stayed is the Logos — the conviction that the universe has a structure, that the structure is not negotiable, and that suffering is mostly the friction of refusing it.

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or. The book found me at the moment things began to turn, and it is not an exaggeration to say it did some of the turning. The aesthetic life and the ethical life are not arguments to be weighed; they are lives to be lived, and the difference between them is commitment. What stayed: a self is not discovered. It is built, by choosing the same thing again and again.

Friedrich Nietzsche. Eternal recurrence — not as cosmology but as a test: could you will your life, exactly as it is, again and forever? What stayed is the therapeutic use of that question, and the colder idea beneath it: that what we call truth is mostly an agreement we have stopped noticing we made.

Sigmund Freud. The death drive, taken seriously — we are not only built to flourish but also to undo ourselves, and both drives wear disguises. What stayed: we are dreaming even when we are awake. The unconscious is not a basement; it is the building.

Douglas Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences. Concepts are like cities — dense at the center, sparse at the edges — and no two languages draw their boundaries in the same places. Learning is not acquisition; it is the lifelong refinement of concepts through analogy. What stayed is the claim that analogy is not a figure of speech but the engine of thought itself. It is the idea behind much of what happens in the piazza.

The Traditions

I came to some of these as a historian and stayed for other reasons. What follows are not summaries — each tradition is a world — but the single concept each one left in me.

Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes). My first encounter with the idea that everything fades. Vanity of vanities — and yet the book does not despair; it pours wine and goes on. Impermanence was scriptural long before I knew it was Buddhist.

The Bible. Elijah on Horeb: the wind, the earthquake, the fire — and God in none of them. God in the still, small voice after. What stayed: the divine speaks in the register you are least prepared to hear.

The Qur’an. I read it in its entirety one Ramadan, slowly, with the commentary of The Study Quran. What stayed are the prophetic cycles — the same story told again and again through different messengers, as if repetition were itself the message — and al-Khidr, the strange figure who teaches Moses that knowledge outruns patience. The lesson of al-Khidr is one word: wait.

Sufism. Not from books first. I lived in Tunisia for three and a half years and absorbed it the way you absorb a climate — through music, through shrines, through people for whom it was not exotic. Rumi is the constant through-line; Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s The Garden of Truth later gave the structure: union requires ethical conduct, knowledge that is not cognition, and love. Of everything on this page, this is the territory I am still most inside of.

Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” A short essay that claims attention is the basic spiritual capacity — that to look at something without grasping at it is what prayer is, and what love is. I think about this almost daily. Teaching, reading, listening to another person: it is all the same discipline, done well or badly.

Alan Watts, The Book. The taboo against knowing who you are. Watts is where I first saw that a serious spiritual life could survive the twentieth century — no robes, no compound, no abandonment of the intellect. What stayed: the self is a social fiction, and seeing through it is not a loss.

And the rest, each reduced to the one thing it left. From Hermeticism: correspondence — as above, so below, the inner matching the outer. From Gnosticism, heavily modified: our senses report what is useful, not what is true. From Buddhism: desire and suffering are the same knot. From Taoism: wu wei, the action that does not force. From animism: the world is inhabited, and not only by us. From shamanism: a person can stand as a bridge between worlds — and every tradition above has needed such people.

The Writers

David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest, the essays, This Is Water. Wallace’s attention is dialectical — it circles, doubts itself, doubles back, pushes against its own conclusions until something true survives the assault. What stayed: sincerity on the far side of irony is possible, and it costs everything. Don Gately on his hospital bed, refusing the painkillers, is one of the few genuinely heroic images I carry.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead. The opposite pole. Where Wallace’s attention is recursive, John Ames’s is receptive — he notices, absorbs, blesses, and lets the world be what it is. What stayed is the discovery that I am both of these at once, and that the second one is harder. Also: that prose itself can be a form of grace.

Other Minds

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire. Assigned in a liberal-arts course in 2013, by a professor who happened to be a theologian; I have never stopped using it. We did not domesticate apples, potatoes, tulips, and cannabis — or rather we did, and they domesticated us right back. What stayed is the reversibility of that arrow. I think about it constantly now, watching what we are building with artificial intelligence.

James Bridle, Ways of Being. Intelligence is not one thing, and it is not ours. Octopuses, forests, slime molds, machines — Bridle widens the term until the human version looks like one dialect of a larger language. What stayed: the sense of wonder, and the suspicion that our definitions of intelligence are the narrowest thing about us.

Half of this canon I have probably misread. Menocchio, the sixteenth-century miller who read a handful of books and built a cosmology out of cheese and worms, was burned for his misreadings — but they were generative; they were his. I would rather misread the way he did, and have the concepts become something in me, than read correctly and have them remain information. This page will be revised when the next edition of the canon arrives. It always does.