Luke Sebastian Scalone — Library

On Piranesi

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Gilead

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

On What Moves the Dead

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Wintering

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

On the Lighthouse at the Edge of the World

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

J. R. Dawson’s The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World was never on my radar. I picked it up at my local library’s recent-releases shelf because I liked the cover and, after reading the jacket, was curious what I’d find. On the surface it’s a plot-driven, dual-perspective narrative about an encounter between two women in the space between worlds, the boundary between life and death, a space embodied here as the physical shore of Lake Michigan, with the story centered on Chicago. It’s a fairly classic, almost archetypal tale that unites traditional Jewish spirituality around death, Greek mythology, a lesbian romance, and the hero’s journey; it’s a combination of the Faust narrative and the legend of Orpheus, except that, unlike those, this one has a redemption arc; the characters aren’t lost, and the story is better oriented toward today’s values.

I found the surface narrative far less compelling than Dawson’s atmospheric language and the thematic depths she submerges us in. The book runs on two main perspectives, with a few short chapters from others, and the two could not be more different. Charlie is a young woman living through the 2000s, in her early twenties, university-aged or just after, and the language of her chapters reflects her, the language of anxiety, of personal independence, of current trends. Nera’s chapters read as though written in the late nineteenth century, with flourishes, though never so many as to distract, and her world is a beautiful, wondrous place to explore. Those two perspectives are fundamental. Charlie is traumatized: she lost her sister in a mass shooting and does everything she can to bring her back, unable to grapple with her grief or to process it, and no one around her can help her do so, so that cynicism and disillusionment color her chapters even as she possesses the miraculous ability to see ghosts. Nera, meanwhile, has been kept like a caged bird by her father, who has spent her whole life trying to protect her from the tragic, horrible circumstances of the living world; born a living human, she has no experience of anything outside the in-between.

Over the course of the story we meet countless ghosts, and “Haunts,” the spirits of the dead unable or unwilling to release their attachment to life, and, as in any ghost story, the characters are metaphors for grief, trauma, and the past that stays with us. The ghostliest character is Harosen, Nera’s father and keeper of the titular lighthouse, a modern Charon, ferrying the dead across the lake to the veil. He’s alive, but he may as well be dead: cold, self-protective, terrified of the outside world, with no memory of his life before he built the lighthouse. We know he came to the shores of Chicago during the Great Fire, but the bulk of what we learn about him comes not from him but from his lover, David. He has a chokehold on the past, it’s so close to him, and yet his memory fails him, by choice. He epitomizes deep trauma: he believes he’s learned the lessons, but he can’t get through them. We meet other ghosts too, like Edna, who reminds Nera to say a prayer as she brings the dead to their next phase. Nera and Charlie might themselves be read as ghosts, though they’re plainly alive: Charlie clings to the past so tightly there’s nothing but past, while Nera has no real history at all. In each case there’s something eerie, in Mark Fisher’s sense; the book plays with presence and absence both aesthetically and thematically.

For all the pain in it, above all Charlie’s, Dawson offers a path through, a way we might process and make sense of our own suffering. Charlie moves forward, with setbacks, but she overcomes them and finds new reasons to live, this time with a deeper understanding of life’s ephemerality: rather than leading only to suffering, the transience of things can empower us to value the small joys of everyday life. Nera’s path is different, but she too learns how to live; she had none of Charlie’s lost pleasures to begin with, and while she doesn’t suffer, she has to learn to appreciate life with no past experience to draw on, hearing of the world’s beauty from those in the lighthouse without much context for it. With her intimate knowledge of death, if not of grief, she’s able to live without the fear of loss, to treasure each moment without gripping it too tightly. There are lessons here for readers like me: we, too, can live this way. We differ from Charlie and Nera in that we have no idea what comes after, but we needn’t fear it. Does a light fear its “off” state while it’s on? Of course not. I find it empowering to believe that death is the process of a drop making its way back to the sea, that it comes with a feeling of wholeness. It’s a horrible process for those left living, who must make sense of profound loss, but we need not fear death itself; we can recognize its presence and live each moment in a way that respects the passage of all things, and, as the Japanese beautify the broken through wabi-sabi, we can find beauty in the ephemeral. The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World treats grief with a tenderness that many readers may need, especially anyone currently mourning. I chose it half by chance, and I’m grateful to have walked through Dawson’s beautiful, broken world alongside such compelling characters. Altogether, an outstanding read.

On How to Know a Person

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Brooks’s premise is that knowing another person resists optimization. That is what separates How to Know a Person from the genre it sits beside on the shelf: this is not How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Brooks would push back on the whole vocabulary of productivity in social life. Where a book like Atomic Habits wants you more efficient, Brooks’s implicit view is that efficiency is the wrong frame entirely: you cannot rush connection. It takes time and effort to learn a person: thoughtful questions without judgment, listening as people tell their stories, seeing them as more than a means to your own ends. Of course, we all say we know this. The real question is why, knowing it, we so rarely do it.

Getting to know people takes serious effort, and I struggle with it. I can’t always locate the holdup: generalized social anxiety that extends even to friends and family, an inflated ego, a plain lack of talent, or maybe an underestimation of my own abilities. But when I watch people who do it well, and for most of them it seems to come without effort, I feel both seen and baffled: how does this person do it? Brooks calls them “Illuminators” and puts them at roughly a third of the population. I’d guess the real number is far lower. The consolation is that connection is a skill, learnable, practiceable, not a temperament you either have or lack.

The book divides in three. The first part is the nature of connection in general, and how to meet people where they are. The second narrows to the hardest case: how to talk with someone who is depressed, grieving, or carrying low self-esteem. I know that terrain from both sides: as the person in a profound depression and as the person trying to reach someone in one, and I’m no longer sure which side is harder. It is hard to talk when you are the one struggling, and hard to stay receptive when you are down in the depths. I keep telling myself it should be easy. It is not, nor should it be. The fight is real.

The last third is about seeing the whole person: how to talk to people about their values, how to notice strengths others have missed, what wisdom is, why a person’s origins matter. The thread running through it is embodied, personal narrative. What stands out is that the point is not to get the “facts” right in some objective, scientific sense; it’s the story a person tells about themselves. And that story changes over time. When it does, it isn’t because they’re lying or trying to mislead; it’s a fundamental human instinct, and I’d go further and call it a need. It’s how we make meaning.

Brooks illustrates this with a longitudinal study of Harvard men who matriculated in the 1940s. One was so closed-off, embittered, and cynical that he let no one in: a stickler for order, discipline, and coherence whom most of his classmates disliked. He mellowed over the decades, through real struggles with his wife and daughters, and by the end of his life had become so warm and generous that the study’s researcher was struck by it. The researcher mailed him transcripts of his early conversations, and the man refused to recognize them: you’ve sent these to the wrong person. The facts mattered less than his self-image, and that is true for all of us. To live well, we have to take it to heart. If we ran on pure data (if there even is such a thing) we’d be operating against the grain of what makes us human.

The book’s method is to braid research from neuroscientists, psychologists, and other social scientists together with memoir and anecdote: Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, a young man named Deo who came from Burundi to the United States, and countless of Brooks’s own experiences. The braiding is what gives the subject life, and it lets him reach insights I couldn’t have arrived at alone. The writing is charitable, warm, encouraging; in places I felt outright inspired.

One of my core goals for 2026 is to connect more deeply: with strangers, with friends and family, and especially with my fiancée. Reading this, I realized how little my family and I actually connect. My siblings and I can speak from the heart, but it’s a rare day that I connect deeply with either of my parents. So on New Year’s Day, on the drive to take my father to the airport, I tried it: I started by asking how he learned to play guitar. In forty-five minutes I learned more about his history than I had in years. It was illuminating, and it felt good. There is something fitting in this having been the first book I finished in the new year.

What Brooks describes does work, but it takes patience and deliberate effort, and old conversational habits are easy to fall back into. In a conversation with my sister’s boyfriend I was learning a great deal, and only at the end did I notice I’d stopped asking open questions and started steering toward yes-or-no, or supplying my own advice. Rather than punishing myself for it, I’d rather credit the attempt: it’s more than I’d managed before, and there’s no such thing as perfection.

For someone not ready to reflect, the book will read as a catalogue of the obvious. With even a little self-examination, I think nearly anyone alive will find something serious in it. Implemented widely, what’s here might be enough to meet the crisis of connection in the United States and much of Western Europe.

On Moral Ambition

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I picked up Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition, I thought I’d grabbed a self-help book. Some readers may expect the same, and it can be read that way, but I think he’s doing something more sophisticated. The book begins as a critique of how we think about ambition now: the people with the greatest skill and the strongest drive tend to funnel into investment banking, management consulting, technology (Silicon Valley especially), and the rest of financial services. Those industries have their place, but much of what they produce is destructive, and in a field like management consulting the people inside it often ask what it’s all for and burn out fast. What does it say about twenty-first-century Western society that our best minds are building algorithms to sharpen the marketing of products no one really wants?

On the other side are people with a strong drive to serve, many of whom land in the nonprofit sector and are quickly swallowed by institutions that morph into beasts divorced from the problems they were meant to solve. That’s a particular shame, because there are so many solvable problems in the world; the only reason they remain unsolved is that no one has given them the attention they deserve. As a remedy for both the ambitious and the service-minded, Bregman offers a unifying idea: moral ambition. He defines it through Thomas Clarkson, the eighteenth-century Englishman who doggedly fought to abolish slavery and built a coalition, especially with the Quakers, that succeeded; through Arnold Douwes, who pressured the inhabitants of a small Dutch town into sheltering Jews during the Second World War, saving them from the Holocaust; and through Ralph Nader, whose team of lawyers fought for small regulatory changes that made an enormous difference, the Traffic Safety Act, the Highway Safety Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act all owing to his dogged work.

The idea is that we can make a difference by aiming our talents at solvable, scalable problems no one else had thought to take on. One example is an executive who turned his attention to the high mortality rate from malaria: not by funding a vaccine, or wiping out mosquitoes, or improving medical care, but by mobilizing a team to raise money for mosquito nets and distribute them where malaria is endemic. Mortality fell tremendously. I find stories like that endlessly inspiring, and they do make me feel I could make a real difference.

The book’s major problem, to my mind, is that it advocates a bit too hard for “effective altruism.” EA holds that we should stop pouring ourselves into pet projects or things that merely make us feel good and instead find any way possible to help the largest number of people and animals. On the surface that makes a lot of sense (it shouldn’t matter whether people are dying in our community or across the world), and I have no disagreement there. My disagreement is with EA’s advocates, who tend to come out of rationalist circles: they think logically, true, but they try to quantify everything, and that’s their biggest failing. It’s easy to quantify mortality rates, the share of people without shelter, access to resources, and since those are fundamental matters of survival, I agree they should take precedence. But well-being beyond bare survival can’t be quantified. How do you calculate suffering? Joy? Community, prosperity, health? You can think about them in material terms, but that simply isn’t enough; to really make a difference, you have to think past the metrics.

Take Tunisia. In numerical terms it’s a middle-income country. There’s deep poverty, but also a middle class (shrinking, under neoliberal pressure); unemployment is high, but most people can lean on family and community institutions to meet their basic needs. You don’t hear of many starving or dying of easily preventable diseases; there’s no war displacing anyone; there’s better access to good education than in North America; and the crime rate is lower than in the United States, lower even than in much of Europe. And yet so many young people are trying to leave for a better life, some dying at sea on rafts toward Lampedusa or Pantelleria. Why, if their basic needs are met? Because their basic needs aren’t met, especially not now; and, more alarmingly, it wasn’t always this way. The change in Tunisia is less about raw material need, the kind an effective altruist could turn into a metric, than about immaterial need. Young people need to feel they’re living meaningful lives, to inhabit a dignified existence; many imagine Europe might offer it, and some find it while others are disappointed. More economic investment and new opportunities would help, but I doubt that’s the core of it: Tunisia was poorer forty or fifty years ago, and yet few wanted to leave: they felt connected to their country, there was enough in material and psychological terms to live well, and they stayed. There’s nothing effective altruism could offer that would change the circumstances of the Tunisian people.

None of which is to say there are no solutions. There are. They just require larger, systemic changes, and I’m hardly qualified to speculate on the specifics. Bregman does recognize some of EA’s limits, but I don’t think he goes far enough; the effective altruists get a great deal of attention here, when other approaches to “moral ambition” might have been worth exploring. One risk of the EA path is saviorism, which strips agency from the people often best equipped to solve their own problems, where capacity-building, investing time and money and attention in those who actually live the issues, and advocacy might serve better. Even so, I found the book thoroughly inspiring, and it’s given me a great deal to chew on as I think about what I might offer the world.

On the Disenlightenment

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t like to be too critical of books, but I’ll make an exception for David Mamet’s The Disenlightenment. I picked it up because the title and subtitle interested me, with no idea who Mamet was; having read it, I now know he’s a prominent playwright and screenwriter behind work like The Untouchables, and a Pulitzer winner. His prose writing, though, leaves a great deal to be desired. There were sentences here where I had little idea what he was trying to say and had to reread them several times. His vocabulary is overly pretentious and adds little, and at times it seemed he was writing to impress rather than to present ideas with clarity and verve.

Worse, I found his arguments nonsensical and out of touch. Throughout the book he praises Donald Trump for heroically saving the American nation, set against the legislature; I have my own tendency to dismiss right-wing politics out of hand, but it’s strange to watch him cast congressional legislators as self-interested (which they are) while calling Trump selfless (he is not). There are stranger views too; in one essay he presents ancient Israel as a forerunner of democracy, and I can’t tell where the idea comes from. Even on the Biblical evidence, the territory was ruled by judges, unified under a three-king monarchy, split into two monarchies, and conquered by imperial powers; the Sanhedrin existed, but it was hardly a democratic body, and to call it a forerunner of democracy is like calling the Estates-General of Old Regime France one. It wasn’t. Mamet pulls no punches in accusing other Jewish people, especially those who advocate for Palestine, of anti-Semitic self-hatred, which I find altogether reprehensible. There’s no need for anyone to downplay their background or belief, but it’s a very different thing to accuse people fighting for justice of anti-Semitism.

The book is also laced with identity politics. Mamet laments the passing of an age when “men could be men,” trans people were kept out of sight, and the United States was the world’s prime power. I couldn’t disagree with him more, and the difference is fundamentally one of values: I value difference, complexity, the whole variety of human experience, and I think the traditional power structures were exactly that: power structures. To borrow the Gen Z phrase, Mamet needs to touch grass and unplug from the media ecosystems that amplify the worst voices of the day, which of course he can’t, since he’s necessarily plugged into that world. To be more charitable, his views on storytelling are genuinely compelling; he understands how important story is to our lived experience of the twenty-first century, and that’s a point worth keeping. But for all his fame as a playwright and filmmaker, his essays aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

On Self-Confidence

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Charles Pépin’s Self-Confidence is a deceptively simple little book that offers a theory of self-confidence at once theoretical and practical. In his view, self-confidence doesn’t come wholly from within; it has three dimensions. The first is trust in others, quite different from how we usually think of it. Rather than looking only to ourselves, we have to have faith that others mean well by us and that we can learn from them. The second does come from within, and there are many ways to build it: learn a craft, play a sport, socialize and discover what good conversationalists we actually are. It’s not enough to believe in ourselves; we have to do something constructive that adds to the world, so that, looking back at what we’ve made, we can see that it came from within. The third is faith in the world, a big one, and it suggests that self-confidence runs inversely to cynicism. If you assume the world is cruel and hostile, you’re less willing to risk a mistake; if you approach it expecting most people to be charitable, forgiving, and well-intentioned, you can fail without taking it too hard. That relationship between outside and inside is crucial.

As he works through each facet, Pépin offers anecdotes and practical advice: surround yourself with generous people; take up a craft like pottery or carpentry or mechanics; try new things and step just slightly out of your comfort zone, returning to it after a long day of adventure. Throughout, he has the voice of a warm, fatherly, nurturing figure, urging us toward the best versions of ourselves and a growth mindset, to meet the world as learners and accept the flow of things. The book touched me; it was what I needed to hear in the moment, and it won’t take you long to read.

On Elsewhere

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Yan Ge’s collection Elsewhere is a fascinating book, and her range is enormous: we meet people in China displaced by an earthquake, get caught up in the political dynamics of Confucius’s academy, follow a young woman through the aftermath of a miscarriage on a trip to Burma, and witness a woman fall in love with a man she barely knew after his death. The stories are strange, and they are also remarkably well-written; they played my heartstrings like a fiddle. I don’t know how Yan came up with them; there’s no way this is all auto-fiction, so it’s plain that her imagination runs well past the usual limits. Inhabiting her head even for a little while is a wondrous thing, and I wish I had access to worlds like these all the time. It’s writers like her who make others, like me, want to write.