The lyrics are about the choice she made to pursue the career of a rock star and the misunderstanding she had with her parents regarding that choice. She left at 18, hungry in the literal sense for a year and a half, chasing a life her parents had not mapped out for her. And then she made it, spectacularly, and found that success had not quite resolved the ache of the distance. It had deepened it. The song’s chorus, calling out to her mother and father with a directness that carries the weight of someone who has everything the world calls success and still wants, above all else, to be held. After her father died in 2011, she was unable to perform the song throughout thirty-two European tour dates, saying “I hope to be able to sing it back one day, but for now, it’s too soon.” That detail alone tells you everything about what the song actually was to her.

I did not hear the Cranberries’ version first. I came to this song through Radical Face, which is the project name of Ben Cooper, a singer-songwriter from Jacksonville, Florida, who grew up in a family of nine siblings and states his family as his biggest influence. I have been listening to him for roughly ten years now, and the relationship I have built with his music is the kind that grows quietly over time, like a tree, each listen adding a layer that the previous one had not yet earned. His cover of Ode to My Family strips the original down to its skeletal emotional core, removing O’Riordan’s keening Irish wail and replacing it with something quieter and more interior, a voice that sounds more like a private admission. It is the difference between grief performed and grief overheard. I prefer it, and I think I know why: it sounds like a thought you are having, not a song you are listening to.

What makes Radical Face the ideal interpreter of this particular song is that family, in all its complicated, intergenerational weight, is essentially his entire artistic preoccupation. His Family Tree trilogy follows four generations of a fictional family called the Northcotes, spanning the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, detailing lives confronting war, death, progress, and the supernatural, with Cooper using only instruments that would have been available at the time the stories take place. It is one of the most ambitious projects in contemporary folk music, and its central conviction, running beneath every arrangement and narrative choice, is that families leave marks on each other that persist long after the people themselves are gone. Welcome Home, Son, his most well-known song, captures the specific bittersweet quality of returning somewhere deeply familiar and realizing you are now a visitor in it. Always Gold is about a sibling relationship so precisely observed it functions almost as anthropology. The whole body of work is saturated with the understanding that the people we come from are a permanent condition.

I’m writing this in my third year living away from my parents, in a foreign country, in a language that is not mine, in a life they can follow from a distance but cannot fully inhabit alongside me. My parents and I are the kind of family around whom worlds revolved mutually: their days organized themselves around me, and mine around them, with the total unselfconsciousness of people who have never had to think about the arrangement because it has simply always been the arrangement. Distance has made that visible in the way that removing something makes its outline apparent. I now know the shape of what I took for granted because I can see the space it occupied.

The first year you are surviving. The second year you are adapting. The third year you know exactly what you have traded and for what, and you hold both things simultaneously, the life you built and the life you miss, without the consolation of novelty to soften the weight of either.

Dolores O’Riordan passed away in January 2018 at forty-six. The Cranberries were one of the most emotionally honest bands of their generation, and she remains one of the most distinctive voices in any genre.

Radical Face’s Family Tree trilogy, beginning with The Roots (2011), is the kind of project that rewards the kind of attention most contemporary music does not ask for. Start with Welcome Home and let the rest follow.

About Time, written and directed by Richard Curtis, is categorized as a rom-com, which is accurate in the way that describing Proust as a novel about memory is accurate: technically correct and almost entirely insufficient. The premise is familiar enough: Tim, a young Englishman, discovers on his twenty-first birthday that the men in his family can travel back in time, returning to any moment in their own lives and living it again. He uses this ability, as any reasonable young man would, to improve his romantic prospects. He meets Mary, played by Rachel McAdams with the kind of warm specificity that makes even minor choices feel inhabited, and the love story proceeds with all the tenderness and occasional farce that Curtis does better than almost anyone working in commercial cinema.

But I would argue, the love story is not what the film is actually about. Or rather, it is the vehicle through which the film arrives at something considerably more serious, which it then delivers with such lightness that you are halfway through grieving before you realize you have been ambushed.

What Curtis understands, and what most writers in any genre fail to understand, is that endearment is not a function of screen time. Almost every character in About Time, including those who appear for thirty seconds, carries a complete interior life that you somehow intuit without being shown it directly. The eccentric playwright, the quietly devastated sister whose storyline runs alongside the central romance like a shadow it refuses to acknowledge, the mother pottering at the edges of scenes with a cheerfulness that only retrospectively reveals itself as a chosen response to things she has had to accept. Curtis writes peripheral characters the way Chekhov wrote peripheral characters: as though the story is also theirs and the camera simply happened to point elsewhere.

But it is the father who breaks you. Bill Nighy plays him with a restraint so precise it constitutes a kind of acting philosophy, a man of enormous warmth and quiet wisdom who has spent his life doing exactly what the film eventually teaches Tim to do: paying attention. His relationship with his son is not dramatized through conflict or the conventional apparatus of father-son narrative. It is dramatized through presence, through the specific texture of two people who genuinely enjoy each other’s company and know, somewhere beneath the daily pleasantness of it, that this will not go on forever.

When Tim makes his final journey back, returning not to fix anything or change anything but simply to stand one more time in an ordinary afternoon with his father, to walk across a beach in the grey English light doing nothing of consequence, I was not prepared for what it did to me. I watched it for the first time in 2015 when I was twenty, and I felt it as something poignant but still somewhat abstract, the way you feel things that you know will matter more later. When I returned to it in more mature phases of my life, it had become something else entirely.

I will not be coy about this: it changed something in my relationship with my own father. Not dramatically, not through any single conversation or declared resolution, but in the quieter and more durable way that a shift in perception changes things. I began to notice the ordinary afternoons more. The phone calls that were really just check-ins, the comfortable silences, the repeated stories I had heard enough times to recite myself. The film had instilled in me what Tim’s father tries to articulate in words but really communicates through the way he moves through his days: the idea that the extraordinary is almost never where you think it is, that it is usually hiding inside the ordinary, waiting to be noticed by someone paying sufficient attention.

This is, of course, a Proustian idea. It is the central idea of In Search of Lost Time: that experience contains more than we extract from it in the moment, that the past holds riches we failed to collect when we were living it, that consciousness applied retroactively to time already spent reveals dimensions that were always there and always missed. Proust’s solution is involuntary memory, the madeleine, the sudden ambush of the past arriving unbidden with its full sensory weight. Curtis offers something warmer: the decision, made daily and deliberately, to live each moment as though you are already living it for the second time. To bring to ordinary Monday afternoons the quality of attention you would bring if you knew you were returning to them.

The film’s closing monologue, in which Tim describes this practice, is so quietly radical that it tends to pass as sentiment. It is rather a phenomenological proposal: that the texture of your experience is not fixed by the events that constitute it but by the degree of attention you bring to it. That a life fully inhabited is available to everyone and requires no time travel whatsoever. Just the decision, renewed each morning, to notice.

I took that message to heart. I found it again on each rewatch, always slightly richer, always landing somewhere different depending on where I was in my own life and what I had in the intervening years learned about time and fathers and the specific weight of ordinary afternoons. That is what the best films do: they do not deliver their meaning all at once. They give you what you are ready for, and they wait, patiently, for you to come back for the rest.

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He called this the Double Empathy Problem. The core claim is: empathy failures between people with autism and neurotypical people are mutual. Neurotypical people are not, in fact, naturally gifted at reading people with autism. They are gifted at reading other neurotypical people, which is a different skill that happens to be treated as the universal standard because it belongs to the majority. When a person with autism struggles to interpret neurotypical social cues, this is called a deficit. When a neurotypical person fails equally to interpret the communication styles of people with autism, this is called normal. The asymmetry in how these identical failures are categorised tells you something important, not about autism, but about power.

The research that followed Milton’s proposal has been fairly consistent in supporting it. Studies have found that people with autism communicate effectively and fluidly with other people with autism, and that the social difficulties reliably observed in mixed neurotype interactions diminish significantly or disappear when both parties share a neurological style. The problem was never one-sided. It was always interactional, always produced by the encounter between two different systems, neither of which is inherently deficient and both of which are genuinely limited in their ability to read the other without effort and without awareness that effort is required.

I care about the corporate implications of this which are quite significant and almost entirely ignored. Management culture is saturated with empathy as a virtue, with frameworks for emotional intelligence, active listening, and reading the room. And virtually all of these frameworks are built around a single implicit model of how social interaction works, which is the neurotypical model, codified, packaged, and sold back to organizations as universal human skill. A manager praised for their emotional intelligence has usually demonstrated an ability to read neurotypical signals fluently. Whether they can read an employee with autism, an employee with ADHD, or anyone whose social cognition diverges from the median, is a question most performance frameworks do not think to ask.

What double empathy demands from management is a more honest account of what empathy actually requires. It requires knowing that your social intuitions are calibrated to a particular kind of person and are unreliable outside that range. It requires treating communication failures as joint problems rather than individual deficits, which changes who is responsible for solving them. And it requires building structures, meeting formats, feedback mechanisms, ways of communicating expectations, that do not assume a single social operating system and penalize everyone running a different one. Most organizations are nowhere near this, partly because it is genuinely difficult and partly because the people designing the structures are usually the people for whom the existing structures work fine, which is a bias so total it rarely registers as a bias at all.

The double empathy problem is, in the end, a specific instance of a much more general truth: that the failure to understand someone is almost never as one-directional as it feels from the inside. The question worth asking in any persistent communication breakdown, whether between a manager and an employee, a team and a stakeholder, or any two people who cannot seem to get through to each other, is not who is failing to communicate. It is what the gap between them is made of, and which of them has been told, so far, that the gap is entirely their fault.

Further reading:

Milton, D. (2012). “On the Ontological Status of Autism: The Double Empathy Problem.” Disability and Society.

Sartre introduces this type in The Age of Reason with great precision. Jacques, when confronted with anything that demands honest engagement, instinctively reaches for altitude. He revolves around the situation rather than entering it, searching eagerly for an eyrie from which he can take a vertical view of other people’s conduct. This is practiced, almost enthusiastic withdrawal that seems like perspective.

What makes the type interesting is that the eyrie feels like wisdom from the inside. The person who climbs above a conflict genuinely believes they are seeing it more clearly than those still standing in it. And in a narrow technical sense they are right: altitude does produce a kind of overview. What it surrenders is everything only visible from ground level. The texture of the thing. The actual stakes. The specific weight of what is being asked. None of that survives the ascent. But the person in the eyrie remains unaware of the loss, because what they have gained feels like the more valuable possession.

There is also a moral convenience to the view from above. If your primary relationship to any conflict is analytical, if your first move is always to rise above and observe, you are never quite responsible for what happens in it. You were watching. You were thinking. You were, in your own account, the most reflective person in the room. The eyrie is not only an epistemological position. It is a way of keeping your hands clean.

What this produces in practice is a particular kind of exhausting interlocutor. Someone who cannot be argued with directly because they are never quite where the argument is. Someone whose response to your most urgent claim is a remark about the nature of urgency. Someone who, when you are trying to resolve something real, offers you instead a typology of people who want to resolve things. You are talking to someone who is not there, and who considers their not-being-there a form of superior presence.

Sartre’s verdict is unsympathetic, and deliberately so. He is, for my money, one of the rare writers whose moral judgments feel earned precisely because he understands the psychology of the people he is indicting from the inside. The vertical view Jacques prizes is, in the novel’s moral framework, a refusal to accept that you are in the situation, that you are of it, that no amount of clever repositioning places you outside it. The eyrie is an illusion. Everyone is always on the ground. The only question is whether you are honest about it.

Reference:

Sartre, J.P. (1945). The Age of Reason. The first volume of his Roads to Freedom trilogy, and the most psychologically immediate of the three. Jacques appears briefly but leaves a long shadow.

But the question underneath my rambling is genuine: why does it matter if something is old? Why does age, in and of itself, produce in me something that I can only describe as reverence? A new café serving equally good coffee at an equally pleasant counter does not produce the same feeling. The coffee is identical. The counter is identical. The experience, in every immediately measurable sense, is the same. And yet something is different, and I feel the difference before I can articulate it, which is usually a sign that aesthetics is involved.

The philosopher who thought hardest about this particular feeling was probably Edmund Burke, who distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime: the beautiful being that which pleases through harmony and proportion, the sublime being that which overwhelms with scale and power and the sudden awareness of our own smallness. I believe old things produce a version of the sublime that Burke did not name. Standing beneath the vaulted ceiling of the Panthéon, or sitting on a bench in the Arènes de Lutèce where Romans sat two thousand years before me, I am experiencing beauty in the serene, proportional sense but also something more vertiginous: the sudden, visceral comprehension of duration. Of how much time has passed and how little of it I occupy. The old Parisian structures are evidence that things persist, that human effort can outlast the humans who made it, that the world was happening, richly and complexly, long before I arrived and will continue long after I leave. This is not even nostalgia, which is a sentimental attachment to a past you actually lived. I believe it’s an aesthetic response to continuity itself, to the fact that a thing has survived the attrition of time and is still here, still functioning, still gathering new people into its orbit.

Culturally, this matters in ways that go beyond individual aesthetic pleasure. A city that has preserved its physical history has preserved a form of memory that no archive can fully replicate. Paris does this better than almost any city on earth because it has refused, against considerable pressure, to become entirely new. Walking from one arrondissement to another you move through centuries without quite meaning to. This is what culture actually is, and it requires the old things to remain in order to function. Without them you get only the present, talking to itself, which is both lonelier and less interesting than it sounds.

Living inside a city with this much accumulated duration does something to your sense of your own place in time. It makes you feel correctly proportioned. One person, in one century, in a story that was already ancient and will continue long after everyone who remembers you is also gone. This is not at all a depressing thought. In the precise Burkean sense, it is a sublime one.

¹ Burke, E. (1757). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

² The idea of cities as repositories of cultural memory is developed most rigorously by the architect Aldo Rossi in The Architecture of the City (1966), where he argues that urban form is itself a form of collective consciousness. Worth reading if you find yourself, as I do, unreasonably moved by old streets.

I was wrong in a way that I find almost embarrassing to admit, and that I’m going to admit anyway because intellectual honesty is apparently one of the things that arrives in your thirties along with the ability to say no to things you do not want to do and the mild but genuine pleasure of going to bed at a reasonable hour.

Thirty has not felt like a closing. It has felt, with a consistency that still surprises me, like a clarification. Not wisdom, exactly. I am not wise. But I am wiser than I was two years ago in ways that are specific and measurable and mine: stricter with my time, more honest about what I actually want from other people and what I am willing to offer in return, more capable of sitting inside a difficult feeling without immediately trying to exit it through distraction or performance. The interpersonal relationships I have now are fewer and better. The occupations I give my hours to are more deliberately chosen. The noise has not disappeared but I have gotten considerably better at not confusing it for signal.

There is a version of the turning-thirty essay that ends here, on a note of serene arrival, the narrator having reached a plateau of hard-won contentment from which they survey their past foolishness with fond condescension. That is not this essay, partly because I am not built for serenity and partly because the thing I feel most strongly at 30 is not satisfaction but anticipation. The best days are not behind me as some nostalgia. They are ahead of me, and I intend to be awake for them in a way that I was not always awake for what came before. Proust’s narrator went to bed early for a very long time. So, in my own way, did I. The difference is that I know it now, which is not a small thing. Knowing it is, in fact, almost everything.

What we call imagination, what we call creativity, is merely the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing those traces. Combining them in new configurations. Rearranging their components. But the components themselves were always delivered by experience first. This is Hume’s Copy Principle, and it is a rather startling claim about the limits of the human mind.

What about a golden mountain, or a red dragon? Surely those are original ideas, produced from nothing? No, Hume says. A golden mountain is gold, which you have seen, plus mountain, which you have seen, combined. A red dragon is a lizard, which you have seen, plus wings, which you have seen, plus red, which you have seen, scaled up and breathing fire you have also seen, fused into a single creature you have not. The novelty is in the configuration, not the elements. And the history of creative genius bears this out rather mercilessly.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is lifted from a twelfth-century Scandinavian legend, filtered through a French retelling and possibly an earlier lost English play. Romeo and Juliet is a 1562 narrative poem wearing new clothes. Dante's cosmology is Aristotelian theology plus Virgil's Aeneid plus the political violence of Florence, assembled under personal exile. Dostoevsky's tormented heroes are Hegel and French utopianism run through Siberian suffering and a faith that kept collapsing and rebuilding itself. Kafka's dreamlike bureaucratic dread is the Habsburg Empire he grew up inside, recombined with Kierkegaard's existential anxiety and his father's suffocating authority. What separates these writers from the rest of us is just the fact that nobody has ever recombined inherited material with greater precision, pressure, or feeling. The Copy Principle, in this sense, is an honest account of what genius actually does.

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Reference:

Hume, D. (1748). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section II. The Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

That someone is, of course, the algorithm. And the mechanism is algorithmic profiling: the practice of building detailed predictive models of your preferences, dispositions, and psychological vulnerabilities from your behavioral data, and then using those models to determine what information you see. Not exactly what you asked for. What they have calculated you are most likely to engage with. These are, it turns out, not the same thing at all.

Algorithmic profiling works by treating your past behavior as a reliable predictor of your future behavior. Every click, every pause, every scroll that slows down fractionally on a particular kind of content is a data point. Aggregated across millions of interactions, these data points produce a model that can predict (with uncomfortable accuracy) what you will find outrageous, what you will find comforting, and what will keep you on the platform for another seventeen minutes at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday when you should really be asleep.

The philosophical problem is not simply that this is manipulative, though it is. The deeper problem for me is that the profile influences the person. The content you are served shapes the beliefs you form, the emotions you practice, and the ideas you would never otherwise encounter. Over time, the algorithm starts producing your preferences rather than just predicting them. You are being nudged, continuously and invisibly, toward a version of yourself that is maximally profitable to someone else.

This is where cognitive sovereignty enters the picture. If your epistemic environment, the information landscape in which your beliefs are formed, is being curated by a system optimized for engagement rather than truth, accuracy, or your own reflective values, then in what meaningful sense are your resulting beliefs your own?

The Autonomy Problem

Philosophers have long distinguished between first-order desires, what you want, and second-order desires, what you want to want. A person with a smoking habit may want a cigarette while also wanting to be the kind of person who does not want cigarettes. The second-order desire is, in some sense, more authentically theirs. It reflects deliberate self-authorship rather than compulsion.

Algorithmic profiling is very good at satisfying first-order desires. It is arguably the most sophisticated first-order desire satisfaction machine ever built. What it is structurally indifferent to, and arguably hostile toward, is your second-order desires. You may want to be better informed, more exposed to views you disagree with, less reactive, more patient. The algorithm has no commercial incentive to help you become that person. Nope. It has every commercial incentive to keep serving the version of you that clicks. This is not at all a glitch or a bug. It is the product working as intended.

Cognitive sovereignty is not a demand for perfect rational autonomy, which is a standard no human being has ever met and none ever will. It is a more modest claim: that you are entitled to an epistemic environment that is not secretly engineered to exploit your psychological weak points for someone else’s profit. That the inputs to your thinking should not be curated by a system whose objectives are fundamentally misaligned with your own.

I have no clue if we can even build the legal, technical, or cultural infrastructure to protect that entitlement. The threat though is very much real. Your attention is a resource being harvested. The harvest is shaping what you believe. And the person who designed the system almost certainly has not thought very hard about your second-order desires at all.

The term “cognitive sovereignty” appears in various forms across digital rights literature. Luciano Floridi’s work on information ethics and the “infosphere” is a useful starting point for the philosophical framing. I was first introduced to the concept by Anna Riedl on Twitter.

For the behavioral mechanics of algorithmic engagement optimization, I would recommend Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Churchland is a Canadian philosopher who, starting in the 1980s, decided that philosophy and neuroscience had been living in separate apartments for far too long and that it was time they moved in together. She called the resulting cohabitation “neurophilosophy,” and she is widely considered its founding mother. Her core argument, put plainly, is this: the vocabulary philosophers and ordinary people use to describe the mind, words like “soul,” “free will,” “belief,” and “desire,” is scientifically empty. It refers to nothing neurobiologically real. And if it refers to nothing real, we should probably stop using it.

This, as you can imagine, went over pretty well with everyone.

What Is Neurophilosophy?

Before we get into why Churchland’s project is so controversial, it helps to understand what it actually is. Neurophilosophy is a strong claim that the right way to understand the mind is to look at what the brain is actually doing, and then rebuild our theory of mind from the ground up using that information.

If we take neuroscience seriously as a guide to what the mind actually is, we may discover that many of our ordinary mental concepts simply don’t carve nature at its joints. Let’s consider “belief.” When you say you “believe” that the coffee is too hot to drink, you are implicitly committed to the idea that there is some discrete, identifiable mental state inside you with a specific content that causes certain behavior. But when neuroscientists look inside your skull, they don’t find anything that obviously corresponds to that picture. They find patterns of activation distributed across neural networks, not tidy little boxes labeled “beliefs” and “desires.”

Churchland’s conclusion is that folk psychology, the commonsense theory of mind you and I use when we explain each other’s behavior in terms of beliefs, desires, and intentions, is a theory. And like any theory, it can be wrong. She thinks it probably is wrong, and that neuroscience will eventually replace it with something more accurate, the way chemistry replaced alchemy and astronomy replaced astrology. If you are currently insulted by the comparison of your inner mental life to alchemy, I’m afraid that is very much the point.

There Is No Soul, and Also No Belief

Churchland’s view is a version of what philosophers call “eliminative materialism.” The “materialism” part just means the mind is physical, which most people accept at some level these days. The “eliminative” part is where things get spicy. It means that certain mental categories we currently take seriously will eventually be eliminated from our best scientific picture of the world, not reduced to neural states, but simply dropped.

The soul is the obvious target here. Virtually everyone in the scientific community already agrees that “soul” picks out nothing in the physical world. But Churchland’s more provocative suggestion is that concepts like “belief,” “desire,” and even “pain” in its ordinary folk-psychological sense may be in the same boat. They are part of a theory that has served us reasonably well for coordinating social life, but that will ultimately prove too crude to capture what is actually happening in the brain.

This makes eliminative materialism extremely unpopular (and not just with religious people). It is also unpopular with philosophers who have spent entire careers analyzing the concept of belief, linguists who study how mental terms work in language, and basically any ordinary person who has ever been asked to describe their inner life and would prefer not to be told that their inner life is a theoretical fiction. That last group includes, I think, most people. In which case, my condolences.

The Objection

The most immediate objection to Churchland’s view goes something like this: “But I clearly have beliefs and desires. I know I believe it is raining right now. I know I want a cup of coffee. How could neuroscience possibly tell me I’m wrong about the contents of my own mind?”

This is a fair objection, and it deserves a fair answer. Churchland’s response is that introspection, our ability to report on our own mental states, is not infallible. There is now quite a lot of neuroscientific evidence that our introspective reports are frequently confabulated after the fact, that our brains make decisions before we are consciously aware of them, and that the story we tell ourselves about why we did something is often a post-hoc rationalization rather than an accurate causal account. The fact that something seems a certain way from the inside is not decisive evidence that it really is that way.

This is a such a fascinating point. It is also the kind of point that makes you feel vaguely nauseated once you really sit with it. The idea that your confident sense of your own beliefs and motivations might be a story your brain is telling you rather than a direct readout of what is actually happening inside you is philosophically exhilarating and personally destabilizing, which is exactly the combination that makes philosophy both valuable and universally dreaded.

So What Do We Replace It All With?

A reasonable follow-up question is: if we are supposed to throw away all our folk-psychological vocabulary, what exactly replaces it? Churchland’s answer is that we don’t know yet, and that this is fine. Science routinely works in the gap between abandoning an old framework and fully articulating the new one.

What neurophilosophy can do in the meantime is start building bridges. Churchland’s own work has explored how neuroscience might inform our understanding of moral cognition, decision-making, and social behavior. Her 2011 book Braintrust argues that our moral sense is rooted in neural mechanisms that evolved to support social bonding in mammals, and that oxytocin and related neurochemicals are doing a lot of the philosophical heavy lifting that we used to attribute to Reason, God, or the Moral Law.

A lot of philosophers feel that explaining where our moral intuitions come from does not tell us which ones are correct. Churchland is skeptical that the question “which intuitions are correct?” has an answer that floats free of biology entirely. This disagreement has been ongoing for several decades now.

Conclusion

Churchland’s neurophilosophy is, at its core, a very simple idea with very radical implications: if you want to understand the mind, you have to look at the brain, and if what you find in the brain doesn’t match your pre-existing philosophical vocabulary, then the vocabulary has to go. Au revoir ! The soul, the will, the self as a unified rational agent, these may all turn out to be useful fictions rather than scientific categories.

This is either a liberating insight or an intolerable affront to human dignity, depending on who you ask. Most people, in my experience, oscillate between the two depending on how the argument is going for them at any given moment. Which is, come to think of it, exactly the kind of behavioral pattern that neuroscience is getting increasingly good at explaining, even if we haven’t quite agreed on what to call it yet.

What I absolutely love is how much the film trusts its supporting characters. Tom Cruise doesn’t have to carry the entire runtime on charm alone. Dorothy’s sister Laurel is a fully realized person with her own frustrations, her own wit, her own arc. Rod Tidwell’s marriage is more textured and emotionally honest than most films’ central relationships. Of course I have to mention the young Ray Boyd who is adorable and provides the emotional weight, grounding the film’s romance in a messy reality. Everyone on screen has a soul, a history you can sense without being told. That kind of quiet, distributed humanity is almost impossible to find today, and watching Jerry Maguire, you feel its absence everywhere else.

And yes, Tom Cruise. There is simply no one like him. Magnetic doesn’t even cover it. He is a different breed of movie star altogether, one that the industry spent decades producing and may never reproduce again. Every beat feels earned.

The film also moves slowly by today’s standards, and that slowness can be such a gift. Things breathe. Scenes are allowed to linger past their narrative utility because the film understands that emotion needs room to settle. It doesn’t panic and cut away. It lets you sit with people. I have missed that feeling.

That is exactly what modern filmmaking has largely abandoned. There’s a particular kind of film being made right now, engineered for half of our attention. Films designed to play in the background while you scroll, constructed with enough noise and momentum to register passively but not demanding enough to require genuine presence. You know the ones. They are sometimes technically competent, frequently expensive, but almost completely forgettable the moment they end.

Jerry Maguire is the opposite. Almost every scene pulls you away from whatever else you were doing and plants you there. The performances are authentic. The emotions are specific. The small moments, a look, a pause, a conversation happening in a car, carry as much weight as anything louder.

There are certain sequences that lean a little too hard into the era’s sentimentality but you know what, I don’t look at them as imperfections. I have thoroughly missed that. The imperfections are human ones, which makes them forgivable. This is a film that was clearly made by people who cared, for audiences expected to care back.

That social contract between filmmaker and viewer has quietly dissolved somewhere along the way. Jerry Maguire is a reminder of what it felt like when it was still intact. A rom-com that is cynical about the world but stubbornly optimistic about people.

I’ve been reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason, which might explain why I particularly fixate on those lines above. The novel follows Mathieu, a philosophy teacher drifting through 1938 Paris, paralyzed by his own freedom. He wants to be authentic, to live without self-deception, to make choices that genuinely express who he is. But every choice feels arbitrary. Every path equally meaningless. He’s trapped by the terrible realization that nothing compels him toward any particular way of being.

This is what Sartre meant by being “condemned to be free.” We don’t choose to be thrown into existence, but once here, we’re responsible for everything we make of it. There’s no instruction manual, no essential nature we’re fulfilling, no cosmic purpose we’re serving. Existence precedes essence. We exist first, then we decide what that existence means, if it means anything at all.

If nothing inherently matters, then I have to decide what matters. Every single time. I can’t fall back on tradition, divine command, what my mom said, natural law, or any other framework that would tell me how to live. I have to choose. And in choosing, I take responsibility not just for my own life but for the kind of world I’m endorsing through my choices. When I choose monogamy, I’m saying monogamy is valuable. When I choose my career over my relationships, I’m declaring that career is more important. When I stay in bed instead of helping a stranger, I’m announcing that comfort outweighs compassion.

Sartre calls the attempt to escape this responsibility “bad faith.” It’s when we pretend we’re not free, when we act as if our choices are inevitable or determined by forces beyond our control. The waiter who performs his role so perfectly he seems to become the role. The person who says “I had no choice” when they absolutely did.

Mathieu, for all his intellectual honesty about freedom, spends most of The Age of Reason in exactly this kind of bad faith. He wants to be free but won’t commit to anything that would actually express that freedom. He wants to be authentic but keeps waiting for some external circumstance to force his hand.

I recognize this paralysis. Once you truly accept that nothing has inherent meaning, that you’re the sole author of significance in your life, the question becomes: on what grounds do you choose anything? If it’s all arbitrary, why choose this over that? Why get out of bed? Why pursue any particular goal? Why care about anything at all?

What does it mean if it all means nothing? The question persists in the face of its own potential futility. Maybe that’s the actual insight. The question “what does it mean?” seems to be built into human consciousness at such a fundamental level that even recognizing the possibility of meaninglessness doesn’t make the question go away.

I wake up and immediately start constructing narratives. This day matters because I’m working toward this goal. This relationship matters because it’s teaching me this lesson. This setback matters because it’s building this quality in me. I can intellectually acknowledge that these narratives are self-created, that the universe doesn’t care about my goals or lessons or character development, and yet I keep narrating anyway.

Sartre might say this is bad faith, this constant meaning-making. But I’m not sure he’s right. Or rather, I’m not sure living in “good faith” is actually possible for creatures like us. We’re meaning-making machines. We can’t perceive raw, uninterpreted reality. We see patterns, stories, significance. Even when we try not to.

The existentialists say: accept that there’s no inherent meaning, then create your own through authentic choice and commitment. But what makes a choice “authentic”? What grounds could there possibly be for preferring one self-created meaning over another? If I decide my life is about art and you decide your life is about family and someone else decides their life is about accumulating wealth, on what basis can we say any of these is more or less authentic? More or less meaningful?

I don’t think Sartre is wrong that we’re radically free, that existence precedes essence, that we create ourselves through our choices. But I also don’t think we can simply embrace this freedom and move on. The vertigo doesn’t go away. We’re stuck in permanent dialectical tension between needing meaning and knowing there isn’t any, between making choices and recognizing their arbitrariness, between living as if things matter and suspecting they don’t.

This might sound bleak. It probably is bleak. But don’t you think there’s something comforting about it too? If nothing inherently means anything, then I can’t get it wrong. There’s no cosmic or divine standard I’m failing to meet, no essential purpose I’m betraying. I’m just here, making choices, constructing narratives, asking what it all means (even when it might mean nothing).

I simply couldn’t stop comparing it to Uncut Gems, which remains a far superior film in terms of structure and natural progression. While Marty Supreme has even more subplots or bigger scale than Gems, the development didn’t feel nearly as organic.

That said, the filmmaking itself is undeniable. It is shot in an incredible way that we simply don't see anymore. We often talk about wanting real, grounded stories that feel lived-in rather than grand "theme-park" spectacles, and this is it. Making a period film feel this tangible is extremely difficult, and it succeeds as a frantic, claustrophobic visual ride with an amazing score. The performances are absolutely stunning across the board, especially Kevin "Mr. Wonderful" O'Leary in his acting debut.

However, despite a phenomenal turn by Chalamet, I felt let down by the script. The story seemed carefully constructed for the Oscar appeal rather than for natural narrative flow. The ending, while beautiful, felt abrupt and unearned. The film simply didn’t do the emotional legwork to justify that final sequence.

If Uncut Gems had received this level of hype and the icon status Chalamet currently enjoys, Adam Sandler would have won an Oscar, and deservingly so. Marty Supreme just isn’t as well-rounded or tight.

An enjoyable ride nonetheless. I will always look forward to anything the Safdie universe produces.

The spire is the cathedral’s ultimate expression of this vertical impulse. It serves no practical function. It doesn’t make the building more stable or increase its capacity. It exists purely to reach, to point, to extend beyond what is necessary into what is aspirational. When I visited the cathedral in Gisors, I watched how the spire changed against different backgrounds of sky. On a clear day, it would cut into the blue like a blade. On an overcast afternoon, it disappeared into gray, becoming almost abstract.

This vertical orientation reminds you of scale, of your smallness, of the vast distance between where you stand and where your eyes are being pulled. The philosophers of the 18th century would eventually call this feeling the sublime: that mixture of awe and terror we experience when confronted with something that exceeds our capacity to fully comprehend it. Mountains. Oceans. Storms. And yes, cathedrals.

I’ve been reading Carlos Eire’s They Flew, his scholarly examination of levitation and bilocation accounts in early modern Catholicism. The book catalogs hundreds of documented cases of saints and mystics who, witnesses claimed, defied gravity during states of religious ecstasy. Teresa of Ávila, Joseph of Cupertino, dozens of others. Eire isn’t really arguing for or against the reality of these phenomena. Instead, he explores what it meant for people to believe these things could happen.

In a world where the physical and spiritual were understood as intimately connected, where the divine could break through into ordinary reality at any moment, levitation made a certain kind of sense. If God could become flesh, if bread could become body, if saints could intercede across the boundary of death, then gravity, too, might be negotiable. The peasant entering a cathedral in 1326 entered a space explicitly designed to demonstrate this logic. The stones themselves seemed to defy their own weight. The vaults spread across impossible spans. The walls dissolved into glass. The building escaped the horizontal plane.

I think about this whenever I’m in these spaces now. That peasant and I are looking at the same arches, the same proportions, the same light diffusing through ancient glass. But we’re not having the same experience. Or maybe we are, and I’ve just been trained to translate it into secular language. When I feel that tightness in my chest standing under those vaults, when I feel simultaneously small and elevated, when the boundary between inside my body and outside it becomes briefly uncertain, what am I experiencing if not transcendence?

In Bruges, I remember visiting the Church of Our Lady, home to Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child. But I barely looked at the sculpture. I couldn’t stop staring at the brick. The way the Gothic builders used ordinary fired clay to create these soaring spaces. The way they developed the pointed arch and the flying buttress, which are incredibly beautiful. This is what moves me most about Gothic architecture: Did it begin with an aesthetic vision? Or with a problem? How do you build taller? How do you let in more light? How do you create a sense of heaven? Were the innovations practical and the sublime just accidental? Maybe the desire to build higher was always about more than structural ambition.

Carlos Eire’s levitating saints were trying to express something that exceeded language. The body lifted because the soul couldn’t be contained. The mystics described an experience of divine union so overwhelming that their physical form simply ceased to obey its usual rules. Whether or not you believe the accounts, you have to reckon with the experience they’re trying to articulate: the sense that reality has more dimensions than we normally perceive, that there are states of consciousness that reorganize our relationship with the physical world. Gothic cathedrals are the architectural equivalent of that testimony.

What am I looking for in these spaces? Not religion, not even beauty, though they’re beautiful. I think I’m looking for the same thing the builders were reaching toward, the same thing the peasant recognized, the same thing the levitating saints couldn’t contain: the experience of being pulled beyond myself, of encountering something that exceeds my explanatory frameworks.

The sublime isn’t comfortable. It’s not meant to be. When you look up at a vault that disappears into darkness, when you stand at the base of a spire that seems to puncture the sky itself, you’re supposed to feel small. You’re supposed to feel the inadequacy of your normal ways of understanding the world. You’re supposed to be reminded that your usual scale isn’t the only scale.

Immanuel Kant distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime. The beautiful, he said, gives us pleasure through harmony and proportion. The sublime gives us pleasure through overwhelming us, through presenting something so vast or powerful that it defeats our ability to fully grasp it. Beauty fits comfortably within our usual perceptual and cognitive frameworks. The sublime shatters them.

Gothic cathedrals traffic in the sublime. They’re too tall, too ambitious, too determined to escape the weight of stone. They shouldn’t still be standing after centuries, and yet here they are. And we shouldn’t still be moved by them in an age of skyscrapers and space stations, and yet we are.

There was a tower. I must have seen it before, but on this particular morning its top had vanished into the fog, the building dissolving into white as if it were still being constructed by some celestial architect who had not yet decided how tall it should be. I stopped. The current of commuters parted around me, indifferent, and I let myself drift sideways into a small clearing where I could stand and look properly. And then I noticed I was not alone.

A man, perhaps in his late sixties, had done exactly the same thing. Out of all those hundreds of people streaming past, it was just the two of us who had stopped, who had broken from the flow to stand in this little patch of pavement and tilt our heads back at the sky. I watched him take out his phone with feeble, trembling hands, and hold it up towards the tower. I did the same.

We did not speak. We didn’t need to. There is a kind of recognition that happens between strangers who have noticed the same thing, a small conspiracy of attention in a world that mostly looks down at its feet or straight ahead at its destination. He took his photos. I took mine. And then, without acknowledgment, we each rejoined the current and went our separate ways.

I have been thinking about what it means that he stopped, that at his age he still carries whatever instinct made him break from the crowd to look at something beautiful and useless. I aspire to that. I fear, sometimes, that the daily grind will eventually wear away this delicate, wondering part of me, that one day I will walk past a tower disappearing into fog and feel nothing, notice nothing, keep walking.

But here is the strange thing: I am thirty now, and I cannot detect any difference between the person who stops to look and the eighteen-year-old version who would have done the same. The capacity for wonder has not diminished. If anything, it has become more precious, more deliberate. At eighteen, you stop because you don’t yet know any better. At thirty, you stop because you have learned what it costs not to.

And that man, from the opposite end of the spectrum, perhaps understood something similar. The frailty of it all. The way life keeps moving whether you pause or not. The way a building can vanish into mist and reappear tomorrow, unchanged, while you yourself are never quite the same twice.

I hope, when I am his age, my hands will tremble too as I lift my phone towards something ordinary that has, for a moment, become miraculous. I hope I will still be the kind of person who steps out of the current. I hope I will still stop.

The score arrived in my life before I knew who was responsible for it. That propulsive, melancholy sound that carried the Hoover family’s yellow van across the American Southwest, the music that made you feel heartbroken and hopeful at the same time. I remember thinking: who are these people, and why does their music sound like a circus tent collapsing in the most beautiful way possible?

DeVotchKa are a four-piece ensemble from Denver, Colorado, which is perhaps the last place you would expect to produce music that sounds like a Slavic funeral procession crossed with a Mexican wedding band. The name comes from the Russian word for “girl,” borrowed from Anthony Burgess’s invented slang in A Clockwork Orange. They started out as a backing band for burlesque shows in the late 1990s, touring with Dita Von Teese, before eventually scoring Little Miss Sunshine and earning a Grammy nomination. Nick Urata, their frontman, plays guitar, piano, trumpet, theremin, and bouzouki, sometimes within the same song. His voice has been described as having “a hint of Rocky Mountain loneliness in it,” which is the sort of thing music critics say when they cannot explain why something makes them want to cry on public transport.

The song that lodged itself permanently in my consciousness is “Straight Shot,” the opening track from their 2018 album This Night Falls Forever. It arrived after a seven-year absence during which the band members had been busy with film scores and side projects and, presumably, the ordinary business of getting older.

The song begins quite simply: “I can draw a straight line through my mind, right back to the good times,” Urata sings, “back when all the stars were aligned, before all the paperwork got signed.” Before contracts and compromises. Before adulthood announced itself. The straight shot of the title is a path through the varied chambers of the heart to parts of town you thought you had forgotten. But it is another line that I love, the one that made me stop what I was doing and play the song again, and then again:

“Can’t hold a candle to you, my fair-weather best friend.”

The phrase “fair-weather friend” is one of those expressions we use to describe someone who is present for the good times but absent for the bad, a friend of convenience rather than commitment. The addition of “best” before “friend” should be a contradiction, an oxymoron, an impossibility. Your best friend, by definition, is the one who stays. The fair-weather friend is precisely the one who does not.

There are people in my life (and perhaps in yours), who were everything to me for a period of months or years, and then were simply gone. Not through any dramatic falling out. Not through betrayal or argument or the kind of confrontation that would at least give the ending some narrative weight. They disappeared the way morning fog does, gradually and then all at once. I could not tell you the last time we spoke. I could not tell you when I stopped expecting them to call.

I think of Rajan, whom I met during a philosophy class in the first week of undergrad in 2015. We talked about something or other, the way you do when you are convinced that every conversation might be the beginning of a lifelong friendship. He handed me a little black Penguin Classic, Dostoevsky’s The Meek One, as casually as if he were lending me a pen. And then after a few months he was gone from my life altogether. No falling out, no explanation, just the slow fade into absence. I have not heard from him since. Reading Dostoevsky did change the course of my life, in ways I am still discovering. For that, I will always be grateful to him.

The song continues: “Now I’m stuck in the slow lane, on the useless side of my brain, the one that drives a thinking man insane, wishing his circumstances never have to change.” This is the cruelty of memory. The useless side of the brain is the one that insists on replaying scenes from a life that no longer exists, the one that conjures faces and voices and the particular quality of light in a room you will never enter again. Urata’s voice, throughout, maintains a strange equilibrium between melancholy and something almost like hope. “And my life is just around the bend, and these broken hearts can mend, it just takes time, time, time.”

What I love about the phrase “fair-weather best friend” is that it refuses to assign blame. It doesn’t say: you abandoned me. It does not say: I was a fool to trust you. It says only: this is what we were to each other, and now we are not. It’s just a description. And somehow that makes it worse.

I think about my own fair-weather best friends. The ones from university who felt like family until we graduated and discovered that we had been held together by proximity and circumstance rather than anything more durable. The ones from various jobs who I promised to stay in touch with and did not. The ones who I still think about, sometimes, when a particular song plays or a particular smell wafts past.

This is one of the ordinary tragedies of adult life. The slow erosion of connections that once felt permanent, the gradual realization that most relationships are, in fact, fair-weather, contingent on conditions that will inevitably change. We move. We get busy. We become different people, incrementally, until the person we were is as foreign to us as the friend we have lost.

“It’s like a straight shot through the backyards and the vacant lots, through the varied chambers of my heart, to the part of town that even you seem to have forgot.” Even you, who I would have said knew me better than anyone. Even you, who I would have trusted with my secrets, my fears, my half-formed theories about the meaning of everything. Even you have forgotten the landscape we once shared.

I’m writing this on an ordinary morning, on the train to work. I have a kindle in hand and a reading list I will never finish, a life that is, by most measures, doing fine. The circumstances have changed, as circumstances do.

DeVotchKa released only ten songs after seven years of silence, and this was the one they chose to open with. A song that sounds like joy and means something closer to mourning. I’m not a musician, and this is not meant to be any analysis. I cannot tell you much about chord progressions or time signatures or whatever it is that people who understand music discuss. What I can tell you is that I have a long commute, and during that commute I have a lot of time to stare out the window and let songs do their work on me.

My fair-weather best friend. Whoever you are now, wherever you have gone: I hope your circumstances are what you wanted them to be.

Fortunately, a few beautifully crafted motifs stand out, and it’s hard to deny the beauty of its conclusion. And what a conclusion it was. I’ve long been fascinated by how common folk must have reacted to one of the greatest storytellers of all time, and I yearn to see Shakespearean settings come to life on screen. The final act delivered exactly this: the profound democracy of stories, how they affect us all regardless of class or gender. When Jessie Buckley’s Agnes sees that she is not alone in her grief, that a story can reach across and hold the people who witness it, the effect is magnificent. This last act is what salvaged the film for me.

Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” continues to torment me in a hauntingly beautiful way, as it has over the years. And Jessie Buckley, the woman that you are! She carried the entire film with her performance.

The film is adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's novel, and I believe this piece of literature matters deeply. Scholars, academics, and historians have treated Agnes (Anne) Hathaway rather horribly over the centuries: she was a peasant, Shakespeare hated her, he fled to London to escape her. Yet there is no evidence for any of this. There is, in fact, evidence that he loved her. A lot. I admire this aspect of the work most of all. Filling the historical gap, restoring dignity to a woman long maligned, and recognizing the quiet urgency of telling her story.

My letterboxd

I lived behind the canvas of paintings, with Da Vinci’s La Bella Principessa, with the Melancholy of Edvard Munch, On the Paris Street of Gustave Caillebotte, in the Balcony of Edouard Manet and Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

I thought I lived behind the musical compositions, with the long laments of Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, with the cheerful Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi, and Rossini’s devilish and dramatic Thieving Magpie.

I thought I lived in these borrowed worlds, these curated refuges of feeling and form. Perhaps we all do, for a time. We find ourselves in the eyes of characters who suffer more eloquently, who love more recklessly, who stand at precipices we dare not approach in waking life.

But there comes a moment when the canvas no longer holds you. When the page turns and you are not carried with it. I began to wonder: had I been living, or had I been hiding? Had these great works illuminated my existence, or had they become a veil, a beautiful obstruction between myself and the unvarnished texture of my own days?

There is a comfort in aesthetic distance. Art asks nothing of us but our attention. It does not demand that we act, that we risk, that we fail. We can weep for Sonya’s sacrifices without sacrificing anything ourselves. We can feel the ache of Richter’s strings without confronting the source of our own grief.

Yet something shifted. Perhaps it was the accumulation of years, or the weight of a life conducted primarily in the subjunctive. Perhaps it was Paris itself, a city that refuses to let you remain merely a spectator, that pulls you onto its streets and forces you to participate in its theatre of daily life.

I realised that the figures I had loved, the Davids and Swanns and Dorians and Rodions, were not meant to be dwelt with indefinitely. They were meant to be companions for a passage, teachers for a season. They show us what it means to feel deeply, to err profoundly, to seek meaning in a world that offers none readily. But they cannot live for us.

And so I stepped out from behind the canvas, and out from between the pages. Not to abandon these companions, but to finally stand beside them. To become, at last, a figure in my own composition. Imperfect, unfinished, but present.

Philippe-Antoine Hoyeck is one of my favorite people on Twitter, and I wholly agree with his observation here: many of us fetishize the idea of reading far more than the act itself. We love the aesthetic, the identity, the literary persona we project to others, but not necessarily the hours spent actually turning pages.

I consider reading to be a sacred activity, one we desperately need to preserve. Reading strengthens our capacity for sustained attention in an age engineered to fragment it. It trains us in delayed gratification, building the neural pathways that allow us to sit with complexity rather than reach for the next dopamine hit. In a world of infinite scrolling, choosing to read is almost an act of resistance.

Yet I see so many people more interested in appearing to love obscure books, especially the classics, than in genuinely engaging with them. Let me be blunt: some haven’t even read the books they claim to adore. They’ve consumed a summary, skimmed an essay, absorbed the discourse, and now perform their literary taste for an audience.

My plea is simple: find the genres that actually move you, and engage with those. Set your own rules and rituals. Do not conform to Twitter trends or TikTok aesthetics. Whether you read 10 books this year or 100, the number is irrelevant. Read what genuinely resonates. It’s for your own sake, after all.

We are all doomed to an extremely brief existence. Do not squander it engaging with art that doesn’t speak to something within you.

I’m on the Line 14 between Porte de Clichy and Châtelet. The woman beside me reads a novel. She has positioned her elbow precisely three centimeters from mine. We are two countries maintaining a border neither of us will mention or cross. She turns a page. I hear the paper move. That sound belongs to her. My breath belongs to me. The silence between us is a kind of treaty.

What I witness on the 66 bus is something else. A young man with headphones. An elderly woman with a small dog in her purse. A child pressed against the window watching the city slide past. None of them speak, yet none of them bristle. Their silence does not repel. It simply is, the way a chair is, or a lamppost.

I have come to believe this silence is a form of generosity.

The woman beside me on the métro has a whole life I will never touch. She has a mother. She has regrets. She has a relationship to her body that shifts depending on the day. She has somewhere to be. I do not need to know any of this. My not-knowing is a gift I give her. Her not-knowing is a gift she gives me.

We are, for fifteen minutes between Clichy and Châtelet, two books on the same shelf. Spines facing outward. Closed. Proximity does not require intimacy. It is the successful execution of a very old idea: that a human being is not a public utility.

Simone Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. I think she was half right. Attention can be generous. But so can the deliberate withholding of attention. To look away from someone is sometimes to say: I will not consume you. I will not make your face into my entertainment. I will not convert your existence into an anecdote I tell later.

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There is a man I see often at Pont Cardinet. He wears the same brown coat. He carries a leather satchel that has seen decades. He has a moustache that belongs to another century. I don’t know his name. I don’t know what he does. Every morning I stand beside him. Every morning we don’t speak. I have come to treasure this man precisely because he remains opaque to me. He is not a character in my story. He is simply there, living his own story, which is none of my business.

By not speaking to me, the stranger on the bus or the metro tells me: I assume you are a complete person who does not require my validation. I assume you have reasons for being here that are sufficient. This is, in its quiet way, the most profound respect. Of course there are exceptions. The drunk who boards and delivers a monologue. The tourist who asks for directions. The child who has not yet learned the code. These irruptions occur, and the métro absorbs them the way a pond absorbs a stone.

Last week I walked through Père Lachaise with a friend. We came to pay respects, as one does, to the dead who no longer need respecting. Proust’s grave first. A simple slab, nothing of the sentences that changed how time could be written. A man stood there already. Perhaps forty. Grey scarf. He stared down at the stone with an expression I could not read. What had those sentences done to him? Had he, too, lost months inside the Guermantes drawing rooms? Had he recognized himself in Swann’s obsession? What passage had undone him? I would never know. He would never know that I wondered. We stood three feet apart at the grave of a man who spent four thousand pages trying to recover lost time, and we did not exchange a single word.

We moved on. Oscar Wilde’s tomb. A young woman stood there photographing the stone. She wore a green coat. She had come alone. What had Wilde meant to her? The Picture of Dorian Gray? The Importance of Being Earnest? Her face revealed nothing. She took her photograph and walked away, carrying whatever she carried, and I was not entitled to any of it.

At Edith Piaf’s grave a small crowd had gathered. An older couple, Italian perhaps, stood very still. A teenager stood nearby with headphones in. Were they listening to her? What did they regret? What did they refuse to regret? We were strangers gathered around a woman who had sung her whole bleeding heart into microphones for decades, and we gave each other the privacy she never had. To speak at a grave feels like interruption. The dead have finally earned their quiet. We honor it by joining them in it, briefly, before returning to the noise of being alive.

We also stood in the Musée d’Orsay, in the room where the Impressionists hang. Monet’s Woman with a Parasol faced me from the wall. A man stood beside me. Perhaps sixty. He wore a dark coat and carried no bag. He stared at the painting with an intensity that made me wonder what he was seeing. Was it the brushwork? The composition? Or was it something else entirely, some private hillside of his own, some woman in white he had lost, some summer afternoon that had passed and could not be recovered?

I will never know.

We stood there together, two strangers, for what felt like several minutes. Neither of us spoke. Monet had made this image in 1875, one hundred and fifty years before we stood before it. His wife would die three years later. His son would grow up and grow old and die. The painter himself would go blind and keep painting, would make water lilies until his hands failed. All of this hung in the air between me and the stranger. Or perhaps none of it. Perhaps he was thinking about lunch. Perhaps he was simply resting his eyes on something beautiful and thinking nothing at all.

The silence in a museum is different from the silence on the métro. On the métro we are in transit, moving toward destinations that matter. In a museum we have arrived at a destination that does not matter, that exists outside the economy of necessity, that serves no purpose except to make us feel something. And yet even here, especially here, we do not speak to each other about what we feel.

I have stood before the Mona Lisa in her climate-controlled fortress, surrounded by tourists holding phones above their heads. Even there, in that circus of attention, there is a strange silence at the center. People approach. People look. People leave. Almost no one speaks to the stranger beside them. Almost no one says: What do you see? Does she look sad to you? Do you think Leonardo loved her?

We keep our responses private. And in doing so, we protect something. Perhaps the painting itself, which does not need our commentary. Perhaps each other, who did not come here to perform our sensitivity for strangers. Perhaps ourselves, who are still learning what we think and do not wish to commit too early to a position.

We are all, on the métro, on the bus, in the museums, living things carrying private universes. Each is a world. To remain silent in the presence of other worlds is to acknowledge their magnitude. Speech would diminish them. Speech would pretend they could be summarized, captured, held. This is what I have learned from sitting beside people who don’t know me. They create, by not speaking, a space in which I can remain uncategorized. I am not forced to be charming. I am not forced to be interesting. I am not forced to be anything at all.

I can simply be a living thing among living things, hurtling through the dark beneath Paris, each of us mysterious, each of us mercifully, beautifully alone together.

This is why Marcel Proust could not have written a shorter book. The length is the argument. Only by making us feel the passage of time, only by trapping us in social scenes that seem interminable before suddenly revealing their significance, only by exhausting us with detail before granting us the revelation, could he demonstrate what he believed: that the work of art is the only victory against mortality.

For Proust, it was all about capturing the internal experience of consciousness. He was trying to do something no one had really attempted before: translate the texture of memory, perception, and time into prose.

The entire structure of In Search of Lost Time mirrors how our memory actually works. We don’t remember our lives as linear narratives with clear cause and effect. We remember them as associations, sensations, fragments that bloom into entire worlds when triggered by something small, like a madeleine dipped in tea. Proust needed those 4,000 pages because he was documenting something beyond those life events: the way they refract through consciousness over time.

The “plot” is the narrator’s evolving understanding of his own life, art, love, time, and memory. It’s less “here’s what happened” and more “here’s what it felt like to have lived, and here’s what that feeling means in retrospect.” You can’t rush that kind of phenomenological excavation. That’s also why I started reading this book back in 2018 and am still only on the fourth volume out of seven. I honestly don’t want it to end.

So yeah, why 4,000 pages? Because life itself takes that long. Because the pattern only emerges in retrospect. Because you cannot understand a cathedral by looking at a single stone.