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.

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.

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.

The Reveries emerged from Rousseau’s final period of exile and ostracism, when former friends had turned against him and Parisian society had branded him a pariah. Rather than simply lashing out at his persecutors, Rousseau turns inward, seeking solace in nature and self-examination. His solitary walks become both literal journeys through the French countryside and metaphorical expeditions into the depths of his own consciousness. In these moments of reverie, he discovers fleeting glimpses of the happiness and authenticity that had eluded him in the social world: what he calls the “sentiment of existence” stripped of all external complications.

Nearly a century later, this predicament of the solitary walker finds a darker, more corrosive echo in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man. Where Rousseau seeks refuge in nature’s embrace, the Underground Man retreats into the suffocating confines of his Petersburg cellar. Both figures embody a similar contradiction: they flaunt a loneliness that is simultaneously forced upon them by society’s rejection and self-imposed through their own misanthropy. Yet despite their proclaimed disdain for human company, their profound sense of loss and desperate longing for genuine human connection pervades everything they write.

The Underground Man’s spiteful monologues and his humiliating encounters with former schoolmates reveal the same fundamental hunger that drives Rousseau’s reveries: the desire for authentic relationship in a world that seems to offer only artifice and betrayal. Both men are exiles from the communities they simultaneously reject and crave, caught in the paradox of needing the very thing they’ve learned to distrust.

In the Reveries, Rousseau bares these contradictions with utmost honesty: his flight into solitude as both liberation and punishment, his yearning to belong warring with his inability to trust, his dream of happiness found in pastoral retreat yet perpetually shadowed by the reality of exile. He writes as a wounded soul seeking to understand the peculiar alchemy by which isolation can breed both wisdom and anguish, how the rejection of society can lead paradoxically to a deeper understanding of what true society might be.

I find Rousseau’s dilemma extremely relevant today. How to maintain one’s integrity while remaining open to love? How to reject false community while still seeking true communion?

By invoking Mnemosyne (the Greek goddess of memory and mother of the nine Muses), Weiss is making a political statement about who owns culture.

I love the phrase “under the aegis”. Aegis is protection, divine authority, the shield of Zeus himself. He is saying that our relationship to art and literature operates under this divine protection, that our internal access to culture is sacred and inviolable. It’s about the way Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Woolf, Van Gogh, Proust all live inside us, shape our consciousness, become part of our mental architecture.

Weiss targets the cultural gatekeepers, the critics, the curators and professors who would tell us what art means, how to interpret it, which works matter and which do not. When someone else presumes to “cultivate” our relationship to culture, to tend like a garden according to their design, they are committing a kind of violence against our consciousness itself.

He argues that culture is democratically distributed, it lives in the interior lives of ordinary people. The working-class protagonists from his book do not need permission to engage with Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa or Kafka’s stories. They carry these works within themselves, and Mnemosyne herself authorizes their interpretations.

Who gets to speak today? Whose interpretation counts? What canon deserves preservation? Rather than fighting over who controls cultural institutions, we should realize that the real work of culture happens in the vast, ungovernable space of individual memory and collective dreaming. Mnemosyne does not take sides in culture wars because she has already won: she lives in all of us, whispering what we need to hear.

“Sunday has left them with a taste of ashes and their thoughts are already turning towards Monday. But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one.

Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it; it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.”

― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

In Nausea, Sartre describes a Sunday evening malaise familiar to anyone who has felt the slow grind of time, the "taste of ashes" left by a weekend already dead, thoughts turning anxiously towards Monday. For most, time is parceled neatly into weekdays and weekends, duty and respite. But Sartre’s narrator, Roquentin, rejects this arrangement: for him there are no Mondays or Sundays, only "days which pass in disorder," punctuated by flashes of metaphysical clarity. Time is experienced as rupture.

Sartre pivots from the drudgery of bourgeois timekeeping to an eruption of existential illumination. The same man suffocated by nausea: the sense of life’s absurd contingency, suddenly experiences its mirror opposite: an adventure in pure presence. “Nothing has changed and yet everything is different.” This paradox sits at the heart of existentialism. The world has not shifted in its facts, but consciousness has cracked open a new relation to being.

For Sartre, these rare electric instants, “sudden lightning like this one” reveal the absurd joy of existence stripped to its core. No Monday, no Sunday, no obligations to institutions of hours and weeks. Just the naked surge of being here. Roquentin becomes the author of his own adventure (instead of being carried by society’s schedule). He feels happy, he says, “as the hero of a novel” (a striking self-awareness, since he is precisely that). Sartre is winking at us: in seeing himself as a hero, Roquentin grasps the strange fiction of identity, but also tastes the freedom of reinvention.

In the real world, this passage touches something many of us intuit but rarely articulate: the tyranny of the calendar can make us forget the raw fact of being alive. There is something quietly radical (and profoundly human) in refusing to see time as office hours stacked upon each other. For Sartre, to live authentically is to slip occasionally out of the clock’s grasp, into moments when what is banal becomes suddenly incandescent. Walking home one night, watching rain streaks on a window, standing in a train station, any of these can rupture the oppressive flow of days with a bolt of presence that reminds us: I exist. Not as planner, not as employee, not as cog, but as this irreducible being.

That’s why I love this passage. It promises that the void of Nausea can flip, without warning, into ecstasy through consciousness attending to its own being. We spend so much of life waiting for something to happen: a trip, a career success, a romance, forgetting that adventure sometimes means nothing more than realizing, with shocking clarity, I am here.

And for those who tend to hear only the footsteps of Monday marching in, this is Sartre’s sly consolation: you don’t need to escape the week to find freedom. You just need to break it open.

It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill-humored and capricious people could live under such a sky. That is a youthful question too, dear reader, very youthful, but may the Lord put it more frequently into your heart!

This opening passage establishes the entire emotional and philosophical framework of Dostoyevsky's 1848 novella, White Nights, written when he was merely 27 years old and still early in his literary career. The description should resonate with anyone who has experienced the transformative quality of night in a great city, whether St. Petersburg, Paris, or any urban landscape where darkness and artificial light create an atmosphere of heightened emotional intensity.

Bradbury’s advice is quoted from a 2001 lecture at Point Loma Nazarene University:

Sliding that first story under my pillow, I couldn’t have chosen a better reminder of why Bradbury prescribes variety. Harrison Bergeron imagines a future America where absolute equality is enforced by handicaps, weights for the strong, ear-shattering buzzers for the bright, hideous masks for the beautiful. Vonnegut hammers home a bleak truth: when equality is mandated, the symphony of human difference quiets to a drone.

That insight aligns with neuro­biologist Robert Sapolsky’s life’s work on individual variation. In his book Behave he writes that the factors shaping any one act: genes, hormones, childhood, culture interact in “messy and magnificent” ways that make each person unique. Eliminate difference, and you eliminate the very raw material out of which creativity, empathy, and resilience are built.

Sapolsky points to the benefits of diversity in social species: baboon troops with a mix of temperaments weather stress better; human teams with varied viewpoints solve problems faster. Vonnegut shows the dark mirror: a society that shackles every outlier winds up literally shooting its brightest possibilities out of the sky. When the seven-foot prodigy Harrison rips off his chains and dances, the moment feels less like rebellion than biology reasserting itself. Variation will surface, no matter how brutal the policy.

Reading Bradbury’s nightly syllabus is an act of honoring “the gorgeous mess” of our species. Each short story nudges a different neural circuitry, reminds us there is more than one way to see. Vonnegut’s satire opens the series with a warning: celebrate variation deliberately, or watch uniformity be imposed violently.

Thérèse herself is a study in repression and longing: a woman raised by her strict aunt, Mme. Raquin, and married off to her sickly, dull cousin Camille. Thérèse’s life is dull and predictable. She works in a small, gloomy shop in Paris, and every day seems the same as the last. It is only when she meets Laurent, a friend of Camille’s, that she feels truly alive. Their affair is passionate and reckless, driven by a hunger for something more than the gray routine of their lives.

But their love comes at a terrible price. Together, Thérèse and Laurent plot to kill Camille, believing that his death will set them free. Zola does not judge them harshly; instead, he shows how their actions are shaped by their circumstances and emotions. It is almost as if they are swept along by forces beyond their control, unable to resist the pull of their desires.

Zola’s genius lies in his refusal to moralize. He positions himself as an observer, dissecting the temperaments of his characters rather than their moral fiber. Thérèse and Laurent are not evil in the traditional sense; they are, as Zola himself writes, “brutes humaines,” creatures governed by their nerves and blood, swept along by forces they neither understand nor control. Their eventual crime is more like an inevitable outcome of their temperaments colliding, a tragic experiment in determinism.

Yet, what fascinates me the most is not the crime itself, but the aftermath. Their relationship, once full of passion, turns bitter and cold. They cannot escape the memory of what they have done, and it slowly destroys them from within. Zola describes their suffering in vivid detail: sleepless nights, hallucinations, and constant suspicion. The world around them seems blind to their pain. Mme. Raquin, now paralyzed and unable to speak, becomes a silent witness to their misery. The other characters go about their lives, unaware of the tragedy unfolding in their midst.

In Thérèse Raquin, Zola exposes the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, the suffocating power of social norms, and the destructive consequences of suppressed desire. Zola’s writing makes us question whether we are truly free, or if we are shaped by forces: our upbringing, our emotions, our society (that we cannot quite control).

Reading this book, I was reminded of Dostoyevsky’s explorations of guilt and Camus’s meditations on the absurd. Yet, Zola’s vision is uniquely his own: a relentless, almost forensic inquiry into the primitive forces that shape our lives. Thérèse Raquin is a book that unsettles, that forces us to confront the darkness within ourselves and the limits of our freedom.

The story follows Durtal, a writer researching the life of Gilles de Rais, a 15th-century nobleman who fought alongside Joan of Arc before becoming infamous for horrific crimes against children. What begins as historical research leads Durtal into contemporary explorations of satanism in fin-de-siècle Paris, especially after he becomes involved with a mysterious woman named Hyacinthe who eventually introduces him to a black mass.

What fascinated me most was how Huysmans uses this dark material to explore deeper questions about faith and meaning. The novel isn't just about shock value (though there's plenty of that). Instead, it uses the extremes of human behavior to contrast spiritual emptiness with religious devotion. Durtal's conversations with his friends, particularly the bell-ringer Carhaix and the doctor des Hermies, create this rich dialogue about modernity versus tradition, science versus faith.

Reading about Durtal's visits to Saint-Sulpice's bell tower while having visited the church before created an uncanny connection across time. Huysmans has this ability to make you feel like you're actually there, whether in Carhaix's bell tower or at the disturbing black mass.

The translation occasionally felt a bit dated, but it still conveyed the vividness of the original French. The novel also sits interestingly within literature history. Oscar Wilde famously referenced it in The Picture of Dorian Gray as the "yellow book" that corrupts Dorian, and more recently, Michel Houellebecq has drawn attention to it in Submission. It's also the first in Huysmans' series of four novels that trace his own spiritual journey from skepticism back to Catholicism.

Down There is certainly not an easy read, but it can be tremendously rewarding for some. It's fascinating to see how Huysmans combines historical research with psychological exploration, creating something that feels both scholarly and deeply personal. If you're interested in the French Decadent movement or simply want a novel that explores spirituality from an unusual angle, I'd definitely recommend reading it.

Accelerationism is his radical vision that embraces the dismantling of social structures and boundaries, as an inevitable process leading toward a post-human future. Land argues that technological advancement, particularly artificial intelligence is driving us toward a “singularity” where humanity might be subsumed or transcended. Unlike many philosophers who approach such possibilities with dread, Land carries an almost ecstatic tone about this potential extinction event. He sees it as as the logical conclusion of capitalism’s inherent drive toward increasing efficiency and development.

I’m currently reading Lands’ Fanged Noumena, which is a collection essays, theory-fiction and philosophical provocations that synthesizes cyberpunk aesthetics, post-structuralist philosophy, occult numerology and nihilistic futurism into a schizophrenic vision of capitalism’s terminal trajectory. God help me!

The story begins with an earthquake striking an unnamed prefecture in Japan, revealing a strange fault on Amigara Mountain. The exposed rock contains countless human-shaped holes. People from across Japan flock to see this geological anomaly, among them two hikers named Owaki and Yoshida who meet on their journey to the mountain.

What begins as curiosity quickly transforms into horror. Some visitors discover holes that match their silhouettes perfectly, as if made specifically for them thousands of years before their birth. One man, Nakagaki, becomes the first to enter his hole, stripping down and disappearing into the darkness despite warnings. Others soon follow, overcome by an inexplicable compulsion that overrides their fear and reason.

The holes call to their matches with a voice that cannot be heard but must be obeyed. As Yoshida tells Owaki after finding her own hole, it was "made for me" and despite her terror, she feels its pull. This compulsion forms the psychological backbone of the story.

This reminds me of what psychologists call "the call of the void" or “death drive”— that strange impulse some feel standing at great heights to jump, despite having no desire to die. In Ito's story, this impulse becomes a physical reality. The mountain offers each person their perfect silhouette, and something ancient within them must accept this invitation.

The genius of Ito's horror (in most of his stories) lies in its restraint. He never explains why the holes exist or who created them. The ambiguity makes the story stronger. Like the characters, we search for meaning in this strange phenomenon and find none.

What happens to those who step into their holes? Junji Ito leaves us with more questions than answers, and I will do the same here. The story hints at a fate that is both terrifying and strangely inevitable, but I will not spoil what lies within the mountain’s darkness, you should discover that for yourselves.

What I will talk about is how we all know this feeling in smaller ways. Sometimes we are drawn toward choices or habits that do not serve us, but we follow them anyway. We find ourselves narrowing our own possibilities, even when we know better. The story’s horror is not only in the fate of its characters, but in the recognition that we, too, might answer a call we do not understand.

Junji Ito manages to tap into something essential about human nature. We are beings who search for meaning, who long to fit perfectly somewhere, even if it means losing ourselves in the process. I believe this is Ito’s best story because it’s not just about horror but honesty: a mirror held up to our own impulses and fears, asking us to consider what shapes us and what we risk when we try too hard to fit.

Homunculus descends beyond conventional horror into something far more unsettling: a mirror reflecting our deepest insecurities and repressed desires. The premise itself sounds like a fever dream. Susumu Nakoshi, a homeless man living in his car, agrees to have a medical student drill a hole in his skull for money. This trepanation supposedly awakens a sixth sense, allowing him to see the "homunculi" of others when he covers one eye. These apparitions are not ghosts or demons in the traditional sense, but rather manifestations of people's inner traumas and self-perceptions.

The homunculi Nakoshi sees are often disturbing, sometimes repulsive, yet they never feel gratuitous. A man with genitalia for a head, a Yakuza appearing as a child in a robot costume, a woman made of crumbling sand, etc. After reading, I found myself seeing people differently, wondering what form my own homunculus might take. What would others see if they could peer past my carefully constructed façade?

It wouldn't be ideal to reveal anything more about the plot, but I'll just leave you all with this conclusion: Homunculus cuts through to something raw and essential. It reminds us that beneath our carefully constructed exteriors lie strange, sometimes frightening truths that connect us in our shared humanity. The manga achieved what great literature usually should: it transformed how I perceived my reality.