Middlemarch & Me

Everyone says Middlemarch is a great novel, one of the best; I certainly found it so. What I didn’t expect, though I wasn’t surprised, was to find bits of myself gazing back at me again and again, reflected off a bevy of different characters. And in all honesty, these are not the bits of myself that I wanted to see. George Eliot somehow dispels all fog, and renders the interior motives and thoughts of all of her characters as clear as a mountain stream. It is the specificity of these descriptions which arrested me, because it felt as though what I found confusing, fearful, and embarrassing in myself was being precisely taxonomized by an Observer, like I were being pinned down. I mean this in the nicest possible way – there is no trace of unkindness in Eliot’s work, and I felt no sense of hostility from the author. Nonetheless, I found myself crucified upon her characters.

 To be sure, this included some of the better characters – I can relate in obvious ways to Dorothea’s scrupulosity, and perhaps everyone can relate to her mistaken judgment. But the resemblance disappears once we consider her as someone who actively lives out her scruples. And when I heard good Mary Garth say this,

“Oh, I have an easy life—by comparison. I have tried being a teacher, and I am not fit for that: my mind is too fond of wandering on its own way. I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.”

I felt kinship with preferring my own wandering thoughts to whatever I ought to be doing for work. I fret about whether or not I have her integrity in the matter, though. And then Will Ladislaw goes about projecting his imagination of how others think about him onto them:

“Yes, suppose!” said Will Ladislaw, in a contemptuous undertone, intended to dismiss the subject. He was conscious of being irritated by ridiculously small causes, which were half of his own creation. Why was he making any fuss about Mrs. Casaubon? And yet he felt as if something had happened to him with regard to her. There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.

This describes me as well as anything I’ve read.

But more than these I regrettably see glimpses of myself in the frustrated, proud dreams of Lydgate, whose mundane life seems to immure him bit by bit over the course of the narrative, but without producing the virtue of contented humility which can let go of the sense that one is meant to be great and anything less is beneath one. This frustration is all too familiar:

But he was now a prey to that worst irritation which arises not simply from annoyances, but from the second consciousness underlying those annoyances, or wasted energy and former purposes. “This is what I am thinking of; and that is what I might have been thinking of,” was the bitter incessant murmur within him, making every difficulty a double goad to impatience.

And the following line articulates quite well the experience of giving up on the dream of academia – even as it betrays a silly self-importance and a mean contempt for ordinary life and people:

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life—the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

More troubling is Mr. Bulstrode, caught in the vice of God – which is how I always tended to see the vice of consequences for my own sins. Many times in my early life I felt the dread of some impending consequence or the heavy obligation to face something which terrified and shamed me, and fled, always casting looks over my shoulder. I suppose there is an extent to which I will always fixate on characters who are caught trying to wriggle out of their conscience in terror. I don’t know how much of that is how one should feel, and how much of it is a kind of scrupulosity that is unhelpful.  

I certainly understand the inability to move on with life without some kind of absolution:

The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all, to whatever confession we belong, and whether we believe in the future perfection of our race or in the nearest date fixed for the end of the world; whether we regard the earth as a putrefying nidus for a saved remnant, including ourselves, or have a passionate belief in the solidarity of mankind.

And the awareness of hypocrisy, of, as this says, the unwillingness to cast away the means of breaking the vow, so often precluded me from believing my own repentance, and so despairing of it:

A man vows, and yet will not cast away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.

And I recognize this exact sequence of thoughts and feelings shadowing my life on too many occasions, stretching back into childhood:

He had long poured out utterances of repentance. But to-day a repentance had come which was of a bitterer flavor, and a threatening Providence urged him to a kind of propitiation which was not simply a doctrinal transaction. The divine tribunal had changed its aspect for him; self prostration was no longer enough, and he must bring restitution in his hand. It was really before his God that Bulstrode was about to attempt such restitution as seemed possible: a great dread had seized his susceptible frame, and the scorching approach of shame wrought in him a new spiritual need. Night and day, while the resurgent threatening past was making a conscience within him, he was thinking by what means he could recover peace and trust—by what sacrifice he could stay the rod. His belief in these moments of dread was, that if he spontaneously did something right, God would save him from the consequences of wrong-doing. For religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.

And ultimately the experience of conscience collapses into panic:

Strange, piteous conflict in the soul of this unhappy man, who had longed for years to be better than he was—who had taken his selfish passions into discipline and clad them in severe robes so that he had walked with them as a devout quire, till now that a terror had risen among them, and they could chant no longer, but threw out their common cries for safety.

But the character that really hangs over me in Middlemarch is Mr. Casaubon. Here is a man who has disappeared down the rabbit hole of his particular academic project, and followed the logic of it to its end, prioritizing it over the rest of life – and yet his project is fruitless, not only because he will never actually complete it, but because it is conceptually flawed – he leapt at an aesthetically appealing thesis, and worked backwards to justify that. This is my way of writing and thinking, and I also worry that all the projects I put time and thought towards and claim to care about are misconceived and will not matter – or rather, that they are a waste of time born out of mistaken self-regard.

“But Mr. Casaubon was now brooding over something through which the question of his health and life haunted his silence with a more harassing importunity even than through the autumnal unripeness of his authorship. It is true that this last might be called his central ambition; but there are some kinds of authorship in which by far the largest result is the uneasy susceptibility accumulated in the consciousness of the author—one knows of the river by a few streaks amid a long-gathered deposit of uncomfortable mud. That was the way with Mr. Casaubon’s hard intellectual labors. Their most characteristic result was not the ‘Key to all Mythologies,’ but a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited—a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage—a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievements, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.

Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have absorbed and dried him, was really no security against wounds, least of all against those which came from Dorothea.

What really worries one about Casaubon is that he knows he is wasting his time, he perceives that others do not regard him as the genius his whole concept of himself depends on, and he fears that this is true – and it is. That idea that one’s nagging self-doubt is the objective truth come to dispel a self-serving delusion is the worm that gnaws my apple.

In Mr. Casaubon’s ear, Dorothea’s voice gave loud emphatic iteration to those muffled suggestions of consciousness which it was possible to explain as mere fancy, the illusion of exaggerated sensitiveness: always when such suggestions are unmistakably repeated from without, they are resisted as cruel and unjust. We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions—how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness!

Eliot is sympathetic to Casaubon, but that is little comfort; is he consigned to slumber in obscure dust, apart from the elect who live for others and thus live in fruitful hope? As long as some men are like Casaubon and do not shake off their selves, but succumb to them, I in my lethargy will take the easy path of identifying with them in fear, to then ask all passers-by for reassurance that all shall regardless be well, rather than actually living well.

These were heavy impressions to struggle against, and brought that melancholy embitterment which is the consequence of all excessive claim: even his religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope in immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten Key to all Mythologies. For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted.

Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think it quite ordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self. And who, if Mr. Casaubon had chosen to expound his discontents—his suspicions that he was not any longer adored without criticism—could have denied that they were founded on good reasons? On the contrary, there was a strong reason to be added, which he had not himself taken explicitly into account—namely, that he was not unmixedly adorable. He suspected this, however, as he suspected other things, without confessing it, and like the rest of us, felt how soothing it would have been to have a companion who would never find it out.

The book ultimately is about how to live well despite the failure of one’s dreams, and about the value of that obscure life laid in the dust; my fixation on Casaubon is a feature of my own insecurity and lazy reticence to risk trying to identify with the real heroes of the story, but they are there all the same to encourage us. The noblest character by far is Mr. Farebrother, who closes the door willingly on his own dream of love in order to help his parishioner and friend, without bitterness or complaint. It is an intimidating thing to see someone with all my recognizable moral sentiments actually obey them in spite of the difficulty.

In the end, the way to live after coming to the dead end at the center of the labyrinth of the self is shown by Farebrother, and Will’s poet’s soul, which rejoices in all of life despite its circumstances, and in Dorothea most of all, who rises from her own dashed hopes to face the dawn and minister to her neighbor, without thought for herself. That remains the only real way to live. I only hope there is some mercy for those of us who might be Casaubons, committed to a worthless self-directed project.

More quotes, some of which speak further to the thoughts I have spoken above:

“Young ladies don’t understand political economy, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, smiling towards Mr. Casaubon. “I remember when we were all reading Adam Smith. There is a book, now. I took it in all the new ideas at one time—human perfectibility, now. But some say, history moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it myself. The fact is, human reason may carry you a little too far—over the hedge, in fact. It carried me a good way at one time; but I saw it would not do. I pulled up; I pulled up in time. But not too hard. I have always been in favor of a little theory: we must have Thought; else we shall be landed back in the dark ages. But talking of books, there is Southey’s ‘Peninsular War.’ I am reading that of a morning. You know Southey?”

“…and stifled in the depths of her heart was the feeling that her sister was too religious for family comfort. Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.”

Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea’s was anything very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to “find their feet” among them, while their elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

“A man must have a very rare genius to make changes of that sort. I am afraid mine would not carry me even to the pitch of doing well what has been done already, at least not so well as to make it worth while. And I should never succeed in anything by dint of drudgery. If things don’t come easily to me I never get them.”

“You seem not to care about cameos,” said Will, seating himself at some distance from her, and observing her while she closed the cases.

“No, frankly, I don’t think them a great object in life,” said Dorothea.

“I fear you are a heretic about art generally. How is that? I should have expected you to be very sensitive to the beautiful everywhere.”

“I suppose I am dull about many things,” said Dorothea, simply. “I should like to make life beautiful—I mean everybody’s life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it.”

“I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,” said Will, impetuously. “You might say the same of landscape, of poetry of all refinement. If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best piety is to enjoy—when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth’s character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight—in art or in anything else. Would you turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing over misery? I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom.” Will had gone further than he intended, and checked himself.

“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.”

“But you leave out the poems,” said Dorothea. “I think they are wanted to complete the poet. I understand what you mean about knowledge passing into feeling, for that seems to be just what I experience. But I am sure I could never produce a poem.”

“You are a poem—and that is to be the best part of a poet—what makes up the poet’s consciousness in his best moods,” said Will, showing such originality as we all share with the morning and the spring-time and other endless renewals.

But skepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill: something we must believe in and do, and whatever that something may be called, it is virtually our own judgment, even when it seems like the most slavish reliance on another.

Caleb made no rejoinder, but presently lowered his spectacles, drew up his chair to the desk, and said, “Deuce take the bill—I wish it was at Hanover! These things are a sad interruption to business!”

The first part of this speech comprised his whole store of maledictory expression, and was uttered with a slight snarl easy to imagine. But it would be difficult to convey to those who never heard him utter the word “business,” the peculiar tone of fervid veneration, of religious regard, in which he wrapped it, as a consecrated symbol is wrapped in its gold-fringed linen.

Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labor by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out,—all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology. His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labor, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of “business;” and though he had only been a short time under a surveyor, and had been chiefly his own teacher, he knew more of land, building, and mining than most of the special men in the country.

His classification of human employments was rather crude, and, like the categories of more celebrated men, would not be acceptable in these advanced times. He divided them into “business, politics, preaching, learning, and amusement.” He had nothing to say against the last four; but he regarded them as a reverential pagan regarded other gods than his own. In the same way, he thought very well of all ranks, but he would not himself have liked to be of any rank in which he had not such close contact with “business” as to get often honorably decorated with marks of dust and mortar, the damp of the engine, or the sweet soil of the woods and fields. Though he had never regarded himself as other than an orthodox Christian, and would argue on prevenient grace if the subject were proposed to him, I think his virtual divinities were good practical schemes, accurate work, and the faithful completion of undertakings: his prince of darkness was a slack workman. But there was no spirit of denial in Caleb, and the world seemed so wondrous to him that he was ready to accept any number of systems, like any number of firmaments, if they did not obviously interfere with the best land-drainage, solid building, correct measuring, and judicious boring (for coal). In fact, he had a reverential soul with a strong practical intelligence. But he could not manage finance; he knew values well, but he had no keenness of imagination for monetary results in the shape of profit and loss; and having ascertained this to his cost, he determined to give up all forms of his beloved “business” which required that talent. He gave himself up entirely to the many kinds of work which he could do without handling capital, and was one of those precious men within his own district whom everybody would choose to work for them, because he did his work well, charged very little, and often declined to charge at all. It is no wonder, then, that the Garths were poor, and “lived in a small way.” However, they did not mind it.

“Oh, my dear, when you have a clergyman in your family you must accommodate your tastes; I did that very early. When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn’t have the end without them.”

“But it is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.”

“If we had to describe a man who is retrogressive in the most evil sense of the word—we should say, he is one who would dub himself a reformer of our constitution, while every interest for which he is immediately responsible is going to decay: a philanthropist who cannot bear one rogue to be hanged, but does not mind five honest tenants being half-starved: a man who shrieks at corruption, and keeps his farms at rack-rent: who roars himself red at rotten burroughs, and does not mind if every field on his farms has a rotten fate: a man very open-hearted to Leeds and Manchester, no doubt; he would give any number of representatives who will pay for their seats out of their own pockets: what he objects to giving, is a little return on rent-days to help a tenant to buy stock, or an outlay on repairs to keep the weather out at a tenant’s barn-door or make his house look a little less like an Irish cottier’s. But we all know the wag’s definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.”

Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch. And so it had. For effective magic is transcendent nature; and who shall measure the subtlety of those touches which convey the quality of soul as well as body, and make a man’s passion for one woman differ from his passion for another as joy in the morning light over valley and river and white mountain-top differs from joy among Chinese lanterns and glass pannels? Will, too, was made of very impressible stuff. The bow of a violin drawn near him cleverly, would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him, and his point of view shifted as easily as his mood. Dorothea’s entrance was the freshness of morning.

“But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me.”

“What is that?” said Will, rather jealous of the belief.

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

“That is a beautiful mysticism—it is a—”

“Please do not call it by any name,” said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. “You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it. I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little girl. I used to pray so much—now I hardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself, because they may not be good for others, and I have too much already.”

“What is your religion?” said Dorothea. I mean—not what you know about religion, but the belief that helps you most?”

“To love what is good and beautiful when I see it,” said Will. “But I am a rebel: I don’t feel bound, as you do, to submit to what I don’t like.”

“But if you like what is good, that comes to the same thing,” said Dorothea smiling.

“Now you are subtle,” said Will.

“It’s a most uncommonly cramping thing, as I’ve often told Susan, to sit on horseback and look over the hedges at the wrong thing, and not be able to put your hand to it to make it right. What people do who go into politics I can’t think: it drives me almost mad to see mismanagement over only a few hundred acres.”

There was a little heap of them on the table in the bow-window—of various sorts, from Herodotus, which she was learning to read with Mr. Casaubon, to her old companion Pascal, and Keble’s “Christian Year.” But to-day she opened one after another, and could read none of them. Everything seemed dreary: the portents before the birth of Cyrus—Jewish antiquities—oh dear!—devout epigrams—the sacred chime of favorite hymns—all alike were as flat as tunes beaten on wood: even the spring flowers and the grass had a dull shiver in them under the afternoon clouds that hid the sun fitfully; even the sustaining thoughts which had become habits seemed to have in them the weariness of long future days in which she would still live with them for her sole companions.

Since Celia’s baby was born, she had had a new sense of her mental solidity and calm wisdom. It seemed clear that where there was a baby, things were right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force.

“I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other I cling to that as the truest—I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.”

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

Mr. Brooke’s regrettable campaign speech reminds me of poor Joe Biden’s last debate:

“I am a close neighbor of yours, my good friends—you’ve known me on the bench a good while—I’ve always gone a good deal into public questions—machinery now, and machine-breaking—you’re many of you concerned with machinery, and I’ve been going into that lately. It won’t do, you know, breaking machines: everything must go on—trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples—that kind of thing—since Adam Smith, that must go on. We must look all over the globe:—‘Observation with extensive view,’ must look everywhere, ‘from China to Peru,’ as somebody says—Johnson, I think, ‘The Rambler,’ you know. That is what I have done up to a certain point—not as far as Peru; but I’ve not always stayed at home—I saw it wouldn’t do. I’ve been in the Levant, where some of your Middlemarch goods go—and then, again, in the Baltic. The Baltic, now.”

Perhaps Will Ladislaw, having heard of that strange ban against him left by Mr. Casaubon, had felt it better that he and she should not meet again, and perhaps she was wrong to wish for a meeting that others might find many good reasons against. Still “I do wish it” came at the end of those wise reflections as naturally as a sob after holding the breath.

I wonder often if a stubbornly-held want, against what feels like conscience, is always fatally wrong. I am preoccupied by the concern that the honesty of “I do wish it” is perhaps no balm against judgment.

Even when he had fixed on what he should do, there would be the task of telling his father. But it must be admitted that the fixing, which had to come first, was the more difficult task:—what secular avocation on earth was there for a young man (whose friends could not get him an “appointment”) which was at once gentlemanly, lucrative, and to be followed without special knowledge?

He would have made, she thought, a much more suitable husband for her than she had found in Lydgate. No notion could have been falser than this, for Rosamond’s discontent in her marriage was due to the conditions of marriage itself, to its demand for self-suppression and tolerance, and not to the nature of her husband; but the easy conception of an unreal Better had a sentimental charm which diverted her ennui.

The present of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

No—she adhered to her declaration that she would never be married again, and in the long valley of her life, which looked so flat and empty of waymarks, guidance would come as she walked along the road, and saw her follow-passengers by the way.

She began now to live through that yesterday morning deliberately again, forcing herself to dwell on every detail and its possible meaning. Was she alone in that scene? Was it her event only? She forced herself to think of it as bound up with another woman’s life—a woman towards whom she had set out with a longing to carry some clearness and comfort into her beclouded youth. In her first outleap of jealous indignation and disgust, when quitting the hateful room, she had flung away all the mercy with which she had undertaken that visit. She had enveloped both Will and Rosamond in her burning scorn, and it seemed to her as if Rosamond were burned out of her sight forever. But that base prompting which makes a woman more cruel to a rival than to a faithless lover, could have no strength of recurrence in Dorothea when the dominant spirit of justice within her had once overcome the tumult and had once shown her the truer measure of things. All the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate’s lot, and this young marriage union which, like her own, seemed to have its hidden as well as evident troubles—all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance. She said to her own irremediable grief, that it should make her more helpful, instead of driving her back from effort.

And what sort of crisis might not this be in three lives whose contact with hers laid an obligation on her as if they had been suppliants bearing the sacred branch? The objects of her rescue were not to be sought out by her fancy: they were chosen for her. She yearned towards the perfect Right, that it might make a throne within her, and rule her errant will. “What should I do—how should I act now, this very day, if I could clutch my own pain, and compel it to silence, and think of those three?”

It had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was light piercing into the room. She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying a baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.

What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness. She took off the clothes which seemed to have some of the weariness of a hard watching in them and began to make her toilet. Presently she rang for Tantripp, who came in her dressing-gown.

“That was a wrong thing for you to say, that you would have had nothing to try for. If we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain, and that is worth trying for. Some can be happy. I seemed to see that more clearly than ever, when I was the most wretched. I can hardly think how I could have borne the trouble, if that feeling had not come to me to make strength.”

Dorothea smiled, and Celia looked rather meditative. Presently she said, “I cannot think how it all came about.” Celia thought it would be pleasant to hear the story.

“I daresay not,” said Dorothea, pinching her sister’s chin. “If you knew how it came about, it would not seem wonderful to you.”

“Can’t you tell me?” said Celia, setting her arms cozily.

“No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know.”

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years? For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.

Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The Fourth Turning

‍ I’m not late, it’s still July. ‍ ‍

I had meant to write this on the 4th of July, alongside everyone and their (in some cases star-spangled) dog, but my parents were taking advantage of the brief Alaskan summer to visit, and I had taken the opportunity to coax them down the 60-mile gravel road to McCarthy, a town that exists as a kind of living fossil left behind by a mining operation that feels as quintessentially American as anything in our history. Prospectors crested Fourth of July Pass on the day you would expect in 1900, and spotted the green glint of copper, the electric blood of America, on the far side of a glacier so vast it appeared eternal and yet was already retreating. This coppersign is of course the same verdigris that bedecks the Statue of Liberty, and soon she would welcome hundreds of immigrants from the corners of the earth to work the Kennecott Mines, which over 29 years turned out over a billion pounds of copper. All of this was shipped out on a railway built two-hundred miles through the wilderness in three years, by hand, much of it in adverse conditions – the 8,000-foot Gilahina Trestle was built in twelve days at -60 below zero. And then in 1938, in one day, they packed everything up and left. The workers, even the management on the ground, didn’t know it was ending until it was already over. ‍ ‍

I wonder if that will be us, someday. I certainly hope not, but when I hear about the things Americans were able to do just a hundred years ago – and in this case many of them were brand-new Americans, taking night courses for their citizenship exams after days at the mine – I am reminded less of our country today, than I am of China. Perhaps that is an overdone narrative – I certainly hope so. Still, I wonder. ‍ ‍

What interests me about the history of the Kennecott Mine is that one can easily imagine different factions of modern Americans latching onto different aspects of it and rejecting others. Many would embrace it as an example of America welcoming immigrants come from destitution to work hard and make good; others might look at the tremendous profitability of the mine and the ability to build things at that rate as a triumph of capitalism under a more efficient regulatory regime. I suspect that those pleased by the relatively high living standards for the workers would nonetheless object to the ecological impacts of tossing the tailings and garbage down onto a glacier; and I wonder if others might resent the high pay of the immigrant workers, which outpaced what many poor Americans lived on during the contemporaneous Depression. And I worry about the burgeoning and ugly strain of “noticing” that would probably brood darkly on the ethnicity of some of the biggest investors – so far have we backslid. ‍ ‍

This is nothing new, of course; history has always been a field of mythmaking in conflict, and there is nothing more American than relitigating our own history. Even people who largely agree politically disagree on how we should think about that – reading this review (https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/06/how-redefine-american-patriotism/687467/?gift=jUioLBatr3tIwuTcBrggCfswLYOpLcwDweqLu1U_Ol0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share) of Dominic Erdozain’s new book critiquing American patriotism (which I must stipulate I have not read), I nod along at the identification of the Founding’s moral faults, only to starkly disagree with the conclusion that patriotism is damaging and that the theological impulse in American political ideology is wrong (let’s not even speak about the dismissiveness towards the Civil and Second World Wars – though in all honesty I recognize a degree to which I have built those myths as moral crusades into the foundation of much of my politics, which can be blinkering). At the same time, I ultimately agree that we should interpret the Declaration as universalistic in its claims, and not particular to the United States – but we can do that while also fully loving and embracing this country. The world is not a zero-sum pie chart, and there is no limit to the reach of the moral claims made at the founding. But then, that is me projecting my view onto the myth, just as everyone does. ‍ ‍

It’s possible that we cannot avoid biasing the story we tell and in so doing, self-deceiving (or deceiving our children, which over time comes to the same thing). And yet we must choose stories to tell with the time we have to tell them, and that will create a particular myth. The failure to educate, the failure to narrate our history, will actually dissolve the mythic bonds surrounding the country, and we will see something akin to cell death under a microscope. ‍

Yoni Appelbaum makes this point well in the Atlantic, which has been hoeing this row for a century and a half now - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/07/american-history-common-narrative/687301/?gift=jUioLBatr3tIwuTcBrggCVrKWlBM9BEZnkmHKitz05Y&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share. She illustrates both the good and necessary reasons why our stable national myth began to fray – something which cannot be avoided if you attempt to hold to both timeless moral claims and present the whole and accurate truth. The problem is that we might be failing to re-spin the fibers into a stronger cord, capable of holding all those things in tension within it sans contradiction. And in our retreat as a community from the frightening effort of collective mythmaking, we have ceded ground to people who are perfectly happy to reduce America to “a particular place, a particular people,” as the Vice President so bluntly puts it. Us, and not them. ‍ ‍

Of course America is a particular place, and the people here are particular – but neither is exclusively so, and we are not more worthy of God’s love than anyone else. This is where the question of exceptionalism comes in – whether or not America ought to be first. But this misses the point. America is circumstantially exceptional because of the influence of its history – think not of a chosen land, but of a brand which ignites a forest fire that consumes the globe. But even if that were not the case it would not change what we should do, or how we should regard ourselves.  We are a particular instance of universal human rights and wrongs played out on a grand scale. Reducing patriotism to affection for the familiar denies the words of the Declaration, which really did make ideological claims that we must accept or reject, and decide what they mean. I don’t want to make an idol out of the Declaration and suggest that God tells us to hold this or that view – but with the moral sense and affection that I have from God, I choose to accept the claims as I understand them because it is a better world in which they are true. If we are going to have a shared future, then we need to remember some kind of coherent past, which is both true in its ugly ways and also good in what it spurs us toward. It is worth re-adopting the approach of historians like the late Gordon Wood (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/revolutionary-gordon-wood-historian/687487/?gift=jUioLBatr3tIwuTcBrggCTRAmDYXIH0vnwHoNI3DLk0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share).‍ ‍

But I am not a historian, and what I can do is not narrate the truth, but relate to what I understand about it in a particular way. And perhaps this personal sort of mythmaking will provide fodder for thought. Real historians, and academics who deal with historiography in their fields, like to engage in a form of mythmaking called periodization. They talk about the long 19th century (1789-1914) or the short 20th century (1914-1991), or throw the blanket Fin de Siècle over the decadent turn between those centuries. This is consciously choosing to impose a frame around a length of time and put a name to it – not as an objective description of the measurable past, but as a creative reaction to the received past. There is no one right or wrong answer to how one does this, as long as one recognizes that periods are not objective and not mutually exclusive – if I decide to split a century up one way, that gives a certain narrative with some truth; but it may be well worth splitting it a different way to cast some light in the shadows of the first. ‍ ‍

We can’t really avoid periodization, actually – even our chronology of decades and centuries imposes a subjective lens. We think of the ‘90s as a cohesive and distinct thing, but naught but our calendar objectively separates them from the ‘80s or aughts. Yet our historical, our experiential (for those of us who remember the ‘90s) vocabulary would be impoverished without this concept, so we use it even as it distorts. Before the numerical calendar, historians in different countries centered the reigns of their kings as the definitive metronome of time – useful for considering the greatness of the ruler, blinkering in that it obscures the rest of the world. Japan still does this with its formal traditional calendar, despite the fact that its Emperor has actually ruled only very briefly and intermittently during the last thousand years. In that sense, the regnal eras are arbitrary; but in an example of how periodization is useful, the Showa Era (1926-1989) has become a wonderful narrative frame to capture the intense drama and rapidity of Japan’s 20th century, illustrated all the better for catching such extremes in a single lifetime.‍ ‍

I may be no historian, but as a tourist I can readily see that Kennecott is from another America. And yet it was operational into the lifetime of my grandparents, who passed in the last year. And that span – of a lifetime – is how I tend to think about periodization of American history. For some time now I have chosen to think about America as divided into thirds, each the length of a lifespan (perhaps a little shorter). There are interregna where the nation is in flux; and of course, one glaringly obvious objection to my scheme is that it puts us in one of these pivotal moments right now, privileging the importance of whatever we do – which is perhaps a narcissism befitting our present era. But then, that’s the role of periods – we impose them on the past as a narrative to help make sense of the present, which is always in flux and unknown; and whatever periods future historians will place us in, we cannot yet know. ‍ ‍

The cookie crumbles thusly: ‍ ‍

Interregnum 1: 1776-1789‍ ‍

I was about to type that this is self-explanatory, but then I realized that I think all of these are self-explanatory and don’t need much elaboration. For the first thirteen years since the Declaration created the country and articulated the things everyone claimed to agree on, there was crisis and transition. First the Revolution itself, an all-consuming crisis confronted by an ad-hoc Continental Congress and Army and many different militia and individuals. This period also saw a rupture between Patriots and Loyalists which was a great trauma that the country tends to forget. After the Treaty of Paris the country continued operating as a loose confederation led by a single legislature, with Washington stepping in when absolutely necessary as the closest thing to a national leader we had. There are echoes here of the unstable English Republic, wherein Parliament expelled its enemies, won its civil war, but failed to stabilize a state that could survive Cromwell’s death. The most important lesson from this is that despite the divisions in the country being elevated by the defeat of the one common enemy, Americans were able to recognize that things could not go on as they were, and form a consensus solution for a change in government. ‍ ‍

Period 1: 1789-1860‍ ‍

The Republic works, but the moral compromises and contradictions baked in from the beginning, which predate the Revolution and were ultimately flaws in the people themselves which the state cannot correct, begin to work out their relentless logic. The power of the Declaration’s universal moral claims is proven by the way in which the hypocrisy of slavery is undeniable and inescapable, and attempts to increase the institution’s power are seen as morally existential by the heirs of the Puritans. In turn, the enslavers feel their own existential dread not simply from the shift in public opinion, but also from economic progress and change, immigration in the North, and their awareness of their own hypocrisy. But there is plenty of that to go around, as the country enthusiastically and aggressively expands west and south, where enterprising self-made pioneering is mixed with, or in cases indistinguishable from, avaricious squatting. I have personally never been able to resolve or tease out my idea of how things should have gone differently, and given that this is a world in which life and death are interdependent, I think that recognizing that good and evil coexisted at times in the same acts and changes, or that God brought good from evil, is the best we can hope for. During the same period the country develops its historic population core, everything from the east coast to the river, which is still visible from space as a dense cluster of lights, all close together. And, crucially, the country developed a highly-literate and politically-engaged population, with a strong sense of national identity. But as the awareness of the population grew, inevitably the logic of the contradiction between slavery’s tension with the values of the Declaration and its entrenched political power produced a breaking point.‍ ‍

Interregnum 2: 1860-1865‍ ‍

The Civil War needs no explanation as a hinge, the second turning of the Republic. Not only does it clarify and enforce (incompletely) the universal values of the Founding, it also resolves the power relations between the different levels of government, and increases the power of the President. But it also marks a turning point as it sees the country knit together by rail and wire, the real beginning of the age in which rapid travel over long distance is affordable, which shifts the physical nature of the country. And, having resolved the contradiction of slavery through the power of the Federal government, that now becomes the single position which must be controlled in any fundamental conflict. But that fundamental conflict of contradictory ideas does not emerge yet, instead giving way to a long period of consensus created by growth, and then one of consensus created by external threat. ‍ ‍

Period 2: 1865-1932‍ ‍

This is one of the most interesting periods of American history, and one which is more a time of rapid and sustained change than a stable state – though the state itself is, at the top, quite static. Society, technology, and the economy all change dramatically. The question of women’s full citizenship, a cause which had developed in company with, but to some degree in the shadow of the abolitionist movement, is resolved not through a single rupture of conflict but through the persistent insistence of those applying the logic of the newly-clarified American ideology of freedom until it tips over into consensus. The economy grows by leaps and bounds, and amid all this growth violence flourishes between labor and management, as the issue of economic justice becomes the central division – one which has no simple answer, as slavery did. The clarity of slavery as an issue perhaps made war inevitable as the solution, because it really was all-or-nothing; the confusion and intrinsic contingency of economic justice create a continuous directional conflict with no climax. But the temperature does rise, mitigated by the general increase in wealth. The operational contradictions and corruptions of the state are reformed piecemeal. The closing of the Frontier, the fevers of aimless nationalism and scientific systematization (and stratification) of the world and time lead the country into imperialistic and internationalistic ventures which are foolhardy dead-ends. Both in those conquests and domestically, cultures are deliberately and systematically smothered by a popular authoritarian majority. Ultimately the country reveals that it can tolerate all these moral contradictions without batting an eye, but it cannot tolerate economic decline – and everything ends abruptly when the Depression creates in the population a wide consensus for a major revision in government. ‍ ‍

Interregnum 3: 1932-1945‍ ‍

The Roosevelt administration, whether one credits it with success or views it as a rider upon the tides of history, presides over the third turning of American history. The country is forced to face the reality of economic deprivation, which had hitherto been successfully marginalized (which is not to say that it did not come down with its full weight on those impacted, but that there was enough growth to keep them at the margins of power). Then, the nation undergoes World War II, America’s Iliad, and these two things taken together create a new bureaucratic state more powerful than any prior empire, with a country re-fused into a shared identity and with a new relationship to the world. 1945 marks the dawn of the apocalyptic state, where prudence in leadership carries the stakes of nuclear war. ‍ ‍

Period 3: 1945-2016?

This is America as I learned it, growing up. I realize this framing minimizes the revolutions of the 1960s or the dislocations of the 1970s, or the end of the Cold War. But I think the Civil Rights movement and the other social changes in the ‘60s were themselves a kind of working out of the logic of the new shared American identity, and its hypocritical oversights. The seeds sown in the 1970s would bear poisonous fruit, but slowly and over many decades. And the end of the Cold War marks a turning in world history, but not so much in America – instead, it is a kind of exhalation. America relaxes into absorbing (so we thought) the whole world, friends and enemies alike, into one system of neoliberal democratic capitalism. There was a broad bipartisan consensus; there were significant external enemies; and there was enough sense of progress that optimism could flourish. But this also created a kind of nihilistic cynicism, an ennui. And, importantly, this is the perspective of someone who is very, very middle class. Increasing partisanship, scientifically managed, and increasing communications in a fragmented ecosystem of self-reinforcing loops created a political situation in which the state was unable to effectively achieve consensus to make reforms; it grew increasingly sclerotic, dragging down the productive capacity of society with it. The inability of any victorious party to really fix anything material, the fixation on cultural conflicts, and most of all, the accelerant of the internet and echo chambers drove a large part of the electorate insane, engaging them in the political system without successfully creating an elite consensus to manage this constructively. Instead, even though things were on paper going relatively well, in 2016 the ossified political system enabled a minority of Americans to vote to blow everything up, whether they knew they were doing that or not.

So here we are, the Fourth Turning of the Republic. We don’t know what its end will be. The contradictions of the First Republic were moral and concrete, and they eventually forced a violent settlement. The contradictions of the Second Republic were largely economic and were resolved only by a collapse (the same may well happen to us soon with the national debt). The contradictions of the Third Republic were in the people themselves, and in their fractured and delusional worldviews. It was less an information age and more an information apocalypse. I think this is important, because it reminds us that as much as we need systemic change and economic change, we cannot resolve our present crisis without resolving the crisis of character and belief in the voters themselves.

I don’t know where we are going next, or when the next Republic will start. It feels as though we are in an inflection point; but then again, perhaps things will stabilize and muddle on, as they did after the 1960s. I hope we can achieve some kind of reckoning that addresses what we have done and creates a shared foundation on which to move forward, but it is difficult to see what that might look like.

As this new age struggles to be born, I return again and again to the same poem, written by W.B. Yeats in 1919, which for Europe was just such a historical hinge amid death, fear, and confusion. In The Second Coming, he writes:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi‍ ‍

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

‍ ‍

‍ ‍

Books I Read in 2025

I read 15 books in 2025, which I’m going to rank, but I’ll start with the caveat that none of these were bad. I don’t often read bad books, so don’t read too much into the ranking at the low end. Here is the list: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/118209919-andrew-bell?shelf=read-in-2025&view=covers

‍ ‍15. The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, Chika Sagawa, 1936

‍Modernist poetry perhaps suffers more in translation than other forms of poetry – or perhaps this is too avant-garde for me to really assimilate. I struggled to connect with these, but they still provide honest and vulnerable glimpses of light from a mind who died far too young and produced an impressive amount of serious verse in her 25 years of life. ‍ ‍

14. The Hard SF Renaissance, Anthology, 2002

‍This is a fascinating collection of science fiction stories. I find that the worldview common to so much hard SF in this period is so bleak and troubling on a philosophical level that I fixate on each story less as science fiction and more as a kind of intellectual horror, which makes them more compelling, if also disturbing to consider as possibilities.

‍ ‍13. The Longest Cave, Roger Bruckner & Richard Watson, 1975‍ ‍

Fun and freewheeling in a way that almost makes you forget that the authors are insane mole-men whose idea of a good time is worming their way miles deep in the unmapped earth through tubes so small that you can’t even crawl properly on hands and knees, but have to slither. As someone morbidly fascinated by the (vicarious) claustrophobia of caving and the romantic danger of extreme exploration, and who also loves extremely detailed and thoroughly-mapped step-by-step accounts of that process of exploration, this is a real good time. I’m glad the authors didn’t die and surfaced long enough to write this book. ‍ ‍

12. The Ghosts of K2, Mick Conefrey, 2015‍ ‍

Another very detailed step-by-step account of the process of exploration, this time in the vertical. I’ve been obsessed with expeditions in the Himavant since seeing an IMAX documentary on Everest at the Pacific Science Center as a kid. I was particularly captivated by the fate of Dudley Wolfe, who was good at climbing up and tolerating the altitude, but perhaps felt less surefooted going back down, and so gradually camp-by-camp ratcheted himself higher and higher on the mountain, declining to descend when the others did, waiting out the bad weather high up, spending four weeks above 23,000 feet, and ultimately dying on the mountain, never to be found, and taking his would-be rescuers with him. It combines the spiritual awe of the pilgrimage of ascent with the reverential horror reserved for the slow process of someone walking to their own death, growing weaker and less sane with every step, but too slowly to notice and pull back. ‍ ‍

11. Alive, Piers Paul Read, 1973‍ ‍

A story of survival where the headline that draws people in is cannibalism, but the actual story is a kind of total refutation of Lord of the Flies in which a group of young men rise to the unthinkable circumstance which confronts them, form an orderly community amid the ice, and in the house of death come to clearly see the face of God. ‍ ‍

10. These Truths, Jill Lepore, 2018‍ ‍

A worthy stab at the project of fashioning American history into myth – a very reasonable and measured liberal myth which attempts to hold together the good and the bad at once, which so many fail at or simply do not attempt, but which is a crucial endeavor if we are to have any hope of a country with both a bright future and a just one. ‍ ‍

9. Opened Ground, Seamus Heaney, 1995‍ ‍

The way I read poetry, trying to progress measurably through a book while reading aloud, is perhaps in tension with this style, which does not run rapidly down the tongue. The smell of the damp earth, however, is still in my nostrils. And I found both useful and affecting the way in which he writes about how to write, how to work. See my review for quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4451129167‍ ‍

Digging: ‍ ‍

Between my finger and my thumb  

‍ ‍

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

‍ ‍‍ ‍

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   ‍ ‍

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   ‍ ‍

My father, digging. I look down

‍ ‍‍ ‍

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   ‍ ‍

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   ‍ ‍

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   ‍ ‍

Where he was digging.

‍ ‍‍ ‍

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   ‍ ‍

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.‍ ‍

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep‍ ‍

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,‍ ‍

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

‍ ‍‍ ‍

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   ‍ ‍

Just like his old man. ‍

‍ ‍

My grandfather cut more turf in a day‍ ‍

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.‍ ‍

Once I carried him milk in a bottle‍ ‍

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up‍ ‍

To drink it, then fell to right away‍ ‍

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods‍ ‍

Over his shoulder, going down and down‍ ‍

For the good turf. Digging.

‍ ‍‍ ‍

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap‍ ‍

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge‍ ‍

Through living roots awaken in my head.‍ ‍

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. ‍

‍ ‍

Between my finger and my thumb‍ ‍

The squat pen rests. ‍

I’ll dig with it.‍ ‍‍ ‍

8. Collected Poems of Robert Service, Robert Service, 1906‍ ‍

Robert Service holds a special nostalgia for me from childhood dreams of the Klondike, now bolstered by the added interest of actually living in the North. I write about this in my blog: https://www.andrewroosbell.com/blog/the-bard-of-the-yukon‍ ‍

7. Annapurna, Maurice Herzog, 1950‍ ‍

A personal and yet personally unsympathetic account of the grand misery of mountaineering. I am so fascinated by the attempt to unfold and pry apart the path into the contorted spires of a reclusive massif made solely through the reckless sacrifice of the human body. Herzog was crazy. I was very happy to follow along on Google Earth, but that is as far as I go. ‍ ‍

6. Journey to the West, Wu Cheng’en (?), 1592‍ ‍

You would think the repetition of the pattern of binding and liberating would grow tiresome, yet it never does; for that we must thank the luxury of the poetry, the fundamentally compelling nature of the theme of overcoming evil, and most of all, Sun Wukong for being a delight.‍ ‍

 5. On Getting Out of Bed, Alan Noble, 2023‍ ‍

I have found great encouragement in the wisdom in this book, and the frank acknowledgment that life is lived in the face of death, which helps to deal with the daily experience of misery and futility. We must live, regardless! More here: https://www.andrewroosbell.com/blog/on-getting-out-of-bed‍ ‍

4. History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, 411 BC‍ ‍

This feels like it could have been written about our world today and it would play out almost exactly the same. The fact that Thucydides is so spare in his commentary, and yet pours his entire life's somber perspective into it, without ever making it about himself, but only about passing on this one piece of wisdom, which cost so many lives to procure, compels reverence. This also gives us the Melian Dialogue, the aphorism of amoral power in foreign relations, which we must gaze into like the fire, and then reject fully as a way of making policy: “you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” ‍ ‍

3. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1950‍ ‍

One of the most impressive and startling books I’ve read, and one I continue to think about. More here: https://www.andrewroosbell.com/blog/the-origins-of-totalitarianism‍ ‍

2. What Maisie Knew, Henry James, 1896‍ ‍

This is one of the best novels I've ever read. There's nothing so astonishing as James's prose, hard and crystalline and expansive as ever, placed fully at the service of a realistic child's perspective.‍ ‍

“The litigation had seemed interminable and had in fact been complicated; but by the decision on the appeal the judgment of the divorce-court was confirmed as to the assignment of the child. The father, who, though bespattered from head to foot, had made good his case, was, in pursuance of this triumph, appointed to keep her: it was not so much that the mother’s character had been more absolutely damaged as that the brilliancy of a lady’s complexion (and this lady’s, in court, was immensely remarked) might be more regarded as showing the spots. Attached, however, to the second pronouncement was a condition that detracted, for Beale Farange, from its sweetness – an order that he should refund to his late wife the twenty-six hundred pounds put down by her, as it was called, some three years before, in the interest of the child’s maintenance and precisely on a proved understanding that he would take no proceedings: a sum of which he had had the administration and of which he could render not the least account. The obligation thus attributed to her adversary was no small balm to Ida’s resentment; it drew a part of the sting from her defeat and compelled Mr. Farange perceptibly to lower his crest. He was unable to produce the money or to raise it in any way; so that after a squabble scarcely less public and scarcely more decent than the original shock of battle his only issue from his predicament was a compromise proposed by his legal advisers and finally accepted by hers. ‍

His debt was by this arrangement remitted to him and the little girl disposed of in a manner worthy of the judgment-seat of Solomon. She was divided in two and the portions tossed impartially to the disputants. They would take her, in rotation, for six months at a time; she would spend half the year with each. This was odd justice in the eyes of those who still blinked in the fierce light projected from the tribunal – a light in which neither parent figured in the least as a happy example to youth and innocence. What was to have been expected on the evidence was the nomination, in loco parentis, of some proper third person, some respectable or at least some presentable friend. Apparently, however, the circle of the Faranges had been scanned in vain for any such ornament; so that the only solution finally meeting all the difficulties was, save that of sending Maisie to a Home, the partition of the tutelary office in the manner I have mentioned. There were more reasons for her parents to aggree to it than there had ever been for them to agree on anything; and they now prepared with her help to enjoy the distinction that waits upon vulgarity sufficiently attested. Their rupture had resounded, and after being perfectly insignificant together they would be decidedly striking apart. Had they not produced an impression that warranted people in looking for appeals in the newspapers for the rescue of the little one – reverberation, amid a vociferous public, of the idea that some movement should be started or some benevolent person should come forward? A good lady cam indeed a step or two: she was distantly related to Mrs. Farange, to whom she proposed that, having children and nurseries wound up and going, she should be allowed to take home the bone of contention and, by working it into her system, relieve at least one of the parents. This would make every time, for Maisie, after her inevitable six months with Beale, more of a change.‍ ‍

‘More of a change?’ Ida cried. ‘Won’t it be enough of a change for her to come from that low brute to the person in the world who detests him most?’‍ ‍

‘No, because you detest him so much that you’ll always talk to her about him. You’ll keep him before her by perpetually abusing him.’‍ ‍

Mrs. Farange stared. ‘Pray, then, am I to do nothing to counteract his villainous abuse of me?’ ‍ ‍

The good lady, for a moment, made no reply: her silence was a grim judgment of the whole point of view. ‘Poor little monkey!’ she at last exclaimed; and the words were an epitaph for the tomb of Maisie’s childhood. She was abandoned to her fate. What was clear to any spectator was that the only link binding her to either parent was this lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed. They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other. She should serve their anger and seal their revenge, for husband and wife had been alike crippled by the heavy hand of justice, which, in the last resort, met on neither side their indignant claim to get, as they called it, everything. If each was only to get half, this seemed to concede that neither was so base as the other pretended, or, to put it differently, offered them as both bad indeed, since they were only as good as each other. The mother had wished to prevent the father from, as she said, ‘so much as looking’ at the child; the father’s plea was that the mother’s lightest touch was ‘simply contamination’. These were the opposed principles in which Maisie was to be educated – she was to fit them together as she might.”

1. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo, 1862

‍One of the best books I have ever read. https://www.andrewroosbell.com/blog/les-miserables

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Music in December 2025

• Mairearad Green & Rachel Newton’s album Anna Bhàn is a haunting tribute to their great-great grandmother of that name and her role in the resistance to the Highland Clearances.

• Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers’ album of last year, GLORY, is a loose buzzsaw of sound.

• sleepazoid is a newcomer landing with a bang (complimentary).

• Taxes turns around a specific moment when the song becomes instantaneously epic and grandiose, which many songs try to do, but this is well done.

• Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed) rolls along gently.

• Out of Touch is a wonderful example of the synth-heavy ‘80s sound that was so easy to dismiss as silly for so many years, and yet is still undeniably great listening all these decades later.

• Ratboys’ 2025 single What’s Right? Is perfect stormy road-trip music.

• People, I’ve been sad is hard to describe, but it goes down smooth and carries you with it.

Does Life Make Narrative Sense?

These are half-formed thoughts; I suppose that if life did make narrative sense, at least if each of us is a protagonist, then I really ought to have invested the wherewithal to make sense of my thoughts, rather than leaving it as an afterthought. But perhaps I can cheat and turn sloth into a starting point. Right here we have an example of how life obviously does not make narrative sense – it does not progress in a satisfying way, it does not even proceed through katabasis and anabasis or even catharsis – I have seen people who lived well for seventy years go off the rails at the end in ways both painful and nonsensical to watch. People say that one takes one step back for every two forward, thus preserving even in retreat the overall hope of progression; but I have often felt that life just as easily moves two steps back between every one step forward – and where does that lead?

I have always drawn reassurance from story itself as a structure, because it grants one an external perspective on characters who, like oneself, invariably struggle and see no sense in the struggle, no way out, and yet then there is always some kind of turn – just as Elijah is despairing in the Negev, God encourages him by rebuking him; the same story, intensified, plays out with Job; and then of course there are the handful of resurrections. I like to take the idea that we need things to make narrative sense, even though they obviously do not from our lived perspective, as evidence that ultimately God will structure life in hindsight in a way that does satisfy that need. But I have also often wondered if that is too good to be true, simply because it is what I want to believe – that alone is enough for some skepticism.

Still, the expectation that things will ultimately resolve in a satisfying manner is always a kind of foolishness to the characters within a story. We put endings on our novels that tie them together in retrospect, and recognize there is no such ending for most lives. But that is because we cannot actually see the end, or read a life back in hindsight from an omniscient perspective. The fact that we need stories to make sense of life, and we need those stories to make narrative sense, to give meaning to the suffering within them and redeem it into something worthwhile, is an indication of the way in which we need the world to be – it is human nature reflecting the obscured form of the reality we are made for, which we cannot now see directly. And this ought to give us hope.

Even the children’s fairy tales which seem so tied to the pettiness of human history and status seem true in the right light. These tales often begin with an orphaned child who is discovered to have secretly been a prince or princess all along. It’s easy to laugh at this kind of fantasy played out entirely within an uncritiqued feudal world – but that is no different from us trying to make sense of what to hope for in eternity, and running up against the limits of our own imagination and experience – what really is the best we can bring ourselves to hope for? There is a very real sense in which the silliest and most fantastical – and I mean in the sense of being a wish-fulfillment fantasy – are true, not because you are secretly the protagonist of the universe, but because God writes us into His universe as protagonists all. I even have hope for the villains.

I come back again to sloth – I’m making myself sit down and post today because it is Easter, and I try to check in on my faith on Easter. But in setting a deadline, I also create the opportunity to write quickly and imperfectly and not bother with editing, because I have to go to bed – which is perhaps all down to my desire to do less work and somehow justify it. And perhaps I am simply making excuses for myself, and imposing a kind of narrative sense onto my life that shapes it in the way I want to see it, rather than how it is. Still I have to hope that in spite of this, the need to make sense of it implies that it does make sense, even if not how I intended. And I do think there is value in resting and not even attempting to test the limits of one’s ambition – though perhaps I am not the person who needs that lesson, having already elevated rest to an art form displacing so much of life.

All these thoughts that break upon my inability to rightly characterize the story of my life with any degree of confidence ultimately redound to make the point that the need for sense must be satisfied by another Author, and that even the solution to the things I feel I am doing wrong is not primarily action – not at first – but simply to be still and know that I am God. This injunction has taken on a different hue as I get older. I used to see it as merely a command to reverence, but now that I always feel I must be racing to do something useful, now that I am always tapping my foot, unable to focus on one thing over the stressful cognizance of fifty other things, God’s “be still” echoes externally what I am already trying to convincingly say to myself, and supplies the need that was not earlier apparent. And none of that means that the things I drop in being still will work out well for me in life, or make what appears to be narrative sense – and there is the fear that this reassurance is all a counterfeit permit to do what one will and expect God to pick up the pieces. But I don’t think the reason to do what one should is the fear that otherwise things will go badly, or else we would not already know the end. It is in choosing to believe in the narrative, that all shall be well, that we come to actually do what we should even in our inability to know it, out of the confidence that whatever we do, God will have already made sense of it in the end.

Music in November 2025

• Dead Hearts is a re-enchantment of the world with the melancholy found when one pauses to recall the shades of those long-forgotten.

• Jonny Greenwood captured a kind of sun-dried western gloom that wouldn’t be out of place in a McCarthy novel in his score for One Battle After Another.

• Only Love Can Break Your Heart & Give the Anarchist a Cigarette both have a fun ambling lo-fi echoey quality to them.

• There’s nothing quite like the bombastic melodrama of Meat Loaf.

• Erica Western Teleport is a really excellent grief song.

• Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan is another strange and profound album from The Mountain Goats, this time seemingly written on the shores of Kinnereth.

• 10,000 Maniacs’ 1992 album Our Time in Eden is one of the many great emotionally titanic musical achievements of the ‘90s.

• Angelo Badalamenti’s score for Twin Peaks is well-deserving of the full symphonic treatment.

The Real Objection To AI

Technologies the public knows collectively as ‘AI’ are rapidly being integrated into seemingly every major software tool and rolled out across industries by corporate leaders anxious ensure their employees do not fall behind the curve of technical advancement. While hurrying to integrate AI into every conceivable workflow, CEOs find themselves stymied by low AI adoption rates. This is not normal resistance to change or a typical tension between the C-Suite and production staff; rather, a rift is forming that likely runs through the majority of white-collar workplaces, quietly dividing eager embracers of AI from those who, under either explicit pressure to adopt AI from the top down or indirect pressure from peer adoption and shifts in delivery timeline expectations, respond with growing alarm and stiffening resistance to the technology. Leaders anxious to make sure their workforces embrace AI tools risk exacerbating this resistance by their very enthusiasm, because a pronounced leadership bias toward adoption tends to confirm the skeptics’ anxieties while suppressing open discourse, even unintentionally.

We can see the public’s broad concerns about AI reflected in polling numbers (https://x.com/davidshor/status/2033906961377316890), and we specifically see the high levels of mistrust that show up when people hear government officials or tech company CEOs deny the threat of AI to their livelihoods. Beyond that there is a hard to quantify but loud cultural backlash from those who simply do not want to use AI, for a wide variety of reasons (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15q5qzdjqxo). If the general public is swimming in a ferment of fear and mistrust of societal leaders, we should expect the same dynamic to pervade every office to a similar extent.

This naturally prompts leaders to attempt to address their staff’s concerns about AI, but in the absence of honest, equal communication and trust vertically through an organization, there is a risk that only the most obvious fears of economic displacement are addressed – and the way in which they are addressed can even end up validating other real objections to AI. This is a problem which can sneak up on workplaces, as those leading in good faith without sharing these concerns may not realize that trust and open communication which had existed in their organization may have eroded quietly in the last few news cycles.

At this early stage much of the discourse is admittedly “vibes-based” and intangible, which obviously benefits everyone’s personal biases and concerns as an interpretive heuristic – mine no less than yours. But there is already a documented gap emerging between senior management and workers: https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/should-you-fire-employees-who-wont-learn-to-use-ai-tools/91267142. 64% of Americans said they planned to avoid using AI for “as long as possible, and almost a third of workers are actively undermining their company’s AI initiatives: https://builtin.com/articles/ai-resistance-at-work.

To be sure, much of this may be due to worries around job stability and security, especially in the age of doomscrolling. While I am skeptical that AI adoption will shrink the total number of human jobs or the economic pie as a whole (this is just not how markets process major technological shifts), those who see the speed of AI encroachment moving faster than their ability to save toward retirement – for those that are successfully saving – have valid concerns that demand credible answers. AI will likely create new jobs and bring gains in efficiency that will stoke demand whatever people could not afford before, even things we have not yet thought to want – but the potential disruption could swamp many careers in progress, and while the economy may move on, individuals might not recover. And so much now depends on planning ahead and investing in the long-term growth of one’s career, that if AI makes credible long-term planning difficult for even a few years and casts doubt on the belief that tomorrow will be much like today, then at the very least that will harm many people’s mental well-being, and it could easily be enough to derail many careers. Josh Tyrangiel explores this risk in this month’s Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/ai-economy-labor-market-transformation/685731/?gift=jUioLBatr3tIwuTcBrggCdEf3Au2KS8Xa7naR4lbA7w&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share. But the continuance of today’s careers tomorrow is far from the only concern.

In justifying the need to embrace AI, some leaders talk about how “change will never be slower than it is today” – an axiom pronounced like a bracingly future-focused and optimistic business mantra, but which to many employees sounds rather more like a threat of singularitarian apocalypse, not of Terminators or Cylons but of increasing speed, frenetic urgency, and an asymptotic learning curve at work, each employee chased on by the specter of their own obsolescence. If leadership seems unconcerned by this prospect of ever-accelerating change, and has no answer or vision for their employees other than to just embrace adaptability and curiosity – indispensable traits, but insufficient to believably answer this threat – and otherwise to enjoy the ride, many people will lose trust in their own leaders’ ability to spot what staff see as an iceberg looming over the starboard bow. It is not enough to promise job security by pointing to the indispensable value of human work, or to highlight how AI will reduce burdensome labor while creating new economic opportunities. All this is true, but it is unhelpful if the individual can still foresee a major disruption in their career with no means to plan for what does not yet exist beyond it, or a gradual or even exponential worsening of their work situation, or if they anticipate personal negative externalities they would incur by becoming dependent on AI tools.

People are not just concerned with having a job, but with whether or not their job will get worse. I think specifically of Cory Doctorow’s speech articulating the concept of the “reverse-centaur” (https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington). If all brain-resting drudge work is automated, one will still need to fill the day with productivity – only that now collapses into the concentrate that demands human judgment and focused cognition. So far, so good. But humans have never made a general practice of working at full cognitive intensity for the entire day. Some will doubtless thrive – but while a few may leverage AI to execute at a much faster pace, it is easy to foresee the expectations for all existing jobs shifting not in a way that empowers most employees with new tools, but which burdens them with expectations of skill adoption and increased production that may be attainable for some, but miserable or unreachable for others. Instead of assuring employees that they will continue to be needed, leaders who want to honestly engage employee reticence must offer a credible vision for how productivity gains will not simply intensify each human’s workload, transforming someone who produces deliverables into someone who manages a team of agents producing at a much faster pace. That may sound like a powerful way to improve efficiency, especially if you have thrived as a manager – that, after all, resembles what you do. But I am very skeptical that everyone can simply be scaled up into middle managers of machines and not be caught in a kind of spiral of effort just to keep up. And that’s just not what most folks have signed up for.

Having said all that, the true reason I wrote this, the real, dire, objection to AI in the workplace, is not the loss or degradation of one’s job, but the far more essential fear that you, yourself, will be degraded by using AI. This may not be an economic concern, but if you care about understanding AI resistance in the workplace or you care about the human life that economic activity supports, it is crucial to understand. Many of us are not worried about losing our jobs to a general employment recession caused by AI, or even by having to learn new technologies and, essentially, new jobs – that all comes with the territory. More frightening by far is the concern that economic pressure, whether top-down or from peer competition, will force those who wish to maintain a middle-class lifestyle to integrate AI tools into things like research, writing, and ultimately, every cognitive aspect of work. This is not groundless paranoia: a report from December suggests that nearly 60% of corporate executives self-reported that they would replace employees who resisted integrating AI tools into their workflow (https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/11/12/3186407/0/en/Most-Executives-Say-Ignoring-AI-Is-a-Bigger-Threat-to-Your-Career-Than-the-Tech-Itself.html).

This is frightening not because the AI tools might not work, from the perspective of deliverable quality, but because substituting AI for human cognition might quickly atrophy one’s ability to think and function and create as an independent person without it. I could link to so many articles and blogs where people explain the credible logic behind this fear, and not just the humanities-diploma-carrying liberals like myself that you’d expect – here’s conservative standard-bearer National Review (https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/02/ai-and-our-collapsing-creative-horizons/), and here’s the ever-interesting Ross Douthat (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/opinion/ai-politics-left-progressive.html?unlocked_article_code=1.W1A.JL_d.PtPnqUGU0Wfj&smid=url-share). But I think Sahil Bloom explains it well here: http://sahilbloom.substack.com/p/the-real-ai-risk-nobody-told-you.

I’m no luddite; I love technological development, and often point out to people that absent innovative scientific solutions to agriculture, the world would never have been able to support 8 billion people. I’m not advocating that we avoid using AI where it is genuinely useful – as long as it does not impose a cost on the human person in the process. I think most leaders urging AI adoption in their companies are people of integrity who mean well and care about their employees, and who certainly know a great deal more than I do about management and the economic imperatives of their industries. What worries me is that when I hear many talk about AI, the concerns they speak to are often about reliability, quality, difficulty evaluating the appropriateness of any given use case, or job security in general. What I don’t hear executives address is the question of whether or not any particular use case is good or bad for the human using it, as a mind, as a creator, as a person.

I’m not trying to champion an atavistic return to simpler days, ignorant of technology; I’m advocating for exercising responsibility and discrimination in how we use it, because I continue to value all the things that one learns (rightly) to value growing up in a society like ours – individualism, curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, literacy, and hard work. What troubles me so is that we seem to be running toward what might be a cliff, and that employees are being carried along by the mass pressure of the market like lemmings – and what baffles me is that this stampeded is not led by impetuous youths but by grey-haired and sober-minded executives. If they do not understand the actual nature of the objection many workers have to AI, leaders will continue to speak about adoption and its risks in a way that ignores the elephant in the room, causing a large segment of their staff to lose trust in them and become more entrenched in indiscriminate resistance to all AI tools – and moreover, to stop communicating those concerns, while still acting on them. Leaders run the risk, in short, of totally bifurcating their workforce’s processes and cultures, and doing so without even being aware that it is happening.

I want to leave you with a couple of posts that articulate this problem better than I can, if not in ways focused as much on the corporate workplace. Professor Alan Noble questions the whole premise that we should accept AI as inevitable: https://newsletter.oalannoble.com/p/why-should-we-just-accept-ai. And Susannah Black Roberts takes an even more fundamental, if more philosophically contentious, approach, which is well worth reading: https://radiofreethulcandra.substack.com/p/a-first-blast-of-the-trumpet-against?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2.              

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Films of 2023

It’s the 2026 Oscars! While Hollywood is busy awarding the films of 2025,  I’m busy awarding the films of…not 2025, nor 2024, but 2023 – because that’s how long it takes me to catch up on cinema and then get around to thinking about my list. As of this writing, I have watched 115 movies with their release date on Letterboxd listed in 2023. I’ll post the whole list at the end of this blog, but as always, it is bound to change when I inevitably watch some other movie released that year. So this is just my list for now. ‍ ‍

Worst Picture ‍

I don’t actually watch very many movies I hate. Generally, I have a bias toward liking films, and I tend to gravitate towards ones I like; and I have very broad taste. I’ll give five stars to Piotr Szulkin’s 1980 masterpiece Golem and another five stars to Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2. And I mention the latter to make the point that I have been along for the ride of the MCU since the beginning, and have had a grand old time like everyone, and I got up and cheered at the credits of Endgame, so I’m no Marvel hater. But having said that, the franchise has finally outworn its welcome, and there is no contest for the worst movie of 2023 – it’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. This movie isn’t offensively misbegotten, nor is it calamitously broken: far worse than that, it is lazy and completely juiceless. It is without juice. It would be all right to make a movie in which there were no original ideas – originality is overrated – but to make a movie in which everything is not only an echo of the Star Wars galaxy, but also an immeasurably weaker version, is just a waste of everyone’s time. I could not bring myself to remotely care about any of it. And even if the actor had not been sucked into his own quantum realm of scandal, the villain is, much to my surprise, completely flat and boring. Also, the entire thing looks like nothing so much as brownish-purplish sludge. Thankfully I watched this in the way it deserves, on the screen on the back of an economy-class seat, struggling to hear the audio through cheap headphones because I was seated right behind the wing and adjacent to the engines.

Best Documentary

Like so many great documentaries, In the Rearview is a film that should not have needed to be made, but unfortunately it had to be. The film is as powerful as it is simple. In the early weeks of Russia’s ongoing attack on Ukraine, a driver takes a van and drives back and forth between the Polish border and villages just behind the front line in Ukraine, carrying refugees out of harm’s way with each trip, and each time dropping them off safe in Poland only to turn around and drive straight back into the line of fire. As these trips unfold, cameras inside the van capture the passengers making their weary, sorrowful escape from known danger into unfamiliar exile. ‍ ‍

Best Special Effects

I’m giving this to Godzilla Minus One for doing by far the most with the smallest budget. They made this thing for under $15 million, which bonkers when you see how well-realized the visuals are – and I don’t even primarily mean Godzilla, who will never look quite real in any movie because there is no real thing like Godzilla, I mean the imagery of post-war Ginza being smashed by Godzilla. This is also a good old-fashioned crowd-pleasing heartwarming movie with all the old tropes Spielberg used to be the king of, and well worth seeing. ‍ ‍

Best Production & Costume Design

‍I think it’s important to recognize that an authentic period piece is really hard to assemble when you need to recreate a whole moment in history that is long gone by, and no film in 2023 did that quite as lushly and gorgeously as Killers of the Flower Moon, which so perfectly recreates 1920s Osage country that you wonder why this part of American history hasn’t been a bigger presence on our screens, and makes you forget how much work it took to recreate it. ‍ ‍

Best Locations

I had to think about this one, as there were a lot of great locations filmed in 2023. Sing Sing is a great location; The Settlers takes place across the wilds of Tierra Del Fuego; The Delinquents revolves around the gorgeous rocky hills of Argentina; The Monk and the Gun is filmed in Bhutan, which is almost cheating. While I may be biased by familiarity, my favorite use of a place in filming was in the undersung Sometimes I Think About Dying, a movie not only set in Astoria, Oregon, but very obviously actually filmed there, and which feels completely immersed in the dense Columbia estuary fog. This is another entry in a subgenre of films from Oregon which feel much more anchored to their locale and authentic to it than many other films – films like Pig or the bulk of Kelly Reichardt’s oeuvre (really this may mostly just be down to Kelly Reichardt). ‍ ‍

Score‍ ‍

2023 was a very strong year for original scores. Bobby Krlic’s unsettling score for Beau is Afraid builds to a very strong climax that is integral to the film, just as his Midsommar score did in 2019. Poor Things features the film debut of Jerskin Fendrix, and it’s as bizarre as the rest of his discography. Kohta Yamamoto and Hiroyuki Sawano collaborated on the final score for Attack on Titan, which appears on this list because it released the end of the show as two movies, and it is as apocalyptic as you might expect. While on the subject of gigantic beasts trampling the earth, Naoki Sato’s score for Godzilla Minus One is a beautiful return to the kind of film scores one used to get, in the kind of movies that that one harkens back to. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s posthumously-released score for Monster is absolutely essential to Kore-eda’s emotional triumph. ‍ ‍

Those are all honorable mentions, ultimately. There were in the end four scores I had to seriously think about when trying to decide which I liked best, all of which I had listened to repeatedly many times at work. The first is Ludwig Goransson’s Oscar-winning score for Oppenheimer, which musicalizes the fraught and quivering tension that binds the atomic nucleus together in a way similarly metaphorical to how Nolan visualizes this abstraction through eerie arcs and sparks of light. The next is Gary Gunn’s incredible score for A Thousand and One, which flows under the movie like a warm river, and provides its heartbeat. Then there is Łukasz “L.U.C.” Rostkowski’s entrancing and melancholy folk score for The Peasants. But my favorite score of 2023 has to be Joe Hisaishi’s restrained and moody score for The Boy and the Heron. The benefit of the restraint of most of the score is that in the few moments where it shrugs off that restraint, the score breaks like a ray of light cutting suddenly through the clouds. In particular, the repeated motifs originating in Ask Me Why and Granduncle strike me like a wave crashing against the rocks. ‍ ‍

Animated‍ ‍

As great as Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron is, the best animated picture of the year is The Peasants, a film which looks as though an impressionistic painting had come to life and was dancing, which uses its animation to unwind the story across the seasons with incredible transitions, and which achieved all of this by actually hand-painting the entire movie frame by frame.‍ ‍

Cinematography‍ ‍

There were so many great-looking movies in 2023 that it’s genuinely hard to say what the best cinematography was. There’s a repeated sequence from Priscilla that is so beautiful I kind of want to give it to that; but then there is also the incredible photography of the whole process of cooking in The Taste of Things; and there is the comforting manner in which The Holdovers is shot, which extends beyond the warm film grain to encompass everything about how the camera enacts its own nostalgia. Faced with this, I am giving it to what in some ways has the simplest cinematography: Perfect Days, which follows Ozu in simply letting the camera be a passive frame into which life and beauty enters. ‍ ‍

Director & Editing‍ ‍

I’m giving both Best Director and Best Editing to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a film which feels so much shorter than its long runtime because of the way in which it spins the different temporalities of its story together, and the way in which the dynamic union of photography, score, and performance make every moment thrill with tension. ‍ ‍

Supporting actor‍ ‍

Best Supporting actor is a ludicrously full category where I cannot really afford to run down everyone who deserves mentioning. You could nominate half the cast of Oppenheimer alone and have a great list just from that call sheet. Robert Downey Jr. obviously deserves mention for that film, but so does the undersung Alden Ehrenreich, the warm and fuzzy David Krumholtz, the deranged Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, the man who conceptualized Project Sundial, a bomb powerful enough to light all of France afire and blast a hole in the earth’s atmosphere. And then there is Casey Affleck’s two-scene performance in which he does very little and yet seems to be channeling Satan himself. Beyond Oppenheimer, great performances abound: William Catlett is an excellent step-dad in A Thousand and One; Mark Ruffalo eats a big ol’ ham sandwich in Poor Things; Paul Mescal extracts his usual share of tears in All of Us Strangers; Jacob Elordi looms unsettlingly over Priscilla; Sam Spruell plays a horribly villainous Colonel in The Settlers; and of course, Charles Melton’s subsumed trauma is the whole juice of May December. We also have to recognize Simon Bennebjerg’s nihilistic villain in The Promised Land, and De Niro’s role in Killers of the Flower Moon is one of his best performances – and while we’re on that, Brendan Fraser comes in an steals all of his two minutes of screentime in a hilarious way. ‍ ‍

There’s one other shoutout I want to give, and that’s to Clarence Maclin in Sing Sing, who plays a somewhat fictionalized, younger version of himself. Maclin is not a professional actor; rather, he used his time incarcerated at Sing Sing to engage with drama as part of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, and he genuinely is extremely compelling. ‍ ‍

My best supporting Actor I’m giving to George MacKay, old shovelface himself, who keeps popping up in straight-to-Mubi indie pictures and is always a delight. I’m sort of cheating with this one, because I’m giving it to him for both his role in Femme and The Beast, and the latter could be considered a lead performance. Across these two movies, he gives an extremely varied and intensely chimeric performance, essentially playing several characters who bury different parts of themselves at different times. ‍ ‍

Supporting actress‍ ‍

I genuinely feel somewhat embarrassed when I look at how short the list of names on my spreadsheet for Best Supporting Actress is, especially compared to the extremely long list for Best Supporting Actor. I genuinely struggled to recall a lot of standout supporting actress roles, though I’m sure I saw many I just couldn’t recall – but this was in stark contrast with Lead Actress, which makes me suspect that the way in which I tend to categorize performances as supporting or lead perhaps bumps a lot of women into lead who might actually campaign for the Oscars as supporting. It may also be a function of a lot of the biggest or best movies I saw either having a heavily-male ensemble (like Oppenheimer) or revolving around a very small cast where there really is just a female lead. ‍ ‍

So, having said all that, first some well-deserved shoutouts. Paula Luchsinger gives a very strong performance in El Conde; Sakura Ando is intrinsic to the success of Monster; Melina Hagberg deserves to be mentioned for The Promised Land because it’s notable whenever a child carries the emotional core and also the sense of fun for whole sections of a very bleak movie, playing against the wonderfully dour Mads Mikkelsen. Julianne Moore is unsurprisingly creepy and upsetting simply in her apparent normalcy in May December, a movie loosely based on an extremely salacious and troubling real story from my home state. And Parker Posey is quite fun in Beau is Afraid – one of the only fun things in the movie. But the winner has to be Patti LuPone, also for Beau is Afraid, for delivering the mother of all terrifying mother monologues. ‍ ‍

Lead actor‍ ‍

There are some candidates for Lead Actor which are obvious and must be acknowledged, people like Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer, Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers, Bradley Cooper in Maestro, Colman Domingo in Sing Sing, and Joaquin Phoenix in Beau is Afraid. I also want to recognize Dominic Sessa’s strong debut in The Holdovers as well as Hinata Hiiragi’s in Monster. Andrew Scott gives an incredibly moving performance as the loneliest man alive in All of Us Strangers, and Seydou Sarr is truly distressing in Io Capitano. My best actor goes to the great Koji Yakusho for his intensely humane turn in Perfect Days, a movie which rests almost wholly on his very unshowy performance. ‍ ‍

Lead actress‍ ‍

There were a great many Lead Actress contenders who were all excellent. Emma Stone is a delightfully odd revenant in Poor Things, while Sara Montpetit is an adorably squeamish vampire in the fun and romantic Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person. Also notably tiny, and deploying that as a tool in service of the film, is Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla. Daisy Ridley, an actor I love in Star Wars but who seems saddled with many movies-that-do-not-exist since then, gives her best performance yet in Sometimes I Think About Dying. Natalie Portman in May December, Sandra Huller in Anatomy of a Fall, Margot Robbie in Barbie, Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon, Juliette Binoche in The Taste of Things, and Teyana Taylor in A Thousand and One, are all superb. But I have to give my award to a performance that struggles to suppress its own terror for the entire runtime, often existing just outside the verge of tears, while remaining inexplicable, and that belongs to Léa Seydoux in The Beast. ‍ ‍

O‍ther ‍

Before getting to my top ten, I wanted to glance over the list as a whole and point out anything I felt could not be left out. This of course includes miscellaneous awards, both sily and serious. For example, I have no strong view on which film actually had the best makeup, and am a poor judge of that; but I definitely enjoyed trying to decide which Glenn had the more fun makeup, Powell in Hit Man or Howerton in Blackberry. On a serious note, 2023 saw the release of debut features from two brand new auteurs. Celine Song’s Past Lives seems to have garnered more attention, and it is an incredible debut – but not the best of the year. That goes to A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, a movie which lands like a thunderbolt from the blue. I was astonished when I looked up the movie after watching it and discovered it was her first feature, this is a masterpiece right out of the starting gate. ‍ ‍

If you look down my list past the top ten, you’ll see a lot of films I could and probably should list as honorable mentions. What can I say; I give out a lot of perfect scores. I’m not going to list them, as the sun is sinking and that’s what the list is for. I want to commend to you Sometimes I Think About Dying, and Ridley’s relatable, stifled smallness in it; The Iron Claw, a film purportedly about professional wrestling that is in fact one of the weepiest films of the year; You Hurt My Feelings, a frank look at a normal marriage featuring not just Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but my beloved Tobias Menzies, who is always fun to see in anything; A Tiger in Paradise, a movie that I found immensely thoughtful, vulnerable, and important, all while fundamentally rejecting its outlook on life; and Fremont, a still small movie. ‍ ‍

Best pictures ‍ ‍

Below are my top ten, and then my list in total for 2023. However, as a reminder that this is just the list in this moment, and things change, since last year’s 2022 list I discovered another film from 2022 that now has displaced something on that list and made it in my top 10 of 2022, the absolutely fantastic Hundreds of Beavers.

10. The Boy and the Heron:‍ ‍

Hayao Miyazaki is continually retiring and coming back, so the fact that this movie even exists is a special blessing. This is easily his strangest and most abstractly symbolic work. There are so many images with stick in my mind: the fiery beginning; the sacred paper in the blast of the wind; the girl in flame; and most of all, the final, grand collapse. Through all the strange symbolism pierces a honest encounter with death, life, and artistic subcreation which feels portentous beyond what I can articulate, like reading the one of the major prophets. ‍ ‍

9. The Taste of Things:‍ ‍

This is such a simple film that there’s actually very little to explain about it. It is essentially a love story about French cooking. But director Trần Anh Hùng shoots the kitchen in the way that Terence Malick shoots nature, or IMAX documentarians shoot the Himalayas. It’s simply too gorgeous to believe, yet so appetizing that, overcoming incredulity, it insists on its reality as the platonic idea of the kitchen. I’m hungry just remembering it. And I think that simplicity is essential to the picture: there is a kind of holy virtue in taking full enjoyment and satisfaction in the blessings of life. I believe God delights in His creatures finding such unspeakable satisfaction in their food that it brings them to the point of tears. ‍ ‍

8. The Holdovers:‍ ‍

This is a movie which takes a deeply relatable melancholy and anxiety about the lost academic life, the disappointing and yet still tenuous career, the profound loneliness of New England in the winter, and out of it pulls a golden thread of encouragement, hope, and how to use one’s life well when that no longer appears plausible.‍ ‍

7. Oppenheimer:‍ ‍

Certainly the most talked-about movie of its year, I have little meaningful to add to the discourse around Oppenheimer, not least because I continue to find the question of how exactly to feel about the whole enterprise it depicts intractably complicated, becoming so grey it is impossible to see a way up or down. But that is all to the benefit of the film and its decision to center the particular, deeply-flawed human who sits at the center of it all. ‍ ‍

I think Oppenheimer makes a good double feature with Sunshine, a kind of diptych in which Cillian Murphy enters purgatory the moment the Trinity test goes off, only escaping at the end of Sunshine. ‍ ‍

6. A Thousand and One:‍ ‍

This is a film about the epic scope of every life and every relationship between the infinite wells that are human beings. It is full of sorrow and beauty, and more than anything else it forces me to face the fact that in this present, broken world, the desire for all things to be well for all people practically amounts to asking for things which are now impossibly contradictory to be resolved, in ways that are just beyond us. But we live in pain in the hope of a world where there will be no such contradiction between my good and yours, and we shall all be together. ‍ ‍

5. Perfect Days:‍ ‍

This movie asks very little of you; rather, it invites you to sit quietly with a contented janitor, and it shows you a glimpse of a way to live. ‍ ‍

4. Monster:‍ ‍

This is a difficult film, emotionally. It captures a child in a kind of pain he can’t even fully articulate to himself, much less find a way through. The adults are no less confused and swamped by troubles in their own way, and everyone is foundering. But there is a way in which hope is depicted at the end which echoes the words of Christ, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them…”‍ ‍

3. The Beast ‍ ‍

This is a very, very loose adaptation of Henry James’s The Beast In the Jungle; interestingly, it is not the only French film adaptation of that in 2023. But the story has been vivisected and splayed into something so calculated to hit all my particular anxieties, and so viscerally horrifying, that it is easily one of the most upsetting films I have ever seen. Beyond that, I cannot begin to describe it. ‍ ‍

2. The Peasants‍ ‍

An animated film that astonishes with every frame as the living brush strokes dance, imprecisely painted by the unseen hands of its makers, this is nevertheless much more than a visual feast. It is in fact a sliver of life, the kind of life lived out again and again and again through time immemorial, and as such it is too brutal to bear. ‍ ‍

1.      The Zone of interest‍ ‍

I have nothing to add to what’s been said about The Zone of Interest. All I can say is that I found the execution of its central conceit so affecting that it went straight to the top of my list and remained there. There are shots in this which live in the dark parts of my brain – and that, from a movie where the whole point is not showing anything. ‍ ‍

The List, in Full (with images of it today given the list is a living document): https://boxd.it/mCVai

Music in October 2025

• Father John Misty’s wry apocalyptic ruminations feel a bit too relevant these days.

• The Last Dinner Party’s album From the Pyre is wonderful, loud, loose, and varied.

• From time to time I like to remind myself that disco was always cool, so I put on something like Emotion.

• There Goes A Tenner is great because it includes the lyric “I hope you remember to treat the gelignite tenderly” sung in an affect Cockney accent. You’re just not going to get that anywhere else.

• Clocks and Hearts Keep Going is a good addition to my long list of soft, sad indie albums.  

• Colors and the Kids is a reverie contemplating perhaps finding the motivation to draw the next breath.

• The Fall of Charleston is a song I wish the US sang more often at national celebrations. We need to revive the crusading spirit of 1865 and the memory once maintained by the members of the Grand Army of the Republic.

• Rachel Bobbitt’s second album, Swimming Towards The Sand, is full of the kind of sustained background droning one usually associates with bagpipes rather than pop. Just to be clear, this is a compliment.

• My Big Nurse feels like David Byrne’s very weirdly upbeat version of an apocalypse.

• The Whole of the Moon is everything I love about the ‘80s: sincerely convinced in its own grandiosity, altogether contrived yet wholly sincere.

• God Only Knows has Bowie crooning low like a downer Sinatra, and I personally find it quite affecting.

• The Kiss is so specific and strange, like everything I’ve heard from Judee Sill.

• Ribbons is a lovely little pastoral album from Bibio.

• Craig Finn writes interesting, depressing, self-condemnatory ballads, like a more ruthlessly confessional Billy Joel.

• Don’t Carry It All is an encouraging call to bear each other’s burdens as we can.

• Beth’s Farm is an incredibly moving yet very odd piece from Shropshire’s own Jerskin Fendrix – it’s hard to describe beyond that.

The Racist Roots of Trumpism

Complying with an executive order from President Trump titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” the National Park Service revised a number of brochures and signs, including, bizarrely, removing the adjective “racist” from the description of Byron De La Beckwith, the Klansman who murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers, in the brochures handed out at the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument: https://mississippitoday.org/2026/02/05/medgar-evers-killer-trump-says-stop-calling-him-racist/. On its face, this is a very strange edit to make – there is no actual doubt or debate about Beckwith’s racist motives, and the entire context of the National Monument is the civil rights struggle. It also seems strange that a broad executive order would be applied all the way down the chain to the level of this brochure, to make such an inexplicable change. And small as this may seem, it is not isolated. Under this administration, there has been a quiet but consistent effort to whitewash American history, including the parts of history that acknowledge racial discrimination: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/climate/national-park-service-deleting-american-history-slavery.html. It should not surprise us that an administration with no regard for the liberal democratic principles that inspired and justified the Revolution would also see no reason to remember America’s greatest hypocritical betrayal of those principles, though I would submit that it dishonors those who died in the Civil War to try to minimize the cost of that part of history. That does not, however, explain why the administration is bothering with this sort of thing.

On the surface, this could easily appear to just be a classic case of trying to advance a more positive self-depiction of America, something which many conservatives have long advocated for, often in reaction to people who go too far the other direction, and refuse to ever admit that the US did anything right, or who apply their principles selectively in their own form of particular hypocrisy, condemning the United States but turning a blind eye to worse crimes committed by “anti-imperialist” states. I am sure that some of that legacy position from an earlier GOP has gone into these revisions; it certainly smoothed the way for them. But I think this is also an example of the executive branch’s priorities, and it goes beyond defensiveness of a kind of Rockwellian Americana (Rockwell, by the way, was a supporter of civil rights – see his painting The Problem We All Live With at the top of my post, for which he was called a race traitor). Instead, it is an outworking of a very different American Rockwellian spirit: that of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party.

I say this not simply because the administration does racist things (though it does), and not simply because its domestic policy priorities have come to be dominated by Stephen Miller, for whose political career racism and xenophobia are the core motivating force; I say it because it is also one of the core messages, motivations, and policy promises of Trumpism, and it has been that way since day one. That is not to say that the people who pulled the lever for the President were all motivated by racism, or that they all even believed his administration would be racist. Famously, Trump received an increased share of the nonwhite vote during the last election. But whether or not people see or acknowledge it, it has been there since day one. When Trump came down the escalator in 2015 and opened his campaign by slandering Mexican immigrants, many voters heard it as a message against imported criminality, a reading given a fig leaf by Trump’s “and some, I assume, are good people.” But Trump was not there to launch a measured and nuanced campaign for border security and public safety, but to kick off the next ten years of promoting discrimination, particularly against nonwhite immigrants. And of course before he came down the escalator, Trump’s personal history of racism was well-documented, stretching from when the Department of Justice sued him for racial discrimination in the 1970s all the way through his emergence on the Republican national political scene, where his brand was fueled by and synonymous with birtherism. https://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/12270880/donald-trump-racist-racism-history

The roots of Trump’s signature priority, and Miller’s brainchild, his harsh enforcement of immigration law – though now that he has for months disregarded numerous court orders, wrongfully imprisoned some innocent people and killed others, calling it enforcement of law is not really accurate – is itself rooted in a very ugly history of racist motivations long predating Trump. As the Times Magazine notes, Trump’s policy echoes the racial immigration quotas of 1924 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/magazine/trump-miller-immigration-ice.html.

If we look further back, it is easy to find other examples of nakedly racist immigration laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Today the law may not be so openly racist (and in fact, Trump’s GOP has not actually changed immigration law substantially – everything that is happening is being done by the executive branch on its own, theoretically operating under existing law, but simultaneously illegally spurning judicial review and legislative oversight), but the way in which it is being applied and the reasons for that remain the same kind of racist views that view some as more American than others by virtue of ethnicity.

This is the history of American nativism that Stephen Miller takes as his model, and Miller has been given wide authority by President Trump to shape American immigration enforcement. The results have been impossible to disguise as anything but deeply racist in practice. ICE (the term now colloquially applied to all of the administration’s immigration enforcement agencies) has frequently and consistently engaged in naked racial profiling in who it targets and harasses, more than suggesting a racial bias among its agents. This profiling is so important to the administration that rather than changing how ICE operates, when sued because of profiling, it instead defended the practice at the Supreme Court. Since then, ICE’s run of racial profiling has continued unabated: https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2026/01/18/allegations-of-racial-profiling-of-us-citizens-on-the-rise-as-ice-surge-expands-in-minnesota/; https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lawsuit-accuses-federal-agents-racial-profiling-minneapolis-immigratio-rcna254245; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/us-citizens-racial-profiling-ice.

The signs of deep-rooted racism as a priority in this administration’s decision-making extend far beyond its approach to immigration enforcement. Even in its first month in office, the Trump administration’s targeting of DEI surged well past the pretense of pure meritocracy and into a pattern of discrimination: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/trump-attacks-dei/681772/?gift=jUioLBatr3tIwuTcBrggCcmkEOmu9qXKYfnWJdkFISg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share. Trump was quick to cut funding that kept millions of people in poor countries in Africa alive, and to bar the door to refugees and asylum seekers from around the world – but he made sure to make an exception for white South Africans. Since then, of course, the President has continued to say and do all manner of racist and generally bigoted things, culminating in sharing the infamous video which included a depiction of the Obamas as apes: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-second-term-most-racist-moments-ranked-top-ten-list. I suppose many of these things have lost their shock value in the age of Trump, but I would remind those who minimize these things that in normal, healthier political times it took far less to create a scandal.

None of this should be surprising, given Trump’s personal history, but it also does not surprise me, because the Republican Party that Trump has remade in his own image over the past decade has now come to be staffed by people who grew up in the festering petri dish of 4chan, a website that people in my generation used to laugh about because it was the source of both ridiculous toxicity and ridiculous memes. Of course, there used to be an understanding that the people posting memes about Hitler were doing it to simply be edgy, and they still knew the difference between jokingly saying something offensive and actually meaning it; or, they grew up and grew out of it once they started to understand the humanity of others and became less immature. But over time some of these folks ceased to be able to distinguish between what they said in jest, and what they really meant; meanwhile, others simply took the joking as a permission structure which created a safe space in which to be openly bigoted. And then, as the anti-woke backlash picked up steam on the far right, and their politics focused more and more on cultural issues, and the right became increasingly synonymous among younger people with fringe online far right movements that peddled explicit nativism, racism, and misogyny, the party that now wears the skin of the GOP has come to be staffed by people who would in a past I can personally remember have been shunned in polite society. If you don’t believe me, consider the popularity of Nick Fuentes on the right, and ask yourself what kind of educated young person would be drawn to this political movement: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/nick-fuentes-tucker-carlson-randy-fine/684939/.

Or ask Rod Dreher, a very socially-conservative blogger who helped JD Vance rise to prominence and who is still close enough to right-wing politics to sit down with the Vice President when he visits Washington. This is what he had to say after a recent visit (Dreher moved to Orbanist Hungary a few years ago, preferring that kind of conservative regime as a place to live): https://roddreher.substack.com/p/what-i-saw-and-heard-in-washington.

Meanwhile, this is the kind of Republican who can run for statewide office and have establishment Republicans simply not say anything against him, even though they know better: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/bo-french-railroad-commission/. It’s not that all these old-fashioned establishment types have become Groypers, but that they no longer view bigotry as disqualifying and see no reason not to appear at events with this sort of person that they share a party ticket with.

This is who Trump appointed to help shape American messaging abroad: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/darren-beattie-state-department/681582/?gift=jUioLBatr3tIwuTcBrggCRWlNtZX21hXHSJUfbFfAaY&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share. Unsurprising, then, that the entire executive branch now seems to be emitting Nazi shibboleths like weapons-grade plutonium emits radiation: https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/01/social-media-trump-administration-dhs/685659/?gift=jUioLBatr3tIwuTcBrggCWLG8lI1zzoB2Snp-RN8uhM&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share.

And this is all downstream of the Republican Party becoming the modern home of Nazis and those happy wink at them and ignore them: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/republican-party-nazi-problem/686055/?gift=jUioLBatr3tIwuTcBrggCa5rD7MvVqQWlVWldk-OrNc&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share.

There are so many other examples, and if you have been interacting with the younger, more online right for long, you will already know firsthand that many of these people are deeply compromised by racism. Now the party of Lincoln is compromised by them in turn, and by their elders and betters who tolerate them. But none of this is surprising, if you remember who Trump always has been, and what his political movement has always been about, from day one.

Music in September 2025

• These Are Days has the elegiac quality and warm early-90’s tone that I find so affecting. Hummingbird Highway has a somewhat similar kind of warm sadness.

• Armies of the Lord is yet another addition to the many biblically allusive poems from The Mountain Goats.

• Straight Line Was A Lie from The Beths might very well be the best album of last year.

• Carter Burwell’s score for Raising Arizona is such an exquisite and odd collection of gems, very much like the movie (the best of 1987, if you haven’t seen it).

• Kim Fox’s 2003 album Return to Planet Earth has a really interesting and nostalgic sound; it definitely feels like the turn of the century.

• Dora Jar’s EP Digital Meadow presents as having a subdued energy, but is actually driven.

• We need to bring back public performance of The Battle Cry of Freedom as a political act; I think its time has come again.

• Losing Haringey is less a song than a reflection. In its specificity and universal relatability, it strikes a particular chord in the heart.

• The Scythe is a dramatic, gusty greeting to death from The Last Dinner Party, a band that I am going to be watching for some time.

• Falling is the theme for Twin Peaks, and itself a collaboration between Julee Cruise, Angelo Badalamenti, and David Lynch, and like so much connected to that show it is a deep and murky well; you never shall reach bottom.

Horror By Daylight

https://x.com/Vahid/status/2014377909008400688

Over the past several weeks an atrocity has unfolded in Iran at a scale and speed unlike anything since the 1940s, and it has happened in broad daylight, with the whole world…well, perhaps not watching, but nonetheless aware. I am only now catching up on posting about this; perhaps I should have sooner, but the exigencies of life intervened, and I am just some guy and don’t see myself as obligated to write about anything at any specific time; and moreover, I am never timely where writing is concerned. Still, I wish I had said something sooner, as useless as that may be, because what is happening is so horrific that it should shock us all out of our armchairs.

The past month has seen massive popular protest against the regime of the Islamic Republic, on a greater scale than before. At first there was great optimism, because it has been clear for a long time that the regime is deeply unpopular, and there appeared to be real solidarity among an unprecedented number of protesters. But now the regime, rather than compromising or buckling, has responded to the opposition of the great majority of Iranians by simply murdering them en masse. They shut off the internet to buy themselves some artificial darkness, but they could not shut out the sky above, so the outside world watched, first by satellite and through escaping rumor, a mass slaughter evolve to a level not seen since the einsatzgruppen operated on the Eastern Front.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/ng-interactive/2026/feb/06/rasht-massacre-protests-iran-timeline

https://x.com/longlosthills/status/2012618009416773982

https://x.com/DeTahmineh/status/2012591558298628343

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/world/middleeast/iran-protester-deaths.html?searchResultPosition=7

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/world/middleeast/iran-how-crackdown-was-done.html?searchResultPosition=11

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/world/middleeast/iran-protests-victims-bodies.html

https://abcnews.com/International/1-month-after-iran-regimes-deadliest-crackdown-death/story?id=130001348

That this has happened by daylight, in the face of the defiance of Iranian society writ large, touches on a terror that has been growing in my heart – the terror of helplessness. I have grown up so internalizing the heroic American myth that if a people as a whole band together, they can overcome any oppression, overthrow any regime – that the main enemy between the oppressed and their freedom is simply their own fear. Of course this has never been quite true, even in America – in fact, the system of chattel slavery in the South imposed such a vicious physical despotism that the terror of the enslaved had very real teeth; still, the many thousands who did overcome that fear and escape, and tell their stories, ultimately led to the destruction of slavery as public opinion turned in the North. But what if a society comes together in protest, and is simply crushed? This has happened – look at Budapest in 1956, for instance.

To me, this idea of a political scenario in which there simply is no possible way to win through to freedom, where overcoming one’s fear with courage does not result in victory, but simply death, no matter the numbers, produces a kind of existential dread that shakes my whole understanding of the world as a place that operates in certain ways, and where one can make some kind of decent life. And it echoes another fear I often struggled with throughout my life, in moments of doubt, or guilt, or outright sin – my terror reading the words of scripture which describe the moment of Judgment when, in the way I understood it as a child, the vast majority of humanity were condemned and destroyed, and all their weeping and gnashing of teeth did nothing at all. Admittedly, I had a bias at times where I wanted to vilify this idea of justice, because I felt threatened by it in my own little rebellions, or simply felt insecure in my doubts; but it also troubled me on a level I can’t properly articulate. The idea of something unspeakably horrible happening, and there being no refuge in others, in even the vast community of others, and no pleading one’s way out of it, appalls me.

Since then, my ideas about Judgment have been complicated, but remain unresolved. But one thing is clear: that this Judgment which again came to mind out of fear, is itself the one relief from the terror I set out to write about today. When something as horrible as the murder of the Iranian people happens, it exposes the world for what it is, and us for what we are; helpless, and doomed to die, in a world where wrong triumphs and there is no hope. But there, beyond the world, and intruding now into is, is the answer – in that Judgment of Christ breaks the final day that will hold to account, and even undo, somehow make right, all these horrors that now go unavenged. The Resurrection is our pledge that this is so – that even death, so absolute and so unfair, will be undone. As it says in the Book of Isaiah the Prophet:

Who is this coming from Edom,

From Bozrah, with his garments stained crimson?

Who is this, robed in splendor,

Striding forward in the greatness of his strength?

“It is I, proclaiming victory,

Mighty to save.”

Why are your garments red,

Like those of one treading the winepress?

“I have trodden the winepress alone;

From the nations no one was with me.

I trampled them in my anger

And trod them down in my wrath;

Their blood spattered my garments,

And I stained all my clothing.

It was for me the day of vengeance;

The year for me to redeem had come.

I looked, but there was no one to help,

I was appalled that no one gave support;

So my own arm achieved salvation for me,

And my own wrath sustained me.

I trampled the nations in my anger;

In my wrath I made them drunk

And poured their blood on the ground.”

 This then is hope for the helpless, for the people who overcome their fear and still are gunned down. But we, and by we I mean you and I, here in the West, are not helpless. While we share the same reality before death, in this moment of murder we hold a vast power that could deliver the victims – and yet we do nothing. It is as if the West were a passive bystander on a sidewalk, comfortably licking away at an ice cream cone and scrolling on a phone, while half-watching someone get beaten to death in the street mere steps away.

Of course, now it is too late for tens of thousands of people, and in the same breath that I condemn our inaction, I have to also urge you to read this warning by Omid Memarian, someone who has suffered greatly resisting the Islamic Republic, who warns that an American attack at this moment would likely make the repression even worse. If America intervened tomorrow in our typical tossed-off and noncommittal way, we would simply provoke more repression. We should have helped the protesters when we had the chance. Now we should take responsibility to actually finish off the regime, which must be done at one stroke; otherwise, we should get out of the way of internal Iranian resistance, help in any way that is actually helpful, but not give the regime more ammunition for its propaganda.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/01/iran-trump-intervention-protests/685730/?gift=jUioLBatr3tIwuTcBrggCTmkbU0RddiwuZ8fQB9xSg8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

But what do I know? It’s very possible that would be catastrophic in other ways. I want to defer to the experts in national security – but at the same time, I don’t trust anyone who is content to accept this kind of unavenged brutality. If we can watch a government no one wants simply gun down civilian protesters, regardless of their numbers, because they have no conscience to prick, and we simply do nothing, then what is all our power even for? What good are we, as a nation? There is no excuse for a country as powerful as the United States (I write as an American, though this applies to several other nations as well) to simply wash its hands and insist that we are not responsible, because Iran certainly isn’t our regime; it’s not as if we haven’t opposed their power for decades. But that’s like booing as someone brutalizes an innocent, but not stepping forward to actually help them. And remember, we are the furthest thing from helpless; when you hold a shield and fail to extend it to cover the broken, that is when you become responsible. If the West, if the United States, with all its power and might, is content to simply watch the cold-blooded murder of a whole people who are doing all they can to stand together and overcome their fears, then we’re worse than useless as a civilization. We don’t deserve to survive.

Music in August 2025

• I’m not familiar with Akino Arai’s work, but I really like the particular brand of laid-back melancholy warmth she uses.

• Moyai is triumphant, processional, and a little bizarre.

• Mistake is yet another case of the Middle Kids being both openhearted and jaded in a wonderful way.

• I love fullhearted earnestness, and nothing is more fullheartedly earnest than Christopher Willis’s score for The Personal History of David Copperfield.

• The Riddle is brought home by the trackless Celtic yearning of Cécile Corbel.

• The Brightness is such a fragile album from Anaïs Mitchell; it’s kind of heartbreaking.

• Dan English’s work on Sky Record is just so darn interesting.

• A Race for Our Autonomy is a good word from MAE that I needed to hear. To forfeit is to start, indeed.

• White Horses is definitely the song on this playlist that has been most caught in my mind, suggesting that perhaps music does, indeed, have magnetic properties.

• God Help the Girl is apparently a film musical, which is surprising because I pay much more attention to movies than to musical releases, but when I put this on the playlist I thought it was just an album. It’s certainly dramatic enough.

• Ha Ha Hey from Girl Most Likely is circa-2011 sad alternative done really well.

• A Matter of Time, Laufey’s 2025 release, is as smooth and strong and rich as her voice. Sabotage, in particular, hits too close for comfort.

• Wreck is Neko Case back at the top of her game, with all the urgent and fearful hopefulness of a nascent love that rushes on beyond the end of the tracks.

• Carousel builds to the kind of wall of sound culmination that I’m such a sucker for.

• Michael Nyman is a composer whose work crops up here and there in different films, but it has mostly eluded me so far. I will have to change that.

• Girls is a song I’ve probably posted before, but listening to Masakatsu Takagi dance lightly over the keys never gets old.

• Mother, Pray For Me is one of the most emotionally affecting songs I’ve encountered, and specifically one of the most vulnerable and honest reckonings with the incredible heartache of children and parents who come to be separated by faith.

The Other Shoe

I started writing this in November when I was struggling with some old insecurities being validated by circumstance, unsure how to cope with that; I then started writing it again around the New Year, because New Year’s is such a turbulent confluence of hope and anxiety. I was too busy then, and meanwhile the wheels of life spin ever faster, milling the soul like grain. So here I am, trying to patch together coherence out of the half-formed scraps of thought of the past few months. But though it is February, I want to situate this in the context of the New Year, because that is the moment when people are, all at the same time, most conscious of slipping into that undiscovered country that is the future. For me, the fear is never future’s obscurity, but rather the thought that it is perhaps too transparent.

The anxious life is spent waiting for the other shoe to drop. I have listened a great deal to people who have helped me try to not live in that expectation, and have spent a long time trying to alter my perspective, to understand the irrationality of my worry, to see it as unhealthy, to see it as overshadowed by a larger hope that dwarfs whatever it is I fear. But in doing this, I come to rely insistently and perhaps greedily on the assertion that there is no other shoe. So what happens when, after all that time training yourself to dismiss and disregard intrusive anxieties, your turn a corner and what you feared all along happens.

Sometimes the shoe drops. Sometimes the thing you worried about, the thing you sought and found reassurance against from other people, the thing you were working very hard to teach yourself to recognize as an intrusive and irrational thought and dismiss as unhealthy and unreasonable, occurs. Everyone has experienced this at some point, and that is perhaps why we find it so hard to get over the fear that the experience will recur. Perhaps you watched the exit polls with mounting dread on election night; or procrastinated anxiously, worrying about your compounding sense of future shame as your procrastination accumulated toward the end of the predictably unproductive day; or you lived in fear that people secretly were frustrated with you, disappointed, annoyed, and then after trying to convince yourself to have confidence over your insecurity, you found out that you were picking up on real signals; perhaps you feared that you would fail at some responsibility or break some trust, and it would be your fault, and then you did; perhaps you worried that the nagging feeling that you were doing something or had done something wrong might be real, and after much encouragement from others to stabilize your feelings and live in spite of that, events make plain to you that yes, you felt guilty because you were; perhaps you feared that if you didn’t fail, if you carried things through as you felt you should, it would be a continuous, crushing weight – and then it was, and then you either gave up, or thought yourself shiftless instead of burdened, or became afraid to hope for relief; or perhaps you struggled to believe some part of your life was solid and could be relied on, and that your insecurities and doubts that you had made certain of it were shadows to be dispelled, and then the solid thing collapses in a way that makes you question even the things you weren’t insecure or doubtful about yourself in the past.

One of the hardest parts about anxiety is that one is always anticipating things that can go wrong, and especially things that one could screw up in some way. There is the sense that worrying is a necessary preventative against failure, against being caught by surprise – but it is too exhausting to sustain. But past experience, both of misfortune catching you by surprise when you felt safe, and long-dreaded fears being realized, works against your attempts to shrug off the burden. If you find these fears to be untenable, acidic to peace of mind, then this creates a kind of lesson of repeated experience teaching that if you can imagine something happening, you can’t trust reassurance that you are safe from it, and if you do trust that and relax, it may then catch you anyway, thus giving ammunition to every other fear and doubt you’ve ever had.

I struggle to write about this even though I think about it much more than other topics, because I think it is important to come to some kind of true conclusion that provides catharsis; but I struggle to find a catharsis that I feel is true and that I am prepared to accept. I suspect the wise answer to all this is to recognize that the thing you fear may happen, and to overcome this fear with confidence in the ultimate promise of God that all shall be well. But aside from being much easier said than done, there is always the lingering suspicion that, just as one refuses to reconcile present peace of mind with the possibility of some sudden loss, because one has decided the loss is unacceptable, by the same token one fears that insofar as you find some earthly loss unacceptable, you perhaps cannot trust the promise that all shall be well, either because what you imagine you require for that to be true is not included in the promise, or, because of that, you are insecure that the promise applies to you personally. Then the pattern of dreading the other shoe, and being terrified to be unafraid and thus caught unawares, applies itself to death and the fear of what comes after, and this is much harder to shake, because there are things we read and hear which seem designed to awaken fear, and there are parables of people caught unawares who weren’t worried – and of course, the way in which you try to relax out of your worries does not always involve a complete surrender of the things you fear to lose, so you doubt you can call your peace of mind holy.

I think a part of the answer to this problem is to focus on the reality of death itself. Death’s inevitability makes every other loss we fear inevitable and rational; it is itself the other shoe, and it will certainly drop. The only way I know to live without worrying about what might come after, is that Christ went through death with us and thus shows that after the last shoe drops, He will pick us up, help us tie them on, and then we shall get to walking. But that feels a bit like trying to cheat on my part, eliding the question of responsibility to fear judgment and repent to escape it; perhaps it is getting off too easy. I want to say that this sort of faith must be true because I lack alternatives; but that may be a denial of responsibility, of the possibility of choosing to repent, to at least try, more than I do, so I fear to assert that with confidence. And so I feel as though I can describe the cathartic answer, but I cannot allow myself to actually deliver it as I am.

Mary Nell Roos, 1932-2026

I have been greatly blessed to have had two grandparents in my life until my mid-thirties. My Grandfather passed away last spring (https://www.andrewroosbell.com/blog/jack-roos-1932-2025), and on January 8 of this year my Grandmother passed away peacefully at the age of 93. As a child, I spent much time with Grandma at her house in Mukilteo, where I came to associate her with the smell of coffee. She always offered me some, and as I child I simply was not interested, which will shock anyone who knows me now. She encouraged my love of music, introducing me to members of the zither family such as the autoharp, which are perhaps less popular and well-known nowadays. And she was always teaching about her great passion, history, and particularly the history of the Second World War. I absorbed so much detailed information about the war from Grandma and her documentaries, magazines, books, and stories, and I was fascinated by the thought that this war existed in living memory – that it was so recent that she had been a child during it, old enough to remember.

In 1944, my Grandmother’s uncle Noel, my great-great-uncle, was killed when his B-24 Liberator crashed on takeoff in Flixton, Suffolk. I know this sounds odd, because my Grandmother was only 12 at the time, but her uncle Noel continued to be a relationship that mattered to her for the rest of her life, as he inspired her passion for the history of the war, leading her to spend decades working to research and preserve the history of the 446th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force. It is this sort of unglamorous, unpaid, painstaking research done by individuals into the kind of details of individual institutions and lives that outnumber the attention capacity of the population at large, which creates the base matter which composes history. As I have gotten older, I have only grown in appreciation for her role as a record-keeper, something I always worry about losing in our society.

But my Grandmother was not simply a hobbyist with a personal motive; I think Noel never stopped mattering to Grandma as a person, because she understood what on some level we all understand emotionally, even if we feel the need to correct what we hope for with the caution of cold rationality, or habitual pessimism. What my Grandmother always understood was that her uncle was not simply a person she had known as a child, and who now existed only in those few distorted memories, and who was receding rapidly into the distant past; rather, he was, and is, a person and a family member, simply absent for the time being. Grandma understood that it is never a waste of time to miss those who have passed away, and that it is all right to miss them, because the remedy of hope exists, that death is simply an interruption, and we will see them again. And so my Grandmother died in great hope and anticipation; hope of meeting her uncle again, anticipation of being reunited with my Grandfather, who she missed dearly, and in the assurance that she would not die alone. She passed in her room at night, by herself, but not alone – Christ was by her side.

I struggle greatly to have this hope in my own life. Even as a lifelong Christian, I have a terror of death, both of the physical sensation of ceasing to breathe, and moreso a terror of what might come after: terror that I might be wrong; terror that others might enter peace, but I might not be willing to; terror even that what that peace might bring might not be what I want. But Grandma is an example to me in this; she died confident in the hope that she would be with her husband, Jack, again, and in a way that would not be less than what was before, even though how to understand that is beyond our theology.

The only sane way to die is in hope. And not false hope, but hope that we are sure of. Nothing else will do; we cannot control our deaths, we cannot save ourselves, and yet we must live and die. Since death is inimical to life, the only way we can ultimately live in spite of it is to believe that God will be with us after, and that all shall be well. We are certain that what we hope for is true, because we must be; and because we are so created that we must live in this hope, we know that it is true. Grandma knew that, and I will endeavor to remember, in forty or fifty years, her example.

Les Miserables

Many years ago I started reading Les Miserables, the novel with perhaps the greatest claim to be the Matter of France. I had grown up on the video recording of the 10th Anniversary Concert of the musical at Royal Albert Hall, which has always been far and away my favorite musical, so I was eager to finally dig into the book. I knew it was long; what I didn’t realize was that the entire first section was going to be an extremely detailed accounting of the everyday habits of an extremely charitable bishop. After seventy pages I paused, and didn’t pick up again until over a decade later (don’t worry, I started over from the beginning). This time I was surprised by just how easily all 1,222 pages went down—at no point did the novel drag, at no point did my interest flag, even when Hugo devotes an entire book to a description of the history and layout of the Parisian sewers so thorough that an engineer could probably use it to base a preliminary report on. Some of this is down to the excellent translation by Charles Wilbour, which I believe was the first translation into English, and which because of its contemporaneity with the novel carries with it the authenticity of the language of the day. The rest is down to Victor Hugo, who wrote what is probably going to go in my list as the third greatest novel I’ve read, after The Lord of the Rings and The Brothers Karamazov.

There is a whole world captured in all its complexity—not simply a perspective on the world, though Hugo voices his opinions with the confidence of a prophet, as he pulls together into one skein the whole complex tension of conflicting truths, and the full personhood, the imago Dei of every wretch on Earth. And it’s not simply a moment in time either—there are the judgements Hugo pronounces on history, whole worlds recalled in memory and nostalgia which had already ceased to exist when he set pen to paper, and then there is the world that shall be when tomorrow comes.

There were two aspects of the book which struck me most profoundly, one expected, one unexpected. The first is how much Hugo’s vivisection of the souls of Jean Valjean and Javert in their moments of crisis did not merely ring true, but actually mirror the precise patterns of guilty, anxious rumination that I remember from my own, much less dramatic, life. Several times Valjean goes through a dark night of the soul of exactly the sort I have lived my life fearing and trying to flee from. This is a story for people who, like Valjean, live in terror of what their conscience will demand of them, and for people like Javert, who are too afraid to ever accept unmerited grace. It is a book of truths which appear contradictory, but which are in fact inseparable.

The second aspect was how well Hugo’s magisterial pronouncements on history, humanity, progress, and the will of God put into words an apology for my own embryonic political theology. Hugo is both more clear-eyed about the darkest parts of humanity, and how deep those run, and more idealistic and hopeful than just about any other writer of fiction. In casting his gaze along the sweep of history’s rapid turning through the nineteenth century and into the future, he depicts what I can only call a non-Utopian eschatological progress. Hugo believes simultaneously in the importance of struggling to bring about a free world, to realize a millennial kingdom on earth that we each must help midwife, while also recognizing that our efforts will not bear fruit in our lives, that they will seem to fail completely, as the June rebellion did. The hope of fulfillment of this dream must rest firmly in God and eternity; and yet from God’s eternity, the inspiration breaking like the first fingers of dawn over the dim horizon should stir us to rise, even prematurely, and march East.

Quotes:

“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”

“The scaffold, indeed, when it is prepared and set up, has the effect of a hallucination. We may be indifferent to the death penalty, and may not declare ourselves, yes or no, so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But when we see one, the shock is violent, and we are compelled to decide and take part, for or against. Some admire it, like Le Maistre; others execrate it, like Beccaria. The guillotine is the concretion of the law; it is called the Avenger; it is not neutral and does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it quakes with the most mysterious of tremblings. All social questions set up their points of interrogation about this axe. The scaffold is vision. The scaffold is not a mere frame, the scaffold is not a machine, the scaffold is not an inert piece of mechanism made of wood, of iron, and of ropes. It seems a sort of being which had some sombre origin of which we can have no idea ; one would say that this frame sees, that this machine understands, that this mechanism comprehends ; that this wood, this iron, and these ropes, have a will. In the fearful reverie into which its presence casts the soul, the awful apparition of the scaffold confounds itself with its horrid work. The scaffold becomes the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, and it drinks blood. The scaffold is a sort of monster created by the judge and the workman, a spectre which seems to live with a kind of unspeakable life, drawn from all the death which it has wrought.”

“’Madame Magloire,’ replied the bishop, ‘you are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the useful.’ He added after a moment’s silence, ‘Perhaps more so.’”

“A saint who is addicted to abnegation is a dangerous neighbour; he is very likely to communicate to you by contagion an incurable poverty, an anchylosis of the articulations necessary to advancement, and, in fact, more renunciation than you would like; and men flee from this contagious virtue. Hence the isolation of Monseigneur Bienvenu. We live in a sad society. Succeed; that is the advice which falls, drop by drop, from the overhanging corruption.”

“What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the day time, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow inclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon; a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky.”

“Here we must again ask those questions, which we have already proposed elsewhere: was some confused shadow of all this formed in his mind. Certainly, misfortune, we have said, draws out the intelligence; it is doubtful, however, if Jean Valjean was in a condition to discern all that we here point out. If these ideas occurred to him, he but caught a glimpse, he did not see; and the only effect was to throw him into an inexpressible and distressing confusion. Being just out of that misshapen and gloomy thing which is called the galleys, the bishop had hurt his soul, as a too vivid light would have hurt his eyes on coming out of the dark. The future life, the possible life that was offered to him thenceforth, all pure and radiant, filled him with trembling and anxiety. He no longer knew really where he was. Like an owl who should see the sun suddenly rise, the convict had been dazzled and blinded by virtue.

One thing was certain, nor did he himself doubt it, that he was no longer the same man, that all was changed in him, that it was no longer in his power to prevent the bishop from having talked to him and having touched him.

….

While he wept, the light grew brighter and brighter in his mind — an extraordinary light, a light at once transporting and terrible. His past life, his first offence, his long expiation, his brutal exterior, his hardened interior, his release made glad by so many schemes of vengeance, what had happened to him at the bishop's, his last action, this theft of forty sous from a child, a crime meaner and the more monstrous that it came after the bishop's pardon, all this returned and appeared to him, clearly, but in a light that he had never seen before. He beheld his life, and it seemed to him horrible; his soul, and it seemed to him frightful. There was, however, a softened light upon that life and upon that soul. It seemed to him that he was looking upon Satan by the light of Paradise.”

“They were of those dwarfish natures, which, if perchance heated by some sullen fire, easily become monstrous. The woman was at heart a brute; the man a blackguard: both in the highest degree capable of that hideous species of progress which can be made towards evil. There are souls which, crablike, crawl continually towards darkness, going back in life rather than advancing in it; using what experience they have to increase their deformity; growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness. Such souls were this man and this woman.”

“Some people are malicious from the mere necessity of talking. Their conversation, tattling in the drawing-room, gossip in the ante-chamber, is like those fireplaces that use up wood rapidly; they need a great deal of fuel; the fuel is their neighbour.”

“There are many of these virtues in low places; some day they will be on high. This life has a morrow.”

“Must he denounce himself? Must he be silent? He could see nothing distinctly. The vague forms of all the reasonings thrown out by his mind trembled, and were dissipated one after another in smoke. But this much he felt, that by whichever resolve he might abide, necessarily, and without possibility of escape, something of himself would surely die; that he was entering into a sepulchre on the right hand, as well as on the left; that he was suffering a death-agony, the death-agony of his happiness, or the death-agony of his virtue.

Alas! all his irresolutions were again upon him. He was no further advanced than when he began.

So struggled beneath its anguish this unhappy soul. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom are aggregated all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity, He also, while the olive trees were shivering in the fierce breath of the Infinite, had long put away from his hand the fearful chalice that appeared before him, dripping with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths.”

“Probity, sincerity, candour, conviction, the idea of duty, are things which, mistaken, may become hideous, but which, even though hideous, remain great; their majesty, peculiar to the human conscience, continues in all their horror; they are virtues with a single vice— error. The pitiless, sincere joy of a fanatic in an act of atrocity preserves an indescribably mournful radiance which inspires us with veneration. Without suspecting it, Javert, in his fear-inspiring happiness, was pitiable, like every ignorant man who wins a triumph. Nothing could be more painful and terrible than this face, which revealed what we may call all the evil of good.”

“This light of history is pitiless; it has this strange and divine quality that, all luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, it often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, and the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendour of the captain. Hence results a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated lessens Alexander; Rome enslaved lessens Caesar; massacred Jerusalem lessens Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. It is woe to a man to leave behind him a shadow which has his form.”

“A certain amount of tempest always mingles with a battle. Quid obscurum, quid divinum. Each historian traces the particular lineament which pleases him in this hurly-burly. Whatever may be the combinations of the generals, the shock of armed masses has incalculable recoils in action, the two plans of the two leaders enter into each other, and are disarranged by each other. Such a point of the battle-field swallows up more combatants than such another, as the more or less spongy soil drinks up water thrown upon it faster or slower. You are obliged to pour out more soldiers there than you thought. An unforeseen expenditure. The line of battle waves and twists like a thread; streams of blood flow regardless of logic; the fronts of the armies undulate; regiments entering or retiring make capes and gulfs; all these shoals are continually swaying back and forth before each other; where infantry was, artillery comes; where artillery was, cavalry rushes up; battalions are smoke. There was something there; look for it; it is gone; the vistas are displaced; the sombre folds advance and recoil; a kind of sepulchral wind pushes forwards, crowds back, swells and disperses these tragic multitudes. What is a hand to hand fight? an oscillation. A rigid mathematical plan tells the story of a minute, and not a day. To paint a battle needs those mighty painters who have chaos in their touch. Rembrandt is better than Vandermeulen. Vandermeulen, exact at noon, lies at three o’clock. Geometry deceives; the hurricane alone is true. This is what gives Folard the right to contradict. Polybius. We must add that there is always a certain moment when the battle degenerates into a combat, particularises itself, scatters into innumerable details, which, to borrow the expression of Napoleon himself, ‘'belong rather to the biography of the regiments than to the history of the army.” The historian, in this case, evidently has the right of abridgment. He can only seize upon the principal outlines of the struggle, and it is given to no narrator, however conscientious he may be, to fix absolutely the form of this horrible cloud which is called a battle.”

“Was it possible that Napoleon should win this battle? We answer no. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No. Because of God.

For Bonaparte to be conqueror at Waterloo was not in the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of facts were preparing in which Napoleon had no place. The ill-will of events had long been announced.

It was time that this vast man should fall.

The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the equilibrium. This individual counted, of himself alone, more than the universe besides. These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head, the world mounting to the brain of one man, would be fatal to civilisation if they should endure. The moment had come for Incorruptible supreme equity to look to it. Probably the principles and elements upon which regular gravitations in the moral order as well as in the material depend, began to murmur. Reeking blood, overcrowded cemeteries, weeping mothers — these are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from a surcharge, there are mysterious moanings from the deeps which the heavens hear.

Napoleon had been impeached before the Infinite, and his fall was decreed.

He vexed God.

Waterloo is not a battle; it is the change of front of the universe.”

“He felt in this a pre-ordination from on high, a volition of some one more than man, and he would lose himself in reverie. Good thoughts as well as bad have their abysses.”

“In the nineteenth century the religious idea is undergoing a crisis. We are unlearning certain things, and we do well, provided that while unlearning one thing we are learning another. No vacuum in the human heart! Certain forms are torn down, and it is well that they should be, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.”

“To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne, and the mitre in the name of the altar; it is to maltreat the thing you support; it is to kick in the traces; it is to cavil at the stake for undercooking heretics; it is to reproach the idol with a lack of idolatry; it is to insult by excess of respect; it is to find in the pope too little papistry, in the king too little royalty, and too much light in the night; it is to be dissatisfied with the albatross, with snow, with the swan, and the lily in the name of whiteness; it is to be the partisan of things of the point of becoming their enemy; it is to be so very pro, that you are con.”

“That evening left Marius in a profound agitation, with a sorrowful darkness in his soul. He was experiencing what perhaps the earth experiences at the moment when it is furrowed with the share that the grains of wheat may be sown; it feels the wound alone; the thrill of the germ and the joy of the fruit do not come until later.”

“M. Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist.”

“There is under the social structure, this complex wonder of a mighty burrow, — of excavations of every kind. There is the religious mine, the philosophic mine, the political mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary mine. This pick with an idea, that pick with a figure, the other pick with a vengeance. They call and they answer from one catacomb to another. Utopias travel under ground in the passages. They branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet there and fraternize. Jean Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his lantern. Sometimes they fight. Calvin takes Socinius by the hair. But nothing checks or interrupts the tension of all these energies towards their object. The vast simultaneous activity, which goes to and fro, and up and down, and up again, in these dusky regions, and which slowly transforms the upper through the lower, and the outer through the inner; vast unknown swarming of workers. Society has hardly a suspicion of this work of undermining which, without touching its surface, changes its substance. So many subterranean degrees, so many differing labours, so many varying excavations. What comes from all this deep delving? The future.”

“There has been an attempt, an erroneous one, to make a special class of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion of the people. The bourgeois is the man who has now time to sit down. A chair is not a caste.”

“All the problems which the socialists propounded, aside from the cosmogonic visions, dreams, and mysticism, may be reduced to two principal problems.

First problem:

To produce wealth.

Second problem:

To distribute it.

The first problem contains the question of labour.

The second contains the question of wages.

In the first problem the question is of the employment of force.

In the second of the distribution of enjoyment.

From the good employment of force results public power.

From the good distribution of enjoyment results individual happiness.

By good distribution, we must understand not equal distribution, but equitable distribution. The highest equality is equity.

From these two things combined, public power without, individual happiness within, results social prosperity.

Social prosperity means, man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth wonderfully; she distributes it badly. This solution, which is complete only on one side, leads her inevitably to these two extremes: monstrous opulence, monstrous misery. All the enjoyment to a few, all the privation to the rest, that is to say, to the people; privilege, exception, monopoly, feudality, springing from labour itself; a false and dangerous situation which founds public power upon private misery, which plants the grandeur of the state in the suffering of the individual. A grandeur ill constituted, in which all the material elements are combined, and into which no moral element enters.

Communism and agarian law think they have solved the second problem. They are mistaken. Their distribution kills production. Equal partition abolishes emulation. And consequently labour. It is a distribution made by the butcher, who kills what he divides. It is therefore impossible to stop at these professed solutions. To kill wealth is not to distribute it.

The two problems must be solved together to be well solved. The two solutions must be combined and form but one.

Solve the first only of the two problems, you will he Venice, you will be England. You will have like Venice an artificial power, or like England a material power; you will be the evil rich man, you will perish by violence, as Venice died, or by bankruptcy, as England will fall, and the world will let you die and fall, because the world lets everything fall and die which is nothing but selfishness, everything which does not represent a virtue or an idea for the human race.

It is of course understood that by these words, Venice, England, we designate not the people, but the social constructions; the oligarchies superimposed upon the nations, and not the nations themselves. The nations always have our respect and our sympathy. Venice, the people, will be reborn; England, the aristocracy, will fall, but England, the nation, is immortal. This said, we proceed.

Solve the two problems, encourage the rich, and protect the poor, suppress misery, put an end to the unjust speculation upon the weak by the strong, put a bridle upon the iniquitous jealousy of him who is on the road, against him who has reached his end, adjust mathematically and fraternally wages to labour, join gratuitous and obligatory instruction to the growth of childhood, and make science the basis of manhood, develop the intelligence while you occupy the arm, be at once a powerful people and a family of happy men, democratise property, not by abolishing it, but by universalising it, in such a way that every citizen without exception may be a proprietor, an easier thing than it is believed to be; in two words, learn to produce wealth and learn to distribute it, and you shall have material grandeur and moral grandeur combined; and you shall be worthy to call yourselves France.”

 “Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this. Although indeed no absolute satisfaction may be vouchsafed to philosophy, no more in circumscribing the cause than in limiting the effect, the contemplator falls into unfathomable ecstasies in view of all these decompositions of forces resulting in unity. All works for all.”

“The future belongs still more to the heart than to the mind. To love is the only thing which can occupy and fill up eternity. The infinite requires the inexhaustible.”

“Civil war? What does this mean? Is there any foreign war? Is not every war between men, war between brothers? War is modified only by its aim. There is neither foreign war, nor civil war; there is only unjust war and just war.”

“His supreme anguish was the loss of all certainty. He felt that he was uprooted. The code was now but a stump in his hand. He had to do with scruples of an unknown species. There was in him a revelation of feeling entirely distinct from the declarations of the law, his only standard hitherto. To retain his old virtue, that no longer sufficed. An entire order of unexpected facts arose and subjugated him. An entire new world appeared to his soul; favour accepted and returned, devotion, compassion, indulgence, acts of violence committed by pity upon austerity, respect of persons, no more final condemnation, no more damnation, the possibility of a tear in the eye of the law, a mysterious justice according to God going counter to justice according to men. He perceived in the darkness the fearful rising of an unknown moral sun; he was horrified and blinded by it. An owl compelled to an eagle’s gaze.

He said to himself that it was true then, that there were exceptions, that authority might be put out of countenance, that rule might stop short before a fact, that everything was not framed in the text of the code, that the unforeseen would be obeyed, that the virtue of a convict might spread a snare for the virtue of a functionary, that the monstrous might be divine, that destiny had such ambuscades as these, and he thought with despair that even he had not been proof against a surprise.

He was compelled to recognise the existence of kindness. This convict had been kind. And he himself, wonderful to tell, he had just been kind. Therefore he had become depraved.”

The Only Way Out

I know that I am unwell; I know that there is nothing good in me, apart from Christ. And I do not feel very Christian in spirit today.

Yesterday, on the anniversary of the President’s attempt to violently suppress the will of the electorate, which killed several innocents, the White House proudly published a bald-faced lie, promulgating a false version of events that we all should remember. But they knew that their supporters don’t care anyway. Then, today, a protester, a single mother, was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a confrontation. Footage of the incident suggests that both parties may have made mistakes; but regardless of what happened in the confusion of the moment, which is still being debated while we wait for more evidence to emerge, the fact remains that the agent was on that street as part of what has for months been a gang of political thugs who have repeatedly committed illegal violence against the innocent, and faced no repercussions for doing so, who in many cases have no qualifications and no legitimate authority to hold deadly force over any citizen, and who conceal their identities, so that they must all be treated as one. The woman who died was there trying to resist, in some small way, this visitation of evil upon her community. The Department of Homeland Security has wasted no time in posthumously declaring her a terrorist, slandering her in order to justify the killing and absolve themselves of guilt for a situation entirely of their own making. And again, they do this because they are confident that their supporters do not care, and that nothing will happen to them.

I have spent too much time already on my phone, distracted from living by the addiction to wrath, and witnessing over and over and over the shameless and open embrace of evil by many who mock and laugh at the death of the innocent at the hands of their fellow tribesmen. And I know better than to condemn others, not just because I am also guilty, and not just because my motives are not the pure love of justice, but also the forbidden, dramatic burn of spiteful rage, and the self-flattery of pride seizing upon a moment when I feel myself to be so right that going too far seems justified. And I know I am casting about in this moment, simply the latest addition to a long train of wrongs, for some as of yet unshattered glass to break in case of fire, some new word to utter, to respond to the worsening world by escalating in turn and making myself unmistakably clear, as if a word could be said which would cause the wicked to combust, rather than simply being laughed off, or silently ignored. And that is itself an almost comically delusional self-important way of thinking, the shame of which alone should be enough to shut me up. And yet I want to say this one thing, and then because of that I must say another.

One

I will be simple. This opinion did not form in a day, or in response to a single day’s events; it accreted through the friction of many actions taken in the same direction for ten years, until it has, finally, accumulated a weight which can no longer be supported. There are so many things this administration has done, continues to do, and threatens to begin, which constitute crimes against humanity. There is no point rehearsing everything that has happened. It is enough to state the simplest, most important realities.

They imprison, injure, rape, and kill innocents.

They proudly admit their motives are selfish and cruel.

They spurn legal accountability and lie to protect themselves.

They cannot be shamed into stopping.

We cannot bring justice in any true sense; we are not permitted revenge. The rectification of evil is the province of God and waits beyond time for its fulfillment. But when such things are done, the guilty must be stopped, and when the guilty are society’s leaders, backed by a large portion of public opinion, and their crimes cause as much harm to the innocent as these do, then a demonstration must be made for future leaders and publics yet unborn that neither the elite nor the majority are so practically immune from accountability that they believe themselves to be beyond good and evil. The lesson must be scored into history so that it will not soon be forgotten and cannot be misinterpreted. There is one tool which we have availed ourselves of for this purpose, and which today would loom above ordinary justice.

We must hang them from the gallows.

Two

We must decide to hang them; and then we must let them live instead.

Nothing we can do will surely deter the atrocities of future generations. Nothing we can do will restore the dead or repair the harm done. At the end of our brief day, the only thing we can do is live as Christ would. And Christ affirms the necessity of the gallows, that the irreparable breach of death is the only answer to the irreparable harm of evil. But he affirmed it by going to the gallows Himself, the once for all. We have no right to erect another. And then He made a demonstration for all time that the harm of death is not, in fact, irreparable; and so the harm of evil is in the same way no longer irreparable. Mercy, then, is justice; we witness that God has done justice in death, and will do justice by undoing all malice, all injury, all kidnapping, all rape, all murder, until every spot of blood is both accounted for and also restored to living veins. Then the only retribution will be restitution.

These are my conclusions. We cannot arrive at the second except by way of the first; we cannot achieve any kind of justice by settling on the first, or we remain trapped in the hell we started in.

Music in July 2025

Belated, but I have been traveling all December. Here are my songs from last July:

• Yes, I have now discovered Meat Loaf, too operatic and big to deny.

• Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird continues to deliver the strange, smooth, peaceful goods with their album Rosewater Crocodile.

• I have also discovered the hurdy gurdy as an instrument, and I think we should deploy it more often.

• I can’t believe I didn’t get into Texas sooner, it’s very much the kind of music I enjoy.

• Mother Big River sure is a ponder.

• Alex G’s Headlights and Frightened Rabbit’s The Midnight Organ Fight are two excellent, odd albums.

• I can’t stop playing You Can Call Me Al over and over again in my head.

• Hideaway has some of my favorite sentimentalism from The Weepies.

Music in June 2025

• The score to Sally Potter’s 1992 Virginia Woolf adaptation Orlando is exuberant and exultant and I love it.

• The nice thing about artists like Reol is I can put them on when I want loud shouty music, but not in English, because that would distract from my work.

• Modern English is a favorite of mine, and Let’s All Dream is a good reminder to “get back to being human.”

• All Day Long has a wonderful bridge that just glows and shimmers.

• There’s a strangely contented yearning at the core of most of Humbert Humbert’s work that makes it irreplaceable.

• Oats We Sow is a beautiful expression of the tragedy of our own hearts.

• Take It on Faith has such an aggressive melody, and it makes me want to move back to the Southwest.

• I am just discovering Rilo Kiley, and I’m kind of surprised I didn’t sooner, given how much I like it.

• Of course The Beths are back on my playlist, but they aren’t the only artist from down under – Montaigne put out the wonderful album it’s hard to be a fish this year.

• I’m not sure I can explain why Beth’s Farm is so affecting for being such an odd song, but it is.

• Everybody Laughs is a wonderful way to respond playfully to life.

2024 Photos

Here is my selected album of photos to highlight from 2024. I’ll post them all on Instagram individually over the next little while, but this is a better resolution: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjCA5QB