A quick letter from the editors here. We’re now preparing to start shipping issue 001 of Chisel to subscribers soon, so annual subscribers should look out for an email requesting address and shipping info before the end of this month.

And if you haven’t already subscribed, be sure to secure your copy before it’s too late! In the meantime, we’re pleased to announce that we’re looking for contributors for future issues…

Chisel is a twice-yearly print magazine and twice-weekly digital newsletter animated by the virtues of beauty, obsession, and play.

Although we have recently wrapped commissions for issue 002 of the magazine’s print edition, we are actively seeking new contributors for chiselmag.com and are eager to hear pitches from talented writers for consideration for both our digital edition here on Substack and for issue 003.

To pitch a piece for Chisel, email us at submissions@chiselmag.com and include the following information:

• Your pitch for the article, in no more than a paragraph

• A sentence or two about yourself

• Links to writing you’ve published elsewhere (self-published work counts)

Please do not send us already-completed pieces, as we aren’t able to read unsolicited materials.

Though we are a small magazine, we pay competitive rates for submissions.

What makes a Chisel piece?

Chisel is interested in essays, critical reviews, reported features, and stories that explore themes of beauty, obsession, and play. We love writing that engages with culture, but we prioritize the timeless over the timely.

Here are a few pieces from volume 001 of Chisel that we think are great examples of the range and quality bar we aim for:

A manifesto from Anu Atluru about work, life, and art. “It’s the work you do in the dark that earns you the light,” she writes.

Mikhail Klimentov weighs the worth of the 3,500 hours he spent in the game Valorant in this personal essay.

Terry Nguyễn examines the allure of cinema-as-dream in this film review.

Alexander Sorondo meditates on great books and the toll they take on their authors.

Other Guidelines

• While we do publish fiction and poetry, we almost exclusively select these by commission from writers whose work we know

• We do not publish AI-generated content and use Pangram to check submissions

• We like articles within the 800–1,600 word range. Longer articles are considered when the topic merits it.

Have other questions not answered here? Write to us at contact@chiselmag.com and we’ll do our best to get back to you.

Business picked up again after the war. How tactless of me, I thought, to stand on that pier, amongst that fiery crowd as they waved their flags and blew their kisses to the returning fleet, watching as the men on deck received their mass greeting with a tired, ambivalent pride. I felt ashamed. We cheered for different reasons. Amidst that cacophony of blaring ship horns, cheering, trumpets … all I thought about was money. Business. What I saw on those ships were customers.

To my credit, it wasn’t due to any callous irreverence, or any cynicism. Only desperation. Money was tight during the war. I lived off of savings that had all but run dry by the time that victory was announced over the radio. As implausible as it sounds, I couldn’t find work. I was manufacturing munitions for a short time, but the pay was terrible. I was a store clerk for about a month until I was fired for showing up one morning drunk. Of course, I did have the occasional client, usually men who weren’t fit for war and needed a warm body to cure them of their guilt, but it wasn’t enough. Most of my time was spent in leisure, thinking, worrying, hoping … I couldn’t wait for the war to end. I didn’t care if I had to whisper my sweet nothings in German or Japanese by the time things were finished. I needed the familiarity of my work – that which I knew I was good at. The work that, beyond paying my bills, gave me purpose.

The men who had returned were, however, not familiar. These were broken men. Men who hadn’t so much as seen a woman in months, years. Men who had received letters describing how their wives had left them, only to return to combat the next morning. For these men I became more than a way through which they could relieve themselves. I was proof that they’d survived. I’d become a symbol of their victory, a trophy. I didn’t know how to feel about that, but it didn’t matter. I could finally work.

I was desperate, too desperate, that I now know.

It was about a couple of weeks after that welcoming ceremony on the pier – I’d returned to my apartment after a short meeting with a sweet boy, a corporal, who wanted something gentle to clear his mind. I lounged in my apartment reading a new magazine, carefully ignoring the articles pertaining to the war. I had a passing interest in fashion, and now that supply lines (and my funds) were stabilizing I was on the hunt for a nice new dress. I expected to have the rest of the night to myself.

Instead I received a phone call. A short one.

“Hey, sugar,” I said, sensually, in a way I had practiced dozens of times.

“Maria?” A low, discreet voice answered.

“That’s me.”

“How much?”

“Jeez, you in a hurry?”

“Huh?”

“I said, you in a rush or something, baby?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sorry.”

“Four dollars an hour.”

He gave me an address and hung up.

I didn’t think twice about how he’d sounded. Lots of guys were like that. I noticed these soldiers came in two types: overconfident, tough guys who wouldn’t shut up about themselves, or guys who were shy, like they’d shrunk back into being kids who hadn’t ever been with a woman in their lives. Some of the younger ones really hadn’t. I’d assumed this guy fell somewhere into the latter.

I arrived at his place as the sun began to set. His house was beautiful – just short of a mansion. Real Victorian. There was a large elaborate flower garden in the yard, and flowers lined the tiled walkway leading to the big arched portico over the main entrance. I thought to myself, either he’s the gardening type, he hires somebody, or he’s cheating on a gal who really knows how to put a yard together. He had a Cadillac parked outside; I didn’t know much about cars, but I knew that was a fancy one. I gave the front door a few knocks.

I must’ve stood there for a full minute before he opened the door, slowly, as if nervous that whoever was on the other side wasn’t somebody he wanted to see. He was a tall, skinny guy, with a square face and a chiseled jaw, dirty blond hair and blue eyes. He was handsome. He was also, oddly, in uniform.

“Hey baby,” I said.

“Come in,” he replied quietly.

The main entrance was jarringly barren, save for a few potted plants by the door and a large white rug. The door echoed as it shut behind me.

“You do the flowers outside yourself? You hire somebody? They’re beautiful, you know,” I said, trying to goad him into saying something that was longer than three or four words.

“Thanks.” It didn’t work.

The atmosphere was off, but not in an alarming way. There was a haze of mundanity, like when you walk into a room and suddenly forget what you were doing. The house itself felt as though its mind was wandering.

“Follow me upstairs.”

“Sure.”

I studied him from behind as I followed him up the staircase. I got a better look at his stature. Lots of my clients had wounds, I mean, it felt like half the men I slept with were missing one limb or another ... But this man, apart from the slightest of limps, was ordinary. There was, however, something I’d recognized in the way he carried himself. He moved in the same way that those injured men did; hesitantly, without rhythm, without direction, dragging himself along. Like he was sleepwalking.

“In here,” he said, holding open for me the door to his bedroom. I could feel his eyes on my back as I entered. His bedroom was dull – a king-sized bed with an austere white headboard, white sheets, a window with its white lace curtains drawn. The air was stale. I noticed a jar of strawberry jam on his nightstand.

“What do you want, honey?” I asked with a smile, one I think he could tell I was forcing.

“Take your clothes off, please.”

“Sure thing,” I said, and began to undress. He watched me in a sterile way, as though he were a medical professional conducting an exam. As I reached my undergarments he stepped closer to me. “Wait,” he said, extending his arms.

He took my bra off himself, with the grace of someone who’d done so a hundred times before. He sunk down to my waist and slid my panties off. As I stepped out of them he paused for a moment, gazing into the garments strewn around my feet. He rose slowly, not to meet my eyes but instead to fixate on my chest, through my chest, as if my skin was as clear as glass. He grazed my breast lightly with his rough fingers, careful not to shatter it.

“Lie down,” he said.

I stepped toward the bed. He stopped me. “No,” he said, “on the floor.”

I hesitated for a moment, then moved down to the floor. The cold hardwood shocked my bare skin. I looked up at him and saw no discernible expression on his face. He took my clothes and placed them aside, then knelt down next to me. He took hold of my wrists. “Lie very still.”

He began to pose me. First my arms; the left bent crooked, at a strange angle to where my hand was almost touching my head, the other by my side, limp, even taking the time to position each individual finger, obsessing over the smallest of movements. He moved my hips to be twisted, my legs to be spread. He gently splayed my hair around my head. He looked for a moment at my hair, and then, as if realizing something about it, stopped and stood above me, scanning for any further imperfections in this display he’d created.

After making several more minor corrections to my pose he turned to his nightstand and opened a drawer, removing a small silver butter knife. He took that jar of strawberry jam from his nightstand, opened it, and stood above me once again.

“Wait, wh –”

“Don’t worry,” he interrupted, “it’s dull,” as if saying that was enough to satiate any concerns I might have going forward.

The situation was growing too absurd for me to make any objections. Besides, I now desperately wanted to know where he was going with all of this. I knew how to handle myself – it wouldn’t be the first time someone had tried to hurt me – although I wasn’t quite worried about something like that happening anyways. Nothing in his demeanor suggested I was in any sort of danger.

He straddled my body and began painting my skin with jam, spreading it heavily on the left side of my face, on my neck, my clavicles, my breasts, my arm, my left leg. Splotches, smears. It would almost be erotic if it weren’t so utterly confusing. The cold floor on my back, the texture of the jam, the warmth of his body as he straddled me – all oddly salacious. He painted me with a fervent creativity, and I could see in his eyes that whatever image of me he had in his mind was coming to fruition.

Finally, he stepped back and looked at whatever it was that he’d done, as an artist would with his canvas.

“Now,” he said, “stay still and quiet.

There fell a deep, tense silence. The sweet scent of the strawberries was beginning to nauseate me.

Then, out of nowhere, his expression morphed. His face contorted into fear, into deadly urgency. His lips began to quiver.

“James?” His voice was shaking.

“Jesus … Jesus, James …”

He collapsed beside me, trembling.

“Hey, hey, can you hear me?”

He put his hands on my shoulders. There was such a genuine, horrible look of dread on his face ... it froze me.

“You look good, James. You look real good. You’re all right, pal, just keep looking at me. You’re bleeding a little bit, we just gotta stop this bleeding, all right?”

He started, frantically, to apply pressure to my shoulder.

“You’re, hey –” he moved my head to face him, “– you’re all right, buddy. Your brother’s gonna be on his way, OK? I’ll get him for you. I’ll – MEDIC!” he shouted, suddenly, loudly, desperately. It echoed throughout the house. I flinched. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Your brother’s coming, all right? Your brother’s on his way. We just have to stay low. We’re gonna get you out of here. Your daughter’s waiting, James, we’re gonna get you home. Stay with me.”

He continued to comfort me, saying that I was going to make it home, that I was going to be OK, that I would be reunited with my daughter and that my brother, the medic, was on his way. He smeared the jam with panicked carelessness over my body and on his hands. As he continued this act I began slowly to realize the role I was supposed to be playing. I turned my breathing shallow. I began to relax my muscles. I thought about things that I could say, stuff I’ve read in war novels, I see you, I’m all right, I’m cold, it’s getting dark, but I was reminded of his command to stay quiet, and I felt a duty not to spoil the moment that he was immersed in.

His comforting words diminished in intensity over time, until they were nothing but somber whispers as he brought himself closer to me.

Finally, the air grew still.

“James?”

I was hardly breathing at all.

“James?” Once more, hopelessly.

He embraced me then. He began to whimper, I felt his tears on my neck. It seemed that I’d died.

He held me for a while, for how long I couldn’t tell. Then the tears stopped. As quickly as he had changed before, he returned to inanimacy. He stood, his eyes still red. I noticed his pants were wet.

He took something out of his pocket. “You can stand now,” he said, his voice hoarse. He handed it to me.

One hundred dollars.

“Go clean up,” he said.

I don’t quite remember the process of cleaning myself, or putting my clothes back on, or returning to my apartment. Clarity returned to me only when I found myself vomiting into my toilet. I felt guilty for a reason that I couldn’t understand. I’ve done strange things before, strange things indeed, but nothing as strange as that.

I met with him again, about four or five times after that, doing the same thing over and over again. I began to learn the pose he wanted me to strike, the way he wanted me to breathe. I memorized the things he said to me, the stages he went through, which were identical every time, the characters, my brother – James’ brother, my daughter, waiting for me at home … I’d assumed he was shell-shocked, that something in his head had snapped during the war, leaving him with this strange pseudo-sexual compulsion to reenact this one moment, the death of this “James,” this moment that seemed to have broken him. His pants were wet every time we finished.

I indulged in his obsession for as long as I could stand it. It was the money that kept me coming back. I’d never made money like that in my life … But one night I decided that I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d stopped eating jam on my toast in the morning. I began having strange, desperate dreams, where I woke up gasping for air, where I was jolted awake by the sound of a gunshot. It had started to affect my performance with other clients. One told me that I had seemed “ghostly today.”

Finally, when he called again, I had the challenge of informing him that I couldn’t play the role of James anymore.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Same time this evening?”

“No, I – look, I’m sorry. I … I can’t do this anymore.”

A pause.

“I understand.”

“I’m sorry, I really am. I just … you’re a nice guy. I mean it. I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK.”

“I hope you’re doing well. I’m sorry. Have a good evening, um – hey, what’s your name, anyways?”

He hung up.

The cover art of the 1981 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set box is a lurid green-red-yellow painting set deep underground. A sorceress and a warrior are battling a giant lake monster. Jewels spill out of a chest by their feet. This is the original fantasy role-playing game for three or more adults, ages 10 and up.

At age 8 – in sight of adulthood, according to the box! – I’d never heard of D&D. I didn’t know Erol Otus, the cover artist for the 1981 Basic Set box, or Dave Sutherland, whose 1970s designs he was homaging. I do remember sensing the painting had been created by someone, that here was the result of a transfer process between imagination and brush. The underground cavern felt alive in some way, not flat like the Biro sketches of Batman I would try on lined graph paper. I didn’t know how, but that box cover was a doorway inviting me somewhere.

I did know that school sucked. I was a gangly oily stuttery kid at Papatoetoe Central School in South Auckland, New Zealand. Talked too much, thought too much, got the wrong end of every stick. Could barely take two steps for all the awkwardness sloshing round inside me.

Mr. Gilbert, a teacher with a small mustache who kicked me out of class daily, was carrying the box in a plastic shopping bag just as lunch break finished. He found me, skirted across the playground, handed it over. Here’s something, boy. No need to bring it back. Just have a go and don’t be so bloody annoying in history period next time.

Gruffness and kindness. And a gift. Open this lurid cardboard box. Here lies adventure.

The 1981 D&D Basic Set cover makes a simple, clear promise: We’re going to descend into twisty mysterious caverns, fight monsters with weapons and magic, and find treasure.

Its aesthetics and execution matter. Earlier D&D art sometimes felt flat and two-dimensional, echoing the original photostat sheets that had circulated among hobbyist groups in Wisconsin in the 1970s. The ’81 Basic Set is richer, fuller, translated into a dynamic three-quarter scene. The saturated greens and yellows carry a Vistavision/Eastmancolor feel of widescreen possibility.

The most iconic D&D cover ever is probably Larry Elmore’s 1983 image of a red dragon swiping at a fighter. But that ’81 box launched a million imaginations including mine.

Holding it in the middle of a dull gray primary school, knowing nothing about rules or mechanics or dice, I felt the challenge. Are you up for this, kid? Unseen territories lay ahead. A threshold of experience and by crikey I was ready to step across it, oily skin and stutter and all.

It’s more than a product when it speaks to us. Doorways matter. They originate.

I remember the old paperback book covers in the winding corridors of the Hard to Find (But Worth the Effort) Secondhand Bookshop, a sprawling wooden house in the Auckland suburb of Onehunga that my mum and I would visit several times a year. We’d always get lost driving there and end up huddled over a map tracing the Biro-pen reminders from the last trip. Straight left after turnoff. Fish’n’chip shop too far.

Eventually we’d reach the row of little high street shops, past an ophthalmologist and a kebab takeaway, then the cedarwood door and jumbled window with peeling art nouveau signage and we’d duck inside, and it would begin.

The Hard to Find Bookshop laughed at the Dewey system, instead using geography as its organizing principle. Major subjects by room, offshoots via gantries and ladders and nooks and crawl spaces that would never pass a building inspection but lit the imagination. A territory full of secrets to be explored. There was a tiny staff kitchen with a burned-out teapot and cartons of milk and marmalade that you weren’t supposed to trespass, but I always did. The milk tasted like dusty endpapers and the marmalade had bits in it.

Upstairs on the first floor, past the trail of National Geographics and dictionaries stacked on each carpeted stair was the Science Fiction and Fantasy room. It had a never-cleaned window looking out onto the backyard of the house, where a washing line usually hung with T-shirts and oversize underwear. Things you could see but never quite figure out how to reach.

The old genre paperbacks lining the shelves had style. Each sci-fi fantasy publisher in the golden years – Ace, Ballantine, DAW, Penguin – was competing for attention on crowded bookracks in newsagents, every cover and spine fighting for your 25c with barbarians, maidens, spaceships, alien planets. Strong deep blues. Sharp acid oranges. Geometric shapes and chunky fonts that ran from psychedelic to weirdly formal, anything to make your eye stop. Those original bookracks were a brutal arena.

In the gentler atmosphere of the Hard to Find they felt like fading souls in a retirement home. Comfy on their shelves but still craving your attention. Wanting a chat.

I had a Mum budget every time. Either $15 or a set number of books. You can imagine the negotiations and trade-offs. Is a thin Isaac Asimov paired with Larry Niven worth more than a hardback Harlan Ellison?

The buying process was secondary, though. Perhaps even the reading was. To this day I’ve never opened Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia, or Frankenstein Unbound, or the short stories of Cordwainer Smith, or Michael Moorcock’s The Dancers at the End of Time. The sunburst covers sitting on a plywood shelf promised me more than the actual text might ever deliver.

I was 8. I knew what I liked. I knew what I could sense but not see. There’s always more in the Hard to Find, somewhere, just out of sight.

What are the first principles of how these covers connect so instinctively? Of how we sense lifetimes and labyrinths in a piece of commercial art?

The most obvious to me is boldness. Not necessarily childish, but with the same clarity that we remember from being 4 years old and seeing a blue-red birdhouse in the morning sunlight for the first time.

The second is they often imply geography. A place our souls can visit, if we dare. Like flaneurs in an unreal city, a realm where flavor and taste and feeling and light and mood and memory and action and THINGS are all somehow the same thing. There should be a simpler and more spatial word than synesthesia.

They’re an incomplete promise we return to. Not to read every book or play every Dungeons & Dragons module but to pause just a moment in that suspended possibility of what if we could.

And they’re more real than reality often feels. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI lead, said recently that we’re not recreating people with large language models, we’re making ghosts. Well to me it feels like the ghosts are us, and all around already. Perhaps only VistaVision monsters and starships can reconnect these fragmented promises of ourselves.

School still felt all too real, and its emotional geography still sucked. Later that year I got a new pair of shoes, blue-striped Bata Bullets that we found in Dress for Less on discount. They felt special for a day and a half until three kids stole one of them and dumped it in the trench of the boys’ toilets by Block 4, pissing on it and laughing and rubbing one of those evil-smelling urinal cakes all over.

Not only is a pissy shoe aesthetically ugly, it’s a trap: Do you clean it up and wear it and be the pissy shoe boy for a term, or does your mum buy you another new set and you’re the fancy bastard?

A promise opened and closed, then. The hopeful line of thought is that pain and humiliation have value in their own right, the sculptor’s chisel blows that help shape us, as C.S. Lewis once said. But I’m simple enough that I’ll still take a Dungeons & Dragons set and a hungry dinosaur over a dribbly urinal cake.

Now I’m here in Tokyo, a place I keep returning to and love. Sitting at a table outside Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama, working away.

Tsutaya Books is beautifully constructed, three interconnected pavil - ions wrapped in a white lattice screen of T-shaped ceramic sticks. The flow connects you to zelkova trees outside, while the interior feels like a private library rather than a retail space. Oak veneer, low lighting, books and art and objects chosen by hand, arranged by taste.

Tsutaya Books is a long way from South Auckland or the Onehunga high street with the kebab takeaway. But it’s a place that loves books and promises adventure, still.

Sitting at this outdoor table under autumn trees. A dog-grooming place nearby that’s wonderfully preposterous. I hurt my knee when I first arrived in Tokyo on this trip but it’s feeling better now, itching under the table in its compression sleeve.

The work right now is making a video game, something my team has been building towards for a while through several false starts. Fittingly it’s about an old bookshop – how things come full circle! – and the art research has involved looking at thousands of old and new paperback covers. When you again dive deep into those painted doors of the imagination you see the love infused into the classic pulp style, those handpainted Ace, Ballantine, DAW, Penguin-type bookrack survivors, with planets and maidens and castles and so many other invitations. In structured testing we’ve consis - tently found that players respond far more strongly to these than modern designs. The pulps communicate in archetypes that reach into your chest and your childhood.

So, happily for us, we’re running with the good stuff as our style.

Making games is exciting and frustrating and hard, late-night Discord messages and video calls and constantly working on the next build. But I’m optimistic we’ll find our way through this one. And there’ll definitely be a box with a warrior and sorceress and a jewel chest tucked away somewhere on a virtual shelf.

Aesthetics matter. Imaginal geography is real. Our minds move in secret rooms and there are invitations our souls still respond to. First forays shift from response and consumption to creating things for others, at which point we become promise makers and continue an ancient evolutionary dance.

The beauty in these things is nutritious and real. It can save the world, and us, if we take up the challenge, open the door, and play.

How much of life do we spend waiting? Waiting for buses, queuing for tills, lining up to get on a plane, rushing down to the door every morning in the hope that a certain letter or parcel has arrived? I have very early memories of waiting – waiting really does kick in early – and oddly enough most of these memories involve games.

What they involve for the most part is waiting to get a turn to play. With two older brothers, both of whom had a brighter claim to the Commodore 64 that itself waited, creating the unmistakable fragrance of too-warm plastic, in the basement, I would spend so much time waiting for my go on a new game that I got very used to just watching games. Games were a thing that I would take in, quietly and politely, spectating with no kind of agency whatsoever. In truth, I still love “playing” them this way.

But then there were games that you actually played and then found you were waiting, too. Ghostbusters on the Commodore 64 was a case in point. You get your franchise running and you swoop around Manhattan bagging ghosts, but really when you play the game, you’re waiting for the moment that the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper converge at Spook Central and the energy in the game goes through the roof.

Somehow, Tetris, a game in which players are busy doing something critical for every second of play, is another game about waiting. And unlike a lot of games, it mints great substance and thought from this part of the design. Waiting, if you ask me, is where Tetris swoops upwards from the plane of brilliant, world-beating design and becomes, what? Something philosophically and morally challenging.

(This may sound like a reach, and I almost agree – but I thought this all up when I was in-game, and waiting, and I felt utterly convinced by the end of it.)

To tackle this in a slightly different manner, once I’d played Tetris for a few years I started to realize that the game I was seeing was only one half of the deal. Approached in a certain way, Tetris is all about negative space. It’s about what isn’t there – or crucially, what isn’t there yet.

So you build the wall and there are gaps that stop you from clearing it and moving on. Maybe the gaps are perfect for a certain block, and while you could fudge it with other blocks, you decide: No, I’m going to play this the right way. I’m going to wait for the block I am after.

This is never more true than when it comes to the most devilish of all Tetris pieces, the I. The long block. The Hero. The long block is just perfect for clearing the board and giving you a Tetris. And so inevitably I find myself playing just for these moments, making sections of wall that are perfectly shaped for the long block to arrive and drop in and clear everything. And solve everything.

The problem with this is that Tetris bucks and resists. It seems to know when you’re playing in a non-pragmatic way. It sees your idealism for what it is: inflexibility. And so you wait and wait and wait for the long block, and then things get out of hand, and then you make a mess of things, and then your plans are in ruins, the wall is a gappy disaster and then – then! – just when you can’t use a long block anymore, it finally arrives. And then, generally, it’s a fast slide towards game over, with no one but yourself to blame.

This is the moral dimension of Tetris, the point at which this simple puzzle game almost becomes a parable. You wait and wait and wait for the long block, and yet so much beauty and potential is presenting itself all the while, and you simply refuse to see it. Because beautiful as all this other stuff is, it isn’t quite as beautiful to you as a long block.

When I find myself among people who love Tetris, I often tentatively broach the subject of the long block, and how it seems dialed into the worst elements of human nature. I think I’m hoping that someone will tell me I’m deluded, or that I’ve thought about it too much, or that I need to get more sleep.

Often, though, the people I’m talking to agree. Even worse, they start to ruminate on the long blocks that crop up in their own lives, far outside of Tetris and its well. The long blocks are the fixations they have, the shot at a perfect moment that blinds them from all the loveliness that’s going on everywhere around them. When I get that big payday! When the roof is finally fixed. When people finally understand how brilliant I am at work.

Regardless of how we play Tetris, I’ve started to believe that we’re all waiting for our long block – and the best thing we can do is simply identify what it is and then try to see the world beyond it. I’m still trying, frankly. Mixed results so far.

[This essay is an extract from the forthcoming book All the Pieces Matter: The Purpose and Meaning of Tetris by Christian Donlan, coming in 2027 from publisher Tune & Fairweather.]

Don’t worry, this isn’t actually an attempt to do transformative hermeneutics, that was just a joke. Ha ha, got you good, didn’t I? On second thought, maybe it sort of is. After all, I am going to offer you a particular interpretation of a well-known historical event, and I am aiming to have some kind of impact on your beliefs and opinions about it. Why else would anyone write anything?

In 1996 NYU physicist Alan Sokal submitted a hoax paper to the journal Social Text. His goal was to make a point about the low standards of a certain type of humanities journal and call attention to how some parts of academia had been captured by the cult of postmodernism. The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was a hodgepodge of trendy critical-theory jargon and technical concepts from theoretical physics thrown together to make the argument that reality itself was a social construct. The editors of Social Text asked for some rewrites, Sokal refused, they published it as submitted, and a few weeks later Sokal revealed the hoax, which generated a huge amount of public attention and discussion.

At the time, the general consensus was that the hoax was a slam dunk. Stories about it appeared in newspapers and magazines all over the world, including the front pages of The New York Times and Le Monde. A handful defended the journal, but most articles subtly or explicitly celebrated Sokal’s successful efforts at mocking the impenetrable jargon and obtuse pretentiousness of cultural studies. The editors of Social Text made things worse by responding with peevish defensiveness. Instead of admitting that they had screwed up and promising to do better, they claimed they knew the article was “a little hokey” but decided to publish it anyway. Stanley Aronowitz, one of the journal’s founders, was haughtily dismissive, saying, of Sokal’s underlying critique, “He got it wrong. One of the reasons he got it wrong is he’s ill-read and half-educated.”

Many stories about the hoax referenced the fable of the emperor’s new clothes, painting Sokal as the innocent child who dared to point out the naked truth. “Sokal’s spoof exposed the hypocrisy practiced by these so-called revolutionaries” wrote Ruth Rosen in the Los Angeles Times. “Their pretensions obscure their nakedness.” In the view of most commentators, Sokal had made the silly pomos look foolish and struck a blow for science, logic and good old common sense.

But I didn’t feel that way. I had no direct stake in the conflict, I was neither a scientist nor a cultural theorist, but I was an avid observer of science and cultural theory, and when it all went down I remember feeling sad. Like something fragile had been broken or something important had been lost.

I remember thinking – don’t these people see the similarities between these ostensibly opposing worldviews? Don’t they realize they are after the same thing? And then realizing, no, they don’t. No one saw this thing that I thought was so obvious, this thread connecting science and math and logic with the convoluted theorizing of postmodern philosophy. The whole point of Sokal’s fake paper was to make fun of this nonexistent thread by demonstrating how stupid it was, how impossible. Imagine someone leaning in, uncomfortably close, and then pushing you off a ledge.

What was it I saw, or thought I saw, the image of which had been so abruptly snatched away? Why on earth would I think that hard-nosed scientists and fancypants circumlocutionary post-structuralists had anything in common in the first place? Wasn’t it obvious that these two tribes were natural enemies? Wasn’t Sokal’s gesture, the pretend handshake turned middle finger, a natural expression of the inherent incommensurability of these two ways of seeing the world? Well, it wasn’t obvious to me.

Somehow, as a casual observer, I had imagined a deep congruence between the ideas of the trendiest, most abstruse continental philosophers and the ideas of the world’s most serious, logical, scientific thinkers. This congruence had to do with systems and their limits, with the puzzles of logical recursion and the surprisingly complicated terrain that one encounters at the frontier of what can be known, said and thought about the world.

In my defense, allow me to point out two related historical facts. It was the 20th century and it was the ’90s. We were just about to make it out of a century in which the scientific worldview, the one Sokal was defending against the effete barbarians of Social Text, had really spread its wings and soared, taking us higher and farther than anyone could have imagined. It had also, in the process, brought us to the very edge of the comprehensible. What does common sense have to tell us about the atomic bomb? What does common decency have to tell us about Auschwitz?

On the one hand, however you tell the story of humanity, almost nothing can compare to the importance of the thing Sokal is fighting for – rationality, the scientific method, pragmatic materialism, whatever you call this way of interacting with the world. Over the last few hundred years it has transformed us more profoundly than any way of life we’d ever tried, any philosophy, religion or political system. And let’s just admit it – mostly for the good. No matter how you slice it we are better off in a world shaped by logic, evidence, trial and error, conjecture and refutation. A world less beholden to authority, tradition and superstition. And yet, on the other hand, let’s also admit that the 20th century was hardly a trouble-free victory lap for this way of interacting with the world.

But that wasn’t it for me. That’s not the explanation for why I hallucinated a thread connecting science and postmodernism. I wasn’t a critic lamenting the tragic outcomes of scientific hubris, far from it. I was an enthusiast, a fan. But being a fan of 20th-century science means being into the weird, late-period, complicated stuff. We’re not talking about Newton’s greatest hits, we’re not talking about cheerful mutton-chopped engineers in white smocks jerkily rearranging billiard balls on an infinite felt plane. We’re talking about the hard stuff – Einstein, Heisenberg, Gödel, Turing.

It’s not a bad theory that reality bottoms out in the cheerful rearrangement of billiard balls according to well-defined rules. It’s a very plausible assumption. It’s a miracle that we even got to a place where we can make such a good guess. I would even say that this reasonable, commonsense worldview, which Sokal is defending, and which he finds so obvious as to need no arguments other than a tongue-in-cheek invitation to come into his home and challenge it if you dare, is the one that I myself, and everyone I know, uses most of the time. But it isn’t actually true. As science itself tells us.

In the mid-1920s Albert Einstein debated with Niels Bohr about the meaning of quantum mechanics. Einstein thought something had to be wrong or missing because of two of the theory’s central features – indeterminacy (the idea that outcomes were probabilistic), and complementarity (the idea that there were some features of the world that you couldn’t observe or measure at the same time).

Around the same time, mathematician David Hilbert asked a question about what it is possible to prove with logic. Is there a method for evaluating statements that will reliably tell us whether they are true or false? Within 10 years, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church and Alan Turing had given us a definitive answer, and the answer was “No.”

It’s important to recognize that quantum indeterminacy and logical incompleteness do not represent some kind of catastrophic failure state of the scientific project. They are not an invitation to say whatever you want, to go wild with radical skepticism or relativism or nihilism, even if they have sometimes been taken as such. Scientists continued to observe and measure and learn things about the world; mathematicians continued to prove theorems and discover true facts about numbers; and mathematical models continued to be a valuable way of understanding the universe.

At the same time, it’s also important to acknowledge that these encounters with the limits of formal systems of knowledge and proof were not just marginal issues or minor details. These encounters with the limits of what can be known with certainty and what can be said with confidence are, arguably, the most important strands of 20th-century science.

Alan Turing’s world-changing ideas – the work that laid the foundation for computer science and transformed computation from useful calculation to a powerful new way of understanding the world – these ideas were developed in order to answer Hilbert’s question. A question so fundamental that it is almost philosophical. What can calculation do? What can it not do?

Well, what can philosophy do? What can it not do? This parallel question seemed to me, at the time, to be the one at the heart of postmodernism.

Let’s take Jacques Derrida as emblematic of the thing Sokal was attacking. When I encountered the ideas of Jacques Derrida, I thought: How cool is it, that these fancy French philosophers are struggling, in their own way, with the same kinds of problems that were at the center of 20th-century mathematics and physics.

Derrida’s work investigates the process of writing and thinking and communication. It is downstream from the approach of structuralism, which itself was an attempt to understand human communication systematically, by studying the mechanics of how it operated. Structuralism can be seen as a relatively sober, pragmatic attempt to understand how words and symbols and signs and signals functioned technically. But Derrida wants to do more. He wants to do philosophy. He wants to talk about big ideas – life, meaning, beauty, history. But he wants to talk about these things in a way that acknowledges the fact that all such talking is, itself, a result of the functional operations that enable language. Rather than sweeping all of that contextual stuff under the rug, he wants to foreground it. To remind us that when we talk about life, meaning, beauty and history, we are also, inevitably, talking about this other stuff.

Derrida’s most famous maneuver, deconstruction, works like this: Any text contains within itself a primal flaw. This flaw is a loose thread which, when pulled, will cause the text to unravel, revealing the binary logic that the text was secretly relying on. This hidden logic will appear as a hierarchical pair of concepts, one of which is seen as primary, fundamental, necessary, and therefore implicitly good, while the other one is secondary, invasive, arbitrary, and suspicious. The reason this hierarchical binary is hidden is that it is part of the underlying protocols that create the overall context of the text and the channel across which it is being sent as a message – whether that context is a scientific paper or a novel – because this is how messages work. Pulling this thread and unraveling the text in this way reveals the arbitrary nature of this binary logic. First we see that the hierarchy can be reversed, that the subordinate concept can be seen as primary. Then we see that neither concept is truly dominant, that the relationship between them is always unsettled.

In a way, deconstruction is a bit like Gödelian numbering. Gödelian numbering is the process by which Gödel demonstrated that you can translate any statement about a formal mathematical system into an object in that system, an object on which the functions of that system could be applied. And he used this to show that no formal system, no matter how complicated or clever, could ever be entirely consistent and complete. Derridean deconstruction is by no means a simple recapitulation of this idea, but it isn’t a million miles away, either. In both cases we are confronted with an unsettling fact. Whether we are in the laboratory or the seminar room, no formal system will ever suffice to grant us absolute certainty on every question we might put to it. No system can justify itself, and none can ever provide the final word on every important problem.

Is Derrida difficult to read? Yes. Elliptical, ambiguous, full of oblique references and nebulous asides. But to be fair, physics papers are also hard to read. So are math papers. So is, as far as I can tell, all of philosophy going back to the dawn of time.

I’m not saying Sokal was wrong to complain about postmodernism as an academic fad, full of derivative, formulaic, jargon-besotted mediocrity. It definitely was. (Although this point can be exaggerated. If, for example, you go back and look at Social Text 46/47, the issue in which Sokal’s hoax paper was published, the other articles don’t look like the gibberish he was mocking. Most of them make straightforward arguments using sensible language and ordinary logic.) I’m not even saying Derrida was a great philosopher, or Foucault, or Deleuze, or Lyotard, or any of the others. I am in no position to make that kind of judgment. I’m just saying that for a while, in the early ’90s, I felt like I had a glimpse of something that helped me make sense of the world. I knew that scientists and philosophers were weirdos from different tribes, that they didn’t read the same books, didn’t go to the same parties. But it seemed to me that they were independently circling around a similar set of weirdo problems and ideas and issues: the power of formal systems and the limits of that power; information as a material process made out of symbols, signals and noise; the mysterious and dangerous dynamics of recursion and self-reference; the fact that a certain kind of imperfection was a necessary and unavoidable feature of the universe, and the fact that we nevertheless continue to prove theorems and interpret novels, solve problems and discover facts and build bridges and try to better understand each other and the world.

Another word we might use for this set of issues is “computers.” And in the first half of the 1990s it seemed like computers might be a key ingredient of the secret weirdo tribe I had constructed in my imagination, the one that might be capable of continuing to work on the most urgent projects of the 20th-century avant garde – making sense and finding beauty in a world gone mad from hyperrationality. I was reading Gödel, Escher, Bach and the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Neuromancer and listening to Kraftwerk and reading Baudrillard’s Precession of Simulacra and dreaming of computer games that would help unravel the convoluted puzzle of instrumental reason.

Well, it didn’t turn out that way. We live in a fully computerized world now, and I guess it’s plenty weird, but not really in the way I had hoped. It seems we are farther away than ever from having a shared sense of how to think about science and facts and knowledge and proof. Farther away from having working methods for successfully operating in a world made out of systems that are partial, imperfect, incomplete, and always secretly dismantling themselves and each other.

All systems for thinking and doing, including science, philosophy and politics, are embedded in the world, objects in an external environment that shapes them. This embedding is obvious, despite being impossible to see clearly from within the system, and affects that system in ways it cannot explain or control. Philosophy doesn’t bottom out in science and science doesn’t bottom out in philosophy, and neither one of them bottoms out in “ordinary life.” Nothing ever bottoms out anywhere. Despite this, we can and must continue to think and do things, including using systems, inhabiting them, comparing them, modifying them and inventing new ones, without slipping backward into superstition or sideways into nihilism. The ability to see and think clearly about this messy state of affairs, to recognize the puzzles and paradoxes that complicate our ability to understand the world and yet continue to act skillfully, wisely and justly, this is the dream of cheerful postmodernism I imagined.

That dream was interrupted when I learned in the wake of Sokal’s hoax that there was more territorial animosity between these tribes than I had thought. But it isn’t completely gone. Recently I’ve started to see a few examples of STEM folks who are interested in how science actually works, and who aren’t satisfied with the simplistic stories science tells about itself, rediscovering the usefulness of some of the postmodern ideas they had always assumed were junk.

Another reason the dream survives is because it’s so obviously true. Despite the ridiculous things we say and do and claim to believe, we all know it’s true. I’m sure if I went to Sokal’s apartment on the 21st floor and told him I wanted to take him up on his invitation, that I thought the laws of physics were social conventions and wanted to test them, he would look at me like I was crazy. “I didn’t mean it literally,” he would say, “it was rhetorical.” If I pushed past him and started to run towards the window he would be terrified. He would grab me and desperately try to hold me back. That’s the difference between reality and some made-up bullshit you say to try to prove a point.

Ever since my son was born, each day feels like I’m being drawn and quartered, because for the past 12 months I’ve been caught between the meat hooks of time. I look at my son and I’m filled with excitement for all that is to come in his life – the games we’ll play, the trips we’ll go on, the conversations we’ll have, the jokes we’ll make, the boy and then young man he will be. I see the son he already is and will continue to become. I see the father he is shaping me into. But I’m also filled with the pangs of passing time, for every first is gone as soon as it arrives. His first smile and laugh, the first clap of his hands, his first steps. Time’s robbery is that I do not get to relive those. People will tell you that the passage of time is bittersweet, but on certain nights when I’m putting my son to bed, it mostly feels bitter.

Alan Lightman, an MIT astrophysicist and author, wrote a novella in 1994 that I’ve been returning to a lot this year. Einstein’s Dreams imagines the young Einstein working in the patent office in Bern while he dreams through the different permutations of time under his then-developing theory of relativity. Lightman takes us into snapshots of these different worlds, where past, present and future do not behave in the same way as in our universe. What Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities did for descriptions of place, Einstein’s Dreams does for time. We are immersed into the dreamscape of worlds similar to our own, but which a few minor changes render so fantastically different.

When I look at my son, my first desire is to freeze time, to stop him from growing up and savor his infancy forever. Lightman gives us such a world: a universe where there is an epicenter to time, a place where time does in fact stand still, where “raindrops hang motionless in air … pendulums of clocks float mid-swing.” He imagines people making pilgrimages to this place, imagining that “as a traveler approaches … he moves more and more slowly. His heartbeats grow farther apart, his breathing slackens, his temperature drops, his thoughts diminish, until he reaches dead center and stops.” What kind of person would make a pilgrimage to the center of time? Lightman identifies two categories: lovers, and parents with children.

For the lovers it’s quite simple, they want to share a charged moment of passion for eternity. But for parents, the motivation is more complicated. Lightman describes it like this:

“[A]t the place where time stands still, one sees parents clutching their children in a frozen embrace that will never let go. The beautiful young daughter with blue eyes and blond hair will never stop smiling the smile she smiles now, will never lose this soft pink glow on her cheeks, will never grow wrinkled or tired, will never get injured, will never unlearn what her parents have taught her, will never think thoughts that her parents don’t know, will never know evil, will never tell her parents that she does not love them, will never leave her room with a view of the ocean, will never stop touching her parents as she does now.”

This passage stops me in my tracks. What seems like a natural desire – to freeze your child before they get too old, so they can never be hurt and never do wrong – is revealed to be horrific. The child is a butterfly pinned under glass, for the parents are motivated more by fear than love. A natural fear, maybe, but the desire to stop a child’s growth is ultimately grotesque. It is anti-love and anti-life.

Lightman offers two opposing reactions to the concept of freezing yourself in time, from two different camps of people in this imagined world. The first camp is against the concept, stating that while life may be a journey of suffering, there is a nobility in the suffering and “without time there is no life.” The second camp are proponents of the practice, preferring an eternity of contentment “even if that eternity were fixed and frozen.” But I’m wondering if there is a third way, because neither of Lightman’s alternatives feel adequate. Is there a way to fully incorporate reminiscing and future-tripping while living in the present?

Whenever I’m feeling melancholy about the swift passage of time, some rational part of my brain sternly instructs that I need to snap out of it and “live in the moment.” We’re told we shouldn’t focus on the future or the past, only the here and now, but this internal voice strikes me as schoolmarmish and unhelpful. The present barely exists. Every moment is swiftly pulled into the past never to be repeated, and my fantasies of the future can stretch on forever. The past and future are both infinite, whereas the present is miniscule. Why would I want to restrict myself to the narrowest sliver of time?

In one section of Einstein’s Dreams, Lightman describes a world with only the now and therefore without memory, where “each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.” This is a world of the constant present. In order for people to know who they are, they must carry a Book of Life, which is filled with the history of their life, for without this Book a person becomes “a snapshot, a two-dimensional image, a ghost.” Lightman seems to be saying that to live solely ‘in the moment” is dangerous. It renders you insubstantial. But becoming too wedded to your memories can be dangerous as well. In a different section of the book, Lightman describes a patchwork town made up of streets and houses stuck at various points in the past. Individuals hang on to some era of their lives and then remain fastened there, unable to see beyond their defining moment, literally living within the architecture of their childhood homes or first marriages or other glory days. Which sounds fine enough, but Lightman accurately depicts it as a tragedy, for no one in this world is happy. They are utterly lonely, for “a life in the past cannot be shared … each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.” The only thing more hellish than having no memories is being trapped in them.

And what about the future? Lightman does depict a universe where there is no such thing as a future. Time is “a line that terminates at the present, both in reality and in the mind.” Nobody can imagine the future, it’s no more possible than seeing colors outside the visible spectrum. In response to this uncertainty, people “cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff,” terrified for any moment to end because “each laugh is the last laugh” and “each parting of friends is a death.” This confirms that I don’t wish for a world without a future. Looking forward to tomorrow is just as important as enjoying the days that have been. I am looking forward to walking into my son’s bedroom tomorrow morning and picking him up from his crib and watching his face light up all over again. His chubby face another day older, his wispy golden hair another millimeter longer, his mind another day more developed. My love for him another day deeper.

In yet another of Lightman’s micro-universes, cause and effect exist, but are so erratic that sometimes events get jumbled and you can’t be sure what action caused which outcome. This chaotic randomness seems exciting, as it appears to offer freedom: You can’t be sure the past is affecting the present nor if your present is affecting the future, so there is no need to dwell on the past or weigh your present actions in terms of future consequences. Rather, each act can only be judged on its own, regardless of what happens before or after. One gets the distinct impression this is a world Lightman would enjoy living in, a world where families comfort a dying uncle not because of an inheritance that may be left to them in the future, but solely because the uncle is loved at that moment. Idealistically, Lightman imagines this is “a world of impulse … a world of sincerity … a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.” And I can’t deny there is something gripping about a life so spliced into moments. But it would be, as Lightman admits, a life of islands, unmoored in the sea of time. In such a world there would be no texture to any relationship, because the best and deepest relationships are built like any structure, one shared moment resting on top of another, each interaction setting a foundation for the next. I don’t think I would want to bring my son into such an unstable world, where we could never build anything substantial between us.

Increasingly, I find myself wanting to integrate all aspects of time when I’m with the people that I love. I want to hear the notes of their past, present and future played together in one harmonious chord. And I don’t want to constantly reprimand myself for dwelling in the past or imagining the future. One image that keeps coming to me is the layers of geology, rocks of different eras stacked atop each other. Epochs and ages that are vastly different meet in the same pile of sediment, thanks to the compression of time and gravity. When viewed vertically, down the rock layers, we see a superpositioning of time, but these different eras are happening simultaneously when scanned horizontally. And this is what I sense within me, within all of us. My whole life, past present and future, is held inside of me, and it’s all happening simultaneously. Lightman’s image of a “center of time” with concentric circles around it reminds me of the rings of a tree. I want to experience time as a tree does, integrating all the rings, all the years, into one experience.

To use another metaphor: If time is indeed a trinity of past, present and future, then I want to experience all three aspects simultaneously. I don’t want to focus on one aspect of time to the exclusion of the others, unbalancing the triangle. Lightman describes a world where time is a “quality” instead of a quantity. So events are recorded by “the color of the sky, the tone of the boatman’s call on the Aare, the feeling of happiness or fear when a person comes into a room.” And thus an event like the birth of a child is not a fixed point in time, pinned by days, hours, minutes. Instead, events “glide through the space of the imagination, materialized by a look, a desire.” The specific shade and slant of a sunset piercing your kitchen window is the same as when you first fell in love. The smell of ripe bananas is when your child first smiled at you. The impulse to sprint across a field of wet grass is the day you graduated from high school. The taste of your tears is the night your grandmother died.

Time as both a quality and as something measurable that stretches out in three dimensions – this is the relationship with time I’m trying to achieve. I want to look at my son and see him as a newborn, an infant, a toddler, a boy, a teenager, a young man. I want to feel the way I did when he was born, when he first fell asleep on my chest, when he first wrapped his pudgy arms around my neck. And I want to be his father through each of those stages: before, during and after each moment has occurred. I don’t want the present to blot out the eternally shining future or the infinitely shimmering past. I want them all happening around me and through me, simultaneously. Call me greedy, but when it comes to my son I want Einstein and Lightman’s experience of time – relative but constant, subjective but eternal, expansive but deeply personal.

The internet is dying. The 2025 “Bad Bot Report” from cybersecurity firm Imperva claims that there is now more bot than human activity on the Web. The online world has become increasingly homogenous and filled with AI-generated content. Even, and especially, websites that prided themselves on crowdsourcing human knowledge have become tarnished by this. Wikipedia now has a “WikiProject AI Cleanup” to combat the inclusion of unsourced and poorly written AI-generated text. With the old internet long dead, it’s hard not to be nostalgic for what once was, or to dream of what it could be, in a parallel world.

“While I believe Wikipedia to be a modern (and exceedingly rare) marvel of community collaboration that I consult regularly, I never set out with the intention to use it as the narrative medium of Neurocracy.” Joannes Truyens is the creator of a sci-fi murder mystery told through an alternate Wikipedia, called Omnipedia, in the year 2049. A “run” of the game is told over 10 episodes, each being a snapshot of a single day, which allows players to trace how older articles have been edited and new ones added over time. With a new episode released weekly, this enables Joannes and his team of writers and designers to adapt updates according to emerging theories and discussions on the game’s community forum. They explain, “The earliest conceptual version of Neurocracy in its current form was a story bible filled with world-building details that I had written and formatted to resemble Wikipedia articles for the sheer fun of it. Eventually I realized that the ideal format for Neurocracy was staring me right in the face.”

Neurocracy isn’t the only alternative Wikipedia that started out as a world-building exercise. Stanley Baxton’s The Shaman, the Outsider, and the Diet of Worms is an experimental piece of interactive fiction including the autobiography of an anthropologist visiting a remote village in a fantasy world, and the accompanying wiki about the autobiography 400 years after it was originally written. “The format was to showcase a world not through an objective lens or the author telling you the exact specifics, but instead through in-universe texts and materials, where they come with their own biases you have to consider.” Stanley has written a postmortem about Diet of Worms in which he advocates for “world-building through negative space,” allowing room for player speculation. “I wanted the player to feel like an active participant in the world, rather than a passive observer, much like they were reading an actual Wikipedia article on a topic they may have been completely unaware of until now.”

Back in 1997, Espen Aarseth coined the term “ergodic literature” to refer to a genre in which it takes a reader a nontrivial amount of effort to traverse the text. He gives a range of examples of ergodic literature across different media, including wall inscriptions on ancient Egyptian tombs with nonlinear arrangement of religious texts, the I Ching, and Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a “sonnet machine book” that can technically produce 10^14 sonnets. The vague nature of the concept has drawn some criticism, but the wiki forms of both Neurocracy and The Shaman, the Outsider, and the Diet of Worms arguably lends them to this definition. As Joannes puts it: “My hope was that players would be intrigued enough by the sci-fi story world of Neurocracy, and the way it’s dispassionately presented through Omnipedia, to dive in and start hunting for clues and basically do research for fun.”

Kitty Ess also sought to design her game, Pink Website, with a particular player experience in mind. “I wanted a feeling of exploration, like you’re uncovering something hidden and being a little nosy. This is why some of the links to the pages aren’t super obvious.” Rather than Wikipedia, Pink Website takes its aesthetic cues from contemporary nostalgia for the internet of the 2000s. You navigate the blog of a young woman in an alternate 2025 where everyone has discovered that the world is going to end in approximately 15 years. Through navigating this blog, you can discover the 2004 webpage of the creator of a cartoon rabbit called Lulu Bunny, complete with era-appropriate graphics.

Pink Website was a solo project, with Kitty herself even appearing as the fictional influencer protagonist in pictures. Stan collaborated with an artist, Reyn, for the 3D modeling and wiki design of Diet of Worms. Neurocracy has more of an anthology format, which allowed for Joannes to bring on multiple writers. “The unifying encyclopedic tone and presentation of Omnipedia meant that writers could cover the most outlandish subjects … expanding the roster of potential suspects in the murder mystery to include an 11,000-year-old humongous fungus and a Fall Out Boy cover band.” Emulating the format of an encyclopedia written by countless people enabled the organic growth of Neurocracy’s intertwined narratives.

I wanted to know what personal experience these creators had with the sites that they’ve drawn inspiration from. For Stan, he was also interested in the community dynamics of Wikipedia: “I’m curious about their motivations for adding, removing or amending text, and what political, social and personal effects influence them to do so.” He remembers watching edits being made to the Higgs boson page in real time as a kid. In Kitty’s case, she didn’t have firsthand experience of the millennial internet. “Since I didn’t experience the ’90s and 2000s web first-hand, for the page from 2004 I studied archived Geocities pages and emulated them to get the look I wanted.” She’s particularly interested in amateur web design and how personal websites have evolved over time, and Pink Website is an exploration of this.

One of the most striking elements of Pink Website for me, however, was how closely it was able to mimic the aesthetics of contemporary web pages filled with advertisements. At one point you are directed to a website called TechVibe, which Kitty based on CNET and The Verge. “I normally browse the Web with an ad blocker, so I deliberately turned it off and studied the way modern news sites are laid out. I then took screenshots of ads I found interesting and recreated them in Photoshop. During my research I was reminded that modern news websites are basically impossible to navigate without an ad blocker.”

All three of these projects used the idiosyncrasies of the internet, past contemporary and future, for narrative purposes. Here we find an alternative online world, though perhaps not one that is any less dystopic. These three works are also about the gaps between what is explicitly said online, and what can be inferred through the traces that people leave through digital infrastructure.

Kitty was specifically inspired to include hidden links by Martine Neddam’s Net art, mouchette.org. Following that thread led me down my own strange internet rabbit hole. Mouchette is a distinctly unsettling experience, especially given that it is based on a 1937 novel about a teenager committing suicide. Exploring that art piece, I found my way to Martine’s About Me section, where she comments: “Available information can be found in the Wikipedia entry about Mouchette.org. The nice thing is: I didn’t make this entry at all. I really don’t know who did.”

Even if the internet is dying, it is still full of secrets. Perhaps it’s the greatest piece of ergodic literature we’ve ever known.

The point of cornhole is to get a little sack of corn into a hole.

Helpfully, in this case, the telos is right there in the name. Cornhole. Look at the little blue or red sack in your hand. Then look at the hole. And then orient your behavior toward getting that bag in the little hole.

This is so obvious that it sounds like the setup of a joke, but you’d be surprised what happens in your mind as you’re playing cornhole, if you’re really paying attention. You might be adding up the score in your head and guessing at the likelihood of victory, or thinking about how the other guy throws the bag, or who’s watching you and what they think about how you’re playing. You could also be thinking about getting something to eat, or the temperature in the room. Or maybe how your arm is moving, whether to grab the bag vertically or horizontally, how much you should bend your knees when you toss, where you should keep your eye, and so on. You might even tell yourself that you’re overthinking it. You’re being too neurotic. It’s just a game! You should take it easy and not get so competitive. Then, you surprise yourself when you overshoot the entire board by six feet and hit the ankle bone of a waitress carrying a tray of full beers and you turn beet red. You bark an odd laugh at yourself and say “oops” loud enough that everyone hears your remorse. You’re even less likely, on the next toss, to get it in the hole.

If you can observe all these goings-on in your head and also somehow be honest with yourself about them, you might say: well, hey, I’d like to win this game. It’s a tournament, after all. There’s prize money to be won. You remind yourself: the point of cornhole is to get the bag in the hole. You fix your eyes on that hole.

You realize only then, perhaps, that your eyes tend to wander off the hole itself, onto the platform (the wood surface that surrounds the hole) because you have an unexamined self-defeating belief that says: I’m not likely to get it in the hole, but as long as I make it on the platform here and there, I won’t be too embarrassed. If you were to interrogate that motivation, you’ll realize your actual aim subtly shifted from getting the bag of corn in the hole, to not losing too badly. The subtle placement of your eyes reveals that you’re actually aiming to lose by a respectable amount, which is not the point of cornhole.

That’s helpful to know. Because what’s motivating that sub-pattern of attention is the superior intention that you’d actually like to win this game. Wouldn’t that be fun? By fighting that temptation and instead putting your eye fixedly on the hole, not the wood around the hole, you’re telling yourself: I know I’m actually a little afraid to find out what I’m really capable of. Since I’m here, though, and I’ve got nothing better to do, why don’t I just aim at the hole? In other words, aim to win, and just see what happens. You were already aiming to lose on some level, after all. So, losing while trying your best obviously wouldn’t be the end of the world.

On the next turn, you resist the urge for your eyes to flick away from that hole, and instead fix them where they ought to be. Then, you give it your toss. You only then realize that in the middle of your throw, your gaze (and therefore your aim) glosses over the hole. You were looking at it, but you weren’t paying attention. Instead, you’re paying attention to your form: do I look like the kind of person who makes it into the hole? The arm movement, the grip, the bend of the knees. You miss badly again.

On your next turn, you decide: I am going to, no matter what, keep my attention on that damn hole. So, without moving your eyes, you toss the bag for the first time with the right intention. Your body’s not used to this, and it goes a little haywire trying to perform the right movements without your direct attention on it. You miss again. But you resolve that your body’s going to have to figure out for itself what it needs to do to get the thing in the hole. Over the next couple of turns you get closer and closer, and then finally you start tossing them, as if by magic, right into that hole. You still miss occasionally, but your percentage goes way up. Despite being completely obliterated the first game, you’re winning 19 to 4. Now people are watching you.

Your teammate, however, begins to choke. His attention (you guess) becomes focused on not losing the lead instead of where it should be: getting the bag in the hole. You’ll still probably win, you tell yourself, even though the other team is gaining on you quickly. All you have to do is remain calm and focused. But you can’t. You have an overwhelming urge to go to your teammate and tell him what you’ve realized (just focus on the hole), but you can’t because he’s way across the room. Your own focus slips toward your fumbling teammate. The other team dominates for ten consecutive rounds. They beat you. The tournament is two-round elimination, so you’re out.

I’m talking in the second person, but obviously this exact scenario happened to me the other night. I had fun, anyway. Surprisingly, when you lose while trying your best to have the right aim, it’s much easier to be a good sport. So I shook hands with my opponents and then I ate someone’s leftover fries.

I’ve been thinking about what I learned from that game. It snapped something into focus for me that’s been brewing for a long time. As I’ve gotten into real adulthood, past my physical prime, I’ve become a much better athlete overall. Before, I was one of those awkward, heady kids. What I didn’t realize at the time was that, yes, I was certainly thinking about things more than my average classmate. But to the extent that all that thinking was making me less able to coordinate my body toward an aim, those thoughts were the wrong thoughts. They were poor aims: fixations, often guided by the desire not to lose too badly, not to be in last place, or to not be seen a certain way, instead of aiming directly for the goal I wanted, which was to do well at the task laid before me, whatever that happened to be.

It makes sense, too, that there’s a stereotype that athletes are dumb and smart people are awkward and nerdy. This is probably mostly wishful thinking on the nerds’ part. However, the partial truth hidden in that stereotype is that if you have an excess of brainpower, you’re much more likely to get attached to bad aims that get in your own way. The cause and effect could also be reversed: if you’re a late bloomer, or have less than ideal athletic form, you could get attached to the wrong ideas purely out of resentment. Whatever the case, that roughly happened to me.

If you haven’t already seen where I’m going, this does not only have to do with sports. The idea that behaviors and subsets of behaviors have a telos, and that you should train your attention to focus on that telos, is obviously not a new idea. It’s Aristotelian. It’s also helpful that the ancient Greeks believed a powerful athletic body was not separable from a sharp and facile mind, that even your looks revealed the clarity of your habitual aims. Not perfectly, obviously. Sometimes ugly people are quite brilliant and strong (and even oddly beautiful), often precisely because they’ve had to work so hard to overcome their limitations. There are lots of counterintuitive examples, which still doesn’t disprove the rule.

It also helps me make sense of that new-agey manifestation stuff, and also why it ultimately fails on its own terms. In the simplest possible terms: if you train yourself to focus on visualizing the outcome you want (like putting the bag of corn through the cornhole or, I don’t know, a million dollars) this thing happens where, at the very least, your entire physical form and biology works with you, toward that aim, without you having to consciously guide any particular part. You no longer have to think about your fingers, or your knees, or the guy next to you, or the score. All the right neurons naturally begin to fire, the ATP is released in your muscles, your posture gets right. The extent to which everything around you also bends toward that aim is, if not deep and cosmic and magical, can at least very much seem that way because of innumerable knock-on effects. A few of which may be: people, being social animals, are very perceptive. If they perceive your intense focus on an aim by cues of body language, they may react to that as if they’re an extension of your own body, helping you achieve it. If awkwardly at first, over time with more and more unification. By focusing solely on your aim, too, you become hypersensitive to minute environmental changes, barometric pressure, wind, momentum, and new opportunities. You can react to them better in real time, because you’re not too distracted by mechanics.

Maybe it would seem to others like extraordinary luck that a gust of wind pushes your bag just where it needs to be, or that you meet the exact right person you need to get your book published. Maybe it was. Or maybe you were able to perceive some subtle shift and factored that in. This is not me trying to account for everything, but just to say that the extent to which our aims inform how the outside world engages with us, and in turn how we respond, is certainly not none, and probably a lot more than we know or could know.

The problem with manifestation is the part that goes unexamined. You never ask yourself: why is this aim important to me? If my aim is to manifest a cornhole win at any cost, for example, I could ruin a lot of other things. I could be a bad sport, ruin the friendship with my teammate, and so on. How do I know when to change my aim to let someone else win? When our aim goes bad, and we don’t know what to aim at anymore, the only thing to do is to adopt the aim to receive the right aim. You need the humility to be receptive to and adopt the right aim, given any circumstance. When you embody this meta-aim to have the right aims, you will naturally get on your knees.

This brings us to another type of overthinker: the optimizers. In reaction to the fear of not knowing the right aim or not being able to focus on it, they focus on the causal markers of those with good aims. They focus on things like testosterone, or muscle fibers, or throw mechanics. If you spend your life optimizing for measures like this, you may get your performance to well above average, but you can’t transfer that expertise to other domains. You will lack the metacognitive ability to assess a situation with gentle and open awareness, decide what the right aim is, and focus on it with the humility to realize that as you make your first attempts, your performance will vary quite wildly.

The best meta-aim, as many people have already identified, is something like the permanent humility of the beginner. This is partly why children can learn languages so quickly. They don’t have a developed enough intellect to be fearful or ashamed of their wide variance in utterances as they babble toward the telos of communication with their parents. But it still allows them to experiment broadly and therefore quickly unify their embodied actions toward their aim. Being generally good at any task you embark on requires more of this childlike openness and playfulness, mixed with focus on the desired outcome.

The task we are set with is to achieve the aims that actually occupy our hearts alone. Not the resentful knock-on aims that result from the undisclosed positive aim; itself undisclosed precisely because we’re afraid of admitting our desire to achieve it and to fail.

An even subtler danger, too, is that we can spend all this time talking about how to focus on the right aim instead of ourselves focusing on the right aim. This is an intractably personal problem. Kierkegaard said that we are constantly in denial of the freedom to be ourselves. That freedom is always singular and unique in our particular circumstances, and therefore in our aims. We would rather make ourselves into specimens, dead categories of a larger pattern, so as to deny the truth: I would actually like to win at cornhole.

If I don’t win, I’ll at least lose with clear eyes and a full heart.

“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.”
– Alain de Botton

If you want to be a writer, you have to suffer first; you need to gather plenty of experiences and adventures to publish something great. There’s no point in writing anything in your 20s. When you’re young, you aren’t wise, you’re bursting with too much energy and enthusiasm, thus you aren’t rational; you can’t produce anything original and you’re going to make plenty of mistakes. To write well, wait another 15 to 20 years, to reach complete maturity, to read enough, reflect enough, take risks, win, and fail.

This is what one of my university professors advised me, after learning that one of my “hobbies” was writing.1 I had already published a few essays on the internet and was working on my first book. In theory, I agreed with him. In practice, I kept writing. Mircea Eliade experienced the same criticism in his 20s, but in contrast with my diplomatic (cowardly?) approach, his reply was stellar: “But, Professor, if I wait another 15 to 20 years, maybe I’ll be dead by then.” And this is the truth. Not maybe. Certainly, for the person we are today will be replaced many times before we die.2

You’ll be a completely different person 15 to 20 years from now, whether you like it or not. Different energy. Different interests. You’ll read different books. Your personality will be different. Your ambitions will be different. Your projects will be different. So why delay the artistic process? People aren’t simply interested in aged wisdom, well-balanced essays and originality. They’re starving for some crazy ideas, silly mistakes and weird books. What’s the value of writing something in your 40s that you wanted to write in your 20s? Odds are you won’t produce better writings, but entirely different ones.

Naval Ravikant isn’t wrong: “Inspiration is perishable. Act on it immediately.” It’s profoundly naïve to imagine you’re going to preserve this energy for another 15 to 20 years. The chances are, it’ll transform into wild frustration or spiritual defeat.

Mircea Eliade wrote of “the power of embracing your age” – you must leverage what’s abundant in the present moment: If you’re young, leverage your optimism and cheerful soul. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to make wise decisions but rather that making “wisdom” your central personality trait is awkward when you’re 23 years old.

Nassim Taleb put it best: “Wisdom in the young is as unattractive as frivolity in the elderly.”

Whoever claims that you need to “reach maturity” to write or produce art is trying to rebrand toxic procrastination and perfectionism as virtues. Postponing your young, fertile urge to live on the edge, to connect with the sacred, to experience prolonged periods of flow for the first time in your life – this is nothing but a terrible vice. And such advice gives you more information about the one who gives it than the one who receives it. Authors who wait “patiently” until they get “wise enough” to publish often spend too much time on the editing process.3 They evaluate and restructure every single sentence, every single page; they reorder and rethink their manuscript 7 to 10 times.4 This may strike you as admirable – but, again, it is a vice masquerading as a virtue. It’s one thing to publish every now and then because you only write when you feel inspired; it’s another to publish every now and then because you waste plenty of time on the editing process. There’s a clear opportunity cost: The time you spend on the editing process is time lost on the artistic process.

There are writers who’ve been publishing for 10, 20, 30 years – but who haven’t written anything yet. They refuse to write what they think, only publishing what they think they should think. Eliade talked about why we overestimate the importance of how a book is written; what matters is who writes it: the personality, authenticity, the choice of subjects and themes, the historical context.

Only “imperfect” books defy time; books like those by Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Balzac, Dostoevsky. Perhaps some academics, journalists or professors could have written these books “better” – in terms of structure, style and comprehension. Yet human nature isn’t interested in the profane definition of perfection.

I am obsessed with a certain colon in Wolf Hall, the first of three books in the late novelist Hilary Mantel’s fictionalized life of the 16th-century English power broker Thomas Cromwell. It appears at the top of page 46 in my foxed and softened Picador paperback – the one with the bloodred cover, where the beady little eye of King Henry VIII peers out from the O in the title and the crescent-moon profile of Anne Boleyn makes the A like a cell in the Tower of London.

At this early stage, we have met Cromwell’s mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, one of my favorite literary personages, in all his glory. But now we are leaping ahead to glimpse his downfall, after his project to annul Henry’s marriage so he can wed Boleyn has failed. The dukes have come to Westminster to turn the cardinal out. They are taking away his treasure chests, his crimson robes, his gospels made of “slunk vellum from stillborn calves, reveined by the illuminator in tints of lapis and leaf-green.”

And they are taking his tapestries, “the scenes of secular pleasure: the sportive peasants splashing in ponds, the stags at bay, the hounds in cry, the spaniels held on leashes of silk and the mastiffs with their collars of spikes: the huntsman with their studded belts and knives, the ladies on horseback with jaunty caps,” and so on.

Now, that first colon is perfectly ordinary, but the second one blows my mind. You’re probably bracing yourself for a zesty defense, à la Mary Norris or John McPhee, of why it’s actually apt, or at least gives the passage a nuance unavailable by more standard means. No – in any reading I can see, it’s just plain wrong; in no way do the huntsmen and ladies constitute or exemplify the peasants and animals. It’s a random colon (not even semi!) stuck in the middle of a list, and honestly I still wonder if it’s a typo I’m reading too much into. It might bear mentioning that I edit lots of books, and thus I have an almost unseemly interest in punctuation.

It’s difficult to accidentally type a colon when you want a comma. The edition seems well edited, and Mantel’s writing was always highly controlled. I imagine it went like this: The line editor left a query – “Stick with comma?” – Mantel said she had the colon just where she wanted it and with good reason, and a note was left on the style sheet for the copy editor. The wonder of this colon doesn’t lie in its effect; the reader scans the passage as the flat series it is. It’s how boldly it represents the supreme bravado, the brazen but justified confidence, that made Mantel an all-time great stylist. The wrong colon is perfect because the book is perfect, because she willed it so, in prose so forceful and alive that it lenses grammar like gravity bending light.

There are many novels I struggled to get through because I didn’t like them enough. But Wolf Hall is the only one I had trouble finishing because I liked it too much.

I came to it idly, several years after its acclaimed publication in 2009. I’m an interested but picky historical fiction reader, often finding it too stagy or televisual, too knowing or strenuously relatable, the authors too awed by the material or eager to excite me. But the audiobook looked interesting when it came up on the Libby app, and I was about to take a road trip. Why not?

In one big way, audio is perfect for Wolf Hall, and that is narrator Simon Slater. He catches its bluff, dashing rhythms, its idiomatic derring-do, and crafts indelible voices. His Wolsey is gloriously plumped and plummy, Thomas More deliciously acidic and unctuous, Cromwell sharp and sardonic. When I finally got to the printed book, those were the voices, and they’re a big reason why I haven’t watched the BBC show. I just know that everyone will be too good-looking, leering around too significantly. Major adaptations never fail to drain something vital from books that I love, from The Lost City of Z to Gone Girl, where Gillian Flynn’s intense characters are played like they’re on ketamine. I couldn’t stand it if that happened to Wolf Hall.

But there are equally significant ways in which it’s an impossible audiobook, and for a long time, I treated it more like an album of music than a novel. I spent nearly two years listening to it, off and on, roving over some sections again and again, before I got the book and properly finished it, then on through the trilogy. Partly just wanting to bask in the cleverest scenes again, but partly because I kept losing track of the story, which melted around like shadows behind the bonfire-bright characters. This is the measure of an obsession: You can’t bear the thought of reaching the end without getting it all inside you, before whatever kind of time runs out.

I was insensible of that colon in audio form, of course, but turning to print, I realized it was part of a grand grammatical adventure in keeping us alert and off-balance. I had felt lost in the plot because the meaning, the flow, the transitions are finely woven in the text itself, which has its own peculiar rules. The POV is very slippery, an edgeless tide of third-person limited and free indirect discourse. We neither observe Cromwell across history nor inhabit his inner world, but instead we seem to ride on his shoulder, where his thoughts leak out a little. To me it’s like the reader is his conscience.

Mantel’s bespoke grammar isn’t just a caprice – it bends the whole world around Cromwell, whom she almost always calls “he,” antecedent be damned. This sows chaos in a book that is already rife with too-similar names. (“Half the world is called Thomas,” as she mentions – Cromwell, Wolsey, More – and there are way too many Marys and Annes.) This results in sentences like “but when More, a scholar revered through Europe, wakes up in Chelsea to the prospect of morning prayers in Latin, he wakes up to a creator who speaks the swift patois of the markets.” Only recently did I grasp that the pronoun means Cromwell, not More, which changes everything. After all this time, I still can’t read Wolf Hall by rote.

I won’t belabor the point by listing all the libertine colons, chancy commas and parkouring clauses, or the scenes that forsake clarity for richness and subtlety, seeming to fix us with an appraising look that says, well, you’ll figure it out, won’t you? There is a challenge to and trust in the reader that such novels often lack. The story teems with Tudors and Medicis, the Protestant Reformation and the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and all the beheadings you know so well, yet it’s how the style animates the characters that has worn my paperback into its sorry state.

Mantel was fearless in getting right up close to them. Cromwell is a genius of the daring bet, wily like Odysseus without the clownishness, a savvy lawyer who resembles “one of those squareshaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes.” This according to the cardinal, feted for “his wit, his sense of wonder and of beauty, his instinct for decorum and pleasure, his finesse,” and damned in “a great unweaving of scarlet thread that might lead you back into a scarlet labyrinth, with a dying monster at its heart.”

How historical is all of this? As a reader of history, I’d want to know, but as a reader of fiction, I don’t mind being fooled. In fact, I insist on it. With her uncompromising style, Mantel demands we pay attention and help make meaning, as history too demands of us, indifferent but bearing some silent expectation.

It’s what Wolf Hall does wrong that makes it feel right – so vivid and unfolding, so near yet strange, so enticingly realistic, and all through one person’s inspired, idiosyncratic command of the same little symbols we all share.

Marcel Duchamp married Lydie Sarazin-Levassor in June 1927. Their marriage would quickly end, with Sarazin-Levassor leaving Duchamp due to infidelity. It was not another woman who had stolen Duchamp’s heart; as far we know, he was entirely faithful by the conventional meaning of the word. We can assume that he was, in matters of sex, entirely within the bounds of his wedding vows. The problem was that his heart belonged to another from the start – not to another woman, nor to art, as you might expect, but to chess. Duchamp was so obsessed with the game that he spent his honeymoon neglecting his new bride, instead preferring to study chess problems. In a fit of jealousy, Sarazin-Levassor glued the pieces to the board while Duchamp slept.

Some have speculated that Marcel and Lydie’s marriage was one of convenience, and perhaps it was doomed from the start. They divorced within months.

Duchamp is now remembered for his contributions to art. Any survey of art history will include some mention of his Fountain and other readymades. He is a provocateur, a Dadaist, a visionary – or, for those more traditionally minded among us, a hack who exposed the shallowness of the art world. But when I think of Duchamp, I think of him hunched over the board. I think of him as a fellow chess obsessive.

His obsession paid dividends. He became a successful theorist of the game, a chess journalist and a Grandmaster. But it came at a cost: Duchamp all but abandoned his art career to devote himself to chess. Yet Duchamp did not quite see it this way – his love of chess and his love of art were one and the same. “I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists,” he told the New York State Chess Association in 1952.

The history of chess is littered with obsessives, with men and women who would spend their lives in slow, and often painful, study of the 64 squares. This raises a question: What about chess draws us to it? Why do so many choose to give their lives to the game?

I cannot remember a time when I did not know how to play chess. That is part of the game’s appeal. A child of 4 can learn how to move the pieces, and many can have a grasp of basic tactics and strategies by age 6. Certain children take to the game immediately and within a few years are regularly beating their teachers. I was not one of those children. I loved board games as a child, and my favorite game was Risk: I wanted to play war games, and I spent hours thinking of ways to best my father. I did not know at the time that chess was an ancient war game, nor did I see its mystical depths.

That came later, when I was well into adulthood. I was in my 30s, in fact. I had found a job in tech, and I soon discovered that many people at large tech companies spend a lot of their time trying to look busy. They furiously opened and maintained tickets, sent out endless emails with near-identical project updates, and did whatever they could to justify continued employment. It is easy enough to fool everyone because many of the people you’re trying to fool are trying to fool you, too. With the right volume and cadence of emails and Slack messages, you can get by for a time. But I needed something to do with my time, and so I took to chess.

It started on my phone. I would play games online, but what I really loved were puzzles. Increasingly complex positions were presented to me, labeled with something like “White to play and win.” Soon, I found chess books, and my wife gave me a small magnetic chess set I could fit in my backpack. While at the office, I would find a corner cubicle, or sometimes even a bathroom stall, and I would try my best to solve increasingly complex puzzles. I would spend hours a day looking at the board.

Chess is remarkably simple in its presentation yet infamously deep. The way a novice plays – frequently hanging pieces, failing to spot opportunities to exploit, seemingly moving pieces at random – is so distinct from the way a Grandmaster plays that it seems as if they are playing by another set of rules, moving pieces in ways a beginner cannot comprehend. But it is always the same game: 64 squares, 16 pieces on each side, placed in the same arrangement again and again. The difference is found in a Grandmaster’s ability to see the board.

A good riddle uses simple language to present a puzzle, or maybe a paradox, and when you first hear the riddle, it should seem impossible to solve. But once you have solved a riddle, the answer is obvious. So long as you remember the first time you encountered it, you will never be puzzled by it again. You can see it for what it is. A good chess puzzle is exactly the same. At first, it should seem impossible: Every possible move can be countered, and the situation can seem hopeless. Once you solve it, you see the position truly, and you see that the game could have gone no other way. The language of the riddle did not change, and neither did the position on the board. The difference is entirely within you.

This is most starkly on display when you play someone much better than you. Eventually, the better player will make an inscrutable move, a move that to the lesser player seems like a blunder. If you are not careful, you will think to yourself, How can they not see it? You’ll take the piece, hopeful for a moment that you have gained the advantage. Perhaps I can win, you’ll think. And then the response comes, and the position becomes clear to you – you can see now that you have lost.

Improving at chess is simple but never easy. The first lesson that a new player must learn is to use their time. This may seem obvious, but many middling players struggle to follow this advice. They want to reserve their time for when a position becomes complicated, perhaps thinking that they will need it in the endgame. They make their moves quickly, and they frequently blunder. Slowing down is not enough, however. You do not simply let the clock run down and magically become better. You use your time to look at the board. A chess coach – a Grandmaster, in fact – once told me that when he taught children to play chess, he told them to sit on their hands. They must learn to consider the position, to avoid making the obvious move (or, more appropriately, the obvious mistake). Sitting on their hands, they had no choice but to look, and only look, at the board.

The more time spent looking at the board, the more you can see. The complexities of the game unfold before you. A new possibility emerges in your imagination, and you begin to explore it. You are overtaken by a sense of wonder. That feeling – that experience of discovery – is what draws us to the game.

It is not known if Nietzsche ever played chess; there is no mention of it in his work, nor any by his biographers. Yet a passage in Twilight of the Idols is some of the best advice for a player who wishes to become better. Late in that book, Nietzsche identifies three tasks that require an educator, and the first one is learning to see. By default, you assume that “you have to react, you follow every impulse,” he says. You must learn “not to react immediately to a stimulus, but instead to take control of the inhibiting, excluding instincts.” These instincts allow you to postpone judgment, to avoid easy (and often wrong) categorization, and to “take stock of an individual case from all sides.” In an odd turn of phrase – for Nietzsche, at least – he calls this “the first preliminary schooling of spirituality.”

It is an odd turn of phrase because we do not associate Nietzsche with any sort of spirituality. We think he is an anti-spiritualist because he is the prophet of the Death of God. But this reaction to Nietzsche stems from the exact problem that he is trying to diagnose. We read Nietzsche as the great critic of Christianity, of theism more generally, and, of course, of traditional morality, and so we try to categorize him as opposed to any sort of spirituality. We have moved too quickly. We have reacted to an immediate stimulus. We are not truly reading him, because we are not taking stock of the case from all sides. Just as he does with virtue and meaning, Nietzsche is providing a reinterpretation of spirituality in those pages.

Was this what Duchamp attempted to do with his readymades? By sticking a urinal in an art exhibit and signing it “R. Mutt,” Duchamp provoked us into thinking about what art is. We cannot look at a urinal and admire its beauty. We do not feel overwhelmed with a feeling of the Sublime. It does not draw us closer to nature, or to God, or to greatness, as we would like our art to do. Instead, it forces us to reconsider what art can be.

The 64 squares do much the same. The simplicity of chess draws us in. We think it must be easy to play – and it is easy to play, though it is painfully difficult to play well. As you slow down, as you begin to look at each game as an individual case, you see its complexity. You see that wooden pieces on a checkerboard can create a kind of geometric art. Players often describe positions as difficult or tricky, meaning it is hard to see where to go next; sometimes, though, they look at the board and call it beautiful.

Hikaru Nakamura, one of the leading Grandmasters in modern chess, has said that the game is more fun, more enjoyable, for players who have not yet achieved a FIDE title. At 1700 ELO or so, a player will still be learning, discovering new things on the board. Becoming even a Candidate Master – which calls for a minimum ELO of 2000 – requires significant time for memorization. Aided by their astonishing capacity for memorization, the top Grandmasters can calculate extraordinarily complex lines and variations; without this memorization, a lesser player cannot hope to compete; skill and intuition will never be enough. And according to Nakamura, the game becomes less enjoyable as it becomes a matter of rote memory.

Only one American has ever held the title of World Chess Champion: Bobby Fischer. Fischer famously hated opening theory, the term used for the collective accrued knowledge of various openings in the game. So much so, in fact, that he invented a new variant of chess, which he dubbed Fischer Random. (It is now more commonly called Chess960, a reference to the number of possible starting positions.) Fischer’s disillusionment with chess was similar to Nakamura’s observation: Opening theory had led to chess becoming a game of memorization rather than discovery. You did not need to really look at the board if you were sufficiently familiar with the standard openings.

In a 2009 documentary, which premiered a year after his death, Fischer was asked if he was a better player than the legendary Paul Morphy, a 19th-century American player who was arguably the best in the world while alive: “I’m better than Morphy … I don’t say that I have more talent than him, I know much more theory. It has nothing to do with his talent.” Instead, Fischer’s advantage was his position in history. This was precisely the problem with standard chess: “Chess is a search for truth … and the truth is chess is no good anymore.” Fischer had played chess at the highest levels, had defeated the best players in the world, and then he had looked at the game and found it lacking. The mystical character of chess that I have described disappeared as the study of chess took on a more scientific character. There was nothing left to discover.

So he pioneered and championed Fischer Random. It is impossible for even the best players to memorize the opening theory of this game because there are too many variations. The human mind simply cannot hold that much information in working memory. Instead, these players must approach each game as if it is entirely new. They are forced to look at the board, to see it as a unique case. I suspect that randomized chess, when it is played at the highest levels, recaptures that mystical quality. So long, of course, as you have learned to see.

In the final decades of his life, Duchamp staged chess games in odd circumstances: life-size chess in fields, floating chess games in lakes, a game of chess with Eve Babitz that she played entirely in the nude. Taking chess out of its usual setting may have been a way to force the participants – the players and the viewers – to see the game afresh. When Duchamp displayed his readymades, ordinary objects were elevated – transformed – into art by their setting. This is art, he was saying, if you can only look at it in the right way. When Duchamp took chess out of studies and tournament halls, he revealed to the world what he had learned for himself: that what took place on the board was already art, but that we must learn to see it afresh. The game itself does not change, but Duchamp forces us to take stock of the game from all sides.

No variation in rules is required – we now can see the game in a new way.

It starts small, contained. A single-screen sandbox shaped with minor gestures: a step here, a click there. At set intervals, decisions are requested – this, or that? I weigh the trade-offs and select an option. And then another, and another, as I assemble an invisible engine with a singular purpose: more. Integers bloom on the screen in pixelated sparks, coruscating rainbows. My power grows; the sum compounds. New combinations unfold. Chaos proliferates. A crushing inevitability accelerates toward me.

And all the while, I make my little choices.

Clover Pit is a self-described “demonic lovechild of Balatro and Buckshot Roulette” that “traps players in a hell of their own creation.” Upon loading a new run I awaken in a dingy, filthy room, barely large enough to turn around in. The only door out is locked. I stand precariously above a pit, balanced on a grate threatening to collapse. The shelf before me holds a well-used ashtray and a register-sized slot machine. The red-knobbed lever extends toward me, like a handshake.

A disembodied authority barks messages at me over the intercom. I have debt, and a deadline. The solution is obvious.

“Let’s go gambling!” the slot machine chirps as I pull the lever and begin the cycle. After a few neon-soaked merry-go-rounds, a paltry sum of coins spills out. Between spins I can deposit my meager earnings, which will generate interest round to round, getting me closer to paying off the debt. It feels familiar.

I also have the option to purchase from a selection of lucky charms, objects equally at home in an occult cabinet of curios and a filthy truck-stop bathroom. The charms augment how often the various symbols appear at the slots, what they’re worth, what a given pattern scores. The ratios and multipliers are etched onto the wall, along with scrawled warnings from persons unknown. I make my decision, and I return to the machine to stare into the whirling symbols, waiting for a pattern to emerge.

Lately I find myself enamored? enthralled? entrapped? by this kind of game. The family tree includes titles such as Balatro, Vampire Survivors, Slots & Daggers, Ballionaire, and Ball x Pit. At its root is that primordial delight, synergy. But there is something else in these games that calls to me. The siren song of their species promises something just out of reach, if I would only sit and play a little longer.

Clover Pit is unabashedly more sinister than its relatives, reveling in the diabolic bargain of both money and time that the player makes with every spin. It is, strictly speaking, not gambling. Just a game about gambling. To actually gamble with my wages, I could turn to one of the many sports-betting apps now legal and available in America. Or I can instead “bet what I know,” as their slogans suggest, with prediction-market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, where I’m offered odds on everything from the final sales price of a rare Pikachu to how soon a world leader will be removed from office (and would you like the odds on alive, or dead?).1

The specifics of the wager matter little. Your trade may be in fruit or gunpowder, cardstock or curses, happiness or misery. But what these platforms and Clover Pit have made so plain, so uncomfortably naked, with their profane calculus, is the Faustian allure of a game that offers you a chance to beat the house. It’s not about riches and high scores, not really. Those are just the proof of agency reclaimed from a cruel, punishing system. This kind of game’s true power fantasy is the fantasy of power – of influence. If the odds are stacked against me, I’ll make them work for me. As it turns out, not all probabilities are created equal, if you know the right plays. The right choices. Just spot the pattern, make a few calls, and you can win back control. Better yet: an escape.

And that, I realize, is how Clover Pit has taken hold of me. It’s why I find myself playing it again and again, staring at my monitor until my eyes beg to blink and the dawn light creeps in, because I’ve cracked it, there is finally order in the chaos, a path out of the pit, an anarchic writhing pattern but a pattern just the same, something that I can shape, that responds to my hand at the helm, even as the world outside careens out of control and ever faster downward, the future and the abyss rushing to meet us. Everywhere I look, I’m locked in the pit. But this game I can beat.

Wastelands retreating into mist. Empty rooms filled with sickly dawn light. The nearly urban world seen from above, photographed from some chilly and uninquisitive perspective. Over the years I have watched Denis Villeneuve’s films, often in a state of admiration, frequently pleasantly frustrated, and always with a growing sense that I am watching a filmmaker exploring the same narrative again and again. And exploration is exactly the word for it. The writers would change, as would the cinematographer and the actors, along with the hooks and the specific details of the plot. Even so, Villeneuve would always find a way back. He would always find a way back to a restaging of the same essential scenario, as if there was always more in there to discover, or to disinter.

When his name came up in conversations, I would tell people that I thought Villeneuve always made the same story over and over, and I didn’t mean that as a slight. If anything, it’s the opposite, surely. Here is a creative person who is willing to set aside the panorama of the changing world and everything in it, to give themselves utterly to the specific thing that compels them. Here is a person drawn back, again and again, to investigating and understanding … what? Some central aspect of their own identity perhaps. Or maybe a deeply set fear. How could anyone know? And would the answer really matter?

As for this story Villeneuve would restage over and over, for a long time, I think I actually had it slightly wrong. I had spotted, I told myself, that Sicario and Blade Runner 2049, the two Villeneuves I knew the best, have what seems like similar, specific and distinctly uncommon central trajectories for their unfortunate protagonists. For starters, the apparent heroes: FBI agents and android bounty hunters by turn. There’s a quest and, for all the melancholy detailing, the promise of something that feels like adventure in both films. But then, over the course of the almost-adventure, these protagonists discover that they are not truly the protagonists. They discover that they are ultimately bit players in a wider story whose focus is somewhere else, and on someone else.

So in Sicario, FBI Agent Kate Macer is invited to join a shadowy, and perhaps quietly illegal, interagency task force combating drug traffic across the border between the U.S. and Mexico. But as events become more chaotic and deadly, Kate starts to question her role, before being told – and in a film filled with torture and executions, this feels like a peculiarly cruel blow – that her actual role is, in effect, purely bureaucratic. The CIA requires the involvement of the FBI if they’re allowed to operate within U.S. borders. She’s not an asset to the team so much as she’s a piece of box-ticking and rubber-stamping, an annoying quirk of complex checks and balances. In truth, everyone else thinks she’s in the way.

Meanwhile, in Blade Runner 2049, K, an android who hunts down other androids, uncovers historical evidence for something this future world has long believed was impossible: an android who was able to conceive and give birth. Navigating by his own seemingly implanted childhood memories, K starts to suspect that he is the child who was born in this unique scenario, which would mean that the memories he cherishes are actually real. Eventually, however, his dreams of singularity are crushed by an offhand comment from an ally. He learns that the child in question was a girl. And she grew up to be the creator of artificial memories for androids. It’s her memory that she gave to K, and the best he can hope for with the remainder of his artificial life is to create the opportunity for a meeting between father and daughter. The best he can hope for is to get out of the way of other, more consequential people.

There is a thrill to pattern-spotting in art, and for a while I was sure I had found one. In one film to the next, Villeneuve would pick his projects and arrange his material to deliver yet another strange hymn to the sad nobility of being insignificant. Villeneuve seemed fascinated by those cognitive biases in which we place ourselves, against all odds, at the center of events.

But then I watched more of his films, and the picture deepened a little. I watched Arrival and Prisoners and a movie called Enemy that I had utterly missed on its initial release. I mused on his work on Dune. I still felt Villeneuve was restaging some crucial repeating narrative in each, but the narrative itself became broader. I see now that in Sicario and Blade Runner 2049 I had found a subcategory of his compulsions. His wider theme, I think, is much simpler and much more universal. Villeneuve is fascinated by misperception.

And as themes go, misperception can creep up on you. I should know. I was three-quarters of a way through writing my first book, a memoir, when I discovered that the story I was telling was not what I thought it was. That’s something to realize when you’re writing your own life story. Rather, the real story the book was telling was exactly the fact that nothing was what I had thought it was. This wasn’t the hero’s journey: It was a minor repetition of Don Quixote, the supreme work of misperception, in which the hero’s role is to mis-see, misunderstand, misinterpret, for our delight and education.

And returning to Sicario and Blade Runner 2049, this is now very clear from the off. Both films concern investigators who are ultimately wrong-footed by the mysteries that are unfolding about them. And both have only tentative holds on the real world in the first place. Sicario’s Kate Macer is a contained and quietly nomadic presence within the film: She’s happy to switch departments to pursue justice, happy to disappear back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico, and what little we see of her apartment and her friendships suggests she has little purchase on the world, little to provide her with the wider context a person surely needs to see things as they are.

K from Blade Runner 2049 is an even flimsier presence: an ersatz human with an ersatz girlfriend whom he is unable to touch, because she is nothing more than a light projection. Her name is Joi, and one of the film’s antagonists is named Luv. So K is surrounded by knockoff emotions in the same way that his head is filled with copies of someone else’s memories. How can he make sense of anything at the center of such an artificial scenario?

Both protagonists move somnambulantly through films that take a surprisingly long time to tell sparse if not entirely simple stories. They both get away with their twists, which are based on the central characters’ misreading of things, because they dovetail their heroes’ delusions with the audiences’ prejudice about the way things should surely unfold. “You imagined it was you?” K is asked when he learns that he is not remarkable. We all imagine it was us. We all wish it was us.

Moving outward from these two films, it’s not hard to see Villeneuve’s protagonists as witnesses as much as dynamic forces in their own rights – witnesses who consistently struggle to understand what they have seen. Even when they act, they probably shouldn’t have. Dover, from Prisoners, is a man whose daughter has gone missing, so he leaps into action, making a prisoner of a person who clearly didn’t take her, a man with learning disabilities, and then torturing him for most of the film’s length.

“Why are you making me do this?” Dover asks of his own prisoner, suggesting that he sees himself as a prisoner, fated to do the bizarre thing that he has done. But he is a prisoner of misperception, which may be worryingly similar to fate in this particular universe. “What if you’re wrong?” another grieving father asks him at one point. But Dover can’t even imagine such a thing. Just as he probably couldn’t explain why his own religious belief must work double-duty for him, as a means of achieving total certainty and a source of unknowable life-giving mystery.

Total certainty. Yet even from about 15 minutes into his plan, it’s clear that Dover has made a mistake. Over time it becomes yet clearer that he is, perhaps unwittingly, putting his victim through the same sorts of things he must fear that his daughter is being put through elsewhere.

And in the end of the film, he has a singular moment of insight into the true identity of the killer, who turns out to be the mother figure of the man he has kidnapped. But when he rushes to her house, instead of launching a heroic third-act rescue, he finds himself kidnapped and imprisoned in turn. It’s a terrifying fate, but also an entirely fitting one: He reaps what he has sown, perhaps. But it’s also thrillingly ridiculous. A man who understands nothing may go to his grave because he finally got something right.

(Prisoners’ story is ultimately wrapped up by a police officer who makes almost as many mistakes as Dover does, incidentally, and who solves the case, such as it is, by something that feels queasily similar to luck.)

I’m tempted to see two of the three Villeneuve films I saw most recently as opening out the question of misperception a little, unmooring it from their protagonists’ perspectives and letting it float around the world and settle elsewhere.

In Arrival, aliens come to earth and humanity must try to interpret their intentions, which means learning their peculiar language. It’s a beautiful film, and also a daringly inert one. If Villeneuve’s protagonists are often witnesses, in Arrival, they’re part of an actual audience. Aliens bring them into their ship and essentially stand them in front of a movie screen on which they then try to make themselves understood. While the hero, a linguist, eventually cracks the code, the wider world takes every opportunity to misunderstand it, bringing the planet close to the brink of a new world war.

It’s a reminder, perhaps, that when you’re wrong, the most dangerous thing you can do is something. All roads seem to lead to war for the global military in Arrival, just as most of the actions taken by Dover and the police officer in Prisoners tend to make things worse rather than better. The real monsters in Villeneuve’s films don’t come from space. They’re normal people who have picked up the deadly notion that they can be certain about the way things are.

Compared to Arrival – compared to all the other films I’ve discussed here – Enemy is a far smaller story. It’s about a man who discovers he shares his town with a doppelgänger. Then they meet. And things get steadily worse from there.

Even though Enemy is a relatively early Villeneuve – it’s from 2013, putting it after Prisoners but before Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 – it feels like the director, cribbing loosely from a José Saramago novel, has found a way to explore misperception in the most open-ended of all ways. Every conceivable thing in Enemy could be the result of misperception. Are the two protagonists truly identical? Is there actually two of them, or is this some kind of psychic break or fugue we are witnessing?

As the film unfolds, the people around them become confused: the wives and girlfriends and mothers. By the end of the film, the audience themselves may have lost track of which is which, as both men seek to infiltrate each other’s opposing lives, perhaps sensing that they have found the negative space of their own choices and temperament.

Enough of this muddling. Whatever the specifics of the story, and whatever treatment of misperception Villeneuve is offering, he does provide an unusual number of ways for the audience to orient themselves – at least with the knowledge that this is all the work of the same creator. Time and again his films offer delicate visuals paired with scripts of surprising bluntness. Arrival is a sensitive film despite the fact that its characters completely forgo subtext and chat about huge ideas – maths, language, love, time – with little attendance to the rhythms of genuine human speech. It’s a movie about the way that language works, and yet to hear it is to hear language of total falsity. And somehow, despite this, it’s gloriously affecting.

He’s also fond of treating everything as if it’s science fiction, showing how easily our perceptions can be muddled. In Sicario, Roger Deakins’ camera silently ghosts over Mexico before framing an Arizona suburb from high above, rendering it as precarious as a Martian outpost. He also likes to visualize his characters’ misunderstandings in neat ways. Circular labyrinths abound, from the recurring spiral motif of Prisoners to the protein farms of Blade Runner 2049 and the alien writing system of Arrival. Enemy’s city is perhaps the true villain of its story: endless mazes of identical concrete where people must somehow live and work, all of it pulled together with a spider’s web of tramlines. It’s a reminder that the best protagonist for these kinds of worlds is always lost, wrong-footed and looking for direction. Villeneuve should be making The Odyssey.

Perhaps he has already made it, in a manner of speaking. What would a Villeneuve film about trying to get home look like? It might look a lot like Incendies, the film of his I’ve watched most recently but which, having come out in 2010, predates Prisoners. Incendies is based on Wajdi Mouawad’s play of the same name, and focuses on a brother and sister. Upon their mother’s death these two siblings are dispatched by the instructions in her will to deliver two letters to people they have never met. One is to their true father and the second is to their brother, whom they were entirely unaware of while their mother was alive.

Through the course of the film, we uncover the mother’s story alongside them, from her youth in the Levant, where a bitter civil war is raging, through the birth of a son who had to be given away for adoption and into the heart of an uprising movement. She is sent to prison for assassinating a local politician, and in prison she is raped by a torturer and becomes pregnant. At the end of the film, the siblings learn that, through circuitous twists of fate, the man who raped their mother is also the son she had to give up for adoption. Their missing brother is their missing father, and both letters are for the same man.

It’s an astonishing film, switching seamlessly from one era to the next and soundtracked, for the most part, by little more than footsteps or car tires crunching on gravel. Its central coincidences feel less like implausibilities and more like profound verdicts on the forces of war that toss people around in wild eddies in their wakes. And even here, in the script for a play that Villeneuve helped adapt, misperceptions abound. But we also get the removal of misperceptions. By the end, we get the truth.

And so the mother and son do not recognize one another when they meet in prison. The siblings, however, slowly come to untangle their mother’s hidden life and strip the fog of history back until the truth of their own lives becomes horribly apparent. In one central scene, which may be among Villeneuve’s very best, the sister finds herself in a house filled with friendly women whose language she cannot speak. Once they find out who she is, the friendliness disappears and she’s confused by the enmity and rejection she suddenly faces.

She’s come to the house in search of her father, but her journey is muddled in ways she does not yet understand. “You’re looking for your father, but you don’t know who your mother is,” she’s told before she leaves. To add to the stacked tiers of confusion, the man she is looking for at the time will eventually turn out to be her father’s father rather than her own.

But Incendies ends on a note of hope, or something very like hope. And it’s perhaps the Villeneuve film where we get the clearest message about why the fight against misperception matters, despite the brutal costs involved. The siblings’ mother wants her children – all of them – to understand who they are and how their lives are connected. This is necessary to “break the chain of anger,” as she puts it. It’s a chain that extends beyond the Greek tragedy of the central family and out into the wider world with its civil wars and prisons and torturers.

The siblings eventually make it home, in the sense that by the end of the film they know who they are and how they got to this point. This is The Odyssey seen at an extreme angle: through hardship and the occasional kindness of strangers, a chance at some kind of peace.

As for Villeneuve, instead of adapting Homer after completing Dune – a series that famously builds up a singular hero purely to prove how dangerous and wrongheaded singular heroes are – he’s off to make James Bond. It’s a strangely tantalizing prospect. Bond the action hero is fine, but Bond the spy feels perfectly placed to allow Villeneuve to continue muddying truth and expectation. After all, in films like Sicario and Blade Runner 2049, if you stare long enough at the patterns, you’ll see that their protagonists’ misperceptions do not completely diminish them, but make their eventual revelations more powerful. Their lives are deepened by the act of understanding that misperception allows for. If that isn’t the best possible thing to take from the shadow world of espionage, what is?

I thought that trying too hard was my natural state of being. That I’d never been and never would be a natural at anything except being a striver. I’d earned all I had from sweat equity – not an ounce of natural talent or beauty or charm. I was blonde because I spent $600 every six weeks to get my roots done. I was tan because of some vile smelling substance that came out from the bottle olive green and foamy. I was thin and strong because I ate less than I wanted and worked my ass off. Through effort, I could make myself perfect. As long as I could try too hard forever, all of this would continue to be true. I’d always tried too hard and I hadn’t stopped yet.

And besides, my job was stupid. It could never overwhelm me. Burnout was the kind of thing you got from squinting into the blue-light glow of a computer screen, checking your emails first thing when you woke up in the morning, balancing budgets and meeting strangers on Zoom. I watched my friend Havana have a full-on mental breakdown, the squiggly tendrils of her nerve endings exposed like the wires of a chewed-up phone charger, brought on by her graduate internship at the Academy Museum. Havana would come to happy hour on Wednesdays at the Cozy Inn and say nothing, gazing catatonic at the scruffy men playing pool as she drained tequila sodas one after another, drained them like her job had drained her. I would go home and thank God for a job that required only a quarter of my brain.

And maybe a fragment of my soul every once in a while, like coins fed into a parking meter, a slow drip death I didn’t notice until my pockets were empty.

Every day for work, I ride a bicycle to nowhere. I stand before a long hall of mirrors, back turned towards my own reflection, pedaling off into the ever receding distance. I hold court from my stationary throne, doling out hollow motivational sound bites.

My courtiers, my consorts, are a revolving door of women adorned in too much gold jewelry, lacking in some higher purpose besides that of maintaining the eminently fuckable condition of their bodies. Their eyes are hungry, empty, bewigged with spiderleg tendrils of lash extensions; their spray-tanned bodies slick and hairless, sealskin shiny; their highlights tasteful, whispering of currency held in offshore accounts – old money, money pieces, quiet luxury.

As a girl, glutted on waterstained Teen Vogue magazines my mother brought home from her job at a free clinic, I would make myself sick wishing for what this type of woman must have had. $400 prom dresses and monogrammed sweatshirts. Tennis lessons and bracelets and skirts – all the trappings of tennis, really, though I never wanted to play the game. I dreamed, with my thighs sweat-stuck to the plastic chair on the porch of our trailer, about a summer home in the Hamptons.

For a long time, I’d thought everything was going according to plan. I had the job.

My apartment in West Hollywood was all white, soft focus natural lighting, like heaven in the movies. And I had him.

Even just saying his name was effortless. Judah. It’s sexy, tossed off, the way you don’t even have to close your mouth at the end. Like one long groan of ecstasy. It feels good to say. Judah. I had begun to suspect, quietly, privately, that he was going to save me. Like the sigh of relief that was his name, his money, his social standing, the gorgeous blue snaking veins of his forearms, they were all going to be the end of some kind of lifelong suffering. As if being poor was a house on fire, and he was the fireman’s hose. He was going to put out the flame.

There was a tacit understanding between us, an unwritten casting call that described my part and the girl who would play it. All I had to do to earn my place next to him was to stay thin, stay desirable.

My mother drove a Ford Taurus that was born before I was, floorboards littered with empty cans of Slimfast. When I was young, I didn’t understand why she drank them. She’d always been thin – part genetics, part empty refrigerator. But now I am older, and I see it all too clearly. She wasn’t drinking a thin, watery meal replacement. She was drinking dreams, assurances. She had learned the same lesson as all American women, raised on a steady diet of Baywatch and Bowflex commercials – that in order to be loved, to be made worthy, you must address the issue of your body. Love, or the potential for it, lived in thinness, in the shadows and gaps around your waist, between your thighs. The best thing you could do, the most feminine, was to glamorously half-exist.

I’d internalized that lesson at my mother’s knee, or maybe in the corner of our tiny, carpeted living room, watching her follow a Jane Fonda tape, huffing and puffing without air conditioning, immediately walking to the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door and encircling her waist with her hands, willing her flesh to shrink at her touch.

I thought I’d cracked the code when I got my job. I could earn money and the thing that truly mattered, a body worth coveting, all in just eight hours a day. And my body was my billboard, too. There was good reason to show it off. Every time I drew the attention of a woman in the Whole Foods on Lincoln Boulevard, I had a card in my wallet ready to hand out, a mantra ready to offer, a variation on the prayers I’d been hearing since childhood. For just one monthly payment of 899.95, you too can have this ass. Look good enough, and some man will come along and save you.

At first, it was so easy. You just spin your wheels.

And then one day, it becomes a crisis.

Another Wednesday at the Cozy Inn. Havana and I haven’t talked in a while. She is deep in the throes of a new relationship, nine months in and incapable of talking about anything else but him.

She walks in shrieking, holding out her left hand. A fat white diamond glitters from her finger, inches above ragged cuticles and unpainted nails.

I shriek too. Outwardly, it is a screech of joy. Inwardly, it is something else.
Havana is beautiful, special in her own way. She has wild curly hair and a brilliant mind.

She does not work out. For my one tequila soda, nursed over two hours until it is bitter, watery, nothing, she drinks three full sugar rum and cokes.
And yet, despite this apparent unworthiness, here she is flaunting the evidence that she has found love. I have defined obliques and lukewarm sentiments from a man I have dated for four years.

At work the next day, I am eager to pedal off this strange feeling, bubble guts and sweaty palms and a heart that is racing like I am being chased. Cardio has always been my cure all. Exercise will fix me, like it always has.
My mind, so often blissfully blank atop the bike to nowhere, fills with vast red questions. Isn’t spinning your wheels a bad thing? Isn’t spinning your wheels what happened when you were stuck in the mud, unmoving on some road you didn’t want to be on?

The next morning, Judah and I have our first ever fight.

Lying in bed on my all-white Egyptian cotton sheets, I see him stirring. I arrange my hair, fanning it out across the pillows in perfect tendrils, as if I just woke up looking like a woman in a Renaissance painting. Something I do every day. I am considering, in every moment, how to offer him the perfect picture. The ideal experience. I am struck by a pang of sadness, an ache like hunger in my heart. Does he do the same for me?

He rolls over, a slow, lazy smile spreading across his immaculate face.

“Would you still love me if I was fat?”

The smile evaporates instantly. “This is how we’re starting the day?”
“Would you?” I know that my role here is to sell him a fantasy. To be perfect and beautiful and patient and yet. Suddenly, I don’t care. The effort in me has evaporated overnight, the give-a-shit reservoir all dried up by the laser beam light of the diamond on Havana’s finger.

“Honestly?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I would have to see it first.”

“Are you fucking kidding me, Judah?”

“Did you want me to lie?”

“No. I wanted it to be true that you would.”

I walk to work. I think about what Judah said. I think about the opposite side of the coin of all that my mother taught me. Without my body, I am nothing. Unlovable. I think about Sisyphus and the rock. How the bike to nowhere makes me no different. Sisyphus with a perfect ass.

I get on the bike to nowhere and begin to shout commands. My body enters a type of fugue state. I become a channel for a higher power – the great God of motivational posters. I imagine opening my mouth and speaking with the voice of a little kitten hanging from a tree branch. “Hang in there,” I yell, “just 90 more seconds in this climb.” My legs spin in pointless circles. I think of how people got exercise back in the pioneer days. Doing useful things with their hearty bodies, things that were necessary for their survival.

“Why are we doing this?” I think. And then I realize that the thought has come out of my mouth and through the little headset microphone that used to make me feel like Britney Spears.

“Because it makes us stronger!” yells a woman in the front row who is here once a day, her gold pendant bouncing in the slick space between her fake breasts.

Her reply spins in my head, filling me with fury, red rising like mercury on a thermometer. It was a rhetorical fucking question. It creeps up on me like a teakettle boiling. A scream that forces its way out through my mouth, into the microphone. A primal, throaty scream.

The women facing me, the Lycra-clad lithe bodies on the dozen or so stationary bicycles, begin to scream too. We all continue to scream until we run out of breath.

I am on the bike to nowhere, and I am quiet. We are in the midst of a brutal climb, the motivational phrases that spill from my lips like vomit forgotten.

An impulse flashes through my mind, a breaking news bulletin.
My phone is connected to the speakers in the room. All at once my relationship with Judah has become a wool turtleneck a size too small. Something I am desperate to get out of, choked and itchy and so, so angry.

I am still in the bike-to-nowhere induced fugue state, still sleep walking as I call him.

“Are you ready to kiss and make up?” he answers, the bass of his voice thundering through the speakers of the cycle studio.

“I deserve better than this,” I say. “Be out of my apartment before I get home. Take all your things.”

“But Summer I–” I hang up the phone. I turn on the cooldown song and stay silent. The room follows suit. When the legion of Lycra-clad women are exiting the studio, I hear them talking to each other. “She just doesn’t give a fuck, does she?”

“I can’t decide if I respect her or if I pity her.”

Me neither.

I go home and I do not shower for three days. I cry and my mascara leaks down in rivers of black. I leave it there. I look in the mirror at the greasy, multi-colored mess of my face, my filthy hair, the strange far away look in my eyes. It is the first time I can remember not finding something wrong with my reflection.

In the past year I’ve written three long profiles about contemporary novelists tackling self-consciously huge projects where the scope and heft of the book is a major component of the book, whether it’s a sprawling geopolitical network of CIA operatives (William T. Vollmann’s 3,400-page A Table for Fortune), an epic about nine characters dealing with supernatural forces and climate change (Mark Z. Danielewski’s 27-volume The Familiar), or the intersection of working-class life, eternity and fourth-dimensional physics (Alan Moore’s 1,200-page Jerusalem). Authors that embark on this sort of thing usually only do so in the middle or late part of their career, after accumulating enough accolades that some publisher is willing to take the risk.

But the resulting novels tend not to do very well.

Vollmann’s book isn’t out yet, but Danielewski’s novel was canceled after five volumes (he’d written and submitted the first 10; volume 5, at least in the UK, sold just over 200 copies), and Moore’s Jerusalem, according to Bookscan, has sold roughly 12,000 copies in 10 years; not terrible, but surprising when compared to his most recent novel, The Great When (only 300 pages), which has sold that many copies in its first year.

Polonius tell Laertes that brevity is the soul of wit. Mark Twain (allegedly) apologized for having written such a long letter by saying he didn’t have time to write a short one. George Saunders said that humor is telling the truth in fewer words than people expect.

But brevity’s also an indicator of mastery – a sparse style, if it’s eloquent and well crafted, has allusive qualities. It gives the feeling of having been edited toward something. There’s a glimmer of intentionality.

Nick Hornby challenged the sanctity of a sparse style in his (ongoing!) column for The Believer, c. 2003, in which he mentions reading David Copperfield for the first time, Charles Dickens’s longest novel, and celebrates how expansive it is, how indulgent, with special emphasis on a scene in which young Copperfield is freezing on a sidewalk, trying to sell his coat to a drunk old man. The scene’s funny, sad, cozy and embracing and fun, is Hornby’s point, even though he can’t imagine a modern novelist getting it into the final draft of their book.

“[T]here’s some stuff about the whole winnowing process that I just don’t get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words … I’m sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all?”

One argument for brevity is that a book, if it’s short, suggests a more hospitable and potentially more skilled or focused work; something with a clearer message.

But a short book could just as well signal that the writer doesn’t actually have that much to say. That they’ve taken some tepid ideas and stretched them to a marketable size.

One way of testing this theory is to open a book by a celebrity or influencer (especially if it pertains to money). Hold it open on a table at any random page. Then, right beside it, open a novel or a Lincoln biography or something that was written by a writer. Note the difference between line spacing and margin size. The amount of white space. The memoir (or get-rich book) is literally filled with air.

So brevity’s obviously not a foolproof signal of value.

This year the journalist C. M. Kushins published a biography of the crime writer Elmore Leonard.

I love Elmore Leonard’s work. I think Kushins does too.

The bio is well reported. It collects facts and pins them on a clothing line and the reader walks out into the yard with her trench coat collar popped against the wind and she looks at those facts, in a left-to-right sequence, and gleans a narrative. After 400ish pages I had learned the whole sequence of major events in Elmore Leonard’s life. A difficult assembly! Takes talent. The sentences were clear and I was never confused.

But I also quit caring at some point, which was weird because as a thirtysomething retail-worker with an English degree I tend to put writers like Elmore Leonard on pedestals high enough they come with a parachute. By the end of the book I felt I had a real grasp of Leonard’s professional trajectory, which previously I had not, and it was interesting to know that he was a recovered alcoholic, and a half-interested Catholic, and it was fascinating that the author was sharing never-before-seen excerpts from the unfinished memoir of one of America’s great literary stylists – but I didn’t understand him any better as a person or an artist.

If Gay Talese or Martin Amis or Zadie Smith had gotten lunch with Elmore Leonard, then written a 5,000-word profile about the stories he told, and the mannerisms employed while telling them, we’d likely know him better than we do by the end of the biography.

Or at least we’d feel that we did.

The kind of book that’s really got me thinking about this is the thousand-page novel or multivolume history/biography that takes decades to write.

Publishers don’t like to release thousand-page books. More paper, more ink and sturdier binding means these things cost a lot to produce, which means the jacket price goes up, which means that prospective readers will be turned away by the cost (which only compounds the deterrence of its intimidating size).

Literary agents aren’t thrilled about thousand-page novels, either, because it’s hard to turn a profit.

It’s one thing to believe, as an author, that your story is important; it’s another to believe that your story is so good, and every passage so valuable, that it transcends the advice of experts, and the norms of the market, and deserves 30-plus hours of a reader’s time.

It is an objectively foolish thing for a professional author to embark on.

But sometimes they’re right.

A big book implies self-assurance. It tells you, by merit of just sitting there at such a size, I am worth the time it would take you to read three books on three different subjects.

Jonathan Franzen writes that the effect of a great novel is “to bring us into lives not our own, and the longer the book, the greater the chance of immersion.” His contemporary Donna Tartt is one of the most celebrated novelists of her generation, producing only three (large) novels in 30 years, most recently The Goldfinch (771 pages). Tartt has said, “I write the kind of books that I like to read, long books that keep me in the same imaginal space and with the same characters for a long time and that take over a big portion of my inner life, including my dream life.” Another contemporary, Michael Chabon (whose 639-page The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001), said that he hoped, while writing a huge novel of his own, that it would feel, to contemporary (mostly adult) readers, the way big books had felt to him as a kid: inviting, immersive, a different world in which the reader can disappear.

Franzen, Tartt, and Chabon were all brought up in the 1970s and it’s an easy rebuttal to say that the reason they’re so in love with books is that they were raised at a time with less media and fewer distractions – a world more conducive to the immersive reading of long novels. Maybe their brains are just wired differently.

Within the span of a dozen years, each released huge novels, 600-800 pages, that were critically and commercially successful.

Go to Goodreads and check out the reader reviews for each book: Readers describe that slow, immersive experience of the sort their authors hailed.

But what if these books were even longer? If each were freighted with an extra 180 or 230 exceptionally good pages, tipping them into the thousand-page realm, how might their reception have been different? Even with the prizes and the celebrity book club endorsements and film adaptations. As hypnotic and lyrical and propulsive as they currently are, page by page – how many people would be deterred by the size of the house before checking out its rooms?

H. W. Brands is a historian and biographer. He’s been teaching for half a century. Author of 30 books. Two-time Pulitzer finalist.

When I interviewed him about his best-selling biography of Ronald Reagan, I mentioned that what I loved most about his approach to the material was that, on page 30, the man is 30 years old. It moves.

We talked about being disciplined as a historian, how to lock your sights on the exact parameters of your topic, keep your story from digressing; we talked about the task of literary portraiture, too, of capturing the details of a subject’s life and times and the intersection of the two.

That’s when Robert Caro came up – a model practitioner in both of these forms.

In 1974, after nearly a decade of research and travel and interviews, Robert Caro released The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses, a kingmaker in New York City public planning. As Caro illustrates, the guy was basically a gangster. One of the most powerful men in NYC for 40 years without getting elected to anything. Moses resisted Caro for years. Told people in his inner and outer circles not to speak with any young reporter who might come around. After three years he relented and granted Caro a few personal interviews. When Caro asked difficult questions, he was shunned once again. When the book was released, Moses insisted it was filled with lies, but could point to none. “It is slightly absurd, but typical of Robert Moses,” Caro told The New York Times in ’74, “to label as ‘without documentation’ a book that has 83 solid pages of single-space small-type notes and that is based on 17 years of research, including 522 separate interviews.”

The weight of the book – the heft of it in your hand, the diligence of its reporting and the scope of what Caro excavates with his research – lends it a prestige beyond its literary qualities. This is the brutally lighted exposure of a viciously private person who’d avoided scrutiny for decades.

The strange magic of The Power Broker, as with Caro’s later projects, is that the book you’re holding in your hands (which is, as the title suggests, not just about one person but about the network of political power in which he operated) not only documents, in lavish detail and beautiful prose, what this fiercely private villain was like, as he displaced people, or betrayed them, or destroyed their reputations … we also realize that the act of reading this account is exactly the sort of comeuppance he would have hated most: to be scrutinized like this, have his legacy taken from him and recast, in brutal light, by this humble-seeming young reporter who chose, out of conscientious dedication, to spend seven years exposing him.

The more we read, the more we want to exact some kind of punishment on Moses.

The more we read, the greater punishment we are exacting on Moses.

Robert Caro, with his editor Bob Gottlieb, cut 300,000 words from The Power Broker’s million-word manuscript – not because they were bad, as Gottlieb was forever at pains to point out (mainly because Caro, at 90, has clearly not made peace with it), but because the final product, at 1,226 pages, was all the sheets that could be bound together in a single volume at the time. “I can make people interested in Robert Moses once,” Gottlieb said, when Caro suggested the book be split into two volumes. “I can’t get them interested twice.”

In the 50 years since its release, Caro has been working almost exclusively on a biography of President Lyndon Johnson. It started as a trilogy in 1982. The first installment is nearly 1,000 pages and covers the first 30-odd years of Johnson’s life. He only lived 64 years.

But then Caro’s research started to creep. Volume 2 covered only seven years. Volume 3, at 1,200 pages, covers a decade. What began as a three-volume work expanded to four. But in the fourth one he became infatuated with Bobby Kennedy as a foil for Lyndon Johnson. So that one becomes almost a dual biography and ends pretty abruptly.

Now, age 90, Caro claims to have written nearly 1,000 pages for the fifth volume.

Brands sees a flaw in Caro’s greatness: “If a student asks me to suggest a book that’ll teach them about Lyndon Johnson,” he told me, “I’m not going to tell them to read Caro’s biography.” It’s too huge. Too granular in its detail.

Indeed, as Caro himself kinda suggests, it’s hardly a “biography” except that this is the closest word we have for it. Volume 3, Master of the Senate, is as much a portrait of Lyndon Johnson as the senate itself; volume 4, Path to Power, is as much a portrait of Lyndon Jonson as vice president as it is a portrait of the vice presidency.

Caro’s work is something in between history and biography; it’s one medium as a vehicle for the other, or it’s both at once. Or some third thing. An artfully neurotic absorption of all material pertaining to this pivotal historical figure, as filtered through the mind of a brilliantly obsessive writer. The literary equivalent of a 12-minute guitar riff.

These books are as much about Caro as anything else.

Another complicating factor in any author’s quest to write a huge book is, coincidentally, the thing that maybe prompts the idea in the first place: the fact that they’re going to die.

Cormac McCarthy was still working on his final novel, The Passenger, 40 years after he started it. He was almost 90 years old. In and out of cancer treatments. Different from the person who’d embarked on that sprawling project in the 1980s when he made little money and worked on his fiction to the exclusion of all else. As his biographer Tracy Daugherty said via email:

“He would often eat at a Luby’s on Mesa Avenue in El Paso. People would approach his table and ask for an autograph. He’d politely decline. Once, a reporter flew all the way from England to speak to him. This guy tracked Cormac to Luby’s. Cormac apologized, said he knew the fellow had come a long way, but an interview was something he just couldn’t do. The reporter flew home.”

Later in life, diminished by illness and needing company as he never had before, this project that’d consumed so much time and effort, piecemeal over the decades, was at risk of never landing.

While profiling McCarthy’s deathbed push to finish the novel, I found that sources close to him resisted any suggestion that The Passenger was incomplete (everything he wanted in the book is there in the book), but all agreed that, had he been in better health, he would have done another couple drafts.

In my reporting on William T. Vollmann’s 3,400-page opus, A Table for Fortune, I was told what Vollmann himself has since confirmed to The Wall Street Journal: His cancer had come back, it was terminal, and he’d seek no further treatment. Hence the writing of the book, as well as its editing, would be conducted against the clock.1

It’s another reality of writing huge books that they take a long time to read. The long road to publication will therefore be met mostly with silence. Even among critics, since they’re likely taking a flat rate to review the book, and the more hours it takes to read something, the less they’re being paid per hour. So they’ll turn down the gig, or, worse yet, they’ll skim, look for the gist, and review it anyway.

The response will be slow in coming, if it’s sincere; the first one will almost always be suspect. It’s a recipe for letdown.

So if the question we’re asking ourselves is “What’s the punchy, coherent argument for why big books are a decisively good thing,” the answer is that there probably isn’t one – the benefits and drawbacks of a gigantic book that takes you months to read are experiential. They contain multitudes. They ramble, they digress, they negate themselves and make you sad and bring you up high and make you sad again, an emotional yo-yo effect that lasts for months, but at the end of it neither one of those feelings prevails – what you get, instead, is some larger and more rewarding feeling of relation with this thing, or these characters inside it, or the authorial consciousness on the other side of it that kinda mirrors the most meaningful personal relationships we have in life: They’re complicated, they’re long, more meaningful than the sum of their highs and lows.

In the literary tradition – and yes, our current moment is tethered to it – huge books endure as mutual leaps of faith, between writer and reader, toward the same single point of sustained quiet and contact.

The odds of a payoff are often remote, but we keep on doing it, through the generations, like a meditation or prayer, a humble gesture, involving us both but aimed at some larger thing.

For years I have had a recurring dream: I am woken in the night by a booming knock. I stumble through my room in the dark and make my way downstairs to the door. The stairs lead from a split-level loft down into an open, high-ceilinged den. Moonlight spills in through a window wall, which opens to a stilted deck that looks out over the backyard.

The details are always the same. The style of the home is modern rustic, and I can see the coniferous trees of the mountains, an impenetrable wall of hemlock and fir sloping off into the distance through the window wall. I reach the bottom of the stairs and turn around towards the front of the house. I walk through the den into a small foyer toward the front door. Crystals of ice collect around the threshold gap and creep slowly across the floor like a shadow cast by the setting sun. With a cool burn beneath my feet, I open the door into the blackest hour of night. A spotlight shines from out of view. The flat ground, colored the blue-black of solid ice, stretches as far as I can see. The howl of the wind beats against my ears, nearly deafening me. Through the flurried haze, a hooded figure in a black cloak stands beneath the spotlight. I can’t make out its face, but I feel its eyes meet mine from beneath the hem of the hood. It beckons. Across the frozen earth, I follow. We are eventually swallowed by darkness.

Emerging from the pure dark, I step into a familiar scene. An empty beach at low tide, lit by the flat white light of a giant, papery moon. The sky is uncannily clear, and a warm breeze carries the sweet, nostalgic scent of summer. I feel at once that I’ve been here before. At the beachhead, a warped palm swoops long and low, forming a natural bench. The hooded figure is sitting there. I approach the tree, clamber up its goosenecked trunk and sit down next to it. We watch the tide gently ebb in silence. The figure turns to face me, but I see nothing beneath the darkness of the hood. It reaches out and places its hand on my shoulder, and I wake up.

From the moment I first awoke from this dream, I knew the beach: Destiny Islands from the 2002 game Kingdom Hearts. The shadowed figure was cloaked in robes similar to those worn by members of the game’s mysterious Organization XIII. I knew who it was, too.

If you’ve played Kingdom Hearts, you know that you leave Destiny Islands quickly. A wave of shadow sweeps your friends away, and you set out to try and get them back.

From the start, though, it is clear that these quaint shores are too restrictive for you to remain there for long. This place was designed to be left behind; to linger in the shared memory of its characters as an everlasting symbol of unspoiled youth. Your time there with them is brief, but the two-hour tutorial zone is steeped in the sweet sadness of impending change. This is the beach at high tide. When these waves return to the sea, life as you know it will be swept away with them no matter how desperately you try to cling to it. You get the sense that these are the good ol’ days, and that they are swiftly coming to an end.

Has there ever been a more perfect metaphor for growing up?

In 2007, I was 14. My best friend, Allen, was learning to play the piano. He had found a YouTuber named Kyle Landry who would cover songs from his favorite anime and video games and use them as a template for improvisation. He had already exhausted all of Kyle’s videos of songs from Naruto, an obsession that had wholly consumed him at the time. Scanning the other videos, he found a few songs from something unknown to us: Kingdom Hearts. I remember walking into his house one day after school to find him (predictably) in the nook to the right of the front door, seated at his piano. The desktop computer behind him was playing Kyle’s first cover of “Dearly Beloved” on a loop. We were enamored, and rushed to play both of the existing mainline games. They became a palpable part of our friendship, the Destiny Islands a shared virtual treehouse of the adolescent soul.

I think of Allen often. We haven’t spoken in years, but the places that we inhabited together, tangible and intangible, still inhabit me.

Virtual worlds are much like dreams; they are informed by our world without being bound by its material constraints. They can burrow into the walls of our minds and permeate our waking lives.

Years after I left Destiny Islands behind, I felt similarly connected to the cold, demanding realms of Myst. These places were quietly chaotic; the disparate wreckage of other worlds crudely reassembled, impractically constructed and absurdly interconnected. Who would design such obtuse machinations? This was clearly the work of people struggling to make sense of the world, so much that they created a world defined by logic of their own. There is nothing easier for a 20 year old to comprehend than that.

Thoughtfully designed environments such as these, ones that weave their narrative themes into their explorable spaces in such a way that they are expressed before any narrative properly begins, are the most crucial thing that video games have to offer.

Both video games and dreams run parallel to our waking lives. They serve as analogous spaces in which we can process our experience unrestrained by the limits of corporeal life. A dream, its nature inextricable from our own, draws directly from our sensory experiences. It can evoke and mimic them. A virtual world, however, bereft of scent, flavor, and texture: what defines its sense of place? We are quick to credit “immersive” visual fidelity, or granular interactivity, or a grounded simulation that makes the world feel more “real.” Though valuable qualities, these are far from what makes a virtual world special.

The world of a video game is defined by its connection to our own humanity. While the origins of our own universe continue to elude us, in virtual universes, by contrast, there is no denying intelligent design. We can reshape our tangible world, but we are forced to work with finite materia. In shaping virtual worlds, the stuff of creation is practically infinite. These places are sculpted from human experience, created by people for other people to inhabit – navigable projections of self, broadcast from soul to screen. A video game invites us to walk the halls of someone’s dream. In turn, it can become part of our own. These digital landscapes are a part of me, virtual threads enmeshed within the fabric of my life. The strata of the human experience contain both tangible and intangible layers. There is no make-believe. It’s all real to me.

That same dark wave that separated the kids of Kingdom Hearts cast Allen out to some shadowed sea beyond my reach. I have struggled to make sense of his absence, just as I struggled to make sense of what a model ship floating in a birdbath has to do with the locked door of a planetarium on the island of Myst. I hadn’t seen him in years until he showed up, cloaked in hooded robes, knocking on the door of my dream. I still don’t know why.

I had never bought perfume, never been interested in perfume, never wanted to know anything about perfume. Nevertheless, as I saw my best friend’s bathroom vanity slowly fill with perfume samples; as she trained her nose to distinguish tonka from coumarin; as she learned what a chypre and what a gourmand was and developed opinions about niche and independent perfume houses; and above all when she sent me a package containing, conservatively, one million half spent and discarded perfume samples, I knew: I was going to get into perfume.

I was not necessarily averse to this inevitability. I saw myself – a version of myself – bathed in a faint golden aura. I was ever so slightly different. I got regular pedicures and slept in silk pajama separates. I was groomed. I had a regular order of operations I carried out before leaving the house – casually, thoughtlessly, out of habit, simply because that’s the kind of person I was and it never occurred to me to live any other way. This sequence involved makeup and a set of everyday pearl studs and culminated in a spray of my signature scent at the hollow of my ivory throat.

My signature scent! I could see it, custom-made, discreetly present, lingering delicately in the room after I left, suffusing people’s memories of me with a warm, subtle intoxication. My signature scent would be so closely associated with me and I with it that the two of us would be indistinguishable. It would not merely make me smell better, but manifest some inner essence in a shimmering concentration. It would, doubtless, be very expensive.

You will note that for the duration of this extravagant little fantasy I have said nothing about perfume itself: nothing about woody notes, attars, benzoin, vetivers. All of the focus has been on me, and the role perfume will play in a certain vision of myself and my life. This is not (or not only) an indication of narcissism. It speaks to a fundamental aesthetic divide between what I like to call the connoisseurs and the basics.

For the genuine connoisseurs, each discrete object is the point of the exercise. They lose their selves in what they love; they want to get deeper into it, and find it inexhaustible. They are always ready to be bowled over by some new wonderful thing, and there is always another hanger in the closet, another space on the shelves. These are the people who amass collections: art, books, jewelry, clothes, or, by way of example, one million perfume samples. Almost everyone who gets seriously into perfume is a connoisseur

I am not a connoisseur. I am a basic.

For basics, the dominant mode of engagement with the aesthetic realm is not devotion and possession, but mastery: the identification of excellence and its successful incorporation into her own persona. The connoisseur wants to have and wear marvelous clothes. The basic wants to look her best. She wants to look her best, specifically. The basic is concerned with two questions: what is best, and what is fitting. And what is best can only be determined with some reference to what is fitting. This is what a basic wants: the signature scent; high-quality clothes that flatter, manufactured in ways that meet her approval, that suit the demands of her specific life; a pair of gold hoops that go with everything.

Basics are not actually lower maintenance than connoisseurs. The rigors and difficulties of a given standard, the constraints on creativity, are half the fun. But deciding on the standard, and then meeting it, is more important – is more fun and pleasurable – than being ever open to the romance of some new particular object on undefined and finally ineffable grounds.

For connoisseurs, taste is an exercise in recognition; for basics, in judicious selection.

I am a basic to such a degree that I will wear what I have and like well past the point of stained and moth-eaten disgrace rather than settle for something new and affordable that is not exactly what I want, or that does not perfectly fit and fill a well-evidenced gap of real need. I rarely buy books; the process confuses me. There is no natural limit on the enjoyment of books, no overriding reason to buy one, but not another. If not one, why not all? I feel nauseous in bookstores. The library is much safer.

So you can see why, upon realizing that I would be following my friend down the perfumed rabbit hole, I needed a schema to order my quest.

I knew, for secret and foggy reasons probably best explained by Mandy Aftel’s contention that perfumery is the heir to alchemy, that I wanted only natural perfumes. That is, I wanted perfumes whose scent molecules derived from tangible materials found in the world, rather than being synthesized in a lab. Excellent – in one stroke, I had narrowed my focus and eliminated the vast majority of perfumes made today. I had also made the whole affair significantly more expensive. This was a promising start.

Unfortunately, perfume immediately began to resist my schemas. I was warned, for instance, against buying perfumes because I liked the notes listed. Tuberose, as a material, is not the same as silk or rabbit fur. However much you know about its properties, what you will think of the role it plays in a given composition cannot be pre-determined without smelling the specific perfume as a whole. Cultural associations and symbolism certainly contribute to our perception of scents, but trusting yourself to them is an uncertain gamble. Many a sniffer’s conception of herself as a tobacco-and-leather kind of person has foundered on the rocks of an irresistible vanilla reverie. The complexity and sensual immediacy of perfumery means that the nose always tells its own story. I found I liked rose and orange blossom, ambergris and animalics. But however much I wanted to specify and control the parameters of my signature scent, it would unavoidably be an exercise in surrender to the vision of the perfumer who translated these parts into a luminous whole.

Then again, perfume is troubled by the mysterious inaccessibility of the other. I can approve of the way I look, and know, more or less, how I look to other people. But I can have much less confidence in how I smell to other people, because the molecules in a perfume are interacting in a particular way with my body chemistry, and again with that of whoever is smelling me. There are many approaches to perfume, and for many of them this fact does not pose a problem. But it did for me. I wanted my signature scent to conjure up some wordless essence of me – some Eau de la Clare – not only to my nose, but to the nose of the other person. Or at least to the other person who mattered most. I wanted a lover’s help in choosing a perfume, which meant that my final once-and-future signature scent must remain undiscovered territory absent a once-and-future husband. My entry into the dark, sensual, and suspiciously French world of perfume had only landed me with something else I had to save for marriage.

And even that, I realized, as I sniffed samples, wouldn’t be the end of it. I would change. My body chemistry would change with time, with meant the way things smelled to me and on me would change. Scents would change from season to season, blooming in the winter and cloying in the summer. There would never be an end to all this sniffing.

I gave up.

That is to say, I tabled the idea of my one-and-only, once-and-future, custom-made signature scent, and decided to buy a bottle of Divine, an old-fashioned, vampy, leopard-skin scent from Providence Perfume. I had received a sample in my giant sample package and instantly fallen in love. It will sit on my dresser, much loved and over-sprayed; a small, grudging, one point seven ounce concession to the delight that makes no promises and the beauty that admits no mastery.

If we were to seek the image of the soul we could do worse than to look to the sky. Yesterday, leaving the supermarket, I was stopped in my tracks by a herd of squat gray clouds scudding across a deepening lilac; the underbellies of their dark, pensive masses flared red, and one star had risen prematurely above the throng in the beset blue of the evening. What it said to me I can express no better than by this description. My mum often sends me pictures of hastily captured sunsets, and I’d estimate that the most common text I’ve received from her besides the thank-yous for letting her know I’ve gotten home are the ones asking me if I’ve seen the moon.1

Up above us the theater of human experience is tossed in capricious and comprehensive analogy, and so evocative is its changeable display of our inner state that to ask which is the reflection and which the original seems foolish – the one expresses the other. More than this, civilization has grown under its tutelage; the sky has given to us not just light and darkness, rain and sunshine, food and water, but symbols, stories, instructions, warnings, ways of life … whether to the ancient Babylonians, the Chinese, the Australian aboriginals, or any other culture that has ever looked upwards.

The sky is the first fount of divination, in that divination requires the opening of a channel of communication between a conscious subject and an object, or composite object, so variable in nature as to present itself in an inexhaustible variety of forms. Theism aside, if the epithet “divine” can be applied to the human being it is because we are born into a world of things to be interpreted – in the interest of survival – not just as themselves but as signs of yet other things. We are born diviners, and the subject-object bond required for divination presupposes at least a potential and temporary oneness, an errant equals sign whose two distinct lines hover ephemerally together at heightened moments of attention.

Divination demands contemplation to the point of immersion, so it follows that the life of religious devotees is often given over to the extended and repeated consideration of sacred objects, and that many religions have declared the sky as the house of the divine, it being the mirror of the soul. The religion of materialism – under whose sway a majority of the developed world has unthinkingly come to live – also conforms to this glorification of the heavens, and for a brief moment in the industrial renaissance of the postwar 1950s and 60s, it began, in keeping with its theological grounding in matter, to see those divine dreamlands among the stars as a real promised land, one into which the body, being the materialist vessel, could rise.

The ensuing Space Race took us to the moon, but no further. Like most grand human operations, it had been motivated primarily by terrestrial competition, and it was as if, after the power play between the Soviets and the Americans was over, the subconscious of the human race had been brought to the edge of a void that we were woefully unequipped to comprehend. The dark chasm of space had teemed with possibility – was it not populated with stars? – but we had always, up until that point, gazed from the ground.

Setting foot on the moon is perhaps one of the two definitive moments of the 20th century, the other being the dropping of the nuclear bomb (and both really can be narrowed down to two molecular instants of impact). On the materialist plane of thought, what could be more significant, more worthy of mythology, more inaugural of a new epoch than these two things – the placing of the earth’s destruction in our hands, and the first footfall on another celestial body?

In the time since these events, our entire collective aspect has shifted, away from what might be called the heroic – not in a moral sense, but characterized by the tendency to venture outwards, and towards something more passive and insular. The most obvious inversion of the archetype of the hero is probably the hermit – the dweller and explorer of the self – but I think that we may have become more akin to frozen spectators, like the figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, sealed in the contemplation of a scene from which we are held forever separate. Not so much wanderers as wonderers. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag tells us that the first major world disaster of the 21st century, on September 11, 2001, “was described as ‘unreal,’ ‘surreal,’ ‘like a movie,’ in many of the first accounts of those who escaped from the towers or watched from nearby. (After four decades of big-budget Hollywood disaster films, ‘It felt like a movie’ seems to have displaced the way survivors of a catastrophe used to express the short-term unassimilability of what they had gone through: ‘It felt like a dream.’)”

Perhaps it is written into the nature of a materialist age of empire that a time comes when there are no more worlds to conquer, or the conquest is brought to an end, and what has been acquired must be considered – the shift into contemplation – before it slips away. The emperor becomes the museum keeper, and a jealous one too (just ask the countries still trying to get their possessions back from the British Museum). Materialism ages into vicariousness when you learn that you can’t have everything – but you can look as much as you like. If this is the age that we have moved into, then it explains the blurring in our time of the psychological boundary between contemplation and acquisition. Our lives are so abundant in images created by marketers, manufacturers of desire. Barriers begin to take on the aspect of shop windows, but the things behind them lose something of their sheen when the window is broken through.

Likewise, the possibilities of space seemed endless to the dreamers of the mid-20th century, but they were virtual, founded on fantasies, hypotheses and images seen through telescopes or TV screens. The cold reality of the moon landing revealed what we had always known: that space is inhospitable to human beings without the kind of extreme adaptation that would push us beyond humanity as we had known it. The astronauts came back singing the praises of the earth. The ground of the moon cannot be kissed, not without dying to pay the price, like the toll exacted by some fatal lunar lover in a fairy tale, one whose light shines alluringly from afar, but whose barrenness becomes evident up close. Once up there, we are out from under the dome beneath which our cultures have arisen. That is not to say that we couldn’t learn to flourish beyond the boundary of our atmosphere, with enough time and technology, but the fact remains that leaving the earth is a severe sacrifice – it demands a severance of the earthly umbilical cord, a becoming alien.

So instead, we turned our technological nous towards the proliferation of digital worlds. It was a small leap, as the very same technology that had been developed for space exploration had also already been put to use in generating the first interactive computerized environments. Steve Russell created one of the very first video games, Spacewar!, on the same DEC PDP-1 computer that was simultaneously being used for NASA’s Mariner program, and on the same Massachusetts campus where technology was being developed for the Apollo spacecraft. Many of the earliest video games were symbiotic with the cosmic zeitgeist, being explicitly narrativized around space travel, including the primitive Lunar Lander, and by the time the Space Race reached its end in the early ’70s, arcade classics like Asteroids and Space Invaders were just starting to be rolled out to the masses like conciliatory dreams. The early arcades were like museums of what might have been.

A similar story was prevalent in the popular cinema and television of the time, with Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Battlestar Galactica, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Buck Rogers, Planet of the Apes and more all dramatizing the space-age dream (or nightmare). One of the very first and most legendary films to use special effects was Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon. The Space Age reached maturity very much within and alongside the still-young medium of cinema. Besides reboots and sequels of old intellectual properties like Star Wars and Dune, most of the successful filmic sci-fi of the 21st century has come back down to earth, dealing more with our growing relationship with technology, with films such as Ex Machina, Her, The Matrix, I, Robot and After Yang, and even popular space films like Interstellar, Arrival and The Martian foreground humanity’s relationship to the earth. These feel more attuned to the current zeitgeist, whereas the epic space operas feel much more like fantasy than they might once have done, though perhaps not to the wealthy fantasists who, having grown up absorbing such media, have rekindled the dream of space travel for a much more exclusive group. But at least for now, the collective dream is no longer space-centric.

We have, of course, continued to expand our conception of the universe, but virtually, sending out probes, analyzing data and construing knowledge of places we have never been and most probably never could go, places that can perhaps only nominally be considered places: the Orion Molecular Cloud or supervoids like the CMB Cold Spot. In the meantime, we have rapidly enhanced our capacity to digitally render our fantasies as environments to be virtually explored. We have grown accustomed to gaining the perception of places into which we can never step. If perception is an invitation for us to act, as Henri Bergson believed, and as anyone who has impotently watched the horror of an injustice play out in the palm of their hand must have surely felt, then how many of our perceptions are erecting a screen between even our simplest desires and their fulfillment? The marketers know – the secret of advertising is that the product being advertised is not really there.

I was born in 1994, and so have grown up used to having vicarious access to virtual and remote worlds. As a child I loved wandering to the edge of the map in video games. Some games would try to justify the boundary with a fence, or an unpassable wall, or open water where certain death lurked; others would turn you around with a curt reminder to stay on course, or simply let you butt up against an invisible barrier. But what led me to seek out these boundaries was that there was – most of the time – a view beyond them. When I looked out onto an inaccessible rolling field, populated maybe with a few buildings or some trees whose low resolution lay plain their purely illusory presence, I dreamed of jumping the barrier. I wanted to try the doors of the out-of-bounds houses because inside of them there could be anything. I used to fancy there might be a whole other game hidden there, or, even better, that I would enter a never-ending landscape whose noninteractive objects teased my imagination with the thought of what just one interactive object might do.

But my fascination with these crude backdrops was contrasted with a kind of ambient fear I felt whenever I played a game that made no use of them, such as the early Super Mario games, or Metroid, or Donkey Kong, which, at least in some levels, were set against an entirely black background. No fake stars to adorn the void; it was as if Mario was running and jumping on platforms suspended in absolute nothingness. When I was very young this fear made certain games almost unplayable for me, especially when, in a game like Space Invaders, the black background would change color to signify an increase in difficulty, and suddenly the void became orange, or green, as if nothingness had suddenly become malevolent and bared its teeth.

It would be an exaggeration to say that space travel has – or ever could – lose its novelty, but it remains true that in the late ’60s we reached a fork in the road of humanity, where we might have continued to branch outwards but instead burrowed inwards. In this insular age, simulation theory has arisen as a new cosmogony – how likely this theory is or isn’t is not the point, what matters is that it is a new collective dream – and, if we take the theory and run with it a little, then the argument could be made that burrowing deeper is not all that different from traveling into outer space. Eventually, if we look deep enough, everything atomizes and spreads apart like a universe exploding into life, as if we were turning not a magnification dial but the wheel on a cosmic clock. We can look at any object and conceive of the universe of atoms that make it up, and perhaps even every individual atom, if we could see deep enough into it, would contain an entire universe – or it could be that all of these fractal universes would simply be the code of our own, re-rendering itself at each entry point, which is everywhere. The distance between ourselves and the edge of space could be – at a lesser stage of magnification – that between the nucleus and the envelope of an atom. Zoom in enough and chasms would open up in space between every molecule that makes up the world, existential lacunas of dark matter, in which nothingness perhaps has its own kind of life unknowable to us, like the characters in Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics who use atoms as gambling chips or marbles to race across the curves of space. Even given these hypothetical degrees of magnification however, the problem remains: We can look, but how do we enter these spaces?

The legacy of the 21st century so far has surely been the ubiquitous proliferation of the internet. We picture it as a web, which is like a diagram of star systems interconnected – digitized, transposed, etherealized into data. Part of the great sci-fi dream was of a universe so vast that nature repeats itself; one in which we might find an earth mark 2, mark 3, mark 400 … on the internet we can see into even more replicas of our world than we could ever dream of. Like space travel, in order to access the web, we rely on technology too complicated for most of us to understand, and once there we enter a non-environment, one that asks us to leave our bodies behind. It promises us entry in exchange for our becoming vicarious.

Simulation theory is an adaptation of belief fit for the internet age; it has its echoes in the Veil of Maya, and in the creationist myths. Great technological advancements have always inspired new conceptions of the universe – as long as there are minds with enough comprehension to contrast one object with another, reality exists alongside representative fantasies of its totality, and seen in this light religious and scientific ideas of infinity seem like metaphors for the same thing: the totality, the pleroma, the outside or beyond that conditions our inside and within. But what really makes simulation theory the apt cosmogony of our age is that in a simulation everything is non-corporeal.

We could psychologize the shift away from corporeality as a sort of collective trauma response after the atrocities of the 20th and 21st centuries – which not only occurred but were seen to have occurred – but really it is nothing new; corporeal suffering is the foundation of the spiritual life and has always been generative of imaginal worlds beyond this existence, perhaps it is even the generative factor of the elusive substance we call soul. To be soulful is to have suffered. What is different in our age is the collective shift towards the vicarious, and we are still coming to terms with our new ways of seeing. Maybe we have been running away from suffering into the spectacle of the suffering of others – maybe that is our new original sin: the guilt of the watcher powerless to act. But the ancients too observed plays of light in a region they could not enter, and from their seeing they advanced their understanding and channeled what they had learned into action. We must not forgot that to see is to divine.

At its most beautiful the sky bruises, and bleeds at the horizon – this vicarious age may be only the first flickers of a new dawn.

Last October, I sought the help of a professional gamer to coach me in Valorant, a teambased first-person shooter in which players are tasked with planting or defusing a bomb (or, better still, just killing all of their opponents). I have played – according to a back-of-the-envelope calculation – somewhere around 3,500 hours of Valorant in the past five years. That comes out to between 7% and 8% of those five years. The math looks worse if you count just waking hours, and desperately sad if you can conjure up the mental image of a grown man sitting at his desk, face several inches from the monitor, and imagine the cumulative strain of those hours on his posture. I’ve probably been subjected (or subjected my teammates) to thousands of hours of middling, uninspired gameplay.

At my peak, I was statistically one of the best Valorant players, if you accept charitable interpretations of all of those words. In late 2023, I vaulted ever-so-briefly into Immortal, the game’s second-highest skill bracket. I slipped from that vertiginous peak literally as quickly as possible, flunking out of the rank in two matches. Nevertheless, being an Immortal Emeritus notched me a spot around the top 2% of players by rank distribution, placing me among tens of thousands of players lording over the unwashed millions of lower-ranked scum. I once ran this boast – that Valorant might be the one thing I was statistically best at, percentile-wise, among all my skills – by a friend of mine. Even over Discord, I could sense he was frowning. “I think you’re probably a better journalist,” he offered, tactfully.

But in the months since that halcyon day, I had regressed and plateaued, bobbing around what I’d estimate to be the top 8% mark. For the sake of my self-esteem, I needed a professional assessment, a qualified somebody to tell me what I was doing wrong and how to fix it. I reached out to a distant acquaintance, a former pro gamer who offers training sessions for $70 a pop. He told me to record myself playing. We’d review the footage together, and he’d point out my mistakes and offer corrections.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes playing Valorant. At its best, the game is the thinking man’s teamwork-oriented first-person shooter. When teams are evenly matched, Valorant takes on an orderly, algorithmic quality: attack and riposte, attack and riposte, as each team aims to be the first to win 13 rounds.

Few matches meet this ideal of play and counter-play. Often, rounds play out instead like a handful of abortive Rube Goldberg machines. On one side of the map, Player X swings a corner for no apparent reason and has his head blasted clean off by an opponent holding the angle. One domino falls askew, without toppling the others. Elsewhere, Player Z flubs a jump and accidentally falls off the map and dies. Meanwhile, some third player has read the timing of the round all wrong, and is miles away from the action as his team gets wiped out, a mistake he has made enough times to earn him the unflattering nickname the Snail among his friends. (Not that this has happened to me.)

And thus, at its worst, Valorant operates as a sort of psychoactive software meant to induce Falling Down (1993) style crashouts. Recently, I was temporarily banned from the game (for the first time ever, I should note) for bad-mouthing a teammate. OK, that’s not entirely truthful: I was temporarily banned for screaming at this teammate – a complete stranger – calling them a fat, disgusting beast, saying they probably typed with just their index fingers, and mimicking what I imagined they would sound like if they used voice comms by doing eight to 10 heavy breaths directly into my microphone. This profane rant kicked off when this teammate wandered away from the rest of the squad at a pivotal moment in the round without saying anything. (We won the round anyway.) I am 31 years old. The person I was yelling at was more likely than not a child.

I was desperate enough to keep playing that I urgently appealed my ban in a groveling email to Riot Games’ support team: “Dear sir or madam, yada yada yada, I want to express my profound regret over my actions. My juvenile playground taunts – nothing hateful! – were hardly constructive, I now realize. I’ve never been banned before and am generally a member in good standing of the Riot ecosystem. In light of my history of upstanding behavior, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” My suspension was, unsurprisingly, not overturned.

I have died over 100,000 times in Valorant, but the most important death was a slow one. In my first year or two playing, I was relentlessly positive, faithful to the idea that any situation and any game was winnable. I hadn’t played a first-person shooter in at least a decade, and I extended to other players the same grace I expected in return: We were all happy climbers, slowly but predictably improving. There was a time, in other words, when I would not have dreamed of joking that I was going to kill myself over the results of a match or round or duel.

Those reservations feel quaint now. Once I’d attained what could be considered a “good” rank in Valorant, a sort of status anxiety set in. Every victory was richly deserved. Losses, however, were personally wounding – a literal but also metaphorical stripping of rank that felt wildly unjust, a conspiracy by people dumber and less agentic than me meant to drag me down to their level. If only my teammates had listened. If only they had gotten more kills. If only they had played in a way that enabled me to get more kills. If only this or that teammate hadn’t made some snide, shitty remark, tilting me off the face of the earth. This map sucks. My teammates are all morons. This meta is horrible. The developers are braindead. The other team is playing so weird. Have I really played three-thousand-some-odd hours and somewhere along the way gotten worse?

I play video games with a consistent group, a pack of guys I fell in with more or less at random, all a few years younger than me. Some of them are … how to put this delicately … precariously employed. And yet, I log more hours than them online playing video games. I cherish their friendship, though my relationship with them has largely played out online; we are virtual strangers, in the sense that for all the hours we’ve spent yapping into each others’ ears, we’ve only met in person a handful of times. We have been, at times, viciously cruel to one another, but also extraordinarily generous and kind. I picked up a taste for Japanese menthols from them at the ripe old age of 29. I hope that they’ll attend my wedding.

A few years back, I began to notice that every morning, for the first several hours of the day, my eyes wouldn’t come to focus. The left eye always felt like it was going over a speed bump catching up to the motion of the right. I could feel it above the eye and under the brow. To fix my vision, I would lightly pinch the less-cooperative eyeball over the skin of my eyelid and jiggle it back and forth to try to shunt it into alignment. Sometimes, I’d dig around with a finger in the space under the top curve of the eye socket, hoping to jostle into place the wiring or whatever was going on back there. The condition made reading difficult, and the stuff of first-person shooting – rapid and precise alignment of crosshair on screen to target – nearly impossible.

Eventually, I saw a neuro-ophthalmologist. An MRI ordered by the doctor uncovered nothing at all, a non-finding that set me back roughly $3,000. If in that time – a year or so of increasingly bad vision, five months of waiting to see the doctor, a few months more to undergo the test and get the results – I even considered that the culprit might be the eyestrain resulting from those aforementioned hours-long gaming sessions, I didn’t take the thought too seriously. To step back from gaming would be to sever what already felt like a tenuous relationship, playing out almost entirely over the internet in the gauntlet of competitive Valorant.

But as the condition worsened, the gulf between what I believed to be my peak and my actual everyday performance widened, made all the worse by the kinds of jokes that are characteristic of a group of 20-somethings. I consider myself a cerebral player, preferring advantageous timings to direct one-on-one duels. But that bit of flattery doesn’t change the fact that I’m just not very good at Valorant’s core mechanic: shooting people. And I wasn’t getting any better. Every missed shot became freighted with meaning: I’m better than my friends can see, but I can’t prove it. To be appraised correctly is to be understood. To be misjudged is crazy-making. Every egregious whiff or misplay became fodder for a mid-coital intrusive thought.

I could feel myself reverting to boyhood, storming out of the proverbial playdate cursing my erstwhile friends after particularly infuriating games. I fell victim to those school-age anxieties – Do these guys even like me? – coming out the back of marathon double-digit-hour gaming sessions, at the end of which everyone is more or less nonverbal. I could feel my neural pathways atrophying with every inside joke repeated unthinkingly, landing to lesser and lesser effect as the night wore on. I grew hypersensitive to small and more than likely imagined changes in social gravity: who’s up, who’s down, who’s spending less time online, who can get people to come online just by getting into the Discord call and who can’t. I toyed with vows of silence, promising to myself on more than one occasion to quit Valorant indefinitely until my friends, on hands and knees, invited me back. And I was also the one to come begging after an unlucky string of matches: “Please, bro. Just one more game. It’ll be normal.”

I have broken that promise (“Just one more game”) hundreds of times, throwing good game after bad, queuing up for another without a passing thought. When I win and queue another, I’m pushing my luck. If I’ve lost, I continue out of despair. It’s a gamble: on myself, on the idea that I can manifest a better performance out of thin air. At a certain point, stupor sets in – the kind of slack-jawed stare that materializes 30 seconds into a short-form video you have no context for and have landed on accidentally, except it lasts all 30 minutes of a Valorant match.

In truth, I play Valorant because at any given moment it is the easiest thing to do. It’s easier than writing. It’s easier than working. It’s easier than chores or exercise or playing an instrument. It’s easier than reading. It’s easier than going to bed. I frequently choose Valorant over all of these things.

“Addiction” is a thorny word when it comes to video games. It calls to mind the anti-gaming panics of the ’90s and early 2000s, the anguished cries of millions of parents: My child is turning into a zombie! When “addictive” is used as a favorable adjective in marketing or press coverage, some critics smartly point out that it’s no trivial thing: Some of us have dealt with real addiction, they say. But I would struggle to choose a better word – compulsion, maybe? – to describe my on-itsface-quite-normal relationship to Valorant, which extracts the maximum of my time and energy for … what, exactly? The reward of a space in which to impress and/or yell at teens?

When COVID-19 hit, I thought I might seize the opportunity afforded to me by lockdown to write an album. Then Valorant came out. Thirty-five hundred hours later, with several thousand dollars invested into virtual in-game goods and a succession of absolutely necessary gaming accoutrements – a desk, fancy chair, mouse, mousepad, mouse bungee, custom keyboard, wrist rest, monitor, monitor stand, headphones and so on – I wouldn’t say that I’m any closer to completing my masterpiece.

As I was recording my gameplay for the coach, I could tell I wasn’t playing well. Still, it wasn’t anomalously bad, something so unexplainably awful that there’d be no point in review. I’d had plenty of games like this before. Not great, not terrible, just sort of nothing-ish. I could learn from this.

I came away from the session with a program – daily routines to train my aim and solidify good habits, and recommendations around in-game behavior to make me a more productive and useful teammate. Toward the end of 2025, I told myself I would commit to that program, with a few health-conscious modifications to dampen the gamer-ness of it all: Wake up early. Stretch. Train my aim following the regimen set by the coach. Warm up my movement in some Deathmatch lobbies. Play a few real games. Pause if they don’t go my way. Turn down invites to team up from friends who might drag me down. Aim train again before bed. Repeat. Slowly climb back to Immortal.

There was a gonzo journalism element to it: I subjected myself to X surprising thing for Y days in hopes of generating Z unusual result. I bought a single pack of Marlboro Reds to smoke if I started to get too silly in-game because I’d read somewhere that academics chew nicotine gum for its focus-sharpening qualities. The idea of maximizing the Oddity Quotient on the experiment for effect really tickled me: getting into powders and peptides or learning about the correct number of milligrams of caffeine to consume daily – things of that nature. I did not, ultimately, pursue those lines of inquiry.

Still, I was eager to get started. So much so that minutes before departing the house to drive to my parents’ house for the holidays, I turned to my fiancée and asked if I could get a quick dub in before we left. She made a face I hadn’t seen her make before. “That would be a little grotesque, no?” she said, after a pause.

The program started in earnest in January. I wish I could say I committed. I wish I could say the monastic tack took, that I summited the ranked pyramid and reached Immortal. In the span of a week and a half or so, I saw real improvement. I stuck with the agonizingly dull aim training – a series of high-speed clicking exercises whose usefulness as a test to detect concussions in professional athletes has been studied.

I can’t say exactly how or why the 3,500-hour fever broke. Maybe it was my friends drifting to other games, the embarrassment of neglected chores, or the sustained attention itself. But I keep coming back to something the coach said as we scrubbed through those 40-something minutes of unremarkable play. Earlier, as he and I reviewed the footage of one of my matches, he remarked, offhandedly, that there wasn’t much in the footage to critique. It wasn’t meant as a compliment.

“You’ve just got to get active,” he advised. There were a lot of stretches, he said, in which I wasn’t really doing much at all.

Nate starts the office tour on the top floor of the building, where he and Andres take in a panoramic view. Andres stares out the window for a good while, squinting in the light. Across the lake, distant spires rise to a pale sky.

“So this is the fruit of ungodly success,” Andres says.

Nate laughs. “It’s pretty crazy. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it.”

“Over time, you get used to anything.”

Andres doesn’t seem confrontational about this, but Nate takes a note to be careful. He’s realizing now that he doesn’t know Andres’ feelings on the company Nate joined, or the whole idea of selling out. There was a time when they shared a sense of resentment at an industry that didn’t seem to want to do anything with them, but those days were years ago. Today, many of the people in their loose circle have taken jobs at companies they used to condemn. People were supporting families, they had to eat. That’s how they got you.

Nate takes Andres down through the floors, showing him the design pods, the art pods, the sound studios, the motion capture studio, the kitchen and the gym.

“Does anyone even use all this equipment?” Andres picks up a nearby hand weight and tests it, as though he doesn’t believe it’s real.

“All the time. There’s usually a pretty good number of people working out, especially in the afternoon,” Nate says. He doesn’t know why he feels defensive. Maybe it’s because there’s a growing suspicion Andres is making fun of him somehow, secretly, or making fun of the whole idea of this luxurious office with its glass walls and views and amenities. In reality, this is the bare minimum of what they get for creating and running several of the world’s most successful games. Some of Nate’s coworkers, who’ve been here much longer than him, speak openly about their exotic sports cars, their wine collections, their heli-skiing trips. Nate has the presence of mind not to share with Andres the alienation he still feels when he overhears those conversations.

“Are you one of them?”

It takes Nate a moment to realize Andres is talking about exercise, and to register the playful tone in his voice. He supposes there’s no reason for him to be dishonest.

“Yeah. I’ve started, at least. It’s only been a couple weeks so far, but I decided I needed to get back in shape. Game development isn’t great for the body, as we both know.”

Andres nods, but he looks distant, lost in thought. “Sure. If I were back on the market, I’d do the same.”

Back on the market. So he knows about him and Monica, then. How? It’s not like it was a se - cret, but he hasn’t spoken with Andres directly in over a year. He supposes knowledge like that moves on its own. People get lunch and dinner together, they have game night and developer socials.

“I’m not in a rush or anything,” Nate says.

“Of course not. How is Liam?”

“He’s good. He’s at the age where he’s starting to become interesting. He’s like a little man. He fixates on weird things.”

“Fixates? Like on what?”

Nate shrugs. “He’ll pick something, and then he’ll only want that. Like just that specific thing, over and over. Right now he’s on a big phase with Virginia Seele. Do you know who that is?”

“The pop star? I don’t keep up with any of that.”

Nate nods. He wants to say he wishes Liam would stop listening to Virginia Seele. Not that he hates herthe songs were fine, the melodies perfectly catchy – but there’s something about his son being a fan of hers that doesn’t sit well with him as a father. He was taken aback when he discovered that Liam had Virginia Seele in his earbuds on the way to and from school. In some sense she was another vapid modern musical act among many, but Virginia Seele made that emptiness the point. I’m becoming who you want me to be, she’d sing. Was that really the best you could hope for? Couldn’t the kids have something a little more full-hearted than this cynical, nihilistic stuff? At least before they became teenagers …

Andres seems to pick up on his thoughts in spite of his effort to hide them. “Kids don’t really start to have taste until they’re 13 or 14,” he says. “Everything until then is just whatever’s in front of them.”

Nate nods, but wonders how Andres would know. Unlike most of the other people in their circle of friends who came up together making indie games, Andres stayed the same. He stayed making experimental interactive fiction for tiny audiences. He stayed single. He stayed stuck in the scraggly-beard-and-cargo-shorts phase of life. Nate, clean-shaven and wearing a dark green Henley shirt he recently bought at a price he would have balked at just a year ago, feels like he is speaking to someone from the past.

“Anyway,” Andres says, “I’ve been meaning to ask. How much money do you make here?”

Nate takes a deep breath, blows air through his mouth, looks at the ceiling, looks pained. Finally, he mentions a number.

“Wow,” Andres says.

Nate shrugs and laughs. “Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s too much, honestly.”

“That’s like four times what I made last year, between sales of my games and contracting. Or more like five times.”

“Well, maybe you could come work here.”

“They don’t need anything I do.”

Nate shrugs. “You would be surprised. They need all kinds of people.”

“They don’t need someone who prototypes shitty little games and makes dinky synth music.”

Now it’s starting to frustrate Nate, the way Andres refuses to accept the possibility that he could find himself in some kind of relation to this company. In fact, throughout the tour, Andres hasn’t said anything in the way of expressing approval or disapproval of what he’s seen. Having some kind of reaction would be the polite thing to do. Nate even would’ve liked it better if he got upset, saying this company and its fancy office stood for everything he was against. Something like that.

“If you say so.” Nate decides to try a different tack. “Look, I understand. At the end of the day, you still have your artistic independence.”

This gets Andres’ attention. “I guess? Too bad artistic independence doesn’t pay the rent.”

“No, but it’s worth something, isn’t it? When I got here I had to learn a whole new language. My boss is always talking about being ‘accountable to the fans.’ And what that means is, we basically have to do whatever they want.”

“There’s nothing new about being in conversation with the audience. That still requires judgment.”

“But that’s the thing, in our case, it kind of doesn’t. Just the other day we announced we were going to make a minor change to the movement system and all these players yelled at us. So a couple days later we pulled back. We gave up. We’re at their whim.” Nate lets out a sigh, realizing how real his disappointment is. “I hardly think of myself as a game designer anymore.”

“You’re a conduit for the will of the people,” Andres says, and Nate finally catches the sharpness in his voice that he’d been anticipating.

“I could put that on my business card.”

“You should. It’s funny.”

Nate thinks there’s something strange about the way he says this, almost like Andres looks down on him. What if he does, though? What if Andres has every right to look down on him? After all, he sold out, leaving behind his money worries, his artistic integrity and his old crew. He went to work for the man and now he’s whining about it.

The conversation with Andres is still on Nate’s mind as he pulls into the parking lot at Liam’s school that afternoon. He thinks that maybe in the future he could help Andres in some way. If not a job, he could fund one of the games, or help put on an exhibition. He could show that there’s something good to come out of his working where he is now, despite the way it looks.

Liam clambers into the car and pulls the door shut without looking at him or saying anything. He’s staring at his phone, earbuds in. It occurs to Nate to wonder if that’s normal for a child about to turn 10. Why does he even have them in the first place? He could ask Monica why. On second thought, maybe he shouldn’t. There’s a thin stream of sound leaking from them. It’s Virginia Seele.

Nate starts driving his son to his mother’s house. He tells himself that Liam will grow out of it. Or even if he doesn’t, what’s the problem, exactly? Can he point to a real reason?

“Hey.” Nate waves to Liam in the back seat, finally overcoming his fear that his kid hates him.

Liam doesn’t seem bothered at all. He pops the earbuds out. “What’s up?”

“I’ve been listening to some Virginia Seele too, you know.”

Nate can’t see Liam’s reaction well in the back of the car. He’s hoping it’s not too cringe for your dad to listen to your music. Unfortunately, he’s pretty sure he would’ve been upset if his own father did that to him.

“Yeah? What do you think?”

“It’s fun. It reminds me of some of that stuff we had in the ’90s.” Nate feels himself sounding ridiculous, but he can’t seem to find the path to a less embarrassing set of words.

“I like the lyrics,” Liam says.

The lyrics? Nate suppresses a laugh. That’s the kind of thing that surprises people about having kids: just how unpredictable they can be. He wouldn’t have expected Liam to be engaging with, much less appreciating, the lyrics to songs like these at his age. Was he already seeing himself in meta-commentary about conforming yourself to the ideals of others? Was that because of social media? Maybe Liam is getting too much screen time. He could talk to Monica about that.

At the same time, Liam wasn’t wrong. The lyrics were what struck Nate, too. To be a pop star, you have to be a strange being, both more than human and less than human at the same time. Virginia Seele existed to fulfill her contract as an avatar. It was strange, because she kept basing her songs on real-life things, even though at the same time she wanted you to know that she had anything but a normal life. Just when you thought you related to her she reminded you that she was different.

“You know, Virginia Seele and I have something in common,” Nate says.

“Yeah?”

“We’re both defined by others, in a way.”

Liam is quiet, and Nate can’t help himself.

“You know when she sings about becoming the person you want her to be, it’s a bit like my job now. I used to be the kind of game designer who decided what I wanted to make players experience. Maybe there’s a long corridor to kind of lull you into a sense of safety, and I put a surprise in at the end to make you jump. Or I want you to think about the relationship between two values, so I design a system where they’re intertwined … but the players of the games I work on now think they know everything about the game already, before I can even put anything new in there. So we just listen to what the players are saying, look at how they behave, and then we do the thing that seems best. It’s no different than if they just told me what to do. So what does that make me, right? The part where Virginia Seele says she’s only who she is because the fans made her into that – I feel like I’m in the same place. Less visible, but the role is the same.”

Liam stays silent.

“When you’ve got this crowd chanting at you to do something, and you do it … who’s in control, really?”

“I don’t think you’re like Virginia Seele.”

Nate laughs. This time he couldn’t stop himself beforehand, but he hopes Liam doesn’t take it the wrong way.

“No, you’re right. We’re different. Very, very different. I don’t sing or dance. And she’s much richer than I am. That’s for sure.”

Liam goes back to being quiet again.

“And Virginia Seele has something to say. I had something to say once, maybe, but I said goodbye to all that.”

Nate is late again. This time Monica doesn’t bother to mention it, but he knows it’ll be going into her database. Her ammunition stores. She’ll reference it later when she again accuses Nate of being absorbed in his work to the detriment of his personal life. Which is funny, because it’s only now that he started the new job that he’s really pushing himself.

“Is he listening to Virginia Seele again?” Monica frowns as Liam runs past her to his room.

“You don’t like him listening to her?”

“I don’t like the example she sets. Why?”

“When did he get the earbuds?”

“All the kids at school have them.”

“Virginia Seele is pretty interesting, actually.” Nate doesn’t know why he’s saying this. He feels like he’s being driven by a motor in his back. “Have you listened to any of it? It’s about how you have to turn yourself into something in response to others. To be a successful artist or entertainer, you’ve got to think about that. But if you go that route, then what’s left of you? If you reduce yourself into nothing but a machine for responding to other people, do you really have any kind of independent existence?”

Monica gives him a withering look. “Does this have something to do with your new company?”

“Maybe it does.”

“Wouldn’t that require knowing how to listen to people?”

There it is. He was waiting for that.

“I guess. I mean, there’s listening, which is what I was talking about, and there’s blindly molding yourself to be what other people want you to be, which is what I think some people mean when they say they want you to listen to them.”

On the drive home, Nate puts on Virginia Seele as loud as he wants. It’s funny, he thinks. He had such big ideas after the separation. He would get in shape, he would find someone new, he would rededicate himself to his craft. The new job initially seemed to be the first of a number of steps he would take to be the person he imagined he could become. But it wasn’t long before his transformation seemed to have stalled out. The chains of reality yanked him back to the sad truth: that he was a divorced dad who would set off alarm bells in everyone he knew if he opened his mouth about Virginia Seele again, no matter how much he thought there was something real in her work. He would keep his head down and go back to the office tomorrow morning, and if he did his job well, he would rinse himself out of the game he worked on completely. No room for any kind of individual taste in what amounted to a pure product, the perfect expression of its customers’ wishes.

Maybe that’s fine. Maybe the worldview of people like Andres is wrongheaded. Wasn’t there a kind of beauty to be found in annihilating yourself in service of the customer? In a total vacuum of artistic intent, you could achieve a kind of synchronization with your players that someone like Andres, who often thought of his audience in antagonistic terms, could never find. Nate was in the business of fulfilling wishes, the same as anyone who worked in an entertainment field. It was time to give up the pretense that he had something to say, something to broadcast to the world. Throughout history, some artists didn’t shape clay to create forms – they were the clay, beaten and distorted by the forces around them.

Nate realizes now that he was on this path before he knew it. He was farther down it than he’d let on to anyone, farther even than he could admit to himself outside of the house. All alone in a cavernous space he originally purchased with the idea he would raise a family, he might gradually lose hold of his mind, let it fall into fragments, let it be replaced by the noise of things.

One night he finds himself scrolling through Virginia Seele’s social accounts. He doesn’t remember the events that led him there, but now he taps “like” on every single post, as though it were a reflex. Is this sad? It’s certainly not a matter of hoping the artist herself would notice or care. There was simply a point where the gravity of her ideal became too powerful. It got him, that was all. Something is lost when that happens, but something is gained, too. Something important. In that heightened moment he can forget the fact that he is him, that he is pathetic. He sheds his neutral poise and starts to believe in something. From there, everything tumbles along at great speed. He only needs to follow the contract he makes with his audience, after all. It’s an ancient, inviolable compact, the same agreement that binds his employer to its fans, the same one that collapses the space between people and turns them into self-reinforcing entities with their own collective minds and memories.

Right now, Virginia Seele is becoming who you want her to be.