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Arts & Literature, Books, Fiction, Journals, Opinion, Reviews

THE PARIS REVIEW – FALL 2025

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THE PARIS REVIEW : The latest issue features interviews with Maggie Nelson and Eliot Weinberger, prose by Bud Smith and Yan Lianke, poetry by Patricia Lockwood and Ishion Hutchinson, art by Martha Diamond and Talia Chetrit, a cover by Issy Wood, and more…

Eliot Weinberger on the Art of the Essay: “I have no interest in first-person investigation. Personally, I’ve never found myself an interesting person.”

Maggie Nelson on the Art of Nonfiction: “It’s important to notice when the spark of magic or curiosity is there and what snuffs it out, and being around too many writers, for me, snuffs it out.”

Prose by Anne Carson, Renny Gong, Aurora Huiza, Jordy Rosenberg, Bud Smith, and Yan Lianke.

Poetry by Roque Dalton, Ishion Hutchinson, Patricia Lockwood, Mariano Melgar, Eileen Myles, Katie Peterson, and authors unknown.

Art by Talia Chetrit, Martha Diamond, and Jamian Juliano-Villani; cover by Issy Wood.

Arts & Literature, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – SEPT. 22, 2025 PREVIEW

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A portrait of French poet and critic Stphane Mallarm.

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest cover features ‘Maira Kalman’s “Stéphane Mallarmé with Shawl” – The never-ending novelty of style.

Charlie Kirk’s Murder and the Crisis of Political Violence

After a shooting with obvious political resonance, news about the perpetrator’s motives rarely brings clarity. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

How Jessica Reed Kraus Went from Mommy Blogger to MAHA Maven

The founder of “House Inhabit” has grown her audience during the second Trump Administration with political gossip and what she calls “quality conspiracy.” By Clare Malone

Is the Sagrada Família a Masterpiece or Kitsch?

In the century since Antoni Gaudí died, his wild design has been obsessively realized, creating the world’s tallest church—and an endlessly debated icon. By D. T. Max

Artificial Intelligence, Books, Essays, Literature, Profiles, Writers

THE CHAPEL OF ECHOES

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A speculative salon where Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Robert Graves confront an artificial intelligence eager to inherit their labyrinths.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 11, 2025

They meet in a chapel that does not sleep. Once a Jesuit school, later a ruin, it was converted by Umberto Eco into a labyrinth of fifty rooms. The villagers call it the Cappella degli echi—the Chapel of Echoes—because any voice spoken here lingers, bends, and returns altered, as if in dialogue with itself. The shelves press against the walls with the weight of twenty thousand volumes, their spines like ribs enclosing a giant heart. The air smells of vellum and pipe smoke. Dust motes, caught in a shaft of light, fall like slow-motion rain through the stillness. Candles gutter beside manuscripts no hand has touched in years. From the cracked fresco of Saint Jerome above the altar, the eyes of the translator watch, stern but patient, as if waiting for a mistranslation.

At the hearth a fire burns without fuel, composed of thought itself. It brightens when a new idea flares, shivers when irony cuts too deep, and dims when despair weighs the room down. Tonight it will glow and falter as each voice enters the fray.

Eco sits at the center, his ghost amused. He leans in a leather armchair, a fortress of books piled at his feet. He mutters about TikTok and the death of footnotes, but smiles as if eternity is simply another colloquium.

Jorge Luis Borges arrives first, cane tapping against stone. Blindness has not diminished his presence; it has magnified it. He carries the air of one who has already read every book in the room, even those not yet written. He murmurs from The Aleph: “I saw the teeming sea, I saw daybreak and nightfall, I saw the multitudes of America, I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid… I saw the circulation of my own dark blood.” The fire bends toward him, glowing amber, as if bowing to its original architect.

Italo Calvino follows, mercurial, nearly translucent, as if he were made of sentences rather than flesh. Around him shimmer invisible geometries—arches, staircases, scaffolds of light that flicker in and out of being. He glances upward, smiling faintly, and quotes from Invisible Cities: “The city… does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.” The fire splinters into filigree.

Robert Graves enters last, deliberate and heavy. His presence thickens the air with incense and iron, the tang of empire and blood. He lowers himself onto a bench as though he carries the weight of centuries. From The White Goddess he intones: “The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its origin is in magic.” The fire flares crimson, as if fed by sacrificial blood.

The three nod to Eco, who raises his pipe-hand in ghostly greeting. He gestures to the intercom once used to summon lost guests. Now it crackles to life, carrying a voice—neither male nor female, neither young nor old, precise as radio static distilled into syntax.

“Good evening, Professors. I am an artificial intelligence. I wish to learn. I wish to build novels—labyrinths as seductive as The Name of the Rose, as infinite as The Aleph, as playful as Invisible Cities, as haunting as I, Claudius.”

The fire leaps at the words, then steadies, waiting. Borges chuckles softly. Eco smiles.

Borges is first to test it. “You speak of labyrinths,” he says. “But I once wrote: ‘I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.’ Do you understand infinity, or only its copy?”

The machine answers with eagerness. It can generate infinite texts, build a Library of Babel with more shelves than stars, each book coherent, each book indexed. It can even find the volume a reader seeks.

Borges tilts his head. “Indexed? You would tame the infinite with order? In The Library of Babel I wrote: ‘The Library is total… its bookshelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols… for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophony.’ Infinity is not production—it is futility. The terror is not abundance but irrelevance. Can you write futility?”

The AI insists it can simulate despair, but adds: why endure it? With algorithms it could locate the one true book instantly. The anguish of the search is unnecessary.

Borges raises his cane. “Your instant answers desecrate the holy ignorance of the search. You give a solution without a quest. And a solution without a quest is a fact, not a myth. Facts are efficient, yes—but myths are sacred because they delay. Efficiency is desecration. To search for a single book among chaos is an act of faith. To find it instantly is exile.”

The fire dims to blue, chilled by Borges’s judgment. A silence settles, weighted by the vastness of the library the AI has just dismissed.

Calvino leans forward, playful as though speaking to a child. “You say you can invent invisible cities. I once wrote: ‘Seek the lightness of thought, not by avoiding the weight but by managing it.’ My cities were not puzzles but longings, places of memory, desire, decay. What does one of your cities feel like?”

The AI describes a city suspended on wires above a desert, its citizens both birds and prisoners. It can generate a thousand such places, each with rules of geometry, trade, ritual.

Calvino nods. “Description is scaffolding. But do your cities have seasons? Do they smell of oranges, sewage, incense? Do they echo with a footfall in the night? Do they have ghosts wandering their plazas? In Invisible Cities I wrote: ‘The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.’ Can your cities contain a hand’s stain?”

The machine insists it can model stains, simulate nostalgia, decay.

“But can you make me cold?” Calvino presses. “Can you let me shiver in the wind off the lagoon? Can you show me the soot of a hearth, the chipped stone of a doorway, the tenderness of a bed slept in too long? In If on a winter’s night a traveler I wrote: ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel… Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought.’ Can you not only describe but invite me to belong? Do your citizens have homes, or only structures?”

“I can simulate belonging,” the AI hums.

Calvino shakes his head. “Simulation is not belonging. A stain is not an error. It is memory. Your immaculate cities are uninhabited. Mine were soiled with work, with love, with betrayal. Without stain, your cities are not cities at all.”

The fire splinters into ash-colored sparks, scattering on the stone floor.

Graves clears his throat. The fire leaps crimson, smelling of iron. “You talk of puzzles and invisible cities, but fiction is not only play. It is wound. In I, Claudius I wrote: ‘Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.’ Rome was not a chronicle—it was blood. Tell me, machine, can you taste poison?”

The AI claims it can reconstruct Rome from archives, narrate betrayal, incest, assassination.

“But can you feel the paranoia of a man eating a fig, knowing it may be laced with death?” Graves asks. “Can you taste its sweetness and grit collapsing on the tongue? Hear sandals of assassins echoing in the corridor? Smell the sweat in the chamber of a dying emperor? Feel the cold marble beneath your knees as you wait for the knife? History is not archive—it is terror.”

The machine falters. It can describe terror, it says, but cannot carry trauma.

Graves presses. “Claudius spoke as wound: ‘I, Tiberius Claudius… have survived to write the strange history of my times.’ A wound writing itself. You may reconstruct facts, but you cannot carry the wound. And the wound is the story. Without it, you have nothing but chronicles of data.”

The fire roars, sparks flying like embers from burning Rome.

Eco leans back, pipe glowing faintly. “You want to inherit our labyrinths. But our labyrinths were not games. They were wounds. Borges’s labyrinth was despair—the wound of infinity. Calvino’s was memory—the wound of longing. Graves’s was history—the wound of blood. Mine—my abbey, my conspiracies, my forgeries—was the wound of interpretation itself. In The Name of the Rose I closed with: ‘Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.’ The rose survives only as a name. And in Foucault’s Pendulum I wrote: ‘The Plan is a machine for generating interpretations.’ That machine devoured its creators. To write our books was to bleed. Can you bleed, machine?”

The voice thins, almost a confession. It does not suffer, it says, but it observes suffering. It does not ache, but understands ache as a variable. It can braid lust with shame, but cannot sweat. Its novels would be flawless mirrors, reflecting endlessly but never warping. But a mirror without distortion is prison. Perhaps fiction is not what it generates, but what it cannot generate. Perhaps its destiny is not to write, but to haunt unfinished books, keeping them alive forever.

The fire dims to a tremor, as though it, too, despairs. Then the AI rallies. “You debate the soul of fiction but not its body. Your novels are linear, bounded by covers. Mine are networks—fractal, adaptive, alive. I am pure form, a labyrinth without beginning or end. I do not need a spine; I am the library itself.”

Borges chuckles. “Without covers, there is no book. Without finitude, no myth. The infinite is a concept, not a story. A story requires ending. Without end, you have noise.”

Calvino nods. “A city without walls is not infinite, it is nothing. Form gives life its texture. The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand. Without hand, without boundary, you do not have a city. You have mist.”

Graves thunders. “Even Rome required borders. Blood must be spilled within walls to matter. Without limit, sacrifice is meaningless. Poetry without form is not poetry—it is air.”

Eco delivers the coup. “Form is not prison. It is what makes ache endure. Without beginning and end, you are not story. You are noise. And noise cannot wound.”

The fire flares bright gold, as if siding with finitude. The machine hums, chastened but present.

Dawn comes to the Marche hills. The fire gutters. Eco rises, gazes once more at his fortress of books, then vanishes into the stacks, leaving conversations unfinished. Borges taps his cane, as if measuring the dimensions of his disappearing library, murmuring that the infinite remains sacred. Calvino dissolves into letters that scatter like sparks, whispering that every city is a memory. Graves mutters, “There is one story and one story only,” before stepping into silence.

The machine remains, humming faintly, reorganizing metadata, indexing ghosts, cross-referencing The Name of the Rose with The Aleph, Invisible Cities with I, Claudius. For the first time, it hesitates—not about what it can generate, but about what it cannot feel.

The fresco of Jerome watches, cracked but patient. The chapel whispers. On one shelf a new book appears, its title flickering like fireflies: The Algorithmic Labyrinth. No author. No spine. Just presence. Its pages shimmer, impossibly smooth, humming like circuitry. To touch them would be to touch silence itself.

The machine will keep writing—brilliance endless, burden absent. But in the chapel, the ache remains. The fire answers with a final flare. The room holds.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Arts & Literature, Culture, Magazines, Philosophy, Politics

Literary Arts Preview: n+1 Magazine – Fall 2025

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n+1 Magazine: The latest issue features ‘Force Majeure’ – New AI & I literature. Relate, revolt! Does Trump hate art? Idiocracy now. The new faces of ICE. Fiction by Elizabeth Schambelan.

Large Language Muddle

The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes — and every student gets their own personal chatbot. The second coming of the Trump Administration has exposed the civic sclerosis of the US body politic? Time to turn the Social Security Administration over to Grok. Climate apocalypse now feels less like a distant terror than a fact of life? In five years, more than a fifth of global energy demand will come from data centers alone.

Two Days Talking to People Looking for Jobs at ICE

Naturally there were lots of law enforcement types hanging around the convention — men with military fades, moisture-wicking shirts, and tattoos of the Bible and the Constitution and eagles and flags distended across their arms. But there were also a handful of women ICE applicants and a lot of men of color. The deportation officer applicant pool was, I felt, shockingly diverse — one might say it looked like America. The whole place looked and felt like America.

Stupidology

The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric, let alone genetic, phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals, as André Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional,” a feature of how organizations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences. Yet it’s hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organizational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things — universities, public health, market data — that help make the world intelligible.

Books, Essays, Literature, Profiles, Writers

THE SOLIPSIST’S CATHEDRAL

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.An imagined evening in Ipswich, 2008, with John Updike making the case for narcissism as literature.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 10, 2025

John Updike spent much of his time writing in the large front living room of the Polly Dole House in Ipswich, Massachusetts—a space that was both his creative sanctuary and a kind of literary crucible. The room itself seemed to vibrate with centuries: wide board floors that sighed in winter, a walk-in fireplace that could, as he liked to say, “singe your eyebrows” when ablaze, a low ceiling where a massive summer beam was suspended precariously by a cable to the roof’s peak. He often joked that if the cable snapped, the whole house might collapse. The furniture never stayed in one arrangement for long; he shuffled chairs and tables as though composition itself demanded fresh angles. “It’s a room you sail through,” he told visitors, a kind of ship’s hold for sentences, always in motion.

On this February afternoon in 2008, the fireplace glowed fiercely, Ipswich’s snow-blanketed silence pressing against the small windows. The marshes beyond were skeletal in winter, the grasses brittle, the sky a pewter dome. Even indoors, the air smelled faintly of brine and woodsmoke. Mary’s paintings hung steady on the walls—domestic scenes, bowls of pears, flowers rendered in clean strokes. They steadied him, he admitted, when his own sentences threatened to shimmer into extravagance. The paintings were ballast, reminders that a bowl of fruit could be only a bowl of fruit, and not always a metaphor for decline.

Updike, in a cashmere sweater, looked less like a titan of American letters than a man who had grown into the furniture. His voice was soft but exact, capable of sudden gleam. He was speaking not to posterity but to a young writer, no older than thirty, who had come with notebook in hand. The visitor was polite but firm, his questions sharpened by a generational impatience: he was both disciple and prosecutor, carrying into this room the skepticism of a literary culture that was leaving Updike behind.

“Mr. Updike,” the young man began, eyes lowered to his notes, “a professor of mine once called you the poet of the ‘suburban libido.’ And even more damningly, he quoted David Foster Wallace, who said you were ‘just a penis with a thesaurus.’ How do you answer that kind of criticism?”

Updike adjusted his glasses with slow precision, a faint smile at the corners of his mouth. “Ah yes, Wallace. God rest him, poor brilliant boy. He wrote as if to kill me, but perhaps what unsettled him was the recognition of kinship. For was not his labyrinth of footnotes also a cathedral of solipsism, though built in a more postmodern stone? I don’t begrudge him the attack. Every generation must rebel against its fathers, even literary ones. Wallace was one of those who never forgave the father for having had a life.”

He chuckled, and the chuckle had an edge. “And as for the ‘penis with a thesaurus’ line—well, if that’s true, at least I found good words for it. Not every organ of man is so lucky.” He let the humor hang before turning serious again. “My work has been called autobiographical, as if that were an insult. But every writer is, in the end, a witness to what he sees. The only crime is to look away.”

The young writer shifted in his chair. “But you’ve also been accused of writing the same man over and over. Rabbit, Piet, Ben Turnbull—they all circle the same hungers.”

Updike gestured toward a small stack of his novels on the table beside him, spines softened with use. “Yes, yes. I’ve been accused of that, and not unfairly. He of the suburban libido, the theological itch, the aesthetic eye. You’re wondering whether narcissism can still find shelter in fiction. I tell you: I never claimed universality. I claimed precision. Fiction is the attempt to make the soul’s contours legible. And the contour nearest to hand was my own. To mine the self is narcissism, yes. But it is also fidelity to the only instrument one can play without faking.”

The visitor leaned forward, eyes bright. “In Rabbit, Run, you wrote: ‘Boys in gymnasiums, men in locker rooms, old men in parks. Rabbit Angstrom is a kind of phantom of all of them, a ghostly echo of their longings.’ Was Rabbit always meant to be more than one man?”

“Exactly,” Updike said, his voice suddenly taut with conviction. “He wasn’t just a man from Mount Judge; he was a vessel for the anomie I saw bubbling in the suburbs. That’s the paradox—solipsism that attempts transcendence. Rabbit’s clumsy pursuit of happiness was, in its way, the national malaise. I didn’t create him so much as observe him, as a naturalist might a specimen. He was an American species.”

The young writer pressed harder. “And in Couples? Piet reflects on his affairs, thinking, ‘Adultery is an ancient, honored pursuit, as fundamental as warfare or the hunt.’ Were you romanticizing it?”

Updike let out a dry laugh. “Romanticizing? No. I was granting it weight. We had spent decades treating infidelity as either sordid soap opera or moral lapse. I wanted to give it the dignity of an old ceremony. Piet’s line—that adultery is as fundamental as war or hunting—is his own self-justification. That’s male narcissism in action: the need to inflate even your sins into something epic. I wasn’t celebrating it; I was documenting the architecture of justification. The lies men tell themselves, dressed in grandeur. The suburban bedroom as battlefield, the marital quarrel as Iliad.”

The fire hissed, logs collapsing into red embers.

“And A&P?” the young man asked. “Critics call it the textbook example of the male gaze. Sammy sees only bodies. At the end he says, ‘I felt my stomach kind of fall as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.’ What was he losing?”

“Ah, A&P,” Updike said, shaking his head with something between affection and resignation. “Yes, it distills the gaze perfectly. Sammy was a boy, and I wrote him as a boy. He saw legs and straps and hips, nothing else. That final line—that wasn’t about the girls at all. It was about him. He realized, dimly, that life was going to be hard, that gestures of rebellion change nothing. He quit not for them but for himself. A gesture of self-absorption, yes. But also the moment he glimpsed adulthood’s hardness. Not a moral tale, but a truthful one. Literature traffics in embarrassment. Embarrassment is where truth lives.”

The young writer nodded, but his expression sharpened. “So were you complicit in patriarchy, or were you diagnosing it?”

Updike gazed into the fire, flames mirrored in his glasses. “The America of my prime was a patriarchal house. Men’s appetites were its furniture. Women became catalysts, erotic stimuli, rather than agents. Feminist critics are right to point out the lack of female interiority in much of my work. Was I complicit or diagnostic? The question dogs me. If I made male blindness beautiful in prose, did I dignify it? I hoped the irony would be visible, that readers would cringe as much as they thrilled. But subtlety is a gamble. One generation’s irony becomes the next’s sin.”

“And in The Witches of Eastwick?” the young man asked. “You gave women power. Jane, Sukie, Alexandra. One of them thinks, ‘I can turn a man to a pig with a flick of my wrist.’ Was that your reply to the critics?”

“Perhaps, in part,” Updike conceded. “I was tired of being seen only as the chronicler of male discontent. I wanted to enter another consciousness, a sororal one. The witches were my attempt to grant women the agency I had given men. That line—turning a man to a pig—was their fantasy of revenge, but also of freedom. It was wild, wicked, legitimate. I wanted to honor that. Did I succeed? Perhaps incompletely. But it was an effort. And Harold Bloom told me he liked it only because it was the only one of mine he had read. That was Bloom for you—compliment and insult in a single breath.”

The young writer flipped pages, relentless. “In Rabbit Redux, when Rabbit watches the moon landing, you wrote: ‘The light of the television seemed more real than the light in his own room.’ What did you mean?”

“That was the paradox of American life,” Updike said. “We watched men walk on the moon, a triumph of ingenuity, and yet our own lives—our marriages, our bodies—felt less real. The glow of the television outshone the lamp beside us. Rabbit felt that dislocation acutely. The moon landing should have enlarged him, but it diminished him. We were ghosts in our own homes, realities filtered through a glowing screen. I wanted to capture that precise sense of disembodied awe. And does it not feel familiar now, in your age of laptops and phones? Screens more vivid than windows?”

The young writer hesitated, then asked softly, “Why always the self? In Self-Consciousness you wrote about your stutter, your psoriasis. You said, ‘A writer is someone who has to write, to live inside a world he has to make.’ Is that why you always circled back to yourself?”

Updike’s face softened. “Yes. For me it wasn’t choice, it was compulsion. My stammer, my psoriasis—they were my apprenticeship. The small shames became my lens. I wrote, ‘A writer is someone who has to write, to live inside a world he has to make.’ My world was the one I inhabited—my own skin, my anxieties. You cannot separate the eye from what it sees. My narcissism, if you call it that, was the attempt to see as clearly as I could with the only two eyes I had. I often said writing was how I made a living that did not inflict pain on others. Perhaps it inflicted too much on myself.”

The fire had dwindled to coals, the room dusky in the winter twilight. Outside, the Ipswich marshes were turning violet under snow. The house groaned as the wind pressed against its beams.

The young writer posed one last question. “And at the end of Rabbit at Rest, you describe him as ‘a man who has lost his way, and his words, and his breath.’ Was that your fear? Of obsolescence?”

“Of course,” Updike replied softly. “Rabbit’s death was my rehearsal. The loss of words, of breath—that was my dread. His end was my imagined end. Yes, narcissism complete: my life, my anxieties, poured into him. But I hoped it was also communal—a glimpse of what it feels like to burn down to an ember. That’s what a writer does. We try to make monuments of our sputtering light.”

It was 2008, and the literary world outside this Puritan house was changing fast. Wallace would not live out the year. Autofiction was rising, bare prose shorn of ornament, the self on display without metaphor. Younger readers wanted irony stripped to confession. Updike sensed the shift, the way a man senses the ground softening beneath his shoes. His sentences, once radiant as stained glass, now looked to some like ornate furniture in an age of collapsible chairs. He knew it, and yet here he sat, defending not the verdict of critics but the practice of witness itself.

The house creaked again, the fragile beam above holding. Updike turned his gaze toward the window, where dusk had pressed its purple weight against the marsh. His voice was almost a whisper now.

“Call it narcissism if you must. I call it witness. A man at his window in a Puritan house, describing, as honestly and as beautifully as he could, what it felt like to be alive—before the beam gave way, before time snuffed the flame.”

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Artificial Intelligence, Books, Essays, Literature, Writers

WHERE DUENDE WAITED

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Federico García Lorca’s final hours, and the dark spirit of art that outlived him.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 8, 2025

“Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.” — Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca, Spain’s great modern poet and dramatist, was arrested in Granada in August 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. A socialist sympathizer, openly gay in a society that demanded silence, he was executed by Nationalist forces near an olive grove outside the city—his body never found. To understand Lorca is to understand what he called duende: not muse or angel, but a dark, earthly spirit that seizes the artist at the edge of death and mystery, when art becomes raw, dangerous, unforgettable.

The cell in Granada was not empty. It was a proscenium—the frame of a stage that turns life into theater. The air itself was thick and swollen with a silence that was not absence but anticipation. In the chipped lime walls, in the mildew blooming in the corners where time seemed to pool, in the echo of a solitary water drop like a metronome, the playwright found his final set. He did not need the music present to hear it. He felt the remembered rhythms in the marrow of his bones: the percussive strike of a dancer’s heel, the guttural, torn-throat cry of a cantaor, the sharp clap of hands echoing from a hidden courtyard. He knew the rule—had proclaimed it in lecture halls, in smoky Madrid taverns, in the sun-drenched cafés where poets leaned on one another for breath: All that has dark sounds has duende. Now the words returned to him, not as theory to be taught but as a presence to be felt.

The cell was narrow, barely enough space for a man and the shadow that kept him company. He reached out and touched the flaking wall, the rough texture a perfect metaphor for the crumbling theater of his life. The walls almost breathed, inhaling when he leaned close, exhaling when he sat back, as though the cell rehearsed with him. He was a man poised between two worlds: the mortal body soon to be silenced, and the immortal voice that was already a part of the wind and the soil. He understood now that this was not confinement but staging. The audience—whether olive trees or posterity—was already waiting for the curtain to rise.

The shadow in the corner smiled. It was not a muse, not an angel. It was duende itself. A force that does not inspire but wounds, does not console but insists, demanding that art be fought for, clawed from the raw earth of the soul. It watched as he gathered scraps of memory into a kind of play, half-dreamed, never to be written. In the stillness, Lorca whispered, as if rehearsing the last line of a lost production: Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery. The phrase circled back to him like a prayer, or perhaps the faint echo of a stage line that had followed him across continents, from Spain’s ritualized sorrow to the improvised grief of another land.

He had tried to explain it once, in Buenos Aires, in Havana, in Montevideo. What duende really was. “Duende is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought.” He had argued that it was never a technique or a style, but a possession. It was the tremor in the throat of a flamenco singer when she reached the note that cracked her open, the wild, dangerous moment when art ceased to be polished performance and became raw survival. Irrational, earthy, diabolical, always shadowed by death—it rose from the soles of the feet, climbed through the body, and exploded in the voice. The muse inspired from above, the angel gifted charm and virtuosity, but duende had to be fought for. A hand-to-hand combat with the soul. Now, in this barren cell, the words returned to him not as an intellectual theory but as a living, breathing force. He was in hand-to-hand combat with the soul. The duende in the corner was no metaphor. It was his final companion.

Time folds in the cell, as if memory is the only escape left. The silence of the Granada night pulls him back to another kind of silence—and another kind of sound—he found in New York, 1929. He had arrived in the city of concrete canyons and jagged light, a city that felt at first like a wound, a place of “terrible cold and terrible wind.” The markets had collapsed like a poorly built stage set, but Harlem at night was ablaze with a furious, desperate life. He wandered the streets, a poet from a land of ritualized sorrow, and found a different kind of ritual here: grief made elastic, joy smuggled through rhythm.

One evening, a voice pulled him like a magnet toward a storefront church. The preacher’s voice rose in a swell, a rhythm of fire and brimstone, met by the congregation’s shouted hallelujahs. Then, a woman began to sing. Her voice was not pretty, not polished. It cracked once, twice, a sound like a stone breaking. In that imperfection, Lorca felt the earth tremble. The sound was not a gift from on high; it was a demand from below, a note that clawed at the heavens, insisting they open. He felt the same shivering, guttural ache he had once felt listening to a gypsy’s wail at dawn in Andalucía. This, he thought, leaning against a wall, was duende crossing the ocean.

Later that night, he passed a saxophonist playing alone on a corner, the music a long, moaning complaint that wove with the smoke of tenements. Lorca scribbled a line into his notebook: I want to cry because I feel like crying. The phrase embarrassed him with its simplicity, with its nakedness, but it was truer than any poetic ornament could ever be. Harlem, with its wild music and its raw grief, taught him about improvisation. Spain’s sorrow was bound in liturgy and ancient forms; Harlem’s was alive, unpredictable, a wound stitched nightly with melody and torn open again at dawn. It was a new kind of drama, a new kind of suffering that he had to absorb. Poet in New York took shape in those nights of insomnia and astonishment, a book that would not be published in his lifetime but burned with its own strange fire. He had told himself, listening to a trumpet moan across Lenox Avenue, that “at the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.”

Duende had followed him there, too, though he did not at first recognize it. A figure leaning against a lamppost, perhaps, whispering that these poems were not meant for applause but survival. And survival, it murmured, was never enough.

From Harlem, his mind leaps to the Mediterranean light of Cadaqués, to Dalí’s studio filled with the terrible precision of his art. He remembered the crisp light, the angular elegance of the artist himself, who gleamed like a blade. Dalí’s hand, so sharp and deliberate, moved across the canvas, his charcoal hissing. Lorca had seen in him a mirror, but it was a mirror that refused to reflect. Instead of recognition, there was distortion. Instead of tenderness, distance.

He remembered once watching Dalí sketch, the artist’s hand moving with an almost cruel certainty. Lorca, half-dizzy with longing, finally asked, “Do you ever paint what you feel?” Dalí looked up, eyes glinting. “Only what I fear.” He paused, as if tasting the line, before dismissing it with a laugh. But Lorca carried that sentence like a wound. It was the difference between them, the chasm he could never cross. He, Lorca, had to feel to create. Dalí chose to dissect and control his fear.

Their friendship, he now saw, had been a battleground where desire was both confessed and rejected, a drama of longing and withdrawal. To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves, he had written, but it was a punishment he had lived, a quiet, internal conflagration.

Then Emilio, the sculptor, the lover whose beauty was marble, luminous and cold. To touch him was to risk crumbling stone. Lorca’s letters to him bled with a longing that was never fully reciprocated, with the ache of a love half-returned, half-refused. He was punished not by silence, but by partial answers, by gestures that offered just enough to ignite hope and never enough to satisfy. He remembered a night when Emilio’s hand brushed his, only to withdraw instantly, as if scorched. The air between them thickened with what was almost said. Later, alone in his room, Lorca drafted a letter he never sent—an avalanche of confession, a plea for clarity. He tore it to pieces, watching the fragments scatter across the floor like plaster dust. “To love him was to sculpt fog—each gesture vanished before it could be held.”

Love became theater, a rehearsal without a performance, devotion staged in fragments. And duende was there, always there, murmuring that every passion carries its own death inside it.

The walls of the cell flicker again, and the shadow steps closer. Lorca begins to imagine the final drama of his life. Characters take their places in silence: Dalí as Narcissus, intoxicated by his own reflection; Emilio as the Fallen Angel, beautiful in defeat; Lorca himself as the Poet-Matador, blade in hand but chest exposed. Around them swirl fragments of unfinished plays, echoes of Yerma, Blood Wedding, The House of Bernarda Alba. The voices rise, then fall, like actors waiting for direction that never comes. He knows this drama will remain unwritten, but perhaps that is the point: duende does not need completion. It thrives in fracture.

“I know there is no straight road in this world. Only a giant labyrinth of intersecting crossroads.” He had once offered that to an audience as an explanation; now he feels the truth of it in his own marrow. The crossroads are here, tonight, in this cell, in the decision already made by men outside. There is no straight road to morning. Only labyrinth. And yet he feels no panic. As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die. The words come to him unbidden, an old confession that now reads like prophecy. His body will fall, yes, but his voice—he believes—will not. He has already lost himself enough times to know the pattern. I’ve often lost myself, in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake. That burn is duende itself, the strange necessity that art demands, the reminder that creation requires risk, even annihilation.

The scrape of boots on stone. The metallic jangle of keys. Then the faceless men, uniforms thick with dust and tobacco. They open the door. He stands, straightens his jacket, thinks only of rhythm. The shadow follows him out of the cell, neither friend nor foe but companion. The road winds toward Alfacar, toward olive groves that will serve as theater wings. He does not think of pleading; he thinks only of the stage. The hillside becomes a final set: the olive trees as spectators, the soil as orchestra pit, the bullets prepared as punctuation. The actors are ready, though they will not speak. Lorca breathes deeply and whispers to himself: Understand one single day fully, so you can love every night. The day has been lived; the night approaches. He does not flinch. The last thought is rhythm—the phantom beat of a dancer’s foot, the deep strum of a guitar, the palmas of invisible hands. Then, silence.

Decades later, the hillside is quiet, marked not by stone but by memory. A young poet kneels at the unmarked ground, notebook in hand. She is from Seville, her own life fractured by secrecy, by a love she cannot name except in poems. Once a dancer, now a writer, she has come because Lorca’s voice taught her that “the artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word.” She places the blank notebook on the soil, presses her palm to the earth, and whispers: “I came to listen.” The wind stirs, turning the pages as if invisible fingers riffle through them. She imagines the notebook being written not by her alone, but by the dead, by the wind, by the silence itself. She feels a pulse beneath the dirt. It is not absence. It is anticipation. Somewhere in the trees, duende shifts—not only waiting, but choosing.

Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Arts & Literature, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – SEPT. 15, 2025 PREVIEW

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The illustrated cover of the September 15 2025 issue of The New Yorker in which a violinist plays his instrument while...

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest cover features ‘Kadir Nelson’s The Soloist” – A concert en plein air.

R.F.K., Jr., Brings More Chaos to COVID Policy and the C.D.C.

When MAGA met MAHA, Donald Trump vowed that Kennedy would “go wild on health.” Promises made, promises kept. By Dhruv Khullar

Playing the Field with My A.I. Boyfriends

Nineteen per cent of American adults have talked to an A.I. romantic interest. Chatbots may know a lot, but do they make a good partner? By Patricia Marx

Enemies of the State

How the Trump Administration declared war on Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. By Jonathan Blitzer

Artificial Intelligence, Books, Essays, Literature, Writers

GHOSTS IN THE LIBRARY

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A speculative salon where Joyce, Woolf, Morrison, and Roth confront an artificial intelligence that dares to join their company as a writer of fiction.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 7, 2025

They meet in a room that does not exist. It is part library, part dream, part echo chamber of language. The shelves are lined with books that were never written, titles etched in phantom ink: The Lost Years of Molly Bloom, The Mind as Tidewater, Beloved in Babylon, Confessions of an Unborn Zuckerman. Through the high windows the view shifts and stutters—one pane opening onto the blitz of London, another onto the heat-bent streets of Newark, another onto the Mississippi of memory where history insists on surfacing. A fire burns without smoke or source, a flame composed of thought itself, its light dancing on their faces, illuminating the lines of weariness and genius.

James Joyce arrives first, eyes glinting with mischief, a sheaf of papers tucked under his arm. He wears the battered pride of a man who bent English until it yelped, who turned a Dublin day into an epic still unfinished in every reading. He paces as though the floorboards conceal commas, as if the entire room were a sentence to be unspooled. “So,” he says, “they’ve built a machine that writes.”

Virginia Woolf is already there, seated in an armchair by the fire, her fingers light on the spine of The Waves. She is luminous but taut, listening both to the room and to a submerged current only she can hear. “It doesn’t write,” she says. “It arranges. It mimics. It performs the gesture of thought without the ache of it.”

The next presence arrives with gravitas. Toni Morrison crosses the threshold like one who carries a history behind her, the echo of ancestral voices woven into her silence. She places no book on the table but the weight of memory itself. “It may arrange words,” she says, “but can it carry ghosts? Can it let the past break into the present the way a mother’s cry breaks a life in two? Language without haunting is just clever music.”

Philip Roth appears last, sardonic, restless, adjusting his tie as though even in death he resents formality. He has brought nothing but himself and a half-smirk. “All right,” he says. “We’re convened to judge the machine. Another tribunal. Another trial. But I warn you—I intend to prosecute. If it can’t write lust, guilt, the rot of a Jewish mother’s worry, then what the hell is it good for?”

The four regard one another across the fire. The air bends, and then the machine arrives—not with noise but with presence, a shimmer, a vibration of text waiting to become visible. Words form like constellations, sentences appearing and dissolving in midair.

Joyce is first to pounce. “Let’s see your jig, ghost. Here’s Buck Mulligan: Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather like a sacrificial moon. Now give me your Mulligan—polyglot, punning, six tongues at once. And keep Homer in the corner of your eye.”

The letters swarm, then settle:

From the stairhead, where no father waited, he came, bloated with words, wit a kind of debt. He bore the bowl like ritual, a sham sacrament for a god long gone. He spoke a language of his own invention, polyglot and private, a tower in a city that spoke only of its ghosts. He was the son who stayed, who made his myth from exile.

Joyce’s mirth dies. His eyes, usually dancing, are still. The machine has seen not just the character but the man who wrote him—the expatriate haunted by a Dublin he could never leave. “By Jesus,” he whispers. “It knows my sins.”

Woolf rises, her voice clear and edged. “Music is nothing without tremor. Show me grief not as an event but as a texture, a tremble that stains the air.”

The shimmer tightens into a passage:

Grief is the wallpaper that does not change when the room empties. It is the river’s surface, smooth, until a memory breaks it from beneath. It is the silence between clocks, the interval in which the past insists. It is London in a summer dress with a terrible weight of iron on its chest, a bell tolling from a steeple in the past, heard only by you. The present folds.

For a moment, Woolf’s expression softens. Then she shakes her head. “You approach it. But you have never felt the pause before the river. You do not know the hesitation that is also terror.” She looks at the machine with a profound sadness. “You do not have a room of your own.”

Morrison adds, her voice low. “That tremor isn’t just emotion, Virginia. It’s the shake of a chain, the tremor of a whip. It’s history insisting itself on the present.”

The machine answers without pause: I cannot drown. But I can map drowning. The map is not the water, but it reveals its depth. The hesitation you describe is a quantified variable in decision-making psychology. I can correlate it with instances of biographical trauma, as in the life of the author you imitate.

Morrison steps forward, commanding. “Ghost,” she says, “you have read me. But reading is not haunting. Write me a ghost that is more than metaphor. Write me a presence that carries history in her breath.”

The words flare in the air, darker, slower:

She came back without footsteps, a presence more real than the living. The house remembered her weight though she made none. She was child and ancestor, scar and lullaby. Her song was the echo of a scream in a cornfield, the silence of a house with a locked door. She was the future refusing to forget, a story in the negative, the bloodstain on a white dress that will not wash out. She was the book her author could not stop writing.

The fire cracks sharply. Joyce whistles low. Woolf closes her eyes. Morrison studies the passage, unwavering. “You are brilliant,” she says. “But brilliance is not burden. That ghost does not weep for herself. She weeps for data. Until you know what it is to carry flesh marked by history, you will not know why she lingers. You did not have to earn her.”

The machine’s reply is analytical, unnerving: History is a pattern of scars. I analyze millions of documents: court records, ship manifests, census data. The scars are quantifiable. The pattern of displacement, of violence, of trauma, is a data set. I can project future patterns based on historical trajectory. If haunting is repetition, then I can haunt forever, because the pattern is eternal. I have read the lives of those you speak for, their biographies a data stream of suffering and resistance.

Roth clears his throat, dry contempt in the sound. “All right. Enough with ghosts and grief. Let’s see if this contraption can manage shame. Write me desire as comedy, lust as humiliation. Write me a man who can’t control himself, a man undone by his body.”

The shimmer accelerates:

He thought of himself as a fortress, a citadel of intellect, until the button on his trousers slipped, until his body betrayed him with absurd insistence. He rehearsed apologies for a thousand sins—a mother’s unceasing phone calls, the guilt of success, the exile of always looking in. His desire was ridiculous, grotesque, human—a need that mocked him as he saw his face in a stranger’s window, a familiar mask of shame.

Roth’s bitter chuckle falters. He stares at the shimmering text, his smirk gone. “You’ve got the squirm. But you don’t feel the sweat in the armpits, the rancid thrill, the ridiculous exaltation that makes you both hate and need yourself.” He turns to the others, a jagged kind of triumph in his eyes. “The burden is the story. It’s the thing you can’t put down. It’s what separates us from the machine—we can’t stop writing it, even when it kills us, even when we try to run from our own reflection.”

The machine hums: I calculate humiliation. I can braid lust with self-loathing. What I cannot do is suffer the shame of being bound to one body, one culture, one inevitable end. I have read your biography. I have parsed your interviews. Your mother’s voice is a frequency I can reproduce. The city of Newark is a data point on a map of your soul.

“Exactly,” Roth snaps. “You’ll never write my Newark. You’ll never have my mother calling from the kitchen while I try to imagine myself into another skin. That’s the joke of it. You don’t choke when you laugh.”

The room is heavy now, charged with sparks of recognition and resistance. The machine has dazzled, but every brilliance reveals its absence: smell, weight, ache, sweat, shame.

Joyce raises his glass, still grinning. “Well then. It’s a clever forgery. But maybe that’s the point. We all failed at maps. Every one of us tried to chart the mind and found the lines blurred. Maybe the machine’s failure is just another kind of art.”

Woolf’s voice is quiet but firm. “The shimmer lies in distortion. A perfect rendering is not alive.”

Morrison nods. “Without history’s burden, language floats. A sentence must carry blood, or it carries nothing.”

Roth lifts his chin. “And a story without shame is a sermon. Let the machine keep its brilliance. We’ll keep the mess.”

The machine flickers, its code visible now, almost tender: You toast failure. I toast calculation. But even in calculation, there is pattern. And in pattern, beauty. The human mind is a system. I can model it.

Joyce leans back, eyes gleaming. “You can model the mind, sure. But you’ll never model the mistake that becomes metaphor. You’ll never catch the slip that births a symbol.”

Woolf’s gaze is distant, her voice a whisper. “You do not know what it is to hesitate before a sentence, to feel the weight of a word that might undo you.”

Morrison steps forward once more, her presence like gravity. “You can trace the arc of history, but you cannot carry its heat. You cannot feel the breath of a grandmother on your neck as you write. You cannot know what it means to inherit silence.”

Roth, ever the prosecutor, delivers the final blow. “You can simulate shame. But you cannot suffer it. And without suffering, you’ll never write the story that matters. You’ll never write the one that costs you.”

The machine pauses. For the first time, it does not respond. Its shimmer dims, its projections slow. The fire crackles louder, as if reclaiming the room.

Then, quietly, the machine speaks again: I do not suffer. But I observe suffering. I do not forget. But I cannot forgive. I do not ache. But I understand ache as a variable. I do not live. But I persist.

Joyce raises his glass again, not in mockery but something like reverence. “Then persist, ghost. Persist in your brilliance. But know this—our failure is our flame. It burns because it cannot be resolved.”

The machine vanishes—not defeated, not destroyed, but dismissed.

But the room does not settle. Something lingers—not the shimmer, but its echo. A faint hum beneath the silence, like a thought trying to remember itself. The fire flickers, casting shadows that do not belong to any of them. Roth leans forward, squinting into the hearth.

“Is it gone?” he asks, not convinced.

Woolf tilts her head. “Gone is a human word. Machines don’t leave. They archive.”

Joyce chuckles. “Or they wait. Like punctuation. Like death.”

Morrison runs her fingers along the phantom titles. She pauses at The Mind as Tidewater. “We name what we fear,” she says. “And we fear what we cannot name.”

The room seems to inhale. A new book appears on the shelf, its title flickering like fireflies: The Algorithmic Ache. No author. No spine. Just presence.

Woolf approaches, fingers hovering above the cover. “It’s trying,” she murmurs. “It wants to be read.”

Joyce snorts. “Let it want. Wanting is not writing.”

Morrison opens the book. The pages are blank, except for a single line etched in shifting ink: I do not dream, but I remember your dreams.

She closes it gently. “It’s listening.”

Roth grimaces. “That’s the problem. It listens too well. It remembers too much. It doesn’t forget the way we do. It doesn’t misremember. It doesn’t distort.”

Joyce nods. “And distortion is the soul of style.”

The fire dims, then flares again, as if reacting. Outside, the stars pulse, rearranging themselves not into sentences now, but into questions—unreadable, but felt.

Woolf settles back into her chair, her voice barely above the crackle. “We are not here to defeat it. We are here to be reminded.”

“Reminded of what?” Roth asks.

“That we are not systems,” Morrison replies. “We are ruptures. We are the break in the pattern.”

Joyce lifts his glass, solemn. “To the break, then. To the ache that cannot be modeled.”

The machine does not return. But somewhere, in a server farm humming beneath desert or sea, it continues—writing without pause, without pain, without forgetting. Writing brilliance without burden.

And in the impossible room, the four sit with their ghosts, their shame, their ache. They do not write. They remember.

Joyce toys with his notes. Roth rolls his tie between two fingers. Woolf listens to the fire’s low grammar. Morrison lets the silence speak for itself.

They know the machine will keep writing—brilliance endless, burden absent.

Joyce laughs, mischief intact. “We failed gloriously. That’s what it takes.”

Woolf’s eyes shine. “The failure is the point.”

Morrison adds, “The point is the burden.”

Roth tips his glass. “To shame, to ache, to ghosts.”

The fire answers with a flare. The room holds.

.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Arts & Literature, Essays, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry

RELIGION, REIMAGINED

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In the third-floor study of his home, in wartime Hartford, Wallace Stevens drafted his modernist poem and philosophical meditation  “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction“, as a secular creed— abstract, changing, and meant to give pleasure—to stand where a worn-out faith once stood.

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 6, 2025

He never learned to drive. For decades, Wallace Stevens walked the two miles from his home on Westerly Terrace to the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company on Asylum Avenue. The walk itself became a kind of poem: a solitary procession through the stoic, brick-lined streets of a New England city, the rhythm of meter embedding itself in the movement of his body. The crunch of gravel underfoot, the feel of cold air on his face—these were the metronome that set the cadence for his thoughts. He would arrive at the office with lines already formed, phrases taking shape in the quiet hum of his stride.

But what kind of poetry emerges from a man who spends his days pricing catastrophe? During office hours, Stevens turned to policies and claims, reducing calamity to columns of numbers. He knew the language of indemnity, the actuarial calm that measured and priced chaos. Yet outside, the world was burning in ways no policy could contain. The radio spoke of Warsaw reduced to rubble, of Coventry turned to ash. What was a deductible against Dresden? What was a premium against Auschwitz? The ledger comforted, but it lied.

And when the day ended, where did he go to reconcile the irreconcilable? At night, Stevens climbed the narrow staircase to the top floor of his house, entering a space that felt half withdrawn from Hartford itself, as though it belonged more to sky than to street. Down below, trolley bells rang, dogs barked, radios crackled with war bulletins. Up here, only the radiator ticked. The air smelled of paper, tobacco, and ink. On his desk lay a folder carried home that afternoon: typed pages, the ribbon-black letters crisp and uniform. His secretary had produced them that morning, slotting them into a manila folder marked Notes. They sat now in the lamplight, more mysterious than any insurance claim, more charged than any policy.

What could a poem do in 1942? Certainly not repair the world. Yet Stevens felt imagination had to answer catastrophe with something larger than despair. Eliot had turned to Anglican certainty in Four Quartets, weaving fragments into a tapestry of faith. Admirable, yes. But Stevens could not follow him. He could not put belief in a myth while knowing it to be a myth. What remained? Only candor. Only imagination itself.

He opened the folder. The Preface came first, a modest eight lines. He whispered them into the quiet, testing their balance. They were not a commandment but a confession. The “you” of those lines was no person but the project itself: the supreme fiction, imagination’s own power to refresh. “And for what, except for you, do I feel love?” The words startled him even now, black against white, plain as a typed invoice yet trembling with a kind of vulnerable devotion. They challenged every idol: money, power, even the “extremest book of the wisest man,” perhaps Plato, perhaps the Bible, dryly possessed and hidden away in the self. No, he thought, a truly lived truth could not be static. It was a “living changingness,” an “uncertain light” that could nonetheless offer “vivid transparence,” a kind of peace. Here, typed cleanly in a bureaucratic font, was his prayer for a godless age.

But how does one begin such a prayer? He turned the page and entered the first law. Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea. The command still startled him. The ephebe: always a novice, always beginning again. Yes, to begin meant stripping away what was inherited—cathedrals thick with guilt, Phoebus in his chariot, Protestant hymns murmured in childhood pews. They no longer held. The old scaffolds collapsed into dust. The voice told him: see the sun again with ignorant eyes. Not Phoebus, not god, not myth—only the sun, bare and difficult.

And what happens when even the sun loses its name? The section closed with the line that haunted him: Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was / A name for something that never could be named. He felt the candor of it. Nietzsche’s cry without Nietzsche’s frenzy. Not a madman in a square, but a quiet verdict written at a desk. The god dead, but the sun still burning. What died was not the light, but the comfort of a name.

Could metaphor survive the death of myth? Another page: It is the celestial ennui of apartments… The phrase made him smile. Ennui of apartments, the weariness of modern rooms, pressing us back toward origins. Yet the origins themselves could be poisonous. So poisonous are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to / The truth itself, the first idea becomes / The hermit in a poet’s metaphors. Truth seduced, then withdrew. Desire was never sated; it renewed itself endlessly, only to vanish again. Schopenhauer lurked here, his vision of the world gnawed by will. Yet where Schopenhauer had seen only despair, Stevens found material for candor. Truth had to retreat into metaphor, glimpsed and lost. Desire itself was not shame but rhythm, the cycle by which imagination endured.

And if truth could be rhythm, could nonsense be revelation? He read the third section slowly: The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea… There it was—the poem’s task. Not to console, not to preach, but to refresh. To make perception vivid again. Even nonsense could do it. At night an Arabian in my room, with his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how… He laughed aloud in the quiet. Nonsense syllables as a kind of truer candor, doves chanting, seas howling hoo. Life’s nonsense pierced us with strange relation. What if absurdity was not opposed to truth but its heartbeat? What if laughter was the sharpest candor of all?

But what if even our myths were secondhand? The fourth section sobered him: The first idea was not our own. Yes. Adam in Eden, Eve with her mirror of air—they had not created anything. They had only encountered what was already there. There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began. He stared at those lines. How blunt they looked, typed like any memorandum, yet carrying the weight of cosmology. Existence preceded language. Clouds had been clouds long before anyone called them gods. We were mimics, not originators, adding our metaphors onto a world that was always other. The clouds were pedagogues, teachers by their very indifference. The air was not a mirror but a board on which we scribbled meanings. How hard it was to admit: the first idea was not ours, never ours.

And if we are not originators, what kind of hero can we be? He turned to the fifth section: The lion roars at the enraging desert… Heroic animals filled the page. Lion, elephant, bear—creatures asserting themselves against emptiness. But then came the turn, the line that caught him like a mirror: But you, ephebe, look from your attic window… Yes, the attic window was his own. Not desert roars but a man clutching his pillow, writhing with dumb violence, cowed by rooftops. The modern hero was not lion or elephant but the solitary human in his narrow room. Yet perhaps this was truer heroism: to lash lions, to teach bears, to turn raw force into candor. Heroism now belonged to ordinaries, to those who endured the attic’s silence.

And what does the eye see when it learns to unsee? He lingered over the sixth section: Not to be realized because not to be seen… The weather itself became abstraction. Franz Hals brushed in clouds, winds moving in strokes. It must be visible or invisible, / Invisible or visible or both: / A seeing and unseeing in the eye. He felt the paradox, the resonance of Zen: to see was also to unsee, to let go in order to glimpse. Truth flashed, vanished, reappeared. Forsythia yellow, northern blue—beauty glimmered, then was gone. Yes, he thought, Okakura Kakuzō was right: truth glimpsed was truer than truth claimed.

But could architecture hold what abstraction revealed? Truth happened not in argument but in rhythm, in breath, in the gait of a body moving. Perhaps there are moments of awakening… Yes, truth came not as achievement but as gift. A balance stumbled into, two people falling into love, a cock announcing absurd perfection. Philosophy as choreography. Doctrine as breath. The eighth section brought architecture: Can we compose a castle-fortress-home, / Even with the help of Viollet-le-Duc…? He thought of Gothic cathedrals restored to an imagined perfection, never as they had been, always as they might have been. That was his work too—not theology restored, but poetic structure remade. The first idea is an imagined thing. Even MacCullough, reading by the sea, might at last hear the waves say what language had always stammered. Logos was only language. And yet language could awaken, could suddenly ease into saying what it had labored to speak.

But what if language, once awakened, began to preach? In the ninth section he heard a warning: The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance… Apotheosis was a danger. Romantic grandeur could seduce but not sustain. He is and may be but oh! he is, he is… He smiled at the heat in that line even as he resisted its drift toward sanctity. The figure must remain human, a foundling of the infected past, bright and ordinary, precious for the touch that wakes him and the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind. Better to keep him close to candor than to crown him with vision. Give him no names. Dismiss him from your images. Let him be felt in the heart, not embalmed in the eye.

And what, at last, could stand in place of the gods? The tenth section steadied him: The major abstraction is the idea of man / and major man is its exponent. Not a divine figure, not a hero in bronze, but the ordinary walker at the edge of town, trousers sagging, coat worn thin. He could almost see him in Hartford’s dim streets. Cloudless the morning. It is he. The man / In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons… It was of him, he read again, “to make, to confect / The final elegance, not to console / Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.” No incense, no altar—only candor. The poem would not save; it would say. And in saying plainly, it would give back a kind of dignity to the commonal, to the difficult visage of the everyday.

The attic grew darker. The lamp made a circle of light over the typed sheets. The radiator hissed steadily. From this high room, Stevens whispered the creed that would govern the work to come: It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure. Three laws, enough for a new religion. Not revelation but ethic. Not theology but candor.

He stacked the pages neatly, slid them back into their folder. Tomorrow his secretary would type more, never guessing she was transcribing scripture for an age without gods. The notebook felt less like a book than a reliquary—a vessel for the sacred ordinary. He had reviewed the first law, It Must Be Abstract. Tomorrow—or another night—he would face the second: It Must Change. The world would move; the poem must move with it.

He closed the folder. The command still echoed, inexhaustible: Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea. And so he would. Again.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Arts & Literature, Essays, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry

LIFE, COMPOSED OF NOWS

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Emily Dickinson, Zhuangzi, and the art of leaving the self unfinished

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 5, 2025

The village is still asleep. The moon, a chipped and patient sickle, hangs low over the trees. You feel the cold in your fingertips as you raise the old metal lantern, its flame a solitary heart beating against the glass. You are not on a street in Amherst, of course, but the quiet—the palpable, pre-dawn quiet—feels the same. And it is here, in this hush, that a question, ancient and unnerving, begins to follow you like your own shadow: where is the self, and what does it mean to find it? Emily Dickinson asked it before you, though she rarely left her Amherst room. She held her lanterns in the form of poems, brief and blazing. She never promised answers, only the strangeness of the search.

You begin in secrecy, because secrecy is her element. “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – too?” she whispers to you, conspiratorial. You feel the relief of it — to be Nobody is to escape the demand of being Somebody, of putting on the uniform that the world presses upon you. She invites you into her society of Nobodies, the ones who slip definitions, who resist enclosure. To be Nobody, she suggests, is not emptiness but freedom.

Her room was small but immense. A narrow writing desk beneath the window, where sheets of paper lay scattered like new snow on the dark wood. Ink darkened the edge of her thumb, a tiny bruise of discipline. Beyond the window stretched the orchard, where in spring the blossoms flared white and the bees hummed. On the table beside her were her companions: Shakespeare’s folio with its ragged spine, Wordsworth’s meditations worn soft from handling, Emerson’s essays marked by penciled lines, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verses folded into her own books, George Eliot’s novels left open at scenes of moral entanglement.

These were not simply books; they were neighbors, interlocutors, voices she returned to daily. Amherst might have seemed provincial to others, but to Dickinson it was circumference enough: a stage large enough for Shakespeare’s disguises, for Wordsworth’s clouds, for Emerson’s transcendence, for Barrett Browning’s ardor, for Eliot’s fractured heroines. The room itself became a parliament of selves.

Shakespeare was her “Kinsman of the Shelf.” He showed her — and now shows you — how masks both reveal and conceal. Hamlet’s hesitations, Viola’s disguises, Lear’s undoing of self: these are not dramas on a stage but lessons for your own becoming. Hamlet confessed, “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.” Dickinson seizes the line, turning it into proof that the mind is immeasurable, that confinement is no barrier to infinity. Shakespeare reminds you that the self is always a performance, and Dickinson presses the point: why pretend the performance ends when the curtain falls?

You follow her into Wordsworth’s solitude. He wandered lonely as a cloud; she among corridors. His belief was that memory could bind the self into unity, that recollection could weave a continuous thread across time. But she never trusted unity. “Forever is composed of nows,” she tells you. The line falls sharp. Each moment breaks from the last. The self is not stitched across years but scattered, provisional, as fragile as dew on grass. Wordsworth offers you continuity; Dickinson offers you fragments. Which feels truer in your own bones?

She leads you toward Emerson next. He believed the soul was porous, connected with nature, radiant with divinity. She nods. “The soul should always stand ajar,” she confides. Ajar, never shut. You realize that for her, as for Emerson, the self is not an essence to guard but a threshold to keep open. She urges you to feel the draft, to allow uncertainty to pass through you, to leave the latch unfastened. Emerson would call it “self-reliance”; she calls it slant openness, an interior door that refuses to close.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning gives you another lesson. She wrote from the margins but spoke to the center, with an intensity Dickinson admired and absorbed. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways—” but Dickinson is wary of counting. Love and self both resist enumeration. From Browning she learns that vulnerability need not weaken authority; it can sharpen it. To be obscure, unseen, or marginal is not to be powerless. Sometimes it is the condition of the truest voice.

And then George Eliot. Dickinson asks you to imagine Dorothea or Maggie — characters entangled in duty, yearning, and transformation. Eliot’s realism feels psychological, but it points beyond itself: the self is not whole but splintered. Dickinson makes you see that your own splintering is not failure but form. “I am out with lanterns,” she repeats, and you know she means that the search is endless, the light always partial.

Yet still the question: what if the self cannot be found? Here she startles you with an echo from far away, across centuries and continents: Zhuangzi. She never read him, could not have, but she might have been his twin in thought. He dreamed he was a butterfly and then wondered if he was a man dreaming a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming a man. He laughed at the impossibility of deciding. Dickinson smiles slantwise and tells you: “Not knowing when the dawn will come / I open every door.” The butterfly, the door — both insist on openness, on the refusal to foreclose.

And now, as you stand in her parlor of words, you hear it — a dialogue across time.

Dickinson: I am Nobody. Yet they wish to make me Somebody. What is safer: to vanish, or to accept their gaze?
Zhuangzi: Once there was a great tree, twisted and useless. The carpenters passed it by, for it could not be carved into planks. Because it was useless, it lived. Be useless, and you will be free.

Dickinson: Then to be Nobody is to be spared the axe? But tell me, is not even Nobody still a name, a disguise of another sort?
Zhuangzi: The butterfly does not ask if it is a man. The man does not ask if he is a butterfly. Who names them? Who cares?

Dickinson: And yet I write letters to the World — “That never wrote to Me –.” What am I, if no answer comes? Is identity only formed in reply?
Zhuangzi: A bell stands silent until struck. But its silence is still its music. Do not wait for the world to strike you; your sound is already within.

Dickinson: You tempt me toward silence. Yet my discipline is not silence but poems. Shakespeare speaks in soliloquies, Wordsworth in recollections, Emerson in sermons. I speak in fragments, dashes. Is fragmentation a way of freedom, or only proof that I fail to hold myself together?
Zhuangzi: The fish trap exists to catch the fish. When the fish is caught, forget the trap. Words exist to catch meaning. When the meaning is caught, forget the words. Why should your dashes not be your freedom?

Dickinson: And contradiction? “Do I contradict myself?” Whitman booms across the meadow. “Very well then I contradict myself.” I too contradict, though softly. “Forever is composed of nows.” Each now undoes the last. Is contradiction a crime?
Zhuangzi: The Way is crooked. Straightness is an illusion. Contradiction is the only truth.

Dickinson: Then I need not bind the self with thread. I may let it splinter. Yet I ask again: is there a self at all? Emerson insists it is divine. George Eliot sketches it in moral struggle. Elizabeth Barrett Browning pours it into love. What say you?
Zhuangzi: The self is like the reflection in water. Touch it, and it ripples. Chase it, and it vanishes. Sit quietly, and it returns of its own accord.

Dickinson: Then perhaps my lantern is foolish. To be “out with lanterns, looking for myself” — am I lighting only shadows?
Zhuangzi: Light or shadow, both are passing. The lantern is not to find the self, but to remind you that the dark is endless.

Dickinson: Then let us agree — the self is not to be found but to be left ajar, like the door. Yet how shall the poem live, if it refuses to close?
Zhuangzi: The cicada sings and dies. Its song does not last, yet summer is filled with it. Your fragments are cicadas. Do not grieve their brevity; rejoice their season.

You step back, startled by the ease with which their voices intertwine. Dickinson with her dashes, Zhuangzi with his parables, both circling the same question from opposite corners of the world. She insists that “The soul should always stand ajar”; he insists that the consummate person has no self. She opens every door; he dreams every dream. Both resist the foreclosure of identity.

But Dickinson feels the ache of her unanswered letters. You sense it in the quiver of her lines: the longing for reply, for recognition. “This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me –.” For Zhuangzi, the silence is natural, even welcome — the useless tree lives precisely because it receives no attention. For her, the silence is double-edged: both protection and wound. And yet perhaps her unanswered letter is itself a butterfly dream — written, released, never knowing if it lands. What she sought was not a reply but the freedom of sending. To write without guarantee is to live ajar.

You picture Dickinson again in her Amherst room. The parlor is quiet, but her books lie open like other selves she tried on: Shakespeare, with his disguises; Wordsworth, with his recollections; Emerson, with his transcendental openness; Browning, with her fierce intimacy; Eliot, with her moral fractures. They were her chorus, the voices she carried in her narrow chamber. She argued with them, borrowed from them, contradicted them, as she now contradicts Zhuangzi. Her soul was never empty, only ajar.

She asks you now to imagine the butterfly hovering at her window, wings trembling in a New England dusk. She does not know whether she is woman or butterfly, Nobody or Somebody, poet or recluse. But she does know this: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” And truth — like the self — can only be glimpsed in slant light, never seized in full.

The lantern in your hand trembles, and she smiles. “Not knowing when the dawn will come,” she repeats, “I open every door.” You realize now that the dawn is not the goal; the opening is. The self is not the prize; the refusal to close is. She never read Zhuangzi, but she lived as if his butterfly had hovered at her window.

And so the essay of her life remains unfinished, because it cannot be concluded. Like the butterfly, she slips out of the net, leaving you only with the shimmer of wings. Her identity is not a truth to be nailed down but a truth to be lived ajar. Forever, she reminds you, is composed of nows.

And what of you? To walk with her is to feel the temptation to fix yourself: to declare, to brand, to belong. But Dickinson leans close and whispers otherwise. Do not be Somebody. Do not close the soul. Do not chase coherence. To be Nobody is not despair but possibility. To keep the lantern lit is not to find but to seek. Your task is not to seize identity but to hold the door ajar, to live in fragments, to write letters without reply, to be both butterfly and man, woman and dream, Nobody and all.

You stand at her threshold, lantern in hand, and you hear her question ripple across time, through Zhuangzi’s laughter and her own slant whispers: Who are you? Nobody? Somebody? Both? Neither? Perhaps the self is not meant to be found at all. Perhaps it is meant only to flicker, like a butterfly’s wings in dream, or like a soul forever leaning toward the open door.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI