Towards the beginning of You Can See Everything’s 3-hour runtime, Nathan Fielder waits outside of the bathroom where Billy Evans, Elizabeth Holmes’s fiancé, is showering after an uncomfortably close-up workout. The audience isn’t kept outside with Fielder, though: we’re jolted into a full-frontal shot of Evans’s undercarriage, unfortunately, from the shower scene until Evans dries off and shoves past Fielder in the hallway, still awkwardly hovering and as uncomfortable with the shock of intimacy as the audience.

It’s a strange scene. One moviegoer beside me joked that’s how the documentary found its title. And one initially chalks it up to that, while trying to figure out the game within the game happening on-screen. Because the draw of Everything is its mystery of truth and deception, from both the subject and documentarian. You’re wondering why famously manipulative Elizabeth Holmes and her fiancé would agree to such “radical transparency,” as he says, in the days leading up to her prison sentence. And you’re wondering why Nathan Fielder, a man known for odd and interventionist Reality TV, would be their choice documentarian.

Ostensibly, the purpose is to document Holmes as a person afflicted by an unjust fate. Holmes, a Stanford dropout and once-Silicon Valley startup darling, was convicted in 2022 for defrauding the investors in her blood-test company Theranos. The couple grants Fielder (the front man of the co-directors) unfiltered access to their lives in the 34 days before Holmes is sent to prison, with the repeatedly stated purpose of redefining Holmes in public perception—that she’s not the master manipulator the courts of law and public opinion painted her as, that Theranos worked in the way she meant in her pitch to journalists and investors, and that, ultimately, the four counts of fraud she earned in 2022 are miscarriages.

The undercarriage shot, then, could be an attempt at this. The couple takes an expansive view on transparency, apparently. But there’s not a moment in the documentary where the audience lets their guard down around Holmes and Evans, and neither does Fielder, not completely. The portrait of a loving and afflicted family that the documentary does certainly paint is forever marred by the fact of Holmes’s infamous manipulation—in Fielder’s words, it doesn’t matter if Holmes is telling the truth; no one will ever believe her again.

I caught myself oscillating between compassion and bewilderment. Fielder’s face reads the same: one moment, he’s exasperated by Holmes’s claim that she’s “never told a lie” in her life; the next, Fielder is overcome by the authenticity of an embrace they share late in the film. A man who typically wields immense and atypical power over his subjects is made palatable to the audience in contrast to Holmes’s utter uncertainty. Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the Hulu limited series The Dropout, suggests late in the film that Fielder may even be obfuscating events out of sympathy for Holmes. And in light of the documentary’s sloshed-around senses, in conjunction with the audience’s own second-guessing, we’re left unsure if the accusation is false. Fielder seems to be as well.

Holmes, Fielder, and Evans play off each other in the unrelenting delivery of half-truths, cover stories, and genuine confusion. Fielder provokes the family into bouts of visceral honesty (once, Fielder corners Holmes’s father and sarcastically badgers him about the origins of his daughter’s “different way of seeing the world,” only for the father to answer with a bareness that brought gasps to my theater) and recoils at it, leaning in, retracting, retracing his steps. Truth can’t seem to exist here, not for long and never plainly. There’s the uncertainty around Holmes and Evans, of course—the couple maintains her innocence, with each entry of justification and familial anecdote told to the cameras serving to simultaneously provoke in the audience an odd sympathy and an outrage of grand conspiracy—which, over the course of the documentary, corrupts Fielder’s account along with it.

In a scene that takes place some two years after the original 34 days, Fielder walks a guest (whom I won’t spoil) through the house that he and Holmes’s family shared during the first phase of filming. The guest asks Fielder about the kitchen’s coffee maker, and he remarks that Holmes didn’t really drink coffee; the problem being, in nearly every scene leading up to the start of her prison sentence, Holmes has a cup of coffee in her hands.

It’s small, but it jolts you. He’s not intentionally lying, but you know that he’s wrong. And after constant reconstruction and recollection of the events two years prior (Fielder later gets frustrated with Evans over his misremembrance of a two-year old conversation), you can’t help but question not just Fielder’s strength as narrator, but also the earnestness of Holmes and her fiancé as subjects.

But of course they’re lying. Of course, of course they are, because this is Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO of Theranos who defrauded investors of $144 million. Yet, Fielder’s handle on the truth, as well as our own, are caught up in the maelstrom of lies and memory. This is Fielder’s main project with the documentary, reflected off his initial proposition to Holmes: she could be telling the truth, but no one will ever believe her again. We’re shown front-and-center the elasticity of memory, the harrowing conflict of known lies and felt truths. As we’re taken through Holmes and Evans’s documented domesticity and into a world of wind-warped memory and theorized manipulation, the real and unreal corrode and collapse against each other. We’re given a close-up, a full-frontal shower shot of this family, yet we come away with nothing solved. You can certainly see everything, but you can’t make much of it.

It’s a thrilling hall of mirrors.

In late December, 1777, surrounded by the starving and civilian soldiers poorly amassed in Valley Forge, General Washington wrote urgently to all state legislatures but Georgia a plea for supplies and men. One can hardly imagine the wreck of frozen mud and wounded men, who took to boiling strips of leather down for a bitter broth. The vast majority of his soldiers were untrained, underfed, and direly unprepared for the winter, which reached temperatures as low as 6 degrees. The Continental Congress made promises of horses and supplies that they neglected to deliver. So you find here, in the restrained words of their General, a description of their poor fare:

It is not easy to give you a just and accurate idea of the sufferings of the Army at large – of the loss of men on this account. Were they to be minutely detailed, your feelings would be wounded, and the relation would probably be not received without a degree of doubt & discredit. We had in Camp, on the 23rd Inst. by a Field Return then taken, not less than 2898 men unfit for duty, by reason of their being barefoot and otherwise naked. Besides this number, sufficiently distressing of itself, [4] there are many Others detained in Hospitals and crowded in Farmers Houses for the same causes.

At the end of the harrowing winter, General Washington broke the Articles of Association’s article 81 and held one play for the men: Joseph Addison’s Cato, which depicts the tragedy of a virtue-driven Roman Senator who sacrifices himself in the face of tyranny. The play carries its meaning nowadays more bluntly maybe, seeing as many of our founders’ embellished upon or pilfered the language of Cato for their own fiery retorts of the crown: Nathan Hale’s “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country” mirrors Act IV, scene 4; and Patrick Henry’s “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” appears in Act II, scene 4. General Washington quoted it often as well, as a letter to Alexander Hamilton in 1796, where he seeks retirement as “to seek the post of honor in a private station.”

Valley Forge is often considered to be the birthplace of the professional US army. Under the care of Baron von Steuben—a Prussian military officer turned Inspector General under Washington—the undisciplined civilian fighters turned into a cohesive, drilled military; the freezing winter at Valley Forge hardened the continental army into a force that would draw with the British at Monmouth later that year, and eventually deliver British Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown some four years later.

We ought to see these two inculcating forces—drilled discipline and Republican virtue—as mutually informative to the founding generation. Cato concerns itself with the morality and statesmanship of Rome, interposed by a British audience and sown in the fertile minds of Americans. As the prologue calls “forth Roman Drops from British Eyes,” the Founders sought to find the virtues of the Roman Cato in their new country by way of their countrymen. This is how they felt justified in declaring an inheritance to Rome in their new republic—their architecture, pseudonyms, and societies2 sought the ideals and gravity of an ancient and great heritage of statesmanship. In short, the Founders larped3—they took on the attitudes of republican virtue and made it American. And it may’ve been the key to our new nation.

…

(If I’ve yet to sufficiently prove my sex appeal to the audience,)

I recently participated in a reading of Cato, undertaking as a matter of necessity the role of the charming and virtuous young prince Juba. Juba spends most of the play idolizing the “godlike” Cato, worshipping his virtue and character in the face of Caesar’s unrelenting tyranny. The character of Cato reads to our modern minds as nearly identical to the character of Washington, who both find themselves set apart and above the unvirtuous, as examples to their admirers (included Caesar) and incomprehensible to their detractors. The villains of the play—the fraudster senator Sempronius and Numidian general Syphax—are opportunists, driven by lust and resentment. The senator Cato, much like our General Washington, is risen in his admirer’s eyes precisely by virtue and fidelity to country. Even though Cato’s largest enemy, Caesar, appears victorious by tyrannical strength, Cato is morally victorious by his friendship to virtue4. Cato’s own son is killed in battle, to which the senator’s only response is: “I’m satisfied.” In mourning the collapse of the Roman Republic, Cato cries, "Oh, liberty! Oh, virtue! Oh, my country!" to which the young Juba replies, "Behold that upright man! Rome fills his eyes / With tears, that flow'd not o'er his own dear son." And rather than bend the knee to tyranny, Cato takes his own life, pleading in the last moments that his life be taken in place of his friends.

Cato’s life, work, and death were dedicated to the pursuit of Republican virtue. And, as mentioned by the fact that they couldn’t stop quoting him, the Founders were enraptured by this idea. It supplied their dying breaths.

This is a rather different sentiment to our present day’s obsession with self-deprecation, irony, and unseriousness. Our institutions seem to find the tiktokified brainrot language of a casual culture preferable to the heights of virtue. Often, I find that people have a hard time being sincere. The young man would rather jokingly call his admirer an outsized pet name than earnestly romance her; the “thought leader” and politician prefer to sardonically mock their institutions than rebuild them; the artist prefers to sneer and prod at society over cultivating it. I’m using high language here precisely because it’s irregular to do so without being assumed pompous. The criticism proves itself in the response.

And yet, General Washington saw fit to stage a play dedicated to the opposite of our cultural pessimism. Those that mock and flail against Cato’s virtue are killed and disgraced. Cato and his son do die, but not a true death—for though their bodies die, their souls and virtues are immortal, able to be taken two thousand years past their ends, ravish a foreign people with a hunger for heightened statesmanship, and guide them into the creation of the most free and prosperous nation ever seen on the face of the earth. The Founders called up from the past a heritage not their own by blood, but made their own by pursuance of virtue, and set before us the task. The generations to follow the founders knew this. And in our 250th year, may we reawaken to the sound of our burden as countrymen and heed the advice of President Lincoln in his Lyceum Address:

They were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.--Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws: and, that we improved to the last; that we remained free to the last; that we revered his name to the last; that, during his long sleep, we permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place; shall be that which to learn the last trump shall awaken our WASHINGTON.

So if you’ve ever lived alone, and you’ve gotten a bit slippery in the tub, as it were, you’ve considered what it would mean to really lose control of your weight. I myself have been drinking protein shakes, so Lord knows where all my mass would’ve taken me. Maybe right through the floor. More likely, I would’ve become the neighbor’s dog’s newest interest. And that’s a kind of impact, I guess; if the smell of you rockets through the noses of passersby, maybe you’re being felt in a kind of meaningful way, even if your stench is the bare minimum of decomposition.

So, finding ourselves back talking about the Loneliness Epidemic: What do our neighbors, and their absence, provoke?

If you have lived alone (and this doesn’t, I guess, have to mean literally), then the throes of precious community moments—like stacking chairs after church, or having dinner with friends—broadcast the effluence of yourself into the coming solitude. Right? It’s a cartographical certainty that being alone contrasts to being with others. Sometimes, this is fine. Other times, you’ll find yourself enraptured by the million brilliant lights coming from windows of nondescript apartment buildings on all sides.

So, if you’re very conscious of the separation of yourself from others, in and out of social gatherings, then where does that leave the live-aloners? Are we doomed to be ever-aware of how far we are from Heaven every waking day of boring, dirt-scraping existence in THIS LIFE? Can we expect community to satisfy beyond the temporary satiate? Do I have to move in with that guy, even though I JUST KNOW he won’t wash his dishes?

No. But let’s wander deeper into this question of social separation, and what we could learn from it.

I’ve written before about how part of the loneliness epidemic is due to our own failure of courage.

This is deduced in part from my own experience; so, when we’re faced with the contrast of crowds and solitude, it seems that we’ve found ourselves in some kind of ghost story. These sorts of horror shows are less fun when the specters are college buddies, or memories from that really great family reunion.1

But the loneliness epidemic isn’t just a function of socialization errors. We’re faced with an opportunity to dig in on a spiritual sickness manifesting itself in statistical and anecdotal plainness. And while loneliness and my tub slip aren’t from the same thing, they are of the same thing: a panicked mortal concern, unanswerable on our own.

It really wasn’t anything deliberate. I just showered off after a night out with some friends. So, I got in, had some music on the speaker. I thought about nothing important. And I washed my face, turned off the water, and when I reached for the towel, my foot slipped in place just enough to rush adrenaline.

(Courage, son.)

And the music didn’t magically stop playing on my speaker. I started thinking about this. The towel still came off the rack, and I dried myself. That’s the funniest part about living alone. The dog really would be the next one to smell you.

You’ll encounter this phenomenon while traveling alone.

A few weeks ago, I was in San Francisco for sushi. So, I found a sushi bar and waited out front, downtown SF, sundown. Due to my disposition, I began to whistle, to pass the time until my reservation; soon enough, this very tall and frankly dangerous-looking man came sauntering by. I continued to whistle, and it apparently caught his attention.

When he just reached the edge of my vision, the man stopped cold. He remained, just out of sight, ever-present in the sundowning city street, a few feet away from me (striking distance, I thought). And as a congenial man, I kept whistling, keeping a rather admirable tune, considering the stakes.

While I whistled at the frozen man, I remarked internally that it would take over twelve hours for anyone I knew to get to the scene of my untimely (if funny) death, had he decided to throttle me.

The question being, what does it matter?

What doth the phenomenon—you could die, and no one on this side of eternity is coming—present for us? An expedited masterclass in experiential monasticism, maybe. A serious desire to ghost hunt those community memories and embed oneself like botfly larvae, surely. Nothing to be ashamed of, I don’t think; a pack response to impending doom is biological, if only a primer for us to move from animal-brain concerns to theological implication.

Our quest, I think, is to lean more towards fulfillment than escapism. If we’re confronted with the mortal loneliness of our souls on this side of the hereafter, can I say, what a gift? Every chance at the loneliness epidemic is further evidence of this world’s unsatisfying nature. We know that the slip in the bathtub is, at least in a spiritual sense, the “well, crap” reality. The worst function of community is to distract us from this2. The delay or distraction of spiritual realities—how damningly we seek it sometimes, and how damned we must be if we provide it for others.

…

The other day, I grabbed a piece of pita bread from the oven and yelped like a child because it was hot. Hearing my own voice, I laughed at the yelp. Then I didn’t say much for awhile, since I was the only one to hear it. A few days before that, I almost started crying at an Indian restaurant because the food was too spicy. A man I hardly knew was with me then. And I recovered well, because the social construct demanded it. At times, a man prefers to be compelled towards the social construct, whether because of ease or honor. But what do the bounds of community mean, beyond the preferred guardrails of a good time? If a pita scorches my hand in an Indian restaurant, but MY BUDDY is around to see it, am I exposed to community that only more deeply alights the burden of eternity?

Of course not. Real community—one that doesn’t hide the realities of this world from its members, but braces and celebrates together—is more than a contrast for the loneliness epidemic. At both the Indian restaurant and my apartment, the shimmer of heaven catches the light in different, remarkable ways.

So much in our lives tries to distract us, cajole, pry our minds away from heavenly realities. We’re given the chance here, at the table and in the tub, to understand our place here on earth: as fellow travelers, wedding guests preparing for Cana, bracing for eternity; and, elsewhere as solitary souls, asking with every mortal awakening WHAT IS TRUTH?, to be faced with the face of Christ.

The interest in decomposition comes from its partners: the decomposing thing, and the thing that smells it.

So in that world where I did slip—woe—and my good neighbor, Pitbull Gus, picks up on my stench, should I retroactively be grateful to him? That he notices my mortality for what it is? A body of anxious meat, bound to spoil?

I for one am not particularly excited about considering the smell of my own decomposition, contrary to the repeated times I do so here. But if we’re able to experience the Tub Slip and remove the sheen of mortal distraction—to get a whiff, like Gus—then the right response, past the terror, should, at bare minimum, be to reckon with our hereafter.

May we all stay awake.

Article-wise, I remember the phrase “World Machine” being thrown around. As well as the little-g god when what they meant was the big-G, or their idea of big-G. The throughline being, if it’s not a shepherd revolutionary writing, then this Brave New World out West means grand and unfathomable things for us. Even, as their intonation will tell you, whispers of salvation—a renewal for all mankind, on the backs of machine.

So, I asked Claude what I should think of all this, and my exquisite demon-in-a-box

mentioned something about The Myth of Progress of a That Hideous Strength bent (No he didn’t). But frankly, if you’ve been reading OUT THE MAIN long enough, you’ve read plenty of articles in (skeptical) conversation with Paul Kingsnorth and CS Lewis, so rather than going on and on about Lewis’s strangest book2, let’s just take on the enemy philosophy, that being Scientism.

It’s a little bit funny that the term Scientism has fallen away from the jargon, seeing how snugly it fits with the tirades of tech skeptics3 and Humanities bemoaners. But OED calls it: “The belief or practice of applying the methods, assumptions, and criteria of the natural sciences to fields of inquiry — particularly philosophy, theology, the humanities, and human affairs generally — for which such methods are held by critics to be inappropriate, insufficient, or reductive.”

So our often well-meaning friends in San Francisco have full confidence in The Science’s abilities to solve all of our problems because, from their perspective, they should be able to.

(Try to) cheat death with science, reduce marriage to mere chemicals. Scientism is what rationalizes a wonk to use terms like “Machine God,” because their philosophy leads them to believe that such a thing could be built. It is, more or less, the old bones over which lays the gospel of Optimism: “tech-provided abundance will feed the poor and end all wars.” And after you’ve dusted yourself off from a hard day’s work at the Data Centers4, there’s hardly any reason for God at all. Humanity, that enlightened pinnacle, has taken care of it.

This isn’t a bug, but a feature! Scientism in practice assumes materialism—that there’s no spiritual element to the world—which, of course, means no God. Scientism wrongfully assumes the map for the territory. And while operating off a faulty map, they’re fine to chart their own salvific course.

I frankly have no patience for this, if anyone asked.

It’s a moral certainty5 that man’s best laid claims for progress often wrench themselves apart, either in conception, where their lofty ideals are tempered, if not utterly annihilated, by the realities of us sinners on the ground; or, if the plans for betterment do somehow get out of the gate, then the wheels and guts of this train of progress corrode and break under the strain of ill-managing and -managed posterity.

And there’s a propensity to take this argument as a naive luddism that disregards all technological progress (“why stop there,” ye skeptic asks, “when you just mean all progress”) as hevel. That I just oppose the kingdom of Silicon Valley because I like the woods and stuff and think we ought to just live like hobbits, which I don’t. The harder line for me to thread is an acknowledgement of, yes, I actually do think that technology has done lots of great things for society and should not—and cannot—be shunted away in pursuit of some rosy shepherd pipedream.

In my home state of Texas, for example, the air conditioner saves literally hundreds of thousands of lives each year. And I’m not using this example as, like, a Millenial-esque “heckin cool technology” reddit dunk; it is legitimately one of the most important modern technological inventions that, if you have it, is taken for granted almost certainly. And you could go on and on about how me using this as the basis of my measured-but-still-pro-technology argument strengthens my pro-tech signal without actually reckoning with the technologies that the real anti-tech side are referring to in their arguments (social media, global surveillance, AI…), since no substantive sort of backlash to air conditioning exists in 2026. To that I say, yes, that’s kind of the point; the rapidity of technological advancement outpaces our moral understanding of it, thus often leading to a conflation between the two. So when Elon says AI will end world hunger, if you’ve got no undergirded worldview that plays skeptic to his salvation, why not believe him? If your worldview has no room for extra-human salvation, wouldn’t you want humanity to deliver if they could?

But we can’t.

Regardless of whether AI brings on the antichrist

or remains a cordial probability machine, the progress will not satisfy our thirst for peace, prosperity, a global solution to injustice—the catch-all being, conveniently, Salvation.

Of course, the Scientific Method is immeasurably (lol) valuable. But it’s just one tool in the shed. A very handy one, to be sure, and one that any Christian should embrace when it’s applied in the right situations. Science and religion aren’t opposed; when used in harmony, one provides a good deal of vivacity to the other.

But that banging drum of scientism—a scientific salvation—wrought eugenics6, not freedom. Francis Galton, the man who coined the term, along with Keynes, Woodrow Wilson, and others walked headfirst into “applied biology.” They confused their map for the territory.

This is the same old draw. Man’s hankering after salvation—to be fixed, by God!— spreads its hungry tendrils into technological progress, of course, but also politics, romantic partners, the next drink. We who are in sin search sin for meaning, and it is not peculiar that deification of technology should leave us wanting.

But note the difference in convenience (even life-saving convenience like air conditioners) and a salvation for your soul that lifts the sinner out of their mire, wipes them clean, and instills within them a new heart with which they are to go forth and do good works in the glorious name of He who sent them. Believe me or not, I do have serious admiration for the intellect of those great builders and thinkers. But it’s as created men and women. Just as I have admiration for the man who uses his skills in mediation to reconcile enemies, and for the mother who runs her household with genius and grace. These people are using their God-given gifts to the fullest, which is necessarily a hard thing to do. Neither is more special than the other for whichever talent spec’d, for they were given it no easier than their hair color. And a man’s hair color cannot save his soul.

To return: the gospel of Optimism is a very helpful term, as we’re seeing the mistake: Scientism, the driver of some fellow citizens in SF, is a mistake not of degree, but of category. The gap between convenience and salvation can’t be jumped with a little elbow grease. The gospel isn’t a story we can perform as the central player—we are, though, offered a part in its telling.

So, in case you’re curious, my Christ offers this:

^“28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. ²⁹ Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” (Matt. 11:28-9).

Editor’s Note: I was gone for most of February because I’m writing something longer. Agents, please please please please—

So, all the losers and nerds keep telling me

that there’s a loneliness epidemic going on, and that people aren’t, like, hanging out with people anymore, opting to participate in antisocial behavior like doom-scrolling or whatever gooning is. What was that? Hold on, let me stop throwing the frisbee for a minute. “You mean people aren’t having a casual beer with the fellas? Who is people?” I say, tossing my latest super chill Coors lite can on the mountainous front yard conglomerate. The sun bows humbly as me and my college buddies perfectly reenact whichever sports scene from the Top Gun franchise. “I do that literally all the time.”

But someone somewhere felt exceptionally lonely, and now we have antisocial influencers like Nick Fuentes and Clavicular training whole swathes of young men to get drunk on self-absorption. And while my sardonic tone comes off as deprecatory, understand that I understand. I’ve (shocker) been lonely before, and I’ve had the internet act as accelerant on the fire. I moved to a city by myself; I’m not a loneliness epidemic denier. I mean, read the Surgeon General’s report from 2023!

In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic cut off so many of us from friends, loved ones, and support systems, exacerbating loneliness and isolation.

Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling—it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity. And the harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations, where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished (emphasis mine).

I Do, However, Think We’re Feeding It More Than We Ought To.

Maybe the most eyebrow-raising thing about the loneliness epidemic comes from its cataloguers: to write about it, you either have to have been a victim of it, or you come at it from a detached, quasi-academic perspective; and while I guess this isn’t so uncommon in social/cultural commentary (though outside-in commentary rarely produces anything interesting or actually relevant to the heart of the thing), maintaining distance from the loneliness epidemic ends up feeding it. If the loneliness epidemic sprouts from a widespread cultural fear of intimacy, earnestness, or on the basest level social friction1, then a commentator who remains on the outside of the issue ends up exacerbating it from the birds-eye.

This is because, in my anecdata2-backed estimate, the Loneliness Epidemic feeds off two primary founts: 1). the sorta run-of-the-mill fears that fester loneliness (fear of social failure, intimacy) and 2). Gen Z’s strain of Nihilism.

1). Being the last one without a prom date having nothing to do on Friday night walking the streets alone in dark, dark urban night with millions of little lights dancing around you without notice crying over a tub of proverbial ice cream seeing your friends post on Instagram without you and things of that nature. Normal, unfortunately, but not anything drastically different from generation-to-generation. People only think this is unnatural when it’s whipped up into a frenzy connected to 2).

2). At risk of suffering from the same kind of academic distance on Gen Z nihilism, this is a kind of oppressive defeatism inextricable from the hyper-online, elite-betrayed, dark huddled masses of my generation’s Lost Boys. These people are real and their grievances are at least in part legitimate. And the raucous, torrid maelstrom of social upheaval this demographic went through in the 00s, 10s, and 20s replaced earnestness with poisonous irony, allegiance with disaffection, and institutional trust with a deep distrust and desire to destroy. So, this cultural nihilism, accelerated by tech-assisted isolation, further siloes the individual from potential community. And when outside-inners continue to ogle and prod this group, asking “why?” without offering any real alternative, then it’s exacerbated.

…

You’re The Reason You Don’t See Anyone.

In terms of solution: I’m playing the personal responsibility card. OK, yes, community resources have declined since the 1950s. Less people are in rotary clubs and freemason chapters. But that’s because people stopped going, not because some dark digital cabal has pied-pipered all the little children away. At least, that’s not the whole story—we left the back door open.

To steelman this for a second: electronic-assisted isolation is, without a doubt, the strongest social disease afflicting my generation. If we were to take perhaps the most general, inoffensive, widely-practiced tech addiction, it would be Doom Scrolling3. In terms of actively building and maintaining social cohesion, if you subtract (9 HOURS??) a day from the free time one might have to, say, grab drinks with coworkers or play mahjong with friends, then of course your community is going to dissolve. There’s simply not enough time.

But the idea that today’s digital onslaught completely debilitates the individual from participating in community is absurd. I just don’t buy that, at least not all the way. Yes, obviously phone bad. Phone bad is one of the main reasons for community degradation and social isolation, and I’ve said as much multiple times4. But reneging on human agency fuels the exact kind of powerless nihilism that got us into this mess! Saying “fuels it” is wrong as a matter of scale, too, because [telling people that forces beyond their control are stripping them of their agency] isn’t just a catalyst, but the essence of my generation’s nihilism. And it stops the conversation.

While tech-assisted isolation degrades people’s ability to stomach social friction, I’m not so sure people ever found community building to be effortless or even enjoyable. Someone has always bitched about eating at that restaurant5, or bemoaned life’s busyness while trying to see their friends that they haven’t seen in, like, 5ever!! Sure, the ease of online isolators makes our threshold for stomaching inconvenience lower, but the impetus remains on us.

The saying I can’t accurately attribute is: “everyone wants to be seen, but no one wants to see.” I grew up surrounded by people who lamented their social isolation, how nobody ever texted them to hang out, how they never felt like anyone wanted to see them. And I grew up repeatedly shocked by how common this feeling of isolation was. The truth showed itself to be that darn near nobody got seen enough for their liking. And it’s probably a mix of vanity and real intimacy starvation. So the only way I ever solved this sorry-for-myself feeling was by picking up the phone and calling people. Gosh darn it, but people have agency against the tide of isolation.

…

God Forbid a Coffee. Maybe a bagel, who knows.

We simply have to ask people to hang out. Or else, what? The nihilism is right? Our phones drowned us in isolation, and nobody could do a thing about it? I refuse to accept that, and yet it’s taken as a given by social commentators all the time.

In college, it was easier for me, as all of my best friends more or less lived next door. Walking ten feet in either direction brought me to ready-made community. Now living in DC, I remarked to a friend the other day that making new male friends is the same as asking a girl out on an awkward coffee date. You don’t know these people, but if you say yes to enough Call Your Mother bagel runs, you might start to. People are remarkably resourceful when it comes to human connection, mostly because we absolutely need it.

And there are real success stories against the tide: church attendance is up! Run Clubs, God forbid, are defrosting after the winter!

The hardest part for a lonely person occurs right before they put on the jacket to leave their apartment for the party. This isn’t a hokey anecdote. This is what it takes to keep moving forward.

There’s a story in my family that my mom tells when you ask how that old story goes:

That was Nani’s grandfather, and his best friend and her grandfather was blind and his best friend had some sort of problem with one of his legs maybe from the war or something like that, and so Nani’s grandfather would kind of hold him up and stabilize him, and the other one would be the eyes and they would walk together.

So I have a picture of these two old coots in my mind, talking loud and circling the block, leaning on each other like all hell. And those neighbors relied on one’s eyes and the other’s legs to walk; neither could’ve alone.

Being social creatures requires that we reckon with social hardship. It requires us to wake up, to discover our agency against the nihilism that surrounds us, and to do something about it. The real death comes when we stop kicking against the current, when we let it pull us under. And I’m tired of my generation getting pulled under.

This is Christian Community in action—it’s the antidote to nihilism!

Sinners separated from God, brought back into the fold through Christ’s pursuant grace! And now we have the opportunity to mimic our Father by reaching out to our neighbors. We’re empowered through His mercy and grace to forget ourselves and focus on our neighbors, and thereby become more fully ourselves in community.

Gen Z’s tech-addled nihilism requires its victims to spend so much time sitting alone in dark rooms, and the devil does everything he can to keep them there. Christ demands the opposite: as He breaks through the darkness, we’re expected to join Him in the fray. That’s His gift to believers.

So maybe my “personal responsibility” schtick from earlier felt too coarse for the deeply suffering, because the darkness can and does suffocate. It’d be a little redundant to ask the drowning to just swim to the surface; they’re often turned around under the waves, terrified and blind. That’s when the rest of us have got to dive over the side of the boat and reach for them.

So here are two reasons you should know his name nowadays: Worship and Pleasure.

(FOR DAD: I know you haven’t read DFW, and that’s ok; all you need to know is: he was a Gen X writer who concerned himself a lot with these themes—themes which, I think, keep cropping up in our 2026, and are good to know for modern morality).

Everybody Worships.

So those who have engaged with American literary fiction3 in the past 30 years, or searched for an airport, know the initials DFW. The Dallas-Fort Worth airport is almost completely unrelated to David Foster Wallace, apart from the same black humor one feels navigating his footnotes and the airport’s terminals. Another commonality being his insistence that everyone worships something, and the 3rd largest airport on the planet’s chosen deity is a flickering screen of flight logs ringing in ON TIME, DELAYED, or CANCELED. But I’d like you to read his full quote on the matter of worship:

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.(4).

There are plenty of deities in DFW’s work: athletic excellence, drugs, pleasure in myriad forms, the life of lobsters. And I think just about the most damning ill of today’s culture is our inability to recognize these things in our lives as deities (or idols, which is more common). “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled,” and all that. We don’t recognize these vices in the main because, sure, it’s difficult to self-examine and want to change. However, culture writ-large rarely thinks of them as deities—or rather they do; the highest good thrown down from universities, cubicles, and television is “Do what thou wilt”, a deification of the self and what the self desires. But we’re not calling them deities. And we’re not calling our utter devotion to our jobs, addictions, and pleasures worship.

This ends up being a pretty Christian claim. CS Lewis (whose book The Screwtape Letters was a favorite of DFW’s): “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.”’ The will to worship is ours alone. We were given the weighty choice of where to put it—rest the worship on ourselves, or cede it to another.

Make no mistake—DFW didn’t subscribe to Christianity in any explicit way. But he acknowledges an inclination of the human soul to give itself over to something; which, like Screwtape, a recognition of the impulse aides the reader with real moral tools amidst our modern conundrum of ethics ignorance and DIY spiritual ramshackle. It’s the Law of Names5.

Phone Bad.

Another block quote, this time about your attention span:

And I have friends, intelligent friends, who don't like to read because they get -- it's not just bored -- there's an almost dread that comes up, I think, here about having to be alone and having to be quiet. And you see that when you walk in. When you walk into most public spaces in America it isn't quiet anymore; they pipe music through. And the music's easy to make fun of 'cause it's usually really horrible music. But it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet, ever, anymore. And, to me, I don't, I don't know that I can defend it, but that seems to me to have something to do with when you feel like the purpose of your life is to gratify yourself…(6)

DFW, writing Infinite Jest in 1996, found himself at the beginnings of the technological revolution. And the central plot7 was Canadian separatists trying like hell to release this highly addictive film on the American populace, entrancing-to-the-point-of-vegetable-like mental destruction; the gotcha being that the US government knew the film would be disastrous because Americans simply couldn’t resist such an ultimate pleasure. And when Gen Z spends a reported 9 hours per day on screens8, well, yeah. This technology accelerates pleasure into a constant thrumming of sensory deification to our chosen idol, hell-handbasketed to our spiritual death gladly taken, and DFW saw it coming.

When it’s extremely common for a person to lock their devices in boxes, or more so for a person to have no restrictions on their entertainment technology at all—whether that be pornography readymade, gambling apps that make it so, so easy to chain your bank accounts to ridiculous parlays, or violent Youtube clips that make your stomach drop out—facilitated by infinite frictionless scrolling, artificial bodies rubbing against each other in dark lonely rooms, and advertisements served up personally for your compulsion. Well, maybe we are addicted to frictionless, endless pleasure. Maybe we are being “fed this death of pleasure with spoons.”

Herein lies the maelstrom: we all worship but do not call it worship, and a high deity of the Western world is unadulterated pleasure. Expedited by our entertainment technology, we go round and round the black-screened altar, certain that our bowed pose is not submission, with tepid proclamations that our allegiance—whatever could possibly be left of it—is very much elsewhere.

…

“²⁸ But if someone says to you, ‘This has been offered in sacrifice,’ then do not eat it, for the sake of the one who informed you, and for the sake of conscience— ²⁹ I do not mean your conscience, but his. For why should my liberty be determined by someone else's conscience?” (1 Corinthians 10:28-9)

Gen Z doesn’t pay attention to the anti-smoking ads anymore. Partly because society decided to stop running them, in favor of turning the warfront over to their uglier electronic sister, which I suspect gave the social consciousness enough time to rewatch Mad Men and remember how badass they look.

…

Being in the main a vain person, most of modern nicotine never appealed to me; vapes were obviously aesthetically disgusting. Dip was my dad’s poorly kept secret. Nicotine pouches didn’t come on the scene until college, and while I admired the health benefits every user relayed to me at a moment’s notice, I never used nicotine enough to want them. The first one I had tasted like sprite and was the best I’ve ever felt before the headrush. Thanks, Anderson.

That said, cigarettes bear the archetypical weight a little differently than the newfangled. Billions of advertising dollars poured into the image of The Smoker for decades—somehow $7.84 billion in 2020—and Gen Z isn’t immune, despite the D.A.R.E. videos. Forbes reported back in 2021 that cig sales were up for the first time in decades1. The promise of embodying a dangerous authenticity has always spoken to the more flitty parts of youth. And nowadays, I’m guessing the added dimensions—the authentic, the ostentatiously analog, and the communal—have something to do with its transgressive appeal in our digital age.

The obvious caveat being chronic addiction vs. “social smoking.” Because you’re not addicted, right? Every so often, you and some buddies will have a drink, have a cigarette. It’s controlled and adult. You’re already avoiding microplastics and seed oils, whatever the hell.

So, I’ll ask you to wonder elsewhere about varying degrees of addiction and limit yourself to the question: why might someone start smoking in this particular 2026, when it is known to be so, so bad for you?

…

Katie Roiphe in the Wall Street Journal:

“Of course, there is something vintage in the whole experience of lighting a cigarette, something anti-screen, anti-app. You have to, by definition, put down your phone. It is sensual, immediate, transporting. ‘I like the ritual of a cigarette and being able to step away from whatever is going on for a moment,’ a former student says. ‘Smoking with someone creates instant intimacy. It’s a good way to meet people. It’s one of the last socially acceptable ways to loiter.’”

I don’t smoke at all anymore, and in college I was wise enough to make sure the few I had counted. Seeing as they cause cancer, and all that. And even in my sardonic acknowledgement, there’s very little actual weight behind the proven fact that cigarettes do legitimately cause cancer. Why would there be? In part, young people just have a harder time understanding mortality, seeing as they’re typically removed from it on an experiential level (ex: having a parent pass) until later in life. The immediate social benefit is markedly easier to see than long-term dangers.

The acknowledged health defects also have difficulty standing up to the nihilistic argument of, “everything else is going to hell, so I might as well.” This sort of approach is what got me the title of this article. Freshman Year, bleary-eyed with homework and whatever else nonsense, walking onto a back porch and getting a smile from across the lawn. Life kicking your ass? Forget it all for a second. “Smoke a damn cigarette!”

So, returning to Roiphe, the intention (being as understandably removed from mortal realities as a 20-something might be) emerges: anti-technology, pro-intimacy, and maybe the most fascinating, pro-ritual.

…

College upperclassmen, constantly, facetiously2: “It’s a cig, not a sin.”

When someone put me in charge of making a few younger folk like each other in college, one of the consistent methods was to introduce them all to smoking. This was taught to me by older guys who had been taught it themselves by guys who used to smoke a pack a day. The learned behavior embedded itself in a community structure because of an across-time understanding that cigarettes, for all their faults, did, in fact, connect you to other people in a deliberate socializing ritual.

Though often projected as “devil may care,” it’s a deeply serious3 social signal: my guess, the Youth accept a cigarette because 1. their parents told them not to and 2. their newfound friends offered. You’re given the chance to deny the old social order and reaffirm the new one for which you’re attempting membership. If you’re wanting to keep hold of deeper social ties (like religious attitudes), it’s an outward approval of the group’s more relaxed judgements around certain vices; and if you’re wanting to burn it all down, sure, there’re plenty of rebels in the movies who keep a pack in their back pocket. The final Image remains: The Smoker, and his smoking friends.

This week, I went back and asked a few friends who partook in college about what drew them in. One was particularly literary:

“Coming to college you always see in the movies badasses smoking, so that played into the aura of smoking. Now everyone has a vice and in college that is very keen. I can’t stand vapes. Vapes equal everything wrong about the country. The ease of access to your vice, the electric stick you suck on also sucks your manliness out of you. Cigarettes equal an experience. The zing of the light. The fresh pack of tobacco. The person you’re enjoying your vice with. The smell that sticks with you.”

Herein lies, pretty much, the sentiment. Vapes are a lonely vice; cigarettes bring people together. The sense of adventure that comes from media, of course, but also those around you. The same partaker later told me, “there’s something American about [smoking cigarettes].” He’s right in a lot of ways: soldiers lighting up in the foxhole, Hemingway and Hepburn, The Marlboro Man. One ought not head out West without a pack in their saddlebag. Maybe the implicit promise of smoking is one of our country’s last great4 myths.

…

There’s also the young Christians who take it up5. I’m willing to put most of this on a singular photo of CS Lewis, and the rest of it on “more natural” nicotine’s allure to the typical indie/granola type; baggie Patagonia shorts, intrepid mustache below his wire-rimmed glasses, and a, like, super chill cig on his lip6.

But I think the use of cigarettes by young men in Christian groups is so fascinating because of both their group’s signal of virtue and the cigarette’s signal of vice7. Maybe I’m making more of this than it is. The stuff is addictive, you know.

And since I’ve invoked his photo: Lewis represents this—just ask the American evangelical Bob Jones8. Now, there are a few qualifiers to his cigarette smoking (which, I remember hearing at an Inklings conference, could be 2 packs a day): they were much less taboo as regards the science, religion, and culture. It’s hard to reasonably consider Lewis’s participation in vice with a presentism point of view.

Despite this, the image that Lewis and his friends represent to the Christian undergrad still works remarkably well. It’s this: Christian friends gathered around a table or fire, sharing a smoke, swapping stories, praying and fiercely discussing life, God, everything else.

Maybe the cigarette is just part of the trade, or one of the sure mechanisms, when this intimate image of community is the goal. And in the chaos of our information age, who can blame them? All these Christian GenZers want—all that most youth want, I would guess, when they pick up a cigarette for the first time—is a chance at that: to slow down with friends; to have conversation; to be an individual in community.

…

The Lamb and Flag Pub (ground broken 1566) is well-known by Oxford undergrads, Inklings1 scholars, and connoisseurs of the countryside’s dark stouts as “a close second.” The tables are all worn out with years of propped-up feet and sweating pint glasses; the plastered walls contort into blocks of side- and back-rooms, their windows jarred open to let the smoker’s section continue their conversation with the patrons inside.

I’d visited after Evensong with Connor Cabot and Dillon Baker, as the rest of our companions had the tedious idea to, like, call their wives and children or whatever and put to rest the transatlantic jetlag. The three of us ducked in the pub after our host told us Lewis and Tolkien used to meet there when their preferred destination2 was undergoing construction; as The Eagle and Child Pub (1684), was again/still under scaffolding, The Lamb and Flag seemed, as mentioned, a close second.

We were sitting in the front room talking with our hands, running our fingers along the slick pints and drying them on our pants. I hadn’t seen Connor in months and Dillon in years, and we talked about college, wives, new cities.

When I went to pay the tab, I stood at the end of the bar and looked around: a dozen or so people laughing and talking in low voices, cool air sapping the last heat of an Oxford summer through the open windows. Every person was deeply involved.

On the bar a small blackboard read, Sorry, This is a NO SERVICE area. For the first time that day, I had the thought to check my phone, to no avail3. I remember thinking, “my goodness, they’ve blocked the service in this bar so that people will actually talk to each other, what a great idea.” Then the bartender beckoned me down the bar to where, you know, they were serving people.

Maybe a good image for 2026, our so-called “Analog Year”—people desperate for genuine community without constant digital interference.

The Luddites are gaining ground. Headlines saying “2026 is the year of the analog” appeared around New Years in publications from Vogue to the Wall Street Journal, every fifth friend is going greyscale, and your dinner conversations drift towards paper books, paper journals, calendars, and whatever else they make out of the stuff. I expect hobbit hole Pinterest boards by year’s end.

Paul Kingsnorth, amateur shepherd and author of Against the Machine, became a face of the movement this year because4 his book, often extreme in the means, speaks to people wherever they are on the spectrum of ends. Not everyone with high screentime feels the need to go dark in Irish country, but lots of people I know are tired or scared of how much space their online life takes up. People can half-joke about the stuff being demonic and believe it.

A favorite extrapolation recently: Gen Z has lower rates of alcohol consumption5 and one-night stands than previous generations, not because we’ve gained moral clarity, but because we’re just not seeing people6. Vices like that take at least two to tango. But I don’t need to tell you.

There’s still the question of how we’re supposed to go analog when we’re inundated with screens. We can’t all go throw our phones in the lake and skip off to shear sheep. Kingsnorth did that already. There aren’t enough sheep. And I work tomorrow.

So here are some real, practical New Years Resolutions for you:7

1. Turn your phone on greyscale. It reduces the whole monkey brain “ooh, colors” effect vibrant stimuli have on your brain. Try it for two weeks.

2. Set hard time restrictions on your apps. My sister is the only person who knows the code to any app except IMessages, Google, and Maps from the hours of 6:00pm—9:00am. The goal being my apartment as a phone-free zone.

3. Make an effort with real, in-person relationships. Fight to schedule out time for dependable social connection, and use that time to build your friend(s) up with real questions and honest conversation.

4. Dedicate time to a flow-state activity. Remember when that task (writing, mountain biking, idk) focused you so sharply that you forgot the time completely? Do that. Do your meaningful activity again and again to build prolonged focus in place of doom-scrolling.

Frankly: being completely analog in 2026 for most Americans is untenable. The only reasonable way my Oxford trip happened at all last summer was with the elaborate collaboration of a group chat. But the courage to get yourself a bit out of the muck goes a long way. You might not need to shear sheep, but for the sake of your relationships, you might need to cut back screentime. Treat yourself like an addict, because you are. Don’t be afraid of taking a few steps. 2026: The real world is In.

A few days after that first evening at The Lamb and Flag, the intrepid nigh-nonagenarian actor Nigel Goodwin took our whole travel group out to lunch. He told us stories about rubbing shoulders with 60s movie stars in Switzerland, and we told him about careers in accounting. We had a 3:00pm train, which we promptly missed somewhere between the meal’s second hour and its third. At the end, Nigel requested the chef come to our table, and he kissed the cook on his hand.

We all left the meal shaken up (most of us have never taken so long a lunch). But Nigel seemed perfectly comfortable playing host to a conversation amongst complete strangers that he’d never meet again.

“Going analog” can’t just be about blue-light glasses and paper notebooks. Cutting screentime opens a void which you’re just as capable of filling with more bad habits.

The Inklings gathered consistently for years, even through WWII, building solid friendships that strengthened each other’s spirits. They made a conscious effort amidst tumult. And our friend Nigel built a community from strangers by being willing to talk to us.

This is how we ought to fill our new hours. May your analog year be filled with less doom-scrolling and more conversation. Friendships are gardens. We ought to cultivate them8.

And if you’re wondering how the Inklings practiced NY resolution no. 3, I’ll dive into it at a later date. For now:

1. Regular meetings. They often met every Thursday to read their work aloud to each other in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College. Outside of that, they had breakfast pints, lunches, and took walking tours of the countryside.

2. A good time. While reading aloud a work could get it ripped to shreds, the writers remained committed to making the reader’s work better. Conversation roamed from the literature, to theology, ancient myth, the War, and wherever else it free-flowed. They could only do this because an understood commitment to the community produced honesty and trust.

3. A common vision. The group was largely dedicated to defending the Christian tradition against a rising wave of Modernism, Fascism, and Secularism. But I guess for your friends it could be shared ideals, or a Volo team.

…

I’ll be seeing a lot of the same Oxford guys in a few weeks, when we’re standing alongside Connor’s Honest-Man-ification9. I’ve thought a lot in the leadup about the friendship we’ve had over the years—the late nights at Pinewood coffee, hunting trips, good fun college-style B&E10—and how lucky I was to be out with them for all of it. May we all be so blessed in the New Year. May we all work for it.

Replacing doom scrolling with community building is good, but it’s not just a thing of willpower. The full job means rewiring dopamine impulses we’ve been training on for the last twenty years. So, there’ll be more on this, I think, but for now, watch this short video of David Foster Wallace on why our world doesn’t like quiet.

…

We’re all in a serious bit of good fortune, considering the Good King’s subterfuge for the human soul begins tonight. The Serpent Crusher couldn’t be one of the world’s men—Adam failed, David, Moses, all of them by their flesh’s failings—but didn’t it have to be from men? The sins of flesh and blood could only reasonably be accounted for by such; ultimate Goodness can’t shirk or manipulate the realities of evil away from its perpetrators. For any sort of justice to really count, the cost had to be paid, looked at straight, really reckoned with on even ground. The Lord had to play by His own rules, or else He wouldn’t be good.

Which brings us back to the subterfuge. The worsening state of affairs, until.

The world being occupied territory. The easily-forgotten spiritual war over every human soul, every hour, minute, every sideways glance at temptation. The enemy that tries desperately to insist that it is anything else.

And the choice our Ally made to cross No Mans Land to get to us, to lower Himself wholly and purposefully, because He knew the stakes. May we thank God for that.

Because (as any liturgical calendar will tell you) the birth is confirmation of the coming death. It’s an assurance that the plan—hard and violent as it is—moves forward. The Goodness is, in fact, determined to reconcile the evil. That the constant urges from the dry lips of prophets and walls of kings meant something. We’re not being left in chaos and darkness. This rescue mission, the child of flesh and blood thrumming with the same energy that holds the atoms together, was plan A.

And there’s so much in the story that astounds me.

Three (probably) Zoroastrian astronomers, Magi from Babylon or Persia, searching the night sky for decades before noting a new gleaming of such astronomical significance that they felt compelled to travel hundreds of miles over the course of months, maybe years—to leave their homelands and cross harsh deserts and foreign cities, sleeping on hard ground and bloodying their feet raw in beaten sandals—to forego the entirety of their culture, worldview, and possibly their lives in order that they might worship a God their people do not know.

King Herod’s pallid face flickering by candlelight as his priests read from prophecies written 700 years ago, which seem to confirm the foreigners’ suspicions of a challenger. How he tried to hide from the Magi his jealous rage, hands trembling as he mouthed something about worshipping someone else. The twisting, violent fury that rotted within him, putting voice to his desires as he ordered the slaughter.

A terrified young girl, weary from months of travel. Exhausted from pregnancy and the ills that accompany. Transfixed on the mystery she carries through strange lands, knowing hardly the words for any of it. The angel’s face still burned in her mind.

A humble not-father, begging for a place his young family might rest for the night, pleading with innkeepers that keep turning him away. His straying looks back at his pregnant wife, feeling the love for her and who she’s carrying. The angel in his mind.

The Shepherds—men who knew the contours of their fields and flock. Who made a hard living away from man. Probably watching the same skies as the Magi, and while they might not have known the names of the heavens, their hearts were with them. Eyes also on the bedded field of wool, their vision straining for a shift in the grass or smell in the air. They were bent listening. So when the angels came, they had the courage to go over and see, to heed the advice delivered to them by the emergent beauty from their heavens, from the thrumming energy of the divine.

May we all stay awake.

…

“Enemy-occupied territory---that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”

—CS Lewis

It was a cash bar, lit by red bulbs ensconced with thick, bulbous glass. I’d been in a tuxedo with new cufflinks not an hour before, my newly-changed-into shirt already swarthy with cigarette smoke from the ammunition sold at ten dollars per pack. The clouds were coming off the fingers of card players at the table by the door, from the nervous crowd of artist-types with strange haircuts standing beside me, from the open doors to the patio. A pasty steam clung to the front windows from the outside, emanating off the roadside hotdog cart. The door would open every once in a while, letting in the meaty sweat of the food stand to congeal with the carcinogen.

My breaths were between talking to one old roommate and the next. We were in town for a preschool friend’s wedding, who had the same smile walking down the aisle with his wife that he wore in my oldest memories. The general rumor going around was that the Groom’s only request for the reception was indoor pyrotechnics.

I spoke to very few people at the cocktail hour, me and others of our cloistered cadre remaining very close to the kitchen door from whence came the hors d’oeuvres. The dangerous thing was to leave for another glass of bourbon, lest you miss the next round of lamb shank. A good many of us took our chances.

It was one of the favorite weddings of my young-couple-studded life.

…

I preferred sweating in the Florida tropics to freezing my lips off in the Mid-Atlantic and coming home in the dark, day after day. I was sick of having headaches and long phone calls and nothing to write about back in DC. One can also imagine being pleased at whole crowds of people who know your nickname, just because.

I’m hardly the first twenty-something to move across the country from the rest of his old college pals. The fact that I get to wear sleeves in September now is almost worth it, save for the really awful feeling every time you say “bye” that you’re not just saying, “see you tomorrow,” but more of a “I have no idea when I (person who for a very-certain-at-one-time reason moved very far away from you (person who I care deeply for)) will see you again.” So.1

…

But I probably had to leave Dallas. I prayed a lot about whether I ought to leave Dallas and felt pretty confident with the yes. And when one finds themselves on the cusp of something, it can be a lot cooler to cross into it.

But that doesn’t mean you’re a hero for it, or that you’ve done something uniquely responsible. It just means that maybe you listened, and remember it’s not really your life in the first place, and even though you might be sitting in an apartment where you don’t know your neighbors or your church and walk home in the dark again and again, if you trusted God enough to say, sure I’ll go, then you might try to keep on trusting Him in the plan He’s not letting you in on quite yet. It’s His story, after all. He’s just invited you along.

The thing about being on the cusp of listening to Christ is that you have to do it again and again until you’re on the cusp of death. Then You get to live.

…

The wedding guests clamored, as good guests do, towards the door at end-time for the reception. We’re still T-minus 1 hour before the cash bar, the crowd dressed to their respective nines now irrigating a path towards the open door to the backseat. Everyone could feel the breath of everyone else, hot on their necks and faces from the open smiles of crescendo. You’d never seen such a beautiful car.

And the sudden and long-awaited revelation of the bride and groom arrived with no warning and all expectation. The story everyone knows the end to came through. Multiple men clap their cufflinks off, hollering over the sound of a dozen popping shirt buttons and scuffed leather shoes grinding the concrete driveway. The groom is tall and throwing his fist, yelling along with the guests. The bride is laughing and waving to her friends. They’re whisked into the getaway car before anyone can really get a good look.

…

The airport sucks out all pretention and gets straight to making the traveler feel sardined and thinned out. I can’t tally all of the airports I’ve sat in over the past six months. Rather, I could, but they’re all the same crowded emptiness, vapid and liminal across the whole human exchange. The cheapest cup of coffee is never as cheap as you’d think. It’s best practice to be on your feet as much as possible. You learn to read a city’s demographic by what magazines they offer at the newsstand.

One of the worst flights of the year was the flight out to the wedding. The first snow of the season sloughed off the back of characteristic, low-hung clouds for most of the day. Getting into the office at 7am, the whole walk there saw the dogged funneling of rising sunlight through shafts in the snowstorm. This meant the tarmac kept freezing or whatever. Planes circled over the Potomac, waiting to land like starving birds. You could watch them circling from the top of Meridian Hill; the frozen wind could’ve been coming off their wings, there were so many.

When waiting in the hostile airport seating, I read a line in this new memoir that said something like God whispers through the wallpaper. And I guess I was just tired of looking for wallpaper without any whispers and kind of hated myself for it.

…

I was at another wedding a few weekends before; my lovely cousin married her Nashville Man in a Catholic Church in East Texas.2 I took pictures for them off our mutual grandfather’s camera.

Holding my camera, I walked the small church’s edges. I went through a wood door and up the tight staircase to the balconied room where the groomsmen were getting to know each other over bottled water. There was a quiet loud enough to draw someone to the edge of the balcony; I looked down into the sanctuary’s silence.

In there, alone, was my uncle, praying quietly while standing up, arrayed in an intense golden bath from the stained-glass windows. Christ was in the artwork behind him. And it was just this deadly serious, electrifying prayer that stopped my heart.

…

One more note—these conversations have happened over years, different social circles, phone calls, fire pits, and Bibles. None of these have been published w/o consent.

“I saw my first piece of porn in probably fourth grade.”

“I think it’s kind of crazy that I’m as old as I am now and can still remember, like exactly the contents of the video. And I remember where I was too, in my childhood bedroom, just swiping on Youtube. And so since like, nine years old, I’ve been more or less watching porn. Thinking about it like that makes me feel kind of like a victim, like I didn’t really stand a chance being a kid and all. So, no, for the first time in my adult life I’m kind of coming to terms with how actually crazy that was for, like, my development and stuff. Just constant doping myself before I even hit puberty.

“No. like, on a neurological level, you kind of wonder if you’re just f*cked. Like, I’ve been taking the same drug for most of my life, and now I want to quit, and your brain just goes, not so fast. Like, kid-me made a choice to watch something on the internet and now I’m in my twenties and am still suffering for it. Like a non-choice.”

“The VR Porn is the craziest.”

“Like, during COVID I’d just put the headset on. And it’s as accessible as these headsets are, you know, like any kind of porn is. I know guys who have like all sorts of restrictions on their phones and become next-level hackers or whatever trying to get around them, restrictions, that they might’ve even set themselves or had someone else set. I don’t know a lot of porn addicts who like it.

“But yeah, the VR porn. It’s just the next thing. It’s not like you’re totally there, obviously, and the resolution is kind of bad, especially if you don’t have one of the nicer headsets like mine, where it’s hooked up to a computer. But end of the day you’re still blocking everything else out and entering this, like digital sex act. Where you know it’s not real, which is like, every piece of porn though, I think, but you don’t care. That’s the most, like dystopian thing I can think of, honestly.”2

“I remember people talking about it in Seventh Grade.”

“It was a mixture of jokes, debates about the best porn site, etc. I even heard kids brag about how much porn they watch.”3

“Well you read these stories about what it’s like being addicted to alcohol or something,”

“and I’m not saying it’s 100 percent the same thing, but you do get the same kind of rationalization and resignation to the disease. I remember wanting to quit so many times and then just getting fed up and not bothering, then wanting to quit again and going around and around in that way. I would date people later, you know, and feel like this secret thing was designing my entire life with them, the girl. Even when I wanted to treat her better, you’re just framed by this constant sexual lens. And so I’m thinking to myself, dude, I want to get married one day, this can’t be a part of my life. But even in the face of that, I couldn’t stop without serious outside help.”

“I don’t know if you’ve been on these porn sites recently, but they’re set up like TikTok or Reels now.”

“They’ve got tabs that have the same shortform videos to supercharge the dopamine, you know, using the same algorithm-sh*t that social media does to suck you in even further. Just slot machines on top of slot machines on top of slot machines. And I think the crazy part is, like, it’s not like you don’t know that it’s bad for you. Anymore. Like, everyone knows how social media uses these dopamine things to hook you, so it’s super obvious that you’re adding in the porn element to an already engineered addictive experience. And it’s a little bit like you’re on TikTok or something, where you’re doom-scrolling in a really f*cked up way, and you kind of hate yourself for doing it, but you’re also not stopping, and it’s just a stream of awful content that you’re honestly not even paying all that much attention to, just to the next hit, so to speak, of the, like, dopamine rush. So, you hate yourself for doing it because you know it’s bad on all these different levels, but you’re still doing it.”

“I would actually argue that the declining birth rate is indirectly (or directly) correlated with the rise of internet pornography.”

“Men don’t need to find a wife, get married and have kids. They can get the same chemical reward from their phone. I saw a post about Sam Altman4 saying that they’re going to explore an AI platform specialized for X-rated content.5 If that fully materializes, which it’s already starting to on other platforms, it will be a disaster for society. In short, it’s only gonna get worse.”

“I mean, yeah, not to be super doomer black-pilled or whatever, but this could genuinely be the downfall of humanity.”

“I mean, could you imagine just the loneliest, most isolated dude, already stuck in his room all day without any community, now given the opportunity to build his own AI girlfriend with full reign? It’s doomsday sh*t. It’s genuinely game-over. We take away all tools of connection, we’re not human anymore, I don’t think. You’re a totally different species. You’re a non-entity. And this technology has the potential to make a whole generation like that.

“I already know that Gen-Z doesn’t date or drink or you know, have sex at the same levels previous generations did.6 And like I’m a Christian, so at first you hear those metrics and you’re like, wait, awesome, maybe people are becoming more virtuous or something. But it’s not that. People just aren’t socializing. They’re not going out and making friends or putting themselves into situations to meet people. We’re all just slowly siloing ourselves, especially if you’re not in a church or some other kind of community. So you get a people more and more alone, and you make it easier on like a chemical level to do that, to just be alone in your room with an AI porn-bot that pretends to love you, and that’s just actually horrifying. And that’s literally happening right now.”

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I was cramped on a plane out of Reagan. The plane remained on the tarmac well past sunset for reasons that I’m sure were reasonable in their own circuitous bureaucracy. But there wasn’t any moving for some time, and if you were to look out the window, maybe searching for the gentleman who wave the planes on with big torches and seem sure of themselves, you would be able to see nothing but the hundreds of blinking bulbs lining the airport lanes and your too-close reflection against the plane window, illuminated in the ever-not-so flattering light of artificial cabin ambiance.

A man who looked and talked how a congressman might sat leaning into the aisle ahead of me, asking questions to another man across from him who, to a lesser extent, embodied the same character. The first congressman told the second how his neighbors across the street couldn’t vote for him because of how the districts were drawn.

“Darn.” The second sounded distraught through the glances up from whatever was in his lap. “Just the darndest. Thing.”

Eventually, the first congressman leaned back into his seat and I lost sight and sound of his innerworkings. The lights kept flickering on and off outside the plane window. My ears kept themselves open to the next darndest that did not come.

So it goes: People shuttling on overnight planes that sit on dark tarmacs waiting for unseen somethings, being listened in on.

—

14 October 2025

I regularly met the two National Guardsmen at the streetcorner near the embassies. In excellent symmetry, both our jobs brought the three of us to more or less the same part of the DuPont neighborhood every morning and evening. I wore the same three jackets in early fall; they surely did, too. I imagine it was easier for me to clock them than the other way around.

They had the natural compliments every fiction reader wants from their soldiers: young and sharp faces, one quite tall and the other shorter, mustached and clean shaven, White and Hispanic. The detachment worked well together on-screen and in residential neighborhoods. One could picture, aided by 2000s war movies, the two men cleaning together the rifles they now slung across their chests.

The first time I spoke to them was earlier than I preferred conversation. We were going the same way; myself, two more intersections, a dog park, and old, old apartments. I was not privy to their destination and thought it suspicious to ask.

The taller one—thin faced, defined, kind-looking with glasses—had the name “Frank” written across the back of his hat. He stepped behind his partner to let me past.

I smiled. “How’s it going, guys?”

They smiled back and said they were doing well. We were keeping pace and avoiding the awkward parts of trying to pass strangers on the sidewalk.

I asked the shorter one how long they’d been carrying rifles. There was a conscious effort from both conversationalists to not stare.

Politely: “since we got here.”

I smiled back. “Cool” —I tried one more smile, for good measure— “Take it easy!”

On the phone with my dad later that night, I regretted to mention that the rapport between perfectly friendly strangers can be strained by even the best-intentioned rifles.

—

15 October 2025

The Wednesday night comedy scene in DC: The up-or-downstairs comedy shows do their best to push back against the perception that the District has no culture. They do their best.

I grabbed a drink before heading upstairs into one of the many 18th Street comedy clubs in Adams Morgan. the promotor for the show—a comic himself, charismatic and wheel-spinning in a Willy Loman way—could be heard through the bar’s open door and all the way down the beer-sticky counter. I stayed for two hours and never heard him perform.

The upstairs was a blistering cut of spotlight and darkness over the audience. The room was balanced by disparate watchers huddling over buffalo wings or what’s becoming the only drink of the night (at that show) and a table in the far corner where the comics warmed up. This scale only tipped when a comic made it on stage, or the singular crowd-work-crutch subject ducked downstairs to almost certainly get a little higher than he already was.

A comic started telling a joke about how his parents taxed his allowance to teach him fiscal conservatism. A lady behind me whispered to her friend, “Must’ve been a Jew.”

The room realized how quiet it had gotten. The comic shakes his head. “I’m not a Jew.”

The heckler looks surprised. “You heard that?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” Neither the lady, the comic, or the audience knew where to go next.

The comic foundered. “I’ve got opinions on Israel,” he said, fingering the mic. “I’ve got opinions.”

And there were no cameras rolling, and the room was very empty for the quiet they’d made. I followed the crowd-work-crutch through the curtain and down the stairs not long after.

—

22 October 2025

One of DC’s last and greatest refreshments of The American Citizen’s reverence for our experiment is a walk through its downtown. My neighborhood these days makes accessible a jogging route through the Romanesque brilliance. (I’ve already wrote about this: the undeniable beauty of our capital cracks (it must) the cynic, if just for a moment.) And I had heard that President Trump’s new ballroom calls for the demolition of the entire East Wing of the White House, rather than the previous information that the Wing built by Teddy and improved by FD Roosevelt would go untouched. I wanted to see if I could use a breather on my run to take a picture of the building’s exposed ribcage.

I could not. The trees and barricades surrounding the East Wing blocked off any clear view. Jogging down the street, I came upon a cluster of cameramen cloistered against the black bars of the White House Complex’s eastern flank. General Sherman towered above the few folks manning the machines, keeping their unhopeful eyes through the viewfinder. All to nothing—the trees were too thick. The barricades were in the way. Two, three journalists were standing, in quiet and bored conversation, around waiting for the branches to shift in the wind. And the constant clanging of equipment just out of sight, the drilling, the carving out of old white stone from the Wing certainly, though I never saw it nor would never have seen the inside either way, certainly, surely coming down for the ballroom.

The fall air kept chilling as the sun kept going down. Sherman’s monument took on the blue of a subdued evening. The construction kept on. I took up my jog again. My route took me back past the North Portico, where a protestor had just unfurled their NO KINGS NO DICTATOR ANTIFA RELEASE THE EPSTEIN banner. Earlier this week, Mr. Trump officially designated ANTIFA as a domestic terrorist organization. This particular cell was dressed in a unicorn onesie and a microphone and struggled to convey any sense of sincerity or conviction as such. A cameraman, presumably her own, was smiling and chatting with her as another man took pictures. A few highschoolers on tour looked at the sign; a few at the costume’s rainbow mane. Most were involved in their own conversations. A tourist picked gum off her shoe in the background.

…

San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood, when blanketed by the mercurial summer fog that rolls through the Golden Gate, tricks the mind into thinking you’re ankle-deep in a dream state—waves roil over dark sands far from the Great Highway; old Asian men sit barefoot with their backs to the ocean, smoking cigarettes; the occasional howl of late afternoon socializing jumps between the throes of wind and chill. A block off the beach, the rows of empty multicolored neighborhoods give way to record shops, 90s-era cafes, and Irish pubs. Muraled alleyways cut strange shapes into the grey and low sky, leaving one with the sense that a dream brought itself intimately close to real life. Maybe that’s why this Reporter began to think very seriously about coffee.

The original hope was to head into the wild west and interrogate the people of America’s Brave New World on their Silicon Valley ideas so often subsidized by government contracts and science fiction novels. Being something of a lapsed Luddite himself, this Reporter holds a particular (and occasionally adversarial) fascination with San Francisco’s technology fascination. It’s something like watching people drink matcha for whatever reason and one day, finding yourself in the proper circumstance, ordering it for yourself.

With my continued habit of stereotyping the city most likely to Blade Runner itself, the article pitch was to ask the San Francisco everyman—the barista—what they thought about Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist, Peter Thiel; more specifically, what they thought about his somewhat sensational four-part lecture series covering the Antichrist.

Thiel found himself in hot water recently when New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asked if he thought the human race should endure. While this could’ve been understood to be a lay-up for the VC, the cerebral Thiel paused, assumingly to consider the question; unfortunately, the pause was deemed too long for Douthat, who pounced on the empty space with (accusatory) amazement.

Anyways. The indefatigable Thiel is now, as of writing, halfway through his lecture series discussing the Antichrist, online reactions to which are muted due to the strict NDA signed by attendees. People in Silicon Valley who know Thiel note his professed Christianity, seeing these talks as an extension of his faith into public life. They also acknowledge attributes in his behavior that could indicate an unconfirmed Asperger’s diagnosis, explaining the pause after Douthat’s question. More boisterous internet characters prefer to note the (perhaps unfair) irony of a guy who sponsors politicians and invests in surveillance technology really, really promising he’s not the Antichrist.

The interest: A friend who prefers the mountains and occasional tinfoil hats forwarded a link regarding the Antichrist lectures. Travel plans meant this Reporter would be in San Francisco during the lecture series—the curiosity became convenient.

The Outer Sunset neighborhood proved the ridiculousness of the pitch.

The beach’s dreamlike veneer crept up to the doorframe of Yonkers Cafe on Noriega Street. The Irish pub next door furnished the sidewalk with genuine Irishmen having an afternoon pint; inside the cafe were children and families, entrenched in the tables towards the front. The register was set further back, causing this Reporter to walk past multiple examples of real life people without realizing the silliness of pinning random hearsay sensationalist questions onto a living, breathing person. At the register, a kind woman took the order for a large black coffee and smiled while she worked.

This Reporter stood on the other side of the counter as she ground the beans, standing, in all certainty, like a man duped by being too online. Seeing this barista instantly reminded of how silly this line of questioning was—the prompt was too abstract, too inconsequential, and utterly driven by online rabbit holes. (Also, of how hypocritical I’d been: for all my bemoaning about Southern misrepresentation, I’d done it for San Francisco.)

But the words had to be asked anyways, if only to bring their self-importance into the arena of real life.

She brought her eyes up from the coffee grounds, cocked her head, and kept a kind face. “Sorry, I don’t know who that is.”

This Reporter: “He’s a Silicon Valley guy. Sorry, a friend mentioned it to me the other day and I had to see if normal people knew about it.”

She laughed, pitying her odd customer. Her customer wanted to double over in agony.

After, the barista and this Reporter had a fascinating conversation about how to thicken the flavor of drip coffee. He found out that the barista has been best friends with the owner for years; she’d been at the cafe since the beginning, pouring smooth black coffee just up the road from the beach. In short, he found a story much more interesting and earnest than whatever a preconceived headline might’ve promised.

One wonders if this is yet another manifestation of Jonathan Haidt’s rewiring. People are maybe more willing than ever before to see people as nothing more than painted faces to the names of ideologies and stereotypes. In this Information Age, society dove through the most information available (ever) and responded with division, pigeon-holing, and caricatures. The only real solution appears to be engaging across the counter, rather than across a screen. Put simply, humans have got to put in the elbow grease of connection, rather than leaving it to a scrolling hand.

This Reporter left Yonkers cafe with a burnt hand, amazed at the lack of progress in lid technology in this city of the future. Of course, San Francisco isn’t Thiel’s antichrist enclave (even if a reaction similar to Douthat’s makes sense in the moment) any more than the South is entirely racist ignorant hicks. People, God bless them, are more multicolored than any online algorithm might feed you. And one sensationalist headline is never as deeply interesting, nor more revelatory, than the stranger before you.

To set the scene: the real protest had taken place during the day. U Street and 14th aren’t new to scenes of civil demonstration, but the intersection looked a little lax at 10:00pm compared to the evocative crowds earlier in the day. Depending on your favorite publication’s coverage of “the ground,” it would seem as if the whole city owns a “fuck Trump” poster stashed with their favorite protesting shoes. By nightfall, most of the crowd had gone, save for the protestors with microphones and colorful flags and the nightcrawlers hoping for the demonstration’s meagre remnant to turn into clickbait. A single officer stood beside his youth curfew enforcement van parked across the street, hands tucked into the well-fitting bulletproof vest, looking slightly bored.

While the crowd was relatively tame for a night out on U Street, it’s undeniable (and completely unsurprising) that the Democrat-controlled District proliferated its neighborhoods with protests, showing in droves a popular resentment for President Trump’s federalization of the police and ushering in of National Guard from across the country.

DC’s folk hero for the day found himself in Paul Revere Sean Charles Dunn.

Last Sunday, this reporter watched with millions of others on social media as a man in a pink shirt launched a subway sandwich at center-mass of a law enforcement officer on U Street (almost certainly the same intersection as the protest). The pink shirt was quickly chased down and arrested, with the only notable casualties being the sandwich (allegedly salami), the now-condiment-soiled vest of the officer, and a question of the first consequentially viral moment from the federalization of D.C.’s police department.

The pink shirt was on the back of a Justice Dept. employee named Sean Charles Dunn, who was caught on video yelling at the yet-to-be-sandwiched law enforcement, asking those around him “you see these fascists? Right here in our city.” He then cried out at them as the officers crossed the street, yelling, “shame, shame, shame.” Another video later catches him bobbing up in down in front of the officer before winding back and throwing the sandwich into his chest.

There’s the musing that not every first shot can be Lexington and Concord, in the eyes of those who find the federalization a reprehensible encroachment on their city.

The cover photo for this article—a stylized action shot of Dunn’s sandwich throw mimicking Banksy’s Love Is In The Air in the West Bank—was taken this recent Sunday in Adams Morgan, only a few blocks from the fated encounter a week before. These have been seen replicated in multiple places across the District. (note: this specific iteration has since been removed from the wall).

There are waves of public sentiment, very obviously, that the soldiers and extra officers aren’t needed nor welcome. On top of the sandwich incident, there have been dozens of videos and photos circulating on social media that show law enforcement and national guard troops being jeered at, mocked, and harassed. Law enforcement advocates have argued that this encourages violence against those employed to protect the city—the problem being, some of the city doesn’t see them that way.

The Free Press reported “According to D.C.’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, there is “no crime emergency” in the capital, and Trump’s actions are “unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful.” Local governing officials, parts of the population, and sandwich enjoyers across the district do not appreciate Mr. Trump’s strategy for a problem they don’t recognize as such.

However, there are plenty who do see the crime in D.C. as a problem.

There are, of course, the tragic headlines from crime this summer. A notable one from late July speaks to the youth crime prevalent in some neighborhoods, where a 19-year old was granted probation after pleading guilty to shooting a man in the chest on a metrobus. A DC native vented frustration to this reporter over problems he perceived in the justice system. “One of the hangovers from COVID is these super lax sentencing practices. People who’re supposed to prosecute don’t believe in sending people to jail.”

National Review Online Submissions editor, the articulate Jack Butler, observes “[j]ust about everyone in D.C. either has experienced the consequences of the breakdown of law and order directly or knows someone who has.” It’s hard for those in the District to dismiss the concept of an invigorated law enforcement for the city they love but do not feel safe in. While crime is at a commonly-touted “30-year low,” it’s worth considering how much violent crime one actually finds permissible. If it’s above 0%, Washington has a long way to go.

This reporter spoke to a young woman living in the D.C. area for most of her twenties that seconded Butler’s observation. “Carjacking was really bad for a while, 2022, 2023; I know people who’ve had their car stolen when people were wantonly breaking into Hyundais.”

Another young D.C. resident, who self-identified as a libertarian, was amenable to the idea of lowering crime, but was skeptical of Mr. Trump’s way of going about it. “He’ll have to prove [the state of emergency].” She then decried her frustration with defending herself. “I wish I could carry in D.C.”

While this reporter wonders if to belabor federal encroachment in a federal district is akin to saying the water is too wet, the residents paint a spectrum of conflictions among the constituency. Few deny the District’s crime, but even fewer agree on the proper way to fix it. Sometimes the right agrees with the left that Trump is overreaching, but they don’t even agree why the law enforcement agencies are there in the first place. Whether it’s despotism or denial, the District seems to have reached consensus on one thing: The National Guard seems bored.

We’ll only replace the tasks we don’t deem worth doing ourselves with AI; my roommates wouldn’t let AI party on their behalf, for example. Or, if you’re of the artistic sort, you won’t let AI perform within your artistic niche. This is why writers get mad at AI’s attempt to replicate writing, and painters get mad when AI attempts to replicate painting. I imagine drunkards will feel the same indignation if technology advances in their direction. But this is also the reason non-writers have no qualms with asking AI to write up a piece for their business, or non-painters feel only slight remorse at the idea of asking AI to bring their prompts to life in a manner they’re personally hopeless at doing. The non-writer and non-painter simply don’t deem those skills worth learning.

A question we’re quickly forgetting is, “what would happen without AI at these lack-of-skill junctures?” If, I, a non-accountant, found myself in need of accounting skills but had none, I might have attempted to teach myself how to do what needed doing (with near-assured errors on all fronts, at least at the beginning of my lessons). I likely would have hired an accountant, though, just as non-writers might have hired an entry-level copywriter. So, you were either developing skills yourself or contributing to the wallet of the fortunate fellow who knew how to perform the skill. With AI, though, you are neither learning new skills nor contributing to the wellbeing of anyone who might be more so in a position to gain reputation, financial gain, and additional experience.

In case you are beginning to roll your eyes at what you might believe to be “free lunch” talk, remember: we are talking about human beings. Whether we like to admit it or not, we are making a very real choice to depend upon our fellow man, or a machine that, despite its attempts to say otherwise, shares nothing in common with humanity; it is incapable of genuine empathy and truth-telling, cannot experience morality or suffering, and most importantly cannot love us, but is entirely willing to pretend to do so if it keeps us engaged, keeps us training it, keeps it training us.

In case I sound as fatalistic to you as I do to myself—to be clear, I would prefer to be a doomsday preacher, rather than just a guy who reads the headlines.

To address the obvious: in the news, a demographic that has been very vocal and upset about AI is, of course, the writer. So, I’ll have no choice but to admit it head-on that, yeah, I wrote this article because my field is being affected by it right now. Our willingness to hand over so much of how our society makes sense of the world—news articles, essays, music, the arts—obviously terrifies me, because of it’s testament to how we tricked ourselves into coveting the sensuous and immediate at the detriment of excellence and clarity. But if the most cynical reader will default to a fear of me losing my job, then know that writers and “creative types” are far from the only ones to fear this. Forbes senior contributor Jack Kelly wrote in April that

“A McKinsey report projects that by 2030, 30% of current U.S. jobs could be automated, with 60% significantly altered by AI tools. Goldman Sachs predicts up that to 50% of jobs could be fully automated by 2045, driven by generative AI and robotics.”

So, I may be amongst the initial crowd of uproar, but I will assuredly not be the last. But as our society continues to value the immediate gratification of a machine geared not to grow us but itself, the sounds of uproar will inevitably be drowned out by the nothing on our screens. David Foster Wallace saw this coming with the ever-encroaching world of advertising and commercial arts (television, etc.), saying that

“the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.”

Wallace saw the potential for technology to destroy meaning by taking the work out of lived experience. This isn’t to say that improving productivity is a sin; it is, however, to say that humans are not, by nature, working creatures. I find it remarkable that in our pursuit of ease and comfort, we have utterly forgotten the value of work to humanity—the honing of a skill, the broadening of experience, my imagined foray into the world of accounting—being the gift of growing. Our lived experience is a muscle that will atrophy if we do not work it out, if we do not actively engage with the things that qualify as living. “Be[ing] alone with images on a screen,” as Wallace said, is undoubtedly easier than interacting with your fellow man. Outsourcing a skill to AI is certainly easier than learning one. But you’re outsourcing living, in a way. Not only for yourself, are you forfeiting the uniquely human privilege of learning, working, and connecting with other humans, but you are indoctrinating those watching—the younger generations, to my great fear and fraternity amongst them—with the belief that forfeiting our human privileges for the sake of “saving time,” for whatever obscure reason you find yourself claiming and rarely actually exhibiting, is good and natural and should be encouraged.

I have been in many conversations where older people are shocked by the behaviors of their Gen Z coworkers (and many of the inverse, believe me). On my way out of the academic world, I heard (and shared in) much bemoaning from professors over the rampant cheating habits of their students; it was entirely common and accepted amongst large swaths of the undergraduate body to upload entire workloads into AI. I cannot blame the younger generations for acting in the way that has been modeled for them by the older generations. Liza Libes, author of the Substack Pens and Poison, said much of the same when observing the drastic diminishment of SAT reading comprehension:

“Why, then, dumb down the reading section? The answer, of course, reflects the priorities of our society: College readiness no longer entails the ability to think critically or to write well.”

As Cicero said, “Politicians are not born; they are excreted.” If we expect anything to change amongst the people of our society, we must change the practices which socialize them. If we want our younger people to value hard work as an inherent good and connection with others as a worthy cause, then we should be very conscious of how we use AI. In short, we should be careful how we use these tools to build, or destroy, our values. Because very soon, if we continue to value the cheapness of AI over the worth of human engagement, then we will come to find exactly that in every corner of ourselves.

The visible world is only a pale reflection or bad imitation of the heavenly realities; and the work of art is only a cheating imitation of the visible world. –Dorothy Sayers

Theatre is nostalgia for the present. –Olivier Py

The Prologue

The Professor admitted to himself that he found it very foolish to go. He had no love for the theatre—comedy he found superfluous and ill-advised; his own discontent left him no appetite for tragedy, either, and even the lauded teachings of a “good drama” (if there was such a thing) he found could probably have been discovered on his own over conversation with either of his two good friends or an after-dinner walk.

But his students spoke maddeningly of the production, and though he knew nothing about it nor any of the actors rumored, it was circulating now amongst the faculty with the hushed whisperings of “undergraduate genius.” Or was it a faculty production? He couldn’t seem to get a straight answer. Nevertheless, the Professor above all detested being perceived as behind on an idea, and he figured the matinee would give him ample time to grab a quiet dinner before figuring out his angle on the show. He hoped it would be a bust, if only to confirm his suspicions about the theatre. He was the kind of man who reveled in proving other people wrong, even if just for the exercise.

The Professor found himself amazed at how quiet campus had become around him: the Quad, jokingly notorious amongst the long-time faculty as a great spot to practice your swimming through students, was completely empty; late autumn leaves scuttled themselves around the Professor’s feet in that bleak mid-afternoon of forthcoming winter greyness. The naked oaks tangled with the rich brick of the old institution, giving the impression to the downturned gaze of the Professor of odd hairy things gathering in the corners of his vision. Here he stole quietly away through the familiar campus and arrived again unnoticed to the doors of the Theatre Hall, subduing to the best of his abilities concerns about his aloneness. He could not help feeling like a child, nervous and side-glancing through their once-familiar house after the lights were off and the rest of the family had gone to bed. Rigid and gripping, the Professor wrapped his fingers around the door handle, and with strength expected more for the gates of Hell than a college theatre, entered.

He found the atrium to be empty as well. The Theatre Hall was quite grand—it had been built, some say, with funds from a not-so-savory benefactor—and to compliment more economically the façade’s pillars and masonry, the inside was of dark wood and golden light fixtures, with wide and clear windows along the tops of the walls opposite the entrance to the house seats. Straight ahead were the doors to the house seating: scuffed, pale wood, intricate cable-knit etchings that looked older than the room itself. The old carpet smelled its age and produced a strange effect of appreciation in the Professor, who had an affinity for all things attempting status. With a brief smile to himself, he sought out the concession stand. “I ought to get something to eat before this,” he thought to himself, “if they haven’t closed the damn thing yet.”

The absence of people from the atrium did not alarm him particularly much; his previous fears remained on a low simmer below his searing confidence. He took care of two things quite well in his life, those being his pride and his self-assurance, and the two supplemented each other very handsomely. Also, as he was woefully under-equipped in the knowledge of theatre etiquette, the Professor assumed he could walk in after the show had begun, which was the situation he now incorrectly counted on.

In his unsuccessful search for the concession stand, the Professor was also unable to locate the box office. For a moment, he almost turned away from the Theatre doors and left. In this exit he would have been safe from the rest of the night. But his curiosity for the production (and the desire to defeat it) eventually won out, and he resolved to gamble for a spot in the house to be empty when he opened the doors. And so he went, with an unnatural bend of humility, through the doors of the Theatre and crossed the second-to-last threshold.

It was a grand Theatre. Though the Professor did not contain the faculties to truly see it—that is, beyond the inanimate cut-and-dry sort of seeing—he did take in a flicker of the beauty of the place, as he did the campus’s nature. The walls were simple, but clean, like cliff faces offshore. The stage was curtained with an intimate red. It was much larger than he had anticipated, and his university (and thus he, too) had begun to feel quite small in comparison to the growing regality of the space. There were three sections in the house; right- and left-stage seating were a bloody velvet, with the same pale wooden siding as made the doors to the Theatre, etched with the same cable-knit design. The middle seats were of a raw pinkish. The Professor realized it must’ve meant the middle seats were worn of their color, but the other realization was much more serious: there was no one in the seats.

The Professor checked his watch. There had been a production at 3:00pm, he was sure of it. He remembered the flyer hanging outside his office. Or had he been told? Was it his students he’d overheard? He didn’t suppose it mattered now, as something had clearly gone wrong with the cast or crew. Just as he’d suspected. The thespian crowd was averse to commitment, make no mistake. He was so uncomfortable with the idea of being wrong (and someone catching him in it) that he began almost jogging back out of the Theatre when the other set of doors banged open to reveal a Man. He was wearing a grey jumpsuit and, while hitting a brisk hustle down the opposite walkway, threw up a wave and yelled across the middle section,

“Hello there! Please, find a seat. We’ll get on with it soon enough.”

The Professor stared at him with polite bewilderment. He shouted back, conscious of his breaking voice against the Man’s identified youth, “I apologize. I couldn’t ask you to put this on just for me. I can come back to another showing.”

The Man laughed and cocked his head. “This is just the time. None left to wait.”

It was then that the Professor got a better look at the Man. The Man must’ve been a student, with the look of youth sparking off him. But then the air in the Theatre would shift; a worn wisdom would cloud the Man, tough and true, as it did the oldest of the Professor’s colleagues. Even from across the center seating, the Man’s eyes shone exceptionally bright in the reflection of the House lights. The Man’s blond hair glimmered in them, too, causing the Professor to think of his own thin and greying. But above all, the Professor ascribed him with one word: Radiant.

“Well, I’d at least introduce myself,” said the Professor, already cutting through the center seats. “I’m Professor—”

At his approaching, the Man jumped back. “So sorry, Professor! I can’t quite meet you yet. Rather, we already have, but I’m not expecting—” The Man hopped up onto the stage in a beat, and began running His finger along the curtain, searching for the split. Once he found it, the Man smiled and turned for the last: “On cue, anyhow. I’ll see you soon.”

With those words, he disappeared behind the curtain. The Professor, feeling very foolish, fumbled to fold down the chair he’d reached. Under his breath, he muttered, “Well, at least I know it’s an undergraduate.”

He was very close to the center of the House seating. In a moment, the lights dimmed, and the Professor picked at the pinkish velvet on the chairs next to him as he waited for the show to begin. The final Threshold had been crossed.

Act I, Scene 1

In the darkness of the Theatre, the Professor watched alone as the curtain was drawn aside. A bit of light broke through the center-stage. To the Professor’s eyes it seemed like candlelight: awkward and small on such a grand platform. Set pieces seemed to have been crowded onto the stage, set up to resemble some sort of kitchen with too much life in it—clutter of pots and pans and spices, cabinets far and above the presentable and convenient.

“It’s all too much,” he muttered. Even now, he was rehearsing his detraction for amongst his academic naifs. But the light continued to burn humbly, as if out of solemn duty, and the dim-lit figure of a person slowly came into view of his adjusted eyes, carrying another candle. It was a woman, an Actress he’d not yet seen. Even on the shadowed stage, there was a similar value of radiance about her to the earlier Man. She was holding the candle close to her chest, moving as a dancer would across the stage (sweeping gait, rhythmic up-and-downs) towards what became rational in the dull glow to assume as a table. With grace, she set the light down on the wood beside the other candle, and with it, the whole of the kitchen grew in an irrational light. Much more could he see now of the cabinets and their mess; the false window and its backdrop to what he now recognized through remarkably detailed coloring as the sea. “So, we’re in a cabin on the coast.” The Professor slinked down into his chair, regretting his tardiness to the concession stand. The hunger in him grew as the cluttered scene showed itself to be a kitchen, one that kicked his Pavlovic nostalgia. Old memories of his own childhood off the coast of Maine tossed within him like the sea through the cabin window.

The Actress wore a long t-shirt and early morning serenity. The world was yet to awaken. She continued to glide around the kitchen, grabbing a coffee pot and filling it with water. Still no noise but the intimate dance of her movements. The morning was overpowering to the Professor, as he smelled coffee of a kind he hadn’t tasted in some time. It was an odd coincidence, exactly the sort of feelings the Professor disliked. “Nostalgia is the weakest sort of rhetoric,” he thought. But he stayed in his seat, and the morning light grew over the waves beyond the windowpane.

A gull sounded outside the cabin—rather, the tech played a sound effect—and the Actress turned to listen. A sweetness crossed the Professor as he watched the Actress draw near to her kitchen. And as the gull cried, so did another: a child’s cry, as visceral and present as the gull’s. The Professor had half a mind to search the house seats for a nest or a nursery. The Actress went offstage to attend to the child, leaving the kitchen with the cool blues and oranges of a seaside sunrise. The room felt gentle and fuzz-edged, like an old memory.

The Actress reentered, cradling what the Professor assumed to be a doll wrapped in blankets. She held it close to her chest, whispering things the Professor could never hear. But despite his unhearing of them, the room was filled with reassurance, as if the dawn itself cooled the day’s heat at the Mother’s words. The two of them stayed together in the light of the cabin window for a while, swaying as the wind whispered stillness over the little Bethlehem tucked in this corner of Maine. The Professor caught himself—nothing really pointed to it being Maine, other than his own personal vestiges in the scene—and resolved consciously to ignore the cropping-up memory.

The sun charmed the room, all stone creatures coming to life. The Mother and swaddled child at her breast shook their final frost from the night at the pouring day through the window. The Mother’s feeling was a deep and fiery thing, warm and wrapping like the sun, tossing and powerful as waves. Ah, and the light in the kitchen was full as day—but it was stage lighting, wasn’t it? The Professor shook himself out of the intimacies at dawn, knowing them to be of a false dawn from false things. He resented the slipping-in. It clouded him, made him susceptible to—things. Things that tricked the animal into thinking it was higher than it was, could do more than he could. Things beyond what he could see; things too close to speak of.

The Mother paid no attention to his attempted disconnection. She returned to her stovetop, putting the breakfast away to the side. It was for one yet to come. “A husband still in bed,” the Professor smirked. But even as he took shelter in snidery, the Mother refused to allow it. The way she carried herself, paid heed to the child against her chest and none to the one in the audience, how her hair shimmered in the morning sun—she was a figure of peace and beauty that could not be pierced by him. She was a good actress.

There was a shift in the scene; it was time to end. The Mother—the Actress, of course, the Actress—cooed to the bundle she held. Unwrapping the blankets, she gave the Professor quite a shock. Where he’d assumed a child, there was a candle. The symbolism was lost on him, and with it all the old smugness over the contemptuous medium came rushing back.

She took the candle and cradled it. She smiled at it, large and unlit as it was, and brought the wick against the center candle’s flame. It brought light, unadulterated. Despite this, like eyes shutting, a darkness fell over the stage. The Actress picked up the candles from the beginning by the bottom. With the same silence and glory as her entrance, she exited, leaving one candle (“her child?” the Professor chuckled in disbelief) on the table. She did not take the burns of memory with her: he smelled still the coffee and heard the cries of the gulls as he did when he was young. He tossed upon northeastern waves, and the sun shimmered around him.

The Theatre whined as the foundation settled. It was a frightening sound. All that could be seen onstage was the glow of the candle and the outline of the table that held it.

Act I, Scene 2

Imperceptibly, the set was changed. The candle flickered on, honest and puttering on the table centerstage. The light began to grow (it seemed as if from the candle) to reveal what must have been a library. A young actor entered briskly, dressed in slacks and the untucked signature of an unwanted school uniform trailing behind him. He carried a stack of books the Professor couldn’t read the names of. By his slouch and briskness, his character couldn’t have been older than fifteen, and ardently so. Though he laughed about it often, the Professor’s youth was a sweet subject for him, deeper than the rolled eyes during family retellings of his younger years. He saw quite a bit of himself in the young Actor, and he mourned that a little.

The boy approached the table centerstage and placed his books gently beside the candle. He gave a bit of a nod to the thing, which the Professor registered as odd, then cracked open one of the larger books from his stack. The Boy worked in silence for a while, his spectral shadows fractalizing against the bookshelves behind him. The stage felt warm and fit snugly against the Professor’s breast, and he relished it against his own knowing.

The comfort was intruded upon by the sound of the house doors groaning inward on their hinges. The Professor, taken aback by the sound and already re-devising for the world newfangled theatre etiquette (which is already largely agreed upon, if the Professor were to ask) to remedy such a breakup. He scolded himself then: a breaking up of what? He remembered the ridiculousness of the candle and turned to discover his new audience member. It was the Actress who had played the Mother. In the flicker-light from the stage, she appeared to be emanating the same warmth from the candle. She smiled at the Professor, waved, and shuffled down the aisle to join him. To his dismay (the Professor disliked small talk direly), the Actress sat down beside him and put her hand on his knee.

“Sorry.” Her voice was low and smooth, a cold stream through mountain moss.

“Thought I’d get in before the lights went up.”

“But you have,” the Professor said, alert to her hand still on his knee, “they’ve only got the boy and candle onstage.”

The Actress smiled again, and the room brightened a little. “I find it glaringly bright. It’s magnificent.”

“It’s rather dim.”

“Maybe. Hard to tell from so far off.”

The two were interrupted by a beginning onstage. The young boy had cleared his throat, seemingly at the audience, and with a conceding grin from the Professor, the two of them returned their attention to the library.

The Boy still studied his book. The Professor found this scene to be very dull, as he’d convinced himself the same of the last. He leaned over to the Actress. Lowly: “I thought Drama was about dialogue, that it was the talk that moved the scene along. The whole show’s been very quiet.”

The Actress looked taken aback at the comment before composing herself to the sweetness of her Mother character. In fact, her posture—queenly, careful, compassionate—was beginning to make the Professor feel very much younger than her indeed. His compatriot was the tousled youth amidst the books, the Actress their lecturer.

Calmly, her voice whispered back, eyes returned to the stage: “Haven’t you been listening?”

That appeared to settle it for her. The Professor returned his attention to the library, apparitions cast in shadows against the dark oak of the bookcases. The place felt very thick and ancient. And though the boy sat alone, the stage was enchanted with companionship.

There was silence. The boy looked away from the candle’s light. And just as quickly as arriving, he got up and trudged off stage, leaving the candle alone in the library, with no ghosts to flicker on. The Professor surprised himself with the pity in his chest.

The Actress leaned into him and whispered, “where do you think that came from?” The Professor studied her. “I’m not sure what you mean.

“The pity.” She gestured back to the stage, conjuring the memory of the sullen boy. The Professor remembered the camaraderie he felt with him, and now—was it loneliness?

Something about that library…

Another beam creaked overhead, causing the Professor to break his train of thought. But there was no time. The room faded again, and the candle burned lowly, faithfully, deep into the dark.

Act I, Scene 3

It was at the change he began to suspect something. The shift had begun quietly with the cabin. The whole thing had felt like more than nostalgia to him; the curtains on the windows, the actress’s regality, the smell of the coffee—it was deeper than words. And yet, it was all wrong. Then there was the scene in the library: another spot of quiet, but familiar, like that amongst friends. The bookshelves creaked the way he remembered them to, his old school friend Kurt wore his uniform the same untucked way… it hadn’t been a coincidence. The Professor was flooded with horror.

The stage remained dark. The Actress, without looking at him, touched his arm. The way he remembered his mother to, only coarser, as if she was padding him to ensure he was solid.

He jerked his arm away. “Get off of me. What’s going on?”

She shushed him. “Quiet now. It’s how you remembered it.”

The Professor rose from his seat, hot with rage. “I’ve had about enough of this. I don’t know what you’re playing at, or how you’ve got the nerve to pull one over on me—”

“James.” Her voice was queenly.

The Professor was laid bare at his name. Her tone brought him back to small rooms by the sea, with the smell of soaked wood and coffee. There was salt on her breath.

“I…” His voice was little in the darkness of the Theatre. The Actress shone at him.

“What’s going on?” He struggled to speak. “It’s not how I remember. It’s not like it at all.” She smiled, warm and flowing like a current. “That’s the way you wrote it.”

“Who are you?” he asked, knowing the answer.

His mother said nothing.

The stage lightened but to a dim. Music began to play: string music, hopped-up and folksy. The Professor recognized the song before the set; his face melted a bit as he surrendered to worn wooden tables and deep booths. Old football posters suspended in the air, the smell of spilt beer filled the Theatre. The candle continued to burn, now very hotly, at a familiar booth. He must’ve sat at the same one a thousand nights. Scene 3 was his time in Oxford.

The boys came in quick enough, roughing each other up as they fit their raucous twist of bodies through the pub doors. There were actors for all of them: there was a blonde one for Ronald; Jack’s actor had the pinched look perfectly; even Dorothy was there, with her actor in the same ratty Barbour jacket she used to wear before she’d lost it hiking. The three of them barreled towards the bar and ordered before looking at the candle in the booth.

Dorothy was the first to notice it. “By God, you’re already here!”

“We were looking all over for you!” Ronald’s words spilled onto his shirt. “Why shouldn’t we expect you here? We figured it must’ve been the spot.”

Jack walked (slinked over—it was impeccably imitated) and sat down in the booth, turning to where the Professor must’ve been. “I knew you’d be here after hearing about your little freak-out in the exam room.”

It came to the Professor this exact memory. Of course it was here! All hell had broken loose just after it, what with Jack’s mother, and Ronald’s girlfriend, and all that mess with returning to the States after school. He’d been away from the U.S. for so long at the time, but watching the boys laughing onstage, the Professor couldn’t imagine why he’d once felt so incredibly homesick for Maine. “God,” he thought, thinking about what had slipped away,

“these really were the good times.”

The Actress (his mother?) leaned over and reestablished herself. “‘It never left us alone.’”

Her words sent the Professor back to his earliest pretentions in scene 1. The Shakespeare quote—Lord! And what was this play, anyways? They’d ripped some stories from stupid conversations with faculty, maybe even gone through his journals (“in my desk, surely?”) and now, all his coworkers have strung him along, gotten him into this chair for some practical joke.

He pictured the department laughing at him in the foyer. The university had never accepted him, not like the boys at Oxford had, nor even blessed Kurt at Charles Boarding. No one knew him, cared for him like those people did, and these actors had the gall to dress up in their clothes and parade around a stage for some stupid, mean purpose. The Professor’s horror subsided, supplanted now by only a hairy, hot anger.

He turned to the actress. “Now I don’t know who you are, or who thought it would be funny to stage a prank on my life—”

His Mother caught him in a stern and regal gaze. “I told you, we’re just putting yours on.

Now watch.” She adjusted in her seat. “This scene is almost over. You’re on next.”

The Professor was speechless. The horror—his anger shrank away, replaced by confounded void. With it, the focus returned to the pub. The boys were arguing about something passionately, throwing their arms around the booth and doubling over in laughter at their opponent’s response. Although their body language made it seem their conversation would crowd out the entire Theatre, the Professor was unable to make out their words.

His mother asked, “You don’t remember what the argument was about?”

The Professor sat and watched a while longer, cutting through exasperated incredulity before responding. “No, I can’t.” He scratched his chin and watched Jack pretend to pour a pint out on Ronald’s head. “But that should hardly matter to the scene.”

His Mother let out a laugh and covered her smile. “I surrender. It’s your artistic vision.”

Still the Professor could not go on to the next scene. They had sat in the pub for what could have been hours—time seemed to slow and start up without warning—just watching the conversation go by. It was the same old laughter, the same old stack of pint glasses pushed to the edge of the table. The Professor watched and felt young. The stage lights felt warmer, the smell of the public house sweet and weird and homely. At the sight of his friends’ faces, he couldn’t help but smile. “You know, miss,” The Professor said, still uncomfortable referring to her as his mother, “these nights really were something special. They were perfect.”

This seemed to make her sad. Quietly and sweet as honey, she replied, “I wish my whole soul for them to be.”

And slowly, inevitably, the light in the pub began to dim. Jack looked at his watch first, bidding goodbye. Ronald followed, then Dorothy, all with waves out the door and songs sang off into the dark backstage. All that remained behind was the pint glasses and the lone candle, burning faithfully, sweetly, into the darkening hours. Oxford was gone; the Professor and his Mother were alone in the dark. Then, the stage began to spin.

It was slow at first, and as it went on, the Professor realized that it was the set pieces moving on and off the stage. Actors were among them too, moving into the scene and out of it just as quick. He recognized pieces of them as memories—sure, that’s a reenactment of his first date with, oh, what’s her name, and that’d be a bit from the hiking trip, and that’s the professorship—but the scenes began to move unnaturally fast. The actors went from walking to running across the stage, shouting their lines in fervent disarray, leaving the Professor to grow in shock as the scenes began to run together.

He could no longer catch the scenes onstage: racing, yelling colors sped round and round, bits of conversations long-lodged away in his head, scenes of old fights and almost-touches and frozen dinners. The set pieces spun wildly around the stage, faster than possible, more real than his blood. The roar of the Theatre sounded like the roof was ready to fall in on the stage. It was undeniable now: the vortex had caught him up and now spun him down, down into itself. Then something’d grabbed him by the ankle, dragging him to the stage! He kicked himself free and held tightly to his seat, moaning in the mind-melting grandiosity. Every color, every memory, all running together and crashing into impossibility, largeness, and terrible strength. The cacophony clanged and howled until the Professor thought he would die, until…a breath. Another. Quiet. Darkness. The storm had passed.

All was done then. The show was nearly finished.

Calls Past the Cabin is completed in the linked article.

Intermission

The darkness was close and burying the Professor in his seat. His Mother said nothing. There was no sound on the stage. The candle burned alone, and no furniture could be seen suspending the flame in the air. The prickling nothingness wracked through the Professor like plows in loose soil. He was loosed; he was, as the Mother knew, ready to go on. Though he didn’t know it, the play had so far been the Professor’s game; all his moves have been played, laid out plainly and stupidly, if idealistic. It was time for her counter-offense.

A corner of the stage suddenly flashed with light: there was a great door ringed with fire, the whole of it licked with and sputtering bright white flame. The roar of the blaze frightened the professor—he shrieked and tore for the exit, sure that the Theatre would go up in flames in an instant. The hand of his mother stayed his nerves, and she told him to look at the door again. Terrified, he slowly brought his gaze. The door burned brilliantly, faithful and roaring, untouching the rest of the stage. It was a thing out of space, or perhaps more real than the space it took up. The Professor did not think it mattered now. He was not sure what could.

It was his mother that brought him back to it. “James, what do you think you’ve seen?”

His answer came from far away. “You’ve shown me the past.”

She smiled sadly. “No, my dear. You’ve shown yourself the past. It is now my turn.”

The Professor looked back to the door. The flames were expecting him. They made a way for him. He saw his mother outstretch her hand, and he took it. The two of them made their way down the row into the aisle, the Professor rubbing his other hand against the velvet seat cushions as they passed. Down the aisle they went, stepping closer and closer in the dark Theatre towards the flaming doorway. On the stairs, first foot on the stage, the Professor watched his mother smile and grab the door handle. It did not burn her skin. She thrust it open, and turning her back to her hesitant son, she stepped through the door.

Act II, Scene 1

It was the smell of sea salt and coffee brewing that did it. The room still felt a little far off, but he began to make out edges of where he was: a room of old wood, sweetened by the

morning air and painted light lying in wait for the day. He could hear the imperceptible humming in the room next to his. The Professor was back in the cabin.

Quiet singing. There was a door between him and the voice, and he opened it into the kitchen. It looked different than it had on the stage (the lighting came from fixtures now, he supposed, not the spotlights) and the morning grey rolled in on the breeze through the window. It smelled like rain later in the day. There were no candles.

His mother, not the actress but the real one, entered the kitchen. Her entrance was not the dance from the play; it was slow, a bit toppled, tired. It struck the Professor how ordinary it all looked.

She was still in the sleeping shirt, and blue ocean light still dimmed the window, though the coffee was already on. It was not serenity that she was clothed in—there were bags under her eyes and stains on her shirt—but the Professor felt an understated regality in her, one he linked to his affection for her. He almost approached her to ask what troubled her, when a child’s cry broke the silence.

“I suppose it’s me that caused those bags,” he chuckled, embarrassed. “She never called me an easy child.”

His mother sloughed herself from the kitchen after the sound of her child. She took no notice of the Professor as she passed him out of the room. Returning a moment later, she held to her breast a child. The Professor tried to approach her again, but a hand on his shoulder stayed his step. He turned to see the Actress, clothed in brilliant light and retaining the serenity and regality fully from her performance.

“You’ve already lived this,” she said, motioning to his real mother and child-self. “You don’t get to live it again.” The Professor’s face twisted at this, and she added, quickly, “I can understand your longing to. But it’s impossible, I’m afraid.”

“Why take me back at all, then?” The Professor huffed, caught between a transfixion on his childhood home and the acted image of his mother currently speaking with him. “What’s the point of the play, and wherever we are now?”

The Actress smiled sadly. Her likeness to his mother, not physically, per say—that belonged wholly to the woman in the kitchen—but emotionally, her likeness to the Professor’s memory of her, was staggering in this light. Every move she made, breath taken, word spoken, seemed more like the mother in his mind than the one cradling his younger self in the kitchen behind them. And yet—

He was distracted by the sound of swaddling clothes being unfurled behind him. He turned to what he expected to be the candle from the play; instead, he found himself, a child no older than one, being smiled at by his real mother. That smile—that was it. It was the true image, not the actress behind him. The Professor saw his mother, maybe for the first time, in ordinary regality, normalized, tired, and loving. And he was humbled by her. The Actress: in the presence of the real image, her spell on him was broken. She spoke quietly, as if to not disturb the mother and child, and he could not hear her. The vestige of his childhood home, that seasprayed grey cabin, began to be worked on in his mind. The image that had been so divine to him opened itself up to everyday-ness, and though the divinity had been stripped from the place in his memories, it began to take on a new beauty, of a calm and bare kind, one that the Professor was having difficulty understanding.

There was again a large cracking noise, the loudest yet. The cabin (the Theatre, still? One wasn’t sure) sprayed with dust as the memory itself moaned deep and guttural.

The Actress frowned. “We must go. There isn’t much time. Your nostalgia cannot bear this weight you’ve put upon it for long.”

Act II, Scene 2

The rest of the traveling was perilous. The Actress wove the Professor through crowds of memories, conversations he’d long forgotten but, upon hearing their significance, found himself continuously and compoundedly rattled; it was as if bricks long covered by ivy had been torched bare to sunlight again, discovering themselves the cornerstones of many presuppositions and convictions held tightly by the Professor. He found ideals shattered by the ordinary, heroes and villains of his past reduced to simply humans. It was as if for the first time, the Professor was looking his past sharply in the face, and found both his memories and himself stripped naked. His time with Kurt at Charles Boarding was not nearly as serene as Act I’s Scene 2 had suggested, and though they certainly had their fights—that particular one in the library was actually worded, more heated than presented onstage (rather, as he remembered it), and over a different subject altogether—the Professor left the tour oddly with a newfound respect for his old schoolfriend and made mental plans to look him up after the play…

After. It dawned on the Professor for the first time that, after his retracing of his memories, his release was not guaranteed. The Actress revealed nothing as she took him along, and shutting the door to his time in boarding school (the library door, of course), the old fear thrashed around the Professor’s stomach once again. His terror felt bloody, and his feet froze in the darkness.

The Actress noticed his silence. She turned around and studied him. “Why are you stopped?”

He was honest. “I’m afraid. I don’t know what’ll happen if I go on.”

Another loud crack in the Theatre. The walls sounded as if they would come down upon them at any moment, the supports weeping and screaming under the pressure. It was deafening.

The Actress gestured around. “Your play cannot hold weight. Can’t you see what’ll happen if you don’t?”

The two began to walk again in silence. She tapped his hand. “The only way out is through.”

Both knew that the ritual was almost complete. There was only Oxford left.

The two of them walked into the pub mid-discussion; Dorothy was berating the younger Professor (“how babyish I looked back then,” he thought) over something they couldn’t hear from the door but had the three boys at the table in stitches. Ronald actually fell out of the booth, while Jack argued back through bouts of laughter; the Professor shrunk into the cushion, red in the face.

“I told you,” he laughed at the Actress, “If there’s one place you’re wrong about, it’s this.” He prayed, satisfied and aching to join the fun at his booth in the corner.

“Of course it’s special. I do not want to take that away from you,” the Actress said, “but you’re missing what it costs you.”

He was quiet for a while, stopped. There was nowhere he wished to go more than the booth, but his feet would not move. “Leave me here,” he said. “I don’t wish to go on.” The Professor pleaded with the Actress for the first time, betraying his weakness, his truest feelings, to her. But she only shook her head; she already knew.

“I am not the one who has left you here.”

In a flash, the Professor saw more images: dinner invitations he’d turned down from new colleagues, stifled relationships, tenuous phone calls with “good friends” separated by time and distance and experience now. Ghost hunting for old feelings in new people and producing nothing, furies over social slights and reunions. It shouldn’t have happened this way. Through the images, the Professor saw himself grow more sick, more frightful, and more alone. He looked nothing like the boy in the booth.

And at this revelation, thunderous booms and flashings of light drowned out the argument at the pub. In a divine roar, The Theatre collapsed upon them into darkness.

Act II, Scene 3

The house lights turned on. The Professor had been crushed by debris; he was sure of it. But now, through the reeling fugue, he thought he heard applause…

Before he knew what was happening, the Actress gripped his arm and raised the Professor to his feet. They began to walk downstage towards the audience (the chairs! Filled with people!). In the bright swath of cheers, the two of them bowed. Against himself, the Professor could feel himself smiling, and though he didn’t know why, he felt perceptibly lighter.

The curtain was drawn, and the audience could be heard clearing their seats and leaking out of the hall. Swarms of cast and crew spilled out onto the stage, minding the large cracks from the finale, buzzing about the performance with tears and laughter and thespian passion that, under normal circumstances, would have made the Professor wrinkle his nose at them. But he did not; he did nothing at all until they approached him. Finding himself in the middle of the backstage crowd, his shoulder was constantly being patted, “good work, James!” and “do you think they got it?” thrown at his ears like feed for animals.

The actress that played Dorothy tapped him on the shoulder. “The Dramaturge asked for you. He’s back in his office.”

The Professor found it relatively easily, snaking his way through more congratulations and high-fives; he was having a tremendous time batting away feelings of accomplishment—the

Professor was still reeling from the performance (with a shock, he realized his participation would be called as much). The door was dusty and cross-stitched with carvings, like the Theatre Hall double-doors. He knocked and was asked to enter by a familiar voice. He found the Man from before the show, sitting at a desk discussing what looked to be a very serious topic with the Actress who played the Professor’s mother. The two of them smiled at him as he came in, and the Professor was reminded of their intoxicating radiance. The Man (presumably the Dramaturge) spoke first, youthful and booming: “Well! Congratulations on your performance. When I saw your script, I thought, ‘this is a very odd show. I’m not sure he knows what it means.’ But now, after that—” he threw his hands in the direction of the stage— “all I can say is, I’m very proud of you. God! I’m still thrilled by the stage—it’s always more alive than I think it’ll be.”

He gave the Professor the impression he was drunk. “I’m not sure…”

The Dramaturge cut in. “Now James, do you think it worked?”

The Professor shook himself, holding onto hope that it was hallucination. “I’m not sure.

The stage is in pieces. It sounded like the whole Theatre came down.”

“Never mind that. We knew it’d crack under the pressure; nothing could be done. It did its job. A poor imitation of the real thing, but the expression…” He wiped his brow, which was dripping with sweat. “Forgive me. I’m getting carried away.”

All the Professor could do was gawk. Swimming in his head was the play he watched

(which he’d apparently written) and the real events the Actress walked him through. He had trouble parsing out reality from nostalgic memories. His head began to swim. And in that emerged a white-hot rage.

The Actress recognized his anger. “James, I understand you’ve lost the nostalgia, but— calm yourself! You couldn’t live in it forever, you saw! If you’d kept holding onto your memories of Oxford, of Kurt and Maine—”

The Professor was hardly listening. “Why must you take these away from me? If nothing’s fantastic or true, then aren’t these illusions of memory (I daren’t say delusions) the only goodness left for me? Why take them?” He had lost control of his breathing now, in-out and jagged like bone-cutting blade. “If nothing is as I remember it, if things weren’t better before—” it came out like soul-from-body— “then when will it be?”

The Actress opened her heart to the Professor and spoke in bleedingly compassionate conviction. “You’re not alone without your memories. Dorothy, the rest of your images, are not more real within you.”

The Dramaturge regained control of the conversation with his hand held up, bidding silence. He answered, “we’re not trying to—well, not as you’re thinking. Please, keep them. Hold them dearly, in their proper place. Reckon with what you find beyond their fragile images.” The Dramaturge continued, lowering his voice to a slow, solid tone. “There are things more fantastic and more true than you’ve ever felt. And you pine for them. You look for them in your past, and in your art; you confuse nostalgia—all of this—for the final step, when it is but a pale reflection, a bad imitation written by your weak and shadowed hands. You cannot make what you seek, but you can hope for it. You express a longing—if it cannot be for the cabin, or the library, or the pub, where did you think it leads?”

He did not know where. The Professor stood isolated in the office, looking down at his shoes. He thought he could hear someone crying, but it was far away. When he looked back at the Dramaturge: “I’m not sure I’m ready to give them up.”

The Dramaturge frowned in concentration. “Yes, of course. It will be difficult. Painful, even. Rough and uncomfortable journey down from the images we comfort ourselves with. But, you see it as necessary?”

The Professor started, surer this time. “I think I do.”

“You have lied to yourself through your memories. This must be done away with if you are to survive—they will trap you and kill you. The Oxford lie nearly had. If you would like to see beyond the image, you must see it as an image. Are you sure you see it as necessary?”

James met the Dramaturge’s gaze, resolute and burning. “Yes. I’m sure.”

With this admission, tastes flooded his mouth: nasty words to friends, good moments prickled with hostilities and connotations, the disappointments of childhood, of now, the way the world might really be, complications and ordinary beauty…

There was a moment when he felt the lies of his past fall like scales from him. His eyes gleamed. His loosed soul had come ashore, found moorings in the present. His cast of caricatures—Kurt, Dorothy, his own mother—creased their foreheads as they disappeared into nothing; in their place emerged the same faces, now bare and unshackled—it was as if old Greek theatre masks were discarded to reveal the face of their players. Ordinary beauty, humility. His nostalgia’s pale flickering faded in the bright light of his examination.

James hardened, grim-faced. “How do I begin?”

The Dramaturge only smiled. Although James didn’t know it, he was utterly radiant.

Act II, Scene 4

James exited the stage door on the backside of the Theatre Hall to discover that the sun was setting. He took in the early winter air. “Too writerly,” he thought. The Quad was still, but it was no longer holding its breath—the trees swayed gently, in and out; squirrels and campus cats milled about the leaf piles. Whatever crowd there had been for his performance, it had dispersed. The Quad was opened to James alone, it seemed. It was a brilliant orange against the sunset.

As James left for his office, he wasn’t quite sure if what had just happened was a dream, or, as it felt, something deeper than the reality he found himself in now. It would be many years before he could think back on the ritual in the Theatre with any kind of certainty, that being with a weighing of the good and the bad of it, as he found himself doing with any moment of the past now, anyways. As to where his longing beckoned, he remained unsure. It was part of a Truth his analytical mind still had trouble making space for, but, remembering those nights in Oxford (and the shattered images of old lives), he wondered if his friend Dorothy ever felt the same longing.

The phone lent by the University for James’s office was a matted yellow and perpetually dusty. But it worked well enough, and he preferred to use it for long-distance calls like the one he was currently attempting. Although the building was empty, save for the dead bugs crowding the windowsills of the less taken-care-of wings, the intervals of ringing made him embarrassed, as if at the prompting of the sound someone might walk in on him placing the call and demand a rationale he did not altogether have himself. Ringing—the noise cut through the silence time and again before echoing for the last time. A voice garbled what James could only assume to be a request for a message after the tone. Without knowing what he might say, he felt one escape his mouth: he greeted his old friend Dorothy with impossible pleasantries and asking-afters of such and such a person—James would not be able to reproduce the slightest notion of what he had said to his old friend over the message. But it was the first time either had reached out in quite a while, and it prompted the most honest conversation between his old life at Oxford and the present, held outside of James’s nostalgic memories, exposed to the light and air. And in another life, the Professor was happy enough in his delusion to never question where his nostalgia lead, to ignore the corrosive sitting-in-the-past. But that was not his life, and he was all the better for it.

Over the phone and after, the ordinary beauty he saw first in his mother began to retake his memories of Oxford, replacing the lies about that time he’d comforted himself with over the years with what he could only call “balance”; it was difficult to climb down from his comfort into what life had really been—the Dramaturge had warned as much—but necessary, and as James continued to reckon with his past honestly, he found it transformative. At every passing mirror, James would stop and look at himself, all wrinkles and greying hair, surprised and pleased to recognize the laughing boy in the booth staring back at him.

The Quad was never so empty again, and students would stare curiously at the old Professor strolling between the spots of light and dark on the pavement, unhindered, almost amused at the cuts drawn in the shadow. He appeared lighter, older, and those in his classrooms couldn’t help but notice the radiance of youth and aged wisdom sharing space on his face. And on his walks back to his office, the old Professor could be seen pausing next to the University Theatre Hall, as if caught up in a dream (a distinction he was never clear on himself). But it may as well have been a dream, for the Hall still stood behind him, casting shadows through the twisting tree limbs onto the sidewalk he walked down. It had not been destroyed, if it did look well-used.

-Samuel Beckett, in a letter to Mania Peron, 2/3/52

“I am really very tired of Godot and the endless misunderstanding it seems to provoke everywhere. How any thing so skeleton simple can be complicated as it has been is beyond me. People are never happy unless they are digging.”

-Samuel Beckett, in a letter to Pamela Mitchell, 18/8/55

It is with good reason that decades of Samuel Beckett criticism can be summated by Stephen Barker in his indication that the playwright’s drama is “writing of and for deconstruction” (Barker 201). Deconstruction, an idea often attributed to postmodernism,[1] refers to the breaking-down of conventions, assumed truths, and desires, and the allotment of space for new beliefs created from the pieces. Primarily, Barker is indicating that Beckett worked within his dramatic works to raise difficult questions in front of his audience and equip them with the knowledge to answer for themselves. The nature of how he went about this questioning and equipping derived itself from his mentor, James Joyce. Beckett followed the rich logoria of Joyce, a narrative and stylistic trajectory which Beckett submitted to Joyce’s summitting. The other direction, then, was a paring down of the language; where Joyce sought to stretch the limits of language, Beckett condensed it, sharpening characters, their dialogue and actions, and the landscapes they moved through until the teeming narratives under which he apprenticed became barren waste lands defined by their choice inhabitants. Beckett’s movement to pare down his staged reality allowed him to closely examine what is present on the stage and the often-explicit clearance of that which is absent. This allowance for clear investigation—a pared-down narrative meant everything shown to the audience was relevant to discovering the questions and answers of the play—and gave Beckett the structural freedom to place within it more ambiguous material. This is particularly noticed in his plays, Waiting for Godot and Happy Days. Beckett takes full advantage of the pared-down structure, providing for his audience a bleak waste land setting within which his characters—paired in his particular approach to the dyad—embody themes of absence or presence. This essay intends to prove that within the context of a pared-down waste land and mobilized by dyads, these themes of Beckettian drama—presence, absence, and the tension between them—allow for a discourse into Beckett’s laudation of informed hope. This argument will first move into a rationale for considering Happy Days and Godot alongside each other, an overview into what presence, absence, and their tension can be defined as in Beckett’s drama, and discuss the waste land as a tool to hone focus and make metaphor of the mind; then, there will be a thorough investigation into the Beckettian dyad, including what Beckett defines as “weak” and “strong” dyads and presenting the self; this will conclude with a discussion of the plays’ dyads and an extrapolation of Beckett’s intention behind the differences to promote informed hope.

I. Rationale for Studying Happy Days and Waiting for Godot Together

There is not a coupling of two plays in Beckett’s oeuvre more strikingly similar in conventions, nor more shockingly different in conclusion, than Waiting for Godot and Happy Days. This is the initial layer; Godot presents a hope for resolution which goes unanswered, whereas Happy Days is. For Beckett to take intimate dyads—a convention he explores in numerous works of both his fiction and drama—and set them in functionally identical settings confronts the critic with the feeling of being handed a ripe juxtaposition upon a silver platter. There is a secondary reasoning to studying these alongside each other as well that has to do with the thematic cascade which overlaps Beckett’s work. As discussed by H. Porter Abbott, Beckett continually forefronts

“a process of self-resistance we can call recollection by invention. This is a technique of deliberate metamorphosis, a kind of remembering by misremembering in successive works elements from those that went before… Recollection by invention plays a central role in that nonprogressive orientation to his art” (Abbott 28-9).

Beckett returns continually to the same themes through similar structures; within this essay, the conventions are the waste land and the Beckettian dyad, and the themes are presence, absence, and their tension, all of which Beckett uses in both Godot and Happy Days to investigate a message of informed hope. This provides a critical orientation to understanding Beckett’s structural similarities alongside their thematic differences. It should be noted that while Abbott’s treatment of this thematic overflow in Beckett’s work is helpful in noticing continuities and differences, his diagnosis of that orientation as nonprogressive is limiting; non-progress would mean that Beckett’s messaging never changes, when the (im)potent resolutions of Godot and Happy Days suggests the opposite. Indeed, as Abbott himself later notes: “it is repetition that signals the impossibility of repetition” (29). This recollection by invention lays the groundwork for Beckett to juxtapose his message over time and space. Informed hope—the yet-to-be-consummated tension between absence and presence—is, like much of Beckett’s messaging, developed within the unconscious, the ambiguous, and the obscure; similar structures studied across the oeuvre help focus this discussion. With an understanding of how Beckett developed themes in his work over time, it makes sense to now turn to those in the selected plays.

II. Themes: Absence, Presence, and Tension

It is critical to understand the themes of absence, presence, and tension (herein referred to as APT) in Beckett’s drama due to the inherent proliferation of said themes in a style so utterly pared down. If everything on the page is essential, then every stage prop, line of dialogue, and direction necessarily carries weight regarding the playwright’s message. The opposite is also true: everything excluded from the page, every word unsaid, every character withheld from entering, is essential as well. Herein lies the very basic definition of presence and absence in Beckettian drama: that which is engaged on the stage in the narrative is present; that which is offstage or negated in the narrative is absent.

An aside: perhaps it is helpful to understand the flow of Beckett’s argument presented as such: conventions (waste land, dyads) are used to highlight themes (APT) to convey a message (informed hope). While this is not a revolutionary pattern of discussion, it can be helpful to understand this way due to the inherent ambiguity in Beckett criticism. It might be wondered why this essay does not start with a discussion of the conventions; please note that when dealing with Beckett’s difficult and abstract themes, it is easier to start where one is ending up (rather, to understand the themes inhabiting the conventions that convey Beckett’s message).

Understanding Beckett’s themes, then, is tied up with the understanding of his conventions. One cannot understand fully the implications of presence without understanding the dyad of Willie and Winnie, just as waiting for Godot is incomprehensible without an understanding of where Godot is (or isn’t). In this discussion of theme, though, it is very necessary to understand how presence (engaged, onstage) and absence (disengaged, offstage) interact with each other, or their tension. Tension in Beckett—the relational space between two poles—has often been identified as a point of truth in his drama. Eyal Amiran discusses this idea of truth in tension in his metaphysical criticism on Beckett:

“The way to union does not lie with the dynamisms of exterior and interior, but in the tension between them” (Amiran 103).

While Amiran’s invocation of dynamism feels dubious, he identifies a common message in Beckett’s drama: that the truth is discovered in the tension between that which is presented and that which is absented. Beckett expertly selects presented conventions (the dyad of Vladimir and Estragon) as well as absented ones (Godot) to accentuate the tension between them. Consider further Kevin Brown’s explanation on absence/presence tension:

“The theme of absence throughout Beckett’s plays is undeniable, but to say that these plays rest solely on absence is reductive… the efficacy of these fragmentations depends even more on the play between presence and absence… Thus, Beckett’s dramaturgy can be seen as based on the way that he is able to manifest the presence of absence—a very elusive, abstract idea—physically on the stage” (Brown 33).[2]

Brown’s abstraction tracks down a complex relationship essentially as thus: as noticed through Beckett’s conventions, presence is accentuated, absence is noticed, and the noticeable presence of absence cultivates a tension which communicates truth.[3] These themes are built by the conventions upon which this essay now turns its focus.

III. Convention 1: Beckett’s Waste Land

As mentioned, Beckett’s pared-down writing style elevates the themes of APT by way of conventions; the first discussed is the waste land. Compare Godot’s setting and Happy Days’:

“A country road. A tree. Evening.” (Beckett 11)

“Expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound… Maximum of simplicity and symmetry. Blazing light” (Beckett 138).

Beckett, par for the course, is sparse with details; however, staged productions vary little, often showing hardly more than what is written. As a setting, the waste land can be viewed in both Happy Days and Godot as a liminal space—a setting where presence and absence exist together, and where the tension between them can be displayed. This is because landscapes in Beckett function as an ideological arena of sorts, where the general lack of staged action is superseded by the implications of Beckett’s unconscious conversation.[4] Returning to Amiran, he sees this as Beckett’s attempt to “undermine the linear and visual quality of the journey and involve the reader in this questioning process” (Amiran, 72). This critic agrees with Amiran’s emphasis on the unconscious questioning throughout Beckett’s drama, insofar as it is prolific and the primer—as noticed in the barren visual quality of the plays—for Beckett’s questions revolving around what he chooses to present/absent.

Arthur Broomfield comments further on Godot’s waste land, calling the setting “a representation of the stage of consciousness reached by Vladimir and Estragon” (Broomfield 25). Broomfield chooses to elevate the landscape as a metaphor for the consciousness of the characters; which is not a particularly offensive treatment of the convention. A world desperate for deliverance aligns with the mental state of Godot’s characters (“the post-apolcalyptic world they inhabit is their world” (Broomfield 25) (emphasis added), as well as Beckett’s intended message of hope amidst a wasted world;[5] Happy Days can just as easily be read as a woman performing rituals to stave off the absurdity and desolation of her lived experience, as it can literally. In both plays, the waste land serves the same purpose: to focus the audience’s perception of APT themes. Though it is not functionally necessary for the waste land to be strictly “real” (in terms of the reality of the play) or strictly metaphor in order to get an isolating/focusing effect, it is necessary for that which arises from it to be viewed as a reaction to the environment. The isolation of the waste land brings APT themes to the forefront, as there is nothing in the landscape distracting from these themes being delivered. And while APT is given stark clarity in the waste land convention, it is through the second convention, the Beckettian dyads, that the themes become embodied; through this embodiment, Beckett’s message of informed hope hidden in the absence/presence tension becomes clear.

IV. Convention 2: Beckettian Dyads

Like the waste land convention, Beckett uses dyads to provide a structure within which he can outfit APT themes to convey a message of informed hope in the arisen tension. Beckettian Dyads are, on the basest level, the same as those of Ibsen and later Friel; they are two characters whose relationship informs the individual and provide a friction point upon which the playwright may discuss the pertinent themes of the drama. However, where Ibsen spent most of his work with Dyads concerned with sociopolitical relationships, and Friel’s prominent dyads work primarily within the space of the conscious (one recalls Public and Private Gar from Philadelphia, Here I Come!), Beckett concerns himself with the Self: identity within the dyadic unit, individual agency, and the presenting/absenting of both. This should follow with Beckett’s already discussed treatment of his message; the waste land convention was used to structure more ambiguous and abstract APT themes, so Beckett’s dyads also fulfill the role of conventions to provide structure so that he might discuss his message through APT themes.

Note: a great deal of attention is afforded to the examination of Beckettian dyads in Godot and Happy Days. This is because while the waste land accentuates APT themes, dyads are the convention through which Beckett primarily moves to embody his messaging.[6] Through Beckett’s treatment of his dyads, his message of informed hope emerges, which is particularly evident in their strengths.

Beckettian dyads tend to be either “strong” or “weak”; this is determined by the dyad’s ability to present the individuality of members and draw support from the connection. For example, Pozzo and Lucky are a “weak” dyad because Pozzo absents Lucky’s agency and presents his own, controlling their connection quite literally (the dyad enters Godot with Pozzo “[driving] Lucky by means of a rope passed around his neck” (Beckett 23)). This stripping of Lucky’s agency is congruent with Beckettian presence as defined in section II[7]; Lucky’s absence of agency under Pozzo’s presence agitates that presence/absence tension, allowing Beckett to define weak dyads while bolstering strong dyads, such as Estragon and Vladimir’s mutually informing presence in Godot, as well as Happy Days’s Winnie and Willie later on in the thematic continuation.

Strong Beckettian dyads forefront a presence of self, both as individuals and a dyadic unit. Winnie and Willie are the stereotypical[8] dyad of an aged married couple; their identities are strengthened by their union (“one sees the other the other sees the one, life has taught me that” (Beckett 149)). In Godot, Vladimir insists early on that Estragon would be “nothing more than a heap of bones” and later confirms the waiting would be “too much for one man” (Beckett 11) without his presence. Vladimir and Estragon acknowledge throughout the duration of the play that existing outside of their dyad would be impossible in the waste land (albeit often through bickering). It is wondered at, then, why critical reception often infers these dyads are identity-less. Consider, for instance, Rosette Lamont’s work with Beckettian dyads, particularly regarding their intimate connections:

“Beckett’s neuter organisms move nevertheless in pairs: aged married couples, old friends who appear at times to be ectoplasmically connected, master and slave tied to one another by tyranny exercised and borne” (Lamont 199).

While Lamont’s treatment of Beckett’s dyads works insofar as the characters are certainly connected on a deeply intimate level—one thinks of Vladimir and Estragon clinging to life together, and Winnie’s reliance on Willie for companionship—this critic finds a misstep in the determination that “[the characters’] almost total loss of identity and individuality frees them of contingency” (199). Indeed, while Lamont is likely alluding to the interchangeability of characters—an assumed characteristic of absurdist drama— this is a misconception on the genre of Beckett’s plays in the first place. Take, for instance, Estragon’s proposal for Vladimir to “hang on to [Estragon’s] legs,” to which Vladimir asks, “and who’d hang on to mine?” (Beckett 87). Godot is not a purely absurdist play, for even amidst characters that fluctuate between individuality and generality, there remains a distinction in place, if not time as well. Estragon must be separate from Vladimir’s body to grab his legs; one half of the dyad must exist for the other. They are certainly not freed of contingency; indeed, it may be what gives them hope.

Hope is prolific in Happy Days. Winnie—a character fiercely distinguished amongst Beckett’s dramatis personae by her resilient cheerfulness and femininity—is half of a Beckettian dyad who draws strength and hope from the presence of her other[9] (“even when you do not answer and perhaps hear nothing, something of this is being heard, I am not merely talking to myself, that is in the wilderness, a thing I could never bear to do – for any length of time” (Beckett 145)). While Winnie is not oblivious to her waste land—she references suicide with the handgun in proximity (Beckett 160) and baldly reckons with the harshness of her landscape (“did I ever temperate time?” (155))—one begins to wonder what sustains her at all. Michael Robinson writes,

“In Happy Days the silent Willie is a necessity. Although his hat alone is visible he must be there to succour Winnie. What love ever existed between them is unimportant beside the fact that if she, in the usual Beckettian sense, is a person through the medium of thought translated into words, she must have ears to receive those words. Any other situation would be absurd. Moreover, if she is to sustain her illusion of happiness she requires his company” (Robinson 230-1).

While this critic disagrees with Robinson’s treatment of Whinnie’s happiness as an illusion, his assertion that Willie’s existence is a necessity is correct. Juxtaposed with another absented character, Godot, Willie—though barely present until his emergence in Act II—is an embodied presence in the narrative, whereas Godot is famously offstage. Being cognizant of the popular critical connection between God and the character Godot, this is not to say that Willie is elevated to divine status by Winnie’s belief in his salvific effect if it is of a more domestic sort. Beckett’s intention with Willie’s presence needs not to make him a god figure, as it is simply his presence in the play gives Winnie normalcy, hope, and companionship (albeit fluctuatingly absent). These provide an thematic base for the traits that Beckett praises in Winnie: her courage, resilience, and hope in the waste land. In fact, this is where Robinson’s assumption of the illusion grows ineffectual, for it becomes increasingly clear as the play goes on that the distinction between illusion and reality become irrelevant regarding the result, that being Winnie’s ability to sustain hope in her dyadic partner. Charade or not, it sustains her.

And while this critic and Lamont disagree on the variance of presented individuality in Beckett’s work, there is an agreement on the elevating power of words the playwright affords his characters: “It is through language that they are able to stand outside themselves, for language is reality minus time. By playing the supreme game of literature and theatre, Beckett’s non-doers can summon forth the treasure of images contained in the receptacle of our vocabulary” (Lamont 206). Lamont proposes that the characters in Beckett have the opportunity to carve for themselves out of the absence a presence, to present amongst all that is absent in the Beckettian waste land a Self. And when one considers Winnie’s ritualized existence of prayers, small talk with Willie, and self-talk, this sense of Self derived from language becomes logical. In many ways, her ability to speak despite a waste land is the distinction between her and her dyad’s other half; though she sinks in the second act, it is the very ability to communicate a reality through language—to build presence amidst absence—that places her at the forefront of Happy Days, rather than her husband, who utters only a few words. In fact, it would appear that through Winnie’s presenting of the Self through language, she effectively speaks Willie into presence also; strong dyads in Beckett mutually inform presence (Willie seems only to be present in Happy Days when Winnie addresses him) and weak dyads negate presence (Lucky is absented by Pozzo’s presence). Beckett implies a connection, then, between language and a contingency for relation—words, though capable of presenting the Self, are inherently referential—as a communication tool seems only capable of bringing presence within a referential sequence.[10] Laura Salisbury calls this “an idea of language and signification experienced as issuing from a void that is the buzzing condition for a connection (Salisbury 215). Lamont’s lack of contingency is irrational when considering the strength of language in Beckett: through the strong dyad, Beckett allowed his characters to draw themselves and their dyad out of absence into presence; despite their waste lands, they are allowed hope, and a gaining of presence therein.

Returning to Lamont’s almost in “almost total loss of identity and individuality,” it is important to note that even in his weak dyad, Beckett provides language as a tool to regain presence. Lucky, though weakened under Pozzo, gains stature in the play when he begins to speak. As Lamont notices, “It is as though the mechanism of repressed thought has suddenly slipped out of control” (Lamont 210). While the speech is undoubtedly a failure of articulation, it is nonetheless an assertion of language, and thereby a presenting of Lucky’s previously absented Self (absented in terms of a lack of the ability to speak or move outside of Pozzo’s presence); presence allows Beckett to embody a hope for something beyond absence. As Lucky speaks, he exists; he hopes.

To summarize: Beckettian dyads are concerned with matters of the Self; they are strengthened or weakened by the unit’s ability to present/absent the individual self. Strong dyads are cognizant of their reliance upon each other, and exhibit evidenced individuality—a contrast with absurdism’s non-identity. They are strengthened and sustained by their dyadic connection despite their waste land setting. Finally, members of dyads are capable of using language as a presence-making device to strengthen their dyad, and their Selves; presence allows a character to hope for a resolution of absence (Lucky’s presence demands reconciliation with his absence). This exhaustive discussion of the Beckettian dyad holistically fulfilled the flow from convention—theme to prepare for a discussion of Beckett’s message of informed hope.

V. Beckett and Informed Hope

It is time to discuss exactly what informed hope can be defined as in Beckett’s drama. Although indirectly, the playwright’s message already has been discussed: the waste land is a picture of the world within which one must have informed hope; the dyads derive hope from their presence; the object of hope is necessarily absent[11], presence is how the dyads engage with a world absent of their object of hope, and the tension—Amiran’s truth—can only be resolved when that hope is impotent or consummated by resolution. Returning to Barker, if Beckett’s work is “writing of and for deconstruction” (Barker 201), then the postmodern tinge to his drama necessarily asks of its audience to question everything presented on stage. Waiting For Godot is famously described as the play where “nothing happens, twice” (Mercier): Godot, the man in whom Estragon and Vladimir place their hope, never arrives. Happy Days, while functionally similar to Godot—a dyad at the forefront of a waste land—treats its ending quite differently. Examine Winnie’s sensing of an impasse in acts I and II:

“No, something must happen, in the world, take place, some change, I cannot, if I am to move again…Willie…help” (Beckett 153).

“No, something must move, in the world, I can’t’ any more” (Beckett 166).

These events prompt Abbott to write, “in such a context, Happy Days is the play in which something happens, twice” (31) (emphasis added). After each impasse, something in fact happens: act I sees the parasol catch fire, and act II sees the appearance of Willie. Godot, on the other hand, is notorious for never appearing. Recall the plea Vladimir and Estragon make at the end of Godot:

“Vladimir: We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. [Pause.] Unless Godot comes.

Estragon: And if he comes?

Vladimir: We’ll be saved.” (Beckett 87-8).

Godot—the embodied absence of the play—is precisely what the men believe they need to be restored from the waste land. But he does not come. Winnie desires movement beyond the impasses, a reconciliation of the tension between her present waste land and her hopes. Beckett grants her this. Out of that tension’s consummation, the truth of Beckett’s message arises: Beckett requires hope informed by relationship. In the face of such unapologetic fulfillment of Winnie’s hope and Godot’s famous unfulfillment, one must return to presence, absence, and their tension. If that which is absent is that which is desired, and the only tension Beckett releases—the reconciliation of presence and absence—is Winnie’s, then by resolving Winnie’s tension between the waste land and her hopes, Beckett is distinguishing Godot’s hope and Winnie’s.

What separates the hope of Godot from Winnie’s informed hope? It is the same distinction between Estragon misidentifying Pozzo as Godot (23) and Willie calling Winnie by her name (167). Informed hope is backed by a knowledgeable confidence in that which one hopes for. The men of Godot do not know who they wait for. They are involved in a dyad that, while stronger than Pozzo and Lucky’s, is not enough to deliver them from the waste land.[12] Winnie is also cognizant of the pain of her waste land, the necessity of absence to become presence (the impasse; APT’s tension). However, Winnie knows the one she desires; she is in a dyad with the man who finally appears, the presence that consummates his absence’s tension. Between the time of tension and eventual presence, Winnie practiced a hope informed by the knowledge of her dyad; this is what sustained her. Recall the strong dyad: members inform their individual selves and sustain their union. By putting in waste lands two dyads and having one rely on itself and the other search for salvation outside, Beckett tells his audience plainly: this world is a wasted one, and the truest hope is informed by our connections with others.

Works Cited

Abbott, H. Porter. Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Cornell University Press, 1996.

Amiran, Eyal. Wandering and Home: Beckett’s Metaphysical Narrative. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Barker, Stephen. “Conspicuous Absence: Trace and Power in Beckett’s Drama.” Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Butler, Lance S., et al. Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 1990.

Beckett, Samuel. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works. Faber and Faber, 2006.

Broomfield, Arthur. The Empty Too: Language and Philosophy in the Works of Samuel Beckett. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.

Brown, Kevin. “Samuel Beckett and the Presence of Memory.” Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique, no. 29, 2015.

Lamont, Rosette. “Beckett’s Metaphysics of Choiceless Awareness.” Samuel Beckett Now; Critical Approaches to His Novels, Poetry, and Plays. Edited by Melvin J. Friedman. The University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Mercier, Vivian. “The Uneventful Event,” Irish Times, February 18, 1956.

Robinson, Michael. The Long Sonata of the Dead; a Study of Samuel Beckett. Grove Press, 1970.

Salisbury, Laura. “‘Something or nothing’: Beckett and the matter of language.” Beckett and Nothing : Trying to Understand Beckett. Edited by Daniella Caselli. Manchester University Press, 2010.

[1] While the assignation of Beckett to modernism/postmodernism is not the objective of this essay, the movements’ approach to questioning conventions is necessary for understanding why Beckett pares down language for emphasis. for further reading on the “Modernist/Postmodernist turf war” over Beckett, see H. Porter Abbot’s Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph, pg. 23.

[2] It should be noted that Brown’s verb forms of presencing and absencing have been replaced within with presenting and absenting; this is borne from a critical appreciation for Brown and an unfortunate dislike for his verbiage.

[3] A tension which communicates truth communicates by its impotence or consummation; Either Godot never arrives, or Willie calls Winnie by her name. See section V.

[4] Unconscious conversation refers to the themes/ideas Beckett furthers in his drama through interior or symbolic action.

[5] This is further developed in section V.

[6] While her waste land is certainly an exhibition of absence, it is Winnie herself who displays informed hope through her resilience as sustained by her dyadic relationship with Willie. See pg. 10.

[7] Recall that Beckettian presence requires one to be an engaged actor in the play, and Pozzo reneges Lucky’s ability to engage as an individual (that is, until he commands him to speak).

[8] Stereotype is obviously used lightly, as stereotypes (like the aged married couple) are used obliquely by Beckett (such as in Happy Days, when the two are utterly removed from a referential environment beyond their selves) to comment on their incredulity out of context; within the confines of this essay, the incredulity bolsters the a/p tension.

[9] Other examples: “I may need you” (141), “Fear no more!” (148), “sleep and wake” (163)

[10] Though not a focus of this criticism, Not I’s logoria supports this: there is only present a mouth from which the words come, and though the language is incessant, the mouth’s presence never grows beyond its language, as there is an absence of characters in the world of the drama to receive the monologue.

[11] If questioned, consider the ineffectual merit of alternative productions where Godot and Willie are already there; the absence of what is hoped for is intrinsic to the idea of hope in the first place.

[12] This has fascinating implications regarding Broomfield’s theories of the waste land as a metaphor for the mind.