Books

Lives of Girls and Women (Alice Munro, 1971). I have had an essay about Alice Munro in my drafts for longer than I’ve had a Substack. Her stories pulled me back into reading, after years when I wouldn’t pick up a book. But they also drive me to neurosis by putting me in the minds of pathologically detached narrators who can’t connect with anyone in a normal way, and convincing me that I should give up on people. I love them, I hate them, I can’t live with them, I always come back to them. For six months, I didn’t touch a Munro story, my longest break since I first discovered her.

Lives of Girls and Women was a good one to come back to. It is her only novel. It is technically a novel, in the sense that it is a book about the life of Del Jordan of Jubilee, Ontario. But it really is just a collection of short stories about Del. We experience her childhood with her overeducated mother, her parochial father, her eccentric uncles and aunts. In adolescence, we see her explore religion, love, sexuality. And while Del has the detachment of an archetypal Munro narrator, she also captures the magic of growing up in a way that I found beautiful.

“If we had been older we would certainly have hung on, haggled over the price of reconciliation, explained and justified and perhaps forgiven, and carried this into the future, but as it was we were close enough to childhood to believe in the absolute seriousness and finality of some fights, unforgivability of some blows. We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more.”

52 Stories by Anton Chekhov (trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2020). In Shortstoryland, all roads lead to Chekhov. He is also the author of the first short story I ever loved, The Bet. So I figured it would be a good idea to remedy my education, and read more of his stories.

I, uh, didn’t think most of them were very good. I’m sure there are people who could spend entire careers writing about the stories I found shallow, and when it comes to Chekhov, I feel afraid to say anything at all. But I didn’t mind reading those stories, because they were interspersed with incredible stories. Perhaps many others have had the same experience as me, but we would never agree on which stories were mediocre and which were incredible. I guess that’s what makes a writer into an adjective, to have a canon that touches everybody in some particular way.

What unified the Chekhov stories that struck me was the power of compassion. So many of his characters suffer agonizingly, but they can experience at least a moment of grace, and they can be saved by it. The Beggar is about a drunk beggar who is given a job chopping wood, but he’s unable to even lift the axe. He is saved by a compassionate cook who secretly chops the wood on his behalf, until he is inspired to stop drinking. I’m concurrently reading Dubliners by James Joyce for a book club, and in Dubliners, nobody is ever saved. Joyce doesn’t seem to believe that people can really change, but Chekhov clearly does.

When asked about his writing process, Chekhov allegedly picked up an ashtray and said, “Look at this. Tomorrow I will write a story called ‘The Ashtray’.” It’s an appealing idea – that when you observe the world clearly enough, everything is worth writing about. There is nothing that is below grace. “To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean,” he wrote in his letters. “A writer must be as objective as a chemist.”

Movies

A Poet (Simon Mesa Soto, 2025). A Poet is incredibly funny. There is not a single joke in the movie, not a single moment where any character tries to be funny. And yet they are, because they take themselves so goddamn seriously, and we know they’re full of shit. Because, of course, they are poets.

Oscar, our protagonist, is not a very good poet. Nobody respects him. He published his best work ten years ago and has been over the hill ever since, living with his mother, sponging off her retirement checks, and refusing to get a job because he thinks it will interfere with his poetic inspiration. The real poet is his high-school student Yurlady. She walks through the world, observes a beautiful tree, and writes a poem about it. She looks at the moon and writes a poem about it. Like Chekhov, she could pick up an ashtray and write a poem about it. But unlike Oscar, she has no poetic misery. She’s a normal teenager. She doesn’t even want to be a poet – she wants to be a makeup artist. She doesn’t care about “escaping the slums” – she wants to stay with her family. The heart of this movie comes from this teenage girl teaching the washed-up poet that there is more to life than poetry.

Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021). In 2021, my friend and I went to see Drive My Car in theaters under the false belief that it was a slow-burn mystery thriller. Three hours later, we left the theater, said “what the hell was that?” and forgot all about it. In 2026, I read the short story on which it was based, in Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women collection, and took it as my sign to revisit the movie. I watched it with six people; after an hour, four of them left. One of them said, “When is the movie going to start?” I don’t understand those people at all.

If I had to express the philosophy of Drive My Car, it would be that each of us has to save ourselves, but we don’t have to do it alone. The movie centers on two characters who have tried to save themselves for so long and failed. When they meet, they learn that the transformative power of seeing and being seen can heal you in a way you didn’t think was possible.

Sirat (Oliver Laxe, 2025). You probably shouldn’t watch this movie, but I loved it. A father goes to a desert rave, looking for his daughter who went missing months ago. He joins a group of ravers heading to another desert rave, hoping to find her. Meanwhile, a war breaks out. From there, everything goes terribly wrong.

I am a certified hater of trauma porn. I don’t like stories where people suffer without cause, where bad things happen because something has to happen and bad things are things that can sometimes happen. Later in this roundup, I will rant about another movie which featured a lot of suffering with no apparent point. But Sirat treats the suffering of its characters the way I imagine God treats suffering – with a loving indifference that is born from the knowledge that all of us are on the same journey, one way or the other. Suffering is a feature of life, to be neither escaped nor feared. I don’t think I have a religious bone in my body, but that treatment was very powerful for me. It helps that the desert aesthetics are outstanding, and the soundtrack is the trance music of the apocalypse.

Mistress Dispeller (Elizabeth Lo, 2024). The premise of Mistress Dispeller is interesting enough as fiction, and then you find out it’s a documentary. In China, there is a market for mistress dispellers: people hired to go into marriages wrecked by an affair and end it by any means necessary. Convince the husband to leave the mistress, convince the mistress to leave – whatever it takes to bring the marriage back from the brink. And to repeat, this is a documentary – the people in the movie are not actors, they are real participants in an affair and the mistress dispelling process. I still don’t know how they filmed this.

There are three characters in this drama: the wife, the husband, and the mistress. Surprisingly, the one I appreciated the most was the mistress. Of the three, she’s the only one willing to look reality in the face. The other two go to great lengths to save face, using intermediaries and veiled language, never saying what they want to each other directly. The mistress is the only person who speaks plainly and without deception. She knows that she is pining for a man who treats her better than anyone her own age, but that she can’t have him. She doesn’t try to break up his family, but she also doesn’t pretend she doesn’t love him. I couldn’t help but respect that.

Love and Pop (Hideaki Anno, 2000). A group of teenage girls in 1990s Japan go on dates with older men for money (”compensated dating”). Our protagonist, Hiromi, decides she really wants an imperial topaz ring, and resolves to go on dates that same day until she can afford it. The dates get progressively stranger, more concerning.

The action of the movie is all about compensated dating and the tense, bewildering, frightening situations she gets into. But the heart of the movie is her friends – her friendship with the other girls in her group and their collective journey of growing up. She reflects on how the others have figured out what they want and started to pursue it, but she hasn’t. Maybe that’s why she’s so drawn to the ring. Wanting something is more important than whatever outlet that want is directed towards. And maybe that’s why I sympathize with her doing something so objectively stupid and risky. Because learning to want things is scary.

All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai, 2001). I don’t want to include movies I hated on these roundups. I write this roundup for fun, after all, and it’s not fun to write about being a hater. But it’s still worth it if it helps me process an experience. And if there’s one thing I can say about All About Lily Chou-Chou, it’s that it was definitely an experience that I need to process.

The movie is about teenagers in Japan growing up in an environment of rampant bullying and manipulation. There is no safety in being a teenager. There is only coping. Our protagonist’s preferred cope is the music of pop artist Lily Chou-Chou. He runs a message board dedicated to her music, and he listens to her albums to get him through the worst points in his life. When his best friend undergoes a personality change and becomes a manipulative sociopath, when he is bullied and humiliated, when unspeakable things happen to people he cares about. He returns to Lily Chou-Chou and he just copes.

But there is no end to suffering in All About Lily Chou-Chou. There is no growing up, no resolution, no point. And I could not stand that. I still get angry thinking about the movie. Uncharacteristically for me, I searched through Letterboxd reviews from people who said it changed their lives, looking to get over my disgust reaction. But I couldn’t. With apologies to Chekhov, I am not yet a chemist; there are things in this world that are unclean to me, and this movie is one of them.

Other

I’ve been replaying Disco Elysium, a game about an alcoholic amnesiac cop who solves a murder. This replay has nothing to do with my previous experience of the game, and everything to do with Jacob Geller’s gorgeous video essay, Searching for Disco Elysium. Geller explores what it means to live in a city using the game’s setting, the broken city of Revachol. Revachol was ruled by a monarchy that was overthrown by a communist revolution, which was in turn overthrown by an international capitalist coalition. It is enduring a conflict between a powerful union and a mega-corporation. Its identity has fractured into a thousand pieces, and each citizen of Revachol lives in their own version of that magnificent catastrophe. But all of them look out at this skyline:

I don’t live in the city where I was born. If I went there today, it would be foreign to me. Nor do I live in the city where I grew up. It is not yet foreign to me, but soon it will be. Whenever I think about the places I’ve left behind, I don’t know what parts of me I’ve left behind. Nor do I know what I will leave behind in the future. Like everyone, I have my own experience of Berkeley. To me, Berkeley is meeting eccentrics at Teance Fine Teas and amusing myself at weekly wine tastings and seeing the setting sun from a grimy graduate student lounge and gazing into warm homes on nightlit streets. When I leave Berkeley – as I inevitably will – will I leave all of this behind?

Ever since I watched this essay, I’ve started going on walks where I just observe the city. I drink it in greedily, knowing that this magic is only for today.

Books

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (Ken Liu, 2020). The Hidden Girl is nominally a sci-fi anthology. And it does feature advanced technologies, aliens, digital minds. But sci-fi worlds are just a canvas for Liu’s real interest – history, family, and continuity with the past.

This theme jumps out from every page. An alien technology traces the path of an antique through hundreds of years of family history. A Japanese-American physicist uses her family’s ancestral ability to talk to ghosts to help the US win World War II. A story about digital minds ends up being about the difficulty of parent-child relationships (so does another story about digital minds… and then another…)

I think a lot of readers would love this as a fresh approach to the “immigrant story”. If you like that kind of story, you will love The Hidden Girl. Unfortunately, I’m a member of the rootless cosmopolitan class. You know the type. We form enclaves with other rootless cosmopolitans in memoryless global cities, all of which are more familiar to us than our parents’ hometowns. The past, like all countries, is foreign to us. We are the slingers of New Yorker fiction and Atlantic cultural analysis. To cope, some of us cook up new mongrel identities, while others deploy ironic detachment. Above all, we only make sense in the present. So to read stories whose animating concern is continuity with a sacred past – that was a needle in my eye. Even though The Hidden Girl is objectively a good book, it was not for me.

Earthlings (Sayaka Murata, 2018). The protagonist of this book is a neglected child. Her family hurls constant abuse at her, her teacher pervs on her, and she has no friends. Her only friend is her cousin who she sees once a year, where they talk about being aliens from another planet and promise to get married to each other. Joyous life indeed.

The second half of this book flashes forward to the protagonist’s adult life, where she has married a man who is somehow even stranger than her. This was where all the trauma porn buildup could have paid off. And there were some really unsettling moments that I loved. But it didn’t go anywhere. My eyes glazed over reading “our wombs and testes belong to the factory” for the hundredth time. The protagonist’s cousin could have been such an interesting character, as someone whose childhood was miserable like hers, but who grows up to be much more well-adjusted than her. Instead, he folds like wet paper. I can’t recommend this book.

Demons (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1872; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky). I’ve been in Shortstoryland for a long time, and I’ve been itching to find my way back to Seriousnovelistan. An unremarkable microsite essay about the AI race introduced me to Demons, so I saw my chance.

In Demons, we are introduced to a provincial genteel society and its colorful characters, who hold readings and intellectual salons, oohing and aahing over the latest ideas in vogue. Its characters are practically parodies, which could trick you into thinking it is a comedy book. But their oafishness is simply a setup, as sinister individuals gather in the province, gaining influence and laying the foundations for a violent plan. The book is one enormous piece of kindling, and its tension comes from wondering if and when everything is going to catch fire.

Dostoyevsky writes characters who are stand-ins for particular ideologies. But because he fabricates them with such richness, he convinces you that the particular ideologies are actually just masks for an underlying personality type. That is how a book about political revolution ends up mainly being about the disturbed and broken psyches behind it.

I wanted this book to transform me. Dostoyevsky was a genius, etc, so surely I should have revelations about my own life by seeing through his eyes. But if Demons is about anything, it is the danger of externalizing your desire for self-transformation. So it goes. I searched for epiphany, but I just found an excellent book.

If you want to know whether you will enjoy Demons, read this excellent review. It’s spoiler-free, because it happens to not be about Demons at all. But it is still the best articulation of what you’ll find in Dostoyevsky’s pages.

Movies

Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, 2022). Technically I watched Decision to Leave at the end of January, but I loved it too much to skip it.1 A detective investigates the death of a man who fell off a mountain, growing convinced that the victim was murdered by his mysterious widow. While investigating her, he falls in love with her, while his own marriage flounders. From there, things fall apart.

My critical brain was pin-drop silent during this movie. I was simply zoned in on the most twisted and compelling love story I’ve seen in years. But I’m aware that if I want you to watch this movie, I should collect my thoughts and say something more descriptive. The detective-suspect relationship is thrilling because it inches delicately through whether she is a murderer, and whether he cares, a minefield that both of them crawl through at a deliciously slow pace. The chemistry between Park Hae-il and Tang Wei is outrageous.

If you loved No Other Choice or any other Park Chan-wook film, let the momentum carry you deeper. Go watch Decision to Leave.

2046 (Wong Kar-Wai, 2004). I see why this movie lives in the shadow of In the Mood for Love, to which it is a sequel. It’s a huge mess. It has too many plotlines that are chopped up and scattered across the runtime, the sci-fi elements are bizarre, and of course it suffers without Maggie Cheung’s magic.

But 2046 is still special. While In the Mood for Love is a love story between two people, 2046 is relentlessly lonely. It shows a man recovering from heartbreak, and asks, what if he just never recovered? Tony Leung’s new playboy persona is caring and open, but he can’t reciprocate the love that other people give him. It’s not that he is hiding from his own feelings. He could string them along, using them as substitutes in a half-hearted attempt to get over his own heartbreak. But he prefers to tell women to their face that he’s not in the mood for love.

His missing heart is not with Maggie Cheung, as you might assume. No, his heart is in a place called 2046. On one level, 2046 is the number of the hotel room he shared with Maggie Cheung. On another level, 2046 is a place where nothing ever changes. Nobody has ever come back from 2046. He writes a story in which the protagonist boards a train back from 2046 to reality. But the train journey never ends. He reenacts failed relationships with the android train attendants, hoping for something to change, but of course it doesn’t.

He declines to treat the many women in his life as substitutes for the one woman who is not in his life. He is wise enough to know that won’t make him whole. But this wisdom is worth nothing, because he can’t find what will make him whole. He suffers enlightened defeat after enlightened defeat, and ends up the most enlightened broken man under the sun.

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonca Filho, 2025). This was a good movie, probably. I was short on sleep when I watched it. Maybe that’s why I got cranky at its length, at the anti-climactic ending, at the fact that there is no secret agent in a movie called The Secret Agent. Yes, that’s technically a spoiler, but it’s one you’re better off knowing before you go in with false expectations of what kind of movie you’re watching. I suspect that if I watched it with a more generous and open mind, I would have enjoyed it. The relationships formed throughout the movie are sweet and compelling, the climactic confrontation is thrilling, and the frame story of two students in 2025 revisiting this story through archival tapes is pretty cool.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004). A core experience of being on 2010s Tumblr was seeing every other crazy person post the clip of Clementine saying “Too many guys think I’m a concept or I’m going to complete them, but I’m just a fucked up girl” and declaring that this movie DESTROYED the manic pixie dream girl trope with FACTS and LOGIC. By affiliation, I nursed some scorn for this movie, and put off watching it for a long time. How wrong I was! This movie deserves all its praises and more.

I have a bad tendency to write off flawed characters and flawed relationships. “He sucks, she sucks, so this relationship is pointless.” Rayne Fisher-Quann:

One of the most remarkable pleasures that love has to offer, in fact, is the feeling of meeting someone who is scarred and beat-up and bruised, too emotional or not emotional enough or oscillating wildly between the two, and offering to love them enough to help them get better (and, of course, to have them do the same to you). To grow beside a friend or lover, knowing that you will poke and prod at each other as you take shape but unafraid of the resulting scar tissue — this is the good stuff.

I didn’t like Joel or Clementine at all. But despite that, I was rooting for them. To see them listening to an audiotape of the worst things they ever said about each other, and still choosing each other – this is the good stuff indeed.

Tokyo Godfathers (Satoshi Kon, 2003). I have a bad habit of comparing everything by Satoshi Kon unfavorably to Perfect Blue, my favorite movie of all time. This comparison clearly sabotages my enjoyment of his other excellent work. But Tokyo Godfathers broke that spell, because it is so different from Perfect Blue, and yet so undeniable on its own terms.

The protagonists are an unlikely chosen family: an alcoholic bum, a trans woman and a teenage runaway, all living on the streets of Tokyo. On Christmas Eve, they find an abandoned baby on the street. Each of them is stung by their own tangled history with family, so finding this baby gives them a chance for catharsis if they can return it to its parents. Their adventure takes them through a gang war, a drag club, and a police chase. It is insane, balls-to-the-wall fun.

Towards the end, the hijinks got a bit too wacky for me. But this movie should be an iconic Christmas movie. Our protagonists are such a great dysfunctional family, their love is heartwarming, and they are hilarious on top of that.

High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963). Some movies can be charitably described as “revolutionary”. They earned their place in the film canon by being groundbreaking for their time, and influencing everyone who came afterwards. But they’ve been outdone by the passage of time. What was new and fresh is now tame and cliche.

Well, High and Low is not “revolutionary”. High and Low is a damn good movie, and it remains damn good today. Even if you don’t like black-and-white movies, even if you prefer modern movie aesthetics, I bet that High and Low will be a more thrilling watch than whatever modern suspense movie is on your backlog.

The movie has two halves. In the first half, an ambitious executive has to decide whether to pay a ransom for his valet’s son, who was kidnapped by mistake instead of the executive’s own son. He’s gone heavily into debt in order to execute a corporate takeover; if he pays the ransom, he can’t make his move and will lose all of his property. But if he doesn’t, a child might die. The tension ratchets up as he makes his decision. In the second half, without giving away how the ransom goes down, the police try to find the kidnapper. The tension shifts from moral dilemma to police procedural. Exposition-dumping mixes with extended sequences where the police follow the kidnapper through a crackhouse or a nightclub. In the end, the kidnapper and the executive come face-to-face for a final confrontation. This is absolute cinema.

My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar-Wai, 2007). I have mixed feelings about this movie. To elicit the electrifying performances that define his best movies, Wong Kar-Wai supposedly tells his actors, “jump, and I will catch you.” Well, either the cast of My Blueberry Nights did not jump, or he did not catch them. It’s a struggle to stay invested when the leading couple have so little chemistry, when the relationships fostered on the cross-America road trip are so shallow. I don’t think I could recommend this movie.

But even though I can’t recommend it, I was very fond of this movie. My Blueberry Nights is Wong’s first English movie, his first movie set in America. And it is clear to me how much of Wong’s America is America from the movies. We have a Brooklyn cafe, we have a Memphis diner, we have a Vegas casino, we have a road trip across the country. The femme fatale con artist from Vegas speaks with a Southern drawl, for no reason at all. If those aren’t enough American tropes crammed into the pie for you, the main character’s dream is to buy a car. It’s so damn movie that I could smell the butter through the screen.

Like Wong, I grew up on American TV shows and movies. So the America of high school drama and suburban family life felt magical. Of course, once I moved here, it all faded into background noise and bland highways. But as the absurdity of Wong’s America played out on screen, I was enraptured by the memory of how I used to see America. We come to this place for magic, after all, and I have to credit My Blueberry Nights for that little spark.

Kokuho (Sang-il Lee, 2025). I sometimes say I don’t believe in soulmates. I cop to being reflexively contrarian, but more importantly, I nurse a different idea of a soulmate. Not someone you fall deeply in love with, or who knows you intimately. I think your soulmate is someone whose destiny is intertwined with yours, who saturates so many signifiers in your mind that every shadow on the wall looks like them. They are the co-creator and recipient of your love, your fears, your almost sexual hatred. Their victory is your suffering. Their love is your poison. But their burial will be your burial.

Kokuho is a movie about two soulmates. One of them is the orphaned son of a yakuza boss, adopted by a renowned kabuki actor who sees greatness in him. The other is that actor’s biological son, groomed to be his father’s heir. These two go to school together, train together, act together. But the journey to greatness is isolating, especially when your greatest skill is pretending to be someone else. That journey severs them from each other, but it severs them from other people even more. They are unified in their isolation and their pain.

Loneliness comes first in Kokuho, and loneliness comes last too. But in between, there comes the possibility for your soul to find its mate, and perform the story it was born to perform.

Miscellaneous

I watched M Butterfly, performed at the San Francisco Playhouse. A French diplomat falls in love with a Chinese opera singer, who turns out to be a CCP spy. On its own, this is an interesting premise. But nobody in the audience bought their tickets because of this premise. All of us came because we knew the explosive secret hidden within this story, and the real case it was based on. If you don’t know that secret, do not look it up. I promise you that your experience will be special.

If you don’t know what brought everyone else to the auditorium, why should you watch M Butterfly? It could be to see the worldview behind orientalism and yellow fever get skewered and barbecued. And yeah, the psychosexual exploration of a white man in China is gripping. But that’s not what compelled me most.

When we don’t know what we want, we substitute our individuality with social images of what we should want. These are “mimetic desires”, but I prefer to call them sexy-nurse desires. After all, nurses are sexy as a cultural symbol, as a porn category and a Halloween costume. Attraction to nurses is a desire that comes from the milieu. It is the opposite of desire born of your own particularity.

M Butterfly is a story about a man who cultivates a sexy-nurse desire for twenty years. But when the bombshell drops, and he has to choose between his sexy-nurse desire and his real desire, his identity collapses. He looks in the mirror and sees only the image of what he is supposed to want.

If that sounds compelling to you, shows run till March 14 – go get your ticket.

Literature

Bamboo Shoots after the Rain (ed. Ann Carver and Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, 1993). This is a collection of short stories by “women writers of Taiwan” (in scare quotes because it includes many authors who never lived in Taiwan). The stories are chosen across generations, with stories written between 1950 and 1985. The older ones are set in imperial China as a kind of anti-nostalgia, while the newer ones tend to be about clashing norms between modernity and tradition.

The standout story by far was Flower Season, by Li Ang. A teenage girl skips school to buy a Christmas tree from a middle-aged man who takes her on a bicycle ride, away from the eyes of society. What happens next may shock you, or it may not. Also excellent was A Woman Like Me by Hsi Hsi; a woman monologues about the dread of revealing to her boyfriend that she is a mortician, knowing that he will not want to be with her anymore. It bums me out that these stories are nowhere on the Internet, so I can’t share them. They really are amazing.

I enjoyed many other stories in this book, but most of them I enjoyed because of the interestingness of their subject matter/perspective more than because I loved the stories themselves. For example, Chairman Mao is a Rotten Egg by Ch’en Jo-hsi is about a family living in China that falls into panic when their child starts loudly declaring that Chairman Mao is a rotten egg. The author actually moved from Taiwan to mainland China during the Cultural Revolution, and published this story in 1976, the year of Mao’s death. (Needless to say, she had left China by then.) That’s a fascinating background, and the story itself is a compelling portrayal of social paranoia, but it sounds more interesting than it was to read. Even so, Bamboo Shoots after the Rain was a great read and I’m glad I found it.

The Butcher’s Wife and Other Stories (Li Ang, 1983). Chasing the high of Flower Season, I picked this up to read Li Ang’s other work. Most of the book is the titular novella, with a few short stories appended afterwards. I was apprehensive about The Butcher’s Wife, which announces itself to be about a wife enduring her husband’s sexual and psychological abuse, until eventually she kills him. I was apprehensive about reading a work of trauma porn. And I was right to be! The story is unrelentingly grim. But it is still compelling. Conjured around one abusive marriage is an entire society: relationships, ideologies and spirituality all weave a frightening chain around the narrator. I was disappointed with how anticlimactic the ending was, though.

The other stories in the collection were decent. In particular, A Love Letter Never Sent is a touching tale revisiting the narrator’s first love, after a long life with many ups and downs. Wedding Ritual is a terrifically creepy story of a boy being tricked into marriage. Flower Season is also part of this collection, in case you have access to this book.

The Lost Garden (Li Ang, 1990). The story follows a narrator simultaneously growing up as a child during Taiwan’s martial law, and her stormy marriage as an adult. Some of the psychosexual exploration was fascinating, but I did not appreciate very much else about it. There is nothing compelling about the relationship that occupies most of the story. Nor does it deliver on the blurb’s promise of recreating the martial law era. Unfortunately, this one was a dud.

Green Island (Shawna Yang Ryan, 2017). A story that spans decades of Taiwan’s martial law, and has large segments in Berkeley (!!), was one I had to read. The author is also a friend of a friend. But I’m not biased when I say that this book was breathtaking. The story goes through the entire life of one woman, starting from her birth in 1947 and ending in 2004. Her father is jailed in the early days of martial law, and he is only released ten years later, twisted and bitter. She marries a pro-democracy activist and they move to the US, but agents of Taiwan’s authoritarian government even follow them there, with threats and intimidation on the streets of Berkeley. The personal dramas of family and marriage are poisoned by the shadow of martial law, and nobody comes out unscathed. The theme that runs through the book is guilt, the guilt of being a collaborator, the guilt of leaving people behind, the guilt of surviving. Absurdly good book.

Film

Classic Cinema

Before starting this journey, I did not know the history of Taiwanese cinema. Taiwanese New Wave is an artistic movement that defined Taiwanese cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. It was an arthouse film style, based on contemplative realism: indirect stories, understated performances, narratives that engaged with difficult issues like authoritarianism and modernization. It stood in stark contrast to – almost in opposition of – the blockbuster cinema of nearby Hong Kong. As you might expect from an arthouse style, New Wave films absolutely bombed with Taiwanese audiences, but they found devoted audiences in global cinephiles, leading to an outsized global reputation. It’s almost funny to describe it as Taiwanese cinema, when Taiwanese audiences themselves preferred Hong Kong popular films, but I was interested to learn more about it.

Taipei Story (Edward Yang, 1984). I understand why this is a beloved movie. It conveys a powerful sense of place and time, and it has so many moments that you just want to memorialize forever. Sometimes it’s two characters on a rooftop, standing silently under a neon Fujifilm sign. Sometimes it’s a group of youngsters dancing to Footloose in a club. Sometimes it’s a long look out of an office window, from a character who doesn’t recognize what they’re seeing. Unfortunately, the core of the movie is a relationship between two characters who are so poorly suited for each other that it was difficult for me to be invested in their future. They both end up with what they deserve. I enjoyed it, but not as much as I wanted to.

Terrorizers (Edward Yang, 1986). In an ensemble cast, it’s unfortunate that absolutely nobody is interesting. Worse, they’re all shitty people, colliding with each other only to fling more shit into each other’s lives. This movie left a sour taste in my mouth. I did not enjoy it at all.

Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000). If I’m thankful for one decision throughout this journey, it’s the decision to not give up on Edward Yang after Terrorizers. I watched Yi Yi with no hope other than to append another paragraph to this review. It ended up being the highlight of this whole journey. I might write a whole essay about Yi Yi another day, so I’ll keep this brief. The ghosts of the past, the pain and wonder of growing up, and the uncertainties of the future confront one ordinary family. None of them know how to move forward, but each of them figures out their own way. None of them wins, but each of them has an enlightened defeat. Glorious film, well-deserving of its status.

Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001). A turn-of-the-millennium story about a hostess with a deadbeat boyfriend, who begins a relationship with a benign gangster. I don’t have much to say about this movie, except that its soundtrack is phenomenal and some of the scenes under nightclub lights are genuinely hypnotic. But the story doesn’t go anywhere and the characters are cardboard cutout-flat. Definitely a lowlight, and killed my desire to see any more of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s movies.

New Releases

Taiwanese New Wave cinema is one thing, but it’s a portrait of Taiwan in the past. So I watched a few movies in theaters, to see what was released recently. There was no unifying theme to the movies, but it was striking how different they were from the New Wave classics. While the New Wave classics were arthouse films, slow and contemplative, the films I watched in theater seemed normal. Some of them were happy, some of them were sad, but they operated at a fairly straightforward level. Put differently: you could make an hour-long video essay about Taipei Story or Yi Yi, but you could only make a twenty-minute video essay about even the good movies listed below. If that sounds like an insult, I promise you that I broadly preferred the new films to the classics.

Left-Handed Girl (Shih-Ching Tsou, 2025). This is a delightful movie about a mother and two daughters who run a noodle stall in a Taipei night market, with their family drama experienced from the younger daughter’s perspective. The story has real gravity, yet it never feels overwhelming because we view it with a child’s whimsy. The child actress, Nina Ye, was outstanding.

Girl (Shu Qi, 2025). I am guilty of overusing the term “trauma porn”, but it was genuinely made for this movie. Stories with no substance other than a hammer to bash you over the head and say “look at this and feel bad” over and over. Sure, maybe I’m not the target audience for a movie about mothers passing their childhood trauma onto their daughters. But if you are in that audience, you still deserve better than this movie.

A Foggy Tale (Chen Yu-hsun, 2025). During the early days of martial law, a girl travels to Taipei to claim the body of her brother, who was executed by the regime for dissidence. She encounters a rickshaw puller who helps her on her journey. The best parts of this movie are when it paints a picture of a Taipei in flux and flooded with waishengren, mainlanders who still identified with their home province on the mainland rather than with their new country. The city is made anew through its new people, and the story is filled with enough zany events to lighten up the heavy plot. Super enjoyable movie, all in all.

On Happiness Road (Sung Hsin-yin, 2017). This is a glorious movie. A woman who has emigrated to the US returns to Taiwan for her grandmother’s funeral, while reminiscing on her childhood and considering her crumbling marriage. Faced with paralyzing decisions, she learns to “see with the eyes of her heart”. It sounds cheesy, but I really felt like I understood what that meant. This movie also solidified to me how much I love the medium of animation; the pastel colors, the visualization of childhood imaginations, and the absurd level of cuteness on display – the movie would be so much lesser as a live-action film. I did not watch this in theaters, but I’ve grouped it with the others since it’s more contemporary than the New Wave films. Thanks to Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu for recommending this movie in a now-paywalled essay, without which I would never have discovered it.

Video Games

Since this is my round-up for Taiwanese art, let me pay tribute to the first Taiwanese art I consumed, long before my recent trip: two video games by Red Candle Games.

Detention is a horror game set during martial law. You play as a high-school girl who wakes up in an abandoned school and gradually uncovers clues about what has happened. We find out that the narrator’s classmates and teachers were secretly reading banned books, including a teacher she was having a relationship with. After hearing him discuss the book club with a female teacher, the narrator assumed that the two were in a relationship, and she was consumed by jealousy. She reported them to the police, hoping for the female teacher to be fired. Instead, they are all arrested and executed. After that, the protagonist committed suicide out of guilt – the events of the game are in fact her spirit being unable to move on because of her guilt.

When I first played Detention, I knew nothing about Taiwan’s martial law. Maybe that is why I still consider it the most moving portrayal, of all the ones I have seen. Or maybe I feel that way because Detention tricked me into thinking I was the victim, before pulling the rug to reveal that I was in fact the collaborator. Like the protagonist’s spirit, I have lingered in that feeling.

Nine Sols is a 2D action-adventure game, featuring a revenge plot set in a futuristic civilization that the developers describe as “Taopunk”. It was my favorite game of 2024, mostly because of its deviously good combat system and boss fights, but it does also have a moving story. An alien civilization suffers from a virus with no known cure. The protagonist is a scientist who devises a plan to colonize Earth and harvest human brains, to suspend the aliens in virtual reality until a cure can be found. But his sister refuses to leave, arguing that they need to accept their death as part of the natural course of life. And so science and spirituality clash with the fate of two civilizations at stake. I can’t say if I have a spiritual bone in my body, but if I do, Nine Sols is part of the reason why.

Takeaways

My recommendations

If you’re looking for recommendations, Yi Yi and On Happiness Road are the highlights. Green Island is an incredible historical novel. And for the love of God, please find a way to read Flower Season.

Who am I to opine?

A question I asked myself many times throughout this process – especially after disliking something I read or watched – was “am I just imposing my own perspective on this?” Frequently I’m dismissing plot points or characters based on a cultural premise that makes total sense to the characters, but is just alien/uncompelling to me. So is it really fair for me to hand down judgment, sitting over here? What right do I have to say whether something makes sense or is compelling?

I make this sound like a difficult question. It’s not. It is obvious to me that I can only offer my own opinion, and that my own opinion is shaped by my own life experiences. I can’t pretend that I have a different perspective; even if I could, there would be no value in that pretense.

In a post-script essay in Bamboo Shoots after the Rain, editor Ann Carver writes about teaching the stories in the book to American students, and how they would reflexively view every story through an American cultural lens. She advocates for a “double vision”, in which the reader tries to view the world through the eyes of a character rather than imposing their own viewpoint. I think this sounds like a good ideal. But I suspect I’m too attached to my own perceptions, which are too hard-won for me to take lightly. So if something I’ve written strikes you as too dismissive or narrow-minded, chalk it up to a failure of my double vision.

The long shadow of martial law

You may have noticed a pattern: a large share of this art focuses on Taiwan’s period of martial law. This was not a decision I made! Indeed, I excluded some art that was focused on martial law, because I felt like I was already overdosing on it. I skipped City of Sadness by Hou Hsiao-hsien even though it’s a classic movie. The Photo from 1977 by Frank Cheng and Phil Tang was playing in theaters while I was in Taiwan, and I skipped it for the same reason. The display sections of Taipei bookstores were checkered with books about Taiwan’s martial law history.

This makes sense to me. Art expresses the collective unconscious, and it would be insane if Taiwan’s collective unconsciousness wasn’t preoccupied with the violence of martial law. Martial law in Taiwan was lifted a mere 40 years ago, meaning that it is a living memory for almost half of the population; for the remaining half, it is a living memory for their parents. Taiwan is hardly alone in this focus, either. The Secret Agent, a Best Picture-nominated Brazilian film from 2025, is also about the political turmoil of Brazil’s military dictatorship. The scars of the past are everywhere once you start looking.

Did I learn something about Taiwan?

The original purpose of this deep dive was to complement my trip to Taiwan, to help me see a different side of Taiwan than I would experience in the day-to-day. But I wasn’t ready for just how different it was. I don’t think my experience of Taiwan was informed at all by the books I read or the movies I watched. I did have many interesting observations from my Taiwan trip, that will become another essay. But those observations are more or less disjoint from the art I consumed.

This is surprising to me. It’s surprising because cinema conveys a sense of place, and yet it was a sense of place so different from what I actually experienced. Edward Yang was singularly focused on depicting Taipei, but he depicted the Taipei of 40 years ago. The chaotic streets filmed in Left-Handed Girl are the same streets I walked on, but that was still rather unspecific (streets are chaotic in most cities!)

Does this mean that I didn’t learn anything about Taiwan from consuming Taiwanese art? That seems wrong. Or is it that travel is a superficial way to learn about a country? That too seems wrong, since travel is such a high-dimensional experience. I guess the only answer is that travel and art show you totally different aspects of a country. That is certainly possible. Nonetheless, this was an unpleasant surprise to me, and something I’m still trying to understand.

At the start of 2025, instead of New Year’s resolutions, I decided I was going to try and live by three principles.

#1: interiority over exteriority

I wrote at the start of the year, channelling Ava:

I have never really tried to learn the shape of my soul, despite thinking about my thoughts constantly. I haven’t learned my taste in friendships and relationships, or what I care about in life that’s distinct from what everyone else cares about, or what I really see as my essential traits, or how to create experiences that I will love, or how to express myself without words (clothes, art), or how to find art that i will love without social proof. This is a kind of interiority that somehow has gone mostly unexplored even as I’ve documented my thoughts in depth. Not in 2025.

I think I set this bar too high. What I described is the project of a lifetime, or at least a decade, not a year. Or maybe that’s just cope and I simply failed to explore my interiority. Regardless, I don’t think I’ve made much progress here. I thought quite deeply about what I care about in relationships when I started dating my partner, so that’s the one area where I think I have understood myself better. But I don’t have any deeper understanding of what I care about in friendships, what my goals in life are, or what my essential traits are.

Maybe I’m skeptical that I have legible and static goals/priorities/traits. Of course there is room for me to learn things about what I like through experience and introspection, but why should these things be constant and situationally independent? I don’t have to be the type of person who goes out clubbing on a Friday night or the type of person who stays in and reads a book on a Friday night, when I can instead be the type of person who decides what to do based on how I’m feeling in the moment, who I’m with, etc. I’ve taken to calling myself “Mr Say Yes”, because when someone asks me if I want to do something I just say yes. And that has worked out quite well for me despite being the opposite of interiority.

At a long-term scale, you could argue that that’s not sustainable. Sure, I don’t need to codify how I spend a Friday night. But can I really feel my way through critical junction decisions like what career I enter? Don’t I need a deeper understanding of myself to make the right decisions there? But I’ve felt my way through this whole life. I didn’t have a rigorously examined theory of why grad school was the right decision for me. I tried to pursue grad school among an array of other options because I liked the idea, and I took it up because it was the only one of those options that worked. This year, I had a job offer that made a lot of sense on paper, but it didn’t feel right, so I didn’t take it. That may or may not have been the right decision, but it was certainly a decision I made based on an understanding of myself. It was just an understanding that I formed in real-time.

If I were to reframe this principle, I would say it represents striving to be in harmony with my self, rather than trying to make my self fit into external circumstances. Under that framework, things like being Mr Say Yes or choosing my life path on the fly is fine as long as I’m not browbeating myself into doing things that don’t make sense for me. If that is the goal, I did well.

#2: production over consumption

From the start of the year:

I spend 30% of my waking hours on podcasts, YouTube and Instagram. I used to think that was a problem because of digital addiction, which is surely true, but it’s even deeper than that. I want to interact with the world as a producer, not as a consumer. The most fulfilling hobby I have picked up in grad school is cooking and baking, both of which give me the pride of pulling something beautiful out of a jumble of ingredients. In 2024 I realized that I could actually produce art, something I long believed was just for a different kind of person. 2025 is going to build on that.

This is the first year in which I have truly and earnestly written a lot on the internet. Granted, most of that writing has been in the past three months rather than the year as a whole. But writing used to have a paralyzing effect on me; I would dread it and do anything to avoid it. That is why writing has been a high-return activity that I still do weirdly little. I used to only write an essay if it forced itself out of my head in a bloody fight. Now I can actually decide to write about things and I might even follow through on it. More wondrously, I’ve even dipped my toes into writing fiction, something I thought I had left behind in middle school.

That said, I don’t think I can be said to have chosen production over consumption in any way. I remain hooked to the slop machine, as shown by my hundreds of hours in Balatro and Silksong, by my too-many-hours-a-day diet of Instagram reels and YouTube shorts. And even besides the slop machine, my creative activities really have been dominated by consumption. I read 18 books and a couple hundred short stories, a cumulative reading list I haven’t matched since COVID. I watched 42 movies, only slightly less than last year, even though last year it was one of my resolutions, and this year it was closer to an anti-resolution.

This is not a coincidence. I wouldn’t have written nearly as much as I did if I hadn’t been consuming so much art. Consumption gave me feelings that I wanted to express, stories that I wanted to tell, ideas that fought their way out of my head. My favorite thing I wrote this year, Scratchpad, is a retelling of a Borges story; I was inspired to write it because I felt so much passion for that story and wanted to write a modern version of it.

I’m glad that my interpretation of “production over consumption” did not lead me to read less or watch fewer movies, because all of that consumption catalyzed a creative revolution in me that I’m very grateful for.

#3: ambition over realism

I wrote at the start of the year:

I’ve always prided myself on being well-calibrated about how likely different scenarios are, and the likely consequences of my actions. I no longer think this is great. Trying to be balanced and reasonable feeds my neuroticisms. I’m experimenting with a new strategy; just making big plans and myopically executing them without really considering all of their long-term implications. Startup people talk about the “reality distortion field” – you need to be irrational to achieve anything, because any rational person would realize that [thing] is an ex-ante bad idea. maybe I’m going to manufacture reality distortion and see how it goes. This theme doesn’t really apply to everyday life unlike the others, but I expect that by the end of 2025, I will have made a career decision differently because of this theme.

At the start of this year, I was a doe-eyed fourth-year PhD student, on track to write a decent job market paper and diligently strive for an academic job. I had turned down a job offer and redoubled my research efforts, with many ideas still left to pursue. Now I am a dilettante who has crashed out of the academic track, with no plans to take a job that has ever been done by an economics PhD in all of recorded history. You can say many things about my year, but you can’t say it was the year I would have had if I just tried to be realistic.

From a skeptical perspective, my trajectory is alarming. It certainly doesn’t call to mind someone stepping on an ambitious path. But I am sanguine. I don’t think it comes across all the time, but I have bottomless self-confidence, and I know the groundwork is laid for what is to come.

Even so, I do regret how little ambition I showed in the back half of my year. From October onwards, I had the opportunity to make big strides towards my goals. I want to keep that vague because I will still do some of these things, but for illustration: there was a job posting that I intended to apply to, but didn’t. I later checked who filled the role, and it was someone with 15 years of experience more than me. So I don’t think I missed out on a job I would have gotten otherwise – but it still showed a lack of killer instinct.

So I may have shown ambition in the overall arc of where I want my career to go, but I didn’t show ambition in my execution, and that is one of my regrets.

2026 on the horizon

2026 is both the denouement to my whole life so far, and the preview of the rest of my life. I will graduate and exit the university bubble; I will enter the workplace irrevocably. That makes it unique.

Unlike 2025, 2026 will be dictated by a lot of forces external to me. What kind of work I do, where I live, who I spend time with will all flow jointly from this one big unknown. How do I construct a vision for the year given this uncertainty?

I will stick to outlining principles for 2026. Going with principles over New Year’s Resolutions was really effective for me this past year. You can fail resolutions, but principles are ongoing. They are never satisfied nor failed. Not to be that guy, but it really is like the distinction between finite games and infinite games. So here are three principles for 2026:

#1: relationships over individuality

As an impressionable teenager, I read The Bet by Chekhov in English class. The story follows a bizarre bet between a lawyer and a banker, where the lawyer agrees to spend fifteen years in voluntary solitary confinement if the banker pays him a million dollars at the end. After fifteen years without human contact, the lawyer reaches an enlightened state where he decides that he doesn’t care about money or winning the bet, so he deliberately leaves a day early to forfeit his winnings.

When we read the story in class, everyone agreed that the lawyer was crazy and made a terrible decision, both to take the bet, and later to forfeit it. I was seemingly the only one who harbored a deep admiration for the lawyer. I imagined being able to sit with myself in a room for 15 years, with nowhere to run from myself, and no one observing me. I worshipped the Ubermensch I would be after severing my need for other people’s approval. I imagined that I too would spurn the money, money being the ultimate signifier of other people’s approval. “There are so many things that I don’t want,” said Socrates, and ironically I wanted that more than anything.

I can’t say I’ve ever taken money to undergo voluntary solitary confinement – these days, people actually pay to get the same experience in a silent retreat – but I have carried that attitude ever since. That all of my problems arise because I need other people to fill my life, because I use other people as distractions from understanding myself. I imagined that my ideal self would of course have relationships with people, but only on top of an achieved layer of total psychological security.

I no longer think this is possible. And I’m coming to terms with that. I still believe in the project of becoming whole, but I no longer believe that my relationships are crutches to ease the pain of not being whole. I’ve been struck by how the times I’ve been able to see myself most clearly are when I see myself through the eyes of someone who loves me, and the times I’ve been most lost have been when I only had my own thoughts through which to view myself.

#2: execution over planning

My ambitions were high in 2025, but they mainly took the form of conceptualizing a path that I could follow, that others couldn’t or wouldn’t follow. This was by design. I had a lot of things to figure out about what I want to do in the future, about what my bets are. I was also burnt out and needed time for leisure.

I’m glad I took the time to imagine all the possible paths I could follow. But I’m entering the last 6 months of my PhD, and the first 6 months of the rest of my life as a working professional. 2026 is a pivotal year for me! Both of these periods demand that I just do things. I can’t keep planning and re-planning, hoping to find the ideal situation.

It’s looking more and more likely that I pursue nonprofit/for-profit entrepreneurship as my path. This is a brutal path, full of financial insecurity and long hours and burnout risk. Everyone I know who works at a startup works a ton more than everyone else I know. It is a lot harder than being a grad student and a lot harder than the relaxed version of grad student life I’ve lived for the past year.

I’m dubious of any (economics) PhD student who says they work 40 hours a week, because other than a couple of crunch months, that has never been true for me. It certainly hasn’t been true in the past year. But it really is time for me to shift gears and move from the slow lane to the fast lane. So I am setting the intention to work a lot more intensely than I have in the past year.

#3: resilience over discouragement

I didn’t meet anyone off a dating app for years before I met my partner. If I had let that failure lead to discouragement, I wouldn’t have found love. Most of the people I’ve tried to befriend in the past couple of years have fizzled out on me. If I had let those failures lead to discouragement, I wouldn’t have befriended some of my closest friends.

There are many things I’ve failed at so many times that I gave them up out of discouragement – like getting my driver’s license, or learning Hindi, or learning to draw, or finishing Celeste. I can’t and won’t commit to doing any of these particular things. Each of them is the project of an entire year, and I have other things to prioritize this year. But what I can decide is that whenever I try and fail to do something I care about, I will patiently continue to fail rather than getting discouraged.

This is a hard thing to promise! Sometimes failure is a sign that I should stop trying. Obviously this is true at some level; if someone doesn’t want to be friends with me, I should stop trying to befriend them. The challenge is figuring out what level it is true at; whether failure signals something about me, something about the other person, something about the natural environment, or nothing at all. This is a question that has driven me absolutely crazy in the past, and one of my proud developments is that I don’t spiral about being a piece of garbage nearly as much as I used to.

2026 bingo

In place of resolutions!

The idea that good taste is about finding things that are objectively good has many defenders. This makes sense. If you admit that you can’t sustain total aesthetic relativism – that in some true sense, Shakespeare is better than the trashy romantasy you love to hate – then you quickly arrive at a view in which some art is better than others. From there, it’s only natural to try and seek out good art, and attempt to enjoy it even if that enjoyment doesn’t strike you naturally. In this model, good taste (yours or others) is the compass that leads you towards what is better, and away from what is worse.

But I disagree with this view. Instead, I propose a different criterion: good taste is about being able to discriminate between two subtly different experiences.

In the cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Samin Nosrat relates an anecdote about the legendary chef Alice Waters. While judging tomato sauce recipes to be used at her restaurant, Waters rejects an otherwise-excellent submission because she can taste that the chef used old olive oil to make the sauce. Even through the intense flavors of tomato and garlic and onion, Waters could identify the qualities of the olive oil. That discernment is the sign of good taste.

Some discrimination is easy and requires no taste (separating a Monet from a child’s doodle). Other discrimination is hard and requires taste (separating a tomato sauce with old oil from a tomato sauce with fresh oil). The closer two experiences are, the harder it is to discriminate between them, and the better a sign of taste it is if someone can discriminate between them. At the highest level, a sommelier has passed an exam that requires them to blindly identify which grape is in a wine that they taste, which year it was from, and even where it was grown. In a model of taste that centers discrimination, that skill is the purest demonstration of taste.

Of course, when it comes to literature, I use “discrimination” more broadly than just the narrow concept of distinguishing between two different experiences (which is more appropriate for the culinary examples above). In general, discrimination is about having a deep mechanistic understanding of that experience – understanding how different choices would have led to a different experience. We rarely ask critics to read a story blind and tell which author wrote it (though I think that would be an interesting test of taste!), but we do ask that critics can explain why an author chose to have some action happen in the story, or why the relationship between two characters mattered.

II

A notable absence from this model of taste is opinion. Having a deep mechanistic understanding of a work of art does not imply that you like it. Can you identify what the author is trying to do with this paragraph or this flashback? Then you have demonstrated taste, whether you actually like the story or not.

This runs the risk of claiming that there is no such thing as good art. I do not believe that. I agree with Kanakia that people with good taste usually arrive at roughly similar rankings of writers, and those rankings are accurate in marking writers as better or worse. My claim is just that liking good art is not the same as having good taste. It is entirely possible for someone without taste to enjoy good art; their lack of taste would reveal itself only if they were asked to explain what they enjoyed about it. When I was 15, I “read” Crime and Punishment, in the sense that I read one page and then another and then another until I reached the final page. I even enjoyed reading it. But I couldn’t tell you why, because I didn’t really understand the story at all. Dostoyevsky may be a genius, but enjoying Dostoyevsky did not imply that I had good taste.

“Good taste is not about liking good art, it’s about [process that usually leads to liking good art]” may strike you as pedantry. But the process is what matters. That is why I react strongly to a statement like “you should like [author], because many people with good taste have said they are good.” I don’t doubt that most subjects of a statement like that are great authors, and that I might even love them. But we come to art to explore our souls. As Ava says, “interiority is not formulaic. You can look to other people for inspiration, but they can’t tell you what is true for you.”

The ability to discriminate frees you from the gaze of other people as your only window into art. It allows you to connect with art without needing an authority to validate that connection. Without the ability to discriminate, you depend on other people to show you what is good; you depend on them to understand your own soul.

I

Video games are art, but that’s obvious. What I think is not obvious is how much interesting art and philosophy today is being expressed through video games, even art and philosophy that is not tailor-made for the medium of video games. It would be easy to argue for the artistic value of video games using a literary epic like Disco Elysium, or a beautiful narrative reinforced by game mechanics like Celeste. But I think it would be underselling the point to focus on those games.

Most games (rightfully) distinguish themselves by maximizing the impact of player interaction. Celeste is a story of a girl who climbs a mountain to heal her relationship with herself, but it only feels impactful because the platforming of Celeste feels like actually climbing a mountain. Disco Elysium has a sprawling story, but it’s the choose-your-own-adventure style unique to video games that makes it feel meaningful. Focusing on examples like that would imply that video games only succeed by boxing themselves into a niche – telling stories that depend on player interaction and player choices for their impact.

I don’t think this is true. I think that many video games today are telling stories that would historically have been told through literature. And I think that video games are an ascendant medium for telling those stories, taking ground that has normally been held by literature.

To back up this provocative claim, I want to tell you about the theology of Fear & Hunger – the most interesting theology I’ve encountered in any medium, and something that would have been expressed as literature a century ago.

II

Fear & Hunger is a survival-horror role-playing game in which the player navigates a dungeon while fighting enemies and the steady drain of their resources. It is an indie game made by one developer, Miro Haverinen, who toiled away in obscurity until the game went viral on YouTube last year. Like most people, I discovered the game through YouTube. Like most people, I have not actually played it myself (it is Windows-only), which strips the game of all its medium-specific appeal. To me, Fear & Hunger may as well be a TV show or a graphic novel. Of course, the gameplay still plays a role in whether it is entertaining to watch, but the story is what comes to the forefront in how I experience Fear & Hunger.

The action takes place in a medieval kingdom, in a world rotted through by magic. In the beginning, there were the old gods. The old gods are primal deities that represent forces of nature, like creation and destruction. They created humans, but they don’t act on the world. Only their traces remain on this plane of existence.

But these traces fill the air with power, and humans crave that power. Over centuries, many humans have journeyed to the seat of the old gods’ power, the ancient city of Mahab’re, to claim the power of the old gods for themselves. Some of these seekers have succeeded, becoming “new gods”. But the new gods were little more than powerful toddlers. They became immortal, and they had immense physical and magical abilities. But that did not give them the ability to fulfill their ambition, of shaping a new civilization. They became more like bloodthirsty warlords, gathering some meager cultists, but never really seeping into the fabric of civilization. And they were inevitably targeted by even more seekers who strived to defeat them and become new gods themselves, repeating the cycle. In the default ending of Fear & Hunger, the player defeats all the new gods and ascends to new godhood themselves.

The problem is that in the world of Fear & Hunger, divinity is not something you can claim by force of will. That is a trap that humans fall into, time and time again, in their attempts to ascend. They endure trials and tribulations, they ascend the throne, and they are presented with something that looks like godhood. And without fail, they claim it. They have the same ambition as the new gods they slew to claim the throne, and the same ambition as the seekers who will inevitably come to slay them. Of course it didn’t work for them… it never does… but maybe it will work for us. But this is a broken ambition from broken humans. An ape with the power of a god is still an ape, still subject to its basest instincts.1

The most fascinating way this argument is made is in the true ending of Fear & Hunger. One of the startling things the player finds in the dungeon is... a girl. A human child, locked in a cage, with no caretaker. She is the daughter of a human and a new god, and she was born in the dungeon. She has never heard language before, and has no ability to speak. It is possible she has never eaten food before, never seen another human being before. If not for her divine parentage, she would certainly be dead. In the true ending, the player takes the girl to the deepest level of the dungeon, to the rotting corpse of an old god. The girl’s soul reacts to that corpse and the power emanating from it, and she transforms into a god. She doesn’t become a mere new god like her mother, but a true ascended being on the level of the old gods. She becomes the God of Fear and Hunger.

The girl had a dark innocence about her. She was born in the dungeon, and never saw the sunlight even once. The only life she knew was relentless terror and starvation. She was not tarnished by even the slightest hope that life could be different, even the slightest desire for anything.

This innocence is why her soul was able to ascend to the level of the old gods, to the level where she could influence the course of civilization, while the new gods could only squabble over a few cultists like powerful toddlers with their toys. She did not have the acquisitiveness that trapped all the seekers who became new gods. Fear & Hunger argues that divinity is fundamentally innocent. It arises from souls that simply are their nature, rather than being twisted by human complexities. The girl was not a human, but rather a being of pure suffering.

But the darkness of her innocence also set the tone for the kind of deity she would become, and the kind of civilization that she would create. The God of Fear and Hunger created a civilization in which humans were fodder for the gears of progress. A civilization in which suffering was the currency that would pay the way forward. In the sequel game, the God of Fear and Hunger is confirmed to be the steward of a society that looks quite a lot like the modern world.

Viewed in this light, Fear & Hunger is a theological narrative about the industrial revolution. The girl’s ascension into the God of Fear and Hunger marks the first time that humans have actually claimed the mantle of divinity from the old gods, and industrialization is the vehicle for that claim. The idea that industrial civilization emerged from the dreams of an Omelas-esque tortured child is a mindfuck that I return to over and over. Even though I do not agree with that theology – I venture that industrial civilization has been a good thing – it has a magnetism that has continued to fascinate me for years after I stopped watching playthroughs of the game. As far as I can tell, it is a genuinely original idea with no direct precursors. It has some influence from Nietzsche, some influence from Gnosticism, but that’s nothing compared to the standard fare in fantasy literature, where the theology is often a thin veneer over the Greek pantheon.

In the real world, Fear & Hunger is the story of one Finnish guy, toiling away in obscurity, who produced a game that is not only fantastic for its genre2 but also has a startlingly original mythology that could have been expressed in Gothic literature or a philosophical treatise a few centuries ago. In a nutshell, that is why I’m enthusiastic about video games as a cultural medium that can express the concepts that have historically been expressed through literature.

III

For most of history, if you wanted to express an idea, you had to write it down. So most creatives throughout history have been writers. (Some ideas were compressible into the form of a painting or a sculpture, but most were not.) About a hundred years ago, visual media expanded to include film and television, and some of the creative energy of civilization went towards those media instead. After all, visual media had much richer information than text, so it could convey things like body language, aesthetics, tension much more vividly.

But film and television are gated behind capital costs. Making a film is by and large too expensive and impractical for an individual. So individual creatives have continued to work through the medium of writing.

I think that three forces have conspired to cause the creative energy of individuals to shift away from writing and towards video games.

1. The current generation of creatives is filled with people who grew up playing video games. Someone who started their creative career in 2015 and grew up in the late 90s or early 2000s would have been exposed to the arrival of consoles in the household, the widespread access to PC games, the handheld games that captivated children. They would have grown intuitively familiar with the medium as a venue for play, for emotional investment. So it would be no wonder if they grew up and decided to channel their creative energy into making a video game, when 30 years before they would have decided to channel that into writing fiction. The developer of Fear & Hunger, Miro Haverinen, is an example of this. He initially created the concept of Fear & Hunger for a school assignment and turned it into a thesis. So he could have naturally turned it into a story that he would have published in a magazine or on the internet. But he was simply more inclined to make it a game, both because Fear & Hunger was inspired by games, and because he was more accustomed to games as a medium.

2. The cost of making games as an individual has fallen dramatically. Non-gamers may not know this, but gamers do: we are living in the Golden Age of indie games. Balatro, a deckbuilding game from a solo developer, was nominated for Game of the Year in 2024. Undertale, a role-playing game from another solo developer in 2015, became a global cultural phenomenon. Hollow Knight: Silksong, developed by only two creators, was the most anticipated game for seven years before its release this year. One of the reasons for this Golden Age is that video games are easier to make than ever before. Game-making engines are easier to learn to use and more powerful than before, the online communities around game-making are supportive, and the encouragement people receive when they post demos and works in progress are a big driver of continued effort. Haverinen described this effect on Fear & Hunger; when he was younger he had messed around with RPG Maker, the game engine he eventually used for Fear & Hunger. When he returned to make the demo for Fear & Hunger as part of his thesis, he showed the demo to a few friends who were hooked while playing it. That pushed him to make it into a full game. And it pushed him to develop the sequel, Fear & Hunger: Termina, through years when Fear & Hunger was relatively obscure, because it had a small fanbase that was dedicated enough to keep him motivated.

3. Fiction-writing has declined precipitously as a vocation. This is a phenomenon that has been bemoaned ad nauseam, so I won’t get into it. But it makes sense that young creatives with a vision that could have been expressed through fiction are much less likely to ever want to try and make writing into their vocation. Of course, game development is also a precarious source of income, but at least the monetization is more direct. People are willing to spend a couple of dollars on a first-time game that looks mildly interesting, and if even a few hundred people do that, a first-time game can be more remunerative than the toils of trying to sell your fiction.

All three of these forces have conspired to make video games the natural home for modern visionary storytelling.

IV

Substack is the platform for writers, and if I want to find any community through this blog, it is the community of writers. So it is certainly an interesting decision to burn my bridges by crowning video games as the ascendant medium over literature. Of course, mine is not a new argument, and you can find a dozen video essays on YouTube arguing the same thing. But that’s because YouTube is the platform for gamers, and Substack is not.

So let me offer my apologies and caveats to a literary audience. Writing is a millennia-old medium and will not be dethroned by a flash-in-the-pan medium like video games. I view this only as a statement about the past ten years of culture, and maybe the next ten years of culture. And I don’t think it is really true that the prevalence of highbrow video games will ever be higher than the prevalence of highbrow literature – this is just my attempt to document a relative trend.

But today, if you are a literary consumer looking for raw creative ambition, you are more likely to find it on Steam than in Barnes & Noble. I encourage you to search for it, and give video games their due as a cultural medium.

Four years ago, I got into a debate with my roommate as he put up a Joan Miro artwork on our living room wall. I had no issue with the art, but I mentioned that I deliberately tried not to cultivate taste because I liked the fact that I was okay with everything. I drank boxed wine, I enjoyed restaurants with 3.8 stars on Google Maps, and I sure as hell would never have cultivated an interest in Joan Miro. He didn’t understand that at all.

He got the last laugh, because I’m a snob now. For the past year, I have gone to a wine tasting every week, where I enthusiastically tell the sommelier whether the Pinot was too grippy or that I prefer wines aged in stainless steel or that I could tell the grapes came from volcanic soil. Today I brought samples from Song Tea & Ceramics to my favorite Berkeley teahouse and shared a tasting with the staff where I described one of the teas as “honey without honey” and another as “if da hong pao went on a vacation to Nantou”.1 I went to a blind wine tasting a month ago, where they hid the bottles from us as we tasted them. My favorite wine turned out to be the most expensive bottle, and I couldn’t stand the wine from the cheapest bottle. I can still generally enjoy a bottom shelf wine or a Twinings teabag, but for better or worse, I can tell the difference now.

What changed? I have a precise answer to that. Last year, I read this psychoactive paragraph from Ava:

A large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. You don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks good to you; you don’t know what you value in a city; you don’t know how to spend a Saturday night. And even if you do know, you might not know how to find it. If you can articulate more to yourself, you can get more specific, and start looking for it.

Reading this paragraph was the first time I understood why I might want to discriminate between things I like and things I don’t. Of course, I had preferences before this. I liked some movies and disliked others. Some books would get me telling my life story in a Goodreads review, while others I couldn’t even finish. But I viewed these preferences as inevitable byproducts of life as a sentient being, not as an aspect of me that I should try to cultivate. This was the point of view I argued to my roommate.

The reason I had this perspective was that taste is really about cultivating dislike. Of course, you could start off disliking every version of an experience, in which case taste could help you find the specific versions of that experience that you would like. But that wasn’t the position I found myself in. Instead, I tended to like most versions of an experience. So developing taste required that I take some experience I enjoyed in the past, and rule that I now didn’t like it, because it compared poorly to something else I liked better. If I liked boxed wine and Premier Cru burgundy in an undifferentiated way before, I now had to take the stance that these were different experiences, and ask myself which of them I preferred. (I didn’t have to prefer the latter, but let’s be honest.) I didn’t like the idea of cultivating dislikes. It seemed certain to make my life worse.

And in the ways I expected, it has! I’m much more demanding about what I like now. I’m now less likely to duck into a random movie at the local theater (and the last time I did, it was garbage). Just as I expected, this has reduced my surface area for experiences that I might have otherwise enjoyed.

But it has also made me into a more specific person. In his exit interview, Obama talks about the narrowing of his ambitions as he grew older:

I actually think, when you’re young, ambitions are somewhat common—you want to prove yourself. It may grow out of different life experiences. You may want to prove that you are worthy of the admiration of the demanding father. You may want to prove that you are worthy of the love of an absent father. You may want to prove that you’re worthy of other kids or neighbors who were wealthier than you and teased you. You may want to prove that you’re worthy of high expectations. But I do think that there is a youthful ambition that very much has to do with making your mark in the world. And I think that cuts across the experiences of a lot of people who end up achieving something significant in their field. I think, as you get older, that’s when your ambitions become “peculiar” … because I think that at a certain stage those early ambitions burn away, partly because you achieve something, you get something done, you get some notoriety. And then the particularities of who you are and what your deepest commitments are begin expressing themselves. You’re not just chasing the idea of “me” being important, but you, rather, are chasing a particular passion.

As you grow older, you get life experiences that etch some unique goals onto you. Without those goals, you are Peter Pan, endlessly chasing a youth in which you never have to confront your individuality.

I

What did I do yesterday? Well, I woke up just after sunrise, since it gets cold in the autumn mornings. That makes it hard to sleep in, but I slept great, so I was well-rested anyway.

I buttered some toast and jam for breakfast. What? Yes, of course I have a toaster. Do you think I live without technology out here? I have as much technology as I can possibly live with. Trust me, I would never have left the city if it meant hand-washing my clothes. Anyways, buttered toast and jam is the best breakfast.

I have been running low on groceries, so I went into town for some shopping. I like to go shopping in that window of time – after the pre-school rush, but before the work-from-home people show up around lunchtime. I pick out my tomatoes and pumpkins without the clamour of people all around me. I will only come back in two weeks, so I carry a hefty load.

After lunch, I went to a nearby clearing where I had stacked some logs for a project. I carve statues out of wood – I’ve done that since I moved out here. I started with simple geometric shapes: spheres, pyramids, cylinders. The end results weren’t that interesting, but it was satisfying to see something in the wood that nobody else sees, and then bring it into existence. So I kept at it, and now I carve pretty decent figurines.

While carving, I listened to the birds. I don’t know their names, but I have a good memory for sounds, so I can usually hear when there’s a bird around that I haven’t encountered. When I can’t see the new bird, I like to imagine who it is. Chrrrrup. I bet that one is black-and-white, a bit large, with weird tail feathers and a mellow personality. Cheep cheep cheep. That one is ginger, tiny and excitable. Someone I met at a party once remarked that the world must look so different to birds, since they’re above it all. I might start carving bird statues.

Before the sunset, I set aside my tools and found a nearby tree with willing branches. I was careless with time; I usually take a short hike up the hill for a good view of the sunset. But I was distracted by the carving and the birds and I didn’t notice the sun setting, so I had to settle for peering through the foliage. Even through the leaves, I felt bathed in light. I was getting hungry, but I stayed until the red streaks were gone. Sometimes I think I was born to experience the sunset. Do you know what I mean?

Then I went home and considered my options for dinner. The weather these days calls for a steaming bowl of soup, and I felt invigorated, so I spent an hour making a lentil squash soup. I drank my soup out of a mug as I sat on my back porch. Then I curled up in bed, switched off the lights, and drifted off immediately.

II

What did I do yesterday? It’s interesting, these days it’s hard to answer that question. In some sense, the answer is that each day I do whatever I want, and what I want changes each day. Human beings need variety, and I’ve tried to craft a lifestyle that lets me experience variety.

Yesterday in particular, I woke up at 9 am. Like everyone else, I want to fix my broken sleep schedule. Kicking the habit of using my phone before bed is really hard. I would say that’s my current project in life. I brewed some puerh tea instead of eating breakfast. I didn’t feel hungry, and I don’t eat purely out of habit. Most people today don’t need breakfast. We don’t live in agrarian societies, none of us have to work in the fields at sunrise, and I don’t need that much fuel to work at a desk.

Work yesterday involved talking to a few interesting people. I had a lunch meeting first, then an afternoon coffee chat. Lunch was with a junior colleague who I’ve been mentoring. They’re talented, like most people we hire. But what I like about this person is that they are psychologically secure. When they ask for feedback, they actually want feedback, not just reassurance that they’re meant to be where they are. Having a strong sense of self is a prerequisite to success. Not just for career success, but for having a life that you will consider successful at the end. Afternoon coffee was with a vendor we are considering working with. We went to my counterparty’s favorite coffee truck and discussed a few things. It’s always more informative to meet someone in their own environment.

Some of my colleagues went to a happy hour after work, but I decided to do some preparatory work for a big project I’m kicking off next week. I don’t consider myself a workaholic. I have personal projects that I am quite invested in. But I am also proud of the work that I do, and I don’t flinch at the idea of putting in extra time for it. We are what we repeatedly do, after all. Besides, I’m not much of a drinker, and work happy hours are a far cry from the quality time I would prioritize over my work.

I got home late, after eating a salad bowl in the office. I read for an hour before bed, then turned in. I couldn’t resist scrolling for a while, after then I spent some more time staring at the ceiling before sleeping. As I said, it’s an ongoing project.

III

What did I do yesterday? So, okay. Well, I have two work modes. Either I spend all day working on one piece, or I work on several pieces at once. Yesterday was the second kind of day. I had a few concepts brewing that I wanted to get into a rough workable form before they dissolved. If I had taken up writing instead, recording my inspirations would have been as simple as typing a few sentences in a notes app. But holding images in my mind’s eye is not my strong suit, so I need to get them onto paper when they arise. For example – I’ll just show you, so this one, that bird is a steller’s jay – it has a beautiful blue color that, I haven’t colored it yet, but I’m going to have to mix carefully to get the right one, you should look it up. And it’s going to have a mosaic background that’s like – you can see it, just imagine that but with some religious imagery that I have to figure out.

At the same time, I worked on finishing a piece that I have to deliver to a client this week. That’s a portrait of him and his dog, I’ve tried it a few times, but I struggle with portraits. I wish I could say it was because I’m face-blind or some other good reason, but it’s just that my attempts to draw people always feel flat. Still, portraits are my most common commissions. It’s the art that pays my rent, not the art I want to make. I don’t mind, though – it all balances out in the end.

I also got a new client yesterday! She lives around here, she found me on Instagram and asked me to give her a lesson next week. She said my work was really creative. That was fun, yeah. When I was in first grade, my art teacher gave me a D for creativity. She did! Yeah, I don’t know why they were grading first-graders on creativity. It’s hilarious in retrospect, but it kept me away from art for years. Maybe in nearby universes it pushed me away from art completely, even. I wouldn’t say my art is creative now – no, I’m not putting myself down, I just think “creative” is a loaded word. People ask questions like “do you work really hard or are you just really creative?” and I can tell that “creative” to them means something titanic. As if your sinews are the warp and weft of the universe, and your eyes see the nature of all things. It’s overwhelming, what people expect from you when they think you’re creative. Or I’m being neurotic, and she just wanted to compliment my work. Who can say?

I’ve skipped a lot of details, I guess. In the morning, I made some coffee and had a bagel. For lunch, this is bad but I skipped lunch, it’s really not a big deal I was just caught up... I wasn’t trying to skip a meal. I’m just in the stage right now where I can just keep drawing. I have a couple of weeks like that, where it feels like my eyes see the essence of all things, and I can spin every vague image into gold. Then there’s a couple of weeks where the well is dry, and I can’t even draw an apple without wanting to go for a long walk instead. I work knowing that I’m working for today and tomorrow, and I rest knowing that I’m resting for today and yesterday.

In the evening, I met up with some girlfriends to go to a warehouse rave. It was a fake warehouse, obviously, but the atmosphere was glorious anyway. The electronic music was only slightly too harsh to enjoy, with an acceptably strong bass. The lighting was vibrant with color, powerfully strobing. I got home at 4 am, too wired to sleep. I was responsible enough to stay away from the unfinished paintings, of course. I drank a ton of water, put on some music, and danced in my studio until I crashed at 6 am. It was spectacular.

I

I don’t really get poetry. It’s embarrassing, because I have a healthy reverence for literature and art. It’s even more embarrassing, because I know that one day I will love poetry. But as of today, I don’t really get poetry.

It wasn’t always the case that I didn’t get poetry. I once wrote 3000 words of rhyming couplets in a verse-off against my high school friend. I spent years on Tumblr writing emo poetry. Unfortunately, that blog is long since deleted, but I remember some of what I wrote, and I think I did get the medium. But I eventually gave up on any structural limitations or brevity, which is how I ended up as the person you read now.

But I think I can learn something about how I understand poetry by going back to the only poem from that period of life that has stuck with me – Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

II

“Everything will be okay” is a sazen. It is a generally true statement! But it is impossible to reconstruct the deep feeling that everything will actually be okay from just hearing that statement. So we play elaborate games of peekaboo to make that sentiment feel new and surprising, even though we would dismiss it as trivial if it was stated plainly.

To be even clearer: when I’m in distress, saying “everything will be okay” does nothing for me. But saying “the world offers itself to my imagination, calls to me like the wild geese, over and over announcing my place in the family of things” makes me feel it. Mary Oliver has found the

This poem has been a hazy presence in and out of my life for ten years. It comes back into focus whenever I’m in distress. I ask myself whether I’ve found my place in the family of things, and comfort myself that I will one day find it, that maybe I’m already in it and it hasn’t clicked yet. As time goes by, an accumulation of my life’s big emotions become entangled with these 131 words.

When I think about it, it’s amazing that those 131 words have such staying power. By default, any other way to put that sentiment together eventually melts into semantic slurry. If my best friend texted me 131 words of comfort, it might really help me in the moment. But there is no chance I would remember that message word for word, or be able to reconstruct what it made me feel when I first read it. But I’ve been able to recite Wild Geese to myself for years.

I don’t get poetry. But I know that one part of what makes it special is that it configures a small number of words with the power to absorb all of your emotions and hold onto them.

III

One thing that Wild Geese impresses on me is that poetry can convey visceral sensations in a way that prose can’t. Stories have too many words, and each word does too much. Like light passing through a thousand fractured mirrors, the sensations created by words in a story become muddled.

Of course, stories can and do make readers feel emotions. But the process is totally different. The emotional core of a story is like a clock, constructed from a thousand pieces. The way each person relates to each other, the way each event proceeds after another, all are engineered to create a particular feeling. Meanwhile, the emotional core of a poem is like the bud of a flower. It stands alone, with only a few petals of decoration. This analogy should not be taken to mean that poems are somehow more “organic” and less “planned” than stories. Only that the end product has much fewer pieces to plan with, and much less attenuation of the raw imagery.

Moreover, some feelings are not amenable to being constructed in the way that prose does, and those feelings are the domain of poetry. I don’t believe a story could convey a sense of beauty in the way that Wild Geese does. If one exists, I haven’t read it. But beauty is not a property that can be constructed from many pieces. It exists in the minimal form. Every piece added to that minimal form diminishes the experience of beauty.

IV

If I understand poetry enough to describe Wild Geese with reverence, then why don’t I get it?

The problem is that I understand these features of poetry, but I don’t experience them. I run most of my experiences through a deconstructive filter, trying to understand each component of an experience. When I read stories and articles, I analyze how they choose a first sentence or an introduction. When I watch a movie, I try to spot the thesis statements or leading metaphors and use them to predict the plot. When I look at people, I imagine their bodies as a collection of polygons. (That one’s a joke… partly. I did that when I was learning to draw.) In short, I intellectualize every experience. And that is not conducive to mainlining a spiky and colorful packet of emotions from a poem.

I get stories because stories are amenable to deconstruction. Taking a watch apart only makes you marvel at it more. Of course I feel things from the stories I read – you’re going to see plenty of that on this blog! – but those are feelings that benefit from marveling at the gears of the watch. It is much harder for me to get poems when I feel that deconstructing them is tearing the flower apart.

But I have the situational awareness of a wild animal. I know that my deconstructive tendencies are built for this phase of life, in which I gain a richer understanding of myself and the world around me. I know that a time will come when I do want to experience the raw sensation of a poem or an artwork that previously I was on guard against. I forage for understanding now to enrich that future me.

One day I will love Mary Oliver, and it will be as if I always did.

I

My favorite short story is Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami. Let me tell you about it.

The narrator of Barn Burning is a writer who meets a girl at a wedding. They strike up an ambiguous friendship, meeting once or twice a month to eat and talk about whatever is on their mind. She goes on a trip to North Africa for three months and returns with a new boyfriend, a mysterious young man who never seems to work, but has plenty of money. One day, while they smoke weed and listen to music together, the boyfriend opens up to the narrator about his unusual hobby: he likes to burn down barns. He goes on to say that he has found the next barn he wants to burn, that it is very close to the narrator, and that it’s been a long time since he found a barn so well worth burning.

Shortly afterwards, the girl goes missing, and stops returning the narrator’s calls. Months later, he runs into the boyfriend in a coffee shop. He asks whether the boyfriend ever burned the barn he was talking about, and mentions that all the barns near his house are still standing. The boyfriend is amused, and tells him that he must have missed it. He reminds the narrator that the girl is still missing, before taking his leave.

I discovered Barn Burning after watching a spectacular movie based on it, Burning by Lee Chang-dong. I didn’t expect to enjoy Murakami’s story after already knowing the whole plot. But I’ve since read it and reread it dozens of times. It has no surprises for me. Every time I read it, I feel the dread and confusion I felt when I first read it. It’s the kind of horror story that fits with my particular fears.

II

Barn Burning has quite a minimalist plot. There are only three characters, and essentially two events in the whole story. But these three characters represent so much, which is part of what makes the story so powerful.

The girl is our vision of goodness. The narrator remarks that she sees people for who they really are, rather than for their superficial characteristics. This puts her in the unfortunate position that is often assigned to women in a Murakami story, as the person to whom s-t-o-r-y must happen.1

The boyfriend is our embodiment of evil. Even before the revelation that he burns barns, we can tell that something is off about him. He seemingly has plenty of money without working, he coolly talks about world events, and we never learn why he was travelling around North Africa when he met the girl. When he talks about burning barns, he does so with a benign malevolence, remarking that he only accepts things that are already ready to be burnt, like the rain washing them away. Murakami even makes his ordinary tics, like scratching his beard or snapping his fingers, into unsettling actions.

Finally, the narrator is our neutral observer. All we know about him is that he is a writer, professionally competent, well-adjusted and informed about the world. Throughout the story, he takes no actions, and expresses no preferences. This witnessing quality is why the girl trusts him, and it is also what leads the boyfriend to open up to him about burning barns. Our narrator is a blank slate for both the girl and the boyfriend.

For what it’s worth, there’s no doubt in my mind that the boyfriend killed the girl, and that “burning barns” is his euphemism for murder. (Perhaps it’s even an honest description of what he sees himself doing, which most of us would call serial murder.) I don’t arrive at this conclusion because of any factual clues in the story – when you get down to it, all that happened is that the girl disappeared. That doesn’t mean anything bad happened to her. No, I arrive at this conclusion because the story that emerges from that ending is much more interesting than if she simply moved away to start her life from scratch. Let me outline what I think that story is.

With these three characters as his canvas, Murakami sets out to tell the story he wants to tell – about how we live in a fragile, carefully-maintained reality. He sets this up from the start when the girl demonstrates to the narrator a technique she learned from mime class, known as tangerine peeling.

On her left was a bowl piled high with tangerines; on her right, a bowl for the peels. At least that was the idea—actually there wasn’t anything there at all. She’d take an imaginary tangerine in her hand, slowly peel it, put one section in her mouth, and spit out the seeds. When she’d finished one tangerine, she’d wrap up all the seeds in the peel and deposit it in the bowl to her right. She repeated these movements over and over again. When you try to put it in words it doesn’t sound like anything special. But if you see it with your own eyes for ten or twenty minutes (we were just chatting at the bar, and, almost without thinking, she kept on performing it) gradually the sense of reality is sucked right out of everything around you. It’s a very strange feeling.

The narrator sees her pantomiming the peeling of a tangerine, and he is so taken by the image that he starts to feel like nothing is real. His first response after witnessing the tangerine peeling is to think of Adolf Eichmann on trial for war crimes! His reaction to the dissolution of reality is both relatable to me, and ironic given his trade as a writer. He dissolves reality for a living, but when it is done to him he feels a kind of primordial terror.

Perhaps he reacts this way because his own reality is a carefully maintained garden, and the boyfriend is a snake that has invaded. It happens first when he’s smoking weed with the boyfriend, and he recalls a school play where he was a villainous shop owner. It seems that being around this man is enough to make him feel the nature of evil. But then it happens more seriously, with the boyfriend’s declaration that he will soon burn down a barn that is very close to the narrator, and the girl’s subsequent disappearance. The facts of the story allow the narrator plausible deniability; he can pretend that the girl simply moved away without giving him her new contact information. And that is what he does, continuing to run past the barns every day without acknowledging their glaring presence.

Murakami’s stories often involve a passive narrator who simply observes what happens in his life without taking any steps to live in it. This is usually a source of suffering. In TV People, he tells the story of a man who sees mysterious men with TV heads walking around his home and his office. But he does nothing about it. Nor does he do anything about his crumbling marriage. Nor does he do anything about his shaky workplace relationships. The story ends with his wife leaving him, while he sits on his couch, unable to even reach for the ringing telephone.

In Not Knowing, Donald Barthelme says “the writer is someone who, embarking on a task, does not know what to do.” After all, writing is about constructing worlds in which action unfolds naturalistically, rather than according to the writer’s caprices. Perhaps Murakami’s narrator, as a writer, was doomed to observe reality instead of shaping it. That’s food for thought, to a writer who has not yet given up on the idea of shaping reality.

III

Tangerines have become my go-to metaphor for unreality. As the girl remarks, “What you do isn’t make yourself believe that there are tangerines there. You forget that the tangerines are not there.” When I sit on a bus scrolling Twitter while the sunset dazzles my world, it’s not because I decided that Twitter was more representative of reality than my physical world – it’s because I simply forgot that Twitter is not reality. When I see people comment on the latest viral article to get outraged at or the discourse of the day, I want to shake them and tell them the tangerines are not real.

But I only witness. It’s hypocritical for me, after all, to pretend that my own reality is securely fastened.

This past Halloween, I dressed up as Makima from Chainsaw Man. I put too much effort into my costume to reserve it for a couple of hours of partying, so I walked around Berkeley all day in costume. For most of that time, I felt like nothing was unusual; I checked my phone, drank my tea, and worked on my laptop like I normally would. But in the evening, as I started to really see that I was in costume, I felt a change stealing over me. I started to walk like Makima, to adopt her amused resting face, to clasp my hands behind my back like her. I haven’t cosplayed seriously since 2013, and I’ve never done a genderbent cosplay before. The red hair framed my vision like a video game HUD. I remembered what it was like to slip into someone else’s skin. I wished I had picked a less creepy character to be.

Last year I played Disco Elysium, a game in which you play as an alcoholic amnesiac detective who is trying to solve a murder case while also recreating his personality. Disco Elysium is a roleplaying game, meaning that almost all of the fun comes from picking what kind of character you want to be. I could be a hedonist who parties on, oblivious of all the people he’s hurt. I could be an unrepentant egotist who boasts of the lack of judgment for his sins. I could bury my personal failures in a political project, whether it’s communism or fascism or neoliberalism. I have all of these options, in Disco Elysium and in life. But I only played Disco Elysium once, and I played my true dominant self – in the story, that made me a straightforward guy who acknowledges and tries to amend his mistakes, but moves forward without dwelling too much on them. I started a second playthrough multiple times, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything else. I was too attached to doing only what I would do in my own life.

Of course, cosplaying a character or roleplaying them in a video game doesn’t actually make you that character. But I couldn’t peel tangerines for that long without forgetting that they aren’t real.

I

Another customer at the cider bar saw my copy of Collected Fictions. “Oh! That’s a throwback. I remember reading Borges in AP Spanish. Are you enjoying it?”

“Yes,” I said, with cautious enthusiasm. “Actually, I’m fascinated with it for a strange reason. In a way, Borges’s stories have helped me make sense of a book I read a decade ago, a book that left an impression on me without me really understanding why. Have you heard of House of Leaves?”

“That’s great!” he said. “No, I haven’t heard of it.”

“It’s about… well, it’s a story within a story. Actually, in a way, they’re the same book.”

By “they” I meant Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, but I don’t blame him for not following my pronoun-laden rambling. “Oh,” he said. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” I picked up the cider bottle in front of me, “see how this bottle casts a shadow on the counter? That shadow looks different depending on how you hold the bottle. So you could say that the two shadows you see from two different angles are two different pictures.” I turned it around in my hands. “But actually, they’re just different shadows of the same bottle. See?”

The stranger smiled. “That’s an interesting idea,” he said. “I’m on board with that.”

We continued to chat about other topics. But at that moment, his eyes betrayed a reasonable question.

What the fuck are you talking about?

II

It makes sense that I discovered House of Leaves in a series of unlikely events. First, when I was 14, I had a crush on a girl who used Tumblr, so I joined the site. Second, within that global village, I started chatting with another user, who turned out to also live in India. Third, he told me he was coming to Bangalore for Comic Con and suggested we meet up there. Fourth, when we met, he told me about his favorite book, called House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. He was over a decade older than me, and I idolized him. So I immediately pirated the book on my iPod Touch. For weeks I would stay up in bed, reading it on the tiny screen.

It’s hard to reflect on what I really thought about the book back then. In those days, I had the hunger to chew through a new book every day. So I could ingest a book cover-to-cover, without synthesizing any deep impressions from it, before I moved onto another book. That is what happened with House of Leaves. I could only tell you its plot at a surface level after reading it. But despite the fact that I didn’t really understand it, I knew it was a book I had to hold onto. I had the sense that though it didn’t click for me then, I would one day be in a position where it did. I just had to pass the book onto my future selves, until I was the self who needed to read it.

House of Leaves disappeared from my life for years, surfacing only when I would reference it as “my favorite book”. But it reappeared when I graduated high school. I wanted to give my best friend a parting gift as we went off to distant colleges. I hit on an idea: I would give her an annotated copy of House of Leaves. I would read it for the second time, this time adding on my own thoughts and questions in the margin, to add to the book’s existing layers of narrative.

I was proud of this idea. It was based on my sister and her friends having one shared, collectively annotated copy of Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants – a book about a pair of jeans that somehow fits four best friends perfectly despite their different sizes, a pair which they send back and forth between them as their collective friendship evolves. I imagined a future in which my friend and I exchanged this copy of House of Leaves back and forth, our dialog unfolding into a superstructure to elevate the book.

House of Leaves, after all, is composed of layered stories. The (fictional) photojournalist Will Navidson makes a documentary about his mysterious new house, whose inside is bigger than its outside, in defiance of the laws of physics. Then the recluse Zampanò writes a scholarly analysis of Navidson’s (fictional) documentary about his house. Then the tattoo artist Johnny Truant transcribes Zampanò’s (fictional) thesis with annotations from his own deteriorating life. Finally, unseen Editors annotate Truant’s (fictional) manuscript with corrections and further details. All of these narrators exist in the same book. Why not add another narrator to this stack? And if there should be another narrator – I asked with teenage arrogance – why shouldn’t it be me?

Well, it didn’t turn out exactly as I planned. While my friend liked the book, she didn’t annotate it and send it back to me for us to continue the cycle. But having that idea showed that the book had actually registered with me, all those years ago. I wasn’t in the habit of annotating books, especially not ones I would give to others. The idea would not have occurred to me if I didn’t somehow grasp its concordance with the book’s structure. This fact is the main reason I’m proud of having had this idea, not because it was a good gift in any way.

I re-read House of Leaves one more time, prompted by graduating college and moving to California. I bought a used copy on Amazon that declared its origins in the Denver Public Library. After this third reading, I wrote in my diary “Uncanny is the feeling of rereading this book after half a decade and seeing an unnerving amount of my personality explained by a single book.”

But I have zero clue what I was talking about. Today, I can only recall a sketch of the book and its plot. I certainly don’t feel like it has left a deep mark on my personality. Yet each time I have read it, I have come to that conclusion.

So there is a divide between the me who is reading that book, and the me who is not. This makes reading House of Leaves a game of peekaboo. Each time, it ends with a reunion between these two versions of me, who exchange some insight before diverging, planning to meet again four years later.

III

For the past year, I have mainly read short stories. So it was only a matter of time before I read Jorge Luis Borges, a writer I associate with smarmy intellectuals who refer to him while talking out of their hats. I had no exposure to his work, other than hearing The Book of Sand narrated for the New Yorker’s fiction podcast. I was unmoved by it. But I have time these days, so when I found his Collected Fictions in the Berkeley Public Library, I borrowed it.

While I was reading Collected Fictions at a teahouse, another patron spotted the book and started telling me enthusiastically about how much he loved Borges. I told him, with some embarrassment, that I had read ten stories and enjoyed none of them so far. He declared that I just needed to find the right translation. I didn’t tell him my thoughts on that particular argument. But I understood the important part; there was someone who loved Borges’s work enough to speak up to a total stranger about it. I continued reading.

The first time I got a glimpse of that man’s perspective was while reading The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim. Borges’s story is framed as a review of a book of the same name, by the fictional lawyer Mir Bahadur Ali. The novel described within The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim is the story of an apostate Muslim law student who kills a Hindu in the heat of a riot. Stricken by his crime, and without the faith to justify it, he goes on a journey through the dark side of society to redeem himself.

A man (the unbelieving, fleeing law student we have met) falls among people of the lowest, vilest sort and accommodates himself to them, in a kind of contest of iniquity. Suddenly… the law student perceives some mitigation of the evil: a moment of tenderness, of exaltation, of silence, in one of the abominable men… the law student hypothesizes that the vile man before him has reflected a friend, or the friend of a friend. Rethinking the problem, he comes to a mysterious conclusion: Somewhere in the world there is a man from whom this clarity, this brightness, emanates; somewhere in the world there is a man who is equal to this brightness. The law student resolves to devote his life to searching out that man.

Here is the catch: Al-Mu’tasim is himself a wanderer, so the search for him is elusive, and the student can only find a trail of people who had progressively more exposure to Al-Mu’tasim. Each of these people demonstrates progressively more humanity. The novel ends just as the student is about to meet Al-Mu’tasim.

Two aspects together make this story interesting. The first is that the law student’s pilgrimage mirrors a pilgrimage to find God, and so the wandering Al-Mu’tasim mirrors the divine. The second is that the story insinuates that the law student is Al-Mu’tasim. He himself has been the source of the brightness he sees, and the people he has met have been progressively more divine because they reflect his own journey towards becoming the person he seeks. Early in the story, he utters a phrase; later in the story, that same phrase is repeated to him as a quote from Al-Mu’tasim. The name Al-Mu’tasim (“he who goes in quest of aid”) certainly describes the law student.

The first aspect of the story is just another religious metaphor, which is not so interesting on its own. But combined with the second aspect, it creates a dizzying theology. The idea that God is someone in search of someone even greater, and that someone is also in search of someone greater than themselves, and so on… This is a line that can only be resolved by making it a circle. But making it a circle means that we are the divine, searching for God just as God searches for us. Taking it further, maybe searching for someone greater than ourselves is what makes us divine.

The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim is not Borges’s best story, but this idea was the first of Borges’s fantastical notions that boggled my mind. I understood why for most of history, theology was the highest intellectual calling. What better use of a mind than to grapple with the unknowable on a regular basis? Modern minds are too smart to waste time on that task. And I have a well-trained modern mind. That is why I was dismissive of the first few Borges stories that I read.

But The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim slipped past my defenses, and opened me up to a sly notion: maybe there is value in thinking about things that I can’t ever understand.

IV

The Garden of Forking Paths is my favorite Borges story. Its protagonist is Yu Tsun, an ethnically-Chinese German spy in England during World War I. He has to convey a message to his German handlers, with no way to reach them, while the authorities are hot on his heels. For reasons that we will only learn later, he looks through the phonebook until he finds one Stephen Albert, and flees to his house. When he meets Albert, he discovers a coincidence. Albert is actually a Sinologist, who has spent a decade reconstructing a lost book by Yu Tsun’s ancestor Ts’ui Pen.

Ts’ui Pen was a renowned philosopher who declared that he wanted to build an infinite labyrinth. After his death, his family searched for this labyrinth everywhere on his property, but could not find it. They found only a book, which they discarded as a nonsensical jumble of contradictory chapters. But Albert analyzed the manuscript, and came to the conclusion that the book itself was Ts’ui Pen’s labyrinth. The reason it seemed to have no structure, and was full of contradictory events, is because Ts’ui Pen conceived it as a labyrinth in time. He imagined a world in which every possible outcome of every possible action all happened. These different possibilities branch off into different futures; it is these branching paths that make up Ts’ui Pen’s infinite labyrinth.

Albert delivers this verdict to Yu Tsun, who is awestruck at the truth that vindicates his revered ancestor. But the mystery looms – why is Yu Tsun there to begin with, given that he did not know of Albert’s involvement with his ancestor before he arrived?

“Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times... In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. In this one, which the favouring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my home; in another, when you come through my garden you find my dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost.”

“In all,” I said, not without a tremble, “I am grateful for, and I venerate, your recreation of the garden of Ts’ui Pen.”

“Not in all,” he whispered with a smile. “Time forks, perpetually, into countless futures. In one of them, I am your enemy.”

I won’t spoil the ending, even though it is difficult to appreciate the story otherwise. Read it. Let’s just say that Borges did not settle for sketching out a concept, like he did with The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero. He created a story in which I could feel the vertigo of countless timelines, and feel the confusion of being in a very strange timeline.

And if this concept seems familiar to you, it is only because it is now ingrained in pop culture. Borges preempted the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics and its popular representations (e.g. Everything Everywhere All at Once). Despite all the fictional depictions of parallel realities that have been created since then, Borges’s original story still flattens me.

V

The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero is not even a story. It starts out with an admission of its nature:

In my spare evenings I have conceived this plot––which I will perhaps commit to paper but which already somehow justifies me. It needs details, rectifications, tinkering––there are areas of the story that have never been revealed to me. Today, January 3, 1944, I see it in the following way…

This is not a literary device. Borges is not setting out a realistic premise for surreal events to follow, or reviewing a fictional book, as he does in The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim. Throughout the next three pages, he does exactly what he stated – he sketches out a story that he planned to write. Within those pages, he storyboards a sequence of events, highlights gaps that would need to be filled if he actually turned it into a story, and wraps it up with a pat conclusion. It reads like a letter to his editor, not like a story.

The substance of The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero is itself interesting enough to make this structure work. Borges reimagines Julius Caesar as a story in which Caesar was secretly the playwright of his own murder, as penance for his crimes. All events around his death were actually an enormous play with thousands of actors. We see a revolutionary leader embrace two contradictory aspects of himself through that play. His traitor self becomes the actor, while his hero self becomes the character. The story’s narrator, a historian reconstructing these events, discovers this hidden truth. He considers telling the world. But he ultimately concludes that society is not ready to see the traitor and the hero as the same person, and hides his discovery.

I have more to say about The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, but then I might write more than the story itself. Borges’s achievement was to take a 300-page novel that could exist, and distill it to a 1000-word outline instead. Does it make sense to analyze a 1000-word story in 1000 words? No. My 300 words are an adequate continuation of Borges’s progression. With more ingenuity I could iterate further, distilling it even further. Why stop at 300 words? I imagine a 100-word summary; very challenging, requires cutting inessential prose. I imagine a 10-word summary; sounds impossible, but perhaps achievable by arranging the words in space in a way that carries semantic weight. I imagine a 0-word summary; a symbol that weaves dualistic motifs into an image of revolutionary fervor.

These are the directions in which my mind wanders after reading Borges. Of course it doesn’t make sense to imagine expressing the theme of the traitor and the hero in 10 words, or 0 words. But I imagine that free roaming towards the bizarre – the surreal, the divine – is what it was like to be him.

The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero showed me that there are no rules. Borges didn’t need to write the story within the story. He didn’t need to construct a literary pretext, or a fictionalized narrator. He simply had an idea and sketched it out.

But it worked.

What would I write if I just let the dream take over?

VI

House of Leaves is unashamed about its Borgesian influence. The boring way to see that influence is through the parallel between Zampanò (the narrator who invents the documentary of Will Navidson’s labyrinthine house) and Borges himself. The story has very few details about Zampanò, making the chosen details even more revealing. Zampanò’s main quality is that he went blind late in life, just like Borges did. Another of his qualities is that he was beloved by cats; Borges wrote a poem revering his own cat, Beppo.

But it doesn’t help me understand the book any better to say “ah yes, Zampanò went blind in his mid-fifties, and Borges went blind at age 55, so they must be the same person.” That is the kind of connection that only serves to make literary critics squeal, because it places each piece of literature in the web of signifiers that they build their lives around. No, the interesting way to see that influence is to see Borges’s DNA woven into the book itself.

One point of convergence is the structural claim of House of Leaves – that you can write a fictional story, within a fictional story, within a fictional story. Borges adopted the same approach in his Fictions collection,1 arguing in its foreword:

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books––setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.

Another point of convergence is in the inner story’s protagonist, the former war photojournalist Will Navidson. At first, he appears to be a hero. He tackles the mystery of the house on Ash Tree Lane with military precision, taking several solo expeditions down there with rope, radio, supplies, and more. He documents a mystery that could break our understanding of the universe, that everyone else is unwilling to stomach.

But in the process, he also destroys his family, and he knows it. His obsession with the house causes them to keep living there, even as its corrupting influence makes his son antisocial, and causes his daughter to have anxious nightmares. His partner is paralyzed at the thought of Navidson being lost forever within the house, and she cannot live with that fear. In the documentary, Navidson-as-character is a pioneer who plumbs the depths of hell to make a stand for mankind against the darkness. But Navidson-as-director includes the emotional wreckage created by his actions, the visual of his partner and children getting into a car and driving away from the man who ruined their lives. He accepts his role as both the traitor and the hero.

The final point of convergence is in the core of House of Leaves – the house on Ash Tree Lane itself. For this whole mystery to feel justified, the house from which all this terror emanates has to be worth it. Danielewski does this by making it defy physics – the house’s interior is one-quarter of an inch bigger than its exterior. This is also the angle of attack Borges takes with his garden of forking paths, by making it a labyrinth that rips up our conception of time. Whether it is a tear in space or a tear in time, both labyrinths are weird for the same reason. They make us question whether we are moving through life under a vast illusion.

These convergences are why I constantly think about House of Leaves while reading Borges. His stories break that book down into a form that I can now make sense of, years after I last read it.

VII

The fact that reading Borges helped me make sense of House of Leaves is trivial. I read a difficult-to-parse experimental novel that was inspired by Borges. In reading the component stories that influenced the novel, I was able to see the same themes more clearly, and thus understand the novel better. This is basic literary analysis.

But what if the truth is something stranger?

Consider a tesseract, a cube constructed in a way that represents higher-dimensional objects. It has infinitely fine-grained textures on its crystalline surface. These textures scatter light in a different way depending on the angle you view the tesseract from. The result is that any two observers looking at the tesseract will see two different images in its glass, because the image is formed from different patterns of light.

The physical explanation for this phenomenon is that the tesseract is an infinite-dimensional object. But we live in a three-dimensional reality, so we can observe the tesseract only through its projections onto a three-dimensional surface. Any observer’s angle of view involves a different projection, and thus creates a unique image. That is why nobody can see the same image in the tesseract. It is impossible for any two people to occupy exactly the same space; even if a director stage-managed ten people to each stand in the same exact spot on the ground, one after another, that infinitesimal precision would elude them. One person will be taller or shorter than another, or their eyes may differ in positions by a few inches, or they may not be able to find the exact millimeter that the director wants them to stand on. Even one observer may sway slightly while viewing the tesseract, so they see not just one image but a dizzying blur of images.

I wish I could say that I came up with it myself, under Borges’s influence. But I pulled it from The Tesseract.

The Tesseract tells the story of one evening in a mansion in Buenos Aires. An art collector and an antique dealer have an argument at a party, after seeing this tesseract in the collection of the eccentric count who is hosting the party. They both vie to impress the count as a possible client, so they start arguing over what they see in the tesseract’s crystal space, each of them dismissing the other’s imagery as the sign of a vapid intellect. The argument grows more and more vicious until the two men leap at each other’s throats and inflict grievous injuries on each other. Meanwhile, the count observes the two and says nothing.

The Tesseract bluntly expresses an idea that Borges explores in many of his stories. In The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim, the law student seeks Al-Mu’tasim, but he may be Al-Mu’tasim himself. In The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, a revolutionary leader is both the hero who liberates his country and the traitor who betrays his movement. In The Garden of Forking Paths, it is the universe itself that is shown to be a unified labyrinth of timelines.

Across all of these stories, what looks like many things is always one. The process of unifying these objects requires pulling the rug out from under how we normally view things. That is why the experience of reading Borges or House of Leaves is first and foremost about disorientation.

Why not take it further?

House of Leaves and Collected Fictions are distinct books. But their distinctions can be understood as different projections of the same underlying form. The dimensions along which that form is projected are all of these incidental details, like the author, the text, the time period. From this view, the fact that the two books have similar motifs is not an exciting claim. Even different projections may overlap slightly, because of chance, or because one observer’s point of view has influenced where another observer chooses to view the tesseract from. The only significance between these overlaps is that they help us see a connection that we would otherwise miss.

But the platonic form being projected between them is something separate from both of these books. I don’t want to name it, because I know I will fail to capture it. But it is a form that is both intimate and alien at the same time. It confuses us, scares us, attracts us, fulfills our needs. We want to understand it. We cannot. Our minds are nimble enough to avoid their own mutilation. That is why Borges and Danielewski have to do stage-magic just to give us a glimpse. That is why I can only point to their efforts instead of making my own. Like you, I am not ready.

VIII

Here is a timeline of events that may be of interest.

In 2013, I read House of Leaves for the first time.

In 2017, I read House of Leaves for the second time. I then gave it away.

In 2021, I read House of Leaves for the third time.

In 2025, I gave away my copy of House of Leaves to a recent acquaintance; I simply wanted him to have it. Soon after, I encountered Collected Fictions in the library.

I started reading Collected Fictions in a Berkeley teahouse. Soon after, I discovered House of Leaves on the bookshelf of this teahouse (a place I have visited for years).

I concluded this essay in the same teahouse.

I have not touched House of Leaves throughout this writing. There is no need.

Peekaboo!