In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère describes himself as a former Christian and now an agnostic who remains irresistibly drawn to the mystery of belief. He wants to know what committed Christians actually experience from the inside. Not what they claim in theological treatises or apologetics, but what they believe in the marrow of their bones. To satisfy that curiosity, he considers joining a Catholic cruise that retraces the missionary journeys of Saint Paul.
Then he recoils.
He realizes that he would be boarding the ship under false pretenses. He would not be a pilgrim but an observer, a skeptical journalist pretending to be a fellow traveler. Worse, he fears he would begin treating believers as specimens in a religious safari, peering at them through the bars of an intellectual zoo.
He cannot bring himself to do it.
The reason is revealing. Carrère respects Christianity too much. More importantly, he recognizes too much of himself in the people he hopes to observe. He has not escaped the longing that once made him a fervent believer. Somewhere inside him survives a hunger for Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, for the intoxicating certainty that dissolves ambiguity and ends the exhausting labor of perpetual self-interrogation.
That is the danger of writing about conversion.
The temptation is to reduce the convert to a caricature—a fanatic, a zealot, a punch line. Once that happens, the writer has stopped investigating and started congratulating himself.
Carrère refuses that temptation.
One of the novel’s greatest strengths is that he approaches even the forms of faith that unsettle him with remarkable humility. He writes without condescension, without superiority, and without the lazy satisfaction of explaining away religious passion as psychological pathology. His tone is one of curiosity, sympathy, self-reproach, and, perhaps most surprisingly, envy. He cannot help wondering whether absolute conviction, however irrational, might be preferable to a lifetime spent wandering the fog of uncertainty.
He cancels the cruise.
He calls doing so “a bad deed.”
That confession stopped me in my tracks because it exposed the weakness in my own writing.
Over the years I have written roughly a dozen shabby, half-baked novels about my teenage years as a bodybuilder. I always blamed the structure, the pacing, the dialogue, or the plot.
Now I think I know the real reason they failed.
I was the man boarding the bodybuilding cruise.
I looked back at my younger self and my gym companions the way a tourist looks at a curious tribe. They were amusing. They were excessive. They spoke in absurd dialects about protein, carb loading, and biceps pumps with the solemnity of medieval theologians debating the nature of grace.
I was clever.
I was also a hack.
Mockery is the refuge of writers who fear understanding.
I never asked the questions that mattered. What terror drove boys to devote themselves so completely to muscle? What loneliness hid beneath the bravado? What private wounds demanded redemption through iron? What aching sense of inadequacy transformed barbells into sacraments?
The bodybuilding was never the story.
The hunger was.
If I ever return to that world, I hope to do so as Carrère approached Christianity: not with detached amusement but with humility, caution, and the uncomfortable recognition that the fanatic I wish to understand is not someone else.
It is a former version of myself.
Cinemorphosis 
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