Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • Soul Foreclosure

    Soul Foreclosure

    I recently dreamed that I committed an act of generosity so spectacularly foolish that it could only occur in a dream.

    A stranger down on his luck needed a car.

    I rented him mine.

    Not for an afternoon.

    For a week.

    When the week ended, the car was supposed to return.

    It didn’t.

    The rental agency proved as reachable as Atlantis. Every phone call dissolved into voicemail. Every inquiry disappeared beneath geological layers of paperwork. Somewhere inside an administrative labyrinth, my car had ceased being an automobile and become a bureaucratic rumor.

    At first I searched.

    Then I inquired.

    Eventually I surrendered.

    I began the strange process of constructing a life around the absence of something I had once considered indispensable.

    That was when the letters started arriving.

    Apparently my missing car had been abandoned in some restricted location, and because it remained there, I was responsible for an endless procession of fines. Whose property it occupied could not be determined. Every answer generated three new forms. Every digital trail branched into ten more dead ends. Bureaucracy reproduced like mold in a damp basement.

    No one could tell me where my car was.

    Everyone could tell me I owed more money.

    The dream became increasingly surreal.

    The car was gone.

    Yet it continued ruining my life.

    I woke with the uneasy conviction that the car had never been a car.

    It was something far more important.

    The dream reminded me of Thomas Dolby’s haunting 1982 song “One of Our Submarines,” in which loss lingers like an unanswered transmission from beneath dark water. Something precious has vanished. The silence becomes its own form of communication.

    That is exactly how the dream felt.

    Looking back, I think it illustrates what I call Soul Foreclosure: the unsettling conviction that something essential to one’s identity has quietly slipped beyond one’s reach, leaving behind an acute sense of incompleteness whose object cannot be clearly named.

    The dream never directly told me what had been lost.

    It merely allowed me to experience the loss.

    The missing car became the perfect symbol because a car is more than transportation. It carries us through the world. It grants direction, mobility, and agency. To lose it is to lose not merely a possession but the very instrument by which one moves toward the future.

    The bureaucratic nightmare only deepened the metaphor.

    The missing soul could not be recovered through diligence.

    Forms multiplied.

    Digital records contradicted one another.

    Every attempt at resolution produced another layer of confusion.

    The system itself had become the villain, a paper-pushing Minotaur guarding a labyrinth whose prize no one could locate.

    Perhaps that is why I woke with such melancholy.

    I wasn’t grieving a car.

    I was grieving the suspicion that somewhere along the journey through adulthood, paperwork, obligations, and the thousand administrative distractions of modern life, I had mislaid some vital part of myself.

    The truly unsettling part was not that I couldn’t find it.

    It was that life kept sending me invoices for its absence.

  • The Bad Apple Principle

    The Bad Apple Principle

    This morning, while swinging kettlebells in my garage, I listened to Larry Mantle’s AirTalk. The topic was dogs in restaurants, or more precisely, the small but talented minority of dog owners determined to convince the rest of us that civilization has been overrated.

    The complaints were familiar. Dogs licked strangers’ hands. Seemingly placid dogs lunged at smaller ones. Playful dogs darted under servers carrying trays of hot food. Then came the owners of “service dogs” who informed restaurant staff that the rules were for lesser mortals. Their pets, like minor royalty, possessed diplomatic immunity.

    I suspect more than ninety percent of dog owners are perfectly considerate. They keep their dogs under control, respect boundaries, and would never dream of turning a restaurant into an off-leash park.

    They are also irrelevant.

    Restaurants don’t write policies for them.

    They write policies for the other ten percent.

    That observation led me to a melancholy truth about institutions. Bureaucracies are not designed around our best behavior or even our typical behavior. They are designed around our worst behavior. They must assume that somewhere, someone will abuse every privilege, exploit every loophole, and confuse entitlement with freedom.

    That is The Bad Apple Principle: the misconduct of a small minority determines the restrictions imposed upon the responsible majority.

    The principle explains far more than dogs in restaurants. It explains airport security, locked toothpaste at CVS, liability waivers, plagiarism software, surveillance cameras, password requirements, and a thousand other bureaucratic irritations. Every rule we grumble about has a backstory, and that backstory almost always begins with someone who behaved just badly enough to make the rule inevitable.

    The idea reminded me of a book I devoured when I was ten: Laurence J. Peter’s The Peter Principle. Ever since, I’ve had a weakness for elegant ideas distilled into memorable names.

    Naturally, I immediately imagined writing my own bestseller:

    The Bad Apple Principle: Why Good People Live by Bad People’s Rules.

    Then reality intruded.

    The entire thesis fits comfortably inside a single paragraph.

    Knowing the publishing industry, however, I’m sure a seasoned nonfiction writer could stretch it into fifteen brisk chapters, three airport interviews, a TED Talk, and a podcast tour. My contribution would simply be to wave wistfully from the sidelines, muttering, “Yes, but the title was mine.”

  • Hope for Those Who Betray Their Highest Convictions

    Hope for Those Who Betray Their Highest Convictions

    With fewer than one hundred pages remaining in The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère confesses that he has postponed writing about the apostle John. Of all the apostles, John is the one who unsettles him most.

    Luke is easy to love. He is congenial, eager to please, and recognizably human in his longing to belong. Paul can be abrasive, impulsive, and argumentative, yet he repeatedly exposes his own deepest flaws. His confessions make him accessible. We may not always like Paul, but we know him.

    John is another matter entirely.

    Carrère calls him “the most elusive, the most multifaceted.” He is the mysterious author behind the Fourth Gospel, the John who must be carefully distinguished from the many other Johns who populate the New Testament. This is John, the son of Zebedee.

    His story hardly begins with saintliness.

    Jesus nicknames him and his brother James Boanerges—”sons of thunder”—because both possess volcanic tempers. Luke recounts an episode in which John rebukes a man casting out demons in Jesus’ name simply because the man does not belong to their circle. His miracles, John believes, lack the proper credentials. Jesus immediately rebukes him: “Whoever is not against you is for you.”

    Later, after a Samaritan village refuses to welcome Jesus, James and John ask permission to call down fire from heaven upon its inhabitants. Once again Jesus rejects their thirst for vengeance. Mark and Luke also portray the brothers as transparently ambitious, maneuvering for the highest positions beside Christ’s throne. Pride and wrath seem to flow through them as naturally as blood.

    Yet by the time we reach the Fourth Gospel, something astonishing has happened.

    John has become “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”

    As Jesus hangs dying upon the cross, it is John—not Peter, not James—whom he entrusts with the care of his mother.

    How does such a transformation occur?

    Carrère remains skeptical that the rough, impulsive fisherman could later have written the dazzling and feverish visions of Revelation. He imagines instead that decades of experience reshaped John into someone almost unrecognizable. The hotheaded youth slowly hardened into one of Christianity’s towering patriarchs.

    “The agitated youth has become a grand old man,” Carrère writes.

    Old age, however, did not soften his life.

    According to Tertullian, John survived torture and even a vat of boiling oil before eventually settling in Ephesus. Throughout those years he faithfully cared for Mary, the mother of Jesus.

    It is in Ephesus that Carrère notices the profound difference between Paul and John.

    Paul, despite his notorious moods, remained approachable. You could seek him out, argue with him, receive instruction from him, even challenge him. His authority emerged through conversation.

    John’s authority emerged through absence.

    Carrère imagines him as remote, solemn, and almost forbidding.

    “When you saw him,” he writes, “you bowed as if he were a supreme pontiff: intimidating, inaccessible, floating on a cloud of incense.”

    John rarely appeared in public. He and Mary lived almost entirely in seclusion. People spoke of them in lowered voices. Their home acquired the atmosphere of a sanctuary. Everything surrounding them seemed wrapped in silence, reverence, and mystery.

    John embodies what might be called Mystical Distance: the condition in which a person’s rarity, silence, and withdrawal from ordinary life increase rather than diminish his perceived authority, causing others to experience him less as a companion than as a sacred mystery.

    This aura leaves Carrère uneasy.

    John’s lofty remoteness creates distance rather than intimacy.

    Peter does exactly the opposite.

    Carrère feels instinctively at home with Peter because Peter is gloriously, painfully human. He boasts that he will never abandon Jesus. When the moment of testing arrives, he collapses almost immediately. Jesus predicts the betrayal in advance, yet Peter insists with magnificent confidence, “Never, Lord.”

    Then he denies him.

    Again.

    And again.

    Carrère recognizes himself in that pattern.

    Indeed, he recognizes all of us.

    We spend our lives making solemn promises to our highest ideals only to betray them when comfort, fear, vanity, or self-preservation begins whispering in our ears. Whether we call ourselves believers or skeptics, we reenact Peter’s failure thousands of times. Every day presents another opportunity to remain faithful, and every day we discover fresh ways to compromise.

    Oddly enough, this realization comforts Carrère.

    Christianity does not pretend that Peter’s failures never happened. It remembers every denial in painful detail. Yet it also refuses to let those betrayals become Peter’s final identity. The disciple who failed most publicly becomes the disciple entrusted with the Church.

    For Carrère, this reveals something extraordinary about Christianity.

    Its deepest appeal is not its miracles.

    Nor its theology.

    Nor even its promises of salvation.

    Its deepest appeal is its startling willingness to embrace people who repeatedly fail their own highest convictions.

    Carrère remains an agnostic.

    Yet this vision of grace continues to haunt him.

    He cannot entirely believe.

    But neither can he entirely leave.

    Perhaps that lingering attachment is itself evidence of what he calls Christianity’s “pure goodness”—a goodness powerful enough to bind even those who cannot confidently call themselves believers.

  • The Strange Beauty of Boring Things

    The Strange Beauty of Boring Things

    I’m almost sixty-five, yet some stubborn part of me remains a man-child, forever scanning the horizon for the next shiny object. There is always another watch to admire, another gadget to research, another purchase that whispers the ancient promise: This one will finally complete you.

    It never does.

    Still, I’m not without hope.

    Lurking beneath my acquisitive instincts is another impulse—one that longs for restraint, clean lines, quiet competence, and the elegant marriage of form and function. I have begun to suspect that growing up is not the abandonment of desire but its refinement.

    The first clue arrived six months ago when it came time to buy a personal desktop computer.

    The younger version of me might have ogled a hulking gaming tower glowing like a radioactive Christmas tree, festooned with RGB lights and fans loud enough to suggest an imminent liftoff. Instead, I bought a Mac Mini with Apple’s M4 chip and 32 gigabytes of RAM. It sits on my desk in near silence, doing exactly what I ask of it without begging for applause. It is the technological equivalent of a competent butler: always present, never theatrical.

    The pattern continued.

    When I think about replacing my car, I don’t fantasize about a German sports sedan or some aggressively sculpted SUV that looks eager to challenge strangers at stoplights. I picture a white or silver Honda Accord Hybrid EX-L.

    It’s boring.

    That is precisely the point.

    It is vanilla and Zen fused into one magnificent state of automotive enlightenment.

    Call it Zen-illa.

    The same instinct explains why I keep gravitating toward a ThinkPad T14 Gen 7. There is nothing glamorous about it. It resembles a laptop designed by accountants who moonlight as structural engineers. It doesn’t seduce you. It reassures you. It quietly announces, “I was built to work, not to pose.”

    Then there is the watch.

    If I buy another G-Shock, it will almost certainly be the GW-5000U—not because it is flashy, but because it isn’t. It is, in many ways, the highest expression of the original Square: understated, overengineered, supremely comfortable, and utterly indifferent to fashion. It doesn’t ask to be admired. It asks to be worn.

    These objects all embody what I call Instrumental Nobility: the quality of an object whose excellence derives from uncompromising function, durability, and thoughtful engineering rather than luxury, prestige, or visual spectacle.

    Increasingly, that is the beauty I find myself pursuing.

    Perhaps this is what maturity looks like.

    Not losing the desire to acquire, but acquiring things that quietly disappear into your life because they perform their task so faithfully that they free your attention for higher pursuits.

    I still have traces of the man-child in me. Every now and then he wakes up and points excitedly at some gleaming bauble, convinced that salvation is only one purchase away.

    The adult has learned to smile politely, pat him on the head, and say, “No. We have a manuscript to finish.”

    If all goes well, by the time I turn seventy, the adult may finally win.

  • The Vulcan Fallacy

    The Vulcan Fallacy

    Emmanuel Carrère praises Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius as “sublime,” calling it “a long, mulling, sumptuous meditation on the art of living.” Seneca’s ambition is not merely to make us happier but to transform us. We are to outlive our vices until our actions naturally align with our highest thoughts.

    Carrère finds striking parallels between Stoicism and Buddhism. Both insist that our fate is shaped by our actions. Both treat gratitude as indispensable to happiness. Most importantly, both reject the notion that happiness arrives by accident. Happiness is a discipline.

    For Seneca, that discipline begins with relentless attention.

    Like physical strength, moral strength must be exercised until it becomes second nature. The Stoics called this exercise meditatio. Carrère’s friend Hervé wonderfully describes it as “the patient and scrupulous espionage of oneself by oneself.” I would call this Self-Espionage: the disciplined practice of observing one’s own motives, habits, and reactions with the detached vigilance of an investigator searching for hidden weaknesses.

    Paul Veyne captures the comic excess of this discipline with characteristic wit: “A Stoic does three things when he eats: he eats, he observes himself eating, and he composes a little poem about it.”

    The joke succeeds because it contains a truth. The Stoic never entirely stops watching himself.

    Eventually, however, the watching becomes unnecessary. Through years of disciplined reflection, thoughts, desires, and actions gradually converge until virtue no longer feels like effort. The mature Stoic—or Buddhist—does not strive to become mindful. He simply is. Seneca expresses this state with extraordinary elegance: “I don’t obey God, I agree with him.”

    This is Virtuous Convergence: the gradual alignment of one’s thoughts, desires, and actions until moral behavior no longer requires constant effort or self-policing.

    If Carrère ended there, The Kingdom would become an eloquent defense of Stoicism.

    He doesn’t.

    He believes something essential is missing.

    Drawing upon Paul Veyne’s introduction to Seneca, Carrère observes that Stoicism ultimately “misses out on what makes life interesting.” Veyne likens the Stoic to a thermostat whose sole purpose is maintaining a constant temperature regardless of changing conditions.

    It is a devastating metaphor.

    Life surely demands more than emotional climate control.

    Carrère presses the point further:

    What is the wisdom that consists in purging life of all novelty, emotion, curiosity, desire? That’s the major objection you can also put to Buddhism: that it considers desire an enemy. Desire and suffering go hand in hand: remove desire, and you also remove suffering. Even if it’s true, is it worth it?

    That question lingers.

    I think of hobbies that border on obsession.

    Some people collect paintings.

    Others collect sculpture or photography.

    I belong to the fraternity of watch enthusiasts, where otherwise sensible adults willingly torment themselves over beautifully engineered objects costing sums that would embarrass a financial planner.

    The obsession is irrational.

    That is precisely why it is enjoyable.

    The endless comparisons, the longing, the research, the anticipation, the occasional disappointment—these are not unfortunate side effects of the hobby.

    They are the hobby.

    A life stripped of every gratuitous passion may indeed become tranquil.

    It also risks becoming flavorless.

    No spice.

    No texture.

    No delightful absurdity.

    It is a world in perfect emotional equilibrium.

    It is also a world inhabited by Dr. Spock.

    The difficulty, of course, is that Spock is a Vulcan.

    We are not.

    This is where I part company with Stoicism.

    Its great weakness is what I call the Vulcan Fallacy: the mistaken belief that the highest form of human flourishing consists in eliminating emotional turbulence, desire, and irrational passions, thereby confusing emotional stability with a fully lived life.

    Human beings are not designed merely to maintain psychological equilibrium.

    We fall in love knowing our hearts may be broken.

    We create art knowing it may fail.

    We raise children knowing they will one day leave us.

    We pursue beauty, excellence, adventure, and impossible ambitions fully aware that desire carries disappointment in its wake.

    The point is not to eliminate suffering.

    The point is to discover which desires make the suffering worthwhile.

    Perfect serenity may produce admirable self-control.

    It has never produced Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

    Nor has it built cathedrals, written great novels, explored unknown oceans, or inspired a father to stay awake all night beside the hospital bed of his sick child.

    The fully human life requires more than a perfectly calibrated thermostat.

  • When Father Time Becomes Your Authorized Watch Dealer

    When Father Time Becomes Your Authorized Watch Dealer

    At sixty-five, with retirement approaching, I have aged out of five-thousand-dollar watches.

    Not because I can’t appreciate them.

    Not because they aren’t beautiful.

    Because I no longer have the wrist time.

    Twenty more years—if fortune is generous—is not enough to justify rotating my current collection alongside two additional grail pieces that would spend most of their lives quietly aging in a watch box. I call this Chronological Misalignment: the condition in which a person’s remaining lifetime no longer justifies acquiring possessions intended to be enjoyed over a much longer horizon.

    Time eventually becomes the harshest accountant.

    But time is only half the problem.

    The other half is geography.

    Or, more accurately, lifestyle.

    I still admire the Grand Seiko GMT. I still admire the Tudor Pelagos. They remain magnificent objects.

    I simply struggle to imagine wearing one while binge-watching Hulu, pushing a shopping cart through Target, or taking my daughters to YogurtLand for frozen yogurt.

    The watch would be dressed for an expedition to Antarctica.

    I would be buying gummy bears by the ounce.

    The mismatch is almost comic.

    I call this Environmental Misalignment: the condition in which one owns or desires objects whose elegance exceeds the ordinary circumstances of one’s daily life.

    Recognizing these two forms of misalignment is not depressing.

    It is liberating.

    Reality has performed the difficult task of setting my priorities for me.

    The question is no longer whether I can justify another grail watch.

    The question is what deserves that energy instead.

    For decades, watches occupied an astonishing amount of mental real estate. They required research, comparison, speculation, buying, selling, photographing, discussing, and occasionally irrational justification.

    Now that enthusiasm has become available for reassignment.

    It belongs elsewhere.

    It belongs in writing.

    It belongs at the piano.

    It belongs in my kettlebell-filled garage.

    Most of all, it belongs to my health.

    I am still about twenty pounds overweight.

    My physician periodically reminds me that it is time for fasting bloodwork—cholesterol, blood sugar, and the rest of the annual report card. I already know roughly what the results will say. At 230 pounds, everything will probably look respectable except my LDL cholesterol, which has an annoying habit of hovering around the borderline.

    So the mission is obvious.

    Reach 210 pounds.

    Then endure the ritual: skip breakfast, forgo the morning coffee, wait patiently while someone extracts several vials of blood, drive home slightly lightheaded, and receive laboratory numbers worthy of the inconvenience.

    At thirty-five, my grail was a Tudor Pelagos.

    At sixty-five, my grail is different. It’s a total cholesterol below 200 and a blood pressure reading of 120 over 80.

    That is not surrender.

    That is maturity.

    There comes a point in life when we stop negotiating with Father Time.

    He begins issuing instructions.

    He says:

    “You’re not wearing a Grand Seiko to Trader Joe’s.

    You’re not timing your afternoon nap with a luxury GMT.

    Your assignment now is different.

    Become as healthy as possible.

    Remain mentally sharp.

    Write your books.

    Play your piano.

    Stay strong enough that your family never has to carry you through the final chapters of your life.”

    For once, I find myself with no desire to argue.

    His orders make perfect sense.

    The remarkable thing is that they do not diminish my life.

    They simplify it.

    The pursuit of watches has quietly given way to the pursuit of longevity, creativity, and strength. Those ambitions promise far greater returns than another polished titanium case ever could.

    I wrote this little manifesto wearing a G-Shock Frogman.

    It told time just as faithfully as any luxury watch.

    More importantly, it reminded me that I have finally found a grail worthy of the time I have left.

  • Why the Rich Writer Walked Away

    Why the Rich Writer Walked Away

    Emmanuel Carrère may call himself an agnostic, but The Kingdom leaves little doubt that he believes Christianity possesses a terrifying kind of power. The tragedy, he suggests, is that many of us fail to experience that power not because Christianity is intellectually implausible, but because its demands are more than we are willing to bear.

    Like Carrère, we have become deeply attached to a particular way of life.

    We cultivate an identity that is worldly, ironic, sophisticated, and clever. We delight in demonstrating impeccable taste—not merely through the books we read but through the books we are seen reading. We proudly own the latest gadgets, make exquisitely informed purchases, and quietly enjoy belonging to that invisible fraternity of people who seem always to know what is worth buying, watching, and thinking. We mistake refinement for wisdom and discernment for virtue. We become connoisseurs of status disguised as connoisseurs of culture.

    Jesus threatens that entire arrangement.

    He insists that what we call power is often a counterfeit. Real power lies not in accumulating influence, wealth, admiration, or control but in relinquishing them. His invitation is not merely to improve our lives but to surrender them.

    That is the problem.

    Even if we admire Christ’s vision of humility and sacrificial love, we remain enchanted by the life we have painstakingly constructed. We love our comforts. We love our reputations. We love the illusion that we are directing our own destinies. We hesitate before following a God who has an unsettling habit of leading people into uncertainty, humiliation, danger, and, in the cases of Peter, Paul, and James, martyrdom.

    Carrère recognizes this reluctance within himself.

    With remarkable honesty, he contemplates his privileged life with melancholy, guilt, and unease. He is an acclaimed novelist. He travels the world. He vacations in beautiful places. He inhabits an aesthetic world polished by wealth, education, and artistic success.

    His confession is devastating: “I live in perpetual worship of and worry about my person, but also that I strongly believe in this person. I know nothing other than my own ego, and I believe that this ego exists.”

    Though agnostic about God, he is utterly certain of his ego.

    That certainty, he fears, is precisely the problem.

    The ego always asks the same question:

    What do I want?

    The Gospel asks a different one:

    What is right?

    The two questions frequently point in opposite directions.

    I know this conflict all too well.

    When I think about factory farming, I arrive at a conclusion I find difficult to escape. Morally speaking, I believe reducing or eliminating my participation in that system would be the more defensible course. The suffering involved troubles my conscience.

    Yet my behavior tells another story.

    I enjoy carne asada tacos. Family celebrations revolve around meat-centered meals. Refusing them would complicate relationships, invite awkward explanations, and separate me from customs that bind me to the people I love. Even if I located a sympathetic vegan community, meeting once a month to encourage one another would hardly replace the ordinary rhythms of family life.

    So I continue with my non-vegan ways.

    There exists a painful gap between my moral convictions and my daily habits.

    That gap exposes what I call Lifestyle Captivity: the condition in which a person’s comforts, status, pleasures, and social identity become so psychologically indispensable that they prevent wholehearted commitment to moral convictions or spiritual transformation.

    My attachment to pleasure proves stronger than my attachment to principle.

    That is not strength.

    It is weakness.

    Jesus’ warning about the rich man and the eye of the needle has always sounded exaggerated—until one realizes that wealth is not merely money. Wealth includes every possession, pleasure, habit, reputation, and identity we cannot imagine surrendering.

    This is the passage in The Kingdom that haunts Carrère most deeply.

    It haunts me as well.

    Reflecting on the story of the rich young ruler, Carrère writes with heartbreaking simplicity:

    “I identify with the rich young man. I have great wealth.”

    His wealth extends beyond money. It includes literary acclaim, artistic fulfillment, intellectual prestige, and the profound satisfaction of having discovered his vocation as a writer. He recognizes himself in an apocryphal saying attributed to Jesus: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

    Writing has become the means by which Carrère brings forth what is within him. It has given his life coherence, purpose, and joy.

    Yet even this gift becomes suspect.

    Whenever he takes satisfaction in his success, another voice interrupts.

    He writes:

    Nevertheless, a stubborn little voice persistently interrupts these moments of pharisaical smugness. It says that all the riches I enjoy—the wisdom I pride myself on, the confident hope I have of being on the right track—are what prevent real accomplishment. I never stop winning, although to really win I’d have to lose. I’m rich, gifted, praised, deserving, and conscious that I deserve: for all of that, woe to me!

    No amount of psychoanalysis, meditation, or self-acceptance silences that voice.

    Modern therapeutic culture encourages him to celebrate himself.

    The Gospel asks him to lose himself.

    Those are not the same project.

    In one of the most moving passages in the book, Carrère finally admits: “Nevertheless, I think that the little voice of the Gospel is right. And like the rich young man, I walk away, sad and pensive, for I have great wealth.”

    He may call himself an agnostic.

    Yet somewhere beneath the skepticism, beneath the irony, beneath the literary sophistication and psychological nuance, an unmistakably Christian longing remains alive.

    He longs to renounce the worldly attachments that have made him successful. He longs to exchange self-possession for surrender. He longs to discover whether lowering himself might, paradoxically, become the only path upward.

    Perhaps that is why The Kingdom refuses to become either an apology for Christianity or an argument against it.

    It is the confession of a man who cannot silence the Gospel’s little voice.

    Neither, I suspect, can I.

  • You Can’t Explain Beethoven

    You Can’t Explain Beethoven

    In his autobiographical novel The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère revisits the three years in his thirties when he became an intensely devoted Christian. Looking back, he is both fascinated and bewildered by the man he once was. He cannot decide whether those years of fervent faith represented a genuine encounter with God or a desperate attempt to survive depression and a crippling creative drought. He wonders whether, like Paul on the road to Damascus, he underwent a kind of mutation—and whether his later deconversion into agnosticism is simply another mutation of the self.

    What is striking is that Carrère refuses to declare one mutant superior to the other.

    He does not write as the triumphant rationalist looking back with condescension upon his younger, credulous self. Nor does he portray his conversion as the last moment of authentic truth before an unfortunate fall into unbelief. He extends equal curiosity to both versions of himself, unable to say with confidence which one saw reality more clearly. The believer and the agnostic remain locked in an unresolved conversation.

    Carrère also discovers an unexpected kinship with Luke. Both are storytellers. Both understand that narratives do more than report events—they persuade, shape memory, create identity, and sometimes become civilization’s most enduring myths.

    For this reason, Carrère navigates the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letters with impressive confidence. They invite historical investigation. They provoke questions of authorship, chronology, motive, and psychology. They reward the tools of criticism.

    Luke’s Gospel is different.

    When Carrère arrives there, his confidence evaporates.

    He becomes, in his own word, “speechless.”

    He wonders whether his silence arises because so much of Luke is imaginative, because it overflows with piety, because too many of its characters seem to exist without obvious historical models—or because approaching such a text without “fear and trembling” renders the entire exercise meaningless.

    That question reveals something profound.

    Analyzing Luke’s Gospel solely as an academic artifact begins to resemble explaining Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony through harmonic analysis while ignoring the experience of hearing it performed. The music may be dissected measure by measure, every modulation cataloged, every motif traced, yet none of that explains why generations have emerged from it transformed. It would be like arguing for Beethoven’s artistic greatness by comparing chord progressions with Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” Such an argument would be absurd. The argument may be persuasive, but it somehow misses the thing that made the work worth discussing in the first place.

    Luke’s Gospel confronts Carrère with what I call Reverential Limits: the recognition that certain works of art, literature, and religion cannot be fully understood through detached analysis alone because they also demand awe, imagination, and existential participation.

    This realization is one of the reasons The Kingdom rises above the familiar memoir of conversion or deconversion. It refuses the tidy architecture of books entitled Why I Became an X or Why I Am No Longer an X. Those books usually know their destination before the first page is written. They exist to prosecute a case and deliver a verdict.

    Carrère’s novel has a more ambitious purpose.

    It preserves wonder.

    The farther he investigates Christianity, the less eager he becomes to reduce it to a slogan, a certainty, or a manifesto. He discovers that the deepest encounters with great religion resemble the deepest encounters with great art. They resist summary. They refuse domestication. They leave us, not with the smug satisfaction of having solved the mystery, but with the unsettling realization that the mystery has somehow enlarged us.

    Sometimes the highest form of understanding is not another argument.

    Sometimes it is speechlessness.

  • Watch Enthusiasts and the Accumulation-Purge Cycle

    Watch Enthusiasts and the Accumulation-Purge Cycle

    A friend of mine has a wealthy father-in-law who retired to a gated community in West Palm Beach. He has cultivated an impressive talent for acquiring expensive watches, designer clothing, and high-end running shoes. His favorite purchase, apparently, is the duplicate. If one pair of premium running shoes is excellent, surely two are prudent. If one luxury watch brings satisfaction, another identical model must provide insurance against…something.

    Eventually, his closets revolt.

    Shelves bow under the weight of unopened boxes. Clothing hangs shoulder to shoulder like commuters on a Tokyo subway. The sheer abundance begins to oppress him. Faced with the consequences of his own abundance, he experiences a sudden burst of generosity.

    Or something that resembles generosity.

    My friend receives bins overflowing with expensive gifts. The contents are genuinely valuable, yet he returns home feeling less like the grateful beneficiary of extraordinary kindness than like a volunteer who has helped a neighbor haul unwanted furniture to the curb. The gifts are real, but so is the unmistakable sense that he has performed a public service by relieving his father-in-law of possessions that had become psychological clutter.

    Watching this reminded me uncomfortably of the watch hobby.

    Collectors, myself included, often suffer from what I call Acquisitive Respiration: the rhythm by which collectors inhale possessions through acquisition and exhale them through selling, gifting, or donating, each phase making the other possible.

    This rhythm belongs to a larger pathology: the Accumulation-Purge Cycle—the recurring compulsion to acquire possessions until their abundance becomes psychologically burdensome, prompting a purge that temporarily relieves anxiety while quietly preparing the ground for the next buying spree.

    The cycle is not merely behavioral. It is homeostatic.

    The system oscillates between excess and correction without ever confronting the appetite that created the excess in the first place.

    The watch collector inhales watches until opening the watch box produces mild panic instead of pleasure. The chronic dieter inhales calories until climbing a flight of stairs becomes an unwelcome cardiovascular event. Then comes the ritual of purification.

    The collector sells half the collection.

    The dieter loses thirty pounds.

    Both experience the intoxicating relief of restoration. Both congratulate themselves on their newfound discipline. Both quietly assume the problem has been solved.

    It hasn’t.

    The collector’s relationship to acquisition remains untouched. The dieter’s relationship to food remains fundamentally unchanged. The purge delivers genuine psychological relief, but it also resets the conditions for the next cycle. Empty watch slots begin whispering about future purchases. A slimmer waistline invites the dangerous thought that perhaps another slice of cheesecake won’t matter after all.

    Before long, the watch box fills again.

    Before long, so do the pants.

    This suggests a broader psychological principle.

    The purge often becomes part of the addiction rather than its cure.

    Indeed, the purge can become one of addiction’s most ingenious accomplices. It reassures us that excess carries no permanent consequences because everything can always be corrected later. Tomorrow’s diet becomes permission for today’s binge. Next month’s watch sale becomes justification for today’s impulse purchase.

    The purge feels like repentance.

    Sometimes it is merely maintenance.

    Real freedom arrives not when we become exceptionally skilled at emptying our closets or shrinking our waistlines, but when we no longer need to inhale so much in the first place.

  • Nothing Gets Better

    Nothing Gets Better

    Yesterday my piano tuner, Cecil, came by to work on my upright. He is pushing eighty, has spent a lifetime coaxing reluctant pianos back into harmony, and charges $250 for a tuning. I pay it gladly. When someone has become the best in the business, you stop thinking about the fee and start thinking about the privilege.

    After he finished, we lingered and talked about Southern California.

    I told him that whenever I return to my old stomping grounds in the Bay Area, I leave with the same impression: everything feels more crowded, more hurried, more stressful, and somehow less hospitable than I remember. The roads seem angrier. The neighborhoods seem denser. Even the air feels impatient.

    Without the slightest hesitation, Cecil smiled and delivered a sentence that landed with the force of an ancient proverb.

    “Nothing gets better.”

    The words settled over me like a truth I had always known but kept forgetting.

    Nothing gets better.

    Cecil continued. Torrance, he predicted, will eventually resemble West Los Angeles. Massive apartment complexes are already rising near our neighborhood. Del Amo Fashion Center has become a preview of the future. Try finding a parking space after eleven o’clock on a weekday. On weekends, don’t bother. The future has already begun circling the parking lot.

    Yet Cecil wasn’t complaining.

    That is the crucial distinction.

    His observation was not an invitation to pessimism but to realism.

    Most of our unhappiness comes from quietly assuming that the world ought to become more convenient, more orderly, more civilized, and less crowded as time marches on. When reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate, we conclude that something has gone terribly wrong.

    Perhaps nothing has gone wrong at all.

    Perhaps this is simply what civilizations do. They grow denser, noisier, more complicated, and more exhausting. Every technological advance solves one problem while inventing three new ones. Every improvement arrives carrying an invoice.

    I have come to think of this as the Cecil Principle: the recognition that the world rarely becomes simpler, quieter, or more civilized over time, requiring us to cultivate resilience rather than nostalgia or utopian expectation.

    The Cecil Principle reminded me of psychiatrist Phil Stutz, who reduces life to three unavoidable realities: pain, uncertainty, and constant work. According to Stutz, psychological health begins not by escaping these conditions but by accepting them. The fantasy that life should become comfortable is itself the source of much unnecessary suffering.

    Cecil, with considerably fewer words, had arrived at the same destination.

    Nothing gets better.

    Strangely, there is liberation in that sentence. Once I stop expecting history to reward me with perpetual improvement, I become less resentful when it doesn’t. I stop waiting for the perfect city, the perfect traffic pattern, the perfect political climate, or the perfect era. I become more attentive to the quiet pleasures still available: a well-tuned piano, an honest conversation, a competent craftsman who has spent decades mastering his trade.

    Nothing gets better.

    Oddly enough, accepting that fact makes life better.

    The truth, after all, has an unexpected habit of setting us free.