Cinemorphosis

Category: fiction

  • My First Apocalypse

    My First Apocalypse

    Struggling with a persistent and indefinable mental malaise, Emmanuel Carrère eventually found relief when his psychiatrist prescribed an antipsychotic medication advertised as a treatment for “erroneous beliefs.” The phrase amused him. It sounded less like a pharmaceutical claim than a diagnosis of the human condition. If his life had been governed by erroneous beliefs, perhaps the drug was aimed less at his brain than at his philosophy.

    As a hormone-soaked adolescent, I suffered from my own spectacular assortment of erroneous beliefs.

    One of the most consequential arrived courtesy of Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling The Population Bomb. The book convinced me that civilization stood on the brink of collapse. Humanity would soon drown beneath its own numbers. Famine, drought, and social chaos were not distant possibilities but tomorrow’s weather forecast.

    Under those circumstances, dating struck me as a curious misuse of time.

    Why cultivate romance when the planet was preparing for its own obituary?

    Why ask a girl to the movies when we would soon be rationing freeze-dried food aboard lunar colonies, assuming we survived long enough to board the shuttle?

    My imagination raced well beyond Ehrlich’s predictions. In my private apocalypse there would be no health clubs, no squat racks, no barbells, and, worst of all, no gravity worthy of serious resistance training. Without a gym and a steady supply of protein, my hard-earned physique would evaporate. I pictured myself shrinking into the shape of a tomato balanced precariously atop four toothpicks. The image horrified me with an intensity wildly disproportionate to the fate of civilization itself.

    Most teenagers worry about acne.

    I worried about post-apocalyptic muscle atrophy.

    Love became a luxury for people foolish enough to believe there would still be a future. Courtship seemed almost irresponsible. Civilization was ending, and I had more pressing concerns than holding hands at the mall.

    Looking back, I marvel not at how mistaken I was but at how eagerly the adolescent mind embraces catastrophe. Young people are naturally drawn to grand narratives. Some expect salvation. Others anticipate doom. Both stories offer the same seductive promise: that ordinary life is about to be interrupted by something world-altering.

    In my case, the world never ended.

    The apocalypse quietly expired.

    My erroneous beliefs, however, proved far more resilient than Paul Ehrlich’s predictions.

  • When Sore Calves Meant Salvation

    When Sore Calves Meant Salvation

    Emmanuel Carrère writes that in 1990 he was “touched by grace.” For the next three years he attended Mass every day, immersed himself in the Gospel of John, and filled some twenty notebooks with commentaries. Looking back, he remembers remarkably little of that period and has made no effort to recover it. His amnesia suggests that grace, at least in its fanatical form, can be exhausting enough to become something one prefers to leave buried.

    I underwent my own conversion in 1976.

    I was touched not by grace but by the bodybuilding bug.

    Like every true conversion, it demanded far more than outward behavior. It required a new vocabulary, new authorities, new rituals, and a new vision of salvation. My sacred texts were Iron Man, Strength & Health, Muscle Builder, and MuscleMag International. My saints were Ron Teufel, Frank Zane, Robbie Robinson, Mike Mentzer, and Tom Platz. Their routines were studied with the seriousness medieval monks reserved for Augustine.

    Every afternoon I retreated to my father’s office and sat before his IBM Selectric typewriter. Carrère filled notebooks with reflections on John’s Gospel. I filled page after page with workouts.

    The process bordered on liturgical.

    KSFX drifted through the room, playing the O’Jays, the Four Tops, Earth, Wind & Fire, and the Miracles while I stared at the page like a theologian confronting an elusive doctrine. I would type a routine, scrutinize it, decide that my split routine lacked perfection, tear it from the machine, crumple it into a ball, and begin again. Sets became sentences. Repetitions became revisions. Every workout was a rough draft of the body I believed I was destined to become.

    What I sought was not merely a better pump.

    I was searching for the Platonic Workout, the one perfect arrangement of exercises that would lift me beyond ordinary muscular development into something approaching spiritual transcendence.

    It was absurd.

    It was also glorious.

    The ritual calmed me, excited me, and filled me with hope all at once. Every newly typed workout promised that next week, finally, I would become the person I had imagined myself to be.

    The conversion had other liturgical requirements.

    On more than one occasion I composed these workouts wearing nothing but a Speedo because it somehow placed me in the proper state of mind. Serious theological work demanded proper vestments.

    One afternoon, after an hour of merciless calf raises, I sat typing when I noticed that my calves were exquisitely tender to the touch. The soreness delighted me.

    My mother walked into the office.

    “Dinner’s ready,” she said. Then she paused.

    “Why are you so happy?”

    I reached down and squeezed my calf.

    “My calves,” I said. “They’re sore.”

    She looked puzzled.

    “Why does that make you happy?”

    I smiled with the serene certainty of a man who had glimpsed the kingdom.

    “They’re growing, Mom.”

    A pause.

    “They’re growing.”

  • True Believers Are Not Exotic Specimens

    True Believers Are Not Exotic Specimens

    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.

  • Everyone Is Waiting to Be Converted

    Everyone Is Waiting to Be Converted

    In his autobiographical novel The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère describes a television series he once helped develop. The premise is quietly unsettling. In a small rural town, the dead return to life. There are no zombies, no horror tropes, no supernatural spectacle. The dead simply resume their ordinary lives. Your husband comes home from work. Your daughter asks what’s for dinner. Your father sits in his favorite chair. None of them remembers dying. The burden falls not on the resurrected but on the living, who must reconcile themselves to the impossible.

    Carrère uses this premise as a metaphor for religious conversion.

    A genuine conversion does not merely alter a person’s opinions. It kills one self and replaces it with another. The converted person still wears the same face, but something essential has vanished. The old personality has become a ghost.

    Carrère knows this from experience. For three years in the early 1990s he was consumed by Christian faith. Looking back, he regards that intensely devout version of himself almost as one regards a deceased relative: familiar, unforgettable, and yet strangely unrecognizable.

    The same paradox appears in Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Saul the persecutor would have despised Paul the apostle. Paul the apostle would have regarded Saul as spiritually blind. They occupy the same body while inhabiting entirely different moral universes.

    Carrère calls Christianity’s astonishing expansion the Great Mutation. Within a few centuries, roughly a quarter of the known world accepted the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, miracles, eternal life, and the conviction that earthly existence was merely the waiting room for a greater kingdom. Whether one believes those claims is almost beside the point. The historical achievement is staggering. Few ideas have ever transformed so many human beings so thoroughly.

    Reading Carrère made me realize that religious conversion is only one species of a much larger phenomenon.

    Human beings are conversion machines.

    A politically indifferent commuter begins listening to Rush Limbaugh during long drives to work. Months later he is no longer merely listening; he is quoting, arguing, and eventually thinking in Limbaugh’s cadences. The broadcaster has not simply gained an audience. He has acquired disciples.

    Sometimes I amused myself by imagining an absurd sequel.

    Suppose Rush Limbaugh had awakened one morning as a granola-eating vegan who had embraced Buddhism, practiced yoga at sunrise, and urged his listeners to forgive their political enemies because resentment disrupts the universe’s healing vibrations.

    His audience would have experienced something close to theological collapse.

    The prophet had abandoned the faith.

    Followers who had built their identities around his certainties would suddenly find themselves spiritually homeless. Many would scramble toward new authorities with the desperation of refugees. Some might discover John Bradshaw and begin healing their Inner Child. Others would embrace Deepak Chopra and begin assuring bewildered relatives that “the universe has no fixed agenda,” thereby ensuring they would never again be invited to host Thanksgiving dinner.

    The point is that conversion is not confined to religion.

    As Eric Hoffer argues in The True Believer, people burdened by inadequacy rarely seek modest improvement. They crave wholesale transformation. If religion fails to satisfy that hunger, they will seek redemption elsewhere—in politics, psychology, nutrition, fitness, investing, or hobbies.

    As a teenage bodybuilder in the 1970s, my friends and I didn’t merely admire Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    We wanted to become Arnold.

    Protein shakes were our communion wine. Carb loading was liturgy. The biceps pump bordered on mystical experience. We weren’t building muscle nearly as much as we were pursuing salvation.

    This morning I stumbled across a Reddit post from a G-Shock enthusiast celebrating his GW-6900. According to him, the watch had changed his life. He no longer wanted another watch. He had conquered watch addiction. He was cured.

    I smiled because I recognized the language immediately.

    He wasn’t describing a purchase.

    He was describing a conversion.

    His watch had become Damascus on the wrist.

    Carrère observes that most of us live comfortably in two parallel worlds. One contains our practical routines: paying bills, driving to work, buying groceries. The other houses our transcendent convictions, the stories that persuade us our lives are moving toward redemption rather than mere survival.

    That second world is never empty for long.

    If we lose one faith, another waits patiently around the corner. It may arrive dressed as a political movement, a diet, a fitness program, a philosopher, or even a watch. We flatter ourselves that we are rational creatures who occasionally become believers.

    The evidence suggests the opposite.

    We are believers searching for the next conversion.

  • The X-Ray Bully Principle

    The X-Ray Bully Principle

    I have often imagined writing a novel about a boy tormented by a sixth-grade bully. At first glance, the story seems painfully familiar. One child possesses power; another lacks it. One humiliates; the other endures. There are already enough novels about that.

    The interesting story begins decades later.

    The bully is drawn to the boy’s visible sadness the way sharks are drawn to blood. Whether that instinct originates in the bully’s own wounds is impossible to know. Perhaps his father’s death from a heart attack in his thirties left him carrying around an anger too large for a child to bear. Perhaps he simply needed somewhere to dump his rage, and the melancholy boy looked like an accommodating landfill.

    Or perhaps that explanation is sentimental nonsense.

    Perhaps the bully required no tragedy to become cruel. Some people seem to arrive in the world with an uncanny instinct for locating weakness and pressing on it until it bruises.

    Whatever the explanation, the bully needed only to glimpse the boy’s face.

    That face was enough.

    The sadness irritated him. The fear provoked him. The quietness felt like an accusation. Around everyone else he was merely disagreeable. Around this particular boy he became incandescent with contempt. The sight of vulnerability transformed him into an artist of humiliation.

    That, however, is not the novel.

    Bullies are common.

    What fascinates me is what happens inside the victim.

    At first the boy hates his tormentor in the ordinary way. He dreams of revenge. He imagines vindication. He rehearses speeches he will never deliver.

    Then something disturbing happens.

    He grows older.

    He begins examining himself with ruthless honesty. He sees his cowardice, vanity, evasions, self-pity, and moral compromises. Gradually, almost against his own will, he starts to wonder whether the bully had been right all along.

    Not right about the cruelty.

    Right about him.

    The bully becomes, in memory, the only person who had truly seen through the performance. Everyone else had mistaken shyness for humility, sensitivity for virtue, sadness for depth. The bully had looked beneath the surface and detected something darker.

    Weakness.

    Duplicity.

    Self-deception.

    The victim begins to believe that the insults were less acts of cruelty than acts of diagnosis.

    He embraces what I call the X-Ray Bully Principle: the belief that a tormentor’s cruelty was justified because he uniquely perceived one’s hidden moral defects and therefore functioned, however unwillingly, as a truth-teller rather than merely an aggressor.

    This inversion changes everything.

    The bully is no longer remembered as a playground tyrant.

    He becomes a prophet.

    His taunts acquire the authority of Scripture. His ridicule is transformed into revelation. His contempt begins to resemble religious flagellation—a painful but necessary discipline administered to expose hidden corruption.

    The victim quietly canonizes his persecutor.

    That is the real tragedy.

    The bully’s greatest victory was never the humiliation he inflicted on a frightened twelve-year-old. It was persuading that boy, decades later, that the humiliation had been deserved.

    The novel, then, is not about bullying.

    It is about the terrifying human capacity to mistake condemnation for insight and abuse for truth. It asks whether our harshest critics possess privileged access to our secret selves or whether shame simply grants them an authority they never earned.

    That question has haunted me far longer than any playground insult ever could.

  • The Great Mutation

    The Great Mutation

    Emmanuel Carrère has become my literary patron saint because he asks the questions I cannot stop asking myself. Of all his books, The Kingdom has lodged itself deepest inside me because it dramatizes the same conflict that has haunted my life: the impossible task of separating myself from Christianity without ever quite escaping its gravitational pull.

    In The Kingdom, Carrère intertwines autobiography with the story of Luke, imagining the evangelist as a writer following the missionary adventures of his hero, Paul. Luke becomes more than a biblical figure. He becomes Carrère’s alter ego, a fellow writer trying to make sense of extraordinary events while simultaneously making sense of himself.

    That double inquiry is what captivates me.

    Carrère interrogates not merely Christianity but his own soul.

    One of the most striking subjects of that interrogation is success.

    By any worldly standard, Carrère has won the lottery. He is one of France’s most celebrated writers. His opinions carry cultural weight. He serves on prestigious literary juries. Filmmakers seek his advice. Publishers court him. His books travel farther than most people ever will. He stays in elegant hotels, dines with influential people, and inhabits the rarefied atmosphere reserved for intellectual celebrities.

    Yet success has not quieted him.

    If anything, it has sharpened his discomfort.

    Part of him believes that his accomplishments have carried him farther from Jesus than closer to him. Although he long ago emerged from what he calls his “Christian period,” the desire to follow Jesus never entirely disappeared. It lingers like an old melody that refuses to leave his mind.

    That desire creates an almost unbearable tension because Jesus demands a way of life that appears to mock nearly every modern definition of success.

    Love your enemies.

    Bless those who persecute you.

    Do not exalt yourself.

    Sell your possessions.

    Take up your cross.

    Act as though this world is passing away.

    Measured against that standard, literary fame begins to resemble an embarrassing distraction.

    Carrère is fascinated by Christianity’s vision of salvation, yet he recoils from its radicalism. The Gospel asks us to hold our earthly attachments lightly. Marriage, children, wealth, reputation, and ambition all become secondary to membership in the family of Christ. Love itself is transformed. Instead of reserving our deepest affection for spouses, children, and friends, Jesus seems to demand an indiscriminate love that embraces everyone equally.

    Carrère pauses here.

    Can love that is equally distributed still be called love?

    Or has it become something so abstract that it evaporates into an ideal rather than a human experience?

    He contrasts this vision with what he sees as the Jewish ideal of the good life. There, holiness unfolds not by fleeing the world but by inhabiting it fully. One marries. One raises children. One prospers through honest work. One celebrates weddings, feasts, and holy days. One delights in family, longevity, generosity, and community. Earth itself becomes the stage upon which covenant is lived.

    Christianity, by contrast, often seems suspicious of precisely those satisfactions. Earthly success is fleeting. Family loyalties yield to discipleship. Riches become spiritual liabilities. This life is preparation for another kingdom.

    Carrère never completely chooses between these competing visions.

    My sense is that he is temperamentally drawn toward the Jewish embrace of earthly life. Yet he cannot stop returning to Jesus.

    Because no one ever spoke like Jesus.

    For Carrère, the singularity of Christ lies not primarily in miracles or doctrine but in language itself. Borrowing the linguistic term hapax legomenon—a word that appears only once in a body of literature—he suggests that Jesus himself is a kind of hapax: an unrepeatable event in human speech.

    He recalls the temple guards in John’s Gospel who return empty-handed after being sent to arrest Jesus.

    Their explanation is breathtakingly simple:

    “No one ever spoke like this man.”

    Carrère believes that even if one stripped away the miracle stories, even if one doubted the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and every supernatural claim, the sayings of Jesus would still stand beside those of Buddha, Laozi, Confucius, and history’s greatest spiritual teachers.

    Something unprecedented happened in those words.

    The New Testament captivates him for another reason as well.

    Some scenes possess the awkward unpredictability of eyewitness memory.

    Who invents the young man who flees naked from Gethsemane after slipping out of his linen cloth? Carrère suspects the embarrassed youth may even have been Mark himself, accidentally preserving his own humiliation in the Gospel.

    Or consider the paralyzed man whose friends dismantle a roof simply to lower him into a crowded room before Jesus.

    These episodes feel too strange, too specific, too gloriously unnecessary to be manufactured.

    By contrast, the Virgin Birth, the bodily Resurrection, and other overtly miraculous episodes leave Carrère unconvinced. They strike him as theological architecture erected after the fact.

    Yet disbelief has never extinguished fascination.

    Quite the opposite.

    Carrère remains mesmerized by what he calls “the Great Mutation.”

    Within only a few generations, an obscure Jewish movement transformed the imagination of the Western world. Millions—and eventually billions—came to believe in the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Eucharist, eternal life, and the astonishing claim that God had entered history as a poor Jewish carpenter.

    When I encounter Carrère’s phrase, “the Great Mutation,” my own imagination travels somewhere entirely different.

    It returns to Saturday evenings in 1978.

    I am alone in the living room watching The Incredible Hulk.

    Dr. David Banner is gentle, decent, almost saintly. He suffers injustice with Job-like patience until one humiliation too many unleashes something volcanic inside him. Suddenly the transformation begins. Muscles swell. Clothes tear. Humanity gives way to myth.

    The catharsis overwhelms me.

    I begin to cry.

    I don’t merely want to become stronger.

    I want to mutate.

    I want my own body to erupt into something so magnificent that every weakness, every humiliation, every fear disappears forever.

    Then the rage subsides.

    The green giant vanishes.

    David Banner returns.

    And finally comes the sequence that broke my heart every single week.

    Banner walks alone down a lonely highway while Joe Harnell’s mournful piano theme, “The Lonely Man,” drifts over the closing credits.

    That was the image I carried inside myself.

    Not the Hulk.

    David Banner.

    The solitary wanderer searching for redemption.

    As a child, I mistook that identification for purity.

    What I could not yet see was the narcissism quietly hiding inside the fantasy. I imagined myself not merely misunderstood but uniquely chosen, destined for some dramatic transformation that would finally justify my existence.

    Looking back, I realize I was already rehearsing the emotional architecture of the religious conversion that awaited me only a year later.

    Long before I met Jesus, I was already waiting for a Great Mutation.

  • The Theology of Big Biceps

    The Theology of Big Biceps

    In my imagined novel Lifter, I borrow a page from Emmanuel Carrère and turn the investigation inward. The subject is not merely my lifelong devotion to weight training but the psychic hunger that made it feel less like a hobby than a form of emergency intervention. Why did I begin lifting weights at twelve? What wound was I trying to cauterize? What fear was I trying to overpower? Looking back, I suspect I wasn’t chasing health so much as prescribing therapy for a spirit burdened by cowardice, insecurity, and an almost inexhaustible sense of inadequacy.

    The story begins before I ever touched a barbell.

    As a boy, I was consumed by baseball. I imagined myself as a fearsome slugger, not because I dreamed of leading the league in home runs, but because I wanted opponents to recoil at the sight of me before I ever stepped into the batter’s box. My heroes were not graceful athletes. They were broad-shouldered giants: Willie McCovey, Harmon Killebrew, Dick Allen, Greg Luzinski, and Reggie Jackson. But towering above them all stood the legendary Ted Kluszewski, whose biceps were so enormous that, in my child’s imagination, they simply burst through the sleeves of his uniform like the Incredible Hulk erupting from Bruce Banner’s skin.

    Only now do I recognize what fascinated me.

    It wasn’t baseball.

    It was metamorphosis.

    I wasn’t captivated by batting averages or slugging percentages. I was captivated by spectacle. I wanted the crowd to gasp before I ever swung the bat. I wanted my body to announce my arrival before my performance had the chance to disappoint. I longed to become less an athlete than a mythical creature who wandered accidentally onto a baseball diamond.

    In that fantasy, my muscles eclipsed the game itself.

    The home run was secondary. The physique was the event.

    Even as a child, I wasn’t pursuing athletic excellence so much as theatrical transformation. I wanted to become someone so physically overwhelming that ordinary rules no longer applied. If my body could become extraordinary enough, perhaps it could silence the ordinary boy trapped inside it.

    That dream would outlive baseball.

    It would follow me into bodybuilding, weightlifting, teaching, writing, and nearly every other pursuit I embraced. The details changed, but the longing remained stubbornly intact. Again and again, I sought transformation through achievement, hoping that each new accomplishment would finally extinguish the old feeling of insufficiency.

    It never did.

    The weights built stronger shoulders and thicker arms, but they proved remarkably ineffective at strengthening self-worth. Every reinvention promised belonging. Every reinvention postponed it.

    Perhaps that has been the real story all along.

    The barbell was never merely a piece of exercise equipment. It was my first attempt to lift something far heavier than iron. I wasn’t trying to transform my body so much as reinvent my soul. In the end, however, the Theology of Biceps proved incapable of saving me.

  • The Reader I Lost, the Listener I Became

    The Reader I Lost, the Listener I Became

    In terms of reading endurance, I am another casualty of the internet.

    In my early twenties, I devoured two books a week with the discipline of a bodybuilder consuming protein to build muscle. Reading was not a hobby. It was nourishment. My brain felt perpetually hungry, and books were the only food that satisfied it. I read because I was curious. I read because I wanted to flee stupidity. Most of all, I read because life felt incomplete unless I had one foot planted in a parallel literary universe. To be deprived of that universe was to feel vaguely cheated by existence itself.

    Then the internet arrived.

    It did not destroy my appetite for ideas. It fragmented it.

    My attention was gradually colonized by factoids, clickbait, social media surveillance, and articles designed less to illuminate than to be skimmed and forgotten. None of these distractions seemed particularly dangerous on their own. Together, however, they accomplished what no enemy of books had managed before: they quietly atrophied my reading muscle.

    I still read, but my reading is now compromised. In the morning, I work through essays with a cup of coffee, forcing myself to stay engaged by taking notes and writing brief summaries or critiques. At night, I can usually manage another thirty minutes of essays or short fiction before my concentration begins to fray.

    That is a far cry from the reader I once was.

    Yet my longing for that parallel literary universe never disappeared.

    It merely changed mediums.

    Today I spend at least two hours a day listening to audiobooks. I listen before dawn, during workouts, while driving, and sometimes while drifting into an afternoon nap. My library ranges from early Christian history to sports biographies, novels, philosophical polemics, memoirs, and books on health and fitness.

    Although I mourn the loss of my youthful reading stamina, I have discovered an unexpected compensation.

    In many cases, I understand books more deeply by listening to them than by reading them.

    Take Emmanuel Carrère’s Kingdom. I have read the novel obsessively four separate times. Yet hearing it performed through Audible has transformed the experience. I am no longer merely reading about Paul and Luke as they wrestle with believers and skeptics across Greece, Syria, and Israel. I feel as though I am accompanying them. Scenes unfold with cinematic immediacy. Conversations breathe. Sentences I somehow overlooked through four careful readings suddenly reveal themselves with startling clarity. Listening has not diminished the book. It has enlarged it.

    Part of this pleasure may lie deep within our evolutionary inheritance. Human beings spent thousands of years listening to storytellers, poets, prophets, and orators before most people ever encountered literature on a printed page. Perhaps the spoken voice still reaches something ancient within us.

    Another explanation is what I call the Auditory Immersion Principle: the paradox in which a listener comprehends and emotionally inhabits a book more fully through sustained listening than through silent reading because the uninterrupted flow of the narrator’s voice prevents skimming, distraction, and premature judgment. A skilled narrator refuses to let my restless internet brain dart ahead or wander elsewhere. I surrender to the current of the story instead of constantly trying to steer it.

    That discovery has filled me with renewed excitement for books I have postponed for years.

    Near the top of my Audible wish list is Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, a novel Emmanuel Carrère has said transformed his life as a child. I have no doubt that listening to it will transport me into one of literature’s great enchanted worlds. I expect to emerge from it not merely informed but changed.

    The anticipation is almost intoxicating. It feels as though pleasures this profound ought to be reserved for another realm, not made available through a pair of headphones during a morning walk.

    Perhaps that sounds like hyperbole.

    Then again, perhaps that is simply the enduring power of great literature.

    The internet may have weakened my capacity to sit for hours turning pages, but it has not extinguished my desire to inhabit extraordinary books. If anything, audiobooks have reminded me that literature has always been larger than ink on paper. Long before stories were read in silence, they were spoken aloud, carried by the human voice from one soul to another.

    In an age that fragments our attention into thousands of disposable moments, that ancient experience may be more necessary than ever.

  • The Great Lachyrmose

    The Great Lachyrmose

    The Great Lachyrmose was the stage name bestowed upon Jeff McMahon, a college writing student, bodybuilder, and part-time laborer at Jackson’s Wine and Spirits on Tunnel Road beside the Claremont Hotel. From 1983 to 1987, the store hosted wine tastings three evenings a week. There were bottles from Bordeaux, Napa, and Tuscany, a polished grand piano in the corner, and customers who came expecting Cabernet, Brie, and melancholy in equal measure.

    The ritual never varied.

    McMahon would be hidden away in the walk-in cooler stacking cases of beer or downstairs wrestling heavy crates of wine. His black T-shirt was perpetually torn, his forearms tattooed with cardboard abrasions, nicks from broken bottles, and fresh cuts courtesy of overzealous box cutters. He looked less like a concert pianist than a dockworker who had taken a wrong turn into a music conservatory.

    Soon someone at the tasting bar would ask, “Where’s Lachyrmose?”

    Another voice would join in. Then another. Before long the room itself seemed to chant for him.

    Store owner Solomon Khan, who understood that theater sells almost as well as Chardonnay, would smile knowingly. If every chair around the tasting bar had been claimed, he would haul out more until the room resembled an impromptu recital hall. Only then would the Great Lachyrmose make his entrance, emerging dramatically from the cellar or the refrigerator like some wounded Romantic hero ascending from the underworld.

    Without ceremony he would sit at the piano and spend the next hour filling the room with mournful nocturnes, elegiac waltzes, and slow-moving ballades that drifted through the store like woodsmoke on a winter evening. Conversations softened. Wine glasses paused halfway to waiting lips. Even the cash register seemed embarrassed to interrupt.

    The most enchanting audience members were the neighborhood’s young mothers.

    They would arrive carrying restless infants whose nightly resistance to sleep had exhausted every parental strategy except surrender. Somehow the Great Lachyrmose accomplished what rocking chairs, lullabies, and desperate pacing could not. One melancholy piano piece after another worked its quiet spell until tiny eyelids surrendered. The babies collapsed into peaceful sleep with astonishing reliability. Their grateful parents would offer Lachyrmose a smile and a gentle nod before slipping out into the Berkeley night, precious cargo cradled carefully in their arms.

    It became one of the strangest guarantees in town. Jackson’s could promise good wine. Lachyrmose could promise sleeping babies.

    As the years passed, however, something inside the pianist began to shift. He grew restless with his own success. He wanted brighter harmonies, quicker tempos, unexpected turns. He wanted music that laughed as often as it sighed.

    His audience revolted.

    The regulars did not come for experimentation. They came for emotional comfort. They wanted the familiar sorrow they had come to love, returning to those melancholy melodies with the same devotion families reserve for a grandmother’s chicken pot pie. Every new composition was politely tolerated before someone inevitably asked for one of the old sad songs.

    Success had quietly become a cage.

    The Great Lachyrmose had become a prisoner of his own repertoire.

    So when McMahon accepted his first college teaching position, he quietly retired the character and left Jackson’s behind. For the first time, he could play whatever music interested him rather than whatever melancholy his audience wished to hear.

    He gained artistic freedom, but he lost something as well.

    He lost the strange little community that had gathered around a grand piano in the corner of a wine shop. He lost the nightly ritual of emerging from the cellar to a room full of expectant faces. He lost the grateful parents carrying sleeping babies into the darkness.

    Even now, decades later, he occasionally misses the Great Lachyrmose. The music has changed. Life has changed. But belonging—that rare feeling that one’s peculiar gifts answer someone else’s unspoken need—is not so easily replaced.

  • When Reading Lost to the Dopamine Feed

    When Reading Lost to the Dopamine Feed

    Rose Horowitch’s essay “The End of Reading Is Here,” published in The Atlantic, chronicles more than the decline of reading. It examines the kind of mind that flourishes after reading has surrendered. Citing data from the National Endowment for the Arts, she notes that fewer than half of American adults read any kind of book in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. By 2023, a mere 16 percent reported reading for pleasure.

    What filled the vacuum? Gambling.

    Nearly 60 percent of Americans now gamble. We have traded one form of anticipation for another. Instead of turning pages in search of revelation, we pull slot-machine levers and refresh sports-betting apps in pursuit of dopamine.

    Even the books that survive have changed. Sentences are shorter. Syntax is simpler. Apparently, asking readers to navigate a few dependent clauses before arriving at the independent clause is now considered an unreasonable burden. The modern sentence has become a microwave dinner: engineered for speed, stripped of complexity, and consumed with minimal effort.

    The same contraction has reshaped our news diet. Long-form reporting that patiently excavates facts has given way to sixty-second video clips engineered for maximum stimulation. The reward is immediate. The understanding is shallow. It requires no political science degree to imagine what happens to a democracy when its citizens lose both the patience and the habit of sustained attention.

    Horowitch argues that this decline in reading parallels a decline in critical thinking itself. Increasing numbers of adults struggle to comprehend what they read, distinguish evidence from assertion, or draw reasonable conclusions. If adulthood once implied literacy, then America is drifting toward a peculiar form of cultural infantilization—a nation increasingly vulnerable to demagogues, conspiracy peddlers, and professional grifters eager to convert intellectual laziness into political capital.

    The greatest irony is that Americans have never consumed more words.

    We read texts, emails, Slack messages, Instagram captions, TikTok comments, headlines, notifications, and endless streams of digital debris. Never has so much language been processed to produce so little contemplation. We are drowning in words while starving for thought.

    That is why Horowitch describes America as becoming postliterate—not because language has disappeared, but because sustained reading has. Literacy once demanded immersion. Postliteracy rewards interruption.

    Nor has this transformation stabilized. It is accelerating. Each generation spends less time reading books and more time marinating its attention inside algorithmically curated feeds. Television, for all its faults, never possessed this power. During the television era, people still disappeared into novels on weekends and carried paperbacks to the beach. TV occupied a room. Smartphones occupy consciousness itself. They transformed distraction from an activity into a permanent habitat.

    I have watched this transformation from a privileged vantage point. For nearly forty years, I have taught college writing.

    The curriculum my colleagues and I teach today would have been almost unrecognizable when I began. We rarely assign long books. Many instructors assign none at all. My freshman composition course still requires one short classic, Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. My critical thinking course assigns no books whatsoever. Instead, students read essays from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. I upload the readings into Canvas, then spend class breaking them into digestible segments through Google Slides. Each slide contains roughly one hundred words followed by a discussion question that forces students to wrestle with the author’s reasoning one piece at a time.

    Some critics insist that professors should simply assign longer books and demand compliance. That fantasy evaporates the moment it encounters reality. Students vote with their enrollment. Assign too much reading, and many will either avoid the course altogether or quietly migrate to instructors who require less. Consumer demand has entered higher education whether professors approve or not. As students’ habits change, curriculum follows. The postliterate marketplace shapes the classroom long before faculty meetings do.

    Yet calling ours a “postliterate society” risks flattening important distinctions.

    My students are mostly between eighteen and twenty years old. Yes, they grew up on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Yes, many arrive having read remarkably few books. But they are also intellectually curious. They enjoy argumentation. They respond viscerally to sharp prose, elegant rhetoric, and clever turns of phrase. They relish exposing logical fallacies and dismantling weak arguments. Once you capture their attention, they often surprise you with the sophistication of their thinking.

    They are not representative of America at large.

    A first-generation college student eager to transform his life occupies a different intellectual universe than an adult who never pursued higher education, works a dead-end job, and spends every evening numbing himself with algorithmic entertainment. Both may read fewer books than previous generations, but their relationship to knowledge is hardly the same. There is no single postliteracy. There are many varieties of it.

    Technology rewires us from the inside out. I can measure the changes in my own brain. At sixty-four, I find myself fighting distractions that barely existed thirty years ago. My attention requires more vigilance than it once did. The temptation to surrender to endless scrolling is no respecter of age, education, or profession. Digital gravity pulls on all of us.

    There is no reversing this transformation. The toothpaste is out of the tube. The smartphone is not going away. Artificial intelligence is not going away. Algorithmic media is not going away. We are not marching back to 1975 carrying hardcovers beneath our arms.

    That reality, however, should make us suspicious of sweeping declarations about postliteracy. Horowitch rightly identifies genuine losses: diminished attention spans, weaker reading comprehension, and shrinking tolerance for intellectual complexity. But we have also developed new literacies. We decode memes, navigate digital ecosystems, detect online irony, understand platform cultures, and learn new technologies with astonishing speed. Our cognitive landscape has not simply shrunk. It has been reorganized.

    Whether that reorganization represents progress remains an open question.

    I doubt we will someday revolt against TikTok and rediscover Tolstoy en masse. The fantasy of 90 percent of Americans reading one hundred books a year belongs somewhere between nostalgia and science fiction.

    Still, I hesitate to declare the reading life permanently dead.

    Human beings possess an appetite that algorithms cannot completely satisfy. Endless novelty eventually becomes monotonous. Constant stimulation eventually feels empty. Even the most dedicated scroller occasionally hungers for something with weight, texture, and permanence—an idea worth wrestling with rather than merely reacting to.

    Curiosity has survived every technological revolution humanity has endured. It survived radio. It survived television. It may yet survive TikTok.

    The reading brain has been wounded.

    I am not convinced it is beyond recovery.