Cinemorphosis

Category: Literary Dispatches

  • You Can Take My Office, but Not My Syllabus

    You Can Take My Office, but Not My Syllabus

    As Steve Lopez interrogates the strange psychological territory of retirement in Independence Day, I discovered an unnerving similarity between us. Lopez can be on vacation, officially released from work, walking around somewhere he is presumably supposed to be relaxing, and still find himself composing a newspaper column in his head. Nobody assigned it. No editor is waiting for it. There is no deadline. Yet the sentences begin assembling themselves anyway. After decades of journalism, the column has become a phantom limb. The job may be absent, but he can still feel it twitching.

    I understand the condition because I suffer from my own occupational haunting. Mine is the syllabus.

    To most people, writing a syllabus sounds like administrative dentistry. They imagine policies, due dates, grading percentages, office hours, and several pages of warnings about plagiarism. I experience something entirely different. Writing a syllabus is glorious. It is the intellectual equivalent of sitting at the master control panel of a spacecraft, surrounded by switches, blinking lights, and navigational screens while plotting a sixteen-week journey through the cosmos.

    Everything matters. Where does the first reading go? Which essay prepares students for the documentary? When do I introduce the counterargument? Which assignment arrives too early? Which one needs another week to ripen? I move readings forward and backward as if positioning armies before a decisive battle. A good syllabus has rhythm, escalation, reversals, callbacks, and a climax. It is not a calendar. It is narrative architecture.

    And I always want the final week to deliver the intellectual equivalent of the ending of the original Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston rides along the beach, sees the Statue of Liberty half buried in the sand, falls to his knees, and realizes what has happened. That is Week Sixteen. I want the semester’s earlier ideas suddenly locking together. I want the students to see that the course they thought they were taking was actually about something larger. I want the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand.

    Then I can retire the course with a mic drop.

    When I am building a syllabus, I enter flow—that peculiar condition in which concentration becomes so complete that time disappears. I can sit down at five in the morning intending to move one reading and look up two hours later having reconstructed half the semester. Breakfast has been forgotten. Coffee has gone cold. The outside world has temporarily ceased operations. I am exactly where I want to be.

    This creates a problem for retirement.

    What happens when there are no more courses?

    I call it the Phantom Syllabus Principle: after decades of constructing courses, the professional task survives the profession that required it. Retirement can eliminate the classroom, the paycheck, the meetings, the grading, and the students, but it cannot necessarily shut down the machinery that spent forty years arranging ideas into sixteen-week journeys.

    I can already see the pathology developing. Three years after retirement, I will be sitting at home reading some fascinating book when a thought strikes me: This would pair beautifully with “The Lottery.”

    There will be no class.

    This will not matter.

    Within twenty minutes, I will have identified the documentary, formulated the essay prompt, devised three mapping components, constructed a counterargument, and determined that the entire unit belongs in Week Seven rather than Week Five. By lunch I will have a Canvas module for students who do not exist.

    At first glance, this sounds like another warning about the inability to let go of work. But I think it points toward something more hopeful: The Unretirable Self.

    One of retirement’s great terrors is the fear that when the job disappears, the person attached to it disappears as well. If I am no longer Professor McMahon standing in front of a classroom, who exactly is left?

    Perhaps more than I thought.

    The parts of teaching that exhausted me can retire quite easily. Grading can retire. Committee meetings can retire. Student Learning Outcomes can retire with full honors and never contact me again. I will not lie awake yearning for another opportunity to enter assessment data into an institutional website.

    But the creative machinery may refuse the pension.

    That is because some activities we perform at work are not merely occupational duties. They are expressions of temperament. Lopez doesn’t compose columns only because the Los Angeles Times pays him. His mind naturally turns experience into narrative. I don’t construct intellectual sequences only because a college gives me three units and a classroom. My mind likes taking books, films, arguments, cultural phenomena, and stray observations and arranging them until they reveal something larger.

    That part of me may be unemployable after retirement.

    It will not be retired.

    Perhaps retirement does not require the wholesale invention of a replacement identity. Some identities were artificial scaffolding: title, office, department, schedule, institutional status. Those can come down. But underneath them may be habits of mind that belonged to us all along.

    The institution can take back my office. It can remove my name from the schedule. It can deactivate my email, assign my courses to somebody thirty years younger, and eventually erase nearly every institutional trace that I was ever there.

    Fine.

    But someday, long after my final class has ended, I will wake at five in the morning with the sudden realization that Week Sixteen needs a better ending.

  • The Road to Hell Has Excellent Lumbar Support

    The Road to Hell Has Excellent Lumbar Support

    Popular psychology has taken Carl Jung’s sprawling ideas about psychological development and compressed them into a tidy Four Stages of Life paradigm. The scheme is probably too neat to be Jung, but it is useful nonetheless, especially if you are approaching retirement and wondering whether the final decades of life will produce wisdom or merely better lumbar support.

    In the first stage, adolescence, you are supposedly the Athlete. You are acutely conscious of your body, appearance, appetites, and sexual power. Self-awareness remains under construction. You occupy the center of the universe and assume everyone else has been assigned supporting roles. You fantasize about dominance, dislike being challenged, and naturally prefer the company of people who recognize your magnificence. If invited to someone else’s birthday party, some primitive corner of your psyche wonders why your name isn’t on the cake. “Athlete” seems far too charitable. I prefer Imperial Narcissist.

    Then adulthood throws you into competition. You acquire a career, make money, take action, climb hierarchies, accumulate trophies, and cultivate a reputation as “a force to be reckoned with.” Hugh Hefner supplied the operating philosophy: Work hard, play hard. You want money, sexual success, professional status, and that most intoxicating commodity of all—respect. The popular Jungian formulation calls this figure the Warrior. I prefer Status Gladiator. He experiences adulthood as an arena with an invisible scoreboard hanging over it, and he checks the standings constantly to make sure his name hasn’t slipped.

    If life goes reasonably well, however, the trophies eventually lose some of their phosphorescence. The expensive car becomes a car. The promotion becomes another job with more email. Sexual conquest begins to resemble an exhausting administrative project. You start wondering whether the purpose of existence might involve something beyond accumulating evidence that you have defeated other people. The Jungian term attributed to this stage is Statesman. I prefer The Man Tired of the Bullshit. He has not necessarily become a saint. He has simply developed enough pattern recognition to notice that status, ambition, possessions, and applause make lousy gods.

    Finally comes the stage usually called Spirit. Here you stop looking for transcendence in a Mercedes and begin looking for the genuine article: love, generosity, service, connection, perhaps God. “Spirit,” however, feels too vaporous for me. My mind goes instead to the famous 1971 “Hilltop” Coca-Cola commercial, with people from around the world standing on an Italian hillside holding bottles of Coke and singing about peace and harmony. They practically glow. This is Radiant Man. He has undergone a metamorphosis. He no longer needs to dominate the room because he is no longer terrified of disappearing inside it. His strength has become generosity. He beams outward.

    The graceful trajectory of aging, then, is to move through these stages rather than establish permanent residency in one of them. Shed the old skins. Outgrow the Imperial Narcissist. Survive the Status Gladiator. Become tired of the bullshit. With luck, arrive at retirement age radiating enough benevolence that other people do not instinctively flee when they see you approaching.

    Unfortunately, modern culture has constructed an enormous industrial complex devoted to preventing this development. It does not particularly want Radiant Man. Radiant Man is bad for business. He already has enough. He doesn’t need another trophy, another grievance, another sexual conquest, another luxury object, another algorithm telling him how important he is. Consumer culture has much greater use for the Imperial Narcissist: the adolescent who refuses to vacate adolescence and possesses enough adult money to finance the occupation.

    Such a man spends his life constructing what I call an Adolescent Fortress. Every purchase, possession, sycophant, grievance narrative, algorithm, and carefully selected media source becomes another brick in the wall protecting him from reality. Eventually he suffers from Adolescent Fortress Syndrome: the lifelong construction of a psychological kingdom into which adult correction cannot penetrate. From inside, the fortress looks like sovereignty. From outside, it looks like a sixty-five-year-old man wearing the costume of a king while hiding from anyone willing to tell him the truth.

    Jon Ronson introduces an astonishing specimen of this condition in The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men: Christopher Mark, owner of a Gothic castle in Woodstock, Connecticut. Mark, approaching his mid-sixties, inhabits a medieval fantasy world of elaborate clothing, exotic animals, darkened rooms, and women who address him as “My lord.” His guard dog is named Cerberus, after the multiheaded hound guarding the gates of Hades. Camels wander the grounds. The drapes remain closed. Hugh Hefner is his North Star. The Playboy Mansion has been reincarnated as a Gothic fortress, as if Dracula had purchased a subscription to Maxim.

    Ronson first visits the castle after his son encounters the place under the pretense of attending a party. What they discover is considerably darker: a wealthy man in his sixties attempting to convert an adolescent harem fantasy into a reality television show called 101 Princesses. The number itself contains the pathology. Why one princess when you can have 101? And why 101 when, if the experiment somehow succeeded, the appetite would inevitably demand 1,001?

    Thomas Aquinas had a word for this: concupiscence, the disordered appetite that grows hungrier as you feed it. The promise is satisfaction; the mechanism guarantees dissatisfaction. You keep adding women, possessions, attention, status, spectacle, and power, expecting the next acquisition to fill the void. Instead, the void develops an appetite of its own. Psychiatrist Phil Stutz describes a related condition as living in the “lower channel,” where existence contracts around immediate gratification rather than purpose. Whatever terminology you prefer, the destination looks much the same: entropy. Or, to borrow Ronson’s word, unraveling.

    What makes Mark particularly useful to someone contemplating retirement is his conspicuous absence of guardrails. An heir to a fortune, he never had to build his adult life around employment. No boss expected him at nine. No colleagues depended on him. No students awaited him. No HR department required him to sit through sexual-harassment training. No professional code periodically forced his ego to accommodate the irritating existence of other people. What sounds like magnificent freedom begins to resemble the Guardrail Deficit: the absence of work, schedules, bosses, deadlines, colleagues, and professional expectations that periodically force us into contact with reality.

    We complain bitterly about these constraints while quietly benefiting from them. Work makes us shower. Deadlines make us finish things. Colleagues make us compromise. Students make us explain ourselves. Institutions routinely irritate us, but irritation is sometimes the friction that prevents psychological free fall. Remove enough guardrails and the Imperial Narcissist can drive wherever his appetites point him.

    Mark therefore embodies what I call the Never-Employed Retiree Paradox. He has reached retirement age with nothing to retire from. The ordinary retiree loses the external structures of employment at sixty-five. Mark never acquired them. In that sense, he has been retired since adolescence, with no workplace, career, professional standards, or institutional obligations separating youthful fantasy from late-life reality. He possesses radical freedom and uses it to dress like medieval royalty while planning a reality show about acquiring 101 princesses. Apparently freedom without maturation does not produce Marcus Aurelius. Sometimes it produces The Bachelor with camels.

    This brings me uncomfortably close to home.

    Most men cannot afford Gothic castles, exotic animals, and harems, but we have developed a more economical version of the Adolescent Fortress: the Man Cave. We carve out little kingdoms where reality agrees to leave us alone for a while. There is the football den with the enormous television, recliner, pizza, nachos, and master remote. On Married… with Children, Peggy Bundy understands that her husband Al’s deepest erotic fantasy is not another woman but a remote capable of controlling every television in the house. Absolute power, apparently, requires batteries.

    Watch enthusiasts have their own castles. I have spent embarrassing quantities of time watching YouTube videos in which grown men gather around expensive watches, conduct ceremonial unboxings, discuss “wrist presence,” and deliver solemn State of the Collection addresses as though NATO were awaiting their conclusions. The watch community becomes a tiny sovereign ecosystem with its own language, hierarchies, rituals, grails, and moat. The outside world may be collapsing, but inside the fortress we urgently need to determine whether forty-four millimeters is too large for a seven-and-a-quarter-inch wrist.

    And then there is my couch.

    Because the ordinary cushions proved inadequate for my 230-pound retired-linebacker chassis, I fortified the couch with a four-inch self-inflating camping mattress, stacked pillows, and a throw blanket. My daughters call it Dad’s Homeless Encampment. In the late afternoon, it exerts a gravitational pull. I lie there watching true-crime documentaries while eating red grapes, hummus, and Wheat Thins, observing homicide detectives restore order to a universe temporarily disrupted by murder.

    The documentaries are disturbing, but they are also strangely comforting. Chaos occurs. Detectives arrive. Evidence accumulates. The suspect lies. The detective catches the lie. Handcuffs appear. Order is restored. The narrative offers precisely what real life refuses to provide: control. Al Bundy has his master remote. The watch collector has his gleaming collection. The football fan has his nacho bunker. Christopher Mark has his Gothic castle and Cerberus. I have my padded couch and a homicide detective explaining why the suspect’s timeline makes no sense.

    None of these refuges is inherently pathological. Everyone needs respite. The danger begins when respite becomes habitat—when the place where you occasionally retreat from life becomes the place from which you conduct it. The fortress gets more comfortable. The moat gets wider. The drawbridge comes up more often. Eventually, freedom from irritation becomes freedom from challenge, freedom from obligation, freedom from other people, and finally freedom from reality itself.

    That is what makes Christopher Mark more than an eccentric character in someone else’s book. For a man approaching retirement, he is a warning. Employment has spent forty years dragging me out of the house, making demands upon me, exposing me to people I did not choose, and preventing my padded couch from becoming the geographical center of my existence. Soon those guardrails will disappear.

    So when late afternoon arrives and I lower myself onto four inches of premium camping foam, arrange my pillows, pull the blanket across my legs, open the Wheat Thins, and watch a homicide detective interrogate a suspect while Cerberus sleeps safely several states away, I do not feel myself approaching the incandescence of Radiant Man.

    I feel like I may already be retired.

  • Retirement. Now Nobody Can Stop You

    Retirement. Now Nobody Can Stop You

    When you retire, you are not merely leaving a job. You are being released from an institution.

    For decades, the institution surrounded you with structures you probably resented: schedules, protocols, meetings, deadlines, evaluations, committees, supervisors, colleagues, students, dress codes, parking permits, passwords that expired every ninety days, and online forms apparently designed by people who believed human suffering builds character. You dreamed of liberation.

    Then one day you get it.

    The restraints fall away. Nobody cares when you wake up. Nobody expects you anywhere at nine. Nobody notices whether you’ve showered, shaved, or spent the morning slowly merging with your bathrobe. Tuesday afternoon can be devoted to reading Dostoevsky or watching twenty-six consecutive YouTube videos comparing the Accord with the Camry even though you have no intention of buying either car. By video nineteen, you have strong opinions about rear-seat legroom.

    Welcome to freedom.

    Be careful.

    For most of your adult life, you benefited from the Institutional Guardrail Effect: the largely invisible system of expectations, routines, responsibilities, and social pressures that kept you moving down the highway like a reasonably functional adult. You may have believed that your discipline came entirely from within. Perhaps some of it did. But the institution was quietly helping. The alarm went off because you had somewhere to be. You shaved because other people had to look at you. You went to bed because tomorrow mattered.

    Then retirement removes the guardrails.

    You become unanchored.

    You become Disinhibited Man.

    Do not congratulate yourself too quickly.

    Before celebrating your radical freedom, reread Pinocchio. Not the adorable Disney version with the cricket and the catchy songs. Read Carlo Collodi’s considerably more savage story, written by a man who seemed to regard children as small criminals awaiting sufficient opportunity.

    The boys discover a paradise without adult supervision. No school. No responsibilities. No restraints. At first, it seems magnificent.

    Then they grow donkey ears.

    Human speech deteriorates into braying.

    Paradise becomes livestock management.

    Collodi understood something that retirement brochures generally omit: remove enough restraints from human beings and they don’t necessarily become Emerson at Walden Pond. Sometimes they become jackasses.

    This is Post-Institutional Disinhibition: the loosening of psychological and behavioral restraints after a person leaves the structures that previously regulated him. The danger isn’t that retirement gives you too little freedom. The danger is that it gives you enormous freedom without supplying the wisdom necessary to manage it.

    Don’t just reread Pinocchio. Read Jon Ronson’s The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men. The book is an anthropological work of nonfiction about men severed from social structures and natural constraints. Their liberation does not produce serene philosophers strolling through gardens discussing Marcus Aurelius. It produces men increasingly beholden to the Raging Id.

    The results are not pretty.

    Freed from inconvenient restraints, these men descend into influencer-fed conspiracy theories, algorithmically amplified adolescent fantasies, white-male grievance monologues, and Ayn Rand-style declarations of heroic self-sufficiency delivered by men who probably cannot remember where they put the charger for their phone.

    Adulthood is not the featured condition.

    Regression is.

    These men don’t merely become eccentric. They begin to warp. Their personalities curl inward like fruit left too long in the sun. Grievances harden. Fantasies become philosophies. Algorithms locate every resentment and feed it weaponized testosterone.

    The results will be terrifying, especially to someone on the verge of becoming Disinhibited Man. But read Ronson’s book you must. Wielding his intellectual machete, he hacks through a thick Amazonian jungle of lost souls afflicted by curdled masculinity and Post-Institutional Disinhibition, clearing a path so the rest of us can see where unchecked freedom can lead. For that, be grateful.

    Consider The Castle required reading for a man approaching retirement. You need sobriety. You need wisdom. You need guardrails. You need to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

    Preferably before you grow donkey ears.

  • How 10,000 Students Ruined My Misanthropy

    How 10,000 Students Ruined My Misanthropy

    In 1984, when I was in college, I was knocked sideways by A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole’s great comic novel about the picaresque adventures of Ignatius J. Reilly, a bloated, know-it-all misanthrope who regards nearly every human being he encounters as evidence of civilization’s decline. The title comes from Jonathan Swift: “When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

    I never considered myself a genius, but the second half of Swift’s proposition appealed to me enormously. Perhaps the world really was a confederacy of dolts. Some of my favorite comedians seemed to agree. George Carlin surveyed humanity and found an inexhaustible supply of idiots. David Letterman arrived on television with the weary expression of a man who had already heard your story and regretted it. His grumpy deadpan seemed perfectly suited to the beginning of a new decade. Disco was departing. Good riddance. Disco was for dunces. Deadpan irony was for people who understood things.

    At least that was how I saw it.

    Misanthropy struck me as a form of intellectual street cred. If you were disgusted with humanity, presumably you had seen through it. Optimists were rubes; cynics had X-ray vision. I imagined becoming a comic novelist with a misanthropic edge, skewering the fools who wandered into my field of vision.

    Unfortunately, contempt is a lousy substitute for insight.

    My fictional characters tended to be flat and two-dimensional because I had already convicted them before they entered the story. They existed to be mocked, not understood. The expression “punching down” wasn’t part of the cultural vocabulary of the 1980s, but I would have benefited enormously from understanding the concept. Satire without empathy can quickly deteriorate into a bully standing over his victims and congratulating himself on his wit.

    Then, through a sequence of accidents that hardly resembled career planning, I stumbled into teaching college writing at twenty-four. In 1987, a friend’s father needed instructors for a Merritt College bridge program at Skyline High School and couldn’t find enough people to teach the classes. I agreed to help.

    That temporary job lasted thirty-nine years.

    I taught for two years in the Bay Area, seven in Bakersfield, and thirty in Los Angeles. Somewhere along the way, nearly 10,000 students passed through my classrooms.

    They ruined my misanthropy.

    It is difficult to maintain a sweeping contempt for humanity when humanity keeps arriving in your classroom every semester with names, families, jokes, ambitions, insecurities, talents, disasters, and complicated histories. My students were too intelligent, contradictory, funny, wounded, resilient, exasperating, and generous to fit inside the crude categories of my younger imagination. The closer I looked at people, the less useful my caricatures became.

    Perhaps I am biased. An absurdly high percentage of my students treated me with kindness. They forgave me when I arrived with mediocre material and rewarded me extravagantly when I brought something worthwhile. On good days, the room crackled. Students argued, laughed, challenged me, and occasionally produced that rare classroom electricity when everyone seemed to understand that something interesting was happening.

    They also discovered that my tortured soul was an excellent source of entertainment.

    The more lugubrious I became, the funnier they found me. I could enter class burdened by some private catastrophe, convinced that existence was a bleak corridor leading toward oblivion, and within minutes twenty-five students would be laughing at me. I found this strangely therapeutic. If my despair could become somebody else’s comedy, perhaps despair wasn’t quite as formidable as I imagined. My students taught me, among other things, not to take my suffering entirely at face value.

    My empathy deepened again in 2010 when I became the father of twins. Parenthood rearranged my vision. Suddenly, when a student struggled, I could imagine one of my daughters sitting in that chair. The exhausted student, the confused student, the student who had fallen behind and was embarrassed to ask for help—each became somebody’s child in a way I had understood intellectually but not viscerally.

    I wish I had possessed that parent-vision when I began teaching. It would have made me a better instructor from the first day. I undoubtedly mistook confusion for laziness, immaturity for indifference, and struggle for lack of character more often than I would like to remember. I cannot travel backward and repair those failures. I can only recognize them.

    Now I am retiring.

    I will miss my students—all 10,000 of them, give or take a few hundred victims of my arithmetic. The overwhelming majority were kind, intelligent, curious, and hungry for the same things human beings have always wanted: connection, dignity, purpose, and some reasonable measure of happiness.

    I ask their forgiveness for the days when my selfish, surly self commandeered the classroom. And I thank them for the laughter, generosity, and encouragement they gave me on the days when my better self managed to show up.

    One thing I know after nearly forty years: sustained contact with actual human beings makes serious misanthropy difficult. You can despise “people” in the abstract. It becomes harder when people acquire faces.

    I still love A Confederacy of Dunces. I still love Ignatius J. Reilly. But after spending four decades in classrooms, I suspect I understand something that Ignatius never did. The confederacy of dunces is largely an illusion produced by distance. Get close enough to the supposed dunces, listen to their stories, watch them struggle, and allow them to laugh at you for a few decades, and the confederacy begins to dissolve.

    Had Ignatius J. Reilly been sentenced to forty years of teaching college writing, even he might have been cured.

    Although I suspect his student evaluations would have been spectacular.

  • What Steroids Can Teach Us About Generative AI

    What Steroids Can Teach Us About Generative AI

    I’ve been examining the effects of generative AI on my college writing students’ compositions over the last four years, and the best analogy I can come up with to get a handle on generative AI is to compare it to the way athletes use PEDs. 

    Athletes want an advantage, they want an edge, and they don’t want their opponents to have a better arsenal at their disposal, so they feel compelled to take PEDs. Same with college students who want the AI advantage. PEDs give athletes confidence that becomes a crutch. As AI does for students. 

    PEDs can give athletes a false sense of power, making them feel like superheroes. These PEDs give dope up their bodies until they don’t want to revert to the natural version of themselves. So does AI for busy students. Students with abysmal reading and writing skills can launder their writing through the AI machine and get a product that looks polished and articulate. This gives them a sense of cognitive doping. They become dependent on its sense of power. 

    Over time, PEDs make the body go flat because it acclimates to greater and greater doses. In this regard, AI makes the brain go flat after its users default to outsourcing their half-baked thoughts and letting AI generate full-blown, overwritten compositions. The disconnection between the writer and the output is soul-deadening. 

    Just as PEDs will never leave sports, AI will never leave writing or academia. Unless the data centers become too expensive to be sustained, the tool is here to stay. 

    The best thing I can do as a college writing instructor is craft assignments that defy AI use, such as field research, interviews, and personal reflections. I know full well that students will try to cheat the system and that I may have to have some blue book compositions to get a better handle on their writing, but we live in a high-performance world where often dangerous tools have to be harnessed. Otherwise, they will destroy us. 

  • Damascus Syndrome

    Damascus Syndrome

    Many years ago, my wife explained something about men that has stayed with me: we are suckers for violent conversions.

    She grew up in a church where people regularly stood before the congregation and delivered their testimonies. These were rarely modest affairs. Nobody announced that over several years he had gradually become less selfish and slightly easier to live with. That would hardly justify taking the microphone.

    No, there had to be an abyss.

    The man had been drinking, drugging, fighting, fornicating, worshipping money, driving ninety miles an hour toward eternal damnation—and then, at 3:17 one Tuesday morning, Jesus grabbed the steering wheel.

    My wife would roll her eyes.

    She suspected that some of these testimonies contained less piety than theater. Ostensibly, the man was glorifying God. Curiously, however, God had given him forty-five minutes of stage time to explain what an exceptionally fascinating sinner he had been.

    Call it Damascus Syndrome: the male longing for a catastrophic encounter that divides life into a disgraced Before and a redeemed After.

    Men seem particularly susceptible to it. We don’t want gradual improvement. We don’t want to become five percent more patient every year. We want an earthquake. We want the old self dragged from the wreckage and a new self emerging through the smoke.

    In other words, we want an origin story.

    Before Peter Parker gets bitten by the spider and Bruce Wayne enters the Batcave, Saul of Tarsus is riding toward Damascus with murder in his heart.

    Saul isn’t searching for truth. He believes he already owns it. He has his convictions, his mission, his enemies. Then comes the light.

    A vision. A voice.

    Suddenly the man who knows exactly where he is going cannot see the road.

    Saul is left blind, helpless, and disoriented. For three days he sits in darkness while a greater darkness collapses inside him. His old identity has suffered an internal earthquake. The load-bearing walls have cracked. The building has been condemned.

    Then a stranger arrives claiming to have been sent by the Lord.

    More unsettling still, Saul will become Paul.

    This new identity feels less like self-actualization than an eviction notice. Saul wants his old certainties back. His old mission. His old enemies. He doesn’t want transformation. He wants things returned to factory settings.

    But Damascus doesn’t negotiate.

    The light has hijacked his life.

    This is the part of the story that fascinates me and makes my wife suspicious. Men love the idea that somewhere out there awaits an event sufficiently violent to blast through the accumulated concrete of the false self. We don’t merely want to change. We want to be struck down, preferably with witnesses.

    A quiet epiphany while loading the dishwasher lacks production value.

    Damascus Syndrome demands thunder.

    Emmanuel Carrère captures the deeper paradox of Paul’s conversion in The Kingdom: “Paul was no longer himself; he was finally himself.”

    That sentence overturns our comforting modern idea of authenticity. We usually imagine the authentic self as something we express: Follow your instincts. Find your voice. Be true to yourself. Peel away society’s expectations until the magnificent original You finally appears.

    Damascus proposes something considerably more terrifying.

    What if the self you are determined to express is precisely the self that has to go?

    What if your deepest identity lies underneath the personality, convictions, ambitions, resentments, appetites, and certainties you have spent decades defending?

    Then becoming yourself requires losing yourself.

    This possibility gives Damascus Syndrome its genuine spiritual power. It also gives men an irresistible opportunity for grandiosity. After all, once you’ve been annihilated and reborn, somebody needs to hear about it.

    Preferably everybody.

    Preferably in hardcover.

    My wife remains skeptical. She has heard too many testimonies, watched too many men turn repentance into performance art, seen too many ordinary psychological crises inflated into The Dark Night of the Soul: My Journey from Darkness into Light.

    Perhaps she has a point.

    Maybe men can’t tolerate the thought that maturity might happen quietly—that becoming a better person could involve thousands of small corrections made without applause, lightning bolts, blindness, voices from heaven, or a publishing contract.

    We want Damascus.

    We want the spider bite.

    We want the Batcave.

    We want our old identity blown to pieces so that we can stagger from the crater transformed, finally ourselves, with one additional blessing from God:

    a hell of a story.

  • The Character Paradox

    The Character Paradox

    If you believe that human beings are capable of genuine self-improvement, Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness is an excellent place to begin. On its opening page, Rosen quotes the Renaissance physician Paracelsus: “Even as man imagines himself to be, such he is, and he is also that which he imagines.”

    Most of us imagine ourselves becoming happier. That is hardly surprising. The more revealing question is what kind of life we imagine will make us happy.

    A little philosophy quickly dispels the fantasy that happiness can be built from immediate gratification. Pleasure is fleeting. Appetite is insatiable. Every indulgence briefly satisfies only to awaken the desire for another. The great philosophical tradition proposes a different path. Happiness is not something we consume. It is something we become.

    Rosen traces this tradition through Benjamin Franklin and ultimately back to Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. There, Cicero argues that the soul must be “tranquilized by restraint and consistency.” The happy person is neither consumed by fear nor driven by restless ambition. He is not perpetually distressed, intoxicated by meaningless excitement, or enslaved by craving. He possesses something rarer: inner equilibrium. His happiness rests not upon favorable circumstances but upon a well-ordered character.

    Rosen summarizes the idea with admirable clarity. The pursuit of virtue is about being good, not feeling good. Feelings are unstable companions. Character endures. America’s Founders therefore understood the pursuit of happiness as a lifelong effort to cultivate virtue by using reason to govern destructive emotions, improve oneself, and become more capable of serving others.

    The argument is compelling.

    It also raises an unsettling question.

    Can moral character actually be cultivated, or is philosophy merely watering seeds that were already planted?

    Over the years I have spoken with many people whose childhoods were marked by neglect, abuse, or abandonment. A few told me they made a solemn vow that their own children would never endure what they had suffered. Their painful upbringing became a moral education. They transformed misery into compassion.

    Others traveled a different road.

    Their adult lives became faithful reproductions of the homes that had wounded them. Chaos produced more chaos. Addiction generated more addiction. Cruelty echoed across another generation.

    Why?

    Why does one person convert suffering into wisdom while another converts it into repetition?

    Were different choices responsible?

    Or were deeper differences already present long before those choices appeared?

    Perhaps character truly is destiny.

    But if so, where does character come from?

    Is it patiently built through discipline, habit, and moral instruction?

    Or does moral instruction simply awaken something that was already waiting to be awakened?

    I sometimes wonder whether the very act of picking up Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness hints at an answer. Perhaps people do not seek goodness by accident. Perhaps they are drawn toward it because some quiet part of them already recognizes its voice.

    That possibility reveals what I call The Character Paradox: the enduring question of whether moral character is principally cultivated through disciplined choice or gradually revealed by the dispositions already present within us.

  • 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.”

  • The Words That Wouldn’t Stay on the Page

    The Words That Wouldn’t Stay on the Page

    No one ever spoke like Jesus.

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

    Carrère returns to a brief scene in John’s Gospel. Temple guards are sent to arrest Jesus, yet they return empty-handed. Asked why they failed, they offer no legal argument or strategic excuse. They simply say:

    “No one ever spoke like this man.”

    For Carrère, those few words explain more than volumes of theology.

    Even if one discarded the miracle stories, doubted the Virgin Birth, questioned the Resurrection, and rejected 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 the way Jesus spoke. His words possess what I would call Verbal Singularity: the condition in which a person’s manner of speaking is so original, arresting, and irreducible that it cannot be understood as merely another variation on earlier traditions.

    The New Testament captivates Carrère for another reason as well.

    Certain episodes possess the awkward texture of genuine memory.

    Who invents the anonymous young man who flees naked from Gethsemane after escaping from his linen garment? Carrère suspects the humiliated youth may even have been Mark himself, quietly preserving his own embarrassing cameo in the Gospel.

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

    These moments feel almost too peculiar to be fictional. They are oddly specific, narratively unnecessary, and gloriously resistant to polish. Their very strangeness gives them the texture of remembered experience rather than literary invention.

    The overt miracles leave Carrère far less persuaded.

    The Virgin Birth, the bodily Resurrection, and other supernatural claims strike him as theological architecture constructed after the fact. They belong to the realm of belief, and Carrère cannot honestly persuade himself to believe them.

    Yet disbelief has never extinguished fascination.

    Quite the opposite.

    He remains captivated by the singular force of Jesus’ language and by those small, seemingly incidental details that often feel more historically persuasive than the miracles themselves. The sayings continue to haunt him long after the doctrines have ceased to convince him.

    As a novelist, Carrère cannot help but marvel at the achievement.

    Every fiction writer dreams of creating a character who feels alive.

    Jesus does something far more astonishing.

    He steps off the page and into history, inspiring the largest and most enduring movement the world has ever known.

  • When Love Becomes Too Perfect

    When Love Becomes Too Perfect

    Carrère is captivated by Christianity’s vision of salvation, yet he recoils from its radical demands. The Gospel asks us to loosen our grip on the very things most people consider life’s greatest blessings. Marriage, children, wealth, reputation, and ambition all become secondary to membership in the family of Christ. Even love is transformed. Rather than reserving our deepest affections for spouses, children, and friends, Jesus appears to call us to a love that embraces every person without distinction.

    Here Carrère hesitates.

    Can love that is distributed equally still be called love?

    Or does it become so universal that it loses the very qualities that make it recognizably human?

    Perhaps love can become so perfect in theory that it dissolves in practice. I would call this Affection Dilution: the condition in which extending equal love to all people weakens the depth, intimacy, and preferential character that give love its meaning within families and close friendships. A love that refuses to distinguish between one’s child and a stranger risks becoming less an experience than an abstraction.

    Carrère contrasts this Christian vision with what he sees as the Jewish ideal of the good life. There, holiness is not achieved by retreating from the world but by inhabiting it faithfully. One marries. One raises children. One prospers through honest work. One celebrates weddings, feasts, and holy days. One delights in generosity, hospitality, longevity, and community. The covenant is lived not apart from earthly existence but within it. Family and flourishing are not distractions from God; they are among the ways God is honored.

    Christianity, by contrast, often appears suspicious of those very satisfactions. Earthly success fades. Family loyalties yield to discipleship. Wealth becomes a spiritual hazard. This world is not the destination but the waiting room for another kingdom.

    Carrère never fully resolves the tension between these two visions of the good life.

    My sense is that his temperament inclines him toward the Jewish embrace of earthly flourishing. He admires Christianity’s uncompromising moral vision, but he cannot surrender the conviction that family, friendship, beauty, and the ordinary joys of this world are not obstacles to a meaningful life. They are, in many ways, the very substance of it.