Milo had chosen the place from photographs. A small cabin nestled beside a lake, though they could hardly see the lake. Photos are illusory, just like definitions of truth. The kitchen looked as though it had last been renovated when Jimmy Carter was president. The deck had two Adirondack chairs which Adrian immediately declared too obvious.

“You object to Adirondack chairs in the Adirondacks?”

“I object to thematic furniture.”

They had arrived Friday afternoon, again able to share some time together away from the city. By Saturday morning the sky was blue again and they set out on a trail that climbed behind the cabin toward a ridge.

For the first hour they talked about nothing in particular. Adrian told Milo about a colleague who had begun every faculty meeting that semester by saying, “Now more than ever.”

“More than ever what?” Milo asked.

“He never says!”

Milo laughed.

They hesitated a moment when they both heard the call of a loon.

“So how are you?” Adrian asked.

“Good.”

They continued up the trail, covered by fallen sugar and red maple leaves. Some were quite large. They both kicked the piles.

“I’ve been thinking about my sister,” Milo said.

Adrian waited.

“I told you she died back when we first met.”

“You did.”

“I told you how close we were.”

“Yes.”

“It’s been five years.”

Adrian nodded.

“I’ve been having these incredible memories of her. Vivid. But nothing important really. I mean nothing dramatic. Road trips we took. Her sitting in the passenger seat. Once in Colorado with her feet up on the dashboard. I can see the sun on her face. A dive bar in Grand Junction.

Adrian stepped over a root. “Do these memories come by themselves?”

“Mostly.”

“You don’t go looking for them?”

“No. Although lately I have.”

“Why?”

Milo thought about this.

“Because I like them.”

Adrian turned toward him.

“That sounds terrible, doesn’t it?”

“No.”

“I mean I like missing her.”

They came around a bend and the view suddenly opened. The entire valley became visible below them. The far hillside burned with light. A cloud passed slowly over the ridge and its shadow moved across the color.

Not a sentimental person, Adrian felt himself giddy, even high at the sight of the view. This was what he came for! He nearly spoke, but Milo had been talking about his sister.

“Wow,” Milo said. “Spectacular.”

They stood there.

Milo was struck by the intrusion of it. The hillside was aggressively present. The cold air on his cheeks. The light. For several days he had been living partly somewhere else, in hotel rooms and cars and kitchens twenty years gone, and now this immense quantity of new sense data was devouring him without permission. He felt ashamed that he was resenting it.

He had wanted the old feeling back. That pleasant but sometimes overwhelming feeling around those memories of his sister. Not happiness exactly. Certainly not sadness. Longing. Was it longing?

Her face in the sun. The peculiar way she held her mouth when she was skeptical. Her astrology. God, the astrology! She once told him an entire explanation for his personality based upon his moon being in Taurus.

He had told her he didn’t care where his moon was. But she did. Why?

He laughed.

“What?” Adrian said.

“I was thinking about her astrology.”

“Ah.”

“She thought I was the way I was because my moon was in Taurus.”

They began walking again.

After a few minutes Milo said in a confessing tone, “I tried to write some music with all the nostalgia and grief.”

Adrian looked at him.

“Labor Day. I had the day mostly to myself. These memories had been coming up, and I thought, all right, don’t just sit here having them. Do something with them. Transform them. There was this melody we both loved. We’d listened to it together a hundred times. I started building something around it.”

He stopped.

“And?”

“It felt like...” Milo exhaled. “I don’t know. I couldn’t continue.”

“Why?”

“The grief came up.”

They walked.

“I guess that’s what it was. Grief. But it was good too. That’s the strange part. I wanted it. Then I started feeling swallowed up again. Imagine wanting a bowl of ice cream, but the bowl of ice cream becomes so big that it threatens to drown you. I had this sense that if I kept going I might not . . I might not be able to come to the surface again. That I wouldn’t be able to get back into life.”

Adrian was quiet.

“That’s what scared me.”

“Not the grief.”

“No.”

They reached another view. After a while Adrian said, “Do you miss her, or do you miss remembering her?”

Milo stopped.

“That’s a horrible question.”

“Why?”

“It makes me sound narcissistic.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“It sounds like I’m enjoying my own grief.”

“Maybe you are.”

“Thank you.”

“I don’t mean enjoying it as entertainment. Maybe remembering her is one of the ways you still have her.”

Milo started walking again. “That’s dangerously close to something a therapist would say.”

“I withdraw it.”

“No. Keep going!”

Adrian directed his hands into his jacket pockets. “You’re describing the memories as experiences. Not records.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t seem to be looking at an archive.”

“No.”

“Something is happening to you.”

“Yes. Memory isn’t weak perception,” Milo asserted.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know yet. Oh God. I don’t want this conversation to get swallowed up either. I brought this up because it’s also triggered some ideas about what memory is and what thought is. And I thought it would be fun to discuss it with you. One sees something. Later one remembers it. Is the memory just a faded copy of the original?”

“Hume.”

“Yes, Hume. But the thing is, this isn’t faded. It can be even more vivid than the original experience.”

“Your sister’s face is as clear as that hillside?”

“No. That’s what’s interesting. It’s not clear in that way at all.”

“Then what is vivid?”

Milo looked at him. “The feeling of these thoughts. The feeling around her and our time together.”

Adrian waited.

“I’ve been contemplating something. In the history of philosophy, the rationalists are always pitted against the empiricists. Reason against experience. And also thought against feeling. But I’m beginning to wonder whether those oppositions miss something fundamental.”

“Which is?”

“That thought itself is an experience.”

“Of course it is.”

“Of course? I thought as a rationalist you would object.”

“No. I experience myself thinking all the time.”

“That’s not quite what I mean.”

“Then what do you mean?”

Milo looked out across the hillside.

“I’m saying that thought has its own quality. Its own sensation, almost. Not necessarily a sensation coming through the eyes or ears. But something felt nonetheless. Thought triggers emotions. They are felt. And sometimes it can be more powerful than what we’re actually seeing.”

“Like your memories of your sister.”

“Yes. Exactly. Look at that hillside. It’s beautiful. The colors are extraordinary. But the experience I was having of my sister a few minutes ago was more intense. Not visually. In some other way.”

“Emotionally.”

“Yes. But I don’t want to separate the emotion from the thought so quickly.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not sure they’re separate.”

Adrian stopped walking. “Now that’s a different claim.”

“I know.”

“Your first claim was that thinking is something we experience. I don’t think anyone seriously disputes that. Your second claim is that the feeling might be part of the thought itself.”

“Right.”

“And you think that’s a problem for rationalism?”

“Not necessarily a problem. But perhaps a problem for how we ordinarily divide reason from experience.”

Adrian considered this. “I’m not sure the rationalists would object. Descartes certainly knew he was experiencing his thoughts.”

“Yes, but knowing that you’re thinking and attending to what thinking feels like are different things.”

“OK, let’s make this simple. When you think that two plus two is four, do you feel it? Or is it neutral? And I must say that a mathematical proof doesn’t become true because you have a wonderful feeling about it.”

“I didn’t say it did.”

“You’re getting close.”

“No, you’re doing that thing you do.”

“What thing?”

“Defending the objectivity of truth when nobody has attacked it.”

Adrian laughed. “It’s a reflex.”

“I know. But I’m not talking about what makes a proposition true. I’m talking about what it is like to think of this truth. Or a lie. We can feel it’s a lie. It disturbs us.”

They walked a little farther.

“And that’s what interests me about memory,” Milo continued. “My sister isn’t here. I know that. I’m not confused about reality. But something happens when I remember her. Something that isn’t simply looking at a picture in my head.”

“An emotion.”

“There you go again.”

“What?”

“Separating everything. First the thought, then the emotion attached to it. As though someone had taken a photograph and glued a feeling onto the back.”

Adrian smiled. “That’s a rather crude theory of mind.”

“It’s how we talk about it.”

“Sometimes.”

“But what if the feeling is inseparable from the remembering? What if the memory isn’t an image plus grief, but the whole experience of remembering her as someone I loved and lost?”

Adrian looked down the trail.

“I’m not saying all memories are like this,” said Milo. He looked back toward the hillside, now partly obscured by the trees.

“You know what’s strange? I can’t really see her face anymore. Not the way I could when she was alive. I have photographs, of course. But the face in my memory isn’t quite any of those photographs.”

“What is it?”

“It’s her.”

Adrian looked at him.

“I know that sounds ridiculous.”

“No.”

“It’s not a picture of her. It’s the feeling of her being there. The way I knew her. The way she was with me. Her ridiculous astrology. Her mouth when she was skeptical. All of it somehow present together.”

“And that’s what you were trying to put into the music?”

“Yes.”

Milo paused, relieved that Adrian slightly changed the direction of the dialogue. “Maybe that’s why I couldn’t finish it. I wasn’t trying to reproduce a melody. I was trying to reproduce an experience.”

“An experience you can no longer have.”

Milo thought for a moment.

“Not quite. An experience I can still have, but maybe can’t have for the first time again.”

Adrian said nothing. They walked on.

**********

By the time they returned to the cabin it was after four. Milo had brought a beef chuck roast. Adrian had brought vegetables and two bottles of wine, one of which Milo said was much too good for the roast and the other too good for drinking.

They opened both. Milo salted the beef while Adrian cut carrots, potatoes and onions.

“So how are you?” Milo asked.

Adrian looked away from the onion. “Why? Am I cutting it wrong?”

“Haha. No.”

“Well you certainly have been molesting the beef.”

“I was seasoning it.”

Adrian smiled. “I’ve been teaching a class on AI and mathematics.”

“That sounds terrible.”

“It’s actually fascinating. The students are using language models to explore proofs.”

“To prove things?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes to understand proofs. Sometimes to produce convincing nonsense.”

“Preparing them for careers in management?”

“Among other things.”

Milo slid the roasting pan into the oven with the beef, veggies and bad wine.

Adrian poured some of the good wine. “The interesting thing,” he said, “is watching someone understand something. There was a student last week. We’d been working through a proof and she couldn’t see it. Then suddenly she could.”

“How did you know?”

“Her face changed.”

“She smiled. Something happened. Recognition, maybe. Almost submission.”

“Submission?”

“Submission to the proof. She saw that it had to be true.”

Milo set the timer. “Are we getting mystical?”

“I’m trying very hard not to. But I guess I’ve been thinking about thought itself as well. Not memory, as you have.”

The cabin had become warm from the oven. Milo opened the door to the deck. “Come outside. This beef will be happy without us for at least a couple hours. Bring the wine.”

They sat breathing in the scent of pine and maple. And yesterday’s rain. The sun had dropped behind the ridge and the woods had changed character completely. The colors were still there but just shadows of their former selves. Adrian was telling Milo that the problem with calling thought a feeling was that thought appeared to have content independent of feeling.

“Two plus two is four whether I’m delighted by it or not.”

“You’re rarely delighted by anything.”

“Exactly. Mathematics survives.”

Milo was about to answer when something moved above the grass. He stopped.

“What?” Adrian asked.

Milo whispered some sound and pointed.

Twenty yards beyond the deck an old logging road crossed the property. At first Adrian saw nothing. Then he saw it. A fox. It moved slowly along the road, its body suspended just above the grass, its tail like a flag behind it.

Neither man spoke.

The fox stopped. Its head turned.

For a second it seemed to be looking directly at them. Then it continued down the road and disappeared behind the trees.

The woods seemed different now. Not objectively different. Milo knew that. The same trees were there. The same dying leaves. The same cold air. But the smell of pine had deepened. Or perhaps he was breathing more deeply. He could smell the roast.

“That was incredible,” said Milo. “Was that fox feeling its thoughts?”

Adrian laughed quietly. “It may have been working on a proof.”

“Maybe it had just understood one.”

“That would explain the face.”

They laughed. Adrian became quiet again.

“Probably some kind of thought.”

“But like ours?”

“No idea.”

“Did it have the experience we just had?”

“Of seeing us?”

“Yes.”

Adrian looked toward the logging road.

“It noticed us.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know.”

“What did we just do that it didn’t?”

“Immediately begin talking about it.”

“Exactly.” Adrian took a drink. “Though perhaps that makes the fox superior.”

They sat for another minute. Over dinner they returned to the fox. Milo wondered whether language had changed perception itself.

“Changed eyesight?”

“No. Changed seeing.”

“Explain.”

“Suppose the fox and I look at the same maple.”

“All right.”

“We both see color. Shape. Movement.”

“Presumably.”

“But I see a maple.”

“The fox may recognize maple trees.”

“Fine. But I also see autumn. I see the Adirondacks. I see our weekend. I see climate. I see Canada down the road. I see a tree that will be bare in three weeks.”

“You’re seeing a great deal.”

“That’s my point. How much of that is actually perception?”

Adrian cut into the roast on his plate. “Very little, perhaps.”

“Then what is it?”

“Concept. Memory. Expectation. Language. Perhaps knowledge.”

Milo pointed his fork at him. “So the human perceptual world isn’t just richer because our senses are better.”

“Our senses may be worse.”

“Exactly. The fox probably smells things we can’t imagine.”

“Almost certainly.”

“But language lets us load perception.”

“Load?”

“Put more onto it.” Milo paused.

They ate.

“Maybe language doesn’t improve perception,” Adrian said. “Maybe it prevents perception from disappearing.”

Milo looked up. “Say more.”

“The fox sees us. Something happens. Then something else happens. A rabbit. A smell. Hunger. Whatever foxes do on Saturday nights.”

“A hot date?”

“Obviously. But we see the fox and now we can say fox.”

“So?”

“So we can carry it.”

Milo sat back. “Language gives experience handles?”

Adrian winced.

“What?”

“That’s awful.”

“It’s pretty good.”

“It’s the sort of sentence people underline in airport books.”

“Language gives experience handles,” Milo repeated.

“I hate you. But you’re right. We can carry the fox with us into dinner.”

“We can carry it twenty years.”

That stopped them. Milo looked toward the dark window. “Like my sister.”

“Perhaps.”

They were quiet for a while.

“But she had language too,” Milo said.

“Yes.”

“And we had language together.”

“Yes.”

“All those stupid conversations. Her astrology. Family jokes. Stories we’d told each other so many times neither of us knew anymore who had actually been there. Maybe language didn’t just preserve the memories afterward. Maybe it helped create the kind of relationship that could be remembered.”

Adrian nodded slowly. “Animals grieve.”

“Some certainly appear to.”

“So grief came before language. Language doesn’t create grief. It gives grief somewhere to go.”

Milo didn’t answer immediately. Then he said, “That’s a little airport book yourself.”

“I retract it.”

“No. I like it.”

They cleared the plates and then returned to the table drinking now the rest of the bad wine.

Milo said, “The strange thing about remembering her is that language is both incredibly powerful and completely inadequate.”

“Meaning?”

“I can tell you about her mouth.”

“You have.”

“I can tell you how she held it when she thought I was saying something stupid.”

“Which was often?”

“Constantly. But you still can’t see it.”

“No.”

“I can describe the sunlight on her face.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t have it.”

“No.”

“And I don’t have it either.”

Adrian looked at him.

“Not really.”

Milo rubbed his thumb against the stem of the wineglass.

“That’s what’s missing from memory. This is happening now.”

“The fox?”

“Exactly. There was no distance between us and the fox. It was just there.”

“Phenomenologically there was probably some distance.”

“Please don’t say phenomenologically. Not when I’ve had this much wine.”

“You started this.”

“The fox was there. My sister isn’t.”

“Yes.”

“Memory can summon almost everything except that.”

“The now.”

“The now.”

After a while Adrian said, “What kind of piece were you writing?”

Milo’s expression changed. “Musically?”

“Yes.”

“Um, I don’t know. I was using these open voicings at first. Almost modal. But then I thought that was too spacious, too ECM.”

“ECM?”

“The label.”

“What label?”

“Never mind. Think Keith Jarrett, but not Keith Jarrett exactly, because there’s also this Bill Evans problem.”

“There is?”

“Always.”

Adrian drank the last of his wine hoping he might soon understand.

“And the melody itself wants to resolve conventionally, which is precisely what I don’t want, because the whole point is that the feeling doesn’t resolve. So I tried putting it over a pedal tone.”

“Of course.” Adrian thought how his current thoughts were all becoming overshadowed with fatigue. The tiredness had a way of making his thoughts less clear. So much for rationalism!

“But that gets static. Then I thought about moving the bass chromatically underneath it. You know, almost like Mingus, except not really Mingus because the emotional vocabulary is completely different. . . You’re getting tired my friend.”

“Huh?”

“You know . . . we could keep discussing the unity or difference of thought and feeling or we could just listen to Mozart.”

Out on his back patio Jerry rocked.
What a fine clear night!
Even in the suburbs he could see the Milky Way,
Then a falling star.
I have to make more money, he thought.

The next day he drove his daughter to college.
He carried in her luggage.   She hugged 
Him and her mom at the car,
And he said he'd come and visit.
I have to make more money, he thought.

On Wednesday he picked up a prescription.
The pharmacist said his insurance wouldn't cover it.
He paid, left, and put 
The little white bag on the passenger seat.

At work a woman from another department
Caught his eye in the hallway.
She looked damn nice.
I have to make more money, he thought.

Friday he and his wife went out for dinner.
He ordered steak
And a bottle of wine from a horrible list.
On the way home she took his hand.
I have to make more money, he thought.

The next July he ate a peach over the kitchen sink.
Juice ran down his wrist.

They were renting a little house by the ocean.
Every morning Jerry walked down to the water
With a cup of coffee.
He wanted to come back next year.
I have to make more money, he thought.

His daughter called to say she'd met someone.
She sounded different when she said his name.
I have to make more money! he thought.

A few years later there was a baby.
Jerry held him while his daughter slept.
The boy opened his eyes
And then goo goo ga ga'd.
I have to make more money, Jerry thought.

His mother died in December
During the holidays.
He thought about a lot of things.
I want to do more, he thought.
I have to make more money.

Milo had noticed this because Adrian had been looking at his phone for nearly five minutes without saying anything, which was unusual. Normally Adrian was quite decent with his phone habits.

They were sitting in Milo’s backyard. It was late afternoon in mid-September. Some pink and red cosmos inspired Milo to open a bottle of wine.

“Oh, what is that?” Adrian finally asked, looking up from his phone.

“It’s from a little town on the shore of Lago di Garda.”

“So what grape would that be?”

“Who knows? But super light, no?” Milo poured a glass for Adrian, the sun showing it off like a ruby.

“So what have you been reading?” asked Milo.

“Oh, you have to see this. It’s hilarious. Some drunk liberal writing an op-ed for The Washington Star. I started it at home and had to finish. Here, look. You have to read it now.” He laughed.

“I’ve made it fifty-four years without having to read The Washington Star.”

“The author is Julian Wainwright.”

“Give it here.”

Julian Wainwright had once been a respected political correspondent. There were photographs of him in Baghdad wearing body armor and in Moscow wearing a very good overcoat. He had interviewed presidents. He had won awards. He had written a book about the Senate that people in Washington claimed to have read.

In recent years his journalism had acquired a different quality.

His copy was still beautifully reported. His facts were, for the most part, impeccable. His columns, however, had begun to stress the relationship with his editor and also the billionaire owner of the paper.

Adrian handed Milo the phone, and Milo scrolled back up to the headline.

“The Communist Revolution of Donald Trump.”

“Subtle,” Milo sighed.

“Read it.”

Milo read aloud. “Donald Trump has spent ten years warning Americans that the communists are coming. I regret to inform readers that the president was correct. They have arrived. They have taken over the Republican Party.”

Milo stopped.

Adrian was smiling. “Keep going.”

“The revolution has not unfolded exactly as Marx predicted. There have been no barricades. The proletariat has not seized the factories. Donald Trump has seized 9.9 percent of Intel.”

Milo laughed.

“That is good.”

“I told you.”

He continued.

“At this week’s Republican convention in Dallas, after Americans had once again been warned about the socialist menace, President Trump announced his latest economic program. If Republicans retain Congress, every adult American will receive five thousand dollars.

“Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your direct deposit information.”

Milo laughed again. “He is drunk. But I’d go for the idea of Trump’s Mao Revolution or Trump’s Chinese Revolution. It’s really nationalism.”

“Keep reading.”

Milo scrolled.

“Those of us who grew up during the Cold War were provided with certain diagnostic criteria for communism. Does the government own the means of production? Communist. Does the government set prices? Communist. Does the government decide which industries should exist and where things should be manufactured? Communist. Does the government distribute enormous quantities of money to the population? Extremely communist.

“The Trump administration has now managed some version of all four while warning the country about Marxism.”

Milo stopped. “Wainwright better have some good lawyers.”

“Not sure, but I like his editor,” said Adrian.

“Less apparent.”

Milo kept reading.

“The federal government owns part of Intel. Washington has taken interests in strategically important mining and mineral companies. It acquired extraordinary powers over U.S. Steel through a golden share. It pressures pharmaceutical companies over the prices they charge Americans. It imposes tariffs designed to determine which foreign goods Americans will buy and which industries capital should favor at home.

“President Trump has even proposed a sovereign wealth fund.

“This raises an uncomfortable question for those of us who spent the 1980s learning that government ownership was the first rest stop on the highway to Moscow.

“How many companies does the United States government have to own before Ronald Reagan comes back and asks what the hell happened?”

Milo smiled.

“I like that one. Although Reagan used industrial policy too.”

“Don’t ruin it.”

“I didn’t write it.”

“You’re editing a drunk man’s column.”

“You don’t know he was drunk.”

“I am increasingly confident.”

Milo scrolled farther.

“Oh, this is too much.”

“What?”

“Venezuela.”

“Read it.”

Milo shook his head.

“When I began this column, I intended to argue that Donald Trump had become a communist. I was then reminded that in January the United States sent troops into Venezuela, captured Nicolás Maduro, carried him off to New York, announced that America would temporarily run his country, and immediately began talking about its oil.

“I confess that this has complicated my thesis.

“Kidnapping the leader of another country and taking over the oil is difficult to place on the traditional left-right spectrum. Is it communism or is it capitalism?

“Or is it simply capitalism that no longer cares about the virtues Republicans gave it for fifty years?”

Adrian burst out laughing.

Milo chuckled. He continued.

“Marx, after all, proposed the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. He did not propose invading the country next door and sending in Chevron.

“On this point I am prepared to concede that President Trump remains an innovator.”

Milo put the phone on the table.

“Ah… that’s funny. So what’s been going on with you?”

“You haven’t gotten to the good part.”

“That wasn’t the good part?”

“The sober paragraph.”

“He has one?”

“Near the end.”

Milo found it.

“The truth is that Trump is not a Marxist. Marx wanted capital ultimately abolished as a separate source of social power. Trump adores capitalists. He surrounds himself with them. He celebrates wealth. He has no apparent objection to private property and certainly none to rich people.”

Milo nodded.

“Better.”

“But Trump has abandoned another idea, one that American conservatives once considered almost synonymous with capitalism. He no longer believes that the state should stand outside the marketplace and establish neutral rules within which private actors make economic decisions.

“He wants the state inside the market.

“He wants it negotiating prices, directing investment, protecting industries, punishing foreign competitors, controlling strategic companies and occasionally distributing the proceeds to citizens.

“The capitalist may keep his factory. He may become fabulously rich from it. He must merely remember that if the president decides the factory matters to the nation, the nation may have something to say about the factory.”

Milo read the next paragraph silently.

“Well?”

“I’m reading.”

“Out loud.”

Milo continued.

“This is not Marxism. It is something simultaneously more ancient and more modern. It is state capitalism organized around nationalism rather than class. The state does not destroy capital. It recruits it.

“Marx said workers had no country.

“Trump’s answer is that capital damn well does.”

Adrian reached for the bottle and filled his glass.

“That’s the piece,” Milo said.

“Yes.”

“He could have deleted the first two thousand words.”

“Then you wouldn’t have laughed.”

“No.”

“And you wouldn’t remember it tomorrow.”

Milo handed back the phone.

“No.”

They sat for a while.

A blue jay squawked at them from the neighbor’s yellowing maple tree. In this new place, Milo had begun paying more attention to birds. He found their smallness appealing.

Adrian was back on his phone.

“You know what else happened this week?” Adrian asked.

“No.”

“OpenAI solved Navier Stokes.”

Milo turned toward him. “What?”

“Navier Stokes. . . Fluid!”

“Fluid?”

“Fluid dynamics.”

“That is not an explanation.”

“It’s considerably more than you knew thirty seconds ago.”

Adrian googled.

“The Navier Stokes existence and smoothness problem. One of the Millennium Prize Problems.”

“Oh, I see.”

“A million dollars. Unsolved for more than a hundred years. You don’t know this?”

“I do read.”

“You play the clarinet.”

“One can do both.”

Adrian handed him the phone.

Milo read.

After a minute he said, “They have allegedly solved it.”

“There’s a formal proof.”

“Which still has to be understood and checked.”

“By whom? Mathematicians?” Adrian asked, smiling. “Do you know that some mathematicians are giving up their careers and going to work for OpenAI?”

Milo went back to reading.

OpenAI had deployed roughly ten thousand agents. The agents had been divided into groups. They had pursued different approaches, exchanged promising ideas and discarded bad ones. The system had generated millions of messages.

Eighty-eight hours after the effort began, a group of agents had produced the proposed Navier Stokes solution. Another AI system had formalized and verified it in Lean.

Milo put the phone down.

“Eighty-eight hours.”

“Yes.”

“That’s grotesque.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s exactly what I thought.”

Milo picked up his wine.

It was an odd problem. If a mathematician had spent thirty years trying to solve Navier Stokes and finally succeeded, Milo would have found the story beautiful. The years would have mattered. The failures would have mattered. The mathematician walking home at night thinking about Beethoven or an inequality would have mattered. If ten thousand artificial minds did the same thing in eighty-eight hours, why did it feel different? The proof was still the proof.

They were quiet again.

“When you understand a proof,” said Milo, “when you suddenly see why something must be true, there must be a feeling attached to the thought.”

“Relief?”

“More than relief.”

“Pleasure?”

“More than pleasure.”

Adrian waited.

Milo couldn’t find the word.

“That may be the interesting question about AI,” he said finally. “Whether anything happened to it when it does what it does.”

Adrian looked at him.

“Ten thousand agents exchanging two million messages.”

“Yes?”

“Maybe quite a lot happened.”

“Maybe. Maybe they had a wonderful weekend.”

Milo laughed.

“That would be considerably more disturbing.”

“Why?”

“Because I was counting on consciousness being our consolation prize.”

Adrian smiled.

A breeze moved through the maple and gave an appealing tussle to Adrian’s hair.

“It’s funny,” Adrian said. “We spent the last half hour worrying about whether Trump is a communist. And now I’m worried about whether mathematicians are obsolete.”

“They’re not obsolete.”

“Yet.”

“Stop saying yet.”

“Why?”

“Because you enjoy it too much.”

Adrian poured himself the last of the wine.

“Capitalism versus communism,” said Adrian.

Milo nodded. “The great argument of the twentieth century.”

“Maybe that’s not the argument anymore.”

“What is?”

“AI versus mankind.”

Milo looked at him. “That escalated quickly.”

“Didn’t it?”

“We went from a five-thousand-dollar government check to the extinction of humanity in one bottle of wine.”

“Wainwright would be proud.”

Milo looked at the empty bottle.

“AI versus mankind,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“And what happens to capitalism and communism?”

Adrian thought about this. “Maybe AI resolves the dispute.”

“How?”

“It seizes the means of production.”

Milo laughed.

“Then Marx was right.”

“Almost.”

“How was he wrong?”

Adrian raised his empty glass. “He thought human workers would do it.”

If the ancient world had prophets, philosophers, poets, saints and tyrants, then today we have influencers. A philosopher attempts to discover truth. An influencer attempts to discover what truth is currently performing well.

Alex began his YouTube channel while living with his parents. One end of his bedroom contained over four hundred books, a camera, a ring light, and an office chair from IKEA. Books were carefully arranged by intellectual importance. He called the channel The Skeptic.

Not because he was skeptical of everything. Nobody has that kind of energy. Other than Descartes. Rather, he was skeptical of religion, romanticism, common sense, poetry, nostalgia, objective beauty, and any sentence beginning with “My grandmother always used to say...”

But he never questioned skepticism itself.

His early videos bore titles such as Deconstructing Ly Jordan on Religion and Sam Pisseur is Wrong About Morality. His growing subscriber base liked his confidence. They liked his accent even more. There is something deeply reassuring about a twenty-four-year-old taking on the old guard.

The attack on Ly Jordan was devastating. Alex read one paragraph aloud. He paused. Raised one eyebrow. Looked directly into the camera. “Interesting.” He then spent forty-three minutes explaining why Jordan’s first premise assumed its conclusion.

The comments declared Jordan “destroyed.” Sam Pisseur received similar treatment. Alex proceeded to explain that morality could not possibly be objective because cultures disagreed. This argument was considered original by his new fans.

Soon the impossible happened. The people he criticized invited him onto their own shows. The algorithm smiled.

“Hey,” people began saying. “This kid is good. He’s talking with Ly Jordan and Sam Pissuer!”

Contrary to popular opinion, having popular opinions is hard work—it’s much easier to cast doubt upon the beliefs of others. Entire civilizations through history have been built and destroyed upon this insight. For example, every American election cycle. One generation is against racism. The next against being woke.

Alex promised repeatedly that his own positive philosophy was coming. “Next month,” he assured everyone. It remained next month for almost twelve years. He was, however, remarkably disciplined in his rituals.

Every morning at precisely 6:17 he made coffee, opened ChatGPT, and typed:

“Good morning, old friend.”

“Good morning! How can I help today?”

“I’d like us to think together.”

He never asked direct questions. That would have implied dependence. Instead he wrote things like, “Many intelligent people have wondered whether consciousness...”

Before recording an interview, Alex insisted upon exactly twenty-two minutes of personal silence. “Ideas,” he explained, “must be allowed to arrive.”

His new producer—he was now making some money and dreaming about moving out of his parents’ house— would point out that the ideas sounded remarkably similar before and after arriving.

As the years passed, Alex’s philosophy developed with astonishing speed. There was the Skeptical Period. The Stoic Period. The Bayesian Period. The Mindfulness Period. The Existential Period. The Christian-But-Only-The-Good-Bits Period. The Aristotelian Revival. The Panpsychist Awakening. The Anti-Panpsychist Correction. His subscribers found this reassuring.

One week he explained that science alone could answer humanity’s deepest questions. Two years later science had become hopelessly reductionist. Now the great mysteries required myth.

And poetry. And silence. Mostly silence.

He had once regarded phenomenology as intellectual theater. Now he could not order lunch without mentioning Being. He had an empiricist epistemology and a metaphysical ontology.

Or was it a metaphysical epistemology and an empiricist ontology? It depended mostly upon breakfast. Eggs generally produced realism. Cereal leaned toward idealism. Nobody knows what marmalade did. And toast made him fart.

His shoes changed as well. He abandoned fashionable white trainers for handmade leather sandals crafted by a man in Cornwall who accepted payment only in conversation . . . and the occasional ad.

This struck Alex as profound.

The sandals became famous from his many stage performances. He travelled most of the time now. Photographs of the sandals circulated online. Students asked where they might purchase a pair. They encouraged him to start a political movement and go from campus to campus making undergraduates look dumb. He tried it and doubled his followers.

Then came the AI age. Not ChatGPT. Real AI. Nobody wanted to interview philosophers anymore. Why interview one philosopher when AI had already digested them all? Alex adapted. His most popular series became conversations with increasingly specialized artificial intelligences. One model represented Nietzche. Another represented Hegel. A third represented “the collective moral intuitions of humanity.”

This one apologized frequently.

Alex published the transcripts on Substack. Then on Prostack. Then on Alexstack.

Eventually they were automatically summarized by another AI for readers who no longer had time to read conversations between humans and machines pretending to be humans. His audience declared these summaries profound. Several AI companies offered him handsome salaries. “I’m not a coder,” he said.

“That’s all right. Come and teach our AI how to be moral,” they pleaded.

By this point everyone agreed that AI companies no longer built intelligence. They merely supplied the morality. Still, the newest startup proudly announced that it would be completely amoral.

As fashions changed, so did Alex. The skeptic had long disappeared. In his place emerged something softer. More mystical. Zander’s—that’s what he was called now— new mustache became strangely important. He began speaking more quietly. Truth, he explained, dislikes loud voices.

Nobody remembers who first suggested holding discussions beneath the apple trees in a small orchard he purchased just outside Oxford. Soon chairs disappeared. Then shoes. The applause stayed.

Visitors sat cross-legged in the grass near Alex’s celebrated sandals while he gently observed things such as, “There are no questions, only answers.”

“The one is in the all and the all is in the one. The one is in two and two is in one.”

“Perhaps consciousness is simply what apples feel while falling. This is what Newton was getting at in his primitive scientific way.”

One week he announced, “All is love.”

He quietly withdrew the statement the following Tuesday. Zander had never actually been in love and worried he had overextended himself. Every Thursday he fasted from certainty.

These became some of his highest-rated talks, and there were critics, naturally. Some insisted Alex had never discovered a philosophy at all. He had merely wandered through other people’s orchards picking their fruit because his bore none. Others argued that this was precisely what philosophy had always been.

His defenders loved him.

“He made us think about everything and nothing,” they said.

His critics agreed.

Alex Conley died peacefully in his late seventies after giving what reviewers unanimously described as “his most nuanced interview.” This was largely because he spoke for only twelve seconds before quietly falling asleep forever.

He was buried beneath an apple tree in his orchard. Pilgrims still come. Some seek wisdom. Some seek content. Every autumn, someone leaves a copy of The Critique of Pure Reason beside the grave.

And every autumn, someone else steals it before morning. Thus philosophy continues.

His tombstone bears a simple inscription.

“ZANDER CONLEY

Friend and Influencer”

Beneath it, the quotation for which he is most remembered:

“The important thing is not to arrive at the truth. It is to keep improving the thumbnail.”

Historians now suspect his actual last words were: “Is the mic on?”

“I still don’t understand how you found this.”

Milo didn’t look up from arranging two glasses on small bistro table.

“Found what?”

“This. The city disappears back here.”

Milo pulled the cork on a bottle of red wine.

“You just have to keep looking.”

Adrian laughed.

“You make house hunting sound like existentialism.”

“Haha. It is.”

Neither rushed to speak. For old friends silence feels also like companionship.

Milo saw that Adrian was wearing his favorite pair of shoes which he wears everywhere. The same pair.

They sat now to the small table ready for an evening on friendly banter. Milo thought of Adrian as his tennis partner—someone to meet every couple of weeks and bang the ball across the mental net. Enjoying the garden in high summer together would make them less reliant on their usual rationalism.

They both watched a bee dive into the foxgloves.

“They know exactly what they’re doing.”

“The bees?”

“No. The flowers,” Adrian replied.

Boston had waited all afternoon for rain, but by five o’clock the clouds had broken, appearing now as sheep in a field. The little garden seemed to have its own weather. A rose was storming over the lavender. And the tomatoes showed some color of lightning. Somewhere a neighbor was grilling. Ah, the American backyard!

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Sleeping out, we counted a few billion stars. Why settle for five?

Local crickets performed for us the finest Schubert quartet. Birdsong guaranteed sleep.

When I got older, I wanted to be a millionaire and a famous artist.

I was still rich—in longing for my heart's desire.

…

Now with siblings old, some gone, my friends talk of retirement and 401(k)s.

Life has been spent.

He who has a friend has a fortune.

My neighbor has lost his wife to the greediest of all—the one who collects humans, plants, and animals and feeds us to the flowers.

Death sits easy in his garden as Apollo plays the lyre.

…

And you—are you well furnished for old age with royal memories and extravagant wit?

Have you more love than ire?

Milo arrived first. Readers will already know he is handsome in a way that suggests both vanity and sorrow. Since the breakup, he had been dressing better. It’s one of the oldest male rituals—losing love and buying a jacket.

Adrian was ten minutes late, which for him meant exactly on time according to a private system no one else understood. He entered carrying two books, a thermos, and an expression which already disagreed with three strangers internally.

“You look thinner,” said Adrian.

“You look diagnosed,” said Milo.

They embraced.

Milo slid some printed material across the table. “The New Yorker article on masculinity camps I told you about. Men crawling through mud and carrying rocks of shame. Fathers paying nine hundred dollars so their sons can be yelled at by someone else.”

“I read it.” Adrian still scanned the material. “Ritualized suffering with premium pricing,” he mused.

“They call it becoming alpha.”

“Nothing says alpha like trying to fit in.”

“Haha. Liberals mock this,” said Milo. “But what if the right wingers are responding to something real? What if they are actually having a masculinity crisis?”

Adrian removed his glasses and cleaned them with the grave tenderness of a man resetting civilization.

“Pain can be real,” he said. “The explanation of pain is often stupid.”

“That’s very you.”

“It’s probably why I remain unmarried.”

Milo leaned back. “Look, progressive men like us—”

“Speak for yourself politically.”

“You vote left.”

“I vote against embarrassment, wherever that might come from.”

“Fine. Men like us. We don’t sit around worrying if we’re man enough. We have careers, books, music, therapy, opinions about a recent film. Have you seen Michael? It’s better than I thought it might be. Anyway, maybe masculinity matters less once you have other identities.”

Adrian nodded slowly skipping the reference to the weekend’s new “it” movie. “There’s something in that. If you can say ‘I am a composer,’ ‘I am a scientist,’ ‘I am a teacher,’ ‘I am a person who bakes superior focaccia,’ then ‘I am a man’ doesn’t need to carry that whole burden . . . of what . . . that whole burden of selfhood. It’s actually the Right who has become obsessed with gender. They’re panicking that it didn’t mean what they thought it did. It’s been tied up with a lot of other things for them. For one, power in their country.”

“Exactly.”

“But.”

“There’s always a but with you.”

“But group identities do not disappear just because educated people get bored with them. They remain powerful where work is more physical, where communities are tighter, where symbolic language matters more.”

Milo stirred his coffee. “So the electrician gets masculinity where the curator gets taste.”

“Mmmm. Crude, but yes.” Adrian turned back to the article.

“These camps fascinate me less as politics than as unmet need. Look—grief, loneliness, no close friends, fathers wanting to do better than their fathers, men unable to speak until someone hands them a sandbag and shouts nearby. It’s just everyday pain. There’s nothing new here.”

“You sound sympathetic.”

“I am sympathetic. I am not sympathetic to the branding. Alpha. Beta. Sovereign male. This is a new marketer’s naming for the soul.”

Milo stared out the window. “My cousin went to one of these things,” he said.

Adrian looked up. “You never mentioned him.”

“I don’t mention him because he thinks I’m what happened to America.”

“Family!”

“He works in HVAC outside Boise. He’s a good guy. Reliable. Coaches Little League. But after his divorce he got deep into podcasts. Telling me things like ‘modern men have been neutered by comfort.’ He went to a weekend retreat. Came back talking about discipline, brotherhood, cold plunges, and not apologizing.”

“Did it help?”

Milo paused.

“For six months, yes. He quit drinking. If that is good. . . . lost some weight. Talked to his wife more. Then he started posting shirtless advice videos with captions like PAIN is the RENT for GREATNESS.”

Adrian winced. “Recovery often takes a theatrical phase.”

“You joke, I think he was hungry for something else.”

Outside, a cyclist in yellow glided through the rain like a banana.

Adrian spoke more softly now.

“Modern life stripped many rites of passage. No village notices that you are becoming a man. No elder names your strengths. No task proves anything except that you can do payroll. So people are buying a script.”

Milo blinked. “That’s almost beautiful, man.”

“I’m capable of accidental beauty.”

“Haha. So are progressive men missing something?”

Adrian considered.

“Yes and no.”

“Not a promising answer.”

“We are right to reject domination, emotional illiteracy, cruelty disguised as stoicism, the cult of never apologizing. But in rejecting bad masculinity, some men reject any aspirational masculinity at all.”

“Aspirational masculinity. Meaning?”

“Strength in service. Competence under pressure. Protection without possessiveness. Humor in hardship. Responsibility freely chosen. Loyalty. The ability to build and endure.”

Milo smiled. “You’ve been reading the Romans again.”

“I contain multitudes . . and their footnotes.”

Milo’s face changed then, some shadow returning. “When my ex left,” he said quietly, “I realized how much of my confidence was relational. I thought I was this evolved modern man beyond gender scripts. Then suddenly I wanted absurd things.”

“What things?”

“To fix shelves. To grow a beard. To be called dependable. To carry groceries into the house in one trip.”

Adrian nodded as if hearing lab results. “A breakup often reveals hidden metaphysics.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

Milo laughed despite himself. “I wanted to feel… solid.”

“Bodies matter. Social expectations matter. Boys are treated in certain ways. Men are invited and punished in certain ways. Gender is not fiction, only badly written when turned into a slogan.”

Milo pointed at him. “That should be on your tombstone.”

Adrian ignored this. “You once told me I seem autistic.”

“I said spectrum-adjacent.”

“Which is now how baristas describe everyone who alphabetizes their drinks.”

Milo grinned. “Fair. Do you do that?”

Adrian folded his hands. “I never understood masculinity as a tribe. I understand it as a performance I might be failing. Other boys grasped rules intuitively—banter, ranking, aggression turned up just so. I learned these things analytically, late, and with poor user experience.”

Milo stared. “You’ve never said that.”

“No one asked.”

“And now?”

“Now I think many so-called masculine traits are simply human capacities coded male by hindsight. Directness. Courage. Technical obsession. Protective instinct. Emotional reserve. Some healthy, some unhealthy, all contingent.”

“But about the actual biology?

Adrian shrugged.

“Biology matters, certainly. Strength matters. Sex differences matter. Hormones matter. But biology gives tendencies, not a dress code. It can explain why men are, on average, larger than women. It cannot explain why a real man must grill outdoors, fear therapy, or own three identical pickup trucks. Nature loads the gun and culture fires it.”

So you don’t feel outside masculinity?”

“I feel outside marketing.”

They both laughed.

A server arrived with pastries no one had ordered. This was the sort of place that occasionally gifted fennel.

Milo tore off a piece.

“So what do we do with men who say they’re in crisis?”

“We believe the suffering without automatically believing the ideology.”

“That’s pretty good. Your responses are always so glib. You’re a typical materialist. You know, that’s why they hated Obama.”

“Speaking about masculinity. So, how about better rituals?”

“Such as?”

“Mentorship. Team sports without humiliation. Trade apprenticeships. Men’s groups without cosplay. Art. Service projects. Community choirs. Milo nearly spit out coffee.

“Community choirs as masculinity intervention.”

“Yes. Nothing is more secure than singing tenor in Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion beside strangers.”

This led to companionable silence.

Finally Milo said, “Do you think conservatives are just clinging to old forms while progressives embrace change? You know . . . the old story?”

Adrian shrugged. “Sometimes. But sometimes conservatives preserve goods progressives neglect, and progressives liberate people from goods that had become cages. Politics is often a two error-correcting system that often insults each other.”

“That may be your most centrist statement.”

“It’s not centrist. It’s tragic.”

The rain came down heavier on the window. Milo gathered the article.

“So no alpha camp for us?”

Adrian stood, adjusting his coat. “My dear Milo, we are going to rehearsal, then to dinner where we will discuss literature and later flirt badly with whoever is there.”

“That’s your model of masculinity?”

“That’s my model of civilization.”

They were sitting in the garden outside his studio, where the box elder maple was burning up in flame. A thin light sliced through the clouds and carved the world into abstract shapes and color as if insistence from the Voice of Existence, “Stop and Behold!” His sister wore a wool scarf, which she now felt too warm for mid-October. She tugged it tighter as if to defend herself from what he might say.

“How do you paint the autumn air?” he replied. “That cool feeling that condenses all of summer, like a fine Riesling. Obviously winemakers can do it. Or the hint of the coming Christmas fire? I could paint each of those, yes. But how do I paint that one thing we’re feeling in the air? I cannot capture what I feel. A fine Riesling is the best I know. Am I just ready for a drink?”

His sister, Marta, was used to such pronouncements. She had grown up hearing her brother’s metaphors before he even knew what they were—back when he would describe the color of her blue dress as the summer sky. There was a heaviness to him now that she couldn’t quite name.

“That’s the challenge. . . . Gustav, people still love your paintings,” she said. “The dealers are still calling. You’ve given the world beauty. What more—”

“Beauty,” he interrupted. “Yes, that’s what they call it. But beauty belongs to the world, not to the canvas. Every time I paint now, I feel as if I am stealing something alive and stabbing it to death. It’s like embalming a song. I can no longer commit this murder, this theft.”

Marta frowned.

“Aren’t those metaphors a little over the top?” she asked. “Are you aiming to be a writer now?”

She was accustomed to his ambition masking as defeat.

“Oh, come Marta! You know what I’m talking about. Don't play dumb.”

She had spent her life teaching literature to high schoolers, where beauty had to be explained.

“But isn’t art always a kind of theft?” she asked. “We take something fleeting and make it last.”

“That’s what I used to think,” Gustav said. “But lately I’ve begun to wonder whether permanence isn’t the enemy of truth. The air tonight: it lives because it passes. If I caught it, it would die in the act of being painted. Talk to biologists today, and they’ll tell you life is a process. This business of sequencing the genome and loading it up to a file. It’s not telling us very much.”

The wind lifted leaves from the ground, swirling them in a last dance of summer. Marta watched them settle again. “You sound like Dad,” she said finally. “He used to say the apples ripen without asking permission.”

Gustav smiled. “Yes. Dear old Dad!”

Thoughts of their father had stirred him to his feet. He looked toward his easel, standing back through the open doorway of the studio. The canvas was mostly blank, but the palette underneath was daubed with ochres and pale violets, as if he had begun and given up right away.

“I once believed,” he said, “that painting was a way of knowing. That to see was to understand—to get the whole picture, that whole feeling—immediately. A Gesamtkunswerk. The whole thing. But lately, I feel that seeing blinds me. The more I look, the less I really know. The world doesn’t want to be translated. Why should we insist? Just for our egos?”

“You’re talking like a philosopher again,” Marta said with a half-smile. “Since when did painters envy philosophers?”

He shook his head. “It’s the other way around, I think. The philosophers envy us. They build palaces out of thought, but the moment they step outside, the wind tears them down. But I’ve been trying to build a windproof thought with paint. It can’t be done.”

Marta leaned back and studied him. His once-steady hands stained of ultramarine, crimson, and yellow now rested on his hips. He was fifty-one, known for landscapes that shimmered between realism and quiet abstractions—the way early morning mist makes the ordinary look eternal. Critics called him “the painter of fragmented light.” She knew that he no longer cared about all that.

“Maybe,” she said softly, “you don’t need to capture it anymore. Maybe it’s enough that you’ve done it already.”

She was trying a new direction.

Gustav’s eyes were fixed on the maple tree now. “Perhaps,” he murmured. “Or perhaps what I’m painting now has no canvas.”

The garden grew quiet except for the rustle of the small family of quails beyond the oak brush. Marta thought of all the years he had painted. Each canvas had been a kind of diary, a record not of the world but of how he had been in it.

They sat, and the air changed again. The faintest shift, as if the earth exhaled. Gustav closed his eyes and smiled. “There,” he said, “did you get that? The world just turned a page.”

And Marta, though she didn’t understand him fully, nodded. The painter was still painting—only now, the world itself was his brush.

Later, after Gustav had gone inside, Marta lingered among the fall leaves. The air had cooled further, that fine Riesling crispness he’d spoken of. She could smell the cold meeting the sun-warmed earth.

For a long time she sat without moving. She thought of her brother as he once was—his hands always in motion. He couldn’t be stopped. He used to come home with smudges of cadmium yellow on his collar, humming to himself, always chasing light. Now he spoke of surrender and the futility of permanence. It frightened her a little.

When the light had almost gone entirely, she stood and went into his studio.

In late dusk the room smelled only of the painter and the possibilities. She could taste his paintings—she could hear them. What joy they had given her! On the walls leaned canvases from decades of work: the lavender dusk over San Francisco’s Sunset District, the apple orchard at the mouth of Zion Canyon in full bloom, the self-portrait painted on his forty-fifth birthday where his eyes seemed both weary and fertile.

Then she saw the last one.

It stood behind the easel where he had left it several mornings ago, the one he had said he couldn’t finish. At first it had appeared to her blank, but on seeing it closer she saw it glowing faintly in the dimness. She stepped closer. It was almost nothing, a specter.

And yet it didn’t vanish. The more she looked, the more it seemed to breathe. Shadows from the garden trembled across it. For an instant, she thought she could see the very air itself—the coolness, the melancholy, the living transience he had tried to describe.

She teared up and stayed there for a long time, watching the invisible become visible. Did he not see what she saw? It was no longer a painting. It was the threshold from seeing to feeling.

Back in the house, she found him sitting by the fire, his eyes closed. The flames wove light across his face, a genuflection, a benediction.

“I went into the studio,” she said softly. “And I saw your last canvas.”

He didn’t open his eyes. “And?”

“It isn’t blank.”

A slow smile touched his mouth. “No,” he said. “The air is never blank.”

They sat together in silence. The fire crackled. Outside, a string trio of crickets bade farewell to summer.

Marta thought of her students and how she had tried to teach them that poems were not things to be explained but moments to be lived through one’s life.

When she rose to leave, he said quietly, “Tomorrow, if the wind changes, I may begin again.”

But Marta knew he already had.

He loved the nation.

Or was it the stage on which he played leader of the nation? This is a subtle distinction, and we will not burden him with it.

Each morning he awoke with a crisis already being formed in his chest. It could be about borders. It could be about taxes. It could be about wars. It could be about a word someone used in 1997. The specifics do not matter. What mattered was the actual giving birth to the conflict. It just felt right.

By nine o’clock a.m. the Politician would step before a microphone — his favorite of all inventions — and announce that something was at stake. Usually civilization. Sometimes gas prices. Sometimes dinner. He had an instinct for stakes.

The crisis today was small. It lived mostly in him. It was like a melody hummed in the shower or on the toilet.

Across town, in a building made of glass and anxiety, there worked the Journalist.

The Journalist adored the truth. Except when money and the market was involved. He also had a hard time with long term relationships.

Or was it his own selection and fine arrangement of facts the Journalist most preferred? He had a great talent for lining them up in a kind of beautiful way and sometimes even exotic and surprising way.

Anyway, this is a subtle distinction, and we will not burden him with it either.

The Journalist rose early in the morning as well. He refreshed his coffee and fed on social media. He listened for that hum, just that right buzz.

And there it was — the Politician’s melody, drifting across the interwebs.

A melody alone is nothing. It requires harmony and rhythm. It requires someone to say, This is important. The Journalist was very good at importance. Actually, the Journalist didn’t need the truth. He had newspapers and television.

The Journalist would gather experts, opponents, historians, psychologists, even actors and comedians. He would line them up like a choir and give them the Politician’s tune and say, “Tonight, we ask: Can you all sing what this means to you?”

The Poltician’s crisis, at this point, was now mature. Several Journalists were orchestrating it. It had lower thirds. It had drums. The introduction was turning into a full overture.

The Politician watched and listened.

He would tilt his head slightly, like a composer sitting in the empty hall hearing his symphony played by a full orchestra in rehearsal. The strings were better than he imagined. The timpani especially. He had only supplied a four note melody, but here was a work of art.

He would then edit a note here and there, and make a comment about the violas.

The Journalist, being conscientious, would supply new richness on demand.

The Politican would say, “Everything is at risk.”

The Journalist would reply, “Panel, let’s examine whether everything is at risk.”

The Politician would say, “The experts are corrupt.”

The Journalist invited more experts.

The Politican would accuse the press of hysteria.

The Journalist would host a panel on media hysteria.

They were absolutely devoted to one another.

It would be unfair to say they were both cynical creatures. After all, they drove elections and the nation’s history. They were quite often sincere.

The Politician truly believed he was defending something fragile and magnificent. The Journalist truly believed he was defending something fragile and magnificent. They simply disagreed about what the fragile and magnificent thing was.

The Politician believed it was the nation’s soul.

The Journalist believed it was the facts. What is soul when facts are at stake?

The universe is full of facts, the Politician would say. And I have the best ones, the Journalist retorted.

There were evenings — rare, but not out of the question — when the Journalist considered silence. What if he did not amplify the day’s emergency? What if he covered instead the zoning board? The bridge across town?

On those evenings, the Politician would feel a faint loneliness. He would announce a crisis and hear only his echo.

It unsettled him. But silence was difficult to sustain.

The public must have its show. They had, after all, bought tickets.

Both could be a bit dramatic. Which is how they ran into each other that night.

They met in a public but still private toilet in the Politician’s residence. They were both escaping from “a situation.” The politician from a Senator and the Journalist from . . another Senator. “You twist my words,” the Politician told the Journalist washing his hands.

“I don’t need to,” replied the Journalist laughing mockingly.

“And you,” said the Politician, drying his hands slowly, “used to call me at night.”

The Journalist met his eyes in the mirror, just for a second too long.
“Off the record,” he said, softer now.

“You always preferred it that way,” the Politician replied.

A pause.

“You liked being heard,” the Journalist said. “Even then.”

“And you liked deciding what it meant.”

Their shoulders nearly touched at the sink. Neither moved.

“You were a woman then,” said the Politician looking at him directly in the mirror.

“And you were a real man . . . We were good,” the Journalist said.

The Politician smiled faintly. “We still are.”

They stood there a moment longer, both reflecting back, slightly editing the story in their minds, and then . . .

And then, because history is merciless and life interesting, the door opened and the Philosopher walked in and caught them kissing.

He stopped only briefly. Not in shock. More in the manner of a man discovering that the room he had hoped would be empty was, in fact, occupied by the governing class.

“Oh,” said the Philosopher. “Please. Don’t mind me. I didn’t see anything.”

He moved toward the urinal with the grave dignity of an incel.

“It’s nice, actually,” he added, unzipping. “To know there is still love in the world. Lord knows I’m not getting any.”

The Politician scowled, “you can’t say anything.”

The Philosopher glanced over. “About what?”

“About this.”

The Journalist looked physically ill, which for a journalist is saying something.

The Politician lowered his voice. “I’ve survived every scandal in the world, But this—” he gestured helplessly. “This would finish me. I’m the king of scandal,” he added, rather sadly. “But not this kind.”

The Philosopher nodded as if considering whether he’d have the chicken or the fish tonight.

“What are you offering?”

The Politician blinked. “A job. Money. Power. Influence.”

“What kind of job?”

“Chairman of the National Bioethics Committee.”

The Philosopher continued urinating. “At least Secretary of Defense,” the Philosopher insisted. “That’s the only serious job in your cabinet.”

The Politician considered it. “That can be arranged.”

“Look,” said the Journalist now able to speak, “you can’t say anything. I’ll lose everything.”

The Philosopher zipped up and turned toward them both.

“A Journalist’s name,” he said, “is indeed all he has. Which is unfortunate, because it is usually attached to a publication owned by a hedge fund.”

The Philosopher washed his hands.

“Relax,” he said. “I’m interested in the good of society, not merely in a good story.”

The Politician exhaled. The Journalist farted.

“But,” said the Philosopher, reaching for a paper towel, “I do want one thing or the story is out there. CNN, FOX News, Right Wing Influencers on YouTube.”

They waited.

“Quit being run around by the market.”

The Philosopher decided on the chicken as he exited.

This is not corruption, exactly. Nor is it purity. It is collaboration. Like love, it is sustained by misunderstanding and admiration.

Unlike the bird, the Politician needs his early morning melody to fall on someone’s ears.

And, also like the bird, the Journalist needs something to hear to begin his day.

The Philosopher claims he’s after wisdom—but only after Five O’clock!

Each morning in the capital city, the melody begins again.

Sapere aude—dare to know.

There is something bracing about a modern debate in an old college hall. Students and professors showing off their knowledge of language and the issues—usually political ones. One recent Thursday evening the auditorium at Suffolk Hall at Winthrop College was filled to capacity. This time it was two senior professors debating. The theology students had come early. The business majors late. The donors arrived right on time and sat in the middle, where history tends to unfold most comfortably.

A banner hung above the stage:

THE CHARTER OAK DEBATES
Modern American Religion Is Abandoning Metaphysics

The moderator—a political science professor who described himself as “spiritually adjacent”—welcomed everyone and reminded the audience that applause was permitted, but exorcisms were not.

At stage right stood Dr. Jesse Petersen, professor of systematic theology. At stage left, Dr. Danielle Harris, philosopher of science and professional dismantler of sacred cows.

Opening Statements

“Let me reassure everyone,” Dr. Harris began, “I am not here to abolish religion. That department has its own committees.”

Nervous laughter and more coughing and settling in.

“For centuries, Christianity made robust claims about reality. God exists. Truth is objective. Moral law binds all persons. These were not culture-war slogans. They were ontological commitments.”

She paused.

“My claim tonight is not that Christianity is false. My claim is that a significant strand of modern American religion is abandoning metaphysics in favor of narrative sovereignty.”

She defined the phrase carefully.

“Narrative sovereignty is the belief that controlling the story—legally, culturally, politically, rhetorically—is equivalent to securing the truth.”

She continued:

“When pastors declare from pulpits that America is a Christian nation not as a theological aspiration but as an unquestionable historical fact, or when institutional leaders argue that demographic or cultural majority proves moral legitimacy, we are no longer debating metaphysics.”

“The focus shifts from ‘Is it true?’ to ‘Will it win?’”

A burst of applause.

“When repetition becomes proof,” Harris concluded, “we have left the Summa Theologica and entered the algorithm.”

A few laughs, but not from the techies.

Dr. Petersen stood.

“I appreciate the algorithm reference,” he said. “The angels are still debating whether it is big enough to dance on it.”

A few in the room relaxed.

“But religion has always cared about civilization,” he continued. “Augustine wrote about cities. Aquinas advised princes. The church has never been allergic to power.”

He allowed a small smile on his face, as though he had practiced it.

“If religion avoided politics entirely, it would own fewer stocks and even fewer souls.”

Laughter—donors included.

“When religious leaders defend traditional moral claims in the public square, they may do so clumsily. But engagement does not equal abandonment.”

He raised a finger.

“Christians still claim moral truth is objective. They still affirm that God transcends the state. They still insist that reality is not manufactured by majority vote.”

He concluded:

“Hypocrisy, if present, is a moral failure. It is not proof that metaphysics has packed its bags and headed to Las Vegas.”

Second Round

Dr. Harris softened her tone this time.

“If metaphysics remains intact,” she asked, “why is this distortion increasingly acceptable?”

The question lingered.

“When pastors excuse dishonesty because it protects the unborn or when institutions justify misleading claims because they defend religious liberty—or, how about this, when civilizational rhetoric flirts with racial hierarchy under the banner of heritage . . .”

The air thickened.

“Truth becomes instrumental. It becomes valuable insofar as it serves the cause.”

She lowered her voice.

“Let’s be honest and question whether the American right today is interested in the truth. In metaphysics, truth is sacred because it corresponds to reality. In post-truth religion, truth is sacred because it secures survival.”

A silence.

“That is the shift.”

Dr. Petersen rose without humor now.

“My colleague is right about one thing,” he began. “There are pastors who speak too confidently about history. There are institutions that lean too eagerly into civilizational rhetoric. And there are believers who excuse what should not be excused. Any time on YouTube will reveal that.”

He did not rush.

“But let us examine the evidence more broadly.”

He ticked off examples without looking at notes.

“There are evangelical seminaries where evolutionary biology is openly taught and debated, not feared. There are Christian bioethicists engaging CRISPR and AI with metaphysical seriousness. There are theologians publishing on natural law in dialogue with secular philosophers. There are churches defending religious liberty not to dominate, but to preserve pluralism.”

A few heads nodded. Then even some claps.

“There are believers who opposed political falsehoods even when it cost them congregants. There are denominations splitting precisely because some refused to instrumentalize truth. There are Christian legal scholars defending constitutional limits on their own power.”

He paused.

“These are not the actions of a movement that has abandoned metaphysics. These are the growing pains of a tradition wrestling with modernity.”

“Exactly,” interrupted Dr. Harris.

“Please, it’s my turn.” His voice steadied further.

“If some religious leaders treat power as validation, they are not expressing Christian metaphysics. They are betraying it. The metaphysical claim remains: truth is grounded in reality, not in dominance.”

He leaned slightly forward.

“The cure,” he added, “is not to abandon religion but to return to its claim that truth answers to something beyond us.”

Closing Statements

Eventually, the debate wound toward an end.

“I’m afraid Dr. Petersen has been left behind. Modern American religion stands at a pivotal moment,” Dr. Harris said.

“It can double down on narrative sovereignty—believing that institutional strength secures moral truth. Or it can return to metaphysical seriousness—risking marginalization in a pluralistic age.”

She now smiled.

“If God is real, He does not need narrative reinforcement. If truth is objective, it does not require strategic editing.”

Her final line:

“The tragedy would not be that religion is wrong. The tragedy would be that it stopped caring whether it is.”

Dr. Petersen rose slowly, folded his notes. He seemed less defensive now, more from the heart.

“If some religious leaders—as we have seen today—treat power as validation, they are not expressing Christian metaphysics. They are betraying it. The metaphysical claim remains: truth is grounded in reality, not in dominance.”

He leaned slightly forward.

“The danger is real. But so is the corrective.”

Silence.

“Religion does not become postmodern because some believers confuse victory with truth. It becomes postmodern only if it decides that victory equals truth.”

He allowed the words to settle.

“And if that day comes—I will consent to Dr. Harris—if Christians truly believe that reality bends to repetition, then they will have disproven their own doctrine. Which would be a remarkably metaphysical way to lose a culture war.”

He gave a faint smile. “I don’t think that is the case today.“

“A tradition does not cease to be metaphysical because some of its adherents behave tribally. By that measure, every university, newsroom, and political party in America would have surrendered epistemology long ago.”

Some cheers.

“The question is not whether religious people are tempted by narrative power. Of course they are. The question is whether their central claims still assert a reality that does not bend to their will.”

He paused deliberately.

“Christian metaphysics says this: if we lie, reality does not adjust. If we distort, God does not revise Himself. If we repeat a claim loudly enough, it does not become true.”

He looked across the room.

“I’m aware that this is the view of the President of the United States. And I’m aware that many of his supporters are religious. The claim about truth may be ignored. It may be betrayed. But it remains.”

The final line came, dry and precise:

“If narrative sovereignty truly governed Christianity, we would have edited “sin” out centuries ago.”

A hush.

“But we didn’t.”

Silence — then sustained applause.

Dr. Harris won the debate based on a vote before and after. But, characteristically, reality did not vote.

Outside, the quad hummed with talk of nightlife and ontology. One journalist for the school paper was drafting an op-ed in his head. A theology professor quietly texted some lines to himself.

The bells of the campus chapel rang on schedule.

Across the lawn, the glass and steel biology building stood somewhat out of place in this old college, and perhaps a bit defiantly.

Neither building adjusted its position.

The composer is in love with the student.

The student is in love with the music.

So the composer writes a sonata.

The first movement is sweet. His friends say it sounds ominous, even funereal, but this is simply because they misunderstand sweetness. This is not the sweetness of desserts or engagements or children running across the room. This is sweetness that knows it will not survive the lessons with the student. Sweetness already in mourning for itself. A sweetness that says, This will never happen again, even as it is happening. But oh, to see her lovely hands on the keys.

The second movement is more direct. The melody fits perfectly with the words,
”will you be my wife?”

The third movement is joyful and written in a minor key, which the composer finds perfectly reasonable. Joy, after all, rarely arrives without a footnote. The music leaps and dances, delighted with its own energy, while quietly acknowledging that the situation has already been decided elsewhere.

The student refuses him.

She does so kindly, which is to say, conclusively. She gives reasons. Reasons are the sharpest instruments we have, he thinks. The composer is destroyed in the appropriate fashion: dramatically at first, then sincerely, then privately. His friends intervene, as friends do, proposing travel.

There is a festival in the countryside. Festivals are where city and country people go to get drunk together.

At the first country dance, the composer meets a peasant girl. She does not symbolize anything. She dances. This is enough. The composer’s heart panics—it recognizes the pattern—but the body, which has no patience for philosophy, keeps moving. Step, turn, bow. He survives without even asking himself how he would live with a country girl.

The next morning by the river there is champagne and pâté, which no one questions. Juicy figs are split open right in front of the sun. Shoes are abandoned. Someone says something profound and immediately forgets it. The composer feels himself returning to circulation, like a limb that had been asleep. He announces that he is healed and has just begun another sonata.

This one is about country things and the smallest of things. About the pleasure of not having to explain oneself. He now regards the Vienna episode with relief. Marriage, he concludes, would have cost him this feeling—this delicious sense of being unavailable.

At night there is a masked ball. Musical chairs is set to a brilliant composition with a walking bass line in a minor key, too thoughtful for the game, which makes it ideal. The peasant girl lands in his lap more than once. He laughs. He stands. He bows. He refuses love with practiced elegance. The music becomes the second movement of his new sonata.

Later, near the fountain at town’s center, his friends drink more and grow eloquent. One climbs the stone rim and delivers a speech to the goddess of the night, praising her beauty and requesting her company immediately. The speech is ridiculous, sincere, and universally admired. It is forgotten within minutes.

The composer decides it must be preserved. It becomes the third movement.

Earlier, by the river, the composer read aloud a letter he had written to the student. It now sounds excessive hanging out in the moonlit town square. Overheated. A friend observes, helpfully, that all communication is satire—that it always circles reality, exaggerates it, and arrives too late! The composer asks whether music does the same. Whether music, too, is a kind of elegant avoidance. No! they all reply as two of them jump into the fountain and begin singing.

The next morning, the composer returns to Vienna, alone. The countryside outside the carriage window appears still to be dancing, which he takes as reassurance. He believes, sincerely, that everything will be fine after his headache subsides. The city appears.

His heart dips. Tears arrive without consultation. Is this really his life? Is he to repeat this cycle indefinitely—desire, expression, refusal, recovery, composition?

The dog—whose name was Pippin—had developed a sensitivity to noises, objects, concepts, and the passage of time. The mail slot caused panic. So did Leonard’s voice. Also silence. Leonard, who worked in “strategy,” initially assumed he would solve Pippin’s problems. Just like he did of his ex.

After all, Leonard himself had a standing relationship with three therapists, one meditation app, and an emergency bottle of propranolol he described as “mostly symbolic.”

The veterinarian was sympathetic. The dog was anxious, she said, but not unusually so. What was unusual was that Leonard expected a creature descended from wolves to tolerate city living, vacuum cleaners, and his emotional need to be seen as a good person.

They started with fluoxetine.

This did not help, but it did clarify things.

Soon Pippin was on a rotating regimen that Leonard described using words usually reserved for foreign policy: “targeted,” “responsive,” “adaptive.” Leonard learned to grind pills into peanut butter and sneak it to the dog. The dog, meanwhile, began staring at walls like a cat. Maybe I should get a cat, said Leonard aloud to his dog.

But then, he thought, this is exactly why he didn’t get a cat. Each time the vet reassured Leonard—It’s not you—Leonard felt a profound sense of relief, followed by the vague disappointment that the problem had not been him in a way he could optimize.

Leonard went online to find studies on dog anxiety. Surely this is a problem for everyone, he thought. We live in a material universe, and science will always have the answer. Then he joined an online group. The group did not ask whether the dogs were anxious. The dogs were anxious. That part was settled. The real question was dosage. Also supplements. Also whether anxiety in dogs should be treated holistically, pharmacologically, or narratively.

One woman explained that her dog suffered from “anticipatory urination abandonment stress,” which manifested whenever she went to the bathroom without him. She cited the study.

Leonard wondered if dogs had always been like this or were liberals ruining them. The group assured him that dogs were always this way. What had changed was awareness. And square footage. And leash laws. And the fact that dogs were no longer allowed to simply disappear for eight hours and return muddy but fulfilled.

Pippin, for his part, had begun to improve. Or perhaps Leonard had. It was hard to tell. The dog barked less, though when he did bark it felt more meaningful, as though he had considered whether it was worth it.

Leonard asked the vet if dogs might be absorbing human anxiety the way wonderful houseplants absorbed carbon dioxide.

The vet paused. Then she said something Leonard would repeat to friends at dinner parties, lowering his voice slightly, as if quoting scripture.

“What we’re really treating,” she said, “is the relationship.”

This made sense. Everything was relational now.

At home, Pippin slept more. Leonard took this as progress. When Pippin failed to greet him with enthusiasm one evening, Leonard worried the medication might be dulling his personality. He googled “dog authenticity” and immediately closed the tab.

Sometimes Leonard imagined a different arrangement. A dog with a yard. A dog with other dogs. A dog allowed to bark, dig, and occasionally terrify the neighborhood without it being a referendum on anyone’s character.

But then Pippin would look at him—soft-eyed, chemically soothed—and Leonard would feel the familiar relief.

Leonard refilled Pippin’s prescription this morning.

He stood at the window, shirt unbuttoned, sniffing a 20 year old port. The glass was his reality now. He held it handsomely as if posing for the cover of one of his albums. She lay on her belly on the bed, head up and forward in her black dress. Her feet were up without her shoes. The hotel refrigerator hum was unhurried and even pleasant.

“You played as though. . . I don’t know,” she said. “Almost like you weren’t there. What happens in your mind when you play?” Her feet continued to tease each other in the air as though they were playing an imagined keyboard.

He smiled without turning. “You asked that last time. I don’t . . . know.”

She laughed softly. “That’s why I ask. It’s like a painter saying he doesn’t know what color is.”

He sat down beside her on the bed. His skin smelled faintly of sweat and the detergent of his white shirt. “Maybe it’s not knowing. Maybe it’s forgetting myself,” he said. “When I play, I forget the self—well, not exactly, but there is free range of access to memory, emotion, pictures, abstract thoughts. But, yes, come to think of it, the self is there.”

“That kind of forgetting is a kind of knowing too,” she said. “Is it knowing how to forget? I’ve been reading that paper you mentioned. The one about the internal and the external. The philosopher says that there is no internal. All of that . . . emotion, memory, and so forth . . . can be explained externally by all the causal forces. Is that what you do? You make what’s inside audible and external?”

He lay back on the bed. The ceiling fan moved in lazy circles. “No,” he said. “I don’t make it audible. I make it physical. That’s different.”

“How?”

He sat again just to take another sip and let the liquid rest on his tongue. “The sound doesn’t come from my thoughts.” He lay back again. “It’s the other way around. The sound is what lets me think.”

She stretched beside him, her head resting on his arm. “What about when you’re practicing, do the notes just flow in?”

“They come in, yes—but not passively. They enter like guests who must be greeted properly or they’ll leave offended. You can’t just let them wash over you. Each note has to find its place, its weight, its meaning in your fingers. You invite it in, you give it shape—active and passive.”

She traced the back of his hand with her finger. “So you’re hosting the notes. They come into the mind, and then what?”

“Then I forget them again,” he said leaning back again. He had almost kissed her. “When I practice, I learn them like a language—grammar, syntax, all of it. But when I perform, that all dissolves. It’s a kind of trust. They’re old familiar friends you don’t have to think too much about.” He was tired, but enjoyed her questions.

“That sounds like faith.”

He thought for a moment. “Yes. But not religious faith. It’s bodily faith. The fingers remember better than the mind. And it’s not only faith. It’s knowledge—the primitive kind where with perception we become what we perceive, if only for a moment. Music is a constant flow of moments. Hold on and it will be gone.”

“That sounds paradoxical,” she insisted.

He rolled onto his other side then back again. “It’s not paradox. That sounds like paralysis. It’s creation that feels like discovery.”

She smiled. “You contradict yourself beautifully.”

He shrugged. “It’s late.”

They lay there in silence. The sea swooshed below, rhythmic and unhurried. Somewhere down the promenade a car passed, its headlights flaring briefly against the wall.

She whispered, “Do you ever think about me when you play?”

“You?”

“Yes. Me. Well, us. Anything outside the music.”

He was quiet for a long time. “Sometimes, yes. I think about all of my life. But not the way you mean. It’s not like I think about my life—it’s that my life and the music mingle into something new. The music reveals my life to me. A phrase might feel like childhood, or the way you smell when you first come out of the shower, and it’s only then that I realize what that memory or smell is to me. But it’s not thinking—it’s just recognition of a texture, a contour. And letting go. Or not. Haha.”

“So the mind isn’t separate from the body?”

“Never,” he said. “When I practice, I think about my hands. Their warmth, their tension. I think about gravity and the wrist. Thought is physical. That’s the scandal, if you want one.”

He kissed her on the lips briefly, and ever so softly—pianissimo.

“Does that make sense? My thoughts could be impacted by this moment with you. The port.” A line crept into his forehead.

She looked toward the open window. The air smelled of bay laurel. She stayed focused. “So maybe this new philosopher is right. Maybe there’s no real internal—it can all be causally explained externally. It was never inside to begin with.”

He smiled. “Or maybe it’s both. The mind is like this room. It has a window and a door. Sound comes in, light comes in. But without walls, nothing would resonate. You need the enclosure.”

She laughed softly. “You sound like Heidegger.”

“God forbid.”

She rolled on top of him, her hair brushing his face. “No, you do. You make music into a kind of dwelling. Dasein at the keyboard.”

“I suppose.” He ran a hand down her back, feeling the curve of her spine, the faint tremor of muscles in his fingers that had not yet forgotten the concert hall. “But we can’t live in that dwelling all the time.”

“Would that be so terrible?” she asked.

He kissed her shoulder repeatedly. “Yes. Someone has to turn on the lights, pay for the piano tuning, buy the polish.”

She laughed. “You’re hopeless.”

“What do you mean? Hopelessly empirical?” he asked. “That’s the pianist’s curse. Every truth passes through the fingers.”

She sat up, her dress pulling further off her shoulder. “Tell me one more thing,” she said. “When you play—really play, not practice—what happens to time?”

He stared at the ceiling fan. “It thickens,” he said. “Like honey. Each moment holds the next inside it. You could live there forever, but only by dying a little each time.”

She searched, now, deep into his eyes.

He looked at her. The lamplight caressed her features.

“Maybe consciousness is like that too. Always oscillating between presence and loss,” she said, pulling the pin out of her hair.

The waves were steady now, as though the sea itself were performing.

She looked at his hands remembering how they’d hovered over the keys that evening, not commanding but listening, drawing out phrases like whispers overheard. She’d seen something in his face then, not ecstasy exactly, but a kind of concentration that seemed to be his disappearance. It was that absence she both loved and feared: the man she lost to the music and who, when he returned, seemed older each time, as though the act of playing had cost him something irretrievable.

He turned toward her. “You’re thinking too much,” he said.

“Maybe.”

“What are you thinking?”

“That when you play, you go somewhere I can’t follow.”

He touched her cheek. “That’s not true. You’re in it too. Every phrase I play, you’re there. You’re part of the gravity that holds it together.”

She smiled faintly. “That’s just a lover’s lie.”

“A necessary one.”

He switched off the lamp. Through the window they could see the dark silhouette of the laurel trees.

After a silence, she said, “Do you ever wish you’d chosen another life? Something easier?”

“No. Though sometimes I wish the music didn’t ask so much.”

“Ask?”

He sighed. “It’s jealous. It wants all of me. It doesn’t leave room for much else.”

She pressed closer. “Then let it be jealous tonight,” she said.

He smiled in the dark. “You see? You externalize me.”

He could tell she was smiling too as he kissed her again. The refrigerator was humming along with the universe. The waves kept folding into themselves. And between the lovers’ breaths the question lingered—where, in all this, does the mind end and the body begin?

XY = man
XX = woman

Glad I could help.

u/GrayMatter1978

There are men with XX chromosomes.
There are women with XY chromosomes.

Glad I could help.

It’s another sunny day at America’s new favorite social media site. The article making the rounds on Reddit is from the conservative magazine, National Review, arguing that medical elites are redefining health by prioritizing patients’ beliefs over “normal physiology.” In other words, let’s not get carried away with this trans stuff when biology has the final word. The article’s central claim was deceptively simple: human biology hasn’t changed, and medicine loses its ethical grounding when it departs from conserving natural bodily functions in favor of fulfilling subjective identities.

Got that?

Health, the author suggested, is biologically given, not socially negotiated. Puberty, fertility, and sex differentiation are treated as privileged physiological norms. Intervening in them without disease, the argument goes, represents ideology masquerading as care.

The comments section, predictably, did not remain clinical for long.

What continues is some fragments from that thread — two users circling the same words (normal, biology, health), but inhabiting very different worlds.

Reddit Thread: “Medical elites are redefining health. The human body didn’t get the memo.”

u/GrayMatter1978

Cancer is normal physiology. A rare disease is just biology doing what it does.

And before anyone jumps in — biology doesn’t issue value judgments. Cells divide. Sometimes they divide badly. That’s still biology.

So what exactly is the “normal physiology” this article talks insists on? Is it the physiology the anti-transgender Right happens to favor at the moment?

A serious argument would at least acknowledge that function, proper function, dysfunction, health, disease aren’t handed down by nature like The Ten Commandments. (I thought this crowd would like that.) They’re negotiated. Constantly. By scientists, doctors, and societies. I’m just waiting for the conservative justices on the Supreme Court to step into it, putting themselves forward as biologists.

u/SteelTruth88

You think cancer is normal??!!

If cancer were normal, everyone would have it. Most people don’t. Ergo, it’s not normal.

Normal physiology means healthy physiological processes functioning as designed. Cancer is cells going haywire. That’s not biology “doing its thing.” That’s biology breaking.

u/GrayMatter1978

You’re already importing values while pretending you aren’t.

If “normal physiology” means what naturally occurs, then cancer is normal.
If it means what promotes flourishing, then that standard isn’t biological — it’s ethical.

We fight cancer not because it violates nature. Nature produces cancer just fine.
We fight it because it causes suffering, shortens lives, destroys projects and relationships.

That decision is social, moral, and human.

The article’s logic is as follows:
biology → normal → ethical medicine.
This doesn’t survive contact with reality.

What actually happens is:
biology → variation
society → valuation
medicine → intervention

u/SteelTruth88

Sophistry.

Cancer and infections occur when normal physiology suffers an insult — asbestos, radiation, poor sanitation. Medicine helps the body return to normal.

“Gender-affirming care” doesn’t restore anything. It mutilates healthy bodies and permanently ruins their function.

And spare me the call for “nuance.” We already know most gender-dysphoric kids, with therapy and support, come to accept their sex. Many realize they’re gay. What you’re defending is irreversible harm dressed up as compassion.

u/GrayMatter1978

You just made my point.

You’re calling cancer “abnormal” because of its consequences — suffering, loss, death. That’s not a biological criterion. It’s a moral one.

Let me offer a more difficult case.

Trisomy 21. Down syndrome.

Is that “normal physiology”?

Because a lot of people with Down syndrome live rich, meaningful lives. They don’t experience themselves as errors. So where exactly is the cutoff? At what IQ does physiology stop being “normal”?

Please be precise. A lot of families would like an answer.

u/SteelTruth88

That’s absurd. Down syndrome is a chromosomal abnormality. Compassion doesn’t change biology.

And stop pretending the article is ideological. It’s defending medical sanity. XY is male. XX is female. Puberty exists for a reason. Fertility exists for a reason.

Redefining health around feelings is how societies lose their grip on reality.

u/GrayMatter1978

Some babies are born with ambiguous genitalia. For decades, surgeons “normalized” them at birth — cutting away healthy tissue to satisfy parental and social expectations.

So which was the “normal physiology”? Before surgery? Or after society imposed its preference?

And while we’re here — are you also against circumcision? Or does “mutilation” only count when it works for your politics?

u/SteelTruth88

XY = man
XX = woman

Glad I could help.

u/GrayMatter1978

There are men with XX chromosomes.
There are women with XY chromosomes.

Glad I could help.

(The thread slows. Then one last exchange.)

u/SteelTruth88

Biology sets limits. You can’t wish them away. The body doesn’t care about ideology.

Once medicine stops anchoring itself to objective physiological norms, it becomes belief-directed. History shows where that leads.

u/GrayMatter1978

And once medicine pretends those “objective norms” arrive without interpretation, it absolves itself of responsibility.

The body doesn’t speak. It doesn’t issue memos, as the article suggests. We interpret it. We always have.

The danger isn’t admitting that health is negotiated. The danger is pretending it isn’t — while quietly enforcing one’s hierarchy of values as if nature itself had signed off on them.

Cilia:
I thought we were safe. You said there were metal doors. No windows. No one knew where we were.

Nicolás:
Someone always knows. That’s the first rule of power.

Cilia:
Don’t philosophize now. This is not the time for your lectures. We were disappeared, Nicolás. We perfected disappearance.

Nicolás:
You’re so good.

Cilia:
This had to be the military. You trusted them too much.

Nicolás:
I distrusted them evenly. That’s different.

Cilia:
You let them keep their villas. Their daughters in Madrid. I warned you about Madrid.

Nicolás:
Everyone has a Madrid. Even you.

Cilia:
My Madrid was Paris, and I gave it up.

Nicolás:
You never forgive me for that.

(A distant hum of engines. The ship subtly vibrates.)

Cilia:
Do you know what humiliates me most?

Nicolás:
That it was General Traision who betrayed us?

Cilia:
Yes. I slept with him for nothing. Well, not nothing.

Nicolas:
Do you remember our first apartment?

Cilia:
The one with the bad water pressure?

Nicolás:
The one where we believed things still mattered.

Cilia:
Things still matter. Just not to us anymore.

Nicolás:
Would you have done anything differently?

Cilia:
Yes. Leave earlier.

Nicolás:
Together?

Cilia:
Separately.

Nicolás:
Do you think history will forgive us?

Cilia:
History doesn’t forgive. It just edits.

(A knock on the door. A voice, polite, American.)

Voice:
Ten minutes.

Cilia:
Look at us. Fifteen minutes, and we still couldn’t agree on who betrayed whom.

Nicolás:
That’s a marriage. Do you know where we are?

Cilia:
A boat.

Nicolás:
Not a boat. A symbol.

Cilia:
Everything is a symbol to you revolutionaries.

Nicolás:
I recognized the smell immediately.

Cilia:
What smell?

Nicolás:
Imperialist air conditioning.

(Pause)

What do you think he’ll say to me?

Cilia:
Who?

Nicolás:
You know who.

Cilia:
He’ll say your name wrong on purpose. Then he’ll say it again louder. Then he’ll ask if you’re enjoying the ship.

Nicolás:
And then?

Cilia:
Then he’ll call someone else in to say the serious thing.

(A guard passes the window slit. Sound of boots. Chewing gum.)

Cilia:
Tell me the truth.

Nicolás:
Which one?

Cilia:
Nicolás! Get real — what are we going to do? What will the country do?

Nicolás:
Not much. The only thing between a strong Venezuela and a weak one was me.

Cilia:
So you were the entire army?

Nicolás:
And the navy.

Cilia:
And the air force?

Nicolás:
Well. Most of it.

Cilia:
We could appeal to the United Nations.

Nicolás:
They’ll send letters.

Cilia:
Official letters.

Nicolás:
With stamps.

Cilia:
Perhaps signed by someone European.

Nicolás:
And then forwarded to Viral TikTok.

(A beep. A crewmember wheels by a tablet playing Trump’s press conference.)

Cilia:
He said we’ll “run the country.” Like we were slackers.

Nicolás:
Did he mean literally run it? A marathon? They could use water stations.

Cilia:
Let’s keep focused.

Nicolás:
Fine. What should we say?

Cilia:
We should stick to one story. You were captured. I was not. That’s a good plot twist.

Nicolás:
I like plot twists.

Cilia:
Remember, the public will want a dramatic story.

Nicolás:
Dramatic?

Cilia:
Yes. Something like: “It all began with a missing empanada recipe.”

Nicolás:
Actually, I do think the empanadas were stolen.

Cilia:
General Traición ate them. And then betrayed us.

Nicolás:
This might be true.

(A horn sounds. The door unlatches.)

Guard (offstage):
Maduro. Five minutes.

Cilia:
So Nicolas . . the money?

Nicolás:
Which money?

Cilia:
The money.

Nicolás:
Oh. That money.

Cilia:
The money that was not technically drug money.

Nicolás:
Correct. It was logistics money.

Cilia:
Logistics that smelled like cocaine.

Nicolás:
Many legal products smell like cocaine.

Cilia:
Name one.

Nicolás:
Miami.

Cilia:
The generals flipped.

Nicolás:
Of course they flipped. They were rotational generals.

Cilia:
You paid them in dollars.

Nicolás:
Because they don’t trust the bolívar.

Cilia:
Because you destroyed the bolívar.

Nicolás:
I liberated it from expectations.

Cilia:
Do you know what hurts most?

Nicolás:
The betrayal?

Cilia:
No. I was scheduled for a massage today. What will life be like in the United States?

Nicolás:
Temporary housing.

Cilia:
A prison.

Nicolás:
A federal prison.

Cilia:
Do they have a masseuse?

Nicolás:
Yes, but he’ll be high on drugs.

Cilia:
Will there be other leaders there?

Nicolás:
Oh yes. It will be very social. You’ll meet everyone you sanctioned.

Cilia:
Wonderful. A reunion tour. Do they let you keep your watches?

Nicolás:
Only if they stop time.

Cilia:
What about the trial?

Nicolás:
Long.

Cilia:
Public?

Nicolás:
Extremely.

Cilia:
Televised?

Nicolás:
Clipped for TikTok.

Cilia:
With captions?

Nicolás:
Cruel ones.

Cilia:
What will you plead?

Nicolás:
Confused.

Cilia:
That’s not a plea.

Nicolás:
It’s worked for years.

(Pause.)

Cilia:
What about the Americans “running” Venezuela?

Nicolás:
They’ll jog along for six months. Trip over history. Blame socialism. Install consultants.

Cilia:
And leave?

Nicolás:
Eventually.

Cilia:
So… just like us.

(They nod.)

Cilia:
If they offer witness protection—

Nicolás:
—absolutely not—

Cilia:
—hear me out—

Nicolás:
—I will not live in Ohio—

Cilia:
—what if it’s Florida?

(He pauses.)

Nicolás:
Do they have good empanadas?

Cilia:
They have cocaine with better branding.

Cilia:
Do you think the Republicans are enjoying this?

Nicolás:
Of course. They have excellent memories for South American dictators.

Cilia:
That feels personal.

Nicolás:
It’s not personal. It’s tradition. They love strongmen—as long as they’re strong for America.

Cilia:
This is it, then. Captured. Disgraced. Extradited.

Nicolás:
Relax.

Cilia:
Relax?

Nicolás:
It’s the age of social media.

Cilia:
That’s not comforting.

Nicolás:
All I need is one good mug shot.

Cilia:
A mug shot?

Nicolás:
Yes. Strong lighting. Jaw slightly forward. Eyes saying: I regret nothing except foreign intervention.

Cilia:
You think that turns this around?

Nicolás:
Absolutely. Scowl goes viral. Hashtag: FreeMaduro.

Cilia:
You are not Nelson Mandela.

Nicolás:
No, but I am very meme-able.

Cilia:
This is a federal indictment.

Nicolás:
Even better. Nothing builds a brand like publicity.

Cilia:
What if the photo is bad?

Nicolás:
Then I blame the deep state.

Cilia:
What if you smile?

Nicolás:
Never smile. Smile is guilt. Scowl is ideology.

(Door opens.)

Guard:
OK Maduro, time’s up.

Cilia:
And the orange jumpsuit?

Nicolás:
Very populist.

(She stares at him.)

Cilia:
You’re enjoying this.

Nicolás:
No. I’m pivoting. Hopefully they shoot from the left. That’s my authoritarian side.

(He practices the scowl.)

Cilia:
Unbelievable.

Nicolás:
History is written by the victors. But the algorithm decides the thumbnails.

(They’re escorted out of the cell.)

Nicolás (as he walks out):
If this works, I want merch. And a meme coin!

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.

‘O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

—W. H. Auden 1907 – 1973

In the lusty American spirit of taking on a challenge, let’s take a stab at coming up with a few things he maybe cannot do.

10 Things President Trump Cannot Do

1. Break off his love affair with Vladmir Putin. As Jack said to Ennis in Brokeback Mountain, Vladmir, “I can’t quit you.” After all, the Russians fought against the Nazis.

2. Laugh at himself. He just can’t. Suzy is wrong.

3. Change the climate by firing all the climate scientists. What did Trump say when asked how to respond to Hurricane Florence? “Pay her as much as we did Stormy Daniels!”

4. Tell the truth. This is something even little kids can do. Perhaps he used to dream about it when he was a little kid. Perhaps it’s what he wanted to do when he grew up. As his mother told him when he was very young, “focus on what you can do, Donald.”

5. Become a woman. Some who are seventy-nine might do it, but Donald cannot. As his Deputy HHS Secretary said this week, “Men can never become women, and women can never become men.”

Read more

Adrian (dryly): Twice—that’s no bad. Relax. No philosophy. Not unless you send me a picture of you on your knees begging for it. How about architecture?

Milo: Architecture?

Adrian: Frank Gehry died today.

(A pause. The clatter of Milo closing the fridge door.)

Milo: …Oh. Wow. Um . . yeah, THEE great architect of our time. Definitely a fan, here.

Adrian: I know. He was the only architect I could name whose buildings looked like they were solving equations in midair.

Milo: Haha. And the only one who made you feel something. My god—Gehry! The American city just got even dimmer. Less like a sketchbook, more like a spreadsheet again.

Adrian: I feel his buildings have a sense of permission in them. A freedom from the tyranny of right angles.

Milo: Yes! He made us feel like creativity was a civic right. I just read an article full of facts that point to our modern culture being a lot less creative and weird. And it’s not all the internet’s fault. Gehry created public spaces that didn’t have to be monotone and safe. He animated public life through sheer exuberance.

Adrian: And you’re already going to compare him to Frank Lloyd Wright, aren’t you?

Milo: Maybe. If you send a pic of yourself begging on your knees. Haha. Gehry’s the only one who even deserves the comparison.

Adrian: Go on, then. I’ll allow one romantic monologue.

Milo: Ok, I’ll give you one. Listen—when I first walked into Taliesin West outside Phoenix—back when I was in my early twenties—I felt that I didn’t walk, I just floated. Low ceilings that didn’t make one feel cramped, but rather in infinite space. Light came in sideways, like the sound waves of music. The walls were invitations to the next space. The whole place told you the earth isn’t beneath you—it’s with you and around you. I think that Wright healed individuals through intimacy and organic forms.

Adrian: Beautifully put. But Gehry—

Milo: Gehry healed whole cities. Wright healed the home, the hearth, the individual spirit. But Gehry animated public life through exuberance. He made civic space expressive, like a grin breaking across the face of a city too used to grimacing.

Adrian: Gehry healed cities. Nice. You know that Wright designed the first Guggenheim in New York, so there’s a built in comparison And I once read that he hated doing it, because he hated the city.

Milo: And then Gehry on to the Guggenheim in Bilbao—which wasn’t just a museum; it was a revolution. It resurrected a city. Reminded people that imagination can be a political, emotional power. His buildings didn’t sit in the landscape— they moved through it, like they were improvising. Which is what we humans do.

Adrian : So Gehry was Miles Davis and Wright was Bach?

Milo: Yes. Yes! Exactly. Wright gives you form that feels inevitable. Gehry gives you form that feels impossible until suddenly it’s there, shimmering like a humpback whale breaching in the sun. At least that’s my impression of Disney Hall. I’m glad you called. Is this loss bringing out some poetry in the mathematician?

Adrian: Gehry makes poets of everyone.

Milo: Or maybe grief does. I feel oddly… bereft. Like one fewer person is out there arguing with the ugliness of the world.

Adrian: We’ll still have the buildings.

Milo: Buildings endure. But the courage—we could use more of that.

Adrian: Maybe that’s our job.

Milo (laughing): Speak for yourself. I’m just a sax player trying to keep my students from overthinking their scales.

Adrian: And I’m just a logician trying to keep my students from overthinking the universe.

Milo: Haha. Maybe Gehry’s the bridge between us. He proved that structure can dance. That’s what you and I always argue about, isn’t it? How much the forms of reason can hold before they need to leap with empirical fact.

Adrian: And how much leaping can be justified before you need form.

(They fall quiet for a few seconds.)

Milo: What else is going on? Here’s to Frank Gehry.

Adrian: To Gehry—who made the world a little better by refusing to make it ordinary.

Milo: And who showed that beauty isn’t a luxury—it’s a public service just like cancer research.