Philosophy, existence, and meaning

In 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky published a short, strange book whose narrator opens by announcing that he is a sick man, a spiteful man, an unattractive man, and that he believes his liver is diseased — though he refuses, out of spite, to consult a doctor. That is the first paragraph. The book gets harder from there. ...

In 1906, Mark Twain published a book anonymously. He had been working on it for nearly twenty-five years. He called it his “Gospel” in private letters. He believed every word of it. And he was so afraid of what his readers would do if they knew it was him that he kept his name off it for the rest of his life. ...

“They made me sit down like a dog. They would hold the string from the bag. They made me bark like a dog and they were laughing at me. One of the police was telling me to crawl in Arabic, so I crawled on my stomach, and the police were spitting on me when I was crawling and hitting me.” ...

We scroll through Twitter while watching TV. We listen to podcasts while working. There are now TikToks that are split-screen videos — so you can watch one TikTok while watching another TikTok. It’s a lot. I wish I could say I was above this. I am not. I engage as much as anyone, probably more. So when I say “we,” I do mean we. ...

It is common to imagine cannibalism as the domain of jungle-dwelling tribes in remote places. Yet virtually every continent has seen some form of it — and not only cannibalism for survival. Almost every developed culture has featured socially acceptable cannibalism in one form or another. Although far from commonplace today, the practice has existed since literally the dawn of humankind. ...

There is a moment fairly early in War and Peace — about four hundred pages in, which is to say barely anywhere by the book’s standards — when Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is wounded at the battle of Austerlitz and falls onto his back in the snow. He has been carrying a flag. He has just been trying to rally a fleeing regiment, an act he has imagined for years as the climactic gesture of a life he wants to be significant. Now he is on his back. He cannot move. There is shouting somewhere above him that he can no longer make out. He looks up and sees the sky. ...

In the mid-1800s, a significant portion of rural Ireland was getting high on diethyl ether. Not as a medicine. Not experimentally. Just recreationally, enthusiastically, and in absolutely staggering quantities — sniffing it, drinking it, soaking rags in it and pressing them to their faces. Entire villages were doing it. It was cheaper than whiskey, it wore off faster, and — crucially — it was not alcohol. ...

The Catholic Church has officially published guidelines and procedures for diagnosing demonic possession and performing an exorcism. But that is only one fragment of a much larger and stranger tradition. For centuries there has existed an esoteric side of Christianity that does not belong to any single denomination and does not begin with doctrine alone. It asks the individual to surrender every easy idea about God, the soul, and the universe. Those ideas, the mystics say, are idols. The truth is deeper, more destabilizing, and more intense. ...

The first sentence of The Trial is one of the most famous opening lines in twentieth-century literature, and it does almost all of the work the rest of the book is built on. Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. It is a small sentence. Several things in it are already strange. We are told K. has done nothing wrong, but we are also told that someone must have been spreading lies about him — which assumes that an arrest, by its nature, is a thing that requires a story, true or false, to make sense of it. The narrator already accepts that K.’s arrest is meaningful, even though he is also asserting that K. is innocent. Within the first thirteen words, the world of the novel has begun to operate by the rule that will sustain it for the next three hundred pages: the apparatus is real even when the charge is false. The fact of the procedure is sufficient to make the procedure feel justified, regardless of whether anything underneath it is. ...

Fascism is immensely dangerous. It is also probably the most egregiously and frequently misused word in political discourse, certainly in America. This combination is a huge problem. It is irresponsible and cheap to recklessly throw this word around as a partisan attack or a sensational headline. Instead, we should strive to understand history’s most violently destructive political ideology and learn to identify fascism in an accurate, honest way. Only then can we realistically keep fascism out of our modern systems of governance. ...