I believe in second chances. The albums of Tom Waits, the movies of Federico Fellini, the books of Ernest Hemingway, did not initially move me, but I grew to appreciate them and ultimately love them.

More than ten years ago, I read the uber-popular “classic” The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, and thought it was garbage. Recently, I decided that it was time to give it another chance. I have been utterly transformed, but not in the way that you’re thinking: I’m not so sure that I believe in second chances anymore.

There are books that don’t move me, or don’t teach me anything new, but I still don’t dislike them. I love reading so much that almost every book I rate on Goodreads is a 4 or 5 star review. There is only one book I truly despise, and that is The Alchemist – everyone else’s favourite book.

It’s not because I’m a literary snob – and maybe I am that – but because it is such blatant garbage. As a work of “literature,” it is entirely without style, and there is hardly a beautiful sentence in it. It is an embarrassment, an insult, and a great disservice to Brazilian literature to include this pathetic book in any list of great Brazilian novels.

Coelho claims to have written this book in two weeks, and I believe him: it reads as if it was written by a high-school student (definitely without the help of AI!) desperately trying to make up his word count for an essay that is due soon. He figured out that if he repeats the words “Personal Legend” 59 fucking times and “Soul of the Word” 35 times, he will have a story that is as big as a book but actually says nothing at all.

If Coelho understands anything about the “human condition” it is this: he knows that most of you really want to be rich and to find a soulmate. What follows is the most shameless attempt to make you believe that you will acquire all of that through the magic of belief.

If I could summarize the utter stupidity of this book in one sentence, it would be this: If you really really want it, God/the Universe will conspire – even if takes a while, even if there are difficulties in the way – to ultimately bring you a chest full of gold and a soulmate.

Santiago, our hero, has a literal dream which sparks his journey to fulfill his Personal Legend. But his Legend, his Spiritual something believed in and desired? A literal treasure. Gold, gold, gold. Turn lead into gold. Find a treasure of gold. Work for gold. Sell sheep for gold. Sell crystal for gold. All that glitters is gold. “Whoever has money is never alone.”

Some people call this book “allegorical.” An allegory implies there is a symbolic level beneath the literal. But no matter how hard I try and how charitable I try to be – there really isn’t anything beneath the surface here. It is literally just about that: dreams, miracles, omens, pussy, and gold.

It is not Animal Farm (an allegory about authoritarianism), or Peter Pan (a cautionary tale about refusing to grow up), or Candide, or Aesop’s Fables or The Little Prince. Even that Jesus-smuggling master of parables, C.S. Lewis, could be silly and cloy at times, but at least he had talent. In fact, I think The Screwtape Letters is very clever and funny, and perhaps the only instance in world literature in which Christian apologetics manages these feats. For that, Lewis deserves some recognition.

But The Alchemist is not any of that. There is no real logical way (internal to the story) to interpret the treasure in the story as being anything other than an actual treasure. To interpret anything as allegorical to anything else. It is a literal story about alchemy and miracles and God and destiny and money and soulmates. God, Pussy, and Gold.

If it were written as a satire, I’d be inclined to rate it somewhat favorably: it is indeed hilarious. But as the serious, ultra-profound parable it so desperately wants to be, it is a tragic, condescending, and outrageously stupid book. You are a hero, a legend, and there really is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for all of you. Listen to the voice of the desert and the falcon and the kisses in the wind and the Soul of the World of the Love of the God of the Hand of the Universe.

The Alchemist is a short but psychologically interminable parade of pseudo-profound spiritual drivel. It is hard for me to decide whether Coelho crafts such stupid drivel effort-fully or effortlessly. In either case, without exaggeration, every single fucking paragraph of this insufferable book is made up of the same pseudo-profound nonsense.

I offer you a small sample:

“If I could, I’d write a huge encyclopedia just about the words luck and coincidence. It’s with those words that the universal language is written.”

“We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it’s our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.”

“When you want something with all your heart, that’s when you are closest to the Soul of the World. It’s always a positive force.”

“That’s the magic of omens,” said the boy. “I’ve seen how the guides read the signs of the desert, and how the soul of the caravan speaks to the soul of the desert.”

“It was the pure Language of the World. It required no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time. What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life, and that, with no need for words, she recognized the same thing. He was more certain of it than of anything in the world. He had been told by his parents and grandparents that he must fall in love and really know a person before becoming committed. But maybe people who felt that way had never learned the universal language. Because, when you know that language, it’s easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it’s in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning.”

“Yes, that’s what love is. It’s what makes the game become the falcon, the falcon become man, and man, in his turn, the desert. It’s what turns lead into gold, and makes the gold return to the earth.”

“The wind told me that you know about love,” the boy said to the sun. “If you know about love, you must also know about the Soul of the World, because it’s made of love.”

“The wind is the love of the soul of the universe communicating in the universal language of the falcon who flies as an omen to the soul of the Maktub. It is written.”

“The boy reached through to the Soul of the World, and saw that it was a part of the Soul of God. And he saw that the Soul of God was his own soul. And that he, a boy, could perform miracles.”

“Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure. You’ve got to find the treasure, so that everything you have learned along the way can make sense.”

“The wise men understood that this natural world is only an image and a copy of paradise. The existence of this world is simply a guarantee that there exists a world that is perfect. God created the world so that, through its visible objects, men could understand his spiritual teachings and the marvels of his wisdom. That’s what I mean by action.”

Instead of some kind of amalgamation of wisdom traditions, as some people claim this book is, it is much closer to a betrayal of what is possibly the only consensus between wisdom traditions: do not become attached to material things, as they are not the way to happiness.

Though the book is infused with Christian language, instead of the Bible’s pretty harsh admonishment that “it will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven”, Coelho wants you to know that, instead, God will conspire to bring you a treasure. In fact, early on, Santiago realizes:

“The sale of his sheep had left him with enough money in his pouch, and the boy knew that in money there was magic; whoever has money is never really alone.”

The alchemist’s Personal Legend is to make gold. And he does. And Santiago’s Personal Legend is to find gold. And not a single character in this story, in which the term Personal Legend is used 59 times (literally), has a destiny that has anything to do with something other than money or a soulmate.

The benefits of travel and multi-cultural interactions? No. Certainly not that. If you like greedy, thieving, warmongering Arabs as a trope, you will find them here! Romantic wisdom? No. Love at first sight with your soulmate! Work ethic wisdom? No. Family wisdom? No. Friendship wisdom? No. Civic wisdom? Legal wisdom? Equanimity and psychological peace? No. There are no ethical insights either: it’s all about my destiny, my legend, my treasure, my dreams. An egocentric orgy of God, Pussy and Gold!

After being madly “in love” with the merchant’s daughter, Santiago instantly “falls in love” with a young woman at the oasis... and this time is convinced that he has found his soulmate.

“I came to tell you just one thing,’ the boy said. ‘I want you to be my wife. I love you.’”

Twenty pages ago, the original Love of His Life was more important than his treasure. Now she is in the dustbin of his memory, and the Hand of God has written for him a new fate. The new girl, Fatima, reacting to a creep who just proposed to her out of nowhere, tells him:

“I have been waiting for you here at this oasis for a long time. I have forgotten about my past, about my traditions, and the way in which men of the desert expect women to behave. Ever since I was a child, I have dreamed that the desert would bring me a wonderful present. Now, my present has arrived, and it’s you.”

More drivel ensues:

“The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes. That’s the way it will be with our love for each other.”

“He followed the movement of the birds, trying to read something into it. Maybe these desert birds could explain to him the meaning of love without ownership.”

My eyes are watering with tears of utter spiritual transformation! I jest. What insufferable gibberish!

Coelho dangles the carrot in front of our eyes. He knows the innate propensity of the human animal to want to be an alchemist, to mould reality into the impossible, to make gold.

If the antidote to despair is delusion, deceit, magic, falsehood, intellectual suicide... I want none of it. A painkiller is not a cure. It is hard to cure an illness if we misdiagnose it. The placebo of a benevolent Universe/God which will conspire to lead you to your treasure is – in the long run – a surrender to despair. That is, of course, if it doesn’t conspire to kill you with malaria, cancer, or have you raped, tortured, imprisoned, or killed. If it does, well, you yourself are to blame, as you did not want your Legend hard enough. Or perhaps it was someone else’s Personal Legend to kill, rape, steal, and because they really wanted it, the Universe/God conspired to lead them to their treasure, of which you were a hapless victim.

We will rage at the world as if it were a Person, an Entity, a God, as if It refused – stubbornly – to bend the knee to us, who want to be kings and rule over It. Coelho sadly and sincerely believes that you are the master of the universe, but you know that you are not and can never be. So why are you lying to yourself? The World, The Universe, will simply not bend to your desires. But I know that I cannot sell millions of copies of that message.

Life is a wager: one must pursue something at the expense of other things. The universe does not conspire. Some fail, some succeed, some both. Some failures lead to success, and other failures lead to more failure. We regret the things we did, but mainly the things we didn’t. One cannot compare two paths that weren’t taken.

Life is a struggle, often a humiliating one. In this vulnerable state, we are easy preys to spiritual swindlers, alchemists that promise gold, priests that promise paradise, quacks that promise quick cures. Coelho is making a blatant appeal to a kind of inexorable logic: if I give up, I cannot achieve my dreams. One can only achieve dreams by believing in them.

In perhaps one of the few interesting passages in the book, Santiago asks a shop-owner:

“Well, why don’t you go to Mecca now?”

He replies:

“Because it’s the thought of Mecca that keeps me alive. That’s what helps me face these days that are all the same, these mute crystals on the shelves, and lunch and dinner at that same horrible café. I’m afraid that if my dream is realized, I’ll have no reason to go on living.”

It is quite funny that people who swallow The Alchemist whole may find themselves precisely in the trap that the shop owner warns of: becoming addicted to their own dreams. Incapable of pursuing realistic goals because they fall short of their promised vision of Paradise.

At the end of this parable, Santiago, a teenage boy, fulfills his personal legend: he finds a chest of gold and his soulmate. Now what? I’ll tell you what: go watch The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Now, that’s a story fit for humans!

The Alchemist is, without a doubt, the worst book I have ever read – and will likely ever read. Its only redemptive “quality” is that it is – by the Grace and Mercy of the Soul of the Universe, Writer of All Things, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ – not too long!

A shepherd cares for his sheep, but ultimately leads them to slaughter. Coelho (“rabbit” in Portuguese), the spiritual shepherd swindling his readers with magical rabbits out of some bottomless pan-religious pan-spiritual hat, ultimately leads them to a tragic life of perennial sacrifice to the God of Greed.

The Alchemist is a snake oil ego massage with an orgasmic “happy ending”; a Rachel Green multi-layered sweet-and-savoury shit trifle, vanilla frosted and dusted with edible gold flakes; a cauldron of Jonestown Kool-aid sweetened with Jesus stevia shoved down our throats.

Having sold millions of copies of the book, Coelho has managed a true act of alchemy: he has transformed pure shit into gold. And we know: “no one is ever alone who has money.”

I guess the joke is on me.

I have loved you for a long time.

When I named you, I thought somehow that might make you more tangible. It seemed reasonable, even harmless at the time, to give you at least a provisional face, and gender, and name. But that choice forced my surrender to the love that already lay dormant, on the verge of supernova, and once I started to love you fully as if you already were, I set myself up for the most astonishing grief. I’ve been torn apart by your non-arrival, but obviously, none of that is your fault.

I write you this letter so that you know I do not regret this grief, or the horrendous chain of events that ultimately caused it, but that instead, I have discovered it to be the most vitally fertile grief I have ever experienced.

Some kinds of grief are silent. They do not manifest themselves in all the usual ways. To lose a part of you or to have a part of you that’s perpetually stuck, incapable of being born, what’s the difference? I suppose there is a difference, and I wouldn’t want to compare my grief of never having had to the grief of those who have lost. I struggled to talk about it, even to the people I paid to listen to me. I struggled to write about it. I did not feel I would get any sympathy or true understanding. I felt, instead, that I’d be ridiculed. In fact, a couple of times, I was. Though I was angry, I now feel pity for those who can’t understand the importance of this non-event.

The intensity of love is proportional to its risk. I’ve always felt that the only loves worth having are the ones that may tear you apart and reconfigure you. Often in life, we reach a limit or a plateau, and we want to become a certain kind of person that we’ve fashioned in our imagination, but we are constrained by so many things (habits, expectations, obstacles, exhaustion), and we can’t seem to get to where we want to be a little bit at a time. That’s when grief and heartbreak come in and tear us apart. Unfortunately, however hard we try to avoid them, they seem to find us all at some point and bring us to our knees. It’s horrible while it’s happening, but it may allow you to finally reconfigure into that better shape you’ve been wanting to be. If you’re anything like me, you’ll cynically respond that sometimes people never heal into better shapes, that they just stay broken or sink deeper into despair.

I’ll be the first to admit that that’s certainly possible. And that I stayed broken for an awfully long time, sinking deeper and deeper into despair, clinging to life only by cowardice or laziness. And because I’ve lived so much of my life in absolute despair, I feel I owe you an explanation, because I know there’s a very real risk that you may turn out like me.

If that happens, one day you’ll rightfully challenge me on why I made this particular risky decision, and I’ll have an answer ready because I’ve been waiting for this for decades, and of course I had to make damn sure I knew the answer to it before I gave you such a dangerous and burdensome gift. I have no guarantee, however, that you will find this answer satisfactory.

I tried to escape my grief by telling myself that you were a ghost – and it’s impossible, or at least crazy – to be in love with a ghost. But I figured it was the wrong analogy. You were a template, an idea, a destination. Every work of art exists first in the imagination, and it must be loved and struggled with, gestated, given birth to. Certainly many people will object to this analogy as well, but I think it’s a closer approximation of what this love meant to me for so many years before you existed, and maybe will continue to exist even if you never come to.

When I stood literally and metaphorically at the edge of a cliff, trying to rage against the dying of the light, after everything and everyone had been taken from me, it was you who held me back. Some people have faith in Gods and Angels, and the Benevolent Will of the Universe, and I don’t, but I had faith in you and the world you could help build. I had faith that the one decision I would never regret would be to give you this burdensome gift. A gift that at times you will resent us for. And I will never blame you, because I always knew it was a burdensome gift.

I realized that the folly of perpetuating life on this ailing planet betrays a certain love for humanity, a more complicated love that may be difficult to describe. In time, you will see how difficult it is to love humanity. But when that memory, that kernel of faith in the kindness of humans was buried under an avalanche of cruelty, it was you who rescued it and brought it back to me.

It was you who reminded me that I too had something to contribute to the world. When I was stranded, and no flesh-and-bone humans were up to the task, it was you who came to the rescue. I beat myself up with shame for holding on to some imaginary hope that might one day anaesthetize my sorrow. I thought it was pathetic of me to need you, that I would never be truly happy as long as I expected someone else to complete something perennially lacking in me. And I’ve been learning not to need you. But I cannot unlearn how to love you. And so I grieve.

I do not want a life devoid of grief, because that would be evidence of callousness. Evidence that I’ve fossilized my heart into something brutal that lives on biologically without being alive.

Of course there were reasons not to give you such a burdensome gift. A million reasons. But there are still people who know the true meaning of the word “despite.” You will be biologically driven to care for some people more than others, to find some people beautiful and fascinating, and not others. But you choose to love, despite the million reasons and warnings not to. Love is always an act of courage, and the only attitude to life worth having is courage. Sure, that implies risk, and sometimes you’ll be knocked down repeatedly and you will lose courage, and you will stay in bed and only get up occasionally to use the washroom and eat bagels for dinner. That’s also normal. But the regrets of a life not lived – and chances not taken – are always what plague people on their deathbed.

The love for a child, if it is a choice, not an accident, is the boldest of choices. The one that requires a leap in the face of certain uncertainty. It’s to know that it would tear me apart if I decided not to love you. It would tear me apart if I decided that there was nothing in this world worth fighting for, worth teaching, worth keeping alive for future generations. And I know now that I could not find a reason to stay alive if I truly believed nothing was of value and worth fighting for in this world.

This is a love that can’t be shattered. No, it’s not unconditional. That’s a stupid word, used often and carelessly. Love may very well co-exist with anger, contempt, even hatred. But if I say I believe it can’t be shattered, it means that I accept that you have the right to refuse it, the right not to need it or want it, the right not to reciprocate it. And my love for you – if it is true – must mean that I accept all of it.

I know that sometimes in life you may not want the love someone offers you, and that you may be grateful for the love they feel for you, but you do not want someone to love you despite who you are, but to love you because of who you are. You will want to earn it, and you will say, just as I say, that a parent’s love for their child is too unconditional to make you feel worthy of it. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll have a hell of a hard time convincing yourself that you’re worthy of anyone’s love. I know that when you hate yourself, the love others offer you feels like an insult and a lie. I know all about it. And though I wish I could give you advice on that problem, I’m afraid that’s a unique problem we all have to face ourselves.

I will respect it if you decide to move away – far, far away – and not call for a year, or I will answer however many calls at four in the morning when you need to scream that you can’t do this anymore, that you cannot find a way to tolerate the downsides of having so big a heart. And I hope you are calling because you remember that I will not lie to you, that I will not belittle your pain, that I will not pretend that because I’ve suffered similar trials I understand the exact pitch of the darkness you’re in.

I will give you the gift of suffering, and that is not fair. But this burdensome gift is the gift of freedom. For a while I will be your custodian, your guide through the wilderness, but you will never belong to me, and at one point, you must carry on alone. In fact, you will insist on it. You may insist on taking the furthest path out of spite. And you will find destinations unknown to me.

And if this burden is too heavy, my greatest fear is that I might lose you in the same way my parents almost lost me. But I have time to try to teach you things I never learned until it was almost too late. And I will never belittle a pain you feel is intolerable. And I will never blame you for it, before, during, or after, because I know that this counterfactual guilt you feel for the grief you may cause can actually -paradoxically - push you past the threshold of the bearable.

We’ll have time to talk about villains, the fake ones in the cartoons, and the real ones you’ve got to watch out for. Maybe I will worry obsessively and repeatedly try to warn you about the people who hate you even though they say “I love you,” and I will have the hardest time explaining why it is that anyone would do that.

And one day I’ll have to tell you about the evil that could’ve ended up in you if I hadn’t lost you the first time. And I will need to tell you how I eventually came to understand that both you and I would be better off for it, because although I was always certain of my love for you, I was not certain of her capacity to love anyone at all, and despite everything that I could have offered you, a child also deserves a loving mother.

Trust me on this: to be incapable of love is a much greater tragedy than not being loved. And if I can teach you anything worth knowing at all, it’s how to tell the difference between real love and its venomous forgery – the kind that enraptures you with hollow acts and words just to enslave you, to leave you thirsty and confused, perpetually waiting for their behaviour to match the avowals they make.

We are made of flesh and bone – prey to illness and decay. Sometimes we lose a battle with an illness, even when we’re young. And I’ve been battling something dangerous for a long time. And I know there is also a risk that you might find yourself in such a horrible position – motherless or fatherless or both - because life can be cruel like that. And I hope you remember I was strong but not invincible. You’ll have something to go back to. A letter I wrote long before I met you, saying: Hang in there, little one. I have loved you for a long time, long before you were born. You saved my life when it needed saving, but no one lives forever. And soon you will understand that to be an object of love one does not need to be alive. Everything and everyone passes. You bear the pall and you carry the torch, making your mark in the bittersweet legacy of humanity.

Do you understand now how much better than unconditional this is? Your ability to suffer is the price you pay for your ability to love like this, and I’m terribly sorry if you feel that’s too high a price, but I think – like me – you’ll find yourself repeatedly at the bottom of the pit of despair and still unable to give up your faith in the good in this world. You will nourish yourself with the art of others, and create your own to nourish others. And when drowning in the evil some people are capable of, cling on to those whose character you do not doubt. And when you are disappointed in humans, remember there are dogs, who will never disappoint you. I will tell you about the most beautiful dog, who also saved my life.

I have loved you for a long time, and perhaps a day will come when I must accept that we will never meet, that I must transfigure my forward-facing grief into a loving memory of what never was. You were never alive, but I miss you. Perhaps the French say it best: Tu me manques. You lack in me. And I know I may come close to you again just to lose you again, maybe many times. Life can be cruel like that, and I know that I’ll have to cross a desert to find you. But I will try – you know it – I have to. I’ll try a little longer and a little harder.

If that’s not enough to make you cry tears of joy, then I’ll say “blame your mother,” and hope you laugh. For my sake, I also hope that I say that in jest. I hope, for both of us, that I have found us the person you and I deserve to be loved by.

A LITTLE GIRL

A little girl giggled
without restraint
at the sounds of
a pigeon cooing

There is no cacophony
of trivial noises
that cannot be elevated
into a symphony
by the virtuosity
of a child’s laughter	

I HARDLY KNOW YOU

I hardly know you
but I read you like a poem
perhaps mistakenly
but entirely absorbed
in the rhythm and melody
of your prudent verse
Caught in the vortexes
you spin with song

I am a knight with no armour
who wears his heart on his sleeve
as a badge of foolish courage
	
You wear yours better
With kindness and grace
Intelligence and strength

We’re exposed and battered
But the pain is the price we pay
For the heights we can ascend

In a dream I ask you:
Sing me your saddest song
The one that will pierce
my last defence
and force my surrender
	
My whole life I’ve been ready
to surrender to someone good

SCATTER MY ASHES

I am a watermark
on the canvas of the world

I am the hundred-proof
poison moonshine
that burns me to oblivion
	
But I will live to
scatter my ashes
to some forward wind and
watch it take a vanquished child
into uncharted seas and shores
where I will never
know the difference
between burning and flowing

One day
I’ll be the water that batters
and roars and rains and soothes
the thirst of the world

(Is Silence Violence?)

It’s easy to love someone lovable. It’s easy to hate someone hateful. It’s easy to hate someone lovable out of envy. The hardest thing of all is to love someone hateful.

I had never been a hateful person. No one had ever given me reasons to hate them. I am inexperienced with this poison, which ravages me like a novel virus. It has made it nearly impossible for me to sleep, to rest, to digest, to defend my body against common respiratory viruses. I have never felt so sick for so long, and I have never tried so many treatments to absolutely no avail.

Hatred is a hallucinogen that ensures a perennial bad trip. It builds momentum until it demands some kind of release: revenge, or forgiveness? I’ve already written about how difficult forgiveness can be. I do not believe I am capable of truly forgiving a snake who still has its fangs on me and refuses to let go. Forgiveness is for past offences, not ongoing ones.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what revenge and justice mean, and whether our craving for them does us more harm than the initial injury itself. If so, is it possible to turn our backs on the ideal of justice? Or should we die trying to defend it?

We’ve overcome the dark ages of constant warfare, blood feuds and duels, times where we had no alternative to taking matters into our own hands. We have been born signatories to a lengthy and complex social contract our ancestors drafted and amended, in which we all agree to outsource the dispensing of punishment to third parties: the police, the courts, the legislators.

But what happens – and it so often happens – when the justice “system” completely fails to give us justice? We then have a very difficult choice to make: to take justice into our own hands and perhaps commit a crime while doing it, or to accept that the injustice done to us will never be remedied.

If the laws aren’t always just, then justice won’t always be lawful. But what “justice” can we really get if we are punished by the audacity to pursue it unlawfully?

Even if – and that’s a big If – someone goes to jail for their harm, is that justice? It might give us closure, it might give us peace of mind that the world is a little safer, but most harms cannot be undone or repaid. This immense gap between our craving for an ideal justice and the insufficiency of real-world justice is quite hard to overcome. Revenge is a thirst that fills that gap: it consumes you like a primal need.

Each time hatred knocks on the door is an invitation: you give in, or you fight it. Hatred is contagious, and it spreads without logic. The more hateful she is, the more I feel worthy of her hatred, or in other words, the more I hate myself. Every time I punch a wall, the wall suffers no pain, and punches me back, following Newton’s laws of motion. Every time the entire system fails to come to my aid, I spread out my hatred far and wide, to encompass the universe and all of humanity. The more I hate myself, the more I believe that I am inherently hate-worthy and that everyone in the world must see it and must therefore hate me too. I know better now: that this is the effect of masterful gaslighting and emotional manipulation, but my brain is so used to decades of falling for this trick that I still have a hard time resisting the dark magic. I then feel that I should punish myself instead of her. To punish myself by proxy, because it’s not illegal to do violence upon yourself. To hurt myself as an act of rebellion, an act of protest, an act of madness, an act of revenge...?

Leaving a full discussion on the morality of physical violence aside, I’m more interested in how to deal with psychological violence, and the fact that it often leaves no traces, no evidence, and often no hopes of being remedied by the justice system. I have come to understand and believe that invisible psychological violence is the iceberg beneath a lot of visible, outward, physical violence. I’m not justifying or excusing physical violence but merely trying to understand its causes and the true source of its impulses. I now fear that our justice system punishes a lot of victims for acting out, while the bullies often go completely unpunished for the reactions they cause. In a book called Ostracism, the psychologist Kipling Williams quotes many victims of ostracism who openly said they would have preferred physical violence to being ostracized, ignored, and neglected, so they could prove the abuse to others. The father of American Psychology, William James, had this prescient insight in the late 1800s: “No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all of the members thereof. If no one turned around when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met ‘cut us dead,’ and acted as if we were nonexistent things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would before long well up in us, from which the cruelest bodily torture would be a relief, for these would make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all.”

The banality of Evil

How can we prevent ourselves from being bulldozed by people’s trace-less psychological cruelties? How to stand up to psychological violence – ostracism, neglect, lying, cheating, manipulation, gaslighting – and how to quench our thirst for justice when we are victims of relentless psychological violence?

I think the reason we fail so catastrophically to stand up to evil is that we completely misapprehend its causes. We think evil is a matter of ignorance, or a matter of someone being neurologically abnormal. But we’re all born ignorant, and should be people be held morally accountable for their failure to gain access to a good education and access to trustworthy sources and the critical thinking skills to sort fact from fiction? Likewise, a neurologically or neuroanatomically damaged human being is washed from responsibility, and he cannot be evil. He can be a beast, a dangerous and violent one who should be kept away from society, but since his brain is not capable of moral choice, he cannot be evil. Evil, I think, is evil by virtue of its banality. It is evil because it is committed or permitted by “normal people”, who could make different choices but don’t out of petty reasons – pride, laziness, negligence...

The banality of evil is a concept first developed by German philosopher Hannah Arendt to explain how seemingly “ordinary men” could have collectively contributed to the Holocaust. In Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility, Arendt wrote: “In contrast to the earlier units of the SS men and Gestapo, Himmler’s over-all organization relies not on fanatics, nor on congenital murderers, nor on sadists; it relies entirely upon the normality of jobholders and family men.”

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she commented extensively on the trial of a Nazi officer after the war, she noted that “despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man [Eichmann] was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown,” and that “except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.” “He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.”

Thoughtlessness, not a coldly calculated “thoughtful” Machievellianism, accounts for most of the banality of evil we still see in the world. There is so much more moral negligence than there is moral injury. There is much more allowing people to suffer and die than directly harming or killing them. Certainly, you know what I mean.

This is something I think about every day: that it is not cruelty but thoughtlessness that keeps us from seizing the lowest hanging fruit in all of Ethics: the fate of tens of billions of sentient animals, needlessly slaughtered for food every year. For example, 70 billion chickens a year, each living an average of 6 weeks in absolute torture: 70 billion times times 60 thousand minutes of torture. 4.2 quadrillion minutes of torture. It is not sadism that accounts for this horror. It is not even caused by any real intent to harm. It is merely caused by thoughtlessness and habit.

Arendt called the Holocaust a series of “administrative massacres.” So, who, in the end, is responsible for them? The leaders, the cogs in the machinery executing the plan, or both? Ernest Becker, in the Denial of Death, had a fascinating perspective on the diffusion of responsibility: “Freud has said in Totem and Taboo that acts that are illegal for the individual can be justified if the whole group shares responsibility for them. But they can be justified in another way: the one who initiates the act takes upon himself both the risk and the guilt. The result is truly magic: each member of the group can repeat the act without guilt. They are not responsible, only the leader is. Redl calls this, aptly, ‘priority magic.’ But it does something even more than relieve guilt: it actually transforms the fact of murder.”

In the same work, he comments that “the leader is as much a creature of the group as they of him and that he loses his ‘individual distinctiveness’ by being a leader, as they do by being followers. He has no more freedom to be himself than any other member of the group, precisely because he has to be a reflex of their assumptions in order to qualify for leadership in the first place. [...] Leaders need followers as much as they are needed by them: the leader projects onto his followers his own inability to stand alone, his own fear of isolation.”

Every narcissist becomes enslaved to the character he has forced everyone around him to expect. He must keep playing the role – consciously or not – lest he be unmasked as the liar and fraud he really is. He must – and automatically does – “project onto his followers his own inability to stand alone, his own fear of isolation.” He is trapped (“has no more freedom to be himself...”) being a monster he has no memory of bringing into life.

We end up with the evil caused by a minority of Dark Triad psychopathic manipulative narcissists enmeshed directly in our lives, in our families, in our workplaces, in our homes, in our corporations, in our political offices... and the broader evil permitted by a majority captured by lies and promises, or by laziness, fear, ignorance, habit, or sheer exhaustion.

The banality of Good

I’ve also been thinking of different kinds of leaders, like Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Martin Luther King Jr. I’ve been thinking about whether there is a banality of Good as well, and if I could start to exercise it.

Gandhi, in his autobiography The Story of My Experiments With Truth, had a valuable insight into the power of silence and non-violent resistance that has stayed with me for years: “Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth.” Please note, before I continue, that he said silence is part of the spiritual discipline.

Later in the book, Gandhi grapples with a spiritual dilemma about the moral legitimacy of participating in a war: “A votary of truth is often obliged to grope in the dark. Ahimsa [nonviolence] is a comprehensive principle. We are helpless mortals caught in the conflagration of himsa [violence]. The saying that life lives on life has a deep meaning in it. Man cannot for a moment live without consciously or unconsciously committing outward himsa. The very fact of his living - eating, drinking and moving about - necessarily involves some himsa, destruction of life, be it ever so minute. A votary of ahimsa therefore remains true to his faith if the spring of all his actions is compassion, if he shuns to the best of his ability the destruction of the tiniest creature, tries to save it, and thus incessantly strives to be free from the deadly coil of himsa. He will be constantly growing in self-restraint and compassion, but he can never become entirely free from outward himsa.”

I’d like to believe Gandhi meant “truth” in a universal and reason-led way, not in a post-modern sense, in which there is no objective epistemology, and we are trapped in relativism and the impossibility of consensus. In this vacuum, we get more and more emotional reasoning, and less objectivity and universal facts. I’d like to believe that Gandhi held that all living beings have intrinsic worth and that we should try, to the best of our abilities, to minimize the harm we cause or allow to be caused to others.

How to deal with the hopelessness when all attempts fail to peacefully persuade someone that they’re wrong and that their actions are harmful? Do we have the right to strike back? Do we have an obligation to strike back? (Could the Nazis have been stopped by non-violent means or only by war?)

I used to be far more vocal and passionate about a range of social, political, ecological, or philosophical issues, but I quickly became exhausted by how ineffective I was. It really didn’t seem to matter how many books and peer-reviewed articles and statistics I quoted at people, how sharp my logic and epistemology were. People seemed unbelievably stubborn and inflexible, and whenever there’s a hint of moral blame and embarrassment associated with acknowledging they’re wrong, they will tend to react by doubling down and digging in their heels even further. It turns out humans will do almost anything to avoid public guilt and embarrassment.

I started to cultivate silence, distance, and asking myself a more difficult question: What is effective? The political “discourse” has never been so “vocal,” but all of this passion (emotion-led, not reason-led conversation) has led to more and more polarization and stalemates. We are so desperate to appear Good, to signal that we stand on the Right Side, to win the approval of our audience, to preach and persecute others... that we end up radicalizing ourselves and our adversaries further. This is the paradoxical cost of leaning in so strongly into the urge to speak up against evil. It may be what feels right, but it does not seem – on its own – to be effective.

I know – because I’ve been told, directly and indirectly – that my political silence can be interpreted as complicity with evil. That refusing to speak up against evil amounts to a tacit approval of the status quo. At times, I fear that it might mean just that, and I feel ashamed. Is silence equal to submission, or is it part of a less obvious, but more effective form of rebellion? Can it mean that, unlike most people, I spend an awful lot of time actively trying to love my enemies, which requires that I take the time to try to understand their ignorance and their hatred, silently, before I can decide whether there is hope for a conversation or an act of persuasion? If we are “helpless mortals caught in the conflagration of himsa,” only true non-violent resistance to violence can diminish – and hopefully one day stop – the conflagration. And if I may have no power to diminish the origination of evil, I always retain the power to not add fuel to it. I think it was this insight into the power of non-violence which has carried the reputations of Tolstoy, Gandhi, and King, among others, to this day. And I think the principle applies equally to non-violence to psychological violence.

Martin Luther King, likewise, reminded his followers that “in the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. [...] We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

Instead, he invited his enemies to be true to their own promise. He refused “to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt,” and that America could not fulfill that promissory note written by its founding fathers: “That all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

King’s dream was not one of revenge, but of reconciliation, “a dream that one day [...] the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

To overcome the urge of revenge, and instead invite our enemies to sit together at the table of brotherhood is the hardest task of all. The “sinners” of this world outnumber the “saints” a million to one. Violence is much easier to indulge than to resist. The thirst for power and punishment are quite difficult to resist. Those who turn the other cheek often get slapped again and again, and sometimes end up losing their lives. There must be a difference between passive and active non-resistance.

Still, I think it should be obvious that no amount of calling people racists, transphobes, conspiracy theorists, fascists, etc, will miraculously “cure” them. Some people seem immune to Truth and Reason: they make their own self-serving reality, and are allergic to any epistemology that functions by universal rules. To not accuse them of evil, but to remind them of the good in them, is not a miracle solution, but it is the only strategy that has the slightest chance of working. To believe, despite the lack of evidence, that there is – there must be – some good in them.

Silence

I now struggle a lot with the practice of mental silence. My mind is a relentless turbine of narratives and emotions. It prevents me from sleeping, from truly relaxing or resting at any time of the day. For all my years of investment into the theory and practice of meditation, I now have nothing to show. I have become the anti-Buddha, trapped in such unbearable dukkha that I constantly crave complete annihilation.

I am not a preacher. I swear allegiance to no political or religious doctrine. I don’t know how to stand up to the layers of evil in my life, in the personal, professional, and political domains. I’m groping in the dark, as a votary of truth, desperately trying to stop a conflagration of cruelty from consuming and ending my life.

But I cannot walk away from the fight. The hatred doesn’t only fuel my fantasies of revenge: it fuels my compassion, a new kind of compassion that resists abuse courageously instead of allowing it. Standing up, not bending over. It was precisely my empathy that made me such a perfect victim. This is, after all, how I ended up in this situation: by being submissive, completely accepting her dominance, and then challenging it, and finally being punished for it. I was silenced (and I further silenced myself) in my marriage, in order to keep the peace. I am now deeply ashamed of how weak and submissive I was, but I also know that if I had tried to keep my voice, if I had tried to fight for fairness and some semblance of equality, I would’ve been discarded years sooner. And blinded by “love” – at least my immature, servile version of it – I truly believed that the good in her would prevail over the evil I always saw lurking in her. The evil everyone else also saw, issuing me warnings I foolishly chose to ignore.

I now understand why she is completely enmeshed in a web of lies, which exists to furnish a narrative in which she is not responsible for anything. She is the only one caught in it, although others may have bought into the stories as well. To narcissists, the web of lies and excuses becomes so extensive that the guilt and shame of admitting them all simply becomes unbearable to them. The reality of who they are is so far from the character they’ve been playing socially for decades, that the terror of being unmasked feels like an existential risk. I have glimpsed these moments of “panic” and “regret” and “shame”. They simply cannot bear the responsibility for all the harm they have done, and they cannot begin to apologize for anything – or they’d have to apologize for everything. When the stakes are this high, and you expose them for the frauds that they are, they will do anything – I mean anything – to protect their persona from being unmasked to others, including, “sending you to meet your maker,” in the words of a self-aware diagnosed narcissist whom I will not name here. To hear such a confession from a narcissist is both terrifying and liberating, because up until then, I felt that this would sound like absolute insanity to anyone except victims of narcissistic abuse, who often feel driven to madness and hopelessness.

I’ve been told dozens of times that this is a war I cannot win. That I should walk away from everything before I lose even more, or myself. That I should “cut my losses.” But I fight for Justice, for Dignity, for Truth… all abstract principles which mean something different to everyone. Well, they mean quite a lot to me, and I fight because someone has to stand for something in this world. I fight because I don’t think I could forgive myself for giving up.

Sometimes we fight loudly and openly, and sometimes we fight silently, which could mean that we’re recovering from being knocked out, and that we’re figuring out how to come back to the fight stronger and more effectively. Sometimes, we have to put our lives at risk to test the limits of someone’s cruelty, to at least try to prove to them that they don’t actually want what they think they want. We have to take off the armour and hand them the knife: “If this is really what you want, carry on. If it is not, then this war ends now.” I understand the risk, and I take it on consciously.

I fight for visibility, because the more I overcome the shame of my story, the more I find others who have been similarly victimized, who all felt they were going insane for believing the things they believed about monsters everyone else still saw as angels.

I will take me years to fully overcome my shame for being so blind and naive for so long. As platitudinous as it may sound, I have to learn how to beat hatred with love, or to lose my battle with love. I still worry this hatred will turn me into a werewolf – a beast hell-bent on revenge. But I write this, publicly, as a memento, as proof that I was committed to take on the violence and humiliation for months, through every legal avenue, without striking back, neither physically nor psychologically.

To love your enemy is the biggest act of rebellion. So much of hatred is fueled by deception, guilt, embarrassment... Take away the fuel, and hopefully that conflagration of violence subsides.

I chose to stay for 14 years because I believed the good in her would prevail over the evil in her. She has given me every reason to abandon that faith. I refuse. I will stand, resolute, through her emotional and financial Blitzkrieg, until I am depleted or until I regain what’s rightfully mine.

No one will ever understand why I didn’t just walk away.

I will never find the right words. It’s some kind of love, some kind of principle.

Things I read in old books.

For those who live their lives in the front lines of the Culture Wars, films seem to be merely extensions of the battlefield. Which means that culture warriors start to judge films before they even see them, and even when they do see them, they cannot help but filter the experience through the lens of whether or not a work of art furthers their preferred political narrative. Even worse if a film ends up being non-political, and - that dirty old word - “escapist.”

Yet people drink and get high to escape reality; they might listen to music or go hiking or make pottery to escape reality; they go on vacation and turn off the news to escape reality. In fact, we would be suffocated by reality if we made no attempts to escape it at times. But to have fun at the movies and escape reality – what a sin!

For a culture warrior, it seems there is only one metric to “critique” a film with: It is either too woke or not woke enough. Conservative culture warriors are more predictable: they will bitch endlessly about the Hollywood elites trying to brainwash (or “groom”) their children with “neo-Marxist” propaganda: the black Little Mermaid, and the lesbian kiss in Lightyear, and Disney’s first openly gay main character, a mixed-race teenage boy in Strange World...

The leftist culture warriors want more female directors represented in Hollywood, and they celebrate when Barbie makes over a billion dollars at the box office, but they take no time and spend no money at all to go the theatres to watch the films of actually emerging independent filmmakers like Raven Jackson (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt) or Eliza Hittman (Never Rarely Sometimes Always), or those of already established directors like Debra Granik, Joanna Hogg, and Kelly Reichardt, not to mention foreign directors.

Or they complain endlessly that gay director Luca Guadagnino is some kind of traitor for continuously casting straight actors in gay roles (this has been titled the “gay-for-pay controversy”). They insist, instead, that film producers and directors make acting the only profession in the world in which applicants must disclose their sexual orientation as a condition for employment, despite the fact that it is generally considered illegal for employers (in any field) to ask applicants to disclose their sexual orientation.

Or they complain every year that the Oscars are too racist, too sexist, too ageist, etc. Despite the fact that the Academy has created and is already enforcing many diversity and inclusion rules to encourage productions to qualify for a Best Picture nomination. Obviously, being an American institution, the Academy still has an English-language “bias” and an American cinema bias. But strangely, we don’t criticize the Cesar awards for having a French bias, or the Goyas for having a Spanish bias. In fact, we could say that the Oscars have become arguably the most cosmopolitan of film awards.

In the past decade, it has nominated foreign actors such as Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Fernanda Torres, and Youn Yuh-jung (who won Best Supporting Actress for Minari). It has awarded an Oscar to a deaf actor, the excellent Troy Kotsur in CODA. It has given Best Picture to indie underdogs such as Moonlight, CODA, and now Anora. Beginning this decade, it has started nominating foreign-language films not only for Best International Feature Film but to Best Picture (Roma, Drive My Car, The Zone of Interest, I’m Still Here), and even awarded the top prize – deservedly – to the South Korean film Parasite in 2019.

Since Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman in 82 years to win a Best Director Oscar in 2009, two more female directors (Jane Campion and Chloe Zhao) have been awarded the prize, and many others have been nominated (Greta Gerwig, Coralie Fargeat, Justine Triet).

As far as I can tell, the Academy is trying very hard to overcome the valid criticisms that were directed at it and the composition of its voting body going into the 21^st century. It is undeniable that the Academy Awards have changed, and I think for the better, even though my taste is more highbrow than average, and I don’t always agree with the Academy’s choices. So what? Art is subjective, and because the Academy is not made up of critics, its collective taste tends towards likeable over artsy.

But despite all this demonstrable progress, some people are still not happy (will they ever be?). Which brings us to the ridiculous culture war outrage over Anora and Mikey Madison this year. It’s obvious why conservatives would even refuse to watch a movie they believe glamorizes prostitution (it doesn’t). While conservative culture warriors simply cringe at the very idea of watching a movie about a sex worker who relentlessly offends the ears of God with her foul mouth, liberal culture warriors cringe at the idea of watching a movie about a sex worker which “misses the opportunity” to “talk about” the horrendous conditions sex workers have to face. In essence, what they wanted was a documentary with a call-to-arms at the end. It is inconceivable to them that maybe some (I said maybe, some) strippers and sex workers (certainly, not every stripper is a sex worker) do the job out of choice, and may make good money doing so, and may not feel oppressed or “subjugated to the male gaze.” In fact, that they may have chosen to capitalize on the gaze of men who are willing to pay them. Could we also say that every woman who voluntarily creates an OnlyFans account is being culturally coerced, or economically coerced to do so? I think that’s an outrageous and untenable opinion.

Sure, director Sean Baker could have made a different movie, even a tragic one, about a different sex worker, and maybe that would’ve been great too. But he made this one, about an “erotic dancer” who appears to at least occasionally also offer sex for money. Baker has carved out his own lane in indie cinema: while social realism is almost always associated with drama and tragedy, he makes social realist comedies, and hilarious ones at that.

Baker has used his many acceptance speeches to urge audiences to experience films in theatres whenever possible. That’s exactly where I first watched Anora, at a sold-out screening at the Vancouver Playhouse during VIFF. And I can recall very clearly what happened: two hours of uproarious communal laughter. I cannot recall audiences laughing so hard for so long since Borat or Bridesmaids. I think most writers would acknowledge that writing comedy is harder than writing drama, and Sean Baker has pulled off a hilarious movie that is unmistakably modern but also hints at the past. It has something of that chaotic eccentricity of Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You, and the slapstick humour of the Marx Brothers or Chaplin or Keaton. It is shot on location, in a freezing New York winter, which gives it that indie social realism look.

How best to explain the astonishing success of Anora, the indie underdog that swept up the Palme D’Or and then most of the main association awards this season? Well, Anora is a movie, as Greta Gerwig put it before handing it the coveted Palme D’or at Cannes, that “let us laugh, make us hope beyond hope, and then broke our hearts, and never lost sight of the truth.”

Is Anora a comedy or a slapstick or a drama? It is all of those things, pulling off many “tonal shifts” as Baker calls them, and it’s an unforgettable blast because of them. Anora is great precisely because Baker refrains from either judging any of the characters or preaching some political “message.” We’re simply invited along for the ride – the ups and downs – with these screwy characters. It is truly a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, launching the belated graduation of one of the world’s best indie directors into mainstream recognition.

Of course, the sanctimonious people on the far left conflating the subject of the movie with the “message” of the movie would never, ever, ever, agree to a week of sex with an immature but charming Russian boy for 15 thousand dollars a week. They are better than Anora (just as they are better than all of us), and they will only fight for the justice they deserve via the systemic overthrow of Capitalism (which again, maybe forces people like Anora to make career choices such as these – sure, maybe). But they miss the obvious point: Anora is not an over-educated college activist. Cut her some fucking slack: she’s a 23-year-old stripper in Brooklyn, who walks into the radar of the initially charming son of a Russian oligarch, and like all of us have done at some point, falls under his spell and is blinded by the light of unrealistic hopes and dreams. If Baker had given this a happy ending, I’d agree, this would’ve been a sordid movie about a poor woman “being rescued” by a rich guy. But it’s a film about disillusionment instead. Both Ani’s and ours. Baker fools us into expecting a certain kind of movie and then pulls the rug from under us.

More criticism has been directed at how the characters behave and how they talk. You really have to be extremely humourless and uptight to suggest that the film itself is prejudiced against Russians and Armenians and homosexuals because the characters say things like “you Armenian piece of shit” and “you’re a faggot-ass bitch.”

If I were to write a film that realistically takes place in restaurant kitchens, you bet your ass there would be plenty of black and blue humour. Because guys who work in kitchens don’t talk like they’re performing to earn the approval of the rest of the world. Some of them are racist and homophobic or whatever. Some of them are full-blown conspiracy theorists who listen to way too much Joe Rogan. But... most of them are funny. And if I had to, I’d portray them exactly like that, foul-mouthed and uneducated and frankly, often, so stupid that you can’t help but laugh.

Should we really use cinema to portray a sanitized version of reality in which no one ever says anything racist or homophobic, and line cooks and strippers sit around vacantly throwing clever-sounding terms around like “late-stage capitalism” or “intersectional” or “male gaze” pretending that they’re delivering a Message to make the world a better place?

This allergy to humour is not actually surprising in the context of the broader revolt against stand-up comedy as an art form, which started years ago. All that matters to political activists is whether or not, again, the comedy is in service to The Message. In order to serve a Message, the comedy must be satirical, and it must have the badgering condescension of films like Don’t Look Up, which bury perfectly good and interesting ideas under a metric shit ton of The Message. To the activists, Anora is disappointingly devoid of a sermon which they went to church in search of.

The fun police go to the movies knowing that they cannot allow themselves to laugh, and that is their job to make you feel bad for laughing when Ani calls Igor a “faggot-ass bitch.” In other words, if you laugh at that line, that automatically makes you and Ani both homophobic (not to mention Baker for writing it). It is completely lost on the fun police that Ani is poking Igor, essentially calling him gay not because she believes that to be true, or because she’s homophobic, but because he doesn’t objectify her sexually like she’s used to. When she asks him, “Why wouldn’t you have raped me?” and he laughs it off and says that he is not a rapist, she wants validation from him that he does find her sexually attractive.

Some have gone so far as to suggest the movie perpetuates the stereotype of Russians as gangsters in American movies. But if that stereotype is there at first, from Ani’s perspective, the entire character arc for Igor is to slowly show that he’s not a gopnik, or a thug, or a drug dealer. In fact, Ani is not used to the many signs of genuine kindness Igor shows to her over the second half of the movie: bringing her scarf, stealing back her engagement ring, taking her luggage up to her apartment in a freezing snowstorm. She is also not used to being emotionally vulnerable, because she’s always been ready for a fight.

This is precisely what makes Anora’s final scene so powerful. (Spoiler alert) Ani goes home, broken-hearted. Vanya remains the same immature little playboy he’s always been. But Ani has learned a lesson through her heartbreak and humiliation (Vanya asking her “are you stupid?” before they get on a private jet to Vegas to annul their marriage). And which one of us hasn’t been humiliated and rejected by someone we completely trusted? Before she leaves Igor behind in the car, perhaps to never see him again, she is trying – but still not quite there – to learn a new form of communication. She tries to communicate with Igor physically but then breaks down into tears, crossing a threshold she hadn’t yet crossed – at least not on camera.

It is a truly spectacular performance, which is why the hypocrisy surrounding Mikey Madison’s Oscar win is harder to understand. Let me point it out. The leftist culture warrior’s outrage is due to a belief that Demi Moore was “robbed” of an Oscar due to ageism and their belief, based on absolutely no evidence at all, that every man in Hollywood is secretly a horny Harvey Weinstein who is so blinded by lust at looking at young actress that they miss the talent of older ones.

But I ask you, what could be more insulting to a young actress than to be reduced to a pretty face and a sexy body? This is the hypocrisy I simply can’t get over: Those who criticize Madison's win over Demi Moore's are doing exactly what they are criticizing the Academy for: sexualizing young actresses.

They call their outrage “feminist” while openly and passionately insulting a young actress and dismissing the merits of a terrific and bold performance. By taking to social media to vocally share their outrage, they are implicitly delivering a message to a 25-year-old young woman: “You are not deserving of this based on talent: you just won this award because you’re young and you were topless for a lot of the movie, and Academy voters are horny old men. Since your success is tied to your youth and your physical beauty, your success will diminish as you get old.”

Where was this ubiquitous ageism when Frances McDormand won her 3^rd Oscar over a just-as-worthy-or-even-more-worthy Carey Mulligan, who was much younger? They see a pattern where there is none. In fact, they believe the Oscars always award the young beautiful actress when in fact they award the youngest nominee... almost never. Sure, Demi Moore’s and Fernanda Torres’ performances were also Oscar-worthy, which was why they were rightfully nominated. But the most reasonable explanation for Madison’s win over Demi Moore is that horror is not for everyone, and horror movies don’t typically even get nominations. Horror fans can easily recall that one of the best horror performances of all time, by Toni Colette in Hereditary, was not even nominated at all.

Yes, my dear pseudo-feminists: you loved The Substance for its “powerful message” and critique of “misogyny” and “ageism” in the entertainment industry, but you act like Dennis Quaid’s character in it (in one of the worst performances I have ever seen), openly insulting a young actress who displays not only all the signs of an incredible talent, but also generosity, emotional and intellectual intelligence, gratitude, and maturity – all the traits we often criticize Gen Zs for lacking. Watch every interview with Madison and you will notice another reason that may have contributed to her win: she is just incredibly likeable. A good, wholesome, head-on-her-shoulders, mature 25-year-old with no social media presence. And oh, a very different person from Anora, which makes her transformation into Anora all the more impressive.

The Brutalist was embroiled in a different controversy: it used AI to correct the actors’ pronunciation of Hungarian, which apparently should’ve meant that Adrien Brody was not worthy of his Oscar either. But Brody’s incredible performance takes up over 2 hours of screen time, and the scenes in which he speaks Hungarian are but a tiny fraction of that. It is ridiculous to say that he was undeserving of the award because of a tiny use of AI to merely correct the Hungarian that he did learn how to speak.

We’ve been photoshopping pictures and color grading movies for decades. We’ve been using auto-tune and vocal editors to make singers sound better for decades. In my opinion, The Brutalist’s use of AI to correct the Hungarian pronunciation of its actors is just as banal as these. I understand we have many reasonable fears about the effects of AI on art and artists, but we cannot be so easily triggered by any use of Artificial Intelligence in art. It is inevitable, and in this instance, it is just another tool in the toolbox.

Madison and Brody won their Oscars for incredible performances in two incredible indie movies, which, I’m sorry to say – and most critics and non-politically motivated viewers will agree – are simply much better movies than The Substance or A Complete Unknown.

I am concerned that abandoning the communal experience of watching films in theatres will lead to even more theatre closures, which will lead to even more watching films at home, alone, always wearing the political lenses, and never ever taking them off. How really are you supposed to unclench your assholes when you begin watching a movie having already decided that you cannot like it because “it used AI” or “it glamourizes prostitution” or “it contains homophobic terms” or “it’s problematic” because one of the actors once said something fucked up on Twitter...?

Anora was made to be seen in theatres – it was a joyful communal experience. The Brutalist, a 3.5hr long movie on 70mm with a built-in intermission, amazing cinematography, an amazing score, and amazing performances, was made to be seen in theatres! Of course I went to see it in theatres! Yes, please! I know that was a much more enjoyable and memorable experience than I would’ve had if I had seen the movie at home, with my phone in my hands.

I would’ve had a hard time choosing between Anora and The Brutalist for the top Oscars. They’re such different films, and both amazing achievements. But I hope their gigantic wins at the Awards circuits are a great harbinger for Indie auteurs.

It is true, thankfully, that cancel culture does not have the power it wishes it had. But this infuriates the Puritans even more. Any hint of moral impropriety, an off-colour remark or joke decades ago, one inappropriate tweet dug up – and an entire film becomes tainted. The controversies that afflicted Emilia Perez due to Karla Sofia Gascon’s tweets are too many to mention here. Personally, I don’t think Emilia Perez is a good movie, but I also don’t think it makes sense to punish everyone else involved in that movie for Gascon’s tweets.

The demand of all this puritanism is that the worth of a film should be contingent on the moral purity not only of all its above-the-line talent, but also of its characters! And who shall be judges of this moral purity? Men who insult young actresses in the name of feminism, and straight people who insult gay directors as traitors on behalf of gay people who aren’t actually insulted.

I guess what I really want to say is: if you are not going to allow yourself to be entertained, then stop watching movies altogether and don’t spoil the fun for the rest of us. Or take a break, leave the politics and religion at home, and go the movies to escape the soul-draining and mind-numbing moral posturing required by the Culture Wars. Allow yourself the freedom to be entertained. Have some popcorn and a laugh or a cry. If you love a movie, share it and support it. If you don’t, let it go.

Politics is politics.

Art is art.

“Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one ‘falls into’ if one is lucky?” Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

The idea that love must follow from lust is not a fact but an article of faith. Worse, it’s a hill billions of people are still willing to die on. They simply cannot believe that it is possible to actively build attraction towards someone we slowly come to know. It seems logical, after all, that you can’t start a fire without a spark.

They are terribly stubborn: they want the windfall. They’re tired of working for things, trying to earn things. Even though they’re often attracted to people they don’t even like, they still keep playing the lottery of lust, only to constantly bemoan how the odds are always against them.

One of the most infuriating and common pieces of pop psychology advice is to “trust your gut feelings.” This is more often than not a genuinely terrible idea. A full exploration of the unreliability of gut feelings would take us off track here (I recommend Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow). For now, let me attempt to persuade you that trusting your instinctive physiological lust is almost always a bad idea.

In The Art of Loving (1956), German psychologist Erich Fromm succinctly summarized what decades of upcoming research on arousal would confirm: “Sexual desire can be stimulated by the anxiety of aloneness, by the wish to conquer or be conquered, by vanity, by the wish to hurt and even to destroy, as much as it can be stimulated by love. It seems that sexual desire can easily blend with and be stimulated by any strong emotion, of which love is only one.”

Many intense emotions, it turns out, can be harnessed into lust. In fact, many people will remember the best sex they’ve ever had was angry sex. Arousal can be many things, biologically speaking, which leads to what psychologists call “misattribution of arousal.” It can be caused by conditions of high anxiety, mystery, fear, danger, and even physical or emotional pain. We often misattribute those gut feelings as positive attraction to a person who just happens to be available as a logical “cause” of them.

Another major reason why attraction often leads us astray: Narcissists can be some of the most charming, lively, confident, attractive people you will ever meet. They will also make the worst partners. They are masters at acting out a lovable character, concealing the so-called red flags, or making you feel like you’re crazy or wrong when you do see them. Ask anyone who’s suffered narcissistic abuse or neglect in a relationship.

But if not guided by lust, how else could we possibly look for good candidates for love?

We suffer from a poverty of language that is to a large degree self-imposed: we mean many things by the word “love,” and in this conceptual confusion we may lose many important insights that might help us find the kind of “love” we’re actually looking for.

The ancient Greeks had many different words for “love”, mainly eros (romantic, passionate love), philia (affectionate love), agape (selfless, universal love), and storge (familiar love). In his masterpiece Love and Will (1969), American humanist psychologist Rollo May discusses all these different forms of love, adding libido as the physiological sexual urge that really has little to do with love.

I think May’s greatest contribution in Love and Will was to criticize the sexual revolution of 1960s not from a religious perspective, but from a psychological one. At the risk of oversimplifying a long and complex book, May poses the ultimate question: What does it mean, psychologically, to make the sex act completely without consequence? Before contraceptives, maybe couples who were truly in love but didn’t want to be continuously bringing new life into the world had no choice but to focus on the kind of sex (and sensual affection) that can’t result in pregnancy. Human instinct, however, has a tendency to hyper-focus on precisely the only kind of sex that can result in pregnancy.

In fact, long before contraceptives lowered the birth rate further after the famous post-WWII Baby Boom, a spontaneous (not medically assisted) but huge drop in the birth rate occurred as a result of a massive population migration from rural areas to burgeoning industrial cities. While children are often considered labour “assets” in rural economies, they tend to be seen as expensive “liabilities” in industrial economies.

May suggested that modern man, having now the choice of whether to have children or not, has a “profound ambivalence about his power to create another human being.” It should be uncontroversial to say that the act of sex must be imbued with more meaning if the intention is to create a new life, which, in itself, will require immense sacrifice and commitment from both parents, changing their lives – for better or worse.

“Although [the contraceptive] frees the individual from the immediate biological enchainment of pregnancy,” May suggested, “it may well increase his psychological ambivalence.” More than 50 years later, this is still very much an internal and taboo drama that plays out in modern love-seeking. We are still clashing our innate instincts to procreate with competing logical narratives against having children (the world is ecologically overexploited, the financial prospects are grim, etc...)

The sexual revolution also promised freedom from old religious and social mores, as well as fun and experimentation. It’s not hard to see why this revolution had such appeal and momentum.

“Hippie love emphasizes immediacy, spontaneity, and the emotional honesty of the temporary moment,” May explains, “but love also requires enduringness. Love grows in depth by virtue of the lovers experiencing encounter with each other, conflict and growth, all over a period of time. The love which is separated from will, or the love which obviates will, is characterized by a passivity which does not incorporate and grow with its own passion; such love tends, therefore, toward dissociation. It ends in something which is not fully personal because it does not fully discriminate. Such distinctions involve willing and choosing, and to choose someone means not to choose someone else. This is overlooked among the hippies; the immediacy of love in the hippie development seems to end in a love that is fugitive and ephemeral.”

May was trying to perhaps find something timeless and true about love, something in between the ultra-commitment of lifelong monogamy-with-children, and the non-commitment of inconsequential casual sex with multiple “fugitive and ephemeral” partners.

He seemed to accept that casting a wider net, so to speak, being able to have more experiences before committing, we might then be better equipped to make a good decision about whom to build a long-term relationship with. Clearly, the idea of marrying someone before ever sleeping with them will strike almost anyone in the 21^st century as a terrible idea. But the idea of never being to able to settle for one person because you haven’t “sampled” the full range of what’s available also sounds terrible. And it is now this idea which imprisons people in the age of dating apps and infinite pools of potential candidates.

The paradox of having an outrageous number of choices is that it forces people to rush things, to want to arrive immediately at their fantasy of what “falling” in love should be like.

“The fact that many people tend not to give themselves time to know each other in love affairs is a general symptom of the malaise of our day,” May wrote. “We are the age, says John Galbraith referring to the motels along the highways, of ‘short order sex.’”

If the 1960s struck its intellectuals as the age of short order sex, the 2020s are the age of short order everything. We are the Age of Instant Gratification, of TikTok reels, of swiping on dating apps, of doom-scrolling, of free pornography, of fast food, of 20-ounce coffees, of painkillers, of “uppers” and “downers.” We cannot sit and read a novel for a couple of hours, watch a movie without checking our phones, or allow a lust itch to pass before it leads us astray. We must act on impulses and cravings, and we simply have no patience to wait for love or lust to develop. Worse than that, we refuse to believe that we must have to actively create and maintain both love and desire. Instead, we want the Disney moment in which our eyes meet with someone else’s, birds start twittering all around us, and a shower of glitter envelops us as we sail effortlessly into Happily Ever After.

May continues: “We arrive now at the fundamental relationship between eros, time, and imagination. Eros takes time: time for the significance of the event to sink in, time for the imagination to work, and if not ‘time to think,’ at least time to experience and to anticipate. This is why someone in love wants to be alone, wandering here and there by himself, not concentrating or trying to work; he is giving eros time to do its work.”

May points out that in Greek mythology, Eros is the son of Ares (the god of war) and Aphrodite (the goddess of love). The erotic is a tension between care and aggression. Esther Perel, a Belgian psychologist, in her bestselling book Mating in Captivity, explains that “we all need security: permanence, reliability, stability, and continuity. These rooting, nesting instincts ground us in our human experience. But we also have a need for novelty and change, generative forces that give life fullness and vibrancy. Here risk and adventure loom large. We’re walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other.” Perel gives abundant examples of this tension in her book. We might want emotional relationships that are on the whole balanced, safe, and egalitarian, but she suggests that the erotic derives from power play, surrender, dreaming up fantasies, and acting them out (to each their own!)

Decades earlier, May described the vibrancy and motion of a vital relationship as “a continuous give-and-take in which one asserts himself, finds an answer in the other, then possibly asserts too far, senses a ‘no’ in the other, backs up but does not give up, shifts the participation to a new form, and finds the way that is adequate for the wholeness of the other. It is an assertion of one’s own individuality in relation to another person. It always skates on the edge of exploitation of the partner; but without it, there is no vital relationship.”

“But eros,” May warns us, “cannot live without philia, brotherly love and friendship. The tension of continuous attraction and continuous passion would be unbearable if it lasted forever. Philia is the relaxation in the presence of the beloved which accepts the other’s being as being; it is simply liking to be with the other, liking to rest with the other, liking the rhythm of the walk, the voice, the whole being of the other. This gives a width to eros; it gives it time to grow; time to sink its roots down deeper. Philia does not require that we do anything for the beloved except accept him, be with him, and enjoy him. It is friendship in the simplest, most direct terms.”

Still lingering on the vital importance of time, May opined that impotence was often not biologically caused, but a psychological sign of a lack of sufficient emotional connection and trust: “In cases of impotence we recognize an all too familiar pattern: the impression of being compulsively hurried: ‘We undressed immediately,’ the patient says, or, ‘We went to bed immediately and I was impotent.’”

Clearly, both May and Fromm would be appalled at how little time people give each other now before deciding that someone is not a “match.” What does it really mean to give someone time? It is simply not possible to make such a crucial decision after one or two or three dates. But there are just too many people to go through, and therefore, you can’t “waste” too much time on anyone (5, 10, 15 dates? Are you crazy?) What that means is that the purpose of the date has become more like a job interview: make sure the red flags aren’t there, compare this candidate to all the others you’ve already interviewed, and then make a yes or no decision by the end of a first date at a coffee shop. Or chase the physical attraction first, like taking cars for test drives: see if the sex is good first, and only then try finding out if this is a good and lovable person. Neither strategy sounds like a pathway to true and lasting love.

Sometimes, in order to define what love is, we have to first accept what it is not. It is not just an accident that befalls us, like being struck with Cupid’s arrow. How could we possibly foster love in an environment that is anti-presence, anti-patience, anti-platonic, anti-erotic, anti-sensual, anti-vulnerable, etc.?

What is Love, then? We return to Erich Fromm:

“Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a ‘standing in,’ not a ‘falling for.’ In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving. The most widespread misunderstanding is that which assumes that giving is ‘giving up’ something, being deprived of, sacrificing. The person whose character has not developed beyond the stage of the receptive, exploitative, or hoarding orientation, experiences the act of giving in this way. For the productive character, giving has an entirely different meaning. Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength.”

Love requires creation, and therefore, creativity. That is why Fromm says it is an art. A relationship is a joint work of art. It requires talent, skill, perseverance, and courage. A true work of art is never easy to create, but it should leave you thinking: goddamn it, it was so worth the effort.

“To love somebody is not just a strong feeling,” Fromm insists, “it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?”

Love demands patience. Lust has none. There are different realms to explore between the platonic and the sexual: sensual touching, a long embrace, smells, and also, the very underrated complement to conversation: sitting together, silently.

Love requires openness, vulnerability, ugliness, which may actually dampen lust. Lust is psychologically blind, because it happens prior to any true knowledge of the person. There is no such thing as love at first sight. Love is the feeling you’d still feel for this person even if you were literally blind, because love has little to do with sight.

Fromm continues: “Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves.”

But to face ourselves requires a great amount of courage:

"Having faith in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. By this I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations remain the same; that, for instance, his respect for life and human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change. To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern—and to take the jump and stake everything on these values.”

One must always have the courage to be willing to risk a relationship ending, in order to have it grow into what we actually need it to be. This is one of the hardest leaps any of us will ever have to make. In fact, so many people now avoid relationships in order to escape ever having to make this leap, to walk away from someone they love but who cannot meet their needs, or to risk finding out that they cannot meet their partner’s needs. In essence, there can be no possibility of love without the risk of heartbreak.

This is the tragic gamble of love. It only shows itself to those who have enough faith to take the leap. Love itself doesn’t require reciprocity (it can be unrequited), but a relationship does. A relationship is a work of art, but a fragile one: It takes two artists to build one, but it only takes one to demolish it.

This is the true wager, Monsieur Pascal: To put your life in someone else’s hands or not? Yes, a million times yes. Choose the person wisely but then surrender completely. The joy of surrender is such that no heartbreak can eclipse it. It will try, of course. Heartbreak makes you forget for a while how it actually felt to love or be loved. But hopefully gratitude for the courage it took both of you can still be rescued from the wreckage. Maybe we smash our immature masterpieces so we can begin again and create a new, better masterpiece.

We don’t fall in love, we fall in lust. Lust is a gravity beyond our control. Love is not falling. Love is building a stairway to heaven, together, one step at a time. Naguib Mahfouz said that “home is where all your attempts to escape cease.” To be in love is to be home, where all your attempts to escape cease, where you surrender, and you can be at peace.

Lust is like showing up at McDonald's looking for a 3-Michelin-star meal. A quickie is a snack. Snacks are fine, but you cannot get all your nutrition from snacks. Chasing lust leaves us constantly malnourished. Fucking is pleasurable, for minutes. Making love is a supernova. Orgasms last moments; the nutrition of true love can last a lifetime.

Love requires creation and destruction, and constant negotiation. It requires sacrifice, and it requires facing our deep ambivalence about creating new life, both metaphorically and literally. Lust is a blinding spotlight that focuses on a physical body as an object of desire and keeps everything else in the dark. Love is the floodlight of curiosity that explores the darkest corners so we can choose with wisdom whether or not to accept a whole person, despite their flaws and limitations.

I believe that lust is naturals selection’s dirty trick to throw us off the scent of love. We evolved to reproduce, not to be happy or in love. Love is the rebellion, the choice to learn to desire someone you didn’t necessarily lust for initially. Lust is animal. Love is human. Lust always expires, but love can be timeless.

“While one is consciously afraid of not being loved,” Fromm writes, “the real, though usually unconscious fear is that of loving. To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.”

The choice is ours. If we all keep playing the lottery of lust, then indeed, we might all die alone.

For those of you understandably terrified of the courage required by love, I will leave you with a beautiful poem by the wonderful Maria Popova:

the most immense danger 
is to live with a leaden heart
always on guard against
being wounded
to make of the world
an anxious projection
to remain asleep through
the day-break of possibility
never touching the great body
of the unknown
sleeping along side
never willing to take
a chance on change
for the only heart
that can be broken is
the heart too ossified to open
to the full range of feeling

“It is not pleasant to experience decay, to find yourself exposed to the ravages of an almost daily rain, and to know that you are turning into something feeble, that more and more of you will blow off with the first strong wind, making you less and less.” Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

After 16 years of living in Vancouver, I can hardly remember a January with two full weeks of sunshine. Without the constant rain and darkness which usually make winters rather bleak, I actually enjoy the cold.

Or I could enjoy it, if not for the fact that the past two weeks have been some of the worst days I have ever lived. I’ve spent them in a kind of suspended grief, muddled with a maddening rage I’ve never felt before, which terrifies me and threatens to turn me into a werewolf.

My dog, my life support, my best friend, has been kidnapped from me. I have a strong case, but still, the legal process to retrieve her is slow, painful, and expensive. I’m left to wonder: Am I losing this dog forever, or am I getting her back soon? I am now facing steep legal costs which may further eviscerate me financially and emotionally. I’ve had to learn the difference between being broke and being bankrupt. I now hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

I’ve struggled to cope with this nightmare and started to engage in a perhaps bizarre but mildly effective psychological exercise, which is to constantly force myself to think of people far less fortunate than me. I remembered a striking passage from Viktor Frankl’s holocaust memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, which is worth quoting at length:

“As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances. If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor—or maybe because of it—we were carried away by nature’s beauty, which we had missed for so long.

In camp, too, a man might draw the attention of a comrade working next to him to a nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods, the same woods in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant. One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, ‘How beautiful the world could be!’”

In an attempt to get out of my rumination, my paranoia, my grief, and my rage, I spent a lot of the past two weeks walking and sitting outside, in the cold sun, trying my hardest to look outward, and pay attention to whatever beauty is available.

One morning, I sat on a bench at Waterfront Park, drinking a coffee, and looking for respite.

A blue sky in January is a gift. The gigantic barge roared like a sea lion and the sea gulls circled the harbour, chanting. Many people hate the sounds gulls make, but I do not. The float houses in the marina creaked and squeaked, and for a moment I thought that I’d like to live in one of them, before my brain objected with premonitions of the Big Earthquake and its ensuing tsunami.

I’d never noticed before how beautiful trees are without their foliage, the branches getting thinner and curving upwards. If I could draw, I’d draw them like this, in pencil, unadorned and unashamed of their beautiful nakedness. Fortunate to be so non-human.

I sat and closed my eyes and tried not to feel cold, and I listened to French pianist Bertrand Chamayou’s Complete Works for Solo Piano by Maurice Ravel. I’ve started listening to classical music and reading poetry since my life started falling apart. I don’t know why they affect me now in ways they never did before. Perhaps we resist poetry and music when we’re younger because we’re not ready to be truly moved. Poet David Whyte once said that “poetry is how human beings speak when they’re trying to create language against which there are no defenses.” I now think both poetry and classical music require an openness, a vulnerability to be... attacked?

I don’t think I chose this openness, but I can think of many ways in which the nightmare of the past 18 months has broken all my defenses. The citadel’s been breached, and everything’s been pillaged. I don’t know who I am anymore, or how I could’ve been so blind and naive, and who I’ll become. Best case scenario, I keep trying to remind myself, this falling apart will make way for the true vulnerability needed to become the writer I’ve always had the potential to be.

But potential is a very difficult thing to actualize. It requires a kind of freedom which often seems beyond reach. The problem is that depression really feels like a maximum-security prison. Sure, for a few minutes, I can appreciate the beauty of the ocean reflecting sunlight, and the soothing white noise of train bells in the distance, the symphony of gulls and twittering birds, the idle chatter of walkers and runners, and the strutting of beautiful dogs... but I am still a prisoner after all.

Elsewhere in A Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl writes that asking “what is the meaning of life?” is like asking a chess champion what the best move in chess is. “One should not search for an abstract meaning of life,” he goes on. “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.”

It’s an interesting analogy, but there comes a point in every game of chess where there is no possible move left to make at all. Games of chess are often either lost or won, and rarely end up in a stalemate. Life in the maximum-security prison of depression feels like a sequence of stalemates followed by risky moves that lead to humiliating losses, until you feel like you have no options left, and your king is finally threatened.

I’m in such a moment. I’m in a panic. I’ve never felt so cornered and about to lose everything. I had a dog, and some money left. I now stand to lose literally everything. My dog, my money, my apartment, my city, my country. Do I get to reset and play a new game after check mate? Do I want to? Do I have to? God, do I really have to?

I take my pills, I exercise, I eat healthy, I do yoga, I meditate, and I spend time with friends and with strangers every week. I check in with my psychiatrist and my therapist periodically. And yet, there seems to be something inherently fatalistic about this illness.

Andrew Solomon, in his atlas of depression, The Noonday Demon, wrote: “Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory.”

The problem with metaphor and allegory is that they are symbols, vague by necessity, a kind of specific language that can only be understood by those who have a direct knowledge of the pain the symbols are referring to. Much as I will never directly know the pain of childbirth no matter how much I read about it or watch videos of it, the metaphors of depression cannot help but sound like ridiculous overstatements to those who don’t directly understand them, although they often seem like understatements to us who issue them. In fact, the pain is so extreme and relentless that it simply cannot be adequately captured by any words, or music, or painting, or anything.

In a way, grief does resolve. It progresses, through ups and down, and it does resolve into a state of acceptance. Grief is universal, an inescapable part of loving people who go away or perish. Solomon continues: “Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.”

My psychiatrist tried to cheer me up by saying that everything I’m going through is “situational,” by which I think he meant it’s not going to last forever, and it’s not as inescapable a fate as I now believe that it is. It’s easy, though, to sit across the table and offer “optimism,” and tweak the medication, and urge me to wait a little longer. Would it even be ethical for him to agree with my fatalistic pessimism even if he agreed with it?

Grief is universal. Depression is common, but not universal. Often, it is temporary and indeed situational, but for many people, it feels timeless, inextricable, woven into the fabric of who you are and who you always will be. For twenty years it has had me gasping for air. One day, though, the optimists say, one day things will change...

I am grateful to the lessons grief has taught me about my depth, but I am still appalled. How can these lessons and clarity lead to a meaningful life? What is the next move in my game of chess? How do I exorcise the Noonday Demon? How to inoculate myself against such abundant cruelty and insincerity in the world? No one really seems to have the answers.

What does it mean to say that this is “situational”? To say that if not for all of this, a person probably wouldn’t have had cancer or heart disease is to deny this person’s entire history. If only they had lived a healthier lifestyle and had different genes, this wouldn’t have happened. Why isn’t it equally ridiculous to say that if only I didn’t have the brain that I have, and if only I hadn’t lived the life that I’ve lived at this particular moment in history, and if only I hadn’t fallen victim to a charming but malignant partner incapable of compassion, then I wouldn’t feel so hopeless now?

If only the Titanic hadn’t hit the iceberg. If only Hitler had never been born. If only this or that. We live in a world of tragic facts, which we try to escape by magical thinking.

Is a denial of reality the only way out of hopelessness? Viktor Frankl’s lasting contributions to psychology and literature were not only a result of an extraordinary amount of personal courage and resilience, but were also contingent on a historical event outside of his control: The Allied victory in Europe, and more specifically, The Red Army marching into Berlin, defeating the Nazis, and liberating concentration camps along the way, turning soon-to-be Holocaust victims into Holocaust survivors.

I dare not compare my plight to those who suffered the greatest possible inhumanity. But inhumanity comes in shades, and it still plagues the earth.

And yet, my “situation” is dire, dangerous, and urgent.

I am eroded, battered, humiliated and exhausted.

I do not know which army is coming to break me out of this prison.

I do not know how to protect my king.

I have not abandoned hope. I have tried, but a mysterious force calls me back to my mission in life, which is to never be at a loss for words, and to never lose the courage to use them. “Never” is a silly word, but in desperate times, that’s the language used by that mysterious voice at the edge of the abyss.

Until that mythical day when the sun may shine upon my inner frost, the pockets of outer sunshine will have to do. Hopefully one day soon, I’ll be relieved by the smell of my dog’s neck and the warmth of her little body as we snuggle on the couch, reunited by the principle of justice, which may or not exist.

If only it did.

I want to put down this burden. I know that I hurt myself a thousand times more by remembering the thousand ways you hurt me. It would be easier to forgive you if you asked for it, but why do I have to wait for you to ask for it, which you probably never will? If it is already within me to give, and I want to give it, why can’t I? Is it because I’m rushing it, and I’m not ready to forgive, and I’m not sure if you deserve it?

Fore-give, doesn’t that mean to give before? Before it’s asked for, before it’s earned? This is etymological speculation, of course. To give, as in a gift, rather than a payment or an exchange? Does someone have to deserve a gift, anyway?

If it can and must be given before someone asks for it, why is it so hard to forgive? We are petty: if our offenders are not repentant, then they don’t deserve it. Maybe so. But what about what I deserve? The freedom from this burden. The relief from this burning rage.

To be able to absolve, to pardon, means that I have power. You resent that power and that I withhold it, but you’d resent it equally if I used it. As if my forgiveness were a bucket of water thrown on the fire of your aggression, which you feel entitled to, presumably because I have done something which in your eyes I should also have asked forgiveness for. Something you have not accused me of. Something utterly unknown and mysterious to me. Perhaps it’s nothing I’ve done, but simply the sin of Being Me.

Maybe you feel so guilty you don’t find yourself worthy of forgiveness. But that’s guilt out of proportion, and I don’t want it to ravage you. Only the gift of my forgiveness can bring it into proportion, and clear the path to self-forgiveness, which you also deserve.

Maybe you do not want my forgiveness because you would resent my capacity for it. Or you would resent that my forgiveness implies that you have guilt to forgive, which you do, but can’t acknowledge. Yet I can’t forgive you without implying your guilt. Is the act of forgiveness a socially endorsed “good deed” masking an insult, then?

I don’t want my anger to linger, I don’t want it to fester into hatred and a craving for revenge which can get out of hand. And I don’t want your guilt to linger, although I believe it’s healthy that you should feel some, if you are capable of it.

To forgive is to wash away the debts: we’d owe each other nothing more. You’d owe me no apology, or your presence, or reparations. But first you must return what you stole from me.

All is forgiven, both sides of the slate, or nothing really is. But what is on my side of the slate? Where is the evidence of my wrongdoing? Maybe you can’t ask for my forgiveness because I haven’t asked you for yours, because I’m not sure what I’ve done, other than react with inevitable anger to the nearly-unforgivable things you did for which I now must try so hard to forgive you.

If I ask you to forgive my anger, will you then allow me to forgive your actions which caused it in the first place? Must we do this backwards?

Forgiveness is such a struggle, and it requires such courage. Again, maybe the courage I show you merely reminds you of your cowardice. And though this may be true, you would be insulted by hearing this. My courage in forgiving you is an insult to you, because you suspect the forgiveness isn’t genuine, but just a front, a moral flex, an excuse to remind you of your faults. To forgive you is to imply your cruelty, your guilt, and your cowardice, but well, by implying them, sincerely forgiving them. Am I sincere, though, or am I naively hoping that the feeling of forgiveness will magically follow from the words of forgiveness? To forgive: is it a virtue or a vice? Is it a necessity or a mistake? I honestly do not know anymore.

If this implication of guilt and cowardice is an injury, which causes you to reject my forgiveness, and react with even more anger, we are trapped, then, with cycles of guilt and anger, snowballing into something ugly that simply did not have to be, something hard to contain, always threatening to turn into the cheapest, foulest desire: revenge.

Only forgiveness can break this momentum. Or is there another way? We must begin by accepting that the deepest wounds can only be delivered by those who have been let into our hearts. To forgive is to first dig deep into the marrow of the anger, to realize, after all, that this anger can only exist because of love. I forgive myself for letting you in. Love is always in the marrow, and it’s with this love that I’m trying to fuel forgiveness. We can forgive our thirst for revenge, and our weaknesses, and how we wronged each other. And we can wipe the slate clean and never again try to measure who hurt whom the most, or who started it, although if I bring this up, again, you’ll think I’m implying that it was you.

I realize I do not need to offer it to you. I can lay down my burden and not tell you. I could forgive you silently, from a distance. Not because you don’t deserve to be told it, but because you’d resent being told.

I’ve spent a year laying down this burden, and I had been feeling lighter. But now you’ve taken a piece of my life which I cannot live without, and you knew just how dangerous this would be. You’ve taken our dog, my best friend, my rock and only source of true affection. To not a single person in the world could you justify what I’ve done to deserve this. I have done nothing to deserve this.

In the peaks of my rage, I think that maybe you’re not worthy of forgiveness at all, and I’ve nearly tapped out the marrow. I’m terrified of running out of it. The memories, the gratitude, the courage it took us to keep going for so long. I write, day and night, drawing from the memories, trying to create works of art that will serve as mementos of our love. The anger now quickly eats away at them, like a pixel-eating virus, poisoning everything, diminishing the resolution of memories which were once so beautiful and pristine. I rush to salvage what I can. To remember the best version of you, even if it’s the least accurate version of you.

I wish it were easier, but forgiveness is such a struggle.

I can’t always forgive myself either. I, both victim and perpetrator, with the power to offer and accept forgiveness, and still I’d rather hurt myself further than forgive myself and call myself names no one else calls me. Your cruelty makes me invent my own guilt: I feel innocent, but I must’ve done something to deserve a punishment of this magnitude. If you will not accuse me, if you will not tell me what it is that I’ve done, I will charge myself with imaginary offences in order to make this logical. Maybe this is the first hurdle. This is the arena where we practice the art of forgiveness, at war with ourselves.

Maybe your capacity for injustice simply isn’t logical at all, and I’m like a toddler trying to fit a triangle block into a square hole.

I’m in a hurry. I’m trembling now, buckling under this burden. This will kill me, and you know it. And if you know it, then you must want it. How can I forgive this much hatred? I want to forgive, to put down my rage, but for such hatred, forgiveness is such a struggle.

I understand why you hate me. You hate me for the same reason Anna Karenina hated her husband Alexei for attempting to forgive her in order to safeguard his honour: “He’s right. Of course, he’s always right, he’s magnanimous!” You both admire and resent my generosity, my benevolence, my clear record. You were grateful for my impeccable loyalty and dedication, but now you hate the fact that I have never wronged you.

We are full of contradictions. Like Alexei, I also sincerely want you to be happy, while also feeling that your happiness is an insult to me. It is evidence of your reward for humiliating me. You deserve happiness, but I wish it had not come at such a cost to an innocent man. More selfishly, I wish I had been responsible for it, as much as you were responsible for mine. And now I want my own happiness, not only for my own sake, but as a kind of ethical revenge. I want to be happier than you, but also happier than I’ve ever been. It’s childish, isn’t it, but it’s also human, and it drives us towards higher peaks. Beneath the childishness, I want us both to be so happy that we wouldn’t be so childish or sad anymore, to be using our happiness as a bludgeon, as a means of retaliation.

But kidnapping a dog is very hard to forgive.

We own forgiveness, and we are capable of it. So many times, I have offered it, clothed in different language. You think it’s a Trojan horse. I cannot deliver it. If not forgiveness, silence, then. Distance, then, and estrangement. Is that the solution? Beyond the requirements of law (it is the law that requires us to still converse, to settle things like adults), are we destined to let Time do the slow and painful work of washing away all the pain we could choose to wash away right now? If it must be, then let it be so.

We are estranged, and there’s nothing left to mend. We’ve swept up the broken pieces of our bond and thrown them in the garbage. The shards were too many, the original beauty could not have been regained by gluing back together what was meant to have never been shattered.

Maybe I’m overthinking it as I always do. Maybe there’s a different way to re-imagine this cruel wound.

I am hurt, and this hurt has a cause, whether it was intentional or not. We might be angry that a falling branch hit us on the head but could never hold the tree morally responsible for the injury. It’s from the possibility of acting differently that I am morally hurt that you chose to act this way. The tree could not have acted differently when it dropped its branch on my head. Maybe you could not have acted differently either. But to know for sure whether you could have acted differently, we would need to solve one of the world’s most difficult puzzles: whether humans have free will or not.

I’m still not sure if we have any free will, but if we do, I’m convinced that we have very little of it, and very little willpower to exercise it. In this fact - or belief if you will - the struggle of forgiveness unwinds. Today, out of sheer psychological necessity and intellectual cowardice, I become a hard determinist and declare free will to be an illusion.

The wound will remain. The scars of it, at least. What’s done is done, it’s irreversible, and without free will, there is no ill action requiring forgiveness.

Maybe forgiveness is the power to break our attachment to the illusion of free will. Forgiveness then is a creative act. It is the result of re-imagining the wound and removing the blame we instinctively placed on the person who caused it.

You are not to blame. You did not mean to hurt me. We fell from the sky and shattered on the ground, and the gravity that caused it is not an entity that can or should be blamed.

Things happen. We must always re-imagine the wounds in a deterministic universe and remove the blame.

If you did not mean to break the promise, then it is an accident, and there is nothing to forgive. The correct action, then, would be something like dismissal. Well, then, let’s call it that, if you prefer. We dismiss, we let it go, we put down the burden, and we smile. Let’s not call it forgiveness, if it’s such an insulting word.

Heartbreak is the price we pay for the courage to love with full surrender. To let someone in completely. To make promises we have every intention of keeping, even though we know most people renege on them at some point. We are never like “most people”! Love requires a large amount of naivete, which is why it afflicts the youth with such relentlessness. It would be ugly without it, tainted by cynicism and distrust.

I now dream of a simpler resolution, where one day we’ll cross paths – also by accident – at the supermarket. We’ll smile at each other but not say a word. We’ll know that the work is done, and that there is nothing left to repair. Everything dissipated on its own time. And we’ll carry on with our days, and go buy more bananas, with our consciences lighter.

I let you in. I’m proud of it. But maybe I’m falling for the free will illusion again, taking credit for something which was also completely outside of my control. Maybe it makes no sense to be proud, because I could not have acted differently either. If you have no free will, then neither do I. It was meant to be, then. All of it. The ascent into heaven, the many good years, the descent into hell, in which I am now still trapped. The beauty and the ugliness. None of it could be helped.

You did not mean to hurt me. You still don’t mean to hurt me. If you could, and I wish you could, you would stop hurting me now. I understand now that there is so much you are simply not capable of.

The dog must return. I will leave it to the law to find a resolution rather than pleading hopelessly to a deaf and callous heart.

You cannot beg a tree not to shed branches in a storm. I’m caught in your storm, in the path of destruction of this natural disaster you have sadly become.

I am hurt and I am angry, but there is nothing to forgive.

Thank God, because forgiveness is such a struggle.

“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present”
Albert Camus, The Rebel

If I asked you what you did yesterday, you would give me a list like: eating breakfast, commuting to work, working, taking the dog for a walk, cooking dinner, watching a movie, etc... But I know that really, while you were commuting and working and cooking, you spent most of the day thinking and narrating your life, and worse yet, you spent most of the day thinking about yourself in the past or the future or in some counterfactual version of the past in which you had a perfect reply to something mean your co-worker said to you yesterday. You also spent hours clicking on different apps, and swiping on them, and then switching off your phone, just to repeat the cycle again in a few minutes, or in an hour, which you probably did many times throughout the day. Looking for something permanent so you can escape the tyranny of your unruly mind and finding nothing but little hits of dopamine which leave you perpetually empty.

If I’m wrong, you may stop reading. Otherwise: When was the last time you had a perfect day? If that’s too much to ask, when was the last time you had a perfect moment? Are moments such a short unit of time that they can’t possibly be either good or bad?

Perfect Days (a 2023 Japanese film directed by German director Wim Wenders) is a movie about a routine: Every day, Hirayama, a middle-aged man who doesn’t own a smartphone, wakes up, folds up his sleeping mat and blanket, brushes his teeth, shaves, sprays his plants, puts on his uniform, steps outside, smiles at the sky, buys a can of coffee from a vending machine, and heads off to work in his van, listening to cassette tapes.

The score is ultimately diagetic, occurring within the context of the scenes themselves, mostly inside Hirayama’s van: It’s as if Hirayama is scoring the movie of his own life, where every song is perfectly placed, and the lyrics fit the context. Most of the songs are by American and British artists such as the Velvet Underground, The Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, Patti Smith, and the Kinks.

Lou Reed’s influence is both more central (his song Perfect Day lends its title to the movie) and more subtle if we pay attention to the lyrics: “Sometimes I feel so happy, sometimes I feel so sad.” “You just keep me hanging on.” “You make me forget myself / I thought I was someone else / Someone good.”

Hirayama’s job is to clean the architecturally beautiful and – dare I say it – even cool public toilets in Tokyo. He bends down to pick up garbage with his bare hands, and his dedication to the job is such that he even uses a little mirror to check if the underside of toilets and urinals are clean. He cleans every nook and cranny of every bathroom with the greatest attention.

He’s stoic, but clearly anti-social, “a nine out of ten on the weirdness scale,” according to his young co-worker, which he listens to without engagement most of the time.

He doesn’t talk much at all to anyone. People using the bathrooms pretend he doesn’t exist. When they kick down his sandwich board, they don’t apologize, and when he takes a young boy’s hand to help him find his mother at a public park, the woman doesn’t thank him or acknowledge him and proceeds rather quickly to clean the boy’s hands with a sanitizer wipe. Hirayama is momentarily offended, but then smiles at the boy, who looks back and waves at him as he walks away.

One thing is clear: Hirayama smiles a lot, in a gentle and effortless way, and he seems to be entirely at peace with himself. He punctuates his days with moments of attentively looking at the sky, at the clouds, at the trees and the shadows they cast, at the buildings reflecting light... Wenders gives us plenty of shadows and reflections to look at: on walls, on the water, on ceilings. This is very unique in cinema, to give us a glimpse – through images and sound and silence – of what human consciousness can be like, what it can pay attention to.

At lunch, Hirayama sits at a park, eats his sandwich, and watches the branches and leaves dance in the sunlight, casting beautiful shadows on the ground. Then he takes a picture of the trees with an old film camera.

After work, he goes for a bike ride to a public bath house, bathes, and sits in the hot tub for a bit, and then heads to a simple restaurant under a subway station for a simple meal and a glass of water. At this stage, it is clear that his apartment is barely furnished and doesn’t contain either a proper kitchen or a shower. It is also poorly lit. He reads on the floor under a lamp every night until he gets tired and goes to sleep. And he repeats this exact same routine every day.

On his weekends, he goes to the laundromat, takes his film stock to be developed, buys another roll, goes to a second-hand bookstore, buys a book, and then goes to a different restaurant, where the owner is an affable divorcee. He somewhat flirts with her and it is heavily implied that she gives him special treatment as a regular.

Wenders is careful about not revealing too much too soon: it’s only about halfway through the film that we get a wide enough shot of Hirayama’s room to realize that most of his possessions are books and tapes and boxes full of his photographs of trees. He spends his meagre salary on books, cassette tapes, and film stock for his camera. The sheer number of books and pictures and tapes suggests that Hirayama has been repeating this routine for years.

Slowly, we get a glimpse into how small disruptions can have big ripples in his routine. From his young co-worker, he learns that one of his Lou Reed cassettes is rare and is worth 120 dollars, but he refuses to sell it. It’s obvious that he’s owned these tapes for a long time and doesn’t think of their value in terms of money.

When he is influenced by his co-worker to drive out of his way to check out the cassette shop, he runs out of gas on the way home. We should stop and wonder how this most meticulous man would fail to notice his gas running low. The sad implication that we’re left with is that he had to walk back to the cassette shop and sell the tape in order to buy gas.

Another major shock comes when he receives a visitor: his teenage niece. He barely recognizes her, which indicates he hasn’t seen her in years. She’s run away from home and asks if she can stay with him. She asks him if he and her mom don’t get along, confessing that “whenever I ask about you, she changes the subject.”

The niece borrows from him a book of short stories by Patricia Highsmith and is struck by a story called “The Terrapin” about a young boy who hates his mother and ends up killing her after she kills a little turtle (the terrapin which he becomes quickly attached to) for a stew. The niece tells Hirayama that she’s afraid she’ll turn out like the boy in the story. This is heartbreaking. She doesn’t seem like a hateful person, and yet, this implies she truly hates her mother. Maybe she’s come to him hoping he’d relate to her hatred, or hoping he could help her overcome it.

One day while riding bicycles, she says to him: “You and us live in different worlds,” to which Hirayama replies:

“The world is made up of many worlds. Some are connected and some are not. My world and your mom’s are very different.”

In a way, she already understands the differences between their worlds, and something called her to his world.

But what exactly does he mean by that?

When she asks him if he wants to go to the ocean, he replies “Maybe next time.”

“When is that?” she insists.

He responds with the mysterious refrain: “Next time is next time. Now is now,” which they continue to sing aloud as they ride their bicycles back home.

Hirayama’s sister shows up at his apartment in a fancy car, driven by a chauffeur, to retrieve her daughter. She is cold and aloof, unmistakably powerful like a businesswoman or a lawyer, but also brings him a gift, a thoughtful one: a box of his favourite chocolates, “for all the trouble.”

She urges him to visit their father in the nursing home, but he shakes his head in disapproval, even though his sister promises him “he won’t act like he used to.”

She asks him if he’s really cleaning toilets for a living, and he nods silently with a smile.

He tries his best to stay silent, as if he has nothing left to say to her, but in the end, he hugs her, emotionally, and immediately starts crying when she drives off.

The arrival of his niece, the encounter with his sister, and his co-worker quitting without notice (leaving him to work a much longer shift) completely upend his joyful routine: for the first time we see a different side of Hirayama, angry, sad, and frustrated, perhaps rightfully so, and now wonder how hard he’s had to work to find a routine that allows him to maintain the peace we saw in the first half of the film. He’s burned bridges, and he’s given up on friendship, family, career and love.

How could this man, probably educated and from an upper middle-class background, familiar with foreign literature and music, end up scrubbing toilets and living in a room without a bed or shower?

But this is the most important question, because the tragic in Hirayama is the key to understanding his joy.

Life is hard for most of us. We can all imagine a different life for ourselves, and we spend most of our days lost in these reveries, shaming ourselves for still being so far from where we wish we were.

We don’t want to settle for less than what we deserve. Why should we? So we rage, in our minds, every day, and by this rage, become trapped in the very life we wish to escape. This despair has its own momentum: it grows so big that it comes to require something miraculous outside ourselves to stop it. Like becoming famous or winning the lottery.

Our dreams are unrealistic and grand in proportion to our pain, and therefore, we’ll keep being humiliated by reality, until we find a way to deal with the pain, so that our dreams become realistic goals. I have abandoned and reignited my dreams countless times. The constant failure and humiliation would grind anybody down. Cycles of courage, humiliation, exhaustion, apathy, and then another period of courage, and so on... Believe me: behind the counters at supermarket or coffee shops or serving you at restaurants around the world are legions of talented people! Poets, singers, musicians, actors, writers! Immigrants who left good careers in search of a different “world.”

We deny ourselves Acceptance because we confuse it with giving up. And thus, we choose to be in a constant state of rebellion. We tell ourselves constantly: “I cannot learn to enjoy this bullshit job. I must hate it, so it motivates me to leave it and find something better.” But that constant narration exhausts us and keeps us trapped. We feel energy-less, power-less. We feel loneliness turning off our devices (as if we’re cut out), or guilt about cutting out the news and not being aware of all the suffering in the world. So we wallow in our own tragedies, “connected” to everyone else’s tragedies, disconnected to anyone’s joy, not knowing how to find solutions, or the energy to pursue them.

What a different life we would have if we could cut the amount of time we spend mentally saying “I hate this,” “I don’t want to be here,” “this sucks,” “I’ll never be able to buy property, or take a vacation,” and “the world is going to shit and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

If we could give ourselves a break, maybe we would be freer and more refreshed to plan for a more meaningful life and execute that plan.

If we put down the past and the future, we realize that there is no other time than Now, and all we can ever do is try to have a good day today.

A life is made of years. Years made of months. Months made of days, and days made of minutes, and minutes made of moments. These are all human inventions to cut up a flow of time that can’t be cut up. There is an edge of now, in terms of consciousness, which is indivisible: We only live in the eternal Now. That isn’t just spiritual/religious jargon. A good life must be made of good moments. If you seize and notice the beauty in ordinary moments, you might find out that doing the dishes, or vacuuming, or cleaning your toilet were the best moments of your day. And what repercussions might this insight have on your life! If only you remember. “I simply can’t, there is too much suffering in my life and in the world.” It is the suffering itself that’s always there begging you to remember that you don’t have to suffer as much as you currently are! We are heartbroken, humiliated, and exhausted, but the sun shines, the coffee tastes amazing, and there are amazing books, movies, and music to keep us company. And beautiful people to connect with, if you’re lucky enough to find people with a mind and a heart big enough to understand you.

Hirayama has found a way to have good days, by focusing on the present moment. Perhaps we think this is a “humiliating” job, but any job can be humiliating if we are forced to sacrifice our authenticity and our values in exchange for money. This label, where does it come from? It comes from within. How often do you find yourself feeling pity for people who clean bathrooms in shopping malls, or airports, or anywhere? Rarely. How would you feel if you found out that they’re happier than you are?

Did he willingly choose the most humiliating job due to a prescient intuition that it was the path to humiliating his tyrannical ego, the one that’s always wishing he could be “someone else, someone good”? No one judges us more harshly than ourselves. Even when someone criticizes us, it can only hurt if on some level, we agree with them: “I’m a loser.” “Nobody likes me.” “I’m going to die alone.”

Hirayama has no reason to be ashamed: he’s the best fucking toilet cleaner in the world.

In short: Hirayama’s wisdom did not come for free. It is precisely the suffering and constant humiliation of having our goals and dreams frustrated that allows us to turn our backs on the future-projection and return to the present moment. This is the secret gift of humiliation: if not Then, then Now. If not Elsewhere, then Here. When the future arrives, it will become the present, and there will be a new future dangling a carrot in front of us, a new pot of gold at the end of the rainbow which we'll never find. In order to be Here, Now, we have to at least sit with that feeling, that itch begging to be scratched, every time we feel like opening an app on our phones, or distracting ourselves again through nostalgia for the past, or longing for the future. What is this feeling we’re always running away from? Behind the dark mesh of all our conditioned thoughts, there is an open sky of awareness, if we sit and let the fog disperse. We stop thinking, and open up to our senses: smell, touch, sight. With this pure awareness, we can savour the moment, the bite of food, or our partner’s embrace after a hard day’s work, or the softness of the blanket, and the comfort of the bed.

We have a choice right now: to perpetually reinforce a sense of lack and failure in pursuit of some imaginary, unavailable joy, or to surrender to the available joys? If we disperse the phantasmagoria of our minds and focus on the present moment and the environment around us, we realize that there is always some joy available. Can you hear the birds, can you see the dancing shadows on the walls? Can you truly appreciate the beauty that artists worked so hard to capture and create? One must have accepted sadness and ugliness in order to appreciate the joy and beauty in the mundane, in the dance of shadows caused by every tree in sunlight, in whatever’s available.

Even bathrooms can be beautiful. Even cleaning a toilet can be beautiful. Even sadness can be beautiful. Even a tragedy about a fragmented family can be beautiful. The fact that we can live vicariously through characters in books and movies is a miracle.

This too is the secret of loss: the gratitude for all that remains, and the clarity we gain by not taking things or people for granted anymore. Hirayama has made choices, and certainly not easy ones, to become estranged from his family, and to abandon the “world” he was raised in.

At the end of the movie, after seeing the woman at the restaurant merely hugging another man (who turns out to be her ex-husband), Hirayama has a crisis and buys three beers, a pack of cigarettes, and a lighter. A brilliant and very suggestive scene. Wenders has made it clear up to this point that Hirayama always has water with his meals. He goes somewhere by a river and chugs his first beer. He is off the wagon.

His joy, which at first appeared so robust and imperturbable, is actually fragile, and all these little shocks have great consequences.

But tomorrow is a new day. Hirayama drives to work to a new tune, Nina Simone’s Feeling Good: “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life for me. And I’m feeling good.” Hirayama knows, though he’s been yanked away from this knowledge, that every moment is a new dawn, and through his suffering and humiliation, he has carved and mapped out a path to a joyful Now, a path he knows how to return to. Hirayama’s life is lonely and tragic, like so many of our lives, but he knows how to find his peace and joy within that loneliness and tragedy.

He cries and smiles and cries and laughs and sobs and smiles again as he drives: they’re all waves in the same ocean of emotion. He’s human, and he grieves for all that he’s lost, and he dreams of love and connection. With this glorious ending to a perfect performance, Koji Yakusho earned the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival.

We place too high a standard on the word “perfection”: to me, Perfect Days is a perfect movie, with a perfect ending, with a perfect performance, with a perfect score, to watch at the end of a perfect day (“Oh it’s such a perfect day. I’m glad I spent it with you”).

Do yourself and your guests a favour: get on your knees, with a smile on your face, and clean your toilet. Joyfully. Thoroughly. To the sound of beautiful music. Watch this movie. Go for a walk in the forest. Listen to the birds. Watch the shadows dance on the ground or on the sides of buildings. Smile at children jumping in puddles with their little rain boots. Pet a dog. Seize the miracle of life and the beauty of nature available through the cracks of our tragic lives, the drudgery of our jobs, and the callousness of a world unraveling in climate catastrophe, a world in which children still die of starvation or are blown up by missiles. You owe yourself this kindness so you can spread it. Maybe then, the banality of evil in the world will start to subside. Hatred, exhaustion, and despair only feed it.

“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”

“You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

I sat down to dinner, and life as I knew it ended. Everything shattered: the past, the present, the future. Everything that gave me stability and hope was suddenly gone, and for the first time ever, I felt entirely powerless. I felt like that man on the beach in Thailand, during the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, who understands there is no point in running, so he roots himself in the sand, faces the wave, and awaits his fate. With a metaphorical tsunami, I had no choice but to watch it gather height and speed, coming towards me, ominously, somehow both too slow and too fast.

I found myself completely adrift in a sea of grief and confusion, perpetually on the edge of drowning but never actually sinking across that boundary into sweet oblivion. My body faltered: it couldn’t eat, or digest, or sleep, or rest, or work, or think, and it certainly could no longer hope to regain its strength. I ended up in the hospital, feeling like a fraud for taking up a room, being perfectly aware that there was nothing anyone could do for me.

For months, I listened to friends, to therapists, to psychiatrists, to mental health nurses. Nobody made any sense to me, and their sentimental optimism angered me more than anything else. I simply could not accept that the “Universe” had a plan, and that things always do miraculously get better.

It’s obvious that they don’t.

There’s a lot of minutes in a day to get through when everyone’s gone and you’re burning in pain, so I took to listening to my usual friends: other writers, the ones who face despair with courage, and not with wishful thinking.

In Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin addresses the hardest challenge in life: “People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”

Deborah Levy, in The Cost of Living, provocatively argued that we might subconsciously want precisely what we fear the most: “Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want. If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a tempest (long lurking in the clouds) might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world. Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don’t want to hold it together.”

Alan Watts, in Become What You Are, hinted at the universality of the experience of losing oneself: “the universal discovery that a man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.”

It was impossible for me not to revisit Pema Chodron’s short but invaluable book When Things Fall Apart. In an insightful passage on the power (and limitations) of language, she tells us that “the Tibetan word for hope is rewa; the word for fear is dopka. More commonly, the word re-dok is used, which combines the two. Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there’s one, there’s always the other.” This blended feeling, re-dok, she ties into dukkha, the unsatisfactoriness of existence which in Buddhist philosophy is the first noble truth that needs to be acknowledged if we have any chances of overcoming it: “Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something. We simply can’t relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment.” Clearly, constantly hoping for a better future robs us of the present moment as much as being nostalgic for a better past does. If we cannot relax into the present moment, we will be trapped in unsatisfactoriness: a Buddhist claim which is not at all metaphysical, and which can – and probably will – be experienced by everyone. If you sit down to dinner as life as you know it ends... you’ll be engulfed in nostalgia, grief, and a desperate yearning for a better future which now seems very unlikely at best. I thought a return to my meditation practice could help keep me grounded in the present moment. I tried to take Chodron’s advice: “We can do our meditation practice with the hope of getting security, but it will only lead to disappointment and pain. Begin the journey without hope of getting ground under your feet. Begin with hopelessness.”

Beginning with hopelessness, I tried being more consistent with my practice, but I simply couldn’t focus, or would quickly end up in dangerous rumination which threatened to spiral into a panic attack. I stopped trying and excused this failure with some rationalization that it was necessary to have at least some ground under my feet. I had no ground under my feet, because I was treading water in the high seas, and the sharpest logic in the world told me that I would soon get tired and inevitably drown. I would run out of money. I would run out of time.

You can’t meditate while you’re drowning. I needed a different path. It’s one thing for things to objectively fall apart. It’s another to overcome the denial and anger phases of grief and then subjectively accept that things have fallen apart. I needed to allow grief to run its course.

Early on in the year, I ran into a short poem by David Whyte which seemed to lodge itself in my brain and eventually shift my perspective on grief. It’s called “The Well of Grief”:

Those who will not slip beneath
     the still surface on the well of grief,

turning down through its black water
     to the place we cannot breathe,

will never know the source from which we drink,
     the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering,
     the small round coins,
          thrown by those who wished for something else. 

Maybe it was okay that I couldn’t breathe, or even better, maybe that’s what was meant to happen. I couldn’t but I could. I felt dead but I was alive. I couldn’t explain it in any logical way, but something in Whyte’s poem was already relatable to me, as if I already knew what “the secret water” was or would be, but couldn’t describe it any more than he could.

It certainly isn’t true that time heals all wounds, but time does pass, and a brain gets weary of the same obsessions. When I realized, after so many months, that I wasn’t thinking much about her, or missing her, I felt guilty. It was inconceivable to me that I’d reach a point where I wouldn’t miss her. I did but I didn’t. Even more than a year later it remains true: I do, but I don’t. I even tried to sleep on her side of the bed once, and simply couldn’t, as if I were trespassing, claiming our bed as my own.

Eventually, I concluded that maybe saying Yes to life also meant saying No to life. There is only one biological life, but within this biological life, we may (and probably will) live many psychological lives. More than anything, I was addicted to the future I was used to having, and I was addicted to it because it was the only painkiller strong enough to dull my pain.

What would it look like if I said Yes to my unmoored, adrift life? I had lived through that moment in adventure films where the boat falls off a waterfall. I spent several months, in a way, trying to swim up that waterfall, to get back to that mooring post somewhere up there, where life at least felt “safe” or like it was progressing – albeit slowly – in the right direction. The greatest kindness I bestowed on myself was also the greatest cruelty, which was to be brutally harsh and honest with myself: You can’t swim up a waterfall. The life you had is over. The future you had planned is over. The past you cherished is tainted. Stop resisting, and flow downstream, to heaven or hell or something in between. There’s only one way to find out.

I listened to my council of advisors listed above, among others, and then released my anxious grasp. I began with hopelessness, and I let it all fall apart, because I wanted it to, or needed it to. It took this falling apart for me to realize how much of my curiosity in life – my ravenous appetite for new knowledge and new art and new experiences – is derived from a gigantic sense of lack, a black hole so powerful it cannot help but draw everything into its gravity. The black hole eats and eats and eats and never fills up. I couldn’t look for a new painkiller: I had to travel into the black hole and understand it from within, or be irretrievably lost to it while trying.

I took the only asset I thought I had left – my talent – and understood the true measure of my reluctance, my procrastination, my perfectionism: I had been protecting my dreams from the possibility of humiliation and death.

We artists, especially the ones still striving for any recognition or compensation, are imprisoned by our own dreams, trapped under the weight of our talent, too afraid to have to face the reality of not being enough, and being left with nothing else to chase, nothing else to promise us future happiness. Dreams nourish us: they are what we get up in the morning for, but in order to attempt to actualize our dreams, we must run the risk of putting our best work out there only to find out that it’s still not enough. We would have to risk being left dream-less, aim-less, goal-less, meaning-less.

We return to the thorny paradox at the heart of Buddhist psychology: what else but dreams and aspirations could keep us motivated to grow, but also... what else could be responsible for causing so much fear and anxiety in us, and for instilling in us a constant sense of lack and failure? Our dreams and ambitions both motivate us and make us suffer. I remember Chodron again: “We deserve our birthright, which is an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.” Could we truly silence or tame this will to meaning, this will to power, this will to matter burning in our core? Could we settle for a life of not trying to achieve anything? I don’t think so. I think the best we can do is relax with “paradox and ambiguity,” and perhaps marry this Eastern insight with Western psychology and break down our grand ambitions into SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).

In order to survive, I’d have to put my greatest dreams on the battlefield and potentially watch them die. But in the short term, it meant I had to set the SMART goal of writing three pages a day and commit myself to the project. In other words, I decided to quit my job, use up all the money I had left, and write one novel. All further ambitions and life goals were still dead, and I allowed the canvas of my future to extend only as far as the timeline of completing the novel. I had no plans for afterwards and had no plans to come up with a plan either. Did I really want to become attached to a new version of a future just to watch that be demolished as well? Wouldn’t I simply be reinstating “the anxious grasp” I used to hold upon my life? Is it possible to find a new wife, and new friends, and a new car, and a new job, and regain the lost money, and regain my health, etc... and not worry about losing everything again?

I wasn’t ready to have a future again. I didn’t want it to rob me of the present moment.

Once I quit my job, I understood what psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett was trying to say in her provocative book How Emotions Are Made: A lot of our most overwhelming emotions – physiological signals that we then build psychological narratives about – are merely the result of our interoceptive network (just read the book) playing tricks on us, because we are straining our body budgets. For about three weeks after I quit my job, my insomnia turned into a kind of hibernation, and I slept for about 12 hours a day, trying to recover from the psychological exsanguination of the previous 6 months.

I didn’t ask for permission or try to justify this decision to anyone: I assumed – probably correctly – that they wouldn’t understand.

There’s no better cure for procrastination than to bet everything you have left on one project, and work on it with the greatest dedication one day at a time. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, and every day I asked myself the same question: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If a writer writes but no one reads him, is he really a writer? Do I really exist? Could I disappear without a trace and have no one notice? Whose life would be as diminished without me as mine is without her? These are the questions that beg for an answer inside the black hole.

Writing a novel which is nothing but a full channeling of inner Truth via fiction, I’ve learned much about myself and the human condition. The difficulty in writing a truthful novel doesn’t lie with having enough time, or inspiration. It lies with overcoming the saboteur who wants to go back to sleep, and into hiding, where he doesn’t have to grapple with the courage to be this ugly, this publicly, and to risk being fatally embarrassed.

I’ve learned that therapy – like anything else – is not immune to the old adage “the dose makes the poison/medicine,” and that it is possible to both have not enough of it or too much of it. Clearly, the prohibitive costs make the former possibility much more common. But with public therapy almost literally being shoved down my throat, I ended up going from enough to too much, and then wisely chose to stop it. The most valuable insights I learned came from DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy), which is at its core designed to teach us how to reach a synthesis of conflicting emotions.

The brighter the sun (intensity) of our emotions, the more towering our capacity for joy, awe, gratitude, or love... the longer the shadows cast. I finally accepted that the emotions which dragged me toward the black hole were the price I paid for having the capacity to also experience heights which most people will never dream of. I was in a lot of pain: was this a price worth paying? That depends: for how long? What happens when you stop fighting the bullies and offer them a hug instead?

Perhaps how exactly we can live with a synthesis of conflicting emotions is best approached by poetry, such as in William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence”: “Joy and woe are woven fine / a clothing for the soul divine / Under every grief and pine / runs a joy with silken twine,” or Rainer Maria Rilke’s verses “'If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well,” and “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

Hope and fear. Beauty and terror. Joy and woe. Grief and gratitude. Not at war with each other, but co-existing, harmoniously, inevitably. Life and death. It’s not so much a skill we must learn but simply an attitude of radical acceptance (an idea Marsha Linehan, who developed DBT, borrowed from her Zen training) towards the impermanence of everything in life.

I’ve also tried very hard this past year to go to events every week, in the hopes of making new connections. I see now how we are all like the lonely ships traversing uncharted waters, as in Longfellow’s poem: “Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing / Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness / So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another / Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”

People are terrified to reach out, and terrified to reach in. Small talk is killing us all. Everywhere I eavesdrop, with a morbid kind of anthropological curiosity, and I realize that no one is talking about anything at all.

In all my interactions with people, even the frustrating ones, I’m guided by the pathos of a perfect and unforgettable Raymond Carver short story called “A Small, Good Thing,” in which a young boy is hit by a car on his birthday and subsequently ends up in a coma, while a baker harasses and abases the parents on phone calls for several days due to a birthday cake that wasn’t picked up or paid for. The hatred builds up into murderous rage... until the characters come together physically at the bakery in a scene of heartbreaking mutual compassion: “Although they [the parents] were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty.” After many pages of grief and hostility, Carver leaves us with a sublime ending: “They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.” To move from hatred to loving friendship, from not understanding to understanding, truthful communication is required. Every drama is really about the same thing: people not communicating, not seeing each other, and therefore, inevitably, not understanding each other.

I’ve dared to even look for love again, but I’ve learned that some people will decide that you’re not ready before they’ve even met you, or very quickly after meeting you, based on some arbitrary temporal threshold they think you have not yet crossed – and they’ll tell you about it.

I’ve learned that some incredible people will disappear from your life just as abruptly as they entered it, leaving you to remember them as tiny islands of sunshine in a vast uncharted ocean on the way to somewhere new. They knew, of course, that I was adrift. Maybe that was why they couldn’t stay.

I’ve learned that other incredible people, who I thought I might never see again, can re-enter my life just as abruptly as they disappeared from it. She too must know I am adrift, but I trust her, and I want her to know. Because it is possible, at some point, for two ships to stop for each other and start a conversation: “We are alike. I understand your pain, and I think you’ll understand mine.” I have faith that one day, someone will choose to stay, and we’ll talk into the early morning, and they will not think of leaving.

I’ve learned that I have much to say, much to share, but I’m tired of screaming it all into a void: I want a conversation. Reading has saved my life countless times, and as ridiculous as it may sound to those who see art as just a form of entertainment, I believe with utmost sincerity that art can save lives.

Most of this wasn’t really handwritten by candlelight, but I have been trying to carve out time every evening, with all devices turned off, and sit in low light with a notebook, not actively trying to conjure up anything, but convinced that a busy mind will always come up with something. The novel serves one purpose. I hope this project will serve another.

Is it possible to say Yes to life after everything has fallen apart? I’m not entirely convinced, but I hold myself open to that question, like to an open flame, because in the darkness of despair only a flickering flame of “faith” can keep the eyes from atrophy. I mean “faith” in an entirely secular way, because I am not capable – despite the darkness – of seizing onto religious delusions for comfort. I have faith in “the secret water” and “the divine clothing” of the poets, and faith in the transformative power of art, both as consumer and creator.

There’s still much to learn, and much to unlearn. I’m convinced now that it takes a lot of courage to either actively live or actively die. Paralysis is the default because it conserves energy, and most of us are already burnt out, merely surviving. The unique gift – and burden – of human self-consciousness is having the imagination to use our agency for something bigger than survival. Existence requires the fulfillment of some basic biological needs. A life worth living requires the courage to build it and the fortitude to Begin Again (a Buddhist motto) when circumstances outside of our control bring everything crashing down.

We’re fragile and mortal, and we cannot survive everything. Time will run out for all of us: its scarcity is what makes it valuable, and because we cannot flip the hourglass of life, we must use the time we have left wisely. I’ll keep doing the only thing I know how to: at the bottom of the well of grief, barely breathing, writing under the light of that flickering flame.

As the embers cool into ashes, I’m at least ready to allow myself to wonder if it is possible to also sit down to dinner and have a new life begin, as swiftly as the previous one ended.