Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

Learning the dynamics of my mood enabled every success I’ve had in work and life. When I feel good, I exploit the feeling for all it’s worth. When I feel like shit, I batten down the hatches and hold on to my confidence that it will pass. That’s so important because it keeps me from changing course during a bad spell, from being tossed in the winds

It’s a feedback loop: the mind creates culture, and culture creates each new mind. The brain makes both possible, but culture and mind are not material like the brain. They create material by-products, like books and rockets and iPhones, but there is “no material aspect to [their] actual happening.” As Greenfeld explains, and this is the crucial po

Anonymity might feel like liberation, isolation like relief. For the same reasons that a city can be alienating, it can also be a site of freedom. For Baudelaire’s flâneur, the loss of self is not agony, but ecstasy. He becomes a “kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness” in “an immense reservoir of electrical energy.”

As Samuel Beckett wrote, “We spend our life, it’s ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench.”

The internet of today, designed to make you a permanent input, does more than just steal time from you; it erodes your agency and substitutes internet-awareness for self-awareness. Those are the three things—time, agency, and self-awareness—that we use to construct our identities. Without them, sense of self weakens, identity destabilizes, and the

The vibrant “life between buildings” in Europe is a result of iteration as much as good design. As Gehl points out, urban planning didn’t come into its own until the Renaissance, and many European city centers formed prior to that. They “evolved through a process that often took many hundreds of years… this slow process permitted continual adjustme

The future folded into the past, and vice versa. “Cities are like compost heaps,” he told The Paris Review in 2011. “Just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent.”

The best description of the numinous belongs not to Otto, but to C. S. Lewis, a friend of Tolkien: Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told “There is a ghost in the next room,” and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear

I first read Camus’s essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” in my twenties, and it was like seeing a transcript of my thoughts.II “That nostalgia for unity,” writes Camus, “that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama.” The impulse for meaning is baked into us, and we can’t rid ourselves of it, no matter how squarely we