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

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

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.”

From Emerson, I learned two fundamental truths: first, that we learn by expressing, not by thinking, which is to say that knowledge doesn’t really exist until you can write it down.

The meanings of words change, sometimes dramatically, over time. Similarly, to understand the value of anything in culture, we have to put it in temporal context. It’s the same with us. We remember into the past, hope into the future. We see ourselves through a temporal lens. “I am not who I was back then,” we say. “I’m different now.”

When I lie down to bed each night, putting my phone, aptly, on Do Not Disturb, I have a hard time remembering ten unbroken minutes in the day during which I did not, in some way, connect. The internet permeates my waking life. It’s omnipresent, invasive. Part of me lives online now. That’s indisputable. But lately I’ve begun to wonder about the opp

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

The chaos of urban centers “stimulates the nerves to their utmost reactivity,” wrote sociologist Georg Simmel in an influential essay from 1903, “until they can finally produce no reaction at all.” As anyone who’s lived in a city will know, it’s easy to feel overstimulated, and too much of that feeling can render you numb and disconnected from the

My obsession with the Lord of the Rings, what drove me to watch it fifty times (so far), doesn’t speak to a secret desire for religion, but to a peculiar feature of the human mind: its craving for meaning. The mind searches for and finds that meaning in stories. The bigger the story, the greater the meaning.

You can hear Emerson’s frustrations in the essay’s opening lines: Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies and histories and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should no