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

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

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.

Cyberpunks married a “hard sf” approach to technology (cyber) with a subcultural perspective (punk). Or as Sterling puts it: “An unholy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized dissent—the underground world of pop culture, visionary fluidity and street-level anarchy.” Or, more simply: high tech, low life.

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

Importantly, this immersion is not a “suspension of disbelief.” Tolkien cringed at the phrase. “What really happens,” he explains in “On Fairy-Stories,” “is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ [The writer] makes a Secondary World which [the reader’s] mind can enter. Inside it, what [the writer] relates is ‘true’: it accords with

The solution to that cluelessness is not more reflection, but to ask questions and listen.

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.”

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

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