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

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.”

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

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.”

Flâneurs like Baudelaire meandered through the streets, alleys, and glass-roofed arcades of Paris, partaking in what Balzac called “the gastronomy of the eye.” On a bench, you become a stationary flâneur (something of a contradiction in terms). Instead of strolling through the world, the world strolls by you.

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.

Cyberpunk turns those messy feelings into a place, where it’s no longer necessary to resist the splintering pressures of society because the fight’s over and we lost. All that’s left is to submit to the carnival of sensations.

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

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

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