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

But the mind doesn’t need cogent thoughts to operate. That’s the second fundamental truth I learned from Emerson, not from his writing directly, but as a consequence of reading it.

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.

For all their accredited institutions, their rigorous processes and impact factors, scientists are essentially saying, Trust us. There’s an unshakable feeling of vulnerability that comes with trust like that, in which a mass of knowledge is outsourced and remains obscure. The layperson can’t confidently defend against challenges to the information

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

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

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

Learning, you learn, is not really a process of expanding your mind, but of watching it shrink against all there is to know. It’s humbling but addicting. I followed that addiction into a new life, free from GPA anxiety, off the checkpointed path.

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 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