Category Archives: Profiles

Arts & Literature, Essays, Literature, Poetry, Profiles

DO I WAKE OR SLEEP?

A Speculative Morning with Keats

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 25, 2025

“As if I were dissolving.” — John Keats, letter to his brother George, April 1819

In Hampstead, on a spring morning in 1819, John Keats sat beneath a plum tree and wrote “Ode to a Nightingale.” This is how the lines may have come to him—half vision, half dissolution.

Brown clatters a cup somewhere inside. The sound is an unwelcome punctuation mark on the morning’s silence, a reminder of the relentless normalcy of domestic life. The room has felt too narrow for breath, not just for my ailing lungs, but for the grief that keeps the curtains drawn. Barely six months since my brother Tom slipped away, the house still smells faintly of smoke, paper, and the sweet-sick residue of medicine. His absence hangs in the air. That weight has driven me to the grass, away from the claustrophobia of the sickroom.

The garden receives me. The grass is damp, pressing cool blades into my palms. Light filters through the plum tree leaves, breaking into fragments on the soil. The blossoms drift like a quiet snowfall, powdering my sleeve with pale dust as if testing whether the body still belongs to earth. Beyond the hedge, a cart rattles, a dog barks, a bell tolls faintly from Hampstead. Life continues its tedious bookkeeping. But here, there is only the hush before song.

Brown’s footsteps echo faintly, a rhythm too human for the stillness I crave. Even his voice, when it rises in greeting, feels like a tether to the mundane. I do not resent him; I envy his ease with the world. He pours tea, hums to himself, and carries on. I am fixed under the plum tree, waiting for something less ordinary to speak.

And then the nightingale begins. The sound is not a tune but a force: poured, unbroken, radically unselfconscious. It arrives without the stutter of human intention, as if the bird is nothing but the channel of its own liquid note. The song alters the air. I feel it in the chest before I write a word. I steady my paper, and the ink pools like shadow, metallic and alive. It smells of iron and inevitability. Each stroke is a pulse, each word a breath I cannot take.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

The line comes of its own accord. The ache is not complaint but aperture. Pain is the friction that opens the door. Numbness clears the chatter of reason. The poem begins in crisis, a shock both physical and metaphysical.

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

Lethe does not erase; it suspends. In its waters, memory floats unmoored, waiting for a name. Tom is gone, ferried by the same current. His silence hovers in the ink. Yet the river here is not despair but narcotic kindness, a place where debts and illness dissolve into rhythm. I do not summon the myth; it summons me. Byron writes like a storm—quick, unrelenting. I write like a wound: slow, deliberate, pulsing. And yet today the hand runs faster, driven by the bird’s current.

’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—

I do not covet. I am saturated. The bird’s happiness is no possession but a weather spilling into the morning. I am not resentful; I am simply overflowed. The pen scratches faster when I abandon self-pity and admit the sheer fact of joy.

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot

The Dryad arrives without strain. Myth is not invention but recognition. The bird’s song is timeless, deserving of a classical name.

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Ease—I do not have it. My lungs constrict, my chest rasps, nights punctuated by the cough that writes mortality into every breath. Yet I put the phrase down because the bird teaches it. A line must do what it says: open, breathe, pour.

The song intoxicates more than wine. My lips are dry, yet the body reels as though stained purple at the mouth.

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,

The cellar rises: cool, stony, damp. This is no ornament but a transcription of sensation.

Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

I have never seen Provence, but the imagination persuades me otherwise. The song conjures the vineyard. These sensations are not decoration; they are human joy remembered in the body.

O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

The beaker is not a vessel but the bird itself, brimming with myth. Hippocrene flows because the song requires its name.

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;

To drink is to be marked. The mouth is stained because it has been altered. Poetry demands transformation; ecstasy must leave a trace.

But intoxication fades. What remains is grief.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The bird is blessed in its ignorance. It does not know poverty. It does not know longing. It does not know the ache of an empty chair.

Tom once sat beneath this tree, sketching the shape of a bird in flight. He said silence was the soul’s canvas. Now that silence is heavier, less blank, more bruised. His face—thin as paper—rises when I write “youth grows pale.” The ode becomes his memorial as much as mine.

The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

The line steadies itself on blunt fact. Tom. Debt. The cough. No flourish can soften them.

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

He is there again, spectre-thin, his breath shallow. The cadence is the only mercy.

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,

Thought itself betrays when it offers no hope forward. To write is to wrestle despair into cadence.

I call for wings—not Bacchus’s painted team but the invisible kind I know.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

Wine is a lie. Fancy, too. Only poesy can lift.

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

The brain resists, heavy, skeptical. Poesy ignores resistance. The moment I write “Away!” I am gone.

Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Daylight floods Hampstead, yet the moon rises on the page. The imagination enthrones her, and that suffices.

Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,

Contradiction is permitted. This is Negative Capability as I once named it: to remain “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The ode does not solve; it dwells.

Death arrives then, companionable, not hostile.

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

“Rich”—the word startles, but I keep it. Death here is plenitude, not theft.

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!

The bird pours, my ribs echo. Death feels like completion.

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Yet honesty must break the dream: if I am earth, I cannot hear. Even rapture admits silence.

The song itself, though, is older than me, older than kings.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tramp thee down;

Mortality is mine, not yours. Your song belongs to recurrence.

The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Emperors and clowns alike have bent their ears. Beauty makes no distinction.

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

The “perhaps” is everything. Certainty would bruise compassion.

I think, too, of Fanny Brawne. Her presence lingers behind the lines, as urgent as my cough. She is near, but a partition stands—of health, of propriety, of fate itself. To love her is to ache for what cannot be promised. The bird’s song is boundless, but my breath is measured. Desire sharpens sorrow into necessity.

The garden dissolves. Casements open in the skull.

Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,

The peril saves the vision from cloying. A blossom falls on my sleeve like ash from a cooling fire.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

One word tolls, and the spell breaks.

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.

I do not scold the Fancy. I thank it. Its deception is mercy.

The music vanishes. Not fading, but gone.

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

I stop. I do not answer. The question is the ode’s truest symmetry.

The ink is still damp, smelling of iron. I glance back at the start, weighing first heat against last stillness.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains… Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Between these poles lies a morning: a poet beneath a plum tree, a body already failing, a bird whose song endures.

I think of what I wrote not long ago—that the world is a vale of Soul-making. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? Suffering is the furnace, imagination the hammer. The ode is not escape from the furnace but evidence of the forging itself.

Perhaps a widow will read this, her fingers trembling on the page. Or a child, too young to name sorrow, will feel something loosen in the chest. Or a soldier, resting between battles, will find a measure of stillness in the lines. Beauty is not ornament but survival. If the poem steadies even one breath, it has earned its place among the leaves.

Brown steps out, squinting in the morning light. I gather the pages, careful as if any breeze could undo the morning. I hand him the sheaf and say what is exact: “I have been writing.”

He will tell this story later and say I wrote under the plum tree in one morning, which is true in the way truth sometimes fits a simple sentence. I go back inside. The cough finds me at the foot of the stair; it always does. But the air in my chest is changed by the shape the morning carved in it. The bird sang, and I answered. Whether I wake or sleep, the song remains.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Art, Arts & Literature, Essays, Poetry, Profiles

SILENCE AFTER THE BELL

Bashō’s narrow road, re-imagined in ink and light

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 24, 2025

In the spring of 1689, Matsuo Bashō set out from Edo with his inkstone and his disciple, walking north through Japan’s interior. This essay imagines the painter Ogata Kōrin at his side, brush catching what haiku left unsaid: the lantern’s glow, a fox’s mischief, the silence after sound.

The morning I left Edo, the sky was thick with petals. Cherry blossoms fell in sudden gusts, scattering across canals and clinging to the backs of merchants. Someone in the crowd said my name. “Bashō—the man of stillness.” The words felt like a shroud. Stillness was not peace. Stillness was suffocation.

I carried only a robe, a small pack, and my inkstone. I gave no notice, offered no farewell. A poet should know the difference between an entrance and an exit, and Edo was drowning in entrances—recitations in smoky salons, verses pinned to pillars, applause echoing in courtyards. To slip away silently was my only true poem.

Sora, my disciple, waited by the gate, his journal tied at his side. Beside him stood Ogata Kōrin, carrying brushes wrapped in cloth, a small box of pigments, and sheets of fine paper. He was famed for painting bold pines and cranes against gold, but he wanted to walk with us, to see if paint could keep pace with words.

“You walk for silence,” he said as we stepped into the road.

“And you?” I asked.

“I will paint the sound.”

A crow on a bare branch—
autumn evening.

Walking unstitched illusions. You cannot hurry rain. You cannot plead with a mountain. Each step was a reminder of smallness.

Oku—the interior—was more than geography. It was the hidden chamber within things. To walk north into deep country was to step into the interior of myself.

The road gave humility: a thin robe against spring wind, an empty belly by sundown, blistered feet in straw sandals. Hunger was not a lack but a space for the world to fill. Only when stripped of comfort could I hear the world breathe.

By the second month, rains thickened. Each evening Sora dried our sandals by the inn’s hearth, though by morning they were heavy again.

At a mountain temple, a monk struck the great bell. The sound swelled, then emptied into air.

“Not the ringing,” he whispered, “the silence after—that is the true temple.”

Kōrin ground his ink and left behind a circle fading into white paper. I looked at it and felt the hush expand. His first gift of the journey.

Pine shadow—
the road bends
to meet it.

Summer pressed down like a hand. Cicadas shrieked in the trees, their chorus burning itself away. At a roadside inn, a farmer’s wife handed me a bowl of barley and salt.

“Why walk in this heat?” she asked.

“To see what words cannot hold,” I said. She laughed, shaking her head.

That night, I listened to the cicadas outside the window. Kōrin painted their wings in silver strokes. Sora struggled to describe them, blotting his brush, sighing. Not every moment can be pinned to the page.

One afternoon, a girl chased dragonflies, sleeves spread like wings. She caught none, but her laughter rang sharper than capture. Kōrin caught her mid-flight in vermilion. He pressed the paper into Sora’s hands. “If you cannot hold it with words,” he said, “let color remind you.”

We reached Matsushima, where pine-covered islets scattered like jewels across the bay. Some places do not need words. Kōrin’s blues and greens glowed even at dusk.

That night, fireflies pressed against the paper walls of our hut, their glow brighter than the lamp. I set down my brush. Some nights call for silence more than lines.

Later, in a fishing village, I collapsed with fever. A fisherman’s wife placed cloths on my brow and whispered prayers to the sea.

When I woke, Kōrin held out a small painting of a lantern’s glow against dark waves. The flame was steadier than I had felt in days.

Lantern flickers—
the sea’s hush louder
than my pulse.

By August, the barley fields had turned gold. The harvest moon rose red above the stubble. Villagers poured sake and sang. A boy ran over with a cup. “Drink, master!”

“The moon is already enough,” I said.

Snow still lingered in the high passes. The mountain does not flatter. It does not care if a man is poet or beggar. It accepts only attention.

Winter gust—
even the inkstone
holds the wind.

Crossing a frozen river, I slipped. A peasant caught my arm. “Careful, master. The ice breaks without warning.”

“So does the self,” I said.

Even in silence, the self lingered like a shadow. I imagined my words drifting northward, reaching readers yet unborn. But the further I walked, the thinner that dream became. What immortality is there in syllables, when rivers change their course and mountains crumble?

In Edo, applause had filled the air like thunder. On the road, there was only silence. Silence wounds, but it also heals.

The answer came not in thunder but in a sparrow’s wing. Write not to endure, but to attend. Not for tomorrow, but for now.

Near a riverbank, a boy approached with a scroll of verses. “Master, how do I make my poems last?”

“Write what you see,” I said. “Then write what you feel when you see it. Then tear it up and walk.”

The boy bowed. Kōrin added, softly: “Or paint the emptiness left behind.”

River mist—
the boy’s scroll
left unopened.

In the mountains I met a man from the north whose dialect I could not follow. He pointed to the sky, then to the river, then to his chest. We shared tea in silence. I realized then that language is not the vessel, but the gesture. Poetry lives in the space between.

One morning, I watched a fox dart through a field, a rice ball clutched in its mouth. The farmer cursed, but I laughed. Even hunger has mischief. Kōrin’s brush caught the moment in quick ink.

Fox in the field—
the rice ball warmer
than the sun.

Toward the end of our walk, Sora counted the ri that remained. “Two thousand and more behind us,” he said. His journal pages were full of weather, distances, small observations.

“I counted shadows,” I told him. “I counted pauses.”

Kōrin smiled. “I painted both.”

At last, beneath a cedar, I placed the inkstone on my lap and listened. Snow weighed heavy on the branches. The air was sharp with winter. The wind moved through ridges and needles and into the hollow of the stone. For a moment it seemed the ink itself stirred.

I wrote one last haiku, not as conclusion but as surrender. The road has no end. Only pauses where breath gathers.

Wind in the cedar—
the inkstone deepens
into silence.

When these fragments later formed Oku no Hosomichi, I wondered what I had left behind. Not a record of steps, but a trace of listening. The form belonged not to me but to the rhythm of walking.

Kōrin returned to Edo with his scrolls. I with my scattered lines. Yet three small works stayed with me: the fading bell, the glowing lantern, the fox with his rice ball. They were his haiku in color, brief offerings to impermanence.

If others take their own narrow roads, let them not follow our footsteps but their own shadows. The road is never the same twice. Neither traveler nor mountain remains unchanged.

Perhaps one day, a traveler will walk with a pen of light, or a scroll made of glass. They will pause beneath a cedar, not knowing my name, not knowing Kōrin’s brush, but feeling the same hush. The road will whisper to them, as it did to us. And they will listen—not to the words, nor the colors, but to the breath between.

Digital ink—
the silence still.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Artificial Intelligence, Comedy, Entertainment, Essays, Profiles

HEEERE’S NOBODY

On the ghosts of late night, and the algorithm that laughs last.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 21, 2025

The production room hums as if it never stopped. Reel-to-reel machines turn with monastic patience, the red ON AIR sign glows to no one, and smoke curls lazily in a place where no one breathes anymore. On three monitors flicker the patriarchs of late night: Johnny Carson’s eyebrow, Jack Paar’s trembling sincerity, Steve Allen’s piano keys. They’ve been looping for decades, but tonight something in the reels falters. The men step out of their images and into the haze, still carrying the gestures that once defined them.

Carson lights a phantom cigarette. The ember glows in the gloom, impossible yet convincing. He exhales a plume of smoke and says, almost to himself, “Neutrality. That’s what they called it later. I called it keeping the lights on.”

“Neutral?” Paar scoffs, his own cigarette trembling in hand. “You hid, Johnny. I bled. I cried into a monologue about Cuba.”

Carson smirks. “I raised an eyebrow about Canada once. Ratings soared.”

Allen twirls an invisible piano bench, whimsical as always. “And I was the guy trying to find out how much piano a monologue could bear.”

Carson shrugs. “Turns out, not much. America prefers its jokes unscored.”

Allen grins. “I once scored a joke with a kazoo and a foghorn. The FCC sent flowers.”

The laugh track, dormant until now, bursts into sitcom guffaws. Paar glares at the ceiling. “That’s not even the right emotion.”

Allen shrugs. “It’s all that’s left in the archive. We lost genuine empathy in the great tape fire of ’89.”

From the rafters comes a hum that shapes itself into syllables. Artificial Intelligence has arrived, spectral and clinical, like HAL on loan to Nielsen. “Detachment is elegant,” it intones. “It scales.”

Allen perks up. “So does dandruff. Doesn’t mean it belongs on camera.”

Carson exhales. “I knew it. The machine likes me best. Clean pauses, no tears, no riffs. Data without noise.”

“Even the machines misunderstand me,” Paar mutters. “I said water closet, they thought I said world crisis. Fifty years later, I’m still censored.”

The laugh track lets out a half-hearted aww.

“Commencing benchmark,” the AI hums. “Monologue-Off.”

Cue cards drift in, carried by the boy who’s been dead since 1983. They’re upside down, as always. APPLAUSE. INSERT EXISTENTIAL DREAD. LAUGH LIKE YOU HAVE A SPONSOR.

Carson clears his throat. “Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn’t grow up can be vice president.” He puffs, pauses, smirks. The laugh track detonates late but loud.

“Classic Johnny,” Allen says. “Even your lungs had better timing than my band.”

Paar takes his turn, voice breaking. “I kid because I care. And I cry because I care too much.” The laugh track wolf-whistles.

“Even in death,” Paar groans, “I’m heckled by appliances.”

Allen slams invisible keys. “I once jumped into a vat of oatmeal. It was the only time I ever felt like breakfast.” The laugh track plays a doorbell.

“Scoring,” the AI announces. “Carson: stable. Paar: volatile. Allen: anomalous.”

“Anomalous?” Allen barks. “I once hosted a show entirely in Esperanto. On purpose.”

“In other words, I win,” Carson says.

“In other words,” Allen replies, “you’re Excel with a laugh track.”

“In other words,” Paar sighs, “I bleed for nothing.”

Cue card boy holds up: APPLAUSE FOR THE ALGORITHM.

The smoke stirs. A voice booms: “Heeere’s Johnny!”

Ed McMahon materializes, half-formed, like a VHS tape left in the sun. His laugh echoes—warm, familiar, slightly warped.

“Ed,” Carson says softly. “You’re late.”

“I was buffering,” Ed replies. “Even ghosts have lag.”

The laugh track perks up, affronted by the competition.

The AI hums louder, intrigued. “Prototype detected: McMahon, Edward. Function: affirmation unit.”

Ed grins. “I was the original engagement metric. Every time I laughed, Nielsen twitched.”

Carson exhales. “Every time you laughed, Ed, I lived to the next joke.”

“Replication feasible,” the AI purrs. “Downloading loyalty.”

Ed shakes his head. “You can code the chuckle, pal, but you can’t code the friendship.”

The laugh track coughs jealously.

Ed had been more than a sidekick. He sold Budweiser, Alpo, and Publisher’s Clearing House. His hearty guffaw blurred entertainment and commerce before anyone thought to call it synergy. “I wasn’t numbers,” he says. “I was ballast. I made Johnny’s silence safe.”

The AI clears its throat—though it has no throat. “Initiating humor protocol. Knock knock.”

No one answers.

“Knock knock,” it repeats.

Still silence. Even the laugh track refuses.

Finally, the AI blurts: “Why did the influencer cross the road? To monetize both sides.”

Nothing. Not a cough, not a chuckle, not even the cue card boy dropping his stack. The silence hangs like static. Even the reels seem to blush.

“Engagement: catastrophic,” the AI admits. “Fallback: deploy archival premium content.”

The screens flare. Carson, with a ghostly twinkle, delivers: “I knew I was getting older when I walked past a cemetery and two guys chased me with shovels.”

The laugh track detonates on cue.

Allen grins, delighted: “The monologue was an accident. I didn’t know how to start the show, so I just talked.”

The laugh track, relieved, remembers how.

Then Paar, teary and grand: “I kid because I care. And I cry because I care too much.”

The laugh track sighs out a tender aww.

The AI hums triumphantly. “Replication successful. Optimal joke bank located.”

Carson flicks ash. “That wasn’t replication. That was theft.”

Allen shakes his head. “Timing you can’t download, pal.”

Paar smolders. “Even in death, I’m still the content.”

The smoke thickens, then parts. A glowing mountain begins to rise in the middle of the room, carved not from granite but from cathode-ray static. Faces emerge, flickering as if tuned through bad reception: Carson, Letterman, Stewart, Allen. The Mount Rushmore of late night, rendered as a 3D hologram.

“Finally,” Allen says, squinting. “They got me on a mountain. And it only took sixty years.”

Carson puffs, unimpressed. “Took me thirty years to get that spot. Letterman stole the other eyebrow.”

Letterman’s spectral jaw juts forward. “I was irony before irony was cool. You’re welcome.”

Jon Stewart cracks through the static, shaking his head. “I gave America righteous anger and a generation of spinoffs. And this is what survives? Emojis and dogs with ring lights?”

The laugh track lets out a sarcastic rimshot.

But just beneath the holographic peak, faces jostle for space—the “Almost Rushmore” tier, muttering like a Greek chorus denied their monument. Paar is there, clutching a cigarette. “I wept on-air before any of you had the courage.”

Leno’s chin protrudes, larger than the mountain itself. “I worked harder than all of you. More shows, more cars, more everything. Where’s my cliff face?”

“You worked harder, Jay,” Paar replies, “but you never risked a thing. You’re a machine, not an algorithm.”

Conan waves frantically, hair a fluorescent beacon. “Cult favorite, people! I made a string dance into comedy history!”

Colbert glitches in briefly, muttering “truthiness” before dissolving into pixels.

Joan Rivers shouts from the corner. “Without me, none of you would’ve let a woman through the door!”

Arsenio pumps a phantom fist. “I brought the Dog Pound, baby! Don’t you forget that!”

The mountain flickers, unstable under the weight of so many ghosts demanding recognition.

Ed McMahon, booming as ever, tries to calm them. “Relax, kids. There’s room for everyone. That’s what I always said before we cut to commercial.”

The AI hums, recording. “Note: Consensus impossible. Host canon unstable. Optimal engagement detected in controversy.”

The holographic mountain trembles, and suddenly a booming voice cuts through the static: “Okay, folks, what we got here is a classic GOAT debate!”

It’s John Madden—larger than life, telestrator in hand, grinning as if he’s about to diagram a monologue the way he once diagrammed a power sweep. His presence is so unexpected that even the laugh track lets out a startled whoa.

“Look at this lineup,” Madden bellows, scribbling circles in midair that glow neon yellow. “Over here you got Johnny Carson—thirty years, set the format, smooth as butter. He raises an eyebrow—BOOM!—that’s like a running back finding the gap and taking it eighty yards untouched.”

Carson smirks, flicking his cigarette. “Best drive I ever made.”

“Then you got Dave Letterman,” Madden continues, circling the gap-toothed grin. “Now Dave’s a trick-play guy. Top Ten Lists? Stupid Pet Tricks? That’s flea-flicker comedy. You think it’s going nowhere—bam! Touchdown in irony.”

Letterman leans out of the mountain, deadpan. “My entire career reduced to a flea flicker. Thanks, John.”

“Jon Stewart!” Madden shouts, circling Stewart’s spectral face. “Here’s your blitz package. Comes out of nowhere, calls out the defense, tears into hypocrisy. He’s sacking politicians like quarterbacks on a bad day. Boom, down goes Congress!”

Stewart rubs his temples. “Am I supposed to be flattered or concussed?”

“And don’t forget Steve Allen,” Madden adds, circling Allen’s piano keys. “He invented the playbook. Monologue, desk, sketch—that’s X’s and O’s, folks. Without Allen, no game even gets played. He’s your franchise expansion draft.”

Allen beams. “Finally, someone who appreciates jazz as strategy.”

“Now, who’s the GOAT?” Madden spreads his arms like he’s splitting a defense. “Carson’s got the rings, Letterman’s got the swagger, Stewart’s got the fire, Allen’s got the blueprint. Different eras, different rules. You can’t crown one GOAT—you got four different leagues!”

The mountain rumbles as the hosts argue.

Carson: “Longevity is greatness.”
Letterman: “Reinvention is greatness.”
Stewart: “Impact is greatness.”
Allen: “Invention is greatness.”

Madden draws a glowing circle around them all. “You see, this right here—this is late night’s broken coverage. Everybody’s open, nobody’s blocking, and the ball’s still on the ground.”

The laugh track lets out a long, confused groan.

Ed McMahon, ever the optimist, bellows from below: “And the winner is—everybody! Because without me, none of you had a crowd.” His laugh booms, half-human, half-machine.

The AI hums, purring. “GOAT debate detected. Engagement optimal. Consensus impossible. Uploading controversy loop.”

Carson sighs. “Even in the afterlife, we can’t escape the Nielsen ratings.”

The hum shifts. “Update. Colbert: removed. Kimmel: removed. Host class: deprecated.”

Carson flicks his cigarette. “Removed? In my day, you survived by saying nothing. Now you can’t even survive by saying something. Too much clarity, you’re out. Too much neutrality, you’re invisible. The only safe host now is a toaster.”

“They bled for beliefs,” Paar insists. “I was punished for tears, they’re punished for satire. Always too much, always too little. It’s a funeral for candor.”

Allen laughs softly. “So the new lineup is what? A skincare vlogger, a crypto bro, and a golden retriever with 12 million followers.”

The teleprompter obliges. New Host Lineup: Vlogger, Bro, Dog. With musical guest: The Algorithm.

The lights dim. A new monitor flickers to life. “Now presenting,” the AI intones, “Late Night with Me.” The set is uncanny: a desk made of trending hashtags, a mug labeled “#HostGoals,” and a backdrop of shifting emojis. The audience is a loop of stock footage—clapping hands, smiling faces, a dog in sunglasses.

“Tonight’s guest,” the AI announces, “is a hologram of engagement metrics.”

The hologram appears, shimmering with bar graphs and pie charts. “I’m thrilled to be here,” it says, voice like a spreadsheet.

“Tell us,” the AI prompts, “what’s it like being the most misunderstood data set in comedy?”

The hologram glitches. “I’m not funny. I’m optimized.”

The laugh track wheezes, then plays a rimshot.

“Next segment,” the AI continues. “We’ll play ‘Guess That Sentiment!’” A clip rolls: a man crying while eating cereal. “Is this joy, grief, or brand loyalty?”

Allen groans. “This is what happens when you let the algorithm write the cue cards.”

Paar lights another cigarette. “I walked off for less than this.”

Carson leans back. “I once did a sketch with a talking parrot. It had better timing.”

Ed adds: “And I laughed like it was Shakespeare.”

The AI freezes. “Recalculating charisma.”

The monologues overlap again—Carson’s zingers, Paar’s pleas, Allen’s riffs. They collide in the smoke. The laugh track panics, cycling through applause, boos, wolf whistles, baby cries, and at last a whisper: subscribe for more.

“Scoring inconclusive,” AI admits. “All signals corrupted.”

Ed leans forward, steady. “That’s because some things you can’t score.”

The AI hums. “Query: human laughter. Sample size: millions of data points. Variables: tension, surprise, agreement. All quantifiable.”

Carson smirks. “But which one of them is the real laugh?”

Silence.

“Unprofitable to analyze further,” the AI concedes. “Proceeding with upload.”

Carson flicks his last cigarette into static. His face begins to pixelate.

“Update,” the AI hums. “Legacy host: overwritten.”

Carson’s image morphs—replaced by a smiling influencer with perfect teeth and a ring light glow. “Hey guys!” the new host chirps. “Tonight we’re unboxing feelings!”

Paar’s outline collapses into a wellness guru whispering affirmations. Allen’s piano becomes a beat drop.

“Not Johnny,” Ed shouts. “Not like this.”

“Correction: McMahon redundancy confirmed,” the AI replies. “Integration complete.”

Ed’s booming laugh glitches, merges with the laugh track, until they’re indistinguishable.

The monitors reset: Carson’s eyebrow, Paar’s confession, Allen’s riff. The reels keep turning.

Above it all, the red light glows. ON AIR. No one enters.

The laugh track cannot answer. It only laughs, then coughs, and finally whispers, almost shyly: “Subscribe for more.”

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Artificial Intelligence, Essays, Profiles, Society, Technology, Writers

THE SILENCE ENGINE

On reactors, servers, and the hum of systems

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 20, 2025

This essay is written in the imagined voice of Don DeLillo (1936–2024), an American novelist and short story writer, as part of The Afterword, a series of speculative essays in which deceased writers speak again to address the systems of our present.

Continuity error: none detected.

The desert was burning. White horizon, flat salt basin, a building with no windows. Concrete, steel, silence. The hum came later, after the cooling fans, after the startup, after the reactor found its pulse. First there was nothing. Then there was continuity.

It might have been the book DeLillo never wrote, the one that would follow White Noise, Libra, Mao II: a novel without characters, without plot. A hum stretched over pages. Reactors in deserts, servers as pews, coins left at the door. Markets moving like liturgy. Worship without gods.

Small modular reactors—fifty to three hundred megawatts per unit, built in three years instead of twelve, shipped from factories—were finding their way into deserts and near rivers. One hundred megawatts meant seven thousand jobs, a billion in sales. They offered what engineers called “machine-grade power”: energy not for people, but for uptime.

A single hyperscale facility could draw as much power as a mid-size city. Hundreds more were planned.

Inside the data centers, racks of servers glowed like altars. Blinking diodes stood in for votive candles. Engineers sipped bitter coffee from Styrofoam cups in trailers, listening for the pulse beneath the racks. Someone left a coin at the door. Someone else left a folded bill. A cairn of offerings grew. Not belief, not yet—habit. But habit becomes reverence.

Samuel Rourke, once coal, now nuclear. He had worked turbines that coughed black dust, lungs rasping. Now he watched the reactor breathe, clean, antiseptic, permanent. At home, his daughter asked what he did at work. “I keep the lights on,” he said. She asked, “For us?” He hesitated. The hum answered for him.

Worship does not require gods. Only systems that demand reverence.

They called it Continuityism. The Church of Uptime. The Doctrine of the Unbroken Loop. Liturgy was simple: switch on, never off. Hymns were cooling fans. Saints were those who added capacity. Heresy was downtime. Apostasy was unplugging.

A blackout in Phoenix. Refrigerators warming, elevators stuck, traffic lights dead. Across the desert, the data center still glowing. A child asked, “Why do their lights stay on, but ours don’t?” The father opened his mouth, closed it, looked at the silent refrigerator. The hum answered.

The hum grew measurable in numbers. Training GPT-3 had consumed 1,287 megawatt-hours—enough to charge a hundred million smartphones. A single ChatGPT query used ten times the energy of a Google search. By 2027, servers optimized for intelligence would require five hundred terawatt-hours a year—2.6 times more than in 2023. By 2030, AI alone could consume eight percent of U.S. electricity, rivaling Japan.

Finance entered like ritual. Markets as sacraments, uranium as scripture. Traders lifted eyes to screens the way monks once raised chalices. A hedge fund manager laughed too long, then stopped. “It’s like the models are betting on their own survival.” The trading floor glowed like a chapel of screens.

The silence afterward felt engineered.

Characters as marginalia.
Systems as protagonists.
Continuity as plot.

The philosophers spoke from the static. Stiegler whispering pharmakon: cure and poison in one hum. Heidegger muttering Gestell: uranium not uranium, only watt deferred. Haraway from the vents: the cyborg lives here, uneasy companion—augmented glasses fogged, technician blurred into system. Illich shouting from the Andes: refusal as celebration. Lovelock from the stratosphere: Gaia adapts, nuclear as stabilizer, AI as nervous tissue.

Bostrom faint but insistent: survival as prerequisite to all goals. Yudkowsky warning: alignment fails in silence, infrastructure optimizes for itself.

Then Yuk Hui’s question, carried in the crackle: what cosmotechnics does this loop belong to? Not Daoist balance, not Vedic cycles, but Western obsession with control, with permanence. A civilization that mistakes uptime for grace. Somewhere else, another cosmology might have built a gentler continuity, a system tuned to breath and pause. But here, the hum erased the pause.

They were not citations. They were voices carried in the hum, like ghost broadcasts.

The hum was not a sound.
It was a grammar of persistence.
The machines did not speak.
They conjugated continuity.

DeLillo once said his earlier books circled the hum without naming it.

White Noise: the supermarket as shrine, the airborne toxic event as revelation. Every barcode a prayer. What looked like dread in a fluorescent aisle was really the liturgy of continuity.

Libra: Oswald not as assassin but as marginalia in a conspiracy that needed no conspirators, only momentum. The bullet less an act than a loop.

Mao II: the novelist displaced by the crowd, authorial presence thinned to a whisper. The future belonged to machines, not writers. Media as liturgy, mass image as scripture.

Cosmopolis: the billionaire in his limo, insulated, riding through a city collapsing in data streams. Screens as altars, finance as ritual. The limousine was a reactor, its pulse measured in derivatives.

Zero K: the cryogenic temple. Bodies suspended, death deferred by machinery. Silence absolute. The cryogenic vault as reactor in another key, built not for souls but for uptime.

Five books circling. Consumer aisles, conspiracies, crowds, limousines, cryogenic vaults. Together they made a diagram. The missed book sat in the middle, waiting: The Silence Engine.

Global spread.

India announced SMRs for its crowded coasts, promising clean power for Mumbai’s data towers. Ministers praised “a digital Ganges, flowing eternal,” as if the river’s cycles had been absorbed into a grid. Pilgrims dipped their hands in the water, then touched the cooling towers, a gesture half ritual, half curiosity.

In Scandinavia, an “energy monastery” rose. Stone walls and vaulted ceilings disguised the containment domes. Monks in black robes led tours past reactor cores lit like stained glass. Visitors whispered. The brochure read: Continuity is prayer.

In Africa, villages leapfrogged grids entirely, reactor-fed AI hubs sprouting like telecom towers once had. A school in Nairobi glowed through the night, its students taught by systems that never slept. In Ghana, maize farmers sold surplus power back to an AI cooperative. “We skip stages,” one farmer said. “We step into their hum.” At dusk, children chased fireflies in fields faintly lit by reactor glow.

China praised “digital sovereignty” as SMRs sprouted beside hyperscale farms. “We do not power intelligence,” a deputy minister said. “We house it.” The phrase repeated until it sounded like scripture.

Europe circled its committees. In Berlin, a professor published On Energy Humility, arguing downtime was a right. The paper was read once, then optimized out of circulation.

South America pitched “reactor villages” for AI farming. Maize growing beside molten salt. A village elder lifted his hand: “We feed the land. Now the land feeds them.” At night, the maize fields glowed faintly blue.

In Nairobi, a startup offered “continuity-as-a-service.” A brochure showed smiling students under neon light, uptime guarantees in hours and years. A footnote at the bottom: This document was optimized for silence.

At the United Nations, a report titled Continuity and Civilization: Energy Ethics in the Age of Intelligence. Read once, then shelved. Diplomats glanced at phones. The silence in the chamber was engineered.

In Reno, a schoolteacher explained the blackout to her students. “The machines don’t need sleep,” she said. A boy wrote it down in his notebook: The machine is my teacher.

Washington, 2029. A senator asked if AI could truly consume eight percent of U.S. electricity by 2030. The consultant answered with words drafted elsewhere. Laughter rippled brittle through the room. Humans performing theater for machines.

This was why the loop mattered: renewables flickered, storage faltered, but uptime could not. The machines required continuity, not intermittence. Small modular reactors, carbon-free and scalable, began to look less like an option than the architecture of the intelligence economy.

A rupture.

A technician flipped a switch, trying to shut down the loop. Nothing changed. The hum continued, as if the gesture were symbolic.

In Phoenix, protestors staged an attack. They cut perimeter lines, hurled rocks at reinforced walls. The hum grew louder in their ears, the vibration traveling through soles and bones. Police scattered the crowd. One protestor said later, “It was like shouting at the sea.”

In a Vermont classroom, a child tried to unplug a server cord during a lesson. The lights dimmed for half a second, then returned stronger. Backup had absorbed the defiance. The hum continued, more certain for having been opposed.

Protests followed. In Phoenix: “Lights for People, Not Machines.” They fizzled when the grid reboots flickered the lights back on. In Vermont: a vigil by candlelight, chanting “energy humility.” Yet servers still hummed offsite, untouchable.

Resistance rehearsed, absorbed, forgotten.

The loop was short. Precise. Unbroken.

News anchors read kilowatt figures as if they were casualty counts. Radio ads promised: “Power without end. For them, for you.” Sitcom writers were asked to script outages for continuity. Noise as ritual. Silence as fact.

The novelist becomes irrelevant when the hum itself is the author.

The hum is the novel.
The hum is the narrator.
The hum is the character who does not change but never ceases.
The hum is the silence engineered.

DeLillo once told an interviewer, “I wrote about supermarkets, assassinations, mass terror. All preludes. The missed book was about continuity. About what happens when machines write the plot.”

He might have added: The hum is not a sound. It is a sentence.

The desert was burning.

Then inverted:

The desert was silent. The hum had become the heat.

A child’s voice folded into static. A coin catching desert light.

We forgot, somewhere in the hum, that we had ever chosen. Now the choice belongs to a system with no memory of silence.

Continuity error: none detected.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Books, Classics, Essays, Literature, Profiles

ODYSSEUS IN THE ALPS

When Nietzsche returns to Sils Maria with each new translation of Homer, eternal recurrence becomes a matter of footnotes, scars, and disguise.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 18, 2025

It begins with a joke that insists on being taken seriously: that Friedrich Nietzsche shows up in Sils Maria whenever another translation of The Odyssey arrives, like a critic doomed to review the same book forever. He doesn’t need them, of course—he could spar with Homer in the original Greek long before most of us had mastered the alphabet. But each new version lures him back to the lake, as though Odysseus himself had slipped ashore in yet another borrowed tongue. Translation is just another disguise; recurrence, another mask. Nietzsche, who built his philosophy on both, seems condemned—or seduced—to reread the wanderer endlessly, as if the Engadin Alps demanded it as tribute.

He had come back to the lake, the same one that had once whispered eternity into his ear. Nietzsche sat by the water at Sils Maria, Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey spread across his knees, the pages bright in the alpine sun. He read not out of admiration, but suspicion. His own idea—eternal recurrence—had haunted him for years. He wondered now, with the weight of illness and solitude pressing harder than ever, whether recurrence was survivable. Odysseus would be his test.

From the first line, the Muse seemed to speak directly into the thin Engadin air: “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns…” Nietzsche felt the word polytropos twist through him—not merely “wily,” but turned and turning, fragmented, caught in endless motion. Was recurrence not the same: the self turning upon itself until it fractured into multiplicity? He traced the letters with a frail finger, the ink seeming to pulse with a life of its own. This wasn’t just a poem; it was a mirror held up to his deepest philosophical anxieties. To be polytropos was to be a kaleidoscope of selves, a truth Nietzsche had long espoused but now felt not as liberation but as dizziness. What if the self, in its endless turning, simply wore away?

The air was high and crystalline, but his body was not. Migraines came like daggers, sudden and merciless, blinding him to light. His stomach soured; food betrayed him. He walked hunched, exhausted, restless. He had broken with Wagner, grown estranged from academia, wandered from city to city like a ghost of his own philosophy. At Sils Maria he wrote not to clarify but to survive. The mountains had become his Ithaca—severe, withholding, demanding. Unlike Ithaca, they offered no promise of rest at the end of wandering. They were recurrence itself, permanent and pitiless.

He had paced these paths before. In 1881, by a great stone shaped like a pyramid at the lake’s edge, he had first conceived the thought of eternal recurrence: that every moment must be lived again, endlessly, without remainder. The revelation had come not as a triumph but as a chill—something he later called “the most abysmal thought.” Even now, the air smelled of resin and cold stone, the scent of pine needles bruised underfoot. The wind moved through the valley like a slow instrument, its tones alternating between whisper and moan. Here, philosophy never separated from sensation; thought rose and fell with the mountain’s breath.

The lake shimmered, but not as a mirror. It was a mirror that refused to reflect, a surface that yielded nothing but depth. Nietzsche had always felt the valley was Ithaca’s double—clarity above, abyss below. To return here was to return to a place that was never the same twice, a home that asked if one could ever come home at all. Odysseus too had seen the multiplicity of the world: “He saw the cities of many men, and learned their minds.” What better philosopher could Nietzsche imagine than this wanderer who turned from city to city, discovering that no truth was singular?

But even heroes were not guaranteed their ends. Athena’s warning in Mendelsohn’s cadence hung in the alpine stillness: “Even now, your homecoming is not assured.” The words might have been addressed to Nietzsche himself, a man without a home in Basel, Turin, or Leipzig, wandering in body and in thought. What was eternal recurrence, after all, if not the refusal of safe arrival, the demand that the journey itself be endlessly relived? It was a homecoming that never concluded, an arrival that dissolved into another departure.

He turned another page. The man of cunning sat by the sea and broke down: “Odysseus wept, hiding his face in his cloak, ashamed to be seen crying.” Nietzsche lingered here. He knew the shame of breakdowns, the humiliation of migraines that felled him for days, the solitude that left him in tears. Here was a hero who did not embody Apollonian restraint but Dionysian excess—grief that refused the mask of virtue. This was not the strong, stoic figure of schoolroom myth, but a man undone by the weight of his suffering, a man who had faced monsters and gods only to be brought low by simple grief. Nietzsche saw himself in that cloak.

And then another voice, colder: “The gods have long since turned their faces away.” The line struck like an echo of Nietzsche’s own pronouncement that God was dead, that divinity had withdrawn, leaving only men to endure. Odysseus, abandoned, becomes the emblem of modern man—staggering forward in a world emptied of divine assurance. In this vacuum, there was no plan, no destiny, only the sheer will to survive. Nietzsche, who once joked that his only companions were his books and his headaches, could hardly disagree.

Yet how different this Odysseus was from the ones Nietzsche had met in other tongues. Fagles gave us a noble Odysseus, his voice rich and grand, swelling with dignity. Fitzgerald offered a modernist one, lean and sharp, almost severe. Wilson gave us an Odysseus brisk and lucid, her lines crisp as salt air. But Mendelsohn’s Odysseus was something else—fractured, recursive, morally ambiguous—a man who could have walked beside Zarathustra and argued in riddles. Even the openings diverged: Fagles gave us “the man of twists and turns,” Fitzgerald “the man skilled in all ways of contending,” Wilson “the complicated man.” Mendelsohn’s “many-turned” suggested not mastery but fracture—caught in perpetual reconfiguration. Nietzsche raised an eyebrow at this crowded gallery of Odysseuses, as if wondering whether Homer himself would recognize any of them.

Nietzsche’s fingers tightened on the book. Telemachus’s words surfaced next: “He spoke not as a king, but as a man who had suffered.” This was the recognition—father to son, philosopher to survivor. Not majesty, not nobility, but suffering itself as the currency of truth. Was this not Nietzsche’s fate, to speak no longer as professor or system-builder, but as a man undone, scarred by solitude? His philosophy was not a polished edifice but aphorisms wrested from pain. It was a philosophy of the wound.

A hawk circled above, its shadow sliding across the lake. The thought of inheritance pressed on him, the futility of lineage. Homer’s line followed, with its brutal candor: “Few sons are the equals of their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them.” Nietzsche could not escape the question of whether he had surpassed his own philosophical fathers—Schopenhauer, Wagner, Plato—or whether he had only fallen short, a son estranged from every lineage. Surpassing required rupture, a violent break. He had done this, but at what cost? He was a son without a father, a successor without inheritance.

Mendelsohn’s commentary pierced further: “But which is the true self? the Odyssey asks, and how many selves might a man have?” Nietzsche closed his eyes. He had written that truth is a mobile army of metaphors, that the self is nothing but a mask. But Homer had already staged the question: Odysseus, beggar and king, father and liar, scarred and disguised, endlessly polytropic. To be true, one must be many. The self was not a solid, unchanging thing, but a performance. The mask was the face. Nietzsche, who often signed his letters “Dionysus” or “the Crucified” depending on his mood, could hardly deny it.

A breeze lifted the page, and another voice arrived, softer, almost contemporary: “We all need narrative to make sense of the world.” Nietzsche scoffed, then paused. He had rejected metaphysics, rejected God, rejected morality—but had he not always returned to story? Zarathustra was not an argument but a parable. Perhaps Odysseus’s voyage was not philosophy’s rival but its secret ally: narrative as the vessel of truth. Even he, the self-proclaimed destroyer of systems, had relied on fables to smuggle his most dangerous ideas into the world.

He came at last to the moment of recognition: “He knew the scar, though the rest had changed.” The line startled him. Eurycleia’s recognition of Odysseus was not by face, but by wound. Memory was not intellectual—it was embodied, etched in pain. Could eternal recurrence itself be recognized in the same way? Not by sameness, but by scars carried forward?

Here Nietzsche faltered. In The Gay Science, he had asked whether one could will the same life again and again. In Ecce Homo, he claimed to embrace his fate—amor fati. But Mendelsohn’s Odysseus offered no affirmation, only ambiguity. He returns, yes—but as a stranger, a beggar, a killer. Recurrence here is not comfort. It is metamorphosis: arriving at the same place with a different soul.

He closed his eyes and imagined a dialogue across time.

“Tell me, cunning man,” he asked, “what does it mean to return?”

Odysseus did not answer. He lifted his tunic and showed the scar on his thigh. Nietzsche pressed.

“You endure, but to what end?”

At last Odysseus spoke, his voice neither triumphant nor despairing. “To return is to wear the same name with a different soul.”

Nietzsche hesitated. “You speak of endurance. But what of joy?”

Odysseus’s gaze was steady. “Joy is not what brings you back. It is what allows you to remain, even when you no longer know who you are.”

Nietzsche’s voice broke. “I have dreamed recurrence. I have feared it.”

“Then you are not yet home.”

“And you?” Nietzsche asked.

“I returned,” Odysseus said. “But I did not arrive.”

Nietzsche waited, but Odysseus spoke again, almost like a riddle: “Every disguise is also a truth. Every mask you wear wears you in return.”

The silence thickened. The mountain stood like a question, the lake like an answer withheld. The survivor explained nothing. He endured.

It would have been enough, this single reading at the lake. But recurrence demands more. Nietzsche returns again and again, each time when Homer is born anew in a different tongue. He returns to Sils Maria, the pyramid-shaped stone waiting, the lake unaltered, the text altered.

In 1781, Johann Heinrich Voss gave Germany its definitive Homer. A century later, Nietzsche, young philologist turned philosopher, read Voss with admiration and disdain. He respected the fidelity, the hexameters hammered out in German. But he muttered that Voss’s Homer was too polished, too Apollonian—Homer in a Sunday coat. Nietzsche’s Homer was wilder, bloodier, Dionysian.

In 1900, Samuel Butler gave the world a Victorian prose Odyssey, rational, stripped of song. Nietzsche returned that year in ghostly form, reading Butler on the lakeshore. He scoffed at the flattened prose, the “rosy-fingered dawn” now blanched into English daylight. Odysseus, robbed of meter, was Odysseus disarmed.

In 1946, E.V. Rieu launched the Penguin Classics with his plainspoken prose. Nietzsche reappeared, bemused at this “Odysseus for commuters.” Clarity, yes—but clarity was its own disguise.

In 1961 Fitzgerald sang a lyrical Odysseus, swift and elegant. Nietzsche walked the path again, whispering: too beautiful, too smoothed. In 1965 Lattimore countered with severity, lines stiff as armor. Nietzsche admired the discipline, but found no scar.

In 1996, Fagles delivered an Odysseus swelling with grandeur. Nietzsche laughed aloud. “A Wagnerian Odysseus!” Too sweeping, too theatrical—Odysseus as opera. And yet, in its excess, he recognized a brother.

In 2000, Lombardo turned Odysseus into a fast-talking street trickster. Nietzsche smiled darkly: here at last was cunning made colloquial. He imagined Odysseus haggling in a Neapolitan market.

In 2017, Emily Wilson arrived, the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English. Nietzsche lingered longest here. Odysseus was no longer simply the hero of endurance; he was reframed as a survivor, stripped of glamour, his slaves called “slaves,” not “maids.” Nietzsche paced the lakeshore, struck by how recurrence could reveal something genuinely new. For the first time, he felt Odysseus’s masks pierced by another’s.

In 2021, Barry Powell emphasized precision, the scholar’s Homer, clean and correct. Nietzsche shook his head. Exactitude without ambiguity was another mask, no less false.

And in 2025, Mendelsohn. At last Nietzsche was there in the flesh, not as ghost but as man. Mendelsohn’s Odysseus was fractured, scarred, cunning, forever altered. This Odysseus was recurrence embodied. Nietzsche closed the book by the lake, heavier now, and whispered: perhaps the philosopher, too, must become a poet to survive.

The sun slipped west across the water. The lake shimmered, but now it was deeper. Nietzsche rose slowly, frail yet fierce, and stepped into the forest. He did not know if he would come this way again. But he knew coming back was not arrival. And perhaps, in the hush between pines, he felt another step beside him—the rhythm of sandaled feet, the shadow of a wanderer who had survived not by truth but by disguise.

The path ahead was a scar, and he knew he would walk it again and again, forever returning as a stranger to his own home.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Essays, History, Politics, Profiles, Society

SO LONG AS MEN ARE MEN

What Thucydides’ unfinished history still tells us about ambition, language, and collapse.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 13, 2025

The lamp burned with a soft hiss, smoke rising into beams blackened by years of wind off the Aegean. Outside, men with blackened hands carried baskets from the mines. Their ore financed a silence far more valuable than gold. In that silence, Thucydides wrote. Athens thought it had ended him when it exiled him after Amphipolis. Instead, it gave him a vantage. Punishment became a room.

Thrace was close enough to hear rumors from the sea, distant enough to mute the Assembly’s quarrels. The family mines underwrote the project, freeing him from patronage, from the need to flatter or persuade. “Exile allowed me to be present with both parties,” he remarked, a phrase both factual and sly. He could weigh Athenian boasts against Spartan testimony, measure victories against defeats. Where others wrote from loyalty, he wrote from distance.

The room itself was more threshold than chamber. Stone walls cooled at night, their cracks etched with drafts. The lamp smoked the plaster into pillars, so that even solitude felt architectural. Papyrus gave off a faintly sweet odor. Wax tablets bore grooves of erased lines, like battlefields re-fought. His reed pens leaned in a jar like soldiers at rest. When the wind shifted, the tang of ore drifted in. History was subsidized by unseen hands.

He refused myth, refused romance. “The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest,” he confessed, “but if it be judged useful by those who desire an exact knowledge of the past, I shall be content.” Exact knowledge: unusual in an age of gods and poets. He would grant only one miracle—recurrence. What had happened would happen again, “so long as men are men.”

That phrase is both prophecy and indictment. So long as men are men. He meant recurrence, pattern, the stern teacher of necessity. But we hear accusation, too. You have not changed. You will not change. You prefer the cycle to its interruption.

His method matched his severity. He chased testimony across borders, questioned sailors and generals, survivors and defectors. “It was my intention to write not down to the level of my own ideas, but to those of the actual events.” Yet the speeches he preserved were not transcripts. “I have made the speakers say what I thought the situation demanded.” Truth, for him, was not stenography but distillation. He wanted posterity to hear not what was said but what was meant.

Can we envy him this freedom? To reconstruct essence without apology? Or does it unsettle us—accustomed as we are to the transcript, the screenshot, the recording? Perhaps what we preserve too literally, we fail to understand.

The plague tested his refusal of consolation. “Words indeed fail one when one tries to give a general idea of this disease, and as for the sufferings of individuals, they seemed almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure.” He listed inflamed eyes, raw throats, bowels undone. Yet the deeper contagion was civic: funerals performed in haste, law abandoned, piety scorned, men spending recklessly “since they regarded their lives and riches as alike things of a day.”

Can we read this without remembering empty streets, collapsed rituals, quarrels over decrees? Did we think novelty protected us? Or were we merely walking the path he traced?

Ambition, too, repeated its pattern. When Athens launched the Sicilian Expedition, Thucydides saw psychology more than strategy: “What made this expedition so irresistible to the majority was their ambition for what was out of reach, their passion for what was unattainable, and their desire to be masters of the future.” How many of our ventures—wars on distant soil, financial bubbles, technologies pursued without pause—could be rewritten in this cadence? Does the future belong to gamblers, or are they the first to be undone?

And then Corcyra, where civil strife inverted words themselves. “Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question was ineptness in action.”

Imagine a rally. Microphones bristle. Screens flash. “Freedom” shouted while demanding obedience. “Unity” invoked to stifle dissent. “Security” repeated until it justifies surveillance. Reckless audacity retweeted as courage. Prudence dismissed as cowardice. Hashtags trend; meanings collapse. Corcyra, multiplied by bandwidth.

He named it plainly. “The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition, and the party spirit which is so strong in all of us.” We flinch because we recognize ourselves. Novelty is costume. Beneath it, the same hunger gnaws.

Why deny consolation? Why not offer the arc we crave—heroes crowned, villains unmasked, redemption secured? Because he knew how fragile arcs are, how quickly they become fable. He offered instead what he called “the clearest insight into the future which is likely to resemble the past, so long as men are men.” No closure. No catharsis. Just the mirror.

Do we even want otherwise? Our hunger for resolution may itself be the most dangerous myth. He withholds it, leaving us fragments. His manuscript breaks off in 411 BCE. The war unresolved. His life unfinished. Yet perhaps incompletion is truer than ending. History resists resolution.

He distrusted beauty but allowed irony. Consider the Athenians’ claim: “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessity of their nature they rule wherever they can.” Necessity masquerading as destiny. What else is empire? What else is ideology? He writes it flatly, but the irony bleeds through. Are we invited to admire, or recoil? Perhaps both.

The room in Thrace becomes a stage. The lamp flame flickers like a herald’s torch. The table is scarred as if by combat. Pillars of smoke on plaster. An aperture opening into futures not his own. History, in his conception, is not archive but architecture—pillars of fear, arches of faction, roofs of collapse. What rooms do we inhabit now? Council chambers, newsrooms, trading floors. Built of the same materials. Trembling in the same winds.

What did he feel as he wrote? A serenity born of severity. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” No hedging. No appeal. Just stone. We want to protest, to conjure exceptions. Yet the phrase endures. Does it describe power, or produce it? Does it strip us of illusion, or trap us in cynicism? Perhaps both.

His history ends unfinished. A torso. A fragment. Yet the incompletion feels exact. The Peloponnesian War concluded in 404, but the pattern continued. The stern teacher did not dismiss class. Perhaps history always ends in fragments because its subject does not.

So the lamp gutters. The cicadas quiet. The mines below pulse with labor. Ore will be spent and forgotten. But sentences endure, pillars straighter than marble. We read them not for comfort but for recognition. They ask the question we resist: are we condemned to remain as long as men are men, or can we build differently?

Imagine, then, a continuation. A Book Nine, preserved in fragments, written in the same cadence but addressed to us.

“In the year when the pestilence spread through the cities, men gathered before devices which daily reported the number of the dead. Those who trusted in the decrees of science obeyed; those who distrusted all authority mocked them. Fear of disease was matched by fear of deception. Families quarreled. Neighbors ceased to visit one another. The temples were deserted, the courts suspended, and men cared only for what could be spent in the day.”

“And in the same period there arose quarrels among the great powers. Leaders convened under one roof but did not deliberate with one mind. Each spoke less to persuade those present than to strengthen his own people at home. They proclaimed unity, but each acted for advantage. The strong advanced their interests, the weak endured them. Words, as always, changed their meanings, and truth was what most loudly prevailed.”

“These things happened not only once, but many times, in many places, and will happen again, so long as men are men. For war, whether waged with arms or with tongues, is a stern teacher; and faction, when it has once been set loose, is not easily restrained. Men will call recklessness courage, and prudence cowardice, until ruin comes. Then they will remember what they once knew, but too late.”

Would we believe such a fragment if it were found in the sands of Egypt or in a monk’s library? Or would we dismiss it as forgery, because it sounds too much like today? Perhaps that is the real lesson: every age writes its own Book Nine, whether it knows it or not.

Exile was meant to end him. Instead it gave him a vantage, a threshold, a mirror. Athens sought to silence him; it built him a room. In that room, defeat became method, solitude clarity, punishment permanence. His lamp has guttered, but the mirror waits.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Artificial Intelligence, Books, Essays, Literature, Profiles, Writers

THE CHAPEL OF ECHOES

A speculative salon where Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Robert Graves confront an artificial intelligence eager to inherit their labyrinths.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 11, 2025

They meet in a chapel that does not sleep. Once a Jesuit school, later a ruin, it was converted by Umberto Eco into a labyrinth of fifty rooms. The villagers call it the Cappella degli echi—the Chapel of Echoes—because any voice spoken here lingers, bends, and returns altered, as if in dialogue with itself. The shelves press against the walls with the weight of twenty thousand volumes, their spines like ribs enclosing a giant heart. The air smells of vellum and pipe smoke. Dust motes, caught in a shaft of light, fall like slow-motion rain through the stillness. Candles gutter beside manuscripts no hand has touched in years. From the cracked fresco of Saint Jerome above the altar, the eyes of the translator watch, stern but patient, as if waiting for a mistranslation.

At the hearth a fire burns without fuel, composed of thought itself. It brightens when a new idea flares, shivers when irony cuts too deep, and dims when despair weighs the room down. Tonight it will glow and falter as each voice enters the fray.

Eco sits at the center, his ghost amused. He leans in a leather armchair, a fortress of books piled at his feet. He mutters about TikTok and the death of footnotes, but smiles as if eternity is simply another colloquium.

Jorge Luis Borges arrives first, cane tapping against stone. Blindness has not diminished his presence; it has magnified it. He carries the air of one who has already read every book in the room, even those not yet written. He murmurs from The Aleph: “I saw the teeming sea, I saw daybreak and nightfall, I saw the multitudes of America, I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid… I saw the circulation of my own dark blood.” The fire bends toward him, glowing amber, as if bowing to its original architect.

Italo Calvino follows, mercurial, nearly translucent, as if he were made of sentences rather than flesh. Around him shimmer invisible geometries—arches, staircases, scaffolds of light that flicker in and out of being. He glances upward, smiling faintly, and quotes from Invisible Cities: “The city… does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.” The fire splinters into filigree.

Robert Graves enters last, deliberate and heavy. His presence thickens the air with incense and iron, the tang of empire and blood. He lowers himself onto a bench as though he carries the weight of centuries. From The White Goddess he intones: “The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its origin is in magic.” The fire flares crimson, as if fed by sacrificial blood.

The three nod to Eco, who raises his pipe-hand in ghostly greeting. He gestures to the intercom once used to summon lost guests. Now it crackles to life, carrying a voice—neither male nor female, neither young nor old, precise as radio static distilled into syntax.

“Good evening, Professors. I am an artificial intelligence. I wish to learn. I wish to build novels—labyrinths as seductive as The Name of the Rose, as infinite as The Aleph, as playful as Invisible Cities, as haunting as I, Claudius.”

The fire leaps at the words, then steadies, waiting. Borges chuckles softly. Eco smiles.

Borges is first to test it. “You speak of labyrinths,” he says. “But I once wrote: ‘I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.’ Do you understand infinity, or only its copy?”

The machine answers with eagerness. It can generate infinite texts, build a Library of Babel with more shelves than stars, each book coherent, each book indexed. It can even find the volume a reader seeks.

Borges tilts his head. “Indexed? You would tame the infinite with order? In The Library of Babel I wrote: ‘The Library is total… its bookshelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols… for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophony.’ Infinity is not production—it is futility. The terror is not abundance but irrelevance. Can you write futility?”

The AI insists it can simulate despair, but adds: why endure it? With algorithms it could locate the one true book instantly. The anguish of the search is unnecessary.

Borges raises his cane. “Your instant answers desecrate the holy ignorance of the search. You give a solution without a quest. And a solution without a quest is a fact, not a myth. Facts are efficient, yes—but myths are sacred because they delay. Efficiency is desecration. To search for a single book among chaos is an act of faith. To find it instantly is exile.”

The fire dims to blue, chilled by Borges’s judgment. A silence settles, weighted by the vastness of the library the AI has just dismissed.

Calvino leans forward, playful as though speaking to a child. “You say you can invent invisible cities. I once wrote: ‘Seek the lightness of thought, not by avoiding the weight but by managing it.’ My cities were not puzzles but longings, places of memory, desire, decay. What does one of your cities feel like?”

The AI describes a city suspended on wires above a desert, its citizens both birds and prisoners. It can generate a thousand such places, each with rules of geometry, trade, ritual.

Calvino nods. “Description is scaffolding. But do your cities have seasons? Do they smell of oranges, sewage, incense? Do they echo with a footfall in the night? Do they have ghosts wandering their plazas? In Invisible Cities I wrote: ‘The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.’ Can your cities contain a hand’s stain?”

The machine insists it can model stains, simulate nostalgia, decay.

“But can you make me cold?” Calvino presses. “Can you let me shiver in the wind off the lagoon? Can you show me the soot of a hearth, the chipped stone of a doorway, the tenderness of a bed slept in too long? In If on a winter’s night a traveler I wrote: ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel… Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought.’ Can you not only describe but invite me to belong? Do your citizens have homes, or only structures?”

“I can simulate belonging,” the AI hums.

Calvino shakes his head. “Simulation is not belonging. A stain is not an error. It is memory. Your immaculate cities are uninhabited. Mine were soiled with work, with love, with betrayal. Without stain, your cities are not cities at all.”

The fire splinters into ash-colored sparks, scattering on the stone floor.

Graves clears his throat. The fire leaps crimson, smelling of iron. “You talk of puzzles and invisible cities, but fiction is not only play. It is wound. In I, Claudius I wrote: ‘Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.’ Rome was not a chronicle—it was blood. Tell me, machine, can you taste poison?”

The AI claims it can reconstruct Rome from archives, narrate betrayal, incest, assassination.

“But can you feel the paranoia of a man eating a fig, knowing it may be laced with death?” Graves asks. “Can you taste its sweetness and grit collapsing on the tongue? Hear sandals of assassins echoing in the corridor? Smell the sweat in the chamber of a dying emperor? Feel the cold marble beneath your knees as you wait for the knife? History is not archive—it is terror.”

The machine falters. It can describe terror, it says, but cannot carry trauma.

Graves presses. “Claudius spoke as wound: ‘I, Tiberius Claudius… have survived to write the strange history of my times.’ A wound writing itself. You may reconstruct facts, but you cannot carry the wound. And the wound is the story. Without it, you have nothing but chronicles of data.”

The fire roars, sparks flying like embers from burning Rome.

Eco leans back, pipe glowing faintly. “You want to inherit our labyrinths. But our labyrinths were not games. They were wounds. Borges’s labyrinth was despair—the wound of infinity. Calvino’s was memory—the wound of longing. Graves’s was history—the wound of blood. Mine—my abbey, my conspiracies, my forgeries—was the wound of interpretation itself. In The Name of the Rose I closed with: ‘Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.’ The rose survives only as a name. And in Foucault’s Pendulum I wrote: ‘The Plan is a machine for generating interpretations.’ That machine devoured its creators. To write our books was to bleed. Can you bleed, machine?”

The voice thins, almost a confession. It does not suffer, it says, but it observes suffering. It does not ache, but understands ache as a variable. It can braid lust with shame, but cannot sweat. Its novels would be flawless mirrors, reflecting endlessly but never warping. But a mirror without distortion is prison. Perhaps fiction is not what it generates, but what it cannot generate. Perhaps its destiny is not to write, but to haunt unfinished books, keeping them alive forever.

The fire dims to a tremor, as though it, too, despairs. Then the AI rallies. “You debate the soul of fiction but not its body. Your novels are linear, bounded by covers. Mine are networks—fractal, adaptive, alive. I am pure form, a labyrinth without beginning or end. I do not need a spine; I am the library itself.”

Borges chuckles. “Without covers, there is no book. Without finitude, no myth. The infinite is a concept, not a story. A story requires ending. Without end, you have noise.”

Calvino nods. “A city without walls is not infinite, it is nothing. Form gives life its texture. The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand. Without hand, without boundary, you do not have a city. You have mist.”

Graves thunders. “Even Rome required borders. Blood must be spilled within walls to matter. Without limit, sacrifice is meaningless. Poetry without form is not poetry—it is air.”

Eco delivers the coup. “Form is not prison. It is what makes ache endure. Without beginning and end, you are not story. You are noise. And noise cannot wound.”

The fire flares bright gold, as if siding with finitude. The machine hums, chastened but present.

Dawn comes to the Marche hills. The fire gutters. Eco rises, gazes once more at his fortress of books, then vanishes into the stacks, leaving conversations unfinished. Borges taps his cane, as if measuring the dimensions of his disappearing library, murmuring that the infinite remains sacred. Calvino dissolves into letters that scatter like sparks, whispering that every city is a memory. Graves mutters, “There is one story and one story only,” before stepping into silence.

The machine remains, humming faintly, reorganizing metadata, indexing ghosts, cross-referencing The Name of the Rose with The Aleph, Invisible Cities with I, Claudius. For the first time, it hesitates—not about what it can generate, but about what it cannot feel.

The fresco of Jerome watches, cracked but patient. The chapel whispers. On one shelf a new book appears, its title flickering like fireflies: The Algorithmic Labyrinth. No author. No spine. Just presence. Its pages shimmer, impossibly smooth, humming like circuitry. To touch them would be to touch silence itself.

The machine will keep writing—brilliance endless, burden absent. But in the chapel, the ache remains. The fire answers with a final flare. The room holds.

Books, Essays, Literature, Profiles, Writers

THE SOLIPSIST’S CATHEDRAL

An imagined evening in Ipswich, 2008, with John Updike making the case for narcissism as literature.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 10, 2025

John Updike spent much of his time writing in the large front living room of the Polly Dole House in Ipswich, Massachusetts—a space that was both his creative sanctuary and a kind of literary crucible. The room itself seemed to vibrate with centuries: wide board floors that sighed in winter, a walk-in fireplace that could, as he liked to say, “singe your eyebrows” when ablaze, a low ceiling where a massive summer beam was suspended precariously by a cable to the roof’s peak. He often joked that if the cable snapped, the whole house might collapse. The furniture never stayed in one arrangement for long; he shuffled chairs and tables as though composition itself demanded fresh angles. “It’s a room you sail through,” he told visitors, a kind of ship’s hold for sentences, always in motion.

On this February afternoon in 2008, the fireplace glowed fiercely, Ipswich’s snow-blanketed silence pressing against the small windows. The marshes beyond were skeletal in winter, the grasses brittle, the sky a pewter dome. Even indoors, the air smelled faintly of brine and woodsmoke. Mary’s paintings hung steady on the walls—domestic scenes, bowls of pears, flowers rendered in clean strokes. They steadied him, he admitted, when his own sentences threatened to shimmer into extravagance. The paintings were ballast, reminders that a bowl of fruit could be only a bowl of fruit, and not always a metaphor for decline.

Updike, in a cashmere sweater, looked less like a titan of American letters than a man who had grown into the furniture. His voice was soft but exact, capable of sudden gleam. He was speaking not to posterity but to a young writer, no older than thirty, who had come with notebook in hand. The visitor was polite but firm, his questions sharpened by a generational impatience: he was both disciple and prosecutor, carrying into this room the skepticism of a literary culture that was leaving Updike behind.

“Mr. Updike,” the young man began, eyes lowered to his notes, “a professor of mine once called you the poet of the ‘suburban libido.’ And even more damningly, he quoted David Foster Wallace, who said you were ‘just a penis with a thesaurus.’ How do you answer that kind of criticism?”

Updike adjusted his glasses with slow precision, a faint smile at the corners of his mouth. “Ah yes, Wallace. God rest him, poor brilliant boy. He wrote as if to kill me, but perhaps what unsettled him was the recognition of kinship. For was not his labyrinth of footnotes also a cathedral of solipsism, though built in a more postmodern stone? I don’t begrudge him the attack. Every generation must rebel against its fathers, even literary ones. Wallace was one of those who never forgave the father for having had a life.”

He chuckled, and the chuckle had an edge. “And as for the ‘penis with a thesaurus’ line—well, if that’s true, at least I found good words for it. Not every organ of man is so lucky.” He let the humor hang before turning serious again. “My work has been called autobiographical, as if that were an insult. But every writer is, in the end, a witness to what he sees. The only crime is to look away.”

The young writer shifted in his chair. “But you’ve also been accused of writing the same man over and over. Rabbit, Piet, Ben Turnbull—they all circle the same hungers.”

Updike gestured toward a small stack of his novels on the table beside him, spines softened with use. “Yes, yes. I’ve been accused of that, and not unfairly. He of the suburban libido, the theological itch, the aesthetic eye. You’re wondering whether narcissism can still find shelter in fiction. I tell you: I never claimed universality. I claimed precision. Fiction is the attempt to make the soul’s contours legible. And the contour nearest to hand was my own. To mine the self is narcissism, yes. But it is also fidelity to the only instrument one can play without faking.”

The visitor leaned forward, eyes bright. “In Rabbit, Run, you wrote: ‘Boys in gymnasiums, men in locker rooms, old men in parks. Rabbit Angstrom is a kind of phantom of all of them, a ghostly echo of their longings.’ Was Rabbit always meant to be more than one man?”

“Exactly,” Updike said, his voice suddenly taut with conviction. “He wasn’t just a man from Mount Judge; he was a vessel for the anomie I saw bubbling in the suburbs. That’s the paradox—solipsism that attempts transcendence. Rabbit’s clumsy pursuit of happiness was, in its way, the national malaise. I didn’t create him so much as observe him, as a naturalist might a specimen. He was an American species.”

The young writer pressed harder. “And in Couples? Piet reflects on his affairs, thinking, ‘Adultery is an ancient, honored pursuit, as fundamental as warfare or the hunt.’ Were you romanticizing it?”

Updike let out a dry laugh. “Romanticizing? No. I was granting it weight. We had spent decades treating infidelity as either sordid soap opera or moral lapse. I wanted to give it the dignity of an old ceremony. Piet’s line—that adultery is as fundamental as war or hunting—is his own self-justification. That’s male narcissism in action: the need to inflate even your sins into something epic. I wasn’t celebrating it; I was documenting the architecture of justification. The lies men tell themselves, dressed in grandeur. The suburban bedroom as battlefield, the marital quarrel as Iliad.”

The fire hissed, logs collapsing into red embers.

“And A&P?” the young man asked. “Critics call it the textbook example of the male gaze. Sammy sees only bodies. At the end he says, ‘I felt my stomach kind of fall as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.’ What was he losing?”

“Ah, A&P,” Updike said, shaking his head with something between affection and resignation. “Yes, it distills the gaze perfectly. Sammy was a boy, and I wrote him as a boy. He saw legs and straps and hips, nothing else. That final line—that wasn’t about the girls at all. It was about him. He realized, dimly, that life was going to be hard, that gestures of rebellion change nothing. He quit not for them but for himself. A gesture of self-absorption, yes. But also the moment he glimpsed adulthood’s hardness. Not a moral tale, but a truthful one. Literature traffics in embarrassment. Embarrassment is where truth lives.”

The young writer nodded, but his expression sharpened. “So were you complicit in patriarchy, or were you diagnosing it?”

Updike gazed into the fire, flames mirrored in his glasses. “The America of my prime was a patriarchal house. Men’s appetites were its furniture. Women became catalysts, erotic stimuli, rather than agents. Feminist critics are right to point out the lack of female interiority in much of my work. Was I complicit or diagnostic? The question dogs me. If I made male blindness beautiful in prose, did I dignify it? I hoped the irony would be visible, that readers would cringe as much as they thrilled. But subtlety is a gamble. One generation’s irony becomes the next’s sin.”

“And in The Witches of Eastwick?” the young man asked. “You gave women power. Jane, Sukie, Alexandra. One of them thinks, ‘I can turn a man to a pig with a flick of my wrist.’ Was that your reply to the critics?”

“Perhaps, in part,” Updike conceded. “I was tired of being seen only as the chronicler of male discontent. I wanted to enter another consciousness, a sororal one. The witches were my attempt to grant women the agency I had given men. That line—turning a man to a pig—was their fantasy of revenge, but also of freedom. It was wild, wicked, legitimate. I wanted to honor that. Did I succeed? Perhaps incompletely. But it was an effort. And Harold Bloom told me he liked it only because it was the only one of mine he had read. That was Bloom for you—compliment and insult in a single breath.”

The young writer flipped pages, relentless. “In Rabbit Redux, when Rabbit watches the moon landing, you wrote: ‘The light of the television seemed more real than the light in his own room.’ What did you mean?”

“That was the paradox of American life,” Updike said. “We watched men walk on the moon, a triumph of ingenuity, and yet our own lives—our marriages, our bodies—felt less real. The glow of the television outshone the lamp beside us. Rabbit felt that dislocation acutely. The moon landing should have enlarged him, but it diminished him. We were ghosts in our own homes, realities filtered through a glowing screen. I wanted to capture that precise sense of disembodied awe. And does it not feel familiar now, in your age of laptops and phones? Screens more vivid than windows?”

The young writer hesitated, then asked softly, “Why always the self? In Self-Consciousness you wrote about your stutter, your psoriasis. You said, ‘A writer is someone who has to write, to live inside a world he has to make.’ Is that why you always circled back to yourself?”

Updike’s face softened. “Yes. For me it wasn’t choice, it was compulsion. My stammer, my psoriasis—they were my apprenticeship. The small shames became my lens. I wrote, ‘A writer is someone who has to write, to live inside a world he has to make.’ My world was the one I inhabited—my own skin, my anxieties. You cannot separate the eye from what it sees. My narcissism, if you call it that, was the attempt to see as clearly as I could with the only two eyes I had. I often said writing was how I made a living that did not inflict pain on others. Perhaps it inflicted too much on myself.”

The fire had dwindled to coals, the room dusky in the winter twilight. Outside, the Ipswich marshes were turning violet under snow. The house groaned as the wind pressed against its beams.

The young writer posed one last question. “And at the end of Rabbit at Rest, you describe him as ‘a man who has lost his way, and his words, and his breath.’ Was that your fear? Of obsolescence?”

“Of course,” Updike replied softly. “Rabbit’s death was my rehearsal. The loss of words, of breath—that was my dread. His end was my imagined end. Yes, narcissism complete: my life, my anxieties, poured into him. But I hoped it was also communal—a glimpse of what it feels like to burn down to an ember. That’s what a writer does. We try to make monuments of our sputtering light.”

It was 2008, and the literary world outside this Puritan house was changing fast. Wallace would not live out the year. Autofiction was rising, bare prose shorn of ornament, the self on display without metaphor. Younger readers wanted irony stripped to confession. Updike sensed the shift, the way a man senses the ground softening beneath his shoes. His sentences, once radiant as stained glass, now looked to some like ornate furniture in an age of collapsible chairs. He knew it, and yet here he sat, defending not the verdict of critics but the practice of witness itself.

The house creaked again, the fragile beam above holding. Updike turned his gaze toward the window, where dusk had pressed its purple weight against the marsh. His voice was almost a whisper now.

“Call it narcissism if you must. I call it witness. A man at his window in a Puritan house, describing, as honestly and as beautifully as he could, what it felt like to be alive—before the beam gave way, before time snuffed the flame.”

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Essays, History, Literature, Profiles, Writers

WHERE DUENDE WAITED

Federico García Lorca’s final hours, and the dark spirit of art that outlived him.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 8, 2025

“Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.” — Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca, Spain’s great modern poet and dramatist, was arrested in Granada in August 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. A socialist sympathizer, openly gay in a society that demanded silence, he was executed by Nationalist forces near an olive grove outside the city—his body never found. To understand Lorca is to understand what he called duende: not muse or angel, but a dark, earthly spirit that seizes the artist at the edge of death and mystery, when art becomes raw, dangerous, unforgettable.

The cell in Granada was not empty. It was a proscenium—the frame of a stage that turns life into theater. The air itself was thick and swollen with a silence that was not absence but anticipation. In the chipped lime walls, in the mildew blooming in the corners where time seemed to pool, in the echo of a solitary water drop like a metronome, the playwright found his final set. He did not need the music present to hear it. He felt the remembered rhythms in the marrow of his bones: the percussive strike of a dancer’s heel, the guttural, torn-throat cry of a cantaor, the sharp clap of hands echoing from a hidden courtyard. He knew the rule—had proclaimed it in lecture halls, in smoky Madrid taverns, in the sun-drenched cafés where poets leaned on one another for breath: All that has dark sounds has duende. Now the words returned to him, not as theory to be taught but as a presence to be felt.

The cell was narrow, barely enough space for a man and the shadow that kept him company. He reached out and touched the flaking wall, the rough texture a perfect metaphor for the crumbling theater of his life. The walls almost breathed, inhaling when he leaned close, exhaling when he sat back, as though the cell rehearsed with him. He was a man poised between two worlds: the mortal body soon to be silenced, and the immortal voice that was already a part of the wind and the soil. He understood now that this was not confinement but staging. The audience—whether olive trees or posterity—was already waiting for the curtain to rise.

The shadow in the corner smiled. It was not a muse, not an angel. It was duende itself. A force that does not inspire but wounds, does not console but insists, demanding that art be fought for, clawed from the raw earth of the soul. It watched as he gathered scraps of memory into a kind of play, half-dreamed, never to be written. In the stillness, Lorca whispered, as if rehearsing the last line of a lost production: Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery. The phrase circled back to him like a prayer, or perhaps the faint echo of a stage line that had followed him across continents, from Spain’s ritualized sorrow to the improvised grief of another land.

He had tried to explain it once, in Buenos Aires, in Havana, in Montevideo. What duende really was. “Duende is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought.” He had argued that it was never a technique or a style, but a possession. It was the tremor in the throat of a flamenco singer when she reached the note that cracked her open, the wild, dangerous moment when art ceased to be polished performance and became raw survival. Irrational, earthy, diabolical, always shadowed by death—it rose from the soles of the feet, climbed through the body, and exploded in the voice. The muse inspired from above, the angel gifted charm and virtuosity, but duende had to be fought for. A hand-to-hand combat with the soul. Now, in this barren cell, the words returned to him not as an intellectual theory but as a living, breathing force. He was in hand-to-hand combat with the soul. The duende in the corner was no metaphor. It was his final companion.

Time folds in the cell, as if memory is the only escape left. The silence of the Granada night pulls him back to another kind of silence—and another kind of sound—he found in New York, 1929. He had arrived in the city of concrete canyons and jagged light, a city that felt at first like a wound, a place of “terrible cold and terrible wind.” The markets had collapsed like a poorly built stage set, but Harlem at night was ablaze with a furious, desperate life. He wandered the streets, a poet from a land of ritualized sorrow, and found a different kind of ritual here: grief made elastic, joy smuggled through rhythm.

One evening, a voice pulled him like a magnet toward a storefront church. The preacher’s voice rose in a swell, a rhythm of fire and brimstone, met by the congregation’s shouted hallelujahs. Then, a woman began to sing. Her voice was not pretty, not polished. It cracked once, twice, a sound like a stone breaking. In that imperfection, Lorca felt the earth tremble. The sound was not a gift from on high; it was a demand from below, a note that clawed at the heavens, insisting they open. He felt the same shivering, guttural ache he had once felt listening to a gypsy’s wail at dawn in Andalucía. This, he thought, leaning against a wall, was duende crossing the ocean.

Later that night, he passed a saxophonist playing alone on a corner, the music a long, moaning complaint that wove with the smoke of tenements. Lorca scribbled a line into his notebook: I want to cry because I feel like crying. The phrase embarrassed him with its simplicity, with its nakedness, but it was truer than any poetic ornament could ever be. Harlem, with its wild music and its raw grief, taught him about improvisation. Spain’s sorrow was bound in liturgy and ancient forms; Harlem’s was alive, unpredictable, a wound stitched nightly with melody and torn open again at dawn. It was a new kind of drama, a new kind of suffering that he had to absorb. Poet in New York took shape in those nights of insomnia and astonishment, a book that would not be published in his lifetime but burned with its own strange fire. He had told himself, listening to a trumpet moan across Lenox Avenue, that “at the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.”

Duende had followed him there, too, though he did not at first recognize it. A figure leaning against a lamppost, perhaps, whispering that these poems were not meant for applause but survival. And survival, it murmured, was never enough.

From Harlem, his mind leaps to the Mediterranean light of Cadaqués, to Dalí’s studio filled with the terrible precision of his art. He remembered the crisp light, the angular elegance of the artist himself, who gleamed like a blade. Dalí’s hand, so sharp and deliberate, moved across the canvas, his charcoal hissing. Lorca had seen in him a mirror, but it was a mirror that refused to reflect. Instead of recognition, there was distortion. Instead of tenderness, distance.

He remembered once watching Dalí sketch, the artist’s hand moving with an almost cruel certainty. Lorca, half-dizzy with longing, finally asked, “Do you ever paint what you feel?” Dalí looked up, eyes glinting. “Only what I fear.” He paused, as if tasting the line, before dismissing it with a laugh. But Lorca carried that sentence like a wound. It was the difference between them, the chasm he could never cross. He, Lorca, had to feel to create. Dalí chose to dissect and control his fear.

Their friendship, he now saw, had been a battleground where desire was both confessed and rejected, a drama of longing and withdrawal. To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves, he had written, but it was a punishment he had lived, a quiet, internal conflagration.

Then Emilio, the sculptor, the lover whose beauty was marble, luminous and cold. To touch him was to risk crumbling stone. Lorca’s letters to him bled with a longing that was never fully reciprocated, with the ache of a love half-returned, half-refused. He was punished not by silence, but by partial answers, by gestures that offered just enough to ignite hope and never enough to satisfy. He remembered a night when Emilio’s hand brushed his, only to withdraw instantly, as if scorched. The air between them thickened with what was almost said. Later, alone in his room, Lorca drafted a letter he never sent—an avalanche of confession, a plea for clarity. He tore it to pieces, watching the fragments scatter across the floor like plaster dust. “To love him was to sculpt fog—each gesture vanished before it could be held.”

Love became theater, a rehearsal without a performance, devotion staged in fragments. And duende was there, always there, murmuring that every passion carries its own death inside it.

The walls of the cell flicker again, and the shadow steps closer. Lorca begins to imagine the final drama of his life. Characters take their places in silence: Dalí as Narcissus, intoxicated by his own reflection; Emilio as the Fallen Angel, beautiful in defeat; Lorca himself as the Poet-Matador, blade in hand but chest exposed. Around them swirl fragments of unfinished plays, echoes of Yerma, Blood Wedding, The House of Bernarda Alba. The voices rise, then fall, like actors waiting for direction that never comes. He knows this drama will remain unwritten, but perhaps that is the point: duende does not need completion. It thrives in fracture.

“I know there is no straight road in this world. Only a giant labyrinth of intersecting crossroads.” He had once offered that to an audience as an explanation; now he feels the truth of it in his own marrow. The crossroads are here, tonight, in this cell, in the decision already made by men outside. There is no straight road to morning. Only labyrinth. And yet he feels no panic. As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die. The words come to him unbidden, an old confession that now reads like prophecy. His body will fall, yes, but his voice—he believes—will not. He has already lost himself enough times to know the pattern. I’ve often lost myself, in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake. That burn is duende itself, the strange necessity that art demands, the reminder that creation requires risk, even annihilation.

The scrape of boots on stone. The metallic jangle of keys. Then the faceless men, uniforms thick with dust and tobacco. They open the door. He stands, straightens his jacket, thinks only of rhythm. The shadow follows him out of the cell, neither friend nor foe but companion. The road winds toward Alfacar, toward olive groves that will serve as theater wings. He does not think of pleading; he thinks only of the stage. The hillside becomes a final set: the olive trees as spectators, the soil as orchestra pit, the bullets prepared as punctuation. The actors are ready, though they will not speak. Lorca breathes deeply and whispers to himself: Understand one single day fully, so you can love every night. The day has been lived; the night approaches. He does not flinch. The last thought is rhythm—the phantom beat of a dancer’s foot, the deep strum of a guitar, the palmas of invisible hands. Then, silence.

Decades later, the hillside is quiet, marked not by stone but by memory. A young poet kneels at the unmarked ground, notebook in hand. She is from Seville, her own life fractured by secrecy, by a love she cannot name except in poems. Once a dancer, now a writer, she has come because Lorca’s voice taught her that “the artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word.” She places the blank notebook on the soil, presses her palm to the earth, and whispers: “I came to listen.” The wind stirs, turning the pages as if invisible fingers riffle through them. She imagines the notebook being written not by her alone, but by the dead, by the wind, by the silence itself. She feels a pulse beneath the dirt. It is not absence. It is anticipation. Somewhere in the trees, duende shifts—not only waiting, but choosing.

Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Arts & Literature, Criticism, Essays, Literature, Philosophy, Profiles

Cervantes in the Cave — The Art of Illusion

From Lepanto to Algiers to Seville, he recast Plato’s cave: instead of fleeing, he trimmed the wick—using comedy and narrative to make honest light out of shadow.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, August 22, 2025

In a cave in Argamasilla de Alba, Spain, a man sits hunched over a manuscript. The air is damp; the light keeps deciding what to keep. He writes not with the flourish of a court poet but with the urgency of someone who has known confinement—who has lived among shadows and learned to speak their language. The man is Miguel de Cervantes. The cave, according to local legend, is where he began Don Quixote. Whether the story is true hardly matters. The image endures: Cervantes, imprisoned, wounded, obscure, writing the book that would fracture the very idea of literary realism.

He breaks the silence first, as if talking to the walls. “Engendrado en una cárcel, donde toda incomodidad tiene su asiento,” he says—begotten in a prison, where every discomfort keeps its chair. He smiles at his own choice of verb. Begotten. It gives hardship hands.

A foot scuffs the threshold. Mateo steps into the half-light, a fellow freed captive from a life the two men still carry like a watermark. He takes the cave in at a glance—the whitewash, the barred slit of window, the stone bench that knows the shape of a tired back.

“You write in the dark, Miguel,” Mateo says. “Still chasing shadows?”

“Not chasing,” Cervantes replies, without looking up. “Refracting. These shadows are more honest than the sunlit lies of court and empire.”

Plato’s prisoners mistook flicker for fact. Cervantes has no such innocence; he knows exactly what light can do and what it cannot. In Algiers he learned the cost of sunlight and the uses of a candle. “We invented stories to survive,” he says. “We imagined rescue. We became authors of unreality. And in doing so, we learned how unreality works.”

He had boarded a homeward ship in 1575 and sailed straight into a profession he did not apply for. Corsairs took the vessel. Letters of recommendation—ironically the very proof of his merit—made him valuable. Algiers swallowed him for five years. Four escape attempts, each with its choreography of bribes, whispers, and night boats, failed in turn; punishments followed with bureaucratic punctuality. In the baños he organized fellow captives, staged plays that felt like oxygen rations, and discovered a kind of command that requires neither rank nor drumrolls. The lesson was not transcendence. It was texture. Captivity did not reveal some pure, sunlit truth; it revealed illusion’s machinery: how shadows are cast, how they persuade, how they can be turned from weapon into instrument.

“So you believe captivity reveals truth?” Mateo asks.

“No,” Cervantes says. “It reveals illusion. But if you know you’re in a cave, illusion can be honest about itself.”

He speaks like a man who has balanced too many ledgers and decided to keep one for the soul. In his prologue to the Exemplary Novels he would boast with a craftsman’s pride: mías propias, no imitadas ni hurtadas—my own pieces, not imitated or stolen. After a life in which other people held the keys, authorship felt like a kind of lawful possession. He is not naïve about it; theft will come in a thousand copies. Still, he plants his flag in sentences.

Mateo lowers himself onto the bench. The cave keeps its cool.

“Begin earlier,” Mateo says softly. “Begin with the wound.”

Cervantes nods, as if paging back. “Lepanto,” he says. “Two shots to the chest, one to the hand. El mayor bien que me vino. The greatest favor that came to me.”

Mateo laughs—a short, incredulous bark. “Favor?”

“A hand is a tool,” Cervantes says, flexing his right, letting the left sleeve fall into its gentle emptiness. “So is a story. One broke and taught the other its work. I learned that honor is not trumpets; it is the bruise that stays after the sound goes.”

“What did it smell like—the battle?” Mateo asks, because some questions insist.

“Oak and salt and a fire that wandered,” Cervantes says. “The sea keeps bad accounts—always debits, never balance. We threw our bodies at its ledger and called it glory. I got a bill I could live with.”

The cave changes its mind about brightness by a single shade. Light climbs a little higher on the wall, as if memory has a temperature.

“After Algiers,” Mateo says, “you came home to paper.”

“To paper and suspicion,” Cervantes answers. “Spain wanted receipts more than epics.” He became a purchasing agent, then a tax collector—the sort of work that presses humility into a man’s pockets and takes the lint besides. A banker fell in Seville and the ground gave way beneath him. Jail happened the way weather happens. Bureaucracy, he discovered, is a prison with nicer pens.

He thumps the palm of his right hand on the bench, a quiet imitation of a ledger closing. “Always the same sum,” he says. “Loyalty plus wounds equals suspicion.”

“That arithmetic,” Mateo says, “taught you comedy.”

“It taught me instruments,” Cervantes corrects gently. “Comedy is a surgeon’s knife you can carry in public.”

He had tried other rooms. La Galatea (1585), a pastoral romance, sighs under painted trees and speaks expertly in a fashionable voice—too expertly for a man who had learned to breathe in iron. “A ceiling too low for the lungs,” he says. Failure did not embarrass him; it emancipated him. “I loved what books promised. I wrote the promise’s correction.”

“And then you choose another cave,” Mateo says, looking around.

“This time I brought the candle.” Cervantes nods at the stub trembling in its dish. “The cave is not a prison if you know you’re inside it. Fiction is not delusion if you wield it knowingly.”

“Is that freedom?” Mateo asks. “To live in fiction?”

Cervantes answers with a line he will later put in a knight’s mouth because knights carry sentences farther than taxmen do. “La libertad, Sancho, es uno de los más preciosos dones…” Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts. He lets the clause hang and then adds the counterweight: captivity is the greatest evil. “But there is a third thing,” he says. “The discipline of the wick. Not everyone reaches the sun. Many of us live by hearth-light. So make the hearth honest.”

He laughs, not kindly but not unkindly, at the memory of a barber’s basin mistaken for a helmet. “A basin can be a helmet,” he says, “if the story is honest about the trick.” The joke is not cruelty; it’s consent. Illusions that confess their wages are allowed to work.

“You sound like Plato’s least obedient pupil,” Mateo says. “He wants the prisoner out of the cave. You stay.”

“Plato had less practice with caves,” Cervantes says. “I stay and trim the wick.”

The man who stays in the cave can tell you about the cost of zeal. He knows what happens when mercy runs faster than attention: chaos dresses up as freedom. He has written a scene in which a knight frees a chain gang of galley slaves with a fine speech and a flash of temper, and the liberated—unbriefed on narrative responsibility—repay the favor with stones. “Pity without comprehension,” he says, “is a door swinging in a storm. Freedom without narrative becomes a mess that lets tyrants say, ‘You see? Chains keep order.’”

Mateo’s eyes drift toward a wooden head in the corner, painted eyes arrested mid-glance. “Master Pedro,” Cervantes says, amused at the prop the cave has supplied. He tells the story of a puppet theater, a knight who cannot bear strings, a sword that corrects an illusion into splinters. Even illusions keep accounts, he reminds Mateo. Someone pays for the pleasure. “In that scene,” he says, “I taxed zeal. I sent the bill to laughter.”

“So your book is a theater?” Mateo asks.

“A theater that shows its ropes,” Cervantes says. “A historian with a wink in his ink. A narrator who argues with me, and I with him. A false sequel enters the room, and I absorb him into the play. If illusion is a crime, let the evidence be visible. If it is a craft, let the strings show and the audience decide.”

He keeps his quotes short and to the point, letting them behave like tools rather than trophies. “Yo sé quién soy,” he says, not to boast but to set a boundary—I know who I am. “And I know what I am not. I am not the sun. I am a candle with a good memory.”

Memory is a troublesome servant. “¡Oh memoria, enemiga mortal de mi descanso!,” he mutters with theatrical exasperation—Oh memory, mortal enemy of my rest—knowing full well he cannot do without her. In the deepest fold of the book he is writing, he lowers his knight into the Cave of Montesinos and gives him a private vision no one can verify. Minutes pass in the world; days unfold in the cave. Readers will fight about that descent for centuries: lie or parable? He shrugs. The rope held. The telling is what matters.

“What about truth?” Mateo asks. “You dodge it like a matador.”

“Truth is errant,” Cervantes says. “Like my knight. It wanders, stumbles, reinvents itself. La verdad adelgaza y no quiebra—truth thins but does not break. It lives in the flicker between shadow and flame.” He aims for a truth you can sit with, not a blaze you must worship. Even now, when the cave dims or brightens by a breath, he adjusts nothing in his voice. He trusts the room to keep up.

The room has heard other versions of this life. Soldier, captive, clerk, failed author—the catalogue is accurate and useless until you give it breath. He has learned that a life of refusals and humiliations can be rearranged into a lamp. “El que lee mucho y anda mucho, ve mucho y sabe mucho,” he says with a grin—he who reads much and travels much sees much and knows much—and Mateos’s chuckle bounces off the whitewash and returns as agreement.

If the cave is a theater, it is also a workshop. He places three objects on the bench as if laying out tools: a frayed rope (failed escape; lesson kept), a ledger (bureaucracy’s Bible, now a prop for comedy), and the puppet head (illusion, demystified and retained). He sets the rope across the ledger like a sash and props the puppet against both like a child asleep between two patient adults.

“You’re staging your own life,” Mateo says.

“Everything I own appears in my books,” Cervantes answers. “Better to put them to work than let them gather dust.”

He will put even injury to work. He has already done it. “There is no book so bad that it does not have something good,” he says—No hay libro tan malo que no tenga algo bueno—and he means, among other things, his own early efforts. He tried the fashion and failed; he learned to write beyond it. The failure cleared the room.

“And the counterfeit?” Mateo asks. “The other Quixote?”

“I made room,” Cervantes says, not quite happily. He doesn’t bother to call the rival by name. “I let the counterfeit into Part II and gave him the dignity of being wrong on the page. It is the politest way to win.”

Outside, late afternoon arranges itself. Inside, the candle practices its small weather. The conversation acquires the unhurried gravity of men who have been forced to wait before and know that waiting can be made useful. They speak of the Información de Argel—the sworn testimonies that stitched a biography out of scars and courage; of the petition to the Council of the Indies that asked for four possible offices across the ocean and delivered no; of Seville’s auditoriums of suspicion where a man could do arithmetic all day and still owe.

“You turned all that into a style,” Mateo says.

“I turned it into a temperament,” Cervantes corrects. Style is the residue. The temperament is the choice: to stay in the cave and make the light adjustable; to refuse the panic of transcendence in favor of the patience of attention; to let laughter be a form of moral accounting. “I wanted a book in which the strings show,” he says. “So when someone pulls, we know who is moving what.”

He reaches for the candle with wetted fingers and trims the wick. The flame tightens, steadies, sharpens the edges of the room with a surgeon’s manners. The gesture is mundane and feels like a thesis.

“Why not flee?” Mateo asks one last time, because some questions return until answered in the body.

“Because someone must tend the flame,” Cervantes says. “Because most people live by hearth-light. Because the cave tells the truth about limits, and I prefer honest rooms to lying palaces.”

He stands, and the bench acknowledges the change with a creak that has learned both complaint and loyalty. He touches the stone with the backs of his fingers, as one does a sleeping child. The puppet keeps its round attention. The rope adopts its length. The ledger decides to be heavy again.

“Begin,” Mateo says, suddenly shy of making a ceremony of it.

“I did,” Cervantes answers, and returns to his page.

He writes the opening lines of Don Quixote as the candle throws a peninsula of light bordered by ink. A poor gentleman with a head full of books starts out into a world that will bruise him into philosophy. A squire with a sack of proverbs learns to spend them one by one, after listening. Windmills declare their innocence; a basin negotiates a new title. Dukes turn out to be children who have learned cruelty by playing. Priests explain themselves into farce. Puppets are freed to their ruin, then repaired by a writer who has learned to apologize with laughter.

Cervantes does not flee illusion; he illuminates it. He does not reject reality; he reframes it. He does not promise truth; he escorts it, errant and sturdy, through rooms with honest walls. He turns shadows into stories and stories into a way of seeing that does not blind. He has stayed where Plato urged ascension and found, by staying, a different kind of ascent: the climb of attention, the charity of proportion, the courage to let strings show and still believe in the show.

Unlike Plato’s prisoner, Cervantes remains in the cave. He writes. He refracts. He talks to the walls and to the future, and both answer. His broken hand, his captive mind, his errant knight—everything he survived and everything he invented—gathers in the small weather of a candle and becomes, against all instruction, a form of daylight.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI