Tag Archives: September 2025

Essays, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion

RELIGION, REIMAGINED

In the third-floor study of his home, in wartime Hartford, Wallace Stevens drafted his modernist poem and philosophical meditation “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction“, as a secular creed—abstract, changing, and meant to give pleasure—to stand where a worn-out faith once stood.

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 6, 2025

He never learned to drive. For decades, Wallace Stevens walked the two miles from his home on Westerly Terrace to the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company on Asylum Avenue. The walk itself became a kind of poem: a solitary procession through the stoic, brick-lined streets of a New England city, the rhythm of meter embedding itself in the movement of his body. The crunch of gravel underfoot, the feel of cold air on his face—these were the metronome that set the cadence for his thoughts. He would arrive at the office with lines already formed, phrases taking shape in the quiet hum of his stride.

But what kind of poetry emerges from a man who spends his days pricing catastrophe? During office hours, Stevens turned to policies and claims, reducing calamity to columns of numbers. He knew the language of indemnity, the actuarial calm that measured and priced chaos. Yet outside, the world was burning in ways no policy could contain. The radio spoke of Warsaw reduced to rubble, of Coventry turned to ash. What was a deductible against Dresden? What was a premium against Auschwitz? The ledger comforted, but it lied.

And when the day ended, where did he go to reconcile the irreconcilable? At night, Stevens climbed the narrow staircase to the top floor of his house, entering a space that felt half withdrawn from Hartford itself, as though it belonged more to sky than to street. Down below, trolley bells rang, dogs barked, radios crackled with war bulletins. Up here, only the radiator ticked. The air smelled of paper, tobacco, and ink. On his desk lay a folder carried home that afternoon: typed pages, the ribbon-black letters crisp and uniform. His secretary had produced them that morning, slotting them into a manila folder marked Notes. They sat now in the lamplight, more mysterious than any insurance claim, more charged than any policy.

What could a poem do in 1942? Certainly not repair the world. Yet Stevens felt imagination had to answer catastrophe with something larger than despair. Eliot had turned to Anglican certainty in Four Quartets, weaving fragments into a tapestry of faith. Admirable, yes. But Stevens could not follow him. He could not put belief in a myth while knowing it to be a myth. What remained? Only candor. Only imagination itself.

He opened the folder. The Preface came first, a modest eight lines. He whispered them into the quiet, testing their balance. They were not a commandment but a confession. The “you” of those lines was no person but the project itself: the supreme fiction, imagination’s own power to refresh. “And for what, except for you, do I feel love?” The words startled him even now, black against white, plain as a typed invoice yet trembling with a kind of vulnerable devotion. They challenged every idol: money, power, even the “extremest book of the wisest man,” perhaps Plato, perhaps the Bible, dryly possessed and hidden away in the self. No, he thought, a truly lived truth could not be static. It was a “living changingness,” an “uncertain light” that could nonetheless offer “vivid transparence,” a kind of peace. Here, typed cleanly in a bureaucratic font, was his prayer for a godless age.

But how does one begin such a prayer? He turned the page and entered the first law. Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea. The command still startled him. The ephebe: always a novice, always beginning again. Yes, to begin meant stripping away what was inherited—cathedrals thick with guilt, Phoebus in his chariot, Protestant hymns murmured in childhood pews. They no longer held. The old scaffolds collapsed into dust. The voice told him: see the sun again with ignorant eyes. Not Phoebus, not god, not myth—only the sun, bare and difficult.

And what happens when even the sun loses its name? The section closed with the line that haunted him: Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was / A name for something that never could be named. He felt the candor of it. Nietzsche’s cry without Nietzsche’s frenzy. Not a madman in a square, but a quiet verdict written at a desk. The god dead, but the sun still burning. What died was not the light, but the comfort of a name.

Could metaphor survive the death of myth? Another page: It is the celestial ennui of apartments… The phrase made him smile. Ennui of apartments, the weariness of modern rooms, pressing us back toward origins. Yet the origins themselves could be poisonous. So poisonous are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to / The truth itself, the first idea becomes / The hermit in a poet’s metaphors. Truth seduced, then withdrew. Desire was never sated; it renewed itself endlessly, only to vanish again. Schopenhauer lurked here, his vision of the world gnawed by will. Yet where Schopenhauer had seen only despair, Stevens found material for candor. Truth had to retreat into metaphor, glimpsed and lost. Desire itself was not shame but rhythm, the cycle by which imagination endured.

And if truth could be rhythm, could nonsense be revelation? He read the third section slowly: The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea… There it was—the poem’s task. Not to console, not to preach, but to refresh. To make perception vivid again. Even nonsense could do it. At night an Arabian in my room, with his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how… He laughed aloud in the quiet. Nonsense syllables as a kind of truer candor, doves chanting, seas howling hoo. Life’s nonsense pierced us with strange relation. What if absurdity was not opposed to truth but its heartbeat? What if laughter was the sharpest candor of all?

But what if even our myths were secondhand? The fourth section sobered him: The first idea was not our own. Yes. Adam in Eden, Eve with her mirror of air—they had not created anything. They had only encountered what was already there. There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began. He stared at those lines. How blunt they looked, typed like any memorandum, yet carrying the weight of cosmology. Existence preceded language. Clouds had been clouds long before anyone called them gods. We were mimics, not originators, adding our metaphors onto a world that was always other. The clouds were pedagogues, teachers by their very indifference. The air was not a mirror but a board on which we scribbled meanings. How hard it was to admit: the first idea was not ours, never ours.

And if we are not originators, what kind of hero can we be? He turned to the fifth section: The lion roars at the enraging desert… Heroic animals filled the page. Lion, elephant, bear—creatures asserting themselves against emptiness. But then came the turn, the line that caught him like a mirror: But you, ephebe, look from your attic window… Yes, the attic window was his own. Not desert roars but a man clutching his pillow, writhing with dumb violence, cowed by rooftops. The modern hero was not lion or elephant but the solitary human in his narrow room. Yet perhaps this was truer heroism: to lash lions, to teach bears, to turn raw force into candor. Heroism now belonged to ordinaries, to those who endured the attic’s silence.

And what does the eye see when it learns to unsee? He lingered over the sixth section: Not to be realized because not to be seen… The weather itself became abstraction. Franz Hals brushed in clouds, winds moving in strokes. It must be visible or invisible, / Invisible or visible or both: / A seeing and unseeing in the eye. He felt the paradox, the resonance of Zen: to see was also to unsee, to let go in order to glimpse. Truth flashed, vanished, reappeared. Forsythia yellow, northern blue—beauty glimmered, then was gone. Yes, he thought, Okakura Kakuzō was right: truth glimpsed was truer than truth claimed.

But could architecture hold what abstraction revealed? Truth happened not in argument but in rhythm, in breath, in the gait of a body moving. Perhaps there are moments of awakening… Yes, truth came not as achievement but as gift. A balance stumbled into, two people falling into love, a cock announcing absurd perfection. Philosophy as choreography. Doctrine as breath. The eighth section brought architecture: Can we compose a castle-fortress-home, / Even with the help of Viollet-le-Duc…? He thought of Gothic cathedrals restored to an imagined perfection, never as they had been, always as they might have been. That was his work too—not theology restored, but poetic structure remade. The first idea is an imagined thing. Even MacCullough, reading by the sea, might at last hear the waves say what language had always stammered. Logos was only language. And yet language could awaken, could suddenly ease into saying what it had labored to speak.

But what if language, once awakened, began to preach? In the ninth section he heard a warning: The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance… Apotheosis was a danger. Romantic grandeur could seduce but not sustain. He is and may be but oh! he is, he is… He smiled at the heat in that line even as he resisted its drift toward sanctity. The figure must remain human, a foundling of the infected past, bright and ordinary, precious for the touch that wakes him and the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind. Better to keep him close to candor than to crown him with vision. Give him no names. Dismiss him from your images. Let him be felt in the heart, not embalmed in the eye.

And what, at last, could stand in place of the gods? The tenth section steadied him: The major abstraction is the idea of man / and major man is its exponent. Not a divine figure, not a hero in bronze, but the ordinary walker at the edge of town, trousers sagging, coat worn thin. He could almost see him in Hartford’s dim streets. Cloudless the morning. It is he. The man / In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons… It was of him, he read again, “to make, to confect / The final elegance, not to console / Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.” No incense, no altar—only candor. The poem would not save; it would say. And in saying plainly, it would give back a kind of dignity to the commonal, to the difficult visage of the everyday.

The attic grew darker. The lamp made a circle of light over the typed sheets. The radiator hissed steadily. From this high room, Stevens whispered the creed that would govern the work to come: It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure. Three laws, enough for a new religion. Not revelation but ethic. Not theology but candor.

He stacked the pages neatly, slid them back into their folder. Tomorrow his secretary would type more, never guessing she was transcribing scripture for an age without gods. The notebook felt less like a book than a reliquary—a vessel for the sacred ordinary. He had reviewed the first law, It Must Be Abstract. Tomorrow—or another night—he would face the second: It Must Change. The world would move; the poem must move with it.

He closed the folder. The command still echoed, inexhaustible: Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea. And so he would. Again.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Arts & Literature, Essays, Literature, Poetry

LIFE, COMPOSED OF NOWS

Emily Dickinson, Zhuangzi, and the art of leaving the self unfinished

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 5, 2025

The village is still asleep. The moon, a chipped and patient sickle, hangs low over the trees. You feel the cold in your fingertips as you raise the old metal lantern, its flame a solitary heart beating against the glass. You are not on a street in Amherst, of course, but the quiet—the palpable, pre-dawn quiet—feels the same. And it is here, in this hush, that a question, ancient and unnerving, begins to follow you like your own shadow: where is the self, and what does it mean to find it? Emily Dickinson asked it before you, though she rarely left her Amherst room. She held her lanterns in the form of poems, brief and blazing. She never promised answers, only the strangeness of the search.

You begin in secrecy, because secrecy is her element. “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – too?” she whispers to you, conspiratorial. You feel the relief of it — to be Nobody is to escape the demand of being Somebody, of putting on the uniform that the world presses upon you. She invites you into her society of Nobodies, the ones who slip definitions, who resist enclosure. To be Nobody, she suggests, is not emptiness but freedom.

Her room was small but immense. A narrow writing desk beneath the window, where sheets of paper lay scattered like new snow on the dark wood. Ink darkened the edge of her thumb, a tiny bruise of discipline. Beyond the window stretched the orchard, where in spring the blossoms flared white and the bees hummed. On the table beside her were her companions: Shakespeare’s folio with its ragged spine, Wordsworth’s meditations worn soft from handling, Emerson’s essays marked by penciled lines, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verses folded into her own books, George Eliot’s novels left open at scenes of moral entanglement.

These were not simply books; they were neighbors, interlocutors, voices she returned to daily. Amherst might have seemed provincial to others, but to Dickinson it was circumference enough: a stage large enough for Shakespeare’s disguises, for Wordsworth’s clouds, for Emerson’s transcendence, for Barrett Browning’s ardor, for Eliot’s fractured heroines. The room itself became a parliament of selves.

Shakespeare was her “Kinsman of the Shelf.” He showed her — and now shows you — how masks both reveal and conceal. Hamlet’s hesitations, Viola’s disguises, Lear’s undoing of self: these are not dramas on a stage but lessons for your own becoming. Hamlet confessed, “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.” Dickinson seizes the line, turning it into proof that the mind is immeasurable, that confinement is no barrier to infinity. Shakespeare reminds you that the self is always a performance, and Dickinson presses the point: why pretend the performance ends when the curtain falls?

You follow her into Wordsworth’s solitude. He wandered lonely as a cloud; she among corridors. His belief was that memory could bind the self into unity, that recollection could weave a continuous thread across time. But she never trusted unity. “Forever is composed of nows,” she tells you. The line falls sharp. Each moment breaks from the last. The self is not stitched across years but scattered, provisional, as fragile as dew on grass. Wordsworth offers you continuity; Dickinson offers you fragments. Which feels truer in your own bones?

She leads you toward Emerson next. He believed the soul was porous, connected with nature, radiant with divinity. She nods. “The soul should always stand ajar,” she confides. Ajar, never shut. You realize that for her, as for Emerson, the self is not an essence to guard but a threshold to keep open. She urges you to feel the draft, to allow uncertainty to pass through you, to leave the latch unfastened. Emerson would call it “self-reliance”; she calls it slant openness, an interior door that refuses to close.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning gives you another lesson. She wrote from the margins but spoke to the center, with an intensity Dickinson admired and absorbed. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways—” but Dickinson is wary of counting. Love and self both resist enumeration. From Browning she learns that vulnerability need not weaken authority; it can sharpen it. To be obscure, unseen, or marginal is not to be powerless. Sometimes it is the condition of the truest voice.

And then George Eliot. Dickinson asks you to imagine Dorothea or Maggie — characters entangled in duty, yearning, and transformation. Eliot’s realism feels psychological, but it points beyond itself: the self is not whole but splintered. Dickinson makes you see that your own splintering is not failure but form. “I am out with lanterns,” she repeats, and you know she means that the search is endless, the light always partial.

Yet still the question: what if the self cannot be found? Here she startles you with an echo from far away, across centuries and continents: Zhuangzi. She never read him, could not have, but she might have been his twin in thought. He dreamed he was a butterfly and then wondered if he was a man dreaming a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming a man. He laughed at the impossibility of deciding. Dickinson smiles slantwise and tells you: “Not knowing when the dawn will come / I open every door.” The butterfly, the door — both insist on openness, on the refusal to foreclose.

And now, as you stand in her parlor of words, you hear it — a dialogue across time.

Dickinson: I am Nobody. Yet they wish to make me Somebody. What is safer: to vanish, or to accept their gaze?
Zhuangzi: Once there was a great tree, twisted and useless. The carpenters passed it by, for it could not be carved into planks. Because it was useless, it lived. Be useless, and you will be free.

Dickinson: Then to be Nobody is to be spared the axe? But tell me, is not even Nobody still a name, a disguise of another sort?
Zhuangzi: The butterfly does not ask if it is a man. The man does not ask if he is a butterfly. Who names them? Who cares?

Dickinson: And yet I write letters to the World — “That never wrote to Me –.” What am I, if no answer comes? Is identity only formed in reply?
Zhuangzi: A bell stands silent until struck. But its silence is still its music. Do not wait for the world to strike you; your sound is already within.

Dickinson: You tempt me toward silence. Yet my discipline is not silence but poems. Shakespeare speaks in soliloquies, Wordsworth in recollections, Emerson in sermons. I speak in fragments, dashes. Is fragmentation a way of freedom, or only proof that I fail to hold myself together?
Zhuangzi: The fish trap exists to catch the fish. When the fish is caught, forget the trap. Words exist to catch meaning. When the meaning is caught, forget the words. Why should your dashes not be your freedom?

Dickinson: And contradiction? “Do I contradict myself?” Whitman booms across the meadow. “Very well then I contradict myself.” I too contradict, though softly. “Forever is composed of nows.” Each now undoes the last. Is contradiction a crime?
Zhuangzi: The Way is crooked. Straightness is an illusion. Contradiction is the only truth.

Dickinson: Then I need not bind the self with thread. I may let it splinter. Yet I ask again: is there a self at all? Emerson insists it is divine. George Eliot sketches it in moral struggle. Elizabeth Barrett Browning pours it into love. What say you?
Zhuangzi: The self is like the reflection in water. Touch it, and it ripples. Chase it, and it vanishes. Sit quietly, and it returns of its own accord.

Dickinson: Then perhaps my lantern is foolish. To be “out with lanterns, looking for myself” — am I lighting only shadows?
Zhuangzi: Light or shadow, both are passing. The lantern is not to find the self, but to remind you that the dark is endless.

Dickinson: Then let us agree — the self is not to be found but to be left ajar, like the door. Yet how shall the poem live, if it refuses to close?
Zhuangzi: The cicada sings and dies. Its song does not last, yet summer is filled with it. Your fragments are cicadas. Do not grieve their brevity; rejoice their season.

You step back, startled by the ease with which their voices intertwine. Dickinson with her dashes, Zhuangzi with his parables, both circling the same question from opposite corners of the world. She insists that “The soul should always stand ajar”; he insists that the consummate person has no self. She opens every door; he dreams every dream. Both resist the foreclosure of identity.

But Dickinson feels the ache of her unanswered letters. You sense it in the quiver of her lines: the longing for reply, for recognition. “This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me –.” For Zhuangzi, the silence is natural, even welcome — the useless tree lives precisely because it receives no attention. For her, the silence is double-edged: both protection and wound. And yet perhaps her unanswered letter is itself a butterfly dream — written, released, never knowing if it lands. What she sought was not a reply but the freedom of sending. To write without guarantee is to live ajar.

You picture Dickinson again in her Amherst room. The parlor is quiet, but her books lie open like other selves she tried on: Shakespeare, with his disguises; Wordsworth, with his recollections; Emerson, with his transcendental openness; Browning, with her fierce intimacy; Eliot, with her moral fractures. They were her chorus, the voices she carried in her narrow chamber. She argued with them, borrowed from them, contradicted them, as she now contradicts Zhuangzi. Her soul was never empty, only ajar.

She asks you now to imagine the butterfly hovering at her window, wings trembling in a New England dusk. She does not know whether she is woman or butterfly, Nobody or Somebody, poet or recluse. But she does know this: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” And truth — like the self — can only be glimpsed in slant light, never seized in full.

The lantern in your hand trembles, and she smiles. “Not knowing when the dawn will come,” she repeats, “I open every door.” You realize now that the dawn is not the goal; the opening is. The self is not the prize; the refusal to close is. She never read Zhuangzi, but she lived as if his butterfly had hovered at her window.

And so the essay of her life remains unfinished, because it cannot be concluded. Like the butterfly, she slips out of the net, leaving you only with the shimmer of wings. Her identity is not a truth to be nailed down but a truth to be lived ajar. Forever, she reminds you, is composed of nows.

And what of you? To walk with her is to feel the temptation to fix yourself: to declare, to brand, to belong. But Dickinson leans close and whispers otherwise. Do not be Somebody. Do not close the soul. Do not chase coherence. To be Nobody is not despair but possibility. To keep the lantern lit is not to find but to seek. Your task is not to seize identity but to hold the door ajar, to live in fragments, to write letters without reply, to be both butterfly and man, woman and dream, Nobody and all.

You stand at her threshold, lantern in hand, and you hear her question ripple across time, through Zhuangzi’s laughter and her own slant whispers: Who are you? Nobody? Somebody? Both? Neither? Perhaps the self is not meant to be found at all. Perhaps it is meant only to flicker, like a butterfly’s wings in dream, or like a soul forever leaning toward the open door.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Aging, Essays, Health, Psychology, Society

THE CURIOSITY CURE

From Darwin’s worms to Turner’s sunsets, why wonder may be the last great art of growing old.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 4, 2025

The rehearsal for memory begins with a question. Where on earth do trees grow with square trunks? It sounds like a riddle from a child’s notebook or a surrealist painting. And it is the question that opened a recent episode of The Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast. The scientists on the program did not answer right away. They made us wait. And that pause, that stretch of uncertainty, is the secret heart of curiosity—the ache that sharpens the mind. To age well, perhaps, is not to gather the answers, but to continue cultivating that ache.

Consider the way a child treats the world. A blurred photograph, a half-said phrase, a dinosaur’s unpronounceable name—all of these are invitations to wonder. Researchers like Dr. Matthias Gruber and Dr. Mary Watley have made a career out of studying that impulse, and what they’ve found is both simple and astonishing. Curiosity—when we let it run its course—lights up the reward circuits of the brain. The hippocampus stirs awake. Memory forms like clay pressed to the mold of desire. The moment of anticipation, the leaning forward in one’s chair before the answer drops—that is where learning becomes not a duty but a joy.

It sounds obvious in theory, yet how often do we short-circuit it? A conversation stalls on a forgotten film title and within seconds a phone flashes the answer. We no longer linger in the sweet spot where knowledge is almost, but not quite, in reach. We save ourselves from the discomfort of not knowing, and in the process, we cheat ourselves of the neurological reward. As Jordan Litman writes in The Curiosity Effect, “we rob ourselves of the very thing that makes knowledge memorable when we outsource every answer to a device.” One study found that people would rather sit with a question, guessing and fumbling, than have the answer immediately revealed. The waiting was the pleasure. In a culture allergic to delay, what are we losing by satisfying every flicker of curiosity instantly?

The story deepens when curiosity is followed across a lifespan. As children, we are indiscriminate: we want to touch, taste, and know everything. By the time we hit our forties, something constricts. The world presses in—mortgages, children, aging parents, bosses, and deadlines—and curiosity, broad and restless, shrinks to a pinhole. This is the curious paradox: we are at our least curious precisely when we are most in need of escape. In middle age, to wonder feels like a luxury. Yet in the later decades, curiosity resurges, not in breadth but in depth. Watley and colleagues, in their 2025 study Curiosity Across the Adult Lifespan, found that while trait curiosity—the stable appetite for knowledge—declines with age, state curiosity, or situational bursts of interest, actually increases in older adults. “We are not less curious with age,” they write, “but differently curious.”

The arc of curiosity across life resembles a river: wide at the source, narrowed by the rocks of midlife, widening again as it approaches the sea. Sakaki, Yagi, and Murayama argue in Curiosity in Old Age: A Possible Key to Achieving Adaptive Aging that this narrowing and widening reflects the brain’s flexibility itself: “Curiosity serves as a dynamic coping resource, allowing older adults to adapt cognitively and emotionally to the challenges of aging.” To age with curiosity is not simply to preserve information, but to practice resilience.

Wallace Stevens sensed this:

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful…

Aging, in his vision, is not decline but the condition of wonder itself. We perceive beauty because we know it vanishes. Curiosity, then, is a metaphysical defiance, a way of leaning into what slips away. Wallace Stevens also reminds us:

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

For the aging mind, curiosity is the metaphorical escape hatch, a refusal to let life calcify into cliché.

Why does it matter? Because curiosity, more than any supplement or crossword puzzle, appears to be a quiet ally against cognitive decline. Those who sustain trait curiosity—the broad hunger for new things—show stronger “cognitive reserve,” the brain’s ability to withstand the slow bruises of age. As Gene Cohen put it in The Aging Brain, “curiosity is not a byproduct of youth; it is a neuroprotective force, a way the brain rehearses its own adaptability.” Cohen’s case studies tell of octogenarians who take up painting, learn Mandarin, or dive into family genealogy not for professional gain, but for sheer, stubborn delight. Their curiosity does not erase aging; it rewrites its script.

Charles Darwin understood this in his final decades. Long after the voyage of the Beagle and the storm of On the Origin of Species, he retreated to Down House, weakened by chronic illness yet still possessed by restlessness. His notebooks from his seventies reveal obsessions not with grand evolutionary arcs but with the behavior of earthworms, how they swallowed soil, turned fields, altered the landscape. Many mocked these studies as trivial. Darwin did not. To him, worms were a final frontier, a slow curiosity about the smallest architects of the earth. He dug into soil and into age itself, confirming what Paul Celan would later crystallize in poetry:

There was earth inside them, and they dug.

Darwin’s late life curiosity was not about conquest but about humility, the patience to follow small questions wherever they led.

So too with Michelangelo, whose last sculptures—the unfinished Rondanini Pietà—show the great master chipping away at marble almost until the day he died at eighty-eight. Gone were the muscular certainties of his youth. What remained was a restless, trembling exploration of form dissolving into spirit. Figures blur, limbs elongate, stone seems to sigh. This was curiosity turned inward, the artist asking: what remains when mastery fades? It was less triumph than question—curiosity as chiseling into mystery itself.

And then J.M.W. Turner, nearly blind, staggering into the London fog of his late years. His paintings in the 1840s dissolve into storms of light and color—Rain, Steam and Speed, the Sea Battles, his almost abstract sunsets. Critics scoffed that he had lost his way. But Turner’s late canvases were curiosity made incandescent: a refusal to paint what he had already mastered, a hunger to see how light itself might undo form.

Turner’s brushstrokes became metaphors for perception itself, daring us to see the world not as fact but as possibility.

But curiosity does more than keep the brain agile—it preserves identity. In their research on learning among older adults, Kim and Merriam discovered that curiosity is inseparable from purpose. “Older learners do not learn to pass time,” they note. “They learn to affirm who they are becoming.” Susan Krauss Whitbourne echoes this in Curiosity and the Aging Self: “Curiosity allows older adults to stitch together continuity and change, to make meaning of both what has been and what is still possible.” To be curious in later life is to declare: I am not finished. Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, insists:

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

Curiosity in age is not nostalgia but preparation—the invisible pressing inward, asking us still to change. Or, in his famous imperative:

You must change your life.

Of course, the dark side cannot be ignored. Curiosity lures us not only toward symphonies and languages but toward car crashes and scams. Morbid curiosity is what slows traffic by the wreck. Online, it is the bait behind headlines—You won’t believe what happens next—that seduces us into click after click. For older adults, whose craving for resolution may make them less discerning, curiosity can become a liability, leaving them vulnerable to fraud and misinformation. As the Innovative Aging time-sampling study revealed, curiosity in older adults fluctuates with anxiety: high levels of uncertainty can sharpen curiosity, but they can also corrode judgment. “The desire to resolve tension,” the study concludes, “can make older adults more vulnerable to accepting simple but false answers.”

Still, to dismiss curiosity for its risks would be to dismiss fire for its burns. The great artists and thinkers carried it as both burden and gift. Goethe, scribbling in his eighties, remained restless as a student. Toni Morrison published novels when most of her peers were content with memory alone. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim Museum at ninety. Their curiosity was not a refusal to age, but a way of ageing differently—turning each year into another aperture rather than another wall. T.S. Eliot gave it a timeless formulation:

Old men ought to be explorers.

And in his final Quartet:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Curiosity does not deny mortality; it loops us back to origins, reframed by age.

Paul Celan’s fractured lyricism captures the moral weight of this work:

Speak, you too, speak as the last, have your say.

In old age, curiosity is no longer optional—it is the last duty, to remain open, to refuse silence.

One elderly woman, at ninety-one, could often be found hunched at her kitchen table, teaching herself Spanish verbs from a battered paperback workbook. She would never travel to Madrid or Mexico City. She was not chasing utility. She wanted the taste of a new language in her mouth, the satisfaction of puzzle and pattern. When she forgot the word for door in English, she would still smile at having remembered puerta. Her curiosity was not a guard against ageing; it was ageing done with grace. Her curiosity, like what Sakaki and Murayama call a “proxy for adaptive aging,” became her measure of resilience, even in decline.

Curiosity is also spiritual hunger. John Donne, caught in his paradoxes, reminds us:

Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.

To age without curiosity is to dwell in the jail of repetition; to age with it is to build palaces of interior richness. And in the Holy Sonnets, he whispers across centuries:

When thou hast done, thou hast not done, for I have more.

Curiosity ensures that even at the edge of life, there is always more.

So is curiosity the key to ageing well? The podcast hedged. Scientists prefer caution. Yet what their data suggested was less a key than a posture, a way of leaning into the world. Curiosity keeps us not young, but alive to the present. It prevents the slide into cynicism, the sense that we already know what the day will bring. To be curious is to keep finding the world strange and therefore worth waking up to. Or as Whitbourne writes, “Curiosity is the stubborn insistence that the story isn’t over yet.” Stevens, Eliot, Rilke, Donne, Celan—they all converged on the same truth: curiosity in age is not ornament but essence.

The riddle that opened the podcast lingered across the episode like a withheld gift. Where do trees grow with square trunks? Not here, not in the daily landscape we take for granted. They grow in Panama’s Anton’s Valley, a reminder that the world still offers unlikely geometries if we are willing to ask. Perhaps that is the true answer: curiosity does not smooth the years or extend the clock. It gives us square trees in a round world, a glimpse of wonder tucked inside the ordinary. And maybe that glimpse is enough.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Artificial Intelligence, Essays, Literature, Performing Arts, Theater

THE GHOST IN THE SYNTAX

Why Shakespeare’s lines demand intention, not imitation—and why machines can only echo sound.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 3, 2025

The rehearsal room was cold enough that the young actor’s breath lingered in the air. He stood on the stage with a copy of Macbeth, its pages soft from use, and whispered the line under his breath before daring it aloud: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. The words fell flat the first time. Too rehearsed. Too conscious. He shook his head, tried again, letting the syllables drag as if they themselves were weary from carrying time. Creeps in this petty pace from day to day… The repetition was not just fatalism; it was the sound of a man unraveling, his will eroded by grief and futility. The rhythm itself had to ache.

A machine could, of course, manage the cadence. A program could be tuned to repeat the word “tomorrow” with perfect solemnity, to stretch the vowels just so. Google’s WaveNet system can produce uncanny variations of stress, hesitation, even sighs—digital sighs—at precisely calculated intervals. DeepMind’s recent work on “expressive TTS” allows a line to be rendered in tones of grief, anger, joy, or boredom. There are demo reels online where Shakespeare is fed through these systems, and the result is surprisingly competent. But competency is not intention. What the young actor does—searching for futility in his own chest, summoning weariness from his own private reservoir—cannot be coded. Intent is not in the sound of the line; it’s in the act of dying a little as you speak it.

This is what Shakespeare demands, again and again: not just language, but will. His characters live on the knife-edge of consequence, their words pressed out by motive. Romeo, stumbling over Tybalt’s body, gasps, O, I am fortune’s fool! He has just killed his wife’s cousin, wrecked his future, and tasted blood he never meant to spill. It isn’t just regret—it’s horror, the shock of realizing you’ve become the villain in your own love story. No algorithm can know the sting of unintended consequence. An AI might shout the words, might even deliver them with trembling emphasis, but the cry comes from a boy watching his own destiny collapse. The line does not live without that recognition.

The experiment has been tried. In 2022, an AI-generated voice performed Romeo’s balcony scene at a conference in Vienna. Listeners were impressed—some even moved. But when the line O, I am fortune’s fool! rang out, the room chuckled. It wasn’t just that the intonation was slightly off; it was that the cry lacked stakes. It was Romeo without a pulse, Romeo without a body to bear the guilt. The line did not fall short technically—it fell short existentially.

Hamlet’s soliloquies are the most treacherous test. In Act II he marvels and recoils at the same time: What a piece of work is man… How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. It sounds like admiration, but it isn’t pure. The words turn over themselves—what ought to inspire awe instead curdles into disgust. He sees hypocrisy in every supposed nobility, futility in every faculty. An actor must carry the irony in his voice, lacing admiration with loathing, as though the words taste bitter even as they sound grand. An AI might deliver a clean, almost clinical balance—“admiration” followed by “disgust”—like toggling sliders on a mixing board. But irony is not a switch. It’s a wound dressed in velvet.

When DeepMind released an expressive model that could generate “sarcasm,” the tech press hailed it as proof that machines could finally do subtlety. Yet what we heard was not a fractured human voice, but a pristine and empty performance. The algorithm delivered a raised-eyebrow cadence, the verbal equivalent of a painted-on smile—a gesture without the impulse to conceal. This is the core of the paradox: sarcasm and irony are built on a bedrock of paradox—they require a speaker to mean two things at once, to hold a contradictory feeling in their voice and body. A computer cannot hold a contradiction. It can only cycle between two different outputs. It cannot fracture its own will; it can only mask its lack of will with a calculated pose. It’s a perfect pantomime of motive, but it is not the thing itself.

John Barton, co-founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, once said that “Shakespeare is inexhaustible because he leaves space for the actor’s choice. Every pause, every stress opens a door.” The line is telling: it is choice that keeps the plays alive, not just rhythm. Machines can render a pause, but they cannot choose it. They have no sense of opening a door.

Brook went further. In The Empty Space, he wrote: “A word, a movement, a gesture is empty until it is filled with the life of the actor who chooses it in the moment. That life cannot be faked.” Brook believed theatre was only alive because of its fragility—the possibility of collapse at any instant. An AI-generated Lear might roar flawlessly through every line, but the roar would lack the pulse of possible failure. For Brook, this pulse was theatre itself.

The question of intention extends far beyond Shakespeare. What of a writer like Samuel Beckett, whose characters mutter their way through a landscape of despair? Molloy, in his absurdist journey, seems driven by nothing but habit. Yet even his rambling, fragmented speech is an act of will. He confesses, he tries to make sense, he fails. The very act of muttering is a defiant choice against silence and nonexistence. The words tumble out of him not because of a calculation of probability, but because he is compelled by the fundamental, human need to bear witness to his own suffering. He wants to be heard, even if he doesn’t know why. The machine, by contrast, cannot be propelled by such need; it does not hunger or fear silence.

Borges provides another mirror. In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” he imagines a modern writer who painstakingly rewrites Don Quixote word for word—identical to Cervantes, yet different in meaning because of intention. The same words in a different century become charged with irony. Borges understood that words are never just words; they are vessels for will, for history, for desire. An AI could reproduce Shakespeare endlessly, but reproduction is not creation. The ghost of intent makes the difference.

Shakespeare writes as if to test whether a human voice can hold the charge of intention. Lear’s roar against the storm is the most elemental: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! It is not just noise; it is betrayal breaking loose. A father disowned, a king humiliated, Lear rages not only at the storm but at the cosmos for his madness and grief. It is a voice already fractured, demanding nature itself collapse. A machine can roar, yes. It can pump bass through speakers, crack like thunder. But it cannot bleed. To speak Lear’s line without the tremor of betrayal is to strip it bare of meaning.

The theater knows this well. In 2019, the Royal Shakespeare Company tested an AI-generated “co-performer” in an experimental production. The system generated lines in response to actors’ improvisations, its voice projected from a disembodied orb above the stage. The critics were fascinated, but they noted the same flaw: the AI could surprise, but it could not intend. The actors on stage carried the burden of consequence; the machine was a clever ghost.

Harold Bloom once wrote that Shakespeare “invented the human as we know it.” What he meant was not that Shakespeare created humanity, but that he revealed in language the contradictions, desires, and paradoxes that shape us. Bloom’s point makes the AI test more daunting: if Shakespeare gave us the map of interiority, then any performance that lacks interiority—any performance without stakes—is not merely deficient, but disqualified.

And then there is Portia, standing in the court of The Merchant of Venice, her voice softening into moral persuasion: The quality of mercy is not strained… It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. Here intent is everything. Portia is not just lawyering; she is pleading with the very idea of justice, urging her audience to see mercy as divine, inexhaustible. Her belief must be palpable. A machine could roll the syllables like pearls, but eloquence without conviction is nothing but polish. What gives the line its power is the speaker’s faith that mercy belongs to the order of heaven. Without that belief, it’s rhetoric without heart.

Here the cultural anecdote is darker: in 2021, an AI-generated voice was used in a court training exercise to deliver witness testimony. The experiment was intended to test jurors’ susceptibility to persuasion by machine voices. The results were mixed: some jurors reported being swayed, others reported discomfort. What unsettled them was not the quality of the performance but the absence of belief behind it. To be persuaded by words without will felt like manipulation, not argument. One legal scholar described the prospect as “trial by ventriloquism”—justice bent not by human persuasion, but by hollow eloquence.

The ghost in the syntax grows clearest here. Machines can offer us form—eloquence, cadence, even dramatic surprise. What they cannot provide is risk. An actor saying The quality of mercy risks hypocrisy if he fails to embody belief. The line costs him something. A machine, by contrast, cannot fail. Every performance is safe, repeatable, consequence-free. And it is precisely consequence that makes Shakespeare’s words ache.

The paradox is that we, as listeners, are complicit. We project intention onto anything that speaks. We hear a chatbot offer sympathy, and we feel soothed. We hear an AI-generated sonnet, and we marvel at its poignancy. We want to find meaning. We bring the ghost with us. The ELIZA effect—named for one of the earliest chatbots—was discovered in the 1960s: people poured out their souls to a crude program that only echoed their words back. If we can believe that, we can certainly believe in an AI Lear. But the belief is ours, not the machine’s.

Could AI ever cross the threshold? Some technologists argue that with enough layers, enough feedback loops, emergent properties might arise that resemble motive. Perhaps one day a synthetic voice will “choose” to pause differently, to inflect a line with bitterness not because a human trained it so, but because its internal processes made that choice inevitable. If so, would that be intent—or the perfect illusion of intent? The philosophers divide: John Searle insists that no simulation, however perfect, ever achieves the thing itself; Daniel Dennett argues that if behavior is indistinguishable from intent, the distinction may not matter. The stage, however, resists the reduction. A pause can be “indistinguishable” only if we do not ask what it costs the speaker to pause.

The Royal Shakespeare Company, now experimenting with immersive technologies, has been clear-eyed about the limits. Sarah Ellis, their director of digital development, called the company’s work with Intel’s motion capture in The Tempest “21st-century puppetry.” She explained: “The actor is always driving the performance. The technology amplifies, but it cannot replace.” The line could have been written as a manifesto for the AI age: amplification without intention is echo, not expression.

Back in the rehearsal room, the young actor stumbles. His voice cracks slightly on a word, a small imperfection that carries more meaning than a perfect rendition ever could. The director, sitting at the edge of the stage, leans forward, attentive. The line is not flawless, but it is alive. The risk of failure is what makes the moment vibrate.

A machine could reproduce the monologue flawlessly. It could echo a thousand performances until the averages smoothed every edge. But what it could never offer is that tremor. The possibility of failure. The risk that gives intention its bite. For intention is always wager, always consequence, always stake. Without it, words are only words, no matter how well they trip on the tongue.

And that is Shakespeare’s test. Could AI ever deliver his lines with intent? Not unless it learns to bleed, to risk, to believe. Until then, it will remain what it is: syntax without a ghost. We may listen, we may marvel, we may even project a soul into the sound. But when the storm clears, when Romeo cries out, when Portia pleads, it will not be the machine we hear. It will be ourselves, searching for meaning where none was meant.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Arts & Literature, Entertainment, Essays, Opinion, Reviews, Society

HOW COMEDY KILLED SATIRE

The weapon that wounded kings and emperors is now just another punchline between commercials.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 1, 2025

In the long arc of literary history, satire has served as a weapon—precise, ironic, and often lethal. It was the art of elegant subversion, wielded by writers who understood that ridicule could wound more deeply than rhetoric. From the comic stages of Athens to the viral feed of TikTok, satire has always been a mirror turned against power. But mirrors can be polished, fogged, or stolen. Today, satire has been absorbed into the voracious machinery of entertainment. Its sting has dulled. Its ambiguity has been flattened. It no longer provokes—it performs.

But what did it once mean to laugh dangerously? In Athens, 423 BCE, Aristophanes staged The Clouds. Socrates appeared not as a revered philosopher but as a dangling charlatan in a basket, teaching young Athenians to twist language until truth dissolved. The joke was more than a joke. It ridiculed sophistry, intellectual fads, and the erosion of civic virtue. The audience laughed, but the laughter was perilous—Socrates himself would later be tried and executed for corrupting the youth. To laugh was to risk.

Two centuries later, in Rome, Juvenal sharpened satire into civic indictment. His Satires accused senators of corruption, women of decadence, and citizens of surrendering their dignity for “bread and circuses.” The phrase endures because it captured a political truth: distraction is the oldest tool of power. Juvenal’s lines were barbed enough to threaten exile. Was he clown or conscience? In truth, he was both, armed with venom.

What happens when laughter moves from the tavern into the church? During the Renaissance, Erasmus wrote The Praise of Folly, putting words of critique into the mouth of Folly herself. Popes, princes, pedants—all were skewered by irony. Erasmus knew that Folly could say what he could not, in an age when heresy trials ended in fire. Is irony a shield, or a sword? François Rabelais answered with giants. His sprawling Gargantua and Pantagruel gorged on food, sex, and grotesque humor, mocking scholasticism and clerical hypocrisy. Laughter here was not polite—it was unruly, earthy, subversive. The Church censored, readers copied, the satire lived on.

And what of Machiavelli? Was The Prince a straight-faced manual for power, or a sly parody exposing its ruthlessness? “Better to be feared than loved” reads as either strategy or indictment. If satire is a mirror, what does it mean when the mirror shows only cold pragmatism? Perhaps the ambiguity itself was the satire.

By the seventeenth century, satire had found its most enduring disguise: the novel. Cervantes’s Don Quixote parodied the exhausted chivalric romances of Spain, sending his deluded knight tilting at windmills. Is this comedy of madness, or a lament for a lost moral world? Cervantes left the reader suspended between mockery and mourning. A century later, Alexander Pope wrote The Rape of the Lock, transforming a petty quarrel over a stolen lock of hair into an epic drama. Why inflate the trivial to Homeric scale? Because by exaggerating, Pope revealed the emptiness of aristocratic vanity, exposing its fragility through rhyme.

Then came the most grotesque satire of all: Swift’s A Modest Proposal. What kind of society forces a writer to suggest, with impeccable deadpan, that poor families sell their children as food? The horror was the point. By treating human suffering in the cold language of economics, Swift forced readers to recognize their own monstrous indifference. Do we still have the stomach for satire that makes us gag?

Voltaire certainly thought so. In Candide (1759), he set his naïve hero wandering through war, earthquake, and colonial exploitation, each scene puncturing the optimistic doctrine that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Candide repeats the phrase until it collapses under its own absurdity. Was Voltaire laughing or grieving? The satire dismantled not only Leibnizian philosophy but the pieties of church and state. The novel spread like wildfire, banned and beloved, dangerous because it exposed the absurdity of power’s justifications.

By the nineteenth century, satire had taken on a new costume: elegance. Oscar Wilde, with The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), skewered Victorian morality, marriage, and identity through dazzling wordplay and absurd plot twists. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple,” Wilde’s characters remind us, a line as sharp as Swift’s grotesqueries but dressed in lace. Wilde’s satire was aesthetic subversion: exposing hypocrisy not with shock but with wit so light it almost floated, until one realized it was dynamite. Even comedy of manners could destabilize when written with Wilde’s smile and sting.

And still, into the modern age, satire carried power. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in 1961 named the absurd circularity of military bureaucracy. “Catch-22” entered our lexicon, becoming shorthand for the paradoxes of modern life. What other art form can gift us such a phrase, a permanent tool of dissent, smuggled in through laughter?

But something changed. When satire migrated from pamphlets and novels to television, radio, and eventually social media, did it lose its danger? Beyond the Fringe in 1960s London still carried the spirit of resistance, mocking empire and militarism with wit. Kurt Vonnegut wrote novels that shredded war and bureaucracy with absurdist bite. Yet once satire was packaged as broadcast entertainment, the satirist became a host, the critique a segment, the audience consumers. Can dissent survive when it must break for commercials?

There were moments—brief, electrifying—when satire still felt insurgent. Stephen Colbert’s October 2005 coinage of “truthiness” was one. “We’re not talking about truth,” he told his audience, “we’re talking about something that seems like truth—the truth we want to exist.” In a single satirical stroke, Colbert mocked political spin, media manipulation, and the epistemological fog of the post-9/11 era. “Truthiness” entered the lexicon, even became Word of the Year. When was the last time satire minted a concept so indispensable to describing the times?

Another moment came on March 4, 2009, when Jon Stewart turned his sights on CNBC during the financial crisis. Stewart aired a brutal montage of Jim Cramer, Larry Kudlow, and other personalities making laughably wrong predictions while cheerleading Wall Street. “If I had only followed CNBC’s advice,” Stewart deadpanned, “I’d have a million dollars today—provided I’d started with a hundred million dollars.” The joke landed like an indictment. Stewart wasn’t just mocking; he was exposing systemic complicity, demanding accountability from a financial press that had become entertainment. It was satire that bit, satire that drew blood.

Yet those episodes now feel like the last gasp of real satire before absorption. Stewart left his desk, Colbert shed his parody persona for a safer role as late-night host. The words they gave us—truthiness, CNBC’s complicity—live on, but the satirical force behind them has been folded into the entertainment economy.

Meanwhile, satire’s safe zones have shrunk. Political correctness, designed to protect against harm, has also made ambiguity risky. Irony is flattened into literal meaning, especially online. A satirical tweet ripped from context can end a career. Faced with this minefield, many satirists preemptively dilute their work, choosing clarity over provocation. Is it any wonder the result is content that entertains but rarely unsettles?

Corporations add another layer of constraint. Once the targets of satire, they now sponsor it—under conditions. A network late-night host may mock Wall Street, but carefully, lest advertisers revolt. Brands fund satire as long as it flatters their values. When outrage threatens revenue, funding dries up. Doesn’t this create a new paradox, where satire exists only within the boundaries of what its sponsors will allow? Performers of dissent, licensed by the very forces they lampoon.

And the erosion of satire’s political power continues apace. Politicians no longer fear satire—they embrace it. They appear on comedy shows, laugh at themselves, retweet parodies. The spectacle swallows the subversion. If Aristophanes risked exile and Swift risked scandal, today’s satirists risk nothing but a dip in ratings. Studies suggest satire still sharpens critical thinking, but when was the last time it provoked structural change?

So where does satire go from here? Perhaps it will retreat into forms that cannot be so easily consumed: encrypted narratives layered in metaphor, allegorical fiction that critiques through speculative worlds, underground performances staged outside the reach of advertisers and algorithms. Perhaps the next Voltaire will be a coder, the next Wilde a playwright in some forgotten theater, the next Swift a novelist smuggling critique into allegory. Satire may have to abandon laughter altogether to survive as critique.

Imagine again The Laughing Chamber, a speculative play in which citizens are required to submit jokes to a Ministry of Cultural Dissent. Laughter becomes a loyalty test. The best submissions are broadcast in a nightly “Mock Hour,” hosted by a holographic jester. Rebellion is scripted, applause measured, dissent licensed. Isn’t our entertainment already inching toward that? When algorithms decide which jokes are safe enough to go viral, which clips are profitable, which laughter is marketable, haven’t we already built the laughing chamber around ourselves?

Satire once held a mirror to power and said, “Look what you’ve become.” Aristophanes mocked philosophers, Juvenal mocked emperors, Erasmus mocked bishops, Rabelais mocked pedants, Cervantes mocked knights, Pope mocked aristocrats, Swift mocked landlords, Voltaire mocked philosophers, Wilde mocked Victorians, Heller mocked generals, Stewart mocked the financial press, Colbert mocked the epistemology of politics. Each used laughter as a weapon sharp enough to wound authority. What does it mean when that mirror is fogged, the reflection curated, the laughter canned?

And yet, fragments of power remain. We still speak of “bread and circuses,” “tilting at windmills,” “truthiness,” “Catch-22.” We quote Wilde: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” We hear Voltaire’s refrain—“all is for the best”—echoing with bitter irony in a world of war and crisis. These phrases remind us that satire once reshaped language, thought, even imagination itself. The question is whether today’s satirists can once again make the powerful flinch rather than chuckle.

Until then, we live in the laughing chamber: amused, entertained, reassured. The joke is on us.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI