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The Shallows was ten years old in 2020, when the second edition was published. Now the second edition is four years old. Those fourteen years have produced copious research that confirms Nicholas Carr’s speculations in 2010—and a lot of this book is speculation, informed speculation, but more predictive than descriptive: at least when it deals with the effects of digital media on the gray matter between our ears. That gray matter spent billions of years to reach its current degree of complexity, and that (Carr argues) is something that technology can never replicate.

To make his argument about digital media, Carr relies on potential analogies between the proliferation of that media and earlier periods of seismic change within the distribution of information (through technology), which in turn rewires how our brains process (and adapt to) that new information technology. These analogies—Carr’s historical analysis, supplemented by some (perhaps cherry-picked) data on the human brain and technology—are the most interesting part of the book. The invention of writing, the invention of the printed press, and the proliferation of mass media in the 20th century: each offer an historical analogy to our present moment.

But Carr raises the stakes because, whereas earlier “intellectual technologies” heightened our grasp on a specific mode of reality, the digital revolution has given us multi-modal access to pretty much the whole of reality itself. This makes digital technology uniquely disruptive, a reality that is probably irreversible since the invention of the smartphone. Can you think of a single relationship
between yourself and the world outside you that hasn’t been altered by your smartphone, that isn't somehow mediated through your device? The fact that most of this book was written before most people owned smartphones is…pretty remarkable.

Throughout The Shallows, Carr pays tribute to Marshall McLuhan, the spiritual father of this book. I love that McLuhan is getting more attention from public intellectuals in recent years, intellectuals who read beyond the simple “medium is the message” cliché. I mean, I could have this wrong because I haven’t read a ton of McLuhan—maybe I know nothing of his work, maybe I think his whole fallacy is wrong, and how I got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing. But I think I “get” McLuhan, and The Shallows is a fine, alarming tribute to him. 

I was something of a “Nixon scholar” during my brief stint as an academic, but I never managed to finish Gary Wills’s Nixon Agonistes until now. I met Wills once when I was a kid, after a lecture he gave at a small liberal arts college in Iowa. The lecture had something to do with the Founding Fathers, and I asked a stupid question during the Q&A, to which he gave a condescending answer (which I deserved, because the question was genuinely stupid). Then he autographed my copy of Lincoln at Gettysburg.

Wills stands out as the most thoughtful and urbane of the so-called "New Journalists" of the 1960s and '70s. The depth and breadth of his knowledge—not just his knowledge but his perspective (a perspective that, like the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church to which he belongs, extends across centuries)—make Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Norman Mailer seem amateurish by comparison. These writers’ insights are frequently sharp and witty; their prose styles are iconic. But for sheer perspective, they’ve got nothing on Wills.

That being said: the opening chapters of Nixon Agonistes, which began as an article for Esquire, are my least favorite. Wills is too scholarly and not nearly cool enough to deserve the New Journalist label. And when he apes the New Journalist style, he doesn’t do a good job of it. Sure, his coverage of the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions is better than Mailer’s (and Mailer’s is damn good!). Like Didion, Wills captures dozens of little moments that wholly embody the American Sixties as if in a microcosm. But these impressionistic, first-person, man-on-the-scene chapters are also a little cringe. I get the impression that, in these chapters, Wills wants to be hipper than he is (this is the man who wrote Lincoln at Gettysburg, Bomb Power, Verdi’s Shakespeare, and more books on Catholic theology than I can count…impressive, but not “cool”). His chapters on Nixon’s roots in Whittier are full of rich insights about the book’s theme, middle-class liberalism. But he also visits a Whittier strip club, just to get the full Whittier experience, and frankly…I just can’t imagine Wills in a strip club. And I don’t want to.

Maybe that’s the reason I never made it to the end of Nixon Agonistes until now. If you’re not into “New Journalism,” try reading the final two parts (eleven chapters) of this massive volume: “The Political Market” and “The Future of Liberalism.” Wills stays grounded in the 1960s, but he also widens his aperture to analyze the ‘60s within the wider context of Anglo-American ideology. These final chapters feel the most prescient when read today, with the perspective of five decades between us and Nixon’s presidency. Wills concludes that American liberalism is doomed, but he’s not an irritable post-liberal and he isn’t especially pessimistic about the future. His deep knowledge of history helps. For Wills, the past is a discovered country, one he knows intimately and that provides examples of what a bright American future might realistically entail. After all, as I said above, Wills seems to think in centuries, not decades. 

After September 11 2001, a cottage industry of journalists popped up to write editorials about Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” one of the most influential ideas in political philosophy during the 1990s. The consensus: Fukuyama’s ideas were now obsolete. September 11 suggested that many people, including religious fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia, were so embedded in history that they’d willingly kill themselves (and thousands others) in a terror attack that itself amounted to an historical argument: “History isn't over, bitches.” The editorialists argued that historical analysis still mattered. One damn thing continued to follow another. Fukuyama had gotten it all wrong. 

 

Such “gotcha” pieces reappeared after the 2016, the year of right-wing populism, Brexit, and Donald Trump; after the 2020 COVID pandemic; after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine; after Xi’s consolidation of total power within the Chinese Community Party; and in anticipation of the geopolitical effects of climate change. According to public intellectuals, the “peace dividend” was over. Fukuyama had been a fantasist, someone who was not merely fooled by the euphoria of 1989—the victory of Western liberalism over Eastern Bloc socialism— but who contributed to the mania of that moment. He bore responsibility for that moment. He embodied that moment as much as Jesus Jones’s hit song “Right Here Right Now” (the one with the line about “watching the world wake up from history”). Throughout the 1990s, Fukuyama had been the chief theorizer of Western hegemony: the equivalent for Anglo-American liberalism of Alexandr Dugin for Russian nationalism. (I’m exaggerating some of Timothy Snyder’s rhetoric here, but only a little.) 

 

In short, Fukuyama had turned the collapse of the Soviet Union into a dangerous fairy tale. He encouraged Western complacency, what Snyder calls “the politics of inevitability.” Because of Fukuyama, we were caught unaware by the return of history in 2001 and 2022. Despite his best efforts to defend his thesis and adjust his ideas, Fukuyama had become a punching bag for people with (I suspect) puny minds. 

 

And so earlier this year, a year of wars and ethnic cleansings, I decided to read Fukuyama’s 1992 statement of purpose, The End of History and the Last Man. I wanted to study the book as a primary document: not to mock its bad predictions or laugh at how poorly it holds up three decades later, but to understand why the idea of capital-U, capital-H “Universal History” was possible at the end of the Cold War…especially because Fukuyama grounded his ideas in the works of Kant, Hegel, and Marx: German philosophers who aren’t typically associated with the Anglo-Scottish liberalism that had just defeated Soviet Communism. Serious historians had rejected the view that history was teleological or universal long before 1989. Hegel and Marx were surely now discredited, right? 

 

But I love Hegel and Marx, and so I suspected that Fukuyama’s argument must have been more complicated than the title of his book—a deceptively simple slogan that journalists couldn’t help misinterpreting—suggested. Summaries and soundbites are usually wrong; I suspected that Fukuyama, however wrong he may have been, had been widely misunderstood. I wanted to finally sit down, read beyond the book’s title, and see what Fukuyama had really written. I wanted to understand The End of History as an historical artifact from a different time, a different world. 

The dust jacket of The End of History and the Last Man features ecstatic blurbs from Allan Bloom, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, George Will, and (perhaps worst of all) Tom Wolfe. Not a great sign. Future president of Georgia Eduward Shevardnadze—you might call him the Georgian equivalent of Václav Havel or Lech Wałęsa—is probably the least ignoble name among the blurbers. 

The dust jacket also reminds us that Fukuyama was a resident consultant at the RAND Corporation. Ruh-roh. 

Once you start reading the actual book, you’ll notice that Fukuyama’s chapters are surprisingly short and the prose is surprisingly clear. A little too short and a little too clear. The bulk of Fukuyama’s argument is that the Anglo-Scottish liberal tradition has wrongly rejected Hegel’s account of capital-H History. But Fukuyama’s summaries of Hegel and Fukuyama’s favorite interpreter of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, are either entry-level, underdeveloped, or simply wrong. For instance: Fukuyama doesn’t adequately account for the tensions between Hobbes/Locke/Smith/Mill (the philosophical tradition that most Western democracies subscribe to) and Kant/Hegel/Marx/Kojève (the tradition they reject), especially the tensions between Anglo-Scottish and German conceptions of freedom. This is a critical oversight, but exploring these tensions would have required a longer, less accessible analysis.

Fukuyama also breezes through a history of the post-war era, arguing for the unprecedented success of liberal democracy on a global scale. He describes the rise of liberalism not only in Europe and East Asia but also in Latin America and Africa (with special attention to the then-collapsing apartheid regime in South Africa). Here are some breathless selections from the book’s first half:

As mankind approaches the end of the millennium, the twin crises of authoritarianism and socialist central planning have left only one competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially universal validity: liberal democracy.

The apparent number of choices that countries face in determining how they will organize themselves politically and economically has been diminishing over time. … What is emerging victorious, in other words, is not so much liberal practice, as the liberal idea (emphasis Fukuyama’s).
 
…we cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better (emphasis Fukuyama’s).

The last quote is a sunnier version of Mark Fisher’s contention that global capitalism asserts hegemony by suppressing the human imagination. We can more easily imagine the end of the world, argued Fisher, than we can imagine the end of capitalism. From a Marxist perspective, that’s basically how ideological superstructures work. Fukuyama, for his part, anticipates Fisher’s objection: “How would we know if there are any remaining contradictions in our present order?” His answers aren’t satisfying. (The correct answer, by the way, is “Wait and see.”)

Fukuyama may have been correct that, after 1991, “international life will be seen increasingly as a competition not between rival ideologies—since most economically successful states will be organized along similar lines—but between different cultures.” Samuel Huntington would agree, as would the political philosophers who are trying to make sense of the recent identitarian turn in Western politics. But if anything, cultures are even more embedded in historical structures than ideologies are. In short, I don’t understand why Fukuyama’s identifies ideology with History but not culture. I certainly don’t think you can reach that conclusion from Hegel, no matter how structural (re: transhistorical) Hegel’s concept of History may be.
 
3. Masters and Slaves
Alright, now I should probably say something about Fukuyama’s concept of thymos.   

Hegel may not have promoted liberalism (unlike Locke, Smith, and Mill), but he (for Fukuyama) best described the engines that drive History toward its liberal end. These engines are fueled by recognition (which Fukuyama identifies with the Greek thymos). This whole process is part of the master/slave dynamic that Hegel made famous.

A summary of the master/slave dynamic: in Hegel, self-conscious subjects crave recognition from other self-conscious subjects. In order to gain recognition and stature, a powerful subject (the master) will use his physical courage and “will-to-power” to exert control over another subject (the slave). But the slave can’t offer the master the recognition that the master craves because, well, he’s a slave: he cannot recognize the master as a self-conscious subject because he doesn’t control his own will.

Meanwhile, the slave (who also craves recognition) achieves self-consciousness through the world-making work of his own hands (which he does on behalf of the master). And the master is now incapable of maintaining self-consciousness because he depends on the slave’s work and recognition, which doesn’t count as real recognition because it is compulsory. Or something. I don’t totally understand it because…well, Hegel is difficult to understand. But he argues that this structural dynamic plays out throughout all human societies and generates History.

Fukuyama argues that all History (and history) is driven by this desire for recognition, or thymos; that the scientific revolutions of Enlightenment Europe gave nations the technologies to pursue recognition through new, powerful weapons of war; that the spread and adoption of these technologies promoted national and individual recognition on a mass scale; and that liberalism is the inevitable outcome of this process, a process that Fukuyama disturbingly names “the machine.”

In short, Fukuyama takes Hegel’s suprastructural notion of History and inserts it into the actual events of history.

Here’s the thing: I like Hegel. A lot. And I want to Fukuyama’s account of recognition as an organizing principle of civic life to be convincing, just as I want to find Marilynne Robinson’s glowing account of Calvinism convincing. But…it’s not. Fukuyama is mostly correct that, for Hegel, the desire for recognition (as opposed to the efficiency of markets) drives History. But Hegel’s account of History’s end is very, very far from Fukuyama’s vision of global liberalism. On this, Fukuyama relies too heavily on Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel (and I’m not even sure Fukuyama gets Kojève entirely right). This leads Fukuyama to some bizarre claims.

For instance, Fukuyama argues that struggle for recognition, not self-preservation (per Hobbes), “is the original source of imperialism.” He also claims that Britain gave up its colonies after World War II because the British “accepted the modern world’s verdict that colonialism was an illegitimate form of domination.” Which…yeah, the British Empire was a centuries-long project that was built via millions of different actions and contingencies. Were these actions and contingencies simply struggles for recognition? And did the British really abandon that empire because they craved greater recognition from their liberal peers?

In his essay “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell makes the case that the British maintained their empire into the 20th century to “avoid looking a fool.” I suppose that trying to save face is itself a kind of desire for recognition. But the fact that the British Empire gave up its colonies at the precise moment it ran out of money and manpower necessary to maintain the colonies makes me think that something other than recognition is at work here.

4. There’s history, and then there’s History
Fukuyama is billed as a political philosopher, which frees him from the rigor demanded of political scientists and historians. But The End of History isn’t even a work of heavy political philosophy. Who was its intended audience? Certainly not Allan Bloom or Irving Kristol, who would have been well-acquainted with the concepts Fukuyama spends so much time explaining. His analysis is very thin…but not so thin that his engagement with Hegel would be easily digested by lay readers.

So who was Fukuyama writing for? I have to imagine his target audience was policymakers, people who imagine they are smarter than everyone else because (as George H.W. Bush once quipped) if they weren't smarter than everyone else, how come they are in charge of the government?

Such an audience is unlikely to notice just how shallow is Fukuyama’s historical analysis. In 1992, he clearly saw world-historical paradigm shifts occurring over a period of about two hundred years. He constructed a model of Universal History based on an historical record that more or less begins in the 1789 and, at best, extends back as far as the 16th century. In the book, he does make cursory references to political systems that aren’t liberalism, socialism, or fascism: he lists monarchy, oligarchy, and Greek democracy as systems that had been tried and then discarded, but he has virtually nothing to say about them. For someone writing a Universal History, Fukuyama seems disturbingly uninterested in most of human history. Early in the book, he writes:

But it is precisely if we look not just at the past fifteen years, but at the whole scope of history, that liberal democracy begins to occupy a special kind of place (author’s emphasis).
 
At this point, Fukuyama shows us a graph that displays the impressive increase of liberal democracies since 1790, an increase that becomes especially pronounced in the years since 1900 and extremely pronounced in the years following the Second World War. This is evidence for Fukuyama that “monarchy, theocracy, fascism, communist totalitarianism” are exhausted as alternatives to liberal democracy. (When describing the world’s democratic surplus, he does use the phrase “outside the Islamic world,” which is telling.) And so, Fukuyama writes, “At the end of history, there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy.”

Throughout the book, Fukuyama berates geopolitical realists for ignoring history, but an historian might berate Fukuyama for the same thing. He writes about history in broad strokes with little attention to local contingencies. I mean, sure, everything in 1989 must have felt like the culmination of history when you’re only analyzing the most prominent events of the 20th century and their immediate antecedents in the 19th century. But from the perspective of 2024, the traditions and institutions of earlier centuries and distant political systems feel more relevant than ever. The old alliances and grievances of those earlier centuries are resurfacing in new and surprising ways.

Consider, for instance, how European support for either Ukraine or Russia tends to break down along the lines of the old Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires. Consider how East Asia, Iran, and India are organizing around political systems that, however much they are influenced by 19th/20th century European ideologies, are heavily modified to conform to political traditions within those nations. And the populations of these nations seem, for now, more attached to their own traditions and institutions than to liberal freedoms or capital accumulation. Not every nation is evolving into 1980s Japan (not even Japan).

Fukuyama’s thesis doesn’t account for the persistence of pre-liberal traditions and institutions, except to dismiss them as mere reactions against free-market liberalism. That’s Fukuyama’s favorite trick, really: if you can define a system as a reaction against liberalism, then you can argue that the system nevertheless admits liberal hegemony. He writes: “there is no inherent contradiction between democracy and at least some of the newly emerging nationalisms.” That might have seemed true in 1989, but it seems less true as those nationalisms—whether Russian, Hungarian, Chinese, Israeli, or American—have evolved over the past three decades.
 
(Aside: in his defense, Fukuyama does describe the trajectory of his Universal History over several millennia in 2011’s The Origins of Political Order and 2014’s Political Order and Political Decay…but those books have been widely criticized by both historians and political scientists for their many ellipses, overgeneralizations, and omissions of key facts.)

Fukuyama argues that compassion (the heart of Hegel’s “slave” ideology, the means through which the slave defends his own self-consciousness) is increasingly the dominant ethos of liberal societies after World War II. But again, the decades after World War II are a tiny sample of the history of political development. The period between 1945 and 1989 was uncharacteristically stable (and only really in the West). Compassion might be viewed as a luxury Western society could afford rather than an inevitability rooted in the development of liberal democracy. With the recent rise of far-right populism, the West in 2024 is arguably far less compassionate than it was in 1991.

Meanwhile, Fukuyama scoffs when realists assert that (in Fukuyama’s words) “democratization of the USSR should make no difference to its strategic position; indeed, many observers schooled in realism predicted quite flatly that Gorbachev would never permit the tearing down of the Berlin Wall or the loss of Soviet glacis in Eastern Europe.” He confidently cites the “small Russia” policy of Yeltsin, which encouraged healthy Russian nationalism sans expansionism. (He compares this to Ataturk’s non-expansionist Turkish nationalism and describes the “Turkification” of Russia after the fall of the USSR.)

But the whole history of the Russian Federation since 1991 has demonstrated that a) Gorbachev was probably the only Soviet politician who would have tolerated the collapse of the Berlin Wall (and he likely had little choice but to tolerate it, given the USSR’s weak position in 1989) and b) democratization, such that it ever occurred in Russia, did little to alter Russia’s geopolitical strategy.

5. Universal History versus Contingent Histories
So The End of History and the Last Man consists of short chapters that race through the book’s principle ideas; oversimplified summaries of Hegel, the thinker who undergirds Fukuyama’s main thesis; and not enough attention to actual history as the essential context for any model of Universal History. 

And what, exactly, does Fukuyama mean by “Universal History”? This is what his critics misunderstand most about his thesis. Whenever a big historical event occurs, whenever liberal democracy is under attack, these critics resurrect The End of History and mock its sunny optimism. But Fukuyama isn’t interested in the direction or duration of historical events: he’s interested in the end—the purpose, the structural trajectory, the telos—of History writ large. He admits that “we have no guarantee and cannot assure future generations that there will be no future Hitlers or Pol Pots.” But capital-H History for Fukuyama is not about a sequence of events, but rather a kind of suprahistorical structure.

However, Fukuyama also writes that “a true Universal History of mankind would have to be able to explain not only the broad and incremental evolutionary trends, but the discontinuous and unexpected ones as well.” And so Fukuyama slips back and forth between Universal History and small-h history. This is especially true when he a) attempts to explain the universal desire for recognition/thymos in terms of historical events (like the invention/discovery of the scientific method during the European Enlightenment) and b) on those occasions when he does make predictions about the near future.

One example of the latter: at one embarrassing point, Fukuyama describes “the political maturity of the Russian people, in particular Boris Yeltsin as their first popularly elected president, rather than a semi-fascist demagogue like Serbia’s Milosevic, or a half-hearted democrat like Gorbachev. The maturity was further demonstrated when the Russian people rose to Yeltsin’s call to defend their new democratic institutions against the conservative coup launched in August 1981” (unsure if he meant 1991). In this quote and others like them, Fukuyama has a very generous definition of “the Russian people.” (He also makes the critical mistake of conflating “the Russian people” with the population of the former Soviet Union, a mistake that is clearer after 2022).

For someone invested in suprastructural historical analysis, Fukuyama seems suspiciously incurious about structuralist accounts of history. He writes:

Contemporary liberal democracies did not emerge out of the shadowy mists of tradition. Like communist societies, they were deliberately created by human beings at a definite point in time, on the basis of a certain theoretical understanding of man and of society.

To what extent is that true and to what extent is that not true? History is an interplay between circumstance (political and geographic), cultural tradition, and human agency. Fukuyama is, like a good conservative, leaning heavily on human agency…a strange approach for the author of a Universal History. And insofar as he leans on ideology as an historical driver, he gives a poor account of the historical transmission of ideology. In one of his many defenses of Hegel, Fukuyama writes: “[W]hile the Anglo-Saxon democracies may have been founded on explicitly Lockean grounds, their self-understanding has never been purely Lockean.” That’s just…not true. Right?

6. Totalitarianism and Cold War Propaganda
A major red flag for me: Fukuyama relies heavily on Jean Kirkpatrick’s definition of totalitarianism, a concept that (to me) is little more than a neoconservative buzzword. Intellectuals in the West came to use the term totalitarian to link Stalin’s genuinely totalizing regime of power with Hitler’s genocidal ideology of racial anarchy. In short, totalitarianism was an invented concept intended to equate Soviet Communism with Nazism, discrediting the former by linking it to the latter. (You would think Stalin's crimes would be enough to discredit his regime, but apparently not...especially when the West was committing crimes of its own.)

The problem is that regimes (i.e., state structures) and ideology are apples and oranges. Serious academics who worked with the model of totalitarianism had to admit that, when you analyzed the state structure of the Third Reich, you had to add caveat after caveat until, in the final analysis, you more or less admitted that Hitler’s Germany was not actually totalitarian. Historian Ian Kershaw is great on this point. But at the time that Kershaw was writing his groundbreaking works on Nazism, Jean Kirkpatrick (an advisor to Reagan) advanced an adjusted interpretation of totalitarianism that differentiated between totalitarian and authoritarian systems. Authoritarian systems, like Pinochet’s Chile, could be gradually reformed into liberal democracies because they relied on open markets. These regimes also ruled by brute force rather than through ideology. They sought to limit their citizens’ freedom and movement but not to control their opinions. Totalitarian regimes, on the other hand, constituted totalizing (closed) systems, immune to reform because a) they rejected open markets, giving liberal democracies no leverage over them, and b) they interpellated their citizens into ideologically compliant subjects. The fact that, in this interpretation, Nazi Germany was more authoritarian than totalitarian did not much bother Kirkpatrick. Her analysis gave the Reagan administration cover for supporting fascistic regimes in the final decade of the Cold War.

If we accept totalitarianism as a legitimate concept, then the ultimate totalitarian regime was Stalin’s, especially during the purges, when victims were not merely murdered but forced to accept and admit their guilt. Stalin did not want to punish his people so much as compel them to accept the Stalinist system in their own minds, even if this required him to murder nearly a million political prisoners. This insistence on the prisoner's conversion to the state ideology is, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, what distinguishes Stalinism Nazism.

And so, in my view, totalitarianism doesn’t really exist outside Stalinism, Maoism, and their offshoots in Eastern Europe and what we called “the Third World.” Totalitarianism, if it exists, is an ultra-leftist phenomenon with no equivalent on the political far-right. The word totalitarianism is only useful politically, when you’re trying to equate Stalin’s crimes with the Holocaust in order to rally Western liberals against the Soviet Union. And so totalitarianism is a junk term because we already have perfectly good names for the phenomenon it describes: Stalinism or (if you like) Communism.

Fukuyama admitted this fact, quietly, throughout his writings in the early 1990s. Wherever he was confronted with an example of post-Soviet illiberalism, Fukuyama saw liberal potential. Nevermind that Islamic fundamentalism or Deng’s China did offer legitimate alternatives to liberal democracy. For neoconservatives like Fukuyama, because these regimes weren’t Communist (or fully Communist), they weren’t totalitarian and were therefore on the path—however curvy—toward the End of History. Jean Kirkpatrick’s politically useful definition of totalitarianism was, for Fukuyama, too tantalizing to abandon.

7. The Last Man and What Comes Next
The final third of The End of History and the Last Man deals with “the last man,” a concept implicit in Hegel and any Universal History. I have to admit that these sections kind of lost me, but I think Fukuyama is trying to account for the problem of human agency when recognition is achieved. Is the End of History just a horizon we approach asymptotically? And if not, what will happen when History has achieved its final purpose? Will a new driver emerge to replace thymos, or will people lazily accept a world without historical tensions? Will being “the last man” suck? Would you want to have a beer with him?

To quote once more a question Fukuyama asks earlier: “How would we know if there are any remaining contradictions in our present order?” It’s not a question Fukuyama really answers in full. His writing and thinking start to become denser and more muddled, and so the final third of the book sort of went over my head.

In any event,  to ask the question “what might happen after History?” is to misread Hegel’s account of History, I think. Because History is not just one damned thing after another; it’s not an account of human actions over time. History is a process that culminates in Absolute Knowledge, and so it occurs suprastructurally above and beyond the thing we call “history.” In other words, the End of History is the culmination of a process that does not depend on actual historical events. But what makes Fukuyama’s account of the End of History so confusing is that he jumps back and forth between Hegel’s suprastructural account of History and the more commonplace understand of history as events.

Fukuyama points out how “the United States and Canada have maintained a continent-wide undefended border for nearly a century, despite the power vacuum represented by Canada.” For a foreign policy realist, he argues, a U.S. invasion of Canada would be inevitable, given this power vacuum. The fact that such an invasion hasn’t occurred (even though it has occurred on at least two occasions) is proof that liberal democracies produce the political and economic stability necessary for peoples to achieve recognition, and therefore liberalism marks the End of History. (Fukuyama’s optimism is also grounded in one of liberalism’s best-known principles, the “democracies don’t go to war” thesis.)

But why should the U.S. invade Canada when it has access to Canada’s most valuable resources without the bother of actually governing Canada? Furthermore, conflict between the two nations becomes increasingly feasible as fresh water and other natural resources become much scarcer with climate change. Tensions around access to and ownership of the Great Lakes and Canadian oil reserves are already evident in the U.S.-Canada relationship today.  

Once again, the answer to Fukuyama’s argument about the U.S. and Canada—and the answer to all of his arguments, which slip between Universal History and real-world events—will always be “Wait and see.”

 Sometimes books of poetry have inscrutable titles that don’t tell us much about the collection. Not true of Anne Cecelia Holmes’s The Jitters. These poems jitter. They rattle. They vibrate, uneasily, like they’ll fall apart if a nut or a bolt comes loose. Holmes’s portrays the human organism, the human brain, and the human soul as a loose network of mechanistic parts threatening to disassemble itself because…well, it has the jitters.

The human machine is capable of “drilling a path through a canyon just to be productive.” “Brains are made to be mapped,” she writes, and in another poem: “When I don’t know what/ to do I place your brain/ in a vat. I program it….” Elsewhere: “My head is a machine you can touch.” These machine-bodies are everywhere and they constitute reality, like Hamlet’s “words”:

Bodies bodies bodies. This is how
the world looks. We can raise every glass
or just keep screaming. On the roof we feel
most of the thunderclap, our organs buzzing
for the new year…

But we’re also part-organism with a parasitic spirit: “Take your body and plant it in the lawn,” she writes, and before that she advises that “the ghost doesn’t want in, it wants something to eat.” The ghost (the soul? spirit and ghost are essentially the same word with different etymologies) is an invader, a virus (a computer virus?), rather than the essence of human individuality. If the soul takes up residence, it’s in “the place in your stomach where/ the light flickers. A felt ghost/ here I am, dissolving above.”

Within our mechanistic existence, we won’t find much solace in companionship. Too many machines too close together and their wires get crossed, they short circuit: “We don’t want to be too accompanied, too much of an electrical fire.”

In the poem entitled “Total Potential Hazard,” Holmes plays on the verbs “screw” and “spring” and “sew” to remind us of Frankenstein-like construction. We “travel by assembly line.” When the universe confronts us, when “the whole/ galaxy says hello,” it seems annoyed by our presence and interrogates us: “who are you? Why can’t you leave us alone?” Elsewhere: “It’s like I’m a real person/ in this strange empty/ animal universe….” I’m reminded of the Modest Mouse lyric, when the universe speaks to humankind: “We’re not sure where you stand/ you ain’t machines and you ain’t land/ And the plants and the animals, they are linked/ And the plants and the animals eat each other.”

But don’t forget: we’re also part-organic. In “Total Potential Hazard,” Holmes reminds us that we have tongues, that we “chew” and “creep.” We blush, we rot, we’re capable of being wounded, capable of “sucking on a stone.” But somewhere along the line, the inorganic has overtaken the organism: memories are made of bricks. Our insides buzz. “Our hearts/ need a better structure.” “Your chest is a switch you have yet to touch.” “I keep shouting, ‘I am not a robot! Please feed my spirit!’ but you know how that ends.” Again, in “Total Potential Hazard,” we feel our distance from the organic world: “Outside it’s like a pile/ of life no one is sorting out.” We’re haphazardly and lazily made, not fully machine but not fully organism. And we’re not as synthesized and sleek as a cyborg. We’re poorly constructed. We’re shaking and rattling and jittering.

I don’t want you to think, however, that Holmes is pessimistic about our condition...even if “anxiety is a history baked in my guts” (one of the best descriptions of anxiety I’ve ever read). In fact, most of “The Jitters” feels a little…celebratory. It’s painful to be us, but our bodies are wondrous: they’re just made of building blocks, that’s all. Echoing Whitman, Holmes writes, “I’m singing a medley for these molecules I have.” We’re all in the same rusted condition, and we should respect each other for that: “Here in this dust bowl I salute you.” 

Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source

Brian Blanchfield is one of my favorite living poets and you should definitely check out his 2014 collection A Several World if you haven’t already and if you like difficult poetry. Proxies is a collection of his essays and nowhere near as difficult as A Several World. So if you're not into difficult poetry, you may still enjoy Proxies.

I’m writing this review in the manner in which Blanchfield claims to have written Proxies: without any source material at my disposal, without any research documents or open websites, and without a copy of Proxies nearby. Consequently, I have no idea if I’m remembering the details or titles of Blanchfield’s essays correctly, or if I’m getting all my facts wrong.

That’s part of the risky fun of Proxies, because in each essay you’re watching Blanchfield riff on a topic without recourse to Wikipedia or an iPhone or any other fact-checking implements. He is, as he says, the single source for every essay in the book. (Blanchfield does correct his most egregious and/or compelling errors in a long section at the end, a section entitled “Corrections,” which lacks any narrative structure but makes for good skimming.)

In other words, Proxies is as much a work of performance art as it is a collection of essays. If we take him at his word that he didn’t consult any outside sources while writing these essays, then we have the pleasure of reading a great writer choose a prompt (usually a single word—like “frontage” or “asymptote” or “pentecostal”) and then compose an essay around the prompt, weaving in and out of definitions (some of which may be mistaken) and details (some of which are probably wrong) for the purpose of personal reflection and gorgeous autobiography. Usually, by the end, these definitions, details, and reflections synthesize into something cohesive and poignant. It’s acrobatic and fun to watch/read.

For me, the most moving and often most painful essays in Proxies deal with Blanchfield’s relationships with family, including his parents and his chosen family. The stories he tells about his childhood in the American South, about his mother and father and stepfather, gutted me. Blanchfield's feelings of shame and guilt are at their peak in those essays about family...although those same essays are also some of the most frustrating in the volume, because Blanchfield is perfectly comfortable (as he should be) playing the role of the misunderstood gay poet-academic who whines about being a misunderstood gay poet-academic.

For instance: when he talks about his mother’s incredulity at his decision to become a career poet, Blanchfield sounds a little too much like me, an academic complaining that his parents don’t understand how tenure works, don't understand what “assistant professor” means, and don't understand why a highly educated person would accept a visiting professorship at the Southwestern North Dakota Technical School of Mining and Cowshit when he could’ve just applied for a normal teaching job at Stanford or the University of Michigan.

That’s how jobs work, right?

In such moments, Blanchfield’s tone can veer into Will Smith’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” And here’s the thing: parents just don’t understand. But, to quote the legendary drug addict Dr. Prof. Jordan Peterson, “Deal with it, bucko.”

Another theme in Proxies that grates on me, a theme I alluded to above, is place. For Blanchfield, this means romanticizing his youthful days in New. York. City. The Big Apple, as people in Utah call it. Specifically: Blanchfield lived in Brooklyn. Yikes! An essay about a poet’s life in Brooklyn would normally turn me off an entire volume of essays, no matter the other topics, but it’s a testament to Blanchfield’s writing prowess that I kept reading and enjoying the book.

And to his credit: Blanchfield writes about the South and the flyover West with a great deal of nuance and some affection. So I can forgive his nostalgia for his time in New York.

As I write this review, I realize that I’m remembering the parts of Proxies that I didn’t like more than the parts that I liked. This probably gives you the impression that I didn’t like the book as much as my rating would suggest. That’s a mistake, and the fault is mine. I remember discomfort and annoyance better than I remember beauty: it's a moral failing I have. But Proxies is a volume full of vulnerability and sorrow and all kinds of loveliness. Blanchfield is a serious poet and a serious thinker, and these essays benefit from both his facility with language and his intellectual rigor. Check it out. 

1.
We’ll never know everything we want to know about our distant ancestors. They’re gone.

And insofar as we gather evidence about the lives they lived and make conjectures about those lives, we still only see them through a glass darkened by our own shadows. That’s my key takeaway from Stefanos Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory, a fun and frustrating work of popular scholarship.

In his epilogue, Geroulanos summarizes his overall project:

Throughout this book, I have tried to offer a strong criticism of our pretensions to grandeur, our thirst for powerful stories, our belief that we grasp the whole picture and spin it into a thorough system of knowledge. It’s always nice to blame others, the ideologies of the enemy; but this project is more of a criticism, as philosophical as it is historical, of our delusion—that we grasp the origin as much as the end, that we control the definitions, that we have master knowledge.

This tracks. The central thread that runs through Geroulanos’s book is his opposition to post-Enlightenment humanism. The project of humanism, he argues, has failed. The ideology of humanism put us squarely on a path toward violent colonialism, the genocides of the twentieth century, and climate catastrophe. Whether he wants to or not, Geroulanos joins a diverse group of grumpy scholars and anti-humanists like Giorgio Agamben, Alasdair MacIntyre, René Girard, and Girard’s pupil Peter Thiel in concluding that the Enlightenment was a mistake and humanism really messed things up.

To be clear: Geroulanos isn’t a post-humanist. Rather, he seeks an alternative, more humane paradigm through which we can live together on the planet. In many ways, the field of prehistory is incidental to his overall project. It’s one of several lenses he could have chosen through which to examine the problems inherent in humanism. Our acquisition of knowledge about any subject (especially history) always always always always reinforces the ideology of the present day, for better or for worse (and usually at the expense of actual knowledge). This is true whether we’re talking about the deep past of our hominoid ancestors or the human past since the beginning of the historical (re: written) record.

To be fair, Geroulanos admits that the field of prehistory does produce legitimate knowledge about the past that is probably worth having. But what we do with that knowledge is usually problematic. Geroulanos writes: “We telescope at will back in time to draw meaning from the deep past about ourselves and the world we want.” Yes, that’s true…and show me a scholarly discipline that emerged from the Victorian era that wasn’t used to justify obscene criminality. I don’t think you’ll find one.

But it’s not really until the epilogue that Geroulanos finally admits that recent discoveries by geneticist and paleoanthropologists have revealed much solid information about our lineage. But really, he asks, what do we want to know about our ancestors? That question changes with every generation and within every cultural and political context. And usually, the answer to that question has disastrous results for people on the social, political, and cultural margins. Geroulanos writes:

The most obvious and greatest cost of the 250-year obsession with human origins research has been borne by the Indigenous peoples whose destruction was rationalized because they were ‘primitives’ who were ‘vanishing’ anyway; by Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others deemed subhuman by Nazism; by all those who were racialized by ideas about prehistoric humanity; and by refugees, still disdained today as a watery mass and a horde.

Later, he writes:

The problem lies less with science or museums rather than with the humanist impulse that accompanies them. The story told in this book is in part a story of scientific horrors. But it is not a story, for the most part, of evil philosophers or scientists, nor at all a story in which science is the enemy. It is a story of the lengths that we will go to convince ourselves that we share something more than (most of our) DNA with hominids from tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago: that what we share with them is meaningful, that it is our ‘human nature.’

A noble sentiment, I think. “Human nature” is a term that is usually invoked to push people around, to oppress people who are marginalized (look at how often neoliberal economists “naturalize” their theories and justify their most brutal policy recommendations by appealing to “human nature”).

But even here, I’m a little irked. To minimize the DNA we share with hominids from tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago is, in my view, to minimize something genuinely important. Our shared DNA does indicate that we share something—perhaps a lot—with our ancestors.

2.
Don’t get me wrong: The Invention of Prehistory is a fantastically entertaining and informative work of popular scholarship. I loved the chapter about the Catholic paleoanthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose theory of the teleological “omega point” at the end of evolution was…just wild. Geroulanos seems to sympathize, a little, with Bataille’s attempt to preserve the spiritual dimensions of human life amid our discoveries about the distant past (Bataille described the Lascaux cave as “the holy of holies”: problematic but beautiful).

And Geroulanos’s epilogue departs from a lot of the moralizing that precedes it. In the final pages, he encourages caution when we study human ancestry and (especially) disseminate knowledge about human origins to the public.

But on the whole, I was frustrated with The Invention of Prehistory because, too often, Geroulanos conflates our paradigms of knowing (and interpreting knowledge) with the acquisition of knowledge itself. He writes with a very moralistic, sometimes shrill, tone about the men and women whose work has produced a lot of our best knowledge about our distant ancestors. At times, it seems like Geroulanos believes that such knowledge is not worth having if it is used to justify atrocities.

Geroulanos claims that The Invention of Prehistory “is not a story, for the most part, of evil philosophers or scientists, nor at all a story in which science is the enemy.” You could have fooled me. He has virtually nothing good to say about any scholar, professional or amateur, whose work he examines. Two of the exceptions is his treatment of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and (to a lesser extent) Sigmund Freud…all darlings of what Paul Ricœur famously called “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” Geroulanos has adopted these hermeneutics wholesale.

Take Saussure. His linguistic analysis (in Geroulanos’s account) bucks the most politically problematic accounts of the origins of human language. Saussure sees through his contemporaries, whose morally reprehensible racial ideologies framed their theories about language. Nevermind, of course, that Saussure’s account has been widely rejected by linguists, and that today’s most credible theories of the origin of language a) amount to corrections of the morally reprehensible models or b) rest on new models of genetic and cognitive analysis. Saussure got the morality right, even if he got the knowledge wrong.

Geroulanos writes: “The fantasy [of humanism and prehistory] allows us to forget that in reality, humans have almost nothing in common with our paleolithic forefathers. We live in the world we have created.” Okay, fair enough. But who is the we here? I don’t live in a world that I’ve created—other people created it for me. And other people created their world for them. And on and on back…all the way, perhaps, to our “paleolithic forefathers.” The past is a foreign country, it’s true. But it’s not utterly inaccessible, as some post-structuralist critics have implied.

In Courting the Abyss a study of the contradictions of free speech within the English liberal tradition, John Durham Peters divides Anglophone society into three camps: religiously-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through revelation; empirically-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through the scientific method; and critically-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through rational (often skeptical) inquiry. Two groups in these three camps will often unite against the third group, and the religiously-minded and critically-minded typically “team up” against the empiricists in order to undermine the authority of “science” per se (especially when they don’t like the products of scientific knowledge).

And few people are as skeptical as me of “science” as a category of ultimate knowledge acquisition. The scientific method is a powerful process of knowledge acquisition, but it is viewed by most English-speaking people as an ultimate arbiter of truth. This is a problem, and it actually contributes (I think) to scientific illiteracy. People in general have no idea what “science” actually is, and at the same time nothing shuts down an argument like “scientific evidence.”

But for Geroulanos and other scholars in the humanities, scientific knowledge is not merely one type of knowledge among many. It is inherently compromised by its imperialist origins. And yet, as I’ve reiterated throughout this review, every imaginable field of knowledge and art since the Enlightenment has deployed in the service of empire.

After a while, I began to feel guilty for being curious about ancient hominids at all!

Reading The Invention of Prehistory, you get the impression that it’s virtually impossible to acquire scientific knowledge without hurting someone. Geroulanos’s struggle with the ethics of knowledge acquisition is most apparent in his chapter on Neanderthals. He rightly criticizes the racist framework within which specialized knowledge about Neanderthals is presented to the public. And he admits that, given the power of recent genetic analysis, we have a much clearer sense of what the Neanderthals’ lives, including their relationship with anatomically modern humans, was like. But, he writes in that chapter’s conclusion, “We still cannot reach the Neanderthal. However much we may ‘know’ about him…he continues to say more about us.” Consequently, Geroulanos’s hypercritical approach to knowledge acquisition, his “hermeneutics of suspicion,” often deploys the same language and critical tools that creationists, climate change deniers, conspiracy theorists, and medical charlatans use when they attempt to overturn scientific consensus.

This is not a party I would be eager to join. 

 Lauren Groff is now officially my favorite living American writer, or at least she’s tied for that spot with Joshua Cohen (author of The Netanyahus). Groff's writing is full of deep affection for her characters but she’s also as wise and honest as a steel beartrap: not one of these stories lets a single character off the hook for the decisions they’ve made or the thoughts, motives, and feelings they have. She’s also just an incredible writer of prose. She describes air conditioners springing to life in the Florida spring “like trolls under the windows.” One character, a brilliant mathematician, notes that “unlike other numbers, money was already self-fertilized.” Whenever I started one of the stories in Florida, I was immediately hooked and couldn’t stop reading. “When we are lonely for a long time,” she writes in one story, “we people the void with phantoms.” I don’t know if she’s lonely, but there are clearly a lot of phantoms in Groff’s world, and we’re lucky that she shares them with us. 

Great idea for a comic, poor execution. The use of two frame narratives could have been cool—they might have mirrored the “set theory” that is a major preoccupation of the characters in this comic—but the frame narratives themselves are pretty boring. The first frame involves the writers/artists behind Logicomix debating how to tell their story, and the second frame involves Bertrand Russell giving an autobiographical lecture on whether the U.S. should enter WWII. The authors wanted to connect Russell’s great career ambition (he wanted to discover the foundations of logic and mathematics) to a moral lesson about how we make ethical decisions. But the lesson they arrive at is pretty underwhelming: humans are irrational and Nazis are bad. Okay.

If you want to read a similar (if non-illustrated) book about the theoretical foundations of knowledge and deep ethical quandaries, check out Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World. The stories Labatut tells are riveting. The story that Logicomix tells is dull by comparison. I suspect that the authors hoped Logicomix would make these exciting ideas accessible to younger readers, but I can’t imagine this comic holding their attention for very long.

Part of the problem with Logicomix is that Bertrand Russell isn’t an interesting protagonist. Sure, he lived an unusual life and had an unsual personality, but a lot of the unusual stuff gets left out of this comic. The supporting cast (Gödel, Frege, Wittgenstein) is full of wild personalities, but they don’t occupy enough of the narrative to really make this book as weird and fun as it should’ve been.

Finally, the authors didn’t take enough advantage of the comic format. Seeing Gödel as a little toddler was fun, but apart from that, there’s very little here that utilizes the near-endless visual possibilities of a comic. Most of the time, we’re watching Bertrand Russell just…live his life, have his thoughts, and argue with his colleagues. Not that interesting, visually.

Again, if this is a topic that interests you and if you want a riveting story about the lives of people who push the boundaries of our knowledge about reality, check out When We Cease to Understand the World. Or, if you’ve got endless months of time to read, maybe go back to a classic like Gödel, Escher, Bach. I’ve also heard good things about Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, Sheilla Jones’s The Quantum Ten, Marcelo Gleiser’s The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?, or any number of books by Sean Carroll. If you’re looking for a comic book on these subjects, I’m not really sure what to recommend…Logicomix might be your best bet, but the authors could have done better. 

Alphabetical Diaries is, however, an extraordinary work of narrative.
And she understands what I’m getting at: “There must be other ways to write a diary than all this minutiae; I don’t want another night at home with all my thoughts.”
And so it’s really, really, really hard not to judge her.
And so, reading Alphabetical Diaries, I was judgmental of Sheila Heti: of the fact that she published 60,000 words of her diaries.
And yes, one of the functions of a diary is to vomit out our passions and worst selves onto the page, to objectify them and make them physically incarnate, and then to toss them aside.
Because liberalism is a lie, and so am I.
Because she’s a woman who enjoys having sex, and writes about it, and publishes what she writes.
Because she’s part of the cosmopolitan “creative class,” with all the grating parochialisms that come with that.
But in this book, “you” is just another word for “I”…which is actually pretty interesting, if you think about it.
But it’s difficult not to read someone else’s diaries, however scrambled and encrypted, without becoming judgmental.
But judgmentalism is not just ugly—it’s a sin, probably the most serious sin, the ultimate misstep anyone can make when interacting with another human, whether in person or on the page.
But private diaries are not typically edited and published by their author, which is what Heti did here (along with the alphabetizing).
But she continues: “It’s amazing to me how life keeps going.”
But the minutiae is of course why this book works at all.
But then she writes, correctly: “When you are jealous of other people, you forget there is a place in the world for you, that you occupy a real and legitimate place.”
For example: “To write one thing that is honest instead of a pack of lies well said. To write the book about being a loser. To write this book again. To write with the thoroughness of my whole being for the rest of my life. Today I shampooed the hair of a man named David who is the conductor of the orchestra at the National Ballet.”
Her meditations on lust and love are ultimately quite fruitful: “But my task is not to love him, but simply to love—to be a person who loves—so to love him as part of an overall loving, not at the exclusion of everyone else, with blinders on, focused only on him, but rather focused on the entire universe, for the universe is my first relationship, the fundamental one….”
Her meditations on writing, which all contradict each other, also all ring true: “If I want to write, I have to move away from, not towards, the dazzle.”
Her thoughts about work, and how to think about one’s own projects (whether writing projects or the kinds of projects you don’t want to do but that other people require you to do) are often extremely moving: “I realize more and more these days that people finish things and live in a world of time, rather than nothing finishing or taking forever for the sake of the eternal.”
How can I, an enlightened liberal, be so harsh and shocked when a woman expresses her sexuality?
I decided to read Alphabetical Diaries immediately upon hearing the premise: a person’s diary edited down and all the sentences reordered in alphabetical order.
I didn’t care whether I would like the book or not; I wanted to experience it.
I once had an idea for my wake, for after I die: I would have my loved ones post my entire Internet browsing history on the walls, everywhere for everyone to read, uncensored, like a kind of self-immolating art exhibit.
I related painfully to this sentence: “It is clear that I have spent these past three years thinking about myself, and that I have a gap in my education three years long.”
(I think, therefore I am?)
I think we can all imagine worse fates.
I thought it might be more like poetry, which I read more than prose, than narrative fiction or memoir.
I was dreading the chapters “I” and “T,” because they would include the words “I” and “then.”
I wouldn’t have been so judgmental of this project if Heti was a man, and so I’m a misogynist, or at least I have strong misogynistic tendencies, and I’ll freely admit that.
I’m not entirely sympathetic to the idea that writing is a lonely, painful activity: “When I think of another year of writing, it seems impossible to explain.”
In English, the letter “Y” appears near the end of the alphabet, and so “you” comes last, which is a good metaphor for the West, just as ya’s position in the Russian alphabet is a good metaphor for the East.
In Russian, my Russian professor used to say, the alphabet ends with the letter “Ya,” which is also a word that translates into the English “I,” so that “I”—the individual—always comes last in Russian.
It’s like life as a woman under the Taliban doesn’t exist, or something.
More on the theme of work and artistry: “It’s better to work, to go into the underground cave where there are books, than to fritter away time online. It’s crazy that I need all of these mental crutches in order to live. It’s fiction. It’s fine.”
My idea about my wake and the browser history.
Of how fucking much she writes about her damn relationships—romances and friendships and fellow creatives—and how she must assume that these relationships are intrinsically compelling to her readers.
Of how invested she is in being “a writer” (“everything has to be sacrificed for writing,” she says) and in fame (“they want to know that after suffering comes salvation, and that salvation will come in the form of fame”).
Of how much she frets about her (largely successful) writing career.
Of how much she talks about the universe as if it has four corners: New York, Paris, London, and California (Toronto, she writes, is just “a pot of concrete”…which I suppose she has the right to say, because she’s from Toronto).
Of how much she writes about sex, and how if a male author wrote about sex like she does, it would be “problematic” (one of her white male friends complains about this fact, complains that he cannot “feel he owns his experiences sufficiently or, if he owns them they do not matter—they are not the important stories to be told”).
Of how narcissistic that seems, and how self-pitying.
Of how privileged she seems, even when it’s clear she struggles with money and can’t keep up with the lifestyles of her peers.
Of how quickly she’d likely agree with what I’ve just written, of how quickly she’d efface herself and accept my judgments.
Okay, who cares?
One thing I didn’t consider was how many other great words begin with “th,” including the word “then.”
Perhaps those are the sacred things in life.
She complains: “I never meet any new people. I never meet any of the interesting people there are to meet.”
She is at least quite critical of her desire for fame and success: “You are nothing but slime, aspiring slime. … Your ugly hollow aspiration.”
She meditates on first knowledge, I think, when she writes: “Use whatever techniques you want and remember what you first knew: that it doesn’t matter what the book is about.”
She pities herself, like we all do, for her inability to be other people: “Walking home from the party, I was upset, thinking Agnes had it all because she had a husband, and now she could have a kid, while I had nothing.”
She says that she wants to write “fiction and nonfiction together, because the imagination is more amazing than anything in life, and life is more amazing than anything you can make up.”
She wants “to be neither beautiful nor famous nor eccentric” (or maybe not; she might be referring to someone else here, I don’t know).
She whines: “I once believed that making art was going to bring me happiness and success and be this pretty thing.”
She writes, “It is a great failure to age.”
She writes, “That’s all I want to know, what the human laws are,” and isn’t that what we all want to know?
She writes, “When you break up with someone, you feel you must have had such incredible powers of self-deception to have gone out with them at all,” and damn, that rang true.
She writes, correctly: “We don’t have a reigning morality. We don’t have a unified religion or philosophy. We don’t know what to be afraid of.”
She writes: “I have started playing Tetris, which feels halfway between writing and drinking.”
She writes: “I love the entire universe and everything in it.”
She writes: “I put my teeth in my pocket.”
She writes: “If in ten years I have a personality, that would be nice.”
She writes: “Regretting not being in New York, a feeling I suppose I will always have” (vomit).
She writes: “We can’t look at humans directly because it’s too hard. We can’t look at ourselves.
We can’t see where cruelty or selfishness comes from.”
She writes: “You can’t afford to move to New York. … You probably won’t move to New York. You probably won’t move to Paris. You see magic and beauty everywhere. … You will probably die in Toronto.”
Some things in life are impossible to explain and that doesn’t have to be a problem.
Sometimes she is Aristotelian: “Everything is very close right now, is about to be brought into being, is just millimeters away.”
Sometimes she is Platonic: “Everything is more beautiful and glittering in my mind than it ever is in real life.”
That, again, is the truth Alphabetical Diaries reveals.
(That’s actually a really horrible thing for me to insert into another person’s head, and I apologize to Sheila Heti for doing it.)
That’s what Heti is doing here, in her own way, and it works so, so well.
The urgency is palpable.
The way these sentences smash together, the juxtaposition of her ambitions and the mundane, is extremely satisfying.
This isn’t just about the knowledge she first acquired as a writer, but the knowledge she was born with, the instinctive knowledge we’re all born with, I think.
When she gets to “then,” a narrative forms that is exhilarating: “Then…then…then…then….”
Why am I so judgmental? 

 This is a volume of translations of translations within translations by unknown translators. Consequently, the organization can be confusing, the prose can be stilted, and the stories can be hard to follow. But the compelling moments shine so brightly it hurts. A real-life satyr instructs a desert monk on where to find God. A woman assumes the identity of a (male) desert monk, Mulan-style, and she out-monks her male counterparts—she is only discovered to be a woman after she dies, and of course she becomes a saint. The devil has numerous conversations with desert monks, and he usually walks away frustrated that he can’t trick them into screwing up their monkish ways. Two desert monks who live together in a cell decide to quarrel over who owns a specific tile on the floor, not because they care about the tile, but because they’ve never quarreled before, and so they feel insufficiently worthy of repentance (spoiler alert: they suck at quarreling). Two desert monks visit the big city: one fornicates, the other doesn’t, but the non-fornicator confesses to fornicating so that their abbot’s punishment will be lighter on the monk who actually fornicated.

All the desert monks trip over each other trying to confess sins greater than the others' sins, trying to achieve humility, and then failing to achieve humility because they tried too hard.

All the desert monks also seem to have lions as pets, and one desert monk curses his lion for eating meat (which, in case you don’t know, is what lions do).

A lot of these desert monks just give up on being desert monks, because being a desert monk is too difficult for them. But, as the desert monks continually point out, grace abounds.

Then there is my favorite story, the cryptic tale of the abbot Lot. Another abbot, Joseph, came to Lot and asked, “Father, according to my strength I keep a modest rule of prayer and fasting and meditation and quiet, and according to my strength I purge my imagination: what more must I do?” In response, Abbot Lot stood up and held his hands toward the sky, "and his fingers became like ten torches of fire, and he said, ‘If thou wilt, thou shalt be made wholly a flame.”

That’s metal.

I also liked this one: “A brother asked the abbot Alonius, ‘What is contempt?’ And the old man said, ‘To be below the creatures that have no reason, and to know that they are not condemned.’”

If you read nothing else from this volume, read the essays “Of Accidie” and “Of Mortification” by Cassian of Marseilles. They are two of the most honest and accurate accounts of the pains, challenges, boredom, and self-effacement that accompany any serious journey toward God.

In sum: it’s hard out there for a monk.