The Taste of Things

The Taste of Things begins with Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) in an estate garden, collecting vegetables. I immediately noticed the sound of her clogs clapping against the boards laid between the garden rows. That sound, it turns out, is a mission statement. This is a profoundly sensual film, one that forces the audience to delight in all the senses a movie can rally to its purpose.

The first 15 or 20 minutes revolve around the preparation of a lavish meal. There is little dialogue, and no real sense of who we’re watching. I was unsure if Eugénie and Dodin (Benoît Magimel) were servants, or a husband and wife working their own stove, or both. Director Trần Anh Hùng nurses that ambiguity. For these people, the preparation of food is the greatest creative act, the greatest act of love, possible. Their passion fills the screen.

I assume the opening sequence lasts about 15 or 20 minutes. I honestly couldn’t tell you. I was transfixed. It may have been 10 minutes, and it may have been half an hour. I could have watched these four people—house servant Violette and her niece Pauline assist—cook that meal for the duration of the movie. It’s a perfect example of the magic of cinema, of something no other medium can do. I was in a shit mood as I walked into the theater, but the aesthetic spell cast from the jump is so complete that I was instantly carried away.

Hùng’s camera lingers on every detail. Every time a plate is scraped into a pot or mushrooms are chucked in a pan, I found myself overwhelmed. If the camera took a moment to peer into a pot, which it nearly always did, I cheered. “I should spend more time preparing my own food,” he thought to himself only two hours before buying a cubano and some oversized cookies in the foodcourt.

The Taste of Things is more accurately represented by its French title, La Passion de Dodin Bouffant. We learn that the elaborate meal they’re preparing, a multi-course monstrosity spearheaded by Eugénie, is a dinner for Dodin and his gourmet friends. They are a kind-hearted group of enthusiasts, men who talk of food while dining, who discuss the history behind dishes and the latest gossip involving the employment of the great chefs. One of my favorite running jokes of the film is that the four friends seem an inseparable collective, nearly always around. There’s something of magical realism about them.

Food, then, is Dodin’s passion. After the meal, his friends pass through the kitchen, complimenting Eugénie for her efforts and asking why she no longer dines with them. “For it to be done right, I must be here in the kitchen,” she demures. At that point, I assumed they were married. The warmth pours out of both of them, helped I’m sure by the fact that Binoche and Magimel were together in real life for about a decade. It’s only later that night, when Dodin and Eugénie are sat outside by the lake for tea, recovering from the exhaustion of the day’s efforts, that we receive clarity. “I’ll ask again,” he says as he puffs his pipe. “Will you marry me?”

That’s more or less the temperament of The Taste of Things, content to reveal without ever focusing. Not only are Eugénie and Dodin not married, they aren’t even “technically” a couple. They are certainly in love. Through food and over time they have discovered the shared language that is at the center of any great relationship.

Dodin proposes to Eugénie again later in the film, during a marvelous scene in which he cooks a multi-course meal for her. He proposes with a dish, and it is in keeping with the movie’s overall sensibilities that this is the one dish we never get a glamour shot of. The Taste of Things avoids the moments of highest drama as much as it can. It’s fitting that we never see the only dish in the story with an agenda beyond the joys of feeding and eating. It occurs to me, that too is a good description of love.

During that opening sequence, Eugénie briefly reveals that she is hiding an illness. We assume she will die later, and indeed she does. When she dies, she takes Dodin’s joy for (not of) cooking away. He loses all interest in food. “You haven’t eaten in two days,” Violette admonishes. That’s a bad sign no matter who you are, but for Dodin, that’s cataclysmic. This is a man who came home from an eight-hour meal to request some simple dishes from Eugénie before going to bed. “He didn’t want to sleep on the memory of that meal,” she says with a smile.

A few hours after getting home, my mind is marinating in the images and sounds of The Taste of Things. It makes the argument that life is what we experience, for however long we manage to do that; it should all be taken in to the fullest extent possible. I’m also thinking about Eugénie and Dodin, about their love for one another, about the language they share between themselves, and about Dodin’s loss.

“I have a very important question for you,” Eugénie says.

“Yes.”

“Am I your cook, or your wife?”

Dodin takes a moment before taking her hand. “My cook, of course.”

Eugénie smiles. “Thank you.”

Taylor Swift got it right when she wrote, “You showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else.”

A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux

I had a bit of an unusual experience with A Man’s Place, Nobel Prize–winner Annie Ernaux’s 1983 book inspired by her father’s death. I started out reading La place in the original French, in one of those handsome Gallimard editions that are the exact kind of anonymous that I’ve come to associate with luxury goods. I made it about 20 or so pages over the course of a week before deciding I was over it. The writing felt somehow too mannered, too self-possessed, like I was watching a pretentious art film.

I had a copy of the English translation, A Man’s Place, and decided to give that a quick look before ditching the book entirely. I started from the beginning, and a strange thing happened: I was so absorbed by what I was reading that I kept reading, clearing 20 or 30 pages of book while standing at the dining room table. What had initially seemed overly mannered and affectedly brusque in the French suddenly felt like an author maintaining the necessary distance to keep herself together.

I still can’t account for it. The French is not particularly difficult, and the English translation is nearly word-for-word how I myself would translate it were I given the task. Why, then, was this the case? More confounding, when I mentioned the issue to my friend Sara, she told me that over the years she had had multiple friends tell her that Ernaux is best read in translation. These were all French speakers, with a variety of native languages. If anyone has any theories, I’m all ears.

A Man’s Place is about Ernaux’s father. In the process of depicting his life, it cannot help but be about class and family relationships, and how those intersect. The first passage I underlined came some 30 pages into this 90-page book, when Ernaux imagines the moment her parents met. “My mother must have been impressed…when she met him at the rope factory. Before then she had worked in a margarine plant. A tall, dark man with grey eyes, he held himself upright and was a trifle conceited. ‘My husband never looked working-class.’”

Something about Ernaux’s mother using “my husband” while talking to Ernaux about her father struck me as remarkably intimate. It feels proud, warmly possessive, and immensely personal. It’s almost uncomfortable to read. I’m realizing now as I write this that Ernaux never tells us her parents’ names, and somehow that serves to make that passage all the more moving. All we are, all we have, is our relationships with those who love us, and so the people here are defined in those terms.

While Ernaux’s parents began life as working class, they managed to work their way up. They opened a grocery store and café, becoming fixtures of the local community in the process. A lot of the most interesting material here relates to the difficulties that result from successfully achieving what I guess we can’t quite call the American Dream, from managing to make more of your financial situation. Relatives appear from time to time, expecting groceries for free while referring to the pair as superior.

Most touching is the impact their transition has on their relationship with their own daughter. When her father visits her as an adult, “I described the flat, the Louis-Philippe writing desk, the hi-fi system and the red velvet armchairs. He soon lost interest. He had brought me up to enjoy the luxuries he himself had been denied, therefore he was happy, but the antique dresser and the Dunlopillo mattress meant nothing more to him than the signs of social success. He often cut me short by saying, ‘You’re quite right to make the most of it.’” He has spent his life working so she can became a part of a world that holds little for him outside of the aspirational possibility of getting there. “Every time I did well in [school], he saw it as an achievement and the hope that one day I might be better than him.” [Italics hers.]

That theme is even reflected in his language, with frequent references to the ways he would oscillate back and forth between textbook French and his native Brittany dialect. It reminded me of Elena Ferrante’s protagonists in the Neapolitan Novels, individuals who manage a similar upward climb over the course of their lives, who would resort to dialect when angry. We are who we are. We can change the surrounding circumstances, but that doesn’t mean we can change ourselves.

Revisiting Promising Young Woman

I watched Saltburn. Because I watched Saltburn, I ended up getting into conversations with a number of friends about Saltburn. Because I ended up getting into conversations with a number of friends about Saltburn, I ended up getting into conversations with a number of friends about Promising Young Woman. Because I ended up getting into conversations with a number of friends about Promising Young Woman, I decided to revisit 2020’s most resilient cultural product.

Say what you will about the film, but Promising Young Woman has stuck around. I had a (pretty good!) date back in August where we spent probably half an hour talking about it. Most people have an opinion on it, and not of the “Oh, yeah, I saw it, it was good” variety. People have theses. They walk around ready to spout off, in one direction or the other, about Emerald Fennell’s directorial debut.

The first time I watched it, I didn’t think Promising Young Woman was very good. I’ve softened on it a bit with this rewatch, but my opinion remains mostly negative. Most of the characters sit in an uncomfortable space between caricature and fleshed out individual. I can’t tell what level of heightened we’re sitting in from how they’re portrayed, and I don’t think the movie knows either. It would benefit from either a firmer grounding in reality, or embracing outright its pulpier impulses. I vote for the latter, but that may not have been in the cards. Saltburn serves as Exhibit B in the case that Fennell isn’t particularly good at register.

I find it alienating that the characters speak and exhibit Fennell’s arguments so directly. Promising Young Woman isn’t a story that’s concerned with themes, it’s themes that tried to cobble themselves together into a story. These aren’t characters, they’re evidence. That is part of why the movie did so well with the audience who responded to it, everything is right there, but while I respect very much the degree to which people have found something to love in Promising Young Woman, it strikes me as a case of loving something for what it wants to be rather than for what it is.

Give me a movie that’s sublimated this movie’s arguments, and we’re talking. Having seen Saltburn, I’m not sure I think Fennell has that in her as a writer.

It’s not even that the film is so heavy-handed. With enough good intent and vision, I can work with that. It’s the combination of heavy-handedness and clumsiness. Cassie (Carey Mulligan) hinges her entire plan on the U.S. criminal justice system following through on her murder. What in the film would lead me to believe that she’d be inclined to do that? This is clearly a woman who doesn’t believe in the established powers that be. She confronts the dean of the school she used to attend about the fact that the school didn’t take her friend’s rape claims seriously. I don’t buy it, and it speaks to a lack of attention.

I spent most of my first viewing on shifting ground, moved by the intent of what I was watching while struggling with the results of that intent. The catastrophic failure for me, the moment we lost all cabin pressure, was Ryan’s (Bo Burnham) heel turn. Towards the end of the movie, as Cassie takes the final steps in the plan that will lead to her death, she discovers that Ryan was there on the night that her best friend was repeatedly raped.

Prior to this, Ryan has been the movie’s source of light. Texturally, he brings something different. The “Stars Are Blind” montage, when the two of them sing in a pharmacy, intercut with footage of their time together, remains the highlight of the film for me, because it is the only scene where I feel like anything opens up beyond the parameters of the essay Fennell is writing.

So now he’s a beast, the same as anyone else. He calls her a bitch. Okay. I don’t buy it. I’ve heard the argument that Ryan’s malignancy is there the whole time, and I specifically watched for the clues on second viewing, but I don’t buy it. Maybe the issue is Burnham’s performance, but I think it’s deeper than that.

Ryan’s turn changes Promising Young Woman into a movie in which all men are irredeemable. Yes, Alfred Molina’s lawyer exists, and he regrets all the hurt he’s caused women over the course of his career, but even he used to be what sounds like a cartoon monster. Burnham’s character serves as an antidote for much of the film, a charming and seemingly decent guy who tries to woo Cassie. She, as a result of her obsession and trauma, is mostly unreachable. That’s making an implied—and compelling—argument that the issues this movie is about effect everyone.

Cassie’s character is meant to be consumed by the past. She is meant to be lost, and disengaged from the world. The scene with Molly Shannon makes it explicitly textual that the film doesn’t want us thinking “Yas, queen, I love all this for you.” Ryan turning into a mustachioed villain makes her right! It removes the tragedy of her specific tragedy.

She’s no longer consumed by revenge to the point of missing out on life. There’s nothing to miss out on. So what if the university had taken her friend’s complaints seriously? At this point, it’s all evidently a lost cause anyway. And she might as well get caught up in revenge and die. In the world of this film, there truly is nothing else. 

I think I’d mind it significantly less if all men in the movie were awful all the time, actually. There’s something specifically about Burnham’s turn from genuinely nice guy—there’s not even anything in the writing or performance to suggest he’s a Nice Guy™, which would also be more interesting—to mustachioed villain that just…I was disappointed. It flattens the movie’s emotional and philosophical worldviews to absurd degrees. The movie suddenly became uninteresting.

I don’t have a strong take on the end of the film, and Cassie’s death. I was deflated by the time that happened, both times I watched it. Saltburn is a movie that desperately wants to shock me, and I think the same impulse underwrites some of what’s going on in Promising Young Woman, but, again, I don’t have thoughts to dive into.

What I’ll give Promising Young Woman, even at my most uncharitable: it is clearly an impassioned, honest work that was trying to say something, and I respected that. If Promising Young Woman hadn’t been interesting, I wouldn’t have cared about Saltburn. Saltburn has more or less ensured that I won’t be seeing any of Fennell’s movies in the future.

There’s a moment in Promising Young Woman, right at the end, when Fennell remembers that movies can relate their themes without explicitly stating them. After Cassie dies, her body is burnt to hide the evidence. Ultimately, the police identify the remains, ensuring justice will be enacted this time, because they find her half of the friendship necklace she and her best friend used to wear. This, I thought, was a beautiful choice. When all of the world is against them, the only thing women can count on is each other.

All of It with Alison Stewart

I appeared on All of It with Alison Stewart today to discuss board games, game night etiquette, and to answer questions from callers! You can listen to the episode on the All of It website.

"The Space Between the Notes"

On Every Good Boy Does Fine by Jeremy Denk

At one point in Every Good Boy Does Fine, pianist Jeremy Denk’s wonderful memoir about his years studying the instrument, a professor mentions the old Claude Debussy chestnut, “music is the space between the notes.” I’ve heard the line before, it’s entirely possible you have too, but something about the context here caused it to click.

There are a few competing interpretations of Debussy’s sentiment. One of the most common understands it as advocation for minimalism (not Minimalism, that didn’t exist yet): write as few notes as possible. Emperor Joseph II would certainly appreciate that parsing. “The space between the notes” can be thought of as the literal space on the paper. If we take this as correct, Miles Davis was getting to a similar point when he said that music is the notes you don’t play.

That interpretation serves composers well, but it doesn’t do much for performers. The other interpretation, the one the professor was using at the time, relates to the lateral and temporal distance in between notes. He was talking about the pulse, about rhythm and phrasing.

After reading that chapter, the way I was listening to classical music changed dramatically. I went from passively hearing and appreciating moments of rubato—when a performer stretches a note for longer than indicated by the sheet music—to actively seeking them out. They have suddenly become the key to understanding something bigger. While only time can tell if this fever will settle in for the long run, at the moment I think of the application of rubato as the heart of classical music performance, if not classical music itself.

Look at Krystian Zimerman’s astonishing rendition of one of Franz Schubert’s Impromptus. This has been one of my favorite recordings for nearly a decade now. It is impossibly moving. Zimerman’s technique is impeccable. He is able to separate the voices, the melody and the accompaniment, completely. You would almost believe there were two pianos at work here, one simply plonking out the melody while the other quietly works away. That’s all masterful, sure. What makes this recording sublime, ultimately, is his use of time.

When Zimerman heads for a melodic climax, he milks it. The music slows ever so slightly. It’s almost too much, frankly. Music with too much rubato either becomes camp or, worse, ceases to be coherent. He pushes the freedom of Romanticism right to the edge, but never over. The music breathes. You could play the same passage with identical technique to a metronome, and it would be lovely, but it wouldn’t feel the same. This is the difference between describing a feeling, and embodying it.

Take a listen to Denk’s own recording of the Goldberg Variations. Pay particular attention to those first two measures, and how that music looks on the page. Notice how the left hand notes, the bottom row, always fall squarely in line with a note in the right hand.

There are many, many recordings of Bach that follow that timing with zealotry. Lord knows I do when I fumble my way through the Aria. With Bach in particular, there’s a pressure to be sehr genau, for everything to be exact. That’s not how Denk plays it, though. In that second measure, he brings in the left hand just a hair, almost imperceptibly, earlier than the right. As a result, the melody pulses with subtle life, a life missing from many otherwise excellent recordings.

To be a performer is a strange thing. You express yourself through the works of others. You have to balance your thoughts, your opinions, and your instincts against their intentions. The space between the notes is the most immediate, and personal, mode of expression musicians have. “Rubato can’t be planned,” a friend of mine said. “That’s the point.” It is an immediate, urgent expression of feeling. In those moments, the boundary between the musician and the sound vanishes.

Every Good Boy Does Fine is an excellent memoir. If you are a music performer, or interested in performance, it is indispensable. It has changed the way I listen to music. Now, the space between the notes is all I can think about.

The Iron Claw

I don’t mean to alarm or surprise you, but The Iron Claw is not a happy movie. From stem to stern, there is little but the pain, cruelty, and suffering inflicted on the Von Erich boys by their patriarch. Fritz (Holt McAllany), a professional wrestling mogul, is a real son of a bitch. Without emotion, empathy, or care beyond his own ambition and success, he throws his children’s lives, one after the other, at the industry that may be the only thing he loves. If he even loves that.

Though cruelty is often what’s on display, The Iron Claw has settled in as a film about love, concerned with its absence and the ways it perseveres in spite of obstacles, a flower through concrete. The brothers love each other deeply, and that love is evident.

I keep thinking about an early moment, when middle brother Kerry (Jeremy Allan White) returns home from Olympic training. The Carter Administration’s boycott of the Moscow games put an end to his chances of escaping the Von Erich black hole. In retrospect, this is the moment everything goes wrong.

When Kerry gets off the bus, the family is waiting for him. For some reason, I was struck by the lack of friends or neighbors. There is no one outside the family unit. In this movie, there seldom is. Fritz comes up first, and shakes Kerry’s hand. Father makes no motion to comfort son. There’s no indication that these two have ever, in their lives, hugged. The first words Kerry says are, “I’m sorry, dad,” locking eyes with Fritz and accepting, somehow, a responsibility that isn’t his. “I’m sorry, too,” Fritz answers.

Then, Kerry is mobbed by all three of his brothers. Instantly, they are laughing, smiling, and hugging each other. Now that I think about it, that hug, which I think is the only time we see the four living brothers embrace (a fifth brother died as a child), is mirrored by the end of the movie, when Kerry meets and embraces his three deceased siblings in the afterlife.

The happiest moments in the film—the only happy moments in the film—happen away from the family house, away from the wrestling ring, and away from Fritz. When youngest brother Mike (Stanley Simons) is denied permission to play at a college party with his high school band, all four brothers sneak out. At the party, we see them relax into full people. Kerry is a born partier. Kevin (Zac Efron) has sex for the first time, with the woman he goes on to marry. Mike sings and plays guitar in his band, who are pretty good. All four brothers can still find joy in the world. You think about that scene later, and you wonder what would have happened to all of them if they’d simply never gone back home.

There’s a pretty good lyric in the song Mike sings, by the way. “I’m a roman candle, waiting for the 4th of July.” Something like that. The Von Erich brothers could have been other people away from all this. Wrestling is all they’re allowed to know, rather than all they want to know.

Much of The Iron Claw is claustrophobic, shot with tight framing. Even when the wrestling matches do go to a wide, the boundaries of the ring feel like the end of everything. The movie is about space and the absence thereof as much as it is about love. Another way to say that: the movie is painfully aware of how those two things are related.

After David (Harris Dickinson) dies in a hotel room in Japan, on the night of the funeral, Fritz flips a coin to see which of his sons will take over David’s odyssean task, winning the World Heavyweight Championship. Kerry is not only selected, but succeeds, in a match that’s kept off screen. We aren’t invited to the joy or triumph of the accomplishment. We find out late at night, when Kerry is back home, sitting at the kitchen table with his belt and a beer. “I’m having a hard time coming down,” he says. He gets on his motorcycle and rides off into the night. Even the open road is shot claustrophobically. It doesn’t lead anywhere. It stretches out ahead infinitely, a narrow corridor, bound in on both sides.

In the final scene, with David, Mike, and Kerry dead, Kevin starts crying as he sits in the yard with his two young children. He’s sold the family business, in spite of Fritz’s wishes, and gotten away from wrestling. The boys ask what’s wrong. “I used to be a brother, and now I’m not a brother anymore,” is his crushing answer. His sons climb into his lap, “We’ll be your brothers,” and give him the first group hug he’s gotten since Kerry’s homecoming. The camera lifts up on a crane, and a subtle dolly zoom adds depth to the surrounding forest. Suddenly, there is space in the world. You can see beyond the edges of the ring.

Home After Dark and The Vision

            I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the last week or so thinking about a thread between David Small’s Home After Dark: A Novel, and Tom King’s The Vision. On the surface, these two comics don’t have much in common. Home After Dark takes place in the 1950’s, and follows a young teenager, Russell Pruitt, as he and his father move to California. The Vision is set in the contemporary suburbs of Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and shows the titular Marvel hero’s attempts to settle down with a family of his own creation. David Small works in India ink, the artwork more concerned with capturing the underlying psychology of the events than full, realistic renderings. The Vision, primarily a collaboration between King and artist Gabriel Hernandez Walta, exists within the typical framework of superhero comics: bright colors, sharp lines, and everything looks (relatively) realistic. Home After Dark is a Bildungsroman, while The Vision is, fundamentally, a thriller.

            What they have in common is a fascination with 1950’s Americana. In the case of Home, the story is set there and then. With Vision, the fascination is mostly subtextual, though the book is littered with visual cues to place the reader firmly in that space. Fundamentally, they’re working with the same clay. Yet Home After Dark is a cruel, grueling read, while The Vision is revelatory. Why is that?

            Home After Dark wants to deconstruct our cultural memory of the 1950’s. There is no other reason for this bleak, miserable book to exist. Beyond the kindness of a pair of Chinese immigrants, the book exists only to say, “It was a dark, violent, awful time, just like any other.” In the age of Make America Great Again, that may have more value than I am instinctually willing to ascribe to it. But I grew up watching Pleasantville, I’ve seen the films of Todd Haynes; that the 1950’s were awful underneath the veneer is old news. All it can do to prove its point is show acts of violence, of cruelty, of bottomless malice. The Vision, on the other hand, is about a ‘man’ who is trying to create that perfect hermetic environment, and what that pursuit can do to you, and to the people you force into that mold. The Vision is interested in the psychology of the cultural baggage that still exists, in the need to create a perfect house and a perfect life with two children, a dog, and a picket fence. Home After Dark tells us what we already know. The Vision confronts us with the fact that we still want what we know was never real.

apparition in the woods

I have more or less come to terms with the fact that I will die. That used to be a problem for me, literally keeping me up at night, but I've made peace with it. I hope it’s rather a long way off, but I accept that it is coming.

What still makes me profoundly uncomfortable is extinction. Serious contemplation of the sun burning out, the food supply drying up, or the universe snapping back in on itself like an over-stretched elastic, can and will send me into spiraling bouts of depression. I can end, and that's alright, but there must be something that continues. There must be life.

*      *      *      *      *

I recently finished rereading The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross's 2007 survey of 20th Century music. It is a wonderful book, impeccably researched, and written in such a way that you can feel Ross' love and passion for the music radiate off the page. The majority of the chapters chronicle a specific musical era or group of composers. It begins with a chapter on Mahler and Strauss, and proceeds more or less chronologically. Ross has a gift for writing about music, and here he manages to illuminate the works of the century's great composers with the cultural and personal context in which they were written.

For my money, the best chapters in The Rest Is Noise are those that concern themselves with a single composer. The chapter "Apparition in the Woods," about Jean Sibelius, is far and away my favorite. Sibelius had much success in his life; he was a living National Treasure of Finland, he was well-known throughout the world, and his works continue to be performed by orchestras everywhere. Despite all this, he had the misfortune of coming to prominence during a time when a large group of composers were willfully and blindly rejecting tonality in the name of creating The New. He never received the respect of his peers, certainly not during his lifetime, and he was rarely truly happy.

One of the most famous pieces in Sibelius's canon is his fifth Symphony, a work of both profound beauty and quiet innovation. The final movement is astonishing, the orchestra struggling in the last three minutes to reach a summit that is unlike anything else in music. Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5 puts the lie to the idea that it is incredible someone so unhappy could make something so triumphant and beautiful; to the contrary, it would be impossible for anyone who has not known the dark to turn on such a powerful light.

*      *      *      *      *

Currently, I am reading Dave Eggers' The Wild Things, the novelization of his cinematic adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. The protagonist, Max, is about the same age I was when I first asked my mom what death is. Last night, just before going to sleep, I read a chapter in which Max's science teacher mentions that humans will eventually be extinct, through some means or another. To Max, this is a revelation. The world makes little sense to him as it is, and this doesn't help. Eggers makes getting into Max's mind look effortless, and handles all of this with clean, simple, effective prose.

As I read, I could feel the depression creeping up. It always starts in my stomach, and spreads from there. It makes it hard to breathe, and harder still to think about anything other than the end of the world. Of course I know that one day the sun will burn out, and when it does, it will likely scald the Earth. And I know that human beings will have gone extinct well before then, likely through our own doing. But I live, day to day, without those thoughts in my head, because I wouldn't get anything done otherwise.

I finished the chapter, and reached for my headphones. I turned off the light, put on the final movement of Sibelius' fifth, and listened. In those final moments, as the orchestra attempts to build, pulled back again and again by the darkness, finally emerging triumphant, it was telling me that as long as there is beauty like this in the world, it is worth existing. You are here, it says. That's all that matters for now.