At first glance, it’s easy to see why. The tortured, poetic soliloquies. The commanding dominance over his lover, repulsive to us now but no doubt inspiring to a young aristocrat or flowering poet of the time. His resistance to control and subjugation. His desire to avenge the injustices of his father’s death.

Manliness, which in retrospect we consider Shakespeare’s tragic hero to be lacking, personified to them through Hamlet and his debilitating introspection.

Another of Hamlet’s character traits so lauded by these men-in-training was no doubt his inclination for the melodramatic. Especially around the topic of death, ‘The Dane’ was prone to lofty and flamboyant theatrics. His ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy stands tall as one of the greatest ruminations on death, courage and the unknown in the English literary canon. He wonders;

Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Death is understandably a theme on Hamlet’s mind. His father’s ghost has just told him of his uncle’s malevolent fratricide, and made Hamlet swear to exact his revenge. Hamlet’s psyche is both processing the results of and plotting the execution of a death, a murder, and this duality is noticeable in his oscillating attitudes towards his own ‘mortal coil’.

Perhaps the attitude that Hamlet takes which we would be most receptive to, both in Victorian training and in our modern times, is his romanticisation of death. We’re suckers for a charming death quote, a pithy but profound aphorism comparing the tribulation of death to the great curtain fall, the great leveller, the great unknown… whatever death is, we feel the need to call it great.

We love talking about death, in no small part owing to the wealth of previous literary material. It’s wildly prevalent throughout Shakespeare’s corpus:

‘But here, upon this bank and shoal of time / We’d jump the life to come.’ [Macbeth]

‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once.’ [Julius Caesar]

‘To die, to go we know not where; / To lie in cold obstruction and to rot.’ [Measure for Measure’]

Shakespeare presents us with a host of death-aesthetic quotes, but he’s not alone. Death and its ideation permeates more modern literature also:

‘He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.’ [Gatsby]

‘Death is a beautiful thing. It takes so much away, but it leaves us with this—a baby’s heartbeat.’ [Beloved]

‘Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time’. [Never Let Me Go]

Why have we always felt the need to romanticise death?

Notice that in literature, film, and art, death often symbolises something more extraordinary—be that love, sacrifice, or destiny. By romanticizing it, we give death structure and meaning, an interpretive framework which makes it easier to process. We can soften the harsh reality of death by poeticising it. We can construct narratives where death becomes a moment of transcendence rather than just a bleak ending.

Less practically, we might think there’s a certain beauty in the melancholy of death—consider Gatsby staring at the green light, knowing he can never reach it. The mourning, longing, and sorrow of death and loss have a poetic quality; we make death feel more like an art form than a biological reality.

Much like Hamlet, we’re uncomfortable when confronted by the bleak realities of death. We always have, and we always will, look for ways to comfort ourselves, using this process of romanticisation to help us reshape death. We use the poetic and dramatic form to fashion death into a literary device, purposefully dulling the knife’s edge so that we might hold it by the blade, and comprehend it fully. ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all’, Hamlet concluded. Rarely have words written in the 17th century been so enduring.

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As divinity would have it, I’m now in italy with my girlfriend, visiting family. I know instantly, as soon as we get to Telese Terme, their small city in the midst of the bootleg, what I have to do. We agree to travel to Naples on Wednesday to realise my dream. I was a young boy and I was happy.

The alarm rang at 8am, not objectively early but, coming off the back of a few 6am wake-up calls for familial activities, a quick shot to the gut. We scrambled ready and took ourselves out into the heat, even then suffocating, and down to the “train station”.

Comprised of two small platforms, our journey from entrance to platform came via a small metal bridge which is on the same level as the tracks itself, and which one crosses by looking left, looking right, and observing no trains in the distance, making the sign of the cross over oneself and taking the plunge. We survived to platform 2 and awaited our train.

For all the despair that is to come, the outbound train was excellent. Double-decked, air-conditioned, slow enough to take in the rural surroundings — we were hopeful, hilariously hopeful, that our Neapolitan journey might resemble my fanciful dreams.

Whatever hope we clung to withered by the time we exited Naples Centrale, the city-centre station. We had decided on this vintage market — dubbed “the biggest vintage thrift in the South of Italy” — with a stunning view of Vesuvius, so we set out on the 1113 Metro line.

As will become apparent, Naples is inseparable from dirt. It is dirty, unclean, decrepit, decayed, unhygienic, unsanitary — it is nasty. The metro station, praised on social media for it’s glorious architecture, is no different. Naples Garibaldi, anyway, is a metal box, with sparse, low-effort graffiti on the walls, dirt on the tracks, and one lonesome sign hanging, hanged, with the name ashamedly written. The train itself was no better, a steamy, sweaty mess of businessmen and schoolchildren, natives as confused as us tourists — in large part, due to the fact that most stations don’t have stop names, and the ones that do aren’t announced on the tannoy anyway — because none of the stops are announced, and there is no tannoy.

Using a mixture of Google Maps and faith in something bigger, we made it to our stop, and picked up our bodies and our morale in the dawn of this most exciting vintage market.

The vintage market, if you would like to call it that, was a street and a half of stalls, power-banks and hair-clips, overpriced and sad. We quickly shook ourselves free and trekked back up to the station, intent on at least getting a glimpse of Vesuvius. We asked a tour guide if there was anywhere in walking distance that we could get that phenomenal view of the volcano that we were promised.

As it turned out, the nearest view site was 10 minutes walk away, by which time we would have missed our train back to the city-centre (at this point, we were yet to walk around the city, and still thinking of it as this metropolitan / old town hybrid, a Rome mixed with Milan with the romanticism of Venice), so we forfeited that too. Dejected and sweating, we got the suffocating metro back into Naples Garibaldi, and resigned ourselves to an underwhelming McDonalds in the birthplace of pizza.

And then it was time to explore the city itself. The area around the station was, in no uncertain terms, completely awful. It was dirty, with a general air of crime and menace, perpetrated mostly by the small gangs of men with wild eyes, concentrated outside of rundown shops and cafes, who would stare at us as we walked past, turning their entire bodies as they did so, and occasionally getting up and starting towards us before we scampered around a corner. This was absolutely terrifying at 2pm on a Wednesday, the least scary time, and yet we were as vigilant as Marines for the duration of our ‘stroll’.

All this may be forgiven if the city itself were architecturally beautiful, but it isn’t. It is decaying, uncared for, the runt of the litter. It has been discarded, disowned, by the majestic Romantic beauty of Rome and Florence and Venice. There is so much trash on the streets, the main streets right around the central station, and animalistic, feral junkies looking for money, drugs, or violence on the street corners. In the right slant of light it feels, by all accounts, like Gotham.

So around 3pm, 4 hours earlier than our projected exit time, we packed up and left. We were deliriously joyful at this point – having suffered through the city itself, in a blanket of weather-warning heat, we had lost our better sense and resigned ourselves to finding the experience, which we had been indignant against so far, hilarious. Our train home was sweatier and slower, but at that point we didn’t care so much. And when we arrived back in Telese Terme, population 7,000, we were so happy. It had never looked so grand, so welcoming. It was a small oasis that invited you in, told you that you were safe… that nothing could possibly go wrong, that everything was as it should be. And, cuddled up in the mollifying arms of this tiny town, the esoteric home of my maternal cousins, we unclenched our jaws.

I don’t doubt that there are lovely parts of Naples – it became apparent to us on our scroll through social media, on the train back, that we had missed all of the picturesque bay area and traversed only the seedy underbelly, the criminal wasteland. But I no longer have that dream where I’m a little boy again, and I don’t leave my mother alone on the Barcelona flight. I don’t dream anymore, at all. I don’t sleep. I don’t ever sleep.

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He’d told me that he was building a Canon. I’d figured he meant a kind of artillery, cause Tom had studied history up in Scotland and he was a pretty overextended sort of guy.

To demonstrate, he picked up Hamlet, the Arden edition, and chucked it in the hatch, carelessly, footnotes and all. The machine gave a buzz of acknowledgement, or pleasure, and when I opened the hatch after the noise stopped Hamlet was nowhere to be seen. The machine grumbled, satiated.

Tom looked pleased with himself. I asked him what had happened.

‘Well, I gave it Hamlet, and it broke it open, every last line, every syllable, understood it perfectly, and now that it’s got the whole thing down there’s no need for the hard copy.’

I asked him what the point of it all was. He looked perturbed, like it was the first time such a question had crossed his mind. His demeanour resolved into a bravado of defensiveness, a sturdy, all-encompassing response to a disrespect that he could find certainty in.

‘Well, eventually, I’m gonna load it up with every great work of literature ever written, and once it’s eaten all of it up The Canon’s gonna fashion something beautiful out from its own digestion, The Great British Novel, and I’ll be a star. And the best part is, the kicker, the bit that’s really gonna get you, is that I won’t have had to lift a finger.’

Tom had left his seat in the midst of his rant. He wasn’t totally red in the face, but his cheeks were starting to rust, and he had that excitable worm vein wriggling around his temples. He was hunched over, in front of me, and I could see the stalactites of saliva clinging to his upper lip, leftovers of the globules that had been sprayed across the room on his impassioned tirade.

I felt so sorry for Tom, standing in front of me, so completely overrun by the revolting jubilations entirely beyond his grasp. When I left that evening the machine was still sputtering, full now, perhaps even sickly, and I felt pretty low about the state of everything.

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Outside, a man heckles for a taxi that drives past, throwing him a puddle. He doesn’t move, and his thumb doesn’t waver.

I lift my head and there’s four drinks on the table and a bowl of peanuts, which you are mindlessly eating.

Tonight there is something missing, something I have not thought to look at before.

I leave the table; I’m going to look for it, even though I know I won’t find it. It’s not in this place, the same place we go every night. I’m coming to sit back down now.

I see it in you, for the first time, I see it, and you see it in yourself, and we take our glasses, two of the four from the table, now in our hands, and drink in the happiness of our mutual recognition.

The man outside is still waiting for a taxi. He doesn’t see it, and I want him to see it, but he doesn’t and secretly I think I know we’re happy about it.

He’s going to give up and get the bus, or walk home, or call a friend. Maybe he won’t go home at all. Any one of these choices is possible and none of them matter, to us

in the regular place that we go to every night, seeing and drinking to and sharing in the knowledge of our seeing.

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Perfume adverts are so bizarre because they rely entirely on metaphor. You can’t write down and speak smells, so there’s really no way to communicate what the product does – what it smells like. Every other kind of advert involves some demonstration, some proof of how the product works and that it does, in fact, do a good job. The closest perfume adverts get to this is the insinuation that, if you wear this fragrance, you too will be riding a horse on the beach and night and sweep a woman off their feet. I don’t think they’re expecting you to fall for that.

Perfume adverts rest heavily on connotation. They work in cluster concepts – the kinds of things in the advert are the kinds of things that the company thinks best represents their perfume. It relies on you and the company conjuring up the same connotations from the image of a horse, or a shirtless man, or a night beach. It’s a lot more uncertain that selling a car, a phone, something that you can demonstrate the utility of much more plainly.

Travel writing is much the same. When you’ve spent a week in Paris, how do you write down the romantic buzz of the city? The vivacity of the streets? It relies on metaphor and connotation, just like the perfume adverts do.

How do you explain the analogue-ness of Castelvenere, miniature village in the south of Italy? How do you represent the deliberateness of going to the flower store, then the fruit store, then the bread store, and then the farm, for eggs? It’s just slow. Everything’s slow, and done with lots of rest in between. Stores close at one and reopen at five because everyone’s napping in the middle of the day. People walk slower, but they drive a lot faster. I think they drive faster so that when they get to where they’re going, they can walk even slower.

There’s no way to write down the smell of the bread store, either. Or the specific quality of the light at five in the afternoon when everything reopens and the village comes back to life, slow and unhurried, as if it had never been asleep. You can say warm and golden and dusty but these are just the horse on the beach. They’re the cluster concept, the connotation, the best approximation. The thing itself resists easy description.

Maybe that’s what the perfume advert understands that the rest of advertising doesn’t. Most products can be demonstrated. A phone loads fast, a car corners well, a blender blends effectively. But some things — the smell of cedar and lavender, the analogue slowness of a quaint village in southern Italy — can only be gestured at. You put a shirtless man on a horse and hope that something in the image resonates with something in the bottle. You write that everything’s slow and hope the reader has been somewhere slow. The best you can do is point and exclaim.

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as such, i am often confronted with the herculean task of condensing all my worldly belongings, my trophies of hard-fought battles and emblems of victory, my life-giving essentials and my joy-making indulgences, into a portable travel case.

suitcase-packing is a lost art, eaten and spit out by the modern world, like letter writing or smoking on airplanes. the catatonic traveller, unable to distinguish between necessity and clutter, can simply purchase a new suitcase, large as a fridge, allowing him to take all his wildest dreams down to Butlins. i see this as giving up. in my needlessly humble opinion, the suitcase befits the traveller. i am beyond clarification.

as any grocery shopper or constructioneer knows, the heaviest items go in first. once the foundations have been laid strong, the lighter dalliances can be strewn across the case; shavers, chargers, underwear, reproductive inhibitors, books. once all this, and more, has been settled, one may find the closing of the case difficult; this is to be expected and is a sign of good health. if you are fat enough, you may find sitting on the case effectively brings the zippers close enough together to be shut, in which instance i point at you and laugh scornfully, asking then to inspect your bag for high-calorie snacks because i am not just fearless but funny too.

if, like me, you see the body as a temple, we resort to more dynamic approaches. a few ill-thought recommendations need to be deconstructed before we settle on a solution; i now go through them in turn.

i. the leap

you may be inclined to leverage your bodyweight into more force than it’s worth by jumping and landing on your suitcase, bringing the zippers momentarily closer, pivoting in mid-air or upon landing to be able to draw them shut while the force of the impact is maintained. while naturally the first port of call, and effective if done first try, this method yields considerable injury to the leaper and risks permanent damage to the shell of the suitcase, which is often a plasticky composite (mine is near-pure adamantine, capable of withstanding gunshots, bomb-explosions (even from within), and is waterproof, but yours won’t be). attempt once, but know when to cut your losses and move on.

ii. the partner

if you happen to be packing in company, enlist the help of a friend or partner in bringing your shared bodyweight together to force the zippers close. undoubtedly, this is the safest and most resourceful method, but there are two major unlikelihoods that prevent this from being my final recommendation.

first, if you are reading this guide, then you are thinking about travelling to the aforementioned dark places. thinking, i say, because unlike me you haven’t the balls to set off on such an expedition. keep wandering around town, fatty! i may be getting my targets confused. once you have faced death all human countenance becomes Life.

in any case, if you are even thinking about travelling to the dark places, merely aware of their existence, then the modern facade of companionship is probably not for you. in which case, you may have trouble soliciting a partner to assist you in this method. fear not, better is coming.

the second unlikelihood is more grave. let us assume that you have found a comrade, a friend, willing to tackle this problem with you — but, let us also assume that the suitcase is only 1 person wide. what are we to do? how might we tesselate our bodyweight to even produce the force required for this method to be effective? trying to share the suitcase seems impractical, because with one leg each dangling off, our combined force adds up to that of one whole individual, negating our efforts. sitting atop one another seems like the obvious solution, but this one is just unacceptable. i won’t elaborate. you can’t make me. i can’t hear you.

this method, as we have seen, is irrecoverable.

iii. the one-handed pushup

you say: ‘but, but, b-b-but I can’t do a one-handed pushup’. I say, ‘then you are reading the wrong travel guide, worm’. I do not point you to better-suited resources. I do not invite competition.

we have arrived at my personal method and unwavering recommendation. when faced with this lid-closing conundrum, i like to plant my feet about a body’s length away from the suitcase, rest one hand on the Persian rug underfoot, and the other on the shell of the suitcase. a beat passes. another. suddenly, i press hard, the horseshoe tricep flares like an engine roaring into life, and the suitcase, perhaps impressed, perhaps shocked into submission, but in both cases defeated, has no choice but to bring those zips parallel, for my closing convenience.

this method works best with a partner present, not for any physical assistance, but for the dual benefit that having this method observed comes with; a closing of the suitcase, always the primary goal, but the birth of a new disciple, a loyal fan, a wowed spectator also.

if you can’t generate the power from one arm, through muscular force or sheer willpower, to bring the zippers together, then i can’t help you. perhaps you can travel with your suitcase open, holding it from the outside seam, like a waiter delivering cold glasses of wine on a tray. and men, lesser and stronger men alike, will look at you and say, he hasn’t the triceps to shut that darned thing, and you will know they are right. that’s what makes it hurt.

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—-

Humans did not inherit the world by strength. The lion rules through force, the shark through speed and certainty, the eagle through vantage. Each creature dominates within its own domain, equipped precisely for survival within it. The human, by comparison, is strangely unequipped. It is slower than the cheetah, weaker than the ox, less agile than the ape. It cannot fly, cannot breathe underwater, cannot rely on venom or armour or instinct sharpened to a single purpose. And yet, it is humans who reshape landscapes, redirect rivers, and decide the fate of other species.

What humans possess is not physical superiority, but abstraction. The ability to imagine what is not present, to plan beyond the immediate, to impose logic onto chaos. Intelligence-not merely in the sense of problem-solving, but in the ability to build systems, languages, and tools-has been the defining advantage. For thousands of years, this capacity has elevated humans above the rest of the animal kingdom. Not as the strongest, but as the most adaptable.

But this advantage is no longer exclusively ours.

In cities of glass and steel-the modern equivalent of dense jungle-another kind of intelligence has emerged. It does not hunt, does not eat, does not sleep. It learns. It processes. It generates. Artificial systems now write essays, compose music, diagnose illness, and generate images with a fluency that increasingly mirrors human output. A language model can produce arguments, mimic tone, even simulate hesitation. A machine can recognise faces faster than any human and predict behaviour with unsettling accuracy.

For the first time, the trait that defined human dominance is no longer uniquely human.

Often described as the rise of a “new predator,” this metaphor is imperfect. These systems do not compete for food or territory. They do not possess will, in any biological sense. And yet, they challenge something more fundamental: the assumption that intellect is our domain. We created them, trained them on the vast archive of human thought, and refined them into tools of astonishing capability. In doing so, we may have diluted the very capabilities that once set us apart.

It’s tempting to dismiss this as imitation. Machines, after all, do not understand, like humans do. They replicate patterns, predict likely sequences, and simulate coherence. When a system writes a poem or holds a conversation, it is not experiencing meaning; it is reproducing structure. The pauses, the tonal shifts, the apparent reflection-these are performances, assembled from data rather than lived experience.

But the distinction between performance and authenticity becomes less stable the more convincing the performance is. As a machine produces writing indistinguishable from a human’s, the question shifts. It is no longer simply whether the machine understands, but whether understanding is as central to value as we once believed. Much of human interaction-especially in modern, digital environments-is already mediated through signals, patterns, and expectations. If those can be replicated, even without consciousness, what remains uniquely ours?

One possible answer is embodiment. Humans do not simply think; they exist within bodies that age, feel pain, and move through space. We laugh not because it is optimal, but because something strikes us as absurd or joyful. We dance not to achieve efficiency, but to express something internal and often inarticulable. We hesitate, contradict ourselves, act irrationally, and assign meaning where none objectively exists. These are features of being human.

Machines, no matter how sophisticated, do not inhabit the world in this way. They do not anticipate death, do not experience time as a dwindling resource, do not attach memory to sensation. A machine can describe grief, but it does not carry it. It can simulate humour, but it does not find anything funny. It can generate expressions of love without ever needing to be loved.

And yet, even here, the boundary is less secure than it appears. As machines become more integrated into daily life-embedded in communication, decision-making, and creative production-the distinction between human-originated and machine-assisted thought begins to blur. If a person relies on artificial systems to write, to decide, to create, where does the human end and the tool begin? At what point does augmentation become substitution?

The question is no longer whether machines can think like humans. In many narrow ways, they already can. The more pressing question is whether humans will continue to define themselves by thinking at all.

For centuries, intellect has been treated as the pinnacle of human identity-the trait that justified our dominance and distinguished us from the rest of life. But if intellect becomes abundant, externalised, and shared with the systems we build, its significance may diminish. What remains, then, is not superiority, but difference.

Perhaps the future will not be decided by which intelligence is greater, but by which qualities cannot be transferred or replicated. Not speed, not memory, not even reasoning-but the peculiar, inconsistent, deeply embodied experience of being human. How we laugh, how we dance, how tall we stand before we fall.

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‘The doorbell rang, or maybe the telephone? Or… no, there was a knock at the door. I remember it clearly now. Yes, a knock at the door and I got up to go see who it was.’

In truth, he didn’t remember this day any more clearly than he had five minutes ago. The details of this bygone adventure had long since vanished from memory, but he could smell the boredom, the stifled yawns and the glances at the wristwatch. He couldn’t let this go on, compound, or else the man would leave, and if the man left, he’d have to return to Indoors, embarrassed, defeated, despairing.

Indoors called out to him, heckled his lengthy narration, beckoned him back into custom. He was determined to escape, to soar brilliantly above the normalcy of life at home, life as a nobody. He felt sure that he too should be a movie star, a rock idol, a beloved figure. In fact, he’d been cheated out of this life, the stardom he was promised from birth.

His great insight, his precautionary prophecy, was that the era of the celebrity was dying. The mainstream beast, the familiar, parasocial faces of TV and Hollywood, were being disposed of in favour of a new God — the internet personality. He tried to shake this grasping urge, tried desperately to be contented with his place among the bees, tried to find purpose in the mundanity, but he knew in his heart he was destined to rule others. Only Indoors managed to quell his desires; Indoors kept him docile, consumptive, inert. Indoors stripped him of his dreams of grandiosity, of cars and houses and adoring fans.

So Indoors became his enemy, and like many of his great idols he retreated to the outdoors. In the cloisters of his ranch in the badlands, the distant plot with no internet, he would perform. Monologues, mostly. He would stand at the edge of the property where the dust met the scrub and deliver his material to the open air — speeches, soliloquies, acceptance addresses for awards not yet given. He thanked people by name. He paused for laughter. He waited for the clamour to die down before continuing. The cattle on the neighbouring property regarded him without feeling.

He had made it. He was well on his way to the stardom and celebrity that he was owed, had been owed for so long. He had waited his turn, and now it was his chance to step forwards, into the light.

On the porch, his friend checked his watch.

A postcard from his daughter fluttered in through the letterbox. The letterbox clattered, the unmistakeable sound of metal hitting metal. He got up to go see who it was.

this is a story I wrote for Slash Magazine. A link to the website is here: https://www.theslashmedia.com/offline-stardom/

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This is a review of Curry Barker’s Obsession. There will be spoilers. I am not going to go over Inde Navarette’s breakout performance, the Top 5 Lines in The Movie That We All Watched, or attempt to situate the film in a wider cinematic context of feminist horror. All of these points are self-referential; they don’t step outside of the world of the movie itself, and are therefore shudderingly uninteresting. I think that a review, unoriginal as it must be, ought at least to be interesting.

Obsession is, at its core, a film about bodily conquest. It is a film about rape, about disregard, about male pretensions of domination. The film is unique in that the antagonist, the immediate architect of all that goes bad in this story, is by no means the villain. Nikki is only perceived as such by her male peers, as overwhelming and oppressive and hysterical.

‘Hysterical’ as an adjective derives from the same root word as hysterectomy: a Greek root hystera, meaning uterus. Historical medicinal practices blamed the ‘wandering womb’ for a woman’s emotions, and hysteria was only recently removed from clinical diagnostic terms. It is a misogynist descriptor, rooted in perceptions of women as overly emotional, flailing, and irrational in comparison to men. As weaker.

Ironic, then, that the ignition of this story is the emotional weakness and cowardice of the main man, Bear. Unable to confess his feelings of romantic interest to Nikki, despite being offered the perfect opportunity (1), he resorts to a mythological wish-fulfilling voodoo to make her his. Whether or not Nikki liked Bear back is irrelevant; the point is, he doesn’t ask, and he uses his one wish, his one chance for anything that the whole world has to offer, to assume ownership of her emotions and her body.

Perhaps Bear never really believed that the one-wish willow was legit, but this cavalier attitude doesn’t mollify his actions. Whether his wish was one of total conviction, or a ‘what the hell, worth a shot’, the fact remains that Bear uses his free ticket to literally anything on forcing this girl to not just like him, but be obsessed with him. Rather than own his feelings, and admit them to her, or even wish for something ameliorative to his own character, the kind of thing that might attract her to him naturally, Bear takes the easy way out. He purchases Nikki, only to freak out when she fulfills the total extent of what it is that he wished for.

This disregard, the way you might with a shiny new toy that you buy all excitedly, only to tire of and refund, is because Bear had no idea what ‘love’ or ‘obsession’ means, outside of complete subordination. He’s not looking for a life partner, a wife, a homemaker; all he knows is that he likes this girl, he’s attracted to her, he wants to sleep with her, and rather than bring any of that about organically, you know, in the way where it might really mean something, he gets handed a ticket to everything he’s fantasised about for the last few years and his eyes light up with dollar signs. What Nikki wants is irrelevant. In fact, we find out that the real Nikki (not this demon that he’s playing around with, that looks like her and sounds like her and is utterly besotted with him) is screaming in what one imagines to be the agony of some fiery underworld, and this does nothing to change Bear’s behaviour.

Because he doesn’t really care about Nikki, about loving her and seeing her happy; he wants the body that looks like Nikki’s body to kiss him, to lie with him at night, to be seen holding his hand in public. He wants what everyone identifies as ‘Nikki’ to be ‘his’, in everyone else’s minds. The soul is optional. He wants ownership of her body and speech, because that’s the cheapest, quickest, most socially-recognised way of her being his. And he has sex with this woman, and they live together, and they go on dates. These things happen unconsentingly, without exception, because they are entirely of Bear’s design, and Nikki — the real Nikki, trapped, withering — was never asked.

Of course the way that Nikki acts is unacceptable. Of course duct taping a door shut, bludgeoning a friend’s face with a steering wheel, and writing incestuous retellings of fairy tales is all terrifyingly strange. But that’s only Nikki in signifier, in the way that you look at a person and say ‘that’s Bob’, because you see the body that looks like Bob’s and he talks to you the way Bob would, without knowing if that’s really Bob at all. Because it’s not Nikki, because the real Nikki, as we have noted, is burning in Satan’s grasp. Bear knows this and doesn’t care, because he is having sex with the body that looks like the girl he’s had a crush on for a while.

When Bear decides that he’s had enough playing around with this woman of his own manifestation, when the obsession that he plainly wished for becomes too much for him to handle, he seeks a way out. He’s left with two options: Either the wish needs to be counterbalanced by an opposing wish, or the wish maker must die, to cancel out the effects of the wish.

The first avenue is fruitless; Bear’s friend dismisses his (hysterical) pleading as nonsense, and instead opts for a billion dollars, which rain down in gorgeous, tragic confirmation.

So Bear opts for the second way out, and tries to kill himself, to ‘save the real Nikki’, ‘rescue her from that burning hell’. That would be one, very favourable way of reading Bear’s actions at the end of the movie. The more realistic interpretation, to my mind, is that Bear has realised that his life is in pieces, his friends destroyed, his home and job inaccessible and decrepit, and finally, that the ‘woman’ he has ‘loved’ and ‘dated’ for so long is not real, but is instead entirely of his own construction, and utterly meaningless. And so, with nowhere to turn, and having made quite the big mess of it all, and maybe feeling just a little guilty, Bear elects to kill himself, with the same overdosing that took his cat.

But Bear doesn’t die, and steps out from the bathroom, pills swallowed, to find Nikki holding a snapped one-wish willow, the same instrument of destruction that got us here, presumably wishing for him to be obsessed with her also. Redemption, karma, simulation. The playing field is evened.

And, while Bear takes his place next to Nikki in the hell of his own design, the two demons embrace each other in the burning wreckage of it all, diffident, inarticulate, happy and unreal.

(1) Nikki asks Bear, in their first car ride, ‘Do you like me? Cause, now would be the time to tell me.’ and looks visibly disappointed at his negative response. This is the tragic element of the movie that haunts all that is to come, the total avoidability of all the future mess and disruption.

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But when you tell somebody happy birthday, or get well soon, or that you love them, it floats in the air for a second and then dissipates.

It doesn’t last. It doesn’t exist, once the vibrations settle. And then, 10 seconds later, it’s as though it never happened. Writing it down is holding on to the words for a little longer. Putting it up on the mantlepiece, reading them back. It’s as though they exist again, playing in your head in the author’s voice. It’s like they’re really there, telling it to you firsthand. It gets to be real again. You get to have those feelings again.a

Barthes described the intention of a love letter as “having nothing to say, but it being to you that I want to say this nothing”. I don’t think it’s having nothing to say. I think it’s wanting what you say to exist a little longer.

It keeps the words alive. And if the words are alive, then so is the joy, or the calm, or the love. We get to believe in these things a little more deeply. We hug each other a little tighter in the crosswinds.

Love letters and birthday cards aren’t replacements for speaking kindnesses to those we hold dear. They don’t counterbalance neglect, or make wrong right. They don’t stand in place of affection. A page isn’t love in a trench coat, it’s love framed. It’s a monument, sentiment embalmed and displayed, saying that I meant what I said. That you can hold me to it, because there’s a record. And that makes it real, and you can touch it, and trace your finger over the grooves.

We shelter ourselves from the furious doubts with scrawled handwriting and smudged ink. We tell ourselves, people might not mean what they say, but they mean what they write. They wouldn’t have written it otherwise. We don’t hold ourselves back. We don’t try to contain it. We scramble back from the precarious edge, clutching pages to our chest, using these pages to stand and to walk. We stake our lives on text messages and hurried notes, on voicemails and envelopes through the letterbox.

Writing it down lets it live forever. And you can be forever young, reading the faded pages, riding through the crosswinds.

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As I grew up, I became less and less interested in plastic and hard things. I stopped trying to get stuff and started trying to do stuff. I decided, somewhere along the way, that my memories were just as durable as the plastic lightsaber, if not more. They don’t rust, erode, or break. Memories don’t get eaten by the dog, accidentally flushed down the toilet, or thrown over the neighbours fence, never to return. I liked this about memories. It satisfied the juvenile hoarder in me, the 10-year-old who wanted as many things as he could get his hands on. Here was a different commodity; I couldn’t hold it in my hand, but it existed in my head, and I got to create it myself, and it was all mine to keep. This made me happy.

Getting older meant that the experiences became more valuable. There wasn’t much I could do at 12, but there was a whole lot I could do—places I could go, people I could meet, experiences I could have—at 17, 18, 19. The 10-year-old was bursting at the seams, swimming on a dragon’s bounty of memories. Plastic things long forgotten.

Now I’m 20, going on holiday with my girlfriend. At Birmingham Airport, I had the chance to buy hard plastic items again. When we landed in Barcelona, I had the chance to buy more plastic, hard things. But I had long since washed my hands of ‘tat.’ I wasn’t interested. There were too many exciting things to do, too many things to see, and too many experiences to have. That is how, despite the draining sterility of BHX, I was excited—excited to be going through bag drop and security, to be paying £13 for Toblerone, to be frantically running to the gate. I was excited because the airport meant holiday, and holiday meant the promise of new things.

The first sensation of Barcelona is no different from the rest of Mediterranean Europe—like Lisbon or Rome, it is hot. It is hot when you get off the plane, but not hot in the way the UK is hot in peak summer—swelteringly, oppressively hot. Barcelona is promisingly warm, a reassurance that nothing bad can happen and everything you could need is right in front of you. It forces you into a good mood, a good mood that will be tested by a shopkeeper calling you fat, a lack of air conditioning in the hotel room, and persistent sweating that cannot be quelled by deodorant. None of this has happened yet.

There are lots of tall buildings. Some of them are imposing, some astounding. The Sagrada Família is of the astounding kind, the type of building that looks ten times taller than it actually is, that seems to bend your neck back for you until it just might snap off, and only then allows you to glimpse the gold-flecked spires of its highest towers. It dominates the skyline, a North Star in a city that, despite the uniform layout, is surprisingly difficult to navigate.

In March, it is too cold to go to the sea unless you wear two insulating wetsuits or are from Bolton. Fitting neither of these criteria, we elected to walk along the pier, eavesdropping on Spanish conversations we didn’t understand and averting our eyes from the elderly nudist intent on becoming a tourist attraction in his own right.

You don’t know what you’re missing until it’s gone, they say. Occasionally, though, you don’t realise how god-awful something is until you’re exposed to a better alternative; this is the case with the Barcelona Metro system. The trains come to the second, unfailingly. The tickets are cardboard and rechargeable, and for ten euros you can go anywhere in a specific zone, as many times as you want, for ten days. Onboard, the handrails divide into two to avoid hand-bumping / flirting, and the stops light up to prevent confusion about one’s location or destination. This is a well-designed metro system—like everything else in the city, I wouldn’t be shocked to hear it was the brainchild of Gaudí himself.

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Johnny wasn’t like the other kids: he seemed to know things inexplicably, things about you that you wouldn’t want your parents, or brothers, or friends to know. He was privy to the wildest desires and darkest concealments of men, and the children – his peers – could sense his intrusion.

‘And if you stare into the sun,’ Johnny would tell them, ‘You can see rainbows.’

The parents of the other children began to complain about Johnny. They called for his expulsion, blockading themselves from his damning intuition. But to the other children, Johnny offered truths at terrible prices; a seeing, a visibility that was at once terrifying and completely satisfying, revelation, exposure, all wrapped up in the piercing, intrusive gaze of the weird boy.

His messianic confidence inspired some and repulsed others. Slowly, Johnny built a following, lost disciples who hoped his incorruptible visions would help them understand the things about themselves that had been pushed deep down. But the band that opposed him worked with the animalistic drive of those who have much to lose, and their plot against Johnny reflected the severity of the tragedies that faced them.

They knew that to take him down, he who knew every spark of their wildest thoughts, an utmost spontaneity was required. So they dwelled in inertia, purposefully avoiding conspiracy as the supposed time drew near, striking only when Johnny couldn’t know it was coming, because neither did they.

Johnny Plebus was killed in the early hours of an overcast Thursday. Nobody saw it coming, including his attacker. His murder was in the paper for a few days, but beyond the initial shock only his widowed disciples grieved. The classroom felt paradoxically empty, voided, and at the same time returned to a purity and a completeness that the boy’s perceptions had stolen.

Now, Johnny Plebus lies in a sleep from which he will not wake. He looks peaceful. He can no longer balance blades on his fingers, and any attempt to do so topples the knife instantly. His mind, which had heard everything of its surroundings, without exception, now transmits only static. We all felt the interference go out, a lid whisked off its suffocating box. We think freely again.

We did not speak of this openly. There was an understanding, distributed among us without being passed from one to the other. We went back to our lives and our lives received us without comment, and if sometimes in the middle of an ordinary thing — eating, driving, standing in a queue — we felt the sudden, vertiginous sensation of being known, we told ourselves it was memory, and memory fades, and we were patient with ourselves about it.

The widowed disciples were less patient. They congregated for a while in the places Johnny had frequented — the corner of the playing field where he’d held court, the particular bench, the stairwell with the bad light — and you could see them from a distance, this loose and mournful assembly, talking with the purposeful intensity of people trying to reconstruct something. They compared notes. They pooled what he’d told them, what he’d seen, what he’d known without being told. They were trying to build him back from his outputs, like trying to rekindle fire from the shapes of its ash.

It didn’t work. Of course, it couldn’t. What Johnny had given each of them was specific, aimed, the particular truth of a particular person, and it didn’t formulise. What was revelatory to one was meaningless to another. They sat with each other’s secrets like men who had been handed maps of countries they’d never visited, and gradually the congregation thinned, and the bench went back to being just a bench.

There was a boy named Marcus who had been neither disciple nor conspirator. He had existed at the edge of both, drawn in by the pull of Johnny’s vision, repelled by the cost of it, and had finally settled into a watchful neutrality that he’d convinced himself was a kind of wisdom. After Johnny died Marcus found he could not sleep without the light on. He couldn’t have explained this if he were asked, and he didn’t try. He simply left the light on and told himself it was a habit he’d acquired and would presently lose.

He didn’t lose it.

I know Marcus well enough to say this: he was not a guilty man. He had done nothing. His hands were clean in every sense that the law would recognise and most that conscience did. But Johnny had looked at him once, really looked, in the way he looked at people, and Marcus had felt it — the full inventory of himself, filed somewhere he couldn’t access — and whatever Johnny had found in there, Marcus never learned, and now never would. He’d been left with the knowledge of his own contents, that they existed, without the contents themselves, a locked room in his own house.

Johnny’s mother had kept the blades. This was reported by someone who’d been to the house, a neighbour, not a gossip but a practical woman who’d gone to offer food and had found the mother at the kitchen table with them laid out in front of her, the various knives and letter-openers and penknives her son had collected, arranged without a visible system.

The neighbour had not known what to do with this information and had given it to someone else to carry, and it had passed around the town in this way, everyone handing it forward, nobody wanting to keep a hold of it for too long.

She was not a strange woman, the mother. She had been baffled by her son as most parents of extraordinary children are baffled —outpaced, constantly arriving somewhere he’d already left, just left. She had loved him in the straightforward way, which is perhaps the purest way, of loving something you didn’t understand. And now she sat with his blades and whatever she was doing with them she was doing privately, and the neighbour who’d seen it had felt, standing in the doorway of that kitchen, the same thing Marcus felt with the light on at night — the sense of something just beyond what she was permitted to know.

We think freely again. We said this to each other in the weeks after, and we meant it, and it was true, and yet.

There are thoughts I have now that I would not have had before Johnny, thoughts about what I want and what I’m afraid of and what I have done in rooms where I believed I was unobserved. I don’t know if Johnny gave me these thoughts or simply showed me that they were already there. I don’t know if the distinction matters. What I know is that the thoughts remain, having outlived their source, and I sit with them in the ordinary light of ordinary days and they are mine now, irrevocably, and there is no one left to tell me what they mean.

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This story appears in my anthology, Songs of Speech, available for purchase worldwide.

The grandchildren told stories of kitchen mishaps and wholesome car rides during the tribute readings. Fond recollections of experiences now committed entirely to memory, recited over and over to each other with bittersweet tuts and careful, measured-out smiles. I find it difficult to face the reality that this will happen to me, too.

That one day the people I leave behind will sit around, dabbing at their eyes, telling stories that slowly morph into something totally distinct from the original, a patina developed by exaggerating only those best qualities in the deceased, as I saw happen today. To think that’s what becomes of us all, a series of amiable tales passed from nephew to grandchild to wife.

This is an unavoidable fate, and our sole imperative is to leave behind a character deserving of those hyperbolic stories. To “wring out every last bit of living”, as Libba Bray said.

The priest read from Ecclesiastes 3:1–8.

There is a time for everything,

and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.

There comes a time for everything, but all of those times are succeeded by a being out of time altogether, a final deadline of experience, events, emotions – of everything. A last toll, a finish line. And then experience, whatever it is that ties together all the events “you” have lived through, just stops. Death is an obliteration of experience, a total, calamitous erasure of living.

It is dark, and violent, and terrifying, and to pretend it is anything but is a self-soothing ignorance. It is the ultimate monster in the woods, the unavoidable line in the sand that you’re being carried towards, screaming, kicking. It is terrifying to die.

Epicurus tries to tell you not to fear death, because “When I am, death is not, and when death is, I am not”. The two can never coincide – you’ll never actually experience your own death, so there’s nothing to be scared of, right?

What Epicurus failed to grasp, evidently, is that the notion of “I am not” is completely horrifying. The notion of not existing, of never existing, of never seeing, or hearing, or feeling anything again – of not being.

The fact that, as Epicurus suggests, I personally won’t “experience” the after-effects of that (because I won’t be experiencing anything) is far from consolation, it’s the exact thing that’s so awful about death, about being a totalising, infinite consciousness in a fragile shell.

The human body is a fragile casing – it cuts, breaks, and denatures. It protects us only from the most insignificant threats. It is a miracle, from a physical standpoint, that you’re alive at any moment, when you think about the sheer number of threats to your body, and its inability to defend against many of them. To live is, largely, miraculous.

Standing in front of the coffin, the understanding of those two inverted axes, the fragility of the body and the finality of death, are fully realised. They are real, and brutal. They can no longer be only concepts in the mind, when you’re staring – you’re weeping – at evidence of their applicability.

In light of it all it seems, then, that the best one can do, the most noble and profound goal, is to leave gracefully, with the knowledge that the family you left behind – three children, numerous cousins, nieces, and nephews, and eight adoring grandchildren – saw you out with love, with happy remembrances, and with the desire to live as you lived.

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A human poltergeist.

He resolved to use his powers for good. As he went about his day he would stare at objects and demand them to do as he wished. As they rarely did he concluded not that his powers were imaginary but that the world of objects was rotten and insubordinate.

It would be his duty to restore order and authority to the inanimate world.

He began to punish his possessions. He bore holes in his chairs, which made it uncomfortable for he himself to sit, but it was for a greater good. He scored tables and cracked glass.

Occasionally he would rust metal.

When these attempts failed to increase obedience he grew tired and irate and resolved to abandon the world of objects whatsoever. He disposed of his worldly possessions and took his leave of civilisation, setting up camp in the depths of the forest.

There he foraged for food and sustained himself naturally. He did not brush his teeth.

He found ways to make meals and replenish his body. For entertainment, he would craft miniatures of the objects that had betrayed him is his previous life, and light them on fire or drown them in the river.

Eventually he began to question his own powers, those by which he had altered the path of his life. He retreated into his woodland, suddenly aware of his unfamiliar surroundings. He was penniless and hungry and owned nothing.

There seemed nothing left to do but to capitulate to mother nature.

In a flailing final effort he commanded the stick beside him to move. He did not actually believe that it would work but he sought desperately for proof that he had not lived in vain. The stick rolled, almost imperceptibly, but it did.

He saw it.

He was vindicated.

And as he died he clutched to his chest the knowledge that he had lived with purpose and meaning. He was still its master, he who had removed himself from the world of objects.

This story appears in Down in the Dirt’s 244th volume, Between Time, which can be purchased here. A link to view the online copy of the magazine, where you can find another two stories of mine, is here. Thank you for reading LUCA ZANI, WRITING.

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The first is the complexity of our language. Most animals communicate in some way; whalesong, the twittering of birds, the neighing of horses. Animals are capable of vocally alerting others to potential danger; this is not specific to humankind. However, our ability not just to huff, grunt, or squeal in the general direction of an approaching predator, but to articulate ‘50km downstream, heading towards us, there’s a mountain lion’ is where we find separation. Our language is complex enough to describe the world in a detail inaccessible to other animals, and what we have done as a result of that ability to narrate the world around us — the infrastructure of modern society — is a testament to how distinguishing of an ability this is between man and animal.

The second collective behaviour that Harari articulates to distinguish us from animals is our shared belief in myth. We are the only species that ‘allows’ (if the power relationship can be thought of in that way) myth to have such power over us — we readily accept the freedoms allowed to us by Google, Amazon, and the United States of America. We don’t find these things in the world. We find trees, plants, and sand. And to every other species, because those are the primary points of interaction, they are taken to be the most fundamentally existent properties; from the sand, trees, and plants, perhaps we could derive myths and legends, making up stories of divinity which might hide in the foliage. Nevertheless, the rooted point of contact with reality would be the physical objects. Humans are not like this. We have devoted so much faith to the myths we create — of countries, of corporations — that we hold them to be truer than our physical touch-points. We have reached a level of subscription to these myths that we allow the non-existent Amazon, Google, or US to prescribe exactly what we can and cannot do with the existent trees, plants, and sand.

This is by no means a call to arms for conspiracy theorists, nor is it an attempt to advocate for some kind of anarchical destruction of corporate America.

Rather, I aim to point out simply that we pledge a level of belief in these myths unseen in the animal kingdom. This is another way in which we are different from animals.

I bring these traits up because both behaviours relate to our experience of consuming literature. Literature has, since the very first stories of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia 4000 years ago, been about the human experience.

Gilgamesh tells the story of a king, attempting to escape into a sort of heaven, before being forced to reckon with his own mortality. We have always written in a distinctly human way, about distinctly human affairs, to make sense of our distinctly human experience. The periods of literature reflect our societal movements. The rising and falling technical trends of writing track our rising and falling progressions and regressions in the way we interact with one another. The process of writing and reading literature is about being human.

Literature does not just exist upon, but celebrates the complexity of our language. We make rhetorical flourishes, clever narrative structures, and sly subversions of grammatical rules to add to our stories. The complexity of our language is not just the method by which we tell stories, but also an integral – and aesthetic – part of how we tell stories.

Literature also takes advantage of, and advances, our shared belief in myth. To accept the non-reality of fiction is to believe, if consciously so, in myth for a while. To suspend the physical roots of connection to the world for a time, and ‘buy-in’ to a narrative as though it were real. Great literature forces us to socialise with its characters. To build relationships, to grieve losses, to celebrate the joys of characters as if they were our own, or the joys of our loved ones. It is not just fantasy stories of elves and dragons which engage our propensity to believe in myth. The non-reality of any fiction, even the most bleakly realistic portrayals of daily life, provokes our myth-making brain into the second of Harari’s distinctly human character traits; belief.

So literature has always been characteristic of humanity. Literature

is our pursuit; it is humanity fictionalised. We see our greatest achievements, most embarrassing failures, and most devastating losses reflected in the literature we create and consume. But more than ever, literature suffers from exclusion — men don’t read. Men shouldn’t read. We have effeminised literature, and most men — manly men, shout-at-the-referee-on-tv-even-though-they-can’t-hear-you men (perhaps an unfair stereotype) — wouldn’t be caught dead with a book, contraband as it has become.

I believe this is the case for two reasons. For one, the subtlety and, in a sense, ‘dainty-ness’ of literature sits at odds with the brashness and indecorum that masculinity has begun to be characterised by. Why sit cross-legged with a book when you could throw a beer in somebody’s face? Why bother learning the intricacies of the perspectives of others when you could shout louder than them, plug your ears, call them an idiot and believe them to be wrong at all costs? Not all men are like this, and I don’t mean to bemoan the present state of masculinity without offering a solution. But it is an increasing proportion of men. It’s more than it was 20 years ago, when it was more than it was 20 years before then, and so on.

The second reason for the feminisation of literature is that it is an inert activity. The predatory, biological instinct of men is to act. To hunt, to seek, to chase and move and generally, do things. Sitting still, reading words challenges this. There is no evolutionary benefit to consuming literature.

Further still, the accumulation of knowledge, without having to actively procure the resources in any way (beyond purchasing the book) reflects more so the primitive ‘female role’, gathering and operating quantities of resources without having to hunt them down in any way. Reading literature is closer to preparing the cave dinner than it is riding the back of a sabre-toothed tiger, throwing spears at gazelles (perhaps not historically accurate), and this is why men don’t read.

If literature is to once again be humanity, and not just a subset, we have to shake off our primitive pasts. Only by getting over our caveman delusions of hunters and gatherers (and the binary distinction between the two) can we once again hope to have the sentiments of literature represent the entire species. And we should, because literature is one of the most distinctly human ways we express ourselves. Were we to lose that, we might end up not so different from animals after all.

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How true the latter sentiment remains, I’m not sure. The Green brothers talk often about the billionaires and government officials of today’s world who desire power for power’s sake, who endlessly chase authority without ever stopping to consider why they need more power, or what (good) they might use it for. I can’t imagine, in our increasingly self-aggrandising moment, many would give up their fortunes or good luck in place of a struggle, would reposition themselves lower on the social ladder.

But I think it does say something interesting about our pursuit of change. Especially in our overstimulating world of likes and swipes, we’re driven to desire change, newness. New information, new narratives and stories and ideas, with as little a lull as possible. Why read a book, which might take twenty hours, when you could watch a movie?

Movies became too long; we wanted information in thirty minutes, not two hours. YouTube videos took off. Then we wanted information in one minute, not thirty. Then half a minute. Then a fifteen-second clip. And now we have summarising AI which delivers three hours worth of research, of the world’s knowledge and ideas, in as little time as it takes to physically load the words of ChatGPT’s response on the screen.

The tools are great. The access to global information and countless resources in seconds is nothing short of magic, and propels us further and faster than ever into the Information Age, into the rapid technological progress and development which continues to mark our period as distinct from those before. But it’s the machines and tools which are built to handle the speed of this advancement, not us. We’re still relatively similar in a biochemical, brain sense to that which came before us, that which did not have to contend with the possibility that a TikTok video of theirs might go viral, that they might get ‘cancelled’, that they might accidentally not end their Twitch stream and say something which gets them ‘banned’ from the platform.

Add up these unfamiliar stimuli, which seem to be growing in number by the week, and you begin to understand that apocryphal piece of research which claims that a teenager’s anxiety levels today match those of a mental institution’s patient in the 1980s. And that’s only going back forty years.

Imagine being a farmer-peasant in 1820s Germany. How much new information would you be exposed to on a daily, even weekly basis? Very little outside of your immediate situation and surroundings. Perhaps you might hear through the grapevine of national concerns, war efforts and ministerial changes. Certainly nothing, or absurdly little, of global affairs.

How much fiction would you consume? How often would you engage with narrative?

More importantly: How grateful would you be for the opportunity to read something different, to dive into a new story?

This is the central issue with our overconsumption of media and information

— the (lack of) scarcity issue. You have access, with some online tinkering, to practically all fiction ever created. Websites exist which allow you to stream, in ever-improving resolution, almost any movie ever produced. If you look in the right places, you can download an e-book version of almost all books ever published. And yet, despite this unfathomably rich library of stories, we meanderingly swipe along rows of ‘We Think You’ll Like’ and ‘Based on Your Previous Download’, evaluating these works based off a cover or a ten-second preview.

I’m not saying we should attempt to consume everything; even if you spent every single minute of an 80-year life watching movies, never sleeping or eating or resting, you would watch about 352,640 movies, which makes up about 44% of movies ever created. We should never strive for exhaustion; skipping past recommendations and scrolling on streaming apps is not necessarily a demonstration of ungratefulness for the availability of media.

But we should cherish what we do consume more. Too often we get bored of reading a book and ask ChatGPT for a summary. We disregard the movie in favour of reading a detailed review, or watching clips of it through TikTok. We consume more than ever, but less and less often do we consume media in

the right way, in a way which gives credit and respect to the toil and method of the author, actor, or director.

Be selective. Consume less and appreciate more. You’re never going to watch or read everything anyway, so stop trying. Stick with a challenging read or a boring movie, see it through to the end and then complain, in your review, that it was too self-indulgent and lacked narrative propulsion. But just finish it. The ‘continue watching’ tab is a graveyard of all the films you gave up on. If you’re doing it right, it shouldn’t be there. One at a time.

If we re-pedestalize media, rather than continuing to think of it as a mere sedative to cure our boredom, we can beat novelty. We can be grateful once again for the stories we do have, the stories which have always been available but have never been so undervalued.

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.” — Susan Sontag.

So time is essential to literature. But reading and writing allow us to experiment with time in ways much deeper than simply chronicling a change from x to y. The central claim of this essay will be that reading and writing literature allows us to interact with time in ways which are inaccessible in our daily lives. In attempting to demonstrate this, the essay will look at two ways that writing literature allows us to experience and experiment with time; claiming that writing literature allows us to stop and record time, immortalising certain conventions and societal customs, as well as offering the author a way to escape time in some way. Furthermore, the essay will consider how, by offering the reader a chance to control time in a way usually impossible in their daily life, reading literature affords us the same experimental ability. This essay will primarily examine time in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, occasionally supplemented with evidence drawn from Italo Calvino’s work Invisible Cities. Through these two works, we will understand just how it is that writing and reading – two activities enabled by time – are able to help us conquer it.

The first way that writing literature allows us to experiment with time is in how it stops and records time. The writing of literature, because it takes place in time, a certain temporal context through which the author is living, cannot help but immortalise certain societal conventions and norms, which appear anachronistic when read by a modern-day audience. Far from being a limitation, this imbues the author with a profound ability: to stop time. We can view The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie through this lens: written in 1961 but set in 1930s Edinburgh, the novel records Miss Brodie’s peculiar ties to Scottish Enlightenment thinking, immortalising a philosophical worldview which would perhaps have been held by a wide array of women at the time of Spark’s writing (or indeed, in 1930s Scotland). Sandy describes the ‘legions of her

kind during the nineteen-thirties… who crowded their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas… in art or social welfare’ (Spark, 1961: 33). The particular ‘new ideas’ of the Scottish Enlightenment which Miss Brodie might have taken on board can be found in Hume, who himself questions the narrative structure of our lives. Hume talks of the mind as a kind of theatre, imagining that all we see are varying perceptions which ‘pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations’ (Hume, 1978: 252). Hume remains sceptical about the existence of any underlying self – an ‘I’ to which this narrative progression is happening, when all the evidence we have points only to a succession of phenomena, and not a continuing mental substance.

In having Miss Brodie supposedly enamoured with Scottish Enlightenment thinking, championing this ruthless empiricism and focus on the observable, Spark stops time for a moment, recording the influence, and impact, of Hume’s thought on the philosophical state of 1930s Edinburgh. Hume’s influence has been immortalised; time perverted to allow for his ideas, originating from the 18th century, to be shown to hold importance in the 20th. However, beyond just recording and promoting the philosophy of Hume, perhaps Spark aims to immortalise another societal convention, one related more closely to the American 1960s from which she is writing; second-wave feminism. The American feminist writer Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, ‘help[ing to] ignite the second feminist wave’ (Alexander, 2020). The second feminist wave aimed to ensure that women’s social and political voice was heard, and encouraged women to fight gender oppression, which Friedan called ‘the problem that has no name’ (Friedan, 1963).

Miss Brodie can also be seen to reflect the pursuit of equality between the sexes found in Friedan; we learn that ‘those of Miss Brodie’s kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists, talked to men as man-to-man’. (Spark, 1961: 34). Is Spark not once again pausing time, recording a particular social phenomenon – namely the rise of second-wave feminism, and an increased championing of female autonomy and voice – and immortalising it in the canon of literature?

Calvino achieves a similar effect, although with a rather different focus, in Invisible Cities. The structure of the text is a series of imaginary conversations between two historical figures, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, about a selection of conceptual cities from which Marco Polo is returning.

Following Polo’s description of Trading Cities 1, Calvino writes of a moment of misunderstanding between Khan and Polo, noting that ‘the objects [which were all that Polo had to convey what he had learned from his travels to Khan] could have various meanings… an hourglass could mean time passing, or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses are made’ (Calvino, 1972: 45). Calvino is recording here the polyvalence of the human experience: that

our observation of the material is structured by our memories, our desires, and our dispositions. In fact, the very structure of the book – a circulation between cities of ‘desire’, ‘memories’ and ‘signs’ – speaks to the interchangeability of humanity. Yet Calvino, as Spark does, stops and records time, taking these exchanges between Polo and Khan –real figures, both active in the 13th century – as demonstrative of our timeless desire to build and experience, of our endless pursuit of legacy. Calvino takes a series of conversations which could easily be temporally located, and uses them to turn our eyes inward, and have us examine the traits in ourselves which accord with Polo’s desire to explore, and Khan’s desire to be remembered. By immortalising certain conventions, and indeed conversations, which would have taken place in the 1200s, Calvino enables us to better understand our present moment.

This unique ability of authorship is part of the way in which writing literature allows us to experiment with time, profoundly changing our experience of temporality.

The second way in which writing literature allows us to experience and experiment with time is in the ability it affords the author: namely, the ability to position oneself outside of time, by lording over narrative progression and cause-event relationships. Spark continually commandeers time to portray cause and effect in different ways, perhaps most evident in the temporally-confusing epithets given after some of the Brodie set’s names. Spark tells us that ‘Rose Stanley was not yet famous for sex’ (Spark, 1961: 17). And later again describes ‘Monica Douglas, later famous for being able to do real mathematics in her head.’(Spark, 1961: 22). That Rose was as yet not famous for sex, and Monica not yet renowned for her abilities in arithmetic, but that they inevitably, unavoidably would be, is a confusing position in time to take up and demonstrates the power Spark, as author, has over time; a divine ability to be certain over events which have not yet occurred, to guarantee what should still be the conditional, and to deliver on those guarantees. This is a relationship to time which goes beyond our daily experience of time, a lordship over cause and effect which we are, in every moment of our lives, unwillingly subject to. What Spark achieves by this is what Barbara Linn Probst denotes as the separation of ‘narrative time’ and ‘reader time’. Probst notes that, ‘Flashback, memory, and backstory interrupt linear time’ (Probst, 2021) corresponding to our understanding of how the unique kind of guaranteed prolepsis that Spark employs in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie drives a division further between those two conceptualisations of time: narrative time, the time in which the events of the story take place, and reader time, the linear progression through the narrative by the reader.

MacIntyre, in the fifteenth chapter of After Virtue, argues that ‘the unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest’ (MacIntyre, 1981), and by

interrupting the reader’s linear progression through time in their consumption of the narrative, the author once again cements their role as outside of time, in control in some way of temporal cause-effect sequences, achieving a relationship to time which, for the reader, remains inaccessible.

Calvino plays with the linearity of time in a similar way, achieving a mastery over time comparable to Spark. In Fedora (Cities and Desires 4), the narrator tells us that ‘In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city’. (Calvino, 1972: 39). Just as Spark does, Calvino steps outside of time; how else might a narrator feasibly be an authoritative voice on what happens ‘in every age’? To assume epistemic lordship over what should be unknowable, just as Spark does with the epithets of the Brodie set, Calvino must briefly ignore the linearity of time, gaining a control over time generally inaccessible in our daily lives.

Writing literature is a generative process which can only be facilitated by moving through time, by relentlessly experiencing. Through our experiences, we might draw together a narrative which reflects some of the most formative and foundational events of our own life. And so all of writing is concerned with time, not just in that events must move through time to be understood, but in the sense that writing is a process, cathartic in some way, which reflects our own, deeply personal experiences of time. And yet, it is only through writing, an exercise which forces us to pay homage to time, that we might wrangle it, control time, and utilise it for our own aesthetic and narrative choices. This is the exclusive ability of the author, who in their writing manages to step outside of time briefly, and contort the typical linear progression to their liking. Writing literature allows us the chance to conquer time.

The experience of reading literature also allows us to experiment with time. When we read that ‘Mary, who later, in that hotel fire, ran hither and thither till she died’ (Spark, 1961: 22) and we realise we are being told of events that have happened in ‘reality’ but are yet to happen in time, what does this do to our experience of temporality? How must we expand our understanding of time to accommodate this apparent divide between the events and the time they have to happen in? However we are to accomplish this, we must begin by acknowledging that this formulation of time goes beyond our quotidian experience. The ‘kind’ of time being played with here transcends our regular understanding, and simply by being witnesses can we as readers begin to control time in ways previously unachievable. To read events which occur out of linear time and order them into a cohesive narrative is to commandeer time; this is what we do as readers.

Reading is re-organising that which needs to be re-organised, taking the events presented as they come and formatting them into a series resembling our real-world experience. ‘Narrative activity, in history and in fiction,

provides a privileged access to the way we articulate our experience of time’ (Ricoeur, 1979: 17). This articulation of our experience of time is what we gain by reading, relating our own experiences to the characters’ progression through a narrative arc of some kind. This is easily done when we read narratives that follow linear time; we are able to map ourselves and our experiences on to the steady development of the characters, relating throughout their own arcs and falls to the peaks and troughs of our own lives.

However, when we read literature, such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or Invisible Cities, which subverts linear time in some way, we have to do much more work as readers to delineate the similarities between the characters and ourselves. Finding these links is one of the readers’ principal aims; Catherine Gallagher notes that ‘Characters’ peculiar affective force… is generated by the mutual implication of their unreal knowability and their apparent depth’ (Gallagher, 2007: 357). We find characters in literature to be impossibly familiar, and this is why we attempt to relate ourselves in some way to the characters we read.

So, when we read of Mary later dying in a house fire, knowing that it hasn’t happened yet but is certainly, unequivocally going to happen, we have to do real work with time and narrative in order to digest the character. Not in an effort to ‘relate’ to Mary, but to understand, to buy Mary as a real figure, ‘impossibly familiar’ as good characters are. To do this, we gift ourselves a leniency with time which is not normally allowed; we rearrange the cause-event relationships, and their positions in time, in order to create what resembles a linear narrative. But what we have produced is a fiction, born of our own self-certified mastery of time and its events; a fabrication by which we allow ourselves to feel confident in our understanding of the happenings of Mary’s life.

To feel satisfied enough in our conversion of these non-linear events to allow ourselves to feel how we typically do for real human interactions – the shame, guilt, awe, pity, elation and melancholy we feel for others – for the characters of literature is the key task of the reader, and this may only be achieved by assuming a proficient control of time.

We have not and will not conquer time in our own lives. We remain trapped in a linear progression of cause and effect, marching inevitably from one moment to the next. Nevertheless, in writing and reading literature we make a small act of defiance against time, manipulating time in ways that we can’t in our daily lives. Writing and reading literature allows us to experience and experiment with time in a multitude of ways; it allows us to stop time, immortalising certain moments. It allows us to position ourselves outside of time, and give ourselves a dictatorship over time which we cannot possibly experience in real life. Only through reading and writing literature can we hope to conquer time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, Kerri Lee (2020) ‘Feminism: The Second Wave’ National Women’s History Museum [online] Available from: https://www.womenshistory.org/exhibits/feminism-second-wave (accessed: 15/12/24)

Calvino, Italo (1972) Invisible Cities, London: Secker and Warburg.

Friedan, Betty (1963) The Feminine Mystique, New York: W.W. Norton.

Gallagher, Catherine (2007) ‘The Rise of Fictionality’ The Novel: History, Geography, Culture, 1: 357.

Hume, David (1978 [1739]) A Treatise on Human Nature: Second Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Joyce, James (2012 [1939]) Finnegans Wake, London: Wordsworth Editions.

MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981) After Virtue, Indiana: Notre Dame Press

Miller, J.Hillis (2003) ‘Time in Literature’ Daedalus 132 (2): 86–97.

Probst, Barbara Linn (2021) ‘Character Time and Reader Time’ Writer Unboxed [online] Available from: https://writerunboxed.com/2021/01/25/character-time-and-reader-time/ (accessed: 15/12/24)

Ricoeur, Paul (1979) ‘The Human Experience of Time and Narrative.’ Research in Phenomenology 9 17 – 34.

Spark, Muriel (1961) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, London: Macmillan.

How I cut my screen time by 80%. How to cure brainrot. How to make each day so fun you don’t have time to scroll. Our no-phone road trip. 10 ways to stop ruining your life. The ideas we lose by morning. A notebook to cure the infinite scroll.

All real, great videos. And all videos you would watch, absorb, reflect on and think: actionable advice. And you’d put your phone down, pick up a journal or a novel, and unplug from the internet for a while. An hour, perhaps two if you’re really feeling it, would pass, and you’d think; I’m cured. I’m detoxing.

I’m fixing things. You’d begin to shift the consumption / production scale back towards the centre. You might write something, record a song or paint a fresco.

And then the last dregs of the dopamine you’d been gifted by the algorithm you so quickly dropped would fade. You return to baseline and now you think: I’m bored. I have nothing to do. All the movies on your watchlist look uninteresting. The book doesn’t hold your attention, and it’s too dark to read anyway, so you might as well not bother. The light switch is all the way over there.

But you can read a phone screen in the dark. And it’s right next to you, and you’ve been so good the last couple of hours, so you might as well. So, you go straight back to the algorithm. Instagram, TikTok, whatever else you can find novelty in scrolling through. And then you hit a real problem.

The scroll becomes boring as well. In retrospect, this is a sign for you to log off, put the phone out of reach, and go to sleep. But, in your half-awake, dopamine-chasing state, you won’t take boredom or silence for an answer. The app store beckons, the promise of a new, original source of stimulation looming. Now you’re scrolling for things to scroll on. Games. Habit-tracking apps and photo editors. Financial helpers and navigation tools and calorie counters. A catalogue of exciting, untested sign-up pages and in-app purchases.

You download two or three. Test them out, get to grips with the basics. Beat a couple levels of a game you won’t remember the name of in the morning. Pay

12.99 for a year’s subscription to a flexibility and stretching app because it was 75% off and that’s a great deal. That’s too good to pass up on. Never mind that you’re in bed already and it would be silly now to get up and start doing yoga on your floor, so you promise yourself that in the morning you’ll make use of your newest subscription.

And then the crash comes. The ‘what am I doing with my life’ auto-immune response to the login confirmation email which pushes you over the edge. Then comes the promise to take yourself seriously tomorrow, to commit yourself again to the dopamine detox – an exciting, novel idea you saw somebody talk about in a reel a while back. You delete the apps, forgetting to cancel that 12.99 subscription. In a year’s time, you’ll see the renewal, curse yourself for not cancelling, and commit yourself to at least putting it to good use – you’ll stretch in the morning.

Now you’re in productivity no-mans land. Committed to improving, but shamefully carrying the lethargy and staleness of last night’s scroll. You boot up youtube – the first step is to watch some long-form content. Test the attention span. You watch the first ‘reducing screen-time’ video essay you can find. And the cycle repeats itself.

This is a perfect example of belief-discordant behaviour. Also known as the belief-behaviour mismatch, this phenomenon describes a subject who behaves in a different way than she consciously asserts that she believes. If you relate to the experience described above, you’ve exhibited belief-discordant behaviour as well. Always having the desire to change and improve, and always choosing the path of least resistance, constantly making the wrong choice. Riding the wave of motivation, and when that inevitably fades, falling back into inertia and waiting for it to return.

This is why those video essays listed above, great as they are, fundamentally don’t work. It’s just too easy to listen to them attentively, take their advice, implement the protocols, delete the apps and install the blockers and whatever else. And to just not follow through. If you’ve installed the blocker, you can remove it as well. And we do. Time and time again.

While she attempts to free herself, Jessie experiences hallucinations and confronts her past traumas, including a long-suppressed memory of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Her hallucinations manifest as the gargantuan Joubert, a serial killer suffering from acromegaly who functions as a manifestation of her innermost fears. Jessie, tortured by her inability to escape while Joubert steadfastly approaches her, screams

YOU’RE NOT REAL! YOU’RE ONLY MADE OF MOON-LIGHT!

And unbeknownst to her, she was right.

In the final scene of the movie, Joubert turns to Jessie and chillingly repeats her words of self-comfort, forcing Jessie to confront the reality of her situation; that while Joubert might not be real, the traumas which he represents are. Through this realization, Jessie is propelled to take ownership of her situation and her history.

For the majority of the movie, Jessie is unaware that Joubert doesn’t really exist. He presents a legitimate threat to her, an actual danger which Jessie believes could cause her physical harm. Without meaning to, she’s made Joubert up. And yet she fears him, even though there’s no ‘him’ to fear.

And what does it mean to fear something? The internet says:

Psychologists define fear as a protective, primal emotion that evokes a biochemical and emotional response. Fear alerts us to the presence of danger or the threat of harm, whether that danger is physical or psychological.

Whereas the biochemical changes that fear produces are universal, emotional responses are highly individual.

So fear alerts us to the presence of danger. We’re scared of things which can harm us. But what about those fears we have, often rooted more deeply than those physical concerns, which we know can’t hurt us, at least in the physical sense? What about our fear of death? As far back as the Stoics, we’ve tried to make sense of our fear of death:

“About death: Whether it is a dispersion, or a resolution into atoms, or annihilation, it is either extinction or change.” —Marcus Aurelius

The basic problem seems to be that we won’t be around to experience it. The process of dying seems like a reasonable issue – it could be excruciatingly painful, could be drawn-out and messy. But death, the state? Traumatic for your loved ones, sure, but you’re not going to experience it. And so, why should you care?

One possible response is known as the deprivation hypothesis. Supposedly, death is bad because it deprives individuals of the potential for future goods and experiences they would otherwise have had access to – ‘it frustrates certain forward-looking desires’. But does it? You don’t know what you’re missing out on. Is Shakespeare worse off than Oscar Wilde? They’re both dead, but Shakespeare’s missed out on more stuff than Wilde – more has happened since his death. Yet, it feels strange in some sense to say that Shakespeare’s death (his being dead, the state, not the moment or action of his death) is worse than Wilde’s. The deprivation hypothesis again needs a conscious observer, and we have no reason to think that we should fear our deaths because of what we might miss out on – you’ll never know anyway.

Much like Jessie forges Joubert out of her deepest anxieties and traumas, so too do we use our fear of death as a stand-in for our greater fears. We fear our own inadequacy, perhaps the smallness of our individual existence on a grander scale. We fear we won’t achieve our goals, that we lack the skills or talent to do so. We worry that we’re wasting precious days, of which we have an ever-decreasing amount, rotting away. And ultimately, we bind these fears, together with the knowledge that our time here is fleeting, into a phobia of death. But we don’t really fear death, because it can’t hurt us. What we fear the most is not making anything of the time that we do have.

I have led a toothless life. I have never bit into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on and I have just now noticed that my teeth have gone.- Sarte.

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Nevertheless, I think his account does miss something of the importance of our surroundings, failing to recognise the profound effect that the architecture and natural landmarks around us have on our creative output.

Art is inseparable from its context, its ‘aura’ as Walter Benjamin put it – the specific time and place in which it was created. A 1:1 copy of

Hopper’s Nighthawks, made today with all the same materials and brushstrokes and assembled in exactly the same order, perhaps even if it was done by Hopper himself, would lack something of the original, Benjamin contends. It would lack that geo-temporal aura, that particular insignia of its time and place of creation.

Benjamin means place here in the broad sense – the country, perhaps the city, and even then maybe going as far as to say simply particular artistic movements or styles associated with a certain geographical fulcrum. But what if we zoom in? Can’t we take place to mean equally the literal surroundings of the artist? The high ceilings, the cramped garage workshop, the glitzy modern studio? There’s research demonstrating the cathedral effect; the height of the ceiling under which you work really does influence the creativity of your thinking. Lower ceilings promote more detail-oriented thinking, and higher ceilings encourage freer and more creative cognition.

Wouldn’t it make sense to look at a piece of art and wonder: how might this have looked different if it was painted in a studio with bigger windows? with more natural light? How would this have changed if it had been created in a basement?

We’re influenced by our surroundings, and in our era of sterilised, brutalist, uninspiring suburbia, it’s no wonder we’re faced with an ever-growing scarcity of creativity. We look at our architectural backdrop, and we’re met with the same blank stares we give to the canvas in front of us. Long gone are the colourful, towering statues of Ancient Greece and Rome, or the tessellating spires of a Byzantine church. No longer can we draw our inspiration from sky-piercing gothic cathedrals, or impossibly methodical pyramids. But we have pre-fabs. We have 12-storey car parks and apple stores with fake foliage for an ‘organic look’ and brutalism. Even the name’s depressing.

Brutalism is a style of architecture born of the reconstruction efforts of 1950s, postwar Britain. Said to have been a reaction against the nostalgia of architecture in the 1940s, brutalism featured heavily in the designs of socialist-influenced, low-cost council housing and institutional buildings.

Brutalism has drawn much criticism in the UK, often being described as ‘cold’ and ‘totalitarian’. One of the key motifs of brutalist design is ‘functionalism’ – a particular aspect being designed to serve its purpose most efficiently, and nothing more.

This is the great issue with modern architecture (not all of which is brutalist, of course, but which often shares the same focus on function over form).

Phrases like ‘modular elements’, ‘formal legibility’ and ‘functional zones’ preside over these building plans, doing away with the grand, sprawling designs of art nouveau doorways and resolving to use raw concrete – after all, it is cheaper. The result is that we end up surrounded by towering concrete blocks, rectangles with uniform windows and symmetrical faces. In every direction confronted by repetitive, soulless edifices. It’s no wonder we find it harder to be ‘inspired’ than ever before.

The answer might be a hut in the woods. Not for the isolation angle; we know how important sustained and valued social relationships are for creativity, as well as basic human survival. Rather, a change of scenery – literally – has never been more valuable. Nature has no scheming architect, and its designs are more varied and complex than many of the neighbouring structures. It doesn’t have to be a hut in the woods, and you don’t need to stay long; no need to live out of a cave like Heidegger. But by leaving the retail parks behind and connecting with nature, you might find a new way of approaching the page.

See what you can create without being suffocated by the ‘concrete jungle’ we so affectionately named.

If you’re lonely or uninspired, isolation is not the answer. Engaging with others and cultivating your relationships is far more helpful for overcoming mundanity. But retreating into nature, escaping the functional architecture which surrounds our everyday life, may do wonders for your creativity. The answer might be a hut in the woods.

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