István is the protagonist of David Szalay’s recent novel Flesh, which won the 2025 Booker Prize for fiction. His internal monologue can itself feel as though it was written by someone else. The novel opens when István is 15 and lives with his mother on a housing estate in Hungary. Ever quiet and restrained, István does what is asked of him with little contemplation. He smokes cigarettes when they’re offered. He fills his mother’s vase with water. He has strange and dispassionate intercourse with the middle-aged woman living next door. “He just lies there while she moves her hips,” Szalay writes.

As he grows up, István only becomes more distant from himself and his body. He joins the Hungarian army and comes home psychologically scarred. One day, he punches a door, so hard he breaks his hand, but he doesn’t know why and doesn’t even feel it until later. Most disconcerting are István’s sexual thoughts, which he renders with an incredible emotional emptiness. At one point, he catalogues the breasts of four women who are out suntanning in the nude. One has an “unfortunate, saggy pair” while another has “almost nothing there at all.” The description is neither impassioned nor acquisitive, but instead unfeelingly evaluative, like an auditor crunching numbers on a balance sheet.

Along with István’s detached narration comes a sense that his decisions no longer belong to him. He recovers from the war and moves to London. The reader never learns why he moved, except that when pressed, he says he “knew … some people who already lived here.” He is offered a job as a private security guard and decides to take it, unenthusiastically, for no better reason than the fact that he can. In fact, István’s decisions rarely seem like decisions at all; they are more a disinterested acceptance of some predetermined fate.

The question of free will crops up throughout Szalay’s body of work. His first book, London and the South-East (2008), follows the life of a salesman who feels trapped both by his melancholic professional existence and his private alcoholism. In 2011, Szalay published his novel Spring, which documents the seemingly inevitable decline of a marriage and the unbridgeable distance that seems to follow. Szalay’s clearest exploration of male agency appears in his Booker-nominated short story collection All That Man Is (2016). He depicts nine men of varying ages, several of whom deal with the possibility that freedom expires with age. Their jobs, investments, and relationships fall through, revealing a harsh determinism at the bottom of it all.

Flesh is Szalay’s sixth book, and its themes fit neatly into the author’s thematic arc. Yet István represents a new extreme of male passivity. Szalay’s other protagonists tend to experience some flashes of introspection and passion, even if they are mostly despondent. István, by contrast, mostly resembles a human plankton.

István’s lack of conviction is not an accident of the text. In an interview with the Guardian, Szalay said Flesh hoped to convey what he sees “in the world, which tends to include men who lack a clear sense of what they should be doing and why.” That much is successfully communicated, and to great value. Too many novels construct elaborate and perfectly logical reasons for their protagonists’ every decision, forgetting that few people experience so much agency and self-knowledge in the real world.

The problem is that this view of masculinity—where men float disinterestedly through time, not thinking particularly hard about the people they hurt—has a vaguely exculpatory quality. Halfway through the book, István begins sleeping with Helen, a married woman whose husband is dying from cancer. Does he do this out of affection, lust, boredom? He doesn’t say, and perhaps doesn’t know himself. Could he have chosen not to sleep with her? Certainly not: he’s just doing what he’s told. After marrying Helen himself, István builds up a lucrative real estate empire—or rather, the empire builds itself up around him—through a series of ethically and legally questionable decisions. Can the reader really hold him liable? He wasn’t thinking very hard about it.

This abrogation of choice is expressed in the book’s synopsis on the Booker Prize website, which says that István is “carried upwards on the 21st century’s tides of money and power.” Are people like István merely carried upwards by forces outside their control, or do they make a choice? It’s true that István receives unlikely advantages: his job as a private security guard is attained more or less by chance, and gives him access to elite social circles; he marries Helen, who is much wealthier than him, and begins gradually siphoning money from the trust of Helen’s son into his real estate business. But chance isn’t entirely effacing of human will. There are moments where he could have said no.

The truth is, it’s hard to say whether István is a lost, fragile soul or a dedicated financial criminal. The job of a novel isn’t to judge its characters, nor is it to shove an ethical agenda down the reader’s throat. But a good novel leaves room for the possibility of moral conviction: it gives us enough data and emotion to make our own judgments about a character’s innocence or guilt, if we are so inclined. In Flesh, glimpses into István’s interior life are few and far between. He has few flights of introspection. He often speaks only one syllable at a time, usually to agree with people around him: yes, sure, okay, thanks. Some readers fare well with this sort of emotional rationing: they are vividly imaginative, and enjoy filling in the gaps for themselves. Other readers need more.

When István puts the postcard back onto the fridge, and his mother finishes answering the phone, the two of them talk. She asks him what happened in Kuwait, and he doesn’t tell her. He doesn’t think she’d understand something fundamental about his experience. “The strange thing,” he thinks, is that “he isn’t exactly sure what that something is, the thing that she wouldn’t understand.” I’m not exactly sure what that thing is either, and I would have liked to know.

In 1975, the Rogers Sugar Factory was crowned the least attractive building in Vancouver. The adjudicator, an author at the Vancouver Sun, pointed to the “sheer force of its industrial ugliness”—and indeed, the building’s greyish, boxy exterior doesn’t exactly melt into East Vancouver’s waterfront.1

Charles E. Goad’s 1899 map of the building tells a different story.2 The sugar refinery is an inviting pink, with yellow splotches for the outlying buildings. The railway tracks wind gently from the refinery to the docks. The whole scene takes on a kind of industrial elegance.

Goad’s map had no reason to be visually pleasing. It was produced in 1899 as a fire insurance plan. The colours represent the material of each structure, while the isometric drawing helps show the heights of and distances between structures. Additional features—doors, windows, hydrants—are inscribed with special symbols. The plan was intended to help underwriters better estimate the risk of fire and price the building’s insurance accordingly. It is a beautiful document with a mundane goal.

The sugar refinery was one subject of a growing collection of urban maps produced by civil engineer-turned-cartographer Charles E. Goad. Born in England in 1848, Goad worked in public infrastructure for several years before moving to Canada in 1869. He became a construction engineer for a railway in Toronto,3 and in 1875, he started a fire insurance mapping business based out of Montreal.4

Goad was a mysterious man. We know he was Anglican and attended St. Thomas’s Church,5 and we know he had at least three sons. Beyond that, information about his personal life is scarce. Goad gave few interviews and left behind few personal documents. Even basic facts—such as whether or where he went to university—are disputed.6

What Goad lacks in biography, he makes up for in maps. His firm had surveyed 340 Canadian towns and cities by the year 1885, and that year, Goad relocated to London and begin a British chapter of his fire insurance business.7 The company surveyed many cities within the Empire—Alexandria, Cape Town, Port of Spain—and some outside it.8 Each map was hand-coloured by Goad’s staff with the same pinks, yellows, oranges, and blues.9

The Goad maps were the culmination of a larger, centuries-long shift in how natural disasters were perceived. Prior to the Enlightenment, urban conflagrations were often seen as acts of God. A prime example is the 1666 Great Fire of London, which left 70-80,000 people homeless and was widely considered an act of divine intervention.10 “God speaks sometimes to a people by terrible things,” wrote Puritan minister Thomas Vincent in the opening words of God’s Terrible Voice in the City. Published one year after the fire, Vincent’s treatise attributes the disaster to Londoners’ “inward filthiness” and castigates those who behave with “sottish inconsideration of God’s dreadful displeasures.”11

The Great Fire of London marked the beginning of a more flammable era in British cities. Large fires—those burning at least forty or fifty houses—increased in frequency as urban populations expanded, wooden homes went up hastily, and stores selling flammable products proliferated near the Thames.12

With the rise of disaster came an urge for scientific understanding. Regulations on building materials, the invention of fire escapes and fire extinguishers, and, of course, the nascent fire insurance industry: all were part of a growing effort to understand and manage risk. By the mid-nineteenth century, “well over half of insurable property in Great Britain was insured against fire.” Scientific solutions to disaster did not necessarily contradict the belief in divine intervention: if disasters were a punishment for human recklessness, perhaps future punishments could be avoided with a dose of prudence.13

Great Britain’s scientific approach to natural disaster soon trickled down to its North American colonies. Canada, more so than the metropole, was a country built on wood. Its residents lived in wooden houses and “were sustained in large measure by the milling, fabrication, and export of wood products.” This reliance on wood gave way to several large urban conflagrations in the nineteenth century: Toronto in 1849, Montreal in 1852, Halifax in 1859, Quebec City in 1866, Saint John in 1877, and Vancouver in 1886.14 Goad’s maps of Canadian cities can be interpreted pragmatically as an effort to distribute risk. But they were also, in some deeper way, the mark of a society trying to understand and cope with an environment under threat.

D. A. Norris notes that Canadians “adapted” to fire hazards before “eliminating” them. That is, preventative measures meant to stop fires were introduced much later than insurance policies designed to handle the aftermath.15 Goad’s maps did both. They helped price risk more accurately; at the same time, knowing about the form and material of buildings helped identify ways to avoid future fires.

In 1899, Goad published a paper reflecting on major conflagrations in the previous ten years. He included 23 coloured maps of cities that had burned, including information on the fire’s path, causes of the fire, local wind speeds and direction. “Many of the sketches show the proverbial clearness of hind-sight,” the Globe reported. In Alexandria, fire-resistant doors might have contained an early fire in a warehouse. In St. John’s, a fire hydrant system was not filled with water beforehand.16 “The spread of fire insurance sometimes seems to invite the evident want of care that we oftentimes deplore,” Goad argued.

Goad, unlike some cartographers, did not believe his duty was solely to represent the world around him through maps. He saw himself as an agent of change. He called upon insurance companies to pressure cities into creating fire-resistant infrastructure by increasing insurance rates and refusing to insure dangerous buildings.17 He even financed a competition for children’s fables about fire safety.18 (Perhaps the most notable product of this competition was a story called “The Fire King’s Duty,” in which a reckless boy named Willie is burnt so badly that “when his friends came to look for [him] they only found his teeth, and the buckle of his belt.”)19

In 1910, Charles Goad died and was buried in Toronto. His company lived on under his sons’ leadership, but did limited work on new urban centres and stopped producing fire insurance maps altogether around 1918.20 In 1931, the Goad Company and its assets were bought out by the Underwriters’ Survey Bureau.21

Left behind by the company’s dissolution were thousands of painfully detailed maps produced by Goad and his staff. About two-thirds of the maps were destroyed,22 but those that survive offer a unique glimpse into urban life across the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. “A photograph captures a person or place at an instant in time,” wrote Frances M. Woodward, “but a fire insurance plan captures a whole community or industrial complex.”23

Goad’s maps reveal the cultural life of cities: the Chinese stores and washhouses scattered across Nanaimo; the domes of London’s cathedrals; the vast gardens of Alexandria.24 They also help us visualize how cities changed. Goad’s staff used correction slips and paste to modify maps when buildings were constructed or destroyed, creating a layered image of urban evolution.25 Recently, the maps have been employed once again to mitigate environmental hazards. Environmental assessors in Canada use Goad’s maps to locate sites of possible historical contamination—such as underground fuel storage tanks—and manage risk accordingly.26

Seen this way, the pink refinery on Goad’s 1899 plan and the grey monolith derided in 1975 are not opposites, but competing visions of the same object. The Goad maps captured a distinctly modern way of seeing the world—one that treated disaster not as fate, but as a problem to be measured, managed, and priced. There is something pleasantly idealistic about the belief that the city, for all its volatility, could be rendered legible using only paper, coloured pencils, and a stack of correction slips.

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At midday on June 13, 1886, the bell at Vancouver’s St. James Church began ringing vigorously. The congregants had gone home for lunch after a morning service, but Reverend H.G. Fiennes-Clinton needed to get their attention. The young city was ablaze, flames travelling down the wooden sidewalk of Hastings Road “faster than a man could run.”1

Fiennes-Clinton didn’t have long to get the message across. A few minutes after he started ringing, the church was aflame. “The bell, in the tiny cupola on the ridge of the roof, melted with the heat, dripped in globules to the earth below, where they solidified into a shapeless mass,” wrote city archivist J.S. Matthews.2

The Great Vancouver Fire, as it is now known, wasn’t entirely unforeseeable. In 1885, there were only about 900 European settlers in the area surrounding the Burrard Inlet.3 European settlers hoped to clear land to expand the nascent city, and the fastest way to clear land was with fire. By the morning of June 13th, “the whole of the hill above Victory Square had been afire for weeks with clearing fires.”

It didn’t help that the summer of 1886 was especially hot and dry. Puddles along Carrall Street had long dried out; heaps of dried-out timber collected on the outer edges of the city, “up to three storeys high in places,” as trees were felled to make space for more people.4 The city had become a kind of waiting tinderbox.

Yet the Vancouverites kept burning. In June, city officials planned a clearing fire in the city’s southwest, intended to make space for a roundhouse. It had been announced only a year before that the township of Granville (soon incorporated as Vancouver) would be the west terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the trains would need a place to turn around. At ten o’clock on the morning of June 13th, the railroad workers were fighting an out-of-control blaze, though they didn’t “even dream that anything so serious as afterwards happened would occur.” By afternoon, the workers had been forced to leave the camp. Several fled into False Creek, where Squamish people from the creek’s southern side came to rescue them in canoes. Three men from the work camp, who had volunteered to help fight the fire, were never found.5

By the time the fire died down, close to 1,000 buildings had been destroyed.6 The City Council and Police Department set up in a makeshift tent and sent telegrams to Central Canada pleading for help. The city rebuilt quickly. A local mill offered free lumber to any inhabitant who had lost their home, and within six months, about 500 buildings had been erected.7

Vancouver wasn’t alone in its fiery unravelling. By the late nineteenth century, North America was experiencing major urban fires almost every year, in large part because of the rise of hastily built, tightly packed wooden neighborhoods. As historian Daniel Immerwahr notes, the widespread use of wood may explain why American fires were “eight times costlier per capita than European ones” by the turn of the twentieth century.8

The Great Vancouver Fire may not be unusual in substance, but it is unusually absent from the city’s narrative of itself. In many American cities, the great fires of the nineteenth century are remembered vividly. “Atlanta, Lawrence, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine, all have flags featuring phoenixes,” writes Immerwahr. Novellists like E.P. Roe and Horatio Alger Jr. spun out motivational narratives of conflagration for the general public.9

The Great Vancouver Fire, by contrast, has faded steadily into oblivion. Vancouver schoolteachers rarely mention the fire that more or less destroyed the community only 140 years ago. The melted remains of the St. James Church Bell are held in the Museum of Vancouver, a scarcely visited collection in the basement of a scarcely visited planetarium. It resembles one of Dali’s clocks; some grotesque mushroom; a postmodernist bronze sculpture at MoMA; anything but itself.

In part, this amnesia can be attributed to the city’s small population at the time of the fire. Vancouver had fewer than 15,000 people in 1886; Chicago had over 300,000 in 1871, the year of its first major fire. American conflagrations were larger, and American cities had more people to carry the memories forward.

In another sense, the fire’s disappearance is part of a deeper urban forgetfulness. “Vancouver has been called a city without a history,” writes urban historian Daniel Francis, “partly because of its youth but also because … it seems to change so quickly that it leaves no trace of itself behind.”10 In 1886, the city quite literally left few traces behind.

These invaders were smaller than Jerusalem’s past enemies. In fact, they were bugs. “Swarms of locusts had flown overhead in such thick clouds as to obscure the sun,” Whiting wrote. They flapped their wings loudly, showered excretions—“especially noticeable on the white macadam roads”—and snacked on the local orchards.

Why were there so many insects? Most of the Middle East’s deserts are home to the migratory locust, which lays its eggs in the sand. In dry weather, most of its eggs die. When it rains, the young locusts crawl out of the sand en masse and fly in swarms. Locusts are known for their “gregarious phenotype,” activated when they enter groups, which causes them to change colour, get faster, and travel together. In 1915, the Levant followed this pattern precisely. Its skies filled twice: first with rain clouds, then with beating locusts.

The locals didn’t know much about locust biology, so they blamed God. “God protect us from the three plagues: war, locusts, and disease,” wrote Ihsan Hasan al-Turjman, an Ottoman soldier stationed in Palestine. It wouldn’t be God’s first experiment with locusts, to be fair. In the Book of Exodus, the Pharaoh refuses to let the Israelites leave Egypt. “Stretch out your hand over Egypt so that the locusts swarm over the land and devour everything growing in the fields,” the Lord says to Moses. The locusts arrived soon after, and “covered all the ground until it was black.”

What the Levantines were being punished for in 1915, however, was unclear. Scripture did not provide a way out, and leaders were quick to embrace earthly solutions instead. Residents constructed large boxes and trapped the locusts inside. In Bethlehem, the locusts were buried in cisterns; in Jaffa, they were thrown to the sea, then used for fuel when they washed ashore.

In Jerusalem, the government deputized its citizens to fight locusts. Each person aged 15 to 60 was obligated to collect 20 kilograms of locust eggs, according to al-Turjman. Those who didn’t comply were fined: the rich had to pay one Ottoman pound, the middle-class paid 60 piasters, the poor paid 30 piasters. “I think the authorities did well with this edict (even though I hate them),” al-Turjman wrote. “The locusts do not discriminate between rich and poor.”

Their efforts were unsuccessful. For the better half of 1915, locusts ravaged the Levant. They weren’t picky eaters: they ate leaves, flowers, fruits, vines. They even burrowed their way into bee hives, “consuming honey and bees alike.” In total, the locust swarms diminished the region’s winter harvest by 10 to 15 percent, and its summer and autumn harvests by somewhere between 60 and 100 percent. Between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths from starvation are attributed to the locusts alone—not accounting for contemporaneous war, resource blockades, and the spread of disease.

Even al-Turjman, who had cautiously supported the government’s plan to fight locusts, grew despondent. He prayed to God in his diary and could “hardly walk in the streets.” It is perhaps this sense of fatalism that is most resonant with our contemporary reactions to humanitarian disaster. “Usually I worry about the smallest matter that can happen to me,” wrote al-Turjman in May of 1915, “but now with disaster visiting everybody, I have stopped caring.”

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I was fortunate to speak with nine American war resisters, most of whom are now in their seventies. Here are a few interesting tidbits—all from one unexpectedly wide-ranging conversation—that didn’t make it into the piece but have stayed with me nonetheless.

On women: “If you want to put something in there that’s notorious and that they’ll probably censor—as you know, women were very free in the late sixties, early seventies, and very curious. And draft dodgers were very interesting. If there were 50,000 draft dodgers, I would guess that each of us slept with at least 10 women.

“So you could open your piece with: at least half a million Canadian women know these guys, and this is what they’re really like. I’m sorry. I’ve been reading too much literary nonfiction.”

On communism: “My girlfriend in Canada was convinced that we went to war in Vietnam because they wouldn't sell rubber to us if they became Communist. I mean, how crazy is that? I mean, they were poor. They’d have sold rubber to everyone.”

On the FBI: “By the way, the FBI showed up for several Christmases outside my parents’ house in Wichita Falls and then in Texas. And once my mom went out and gave them hot chocolate. They were sitting there with their crew cuts in the car, waiting for me to come home so they could nab me … This is how clueless they were. They didn’t even realize I was Jewish.”

On life: “I thought I would die at 36. You know? And here I am at 78, and I’m still being useful to people. It’s incredible. But sometimes I’ll put my hand on [name of wife]’s stomach. You know, she’s had kids of her own. And I just wish to God that we could have had kids, or that I could have had kids with other people I loved along the way.

“Most of my friends never did [have children] because we were trying to save the world. I mean, it turns out that life is very long. Even with children and a family, it’s almost infinitely long.”

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A human being is a bit like a 1965 Volkswagen, according to the American philosopher Christopher Boorse.

A Volkswagen is built from a blueprint. When a car deviates from the plan, we say it’s malfunctioning. A human comes from a blueprint too, albeit a blurrier one. Maybe we don’t know exactly what the ideal human looks like, but we know that humans are supposed to have working organs and live for a long time and have lots of kids. When a person’s body stops following the plan — when their lungs stop working, when they can’t walk the same way as before — they are akin to a malfunctioning vehicle. We call that malfunction a disease, Boorse says.

Does the Volkswagen framework allow for mental illness? Boorse thinks not. That’s because there’s no blueprint for good psychological health. Someone with a substance use disorder might want to use substances, Boorse says, whereas nobody with a lung infection wants to have a lung infection. Boorse writes about Vincent Van Gogh, who suffered deeply yet produced brilliant things. Van Gogh’s depression allowed him to experience life in a rich, intense, complex way. The term “disease” doesn’t fully capture that.

And so, Boorse concludes, a mental illness isn’t really an illness at all.

Now, there are a lot of problems with this argument. For one thing, there isn’t a blueprint for the perfect human body. People disagree about what physical problems qualify as diseases — think about chronic pain, or even tone deafness. For another thing, there are objective-ish psychological goods. Almost everyone wants to feel energetic, to fall asleep easily at night, to be close to other people. And, pragmatically speaking, mental diagnoses can be helpful. At least a modern-day Van Gogh could get a day off work.

Yet I think there’s a glimmer of truth in Boorse’s essay. Mental suffering is different from physical suffering. Our minds are messier and stranger than our bodies. And sometimes psychological diagnosis flattens experience. Grief, hollowness, exhaustion turn into “depression.” Haunting, vivid images become “schizophrenia.” The desire to leave this world behind becomes “suicidal ideation.” What Boorse is getting at, I think, is the danger of allowing diagnostic categories to obscure a more human thing.

Pengkonghe Ellery Cartwright grew up in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, with a Bahamian father and a Chinese mother. He goes by Ellery. When he was 17, he moved to Vancouver Island to attend Pearson College (which is where we met). Ellery now studies Business Analytics and Management at Methodist University in North Carolina. This week, we talked about Christianity, mental illness, and what it means for something to be real. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

…

What’s the story behind your name?

Pengkonghe is a Chinese name where peng is my Chinese family name, and he is a mythical bird that’s said to give luck.

In the middle, there’s a typo. It’s not supposed to be kong. It’s supposed to be kang. My mother felt very guilty, for a while, because kang is healthy in Chinese and kong means empty. She was like, “Oh, no. I made an empty child.”

So I am lucky and empty, but also healthy at the same time. Except I’m not.

How did you become religious?

It’s always been kinda complicated. When I was a young tot, I didn’t really question religion at all. My family has basically never gone to church, so it was basically my parents saying, “God exists. Believe it.” I was like, “Okay.” And then when I was around 12, I was like, “God doesn’t exist. Only science is real. Dad, Mom, take that.” And they were like, “Okay. Whatever.”

What do you think led to that period of questioning?

I was a very difficult child, I think. I went out of my way to try and be different because I felt like my family was controlling me.

There was definitely some rebellion in there, but also the school I went to at the time was one of the few non-Christian schools. It was a very high-class preppy school. Definitely not the place I belonged, and the kids there were terrible. And I was very impressionable because, at the time, I was always the youngest in my class. So there was a mix between rebellion and having really bad company.

What did you find so off-putting about the school?

I didn’t find the culture off-putting until later. I just picked it up and ran with it. It made me a really bad person for a while. I lied pathologically, constantly, and I was a 12-year-old saying very obscene things. I mean, not that there’s anything inherently wrong with saying obscene things, but it was in a not-great way.

I also didn’t fit in because I’m not high-class. I am middle-class at best. There was a lot of wealth disparity, and the kids never made a deal out of it, but I could tell there was a very strong difference in the way we lived and the way we thought about things. A middle-class child with high-class ideals is never a good mix.

What were some of the differences in how you thought about things?

Well, money, obviously. I didn’t keep a wallet on me until I went to Pearson. I didn’t have a phone until I went to Pearson. So them being, like, driven to school in fancy cars or in golf carts. And the way they viewed money, and how they had new stuff every week. And not being able to go to hangouts and everything, because I either didn’t have money or they had no way to contact me because, again, the phone.

I wasn’t getting bullied, but it was kind of off on both sides. They’d never met a kid like me, and I was starting to get sick of them.

How did you come back to Christianity?

Almost all the schools in the Bahamas are Christian schools. So eventually, when I was older, I moved to a Christian school. And I was like, “Maybe I should give this stuff a try.”

I became extremely Christian between the years of 13 and 15. Like, on-my-knees-praying-every-night, Christian.

It was pretty stereotypical, really. Troubled youth enters stage left, and he’s saying obscene things, and he’s making gestures at teachers and whatever. And then someone sits him down and is like, “Hey. God loves you, man.”

And I was like, “Me? Even though I’m so flawed and useless, but also, really, really cool?” He’s like, “Yeah. Even you.”

Was that an actual conversation you had with someone at the school?

Every morning, we had an assembly, and that was basically the message every single time. So it never happened to me personally, in a one-on-one conversation, but it was a message displayed constantly.

The curriculum was a whole homeschooling curriculum. If you search up ACE curriculum — American Christian Education — it’s a series of homeschooling books with strong Christian messaging. Every book has a scripture that you have to write down several times.

I know that strong Christian messaging, in some eyes, is brainwashing, especially when you’re that young. But honestly, I thought it was a lot more balanced than traditional schooling. Every subject was taught individually. So a kid could have eleventh-grade English and ninth-grade science at the same time because they were effectively teaching themselves, instead of having to struggle with doing the same thing as everyone else.

Would you say that there were positive things you took away from religious schooling?

It helped me get my act together, in a way. But I feel like the big influence in not being a snotty-nosed rat at 15 was not Christianity, but that the people at the school were like me: for lack of a better word, they were weirdos. Kids had individual cubicles with wooden dividers in between them, but you could remove the divider and just sit with someone the entire time and talk and do work. It was one of the first places I really felt like I belonged.

Christianity itself was enlightening. Though I can’t say it had a lot of effects on my emotional state, except for the kind of stability that comes with having a belief — any belief. I feel like people who have a faith of any kind are generally more persevering. They’ve got a sense of calm to them, because a lot of different faiths come with the belief that if you do good, everything’s gonna be alright.

You mentioned earlier on that you became “extremely Christian.” What did this look like for you?

Memorizing scripture, reading the Bible for leisure. I never did go to church, but I had delusions of having abilities — Christian superpowers — in a weird way.

Christian superpowers?

I don’t know if you’ve heard of eighth-grade syndrome. It’s apparently when a person of adolescent to early adult age believes that they have secret abilities. Not to the point where they go out and become a vigilante, but it’s a very strictly held notion. It’s like when people think they can talk to rats. For me, I thought I could sense the energies of the world and manipulate them.

Were there ever things that happened to you that felt supernatural?

Yeah. I’ve never been a clumsy person, but when I was younger, things would just break around me. I remember one particular time, when I was still in the really bad prep school, before I became a Christian addict. I was talking with a friend of mine, and I said, “Stuff just breaks around me.” And she said, “That’s weird. That’s devilry and whatever.” And I said, “Watch this, I’m gonna turn the power off.”

And I sat there, and I closed my eyes really hard. The way I would go about it was, I would try and trace where the energy was going. From this light bulb, into the roof, along these walls, to the main breaker, and I just sat there thinking as hard as I could: “Break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break.”

And then it happened. We had a power outage. We got sent home early.

In an earlier conversation, you mentioned that your supernatural experiences came back during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do you want to walk through what happened?

A small bit of backstory: When I was three or four, I would stare at the ceiling for hours and just think about what would happen after death. I’d get a really bad feeling in my stomach that I later learned was abject fear, and I wouldn’t be able to imagine an afterlife. My brain didn’t imagine any sunflowers and roses, or even bad stuff — poking sticks, or whatever. It was just nothing.

That happened again later on, when I was 15 or 16. It’s during quarantine, it’s nighttime, I’m trying to sleep, and my brain spontaneously says, “What do you think happens after death?” And I became so incredibly afeard that I couldn’t sleep. I prayed as hard as I could, but wasn’t released from the shackles of my fear.

I thought it would go away, but it didn’t. The same thing happened the next night. They weren’t really nightmares because I didn’t have bad dreams. It was more that while I was still awake, I was incredibly afraid because I thought what was waiting for me at the end of my life was an eternity in nothingness. Fading to black and then blackness forever, completely alone, just kind of floating there. And that thought was like, “Oh my god. Please no.”

I would just stay up until I passed out. I started going to sleep at about four in the morning and waking up with the sunrise at six or seven. And then it started happening during the day. I couldn’t be in darkness. It got so bad that I couldn’t blink for too long because my eyes were closed for too long.

And eventually, I thought I was hearing noises on my roof and outside my window. I thought those were demons waiting for me. I thought that if they noticed that I noticed them, that bad stuff was going to happen. I started seeing stuff on the walls — shadow demons.

What does hallucination feel like, in the moment? How real do the images seem?

At first, it was a lot of disbelief. But when it happens night after night, for three months, you get very immersed. I definitely thought the images were real. I don’t think I thought for a second that these were just figments of my imagination.

Did you ever view the demons as being a kind of divine punishment?

Initially, I thought they had come because I had salacious thoughts — that I was of unclean mind, that my soul was tainted by sin. I don’t know how much sinning you can get up to when you’re locked in your house for three months, so I don’t think that was it. Later on, it became more akin to a curse — like, this is just what’s happening to me.

Do you see any connection between the pandemic or lockdown and what was happening to you?

The only real connection was the fact that I wasn’t doing anything. It was kind of akin to being locked in a padded room. You know? Even if you're a normal person — I don’t know if I would call myself normal — being isolated in a place for a long time with nothing to do will start making you think some pretty weird stuff.

Were you able to talk to other people about what was going on?

Well, close to the end of quarantine, I was at a sleepover at a friend’s house. One of us was a big horror movie buff. So they were like, “Scary movies. Let’s do it.”

The first one we were supposed to watch was one called The Babysitter. And within the first couple minutes, this kid ends up with two knives sunk into his head. I think I’m known for having a pretty punky personality. But when my friends looked at me, I was probably pale in the face and shaking, and I said, “Can we watch anything else, please?” in the smallest voice possible. They immediately acquiesced because they could tell something was wrong.

I think we watched The Notebook afterwards, and I fell asleep. Put this on record: The Notebook, not a good movie.

What’s wrong with The Notebook?

Too long. Pacing, absolute garbage. I’m not the kind of person that needs the plot delivered to me immediately by trebuchet. But The Notebook is three hours long, and it’s a series of flashbacks about some old guy’s life. I don’t think he even gets the girl, in the end.

Wait — he does get the girl.

Yeah, I wouldn’t know how it ends because I fell asleep.

Anyways, after The Notebook, we’re all tired. It’s 2AM. Almost all my friends were girls. I got my own room, and I could not sleep for fear of the shadow demons. I eventually knocked on their door, and they were still awake. And I confessed, “I haven’t been able to get to sleep. I think demons are out to get me, and I am afraid all the time. It’s been going on for months now. I don’t know what to do.” I just kind of broke down and started crying.

I remember one of them was very religious. And she prayed for me. At that point, I was like, “There’s no way this helps.”

But I just felt so thankful that someone spared the thought of, “How can I help him in this moment?” You know? I’d been prayed at — not fun — but I don’t think I’d ever been prayed for until that moment. And that was really, really, heartwarming. I fell asleep in their room.

How did your family respond to the situation?

I told my parents I was having really, really horrible nightmares. I told them I wanted to see a therapist, that I wanted to get help because I didn’t feel like this was something I could deal with on my own. And they said that I should stop playing so many video games.

I didn’t bring it up again. It didn’t seem worth it.

How did you stop seeing the demons?

It was when the quarantine stopped and I started to leave the house a little more. I could sleep, just because the day was long and I was tired. I also had other stuff on my mind, besides the end of all things.

(And death kind of is the end of all things. You perceive reality through the self, and you can’t really prove that anything else is real besides yourself. So, when you die, in a way, it’s like the death of all things because you’re not around to perceive anything else.)

The thing that lasted after the hallucinations stopped was that my personality kind of fractured. I had more voices than one. There should only ever be one voice, really.

I can’t really pin down exactly when different voices appeared, but they definitely did. I’d have full-blown conversations with myself. And not in a normal way. It was more that I struggled with making friends, and I thought, “What if the friends can just be in my head?”

Would you say the voices had stable personalities, like in Inside Out, or that they were less consistent?

For me, they were very stable archetypes. The main ones were anger, fear, and a sense of conscience. It ended up getting more varied — there was lust, hunger, and so on.

I gave them names, and I could see them. I went back to high school, and I didn’t know anyone, and I didn’t talk to anybody. So I would sit at empty lunch tables, and I would look around and have conversations around the lunch table with the different voices.

What did it feel like when the voices disappeared?

It felt like focusing a camera lens. When things are out of focus, they’re hazy, and you can’t really tell what one thing is and what another thing is. And then you twist a little bit, and you can clearly see that this is a tree, or something like that. I think it came from the realization that I could pin a part of me to each of these voices.

Did you ever end up seeing a therapist on your own?

No. Not even a little bit. I do think this whole thing would have been a lot quicker if I had gotten a good therapist.

The most I ever did was take a psychology class. I learned that what happened sounds very similar to an early expression of schizophrenia, which means there’s a chance it comes back later in my life. So I have that to look forward to. Maybe you can interview me again if it ever happens — see the before and after.

Do you worry about it coming back?

I don’t worry about it. I think the chances of it happening are the same as the chances of anything else happening. And even if it is going to happen, there’s not really a way for me to stop it.

When you look back, do you think your experience affected your view of mental illness?

It changed the way I thought about being “crazy,” for sure. For all intents and purposes, I was sane beforehand, and this just kind of happened to me.

So when I see people in the street with mental issues, I’ve stopped thinking “Oh, they were born that way,” or, “Oh, it’s because they’re on crack or whatever.” Stuff can just fall out of the sky and happen to people. Therapy is expensive, and even then, it doesn’t always fix the problem.

So, really, it could happen to any of us. It happened to me, and I never really forgot that it happened to me.

Are there any fictional depictions of mental illness that you resonate with?

I think the Joker movies do a really good job of depicting madness. The Joker isn’t inherently insane. He’s got a condition, but it’s not really a mental condition. He just laughs. The condition isn’t that he finds things funny. The condition is that he laughs uncontrollably.

It’s easy to point the finger and say, “This guy is insane, and I think he killed five people or something.” I’m not advocating for the killing of people. But boiling it down to craziness doesn’t help anybody. Maybe he’s not doing so well mentally right now, but at some point, he was fine. I think it’s important to work backwards to a point when someone was more stable, instead of working under the assumption that they’ve been secretly crazy this entire time.

How do you relate to people who experience “madness” in real life?

When I was going around Victoria or Vancouver, homeless people or mad people would come up to me and strike conversation. We would talk for half an hour.

The one that sticks in my mind was next to the bus stop, by the parking garage. There was a guy that came up to me, and he was like, “Should I end it all today?” And I was like, “No. I don't think so.” He asks why, and I say, “Well, it’s the first clear day we’ve had in two weeks. Clear blue sky and everything. I’m enjoying today. Are you having a good time?” He says, “Yeah. That’s good. Then I won’t.”

We end up talking about his views on the world and whatnot. I think the main thing that sticks with me is that, to these people, what they’re saying is very real. And to try to dissuade them and say, “Hey. That’s not real,” is kind of meaningless.

Because if someone had told me throughout my entire experience that I was crazy and I was imagining the whole thing, I would have been pretty offended. How could you? A strong sense of betrayal from my human peers.

That’s the kind of feeling I don’t wanna give to these people — to my people. It feels like they’re imagining it, but that’s because we’re not imagining it with them. We can write it off as imagination, but imagination in and of itself is a very potent thing.

I think that’s a good place to end. Ellery, thank you so much for your time.

Thanks for having me.

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The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955)

Fowler: “How many hundred million Gods do people believe in? Why, even a Roman Catholic believes in quite a different God when he’s scared or happy or hungry.”

Pyle: “Maybe, if there is a God, he’d be so vast he’d look different to everyone.”

The Quiet American is set in South Vietnam in the early 1950s. At the time, the U.S. was slowly supplanting France’s control over Indochina, sending more and more ‘advisors’ to the region and financing about half of France’s war costs. America’s grasping attachment to Vietnam would increase in the decades to come, but, at the time of Greene’s novel, America was still staring over the edge of the precipice. It was an unusually fragile and decisive time in American politics, or perhaps such fragility is only imagined when looking back from a time where the consequences of this era’s commitments are more clear.

The Quiet American breaks through this fragility. The book’s protagonist is a British war reporter named Thomas Fowler, who describes America’s incursions with cynicism and dry humour. He meets Alden Pyle—the young, idealistic American advisor for whom the novel is named. Greene, as embodied in Fowler, questions whether American presence in Vietnam is productive or ethical. The book was published in 1955, ten years before American troops set foot in Vietnam. With the benefit of hindsight, it reads almost prophetically.

The novel does have a life outside its political messaging. Greene takes care to describe the green and gold of the Vietnamese countryside; the hazy warmth of opium during Fowler’s evenings at home; a timeless feeling of distance between ourselves and others. These moments are rendered beautifully.

Overwhelmingly, however, the novel is focused on appraising America’s intentions in Indochina—in a way that many critics of the 1950s found unfair. A writer at the New York Times remarked that “[Greene's] caricatures of American types are often as crude and trite as those of Jean Paul Sartre.” (I have not read any Sartre, but I assume this is trying to communicate disapproval.) There is some merit to this accusation. Sometimes the narrator embarks on an unprompted monologue about American hypocrisy. “Don’t go on in the East with that parrot cry about a threat to the individual soul,” Fowler says to Pyle at one point, “Here you’d find yourself on the wrong side—it’s they who stand for the individual and we just stand for Private 23987, unit in the global strategy.” This strikes me as an oddly theatrical statement to include in normal conversation. In moments like these, the political substance behind the fiction is veiled too thinly for my liking.

Yet I don't feel the novel is consistently negative in its view of Pyle, or even America at large. Greene captures an endearing side of idealism. Pyle’s answer to the inconsistencies of religion—his suggestion that God might be vast enough to look different to everyone—is unexpectedly romantic. It demonstrates that faith can bend reality in unlikely and beautiful ways. Pyle’s idealism about American presence in Vietnam is misguided, perhaps, but not entirely unsympathetic. Greene describes the “look of pain and disappointment [that] touch[ed] his eyes and mouth when reality didn’t match the romantic ideas he cherished.” I think this is a keenly empathetic account of idealism—it does not condemn Pyle’s romantic ideals, but merely describes the grief of losing these ideals. We can certainly criticise Pyle’s naivety when looking at the war purely through Fowler's eyes. Still, I think the reader is intended to find something valuable and sympathetic (if ultimately unredeeming) in Pyle and in America’s belief in its capacity for good.

It is difficult today to conjure the energy that political idealism requires (or maybe it always has been). The Quiet American will not give you this energy. What I did get from the book was the recognition that there is some implacable beauty in the ideal; in innocence; in cherishing something unreachable by others. Even if those ideals don’t endure.

Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Ryan North, Albert Monteys (original published in 1969, adapted in 2020)

“Is it weird to experience only one moment at a time?”

“Your guide here explained it to me with a metaphor: it’s a bright day, and while you can see all around you, I’m welded to a flatcar on a train that’s always moving, and the only way I can see anything is through six inches of steel pipe... I don’t know that I’m on that train, or that there's anything unusual going on. I just think ‘Well, that’s life.’”

I have a light prejudice against visual adaptations of books that I like. Perhaps this can be interpreted generously as a preference for books as a genre: I think there is value in the slower pace of reading, and in demanding that readers imagine their own characters and places rather than gaze at a prefabricated world. But the more honest explanation is that I am attached to my initial experience of the text. I would like things to be exactly the same as they were the first time, however unachievable and irrational the desire is.

For those who haven’t read Slaughterhouse-Five: the book is about a fictional soldier named Billy Pilgrim, who is captured by Germany and lives through the Allied firebombing of Dresden. His experience is horrifying and exposes the ethical costs of war. In a marked departure from other WWII literature, Billy also travels back and forth through time, meeting an alien species called the Tralfamadore, and so we get to see other snippets of his life.

In spite of my prejudices, I thought North and Monteys’ graphic novel adaptation was really delightful. It is true that something is lost from the original novel—a kind of subtlety that is difficult to achieve in so few words, or maybe just some nice turns of phrase that couldn’t be accommodated in a speech bubble. For example, the flatcar metaphor in Vonnegut’s original novel is a longer and more beautiful passage. It doesn’t carry the same weight in the condensed speech bubble form I quoted at the top of this essay.

But something is gained in adaptation too. In some ways, Slaughterhouse-Five lends itself more naturally to a visual form than a written one. Billy’s time jumps are much easier to follow when we can visually observe changes in his age and environment. The novel’s dark humour carries over well—Monteys’ figures are very facially expressive, which brings out interpersonal dynamics that were less clear (or entirely absent) in the original work. The illustrations are often captivating and evocative in their own right. The most memorable, in my eyes, were Monteys’ full-page landscapes of Dresden before and after firebombing, which expose the costs of aerial attack in brutal detail.

Perhaps most importantly, the graphic adaptation gives authenticity to Billy’s fantastical experiences in a way distinct from the novel. Slaughterhouse-Five is usually understood as a piece of antiwar fiction that records the challenges of PTSD. This interpretation says that Billy does not actually jump through time and meet aliens; these experiences are meant to reflect the psychological distortions caused by the trauma of war. This interpretation is correct, on some level—Vonnegut is drawing upon his own experiences from WWII, and it seems unlikely that he met aliens and jumped through time.

At the same time, I hesitate to reduce the science fiction plotline to an instrument in Vonnegut’s broader argument against war. It feels reductive to dismiss Billy’s interactions with aliens as a PTSD symptom and nothing more, in the same way that I find it reductive to imagine Alice in Wonderland solely as a story about a girl having a strange dream.

I think there is meaning in Billy’s conversations with the aliens. The Tralfamadorians move through time effortlessly; they can go backwards and forwards, and when bad things happen, they merely shift their focus to a different point in the timeline. Maybe this is a more natural way of life. What I appreciate about the flatcar metaphor is that it alienates us from our own experience of the world: why can’t we move back and forth in time as we can through space? When I read this novel for the first time, I had little context about Allied firebombing during WWII, so the antiwar stuff didn’t hit as hard. What I took away was a sense of temporal captivity that I still reflect on occasionally (particularly on days such as January 1st, where things seem to have moved too quickly, and I wish for a little more control over the pace of my own life).

These reflections only take place if, at least temporarily, we treat the Tralfamadorians as real within the context of the book—if we see them as more than a symptom of Billy’s mental condition. I liked the graphic adaptation partially because it treated Billy’s time jumps and alien encounters as concrete and important in themselves. They are illustrated with the same colour and detail as Billy’s ‘real’ experiences in war. If the aliens are indeed a hallucination, they are vivid enough that the reader experiences the hallucination too. We are brought along to Dresden and Tralfamadore alike, perhaps more immersively than is possible in written form.

A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley (1962)

“She turned abruptly to the stove, took a plate from the top of a pot of boiling water... brought it to the table and although he thought she might bang it down, set it down quite gently.”

A friend persuaded me recently that the best novels are those where the characters surprise us. Not primarily because the surprises create excitement or suspense, but because the fact of being surprised means that we were expecting something different—that some aspect of the character’s beliefs or intentions was unknown to us. Relationships in real life are remarkably opaque: we don’t know what other people are thinking or how they’ll behave, and often they don’t know either. Good literature captures this uncertainty, my friend argued. What feels hollow about many novels—particularly political ones, which are trying to communicate something specific and intense—is that the interior is exposed with graphic clarity.

A Different Drummer is set in 1957 in an unknown state of the American South. One day in 1957, every black person in the state decides to leave. The novel is told from the perspective of white characters, so the reader doesn’t immediately understand why they leave. In broad strokes, it is because they are exhausted by decades of racism and violence; yet the smaller details—the personal reasons that individual characters have for leaving; the conversations they have with one another along the way—emerge slowly and incompletely over the course of the novel.

Equally uncertain is Kelley’s answer to the perennial question of what motivates violence. Sometimes the book depicts violence rooted in genuine malice. Other times, violence is less controlled—one character kicks another “as one kicks a tin can down a dark street, with absent-minded savagery.” The book is narrated by multiple white residents of the town, most of whom are written empathetically. They are prejudiced but not inherently villainous. And though the story ends in a chilling act of brutality, it doesn’t read nihilistically when considered as a whole.

In other words, the book speaks to heavy themes in American history without reducing these themes into a unified political message. Much is left ambiguous. Beyond this, Kelley is a beautiful writer, and doesn’t neglect smaller domestic moments in the novel. I come back to the quote about the plate (at the top of this essay) not only because it reminds me that our predictions about others can be incorrect—but also because it leaves intact a hopeful fragility in domestic life that, in a novel that contains so much violence, would be easy to tear down.

I’m surprised that this book isn’t more widely included in discussions of Civil Rights-era literature. Maybe it’s because the novel is sharper and more disturbing than To Kill a Mockingbird, or because it is difficult to pin down the precise meaning of Kelley’s alternative history. I hope it makes a resurgence.

The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren (1973), translated by Joan Tate

But that evening, when I was so afraid of dying, he said that as long as I got to Nangiyala, then I would at once be well and strong and even beautiful, too.

“As beautiful as you?” I asked.

“Much more beautiful,” said Jonathan.

Out of all ancient virtues, bravery is perhaps the least recognisable in the world around me. I don’t often see people fight wild animals or go off to war. I don’t know many people who attend life-threatening protests. The people around me still act courageously—it is courageous to express oneself honestly in face of social disapproval, or to quit a stable job to pursue a riskier opportunity, or to let your child do something that worries you—but these risks are different from the risks that I might’ve confronted had I grown up in another time or place. Nothing about my life requires me to sacrifice personal safety for the good of others. I suspect many readers from economically stable, politically peaceful backgrounds have had a similar experience.

What this results in is a kind of fascination with narratives of courage. Most fantasy books are built partially on this fascination—they capture a form of personal sacrifice that is unfamiliar and entrancing. And in a fictional world with inflated personal risks, where choices have steep costs, the values and motivations of each character become clearer. The Brothers Lionheart is one such book. It tells the story of a boy named Karl Lionheart, who joins his older brother Jonathan in an expedition to defeat an evil monster named Katla. Each decision they make comes with the risk of personal suffering or death. Their bravery, as a consequence, is both more foreign and more self-evident than it would be in a book that more closely mimicked my experience of life.

The book is written for children, which partially explains why the characters have relatively simple virtues and motivations. And, to be clear, I wouldn’t want every book to sketch its characters with such transparency. But there is a charming side to this simplicity: it can be nice to see characters for who they really are, the layers of deception and self-consciousness peeled off. Perhaps because of its simplicity, the book is achingly sad in a way I didn’t expect from a Scandinavian children’s classic. The sadness is distilled and uncomplicated, which makes it sharper. There is no elaborate literary ruckus to distract you from the sacrifices that characters make for one another.

Maybe this is the response to my argument about A Different Drummer and the importance of ambiguity. There are enough ambiguous characters in real life: it is reassuring when books contain a more comprehensible type of human. The constancy of Karl and Jonathan—their distinctive moral outlines; the charmingly foreseeable way they care for each other—was a warm addition to my year.

“And then the fire gets smaller and smaller, until only the embers are left, and the shadows thicken in the corners, and I get sleepier and sleepier, and I lie there and don’t cough and Jonathan tells me things. Tells me and tells me and tells me, and in the end I hear his voice just like those whisperings again, and then I fall asleep.”

(Special thanks to Tomas and Hilde for the excellent book recommendation.)

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Mom: Today we need to get two new toilet seats. I don’t want your friends to come here and ask why our toilet seat is yellow. And the other one is broken.

Me: I don’t think they’re going to ask why our toilet seat is yellow. 

Mom: I just don’t think it looks nice. 

Me: Well, when should we go to Home Depot?

Mom: I’ll have my tea, and then we can leave at four.

At 3:59pm, one of us realises we are tired or sick or in a different municipality, and we reschedule to the following week.

Yesterday, after having done nothing for three days in a row, I finally failed to generate a reasonable excuse to not go to the hardware store. And so, after much grumbling and a drive that was shorter than we thought, my mother and I arrive at the depot of our dreams.

Home Depot is crisp inside, and orange. We are greeted by a tremendously multiracial group of employees.

Mom: Where do you think the toilet seats are?

Me: I think they’re in the bath aisle.

Mom: Yeah, I guess they don't want to write “toilet,” because then customers would think it’s a bathroom.

We walk down an aisle with about 50 different toilets. They are mounted on the shelves like trophies. It looks like a scene from Captain Underpants or an exhibit in MOMA or maybe the future of female urinals. We approach the toilet seat area, where the seats are suspended in a massive grid.

Me: I wonder if they have different colours.

Mom: Let’s ask them.

Me: Oh, you don’t have to.

She turns to a middle-aged man who is puttering around the shelves.

Toilet Seat Salesman: Is there anything I can help you with?

Mom: Do you have different colours of toilet seats?

Toilet Seat Salesman: We mostly have white. Although, we do have a beige colour over here, as you can see... There’s a bigger selection on our online store if you’re interested.

Mom: Thank you! I’d also like to know, why is this toilet seat 76 dollars and the one we picked up over there was only 18? What's the difference?

Toilet Seat Salesman: It’s a difference in quality. Like the plastic on this American Standard model is better because... Well, you know, it’s higher quality.

Mom: We’d really like a toilet seat that won’t break or anything in the future, or get discoloured. What would be your recommendation?

Toilet Seat Salesman: The Kohler is always a classic. It’s plastic, which is better than wood, because the paint will just come right off those wooden ones, in less than ten years!

Me (aside): Can you get microplastics from a toilet seat?

Toilet Seat Salesman: And that Glacier Bay one, you also don't want. It’s much thinner than the others.

At this point, we get out the toilet seat lid that we brought from home for shape matching purposes and disguised (poorly) in a white plastic bag. My mom begins holding it against the other toilet seats to see which one is a fit. I take out the tape measure I have brought with me, and begin measuring different seats. The other customers stare at us, clearly feeling insecure about their own lack of preparation. 

Mom: They’re all the same size… You know, I think we’ve spent enough time thinking about toilet seats.

Toilet Seat Salesman: I can see the Kohler is the model you have from home. A great choice.

Mom: Then we’ll just get these Kohler ones, and then we can pick up some doormats and leave.

We pick up the doormats with great efficiency, but on our way back, we notice a collection of tall Halloween-themed figures that people can put in their front yard. There are clowns, witches, ghouls, skeletons, a skeleton dog, and a short green man named Dean the Deathologist. 

We pass by Dean and arrive in front of a 7.5-foot-tall animatronic plague doctor. The doctor is speaking to us.

Mom: What is that for? Is it a decoration? Oh, it’s for Halloween already.

Me: What is it saying?

We move closer.

The Plague Doctor: Come closer, and I’ll rip you apart.

Mom: He's saying he’ll rip us apart!

Me: It says there are three different sounds!

The Plague Doctor jerks suddenly, and violently hits the clown to his left, who sways a little from side to side.

Mom: He hit the clown! Wow, I want it. We could put it in our front yard for the whole year.

Me: What about when Halloween is over?

Mom: We could decorate it for Christmas, and all the other holidays. And everyone would come look at it.

Me: I don’t know if our neighbours would like that.

Mom: I like the plague doctor the most. He even has a bag... Such a nice bag… Do you think his bag is included, or do you have to buy it separately? And why does he even have a bag? Does he have stuff to carry? It's not like he’s going anywhere.

Me: I couldn’t tell you.

Mom: I wish I could buy it. I wouldn’t pay 277 dollars for him. I would pay seven. Or even 27. But not 277—that's too much.

Me: Yeah, we got our seven-foot-long papier-mâché fish for free last time. 

We decide that the plague doctor would not be a good purchase, so we check our items out and leave the store. We’ve parked one block down. The toilet seats won’t fit in the bags, so we carry two new toilet seats, the toilet lid we brought from home, and three doormats in our arms down the street. We almost drop the toilet seat from home on a husky walking by. I don’t know if I would have even had a spare hand left for the massive weatherproof plague doctor in a floor-length gown. 

Mom: Hmm, I like how that Plague Doctor kept saying he’d rip you apart. Maybe 277 dollars isn’t unreasonable... What if you buy it for my birthday?

The people with the husky, who are still within earshot, glance at us a second time. We get to the car, throw the toilet seats rather unceremoniously into the backseat, and begin driving home.

Mom: Where is that license plate from? Is it California?

Me: I can’t really see it from here. Let’s tailgate them for a second?

Mom: We don’t want to run them over.

Me: Oh, it’s Saskatchewan.

Mom: Do they grow weed there? Or hemp? I know Saskatchewan is a large producer of lentils. But I don’t know about marijuana.

Me: The plate says, “land of the living skies.” I like that.

Mom: I like it too.

We drive in silence for a while, our minds clattering with images of plague doctors and living skies. It has been an unusual afternoon. 

Me: I’ve been trying to write a blog post about Harvard, but I don’t have very much to say about it.

Mom: About Harvard?

Me: Like, my first year. I wanted to write something before I go back. 

Mom: What ideas do you have so far?

Me: That I don’t like it.

Mom: That doesn't sound like a very nice blog. And they might come say, “take your tuition back.” Your 150 followers—or is it 200?—someone will go tell Harvard what you said. And then you’ll be in trouble.

Me: Hmm. Well, maybe I’ll write something about the Home Depot instead.

1. “Why are there so many books titled with abstract nouns?” my friend asked me, when I told him I was reading Richard Powers’ Bewilderment. It’s a good question—there’s Atonement, Persuasion, Disgrace, even It. Why not The Life and Times of Briony Tallis? Why not Pennywise and his Murderous Mania?

I think one answer is that the lengthier a title is, the more specific and more confining it feels. I never much liked the title The Sun Does Shine for Anthony Ray Hinton’s memoir about his time on death row, for example. It forcibly imposes optimism upon a narrative that is, in reality, sometimes hopeful, sometimes discouraging, sometimes deeply harrowing. The breadth of a single word—‘atonement,’ which packages dozens of connotations into three syllables; ‘persuasion,’ which captures each of the forceful, delicate ways we exert influence on others—is sometimes more inclusive of different interpretations.1

Bewilderment is one of these profoundly multivalent novels. It’s told by an astrobiologist, named Theo, raising his nine-year-old son, named Robin, in a dystopian American future. The story is about environmental loss and the erosion of American democracy. It’s peppered with intricate, aching descriptions of life on fictional planets—a planet whose orbit is just barely out of tilt, causing life to be destroyed and regrow every few million years; a planet where life is frozen under ice. Perhaps more than anything, it's about parenthood—about what it means to protect a child growing up in a gratingly unempathetic world; how to do so without patronising them and without lying to them.

The book is served well by its title, I think. In each thread, Powers manages to capture the wide-eyed, painful confusion we feel when things go wrong. There's the bewilderment of watching fragile things be carelessly destroyed, and there's the bewilderment of watching someone you care about transform. “I’d missed something obvious,” Theo narrates, “in over thirty years of reading and two thousand science fiction books: there was no place stranger than here.”

2. There are moments when Bewilderment feels a little artificially political.

Robin, for example, is described at various points by reviewers as “behaviourally challenged,” “volatile,” “acutely sensitive,” and “intense.” (Which are all true but also sound vaguely like a primary school teacher's attempt to write a report card for a truly menacing first-grader without getting fired.) He’s mostly angry about how people treat the environment. He hits his head against a wall when cows are put in such close proximity that they develop brain-eating diseases and degenerate. He walks into a glacial river to take down stone cairns, because their construction dislodges micro ecosystems beneath them.

These fits of anger sometimes read as contrived. To be sure, people’s anxiety, frustration, confusion over climate change is real. Still, I don’t know how many nine-year-olds there are whose severe anger management issues are triggered almost exclusively by seeing environmental crises in the news—who have few interests or friends or pet peeves that are unrelated to climate change. Maybe there are a few. Maybe this is what a lot of neurodivergence is like. To me, Robin occasionally feels a little too neatly carved to fit the degrowth-return-to-earth-anticapitalism mold of Powers’ recent fiction. In these moments, the novel’s politics pick away at its sense of integrity and realism.

And if we treat Bewilderment as a piece of political media, it seems remarkably unempathetic to other points of view. The book is probably set in a second Trump administration, with constant tweeting and deportations and defunding of academia. We rely on Theo for fearful descriptions of this securitised state. There are no characters who seem remotely supportive of the government, people who could explain how we got there. 

The job of a novel is not to represent all perspectives equally. I’m not suggesting that Richard Powers writes his next novel about a lumberjack who relies upon deforestation for a living. I do think it might feel more psychologically realistic (and more politically useful too) to write characters who see the world in more shades of grey. 

The word ‘bewilderment’ itself implies not just a political disagreement, but an inability to understand where the other side comes from. I don’t think that most environmental destruction is bewildering, per se. I understand a lot of it, actually: people are profit-driven, or are trying to make a living, and we don't see whales or old-growth forests very often, so the problems sort of recede comfortably to the back of our minds. I feel frustrated about the lack of change, and sad about the loss of wonderful things, but I don’t think this loss is beyond understanding. Sometimes Bewilderment makes the political gulf wider than it needs to be.

3. “‘What’s the ocean like?’

What was the ocean like? I couldn’t tell him. The sea was too big, and my bucket was so small.”

I get a particular feeling when I learn something unexpected about someone I’ve known for a long time. My mother flew small planes, as it turns out. A friend from boarding school is the child of a prominent airline executive. A friend from high school, who never struck me as particularly anxious, wakes her older sister up every day at six in the morning to take the dog out because she’s too scared to go outside alone when it’s quiet. Small and large things.

The feeling is a kind of gentle bewilderment—surprise, and a brief scraping of previous interactions to search for unappreciated evidence. Mostly, these moments make me think about what a narrow aperture we have into other people’s lives. We don’t know most of what other people are thinking. More fundamentally, we can’t feel the precise things that other people feel—we can only hear words and read faces, and imagine what these signals might translate to. What if another person’s sadness or anger feels completely different than mine?

Sometimes these imprecisions matter. There’s a very quotable John Steinbeck quote from The Winter of Our Discontent: “I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.” I occasionally mull over this when I walk down streets, looking at passersby, or when I return from a long day with a friend—what am I not seeing?

I think this is why so much of speculative fiction focuses on people inhabiting the lives of others, in one way or another. Freaky Friday, where a mother and a daughter switch places for a day, comes to mind. Or John Wyndham’s protagonists in The Chrysalids, who share thoughts and feelings without speech. Or the ‘empathy boxes’ in Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that, when touched, allow people to vicariously experience another person's suffering. We are imagining what it would be like to fill this gulf in experience. 

In Bewilderment, Robin participates in a fictional neuroscience study. He sits in a scanning machine and is made to imitate the brain signals of people who feel happier and calmer than him. Eventually, he reproduces his late mother's brain signals too, and becomes progressively more like her. I think Powers depicts something powerful here—a child who feels displaced among others, his longing to fully understand other people, a sense that normal relationships rarely allow for this complete form of empathy. And what it might look like if they did. 

4. Powers’ 2018 novel The Overstory asks a lot of questions about how we can live amidst a destructive, changing environment. Bewilderment is a courageous attempt to answer these difficult questions, perhaps a little more dogmatically than I would’ve liked. What resonated with me the most, in the end, were the things that least resemble my experience of Earth—a futuristic kind of parenthood; Powers’ beautiful faraway planets that now infiltrate my dreams; his speculations on how empathy can be technologically invented and diffused. Sometimes it’s nice when literature isn’t just a mirror but a window to someplace else.

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Seven months ago, I started reading The Overstory. I had found myself in an unenthusiastically air-conditioned bookstore in Ho Chi Minh City—the kind without chairs, where you perch on shelves awkwardly because people will stare at you if you sit on the ground. (How I got there is unclear, but it involved a desire to be tucked away from motorcycles, debaters, and the sun.)

I noticed the book mostly because its spine was overlaid with an image of swirling wood that looked like my kitchen table. I picked it up mostly because I remembered Obama saying something about Richard Powers in the news. And I kept reading because the book felt richer and steadier than my life had felt for weeks. In Vietnam, of all places—among a people who once lost five million acres of white pine, mangrove, mahogany, copperpod to the country I will briefly call home—I began to read about trees.1

2. “People have sex with strangers. People marry strangers. People spend half a century in bed together and wind up strangers at the end.”

I sat down last week for tea with a friend I hadn’t seen in two or so years. We used to sit together in high school math, passing notes and drawing spiders. The math classroom is an unexpectedly intimate space. You begin to see where a person’s mind goes in the quiet, tedious moments. 

Over tea, he tells me about his linear algebra courses and how his brothers are doing. I tell him that I liked my roommates this year and read most of Ulysses. The woman at the table next to us puts her earphones in to avoid the next half hour of verbal table tennis. We toss stale questions back and forth, the rhythm broken only by occasional laughter at the stupid things we did when we were 14. It is painful in a nibbling way—this sense of estrangement from someone I once knew so well.

Which one of us has changed? I ask myself, after we head down opposite directions of the street. Is he more serious than before? Am I more judgmental? Or were we like this all along—have the memories just blurred over time? 

Powers’ book has nine main characters, who similarly grow and wither over 600 pages. There is Adam, who grows up sitting in trees and dabbing nail polish onto ants to track their movements down a sidewalk, and withers in a federal prison on arson charges. There is Olivia, who withers in substance-induced delinquency in college, only to grow into a fierce conservationist and live on a platform in the forest canopy. The characters lose legs, speech, jobs, hope. They gain pragmatism, money, convictions, conviction.

While Powers’ heroes live more dramatic lives than the characters in my world, their stories evoke a familiar feeling. At its core, more of human development than we realise is about the dulling of sentiment (and maybe, if we’re lucky, its eventual regeneration too). We all love trees, at age six. It’s only later, as we grow more cynical, that they become expendable things in our minds—“we see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade… obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope… dark, threatening places.”

I am at a stage in life where this dulling surrounds me. My friend, who once dreamed of being an architect, professed over tea that he is now reluctantly becoming an electrical engineer. My mother no longer makes chairs, and I no longer want to write novels.

Nothing is morally wrong about pragmatism, most of the time. Often, we lack choices. But there is something deeply sad about these transformations—the hardening of people “like shale into slate”—as utile as they might be. 

3. “If you carved your name four feet high in the bark of a beech tree, how high would it be after half a century? She loves the answer: Four feet. Still four feet. Always four feet, however high the beech tree grows. She’ll love that answer still, half a century later.” 

What makes the tree a seductive metaphor is that it is constant. 

Very few things are. People drift quickly across cities and continents. Old storefronts grow into skyscrapers—concrete takes a few years to shoot upwards, where an oak might have taken 150. Samsung wants to give your refrigerator buttons and a brain. These changes aren’t bad. Many are good. But they share the same wistful, disorienting quality as my recent teatime charade.

Most books about trees tug at this feeling, overtly or not. In the 1933 novel To A God Unknown—a kind of old-growth in itself: a forgotten, beautiful thing that took Steinbeck longer than The Grapes of Wrath to compose—Joseph’s towering oak tree long survives his dying father. In Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, a boy grows into a gluttonous adult, unrecognisable from the kid who sat in the shade and ate apples. His tree endures, rooted firmly in the ground. Sometimes I wonder how much of real-life environmentalism begins here. Not in a calculated fear of extinction, or a belief in the moral value of wildlife, or even a sentimental affection for nature, but in the desire for some things to remain still.

In the seven months I spent reading The Overstory, the novel itself became something of a constant for me. The prose is too dense and too rich to be crammed into one’s eyes, a hundred pages at a time, like a Grisham thriller. And so it followed me slowly, through long evenings at my oak desk in Cambridge, through quiet mornings in a tent on a certain Canadian island, through warm afternoons in the shade of sycamores along the Charles River. 

Nicholas, Mimi, Adam, Dorothy, Ray, Douglas, Neelay, Patricia, and Olivia became fixtures in my life. I tried to visit them every week, even as the actual humans in Cambridge rotated in and out of my universe (an anticipated yet unsettling part of the first year in a fast-moving place). The nine of them will stick around for a while, I think, held together immutably by the same grained, oak-coloured spine I found last December.

4. “The oracle leaves turn the wind audible. They filter the dry light and fill it with expectation. Trunks run straight and bare, roughed with age at the bottom, then smooth and whitening up to the first branches. Circles of pale green lichen palette-spatter them. She stands inside this white-grey room, a pillared foyer to the afterlife. The air shivers in gold, and the ground is littered with windfall and dead ramets.” 

The Overstory is an intensely beautiful book. It is also a long book. And so I was surprised, when I turned the final page a few nights ago, that the story still felt incomplete.2 Powers remarked in an interview, “I wrote a book that asked a very hard question: why are we so lost and how can we possibly get back?” The novel conjures so many generational anxieties—about environmental damage, but also about technology, brutality, displacement, disconnection—and refuses to put them to bed. 

When I closed the book, my mind wandered to the final lecture I attended this year. It was on The Iliad. Our professor had paused for a moment, long enough for 90 dishevelled students to sit up straight and listen.

“Does beauty sensitise us to grief?” she asked. The Iliad is a violent poem, so violent that it is occasionally difficult to find substance in the wreckage. What gives the text meaning, for many, are the pockets of domesticity, warmth, beauty—Achilles’ horses in tears over Patroclus’s death; Andromache preparing a bath for Hector, who will never come home. We come to see violence not only as an act, but as a deprivation of something softer.

I think that The Overstory is not so different, 2700 years later. Powers spends pages describing oaks, cedars, aspens, pines. These moments are not side dishes to a neatly bundled political fable. They are an attempt to make us see the life in an organism that, mostly, is either unnoticed or used for something else. If nothing else, a beautiful novel is worth reading for its own sake. There is hidden stillness around us, waiting to be observed.

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— V.E. Schwab, A Conjuring of Light

Each May, a few dozen teenagers try out for the Canadian national debate team. It’s a gruelling process, and most kids have already jumped through several hoops to qualify. Some will get happy phone calls the week after, but most will get a politely-worded, mildly soul-crushing rejection email. They’ll be upset for a while after, and I suspect many of them will simultaneously be a little ashamed of how intensely they feel — because while we look down upon failure, we also expect a sort of measured nonchalance in its aftermath.

I often hear people tell one another that things like competitive debate don’t matter. “When you look back in 20 years,” they say, “You won’t remember which rounds you won or lost.” (The same goes for math grades, or job interviews, or college applications.)

In a cosmic sense, this is true. A bad speech will not injure you; it will not starve you; you are a high-achieving 16-year-old who will probably still have some wildly successful future career in corporate consultancy. But I think this ignores how much of human meaning is derived from seemingly meaningless things. We pay some people millions of dollars because they are good at throwing orange balls into a metal hoop. We spend months grieving breakups with people who, frankly, are probably very replaceable by one of the billions of other humans on the planet. Sometimes the fact that we care about something right now — in all its subjectivity and imperfection — has to be enough.

Within this odd, artificial realm of meaning, then: I think getting to represent a country is a rare and deeply rewarding thing. I’ve written before on the unsatisfying hollowness of Canadian national identity. Competition helps make our imagined community a little less imaginary; our team is acknowledged and spoken about as something distinct from others.

The legacy stretches beyond our particular moment in time. Over the last 30-ish years, a couple hundred nerdy Canadian teenagers have boarded planes to foreign continents and sat in anxious anticipation of the speeches to come. Each of them has worked long hours into the night, reading about secessionist movements and structural adjustment policies until the letters melt together. Each of them has been castigated for making a particularly moronic argument in the heated days before WSDC begins. I get an odd sense of almost-déja-vu sometimes: the feeling that someone else has walked a similar path to me, and has left some footsteps behind. 

1.1. I feel something between gratitude for and obligation towards the dozens of invisible people who made this experience possible. I won’t list them here. But I do think it’s worth observing all the small acknowledgements contained within our speeches themselves. If you don’t hear them, listen a little more closely:

I begin my speech in the finals this year by describing Buddhist protests in the Vietnam War. The image has been seared into my brain from the 18-hour Ken Burns documentary that Brent loves so much. In a debate about elite universities, we manage to weave in Arsalan’s biweekly rant about the warmongering sociopaths of the Harvard Kennedy School. He looks proud.

And then there are subtler things — habits that are unconsciously imprinted upon us, and only reveal their sources upon detailed examination. Vincent pronounces his long a’s the same way as Matt Anz. We say ‘deranged’ far too much, thanks to the influences of Max Williams. I still use case studies from the Chomsky books that Matt Farrell recommended me when I was 15.

I think this is one of the most precious things about the activity. Each debate is so wonderfully iterative — it weaves together disparate threads, the quirks and passions of people from different chapters of our lives. At its best, the pieces come together into something new and complete, with richly familiar moments.

2. “No animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I don’t like competing. This is an odd confession, for someone who has spent roughly five years doing it obsessively. But I don’t like the way it makes me feel — the frustration of stumbling over words that are fluid and clear in my mind, the anxiety that slithers up through my throat before a decision is made, the deluge of thoughts afterwards.

Sometimes, competition flattens the beauty of speech. I became a more disciplined speaker over time, and a more successful one by the metrics of the activity. I learned to speak more efficiently, to excise unnecessary words, to stop rambling for several minutes at a time about Tsarist Bulgaria or geoengineering or the ethics of meat consumption. Concision is a useful skill, but a painful one to develop — it requires so much sacrifice of what is interesting and meaningful to us. Only occasionally do beauty and competitive strategy fully overlap.

Perhaps most disappointingly, competition incentivises a certain viciousness that I find unappealing. Debate is a civil activity, compared to any real sport, but there is a unique cruelty in the way we manipulate our opponent’s ideas — bending and deliberately misapprehending them into some unrecognisable result. Maybe I don’t want to call people’s well-intentioned arguments absurd. Maybe I don’t want to interrogate them, in the middle of their speech, with a question I know will nudge them into stuttering confusion. 

It’s worth noting that none of these problems are inherent to competition. It’s possible, with attention and time, to discard many of our anxieties over achievement. It’s possible to reach the delicate equilibrium between self-expression and competitive success. (Some audiences secretly crave authenticity anyways, I think.) Most importantly, I think it is possible to disagree in a way that is both kind and persuasive. It involves listening more carefully, appraising arguments more charitably than is necessary, phrasing things more gently around the edges. Sometimes this will cost some competitive zeal. I see this as a sacrifice worth making.

3. “Together, they would watch everything that was so carefully planned collapse, and they would smile at the beauty of destruction.”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Each debate can be won through many different strategies. Sometimes debaters refer to them as ‘paths to victory,’ and I often imagine them as physical paths to a glittering destination. In some debates, the path to victory is clear — it has few crossroads, and is paved cleanly with pretty words. In other debates, the path is more complex; it might bend back on itself to avoid a particularly threatening argument from the other team, or swerve dramatically and unexpectedly, mid-round, to reflect some crushing epiphany. And then there are debates where you are forced to defend difficult, messy things — arguments that are politically sensitive, let’s say, or subject to misinterpretation. Here, the path to victory is rocky, potholed, strewn with thornbushes. It requires precise and careful navigation.

I’m always fascinated by how many distinct ways there are to reach the same endpoint. In the first few minutes of preparation time, the paths begin to emerge before me. We begin discussing; my teammates point to various obstacles, and map out new roads that I didn’t notice before. I love this part of the process — the raw creativity, and the joy in observing how differently all five of us think.

When you lose, the diversity of paths becomes more painful than exciting. You examine the landscape of the debate again and notice the vast, unexplored regions that were previously ignored. Perhaps we could’ve used a different thought experiment to defend civil liberties, you think to yourself. We could have said several more reasonable things when they asked how we solve global poverty. We become cartographers after each failure — mapping the hundred different turns we could’ve taken to get to the right place.

I could meander on here and suggest that we ought to focus on the journey rather than the destination, and put aside our failures once they’re done. But honestly, who knows whether the human brain is even capable of switching off its neurotic instincts?

What I’ll say instead is that there is often something beautiful to be found in all the neuroticism. Our final debate was about whether we should let benevolent AI govern the world. In the car ride home from the auditorium, runner-up medals burning holes into our pockets, we spent at least an hour talking about existential risk and killer death robots and what J.S. Mill would’ve said about eugenics. After a brief wave of annoyance — why didn’t I think of these things three hours ago? — I sit back a little, and observe how passionate and indefatigable my teammates are. They divulge their wildest, most ambitious claims to the group, who reshape and expand the ideas in turn. They gently repair speeches that won’t ever be used again.

Oh, how I’ll miss this, I think to myself, as they argue softly in the backseat.

4. “Words strain, 

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, 

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, 

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, 

Will not stay still.”

— T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets: Burnt Norton”

For about five days after WSDC, I did not speak a single complete English sentence. This was not exactly a choice: through the magnetic forces of social obligation, I had arrived at the remote Bengali town where my (very loving, but only partially literate) grandparents have lived for decades. I can barely speak Hindi, and they definitely can’t speak English. So I scraped together broken phrases from my meagre stash of words. With a healthy dose of pantomime, we made things work.

The contrast between my two worlds was jarring. I had spent three weeks trying to carve perfect sentences out of my thoughts. We use the English language almost gluttonously in debate. And here I was, 48 hours later, struggling to ask my grandmother if she needed help getting to the table.

Sometimes language fails us in the moments where we need it the most. The experience is inarticulably frustrating, and a little melancholic too: it evokes all the what if’s and if only’s of living so far away from the place where each generation before me grew up. 

Silence does offer some unexpected relief. I don’t find it easy to speak much of the time, even in English, even among people I’m close with. Some of my friends’ words flow smoothly off their tongues, confidently and with little hesitation. When I form sentences, it’s a less steady process. My mind grasps frantically around for the next word — shortlisting, trimming, rejecting unsuitable candidates. West Bengal gave me the license to be quiet.

4.1. I think I was ultimately grateful to return to English-speaking civilisation. I used my words timidly at first, newly conscious of their worth, but soon relearned my usual, half-lucid, half-jumbled method of speech. 

It is tiring but worthwhile to express oneself precisely. And in a way, the experience reminded me of what it was like to start debating in the first place. I recalled the frustrations of imperfect expression, the longing for comfortable passivity, and eventually, the freedom in communicating frankly.

We end up in a place of gratitude. Because despite its flaws — the anxiety, frustration, cruelty, transience, perceived meaninglessness — debate allows us to speak and be heard completely. Most of us don’t get this privilege too often.

1. An unorthodox kind of nationhood

As a Canadian, I was often accused over my two years at Pearson of not having a real national identity. The worst part about this accusation is that it’s mostly true. Canada is beautiful in its multiculturalism and liberal political flexibility, but also somewhat hollow. It’s difficult to find a ritual, or song, or food that resonates with everyone equally. Most of us are deeply detached from Indigenous traditions that once defined the land we live on. I’m technically a second-generation immigrant, but in a vaguely fraudulent sense — my Hindi is mostly incomprehensible, and I have a regrettably tense relationship with our local pandit-ji (think Hindu priest) due to my Obnoxious Childhood God-Hating, Sam Harris-Loving, Atheist Phase.

At times, Pearson made me long for the depth and richness that my peers had experienced in their home countries. Some cultural expression is entertaining — we were all on campus for the FIFA World Cup, and I watched my peers wake up at 5am to throw on their jerseys, huddle in the living room, and shout unintelligible words into a screen. Other times, culture is difficult. On Nakba Day,1 Israeli and Arab students exchanged heated campus-wide emails about the history of Palestinian displacement. But the best types of cultural memory seem irreplaceably precious — a friend recalled to me the experience of living on land that had been passed down through dozens of generations, of walking through the same fields and graveyards as their grandmother’s grandmother.

There’s a common thread here. Outside the soulless concrete hellscape of the average North American city,2 lots of people continue to possess something the West has mostly erased from our political memory: a collective identity strong enough to motivate sacrifice or disagreement, and the ability to see oneself as part of something larger. 

1.1. My jealousy subsided about a year in — because as much as Pearson made me see the gap in my life, it also filled it. The College feels like a small nation in many ways. It’s small and isolated. There were a little over 200 of us, living 40 minutes away from the nearest store and almost three hours by public transit from the nearest city. Within our little settlement, we ate together, and shared clothes, and on the last day, we put all our blankets on somebody’s bedroom floor and napped together too.

And like every other nation of substance, we believed that there was something unique in what we imagined, experienced, and created together. You can view the identity of the school in its official ideological terms — some students, more than others, internalised the unceasing motto of “peace and a sustainable future,” which is admirable in its own way. But I think I saw our collective identity in more mundane things — in stargazing; socks and sandals in the rain; cereal with honey; random black bear appearances; Zonta blankets;3 frequent trespassing; and a truly astonishing amount of noodles. We combined the copy-pasted cultural traditions of other countries with a good portion of our own weirdness, and ended up with something worthwhile. 

2. Culture as a deliberate construction 

My most precious possession is an A4 manila envelope. Inside it is a stack of notes and letters from my fellow Pearsonites — some of them on notebook pages, one of them on origami paper, and one, oddly on the back of a napkin. At the end of every year, Pearson administration hangs up an envelope for each student on a large wall, and encourages students to leave each other messages of gratitude for the two years they spent together.

The tradition is followed religiously by most students. If you walk around campus at any point in the last week, you’ll spot maybe a dozen kids sitting in the sun and scribbling thoughtfully into their notebooks. It’s not just the usual suspects, either. The artsy English literature people with cool notebooks are probably the most enthusiastic, but the basketballers and cyborg chemistry nerds and various other heathens do it too. On the buses and trains and planes home, people begin to sift through their envelopes. They rewind to and experience their two years again — this time through the eyes of people who love them. (If you ever take a flight out of British Columbia in late May, and have a very ethnic-looking student start sobbing uncontrollably into an envelope nearby you, this may be why.) 

What strikes me about the letters is that they’re mostly a product of institutional action. I don’t know exactly how the tradition started, but presumably some teacher put up a bunch of envelopes one year, and kids decided to give it a shot, and over time it grew into something larger. If the envelopes had never been put up, a few people would’ve still written notes — but probably not with the same commitment and sense of importance. 

This applies to many of Pearson’s cultural quirks. Faculty are encouraged to sit among students in the dining hall, and get to know them personally; this helps create a culture that is less hierarchical and more horizontal. Students work in the kitchen for at least 15 meals each year; this helps generate more gratitude for and connection with cafeteria staff. These examples suggest that culture can be cultivated and facilitated by those with authority. We can’t force people to interact with more kindness or authenticity or camaraderie, but we can coax them along.

2.1. I think society understates the possibility of deliberately constructing culture. We speak about norms and traditions as elusive, mythological things. “Culture is like the wind,” says the top search result, if you Google ways to change culture. “It is invisible, yet its effect can be seen and felt.” Many schools follow a similar line of thought. They will intervene in dire situations of bullying, or put up vague posters to ‘spread awareness,’ but are reluctant to cultivate positive behaviour more energetically or unconventionally. Maybe this can be attributed to a lack of inertia, or maybe they too fall victim to the ‘culture is wind’ fallacy: the belief that norms are inevitable, organic, immutable.

I wonder what the average school could look like if they overcame these inhibitions — if every administrator adopted letter-writing, aggressively jumbled cafeteria seating, enslaved their students in the cafeteria, and came up with their own wacky plots. It won’t work 100% of the time. Not every teenager will want to write 30 gratitude letters. But over time, I think we have an opportunity to construct more kind and compassionate communities.

3. Moving on 

There’s a scene in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once that I think about often. It’s near the beginning of the movie, when the main character, Evelyn, goes into an elevator and wears a headset that takes her into a series of flashbacks. We watch a montage of key moments from her life — when she’s born, when she likes a boy in her class, when she moves to the U.S. with him, when she starts a washing machine business, when she gets into a fight with her daughter, and so on. It’s a distilled, evocative way of giving the audience a window into her past.

Lately, my mind has felt a little similar, for reasons that are not precisely clear. I don’t have flashbacks, of course, but I guess I’m a little less tethered to the present than usual; memories flow through my brain with less viscosity. I went biking past my old daycare, and my thoughts wandered into a cache of childhood memories I didn’t even know existed — eating bananas chopped into slices, putting five beaded necklaces on at the same time, sitting in a stroller looking out onto the world. Sometimes the reminiscence starts from something more random. The feeling of sun on my shoulders will bring back lazy evenings on the Pearson docks; sunbathing on the island in the centre of Matheson Lake; the bright mornings when our English class sat in the field and had leisurely arguments about the Chinese graphic novel that none of us read. It’s a light form of nostalgia: one that isn’t overpowering, or negative, or positive, but just bittersweet and occasionally more visceral than expected. 

3.1. When you move on from most stages of life, there’s a comfortable, collective delusion that you’ll stay in contact with the people you leave behind. It wouldn’t be hard at all, most of the time. Maybe you still live in the same city, or they’ll be back for the summer next year. Over time, life gradually disabuses you of these delusions. I’ve made plans with a total of seven people from my previous high school in the past two years, and while I’m on the introverted side, I suspect a lot of people aren’t doing much better. The gradual withering of relationships isn’t even particularly upsetting, because people drop out of contact at roughly the same rate that you stop thinking about the place you left.

Leaving Pearson is different. People scatter to far ends of the Earth after leaving — back to 90 or so countries, to jobs and gap years and various colleges and sometimes mandatory military service. I probably won’t see around half of my graduating class ever again, being generous. Some people will eventually accumulate in nearby places, but I think there’s an unspoken acknowledgment that things won’t ever be the same — that so much of what we experienced was specific to the time and place, and the fact that 200 of us were all together. The loss feels much sharper.4 It lacks the insulation of hypothetical friendship: the knowledge that I could walk a few blocks and see the girl I sat next to in Grade 7 math, even if I never will. 

And to be honest, I sometimes wonder whether humans were meant to live like this. In the tribe,5 I don’t think we would’ve hopped around from one community to another. Social groups would have been more permanently fixed, and when the village moved, it would move together. (I have a vague mental picture of a nomadic hunter-gatherer community that operates a bit like a travelling circus, but there’s about a 50% chance that I am factually wrong about how early human civilisation worked. Please correct me if so.) Something about transition feels not just unpleasant, but also somewhat unnatural. 

The one good thing about impermanence is that it pushes us to cherish what we have while it’s happening. Andy says in The Office: “I wish there was a way to know you're in ‘the good old days,’ before you've actually left them,” and for the last two years, I think most of us did know. We talked about leaving often, and most of us made choices that acknowledged the finite nature of our experience together. We kayaked, learned Ukrainian dance, drank tea, went hammock camping. We accidentally wore a traditional Bolivian cultural costume on stage in front of 200 people while hosting a school-wide trivia night, and then got in mild disciplinary trouble — not for wearing the Bolivian outfit but for failing to consult the Calendar Committee on the timing of the trivia night. (Some of these decisions are more universal than others.) It’s rare to look back on a period of time and believe that you used most of your time wisely. 

3.2. My time at Pearson ended at the same place it started — in the run-down gravel parking lot near the forest. We said our goodbyes there as people boarded school buses to the airport and ferry terminal, and produced enough tears to fill a medium-sized kitchen sink. As we headed up the winding roads out of Pearson, my bus was mostly silent. We pressed our heads against the windows to soak up the final images from two years. Eventually, the bus emerged from the forest. We turned our gaze to other things.

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