I have zero interest in football, which can make it challenging to move through American life. I dread getting cornered in an elevator or stuck in line with some chipper guy asking if I saw the game. Saying no, I don’t follow football feels like a failing and a pretension that leaves me doubting my manhood. So a novel about middle-aged men who gather each year to reenact a violent NFL moment from 1985 was not high on my reading list.

But Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special relies upon football only as a stalking horse to guide us through the interior muck of failure and pretension. The action unfolds in hotel rooms and hallways, where the hum of the ice machine veers from reassuring to sinister. The story is delivered in a deadpan, ethnographic tone that flirts with the surreal: “The bright, enormous clock bathed the entire lobby in time.” Continental breakfasts and highway medians become totems of American desire and pilgrimage, our last shared rituals and churches. A man admires the trash strewn along a service drive: “By night it looked ceremonial, festive, as if it had once stood for something holy but now just stood prettily for itself.”

Line for line, this book has some of the best writing I’ve read in years, dignified and comic without slapping you on the back, and I’m harassing everyone I know to read it. This sentence captures its overall spirit: “Chad had ceased being a discrete unit of biological meaning. It felt okay.”

(Matt Bell’s newsletter encouraged me to read it, and here’s a nice interview with Bachelder.)

It wasn’t until midway through revising the novel I’m writing that I realized I was writing a ghost story. It’s an interesting moment when you give up control of something you’re making and instead become its servant, helping it become what it needs to become. The trick, I think, is to stay out of its way.

I spent the summer reading some touchstones of horror: Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Koji Suzuki’s The Ring, Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, and most recently, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

Hill House, famously “not sane,” bothers the soul because Jackson describes the perception of horror, not the horror itself:

"[The house] had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest possible tolerable length."

We’re left to imagine what these walls might look like. Later, a woman turns and sees something, then screams to her companion, “Don’t look back—don’t look—run!” Another character struggles with her bedroom door but is “unable to open it against the volume of noise outside.” The fear is vivid; the causes remain unknown.

Early in the story, a professor ruminates about our need for explanations. “People are always so anxious to get things out into the open,” he says, “where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring.” Jackson trusts that our imaginations are far more wicked than anything she might describe, and she creates the conditions for these imaginings to fester into something genuinely horrifying because they cannot be named.

Ghost-wise, I’m not sure where to go after Jackson. Any recommendations for novels that deal with hauntings would be much appreciated.

Maybe I was primed for horror because I woke before dawn on a Sunday morning and could not find my way back to sleep. I hate the sunrise. It brings to mind all-nighters and benders from my past, the grit and clench of bad drugs and insomnia. When I think about all those blissed-out swamis, granola-eaters, and alpha go-getters who believe dawn is the most beautiful part of the day, I wonder if something is wrong with me. So as the sky turned an uneasy pink, I picked up Doris Lessing‘s The Fifth Child and discovered a story about living beyond the bounds of time, consensus, and normalcy.

The novel’s crisis is simple; its implications are not. A young couple is determined to fill their home with children and find “happiness, in the old style.” But their fifth child frightens them. I’ll leave it at that. Read it. It’s a fast 125 pages, and we should have more novellas. There are no chapters or sections, which makes the story relentless.

Lessing’s writing is lean and frighteningly precise, fusing the sweep of a fable with a cinematographer’s mastery of space. She carries us through the family’s home across decades, roving through rooms I came to know well until, without my realizing it, she’d left me stranded in a moral grey zone where I found myself rooting for a terrible outcome. I had become part of a horror that telescopes from the personal to the social to the existential. We remain in the house until the mother takes a ghastly trip that feels like a permanent stain on some part of myself I cannot name. At that moment, I was grateful the morning sun was shining through my window.

(Thank you, David Leo Rice, for the recommendation.)

The windows are open, summer is here, and I sent a newsletter yesterday. The sun went down at 8:35 tonight, and this bit in Stephen King’s Joyland struck a nerve:

When you’re twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It’s only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you’ve been looking at the map upside down, and not until you’re forty are you entirely sure. By the time you’re sixty, take it from me, you’re fucking lost.

Yeah, my map is upside down, inscrutable, and probably for a different planet. But I bought a whiteboard yesterday. Maybe this will help. I put a lot of faith in office products to solve my existential problems.

I’ve been reading too many dreary new literary novels lately, so I’ve retreated to Stephen King for a palette cleanser. It’s nice to be reminded that it’s possible to write outlandish, frightening, even bloody things while still liking people and having some faith in the human project.

Tonight I’m putting my faith in Civilistjävel!, which is Swedish for “Civilian Bastard.” That’s all anyone knows about this shadowy outfit, which releases hyper-limited vinyl without much of a digital trace. Some say these records are private tapes unearthed from the 1990s, and their press releases deploy heavyweight phrases like “lonesome, levitating kosmische themes” and “a dronal, dubwise, heavily psychoactive minimal techno realm.” 

Regardless of where these records fit in space and time, they’re a welcome throwback to techno’s ghost-in-the-machine ethos circa early 90s Basic Channel, Studio 1, and Plastikman. And I’m grateful to Sasha Frere-Jones‘s weekly dispatch for alerting me to a proper new Civilistjävel! release available via Bandcamp.

Low-slung and roomy, this is excellent music for the small hours, especially A2 and B1. Any recommendations for more mysterious music in a similar vein are much appreciated.

Update: I just came across this interview with Civilistjävel!, posted a few days ago. It’s a nice piece, but I’m disappointed there’s one less mystery in the world.

One of those fine afternoons when you wander into a dusty bookstore in an unfamiliar city and come across a book by a writer you don’t know, but it harmonizes with the noises in your head and leaves you wondering about the lines between randomness, serendipity, and synchronicity.

London. Another day of clouds and drizzle punctuated by a few moments of sunshine—an event so rare that it feels like a cosmic event when the light shifts and the world briefly brightens as if the gods are smiling down upon us. A high of 53 degrees and the sun goes down at 5:28pm. England ended most of its pandemic rules today, and Russia is claiming territory in Ukraine. The moon is in its final quarter.

My mind is fragmented this morning, flicking around our little flat by the train tracks, batting at threads but unable to grab hold of anything. “You can say anything about everything,” said C. as we studied the pompous text on the wall of an art gallery, where a blotch of paint was apparently renegotiating the past with the future and forcing us to confront our problems. You can say anything about everything—this might be a proverb for the 21st century. We’re living in murky times, and nobody’s keeping score of what makes sense anymore, which is both frightening and liberating.

Yesterday I tracked down a copy of John Berger’s Confabulations, needing to read something sane from someone who could render fragments into something beautiful. I like everything about this little book. The simplicity. The straightforwardness. Even the large typeface. “True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal,” Berger writes. “What has prompted me to write over the years is the hunch that something needs to be told and that, if I don’t try to tell it, it risks not being told. I picture myself not so much a consequential, professional writer, as a stop-gap man.”

And somewhere off to the left, I can hear Georges Perec: “Question your teaspoons.”

Blank skies, single-digit temperatures, and the sun goes down at 5:38pm. Spent the afternoon at the Department of Motor Vehicles, trying to figure out how to legalize a car. It takes a lot of paperwork to be a person. While explaining myself to the grumpy clerk behind the glass, I realized I have no idea where I legally live. Ohio for a few more weeks. Maybe Nevada in a few months. Perhaps we’ll wind up back in New York. But I need to make a decision so I can be taxed appropriately: another small reminder of the fiction of states, the collective hallucination of nations and borders.

Here in the Middle West, I’m filling the quiet with books and music, absorbed by text and sound in ways I haven’t felt in years. I’m midway through many books at once, which is unusual for me. I tend to doggedly read one book at a time, grinding it out until the last page even if I’m not enjoying it. I like to believe I have faith in an author’s vision and should see it through—but really, I just don’t want to admit I’ve made a poor selection. 

Right now, I’m midway through a few books, and I’m enjoying all the ways to tell a story while I continue to work on my own. After discarding a few buzzy new novels that were rants and op-eds masquerading as fiction, I’m settling into Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark, a dreamlike series of vignettes about calamity and grief. And I’m looking forward to getting deeper into Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy, a patchwork of desert weirdness, scattered histories, and technological speculations. 

At night, I fall asleep with Bring Up the Bodies. Although I’m not terribly interested in the Tudors, Hilary Mantel’s prose is so lyrical, dense, and wise that it feels like learning to read—and write—again. I drift off with Tomonari Nozaki’s Waves looping on the hi-fi: 54 minutes of ambience that pulses and breathes.

This month I’m playing Dedekind Cut‘s entire discography for days at a stretch: a suite of releases that fuses the quiet with the dreadful, occasionally erupting without warning into growling synths and manic percussion. (I recommend starting with Tahoe and American Zen.)

Sunset: 5:19pm. A cloudy day with highs in the low 40s and a few beautiful minutes of blustery snow. I’m reading Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment of Hilary Mantel’s dense portrait of Thomas Cromwell. It’s slow-going for me, but worthwhile for images like this: “Troubled men . . . sidling around the peripheries of their own souls, tapping at the walls: oh, what is that hollow sound?”

If I have a soul, what are its measurements and boundaries? I close my eyes and try to imagine it. Perhaps this is a fool’s errand, a pointless exercise in metaphysical speculation. Then again, there’s the 21st-century joke—or horror—that our search histories might be the most accurate portrait of our souls.

All the little gestures and routines that define me—listening to music, walking, running, meditating, writing, reading, sleep, breathing—can now be quantified via a weirdly persistent army of devices and apps that want to tell me how fast, how long, how far, how often, and how many people.

While I wasn’t paying attention, my life became gamified into metrics and streaks. But turning myself into a scoreboard has led to blinkered thinking, a binary view in which every activity becomes about the accretion of data, not the mystery and mess of life itself. Maybe I’m not meant to know so much about myself.

So I spent the afternoon sidling around the peripheries of my devices, tapping at the delete button.

Tsone – Taking Measurements from Broken Scales

Pagan Oceans I, II, III | Home Normal | Bandcamp

Four days left in New York City. Sunset: 4:28pm with highs around 50, and the weather has been distressingly warm while we put our things into boxes. 

Last night I finished Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, and even as I turned the final page, I was amazed I was reading it at all. Franzen has become an unfashionable writer for reasons I no longer remember. My opinion of him is nonexistent; I’ve only read him in bits and pieces. He writes realistic novels that mirror our world, whereas I prefer fiction that takes me somewhere new. But late one night, I came across a series of reviews in which the fashionable critics seemed to be writing with gritted teeth: yes, Franzen is pompous and says punchable things, but his new book is very very good.

And so, in a reckless post-midnight mood, I decided I should read something that inspired such begrudging praise. I pressed the pre-order button and forgot all about it until, three weeks later, a six-hundred-page slab appeared, and I wondered why on earth I ordered up a saga about a Midwestern minister’s family in 1973. Crossroads sat on my table for several weeks, taunting me for making impulsive purchases. Finally, I cracked it open to confirm my poor decision and that I could gift it to someone else. Then I was on page 100.

The writer Elisa Gabbert posted, “Still reading a little Franzen every night the way people used to read the Bible.” This captures the appeal of Crossroads perfectly. Reading it became liturgical. Each day I found myself looking forward to bedtime, when I could spend an hour or two with this broken yet hopeful family, each member lost in their private dramas and desires. There’s no flash or flourish in Franzen’s writing, just clean sentence after clean sentence that conjures a cozy, richly detailed world of people falling in and out of faith—and sanity. A fair chunk of it takes place just before Christmas, back when it used to snow, so it’s an ideal holiday read.

Sunset: 4:35pm. A bright springlike day with a high of 70 degrees and lows in the fifties. Tonight the moon is full. This morning I flipped open my beaten copy of Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind because I needed what it advertised. Some zen. Some peace of mind. Some enthusiasm for this exhausted world. My finger landed on a heavy-duty sentence I’ve been considering all day: “When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.”

Suzuki emphasizes the importance of doing rather than thinking because ruminating leaves a trace. I like this image of traces, of thoughts that can tint and even stain. And my head is shellacked with so much babble and gunk. I can feel it in my nerves. Maybe even my soul, although I’m not yet sure if I believe in such a thing. Perhaps I must. Otherwise, what is the Darwinian function of all this head noise?

I’ve also started reading John Yorke’s Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey into Story to improve my understanding of how stories work. I wish I’d read something like this sooner. It’s both humbling and reassuring to see all of my tangled plots and narrative cul-de-sacs crisply addressed thousands of years ago by Terence, Horace, and Aristotle. 

And returning to the bonfire, I love the doom-metal energy of this line from Shakespeare’s Richard II: “Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.”

In Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn, the Twin Towers reappear in South Dakota, wholly intact and without explanation.

“As the crowds arrive over the following days, the families and loners, the footloose and motor-bound, the drivers and passengers and hitchhikers, the cards and RVs and trailers, the shuttles and buses and private jets, the news vans and military jeeps and airborne surveillance, the constituents and pols and advance teams, the graphic designers and Hollywood scouts and novelists who can’t make up anything anymore, the systems and cynics and juries-still-out, the Towers loom from the end of what becomes a long national boulevard.”

Meanwhile, Elvis’s stillborn twin brother roams the mid-twentieth century, rewiring history. Shadowbahn is a widescreen novel with a sense of lightness and invention I hadn’t encountered before. Each chapter is a page, and each page leaps and loops through a garbled American landscape dotted with the Velvet Underground, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, John Lennon, new states and territories, and endless music trivia. And there’s the sense of being held captive—in the best and worst ways—to the author’s obsession with the perfect playlist.

I’m slowly forging through High Weirdness, Erik Davis’s inventory of 1970s mysticism. He writes wonderfully about the feedback loops between our image world and the sense of spiritual possibility: “The object of weird fascination is folded back into the subject, constructing a strange loop of cultural play, recursive enigma, and extraordinary encounter that makes a raid on the real.”

Each time I come across the word “ontological,” I need to look it up, and the definition always inspires a low-grade panic attack because I know I’m reading the same sentence about “being, becoming, and existence” for the thousandth time.

The fuzzy line between media consumption and my soul reminds me of a moment in Don DeLillo’s Underworld when one of his characters zips along the Jersey Turnpike:

…and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays—all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality…

And I’m generating terrible realities for myself when I vacantly scroll through the day’s headlines, clickbait, two-minute hates, and social media psychodramas.

The Field – Looping State of Mind

Looping State of Mind | Kompakt, 2011 | Bandcamp

The stock market spiked in response to encouraging test trials for a vaccine. Some say it might be ready for the public early next year. I feel compelled to write this down because I want to remember this moment of optimism; time will tell if this announcement was made in good faith or simply to juice a few pharmaceutical stocks. The design of America encourages suspicious thinking. At a press conference, our president proudly said he was dosing himself with an anti-malarial drug that has no proven effect on coronavirus but might trigger a heart attack.

Maybe we’ll have a vaccine soon. Maybe the president will poison himself. Things can go either way these days.

I’ve started reading Erik Davis’s High Weirdness, a catalog of 1970s visions, paranoia, and the “strange loop of cultural play” seen through the lens of figures like Terence McKenna, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Anton Wilson. Seems like an appropriate companion as we enter this deeply peculiar summer.

Shadrack Chameleon – Don’t Let It Get You Down

IGL Records, 1973 | More

One of my favorite 1970s songs, heavy and plush. Although I knew this album was recorded by a few teenagers in a homemade studio in Iowa in 1973, I didn’t know much else. While searching for more details, I came across this update from 1998 that’s a beautiful blend of the banal and reassuring: “Today, Steve Fox is an electronics technician in State Center, Iowa, and also publishes analyses of social issues; Randy Berka is a genetic researcher in Davis, California, and still plays music; Jon Porter is an insurance agent in Boulder City, Nevada, and also a representative in the Nevada State Legislature; Dan Dodgen owns a retail store in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and continues to play music locally.”

They’re taking down the makeshift hospital in Central Park. Someone put masks on the status of Romeo and Juliet. Masked icons have become a new genre, an emblem appearing on statuary all over the world.

The mood is shifting in New York City. The Chinese takeout spots have pulled up their metal shutters. The florist is open. Bars are serving takeout drinks, and there’s a block party atmosphere along the Avenues as people gather among the corporate art and concrete plazas of the high-rises.

Finished Ling Ma’s Severance this afternoon. Although I’ve had my fill of emotionally-detached narrators from Brooklyn, I admire how she places something that feels like a memoir within a dystopian frame. Her depiction of a pandemic-stricken New York harmonizes with our current moment to an eerie degree, particularly the slow unwinding of normalcy rather than the sudden cataclysm that defines so many other apocalyptic visions. And she writes wonderfully about how we cling to routine while craving disruption: “We hope the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn’t go to brunch instead.”

A rainy Sunday that underscores these days of suspension. New York is reporting fewer dead each day, and there’s a sense of exhalation at last, although nobody knows what the future holds. Will there be a second wave? Will there be a depression?

My projects and plans for the year have been scrapped, and I feel as though I should invent a new life. Maybe I should work on my resume. Instead, I press on with reading The Plague, dropping the book every few pages to marvel at its resonance: “Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

When Camus describes the town’s refusal to recognize the reality of the disease, it feels like an indictment of those late February days when I still rode the subway, still made plans, and believed a complimentary bottle of hand sanitizer would protect us all. “They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views,” Camus writes. “How should they have a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views.”

The future is not ruled out, but it’s more difficult to imagine.

Flying Saucer Attack – Rainstorm Blues

Further | Drag City, 1995 | More

Today the price of oil went negative for the first time since we’ve started keeping track of these things. There’s too much oil now. So much that we have no place to put it. I’m not bright enough to understand the implications beyond the fact that we’re living in an age of graphs and charts doing unthinkable things. Meanwhile, our president does everything he can to make things worse: tonight he announced that he was suspending immigration to America “to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens.” It seems appropriate that a rejection of the American experiment would be announced with idiotic capitalization.

I’m pressing on with Camus’s The Plague after pulling it from my bookshelf in some sort of fugue state two nights ago. I thought I’d only dreamt about picking up the book in the grey light before dawn; I’m not even sure how it ended up on the shelf. I don’t remember buying it. But I’ll keep reading it because I want to believe in limbic wisdom and subconscious patterns.

My eyes stutter and loop through the words before me because my attention span has been chewed up by the news. I read the same sentence on page five again and again, struck by how it harmonizes with today’s headlines about oil, stocks, and employment numbers: “Think what it must be for a dying man, trapped behind hundreds of walls all sizzling with heat, while the whole population, sitting in cafés or hanging on the telephone, is discussing shipments, bills of lading, discounts!”

Plastikman – Sickness

Plus 8, 1997

One of those days when the moon is perfectly visible in an empty blue sky. It’s unseasonably warm for February in New York. Riding the train along the Harlem River, I finished the last pages of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a stunning book dedicated to the artist Robert Irwin’s singleminded quest to understand awareness and presence. Of attending to the world. Asked in 2008 if technology will enhance our sense of perception, he responded: “The point is to get people to peel those visors off their faces, to remove the goggles, to abandon the screens. Those whose very purpose is to screen the world out. Who cares about virtuality when there’s all this reality—this incredible, inexhaustible, insatiable, astonishing reality—present all around!”

His enthusiasm is infectious. Walking down street tonight, I find myself paying closer attention to shadow and light, reminding myself that yes, this is plenty. This is more than enough.

Meanwhile in Iowa, the first caucus is underway for the 2020 election. Citizens clump together in the corners of gymnasiums and cafeterias, waving signs for their favorite candidate while reporters explain the byzantine logic for assigning delegates. It’s a portrait of American democracy: needlessly complicated spectacle, even in a recreation center in Des Moines. The television babbles through the night about “the viability threshold” and “the realignment procedure” like some kind of bad science fiction.

Here is another book that describes the end of our world. I did not want to spend 228 pages thinking about climate change, so it sat untouched on my desk for several weeks until I realized this was like plugging my ears while a doctor delivered the diagnosis. And David Wallace-Wells delivers the news with painful clarity: “The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead.”

Wallace-Wells writes beautifully about the days of fire and flood to come, diligently translating “the eerily banal language of climatology” into an eye-popping portrait of a world utterly transformed within decades. He forced me to look beyond the narrow fixation on the sea level and contemplate the wider landscape. Like a modern day Virgil, he guided me through a weaponized geography of fire, mud, drought, floods, toxins, contagions, and monstrous winds “tugging trees out of earth and transforming them into clubs, making power lines into loose whips and electrified nooses, collapsing homes on cowering residents.” His vivid rendering of climate change brings new energy to Schopenhauer’s question: “For where did Dante get the material for his Hell, if not from this actual world of ours?”

More critically, Wallace-Wells reckons with the knotty blindspots that prevent many of us from taking action, outlining a list of psychosocial reasons from distrust to greed to fatigue to simply living through these bizarre days that require a permanent suspension of disbelief: “Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted ‘normal’.”

“Toxic knowledge” is the environmentalist Richard Heinberg’s term for information that forever altars our sense of the world. “Once you know about overpopulation, overshoot, depletion, climate change, and the dynamics of societal collapse, you can’t unknow it,” he says, “and your every subsequent thought is tinted.” This book is filled with toxic knowledge: air filled with plastic, parasites awakening in our bellies, and the fragile aberration of social stability. Sunny day flooding. Rain bombs. Damage mechanics. The grammar of tomorrow’s weather shimmers with dread, and The Uninhabitable Earth maps the tribalism, autocracy, and retreat into dogma that are emerging as a response. We are rapidly moving beyond the Romantic notion of nature’s sublime terror towards a terror that is only manmade.

Yes, this is a book filled with toxic knowledge, but it also gives some cause for hope. Wallace-Wells reminds us that “what may sound like stoic wisdom is often an alibi for indifference.” We have agency. We have options. We already have the resources to end hunger, poverty, and hundreds of other ills, but we collectively choose not to. We can change course. If we do anything about climate change, we’ll probably dim the sun or paint the sky rather than rethink the religion of capitalism. One day soon we might awaken to a science fictional world with swarms of robots scrubbing the sky. If we are lucky.

Meanwhile, we live in a world that, as Wallace-Wells puts it, is “a running car in a sealed garage.” But change is coming, one way or another.

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells (Tim Duggan Books, 2019); Richard Heinberg quote from p.207.

Finally tracked down a clean hardcover copy of Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy, which might be the book I return to the most. Something about it feels like home. Aside from elegantly navigating the depths of Bacon, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer et al, Durant might be the most kind-hearted and humble writer I’ve ever encountered. A valiant warrior against the incomprehensible language of academia, he seeks to “break down the barriers beyond knowledge and need,” arguing that the academic’s “barbarous terminology” has forced the world to choose between “a scientific priesthood mumbling unintelligible pessimism, and a theological priesthood mumbling incredible hopes.” Instead, he is on the side of warmth and humor, “not only because wisdom is not wise if it scares away merriment, but because a sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other.” And all of this is in the first three pages of the preface.