“What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.” — Woolf

I. Matches in the Dark

“for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge,” — Woolf

Some lines live with you, humming at the edge of understanding. This sentence of Woolf’s, nestled in To the Lighthouse, reached me like that. On my first encounter with this lovely passage, I was a teenager in the eerie quiet of the early Covid lockdown, adrift in Manhattan’s uncanny stillness. But I found her words and felt something slacken inside me. To want to be known—fully, wordlessly—is a longing I carried alone, but no, it was shared. This woman I’d never meet or know reached me at my most unreachable. I read that paragraph over and over until it sank into memory. Now I carry it with me: on walks through the city, atop rain-slicked rocks, at the apex of hikes. It isn’t just beautiful—it’s a kind of tether: a signal that someone, once, reached toward the same ache.

That sense of being joined is what draws me back to poems as well. The first one I ever loved (the first I ever read, in fact) was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by Eliot. The sheer music of the “There will be time, there will be time” stanza felt like it was metronomically keeping time with something inside me. There are others, too, that arrive like small prayers. “Do I dare / disturb the universe?” returns when I’m on the edge of decision, when some part of me wants to speak with conviction, to honor what I’m feeling, to do justice to the moment ruat caelum. These lines are faithful companions.

II. Reading Against the Grain

“Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to.” — Forster

There was a time when I read to complete a list, to recognize the titles people mentioned in essays—essentially, to feel equipped. I don’t regret it—I got what I wanted, I’ve read enough and read around enough to feel equipped—but I’ve moved on from reading as accumulation and extraction. These days, my interest lies in tension, in friction, in books that press back against what I think and know. What I want most is to dwell inside the texts, to read and reread without trying to solve or resolve. The books I keep closest are the ones that change shape when I return.

This has made me wary of neatness. When a novel explains too much or closes too elegantly, I doubt its stakes. Complexity isn’t the same as confusion, of course, but I want the sense that the writer followed something unwieldy rather than packaging a thesis. Forster’s idea of expansion feels like an ethical position as much as a technical one, like a kind of structural generosity. The books I care about leave strands loose, characters unfinished, images unresolved. That incompletion is what makes a book stay animate and alive.

III. Reading as Ethical Encounter

“All knowledge that is about human society…rests upon judgment and interpretation… Humanism is the final resistance we have.” — Said

As out of fashion as it seems, I do judge texts. Heavily. I judge when the writing is slack, when the tropes are lazy, when a story moves along the path of least resistance. I don’t demand novelty for its own sake, but I expect a work to push itself—to ask something of its form, its language, its characters. I want it to ask something of its readers, to expect me to rise to its challenge, for there to be serious engagement with the fact it has readers who give a damn.

That doesn’t mean everything has to be experimental: I read across genre, across register. A mystery novel can be as exacting as a modernist one if it honors the demands of its shape. Read Patricia Highsmith or Dorothy Sayers if you doubt me. But, I still want writers to stretch, to try, to care enough to risk failure. I need to feel that the text has earned the time it takes to read it. I read for beauty and daring, and when a piece lacks those things, I feel a genuine sense of betrayal. In short, the emotional stakes run high for me.

I also read with a sharp eye for omission. History is made up of fragments and absences, as Benjamin said, and literature often inherits or amplifies them. When the narrative avoids the hard question, when a character’s inner life is flattened or a story’s resolution comes too easily, I feel it. I don’t mean politically correct inclusivity representative enough for the UN—I mean true attentiveness. I want to see the weight of what’s absent. When a text avoids something it ought to face, it feels like a breach of trust, as if I’m being tricked into satisfaction. The texts I return to are the ones that hold themselves accountable—to complexity, to difficulty, to the reader.

IV. What This Series Will Be

“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” — Ellison

This is not a confessional series: the texts come first. I’m present, of course—I’m always the one reading, worse luck—but my life isn’t the main event. If I mention it, it’s because it feels textually necessary, not biographically revealing. I trust the reader to sit with what’s unsaid as well as what’s underlined. If something is withheld, it isn’t coyness. It’s an invitation to focus. What matters here is the structure of attention: the emotional weight, the syntactic gravity, the ethical pressure of the form itself.

I don’t come to these pieces as a scholar: I’m just a person doing my best to read carefully and think about what that care entails. The texts I include aren’t selected for prestige or alignment. Some are canonical, others are less read, but all of them have marked me in some way. I don’t expect these posts to be definitive, just honest attempts at attention—at remaining. If even a few people take that project seriously, and if I write pieces I’m proud of, then the series will have done what it’s meant to do.