Part I - Why Dante, and why an entire year?

Part II - My reading & research shelf

• The primary text

• The research shelf

  • Introductory scholarship

  • Digital Dante resources

  • Selected critical works

  • Comparative and philosophical reading

• Writing alongside the reading

Part III - The 2027 reading calendar

1. January (Cantos I–III)

2. February (Cantos IV–VI)

3. March (Cantos VII–IX)

4. April (Cantos X–XII)

5. May (Cantos XIII–XV)

6. June (Cantos XVI–XVIII)

7. July (Cantos XIX–XXI)

8. August (Cantos XXII–XXIV)

9. September (Cantos XXV–XXVII)

10. October (Cantos XXVIII–XXX)

11. November (Cantos XXXI–XXXIII)

12. December (Canto XXXIV and the whole poem)

Part I - Why Dante, and why an entire year?

I have always been drawn to the personal curricula people share on this platform, especially the care they take in building an intellectual life, following their curiosities, and staying connected to their own minds. Reading about those commitments has encouraged me to think about my own, and this project grew out of that interest, alongside my fascination with Dante’s Hell and my wish to spend more time understanding it.

I also have my eye on a summer school at Oxford University on Dante’s Divine Comedy, and should I get into the class, I would like to arrive with enough grounding to make the most of the experience. Since I often think through writing, it feels natural to write about the poem as my reading unfolds over the year.

This is a personal project, but I am making it public because I want to leave a record of the experience: the passages that stop me, the interpretations I find convincing, the arguments I struggle with, and the questions I can’t quite answer. I hope that sharing those questions might lead to conversations with fellow readers as I find my way through the poem.

Over the past few months, I have been putting together a reading plan, a growing list of possible essays, and a shelf of books and resources that I hope will help me understand what I encounter. All of this remains provisional, though, because I don’t want to decide in advance what the poem must teach me. I want to leave room for the reading and writing to surprise me, complicate my assumptions, and perhaps change my mind.

I am drawn to books that make me reconsider something I thought I understood, or reveal a difficulty in something I had considered simple, and Dante’s Inferno seems particularly suited to this kind of reading. I have encountered bits and pieces of the poem before, but this will be my first attempt to spend time with the whole of it, which I am very excited about.

As I read, I want to explore its moral, theological, political, and imaginative world, and think through the questions it raises about responsibility, desire, the misuse of intelligence, and what it means to judge another human being. That last question especially interests me because Dante imagines a universe in which every punishment has meaning and every soul’s condition belongs to a larger order of justice. I am curious about what it means to inhabit a work that presents its moral universe with such conviction, especially when some of its judgments may be difficult for a modern reader to accept.

I am also drawn to the relationship between the person who experiences a journey and the person who later tells its story. Dante the pilgrim enters Hell frightened, uncertain, and often unable to understand what he sees, while Dante the poet narrates with the knowledge of the journey behind him. The distance between those two perspectives interests me, because what the pilgrim feels in the moment can differ from what the poet, looking back, wants us to understand. As I think about that distance, I wonder how my own experience of reading will sit alongside the account I eventually write of it.

The poem emerged from a particular religious, political, and intellectual world, and to understand at least some of that world, I plan to read selected scholarship on medieval theology, the political life of Florence, classical literature, Dante’s literary inheritance, and ideas about sin, justice, and human nature. I don’t expect to become an expert in every subject that appears in Inferno, though. That would be a different project, and probably an impossible one alongside my full-time work as a software engineer, especially since my job can be demanding and developing ideas and writing prose both take me a considerable amount of time.

Part II - My reading & research shelf

The primary text

I plan to read all 34 cantos of Inferno from January to December 2027, using Robert and Jean Hollander’s translation and commentary as my primary edition, alongside selected scholarship and other relevant texts.

My starting point will be the poem itself, and I want to spend time with the language, imagery, encounters, and choices before turning to scholarship for an explanation. As I move between the poem and the scholarship, I want to keep some distinctions clear: what the poem explicitly presents, what a scholar argues it means, and what I infer from it (this is what I intend to write in my essays).

The research shelf

The following is a working bibliography, with some resources that I expect to use throughout the year and others that may become relevant only when a particular passage or question sends me looking for them.

Introductory scholarship

• Rachel Jacoff, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Dante, particularly the introduction to Inferno and chapters relevant to the cantos I am reading.

• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Dante Alighieri, for a broader philosophical orientation, his literary work, and intellectual traditions he draws upon.

• Selected entries from reliable reference works when I need historical, theological, literary, or biographical context.

Digital Dante resources

• The Princeton Dante Project - The poem, translations, historical and interpretative notes, audio recitations, and links to other Dante resources.

• Digital Dante - A digital humanities project offering material for exploring Dante's writing, historical context, and reception.

• The Dartmouth Dante Project and Dante Lab - Valuable when I want to compare how different commentators interpret the same passage. The database brings together more than 75 commentaries, and Dante Lab allows parallel comparison of texts

• Danteworlds, for an accessible visual and interpretive introduction to the poem’s geography and structure.

Selected critical works

• John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion - A major critical study for thinking about conversion, interpretation, and the poem's spiritual and literary dimensions.

• Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante - A critical approach that examines Dante's narrative strategies and questions how the poem constructs and directs its claims to truth.

• Relevant chapters from scholarly companions and handbooks, selected according to the questions that arise.

Comparative and philosophical reading

I expect to read selected passages from:

• Virgil’s Aeneid, especially Book VI, which provides an important classical comparison for Dante’s journey into the underworld.

• Homer’s Odyssey, particularly where the poem’s treatment of Ulysses becomes relevant.

• Augustine’s Confessions, when questions about will, desire, memory, and self-knowledge make the comparison useful.

• Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, through selected passages relevant to sin, passions, virtue, justice, and human action.

• Biblical passages that illuminate particular allusions, theological assumptions, or scenes.

Writing alongside the reading

My initial plan was to write two essays every month, but I have since changed that to one substantial essay a month, with a second when time and interest allow. I expect to write close readings of selected passages, reflections on the reading, and essays that draw on historical, literary, and philosophical context where it helps me understand the poem. Occasionally, I may follow a question across several cantos rather than confining it to a single month’s reading.

I often find that writing helps me discover what I actually think, because an idea that feels persuasive in my head can become less convincing when I try to articulate it, while an observation that initially seems minor can reveal a much larger question when I follow it through. I want to give that process room to happen, including being open to writing about the things I don’t understand.

With that in mind, I intend to publish regularly, though I’m hesitant to promise fixed dates or an exact number of posts. A monthly essay gives me a commitment to work towards while allowing for the time the reading and writing may need, and I would rather publish fewer thoughtful essays than turn the project into a publishing treadmill. I also want to leave room for my other writing on literature, mythology, art, and ideas alongside Dante.

Part III - The 2027 reading calendar

To put together this schedule, which divides the 34 cantos into 12 monthly blocks, I have drawn on other readers' personal curricula and study plans for Inferno, with help from AI. The themes are my starting thoughts about what each block might offer, and I expect some of them to change as I read, or to lead me towards questions that carry beyond their assigned month.

January (Cantos I–III)

Lostness, guidance, thresholds, and the beginning of judgment.

• Primary reading: Hollander’s Inferno, Cantos I–III, including the notes.

• The Cambridge Companion to Dante: “Life of Dante” and Lino Pertile’s “Introduction to Inferno.”

• Virgil, Aeneid: Book VI, lines 264–416, covering the entrance to the underworld, its unburied dead, and Charon.

• Danteworlds: Read the overview of Hell and the material accompanying the dark wood and the entrance to Hell.

• Princeton Dante Project: Read Hollander’s commentary on Inferno I.1–3, I.31–60, II.52–126, and III.1–9, focusing on the opening, the beasts, the intervention of the three women, and the gate’s inscription.

February (Cantos IV–VI)

Virtue, desire, sympathy, and judgment.

• Primary reading: Hollander’s Inferno, Cantos IV–VI, including the notes.

• The Cambridge Companion to Dante: “Dante and the classical poets,” concentrating on the classical inheritance relevant to Limbo.

• Augustine, Confessions: Book VIII, chapters 5–12, on habit, the divided will, and conversion.

• Dartmouth Dante Project: Compare Hollander’s and Singleton’s commentary on Inferno V.100–138, particularly Francesca’s account of love and the lovers’ reading.

• Danteworlds: Read the entries accompanying Limbo, lust, and gluttony, paying particular attention to the virtuous pagans, Francesca and Paolo, and Ciacco.

March (Cantos VII–IX)

Appetite, anger, power, and the limits of reason.

• Primary reading: Hollander’s Inferno, Cantos VII–IX, including the notes.

• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: II–II, Question 158, articles 1–3, on anger, its relationship to reason, and its moral seriousness.

• Danteworlds: Read the material accompanying avarice and prodigality, wrath and sullenness, and the approach to the City of Dis.

• Princeton Dante Project: Read Hollander’s commentary on VII.67–96, concerning Fortune; VIII.31–63, concerning Filippo Argenti; and IX.64–105, concerning the heavenly messenger.

• Comparison exercise: In Dartmouth, compare Hollander and Singleton on VIII.37–63, where the pilgrim’s anger and Virgil’s approval become especially difficult to interpret.

April (Cantos X–XII)

Knowledge, political memory, heresy, and violence.

• Primary reading: Hollander’s Inferno, Cantos X–XII, including the notes.

• The Cambridge Companion to Dante: “Dante and Florence.”

• Princeton Dante Project: Read Hollander’s commentary on X.22–120, covering Farinata, Cavalcante, political conflict, and the knowledge of the damned.

• Close rereading: Read XI.16–111 slowly, alongside the commentary, as Dante’s explanation of the organisation of lower Hell.

• Danteworlds: Read the material on heresy and violence against others, particularly Farinata, the Minotaur, the centaurs, and the river of blood.

May (Cantos XIII–XV)

The body, self-destruction, reputation, and love.

• Primary reading: Hollander’s Inferno, Cantos XIII–XV, including the notes.

• Augustine, Confessions: Book X, chapters 8–17, on memory and the difficulty of understanding oneself.

• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: II–II, Question 64, article 5, on suicide, read as theological context for Dante’s treatment rather than as a contemporary account of suicidal suffering.

• Dartmouth Dante Project: Compare Hollander and Singleton on XIII.31–108, concerning Pier della Vigna, and XV.22–99, concerning Brunetto Latini.

• Princeton Dante Project: Read the notes on XIV.94–120, the Old Man of Crete, to understand the image and its scriptural background.

June (Cantos XVI–XVIII)

Human creation, fraud, appearances, and the midpoint of the journey.

• Primary reading: Hollander’s Inferno, Cantos XVI–XVIII, including the notes.

• Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Chapter 3, “Ulysses, Geryon, and the Aeronautics of Narrative Transition.” This will also be worth returning to in September.

• Princeton Dante Project: Read Hollander’s commentary on XVI.124–136 and XVII.1–27, covering the announcement of Geryon and his appearance.

• Danteworlds: Read the material on Geryon, usury, and the first two bolgias of fraud.

• Close rereading: Read XVII.79–136, the flight on Geryon, alongside Barolini’s discussion of narrative transition.

July (Cantos XIX–XXI)

Sacred authority, corruption, performance, and institutional sin.

• Primary reading: Hollander’s Inferno, Cantos XIX–XXI, including the notes.

• The Cambridge Companion to Dante: “The theology of the Comedy.”

• Bible: Acts 8:9–24, the story of Simon Magus; Matthew 23:1–36, on religious hypocrisy; and John 11:45–53, for the Caiaphas reference in Canto XXI.

• Princeton Dante Project: Read Hollander’s commentary on XIX.1–6 and XIX.31–117, covering simony and the encounter with Nicholas III.

• Dartmouth Dante Project: Compare Hollander and Singleton on XX.19–30, where Virgil rebukes the pilgrim’s pity, and XXI.37–54, concerning political corruption.

August (Cantos XXII–XXIV)

Hypocrisy, theft, transformation, and the unstable self.

• Primary reading: Hollander’s Inferno, Cantos XXII–XXIV, including the notes.

• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: II–II, Question 111, articles 1–4, on dissimulation and hypocrisy.

• Danteworlds: Read the material accompanying the barrators, hypocrites, and thieves.

• Princeton Dante Project: Read Hollander’s commentary on XXIII.58–126, covering the leaden cloaks, the Jovial Friars, and Caiaphas.

• Dartmouth Dante Project: Compare Hollander and Singleton on XXIV.97–120, Vanni Fucci’s destruction and reconstitution. Leave the more elaborate transformations in Canto XXV for September.

September (Cantos XXV–XXVII)

Intelligence, curiosity, eloquence, and moral responsibility.

• Primary reading: Hollander’s Inferno, Cantos XXV–XXVII, including the notes.

• The Cambridge Companion to Dante: Return to “Dante and the classical poets.”

• Homer, Odyssey: Book XI, the encounter with the dead, and Book XII, the dangerous return voyage.

• Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Return to Chapter 3, “Ulysses, Geryon, and the Aeronautics of Narrative Transition.”

• Dartmouth Dante Project: Compare Hollander and Singleton on XXVI.85–142, Ulysses’ final voyage, and XXVII.61–129, Guido da Montefeltro’s account of counsel, repentance, and absolution.

October (Cantos XXVIII–XXX)

Division, falsification, embodiment, and the fragility of truth.

• Primary reading: Hollander’s Inferno, Cantos XXVIII–XXX, including the notes.

• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: II–II, Question 110, articles 1–4, on lying and its moral classification.

• Danteworlds: Read the material on sowers of discord and falsifiers, including Bertran de Born, the alchemists, impersonators, counterfeiters, and liars.

• Princeton Dante Project: Read Hollander’s commentary on XXVIII.118–142, Bertran de Born and the explicit naming of contrapasso.

• Dartmouth Dante Project: Compare Hollander and Singleton on XXX.49–129, the encounter with Master Adam and Sinon, then read XXX.130–148 on the pilgrim’s fascination with their quarrel.

November (Cantos XXXI–XXXIII)

Power, betrayal, grief, and the destruction of relationship.

• Primary reading: Hollander’s Inferno, Cantos XXXI–XXXIII, including the notes.

• The Cambridge Companion to Dante: Return to “Dante and Florence” for the political background to these encounters.

• Bible: Genesis 11:1–9, the Tower of Babel, alongside Nimrod’s appearance in Canto XXXI.

• Dartmouth Dante Project: Compare Hollander and Singleton on XXXII.73–111, concerning Bocca degli Abati, and XXXIII.1–90, concerning Ugolino.

• Princeton Dante Project: Read Hollander’s commentary on XXXIII.109–157, the encounter with Fra Alberigo and the claim that a soul can enter Hell while its body remains alive.

December (Canto XXXIV and the whole poem)

Evil, freedom, transformation, and leaving Hell.

• Primary reading: Hollander’s Inferno, Canto XXXIV, including the notes.

• Rereading: I.1–90; V.100–142; XIII.31–108; XXVI.85–142; and XXXIII.1–90, returning to the dark wood, Francesca, Pier della Vigna, Ulysses, and Ugolino.

• Augustine, Confessions: Book VII, chapters 12–16, on goodness, corruption, evil, and the will.

• Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion: “The Prologue Scene,” returning to the beginning after reaching the end.

• Princeton Dante Project: Read Hollander’s commentary on XXXIV.28–67, Lucifer’s appearance, and XXXIV.70–139, the reversal of direction and the departure from Hell.

I would love to have fellow readers alongside me, whether to talk through a passage, offer another interpretation, point me towards a useful resource, or help me see something I have missed, and you're welcome to join a conversation even without following the reading plan yourself.

Yours in thought,
Yana

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The question I cannot let go of after reading Canto I of Inferno is why after seeing the illuminated hill, he turns back towards it?

I just began my Hell’s journey, and Virgil has just appeared in the dark woods and identified himself. Dante is standing before the poet he has studied and loved, the poet from whom he believes he learned his own “noble style”. Imagining myself in the shoes of Dante, the first reaction I would feel is a moment of relief. Someone whom I can recognize has arrived and he seems to understand where he is. Yet Virgil’s first real question, is interesting, and has resonated in the back of my mind through the study session.

“But you, why are you turning back to misery? Why do you not climb the peak that gives delight, origin and cause of every joy?”

Why are you turning back?

This is making me think how Dante’s situation more difficult than I first understood it to be. He has seen the hill, and has begun to climb towards it. He could start to grasp that a way out exists, and he can see it. Still, when the beasts appear, especially the starving she-wolf, he wants to retreat towards the wood he was trying to escape.

The self I know inside misery

I initially thought this was simply fear, because, of course, venturing into the unknown is harder than remaining with the known, even when we know that the known has become miserable. That’s the one daunting “reality” we already know and understand. There were many times in my life, where misery has become the known ground, and I understood its paths and what I could expect from it. More importantly, I think, it is because I know what kind of person I am inside it. At those times, there is always a prospect of joy, which I yearn to desire, but it may also require me to become someone I do not yet know how to be. And that’s when I stop dead in my tracks and stick to the known misery.

In my previous piece on the Inferno’s introduction, I had already been wondering and thinking that pain is easier to understand than happiness. Extending that thought now, I think the difficulty is not just that happiness is harder to imagine. But the more pressing underlying problem is, happiness can feel less familiar than pain. Maybe in those times, the unknown good asks something of us that the known misery does it. What do you think about this? Is there any other way you can help me define this?

The hunger that never eats enough

Alright, going back to the Canto. The hill appears before the beasts do, and Dante emerges from the darkness, looks up, sees its light, and in that moment, I may presume that his fear begins to quiet down. The woods are behind him, and the light is above him, and he only has to climb.

Now, the animals appear.

The she-wolf was interesting, she is thin, yet charged with all the appetites. Her hunger has already made many people miserable, and Virgil later says that feeding only makes her hungrier. The more she possesses, the more she wants.

My first note beside the passage was she simply resembled “greed”. The more I reread her passages, I could place almost anything insider her hunger — money, work, achievement, praise, certainty, knowledge, attention, love, anything. Even reading can become a form of appetite when I begin treating every book as something to finish, possess, or use before moving restlessly toward the next one.

That kept me thinking, why? Do I crave more because the last experience or acquisition has not settled whatever I hoped it would settle? Strangely, if we do feel that way, then that attempt was a failure, but it does not make us abandon the pursuit for the next and persuades us that we did not acquire enough. In the poem, its mentioned that she is thin despite everything she consumes. Does her thinness resemble the endless consumption that could lead to deprivation and the capacity to be never satisfied?

Not just Dante, she would have frightened me more as well.

Shame

When Virgil asks why he is returning to misery rather than climbing toward joy, Dante does not answer but instead he recognizes Virgil and says: “Are you then Virgil, the fountainhead that pours so full a stream of speech?” I answered him, my head bent low in shame.

Why does Dante lower his head? I still do not understand.

Dante praises Virgil as the honor and light of poets, even speaks of his long study and great love. Then calls him his master and author, the source from whom he took the beautiful style that brought him honor. But why is Dante ashamed?

I cannot think why. Is it just simple modesty before a revered poet? Dante has unexpectedly encountered the author whose work shaped his own. I can imagine the embarrassment of meeting someone I have read so closely that they have become part of my private mind. It is as if admiration can make me suddenly conscious of myself, of everything I know, and everything I do not know, and particularly of the distance between the work I admire and the person standing before it. Virgil has just asked Dante why he is retreating or fleeing, and Dante stands before his literary master at the moment of his own failure.

I have recently been stuck in a rut for some time and had continued to be, so I think I am asking myself why am I choosing the familiar misery again and again? Often I think we can give explanations. I was tired / the moment was wrong / the risk was too great / I needed more certainty / I was waiting until I felt ready. Some of these explanations may even be true. But at the same time, they can simply mean, I became afraid and retreated as well.

Virgil here clearly did not accuse Dante of cowardice, but he simply asked a question, to which Dante himself have answered with shame. This is why the bowed head interested me. Most often, shame begins when I see myself from outside, particularly through the eyes of someone whose judgement matters to me. Before Virgil had appeared, Dante’s fear was filled with the landscape and beasts, and I think once Virgil asked why he is turning back, Dante becomes capable of seeing his own movement within the scene. He has began responding to the frightening happening to him.

I wonder whether shame, in its least destructive form, begins at precisely this point. Does it appear in the narrow gap between the person I believe myself to be and the action I suddenly see myself performing?

Following before I am ready

Dante has apparently found the direction he needs to travel, and instead Virgil now tells him that he must take another road, that the she-wolf allows no one to pass. Dante will have to journey through Hell, hear the cries of the damned, climb the mountain of Purgatory, and only then approach the blessedness.

That is something very highly relatable to our everyday lives. Walking away from misery into building a life finding happiness, does take an effort worth traveling through Hell and finding Heaven.

I often assume clarity should be enough and once I understand that something is harmful, I expect understanding to release me from it. Once I see a better path, I expect myself to take it. When I do not, I treat the failure as evidence that I lacked discipline or never truly wanted to change.

At the end of the canto, Virgil has moved and Dante had followed him.

How uncomfortable is it to follow someone without understanding where the journey might lead to? I do not think I have such courage to blindly do it, or acquire enough trust to take the next step. Do you?

I still do not know whether happiness is harder to understand than pain. Maybe I have been asking the question too abstractly. The poem will need three realms and a hundred cantos to discover what is concealed inside the retreat.

Virgil’s question of why turn back to misery, I still cannot answer it. The closest answer I can think of, is probably because I know who I am there. The more difficult question is whether I am willing to meet the person I might become elsewhere.

Yours in thought,
Yana

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Standing outside the gate

I picked up Robert and Jean Hollander’s translation of Dante’s Inferno¹ today and made it only as far as the introduction before my mind began filling with questions. I have yet to enter the dark wood. I have not yet passed through the gate of Hell, crossed the Acheron, or met any of the souls whose punishments have survived in the cultural imagination for seven centuries. At this very moment, I am standing just outside the poem, gathering impressions of its shape, its theology, and the strange people and figures waiting within it.

Everything I write in this essay here carries the eagerness and naïveté of someone at the beginning. I feel a little like a puppy encountering grass for the first time, overwhelming by the discovery that there is so much here to smell, touch, and misunderstand. Mind me, Dante has not yet had the opportunity to correct me.

I would like to think that, this, is the right condition in which to begin reading him. The Divine Comedy is in fact itself concerned with a person who begins in confusion. Robert Hollander describes the pilgrim’s journey as a model for the reader’s own movement through the poem: we are expected to learn as Dante learns, and perhaps to discover that our initial sympathies and judgments cannot always be trusted.

For now, I know only the outline. A living Christian travels through the kingdom of the dead. His first guide is a Roman poet who lived before Christianity. The damned speak, remember, argue, accuse, suffer, and somehow continue defending the desires and decisions that brought them there. Beyond Hell there is a mountain called Purgatory, and beyond that mountain there is Heaven. And the complete journey moves toward salvation and the vision of God.

Why does hell dominate the imagination?

Yet even before beginning the journey, I have heard far more about Dante’s punishments than his salvation. I have seen diagrams of his circles of Hell. I know that the lustful are blown about by winds, the traitors are frozen in ice, and that terrible bodies experiences punishments shaped by the sins that governed them in their lives. I have encountered the adjective “Dantean” applied to disasters, violence, and scenes of violent confusion. I have rarely heard it used for the vision of divine love with which the Comedy ends.

Why does Hell so completely dominate my imagination that Dante can be mistaken for a poet who wrote only about damnation?

I might understand that better once I have read the poem. At the threshold, however, I find myself beginning with many questions.

Why Virgil?

I understand part of the literary answer. Virgil’s Aeneid² helped make Dante the poet he became. Similar in Aeneid, Aeneas enters the underworld and encounters the dead. Dante’s journey therefore follows a road that Virgil had already opened in poetry. Hollander’s say, Virgil could lead Dante into darkness because, in a literary sense, he had entered it before.

I think the relationship goes much deeper than that borrowed episode. Hollander describe Dante’s engagement with Virgil as one of the most complex examples in literature of a later writer taking up the work of a precursor. The Aeneid helps Dante structure and populate the otherworld, while Virgil’s language continues to echo through the Comedy even after the Roman poet is long gone and has disappeared as a character. Dante’s attachment to Virgil appears to have shaped the very decision to write an epic poem about serious matters³. Martin Eisner similarly notes that Dante uses Virgil throughout the Comedy to organize the landscape of the afterlife and to guide his encounters with other poets⁵.

Virgil offered him a form of a journey, the inheritance of a poetic tradition, and an example of how history, empire, exile, suffering, and destiny could be gathered into a single epic. Virgil gave Dante something a poet could follow, according to Hollander. Virgil is a classic allegorical interpretation of human reasoning, the faculty capable of guiding a person through the recognition of sin but incapable of bringing the soul into the direct presence of God. Hollander complicates that interpretation. Dante’s Virgil cannot be reduced to a psychological faculty. He remains recognizably Virgil: a Roman, a pagan, the author of the Aeneid, and the poet Dante considers his master. His importance comes partly from what he represents, though it also comes from who he was and what he wrote.

A guide who cannot join the destination

This makes his presence feel more tragic to me.

Virgil can guide Dante through Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory, but he cannot accompany him into Heaven. He can help another person understand the moral structure of a Christian universe without sharing in the salvation that gives that structure its final meaning. It eerily sounds familiar to the meaning of a “teacher”, so simply to understand, how a parent teaches the child on life, but they cannot live the life of the child.

A pagan poet guides a Christian pilgrim toward a God he cannot see. That is tragic to me.

There is something painful in being able to lead another person toward a place one cannot enter oneself. Dante could become Dante because of Virgil, while Virgil could never become what Dante’s universe required him to be. The guide makes the journey possible and remains excluded from its destination. Dante loves Virgil. Hollander writes that Dante “could not do without him,” even as the Comedy repeatedly reveals the limits of Virgil’s knowledge and authority. Virgil can be revered, corrected, surpassed, and mourned at the same time.

Who is your Virgil?

This makes me wonder about the guides in our own lives. Who is my Virgil?

I do not know. Perhaps we rarely recognize the people or books shaping us while the shaping is taking place. We experience attraction, irritation, imitation, and the recurring desire to return to a particular voice. I would like to imagine, Virgil was that voice for Dante. Years later, we may understand that someone taught us how to see. By that time, we might also have travelled beyond the limits of what they could teach us.

I want to believe a Virgil is someone who leads us far enough that we eventually have to continue without them. And that limitation do not erase what they gave us. Sometimes they might even become part of the gift because they force us to discover where we must part from them.

So I want to ask you: do you know who your Virgil is? Who gave you language for something you could feel but you do not have a name for it? Who helped make you yourself?

Why does Dante give the damned so much room to speak?

The obvious answer is that Hell is a place of moral instruction. Its punishments reveal the nature of the sins being punished. I learnt that Dante’s system is often discussed through the principle of contrapasso, in which punishment corresponds to sin through resemblance, reversal, analogy, or consequence. Hell, turning inward inclination into outward conditions.

The souls in Dante’s Inferno, speak. They tell stories about themselves. They remember political grievances, betrayals, loves, families, ambitions, and deaths. They can also be seen defending their motives and redirect blame, while some remain attached to the identities they possessed while alive. Even in eternity, they are concerned with how they will be remembered on Earth.

Hollander argues that the reader must learn to distinguish between the authority of the poem’s theological structure and the emotional force of the sinners own accounts. Several of the damned are sympathetic because Dante gives them dignity and intelligence, making their pain recognizable. They often present themselves as the victims of love, fortune, politics, or other people, moving the reader⁴.

I am yet to dwell deeper with these souls, but I am already intrigued by the risk Dante takes in allowing them to speak so well. A moral allegory could have made every sinner repulsive and every judgement immediately visible. But here, the damned tell beautiful stories about the desires that destroyed them.

Damnation contains narrators.

I would like to imagine that is the reason why Hell has remained so culturally alive. The souls have histories, explanations, wounds, and unfinished arguments. They may have been judged by God, but they have not necessarily surrendered their own interpretations of themselves.

That makes me want to say, that saints might have reached an answer. The damned remain imprisoned within their questions, and perhaps this is part of their Hell.

Memory but no possibility of change

They cannot stop explaining. They cannot imagine themselves outside the stories they have already chosen. Their punishments continue eternally because the self that created the sin has become fixed. they possess memory without the possibility of change. They almost seem like they can look backward, but they cannot become otherwise. That may be more frightening than any physical torment. To be damned would mean becoming inseparable from one interpretation of oneself. Every explanation would lead back to the same desire. An eternal loop of personalized Hell. Every explanation would lead back to the same desire. Every memory would confirm the same problem, and they do not realize the possibility of change.

I want to know whether Dante’s sinners recognize themselves in their punishment or remain trapped within their own explanations. Do they understand where they are, or do they know that they are suffering? Can a person acknowledge the consequences of a choice while remaining incapable of seeing the choice itself clearly?

I suspect that I will be tempted to pity them. Dante may ask me to examine that pity. Am I responding to suffering itself, or have I been persuaded by a compelling narrator? Does sympathy help me see another person clearly, or can it become a way of me avoiding judgement? I am very enthused to see if I can recognize pain without accepting the explanation the sufferer gives for it.

While I write these questions, they are already making me feel that my upcoming study sessions will feel morally unstable. I am preparing to enter Hell as a spectator. I know that the figures I encounter have been condemned by the universe of the poem, but I do not yet know whether I will agree with its judgements. The poem may reveal something about my own instinct through the people I excuse, the people I condemn, and the punishments I find disproportionate. And that, my darling, is scary.

Giving darkness an architecture

Fear usually tells us to look away from Hell. Dante constructs a poem that requires us to enter it, move through it, listen to the people who live there, converse with them. His Hell has circles, ledges, gates, rivers, weather, laws, histories, and conversations. It contains an entire geography of moral failure. I find this strangely stimulating.

In much of the psychological advice I have encountered about fear, the first instruction is to name the thing that frightens us. A shapeless fear gives the mind nowhere to stand. Once fear acquires a name, boundary, or structure, it can be approached. It may still remain frightening, but now it has become available to thought.

Dante appears to do something similar by giving darkness an architecture. Hell is no longer an undefined region beneath existence. It becomes a world through which one can travel, with its chaos having an argument and it’s suffering has categories. Even the most frightening landscape ever known to humankind, now, has a path running through it, and the pilgrim has a guide who knows enough to take the next step. But will this architecture make the darkness more frightening or less?

Before learning how Dante understands salvation, I find myself drawn toward his understanding of ruin. I want to watch a desire become a destiny. I want to know how love, appetite, pride, violence, deceit, or resentment can grow so powerful that a person becomes unable to imagine themselves apart from it. I want to know whether Hell changes anyone, although change may be the one thing Hell no longer allows?

Why is suffering easier to imagine than blessedness?

This bring me back to the question with which I began. Why does the Inferno dominate my imagination more completely than Purgatorio or Paradiso? I can only think that suffering is easier to picture than blessedness.

Pain gives us events and that narration has a body. A person is chased, burned, frozen, torn apart, transformed, silences, or forced to repeat an action without end. Punishment here can be represented through images that can be felt and easily understood.

Perfect happiness is harden to imagine, I reckon. When I try to picture hope, it generally becomes very vague. I can imagine the removal of pain, but the absence of pain is not something I can quite contemplate as the image of blessedness. I can imagine a problem being solved, though I struggle to imagine what desire becomes when nothing remain missing, and everything is as is.

Hell preserves many of the conditions from which stories are made of: conflict, memory, personality, grievance, consequence, and frustrated desire. Heaven asks the imagination to approach fulfillment and vision of God. I understand why a person runs from pain more easily than I understand what it means for a soul to rest in perfect love. Hell peaks through the recognizably human language of wanted. Paradise, I think, might require another language altogether. I wish I find another arcane poet who journey’s me through Heaven.

I think this is why Dante’s punishments survived for so long, even among people who no longer believe in his theology. One does not need to accept the literal existence of Hell to recognize the experience of becoming trapped inside an appetite, a resentment, a torture, or a story about oneself. I would like to imagine, Dante gives that psychological condition an eternal landscape.

Heaven, I think asks a more difficult question: if I release everything that changes my changes, what would remain of me? That question leads me toward something even less stable.

Why do we invent gods?

I suspect we are searching for hope. We gather hope into a figure, give it a name, and call it God. We want to believe that darkness has an edge, that suffering belongs to some unknown shape, and that continuing through life amounts to something more than postponing death. God becomes the place where this hope can live.

At times I think darkness may be the ultimate truth and God only a phantom hope. Perhaps we create divine order to endure the darkness. We image that suffering means something because meaninglessness would leave us with nowhere to place our pain into. Does this even make sense?

Yet the moment I call hope a phantom, I have already assumed that darkness is more truthful. Should I even place this privilege into it? Perhaps I am too ready to regard hope as an invention while accepting hopelessness as a discovery.

Dante seems like someone against whom I can test this suspicion. He would presumably reject my phrasing from the beginning. Within his theology, human beings do not invent God to give darkness meaning. God is the reality by which both darkness and meaning become intelligible. I think he sees Hell as something that exists within divine order rather than beyond it. In that case, even damnation testifies to the structure of God, or creation.

Again, this does not erase suffering into happiness. Dante built an entire world around the claim that darkness has meaning, and some of that meaning takes the form of judgement that can never be reversible.

Before Dante corrects me

There is something terribly fascinating about discovering that an arcane person who lived a septcentenary ago thought something so strange that I suddenly need to understand why. I want to see, as far as another person can, what Dante saw. I want to understand how Hell, Purgatory, Heaven, pagan poetry, Christian revelation, political history, grief, judgement, and divine love could being in one imaginary universe, strikingly beautifully.

Reading has always given me a temporary access to a mind that could never have imagined me. I cannot ask Dante my questions, but I surely can enter the poem in which he spent years and years answering his own.

For now, I am standing outside the gate. I have questions about Virgil, the damned, the architecture of fear, and the gods. I suspect Dante will complicate all of them.

How strange. How beautiful. Tell me more.

Yours in thought,
Yana

Notes and further reading

1. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander.

2. Virgil, The Aeneid.

3. Robert Hollander, “Dante’s Virgil,” Princeton Dante Project.

4. Robert Hollander, “The Moral Situation of the Reader of Inferno,” Princeton Dante Project.

5. Martin Eisner, “Dante’s Guide: Virgil, Aeneid,” Duke university’s Dante’s Library.

Slowly reading Greek literature, tragedies, and mythology as a long, lived thing by staying inside the events until they start giving me meaning.

Helen leaves and grief becomes humiliation

A door closed, a ship left, a bed stayed empty, a man came home, and found his life altered. Helen goes with Paris, and in one version she goes screaming, and in another she goes quiet, and in another she goes as if she has finally been invited into her own life. I do not know which version of this story is true, and the ones I read, they say she is gone of her own will, and a part of me thinks it is because to protect Menelaus with the easier story.

“Taken” gives the husband a clean kind of sorrow, and “chosen” gives him humiliation. I think this is the part where honor slightly has the factor of fear intertwined. More precisely, fear of being the first person to let something slide, and then becoming the example of what can be done to someone like you. Here, Menelaus cannot afford to be a private man with a private grief. Unfortunately a king does not get to have that kind of privacy.

Paris breaks more than a marriage

I wonder if that is what is called a scandal but not entirely a sin, assuming there is genuine love involved. The bigger problem is, a lover running away with a lover, in a small room, is still just desire and can be handled by silence or negotiation or by grief that stays inside a marriage. But here, Paris is a guest, and that guest-hood is public. He eats at Menelaus’s table! If you take that seriously, then Paris leaving with Helen is not a breach of hospitality, which is another way of saying it is a breach of thin membrane that makes civil life possible. I would like to believe that Menelaus treats this as an insult to everyone, and not just to himself. It can easily make a strategic as well as an emotion move. If he can make it everyone’s problem, he does not have to sit alone with the most humiliating question, which is not “Why did Paris do it?” but “Why could he do it to me?”

If a guest can come and take and leave with no cost, then the whole idea of hospitality is comedic. Imagine the headline begins to form as not “Helen left” but “this can happen” is an interesting flip of events. The appetite of other people for the possibility that they too could take what they want and fear of others that they too could be taken from. I am more included to look at Menelaus’s humiliation not about only losing Helen but about being laughed at, though it sounds petty when I write it out like that.

Helen becomes a story other people can use

It is too easy to moralize Helen and Paris into these symbols. It is too easy to say she is a prize, he is a thief, and the war is a punishment, but myths are never entirely as neat as this. Assuming Helen went willingly, then I have to ask what “willingly” means where gods push and push? On the contrary, if she went unwillingly, then I have to ask why the story always points towards the possibility that she walked? Whatever it is, the story keeps it open and this ambiguity perhaps might be useful later.

If Helen and Paris were lovers, then there must have been a period when it was still their secret. Then when did they start lying to themselves in small ways first? They do not tell their friend how much they want them, they do not tell their spouse how empty they feel. They tell themselves they are still the same person they were yesterday, and they do not know when they have started to change.

Menelaus turns injury into a collective threat

Anyways, now that the damage is done, and the rumor has grown legs and is traveling, this is where Agamemnon enters to make this grievance become a war campaign. Then comes the old oaths that forcibly or willingly bind people in this war. The Oath of Tyndareus, I could say a legal solution. A father trying to prevent a crowd of powerful men from turning his daughter’s marriage into a bloodbath. Also a gather admitting that he cannot control men with persuasion alone and he needs something ancient or sacred enough to frighten them into restraint. I always like to think that oaths are something that bind humans together and particularly this oath binds men together in a shared trap. The moment everyone has agreed publicly, the moment reputations are staked, it becomes too late to stop the moving war that might brew years later. When someone tries to stop then, it would require too many men to admit they were carried by something they could have resisted in the past. Some of them basically bound by the fear of what will be said if they don’t go. A social technology, smart!

The old oath wakes up

In Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, the oath is described with ritual specificity: they join right hands, pour libations, bind themselves with a curse, and swear that whoever wins Helen will be defended if a rival takes her away, and that they will march and raze the offender’s city.

“Hellene no less than barbarian”

So Menelaus invokes the ancient oath and declares the duty of helping the injured husband. Even if Helen and Paris were lovers and even if their desire is sincere, then this sincerity does not matter once duty and honor are invoked. I think about how often this happens in our time as well but in smaller ways. A relationship ends, and suddenly it is not only two people, but it becomes friend groups, becomes family, reputations, and sides. Somehow it becomes something that must be discussed, interpreted, judges, and it ends up becoming a story which people can carry on.

Agamemnon gathers the machinery of war

I am going back to where I begun, the difference between personal insult and collective insult. I would like to imagine Menelaus is doing something clever when he frames it as a threat to everyone’s house and everyone’s rule, also highlighting how fragile these rules were in the first place. The whole system must have been built on something shaky to be threatened by one act of desire. That is what I always like about myths, how quick we convert emotion into institution. A man feels humiliated, and instead of sitting with it, he recruits others. A father worries about violence, and instead of trusting desire to burn itself out, he formalizes it. A group fears being laughed at, and instead of risking laughter, it chooses war.

Helen here, even if she went willingly and she was in love, she merely became a reason or a banner or a name to be used in speeches. I wonder what it must be like to be her, to feel the private truth of her own desire, whatever it was, being flattened into something other people can chant. I also wonder about Paris, in this lover reading. If he loved her, then what did he think he was doing? Did he think he was rescuing her from a marriage she did not want? Did he think he was claiming what he had been promised by Aphrodite?

“Too late to stop now”. Whenever I say or here this phrase, it makes me think there was a moment when it could have been stopped or there were earlier moments when different choices could have been made. It is easier to say “I had to” than “I wanted to”, or “I was afraid”.

Oaths sometimes are scary. It is beautiful when it forces people to keep their word but on the other hand it lets people outsource their conscience to a past version of themselves. When you swear, you create a future version of yourself who os obligated to obey the past version, which is trapping your future hesitation inside your current conviction. At that moment, you do it because you know yourself or know that later you might falter or have second thoughts. Later you might not want to pay the cost of what you are saying now, so we recruit gods, witnesses, blood, ritual until it becomes harder to betray. We are essentially becoming forced to become obedient to our own earlier performance of virtue here. Creating rules to manage the mess, and then later the rules become the mess.

Even now in families, friends, institutions, nations, people make vows, sign documents, align themselves publicly with causes, and later when they no longer feel connected or aligned, they cannot easily withdraw without social mockery or punishment, so sometimes they keep moving in the old direction while obeying their old self. Putting our loyalty to a decision we no longer fully inhabit. Do you think such kind of oath fulfillment is honest?

There is a similar story in Mahabharata from Hindu mythology about the vow of Bhishma, and that’s eerily familiar. When binding people together, it also binds violence together, then it feels harder to feel responsible for it, and becomes easier to call it history, or fate, or precisely a necessity. Then, somehow, a love story becomes a war story. Here Agamemnon became the one who leads, Menelaus became the one who will not be mocked, and the other kings became the ones who keep their word.

Duty calls.

A love story becomes a war story

Now Euripides’s, Helen.

“It is said by some, however, that Helen was stolen by Hermes in obedience to the will of Zeus and taken to Egypt, where she was entrusted to Proteus, king of Egyptians, for safe keeping, and Alexander went to Troy with a phantom of Helen fashioned from clouds”
— Apollodorus, The judgement of Paris and abduction of Helen

He takes a well known Greek epic and completely turns it on its head. According to it, Helen was never taken to Troy but rather taken to Egypt and hidden away and a phantom sent with Paris namely because the gods did not actually want Helen to be defiled by the Trojans. The idea was that is the Greeks failed at Troy (which makes me think that, in Euripides’s mind, the outcome of the Trojan War was never certain) then she would be safe in Egypt. However, one does question whether, if the Greeks did fail, would the Greek homeland be under threat?

Now, the idea of appearance and reality is that not everything was as it seemed to be. The Helen that was taken by Paris was not the true Helen, but rather a ghost. Also notice that there is a suggestion in the play that nothing may be unique, as Menelaus says “may there be two Spartas”. Let us assume this version of the story is true, then the entire Trojan War was fought over nothing but a ghost, despite the fact that Menelaus has no idea that Helen had been spirited away to Egypt. Not only had he spent ten years at Troy fighting, but another seven years attempting to return home. It adds another layer to the idea of war (and remember that during the time that Euripides was writing, Athens was in the middle of a major war). I suspect that there is an anti-war sentiment coming out here.

However, the one thing that I find interesting about this play is that Euripides is rewriting history to redeem Helen. Throughout history Helen has been seen as in a negative sense, because she deserted her husband and ran off with another man, and it was not as if she went unwillingly. It seemed in many cases that she agreed to leave with Paris. But I really like the idea of the play. The questions that it raised are, what if she was not a willing participant? What if she was forcefully taken by Paris? What if she never went to Troy and was stranded in a foreign land and held prisoner?

Next up

With a stalled fleet and a room full of leaders and soldiers, there is a problem that needs to move, and suddenly the easiest thing to spend is a girl. I am reading more reference and supporting texts on Iphigenia to understand why her acceptance feels both moving and terrifying.

I will share more of my thinking-on-paper thoughts as they come to me. Until then, take care.

Yours in thought,
Yana

Read Published Greek Dispatches

Reading list

• Apollodorus, Library

• Hyginus, Fabulae

• Euripides, Helen

• Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis

Image credits

• The Reconciliation of Helen and Paris after his Defeat by Menelaus, by Richard Westall

• Les amours de Pâris et d'Hélène, by Jacques-Louis David

• Paris and Helen, by Rudolf Friedrich von Deutsch

I pity the moth for mistaking the lamp for the moon. The moth circles the light with such devotion, such helplessness, and when I witness this, it becomes an image I can understand before I have even thought about it. Poor thing, I think. It does not know the difference between what calls it and what kills it. It does not know that the moon is far away and brightness is the only truth it knows.

But I do not know if I have earned the right to pity it.

Here I am, confusing a screen for the world.

Or I tell myself I know the difference.

I know the room around me still exists when I am looking down. I know my body is somewhere, my neck bent, my eyes drying a little, my hand moving almost without any instruction. I know there are things outside the screen that cannot be refreshed or scrolled through or kept open in another tab. The world has weather. It has smells, laughter, sorrow, conversations that go on too long, cups of tea going cold, and the strange presence of another person breathing near you. A screen can show me these things, but it cannot be them.

Still, knowing the difference has not saved me from confusing them.

Perhaps I would like to think the moth also knows something, in its own moth way. Perhaps it does not think the lamp is the moon. Perhaps that is a story we invented because it makes the moth seem foolish and us seem separate from it. Perhaps the moth is not making a mistake so much as obeying the only language available to it. Light means direction. Light means something to move toward. Light means continue.

I wonder how much of my life has been arranged around things that glow.

There is literal glow, of course. The phone lighting up in the dark. The laptop becoming the first and last face of the day. That glow contains messages, books, maps, money, memory, music, photographs, proofs of having existed somewhere. I am not saying the screen is evil. It is useful, and has carried voices to me when I needed them. It has held poems I would not otherwise have found. It has let me write things before I knew whether they deserved to be written.

The screen asks so little of me physically. I can come and go, look without being seen, speak without my voice shaking. More importantly, it makes the world available while keeping the world at a distance. And because distance can feel like safety, I begin to call it preference.

Usefulness, a very clever disguise.

I begin to say I like it this way. I begin to forget that some parts of me only appear when I am not in control of the frame. The moth does not have this luxury, and its wants are visible. It throws its whole body at the light.

It is easier to pity the moth than to admit we understand it. It is easier to say, poor thing, it cannot tell the difference between the moon and a flame. We say this while moving toward our own little brightnesses, again and again, even after they have burned us. Not all burning looks like destruction, and I would like to think it more often looks like distraction. Some of it looks like losing the ability to sit in a room without reaching for something. Some of it looks like becoming more and more informed, and the consequence being less and less present.

For the moth, flying toward the flame and flying toward the moon both end badly. The lamp kills the moth because it is too near and hot. The moon would kill it because it is impossibly far and cold. One destroys by contact, saying come closer, and the other by distance, saying keep going. Either way, the moth spends its brief life in relation to light.

But what else is a moth supposed to do?

This is the part I cannot move past. We speak as though survival were the highest wisdom. For a creature with such a brief life, a moth living voluptuously is still dying, and the one avoiding every flame is still dying, and the one refusing the moon is still dying.

The tragedy is not choosing wrongly.

And then I have to turn the thought back toward myself, though I don’t really want to.

What am I preserving myself for when I refuse the world and choose the screen instead? There are days when the screen feels like a lamp and days when it feels like the moon. Sometimes it is too close, too hot, too full of other people’s voices. Sometimes it is distant, showing me the illusion of somewhere else, someone else, a life beyond my reach. Like the moth, I throw myself at it. I tell myself I am looking for knowledge, connection, rest, fulfilment. Sometimes I am. Sometimes I am only moving toward it because movement toward light feels better than sitting in the dark, because busyness can imitate being alive.

I do not intend to say that the screen is the villain, and the world outside it is not automatically more real just because it has trees and dust and traffic. A bad conversation in person is not truer than a good sentence read online. Sometimes a message can save a day. A digital photograph can hold someone or something with unbearable tenderness. I want to look at this in black and white, but the distinction is not between false and real, and the question is not whether the light is natural or artificial.

Then what am I trying to ask?

I think it is whether I can still tell what is happening to me when I move toward a certain kind of light.

The moth cannot pause in midair and ask itself whether this brightness is making its life larger or smaller. Perhaps it can. I am not sure. But I can, at least sometimes. I can notice the small thinning of attention. I can notice when I have been looking at the lives of others instead of living any portion of my own. I can notice when I am not seeking the world through it, which is what I tell myself, but hiding from the world by being inside this.

Noticing does not always change anything. I wish it did. I wish awareness were stronger than habit. The flame is not the moon, but it is still light. The screen is not the world, but the world we live in flows through it. I want to say I will choose the room, the weather, the person, the body. I do want these things. But even as I write this, the words are appearing on a screen. Even this attempt to think against the glow depends on the glow.

So I surely do not know how to end this. Only this image of the moth, still circling. Only my own face lit faintly. Such a strange humility, realizing that awareness has not made me less vulnerable to brightness. It has only given me more elaborate ways to explain why I keep flying toward it.

Perhaps that is close enough to being the moth.

Yours in thought,
Yana

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I never read as a child, but I started reading when I was a young adult. I always want to go back to children’s books, and I ended up choosing The Velveteen Rabbit, and I got emotionally ambushed. I can’t stop thinking about what it means to become real to someone. By real, I mean when your feelings decide to live somewhere, inside a thing or a person. I’m 30, and I still have a toy I tuck myself in with every night. I can’t lie about how many times I’ve wondered whether my soft-toy dog, Willa, becomes real just by being held and worried over, worn down, and whether I made her real too.

The book makes it sound simple, like love is a slow alchemy. But why do we love things that are not living? Why does it matter so much that the rabbit is real to the boy, even if no one else agrees? I’ve always believed love outlives the object it attaches to. When you lose something you love, the love doesn’t leave in the same moment. It just starts looking for somewhere else to go. Sometimes it returns to you in a form you recognize, and most often it doesn’t. Still, it returns. It comes back wearing another face.

This magic has happened to me. I used to take care of a stray dog named Maya. I loved her, and one day she disappeared from my life. I never got closure or a neat ending. There was no final goodbye that let the love close itself properly. For a long time, the love felt like a loose thread. Now there is another dog, Maple, a friend I meet in a park. I talk to Maple about my life the way I used to talk to Maya, even though I know how absurd that sounds when I say it out loud. Maple brings me comfort, and I’m grateful for it. Sometimes it feels like I’m looking at Maya when I look at Maple, just a different face, and not quite the same.

I keep thinking, “nothing loved is ever lost.” But what does it even mean in a world where loss is inevitable? Part of me wants the sentence to protect me, to tell me I don’t have to worry so much because love will find its way back. Another part of me resists it because the beauty of love is limitless, and I remember I am limited and on borrowed time. Maybe both are true. Maybe love returns in disguise, and maybe the disguise is not meant to erase the loss. Maybe it is only meant to make the loss survivable, in a silly way, in a park, in the shape of a dog who is not the same dog, and still somehow brings the same calm in me.

This little book has given me the idea that love does not always end where the story ends. It leaks into other days, other animals, other humans, other objects you keep close, and keeps trying to translate itself into whatever is available. Love comes back asking to be placed somewhere, and if you are lucky, there is a warm forehead in front of you, ready for it.

P.S. I read The Velveteen Rabbit to Maple. She loved it.

Yours in thought,
Yana

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I recently watched The Sheep Detectives, and it’s very well made. I don’t think I’ve entirely left its world yet. The sheep are cute, but something about the way these small, woolly creatures move through confusion, grief, sadness, and mystery was interesting. I went in expecting very little, assuming it would be a funny, light story: a flock of sheep tries to solve the death of the man who cared for them. George dies, and the sheep become detectives. That sounded like the whole joke, a silly premise and nothing more.

Sheep storytime, go to bed, then a death

George reads to them every night, mostly detective stories. He does it for comfort, without noticing the way stories build inner worlds. After his death, the sheep begin to think through the grammar he gave them. They look for clues, assign motives, press events into patterns. It’s hard to watch without thinking about what books do to humans, and how often we call it “enrichment” or “entertainment” when it is really a slow reshaping. It is not just decorating the mind with additional knowledge..

Oops, the sheep brain has been edited

Most of us are carrying forms of attention we received from others long before we consciously chose them. Stories teach us what to notice, what to fear, what to expect from love, justice, suffering, loneliness, beauty, or hypocrisy. The forms we inherit become habits, and they feel like our own minds. A child raised on myths does not look at storms the same way as someone raised on scientific explanations alone.

A very fluffy theory of death

“Sheep don’t die, sheep turn into clouds” was my favourite line. The sheep can’t fully comprehend death, so they reach for a story that makes it bearable. And of course they do. Every culture wraps death in narrative because bare mortality is too immense to hold directly. Religions, epics, myths, family legends, even national histories become ways of rendering suffering narratable. It makes me wonder whether a mind can live for long inside pure chaos, with no story to hold the edges of it.

Sheep stay sheep

Throughout, the sheep remain recognisably sheep without turning into woolly humans with clever lines. They misunderstand, get stubborn, interpret the world incorrectly. The flock starts to resemble a civilisation, with rumours and hierarchies and beliefs that harden into certainty. Without meaning to, George has shaped the architecture of sheep minds through storytelling. That is beautifully and tragically human because we are altering one another without realising it. And perhaps this is why George’s absence feels so enormous to the flock. They have not only lost a caretaker. They have lost the voice that once interpreted the world for them every evening. Long after we forget plots and quotes, books remain inside us as habits of seeing, in questions we ask and details we notice. Sometimes another mind enters ours, and we only recognise the change years later.

Yours in thought,
Yana

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There was once a woman who lived inside words and worlds. She wandered through pages as though they were forests. She could disappear for hours into a single sentence. She read not because she wanted to become intelligent. She read because she wanted to become porous. She wanted life to enter her. She wanted to feel the world more deeply than her own skin allowed. And somewhere along the way, she vanished. Perhaps buried so deep that she has become a stranger. Who has she become?

Same mind, but a different heart

When she looks at the woman she is now, she does not entirely recognize her. She still reads, yes. She still thinks. She still writes. From the outside, it might seem like nothing has changed. But the soul inside has altered in a devastating way.

Once, reading was a form of falling in love. Now it feels like a performance, to prove a point.

She used to sit doing nothing, and thoughts arrived naturally, mysteriously, without any force. Now every thought seems to stand trial before it is even allowed to exist. Is this good enough? Is this intelligent enough? Is this articulate enough? Is this worth saying aloud?

Once, writing was how she listened to herself. And now all it feels like is explaining her existence to strangers.

And she does not know exactly when this transformation occurred. That is perhaps the cruelest part of it. Just a slow poisoning of that beautiful soul she once was. The woman she used to be read because she was hungry. The woman she is now reads because she wants to remain relevant to conversations she no longer even enjoys.

There is a difference between devotion and consumption, and in this chaotic modern world, the two get confused. It is bizarre to think that even beauty must justify itself through usefulness. Even solitude must become growth. Every reflection must become content. When did she stop simply experiencing things?

Moonlight, but artificial

Sometimes she thinks the internet did not merely give audiences, but an abyss. People keep staring into it too long, and then they get lost, with no way back, because the world just keeps moving forward.

There was a time when she could read a passage and simply let it move through her, like moonlight through water. She did not need to formulate opinions instantly. She did not need to extract arguments or construct frameworks or convert every emotional encounter into intellectual architecture. She did not need to prove the legitimacy of the feeling. Now even her wonder feels observed. She is starting to believe this is what grief looks like in the new world.

She used to love being her. There was something holy about her aimlessness.

In this terrifying and overwhelming world, people who genuinely love thought and art and literature begin, without meaning to, to wear intelligence like a mask of legitimacy. They read to construct an identity. They write to maintain relevance. And worst of all, they begin to think not because they are moved to think, but because silence now feels like failure. What a tragedy that is.

She doesn’t know what to tell her

She wonders whether the woman she used to be would recognize her now. Would she love her? Would she be proud of her? She thinks that woman would admire certain things. She would be proud that she became articulate. But she also thinks she would be worried.

She would ask why everything feels so heavy now. She would ask why she does not read for fun, but keeps taking notes for the next essay she wants to write. She would ask why every thought seems exhausted before it is even born. And perhaps hardest of all, she would ask why every human experience and every life has to become material, content. And she does not have an answer for her.

She thinks people underestimate how much of the soul depends upon uselessness, upon just wandering. When was the last time she invented worlds from dust, light, and fragments of imagination?

What has she become? What a sorrowful corruption of something once so sacred.

The woman who understood that to think deeply was never the goal, she refuses to believe she is dead.

Because, darling, dead things do not mourn themselves.

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I’m studying a course on Greek mythology, and this week’s overthinking has been strangely simple: what is a myth. It’s one of those topics that feels obvious until you attempt to define it. I’d love to hear your view, if you feel like sharing in the comments. So, what are myths?

They are stories, yes, but they are also a culture’s way of introducing itself to itself. A community trying to say, in the only medium it had for a long time, this is who we are, this is where we come from, this is what the world feels like when you live inside it. And maybe most importantly, this is how we live under the forces we cannot fully name, the gods, fate, the sky, whatever word a particular time and place chose. Sometimes, a kind of fear too. Hope and fear are a strange pair, but they make sense together here.

When I read myths, I notice how hard it is to talk about “truth” without immediately sliding into the modern habit of asking whether something really happened, because myth doesn’t behave well under that question, as we can’t verify it. And yet, it also refuses to become more fiction in the way a novel is fiction. There’s something else going on here, a claim to truth that is not about dates and evidence. I think it feels closer to psychological truth or value-truth, or the kind of truth that has to do with atmosphere.

• What does it feel like to be a person in this world?

• What does it feel like to belong to this community?

• What kinds of things are admired here?

• What kinds of things are feared?

• What kinds of things are punished?

• What kinds of things are forgiven?

Sometimes the only way to say those things is to let gods and heroes carry them for you. I think this is why myths feel formative in a way that formal education rarely is. We tell children stories before we teach them arguments. We give them narratives before we give them frameworks. And even when we call those stories “just stories”, they make a home inside the child’s mind. They begin shaping what feels plausible, what feels heroic, what feels shameful, what feels sacred. That feels more influential than we like to admit, because it implies that what we choose to tell our young is not harmless entertainment, but it gets inherited and becomes the soil in which later thought grows.

In that sense, to me, myth becomes a reservoir.

• Art draws from it, because myth is filled with symbol and emotion.

• Religion draws from it, because myth already holds relationships with the divine.

• Philosophy draws from it, because myth raises questions before it answers them.

• Science draws from it, in its earliest impulses, because myth is one of the first ways human beings tried to explain the world.

This is where storytelling was/is the key for myth to survive becomes stories survive. Someone tells them, someone remembers them, someone repeats them. They belong to memory (not in the vague sense of “the past”) as the intimate sense of someone’s voice carrying something they did not invent. Because we know myths are often older than the people telling them. They get altered by every retelling.

Oral tradition, especially makes this more prominent. Before writing, a story is not fixed. It is not a text you can point to and declare definitive. It is something that changes with the teller, with the place, with the listeners, with the needs of the moment. Here variation is the medium in which story flows, allowing multiple versions to exist without one version needing to defeat the others.

And then, at some point, the myths enter the written world. Around the literate era, the tales begin to crystallize into literature. They moved through poets and tragedians, through historians, and philosophers, through scholars and commentators. What interests me is how the myth doesn’t stop being myth when it becomes text. It moved from voice to page, from performance to manuscript, and then continues to live through the people who interpret, argue with, and reframe it. Sometimes I feel that we underestimate this. We think of writing as preservation, but writing is also transformation. It changes what a story is allowed to be. One another thing that’s interesting about myths is, how they leave more room for multiple versions to coexist without one completely closing the others down.

Another fascinating thing to me is, the way myths link to the cosmos. Stories contain gods and skies, and sky itself becomes part of its symbolic vocabulary. Planets map onto gods. Gods map onto moral qualities. The movement of stars becomes a way of imaging the movement of history. Even if we no longer believe any of that literally, its difficult not to feel the beauty of the impulse. Beautiful desire to make the universe speak in a language.

Lately, I’ve been stuck on one claim that “myth can’t simply be invented”. That if everyone understands a story as gratuitous invention, it becomes fiction, not myth. I understand, myth needs credibility, not necessarily factual credibility, but some sort of existential credibility. It needs to feel as though it came from somewhere larger than a single person’s imagination. And yet I also want to push back, or at least complicate it. We are reading these stories from so far away. The life-world that produced them are long gone. The way people lived, the way they understood life, suffering, divinity, fate, nature, language, all of it is distant.

Sometimes I wonder whether this distance is part of why myths fascinate me. They feel like messages from a human mind that is not quite ours anymore, which is shaped differently. And then I can’t help turning these thoughts around.

• If people thousands of years from now looked at our stories, our films, our political myths, our personal narratives, would they feel similarly detached?

• Would our stories begin to look like myths to them?

• Would they still carry a claim to truth, even if the details seemed strange, even if the context was impossible to fully recover?

What makes a story turn into myth over time? Is it age? Is it repetition? Is it usefulness? Is it the way a community keeps needing it?

The development of language feels like a turning point not just in human evolution but in human self-understanding. I can imagine long stretches of time where storytelling cultures flourished without writing. Where memory, voice, and repetition were the technologies then. Where a community’s sense of itself depended on what could be carried in speech. Writing comes later, and it brings so much, but it also changes this beauty in transmission, making it easier to preserve and freeze.

Myths to me, still feel alive because I see the traces of them being told. They carry the sense that they were never meant to be pinned down into a single correct version. They were meant to be lived with, returned to, spoken again, maybe sightly different, by another mouth, in another time, making them endure to remain capable of holding human experience.

Yours in thought,
Yana

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Dispatches that went out this quarter

#1 — There is a thing called a brain. Do not stop using it. It will surprise you more than AI.

Cognitive offloading is different from cognitive surrender. And then I sit with the question that scares me most: not that the tool will be smarter than us, but that we will get used to not thinking, and call it progress.

#2 — An essay after reading John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.

Seeing is never innocent. The essay moves through that narrowing act of looking, the strange loop of being perceived, and the difficulty of carrying a fluid, ocean-like interior world into words without shrinking it into buckets. And somewhere in that struggle, I end up at why we make anything at all.

#3 — The Greek Dispatches: The war gets its first weapon, a golden apple

At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, parents of Achilles, Eris, goddess of discord, throws a golden apple into the room. It poses a simple, public question: who is the most beautiful? Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite cannot ignore it. A wedding party becomes a contest. Zeus opts out, pushing the responsibility of judgment into a mouth that isn’t his. The apple becomes the war’s first weapon.

#4 — The Greek Dispatches: The war begins upstairs

Paris must choose between three goddesses. Each offer is a promise about what Paris gets to have and who Paris gets to be. Paris chooses what he wants most, and a private desire turns into a public war. Hera and Athena offer him futures that require a new self. Aphrodite wins because her offer doesn’t require Paris to become someone new. This essay is about the difference between becoming and admitting. About offers that change you versus offers that reveal you.

#5 — The Greek Dispatches: Let me be your muse

Zeus makes Aphrodite desire a mortal, Anchises, and the seduction turns toward fear, because beauty in Greek myth always carries danger. So I end up thinking about what desire demands of us once it enters our life. How it binds, how it makes us vulnerable, how it smuggles loss into love.

#6 — What if most of what I am preparing for never happens?

A note before you read: This is about my relationship with anxiety and imagined catastrophe, but I am writing it for anyone who has spent their days bracing for disasters that rarely arrive. If you are like me, then first for all, I understand you.

#7 — Midnight scribbles: Wanting but flinching, do you too?

I write about how easy it is to become a spectator of one’s own life, to keep preparing for living, imagining living, planning living, and still postponing the thing itself.

Thank you for being here and reading alongside me.

I will post another letter next quarter on what I am reading, writing, and thinking. Until then, take care.

Yours in thought,
Yana

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Cognitive offloading is different from cognitive surrender.

In my own thoughts, if I have to define offloading, I would say it is what notebooks, calendars, search engines, maps, and libraries have always been for. You put something down somewhere else so your mind can move on to what it is actually trying to do. But surrendering is a dangerous slip. It is the moment the tool stops being a place you store your thoughts and becomes the place your thoughts come from. Cognitive surrender is the same as saying “I no longer wish to think for myself”.

I read an article recently that pushed me into this line of thinking again, though the real push was not the article itself so much as the feeling I had while reading it.

Article link: Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender

We are tired, we are under constant pressure, we are being measured, we are being asked to produce something, anything, in a world that rewards output and often does not care what kind of thinking produced it. In that environment, surrender feels such a relief and sometimes disguised competence. Because you have an answer, you can move faster, and you can stop struggling. Basically, offloading is help, and surrender is substitution.

There are days when I need something outside my brain to hold onto details because my brain is busy trying to see a pattern. When I take notes while reading, I am offloading. When I make a list, I am offloading. When I use a tool to retrieve a quote or summarize a section I already understand, I am offloading.

The point is not that I am outsourcing the act of understanding, but that I am giving my attention back to the part that matters. Think of it as clearing a table so I can actually work on it. Surrender, though, happens when the table is already set for you, and you stop noticing that you never chose what meal you wanted.

A lot of our current conversation about AI confuses these two states because we are obsessed with capability. We ask whether the model is smart, whether it can reason, whether it can write better than us, whether it will replace this profession or that. What we miss is that capability is not the only thing at stake, and the deeper risk is not that AI will be better at thinking than humans, but that humans will get used to not thinking, and then call that progress.

What makes this tricky is that AI is genuinely good at something that looks like thinking from the outside. It surprises me how it can produce fluent explanations, generate plausible plans, give me working code for an entire app in short time, stitch together arguments in a way that feels coherent and good. But there is this eerie feeling, intellectually, that it might be wrong.

The problem is that real thinking is often not coherent at first, and it is almost often ugly. It is full of half-sentences, chicken scratches, and sometimes backtracking. Sometimes it is the uneasy feeling that you do not understand what you thought you understood. Sometimes it is the discomfort of realizing your question was badly formed. Sometimes it is staring at a problem long enough to discover that the problem is not what you thought it was. And I think that part is hard to simulate, because it is hard to tolerate.

There then comes this moment in almost any meaningful intellectual work where you cannot move forward by adding more words, but can only move forward by sitting in confusion long enough for your mind to reorganize itself. It is never a pretty process and definitely not efficient. But it is this process that changes you, because it forces your mind to build new structures instead of borrowing someone else’s.

When we surrender, we skip all these moments. We jump from prompt to output and accept a framing that feels reasonable, and then we polish it. And in doing so, we replace problem-solving with problem-defining. We become fluent at responding to the question the tool gives us, instead of wrestling with the question we actually have. Linking it to critical thinking and writing, it is not that you would stop having opinions, or that you stop writing. In fact, you might write more, or sound more articulate, or look like you gained clarity.

But underneath all that, your reasoning becomes increasingly dependent on whatever the system produces. Your “thinking” starts to be a kind of acceptance, and the work becomes one of editing or reviewing rather than creating. It is easy to tell ourselves that editing is still thinking. And it can be, because there is deep thinking in revision, there is deep thinking in critique.

But my dear, the question is: critique of what, revision of what?

If the first draft of your reasoning always comes from somewhere else, your mind begins to lose the muscle memory of starting from scratch. You may still be intelligent, but your relationship to your own mind changes. You become a curator rather than a maker, and eventually even your taste starts to adapt to what is easiest to curate. The scariest part is that you may not notice this happening because the incentives around you will reward you for it. Speed, metrics, performance, engagement, the constant pressure for output.

In many situations it is tempting to accept that the person who delivers the neatest answer fastest is treated as the best thinker, even if that answer is shallow, or even if the person does not actually understand what they are saying or doing, even if they are simply good at producing something that looks like understanding. There are very few who can accept this and make efforts to actually understand and learn. What about the rest?

That is where I think the paper I read made me notice how often modern work asks people to move forward without understanding, to nod along, to accept requirements they do not fully grasp, to execute plans that have been defined elsewhere. That being said, it is always majorly on the individual, but not completely the system. AI is outperforming the average thinker. If an organization was already built on a foundation of people who are not expected to understand deeply, a tool that generates confident answers can be slotted in seamlessly and can make it feel like an upgrade. And in truth and reality, it is.

The question, then, is not whether AI will make people less intelligent. The question is whether it will normalize a world in which “understanding” is optional because something else can produce the surface-level artifacts of understanding. Surrender is again often social, because people surrender together. A team can collectively accept a tool’s output because no one wants to be the difficult person who insists on thinking from first principles, no one wants to look slow, no one wants to be the one who cannot keep up.

This is where I think we need to be honest about what we are doing when we use these tools. Question what part of my mind am I outsourcing? Am I using the tool as a place to hold memory and speed up retrieval? Or am I asking it to show me patterns I might have missed? Or am I letting it define the pattern entirely? Or am I asking for a way out?

That is one way to tell, I think. When I am offloading, the tool’s output feels like it supports my thinking. When I am surrendering, the tool’s output feels like it replaces my thinking. It creates a feeling of completion that I did not earn. And earning is an odd word here, because it sounds like I am saying you have to suffer to deserve an idea, and I am not trying to romanticize struggle.

But there is something real about the effort of thinking, to let that brain hurt, and how that effort is part of what makes the thought yours. A mind that has taken billions of years to evolve to build a certain capacity of judgement and ability to see beyond what it is immediately given, is marvelously beautiful. If we hand that over too easily to a “tool”, to me, it is a change in what it means to be a person in the world.

The obvious counterargument is that we have always handed things over. We gave arithmetic to calculators, we gave navigation to GPS, we gave memory to the cloud. And yes, that is true. But there is a difference between outsourcing a function and outsourcing judgement. There is a difference between outsourcing a task and outsourcing the process by which you decide what the task is. Arithmetic is a tool. GPS is a tool. They do not usually pretend to be your mind, but AI does. That is part of its power and part of its danger. It can provide the next sentence before you find it yourself, and if you let it do that often enough, you start to forget how to wait for your own sentence.

I think that is why resisting surrender requires a strange kind of self-motivation. By any means, I am not saying “work harder”, but be loyal to your own interiority. Do not let speed and metrics dictate what counts as thinking. It also requires humility, because one reason surrender is tempting is that it protects you from feeling stupid. When you are thinking on your own, you have to face your own limitations, and face what you do not know, and face the possibility that your first instinct is wrong. A tool can spare you that, and it can give you a polished answer and let you pretend you were never confused.

But my dear, confusion is never a defect and often the beginning of understanding.

There is another layer here that I find hard to name without sounding dramatic, but I will try anyway. When we use AI to think for us, our reasoning becomes only as good as the AI’s reasoning. It means your judgement begins to inherit the model’s defaults, its sense of what counts as relevant, or what counts as a good argument. Even if you disagree with it, even if you push back, you are still operating within its range of possibilities and letting it set the initial space in which you move.

Perhaps that is the deepest risk. Not that we will become stupid, but that our imagination will narrow. That our mental world will be shaped by the same statistical patterns, the same consensus phrases, the same generic forms of reasoning. That we will begin to sound alike, our apps will look all the same, and then begin to think alike.

I do not want to claim that everyone who uses AI will end up like this. I do not want to universalize my fear. Some people will use these tools in ways that genuinely expand them and overcome barriers. The problem is not the existence of this assistance, but the ease with which assistance becomes abdication when the surrounding system rewards abdication.

So what does it look like to stay on the offloading side of the line?

For me, it begins with staying close to the question or problem. If I am using a tool, I want it to help me see my own question more clearly. I do not want it to replace it. I want it to help me retrieve, compare, reorganize, and I want it to act like a reflection of what I have said so I can hear it. But I do not want it to tell me what the question should be, because that is where my agency lives. Sometimes the questions it tells me are quite good too, because I have not thought about it, and that is very acceptable. But I want to be the one in the driver’s seat.

I am unsure if this feels like more than a tech debate, but more of a question about what kind of life we are building. A life where we remain participants in our own reasoning, or a life where we become managers and reviewers of borrowed outputs, or is it a life where we try to keep the muscle of thinking intact. I do not have a clean conclusion anyway, and I only know that the slip and fear is real and that it is easy, and that it happens under the most ordinary pressures. I know that we are tired, I know what the world is demanding. I know that the temptation to surrender will often feel like the sensible choice.

If AI can help us offload the parts that weigh us down, that is a gift. If it teaches us to surrender the part that makes us human, then it is not a gift at all. It is just another way of getting through the day without ever really being there.

Yours in thought,
Yana

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One might call that “reality.” Reality, in that sense, arrives already filtered by language, culture, and values, and by the limits of what a nervous system can register, and by the simplest fact that the observer is always inside the observation. So how can I be sure whose eyes I am seeing through? I can’t, because there is no clean outside position from which to verify what is being seen. It is not purely somebody else’s eyes, and it is not purely mine either, because I am a culmination of life that has happened to me, and of life that happened long before I came into existence. I can list the causes, like genes, DNA, society, culture, experience, and the accumulation of what has happened.

Berger’s line, “We only see what we look at,” starts to feel more interesting to me.

When I separate the physical fact of vision from the act of “seeing,” it becomes clearer that looking is a kind of choice. And choice is narrowing. One thing is brought within reach, and a hundred other things fall back out of reach. Even that narrowing has already been shaped by what I have been taught to notice, and what my mind has learned to scan for.

Whose eyes?

That brings me back to my earlier question about “whose eyes” I am using. There is a growing consciousness of individuality here, proof that this was one person’s seeing and not another’s. At a certain point, the question of perception becomes inseparable from the question of being perceived. The moment someone notices they are being seen, they often begin to see themselves through that gaze. Even when one is convinced they are seeing clearly, they are also inside someone else’s seeing.

Also, present perception is braided with whatever has already happened: past experience, past habits of attention, what I have learned to fear, what I have learned to call beautiful, what I have learned to ignore. All of it becomes what I draw inferences from, and what I carry into the present. It is difficult to pretend this is not happening every time one looks at something.

Berger also writes, “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”

And then I get stuck on the question. When I see something, where does seeing end and where does interpretation begin?

I think about how the eyes can hold still while the mind keeps moving, stitching pieces together. It pulls in memory, preference, fear, desire, and the whole backlog of what I have already learned to notice. In that sense, “vision” can feel continuously active, because “thought” is continuously active. The mind connects fragments and I end up calling that connecting “seeing.” What looks like a single act is a layered process: sensation, orientation, association, and then meaning.

The mighty ocean and petty buckets

When I move from “seeing” to “thought,” I realize I have spent my whole life trying to articulate what I call “thoughts.” Quite often, though, I feel convinced that language restricts thought, that thought has to be forced out into words, and that something in that forcing becomes rigid. But my mind does not feel rigid. It feels fluid, always moving, never quite settling. So how do I “show” you what my thought is?

It can feel like standing in front of an ocean and being asked to capture it, to tell the world what it is. So I reach for buckets. I fill them with whatever words I can find. In the end, the buckets can be shown to someone else, the way I am writing this to you now, so you can read it and “see” my thought. Even then, am I sure? It is easy to argue that it is not enough. The source of my thought feels like an ocean, a sense of meaning with no edges, and I keep reaching for language to give it edges. That sounds absurd.

Each of us can see and feel the ocean individually, and it makes me wonder whether the ocean is the same for everybody, a shared edgeless field of meaning, or something like it. Even if there is a sharedness, the forms shaped out of it, through the buckets, are obviously different. That is why each of us is different, and the difference comes from the “ways of seeing”, from perception, from upbringing, from what we are taught to value, from the kinds of thinking we learn to build, from what is called reality.

When you’re inside the ocean, is there an impulse to understand, and does understanding become an act of capturing it, naming it, explaining it? Because when I’m inside the ocean, meaning feels like the only way to trust the ocean. Then the search for meaning pulls me out of it, and I get further away. I start thinking about the intent behind stepping out, about finding buckets for the ocean, about carrying it forward into another person, about changing something, for example, you.

That is why the ocean, or shared meaning, feels like a kind of magic to me. We show each other our buckets, and sometimes something stable appears between them. The ocean is not possessed by any one person’s way of seeing, and yet it can be approached together. Isn’t that beautiful?

The paradox is living without explanation, or explaining oneself out of living. What would you choose?

Why make anything?

At this point, feeling, touching, or immersing inside the ocean is what I can clumsily call whatever is there before interpretation begins. The ocean is the first contact before words. But is it before thought, or after? In that sense, the ocean is not just something happening to me. It is what lets the underlying things feel real, even when they cannot be proven in language. Because without language, or any sort of expression, there would be no way to claim the ocean exists at all. That is why we make art, we write, we picture, we create.

Perhaps this is one reason art keeps returning, even when each era feels compelled to justify it. The age of AI asks again what art is for, the way earlier periods, and Walter Benjamin, asked what art is for in the age of mechanical reproduction. The recurrence of the question might come from anxiety, but the answer feels the same. When something is made, written, sung, photographed, something is placed outside the self and then met again. It is proof that something moved through a person, that existence left a mark.

Yours in thought,
Yana

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It feels like I carry a paradox in my chest like a stone, still looking forward, still reaching for the pulse of living, and at the same time trembling at its immediacy. I am afraid of living. There is a strange fear that keeps building up in me: want to feel, want to breathe, want to inhabit each moment fully, and yet there is something lurking in the name of “fear” as if doing “life” might unravel something I have been holding together. I do not always know what I think will unravel, but I only know that I get afraid. Sometimes I wonder what it is, exactly, that makes living feel terrifying and too much? At its worst, I am haunted by a fear that I might die without ever truly living. I do not mean that I have done nothing. I have done things. I have had days. I have survived. I have watched time pass and known I was in it. But the fear is that my life will be made of fragments, little safe fragments. Moments I allowed myself, then retreated from, a life always lived at arm’s length. If I am afraid of living, and I keep pulling back from the very experience that promises meaning, is that not also a kind of existence. A hesitant existence, if I have to be precise. A life where fear and hope keep touching each other, like two wires that should not meet, and still they do. What kind of life is that. Is that the only life there is for some of us. Or is living, in its truest sense, simply learning to hold this paradox. To let it sit heavy in the chest, and still take a step forward anyway. I once read about “self-actualization” from Abraham Maslow. From what I could recollect and understand is, living in a way that actually unfolds one’s potential. A life where authenticity, creativity, and purpose are structural. He suggested that fear often pushes us into safety and predictability, and that we become spectators of our own lives instead of participants. Is that what I am doing? Because I admire my own life from a distance, the way I can prepare for living, think about living, imaging living, plan living, and still delay the thing itself. Safety can look like so many things, sometimes it looks like waiting until I am ready, until I am healed, until I am better, until I have earned it. And i do not even know what “it” is sometimes. I only know the shape of postponement. Because vulnerability of life is, not being able to control how life lands on you, and more how you land on life. Of letting yourself be seen, and letting yourself care, and letting the world touch you. I want to live. I want laughter that wrinkles my eyes. I want the ache of love, because it proves I care. I want the kind of joy that feels slightly dangerous because it makes me feel how much I could lose. And still, I can feel the hesitation in my chest like a stone. A dark cloud walking beside me like a shadow, taking the name of fear. What if living leaves scars I cannot soothe. What if truly living demands more that I am ready to give. I think some part of me has been conditioned to equate living with risk. Risk of pain. Risk of failure. Risk of loss. Risk of humiliation. Even risk of being misunderstood. There is a part of me that treats intensity as danger as well. As though feeling something fully is the same things as stepping off a cliff. We are taught, in so many ways, that the ideal is to be without fear, as though it is a flaw. But I think fear is not something we eliminate and more of it walks with us into the act of living, and the real question is how we relate to it. I also think about the way fear is built into us. I have read little about it in cognitive neuroscience, and it is hard to escape the basic fact that fear has survival value. It arises because it improved the odds of staying alive. It is not there to make me happy or fulfilled. It is there to keep me from dying. In the modern human, I think those circuits are misfiring and becoming overactive responding to things that are not threats on the dying sense, but still feel like threats. A perceived failure. A risk to identity. A risk to belonging. A risk to being loved. It is strange to realize that my fear of living might not be a failure or risk to live. It might be my brain doing exactly what it was designed to do, only in the wrong situations, at the wrong volume, and for the wrong reasons. Kierkegaard’s “the sickness unto death” — the despair that comes from not being fully oneself. I do not always understand him, but I understand that feeling. The sense that something in me is not being allowed to come into the world. the sense that I am withholding myself from my own life, and that while holding becomes it own kind of pain. Kierkegaard’s soul living between hope and fear, that, feels like the most honest description of my inner world. I can still want it. I can still imagine a life that feels wide and alive. Fear, because to step into that life is to take on the responsibility of choices, and consequences, and the way mine intersects with other lives. Sometimes I wonder if I hold back because I do not trust myself with the weight of my own life. Or because I do not trust the world with me. Or because I am afraid that once I really begin, I will not be able to stop, and I will have to feel everything I have been keeping at a distance. We look at the horizon of living and admire it from afar. We long for richness of experience, depth, and connection. And we fear the very things that make life feel alive. So, is fear the opposite of living? Or is it simply part of it? Perhaps the work is not to become fearless, but I must try to become someone who can live while afraid, someone who can keep showing up anyway. Again and again in the full complexity of the heart. Risking being hurt because the alternative is a life closed off from sensation and dreams, that feels like a kind of dying to oneself, like a slow erosion of something that still wants to be born. I am afraid of living because it matters, and the tragedy, my darling, is to never dare to be alive in the first place.

Yours in thought, Yana.

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Slowly reading Greek literature, tragedies, and mythology as a long, lived thing by staying inside the events until they start giving me meaning.

I am not sure where else to begin except with Aphrodite. I have been reading the Homeric Hymn to her, and something about the way desire gets talked about there has made me want to write about it.

In many cultures and myths, desire is never treated as a private affair, but was always given a name, a goddess, a history, a genealogy, a war, and a set of consequences, and more importantly, placed her among the powers that contain the order of the world.

When I can say no one can escape her, it is because the goddess moves among the gods and mortals as swiftly as entering a bedroom or a battlefield, a forest or a city, perhaps drifts in the air or washes off in the sea. Every living creature in the world answers to her, be it birds or beasts; even the gods and goddesses are wooed by her charms. Then how small are mortals, and how influenced are we by Aphrodite?

What instantly grabbed my attention was the voice of the hymn itself, how perfectly it assumes the reality of the gods and the seriousness in their powers. Aphrodite’s appearance felt as a presence that alters the shape of things, and to feel that desire itself is being described as a force that possesses, something that is irresistible.

I had a feeling that desire in the hymn is elevated because it is unavoidable. Without it, nothing would begin, no lineage would continue, no world would reproduce itself. Aphrodite is that force that compels beings out of isolation and bonds them into relation, which gives the world a movement, to move forward.

I also used to think of desire as something interior and expressive, something that belongs to me, that reveals who I am. But the hymn made me think of a different idea: desire does not originate inside us, but it comes to us, and at the end, makes use of us.

In the hymn, yet again Zeus intervenes and causes Aphrodite herself to desire a mortal man. I think this is central to the Greek moral imagination, that what you have authority over is never absolute and to rule a certain domain is to be bound by it too, and that gods themselves are not exempt from the structures they uphold or govern.

So Aphrodite’s desire takes her to Anchises; she disguises herself, appearing as a mortal woman of extraordinary beauty. This encounter unfolds slowly, and suddenly the seduction turns into fear. Anchises is not confident and I think he senses that such beauty always carries danger. In a few moments he worries that this woman might be divine, that intimacy with her might destroy him. I am going to settle for an intuition that attraction arrives alongside that something irreversible is about to occur.

After they sleep together, Aphrodite reveals herself and that is when the revelation is devastating because Anchises is expecting death. In Greek myth, mortals who cross divine boundaries rarely escape unpunished. That is when Aphrodite starts to speak and I cannot miss how she speaks of humiliation. Of the indignity of having loved a mortal, of having been drawn into the finite world that she usually only visits, of bearing a child who must grow old and die. She will bear a child. Aeneas will be strong, noble, protected, but he will age, hence he will suffer and he will die. However much she would want to intervene, delay this, or shield her child, in the end she cannot undo this basic structure of human life.

What makes me relate this feeling to desire deeply is to sense the fear of loss, becoming vulnerable and exposed. When we love someone, we start to sprout a new fear inside us, for them. Perhaps, that is the burden of love.

We often speak of following our desires (follow your heart, follow your desire…) as though they were guides to our authentic true selves. But the hymn made me question this too: once desire has entered our life, in any form, what will it demand of us and how does it change, and do we submit to this change willingly or unknowingly?

Desire once entered becomes an event that alters the conditions of a life, to feel compelled, and we mistake it for just a mood. To desire is us giving approval for inviting change and attachment, at the same time, accepting that something will be lost.

From this moment I am going to see Aphrodite among us even though we rarely name her. I will start to see her when we reach for connection and recoil from the dependence that connection has compelled us to. To live under Aphrodite’s power is to live with the knowledge that desire will change us, that it will bind us to others, that it will make us vulnerable to loss.

Oh Aphrodite, hear my prayer, when you come to me, show me what you will make of me, show me what I am willing to lose.

Next up

I’m reading the chunk of texts and references where Paris escapes with Helen and how old oaths force the Greek leaders to join the war.

I’ll share more of my thinking-on-paper thoughts as they come to me. Until then, take care.

Yours in thought,
Yana

Share Yana's Reveries

Read all published dispatches here

Reading list

• The Homeric Hymns, a new translation by Micheal Crudden

Image credits

• A summer morning by Rupert Bunny

A note before you read: This is about my relationship with anxiety and imagined catastrophe, but I am writing it for anyone who has spent their days bracing for disasters that rarely arrive. If you are like me, then first for all, I understand you.

Someone from work suggested a book that I am currently reading and only done with the first chapter, but for every five minutes I find myself pausing more than I read. Constantly I kept asking myself about the difference between real danger and imagined catastrophe. And in that chain of thought, I got stuck with an uncomfortable realization about how small my problems are. How absurdly cushioned my anxieties look when placed beside lives that have known actual risk. Bodily risk, existential risk, the kind of risk that does not live entirely in the head. By any means I am not saying mental endurance is not harmful, but imagined problems are.

For the past couple of hours, I have been asking myself this question: Why are you doing this? Spending your days bracing for disasters that almost never happen? But let me tell you, I hesitate even writing that, because I know how easily it can turn cruel. I certainly do not want to diminish my own suffering or shame myself into gratitude. I know that anxiety is not cured by being told that others have it worse. But there is something I want to write about, something I need to understand myself, and here I am.

I have lived most of my life in preparation mode, always scanning, always anticipating, always imagining what could go wrong. My mind runs simulations constantly, because I think vigilance is my most important duty to survive. This habit certainly did not appear out of nowhere, but has been with me since childhood, and it kept me safe most of my life. I understand it is an old survival strategy as well, because some people learned to prepare by storing grain and some learned to prepare by storing imagined futures. Fortunately or unfortunately, I fall into the latter.

But the difference is, back then it felt intelligent and responsible. I learned early that if you think far enough ahead, if you rehearse every possible scenario, you might be able to soften the blow when things go wrong and you might suffer less later by suffering a little in advance. Except that “little” turned into a lot as I grew older. All this preparedness became a way of living when it was supposed to be a tool or mechanism. That in turn made my nervous system stay switched on, and my inner world became crowded with futures that never arrived. 99% of what I worried about did not happen, but the cost I paid was huge. I paid in tension, in worry, in tiredness, and in a constant sense of being mentally elsewhere.

Reading about someone whose days were shaped by real danger, by existential trauma, by physical endurance, by the possibility of actual harm, made something clear that my anxiety is responding only to imagined moments, and more often I am neither responding nor reacting, but always rehearsing. Do that intensively and extensively, then you realize that the problem with living in rehearsal constantly is that you never arrive on stage. Life keeps happening while you are preparing for it with days passing and experiences blurring. Moments that could have been inhabited fully are instead filtered through a haze now. When this rehearsal is not being put into reality, the problems are largely internal, living in the head, feeding on the little attention that’s left. The “real” challenge is that they can continue to live endlessly because they mostly do not demand any immediate action from the reality.

That made me realize something about what this takes from me. It seems like it takes a toll on my mind, but what is happening in the background is that it is equally taking a toll on the body. Because our nervous system is not designed to treat hypothetical futures as not emergencies. Yet that is exactly what I have trained mine to do. Every uncertainty becomes a potential threat, and every decision branches into a dozen imagined failures. It is exhausting, seriously. It makes me tired in a way that sleep or any amount of rest does not fix. Tired of always thinking, always anticipating, always standing a few steps ahead of my own life, tired of mistaking anxiety for foresight, tired of living as though something terrible is always just around the corner, even when the present moment is perfectly fine to live.

This is where the book I am reading made me feel a bit of gratitude for my life. A sense that perhaps I owe it more presence than I have been giving it. Because this life is the only thing I know for certain that I have. I do not know if there is rebirth. I do not know if consciousness returns in another form. I do not know what happens after death. All of that belongs to belief, speculation, spirituality, and maybe philosophy. What I do know is that I am alive now. That time is passing now and experience is still available to me now. But unfortunately anxiety is stealing this time without me recognizing it because my time is filled with moments where the body is present but the mind is elsewhere, busy running scenarios that never materialize or come to reality. To put it plainly, it is a tragedy to spend a finite life preparing for disasters that mostly do not come.

I do not know how to solve this, because this is all I know since I can remember my life. I do want to find another way. But I still worry. I still overthink. I still overthink my overthinking. My mind still gravitates toward worst-case scenarios with perfect consistency, and I am a conscientious person, so that is an added extra trouble. I have always been running around the question of how do I control my anxiety, but now I am starting to ask what kind of life do I want to be present for? I find myself wanting something simpler than happiness because happiness feels too abstract and easily commodified. What I want is to experience my days without constantly bracing against them. To enjoy time not as something to be optimized or protected, but to be lived. I want to sit inside moments without immediately trying to escape them mentally. I want to trust, just a little, that not every future needs to be pre-lived in my head. I want to loosen the vigilance a little to let life surprise me. I cannot remember when I last felt something surprising.

What I have learned reading stories is that fear has many forms, and that not all of them deserve equal authority. I am beginning to suspect that my anxiety is less about danger and more about control. My way of trying to outthink uncertainty and of believing that if I imagine every possible outcome, I can somehow protect myself from pain. But is that even possible? I clearly do not know how to un-train a nervous system that has been learning this pattern for three decades. I do not know how to stop scanning for danger in a world that sometimes does contain it. I just need to acknowledge uncertainty without letting it trap every minute of my day.

Most importantly, I want to stop missing my own life while trying to protect it so ferociously. I want to learn what it feels like to live in the world instead of in my head. To be here, in this moment, in this body, in this one life that I know I have, but with a little more trust that I can meet whatever comes without having already lived it a hundred times in my mind. I am nowhere near to knowing how to get there, but my dear, do you?

Yours in thought,
Yana

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Hope you had amazing moments to yourself amid all the “starting over” energy. For me, this month has been splendid: full of Greek stories and characters to talk with.

The Greek Dispatches

I’m slow reading Greek literature, tragedies, and mythology as a long, lived thing by staying inside the events until they start giving me meaning. Currently, I’m sitting and thinking with Homer, to ask why the moments and figures in The Iliad matter, and to explore how the feelings and judgments in this ancient text still resonate in our modern life and thought

Dispatches that went out this month

The Iliad poem opens in the tenth year of war, so I spent time this month to read the backstory of the Trojan war before The Iliad begins.

#3 — The war gets its first weapon, a golden apple

#4 — The war begins upstairs

Notes and a bit of side reading

Reading The Lucifer Effect, I came across this passage that stopped me mid-page. Philip Zimbardo, drawing on C. Wright Mills, writes about the “power elite” not merely as decision-makers but as those whose failure to act is itself a consequential act. Their power lies less in what they choose to do, and more in the fact that they can afford not to choose at all. It sent me straight back to my post on Zeus and the golden apple.

In the myth, Zeus’s “not my problem” is made possible by power, because he had the power. The power to step aside and refuse judgment, which inevitably lets consequences fall elsewhere, more precisely cascading downward. This kind of power belongs to those who are positioned high enough that they will not bear them. Mills puts it plainly: occupying such positions matters more than any single decision, because inaction reorganizes the world just as surely as action does.

Myth and social theory are meeting the same idea here, named differently: responsibility flowing downward but not power.

Thank you for being here and reading alongside me!

I’ll post another letter next month on what I’m reading, writing, and thinking. Until then, take care!

Yours in thought,
Yana

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Slowly reading Greek literature, tragedies, and mythology as a long, lived thing by staying inside the events until they start giving me meaning.

Desire.

That’s what comes to mind as a quick answer when I try to answer the question: Why did Paris choose Aphrodite? The most beautiful woman in the world as his wife. After reading the judgment of Paris, I slept with one question still lingering in my mind: what would I do if I were Paris and was given three bribes, one of them being “the most handsome man in the world as a husband”? Would I choose Aphrodite? Why and why not? That’s the thought that kept me up one night, and I was going round and round revolving around the three bribes/gifts the goddesses had to offer, and choosing one (for a second forgetting the whole point of this petty battle being about “who’s the fairest?”). There’s something more than just desire to drive Paris toward picking Aphrodite, and after a rabbit hole of thought, I ended up with: Hera and Athena offer him futures that require a new self. Aphrodite wins because her offer doesn’t require Paris to become someone new.

If I imagine being in Paris's shoes and try to take a look at these three goddesses and see them as women, perhaps they are not "women" so much as three forces/powers wearing faces and bodies. That is the first thing I want to hold onto and forget for a second about the goddesses, which will let me not see this as a beauty contest, because in the end it was not. So, it is power speaking in three accents, more precisely, institution (Hera), performance (Athena), want (Aphrodite), standing in front of a human being (I'm stressing it again, a human) whose hands are made for ordinary, mundane, mortal things. The story I was taught in school makes a big deal out of the apple, gold, beauty, the writing, but when I read it again after so many years, all I keep seeing is the hand. A poor mortal hand taking a problem that is too heavy for it, not in the way gold should be, but the weight of consequences, or the weight of public meaning, or the weight of being turned into a symbol (or even a fool) before you even know you are in an epic story.

Then comes Hera, whose offer is almost too large to be heard by the person she is addressing. Choose me, and I will make you king, not of a small place, but where power holds and lasts. What this one force is offering: position, or in other words institution. If I'm being this hand, and I chose this force, then it is offering me a self with a future with a throne, and a life that must stretch to contain it. But then the small mortal hand is used to tending goats and sheep, that can't even imagine where a life with a throne would go, without the inner furniture for it yet. This really seems like handing a child a crown and calling it practical. When one picks this offer, it demands you become someone else first, and then perhaps you can have it, and the becoming itself will justify the wanting: you will be king, so you may want what kings want.

Athena's offer comes with a different seduction: if you want kingship, I can give you something more reliable than a throne — a skill, victory, a mind that does not lose. This force is offering consequences, competence, strategy, excellence, admiration that is earned. Because a throne can make you admired for what you have, this will make you admired for what you can do. Now going back to the image of mortal hands of a shepherd, this offer sounds like a weapon which he does not know how to hold.

Then Aphrodite: You don't want a throne, you don't want a battlefield, you want one thing, and I can see it in your eyes. Companionship, passion, desire, and love for a lonely life is all that it wants. This force is not promising a future self, but choosing it will give you what can make your present self more beautiful and fulfilling. And that there is where the myth turns for me from a simple "bribe" story into something more psychological. Because so much of what we call "choice" is really a choice between the selves we are willing to become. It beautifully fits inside the life he already has sliding into the groove that already exists in him. He can stay him. All the goddesses offer him what a human is allowed to want and also offer him what a human is allowed to be. Hera and Athena offer futures that require a new self, where Aphrodite's offer doesn't need any transformation or ask for practice or ask him to earn; just asks to admit the want, a door that's already warm from his own hand.

There is a temptation to moralize this, to say that Paris chooses the easy path, or that Aphrodite is a trickster. But human desire alone can make kingdoms rise and fall. Put that aside for a moment. "You can stay you" — no transformation required at first, no need to imagine a new identity, no need to stretch and fail publicly, no need to tolerate the long pain of becoming eligible for what you want. Hera and Athena say, in their own ways, you can have it later, but first homework. Aphrodite says, you can have it, and you do not have to become someone else to deserve it.

The more I look at it, the more I see that the myth is not only about which bribe is stronger, but about which kind of wanting is bearable. Given that tense situation of three divine forces in front of him, it is very easy to choose satisfaction and comfort. It frames the choice as a risk calculation that happens inside a trembling body. The word "fairest" is really a trap-word, which locks a whole future into place. When Paris chooses Aphrodite, I imagine her being unceremonious, that apple was never the prize to her. She had to win the contest that claims the winner to be the most beautiful. What remains of a goddess of desire when she is publicly told she is not the most desirable?

After all the fuss is over, then the actual problem begins for the mortal hands, because Paris might think the danger is in what he chose, but the real danger is that the world now has a public record of who humiliated whom, and that is him. What Hera and Athena heard from his mouth is not "Aphrodite"; they heard, "You lose," and a story that will be retold. He becomes the mouth that spoke the humiliation, and mouths can be shut. To learn what is the cost to embarrass a queen and the goddess of war. Threats aside, I believe he chose honestly; he chose what he wants the most. Is it honest to choose the offer that asks the least of you, because it matches the self you already are? I do not know. I only know that myths care about consequences.

It makes me think of how rarely our choices remain private even when they begin in private desire. A private desire turning into a public war. Sometimes "love" is the word that makes theft sound socially acceptable. Theft. Love. The names we give to the same act depending on whose side we are on. I'm not sure what I think about Helen as a prize promised in exchange for a verdict, and a desire becoming an excuse for a war where so many bodies will be buried. Keeping aside Helen for a moment, what's interesting is Aphrodite wins because she offers something that requires no becoming, but something inside him, and she dressed it as destiny.

That night, I kept thinking about the difference between becoming and admitting. Becoming has a kind of dignity to it in modern culture and looks like effort and growth and earning. But there's its own cruelty: it demands that you inhabit a self before it is fully real, and it makes you perform eligibility. Admitting, on the other hand, can look like laziness, like indulgence, like weakness. It can also be the most honest thing you do, because it strips away the narrative of improvement and leaves you with the raw shape of want.

I'm not saying comfort zone is evil, but the offer that lets you stay you can also trap you inside the smallest version of yourself, keeping you from ever finding out what you could become. "Becoming" is the first step towards change, and also asks you to act as if you are already the person you are trying to become. And this is where the ethical question starts to wobble for me. Yes, becoming can be truthful, but it can also be a tactic, a way to manipulate yourself. A way to pretend you're somebody else and keep an identity project going even when the interior reality is different.

The opportunities that tell you you don’t have to change are more dangerous than the ones that ask you to change. And when you flip the coin to: becoming in private vs. becoming in public, then what’s your admission or accountability level?

We are living in a moment where these admissions are becoming social media content, where people confess their transformations as a form of proof. I see seductive "becoming her/him" essays, videos, everywhere. I'm becoming. This year is about becoming. The morning routine. The night routines. The glow-ups. The reset. The new era of someone who is always on top of the day. It's so exhausting because becoming feels like there is a future self already real and you are just catching up. Once you say "this is who I am becoming" in public you can't easily revise it without looking like a fool. People will read it as a failure or even lying. So the public transformation becomes its own trap. You are forced to keep being someone you may or may not "really" be, because the performance has witnesses now. This is where the apple returns to me. It forced a public verdict of what you chose to be.

I love "becoming," and I have many versions of myself whom I want to become. But my biggest problem with running after becoming is that when I keep "becoming," I keep postponing the moment of actually "being." I stay in preparation forever and can never admit what I really want without the armor of self-improvement. As if sometimes I forget what I am if I am not becoming her.

Alright, let's go back to our myth. I'm not saying Aphrodite is "evil" and Athena or Hera are "good." The three goddesses are three different ways of laundering desire and greatness into a life.

My Paris answer

If I were Paris, I'd choose Athena. A competent mind, where the wanting is justified by ability. Not "I should have it because I'm queen" but "I should have it because I can win." I admit that sounds brave in theory, but in practice it is terrifying. I can clearly see a downfall to this offer because a mind that doesn't lose implies a life where losing is intolerable. That sucks! Because life will make you lose sometimes.

What’s yours?

Leave a comment

Next up

I'm reading the chunk of texts and references where Paris escapes with Helen and how old oaths force the Greek leaders to join the war.

I'll share more of my thinking-on-paper thoughts as they come to me. Until then, take care.

Yours in thought,
Yana

Share Yana's Reveries

Read all published dispatches here

Reading list

• Apollodorus, Library

• Hyginus, Fabulae

• Judgement of Paris

• The Judgement of Paris in Greek Mythology

Image credits

• Source unknown, copy from Panegyria

• Judgement of Paris by Peter Paul Rubens

• Paris in the Phrygian cap by Antoni Brodowski

• Judgement of Paris, fresco from Pompeii

Slowly reading Greek literature, tragedies, and mythology as a long, lived thing by staying inside the events until they start giving me meaning.

Somehow, trouble and calm, both know the way to the human heart like veins and arteries.

I’ve just finished reading the backstory of the Trojan War, before I begin my slow reading of the Iliad’s main narrative. And I wonder, the first weapon in this huge war was a question that was carved into gold and left where everyone could see it: to the fairest. That seems like such a small thing to ignite a world, and yet it’s all it takes to change the temperature of a room. If the same question was asked in private, it would seem like flattery to make somebody smile. But the whole mess started when the question was posed and demanded as a public ranking. To give the title of the most beautiful will rearrange the whole dynamics of who is above and who is below. I think wars begin there, long before any ships have sailed and long before anybody bleeds: who’s above and who’s below. It’s the moment the war learns it can hurt someone without drawing blood.

Once the question barges into the wedding party, someone has to answer it or refuse it or even pretend it does not need answering. But none of these are neutral choices because if no one picks the apple, who is refusing it? The whole point of the apple is not about “the fairest,” but it was designed as a means to humiliation. The cleaner way to design it is to use beauty, because unfortunately beauty is a socially permitted reason to rank women without admitting you are ranking status.

When the public humiliation is between the goddesses, then it becomes a melodrama of its own kind. Myth survives with stories, and people telling those stories. And one such humiliation story is the story of the golden apple of discord. Being hurt in public with witnesses who will remember and retell what they saw. We pretend we live in a world of private feelings and personal choice, but so much of what we do is shaped by the fear of what will be said later or the story that will be told about us.

A humiliation that happens in private is still devastating, and it belongs to the two people (mostly) inside it. But public humiliation on the other hand, grows its own body to live, legs to spread, and a mouth to twist the facts. Someone humiliated is seen being hurt by witnesses who might not even mean harm. But it still travels and spreads because that grown mouth will retell this memory to others. I came across a talk by Ute Frevert (video below), and in her book she argues that shaming works as an instrument of power, not only when a state punishes, but also when institutions do, when ordinary groups do, and when the media does. It doesn’t mean people are bad, but that shame can be passed around. Even when formal punishment changes its shape, the social appetite for shaming can simply migrate into new places: schools, workplaces, newspapers, and the internet. It made me think of the apple again. You don’t need to hit someone to control them. Just place them under a light with other people watching.

I understand why it’s important for the three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, to win the contest. For Hera, queen of Olympus, to be ranked second in a public forum would be to undermine her authority. Queens don’t lose contests in public and remain queens. Athena here is facing a different calculus altogether. She is the goddess of war and strategy; somebody who doesn’t/cannot lose. It’s no longer about being told you are not the fairest in public for her but about the challenge to status. As for Aphrodite, her reason is the most existential. As the goddess of desire and love, she exists in the realm of attraction and longing. One can imagine all the bodies and faces turning towards her in the hall when the apple’s inscription was revealed. If she loses a beauty contest, the very category that defines her essence, what is she then? What remains of her divine identity?

When the three goddesses go to Mount Ida with Hermes to visit Paris, that moment, the problem leaves the room and begins looking for somewhere else, more precisely, somebody else’s (not Zeus) throat to live in. When the goddesses meet Paris (Alexander), that’s when the apple finds a carrier. The problem has found a carrier. I reckon his first instinct should be to run. His second, to freeze. Or ironically, the third, to pray. Then the mind catches up and asks the most useless question in the world. Who do you pray to when gods are already standing in front of you? The moment the apple changes its owners, that’s when Strife succeeded in her plan. The golden apple made gods into a conflict, and now it needs to become a conflict that can spread.

The story becomes more interesting when the most powerful figure in the room refuses to touch the problem at all. Zeus says no. The moment he says “not my problem,” I feel two things at once. One is disgust. The other is fascination. I can’t tell whether he’s dodging responsibility or designing a trap. He simply passed down the problem, which in this case is a verdict, into a “mouth that isn't his.” How clever of Zeus. He doesn’t actually remove himself from the equation. He merely creates enough distance between his actions and their consequences so that he can maintain plausible deniability. Not my problem. And yet the problem still moves forward, routed through other hands, but his remain clean while the story continues. Later, when suffering arrives, the story will have a culprit with a face, which is not his.

I tend to think being in a position of leadership demands a lot of decision-making and actions. But this one move from him is so very different from how the war had become a mortal burden because of old oaths. So ironic that gods wash their hands, but mortals took up the inevitable burden and carried it. Perhaps that’s the second weapon in this war, after the golden apple. War looks like blood, swords, and spears; that’s what is easy to see. What’s harder to see are these tiny courses of action that prepare violence long before anyone lifts a blade. In the Trojan War, this casual escape of responsibility created perfect conditions where violence became inevitable.

I remember how I first met the Trojan War in school. I memorized names, events, the story itself, to pass the exams. I never truly understood why the war starts, what makes conflict feel necessary to the people inside it, why a small insult or a public ranking has the power to spread and remain. Even now, when people fight, when the news carries wars into the room, the same question returns in a plain and helpless form. Why? Why should a conflict start at all? Why can’t people live and let live?

Perhaps the people who can say “not my problem” are often the ones with the power to actually solve the problem.

Refusal which leads to some other’s action is still an action. Refusal can keep hands clean while still making the thing happen. Sometimes it looks like avoidance, but the more I look at it, the more it feels like strategy. I can’t always tell whether it is refusal by avoidance or by design. The difference matters because those two don’t mean the same thing when someone is not strong enough and deflects out of fear, versus when someone is strong enough and deflects out of control. The story keeps asking a question:

How does one tell honest refusal from power hiding, when avoidance and strategy can have the same shape, separated only by who has strength and who does not?

Zeus outsourcing the mess into “a mouth that isn't his” pushes the responsibility into Paris’s mouth, into a small mortal life. The pattern repeats throughout our human history. Leaders speak through advisors, counselors, corporations, representatives. With each layer or step of separation, distance is added between the decision maker and the consequence bearer. The decision maker stays protected while the consequence bearer becomes identifiable, punishable, and blame-able. And it becomes clearer why fear gathers around decisions. In this case, not only the decision itself, but also the story people will tell about it later. The ruckus it would create if things go wrong. So hey, not me, it’s them. How easy it is to have a person-shaped explanation when we say we want justice. We want a name we can repeat and a face that can be made to stand in for the whole mess, because it’s too hard to stay angry at a system. To say “this person hurt me” is easier than to say “this thing hurt me.”

I wonder if Homer understood how god’s politics feel eerily familiar for human institutions thousands of years later. A perfect template for how power preserved itself by creating these layers of deniability or silence. Somebody else will bleed for it. Not always literal blood, at least not at first. Sometimes reputational blood comes first; the blood of who started it, who made the decision that triggered the chain of events. I don’t fully trust this move of Zeus, but I can see why stories do this. A human choice or mistake is easier to hate or punish than a god’s shrug.

Then another question opens: what does it mean to have the convenient option to opt out of consequences? Zeus can surely step back because, ultimately, he won’t be the one bleeding on the battlefield. The gods watch human suffering with the detached interest of spectators at some sporting event. We have not yet started the main narrative of the Iliad, but the gods have favorites, they place bets on their favorites, they occasionally interfere, but who’s the one bleeding? Actually bleeding? Gods are surely not invested in the way the mortals are.

I’d call this “watching distant suffering” today. It’s easy to watch wars, disasters, suffering one doesn’t experience directly but through screens. However, everybody has opinions, preferences; some might even donate or advocate, but there is still the ability to turn away when it becomes too much. “Not my problem” — that’s our privilege. Because one can close the app or change the channel, simply divert the attention elsewhere.

The relationship between power and responsibility in the Iliad feels deliberately imbalanced (at least presently). Influencing the events while not claiming ownership of outcomes. But the king of gods acting this way is dangerous. Because he is unbound by the consequences, with so much power to create potential harm. Why? When the greatest god steps back, the problem goes to smaller gods and mortals to fill the vacuum. The smaller ones don’t get to opt out or change the channel. That there is a trap, which is hard to escape once it has happened.

How neat Zeus’s move is! He was asked to pick a side in what could be called a child’s game. I can’t call him innocent, but I also can’t call him simply guilty. If there is one thing I’m taking back from this chunk of reading: Zeus has shown me a kind of power that doesn’t need to touch the knife. It only needs to decide whose hand will hold it, not the one who routed the problem. And then, later, when blood comes, everyone points to the hand holding the knife. Not the one who designed the situation or routed the problem.

If refusal can be an action, then how do we differentiate between honest refusal and power hiding?

The apple leaves the wedding hall, but it does not leave the story. It travels to a place where a verdict can be spoken without the speaker having the power to survive it. Soon the contest will stop being about being seen and become about what desire can buy when it is offered the wrong kind of authority.

Next up

I’ll be reading the Judgment of Paris. I’m curious to see what drew him to Aphrodite, and why he chose her over the other goddesses. I’ll share more of my thinking-on-paper thoughts as they come to me. Until then, take care.

Yours in thought,
Yana

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Read all published dispatches here

Reading list

• Apollodorus, Library

• Hyginus, Fabulae

Image credits

• @memorias_delpasado

• Eris Greek Goddess by YeCuriosityShoppe

• The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis by Peter Paul Rubens

• The Judgement of Paris by Gustav Pope

Psst, quietly sliding this across the table: I've been brewing a new project, and I think you're going to love it. More details at the end of this letter.

Wherever you are, I wish you Merry Christmas and Happy 2026!

This month, I started reading ancient Greek literature, especially the tragedies about fate and free will. In Sophocles’s works, characters face moments where they must choose between accepting their destiny or following their own moral values. And their choices leads to their own destruction.

What seems predetermined vs. what we choose for ourselves — that’s this month’s theme!

What I read, wrote, and thought

1. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

Essay exploring fate, free will, certainty, and prophecies. I was fascinated by how knowledge (certainty about the future) itself becomes a kind of fate. Prophecies aren’t just predictions, but they’re images of our fears and desires. When we try hard to understand what’s coming, that search itself can lead us straight to the thing we were trying to avoid.

2. Antigone by Sophocles

Essay about moral courage. At the heart of Antigone, the tragedy is about divine vs. human law. Sticking to what you believe is right, even when it costs you everything, shows the best of human character. But do we? Strong beliefs can feel pure and right when they’re your own, but can look stubborn and inflexible to others.

3. Musings: On consciousness

I try to understand consciousness the way I understand engineering problems. But in engineering, you must clearly define the problem before you can solve it. Consciousness doesn’t stay still long enough for that. The mind is both the tool we use to study consciousness and the thing we’re studying. Unfortunately we can’t step outside it to look at it objectively.

4. Musings: On atomic priesthood

I start with the “Golem of Prague,” an old Jewish myth. But I’m really thinking about what happens when we create something we can’t control anymore. Nuclear waste is like a modern golem and will be dangerous for thousands of years, long after we are gone. The idea of “atomic priesthood”: one day, we stop relying on instructions and start relying on myth and fear to keep danger sealed and hidden.

What’s coming next!

The Iliad by Homer

The Greek Dispatches is me slowly reading Greek literature, tragedies, and mythology as a long, lived thing by staying inside the events until they start giving me meaning. I read a chunk of the poem, stop where I feel pulled, and write essays from there.

Currently, I’m sitting and thinking with Homer, to ask why the moments and figures in The Iliad matter, and to explore how the feelings and judgments in this ancient text still resonate in our modern life and thought.

Thank you for being here and reading alongside me!

Yours in thought,
Yana

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Slowly reading Greek literature, tragedies, and mythology as a long, lived thing by staying inside the events until they start giving me meaning.

Sometimes we don’t follow the order of events; we follow the order of grief.

Oedipus Rex was my first encounter with Greek tragedy, which kept me drawing back to the Theban plays, leading me to Antigone. Though Oedipus at Colonus comes next chronologically in the story, I chose Antigone partly to understand Sophocles’s writing process. He actually wrote Antigone first, followed by Oedipus the King, and then Oedipus at Colonus.

Written in or before 441 BCE, Antigone is a page in the book of all we’ve lost, and all we’re still fighting for. The play explores divine vs. human law, the weight women carried in that distant age, and what the limitations of authority can mean — then and today!

My essay on Oedipus Rex, a Greek tragedy by Sophocles about fate, free will, certainty, and prophecies.

For Those Who Haven’t Read It

Note: If you’ve already read the play or know the story, feel free to skip this section. For context on events before Antigone, read my Oedipus Rex essay.

The two brothers (Oedipus’s sons Eteocles and Polyneices), fight because they had agreed to take turns ruling Thebes, but Eteocles refused to give up the throne when it was Polyneices’s turn. Polyneices then gathered an army from Argos to claim his rightful place, leading to a battle at the seven gates of Thebes where both brothers killed each other and their uncle Creon becomes king. He orders that Eteocles be buried with honor as a defender of the city, but Polyneices must be left unburied as a traitor. Their sister Antigone defies this order to honor divine law by burying Polyneices. When caught, she accepts her death sentence rather than back down. Her defiance triggers a tragic chain of events → Antigone’s death leads to the suicide of Haemon (Creon’s son and her fiance), which causes Eurydice (Creon’s wife) to take her own life. By the end, Creon understands his terrible mistake, but only after losing his entire family.

Female confrontation in a patriarchal world

In ancient Athens, women were considered legal minors throughout their lives, always under the guardianship of a male relative. They couldn’t own property independently, participate in politics, or even move freely in public spaces. Their primary value was in producing legitimate male heirs and maintaining the household.

Now imagine Antigone confronting THE KING! How bold! This becomes clearer when Creon, enraged at being challenged, says, “If she’s not punished for taking the upper hand, then I am not a man. She would be a man!” and later, “As long as I live, I will not be ruled by a woman.” What Antigone was unknowingly doing here was threatening Creon’s identity as a man in power.

I absolutely loved and admired the power of Antigone’s unflinching moral certainty. When Antigone was questioned if she’s not ashamed to have a mind apart from others, she does not back down. She believes divine law is higher than human law.

“I cannot side with hatred. My nature sides with love.”
“He has no right to keep me from my own.”
— Antigone, speaking of Creon’s order against burying her brother.

Compared to Ismene’s (her sister) submissive nature, Antigone has a clear sense of where she stands. Having such a strong will, especially in those times when men ruled, was astonishing!

“We are women and we do not fight with men. We’re subject to them because they’re stronger, and we must obey this order, even if it hurts us more.”
— Ismene

Reading these lines, I was slightly frustrated. Stronger in what way? I agree, physically stronger, by default. Setting aside gender, what makes someone right or just? What about mental strength? What about wisdom, values, nobility, and virtue?

Haemon: Younger but wiser than the older

I loved Haemon’s role in this tragedy. He stood right in the middle, caught between competing loyalties as Creon’s son and Antigone’s fiancé. And confronted his father’s rigidity with absolute wisdom!

Throughout the play, he makes powerful arguments about the nature of good leadership. He points out that the city actually supports Antigone, which reveals that Creon’s stance doesn’t represent the will of the people he claims to protect. Haemon tells his father that a good ruler should be willing to listen and adapt, and that wisdom comes not from rigidly holding one’s position, but from being open to other perspectives.

What I found interesting about Haemon’s argument compared to Antigone’s was that his came from a position of civic responsibility while hers appealed to divine law. His argument fell right between Antigone’s approach and Creon’s human tyranny.

Haemon showed that wisdom isn’t about age or power, but it’s about being willing to listen and change if proven wrong.

Divine vs. human law

At the heart of Antigone, the tragedy is about divine law vs. human law. Antigone stands very firmly on the side of divine law, insisting that the burial of the dead is a sacred duty that comes before any human order.

“No man could frighten me into taking on the god’s penalty for breaking such a law”
— Antigone

In all of the Theban tragedies, Tiresias (the priest) played such an important role. The blind prophet who serves as a bridge between the human and divine realms, eventually confirms Antigone’s position when he tells Creon: “The dead are no business of yours; not even the gods above own any part of them. You’ve committed violence against them.”

If Tiresias hadn’t appeared in the play, I wonder if Creon would have ever recognized his error. His stubbornness could have continued unchallenged, at least in his own mind.

“It is common knowledge, any human being can go wrong. But even when he does, a man may still succeed. He may have his share of luck and good advice but only if he’s willing to bend and find a cure for the trouble he’s caused. It’s only being stubborn proves you’re a fool.”
— Tiresias

The strength that we discussed earlier: I think true strength lies in being flexible enough to recognize and correct our errors.

Loyalty, authority, and Antigone’s relevance in current times

I was recently asked: is absolute loyalty to authority morally right?

Coincidentally, Antigone’s clear answer: NO. Sophocles shows us that moral authority doesn’t come from power or position, but from following principles, whether divine, as Antigone would have it, or the common good, as Haemon argues.

This tragedy feels so eerily modern because it’s screaming civil disobedience to state power. When laws violate our ethical principles or moral conscience, what should we do? Antigone’s tragedy is similar to → from civil rights protesters to whistleblowers who risk everything to expose wrongdoing. Like standing up for what we believe is right, even when it costs us everything, is what gives our lives meaning.

Moreover, Creon’s flaw is also very human: he can’t separate criticism from personal attack. When we hear something we don’t want to hear, we blame the messenger and take out our emotions on whoever delivered the news. How many of us respond to criticism by attacking the critic instead of considering whether the critique has merit?

Afterthoughts

I’m still thinking about moral certainty. I admire how brave and clear Antigone is, but I’m also worried about how absolute both she and Creon are in their beliefs. Being so certain about what’s right can be both heroic and destructive at the same time. It’s made me rethink what moral courage really means. Sometimes, sticking to what you believe is right, even when it costs you everything, shows the best of human character. But when you’re so certain that you won’t consider other options or change your mind, that certainty can make you blind to other truths. That’s why I appreciate Haemon and Tiresias → they’re willing to reconsider and adapt when needed, to bend and find a cure for the trouble one has caused. But I know the real world doesn’t always work that way.

I’m left wondering:

What if we all had the courage, like Antigone, to stand up against unfair authority?
Would that make our world better?
Or would things stay the same, and we’d be helpless, as we are now?
Does speaking up actually change anything?

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What I’m Reading Next

• The Iliad by Homer

• The Odyssey by Homer

Yours in thought,
Yana

Read all published dispatches here

Share Yana's Reveries

References for facts mentioned in this essay

• Women in classical Athens

• The role of women in ancient Athenian society and culture

• Women in Classical Greece: The Life of Athenian Women during the Classical Period

• Women in ancient Greece The role of women in the Classical Period