The Mumpsimus

Kaoru Nonomura's Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple (trans by Juliet Winters Carpenter) is, as far as I know, the most detailed look inside the practices of the Eiheiji temple, founded in the mid-13th century with the great Dōgen as abbot. Certainly, it is the most detailed description in English of daily life within Eiheiji. I will read almost anything about monks and hermits, regardless of religion or inclination, if the focus is on the practicalities more than the dogmas. (An obsession with Henry David Thoreau when I was in high school was probably the first sign of this inclination.) My ideal life would certainly be that of a monk; alas, I have no ability to believe in any particular religion, never mind devote my life to faith. Is there a cloister for cheerful nihilists, a quiet scholastic place where I might sit and contemplate the meaninglessness of existence? Many years ago, I met a former Trappist monk in Nicaragua, a man inspired, like many,...

At the end of an interesting episode of the Hermitix podcast, Jesuit priest and professor of theology Ryan Duns says that he has been thinking about how to write his next book, one built partly from his course at Marquette University on “Evil, Horror, and Theology”, and that he has struggled with a focus for it as well as a title. His original idea for a title was The Dark Transcendent: The Metaphysics and Theology of Horror , but because that makes the topic so large, he is now inclined to call the book Horror: A Theology . I would eagerly read a book with that title, especially one written by someone with as deep an understanding of theology as Duns, because most of what I’ve read on the topic of how horror intersects with theology feels superficial or reductive. Yet horror is the mode of storytelling most reliant on systems of belief and unbelief, both as subject of its stories and as tool for its effects — thus horror is the mode most inclined to exploration of how belief matter...

2020 has been such a difficult, strange year that I often forget a book I wrote got published at the beginning of it. The publication of that book feels like it was a lifetime ago, something from a different world. And in many ways it was a different world, because the book was released just as we were becoming aware that COVID-19 might be something of a problem for the United States. A month after the book's publication, we knew things were serious. Two months after, the routines of the world had changed. Trying to do a year in review post this year is especially difficult because the year felt so long and life was so upended that memory is both hazy and untrustworthy. This year, I didn't write a lot, but I read far more than I thought I had — once I started making a list in preparation for this post, I was surprised at just how much reading I did. This realization made me somewhat less depressed about how little success I've had this year at writing fiction or essays, ...