how to change your life, part 2: agnes callard's aspiration

every writer begins as a poseur ✦ on Kafka, Proust, philosophy, and trying very hard

On Monday I woke up at 5am, wrote from 6–7am, and then headed into work. This isn’t the first time in my life I’ve tried to have a writing schedule like this. Indeed, it often feels as if the last decade of my life was a long, ineffectual struggle between wanting to write and wanting to be peaceful, lazy, leisurely, still. Was it all laziness? Part of it was fear, too: The terrible, lonely fear that, even with a writing schedule in place, I would have nothing to say.

How did I get here, to this strange state of discipline and ease, where writing is no longer the thing I aspire to do, without being able to actually get any of it done? How did the aspiration transform into an actual habit?

Illustration from Ochiai Yoshiiku’s Clear Shadows (1867), via the Public Domain Review

This is part 2 of how to change your life, where I write about philosophy texts as self-help books. In making this comparison, I’m not trying to denigrate philosophy, but elevate it. Yes, philosophy is a serious, rigorous academic discipline, with a lot of people reading Wittgenstein in the original German and pontificating away in a paywalled journal article. But it’s also, I think, a discipline that is meant to resonate with our ordinary lives, our real lives outside the ivory tower. In our real lives, we’re falling in love and working for a living and trying to find meaning. We’re trying to wake up early or stay up late and do something that matters to us, and sometimes it’s hard to explain why it matters so much, why it feels so necessary and vital to be spending our time reading books we don’t understand, writing essays that feel inadequate. We’re trying to answer difficult questions, like what we want and value and desire and long for—and these are all questions that philosophers have wrestled with.

Part 1, if you missed it, is about L.A. Paul’s Transformative Experience (2014) and how I’ve applied it to thinking about queer identity and gatekeeping:

This post is about Agnes Callard’s Aspiration: The Agency of Belonging (2018). I’m always suspicious of people who say things like This book changed my life—like, what does that even mean? Many books have enacted small shifts in my consciousness, given me new facts and feelings that I didn’t have before.

But Aspiration is the rare book that helped me make a major life decision. The year after I read it, I quit my job to spend two years reading and writing (also known as “going to grad school”). So when I say that Callard’s book changed my life, what I mean is that it helped me articulate who I wanted to be—someone intellectually serious and devoted—and it gave me the courage to try and become that person.

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Agnes Callard’s Aspiration: The Agency of Belonging

The terminally online may recognize Agnes Callard because of the fantastically gossipy profile that Rachel Aviv wrote for the New Yorker last year, “Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds.” It’s elegantly and demurely written and rivals the best viral essays from The Cut. Why? Because it’s about Agnes Callard’s complicated, fascinating love life, and specifically how, as a philosophy professor at UChicago, she left her husband (a professor in the same department) for a younger grad student (doing a PhD in…you guessed it, the same department). Oh, and Callard, her ex-husband, and her new husband all live together now.

Philosophy (at least from my removed vantage point) seems like an incredibly gossipy discipline—their version of Deuxmoi is basically Leiter Reports. But Aviv’s profile made Agnes Callard a recognizable name outside of academic philosophy—in tragic ways, I think, because in the following weeks, it felt like everyone was jostling to post their Agnes Callard takedown, essentially dismissing her as interpersonally callous and unserious.

Which I really, really resent, if I’m being honest! Not because I have any particular stake in Agnes Callard the person, but because she’s one of the few writers where I can say, with great seriousness and sincerity: Her book changed my life.

My first introduction to Agnes Callard was through an earlier New Yorker article, Joshua Rothman’s “The Art of Decision-Making,” published in 2019. In it, Rothman writes about how we choose to change ourselves—in hesitant, fumbling ways—and how Callard’s philosophy of “aspiration” understands those choices.

Suppose that you sign up for a classical-music-appreciation class, in which your first assignment is to listen to a symphony. You put on headphones, press Play—and fall asleep. The problem is that you don’t actually want to listen to classical music; you just want to want to. Aspiring, Callard thinks, is a common human activity: there are aspiring wine lovers, art appreciators, sports fans, fashionistas, [DJ]s, executives, alpinists, do-gooders, parents, and religious believers, all hatching plans to value new things…

…[A]spirants must grow comfortable with a certain quantity of awkward pretense. If someone were to ask you why you enrolled, you would be overreaching if you said that you were moved by the profound beauty of classical music. The truth, which is harder to communicate, is that you have some vague sense of its value, which you hope that some future version of yourself might properly grasp.

I felt a deep sense of identification reading Rothman’s words. Because the reason I had a copy of the New Yorker in front of me that evening was precisely because of an “awkward pretense” I was enacting. I was a young person, living in San Francisco, working in tech, who hadn’t taken any serious literature or humanities classes in undergrad. I was dissatisfied with myself, and conscious of how little I knew about the world. Subscribing to the New Yorker was my attempt to stake out a different self—someone who was well-read, historically informed, and culturally literate—but I was painfully aware that I wasn’t that person yet. The issues would arrive on my doorstep and I’d try to read them, and then I’d somehow end up on my phone for the next three hours. I suspect that, over the 12 months I subscribed to the magazine, I only finished reading 1 or 2 issues in full.

I’m lucky, really, that one of the issues I read was the one where Rothman’s article appeared. Because the article helped me see my hapless, inadequate pretensions with a bit more compassion. “Being a well-meaning phony,” Rothman suggested, “is key to our self-transformations.” Phoniness wasn’t a sign I was fundamentally, intrinsically unworthy of my aspirations. Phoniness was, in fact, an essential part of any aspirational project.

Faking it (before you’ve made it)

There’s something uncomfortable about people who are trying too hard. We judge them for their pretensions; we feel embarrassed at the nakedness of their effort. The embarrassment is often a projection of our own insecurities about striving. If we managed, with heroic unselfconsciousness, to really commit to becoming a writer, an artist, a better person—then we would have to acknowledge that we aren’t that person yet. More than that: Striving means we aren’t that person yet—and we might never become that person. It’s easier to not try—and indulge in the subtle, self-lacerating logic of I can’t believe that person is trying so hard! I would never.

It’s so embarrassing to try and be someone you’re not. It makes you a tryhard, a poseur, a pseud. The problem, of course, is that when you aspire to be better than you are, there’s no other way to do it except by starting. You’re always faking it at the start, always doing things badly. You’re pretending to appreciate things that you can only dimly discern the value of. You’re not a writer yet, you’re not even someone with a legitimate writing practice, you’re just someone returning over and over to that Ira Glass quote about taste, telling yourself that it’s okay to be terrible at writing, as long as you keep on trying.

Aspiration, Callard writes, is “work” for the aspirant:

The work is visible in her struggles to sustain interest in the hobby or relationship or career or religion or aesthetic experience that will later become second nature; in her repeated attempts to “get it right,” attempts that must be performed without the benefit of knowing exactly what rightness consists in; and, most generally, in the fact that she always wants and strives to be farther along than she is.

The aspirant, quite naturally, becomes fascinated with others who are further along, who have attained the state of being she would like for herself. There’s envy, of course. But there’s also a desire to understand how others got there, and whether the aspirant can learn anything from that process.

I remember being fascinated at everyone I met who was more well-read and well-spoken than me. Many had some form of a liberal arts education, and many were grad students. I had this formless sense that they had something I didn’t—a greater capacity for serious thought and literary expression. What was second nature to them was totally foreign to me. I would read the books they referenced and recommended, trying to “get it right,” as Callard might say, even though I didn’t quite understand what the “right” kind of reader, writer, and thinker was to me. I just knew I wasn’t that person yet!

And to become that person, I had to put in the time—I had to work on becoming, which seemed to mean reading and writing more, even though I wasn’t totally sure I was reading the right things or writing anything worthwhile. I’m reminded of

Ava

’s post on effort, where she writes:

So much of getting good at anything is just pure labor: figuring out how to try and then offering up the hours…

…[P]eople always assume I’m interested in the end result—the wonderful thing they’ve made—when what I’m really interested in is the process. How did you get this way and why? I’m curious about the ugliness of trying, the years and years of wanting and hoping and working. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by craft. I think it’s because it requires such a sustained tenacity.

The tenacity comes out most clearly in writers’ diaries and writers’ routines, where the work of aspiring is clearly laid out. In Franz Kafka’s diaries, which he began keeping at the age of 25, early sketches of his stories (often exhibiting a strained, self-conscious attempt to push his style further) are interspersed with the emotional turmoil that accompanied his efforts. In one entry, for example, he writes:

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't give up! Even if no salvation comes, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.¹

Kafka himself was reading Goethe’s diaries at the time, with great reverence and interest. Kafka, who remained relentlessly insecure about his writing throughout his life, couldn’t have known that his own diaries would end up serving as inspiration for later writers. One of those writers was Lydia Davis, who wrote in Essays One:

I used to study Kafka’s diaries, back in my twenties. They were important to me for several reasons: the quantity of good writing they contained; the insight they gave me into what went on behind the finished pieces of writing—the rough attempts, the more finished attempts, the thoughtfulness, the persistence; and the window they opened into Kafka’s mind—his combination of fictional invention and more mundane daily preoccupations, particularly the way his fictions grew organically out of his daily life. And perhaps they were more accessible than the finished work, being so brief, so unfinished.

It’s not just the work that is unfinished; it’s the writer, who—in the act of writing his diary—remains the tentative, earnest, nervous aspirant. There is no guarantee he will become who he wants to be.

What Agnes Callard argues—and what writers’ diaries show us—is that we have to keep trying. Write regularly! Don’t give up! Don’t let the doubts stall you, the doubts that say: Who do you think you are? What makes you think you can write? Aren’t you fundamentally unqualified and incapable, in this moment, of writing well? Why are you trying so hard?

One approach to defending yourself against these doubts is to dismiss them: I am a writer. I am qualified, I do have something to say, and I can write very well, thank you very much.

I admire the people who can say this to themselves, say all this and believe it. But this approach has never worked for me! When you don’t believe in your work—yet—you can’t really turn off your critical sensibilities and say, Yes, this work is good enough. Because it’s not good enough.

When I first started writing more, I knew that. In 2019, I aspired to become that strange species of humanity known as the “essayist,” but all the essays I wrote that year were, honestly…bad! They were inadequate, clumsy, facile, pretentious, boring. I wrote them and felt horrible about them; I edited them and felt I had turned something abysmal into something merely adequate. And I couldn’t say “Yes, I’m a writer” without feeling stricken by doubt and uncertainty, because it seemed as if one or two mediocre blog posts hardly qualified me for the title.

Agnes Callard’s theory of aspiration gave me a different way to address my doubts. Not by stifling them, not by doubling down into a delusional form of self-confidence. Callard merely asked that I accept them, as a necessary part of aspiring:

We aspire by doing things, and the things we do change us so that we are able to do the same things, or things of that kind, better and better. In the beginning, we sometimes feel as though we are pretending, play-acting, or otherwise alienated from our own activity. We may see the new value as something we are trying out or trying on rather than something we are fully engaged with and committed to.

Doing something badly, she insists, isn’t a sign of unworthiness. Nor is the fear that you are doing it in a way that seems fake, insincere. If you can’t apprehend the value of a writing practice yet, it’s enough to apprehend that there is something there, something desirable and important to you. That’s more than enough to begin. Aspirants, Callard writes,

…are trying to acquire a desire…because they see (that they don’t fully see) that there is something of value out there.

Life is a 4,000-page novel, and most of it is about trying to be a writer

One of the greatest aspirants of modern literature is the protagonist of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Based on how people reference the novel, you might think that the protagonist spends 4,000 pages eating madeleines and repeatedly falling into a reverie. No! He actually spends most of those pages swooning over women, observing other people’s gay and lesbian situationships, going to parties—and trying to be a writer.

In the first volume, the protagonist—who is very much like Proust himself; that’s part of why I, and Sheila Heti, basically think of In Search of Lost Time as a work of autofiction—tries to write, and struggles endlessly:

[S]ince I wanted to be a writer some day, it was time to find out what I meant to write. But as soon as I asked myself this, trying to find a subject in which I could anchor some infinite philosophical meaning, my mind would stop functioning, I could no longer see anything but empty space before my attentive eyes, I felt that I had no talent or perhaps a disease of the brain kept it from being born.²

A few years into his adult life (also known as volume 3), the protagonist is still trying and failing to write:

If only I had been able to start writing! But, however I set about it (all too similarly, alas, to the resolve to give up alcohol, to go to bed early, to get enough sleep and to keep fit), whether it was in a spurt of activity, with method, with pleasure, in depriving myself of a walk, or postponing it and reserving it as a reward, taking advantage of an hour of feeling well, making use of the inaction forced upon me by a day’s illness, the inevitable result of my efforts was a blank page, untouched by writing…

This is all highly relatable. Who hasn’t sat down with the desire to write and yet no actual ideas worth writing? Who hasn’t cultivated a furtive, inner desire to write that seems to have no visible output—instead of an essay or a poem or a novel, there is just “a blank page, untouched by writing"?

And yet we know that this protagonist (who, in true autofictional style, both is and isn’t Marcel himself) does start writing! As Lydia Davis writes:

[W]hereas many novels contain a child who wants to grow up to be famous, particularly a famous writer, or is sad that he will never be one…In Search of Lost Time…is among the few novels in which the child in question will have his wish granted and will in fact grow up to be a famous writer…we the readers know that the child on whom this young narrator is based has indeed grown up to be a famous writer; yet neither the fictional nor the real child knows this; and even Proust the author, as he writes it, cannot be at all sure (though he may suspect it), since he is still, at this point, spurned by artistic circles in Paris as a superficial dandy. So we the readers are the only ones who know—we know more than Proust himself, in this case.

The child, as Proust narrates it, worries that he has no ideas, that there is an empty hole where the future subjects of his writing should be, that he would live and die just like “other men” and “was simply one of those who have no aptitude for writing.”

Now. I am not saying that you and I will grow up to become just like Proust. (In fact, in certain ways I hope I will not become just like Proust! Please don’t let me frivolously spend my inheritance on luxury automobiles and then, in middle age, retire to a cork-lined room to write a 4,000-page roman-fleuve in a neuraesthenic haze! I’m happy to be a mediocre writer who is forgotten in less than a generation, as long as I can stick to my budget and tolerate small sonic discomforts.)

But! There is something deeply comforting in reading all the doubts and difficulties that a “real” writer like Proust must have experienced in his youth. For the aspirant, there’s nothing more comforting than realizing you are not alone in trying. You’re not alone in trying to find a subject, trying to develop the discipline, trying to turn your life towards something that you can’t quite understand yet.

You’re a beginner. You haven’t become who you want to be—yet. You want to wake up in the mornings to write, but you often don’t manage it. What we learn from Agnes Callard—and Kafka, and Proust—is that here’s nothing wrong with this state of affairs, nothing to be ashamed of, no reason to stop. We can, and should, continue to aspire.

As the late, great American poet Lyn Hejinian wrote in her poem The Fatalist:

Time is filled with beginners. You are right. Now each of them is working on something and it matters. The large increments of life must not go by unrecognized.

How does change happen? Through aspiration or transformation?

Now that I’ve discussed L.A. Paul’s Transformative Experience and Agnes Callard’s Aspiration, the question is: Which philosopher’s approach is best for understanding how people change?

Both philosophers are interested in how people change themselves, and whether it’s possible to do so rationally. Both philosophers agree that the person we are before a change is different than the person we are after. That difference makes it hard to decide whether to undergo the change, or understand exactly how it will alter us.

It seems to me that their ideas are useful for very different kinds of experiences. One key difference is duration of the experience. L.A. Paul’s model of “transformative experience” works best for situations that have a clean before/after. The after is where you are epistemically transformed, and your self, tastes, preferences, and knowledge might all be very different. Such experiences might be:

• Falling in love

• Encountering a single, transformative work of art (a painting, let’s say)

• Making a discrete decision in your life, like eating a novel fruit

In contrast, Agnes Callard’s model of “aspiration” works better for elongated experiences with a before/during/after. The during is where an aspirant works to apprehend the values that her after-self will have. Such experiences could be:

• Staying in love

• Sustaining a deep, long-term engagement with an art form (not just viewing one painting, say, but researching the painter, learning about their time period and associated movements, perhaps aspiring to become a painter or art historian or curator)

• Making a number of decisions in your life, which together represent some overall orientation or set of values, like regularly eating things that are new and unexpected

Another key difference is where agency resides in their models of change. For Paul, your agency is primarily used to make a decision—whether to have or not have a transformative experience—and then the experience is what transforms you. It’s as if the experience takes over your consciousness, pulls you under, forcibly changes who you are. Which perfectly models, at least for me, the experience of taking an empathogen and realizing you’re not straight (I recommend this experience to everyone, btw).

But Callard is interested in experiences where your agency is needed, over and over, in order for the transformation to occur. The experience doesn’t happen to you; you make it happen, through tireless effort. “When one makes a radical life change,” she writes,

one does not submit oneself to be changed by some transformative event or object; one’s agency runs all the way through to the endpoint.

And this is ultimately why Callard’s approach works better, imo, for experiences like becoming a writer (or artist, critic, more attentive friend, &c). It works especially well when you’re struggling to assume that aspirational identity. “The work of the aspirant,” Callard writes, “is often marked by some resistance to doing that work.”

I’m writing this at the end of a long work day. I don’t really want to write—I want to scroll on my phone, I want to text a friend, I want to read something fascinating and totally banal, I want to gossip about a friend’s housemate’s coworker’s ex’s dating life.

What would Agnes Callard do? She would tell me (I think; I’m parasocially projecting onto her) that if I want to be a writer, then I need to devote myself to the task of changing my values—pushing myself to value working on my writing, instead of valuing the tempting, totally irrelevant things on my phone. She would tell me that the resistance to doing the work is normal. She would tell me that I have to do the work anyway.

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Four recent favorites

How Kierkegaard can change your life ✦✧ “Being a mere mortal is enough, more than enough” ✦✧ In defense of Descartes ✦✧ Laurel Halo

Vigdis Hjorth on how reading Kierkegaard changed her life ✦

Speaking of philosophy changing your life: Here’s the novelist Vigdis Hjorth on how the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (Denmark’s foremost volcel and existentialist) changed her life:

At the age of nineteen, I began my studies at the University of Oslo and Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments was on my required reading list. I read it without understanding a word, but I had a vague feeling that I was in the presence of something important, what Freud calls “the navel of the dream,” which opens a channel to the unknown and mysterious. What Freud, along with Kierkegaard, believed is that there are pathways to knowledge about life and the human condition to be found outside science, laboratories, and statistics. Some years later when I was going through a major crisis and was on my way to New York, I packed my Kierkegaard and read about different life stages. I understood, in the transatlantic twilight, that I was a middle-class, bourgeois woman, married to a middle-class, bourgeois man, that I had given birth to three middle-class, bourgeois children, and that I had to get a divorce. Something I set about on my return. So reading Kierkegaard really can change your life!

The most important thing for me is Kierkegaard’s insistence that being a totally ordinary human being is an enormous task and a declaration of faith from above, and that when you are lucky enough to be given this one life on earth as a human being, then you need to live it with complete sincerity and full responsibility. He writes somewhere that many people live in the basement even though there is plenty of room on the top floors where the view is broad and you can sense infinity.

I try — with Kierkegaard’s help — to climb from the basement to the top! As do many of my protagonists.

I’ve bolded the part that, to me, reflects what is so personally moving and galvanizing about Kierkegaard’s writing.³

“Being a mere mortal is enough, more than enough” ✦

I love Hjorth, btw—I really think that she’s one of the greatest contemporary novelists we have right now, and I am profoundly grateful that her translator Charlotte Barslund has brought so many of her books to an English audience!

The first book I read of Hjorth’s was Long Live the Post Horn!, which Verso mailed out to subscribers of their book club subscription in January 2021. As I wrote for Kyle Chayka and Nate Gallant’s

One Thing

earlier this year, I really think of book publishers as literary curators—they help us discover ambitious, exciting, new work:

🟧 Book publisher as curator

Since we’re discussing Hjorth already, I’d just like to share one of my favorite passages from Long Live the Post Horn! The novel, which I described in a Goodreads review as “a fairy tale for adults who worry all the time about neoliberalism,” is about a depressed, isolated Norwegian woman who becomes involved in a trade union campaign and finds new ways to live with honesty, gratitude, sincerity, and solidarity with others.

This passage appears near the end of the novel (there are no spoilers, though!) and is indeed very Kierkegaardian:

Self-acceptance, was that what I was struggling with, was that what I was longing for? To accept myself as I truly was, my childhood, my story, my mum, my sister, my job history, my shortcomings and my apathy, the whole package. And that was just for starters. And then take responsibility for myself and my actions and my growth. Not blame them on external circumstances, though these obviously placed a part. Not blame society, though it obviously provided the framework for my activities and my being. I had choices, the choices were queuing up from when I got up in the morning till I went to bed at night, I had a choice right now…

I stood by the window in my hotel room and convinced myself that behind the storm, which was brewing outside, I could make out Mount Bæskades, while I reassessed my own story which I hadn't understood was unbearable until [recently]…now I was here. A mere mortal, but perhaps that was enough? Might life be a serious business that required something of you, a daunting enterprise? The thought, however, wasn't oppressive but liberating because it's good to have a purpose, to be given a purpose, it's a declaration of trust because you don't entrust a task to someone you don't respect. It was almost as if I, too, was standing on the bottom step of a dark basement staircase and could see dawn creep under the door at the top, and I was filled with great faith that I would make it all the way up and step out into the bright ground floor.

In defense of Descartes ✦

I’m starting to believe in synchronicity, by which I mean: I started writing about philosophy this week, and how interesting it is for me to read it, as an aspiring amateur. I was thinking, What else do I want to understand about philosophy? What else should I be reading and thinking about?

And then

Elif Batuman

—who is actually the reason I began reading Kierkegaard, and partly the reason why I began to feel that philosophy was for me, it was for answering questions in my life, and to help me think more clearly—published this very interesting discussion of Descartes:

"I don't have a problem with Descartes."

Descartes, poor guy, has become the philosophical poster child for everything that’s wrong with the world, because he argued that the mind and body are distinct. In Descartes’s worldview (or rather, the worldview that other people I’ve read have ascribed to Descartes, lol), you can think about the world from a remote, coolly conceptual vantage point, removed from your embodied experience.

Earlier this year, I was taking a class with

Zoe Tuck

where we read through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception together, which of course is very critical of Descartes—and insists that our minds and bodies are inextricably tied together, that we’re always perceiving the world in ways that are influenced by the bodies we are moving through the world in.

But somehow, Zoe noted, Descartes has become “the fall guy of dualism,” when really there was so much more he was thinking about, and writing about, and doing. Ever since Zoe said that—I’m looking at my notes; this was January 25—I’ve been wondering if I should learn a bit more about everything else Descartes had to say.

And so. Here is Elif Batuman writing about her own relationship with Descartes:

I don’t feel that I write about myself; I feel that write about the world—but I only have one legitimate access point to the world, and it’s behind my face. And you know who I think explains this well-known phenomenon in a compelling way, is Descartes.…his “method” is to take other people’s thoughts along the same path as his own—not to lead with his conclusions, but to emphasize the history of his thoughts…

Laurel Halo’s 2023 mix ✦

80% of this…post? newsletter? essay?…was written while listening to this Laurel Halo set at Nowadays. Love her, and am still very upset at myself for missing her appearance at The Lab SF late last summer—

—and I’m always so happy when DJs post a tracklist, because I’m particularly obsessed with the opening track and the strange, slow, patient voice running through it:

I am grateful that I have failed in every way this world wanted me to succeed in, because I’m not of this world.

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One final reflection: When I say that reading philosophy can change your life, I don’t mean reading as in a passive and purely individual process. No, it’s reading the philosophy, letting it take up space in your mind, thinking about it, perhaps journaling about it—

But it’s also about thinking about the philosophy with other people. Talking to friends. Talking to strangers, some of whom might become friends. Writing here in the hopes that I can touch and speak to others. Thank you for reading this!

Also, please say hello in the comments (or in the DMs???) if you have any philosophical musings to share—

1. From page 196 of the new Ross Benjamin translation of Kafka’s diaries.

2. From Lydia Davis’s translation of In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, titled The Way by Swann’s.

3. To be clear, I haven’t read that much Kierkegaard! Just Either/Or—because I love Elif Batuman and wanted to understand how Kierkegaard’s ideas informed her second novel, also named Either/Or—and a few excerpts from Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, collected in Basic Writings of Existentialism.

When it comes to existentialist philosophy, I’m still an aspirant: I cannot yet apprehend Kierkegaard’s thoughts fully (and indeed I’m often rhetorically disoriented and basically falling asleep when I try to read him)…and yet I still try; I’m convinced there is something there that will change my life and shape me, even if I can’t yet figure out what it is.