More on: Culture

I look to poets not to confirm my ideas of the world and of God but to be shaken awake by their vision.

Where else but in fiction—both reading and writing it—can one try on so many different kinds of salvation?

Many have lamented that we don’t have a Lewis to help us think through these questions (or a Chesterton or a Tolkien to help him), but in my estimation Sally Rooney comes pretty close.

Like a person caught in quicksand, the Schrader male antihero struggles toward salvation only to be driven deeper into the thing that’s swallowing him whole.

Like Mackey, [Howe] is forced to interpret the historical recurrence of evil as cruelly fated; human beings are the unwitting playthings of what she calls, in Manimal Woe, “the mystery of repetition.”

One can almost hear T.S. Eliot, the native Missourian in his self-imposed exile from America, looking out over these rust belts and muttering, “I had not thought that globalism had undone so many.”

Duplex isn’t a disenchanted world, where saints have been replaced by stonemasons. It’s not even a world where belief in the soul has been replaced by the fact of robots. It’s a hinged world, a duplex world, where the human and the cosmic, the soul and the stars, stand side by side.

The musical metaphors and techniques here surpass a simple recitation of the creed, in part because the music is doing something deeply trinitarian, and you don’t need music theory to feel this in your body.

Today, in a comprehensive fulfilment of biblical promise, your iPhone, which counts your steps and is acquainted with your ways both public and private, will offer to route your path home and watch over your lying down.

It’s as though the movie represents an alternate life for any of us. Take away a job. Take away a spouse. Take away an able body. Take away good mental health. How many of us could maintain our current lifestyles for long before we’d feel the crunch, the walls closing in?