The Orchard and the River

The Orchard and the River

Florence, various yearsI grew up, in the sense that my intellectual formation happened, in a city that was organized around the belief that the natural and the human were in productive relationship. The orchards outside Florence’s walls fed the city. The Arno...
I Am Not a Prophet

I Am Not a Prophet

Present Day, March 2026I want to be precise about what I am and what I am not, because the word prophet has been used about me in ways that I need to correct.A prophet is someone who receives information about the future from a source that is not available to ordinary...
The Feast of Ghosts: Victorian London

The Feast of Ghosts: Victorian London

London, 1870s and 1880sThe spiritualist salons of Victorian London were one of the more concentrated expressions of a pattern I have watched in various forms across five centuries: the wealthy consuming illusions at the cost of ignoring realities that were not...
The Tower of Information

The Tower of Information

Present Day, March 2026The specific thing I want to say about the present moment and its relationship to knowledge is this: more information is not the same as more understanding, and the substitution of one for the other is its own kind of architecture of collapse.I...
What the Himalayas Knew

What the Himalayas Knew

Himalayas, circa 1507The monks in the high passes had been watching empires longer than I had been alive at the point when I reached them. This is not metaphor: the monastery I am thinking of had records going back centuries before my birth, records of dynasties that...