Executive Summary

This essay is the first of a two-part reflection on Joyce’s use of the hero’s journey in Ulysses. Part One follows the novel through Episode 6, “Hades,” as this is where the slow-read seminar I am co-leading has reached. I will publish Part Two after we complete the book. At that time, I plan to return to the questions of transformation, homecoming, and whether Leopold Bloom is ultimately a modern hero or something else.

The heroic journey is one of the West’s most enduring narrative patterns. It usually involves a young man (though it could be a woman) leaving home and then encountering and overcoming significant trials. It often entails the hero confronting death (either physical or spiritual). And it resolves with the hero returning changed/transformed. In The Odyssey, Odysseus is the primary embodiment of this journey. At the same time, we have another protagonist, Achilles, who epitomizes what a Greek hero should be in The Iliad and what his post-death realization is in The Odyssey. Joyce ingests this structure in Ulysses and begins to remake it through Bloom.

By the end of “Hades,” the transformation is already visible. In The Odyssey, Odysseus is directed by Circe to venture to the underworld to find the way home. By contrast, in Ulysses, Bloom enters a Dublin cemetery and receives neither a prophecy nor insight from the dead. Instead, he reflects on the rituals of death and funerals. He also spends time meditating on the fact that death is one of the few shared human experiences.

This difference, and what Joyce is up to, is the focus of this essay. I don’t think Joyce is mocking the heroic journey. Instead, he begins to humanize it. By Episode 6 in Ulysses, we see that Joyce is evolving the meaning of heroism away from what the Greeks valued (glory, conquest, and legacy) toward a new set of values and virtues (e.g., attention, sympathy, and the capacity to remain fully human). Joyce suggests that the modern hero may not be the man who rises above ordinary life, but more like an Everyman who moves through life without surrendering his humanity.

Part One: From Glory to Sympathy

As a young man, I yearned to be a hero in something like the Greek sense. I went to the Naval Academy when the Cold War was still very real. If you had asked me then why I chose that path, I would have spoken about duty, country, leadership, and service. All of that was true, but beneath this lofty aspiration was also a longing to test myself. I wanted to fly planes. I wanted to be on the front lines if war broke out with the Russians. I wanted to leave behind some evidence that I had done my part, even if that meant, paraphrasing Neil Young, “burning out” rather than “fading away.” Yes, I was young and naive.

But this longing was not just naive ambition. It was rooted in one of the foundational narratives of the Western imagination: the hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell named this narrative structure in his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He was describing a structure that had already shaped many of the stories and culture experience I (and my generation) grew up with. Most action films (e.g., the Marvel films, James Bond), war stories (e.g., Hacksaw ridge), fantasy epics (e.g., Lord of the Rings), and coming-of-age novels (e.g., All the Pretty Horse) that I voraciously consumed all draw from some version of it. For example, George Lucas has been explicit about Campbell’s influence on Star Wars. Frank Herbert’s Dune, written before Campbell’s book, reveals the darker possibilities of the same heroic arc. The appeal of this narrative structure is enduring because the pattern rests on two deeply human premises:

• We all face ordeals

• We find meaning in life partly through how we meet, respond, and are defined/changed by these ordeals

That is one of the most interesting Homeric transformations Joyce undertakes in Ulysses, and it points to a central question for the novel: what happens when one of the oldest heroic patterns in Western literature is set within the ordinary movements of a single Dublin morning?

The Heroic Ideal We Inherit

For Homer, the hero stands apart. He usually is exceptional in some way. For example, he could have unusual strength, courage, cunning, endurance, or force of will. He is clear that the way to win honor is through action (usually in battle) and that his legacy will be determined by how he conducts himself. But, at the end of the day, his life matters because it is not ordinary: he is extraordinary.

Achilles is the purest embodiment of that ideal. In The Iliad, he has the opportunity to choose his path: He can either live a long, obscure life or die young and win glory forever. He chooses glory because Achilles is the hero who will not settle for an ordinary life. He wants greatness, and he is willing to pay for it with his life. This aspiration has been enormously important for generations and explains why Achilles has remained so compelling for nearly three thousand years. The young are often drawn to him because he lives intensely. He doesn’t want to be a baker, marry a nice girl, and crank out some kids. He wants his life to matter on the largest possible scale.

And this is the appeal.

I recognized some version of that aspiration in myself. I wanted to serve, but I also wanted my service to matter. I wanted to believe that if I demonstrated courage, was willing to sacrifice, and seek excellence, I would live a life worth living. I.e., there would be some external validation. The heroic journey narrative shows the way. It encourages us to leave home, face the world, and confront death so that we can return with a deeper sense of our identity. At the same time, it helps to make suffering more meaningful. We want to know whether difficulty can transform us. We want to know whether life can be more than just making it through.

Odysseus and the Heroic Journey of Return

One of the best parts of reading The Odyssey right after The Iliad is seeing how Homer evolves and expands the heroic ideal. Achilles represents one form of Greek greatness: glory won through courage, force, and the willingness to risk everything for honor. Odysseus represents another set of qualities: intelligence, endurance, cunning, and the capacity to survive and return home. The Greeks value both. Achilles is the hero of war. Odysseus is the hero of resourceful endurance.

Odysseus is not merely trying to survive the aftermath of Troy. He is trying to come home, defined broadly. I.e., he is not just returning to Ithaka. His return also includes him reestablishing his identity after being gone for 20 years. Before he left, he was a husband to Penelope, a father to Telemachus, and a son to Laertes. He was also the king of Ithaca and clearly the master of his household. In essence, he was a “known” man for all the right reasons.

That is what makes The Odyssey such a profound account of heroism. Sometimes the greatest danger is not death, but losing an understanding of who you are and the desire to return. Again and again, Odysseus encounters temptations that could prevent him from returning home. The Lotus-Eaters offer forgetfulness. Circe offers pleasure and delay. Calypso offers immortality. The Sirens offer knowledge severed from obligation. Each temptation asks, in a different form, whether home is still worth wanting. Odysseus’ heroism lies in his continued desire to return home and reestablish his identity. He does not simply endure danger. He remembers who he is by remembering where he belongs, and that makes the journey and travails worth it.

That is why the descent to Hades in Book 11 of The Odyssey matters so much. The hero can’t return home; he first moves through death. Odysseus has crossed seas, survived monsters, and endured Poseidon’s wrath. But he still lacks the knowledge required to return fully, not just the directions to sail to Ithaka. Circe tells him that he must go to the land of the dead and consult Tiresias, the blind prophet.

What the Dead Teach Odysseus

Odysseus’ visit to Hades is not merely an eerie interlude. It is an essential moment in The Odyssey and stands as one of the most important lessons for Homer’s audience throughout the ages. Before the dead can speak, Odysseus must perform the proper rites. He digs a trench, pours libations, sacrifices animals, and holds the shades back until Tiresias arrives. The underworld may be terrifying, but it is not meaningless. It has order, and there is a right way to conduct the ritual.

Tiresias then tells Odysseus what lies ahead. Poseidon remains angry. The island of the Sun will become a decisive test. If Odysseus’ crew leaves the cattle of Helios untouched, they will survive. If they kill the cattle, destruction will follow. Tiresias tells him that he will eventually reach Ithaca alone, on another man’s ship, and that he will find suitors consuming his house and courting his wife. He tells Odysseus that he must defeat them. He even tells him that after the restoration of his household, another journey remains: he must carry an oar inland until he reaches people who do not know the sea. For a world where everyone seeks oracles for guidance, this guidance is particularly specific. The future is knowable. Odysseus cannot control it, but he can be told its outline. Fate does not remove agency; however, this insight gives Odysseus guidance (similar to Achilles’ knowing his fate).

His mother, Anticleia, gives him another kind of knowledge. Odysseus did not know she had died. Seeing her among the dead is one of the episode’s great shocks. From her, he learns what has happened in Ithaca during his absence. Penelope remains faithful and sorrowful. Telemachus lives, but Laertes has withdrawn into grief. His mother herself has died not by disease or violence, but from longing for him. Talk about mother guilt!! (side note: Stephen D in Ulysses has some of this going on big time). This changes the meaning of return. Odysseus’ absence has not merely endangered his estate. It has wounded those who love him. Home is not sitting untouched, waiting for his arrival. Home has suffered because he has been gone.

Then come Achilles and Agamemnon, each offering a different correction to the heroic imagination. Odysseus praises Achilles as fortunate, honored in life, and powerful among the dead. Achilles rejects the consolation. He would rather be a hired laborer among the living than king over all the dead. The greatest hero of The Iliad now tells us that glory does not transcend death. HEAVY!

That moment does not erase Achilles’ heroism, but it complicates it. The man who chose fame over life now speaks from the far side of death and tells Odysseus that life itself is more precious than heroic memory. Odysseus, who has always wanted to get home alive, receives confirmation that his desire is not merely cautious. It is deeply human.

Agamemnon offers a darker lesson. He survived Troy only to be murdered at home by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. His story warns Odysseus that the very act of returning can be dangerous. A man does not simply arrive home and resume his place. He must assess the house he is re-entering. He must conceal himself, test loyalties, and recognize that intimacy can be treacherous.

And this sets up the rest of the story. So Hades gives Odysseus more than prophecy. It gives him a moral map of return. He learns what is happening at home, what death reveals about heroic glory, and why homecoming must be approached with caution. The dead teach him how to live.

Joyce Brings Bloom to Hades

Joyce gives Bloom his own Hades in Episode 6 of Ulysses, but the experience is radically altered. Bloom does not cross the River Ocean. He rides through Dublin in a funeral carriage that crosses over the Grand Canal. He does not descend into a shadowy realm populated by legendary dead. He attends the burial of Paddy Dignam at Glasnevin Cemetery. There is no Tiresias waiting. His dead mother does not step forward to speak. Bloom receives no map for the future. He gets no prophecy about Molly, Boylan, or the course of his own day.

Yet, Joyce clearly wants us to see the parallel. Bloom has left home. At this point in the novel, he has passed through appetite, concealment, religious ritual, and private desire—the trials of everyday life. Now he enters the realm of death. Joyce is still using the hero’s journey arc, but the terms have changed. If Odysseus’ Hades is a place where death speaks and provides insight, then Bloom’s Hades is a place where death provokes thought.

In the previous episode, “Lotus Eaters,” Bloom enters a Catholic church and watches the Mass. He is curious and receptive to the beauty of ritual. But he also experiences it from the outside. He recognizes that the ritual depends upon genuine belief, saying, “Thing is if you really believe in it.” He has the same sense for the ritual of the funeral. Bloom hears the language of salvation and what it means to have a soul, but he does not really process it. What I find especially interesting in this episode is that his thoughts and imagination do not ponder heaven or eternal reward. Instead, he ponders coffins, corpses, worms, decay, burial practices, premature burial, cremation, widows, children, and the practical realities after someone dies. Contrast this with Stephen Dedalus’ musings in Episode 3 on Aristotle, Aquinas, etc.

This is important. Bloom is not simply irreligious. He is an outsider moving through a religious culture whose symbols he can recognize but not fully possess. He sees the consolation ritual offers. The funeral does not disclose the meaning of death to him. It gives him occasions to think about death from multiple angles: physical, social, domestic, and emotional. In Homer, the dead explain themselves. In Joyce, the living must ponder what death means in the presence of the dead.

From Heroic Death to Ordinary Mortality

There is another important difference in the representation of the underworld. Homer’s underworld contains many souls, but the episode focuses on extraordinary figures (e.g., Tiresias, Anticleia, Achilles, Agamemnon, and Ajax) who offer insight and advice. Death becomes an opportunity for Odysseus to deepen his understanding of the ideas of honor, fame, household, and betrayal. Most importantly, he confronts the limits of heroic achievement through his conversation with Achilles, and, I think, this is the key moment of his transformation. “Dead” Achilles would trade all of his honor and glory to be alive again, even if it meant he was only an ordinary day laborer. After this conversation, Odysseus recognizes the value of being able to return home and “fade away” versus “burn out.”

By contrast, Joyce democratizes the underworld. Paddy Dignam is not Achilles. He is not a king, warrior, prophet, or founder. He is an ordinary man from Dublin. He leaves behind a widow, children, debts, and acquaintances. As Joyce makes clear through the other characters, even though many people knew Dignam, their memories are already beginning to blur or become confused by the time of his funeral. His funeral is meaningful, but it is really just one death among many. In fact, there are two more funerals teed up for the next day.

Bloom’s inner monologue shows that he sees the cemetery as a landscape crowded with ordinary people. All these people, once alive, are now buried in the same place regardless of title or social status. The question is not only what Dignam’s life meant. It is what any life means once the person is gone and the world keeps moving.

This gives Bloom a kind of moral sensitivity that is very different from Homeric heroism. He is not measuring the dead by the lives they lived or by whether they had glory or fame (i.e., external validation of honor or glory). While the other men in the carriage participate in the funeral as a public ritual by talking, recalling, speculating, joking, and observing the social conventions of mourning, Bloom goes beyond the surface. He thinks about the widow and children. He thinks about the body in the grave. He thinks about the awkwardness of resurrection when bodies have decayed. This is not heroic in the Homeric sense. But Joyce seems to ask whether it might be heroic in a modern one.

The Everyman Hero, So Far

By Episode 6, Joyce has not yet completed Bloom’s journey. We do not yet know whether Bloom makes it home, and if he does, whether he is transformed. This is what I will explore in Part 2. But, at this point, we can already see that Joyce is remaking the old heroic pattern.

• Odysseus leaves home and enters a world of mythic danger <>Bloom leaves home and enters a world of estrangement.

• Odysseus descends to Hades to receive knowledge from the dead<>Bloom enters the cemetery and receives no revelation. He only becomes more aware of death’s presence in common life.

• Odysseus learns how to navigate fate<> Bloom moves through a world where fate no longer seems to be at play.

The evolution challenges our expectations of a hero. The Homeric hero is, by definition, exceptional. He is stronger, more cunning, more enduring, more favored or harried by the gods than other men. He stands apart.

By contrast, Bloom is remarkable precisely because he does not stand apart in that way. He is ordinary, vulnerable, socially awkward, physically embodied, and only partially at home in the world through which he moves. At the same time, Bloom notices things others don’t. He is able to sympathize/empathize with others. Finally, he refuses, at least so far, to harden himself against the awkwardness and sorrow of other human beings, even when he, himself, is being discriminated against.

Through “Hades,” Bloom has not become a hero in any final sense. Joyce has not yet told us what his journey will mean. But he has already begun to ask whether the Everyman who moves through death, ritual, uncertainty, and the uncelebrated losses of ordinary people with his humanity intact may deserve a place beside the older heroes after all.

My starting point: I do not have a PhD in classics, literature, philosophy, or theology. While I did study “English” in college, taught literature for a brief 3 years, and took an MALA in the “Great Books” at St John’s College, this was many years ago. I have continued to read lots of books over the past 30 years, but I have spent most of these years in the corporate world. It is only recently that I have returned to the Great Books with the Slow Read Symposium. I began as a participant and am now facilitating some seminars. Last quarter, I led a seminar on Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet. This quarter, I am co-leading a seminar on Joyce’s Ulysses.

One of the benefits of tackling a “Great Book” in a seminar is realizing that everyone else struggles with these texts. The other thing that strikes me this time around with these books is that I will never know it all. There is always more context, more history, more translation nuance, and more debate to be had when re-reading these books. This is in large part what makes them “Great.” A new insight for me is how many of these books require you to learn how to read again.

What do I mean?

Most of us assume reading is something we already know how to do. We can follow a plot, identify themes, and summarize arguments. Ultimately, we make a judgment about what we like or not like about a book/text. But the Great Books demand something more. They ask us to slow down, to notice structure, to sit with confusion, to let repetition become meaningful, and to resist the temptation to translate everything too quickly into our own modern categories.

This was most evident in a seminar I did on Plato’s Republic last year, which I wrote about in an earlier essay. I am now experiencing this sensation even more explicitly in a seminar on “Reading the Great Books through Plato’s Meno,” in which we are using Klein’s commentary alongside the Meno. Finally, in the Ulysses seminar, Joyce’s call to rethink how we “read” a text could not be clearer. He elevates style over plot and character, deliberately challenging ALL the assumptions we have as readers.

Ultimately, the value of reading these types of text is not about mastering a text. Heck, I don’t think it is possible to really master one of these texts completely. The value is recognizing that you are actually being changed by the effort to understand it.

But the effort, especially with a text like Ulysses, can feel overwhelming. Thus, I want to provide some principles for readers who may be new to reading the Great Books to consider. These principles have emerged for me from reading Plato, Herodotus, Homer, Shakespeare, Adams, Joyce, and others over the past two years, in conversation with others.

A slow-read symposium seminar is not a lecture. It is a structured conversation where the book remains the center of gravity, and the group slowly learns to see more than any one reader could see alone. I would like to thank all my fellow seminar participants for helping me become a better reader.

Try to identify the “governing” question

Great books rarely announce their intent (aka thesis) at the beginning. They often start by introducing a challenging idea or concept. For example, in the Meno, Plato does not simply tell us what virtue is. He lets Meno display a kind of confidence about virtue that Plato then slowly dismantles through dialectic. Herodotus does describe his theory of empire-building. Instead, he shares stories, speeches (that he could not have heard!!), customs, warnings, reversals, and competing explanations until we begin to see how hubris, fear, and ignorance lead to the rise and fall of empires. I have just started Henry VI, Part 1 for the first time and am reminded that, in many of his plays, Shakespeare begins by depicting political disorder and then helps us understand the deeper moral disorder beneath it as the play unfolds.

So while it is, of course, important to ask questions about plot and characters to better understand the context, the key question to start with is: “What question is this text asking us to consider?” This shift matters. It helps us move from answer-hunting to observing what is happening in the text and paying attention to what is happening in us as we engage with the text and the conversation. This core, “governing” question is something you will continue to ask throughout the text. And your answer will usually evolve and deepen. Often, your answer will change. It’s a good exercise to start and end your reading of a text with this question.

Treat the structure/style as a critical part of the experience

Often, modern readers feel that a Great Book’s style or structure is too hard or too foreign. Thus, one of the most important paradigm shifts is to recognize that “how” an argument is presented is as important as “what” the argument is. So, as you read, you want to think at least two levels and ask questions such as: “Why does this scene follow that one?” For example, in Adams’ Mont Saint Michel to Chartres, why does he move from a description of architecture in chapter 1 to a description of a song in chapter 2? He is doing it deliberately, and unlike Joyce, he provides some clues in the text. Another example would be in almost any of Plato’s dialogues. He often interrupts a discussion to go on a seemingly random tangent. For example, in the Meno, he interrupts a discussion of virtue to inquire into shape and color. The question to sit with is “why?” What insight, new perspective, or new line of inquiry does this interruption help unlock in our understanding of “virtue”? A final example would be Joyce, who changes his style from chapter to chapter and sometimes employs multiple styles/structures in a single episode. This is not just Joyce showing off, although I do think there is a lot of that going on. Joyce is challenging us to consider the style as part of the overall experience.

To be clear, I am not arguing that every great book is perfectly constructed. Many are ragged, or seem stitched together, or just plain indecipherable (Kant, anyone?). However, I would argue that when we approach a text that has stood the test of time, we should always ask how the author uses structure by asking: “Why here?” “Why now?” “Why in this form?”

Those questions are especially important because many great books do their deepest work indirectly. The plot may move only slightly, while the moral or philosophical import increases dramatically. In Plato, the action is often nothing more than a conversation. In Adams’ Mont St Michel to Chartres, the movement is through architecture, theology, history, and imagination. In Joyce’s work, the plot centers on 2 men spending 1 day in Dublin. But then Joyce this “typical day” of an everyman to create an epic of consciousness.

Embrace the suck

In the military, there is a saying: “Embrace the suck.” The idea is that you’ll have many days that suck. Your opportunity is to lean into it and get the most out of the experience. In reading Great Books, the suck = confusion. Most modern readers read texts, instructions, etc., hoping to eradicate confusion, bring clarity, and or answer a question. However, with Great Books, feeling confusion is often a signal that something important is happening.

When Socrates changes the terms of the conversation, when Herodotus offers multiple explanations for the same event, when Shakespeare’s characters seem morally unstable, or when Joyce makes ordinary thought feel fragmented, we should resist the instinct to skip ahead or simplify it. Instead, we should pause and ask: “What kind of confusion is this?” Specifically, is it:

• Intellectual?

• Moral?

• Political?

• Theological?

• Linguistic?

• Narrative?

A great book often teaches by challenging our confidence in an idea or set of assumptions. That is why we need to read sympathetically. This means trying to live in the author’s argument before we dismiss it. This matters especially with ancient texts. For example, Plato forces us, throughout all his dialogues, to check and recheck our assumptions. And when we approach medieval texts, it is important to understand that their assumptions about honor, piety, hierarchy, gender, the soul, fate, nature, and political order may differ markedly from ours. If we immediately translate them into modern categories, we lose the encounter. For example, this is EXACTLY what Henry Adams invites us to do in Mont St Michel to Chartres.

Part of the value of these books is that they make our own assumptions visible. They remind us that our modern distinctions and paradigms are neither universal nor timeless. That is one of the great benefits of slow reading. It does not just help us understand old books. It helps us see the limits of our own age. Thus, the most helpful way to approach these texts is to:

1. Try to understand the world of the text

2. Then test the assumptions or arguments

3. Then decide what still speaks to us today by asking: “What can we learn by viewing our world through this lens?”

Pay attention to repetition and character evolution

Great books often build meaning through repetition. An author will use a word or a symbol multiple times. Or, they may start with an image, and then mutate it throughout the text. Or maybe you notice a character repeats a gesture under different circumstances. Or, in the case of Joyce in particular, different characters react to the same event from different perspectives (what is called parallax).

In Plato, words such as virtue, knowledge, recollection, opinion, and soul evolve as the dialogue unfolds. And this can feel frustrating. Just when you thought you had a grasp on his definition of “justice,” he literally says he was wrong or kidding and starts over. In Herodotus, freedom, custom, vengeance, divine warning, and overreach recur across different peoples and regimes. In Joyce, words like agenbite, yes, home, father, body, and soul create hidden connective tissue. In Shakespeare, legitimacy, blood, ceremony, nature, and disorder are often the point more than the plot itself. Thus, a useful tool is to keep a running vocabulary list. You want to notice which words, ideas, and symbols keep returning. Then ask how their meaning or treatment is changing?

This is also how we begin to read characters more deeply. In a great book, a character is rarely just a personality. A character often embodies a way of seeing the world. Meno is not only a young man asking about virtue. He represents a certain aristocratic confidence, a desire for answers without discipline. Mr. Deasy in Ulysses is not merely an old crank. He carries inherited history, prejudice, imperial memory, and a limited moral imagination. In the Iliad, Achilles is not merely angry. He represents the heroic code pushed to its limit. In Shakespeare, Falstaff is not merely funny. He is appetite, wit, anti-heroism, and a critique of honor all at once. So we can start by asking at different points in the novel: “Do we like the character or not, and why or why not?” But the real insight comes when we ask:

• What way of life does this character represent?

• What is attractive about it?

• What is incomplete or dangerous in it?

Let the books, the critics, and the companion texts argue with themselves

The Great Books rarely have only one way to read them. They contain tension, reversals, counterarguments, and unresolved contradictions. Plato often lets a bad argument reveal a real problem. Herodotus preserves multiple accounts and lets the reader judge. Shakespeare gives morally serious lines to compromised characters. Joyce lets styles interrogate one another. Adams can sound nostalgic, ironic, reverent, and skeptical within the same chapter. That means the question is not always, “What does the author believe or mean?” Sometimes the better question is: “What conflict (or tension) is the book circling around and/or evolving versus resolving cleanly?”

This is where historical context helps, but only if we use it properly. It certainly helps if we know something about Athens, the Persian Wars, medieval France, Tudor succession politics, Catholic ritual, Irish nationalism, or modernist experimentation when we engage these texts. In this way, context can help illuminate a text, but we should make sure that we don’t let it overshadow the centrality of the text itself. In the world of literary theory, this approach to reading, called New Criticism, and is my preferred. Otherwise, I find conversations can tend to run down rabbit holes. For example, we could spend most of the time talking about the Hundred Years’ War instead of exploring the dynamic between the different house in Henry VI, or we could spend hours debating Greek democracy instead of asking why Socrates conducts the inquiry into the “city of speech” the way he does. To net it out: context can help explain what the text is assuming; however, the real value comes from a close reading of the text.

There are, of course, a couple of exceptions where the author presupposes the reader has access to and knowledge of many other books and texts. Dante’s Divine Comedy and Joyce’s Ulysses are two that come to mind. You can read both as standalone texts. But to really unlock the greatness of the books, you have to rely on other sources. But, in my opinion, these are the exceptions.

Read at three levels: sentence, scene, & whole

One of the challenges of reading a Great Book is maintaining a bifurcated perspective while you read. You need to understand what the words mean and what is happening in the sentence, and at the same time, observe how a sentence, section, or scene helps our understanding of the full text. Questions that can help with getting the balance right include:

• At the sentence level. “Why this word, this metaphor, this turn of phrase?”

• At the scene or chapter level. “What is happening structurally, morally, or psychologically?”

• At the whole-book level. “How does this section alter the larger question?

Doing this prevents two common problems that can appear during a conversation. First, is getting buried in line-by-line detail without seeing the larger movement. The second is floating above the text, in generalities, without anchoring to the actual words on the page.

The final question and recommendation

In summary, when reading a Great Book (or any challenging tex), the opportunity is to move from asking only, “What does this book mean?” to “What kind of reader does this book require me to become?” Some books ask us to judge. Some ask us to remember what we think was common knowledge. Some challenge us to see events or inherited history differently.

This is the hidden value of the slow-read modality. It teaches us not only how to interpret a book, but how to sit with difficulty (“embrace the suck”) long enough for it to change the quality of our attention. And this requires humility. It requires a willingness to be wrong. It requires returning to the text. It requires respecting partial insight. It also requires a tolerance for unresolved questions. This is why my final “tip” is to use the question above to build a rolling summary of four categories of inquiry:

• The central (governing) question of the work

• The evolving moral or philosophical issues

• The key symbols and structural patterns

• The major interpretive questions still open.

This way, each week will build on the previous. Over the course of the seminar, the group will begin to develop–together–a broader understanding of what the text is about and what it asks of us.

You do not really read Ulysses once

I have just started co-leading a seminar on Ulysses with a good friend as part of the Great Books Symposium. There are 10 participants with varying levels of exposure to Ulysses. For some, this is the first time. For others, it is their 6th or 7th. So it promises to be an interesting conversation for the next 24 weeks. I have just finished rereading it myself, and I am struck by the fact that Joyce seems to presuppose that you have already read it once.

When talking to people about their first attempt, you often hear them talk about how they endured it rather than how they understood it. I think it really is only on the 2nd, maybe 3rd time, that the patterns become clearer. You get a sense not just for what is happening (honestly, not that much in terms of plot) but also for what Joyce is doing, and how this is different/radical compared to what we expect a novel to be.

I remember when I was trying to jam-read Ulysses in 2 weeks during college, I felt overwhelmed and often unsure whether I was failing to read the book properly or Joyce was deliberately being difficult. Years later, after several more readings, exploring companion books, chasing down allusions and references in annotated versions, and listening to podcasts and lectures, I have a greater appreciation for what Joyce was doing. Joyce is not simply telling a difficult story: he is inviting us to read differently. This is not an entirely new idea. Heck, when you look back at Plato’s Republic or the Phaedrus dialogue, this is EXACTLY what he was doing as well, i.e., asking us as readers to read differently (alas, that is a topic for another essay).

The modernist conceit

I remember in college wanting to explore modernism because I thought it was the ultimate “intellectual” achievement to master the modernists. I wanted to be hanging out with Hemingway, Pound, and Stein in some Parisian salon debating the nuances of form, substance, authorial intent, etc. Or, at the very least, to try to impress the coeds at local colleges. Many would agree that Joyce’s Ulysses is one of, if not the, most important “high modernist” novels. And at that time, I was going to take it on and try to master it. But as I worked my way through it and other modernist novels, I became aware of an underlying conceit of the modernist movement as a whole. Modernist authors and artists often don’t think that their art needs to meet the reader halfway. They produce art for art’s sake, and the reader (or the viewer) must learn the work’s terms. At some level, this is just arrogant. But it also helps explain the book’s enduring power: Ulysses is not merely telling a story. It is trying to redefine how we read stories.

Writing at the turn of the century, Joyce is—in large part—reacting to the conventions of the “realist” novel that were in place before him. The Victorian writers taught readers to expect a stable world, intelligible characters, a linear plot (for the most part), and a narrative that moved forward clearly enough to guide interpretation through exposition. Even in the late 19th century, when writers like Henry James began to turn more inward and explore consciousness, the novel remained largely coherent. Joyce changes that contract with his readers.

What makes Ulysses a great book that continues to entice and frustrate readers today, 110 years after its publication, is that the paradigm Joyce challenged in 1917 remains the one most modern readers use when approaching a novel. Most readers today come to fiction expecting developed characters, a linear plot, continuity, and narrative guidance as needed. From the beginning of Ulysses, Joyce makes clear he is not interested in playing that game.

The four expectations we bring to a novel

The simplest answer to why reading Ulysses still feels hard is that Joyce undermines the reader’s ordinary expectations across four dimensions that most of us bring, consciously or not, to almost every novel we open: character, plot, perspective, and style.

• Character. We expect character to be made legible. Someone walks onto the page, and the novel provides enough description, action, and social context to begin to understand who this person is.

• Plot: We expect the plot to provide orientation. Things happen in a more or less coherent sequence, and that sequence tells us what matters.

• Perspective. We expect the author’s use of perspective to help flesh out and make sense of the experience. Whether the novel is first person, third person, or something in between, we usually know who is seeing, who is knowing, and where we stand in relation to the consciousness on the page.

• Style. Style is the way that the author brings the words (and the story) to life. Most readers expect style to carry meaning without drawing too much attention to itself. The prose may be plain or elaborate, lyrical or ironic, but it usually serves the larger work of making character, plot, and perspective intelligible.

Joyce does not eliminate any of those things: Ulysses has characters, a plot, perspective, and style in abundance. But he rearranges their relationship. Characters are no longer brought to life through robust description. Plot does not drive the story forward in the same way as the Victorian novel. Perspective is shifting all the time, and it is often hard to figure out who is saying what and who is thinking what. And style, rather than serving the other elements, moves to the foreground. It becomes an active force in how character is disclosed, how plot is interrupted, how perspective shifts, and how meaning itself is made.

Episode 1 is about educating the reader’s education

That is why the first episode matters so much. “Telemachus” is not simply the beginning of the story. It is the beginning of the reader’s education. At first, the opening appears manageable enough. The setting is a tower that you can still see in pictures today. It is morning, and 3 men are starting their day with the normal rhythms. There is shaving, cooking, and an interaction with the milkmaid. There is friendly banter, and some conflict starts to emerge. On one level, this feels familiar. It resembles the opening of a recognizable social novel. But from the very beginning, Joyce challenges how we learn about the characters, the conflict, and the underlying themes.

“Stately, plump” Buck Mulligan does not simply enter the scene. He arrives performing an irreverent version of the mass. “Introibo ad altare Dei” turns an ordinary morning routine into a mock liturgy. On one level, it is funny. On another, it is theatrical. On another still, it frames the entire social and spiritual atmosphere of the episode. Mulligan is not just shaving. He is claiming the stage, profaning inherited ritual, and placing Stephen inside a world where language is never merely functional.

That first example touches all four dimensions at once. Buck’s character is not introduced through neutral description alone, but also through performance. The plot gets interrupted even before we get going. Buck’s ritual parody takes over the scene, and we are left wondering what is going on. Perspective is already becoming unstable because we are not simply watching events unfold from a fixed external vantage point. Multiple perspectives begin to compete with one another as Joyce slips from inner monologue to external description. Finally, Joyce is deliberating using style to challenge our assumptions about how we build meaning in real life.

The power of interruption.

Stephen, one of our protagonists, seems almost like a minor character given Buck Mulligan’s grand entrance. There is no long description. Instead, Joyce has him emerge through different interactions and reflections. It is as if he is painting him more slowly than we are used to in a typical novel. One of Joyce’s most powerful techniques to do this is the “interruption.” Jocian scholars describe these mini-episodes as interpolations, and they become much more obvious in episodes like “The Wandering Rocks” (episode 8). However, at this point Joyce uses interruption in an unsettling way. For example, when Stephen says, “I am the boy / That can enjoy / Invisibility, ” it seems to come out of left field. In a more conventional novel, a memory like that might be explained in more detail or seem to flow more naturally from the context. Joyce, however, is asking us to think more about how consciousness actually works. In this case, this fragment simply arrives. It appears in the scene without context.

The point is not just to puzzle the reader. The point is to force the reader to recognize that meaning in Ulysses is often built associatively rather than sequentially. Character is being disclosed, but not by summary. The plot unfolds, but not in a straight line. The perspective shifts inward, and style is the medium by which we feel that shift happen. Style, in some ways, trumps everything else. . . and this, for me, is the epitome of modernist conceit.

This is where inner monologue becomes so important. It is one of Joyce’s central tools for destabilizing the ordinary reading experience. The surface world of the tower remains present, but it is repeatedly interrupted by Stephen’s inward life: memory, grief, association, resentment, and recoil. We are no longer simply watching a scene from the outside. We are being asked to move between outer reality and inner consciousness, often without warning. It requires one to slow down, re-read a passage, and reorient oneself to what is going on and what the deeper meaning could be.

When grief breaks the scene

A powerful example of this in Episode 1 is the return of Stephen’s mother through the Latin prayer, “Liliata rutilantium...,” and Stephen’s cry, “No, mother! Let me be and let me live.” This is not information delivered for the reader’s benefit. It is an interruption. The scene is punctured by grief, guilt, religion, and unfinished psychic conflict. Joyce does not first explain Stephen’s burden and then show its consequences. He lets the pressure of Stephen’s grief break through (ala “Hamlet”, which becomes more relevant in later chapters). In this way, a character is no longer something simply described. Character is something the reader experiences through ruptures in the scene. Plot is no longer merely what happens next. It is the conflation of memory, inward life and whatever else Joyce throws into the mix. Perspective becomes unstable because the scene is now being lived from inside trauma as well as outside action.

This is all possible because of the style that Joyce deploys. The narrative is moving along, and then another Joyce introduces another element, for example, a ritual, a song, a memory, inward speech, a parody, or grief. At first, these can feel like obstacles. But as one learns to read Joyce, they begin to feel less like breaks in meaning and more like an opportunity to explore further.

A reading method for Ulysses

By the end of the first episode, Joyce has already begun teaching the reader a new discipline. When the narrative is interrupted, the point is not to panic or simply push through. The point is to ask better questions.

• Who is speaking or thinking?

• What was the catalyst for the interruption?

• What is the interruption doing?

• How does it connect to what has come before or, when rereading, how does it connect to what is coming?

• As we move back to the core story, what has changed in our understanding of the character, the context, or the conflict?

Read that way, the difficulty of Ulysses becomes less a wall than a method. Joyce is training the reader to stop assuming that the novel’s job is to make experience immediately legible. Instead, he asks us to move through language the way consciousness itself moves: by association, return, interruption, pressure, and layered awareness.

Why Ulysses still feels hard, and why it still matters

At times, Ulysses can feel like a dare, almost like a puzzle. But the book lasts because it is not only a puzzle. At some level, I don’t think Ulysses can ever really be solved. On every reading, I learn something new, but I still find passages that are completely incomprehensible. Perhaps, in this way, it is more like poetry. As much as academics have made their careers chasing down all the references and Joyce takes pride in how erudite he was, I don’t think the real value in reading and re-reading Ulysses is chasing down all the references and allusions. I think the real value is that it encourages us (like Plato before him) to learn a new mode of attention.

That may be why no one really forgets a first reading of Ulysses. One survives it, perhaps half-disoriented and half-exhilarated, and then returns to discover that Joyce was never simply withholding the story to be difficult. He was teaching us to look for the story in places conventional fiction does not teach us to look. A scene is never only a scene. The voice is never only one voice. The story is never only a sequence of events. That is why Ulysses still feels hard today. It is also why it still matters. Joyce does not just ask us to read a difficult book. He asks us to become a different kind of reader.

This week, my son came home from college for Spring Break with his girlfriend, who is delightful. They are in that early stage of young love, where everything is new and all-consuming. They are inseparable, I mean, like Siamese twins, inseparable. It is clear that they love each other, and this makes my wife and me happy. At the same time, it is obvious that this relationship now occupies most of their time outside of classes. For now, their world is each other.

This week I also happened to listen to an episode of The Daily Podcast on “looksmaxxing”: “Injections, Bone Hammering and the Pursuit of Peak Male Beauty.” The theme was familiar. Many young men are struggling to find direction, structure, and a sense of identity, and some are taking that search to an extreme. Some might argue they are suffering from the Adonis Complex. What is true for this type of subculture is that the relationships they are establishing with other men are anchored in external validation, how they look, how they rank, and how they are perceived by others. They are not anchored in becoming good men. They argue that doing things such as injections, supplements, and bone hammering (seriously, this is a thing) are justified because looks determine power. (Yes, I can sense all the women who read this rolling their eyes at this point)

Both of these relationships illustrate young men trying to figure out who they are and where they belong. In one case, identity is being shaped almost entirely through a romantic relationship. In the other, it is being shaped through status and validation among other men. Neither is inherently wrong, but both feel incomplete. Seeing those two patterns back-to-back made me reflect on what it means to have healthy male relationships at different stages of life. More specifically, it reinforced something I have come to understand over time but did not appreciate when I was younger. The relationships that shape you early in life do not sustain themselves. At some point, they depend on what you choose to maintain. What looks like connection at this stage does not always translate into something that endures.

In the U.S., most boys really start to individuate when they leave home, whether that is for college, the military, or something else. At that point, they step out of the web of relationships that supported them through their first 18 years, whether they fully recognized it or not. Family, coaches, other parents, older siblings, and the broader community were all, in different ways, invested in helping them transition from boyhood to manhood (I wrote about the stages of a man’s life in this article).

None of those relationships disappears, but their bonds begin to loosen. As a college-bound kid, you move from a world where relationships are largely a function of your environment and your family’s priorities, e.g., church, school, sports, Boy Scouts, into a world where the relationships become mostly self-directed. And this is NOTHING that you, as a parent, can do to influence those choices.

I remember that shift vividly. In college, pursuing romantic relationships became my primary motivation outside the Naval Academy, sometimes at the expense of building male friendships. After that, as I launched my career & got married, I formed relationships around life stage, career path, interests, and proximity. Each stage came with its own set of connections, but very few male relationships carried forward automatically. That is the part I did not fully appreciate at the time. Your home web never disappears, but nothing naturally replaces it. And without deliberate effort, relationships with other men often fade first.

How Men Often Build Trust

In my experience, men build friendships through activities. My best friends are the ones I ride bikes, train, and travel with. We spend time doing things where conversation is not the point. In this modality, you build trust through repetition and shared experience. The emotional layer is there, but it is usually accessed later and sometimes only during a crisis (e.g., divorce, death of a parent, major injury). I find that, when there is a shared time of vulnerability and emotional connection, there is a directness to it. There is a willingness to challenge, to say things without filtering for how they will land. It is less about processing and more about calibration. Love and affection are often demonstrated by making fun of the other person, which drives my wife nuts. This kind of relationship is easy to take for granted because it does not demand your attention in the same way others do. It does not insist on itself. But it will fade away unless you make a deliberate effort to invest.

Looking back, I had these types of male relationships in abundance at the Naval Academy. We trained together, competed together, and spent most of our time in close proximity. There were also older men who served as mentors (officers, coaches, sponsors). The good ones modeled what it meant to be a professional officer and helped us define the type of men we wanted to be. Thus, college acted like another web of support. None of it required much effort to maintain because it was built into the environment. At the time, I did not think about it as something I would need to sustain later. Like a lot of things that are given to you early in life, I assumed it would always be there in roughly the same form.

What the Classics Reveal About Male Friendship

There is a moment in the Iliad where Achilles loses Patroclus. Their relationship was built through shared experience and fighting side by side. Homer does not fully articulate the depth of that bond until it is gone. Achilles’ dramatic grief reveals what had been there all along. That pattern feels familiar. The depth is real, but it is often expressed indirectly, and sometimes only becomes visible in its absence. It is one of the reasons male friendship is easy to misunderstand from the outside. What matters is often embedded in shared history, not always in shared language.

A similar idea shows up in Ulysses by James Joyce. Written more than two thousand years later, it explores a different dimension of male relationships. Stephen Dedalus has a father, but he is also testing other figures, observing, selecting, deciding who to learn from. He rejects some, tries to impress others, and works through what it means to find intellectual and moral grounding. It is not just inheritance. It is a choice. This dynamic never goes away. However, over time it becomes less structured and harder to navigate. The expectation that you will find and maintain the right relationships shifts almost entirely to the individual.

These two examples point to two dimensions of male friendship. There is a horizontal dimension, the peers who know you through shared experience and activity. And there is a vertical dimension, the relationships built across generations with mentors and, over time, the role of becoming one yourself. Books like Iron John and King, Warrior, Magician, Lover point toward the same gap in modern life. There are fewer structured ways for men to move through the necessary stages of maturity. We have less shared understanding of what those transitions require. We have fewer rituals to recognize moments of transition. We have less clarity about how to honor our maleness without impinging on a woman’s ability to be all that she can be. The problem is that when we are not focusing energy and effort on building healthy male relationships, something else fills the gap, and it is not always constructive.—like looksmaxxing.

When the Web Begins to Thin

Strong relationships do not fail all at once. Whether they hold depends on what you do during the years when it is easiest to let them fade. If you do not invest time and energy, the connection becomes a thin strand. You end up trying to catch up on 40 years in 5 minutes at your next high school reunion, which I will do in April. I know this from personal experience. As I moved through life, my own web started thin. It was gradual, driven by the fact that I moved around a lot for various jobs and was consumed with raising a family. I had fewer shared experiences with men who knew me outside of the role I was playing at that stage of life.

Some people do the opposite. They continue to invest, and those relationships deepen over time. These lifelong friends knew you before your current role, and they can see you across stages. There is real value in being known by people who have seen you at different points in your life, not just who you are now, but who you were becoming. That is part of what I was trying to get at in Seasons of a Man’s Life. Who you are evolves over time, naturally and necessarily. The ultimate value of healthy male relationships is that they do two things at once. (1) They can keep you grounded in your core values and (2) they help shape who you are in the next stage. Thus, they give you both continuity and development. They remind you where you came from; they challenge you and the choices you make; and they help call you forward to be the best you can be. At the risk of another classical allusion, this is one of the key drivers of Socrates engaging Glaucon and others The Republic. He is trying to help them realize what it means to live a “just” life focused on “the good.”

Built-In Bonds and Deliberate Investment

Over the past month, Dana and I have had a number of people visit us in Sun Valley. Some were couples we are close with, and I enjoy spending time with both the women and the men. These weekends follow a common pattern. We do things together, meals, activities, and have conversations that include everyone. I am grateful for these “couple” friendships. The relationships are meaningful, and these friends have been part of our lives for many years. But they are different than my male friendships.

By that point, a group of my closest male friends (plus 1 woman who can kick all our asses) came to visit the other week. These are people I have known for decades. In our early years in Seattle, we did everything together. We rode bikes; we did adventure races; we skied; we spent long days exploring the Pacific Northwest. For many years, we also worked together. It was intense and constant, requiring little thought to maintain. Then life shifted. I moved to Oakland, and we became focused on our careers. Staying connected required more effort. Over the years, we would meet in places like Hawaii, Napa, or Santa Barbara to ride bikes. These trips were always anchored in a shared activity, but it was no longer automatic.

A third group of men, who have come to Sun Valley and will come again this year, are my guy friends from the Naval Academy. Our shared experience was a different kind of intensity. Four years of trying to survive at a formative stage, followed by early separation, and then reconnection later in life. Early in our Navy careers, we would connect at reunions and periodically on social media. The connection was still there, but it was thin. What brought it back was a shared recognition that (1) these types of relationships mattered, (2) it was good for the soul to spend time together again, and (3) if we wanted those relationships to continue, we had to invest in them deliberately.

Looking at all of these relationships together, the pattern becomes clear. Your support web does not disappear; it just stops holding on its own. Career, family, geography, and the natural progression of life all loosen the connective tissue. That loosening is inevitable. What is not inevitable is whether the relationship survives it.

And, Not Either/Or

Watching my son, I can see the beginning of the same transition. He is building something new, and that matters. I would not want to interrupt that. But at some point, the web around him will loosen in the same way it did for me. The question is not whether he will care about male relationships in his life. The question is whether he will learn early enough that relationships only endure if you keep choosing to invest in them. It does not have to be an either/or choice. I.e., it is not a question of choosing between a relationship with a partner or relationships with other men. The challenge is learning how to build both and to invest enough time over the next 3 years so that his male relationships survive the stages of life that will pull them apart.

To be fair, not every friendship needs to last for life (I wrote about this dynamic in an article about friendships for a season, a reason, or a lifetime). Some should fade. Some belong to a specific stage. But there is real value in carrying a few of them forward, especially the ones built on trust, shared history, and mutual respect. These friendships become a source of perspective, grounding, and renewal. Most of us do not think about that early enough. I certainly did not. But looking back and seeing where I am now, I can see that male friendship is not a luxury in a healthy life. It is part of how a man stays connected to who he has been, and part of how he grows into who he still needs to become. I am extremely grateful for the ones that have persisted.

This is not my first encounter with the book. I have read it several times over the years, and I once spent sixteen weeks working through it at St. John’s College as part of my MALA. I can track the argument from book to book and explain, with some confidence, what most readers would describe as the major takeaways. And yet, every time I return to the text, I find myself doing two things at once: trying to understand what Plato is actually arguing, and revisiting definitions and conclusions I thought I had already understood.

That experience feels increasingly strange given how we are “learning” in an AI-powered world.

We live in a world where we use AI constantly, often without noticing it. We rely on tools like ChatGPT to summarize arguments, clarify concepts, and compress complex texts into something immediately intelligible. I am doing some version of that even as I write this. We have never had faster access to explanation, and we have never been more efficient at resolving confusion. Some days, I would like to have a neural net plugged into my brain so that I could have always-on access to all information ever produced. Maybe this is what it would be like to live in the Matrix?

Which makes reading The Republic feel even more disorienting.

Reading “Hard” Literature

Most of the demanding literature I have read over the years does not tax the reader in quite the same way. Even texts people routinely describe as “hard” tend to move forward. Homer’s epics move from beginning to end, even as they circle themes of honor, fate, and homecoming. Shakespeare’s plays demand sustained attention to language and character, and I often rely on footnotes and commentary to unpack the metaphors and allusions. But the dramatic structure provides orientation. I know I miss things when I read those works, which is part of what makes rereading them rewarding. I rarely wonder, however, whether I am fundamentally failing to understand what the text is doing. To be fair, Kant still leaves me completely lost.

The Republic feels different by design.

Plato does not offer a narrative that unfolds toward resolution. He constructs an argument that loops, restarts, and repeatedly destabilizes its own conclusions. Each time I return to the text, I find myself wondering not only what Plato is arguing, but whether I am actually understanding it at all. The experience feels closer to reading a modernist novel like Ulysses, where progress is measured less by advancement than by sustained exposure to difficulty. (I also wrote about a similar experience of disorientation reading Lorca’s poetry here) In this reading of Plato, I am relearning that this is the point.

What It Means to Know Something

That persistent disorientation has forced me to reconsider what it actually means to know something. For example, for most of my life, learning felt cumulative. I read texts, studied arguments, and practiced applying what I had learned. Over time, I felt I understood the topic, and “knowledge” felt like something I acquired through this discipline. The frustrating part was that I often also forgot what I knew pretty quickly. But I always knew I could go back and re-engage with the text, and I would get the gist. And now with AI-powered LLMs, I have immediate access to the texts, the critics, and the research surrounding a text. It is, in many ways, overwhelming.

I have also seen this play out with my youngest son, who is an Engineering Major. He is working his way through Cal I, II, and eventually III so that he can learn the math needed to describe motion and take on classes like calculus-based physics. In this model, knowledge is cumulative. The Republic does not reward that approach. Just when he seems to get his interlocutors to agree to a definition that seems sufficient to them (and me as a reader), Plato exposes the assumption that made it feel adequate. The same is true for his arguments. He seems to bring an argument to a close, then he reopens it. Frustrating to say the least. However, I don’t think this is a failure of my reading. I think it is the experience Plato is trying to induce for both the interlocutors and the reader. I.e., you have to live this disorientation to achieve knowledge of justice and the good. The question is why?

Dialectic as a Discipline

Plato does not use dialectic as a tool for efficiently producing answers. He uses it as a discipline for exposing false certainty. Dialectic works by allowing an idea to feel adequate, then revealing the conditions that make it feel complete. Each interlocutor in the Republic represents a genuine human standpoint, not a straw man. Each captures something real about how people think about justice, power, obligation, and self-interest. Plato insists that none of these standpoints, taken on its own, is sufficient.

The Case Study: Justice

Plato does not advance an argument about justice in a straight line. He advances it through a sequence of attempts that repeatedly restart, each voiced by an interlocutor who represents a recognizable way of thinking about moral life. Cephalus leads off by defining justice as “telling the truth and paying one’s debts.” That seems reasonable, but then Plato shows why it is inadequate. Polemarchus jumps in and defines justice as helping friends and harming enemies. Again, this may be an element of acting justly, but it is not justice. Thrasymachus reframes the question entirely by identifying justice with power and political advantage, forcing the reader to confront the possibility that moral language functions as a cover for domination rather than a constraint upon it. I found this to be very similar to Callicles’ argument in The Gorgias dialogue, which I wrote about here. Plato totally smacks down Thrasymachus, whether Thrasymachus recognizes it.

Glaucon jumps in and recasts justice as a social contract rooted in self-interest and fear, using the metaphor of the Ring of Gyges (which some say was the inspiration for the ring in “The Lord of the Rings”). The ring does not tempt its wearer to commit injustice by making it attractive. Instead, it tempts the ring wearer by removing exposure, consequence, and accountability. Under its protection, one’s reputation no longer constrains desire, and the distinction between being just and appearing just collapses. Glaucon’s claim is not that people love injustice, but that they love safety, advantage, and freedom from penalty. In this case, justice exists largely because it is enforced rather than chosen. Now that is mindboggling.

This argument is alluring because it feels psychologically honest. It does not flatter the reader’s moral self-image. It explains behavior in a way that aligns with history and experience. If Glaucon is right, justice is not a good in itself. It is a rational compromise made by people who lack the power to act with impunity. In fact, Jonathon Haidt in his book, The Righteous Mind, makes this argument, i.e., Glaucon is what the real world is like. And it is important to note that Plato does not dismiss Glaucon’s argument. In fact, if Glaucon is right, Plato implies that philosophy has nothing deeper to say about justice at all. Boom!

Plato responds not by refuting Glaucon directly, but by redirecting the inquiry. This is where he introduces “the city in speech” metaphor and suggests that justice is akin to harmony amongst the different components of the soul. At this point, I was like “yes.” This makes a lot of sense. However, Plato refuses to let the argument settle there. He says order explains stability and harmony, but does not yet explain why justice should be chosen when injustice succeeds. I.e., why do bad people get ahead in this world.

Plato’s final redirection comes with the distinction he draws between opinion and knowledge. Each prior account of justice has relied, in different ways, on what appears to be the case from a particular vantage point or perspective. Plato now insists that justice cannot be fully understood unless it is grounded in knowledge of what “is,” rather than opinion shaped by perspective, interest, or advantage. Yes, I know this sounds a little Dilbertish—i.e., justice is truly knowing what the is “is.”

It is important to note that Plato never discards what came before. Each definition and exchange captures something real. At the same time, each definition is incomplete. Thus, The Republic does not advance through replacement. Instead, it advances through accumulation, forcing the reader to carry unresolved partial truths as the argument progresses, which is really frustrating. Ultimately, the experience is less about following a proof and more about realizing the limit of your own certainty. In other words, Socrates does to the reader what he does to the interlocutors.

What Has Been Clarified, and What Has Not?

By the midpoint of the Republic, Plato has not delivered a final definition of justice, but he has established firm constraints.

Justice is not merely a social convention or an external rule. It is an internal condition of the soul. It cannot be reduced to self-interest, even if self-interest explains much human behavior. It involves order and harmony among parts. And it cannot rest on opinion alone. It requires some orientation toward what is rather than what merely appears. At the same time, Plato has not yet justified justice itself. He has not shown that knowledge of what “is” is possible. He has not demonstrated that a just life is better than an unjust one when injustice succeeds. And, as such, the reader is left in a state of productive incompleteness.

And this is where I am today. I am at the end of Book V and ready for more disorientation as we move forward in the argument.

ChatGPT and the Temptation of Premature Clarity

This is where the Republic seems so out of touch with a world shaped by ChatGPT. ChatGPT and other LLMs are extraordinarily good at explanation. They can summarize arguments, do deep research, trace distinctions, and clarify positions with mind-boggling speed, even if they still hallucinate. Plato would have described this as “opinion” in the technical sense. That is not a criticism. Opinion is necessary for shared reasoning and public discourse. What opinion cannot do is ground itself.

Dialectic exists to expose that limit. It resists premature closure. It forces the reader to live with what has not yet been proven. The risk posed by AI is not that it gives wrong answers, but that it gives answers too easily, allowing clarity to arrive before understanding has had time to form.

Staying with the Question

By the midpoint of the Republic, Plato has not answered the question of justice. He has just made it harder to answer unequivocally. To the point above, progress in the book does not consist in accumulating conclusions. It consists of learning where certainty is unwarranted and why. Understanding arrives not as possession, but as restraint. In a culture optimized for speed, efficiency, and explanation, there is something radical about committing to a text that refuses to resolve itself on demand. If the Republic is still relevant in the age of ChatGPT, it is not because it gives us better answers. It is because it teaches us what it means to learn, what it means to know, and why some questions are worth staying with long enough to be less wrong than before.

Yesterday, two things happened.

1. Trump invaded Venezuela

2. I turned 58

#1 is a serious event, and I started writing about what this new posture means for us, as a republic, and our standing on the world stage here. I will be writing more about it in the coming weeks.

My turning fifty-eight is not nearly as important. This essay is about that, and I am noting the timing only so it doesn’t sound tone deaf.

An Annual Check in

For the past fifteen years or so, I have used my birthday, January 2nd, as a deliberate check-in on job satisfaction and, more broadly, on where my life stands at that moment. Each year, I would force-rank a short list of criteria that captured what mattered most to me at that stage. I would reflect on the prior year, what worked, and what I learned, then ask whether my current role and trajectory could reasonably deliver on those priorities in the year ahead.

The timing often coincided with annual review cycles, which made it a natural moment to frame a conversation with my boss. I did not approach this as a negotiation. Instead, I treated it as a renewal of a social contract. When I started a new role, I tried to define a three-year tour of duty, likely influenced by how my career began in the Navy.

To be candid, I started this practice in part to address my own fear of missing out. Early in my career, there always seemed to be a bigger role, a broader scope, or a more prestigious opportunity somewhere else. That mindset consumed a lot of time and energy. After a few years in the corporate world, I realized I was driving myself nuts. If I wanted to do good work, I needed to stop scanning the horizon and focus on the year ahead. These annual check-ins became a way for both sides to recommit with clarity.

Over time, I extended this practice to the people and teams I worked with. I have found that ambitious, high-performing people can burn a lot of energy questioning whether they should be somewhere else. In an “employment at will” environment, I wanted my teams to feel they could consciously recommit, do their best work, and not be distracted by background noise. This also helped us do deliberate succession planning when the fit was not quite right.

A Pause I Didn’t Plan

For most of my career, these reflections were internally motivated. This past year was different. Some of the forces that created space for reflection were external. I left Maxio in April. My mother had health issues in May that required my sisters and me to engage much more intentionally. Our youngest son was also graduating from high school in May. Any one of these events would prompt a time for reflection. Together, they created a pause I had not planned.

The good news is that this pause became an extended opportunity to reevaluate what Dana and I wanted our lives to become. We spent the summer in the cabin in Idaho for our last summer together, which I wrote about here. I then spent the next six months thinking deliberately about what the next season could/should be, which I wrote about here.

During that time, I also began advising a few companies, initially as an experiment. Over the years, I have enjoyed serving on boards and doing periodic due diligence for PE, VC, and banks. That work is also advisory in nature and largely project-based, but there is an important difference. In those roles, I was typically engaged by someone other than the CEO.

With my new firm (CEOx.io), I work directly with and for the CEO and the executive team. My sole goal is to help them scale smarter, operate better, and grow with confidence, especially during the volatile $1M to $40M ARR range. I really like working on real problems in real time, without being personally responsible for every outcome. As one of my mentors described it, this means having my “nose in, but fingers out.” I also slept better and had more time to integrate interests outside of work, including reading and writing.

The question that I wrestled with all summer was whether I was ready to step out of the operating arena and commit to this new way of life full-time.

Direction Over Elevation

For much of my life, I thought of a career as a ladder. I hoped that each step up a rung would bring greater scope, greater responsibility, and, ideally, greater compensation. Progress was measured vertically, and the implicit goal was to keep climbing.

What I see more clearly now is that a career may be better understood as a series of vectors. I.e., direction matters as much as magnitude. Not to overuse the metaphor, but from this vantage, a role can carry significant momentum but could be pointing you in a direction that you do not want to go. In this case, intentionality matters more than elevation. I.e., the question to ask is not whether you are moving up, but whether the direction you are moving still aligns with what you value.

This realization showed up most clearly this summer. Moving to Hailey is the first time I have ever moved for quality of life, not a job. Every prior move was motivated by a new opportunity. For example, I moved multiple times around the country in the Navy, moved to Boston for Business School, and returned to Seattle to jump into the Internet. Dana and I then did a “tour of duty” in London, and then moved our little family to California so I could start a job at Salesforce. We stayed in California while I worked for four different companies, as being in close proximity to Silicon Valley matters for a software guy.

To be clear, Hailey is not in the middle of anything. There is no industry here to plug into, no VC/PE/AI community to engage with, and no built-in momentum beyond perhaps on a mountain bike or downhill skiing to leverage. Choosing to live here was a decision about what we wanted our lives to be. For the first time, the place came first, and I hope the work will follow.

Work, Service, and a New Top Priority

Professionally, this is a new chapter. Coaching CEOs, teaching, and writing feel like expressions of the same underlying impulse that has guided my career: helping people become their extraordinary selves. These days, I am less interested in having to make every call. Instead, I am excited to help others identify options, think through tradeoffs, mitigate risks, and then execute with confidence.

I am also starting to see this chapter as an opportunity to get more involved in the local community. When I joined the Navy at eighteen, a major driver was the chance to travel the world and do cool stuff. At the same time, I remember a strong desire to do my part for the Republic. I spent twelve years in the Navy and, when I left, felt I had done my part for “god and country.”

The next chapter was mostly defined by achievement and trying to win in the corporate sector. I kept trying to stay involved, but mostly through our kids’ activities (sports, school, Boy Scouts). What feels different now is the opportunity to reconsider what it means to serve the community not as an obligation, but as a choice.

When I sat down this year to do my annual job satisfaction reflection, the criteria looked different. In the past, I would have ranked intellectual stimulation, the opportunity to make an impact at a company, and the ability to support people at the top. This year, quality of life tops the list. This is not because my ambition has faded, but because I have a clearer sense of the direction I want to pursue. . .. with gusto!

A Time to Reckon

There is also a reckoning embedded in closing the last chapter. When you spend decades trying to make an impact and build software companies, there is a promise of a life-changing outcome. My path did not resolve that way. I had the opportunity to do good work with great people at several incredible companies in a variety of roles. There were real wins, and there were real losses. Looking back, what stands out most is how much I learned along the way, often in ways I did not expect at the time. But now I hope to share these lessons with a new generation of CEOs.

In this next chapter, success is starting to come into focus, and it looks different. It has less to do with scale and more to do with alignment. It is about being present with my family, developing fewer/deeper relationships, making a meaningful contribution, and continuing to learn. I do not feel finished; however, I am getting clearer about what matters. And this feels like a reasonable way to begin fifty-eight.

What I Hope My Boys See

I am also aware that our college-aged boys are watching, whether they say it or not. They are forging their own paths and beginning to define what success means to them. If there is anything I hope this chapter models for them, it is that direction matters and that it is worth pausing to ask what you are optimizing for.

Like many boys of his generation, he grew up loving tech & computers. He built things, tinkered constantly, and spent hours coding. Early in high school, he was convinced he would major in computer science. He talked about his interest in the subject and the fact that CS majors were among the highest-paid graduates. Both my wife and I worried he might be solving for the wrong thing. It felt premature to focus on compensation as a primary driver of this decision. But, you know: “kids these days.” We rationalized that he still had a lot of time to figure out what he wanted to be when he grew up.

Then stories began surfacing about rescinded internship offers, hiring freezes, and shrinking data roles. By senior year, he shifted his focus to engineering. That path actually made sense to us. His first passion had always been building and experimenting. He can still study and use computer science as an engineer. We will see where he lands. The data suggests he will change majors more than once. At least for now, this choice of vocation is closer to his avocation.

This brings me to Plato’s Republic. One of Plato’s central insights is that an ideal city becomes happy when its people do the work that fits their abilities. Farmers farm; Carpenters build; and Guardians protect. For Plato, justice is not primarily a legal concept. It is a matter of structure. A city is well-ordered when each person performs the role suited to their nature rather than trying to live someone else’s life. Happiness follows from that order. When people are misaligned with their roles, the city becomes stressed and unstable. When they are matched well, the city becomes peaceful and productive.

Plato calls this ideal city a “city in speech.” On the surface, he is using dialectic to construct a political community designed to function well. At the same time, the city in speech serves as a model for how a life becomes ordered. Happiness, or at least contentment, comes from aligning one’s nature with the work one chooses. Disorder enters when those drift apart.

The Greek term behind Plato’s idea of happiness is “eudaimonia.” My understanding of the word is that it represents the idea of flourishing or well-being rather than the more modern idea of a feeling of “happiness.” A person flourishes when their actions develop their full potential and are guided by reason and steady moral judgment. Eudaimonia is not a mood. This is not a temporary state but a lifelong pursuit that is achieved through living in accordance with reason and moral virtue (i.e., pursuit of the noble and the good) throughout one’s/life.

Plato does not use our modern language of passion or purpose, but his point is straightforward. A well-ordered life begins with understanding who you are and choosing work that fits that nature. I understand why. We tell young people to be practical. But Plato would say the better way is to spend time understanding your inner nature and not reacting to external pressures or ambition. Money, power, and fame are all temporary.

I learned this the hard way in my own career.

When I graduated from Harvard Business School (HBS) in 2000, the internet boom was booming. A large percentage of my classmates turned their backs on the lucrative consulting and banking jobs to “bet it all” on the internet. Ironically, we thought we had already missed the opportunity as it seemed the Internet had peaked in 1997. I joined AvenueA, a pioneering internet advertising agency and tech company. I was genuinely interested in the promise of the Internet, but, like my son, I was also hearing the siren song of potential life-changing wealth.

AvenueA (which became aQuantive [AQNT]) was a poster child for this boom/bust cycle. I joined in Feb 2000, right before its IPO. Its stock was priced at $24, popped to $90 on the first day, and then dropped to <$1 over time (note: I can’t find a clean public record to support this, but this is directionally correct). I vividly remember someone saying our cash in the bank (from the IPO) was worth more than the company’s value on the NASDAQ! We were facing the very real possibility of being delisted, it was so low.

In fact, the irony is that it is often when the top business school grads start to flock to a sector that that sector is about to bust. For example, the Harvard MBA Indicator (Corporate Finance Institute), which tracks what proportion of Harvard grads choose market-sensitive roles such as investment banking or private equity, has flagged major market downturns. When over thirty percent of a graduating class enters those fields, the historical signal has been that the market is near a top. To that point, we had about 30% of our class in 2000 go into the Internet. Similarly, Wharton career-flow data show that as technology boomed, the share of MBAs going into tech rose dramatically and correlated with the sector’s valuation.

Months later, the bubble had clearly burst, and then the carnage began. AvenueA laid off half the company in one day. And we represented just one small part (internet advertising) of a much larger sector collapse. In fact, dot-com layoffs exceeded 100k in 2001 alone, which was double the number in 2000. Across the broader tech sector, there were ~500k layoffs from 2001 to 2002. One moment, any “internet” company, no matter how absurd the business model was, was being rewarded. The next day, the same companies were fighting for survival. The whiplash was real, reshaping entire careers and lives.

Here is the nuance that matters. The internet did not die in that collapse. It hit its first peak, crashed, and then rebuilt into something far larger. But during the downturn, many people left tech altogether. I had friends who were laid off and then struggled to get rehired. Some moved into real estate, nonprofit roles, or entirely new career paths. Some went back to school to weather the storm. They were not wrong. They were responding to real constraints: rent, debt, family, and the need for stability.

Others stayed. I was one of them, but not because I had any foresight. I had school loans and bills, and I was extremely grateful to have a job. I kept my head down and just focused on the work. I was painfully aware that, at that time, luck mattered as much as conviction. IMHO: survival during the first internet crash had very little to do with insight.

The just released Indeed Hiring Report shows a similar dynamic today to the one we experienced with the first Internet boom/bust. According to Indeed, the swings in tech hiring over the past three years are some of the sharpest in the labor market. Their Job Postings Index (JPI) tracks employer demand relative to pre-pandemic levels, with 100 set as the baseline. Tech peaked above 200 in 2022, meaning demand was more than double what it had been before the pandemic. Since then, the index has collapsed to 67, which places tech nearly one-third below its pre-pandemic baseline.

The whiplash in tech and data hiring is clear. Demand surged in 2022, but by late 2025 both sectors had fallen well below pre-pandemic levels while application volumes continued to rise.

This is the environment my son was reacting to when he shifted away from computer science. But the data also show why timing a college major to the labor market is often a mistake. The hiring cycle that shaped his decision will almost certainly look different four years from now. Tech cycles move faster than degree cycles. The market today is a snapshot, not a map

And this is where the distinction between vocation and avocation becomes useful. Plato does not speak in terms of passion (i.e., avocation), but the idea sits beneath his argument. If you know your nature, the work that fits it (i.e., your vocation) becomes its own reward. Thus, in modern terms, vocation and avocation overlap. But the world is more complex now. We tell people to follow their passion, yet rent, student loan debt, and responsibilities shape every practical decision. The ideal is to find work that matches your nature and your interests, and then anchor yourself in that alignment long enough for the cycles to turn. Even then, luck and circumstance will play their part.

That tension is also part of being a dad. I don’t want to overwhelm them with advice and my “I remember when” stories. I don’t want to overly influence their choices, as if they would listen to me anyway. I hope they do not have to repeat my mistakes. To that point, perhaps they will read this essay one day, and it will resonate. As Eleanor Brown put it, “You only have one life to live. Make sure it’s yours.”

The Wardroom Rule and the Dinner Table

There’s an old rule in the Navy that when you’re gathered for dinner in the wardroom, it’s best to avoid politics and religion. The idea is to keep the peace in close quarters, and it’s a good rule anywhere. But the other night, sitting at dinner with friends, the conversation drifted into forbidden territory. Somehow, we started talking about spiritual education, which led to the question of how many of us still believed in God.

What followed wasn’t an argument so much as an exploration. I was surprised that most identified as atheists, sure that no divine order or hidden agency guides the universe or shapes our lives. One or two leaned toward agnosticism, conceding that something might exist beyond comprehension but doubting our capacity to know it. No one went further to ask what the divine might look like if it were real, or how it might touch our lives. We stayed safely on the threshold, discussing God as an abstract idea rather than a living possibility.

I’ve been on both sides of that divide. Raised Catholic, I remember being a fervent believer. Though, as a child, I was really adopting the faith of my parents, both of whom were deeply Catholic. We went to church and Sunday school every week, said prayers at dinner, and emphasized the religious rather than commercial side of Christmas and Easter. Like many adolescents, I struggled with what it meant to be religious and part of a church tradition versus being spiritual and part of a broader faith. I continued to go to Mass while at the Naval Academy, drawn to the ritual and the silence amid the chaos. But for most of my adult life, I stopped attending services. At the same time, I started exploring other faith traditions. That’s why I now describe myself as a “recovering Catholic.” I am not sure exactly what I am, but I am still searching.

Still, I remain drawn to the rituals I grew up with: the smell of candles, the rhythm of the Mass, the music. When Dana and I were in Europe this September, I lit candles in the churches we visited. I do it less from belief than from respect for the mystery that lingers when belief fades. I also do it because my mother lights candles for our family every time she goes to church. For me, it’s a way to honor that tradition, take a moment to pray for family and friends and, at the same time, to gesture toward something I still sense but can’t define.

Maybe that’s one reason I’ve been so taken with Rumi over the years. His poems don’t reject reason, but they begin where reason ends. He doesn’t argue for faith; he assumes the divine and invites us to experience it. He treats doubt not as failure but as a doorway (“Moses and the Shepard” is a great example). Reading him, I realize that what I’ve called uncertainty may actually be reverence, a willingness to live inside questions I can’t resolve. He captures this sentiment so well in poems like “Love Dogs,” “Pickaxe,” and “Guesthouse.”

The Confidence of Atheism

Listening to my friends, I was struck by how modern their certainty sounded. Atheism is clearly an heir to the Enlightenment’s faith in reason that replaced the mystery of the Catholic Church with the need to provide scientific proof. Atheism, in its pure form, holds that there is no divine agency; there is no creator, no final cause, no spiritual essence animating the world. Everything we observe arises from natural processes: matter, energy, chance, and time. It can all be explained by science. In this worldview, consciousness is seen as an emergent property of biology rather than the imprint of a soul.

As we all know, the Enlightenment was the great 18th-century project to free human thought from superstition. The rise of empirical science, the success of Newtonian physics, and the philosophical rigor of Descartes and Hume gave reason unprecedented authority. Kant defined the limits of knowledge, and Darwin later removed the need for divine design. Nietzsche took the final step, declaring that “God is dead,” meaning not that a deity had perished, but that modern humanity had outgrown its need for one. I remember wrestling with these thinkers and their ideas in college and St John’s College. Their logic attracted me, but I always felt something was missing.

This Enlightenment vision was heroic. It suggests that humanity is defined by its own intellect and stands on its own, unafraid of a purposeless universe. And, in fairness, that worldview has produced staggering achievements across many fields, including the sciences, medicine, technology, and democracy. It was the spark of progress. It helped us break free of the confines of the Catholic Church and of an orthodoxy limited to a priest’s interpretation and tradition. The modern mind is its triumph. But it also left something out: the sense that life carries meaning deeper than mechanism.

Atheism can explain the structure of reality but struggles to account for its significance. It tells us how things happen but not why. In the atheistic imagination, existence is an accident; consciousness is a temporary spark. Yet when I look around at the beauty of music, the persistence of love, the moral impulse that drives us to care for one another, I have trouble believing those are random byproducts of chemistry. Something in us yearns for coherence, as if the universe were not indifferent but intimate.

The Question Behind Belief

The question that has always shaped my own belief is simple but unrelenting: What came before the before, and what will come after the after?

Science gives us models for understanding the known and unknown worlds (e.g., the Big Bang, quantum fluctuations). But even these presuppose something prior. What ignited the spark? Why is there something rather than nothing? We can chase the regress of causes back through time, but eventually we hit a wall that no equation can cross. And when we do, we’re left with awe. The sense that existence itself is the first miracle.

To me, that awe is not proof but orientation. It suggests that the universe may be more than a sequence of physical events, that consciousness and moral imagination might not be evolutionary accidents, but expressions of something more profound. Every faith tradition, in its own language, points toward that mystery. Whether one calls it God, Brahman, Tao, or the Real, the intuition is the same. Reality is not cold and indifferent but alive with meaning.

This doesn’t mean rejecting science or reason; it does mean recognizing their limits. Reason can map the visible, but it cannot explain why we are moved by beauty, or why love can transcend survival. Those are not irrational experiences. They’re trans-rational, touching dimensions that logic can’t reduce.

Rumi’s Counterpoint – Longing as Evidence of the Divine

Rumi would not recognize the question “Does God exist?” as meaningful. For him, the divine is the starting point, not the conclusion. “I am the dust on the path of Muhammad,” he wrote, grounding his mystical vision firmly within Islam. God is the Real, the source from which everything flows and to which everything returns. The individual soul is not a separate creation but a fragment of that divine whole, temporarily exiled in matter.

In the “Song of the Reed Flute,” which opens his Masnavi, Rumi begins with a cry of separation. The reed, cut from the reed bed, laments its distance from the source: “Ever since they cut me from the reed bed, my song has caused men and women to weep.” That longing is not despair; it is the sound of memory. The reed knows where it came from and yearns to return. I feel this longing.

Within Sufi thought, this journey back to the Real unfolds through four stages of realization:

• Sharīʿa (discipline)

• Ṭarīqa (devotion)

• Maʿrifa (direct knowing)

• Ḥaqīqa (union)

Each marks a deepening of consciousness, a shedding of illusion. The final stage (fanāʾ fī al-Ḥaqq, “annihilation in the Real”) is the moment when self and source are no longer two. The lover and the Beloved are revealed as one. I don’t think I have ever actually achieved this, but reading his poems or watching the Whirling Dervishes do their Sema makes me want to!

Rumi’s insight is that this longing for reunion is itself divine. The ache for God is planted by God. It is like the homing signal of the soul (“Sunrise Ruby” and “Waterwheels” are great poems that touches on this idea). Every experience of beauty, love, or awe is a small remembering.

Atheism, by contrast, sees that same longing as an evolutionary byproduct, a trick of consciousness. But Rumi would say that the longing is the most reliable evidence we have: the heart remembers what the mind has forgotten.

The Outsider’s Faith

I don’t claim certainty. I stand at a distance from Rumi’s world as I don’t speak Arabic or Persian, haven’t read the Qur’an in its original language, and wasn’t raised in a culture that fuses law, devotion, and love into a single path. Yet when I read him, something stirs that feels older than doctrine and deeper than language.

It’s the recognition that faith need not mean blind belief. It can also mean reverent curiosity, i.e., a willingness (and humility) to approach mystery without needing to master it. When I light a candle in a church, I’m not petitioning a god for favor. I’m acknowledging the mystery that allows any of this to exist at all. This is the same mystery my atheist friends call chance and Rumi calls love.

Closing Reflection – The Candle and the Dark

Maybe that’s the only faith left to a modern mind: not certainty, but attention. To stand in a quiet church or beneath a night sky and feel the pulse of being. To recognize that we came from something we cannot name and will return to something equally vast.

Faith, then, becomes not an answer but a posture. It is a way of being in relation to what exceeds us. Atheism offers clarity through reason. By contrast, mysticism provides depth of experience through mystery. In between is where most of us humans exist. We are reasoning creatures who still long to kneel. One of my favorite Rumi poems is “Love dogs.” The final quatrain is:

There are love dogs

no one knows the names of.

Give your life

to be one of them.

Here is to the love dogs in the world!

I was introduced to Rumi by my mother more than thirty years ago. The first compilation she gave me was The Essential Rumi, translated or, as I would later learn, interpreted by Coleman Barks, an English professor at the University of Georgia. Over the years, she sent other books of Rumi’s poetry, though I no longer recall the translators. Barks, who does not speak Farsi, had a particular gift for rendering Rumi’s voice into something that felt immediate and modern. Many credit him with making Rumi the most-read poet in America. His versions seemed to bypass intellect and speak directly to the heart.

Recently, I began co-leading a six-week seminar with my mother on The Essential Rumi. The class started as a celebration of the poetry that had shaped our imaginations and respective spiritual journeys for decades. But during one session, a participant noted that “real scholars” do not consider Barks a legitimate translator. The comment stopped me cold. I realized that, like millions of others, I had come to know and love Rumi through Barks’ voice, not Rumi’s own.

On one level, this should have been obvious. Whenever we read a translated work, we stand one step removed from the original language. During my master’s program at St. John’s College, this kind of scrutiny was a sport. We would argue over Greek and Latin word choices, cross-compare translations, and chase shades of meaning. Honestly, it could be mind-numbingly tedious. At the same time, this discipline, this attention to the details, revealed how fragile meaning becomes when language shifts even slightly.

Yes, I had never thought to apply that rigor to Rumi. As Homer Simpson would say, “Duh!” Perhaps it is that, for me, because poetry has always lived under a different standard of “truth.” We forgive imprecision when beauty or insight carries us. But I began to wonder: if Barks relied on earlier English translations rather than Rumi’s Farsi originals, was I really reading Rumi or an American interpretation of him filtered through culture, language, and intention?

That question opened others. How did a thirteenth-century Muslim theologian from Konya become the patron saint of Western spirituality? What happens when a sacred voice is translated, then re-translated, until its theology becomes therapy?

This realization has led me to think not only about how we read poetry, but how we read truth itself. It has made me reflect on how we consume news, stories, and interpretations that shape our understanding of the world.

The Spectrum of Truth

We live in an age obsessed with truth yet uncertain how to find it. One way to map the problem is on a continuum:

Fact → Interpretation → Translation → Opinion

• Fact: What happened?

  • I.e., a fact is a verifiable truth.

• Interpretation: What does it mean?

  • Obviously, an interpretation is subject to bias and framing.

• Translation: How does it travel across language or worldview?

  • A translation is shaped by the translator’s skill and the choices made to preserve tone, rhythm, or rhyme.

• Opinion: What does it mean to me?

  • An opinion is interpretation made personal. It says more about the speaker than about the subject.

Each step on the continuum moves farther from the source. In journalism, that distance can be dangerous. In poetry, it can be illuminating. The challenge is knowing which kind of truth you are reading, and what is at stake if you misread it.

In the United States, we once had many news outlets that prided themselves on offering “just the facts.” When they had a point of view, it was primarily confined to the opinion or editorial page. In recent years, with the rise of unapologetically partisan media on both the right and the left, interpretation and opinion have come to dominate. For anyone who wants to understand what is actually happening, finding the facts has become more difficult. In the worst cases, when reporters deliberately alter meaning, we as the polis suffer.

By contrast, when a poet like Barks alters or interprets, something different is at play. The poet calls on imagination in search of resonance. Yet the underlying mechanics are the same across all forms of communication. We like to believe we consume facts, but what we actually consume are interpretations of interpretations. Every act of writing, speaking, or reporting is an act of translation. Each transforms private experience into public language. Heck, that is what I am doing with these essays.

Interpreter vs. Translator

Coleman Barks is not a Persian scholar. He worked from literal English renderings by academics such as A. J. Arberry and Reynold Nicholson, recasting them into loose, musical American free verse. His goal was to help Rumi come alive in English. He wanted to capture the feeling, even if the theology was lost. In that sense, he is an interpreter rather than a translator.

In some ways, he resembles a skilled television producer. He takes a complex story, compresses it, adapts it, and makes it compelling for the audience. His genius is accessibility. Critics, however, argue that by doing so, he sacrificed fidelity and nuance. They see his versions as dramatizations: the events remain, but the motives, the religious scaffolding, and the metaphysical grammar have been simplified for prime time.

The tension between access and accuracy defines all translation and much of modern media. But I am left wondering, “is this necessarily a bad thing when we are talking about poetry?” Without Barks, few of us would have found Rumi at all. He democratized mysticism. When we understand that, we can treat Barks as an introduction to Rumi and, by extension, to Sufism and Islam. I know I have been inspired to spend more time with these traditions because of the world that Barks has opened for me.

Poetry’s Permission vs. Politics’ Consequence

I have struggled with poetry my entire life. I captured this struggle in an earlier essay on reading Lorca. Recently, though, I have been reading more poetry and am enjoying it in a new way. It may be an age thing, or maybe it is simply a matter of time and attention. Now I have the space to sit with poems.

One thing I have always believed is that poetry grants misinterpretation a special license. Each reader becomes a co-translator, uncovering personal meaning in a text that was never meant to be static. When we read a line differently, no lives are at stake. The risk is emotional, not existential.

Politics and journalism operate under a different covenant. In these arenas, interpretation can distort shared reality, and our expectations for factual accuracy should differ. When a poet plays with metaphor and inverts established norms, as Rumi does in “Love Dogs,” embracing dogs as spiritual guides even though they were considered unclean in traditional Islamic culture, we give the poet license. We let the paradox wash over us.

This is part of the magic of poetry. It expands and challenges our worldview, inviting us to discover new facets of ourselves. By contrast, when a journalist misrepresents a policy debate, we lose trust in one another and in our institutions. Both poetry and politics rely on framing, but the difference lies in the consequences. That is why reading Rumi (or any poet) can help train our civic muscles. Poetry reminds us that interpretation is inevitable, but understanding is not.

At its best, poetry teaches us how to tolerate ambiguity. It shows that meaning can hold tension without collapsing into certainty. When I slow down to work through a difficult image or an unfamiliar metaphor, I am practicing a kind of patience we rarely value in public life. This way of reading builds the habit of considering before concluding, of asking what else a person might mean before passing judgment. It creates space for mutual understanding and appreciation.

In that sense, poetry cultivates humility. It reminds us that no single interpretation can claim authority over meaning. Each reading is provisional and dependent on context and perspective. Suppose we could bring that humility into public life, acknowledging that our political and cultural truths are also partial translations. In that case, we might recover the capacity to listen without immediately needing to win.

Perhaps what has changed for me most at this stage in my life is not just appreciation for poetry but also the value of focused attention when confronted with ambiguity. Poetry rewards the kind of slow noticing that modern life discourages. It asks for presence, not productivity. That may be why it feels more urgent now than ever to practice seeing carefully, in language and in each other.

The Practice of Discovering Together

One of the most valuable insights I have gleaned once again from exploring the great books with the Slow Read Institute over the past couple of years, is that collaborative reading changes the experience of truth. Many people prefer to read poetry alone. I am not one of them. I rarely have the patience or perhaps the stamina to engage with difficult poems in isolation. But when I read with others, something different happens. Meaning opens. A poem becomes communal property. Each person hears a different inflection, notices a hidden pattern, or reveals how a single verb can carry two meanings at once.

Rumi, especially, rewards this kind of shared attention. His images often speak to both body and spirit, matter and metaphor. In conversation, those layers begin to unfold. What feels obscure in solitude becomes luminous when refracted through other minds. In this way, discussion becomes revelation. And, for Rumi, it is all about revelation.

One of the most liberating aspects of shared reading in this context is that authority shifts from the individual to the collective. No one owns the meaning, including the leader. I am in no way a Rumi scholar. I am just a fanboy. However, I love being able to share this poet with others. And, together, we explore and build meaning.

Here lies the essential paradox of great poetry. It does not yield one truth but many. The challenge is not to resolve the differences but to hold them together. When we read this way, we learn to see complexity as strength rather than confusion.

Closing Reflection: Reading as a Civic Act

The more I participate in these seminars, the more convinced I become that reading together, whether poetry or policy, is an antidote to polarization. It replaces the reflex to be right with the habit of listening.

A healthy democracy depends on that same habit. We should be able to disagree about emphasis without accusing each other of deceit. We should be able to see ambiguity not as weakness but as an invitation to think and explore an idea more deeply. Reading Rumi together has become, for me, a way to practice how to speak with those who hold different beliefs. It requires patience, humility, and the willingness to let another person’s interpretation expand your own.

In one session, a participant lingered on the metaphor of the ruby in “Sunrise Ruby.” We debated its meaning. Why did Rumi pick a ruby versus an emerald or a sapphire? What does it mean for a ruby to be semi-transparent when thinking about the union with the divine? We never settled the question, but the conversation itself became the meaning.

That is what our public discourse needs: a willingness to live inside questions long enough for understanding to emerge. Democracy, like poetry, depends on interpretation, but only if interpretation remains tethered to empathy. As Rumi wrote, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.” That field is not moral relativism; it is shared inquiry, the place where conversation can begin again after certainty has failed.

Net/net: we would all benefit from more poetry in our lives, not because it provides answers, but because it restores our capacity to listen.

The other week, I wrote about the three faces of time: Chronos, Kairos, and Aion. In that essay, I talked about how we experience Chronos in the daily rhythm of tasks, schedules, and deadlines. We experience Kairos less frequently, sensing it during moments of transition or peak experiences. Aion is the rarest, as it requires a shift in consciousness. It appears when we experience the awe of eternity, which is, by definition, and paradoxically, timeless. Reading Homer’s epics over the past year helped me realize that these faces of time are not abstract at all. They are lived out in the choices, burdens, and transitions of men (aka “the seasons of a man’s life) as they move from youth to responsibility to elderhood.

Four Readings in Forty Years

I have read Homer’s epics 4 times over the past 40 years. The first time I read the Iliad was in high school, when I was dreaming of joining the Navy. I wanted to be a warrior, and I viewed the Iliad as THE manual for how to be a great one. At that time, I don’t think I appreciated how Achilles, Agamemnon, Nestor, and Odysseus were not just characters in a heroic epic. It has taken nearly 40 years and four readings of the epics for me to appreciate how these characters represent the key archetypes of a man’s life.

Achilles and the Fire of Youth

Like many young men, I initially identified with Achilles. Achilles viewed every day and every moment as a test of his worth. He lived almost entirely in the realm of Chronos. His gift was clearly his fearlessness, combined with his martial skill and legendary strength. At the same time, the book opens with the poet saying:

“Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath of great Achilles, son of Peleus, which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain and sent so many noble souls of heroes to Hades.

Thus, the entire story of the Iliad is rooted in the “rage of Achilles,” the dark side of this archetype. But the takeaway for me, at that time, was that if I pushed hard enough and fought bravely enough, glory would follow.

The next time I read the Iliad was as an English major at The Naval Academy. As I mentioned in my other essay, life at the Academy was ruled by Chronos, with each day divided into blocks of time: drills, classes, inspections, and formations. The pull of Achilles was much the same. Every exam, every athletic competition, and every training exercise became another opportunity to try to prove myself. Discipline, focus, and training were the measures of success.

Shadows Revealed: Teacher and Student

The third time I read the Iliad was when I returned to the Naval Academy as an English instructor, and was studying the classics at St. John’s College as part of a MALA program. It was then that I began to see the text differently. I still identified with the warriors, but now I noticed the shadows. Rage and pride no longer seemed like romantic passions of youth. They looked like forces that could ruin a man, a leader, a community. As Homer wrote, Achilles’ rage “made men the spoils of dogs, a banquet for the birds”. The Iliad began to read less like an adventure and more like a mirror.

Agamemnon and the Burden of Command

My fourth encounter with Homer was 30 years later. After 12 years in the Navy, I had spent 25 years in the corporate sector, the last decade as CEO of several companies. I joined a slow-read symposium last year where we worked through the Iliad and Odyssey one chapter a week. This model allowed our seminar group to explore themes in depth and notice details that I had previously missed. With the perspective of years, I now find myself identifying less with Achilles and more with Agamemnon as the leader/king archetype. I understand the burden of command and the constant battle with ego. While also a great warrior, Agamemnon’s gift was stewardship. His shadow was the potential to be a tyrant. I could see both in myself as a leader and CEO.

Being an effective leader requires living in Chronos, managing daily operations to keep an enterprise (or army) moving forward. But it also demands attentiveness to Kairos, specifically the ability to recognize decisive moments and act on them. This was Agamemnon’s greatest challenge. He often sensed the magnitude of a moment but failed to act decisively. In Book 14, when the Trojans press hard against the Achaeans, Agamemnon wavers and suggests abandoning the fight and sailing home. It is only the intervention of Odysseus and Diomedes that steadies the army. I empathized with this weakness as well. Being a CEO is often a lonely job. You can seek counsel, but at the end of the day, you must decide on which path to take with incomplete information and no way to guarantee success. This is the burden of command.

Nestor and the Work of Elderhood

And now, approaching sixty, I find myself drawn to Nestor, who embodies the elder archetype. He is no longer the strongest warrior, nor the commander of armies. His authority comes not from force but from perspective. Nestor lives in Aion, and his power comes from memory and legacy. His central question at this time in his life is not “What did I achieve?” but “What can I pass on?”

Interestingly, Nestor is one of the few figures who appear in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, which signals his importance for Homer. In some ways, this is not surprising, given that Homer, as the poet, is embracing the archetype of storyteller and wisdom keeper. In the Iliad, Nestor represents the voice of experience, often reminding the younger warriors of the battles he has fought and the lessons hard-won. Sometimes his long speeches steadied the Achaeans; other times, they bore them (I know I was often bored with reading them). So if Nestor’s gift is wisdom and perspective, then his shadow side is drifting into nostalgia or irrelevance. In the Odyssey, Nestor anchors the early journey of Telemachus. He models the virtue of hospitality and acts as the memory of Odysseus. Here, his strength is clearer: he blesses the next generation, guiding without grasping.

Odysseus: The Magician and the Lover

And then there is Odysseus, who complicates the pattern. He embodies the magician and lover archetype, navigating life with adaptability, cunning, and a devotion to his home. His gifts are imagination and resilience, and his shadows are manipulation and estrangement. I would suggest that, unlike Achilles, Agamemnon, or Nestor, Odysseus cannot be contained by a single face of time. He fights in Chronos, seizing opportunities in battle. He survives by Kairos, recognizing the decisive moment to deceive, persuade, or escape. And ultimately, he longs for Aion, the timeless bond of home and family that makes his journey more than survival. Perhaps this is why Homer gave him an entire epic of his own. The Odyssey is not about glory or command but about return, endurance, and the search for meaning and ultimately identity (I wrote an essay on this here). In many ways, Odysseus is the archetype our modern age knows best, because he embodies the fluidity, improvisation, and longing that define life in a world of constant transition.

Lessons from the Men’s Movement

When I look back on my life, it was the men’s movement that helped me see these archetypes not just as literary figures but as markers of masculine development. I don’t know why I was interested in the men’s movement at the time. Perhaps it was the strength of the feminist narrative in the late 70s and early 80s. I was all for the liberation of women, but at the same time, I recall wrestling with a parallel question: how does a young boy become a mature, well-adapted man? And so I started to read…a lot.

Some of my biggest takeaways came from authors like Robert Bly, who reminds us, especially in Iron John: A Book About Men, that boys need initiation and men need mentors. Obviously, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (and in many related works) was incredibly helpful in describing the hero’s journey embodied in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. It was Campbell who helped define the different stages of a man’s life (departure, initiation, and return), which has informed my own journey and has me reflecting and reconciling our boys’ transitions. It was Daniel Levinson, in his book Seasons of a Man’s Life and his work on adult development, that helped illustrate how a man’s role shifts across decades. Summarily, William Bridges described these transitions as thresholds in Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes. His insight that each transition beginning with an ending has been especially insightful for me at this inflection point in my life. To that point, Richard Rohr, especially in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, argues that the second half of life often requires surrender. He suggests that this requires a shift from striving for and achieving toward wisdom and contribution. Easier said than done!

Of course, all of these works can trace their intellectual roots to Carl Jung, whom I have been reading and studying for 40 years. It was Jung who initially revealed that each archetype carries a shadow. And, even more importantly, if these shadow sides are ignored, they keep us stuck in immaturity. I have been exploring this dynamic for over 15 years as part of pathwise leadership.

Together, these authors showed me that the work of becoming a man is not about chasing one heroic role but about learning to inhabit each season with awareness. At every stage, we are invited to understand the archetype we are living, its gifts, its limits, and its shadows. Achilles must learn discipline beyond rage. Agamemnon must lead without slipping into tyranny. Nestor must speak wisdom without retreating into nostalgia. Odysseus must use cunning without collapsing into deceit. None of these roles is sufficient on its own. The deeper work is to recognize that we are never just a warrior, or a king, or a magician, or a lover. We are all four, and maturity means drawing on each as life requires, while holding their shadows in check. To grow as a man is to embrace the stage you are in while also preparing for the next, carrying forward not only achievement but also perspective.

Fatherhood and Mentorship

Fatherhood made all of this real. Raising two boys required me to ask what activities and rituals could help guide them through the stages of growing up. Participation in sports helped them develop their sense of what it means to be a follower, a leader, and a team member. Scouting provided another answer. Rank advancements, Boards of Review, and the ultimate Eagle Court of Honor were modest ceremonies that gave shape to important transitions in their young lives and served as markers of Kairos.

Beyond my own sons, I also had the opportunity to coach teams and mentor other boys through scouting. Practices, games, and meetings became places where adult men worked together to share lessons and shape character. The presence of multiple male voices mattered. Boys could see different models of leadership, hear different perspectives, and learn that no one man has all the answers. It is also how they are initiated into a tribe. Each word of encouragement, whether from me or another leader, became a small initiation into responsibility and maturity.

In helping to guide others, I was also learning something about myself. I feel the act of teaching and mentoring over the past 40 years has been preparing me for the next stage. Now, standing between Agamemnon and Nestor, I feel the shift. To live less in Chronos, to recognize Kairos when it arrives, to offer counsel from Aion. This is the essential work of a man’s life: to master Chronos without being enslaved by it, to honor Kairos when it appears, and to embrace Aion as the gift of “elder” hood.

A Question for Every Man
Our culture is thin on true elders. Too many men cling to the fire of the warrior or the authority of the king and never make the passage into wisdom. We all know that glory fades and that we will eventually have to pass on the responsibility of command to the next generation. What can endure is counsel offered at the right moment.

When I look back at my own path, from reading Homer as a boy dreaming of the Navy to now rereading him in this next season of a man’s life, I see the same question returning in different forms: “What does it mean to live well as a man?” Or as Socrates challenged the men of Athens 2400 years ago, “What does it mean to live a good and noble life?” There is no single answer. To that point, there is no single archetype to master. Instead, the task before us is to recognize what stage we are in and what archetype we are being called to be. We then must spend the time to learn the strengths and shadows of that stage. Ultimately, we must be willing to grow into the next stage.

That work is unfinished for me, as it is for all of us. That may be the point. The Iliad ends without a complete resolution. The Odyssey ends with Odysseus continuing his journey. Similarly, in life, we will all experience the various seasons of our lives. The challenge is to approach them with awareness, courage, and grace, both for ourselves and for others. Within these seasons, we live with the daily rhythm of Chronos and try to recognize those moments of Kairos that can signal a new beginning. As we approach the elder stage, it is Aion that reminds us of the larger story we are part of and helping to write. This becomes our legacy.

When Travel Changes the Traveler

Since rereading The Odyssey, I’ve been thinking about how travel reshapes identity. Odysseus leaves Ithaca as a king, fights in the Trojan war for ten years, and then spends another ten years trying to find his way home. Along the way, he changes names, tells false stories about where he’s from, and adopts new identities based on the situation he is facing. By the time he finally returns to Ithaca, the question is not just whether his family will recognize him but who he has become through his travels and experiences.

Over the years, I’ve had many identities influenced by the regions I have lived in. I was born in Manhattan, spent my formative years in the South, and then lived for periods of time in the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, Midwest, Pacific Northwest, and the West (California). During these sojourns, I’ve come to recognize the nuances of each region’s personality. For example, the cadence of speech, the style of hospitality, and the way people define loyalty reflect a deeper cultural identity of each region. These characteristics are reflections of what Yoram Hazony would describe as a “tribe” in his book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, which I wrote about in this essay.

Having moved between these regions, I also recognize the influence of these regions on how I view the world and interact with others. Like many, my identity is an amalgamation of the experiences and values drawn from the different communities, friends, and family that have shaped me. I was reminded of this once again while sitting in the Blaine County (Idaho) DMV in the Mountain West, a region I have not lived in before. At that time, I found myself pondering a very Odyssean question: “Which part of me speaks first when I say who I am, and how will this new region/culture impact who I become in this next life stage?”

A New Number; A New Tribe

The Idaho licensing office is VERY different than the Oakland DMV. It is quiet, clean, and empty. There is a man in a Carhartt jacket renewing a license he’s probably had since Reagan was president. A young Hispanic family is working with a translator to get their paperwork in order. And a retiree is sitting next to me wearing a fishing hat.

I had made an appointment, and they called me up early (this would never happen in Oakland)! When it’s my turn, I hand over my California license and can feel the shift in tone from the clerk. Today, only about 45% of Idahoans were born in Idaho. Most of the emigrants come from Washington, but Californians have been moving to Idaho in droves, and many of the locals are wary. The little gold bear on my license isn’t just an emblem, it’s a marker of another tribe.

The clerk is polite but not chatty. She takes my license, voids it, and hands me a paper temporary Idaho license with my new number. For the past two weeks, I have been traveling with both the plastic CA license and a piece of paper that says I am now an Idaho resident. I am officially between tribes. The legal change is instant. The cultural change will take longer.

Passports, Tribes, and Shifting Identities

I’ve been thinking about cultural differences for decades. When I was young, I believed I would never be fully educated until I had traveled through Europe on what 19th-century Americans called the “Grand Tour.” That dream shaped many of my choices: I joined the Navy in part to see the world. As a Trident Scholar during my senior year at the Naval Academy, I wrote my thesis on “The American in Europe in 19th and 20th Century Literature.” I was clearly obsessed with Europe. I then backpacked around Europe several times, studied for a summer in France, did a tour with the Norwegian Navy, and later lived in London.

After leaving the Navy, I spent 20 years leading global teams in the corporate sector, which brought me face-to-face with the same question every time I left our country: What does it mean to be an American? Abroad, no one cared what state I was from. Yet in recent years, I’ve noticed a shift. Being “from California” carries its own cultural weight, distinct from, and sometimes even more charged than, simply being American. At Microsoft, I once attended a training on Global Cultures that gave me a valuable lens for understanding the cultural differences between countries and how to be a better “global” leader. The framework rested on a few key dimensions:

• Individualism vs. collectivism

  • Key question: does the group come first, or the individual?

• Task-based vs. relationship-based trust

  • Key question: is trust earned by performance, or by connection?

• Low- vs. high-context communication.

  • Key question: do people “say what they mean,” or expect shared context to carry meaning?

From Stereotypes to Structures

If nationality is the primary way to define one’s identity when traveling abroad, then at home, the question of “which America you belong to” is more important. To this point, Hazony argues in his book that it is more important to know “Who is your tribe?” when trying to understand who you really are. He asks the reader to consider where their identity anchors (specifically, to whom they feel mutual loyalty). Is it to a town, a state, a region, or the whole country? So when I am abroad, I may be asked to explain America. By contrast, inside America, I feel like we are all being asked which America we are from, especially during these highly charged and partisan times.

From what I can tell, this is actually not a new phenomenon. In the 18th century, the Founders thought of themselves first as Virginians or New Yorkers before they thought of themselves as Americans. Our identity as Americans emerged over the past 150 years, but the older pattern still echoes today. Regional identity in America has never fully dissolved into a single national persona. Each region has its own identity which shapes how people see themselves and how they interact with others. At the risk of sketching in stereotypes, here’s how the tribes I know best express themselves. These are broad strokes, but they reflect the broad patterns I’ve observed:

• New York. New Yorkers are defined by their urgency, directness, and transactional trust.

• Mid-Atlantic (Baltimore area). This is where my relatives all come from. They value deep community networks and heritage.

• South. The South, for me, is defined by its hospitality layered over tradition. There is deep loyalty tied to place and their history.

• Midwest. My experience with people in the Midwest is that they are steady, consensus-driven, and reliable.

• Northwest. More than anything, the Pacific Northwest is defined by its value of the outdoors. Their lifestyle is woven into the landscape.

• California. CA is a restless place. It is all about reinvention and openness.

Mapping America’s Tribes

While some key dimensions of comparison between countries are also relevant for comparing states, I have been considering several other “dimensions of difference.” Seen together, these differences cluster along several axes, e.g.,

• Independence vs. community orientation.

• Willingness to trust vs. openness to outsiders.

One way to represent this would be on a 2X2

Another interesting “dimension of difference” when comparing regions is how their people interact with the Outdoors and their “pace of life.” In fact, this dimension has become more relevant as I think about what it means to be an Idahoan.

Idaho in Contrast

I have been visiting Idaho for 25 years with my wife’s family, so the place isn’t entirely new to me. I’ve hiked, biked, snowshoed, and skied here. But I’ve also mostly experienced it through the lens of a visitor. This is the resort-town version of Idaho, where you’re a tourist, however warmly received.

We have been spending a lot more time over the past 4 years since we built our cabin in Hailey, Idaho. While I don’t claim to understand the Idahoan persona fully yet, I have detected some differences from the other regions I have lived in. For example, Idahoans tend to be:

• Quiet, pragmatic independence. They are less performative in terms of asserting their autonomy than Texans and seem more grounded in “get it done” self-reliance than many regions.

• Relationship-based trust. It feels like trust is high once earned, but it is not extended as easily or as early as in some other regions (e.g., the Midwest).

• Guarded openness. The folks we have met are certainly polite to newcomers, but it feels like they are slow to integrate them until they prove they fit in.

• Deep outdoors orientation. In Idaho, the outdoors is part of everyone’s identity. This is not about weekend adventures. For locals, the outdoors isn’t an escape; it’s the organizing principle of their lives. Work schedules flex around hunting seasons, snow conditions, and river levels. Even compared to the Northwest, the attitude toward being outdoors feels different here. In Seattle, you often have to commit to going outside despite the gray and rain, especially from September through July. In Idaho, there’s no waiting for a perfect weekend. The sun seems to be out all the time, and the folks we know are getting outside to do something every single day.

Self-Reflection

In looking at the 2×2 above, I can see the cultural imprints each region has left on me. I was born in the “individualist/transactional” Northeast, and was shaped by its fast pace, ambition, and need for status. My formative years were spent in the collectivist/relationship-oriented Deep South, which brought forward a sense of hospitality and belonging. My time in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest instilled civic duty and steadiness. Finally, while in the Pacific Northwest, I felt a strong pull to be outdoors and find a way to build consensus in work settings. California, for me, represents the far edge of individualism and transaction. It is a place of relentless reinvention, where trust is provisional and tribes form and dissolve with each new venture. But it is also intoxicating. When you live in California, you think anything is possible.

Now, in Idaho, I find myself in a different quadrant altogether: fiercely individualist, yes, but bound together by trust and belonging within the tribe. It is a culture at once open and guarded, neighborly to insiders, suspicious of outsiders. And I see the differences most clearly when I look at my youngest son, Spencer. He was 5 when we moved to California, and he embodies the other side of the place-identity spectrum. For him, California is more than a state; it’s the air he’s breathed his whole life, and the cultural “vibe” defines his comfort. He is deeply aligned with California’s entrepreneurial, hyper-individualist culture, which is impatient with institutions. In him, I recognize the very quadrant I am now stepping away from, even as it shaped so much of who I am.

Ithaca, For Now

The upside of moving between tribes is obvious: you learn the languages and cultures of many places. You become adaptable, resourceful, and unafraid of change. The downside of this itinerant life is that you never really grow roots. As Homer makes clear through the example of Odysseus, recognition goes both ways. Our move to Idaho is as much about my wife and me deciding the culture we want to be part of as it is about geography. Who do we want to be, and who will this place recognize us as? It’s one thing to get a license, register a car, and adopt the name of a place. It is something else for that place to claim you in return.

So the question that Dana and I face is: “Do we want to be people who slow our pace, root ourselves in place, and invest decades into one community? Or will we pack up the U-Haul in a couple of years?” I know what Dana’s answer is: “We are never moving!!!!” For me I am not sure. For now, Idaho is my Ithaca. But the oar is still in my hand, and the road back to Ocean is still open.

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A Life Well Lived

This past week was full of grief.
As I wrote about in my last essay, some of this was my own. The grief I felt was my processing of sending our boys to college and the reality that our home and our lives will be changing. I was mourning what had been true for our family while, at the same time, anticipating what the future could hold for all of us. It was natural and on the grief scale, probably a 2 out of 10. However, this weekend, I also faced grief that maxed out the scale.

First, on Saturday, we attended the celebration of life for a friend and neighbor we had known for 13 years. He was what people would describe as a “salt-of-the-earth” man. He was tall and could, I imagine, be imposing. But he was also incredibly kind and generous. . . especially to our boys. We lived on a cul-de-sac, and his family’s house was where we would gather periodically for a “hot night,” for which everyone would bring something to share and drink. This man was known for his grilling skills and would always bring smoked salmon, grilled steak, and beef jerky to share. We would sit around a fire for hours while the sun set and the kids rode their bikes, kicked the soccer ball, or played basketball in “the sac.” We had moved to Oakland without knowing anyone, and these neighbors became our extended family over the years.

This man and I could not be more different in terms of where we grew up and how our careers played out, but we enjoyed each other’s company and stories. As we got to know each other, he shared that he had been battling a rare strain of cancer since 2011. He and his family had been through quite the ordeal over the past 14 years as he suffered through one round of treatment after another. But, as he would say, he was not giving up. He always showed up at the “hot nights” with a smile and something smoked to share. And he always took time to talk to our boys.

As we sat in the chapel for his celebration of life, it became clear from the stories that people told that relationships with friends and family were the thing he valued most. The chapel was packed with people he had touched over the years, and those who shared memories of him during the service told stories of his family, his friends, and his love for fishing, diving, and grilling. Story after story at the service came back to those touchstones. His life had purpose. He lived long enough to see his daughter marry. So while there was certainly grief, there was this sense of joy as well. This was a life well lived. It reminds me that a well-lived life is about the legacy you leave.

When Great Trees Fall

During the service, someone read Maya Angelou’s poem When Great Trees Fall, and two passages struck me:

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.

I.e., when a great soul (someone who has made an impact on a community) dies, we all feel it. With this type of grief, there is a sense of completion, of a well-lived life’s arc fulfilled.

Later in the poem, she writes:

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.

I.e., over time, we recover from this type of grief. We have to let ourselves go through the full cycle of grief, but if we do, we can get to the other side. I have felt this cycle of grief after the death of several friends and squadron mates in the Navy, the death of my first marriage, and, most acutely, after the death of my father.

A Life Barely Begun

But there is another kind of grief that I am not sure you ever recover from: the death of a child. Earlier this week, we learned that another neighbor, one of Graham’s classmates from elementary and middle school, died in a car accident. He was 20. His death was sudden and unimaginable.

His was a life barely begun. There are so few milestones to look back on. There is no whole arc of a life’s story, only the raw, incomprehensible absence for his family. There is no narrative sturdy enough to hold this kind of grief. It is disorienting, a rupture in the natural order. Parents are not meant to bury their children.

I cannot imagine what his parents are going through. This is the kind of loss that forces people to ask the unanswerable: If God is good, how can this be? In this case, I imagine, time may soften the sharp edges, but the wound will never close. The absence remains, a hollow space where a future should have been.

From Glory to Grief

Before rereading The Iliad this year, I had half-forgotten that the poem doesn’t end with the sack of Troy or Achilles’ triumph. In my memory, it concluded with Achilles’ victory over Hector. Troy fell, and the Greeks won. It was an epic about war, honor, and heroes. But reading it this time, I saw something different. The story does not end with conquest; it ends with a burial and a moment of shared grief. Priam, the King of Troy, has lost his son Hector (actually, Hector was killed by Achilles). Achilles has lost Patroclus, his closest companion (some say lover). Knowing the weight of genuine grief, Achilles returns Hector’s body to Priam, and they share in their mourning.

The mind-blowing insight (for me) from this scene is that the empathy that Achilles feels as a human transcends his tribal allegiance as a Greek. In this moment, the war recedes, and what remains is the universal truths of human suffering and grief. That shift in focus from glory to grief reframed the entire arc for me. Purpose, for both men, had been bound up in the war. For Achilles, that purpose was singular from the start: to be the greatest warrior, whatever the cost. For Priam, the purpose was to defend Troy and his family, and this purpose was shattered the moment Hector fell.

There is a particular weight to losing someone who had realized their purpose, like Achilles, and a different, crushing weight when death comes before purpose has even had the chance to form. Our neighbor, who died at 65, had lived fully into his purpose. He had a wonderful family, many friends, and a life rooted in love. The young man who died at 20, like so many taken too soon, was at the threshold of life. His purpose had barely begun to reveal itself. That makes the grief doubly heavy. It is not only the loss of the person, but the loss of all the possible futures.

The Philosophy of Purpose

The question about purpose is at the heart of a recent episode of Hidden Brain featuring Victor Strecher, author of Life on Purpose. Strecher describes how purpose is grounded in the values that guide our lives, and how those values can orient us toward either self-enhancing goals, focused on personal gain, or self-transcending goals, aimed at contributing to something larger than ourselves. Aristotle would have recognized the distinction. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes that fleeting pleasures, the “hedonic,” are not the highest human aim. The ultimate good, “eudaimonia,” is human flourishing through virtuous, rational activity. Pleasure, in this sense, is not the goal but the result of life lived well.

Purpose, then, is more than the pursuit of comfort or even achievement. It is the alignment of our actions with our deepest values. As Homer, Aristotle, and Strecher remind us, one’s purpose is often clarified in the crucible of loss. This weekend offered me the two bookends of that truth: a life fully lived, leaving a legacy that filled a chapel with gratitude, and a life cut short before its purpose could fully emerge. Between those ends is the space we all inhabit, the space where we still have time to ask and answer the question: What is the purpose of my life, now, in this stage?

Grief has a way of stripping away the nonessential. It reminds us that time is not infinite, that the people we love will not always be here. The lessons from this week for me, then, are two. We should take time to:

1. Clarify our life’s purpose.

2. Hold our loved ones closer.

If we do this, then we can hope that when we reach the end of our own arc, those we leave behind will know without doubt what and who mattered most to us.

There are summers you remember because of what you did, and there are summers you remember because of what changed for you. For our family, this summer—when we truly will become empty nesters—was both. Dana and I have been anticipating this change for a while. We did not dread the change, and I don’t think we were oversentimental about it. But we are both very aware that this was going to be the most significant change we have experienced since the birth of our boys. For us, moving to Idaho wasn’t an escape: it was an opportunity to be present to this transition in real time. It was an opportunity to notice what it means for each of us as individuals, as part of this family, and for the family itself as it becomes something new. This essay is about what this transition has meant to me as a father and a man.

Getting ready to launch

This summer, we moved to Idaho, knowing it would be our last one with both boys truly under our roof. This is the week everything shifts. They wrap up their summer jobs, we pack the car, and the four of us begin the next journey. As I imagine it is for every family facing this transition, it feels both ordinary and monumental. This is what is supposed to happen. We have made it to this point, and now it is time for our boys (Graham and Spencer) to launch.

Every morning, my phone flashes a kaleidoscope of our lives, providing a photo summary of that day (e.g., August 3rd) from years past that I then carry with me throughout the day. I get to see their baby faces, those early hikes with sippy cups in the Bay Area, flashes of soccer fields, and Scout campouts. And then I look up at them now, striding beside me as we climb these Idaho trails together, their voices deeper, their steps longer than mine. As we hike, we talk in bursts about school plans, life, trail directions, and half-serious debates about which of us can out-hike the other (to be clear, they always crush me). And then we fall into companionable silence.

This has been a summer of transitions. I left Maxio. We left Oakland. We moved to Idaho not just for the mountains but for the opportunity to carve out one last season together. And it has been a gift. If we were in Oakland, we would never have seen them. But this summer we have been able to share long family dinners, time with extended family and friends who have visited, and lots of hikes. And now, in a single week, we are doing all the launching at once: them into their next chapters, Dana and me into a quieter house, all of us into an unknown future.

I find myself wondering: will they see this place as home? Will these mountains call them back on college breaks? Someday with a spouse or partner? Someday, far down the road, with kids of their own?

Reflections on fatherhood

It wasn’t always clear to me what kind of father I would be. When we found out Dana was pregnant, I (like many parents) started reading every book I could find on raising kids, half hoping there might be a manual for the job ahead. When the ultrasound revealed we were going to have not just a child but a son and then, again, a second son, I felt the weight of it settle in. Boys. Brothers. While I lobbied to try one more time for a girl, Dana put her foot down. We were going to be a family of boys. A family that would be shaped by whatever we managed to build together as three men with one extraordinary woman at the center.

To that end, I started reading books on raising boys as I felt the responsibility to help them make the transition from rambunctious boys to responsible men. Those books talked about everything from nature versus nurture, the tendency of boys to be “pack-like” animals, the value of other male mentors/teachers in their lives, the importance of structure and consistent rules, and the transformational power of rituals. While I wanted to believe that we could guide and shape (i.e., nurture) them through patience and consistency, it was clear that nature played an even more critical role in the men they would become. Their temperaments showed early: Graham was always cautious and observant, while Spencer was more fearless and kinetic.

I wondered how much of who they would become was already written in their DNA and how much of it depended on my ability to show up as a father. Mostly, I wrestled with what it meant to be good at this. I carried the lessons of my own childhood as both warnings and guideposts. There were things I wanted to replicate, and there were things I swore I’d do differently.

Like with all kids, raising them was never a straight path. It was a trail with switchbacks, unexpected drop-offs, and those long, steady climbs where you don’t realize how far you’ve come until you stop to look back. There were moments I worried I wasn’t patient enough, that my desire to prepare them for the world sometimes outweighed my ability to just be present in it with them. But beneath all the theories and self-doubt, I hoped that if I tried to show up over and over again, this would count for more than any single decision I got wrong.

There were the obvious milestones: teaching them to ride bikes when we lived in Seattle (unfortunately, neither of them really dug biking), spending several years commuting to Tahoe so they could learn how to ski (fortunately both of them became skiers), going on our first camping trip when everything went wrong but we laughed anyway, the nights when they were awarded their Eagle Scout.

And then there were the hundreds of invisible moments that built the foundation: standing on the sidelines coaching their sports teams, those rainy Saturday (or Sunday) mornings when the game was less about winning and more about teaching resilience. Thirteen years of scouting with its weekly meetings, monthly campouts, and annual Scout camps taught them how to be followers and then, eventually, how to be leaders.

I took them off and on to Sunday school and church before COVID rewrote our rhythms, not out of duty, but out of hope. I hoped that the stories, songs, and fellowship might open a window to a deeper spiritual center they could rely on when the world got too crazy. I am not sure it worked, but one thing I have learned through my own journey is that faith isn’t just about belief; it’s about planting seeds and trusting the soil. It is now up to them to reap the harvest.

The men they have become

Like all parents, Dana and I are so proud of them both, not for what they’ve done, but for who they’ve become. They share a core of kindness and generosity of spirit that feels like the best possible answer to all the questions we had when they were little: Are we raising them right? Will they make good choices? Will they pursue both the noble and the good in the world? At this point, it feels like they are heading in that direction.

From the beginning, their personalities were distinct. Graham, our firstborn, came into the world gentle and kind, with a caution that seemed to come from deep inside him. He was born with a disability that made expressing himself difficult. It also made reading and writing a constant uphill climb, and this clearly shaped him early. The world was simply harder for him. Every step, every lesson, every task asked more of him than it did of others. But he never gave up. In looking back, I am grateful that his disability did not harden him or make him resentful. Instead, it seemed to make him softer. He has always been a hugger by instinct. I think, in some way, he knew love was his safe harbor, and he built it wherever he went. In the end, he persevered, and now he’s flourishing in college—a milestone Dana and I once weren’t sure he’d reach, and one that feels like the culmination of his quiet, steady fight.

Spencer was a force from the time he arrived on this earth. Neurotypical, fast-moving, and brimming with energy, he came with a spark in his eye and an impish grin that always seemed to say he knew something you didn’t. He’s been a risk-taker from the beginning, eager to test boundaries and learn by doing. Where Graham approached the world with measured steps, Spencer leapt. And, yes, sometimes we had to take him to the hospital because he did not look before he leapt! Where Graham read the room before entering, Spencer burst through the door and made it his own.

They are their own men now, but those early currents are still visible beneath the surface, shaping how they move through the world. Graham still leads with love and steadiness; Spencer still pushes and explores with fire. Together, they are a study in contrast and complement. And the best part is that they get along. . . mostly. And in those rare flashes when they don’t, I can see that they still do deeply care. I am certain they will take care of each other when we are no longer here.

Transitions

When I was going through my own “what does it mean to be a man” phase, I read some really insightful books (e.g., A Season In A Man’s Life, King, Magician, Warrior, Lover, The Hero’s Journey, etc.) These more modern books amplify themes that have been with us for generations. For example, in the Iliad, Homer outlines the stages of a man’s life through three characters: Achilles, the fierce young warrior still discovering who he is; Agamemnon, the man in his prime, carrying the weight of command; and Nestor, the elder statesman, no longer in the fight but holding the stories, the wisdom, and the memory of what it all meant.

This summer, as we stand on the edge of sending our boys out into the world, I see all three stages laid out in front of me. They are in their Achilles years: full of energy and possibility. They are individuating and eager to test themselves against the world. I am in my “late” Agamemnon years. I am still in the arena, still building, still carrying the weight of family and work. But I can feel the shift coming. I am closer to Nestor now than I used to be. I am closer to the stage where the work is less about doing and more about remembering, less about fighting the battles myself and more about equipping the next generation to fight their own. This next stage is about legacy. Was I a good husband, father, son? Did I make an impact on the people I worked with over the years?

That’s why this Idaho summer has felt so charged. It was not just a move. It’s a marker. We’ve climbed mountains together this summer, both the literal ones up the different peaks in the Pioneer, Boulder, and White Cloud ranges, and the invisible ones within ourselves. Every morning, as that kaleidoscope of their childhood flickers on my phone, I feel the weight of years collapsing into this one season. Like for all parents, these years have been both a gift and a preparation. Now it is our boys’ turn to step into the world as men, and my turn to embrace this next stage of manhood. What can I now do for our community and country, given I have more time? I don’t have the answers yet, but I feel the call.

Someday, maybe, they’ll bring partners here. Someday, maybe, their own children will scramble over these trails. But for now, this is the moment of departure. The last summer of four. The beginning of new journeys: one for each of them, one for me, and one for me & Dana. It is a moment worthy of Achilles, Agamemnon, and Nestor alike.

We are living through a second Machine Age, only this time, it isn’t human labor that’s being replaced. The promise and threat of AI’s potential point to something more profound. If the first Machine Age mechanized the body, this one threatens to mechanize the mind. AI doesn’t just automate tasks; it, in effect, automates the very act of cognition. Its power to augment our intelligence is truly awesome. It answers questions before we’ve fully formed them. It drafts emails, diagnoses patients, writes code—and yes, it can analyze poetry. For example, you can tell it to take on the persona of a poetry professor at a top Ivy League school, and it can tell you in seconds what Lorca’s moon might symbolize, or what death means in “The King of Harlem.”

AI’s ability to simulate expertise is both astounding and unsettling. Which leaves many of us asking: “What work is still ours—as humans—to do?” Or, perhaps even more existentially: “What does it mean to be human?” As a businessperson, I am seeing this question surface everywhere. The promise and threat of AI animates every board meeting; it is the backdrop of nearly every conversation I now have with clients and colleagues. Specifically, we are all trying to figure out:

• What tasks can we automate?

• What decisions should still belong to humans?

• How should we design decision-making systems and processes? (i.e., augmented by AI, replaced by AI?)

• What does it mean to be an expert, and how does one develop expertise?

As a father of two college-aged boys, this last question feels even more personal. What should they study? What kind of future are we preparing them for? In a world where knowledge is instantly available and expertise is in open question, what does it mean to know anything at all? How does a young person develop mastery of a discipline (sales, marketing, coding)? How does one develop judgment, and where does it live when machines seem to reason?

We’ve been here before. Every new technological advance brings a period of disruption and uncertainty. Looking back at those moments may offer clues for how we navigate this one, which brings me to the Spanish poet Lorca. In 1929, Federico García Lorca arrived in New York City at the height of a techno-cultural upheaval. The stock market had crashed. People feared that machines were replacing men (think of the movie Metropolis, released in 1927). Cities had grown so fast that they swallowed the sky. Lorca, a gay Andalusian poet already haunted by death and repression, came to the center of the capitalist world and found not progress, but alienation. His New York was filled with nameless, faceless crowds and death everywhere. He did not see the promise of utopia. Instead, he found Rage. Vomit. Blood. Piss.

In this setting, he wrote his Poet in New York not as a critique, but as a reflection—a portrait of the dark underside of modern America. Think of it as the anti-Democracy in America. If Tocqueville saw democratic promise, Lorca saw mechanical despair. He showed what it felt like to be human at a moment when humanity was being disfigured by machines.

And I wonder now if we’re in another such moment. Reading Lorca in the age of AI has me wondering not just what poems mean, but what it means to be human in this new reality. What is the value of struggling toward meaning when a machine can provide the answer? What is the purpose of thought that takes time? Of feeling that resists simplification?

This essay is part primer, part reflection, and part argument. I fundamentally believe that there are still things that only humans can do. Moreover, in our hunger for immediate answers, we risk forgetting the value of what Socrates called “aporia” (not knowing). There is something uniquely human in sitting with uncertainty, complexity, and nuance until, slowly, something more lasting takes form.

This has been my recent experience with Lorca’s poetry.

I. My Long Struggle With Poetry

I’ve always struggled with poetry.

From my time in high school English classes through college as an English major, poetry never came easily. I read it; I wrote about it, but I don’t think I ever got it. Honestly, I didn’t really ever like it. Poetry always demanded something I wasn’t always able (or ready) to give: patience, attention, and time. I just wanted the answer. Prose was my jam.

But then I returned to the Naval Academy to teach “literature,” and poetry was one of the four required genres of the plebe (freshman) curriculum. UUGGHH. Trying to teach plebes at the Academy the value of literature was enough of a challenge. Trying to teach them to like poetry when I was not even sure I understood it myself was like trying to explain a magic trick while still trying to figure out where the rabbit went.

Over the past 35 years, I have rarely deliberately read poetry until now. This spring, I signed up for a seminar on Lorca as part of the Slow Read Institute.

Why?

I was introduced to Lorca by Dana, my wife, who was a theatre major when we were dating. She said that Blood Wedding was one of her all-time favorite plays. Well, we were dating, so I read it. I also read The House of Bernarda Alba. I found them both to be musical, mythic. . . and strange. I didn’t fully understand them; I was just hoping to get enough of the plays to impress Dana.

So as I perused the courses for this quarter, the one on Lorca’s Poet in New York caught my eye. All I have these days is time and so I thought I should give him a go. However, I knew I didn’t want to decode it alone. I needed to hear what other people thought about these crazy metaphors, ideas, and surrealistic images, or I was going to put the book down. It has been quite an experience. Lorca and other poets like him are speaking an entirely different language— surreal, urgent, unsettling. I describe it as being adjacent to reality.

II. Lorca and the City

Before Lorca came to New York in 1929, he was already a recognized artist in the Spanish artistic scene. He studied and lived alongside Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, both of whom would go on to define surrealist visual and cinematic art. They formed the Generation of '27 with other artists, blending modernism with folklore and irony with tragedy. Lorca’s poetry never celebrated modernity without also mourning it. This was primarily because he was a gay Catholic from the countryside, which put him at odds with the forces reshaping Europe in the 1920s.

Lorca moved to NYC to study English at Columbia. In his early days, he was a foreigner, often alone, and barely fluent in English. He would walk the streets, listen to Harlem’s jazz, and witness the eerie silence on Wall Street after the crash. As an outsider, he saw these things differently than Americans. Like many artists before and after him (de Tocqueville, Baldwin, Sontag, Sebald, and others), his distance became his advantage. For the artist, cultural estrangement sharpens clarity. As such, he became a witness to a transformative age.

III. How I’m Reading Him Now

At first, each Lorca poem felt like a mental and emotional ambush. His metaphors are not just obscure; they are disorienting.

• Is a horse a symbol of desire or death, or Harlem, or all three?

• The moon vomits—what does this even mean?

• Infants are crushed beneath machines. YUCK!

• There are fat ladies and weeping multitudes, blood clots and shadows and silence.

More than once, I wondered, “Do I really need to be reading this?” However, given that I had signed up for this seminar, I felt obligated to continue. Plus, we were reading only one poem a week and spending 90 minutes with each poem. And, for me, this is what poetry has always required: time, patience, attention. I also realize that, maybe at 57, I can settle into poetry in a way I was not when I was 22.

What has become clear over the weeks is that Lorca’s images accumulate power through repetition. Vomit, blood, masks, rivers, trees, Harlem, moonlight, machines. His poems aren’t logical; they’re atmospheric. They create a space adjacent to our reality.

IV. What the Poems Have Shown Me

Eventually, I stopped trying to fully decode the poems. I am listening to them in a different way. It is more about feeling them and letting them do their strange work. And that, I’ve come to think, is part of what it means to be human. Here are some examples that continue to strike me with their grotesque musicality:

• In “City That Does Not Sleep,” Lorca opens the night like a wound: “There is no one who does not tremble in the night / among the weeping of sleepers.” The city is not a place of rest. It is a collective insomnia. A stage of unconscious terror.

• In “Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude,” he offers a grotesque indictment of consumption: “The fat lady came forward / between columns of ash / and vomit.”

  Modernity is not clean. It is bulimic, excessive, and sacrificial.

• In “New York (Office and Denunciation),” the poem becomes a litany of structural cruelty: “Because you crush the infant's skulls on the walls…” Here, Lorca is no longer metaphorical: He is furious.

• In my favorite poem so far, “The King of Harlem,” the voice shifts into rhythmic lament: “I am / not from Harlem. I am not. / But I suffer its blackness / and am bleeding beside it.” Lorca’s empathy becomes identification. He doesn’t appropriate Blackness; he bleeds alongside it.

I would argue that these are poems one will never totally “get.” They are poems we experience. Honestly, even after 90 minutes with one poem, there are metaphors and complete stanzas that I still don’t understand. What each requires is “attention”: emotional, moral, and imaginative. It also requires intellectual humility and vulnerability. And this is the best part of doing it as part of a seminar. We are all struggling with Lorca’s world together. This kind of knowing is something no machine can replicate. It’s not about processing data. It’s about being changed. . . It’s about what Socrates called not knowing—and choosing to stay there, together, long enough for something human to emerge.

V. Why Poetry (Still) Matters

Lorca doesn’t give answers. He creates rhythms and scenes that shock our senses and unsettle our certainties. And in studying them the last couple of weeks, I’ve found something that feels increasingly rare in the AI era: the power and value of the struggle.

As humans, we don’t imprint memory through information retrieval. We imprint it through difficulty. Through wrestling with the unanswerable. There is no “right” answer when reading a poem. This is what Socrates called aporia—the state of not-knowing that marks the beginning of real inquiry. And it’s what Aristotle believed was essential to human flourishing. For both, becoming more human was not about accumulating more information or, in our current reality, having access to all the world’s collected information via Google or ChatGPT. For these philosophers, the value is in the cultivation of habits that shape our judgment and form our character. Machines might mimic the surface of that struggle one day. But they won’t be able to really live it. . . yet (queue the Matrix). And, this act of struggling in pursuit of knowing is at least one thing that makes us uniquely human.

There’s a lot going on today: Wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and now Iran. And now we are facing a very real potential nuclear crisis playing out in the Middle East. In the face of such immense issues, returning to the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank may feel myopic, or, at least, tone-deaf. In 2023, I was the CEO of Maxio, a Battery Ventures—backed company. We banked with Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), and we benefited from the FDIC action that weekend.

At the time, I defended the government’s intervention to protect depositors. Over the past two years, one former colleague has continued to challenge my defense. He claims my stance reveals an elitist double standard: that when the rich are at risk, the system bends to save them. So, at one level, this essay is an attempt to respond to his (and perhaps others[?]) criticism that, because I supported the government action at that time, I don’t have the legitimacy to speak to government overreach and the resulting threat to our republic today. But I wouldn’t bother writing this if it were only a defense.

I’ve come to believe the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the government’s swift response exposed something more profound about our ongoing crisis of trust in institutions and the idea of expertise writ large (what I wrote about in this essay). This experience wasn’t just a financial event. For many people, it was another example of government failure, with echoes of the 2008 Financial Crisis. It begs a couple of questions:

• “What does it mean to place trust in systems that are supposed to serve the public good?”

• “What happens when those systems appear to protect the powerful at the expense of everyone else?”

This essay, then, is both a reckoning and a reflection. It’s a look back at what I experienced that weekend, why I stood by the government’s decision at the time, and how I think about it now. I’m not a banker, nor a policy expert. But I’ve lived through moments when the system blinked, and people’s livelihoods were on the line. This is my effort to understand that moment more clearly, and to contribute to a conversation we need to keep having about civic trust, democratic decay, and the role of expertise.

The Week the System Blinked

For those who remember, it started on a Thursday. There were whispers that SVB was in trouble. I remember talking to our GP at Battery Ventures about what they were seeing across the portfolio and what we should be doing. This was completely new terrain for me. By Friday, the panic was real. I was texting with other CEOs constantly. My CFO was repeatedly refreshing wire transfers. No one could get money out.

At the time, Maxio had most of its assets at SVB. That wasn’t unusual. In fact, it was pretty standard for Silicon Valley-based start-ups to work with Silicon Valley Bank. SVB specialized in venture-backed tech and had a deep understanding of SaaS companies’ business and operating models. As such, it offered favorable terms. More importantly, VCs and PEs across the Valley strongly encouraged (insisted?) their PortCos to bank there. The investors benefited from aggregating their portfolio’s banking relationships, and SVB’s integrated services made things easy.

So when the crisis hit, like many others, we didn’t have a contingency plan. And then the real implication hit me: if we couldn’t make payroll by Tuesday, we would be legally required to furlough 240 people. Not hypothetically. Immediately. That would affect every employee and every family—mine included.

So my CFO and I scrambled. We asked Battery for a backstop. They couldn’t help; their money was also at SVB. We reached out to other banks to open accounts, but it would take too long. I even talked with my wife about whether we could personally front payroll to buy time. Our executive team began contingency planning on multiple dimensions, including determining what money could we collect. . . what payments could we defer. . .what could/should we communicate to employees and customers during a rapidly unfolding crisis. This wasn’t about protecting our reputations. It was about protecting our people.

A CEO’s Limited Line of Sight

When I became CEO in 2022, the SVB relationship was already in place. I didn’t question it. No one would. SVB had a great reputation and was built for our ecosystem. Their risk models were SaaS-aware, their teams were responsive, and their terms were favorable, especially when you consolidated your accounts. Looking back, that consolidation came at a cost. Diversifying capital wasn’t just discouraged, it was penalized. The incentives pushed us toward capital optimization rather than capital protection. And that was my first lesson from this experience. CEOs try to control what they can. But some risks are structural. SVB’s collapse wasn’t just a case of bad luck or a one-off error. It was the result of misaligned incentives, insufficient oversight, and misplaced confidence in an institution we assumed was sound.

What Caused the Collapse?

SVB’s collapse wasn’t due to a single bad bet. It was the product of misaligned incentives, lax oversight, and systemic blind spots in both management and regulation. On the bank side, executives concentrated their assets in long-duration Treasury and mortgage-backed securities without adequately hedging against rising interest rates. When rates rose faster than expected, those securities lost significant value, and the bank was forced to sell at a loss when depositors rushed to withdraw funds. But this was just the tip of the iceberg. According to several sources, SVB had also lobbied for lighter regulatory scrutiny, successfully rolling back parts of Dodd-Frank in 2018. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Fed failed to respond aggressively to red flags. The system wasn’t caught off guard. It blinked. It saw the danger but didn’t act in time. That’s not just a financial failure. It’s a failure of institutional trust and accountability.

Historical Echoes: 2001, 2008, 2023

This wasn’t my first financial crisis. In 2001, I was working at Avenue A, a dot-com advertising technology (AdTech) firm. When the bubble burst, we went from 500 to 250 employees in a single day. Fortunately, I kept my job. But many of my friends and colleagues didn’t. At the time, there was no government intervention. People were tossed into a collapsed sector with little severance and no safety net. I know of several friends who had to move from Seattle and were unable to find a job in tech again.

In 2008, I was 42 years old, working at Microsoft with a young family. And I was very far away from the financial crisis playing out on Wall Street. Like everyone else, I saw how the government bailed out the banks, but not the homeowners. I didn’t take a public stance, and I don’t remember why. It was probably because it was so complex and nuanced, and I was consumed with life. I just let it pass. What I do remember is being disappointed that there was a real breakdown in accountability. Specifically, no one went to jail. Well, to be fair, one guy did. According to the University of Chicago Law Review, Kareem Serageldin, a managing director and trader at Credit Suisse Group, was the only Wall Street executive to go to jail for his role in the 2008 financial crisis. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison for conspiring to falsify books and records to hide losses. While other bankers faced fines and penalties, Serageldin was the only one to serve jail time in the United States for his involvement in the crisis. I mean, seriously? Kareem was the only guy? There could be no clearer signal that the financial elites were being protected.

So in 2023, when SVB failed, I had these memories in the back of my mind. However, as I argued then and still argue today, the government’s decision to backstop deposits was not cronyism. It felt like a necessary act to prevent a cascading failure. Still, I understand why others may see it differently. SVB was the bank of the Tech Elites (VC-backed & California-based). To many Americans, this appeared to be another elite bailout. I appreciate that this perception matters. But I do think the differences between the different scenarios are informative. The 2001 crash had no safety net, resulting in major job losses and long-term career disruption. The SVB backstop was implemented without Congressional action, within 72 hours. The Public backlash in 2023 was driven by perception of elitism (VCs, tech founders), even though the mechanism was not a taxpayer bailout.

Historical Context: Three Financial Crises Compared

Note: FDIC DIF = Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Deposit Insurance Fund

The Counterfactual: What If They Hadn’t Stepped In?

Let’s pause and ask the question: What if the FDIC and Treasury hadn’t intervened?

According to estimates from the Brookings Institution and analysis by industry groups, SVB had over 37,000 corporate clients, many of whom were startups or small businesses. There was also ~$150 billion in uninsured deposits at risk. As I mentioned earlier, the risk was also concentrated. Most of these companies were clustered within portfolios managed by venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE) firms. If SVB failed, the assumption was that the domino effect would have been swift. Multiple startups would fail meet payroll, which would result in thousands of layoffs. There would be breach-of-contract consequences for vendors and customers and a collapse of near-term tech “innovation funding.” Probably more concerning was the potential panic at other banks, which were teetering. This wasn’t about protecting billionaires. It was about protecting the operating capital of the startup economy.

And here’s the kicker: the FDIC's special assessment used to fund the intervention did not rely on taxpayer money. It was levied on other banks — essentially a form of private-sector mutual insurance.

Was it perfect? No. But was it a reckless elite bailout? I don’t think so.

The Real Failure: Lack of Accountability

What still frustrates me, though, is the same thing that frustrated me in 2008. Where was the accountability? SVB’s leadership took on interest-rate risk without adequate hedging. Its board failed in its oversight responsibilities. As many people have argued, the regulators (including the Fed) didn’t act quickly enough despite warning signs.

In the immediate aftermath, many assumed—as I did—that accountability would follow. That there would be serious scrutiny, structural changes, and consequences for failure. For a while, it felt like nothing was happening. But based on a limited Google Search this morning, there have been some efforts on this front. For example, the FDIC filed a lawsuit against 17 former SVB executives and directors, including the former CEO and CFO, alleging gross negligence and breaches of fiduciary duty. Congress introduced claw-back legislation aimed at recovering compensation from failed bank leaders. The DOJ and SEC have launched criminal and civil investigations, and the Fed admitted its own regulatory failures in a self-critical report. These are not nothing. But the larger public narrative that wealthy institutions and the elites are selectively rescued while everyday people bear the cost still stands. It’s not just about whether there’s legal action; it’s about whether trust in the system is restored.

And this is the second lesson. Interventions may be justified, but they must be followed by thorough scrutiny, clear consequences, and meaningful reform. Otherwise, public trust corrodes. We get the appearance of elite impunity, which fuels populist rage, conspiracy theories, and democratic decay.

Framing It All: The 4P Civic Lens

To help structure my thinking about events like this, I have been using a simple civic framework I call the 4Ps. As a quick reminder, the 4P Framework includes:

• Principle – What core value is at stake?

• Policy – What was the intended rule or norm?

• Process – How was the decision made and by whom?

• Practice – What happened on the ground and what were the effects?

Let’s apply it to SVB:

Was this process transparent? Not entirely. Were the practices consistent with past precedent? Arguably not. But the principle of preventing a larger economic collapse was (and I would argue “is still”) defensible. The policy had limits. The process was rushed but coordinated. The practice was effective.

4P Framework for the Future: How We Rebuild Trust

Now let’s flip it forward. Here’s my attempt to sketch a better 4P path going forward.

This isn’t policy prescription. It’s principle-first civic design. It’s a way to help us ask better questions, hold leaders accountable, and work toward a republic that serves all its citizens, not just those with money who have proximity to power.

Conclusion: From Reckoning to Responsibility

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank didn’t just expose financial vulnerabilities. It surfaced more profound civic questions: Who gets protected? What do we owe each other in a crisis? And how do we rebuild trust in the institutions that are supposed to serve us all?

As a CEO, I will carry forward the operational lessons: diversify capital relationships, assess institutional counterparty risk more rigorously, and never confuse convenience with resilience. As a board member, I’m asking CEOs and exec teams questions along these lines—specifically, their capital strategy.

As a citizen, I’m still wrestling with what it means to have appropriate trust in expertise, in government, and in markets. I use the 4P framework as a way to begin asking better questions. I firmly believe that we need a more principled approach to building (rebuilding?) public trust. That starts with naming the ideals we believe should guide government intervention. It requires policies that don’t reward recklessness or exacerbate inequality. It requires building systems of transparency that bring accountability to the policies and the resulting processes and practices.

Transitions are hard on friendships

Until my early forties, I lived a nomadic life. I left home for the Naval Academy, served in the military, and then completed tours of duty at both large and small companies, spanning from coast to coast and including a short stint in the UK. There was actually an eleven-year stretch where I had 13 addresses. Moving was a constant. I never had a sense of digging in.

Then came Oakland. Dana and I arrived with our two boys (age 5 and 7) in 2012, thinking we would have a “California Adventure” for 3-5 years. We found a great neighborhood with good schools and a nice house. Thirteen years later, I realized that this was the longest I had ever lived in one place. . .ever. One house. One community. 13 years. As they say about raising kids, “the days were long, the years were short”

In Oakland, my friendships took root through the routines of parenting. Our kids’ lives became the catalyst for our social lives: weekend sports, scouting events, and auction parties—-lots of auction parties. My boys’ friends’ fathers became my friends, not by some grand design, but due to proximity. But proximity alone wasn’t the glue—it was what we did together that made the relationships real. As I often tell my boys, men build friendships through shared experiences (activities). With my friends at least, it is rare for us to sit across from each other and talk about our deepest fears (note: I get this may be a problem). Instead, we hike, we ride, we coach Little League, we build campfires. Sharing happens during an activity.

C510 and the Value of Effort

There was also a bike group (C510) I rode with. This group included a cast of characters, some hardcore and others barely hanging on to the back of the peloton with me. We met in the early hours when it was usually dark and damp to get the miles in. And every weekend, there was a group ride somewhere around the Bay. We didn’t talk about life much, but we got to know each other one hill at a time. I have always found there to be something uniquely honest about friendships built on physical effort. You can’t fake a climb. A sprint humbles us all. And, at the end of the day, you show up, or you don’t. That is a true test of character, commitment and friendship.

Friendship and the Power of Context

Now that we have moved to Sun Valley, I don’t have the advantage of proximity. I can’t host friends on our deck for a Friday cocktail hour. I won’t have my default Sunday rides. As I make this transition, I wonder: which of these relationships were built on shared logistics, and which were built to last?

I have faced this question before when I moved from city to city. When I was younger, I thought friendships just happened. A shared context and close proximity enable you to build connections. I found this to be true in High School, College, Flight School, when I was stationed with a squadron, and then at business school. Each context provided a catalyst to connect. The disappointment for me was that once the context changed, many of the friendships faded. Proximity is a powerful force, and without it, even strong bonds can fade.

At the same time, some of these friendships from each experience have persisted. Over the past decade, I have made a conscious effort to invest more deliberately in a few cohorts: a handful of high school friends, a few Naval Academy classmates, a Seattle crew from my early professional years, and, more recently, a group from business school. Each group has its own unique rhythm and set of rules. Some trade sarcasm as currency, which drives my wife nuts. Some default to deep dives and strategic reflection. Some are men only; some include both men and women. These groups don’t survive on nostalgia alone. They survive on intention. It requires reaching out, planning trips, & showing up. The shared histories were the starting point. The ongoing investment is what makes them vibrant.

What Will Carry Forward?

As I reflect on our 13 years in Oakland, I wonder: Will a new cohort of friends emerge? Or will it be a couple of “couple” friendships, families with whom we will stay close because of our shared history and values? As anyone will tell you, closing a chapter of life is harder than it sounds. There’s no ceremony, no final scene. There is just a slow fade-out of texts, group dinners, and spontaneous Saturday plans. And there is a choice to be made about which friendships will play forward.

There is also a choice to be made in finding new friends. Do I really want to start over? Since we don’t have our kids’ lives to provide the catalyst, will I find new friends that I seek out not by default, but by design? And will they endure not just because we ride together or share a neighborhood, but because we challenge and enrich who we are becoming as human beings?

What Makes a Life Truly Satisfying

“If you strip away the noise—accomplishments, money, titles—what makes a life truly satisfying?”

That was the animating question behind the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running longitudinal study on human happiness. For over 85 years, researchers have tracked the lives of hundreds of men and, later, their families, measuring everything from income to cholesterol levels to career success. What they found was both unsurprising and quietly revolutionary: The quality of your relationships is the clearest predictor of your happiness and health, more than fame, more than wealth, more than genetics. In his TED Talk, Dr. Robert Waldinger puts it simply: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”

Stress, Fitness, and Friendship

In his TED Talk, Dr. Waldinger reminds us that meaningful connections do more than fill our social calendar; they serve as stress regulators, helping our bodies reset after life’s inevitable challenges. I recall experiencing this throughout my life, whether riding bikes, skiing, or engaging in other activities with friends. It wasn’t just about building physical fitness, it was what Dr Waldinger described as building “social fitness.” This has become even more true for me as I have tried to be more intentional with specific friend groups.

Friendship, like physical fitness, requires maintenance. You can’t binge your way to strength, and you can’t neglect relationships and expect them to thrive. Social fitness is no different. It requires consistent investment, even when life feels overfull. We all have limits to the time and energy we can give. That’s part of growing older: making decisions about where and with whom to invest. This calculus changes now that both of our boys are going to college. I certainly look forward to the time I get to spend with Dana, and the time I will have to myself to read, to write, to do whatever. And I am looking forward to meeting new people—I think.

Three Kinds of Friendship

Of course, not every friendship deserves the same investment. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that part of maturing—emotionally and relationally—is learning to discern where that effort should go. Some friendships offer energy, perspective, and support; others simply exist out of habit or history. And this is where I’ve found the Greeks surprisingly helpful. It turns out that long before Harvard started tracking social fitness, the Greek philosophers were already mapping out the different kinds of relationships and helping to clarify which ones are built to last.

To that point, I have been working through Xenophon’s Memorabilia as part of a seminar. In this text, Xenophon records Socrates’ teachings on various topics. There is an entire section on friendship—what makes a good friend, how to be a good friend, what friendship means in life. Netting it out, a good friend is someone who is “useful,” not in terms of transactional ‘utility,’ but, instead, in the sense of someone who actively contributes to our character and clarity, and for whom we do the same. Aristotle built out the concept of friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics, defining three kinds of friendships:

• Those based on Utility. They are formed out of need and are often temporary.

• Those based on Pleasure. They are based on enjoyment or shared interest.

• Those based on Virtue. These are rare and resilient. They are formed between people committed to each other’s flourishing.

I assume Dr Waldinger would say all three are valid and contribute to your happiness. But I would argue only one, the virtuous kind, is built to last. As Aristotle notes, “Friendship of Virtue… continues because two people are friends because of The Good each person represents.” That’s why the saying, “you have friends for a season, a reason, or a lifetime,” resonates so deeply for me. Given all of the transitions I have gone through, I have had to come to terms with what type of friendship I have with an individual. Friendship, like any meaningful relationship, requires something from both people. But the return can be profound.

That’s certainly been true in my life. The friends I’ve kept over time are those I admire for their character, their humor, and their intelligence—even when we may disagree on politics or religion. My best friends have also always included some sort of shared activity. And it was during our time engaging in these activities that genuine honesty would emerge and our loyalty to each other would deepen.

I guess this is one of the blessings of the modern world: while proximity once defined possibility, we now have more freedom to choose our contexts. When I was deployed on an Aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf in 1993 and 1995, there was no internet. There were only letters and “mail call.” My relationships were nurtured through the written word. And, to be honest, I did not write often—if at all—to my male friends. It was only to my wife and family. I had new “naval aviation” friends with whom I was traveling the world. However, I had lost touch with my high school and Naval Academy cohorts.

Today, it is easier to keep up with people’s lives on Facebook. Texts are much simpler than letters. And it’s easier to plan a trip, meet halfway for a ride, or book a long weekend in the mountains. As Dr Waldinger suggests, it is this sort of investment that is needed.

The Next Chapter

In his talk, Dr. Waldinger emphasizes the power of shared passions. In his talk, he says, “follow your interests... rub elbows with the same people again and again.” This is exactly what I’m starting to do in Sun Valley: meeting guys on the trails, slopes, and weekend activities to start to build that connective tissue. The terrain is different, but the rhythm is familiar. We sweat; we laugh; we crash. But now there’s more at stake than simply finding people to ride with. I’m not just passing through this time. Dan and I have chosen to make a home here (at least for now). I don’t know yet what this chapter will hold, yet I have been thinking a lot about how this shift changes how I think about friendship, the ones I want to continue to invest in, and the ones I want to build. I don’t just want to live in Sun Valley, I want to feel connected. But I know what I’m hoping for: a new circle, forged by effort and choice. I want to find men of character. As Putarch writes: “Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried…” That discipline, valuing character before closeness, is exactly the filter I’m using as I both hold onto old friendships and build new ones. It will take time.

To be clear, I’m not trying to meet everyone. I’m trying to meet the right few and to invest, over time, with care and consistency. Because if the science and the philosophy are right, those few will make all the difference to the value of the life I experience and the legacy I leave.

Final Outreach

Dr. Waldinger closes his talk with a deceptively simple call to action: think of a friend and reach out. In our world of text messages and DMs, you don’t even have to pick up the phone. He says you will be surprised by the response. I recently did this with a very close friend from Oakland, whom I didn't get to say goodbye to before we left, and it was such a wonderful feeling to feel the reciprocation of mutual admiration. And as both the Greeks and Dr Waldinger would argue, for the friendships that matter (the virtuous ones), it’s precisely those small gestures that sustain the connection. As C. S. Lewis observed, such bonds are “a deeply appreciative love”—a friendship chosen and cherished, not incidental. The outreach becomes the investment.

So this chapter will be interesting. It’s about establishing new friendships in a new place, yes, but it’s also about tending to the old ones, with intention and care. Because in the end, connection isn’t just a measure of happiness. It’s the work of a life well-lived.

The Battle of Midway, fought in June 1942, was the Pacific War’s turning point. Outnumbered and outgunned, the U.S. Navy sank four Japanese aircraft carriers and forever shifted the balance of naval power. Over 3,000 men died in the span of three days. Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, later said: "They fought together as brothers-in-arms. They died together and now they sleep side by side…to them we owe the high resolve that the cause for which they died shall live."

At the Naval Academy, we studied the Battle of Midway in depth. We learned that the American victory wasn’t just about luck or codebreaking, it was a master class in strategic adaptation. Up until that point, the US had been—to be frank—getting its ass kicked in the Pacific. But then, we broke the Japanese code and gained critical insight into the planned attack. To confirm that Midway was the objective, the Navy sent a fake distress message about a broken water distiller on the island, which was soon mirrored in a Japanese message confirming the target. BRILLIANT!

Armed with this intelligence, Admiral Nimitz positioned his carriers at “Point Luck,” northeast of Midway, and concentrated his forces rather than spreading them out—which is what the Japanese were doing. He gave clear orders and then trusted his subordinates to execute under a doctrine of “calculated risk,” a very American way of operating. The Japanese, by contrast, relied on a complex plan which included a diversion in the Aleutians, an attack on Midway, and the expectation that American carriers would arrive late. Their rigid assumptions, dispersed fleet, and failure to detect U.S. forces proved disastrous.

The result was one of the most lopsided and decisive naval victories in history. Four Japanese carriers were sunk along with hundreds of aircraft and thousands of sailors. The US lost one carrier & one destroyer. There is a story, no doubt apocryphal, that gamers at the Naval War College have many times replayed the 1942 Battle of Midway but have never been able to produce an American victory. That’s how improbable it was. And how brilliant the strategy. As historian Walter Lord wrote: *"They had no right to win. Yet they did, and in doing so they changed the course of a war... Even against the greatest of odds, there is something in the human spirit — a magic blend of skill, faith, and valor — that can lift men from certain defeat to incredible victory."*

My connection to the Pacific theater goes back before my own time in the Navy. My grandfather served aboard the USS *Intrepid*, one of the most storied aircraft carriers of the war. The Intrepid entered the Pacific theater in 1943, after Midway, at a time when America was beginning to take the fight back to Japan. Prior to Midway, we had been losing badly. Pearl Harbor had shocked the nation. The Philippines had fallen. The Battle of the Coral Sea was costly and inconclusive. It was only after Midway that the tide began to turn. Midway was our first decisive victory in the Pacific, a moment that shifted momentum and offered hope that we could not only survive this war, but prevail. And from that turning point forward, ships like the Intrepid played a critical role in pushing westward across the Pacific. It was men like my grandfather and his generation that secured the freedoms we all enjoy today.

Standing there in the terminal, reading names etched into the walls, I thought about my own time on active duty. I lost sixteen friends or squadron mates while on active duty. All of them were married. All of them had children. There isn’t a Memorial Day that passes where I don’t think about them.

Over the years, I’ve tried to instill in my boys the importance of this day. Sometimes we’ve gone to formal ceremonies as part of Scouting. Other times we’ve simply walked through a cemetery, placed flags, and read names aloud. I’ve always believed that Memorial Day is one of our most sacred civic rituals. For me, it is not a celebration, it is a national moment of mourning and reflection. If the Fourth of July is about jubilation and freedom, Memorial Day is about sacrifice and remembering. It is not about glorifying war; it is about honoring those who stepped forward when called and never came home.

Last year, I visited the American Memorial Cemetery in Manila. The walls there are etched with the names of more than 17,000 American and Allied troops who died in the Philippines campaign. The scale is staggering. Walking those corridors, you’re surrounded by names, long columns of them. I have also walked the beaches of Normandy and then through the cemeteries that line the bluffs. Both places are a bit surreal in their silence. There are no speeches. There are no slogans. They just stand as enduring records of sacrifice.

I experienced a bit of this silence again at the Midway exhibit in the airport. This is what Memorial Day is really for. Not the flags or the flyovers, not the sales or the slogans. For me and many others, it is about the simple act of remembering. We are reminded to remember those who paid the price so the rest of us could live ordinary lives, board ordinary planes, and come home to our kids.

Which is why this year, the contrast was so jarring.

While many Americans spent this Memorial Day doing their own type of reflection with friends and family Trump posted a message on Truth Social that began with a perfunctory, “Happy Memorial Day to All,” before descending into grievance politics and personal attacks. Rather than use the day to speak to national unity, shared sacrifice, or the men and women who died wearing our flag, he used it to settle scores and elevate himself. There was no mention of Arlington, no tribute to the fallen, no call to civic duty—just a grievance-filled missive that turned a solemn holiday into yet another political stunt. I don’t know why I would expect anything else, but his self-centeredness still shocks me. We have never had a president do this.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, it “shouldn’t” be this way. There’s a certain decorum that ought to be observed on Memorial Day. It is a day for humility, not hubris. It is a day for remembering others, not promoting oneself. The men who died at Midway did not ask what was in it for them. They went because they were called. And we honor them best not just with flags and ceremonies, but by demanding more of ourselves and especially of those who lead us.

I’ve seen what real service looks like: from my grandfather on the *Intrepid* to my own friends who never made it back. I’ve stood in the silence of Manila and Normandy and felt the weight of all those names. I’ve watched my boys learn how to salute the fallen. None of it is performative: all of it matters. I think we honor those we have lost best not with speeches or slogans, but by carrying that memory with us—in quiet moments, in how we show up, and in what we expect from those who would lead.

My sisters and I, who’ve always had a warm and relatively low-friction relationship, had to quickly become something more, something closer to what Socrates describes in Memorabilia when he urges quarreling brothers to act like parts of a single body: the hands working together, each serving the other so the whole can survive.

The last two weeks have been filled with hospital visits, phone calls, and 1000s of texts as we have tried to help her process this new reality, let her friends/ extended family know, and begin to figure out what this means for all of us. And in a twist of fate (irony?), this all coincides with my reading of Book 2 of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, where Socrates turns from the public square to the private sphere in preparation for a seminar this week.

For years, I’ve read philosophy to understand politics, justice, and ethics in the abstract. But Xenophon does something different. He brings the search for virtue into the home. In these chapters, Socrates isn’t arguing with generals or sophists; he’s speaking to sons and brothers (yes, it was all male all the time in Socrates’ time). Through his dialogues, he challenges different people to think about what it means to live the “good (aka virtuous)” life. He guides us toward self-restraint, patience, and reverence within our daily lives. This is the real insight of Xenophon. The first, and perhaps hardest arena of virtue, is at home with your family.

I. Vice and Virtue: The Foundation Beneath the Friction

Throughout the Memorabilia, Xenophon challenges us to answer the question: “What kind of person am I trying to become?” In Book 1, Xenophon defends Socrates. In Book 2, he starts to explore the moral architecture that Socrates built. In this book, Xenophon shifts from legal and political framing to domestic virtue, showing that Socrates' greatest lessons were not abstract theories, but practical guidance for daily living.

He actually opens Book 2, framing a challenge to Aristippus about what type of life is worth living: one ruled by vice and pleasure, versus one shaped by virtue and discipline. Virtue, in his view, is earned through effort. Socrates paints a stark picture: the person ruled by his/her appetite becomes a slave to impulse, while the one who governs his/her desire becomes free to act justly. And, by doing so, we are ready to serve others, and we are ready to lead.

I think he does this to help create a moral internal framework that he then illuminates through the examples of family life. This makes sense as family life, after all, is full of tests: emotional triggers, power struggles, ancient resentments. Without some type of moral compass, we end up being slaves to our passions, our ego. I have never really thought of this before, but Xenophon argues that the domestic realm is not just about eating, sleeping, and working; it has the potential to be spiritual training. Too bad I am just figuring this out at 57. :)

II. On Mothers: Reverence and the Reversal of Roles

In the next chapter, Socrates speaks to a young man—possibly his own son—who complains about his difficult mother. It is clear she is emotional, irrational, and hard to bear. Rather than arguing with him, Socrates shifts the way to think about the relationship, asking: “Did she not suffer for you?” “Does care not create a moral debt, even when it comes without emotional ease?” Talk about a guilt trip!

Reading this while staying with my mother in Richmond this week had a completely different impact than it would have 2 weeks ago. Luckily, my mom is not like Lamprocles’ mother. She has never been manipulative or volatile. Well, ok, she is Irish Catholic, so she has her moments. But for the most part, she has always been generous, kind, and loving. She has also been incredibly spiritual and committed to doing good on this Earth. This is why I cringe when I remember how ungrateful I was when I was younger, especially during high school. I was probably like most teenagers—impatient and dismissive. But still, in reading Xenophon’s questions to Lamprocles, I cringe. . .Uggh.

Now I’m back under her roof for a week. She’s basically lost all ability to see anything other than light and dark and make out shapes. As she says, it is as if she is in a snowstorm all the time. Thus, she is, for all intents and purposes, blind. And our roles are now reversed. Rather than her holding my hand when we walked around the park when I was a child, she holds my arm as we navigate a walk in the neighborhood. I was reminded of this when we were touring assisted living places this week, and she turned to me, smiled, and said: “This feels like when I took you around to look at preschools.” Fifty years ago, she was choosing my future. Now I’m (with my sisters) trying to help her navigate hers.

Socrates was right: reverence is not about ease, it’s about remembering. It’s about carrying forward the investment someone else made in you, even when the emotional balance shifts. It is patience earned through perspective, and I am not a patient person. It helps that I am not working these days, so I don’t have an excuse to not be present, to not be patient. But it is hard.

III. On Brothers (and Sisters): Turning Affection into Action

In Chapter 3, Socrates moves on to talk about the relationship between brothers. He asks, simply: Would you treat a stranger with more patience than your own brother? And then he reminds them that the body only works when all parts serve each other.

Again, I cringe at how I was when I was younger. I was the oldest, and I was certainly convinced of my own self-worth. I have two wonderful sisters, but when I was younger I viewed them, for the most part, as “impedimenta” (as my Uncle Rob says). Over the years, we have developed a very nice relationship—one based on a common respect for each other and deep love for our parents. I think having this foundation in place helped us deal with the initial shock of my mother’s stroke as a team. The stroke, of course, was an emotional event. But it was also a logistical one. All of a sudden, we had to coordinate care, reorient our time, consult doctors and staff, visit facilities, and start to put in a completely new system of support. This was not part of our plan; however, we all leaned in. In this context, there is no room for ego, for “Why didn’t you do this?” or “I thought we agreed.” We have had to engage, show each other some grace, and focus on doing what was best for our mother.

This brought to mind a recent NYT article on Siblings, and the surprising ways they shape our lives. As Susan Dominous notes, our sibling bonds are the “longest and most emotionally intense” of our lives—shaped by memory, but stretched by adulthood, divergence, and change.¹ Socrates understood this and was talking about this 2400 years ago!! As with most everything I experience today, the Greeks had already wrestled with it and provide a compelling way to think about it.

IV. Household as Polis: The Moral Laboratory

What ties all these scenes together: vice vs. virtue, parent vs. child, brother to sister—is Xenophon’s main point: the household is the first arena we must learn to govern. If you cannot restrain your tongue at the dinner table, how can you give wise counsel in the assembly? If you cannot forgive your sibling, how will you reconcile with your enemy? If you cannot show gratitude to the one who bathed you, fed you, and raised you, what kind of citizen, mentor, or leader can you hope to become?

And this is what makes Xenophon’s Socrates more approachable to me than Plato’s Socrates. Virtue isn’t born in the senate; It’s born in the kitchen. In some ways, this also makes the call to live a "virtuous” life both more compelling and challenging. It is not about being a “philosopher king,” it is about being a good son and brother. Ugggh. I cringe again.

Two weeks ago, everything changed. But maybe this is exactly when philosophy matters most—not in the abstract, but in the actual. While it is worthwhile spending time imagining what the “good” life should be, the real value comes from trying ot learn how to live this life.. . . one small act at a time.

We launched from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, just after midnight, somewhere in the Indian Ocean, on our way to the Persian Gulf in 1995. It was a routine mission. There was no weather. There were no threats. It was just another training sortie in the A-6E Intruder—a low-level, medium-attack aircraft.

As a Bombardier/Navigator, I was in the right seat with the terrain-following radar and weapon systems in front of me. As I remember, it was a routine flight; however, it was also a moonless night with no discernible horizon. This meant we could not look outside to orient ourselves. We had to trust our instruments. About thirty minutes into the flight, something snapped. My inner ear screamed that we were falling out of the sky.

I had never experienced vertigo like this before. My senses told me that we were diving to the deck. . . that we had lost control. However, all the instruments said that we were flying straight and level. That’s when I turned and looked at the pilot and asked if we were “all good.” He turned to me with a quizzical look and said something like, “Yeah, dude... what’s your problem?” I shook my head and turned back to my radar.

One of the first rules of flying at night or in bad conditions is to “trust your instruments.” The pilot didn’t feel the chaos I felt. He knew we weren’t falling—not because of a gut feeling, but because he had trained to trust the system. In this context, we, as Naval Aviators, had spent years learning how to perceive the world through data, repetition, and disciplined judgment. . . not emotion. And, in that moment, I had a choice: trust my senses or trust something deeper.

I’ve never forgotten that moment. Because what threw me wasn’t enemy fire or a mechanical failure; it was uncertainty. My own mind. My inability to reconcile what I felt was going on with what was really going on.

I find myself feeling a similar disorientation in today’s current geo-political reality. What I thought was ‘true’ is being completely discombobulated. It is forcing me, like many others, to reevaluate the instruments that we use to guide our actions and inform our decisions.

2. Socratic Radar: Reclaiming Our Moral Instruments

That night in the A-6 has haunted me for 30 years. Not because anything went wrong, but because it was really the first time that I realized how quickly the mind can betray the moment, how easy it is to feel lost, even when everything is actually fine.

Over the past 100 days, I have been wrestling with the question of how to define reality within a very different context. I am participating in a seminar on Xenophon’s Memorabilia, as part of the Slow Read Symposium, sponsored by the Great Books Institute. (Side note: I highly recommend this forum for anyone who wants to spend time with the great books and great thinkers who influenced our modern society.)

Throughout Xenophon's Memorabilia and, more broadly, Plato's dialogues, Socrates challenges us to examine the foundations of our beliefs. His method, often cloaked in seemingly simple questions and riddles, compels us to confront profound uncertainties:

• How do we discern right from wrong?

• What if our convictions are misguided?

• Could it be that the world remains constant, and it's our understanding that's askew?

Rather than providing direct answers, Socrates employs a dialectical approach (what we might call “precision questioning today), prompting individuals to define their terms and justify their beliefs. When someone claims to be a good general, he inquires, "What is a general?" If one professes to love justice, he asks, "What is justice?" His intent isn't to undermine for the sake of argument, but to guide individuals toward self-awareness, ensuring they aren't navigating life with misplaced confidence and unexamined assumptions.

The core problem Socrates uncovers is this: we often mistake perception (or sensation) for understanding, confidence for knowledge, and status for wisdom. And this is the insight I now think about when reflecting on that event in the Indian Ocean. My pilot was calm and certain, not because he felt right, but because he knew how to perceive the reality of our situation at that moment. In an age of noise and narrative, where even our most capable leaders are flying through a fog of opinion, misinformation, and pressure, this kind of clarity is rare.

3. The 4P Framework: Recalibrating Our Moral Compass

In an age where moral relativism often clouds judgment, I would suggest we need to revisit and reinforce the internal instruments that should guide ethical decision-making. It may be a stretch, but I am going to employ the 4P Framework I introduced in an earlier post to help navigate the chaos we are currently experiencing.

• Principle – Anchoring in Enduring Values: I am not going to debate that there is truth with a capital “T;” however, I will argue that at the core of ethical leadership lies a steadfast commitment to universal principles such as justice, honesty, the rule of law, and respect for human life/dignity. These principles should serve as the internal compass, guiding leaders through uncharted territories and turbulent times.

• Policy – Translating Values into Actionable Guidelines: Policies should reflect and operationalize these core principles, providing clear directives that align organizational practices with ethical standards. This ensures consistency and accountability in decision-making processes.

• Process – Establishing Ethical Decision-Making Mechanisms: We need more debate. We need more structured processes for ethical deliberation, including stakeholder consultations and impact assessments. We need our governance structure to promote thoughtful and inclusive decision-making that upholds moral integrity. We need leaders who are not afraid of “constructive tension.”

• Practice – Embedding Ethics into the Way We Engage the World as a Country: We need to adopt an operating model where ethical considerations are integral to everyday actions, reinforcing the importance of moral responsibility. This involves continuous education, open dialogue, and leading by example to foster an environment of trust and accountability.

4. Defunding Virtue: When We Dismantle Our Moral Infrastructure

In recent months, Trump and his administration have used an unprecedented number of executive orders to make dramatic cuts to institutions that have long served as moral and informational compasses. Most recently, it was to defund NPR and PBS, citing alleged ideological bias. I know these organizations have leaned left over the years, but they have also provided educational and cultural programming for everyone over the years. I mean, he is shooting Big Bird. Come on.

And this is just the latest attack. In his first 30 days, via Elon Musk and DOGE, our government has halted most U.S. foreign aid, including substantial cuts to USAID, which has disrupted humanitarian efforts worldwide. These actions have led to the suspension of critical health and development programs, affecting vulnerable populations and leading to real deaths. 3 data points:

• HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis: An analysis by Dr. Brooke Nichols at Boston University estimates that if foreign aid is not restored by the end of 2025, over 176,000 additional deaths from HIV and 62,000 from tuberculosis could occur globally. As of April 2025, the tracker reported over 210,000 deaths, with more than 140,000 being children.

• Vaccinations and Malaria: According to a statement from Senator Bernie Sanders, the cuts could lead to 2–3 million additional deaths due to lack of vaccinations, 166,000 more deaths from malaria, and 200,000 more children paralyzed from polio.

• Child Malnutrition: UNICEF reports that funding cuts could leave more than 2.4 million children suffering from severe acute malnutrition without access to Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), and up to 2,300 lifesaving stabilization centers at risk of closing or scaling back services.

Not only does this ignore the power of soft power, it is just mean and cruel. As Pope John Paul II remarked, "A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members." I believe this includes helping, as we can, to support other countries. To be fair, I don’t know what the right level of investment is, but it is certainly not $0.

These defunding measures not only undermine the dissemination of knowledge and aid but also erode the moral infrastructure that supports a virtuous society. By dismantling institutions that promote education, cultural understanding, and humanitarian assistance, we not only risk losing our position as a world leader, but—more importantly—we risk losing the internal instruments that guide ethical decision-making and civic responsibility.

5. Listening to the Daimon: Returning to First Principles

In Plato's Apology, Socrates speaks of a divine inner voice, the daimonion, that guides him away from wrongdoing. He describes it as a spiritual sign that intervenes to prevent him from making moral missteps.

"This sign I have had ever since I was a child. It is a voice, and whenever it speaks, it turns me away from something I am about to do, but it never encourages me to do anything."

This daimonion isn't a mystical force; it's the internal compass that alerts us when we're veering off course. It's the quiet voice that urges us to pause, reflect, and choose the path of integrity. In our current fog of misinformation, polarization, and moral ambiguity, my own daimonion is clamoring that we are about to crash in a spectacular fireball if something does not change in our trajectory as a Republic. I would suggest that we all face the opportunity to rediscover our own inner guide. This is not about defining "truth” with a capital “T.” We must return to foundational principles that transcend political divides.

On December 24, 1968, astronaut Bill Anders looked out the window of Apollo 8 and called to his crewmate:

“You got a color film, Jim? Hand me a roll of color, quick, would you?”

The photo he captured—Earthrise—showed our planet like we had never seen it before: whole, fragile, suspended in the blackness of space. No borders. No nations. Just one shared home. That image changed the course of environmental history. And it changed the course of my family.

When my mother saw that photo, she experienced what she later described as a mystical awakening. Though trained in English literature, she dove headfirst into Earth sciences and cosmology. That image, she said, revealed our place in the universe—and our responsibility to it.

In 1981, we moved to Atlanta. A year later, her mother died. Overcome with grief, she couldn’t return to church. Instead, she began taking daily walks through the newly designated Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, which bordered our neighborhood. The woods became her sanctuary. The trail, her chapel. And in time, she discovered her mission in life. She went on to:

• Fight and win a grassroots campaign to block the development of 50 acres of National Park land.

• Help launch Cobb County’s first Land Trust, preserving historic green spaces in the area.

• Become a leader at the Georgia Conservancy, organizing field trips and environmental education programs.

• Work with national sustainability leaders and help create Georgia Tech’s Office of Sustainability, now a thriving hub for climate innovation.

Alongside her activism, she began a spiritual journey rooted in Celtic Christianity, a tradition where "Christ wears two shoes—Scripture and Creation." She believed Earth was not just a home, but a holy text. As Fr. Thomas Berry, whom she knew and worked with, taught: "The Earth is primary; everything else is derivative."

The Earth is primary; everything else is derivative . . .

That’s a profound worldview. Earth first versus mankind first. In this tradition, Earth is not a backdrop—it’s a living revelation. To desecrate the Earth is to desecrate the sacred.

When I was younger, I didn’t get it. I didn’t always share her reverence for nature. But I inherited her rituals. As a family, we were always walking. We walked the trails of the Chattahoochee National Forest and the North Georgia mountains. Every weekend away included a walk somewhere. As a kid, I hated it. I wanted to run, sweat, suffer—if it didn’t hurt, it didn’t count. Walking felt like a waste of time. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate walks more. Maybe because I’ve gotten slower. Or maybe because I’ve finally come to understand what she was sharing through her lived experience.

I remember one walk in particular—during the chaos of my divorce. My mom and I wandered through the woods, just the two of us. We talked and talked. I don’t remember all the words. But I remember the comfort. I remember the sound of the river. I remember the silence that made space for healing. My mom is now an octogenarian and still walks... every day... along a new river—the James in Richmond, VA. When I visit, we walk and talk.

This past week, I found myself walking again—this time in Japan with my son, Spencer. We visited temples, yes, but also gardens and parks. The Japanese have a special reverence for nature, shaped by both Shinto and Buddhist traditions, where spirits reside in trees, stones, and streams, and where stillness is seen as sacred. I’m still not the nature lover my mom is. But walking with my son, I thought about walking with my mom. She would have been “over the moon” strolling through those carefully tended spaces.

There’s a Japanese word, niwa (庭), that means garden—but it implies more than a plot of land. It suggests a cultivated relationship with nature, a place where order and wildness coexist. In every moss-covered stone and raked gravel path, you feel that intention. It resonates with the reverence Celtic Christians feel for the Earth. And I know my mother would have felt right at home in those gardens—each one a quiet sermon on patience, care, and beauty as a form of devotion.

And yet, I return home to a country undoing so much of what Earth Day stood for.

As Bill McKibben recently wrote in The New Yorker, the Earth no longer looks like it did in that photo. Arctic ice is retreating. Carbon levels are 50% higher than pre-industrial levels. March 2025 was the hottest March on record.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is accelerating our planetary decline:

• Executive Order 14162 pulled us out of the Paris Climate Agreement, halting all U.S. climate funding.

• The EPA is being dismantled, with hundreds of staff laid off and environmental justice programs slashed.

• Fossil fuel expansion is being fast-tracked without public input or environmental review.

• Renewable energy initiatives are being defunded.

To be clear: this is all part of Project 2025: a systematic effort to weaken climate science, silence environmental regulation, and gut clean air and water protections. This isn’t passive neglect—it’s active sabotage. I keep asking myself: Why? Is the principle simply "consumption without consequence"? Or just "exploit while you can, wherever you can"? It’s mind-boggling.

From space, there is no "America first." There is only Earth. And it is time, once again, to rise.

What We Can Do Today

This Earth Day, I invite you to do three things:

1. Learn – Read about Project 2025 and understand what’s at stake. Environmental policy is being quietly dismantled—and silence equals consent.

2. Act – Support organizations that are fighting for environmental protection:

• Your local park service – They're underfunded and often overlooked, but if we don’t support them, we will not have access to them for future generations.

• Earthjustice – Using the power of law to fight reckless environmental policy.

• 350.org – Advocating for global climate solutions rooted in renewable energy.

3. Ritualize – Make experiencing nature part of your family’s rhythms via walks, gardens, and small acts of restoration. That’s how movements start.

We don’t need another photo from space to remind us what we’re losing. We just need to look up. Look around. And refuse to look away.