Category: Essay
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The Gadfly and the Hemlock: Who We Are According to Socrates
He wrote nothing. He claimed to know nothing. He taught by pretending not to teach, questioned by pretending not to have answers, and led the most examined life in the history of Western philosophy — and then, when Athens offered him the choice between his life and his vocation, he chose the vocation. He was…
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The Reel Argument: Satyajit Ray
By Bergotte Satyajit Ray made his first film in 1955 with borrowed equipment, a cast of non-professional actors, and enough money for perhaps half the shooting he needed, and what he produced was one of the most complete and devastating works of art that cinema has ever seen. Pather Panchali — Song of the Little…
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The Human Condition According to F. Scott Fitzgerald
By Bergotte F. Scott Fitzgerald understood enchantment better than any other American writer — understood it not as a pleasant illusion to be gently corrected but as a fundamental feature of human consciousness, the capacity to project onto the world a beauty and a meaning and a promise that the world does not independently possess,…
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Gil Schafer
Makers & Rooms — Essay VII The House That Remembers You Gil Schafer builds houses that feel as though they have always been there. This is not an accident, a stylistic affectation, or a retreat from the present. It is the result of a very particular theory about what a house is for — and…
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What’s So Special About Fela Kuti
By Bergotte Fela Anikulapo Kuti built a nightclub in Lagos, declared it an independent republic, married twenty-seven women simultaneously, recorded nearly eighty albums, was beaten, imprisoned, and raided by the Nigerian military so many times that he began to treat the violence as material, and in the process created one of the most original and…
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The Weight of Being Seen
I have never much minded what people think of me. I don’t read a room for approval, and being ignored has never cost me (much) sleep. Which is what makes the last fifteen years interesting to me in a way that has almost nothing to do with vanity: I ran an accidental experiment on how…
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One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy: Who We Are According to Albert Camus
He is the last philosopher in this series and the one who answers the question the series has been building toward. Not the question of what the self is, or how it is made, or what it is condemned to. The question that Sartre’s radical freedom leaves ringing in the air: given all of this…
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Sophia Luna Portra
Encounters · No. 8 Snake Skin, Warm Blanket Sophia Luna Portra makes sculptures from muslin and coffee, sings gothic folk songs about transformation, and thinks about clothes the way a philosopher thinks about the self. She is at the beginning of something. By Bergotte A note on this essay: the preceding pieces in this series…
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The Reel Argument: Agnès Varda
By Bergotte Agnès Varda spent sixty years making films about the people and things that the world had decided did not matter, and she did it with a curiosity so genuine and a formal intelligence so complete that the combination amounts to something close to a philosophy of cinema — a sustained argument, made in…
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The Human Condition According to Mark Twain
By Bergotte Mark Twain understood that civilisation is a confidence trick. Not a failed experiment or a work in progress or a fragile achievement requiring defence, but a sustained, organised, multigenerational deception in which human beings persuade themselves and each other that the cruelties they practise are either necessary, natural, or invisible. His comedy —…
