Tag: In Times of Dragons
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Fernando Caruncho
The Gardener Who Thought in Light Fernando Caruncho, who died on 23 August 2026 at the age of sixty-eight, called himself a gardener rather than a designer. The distinction was not false modesty. It was a philosophical position — one he had held since he first understood that the garden was not a space to…
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What’s So Special About Joni Mitchell
By Bergotte Joni Mitchell did not simply write songs about her life. She invented a language for the interior life of a woman at the precise moment in history when no such language was thought to be necessary — and then she kept reinventing it, album by album, tuning by tuning, until she had produced…
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One Is Not Born: Who We Are According to Simone de Beauvoir
She wrote the book that changed what women thought they were allowed to want. She lived a life that her own philosophy would judge with considerable severity. She was the most important philosopher of freedom of the twentieth century, and she spent decades in the gravitational field of a man who made her smaller. The…
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Carl Larsson
The House That Light Built Carl Larsson painted the same home, the same wife, the same children, hundreds of times. The result was not repetition. It was an argument — about beauty, about Sweden, about what a life is allowed to look like. There is a house in Sundborn, in the Swedish province of Dalarna,…
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The City That Comes Back to Itself
The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte. Paris, and why September is the only month that matters There is a particular quality of light in Paris in late August that travel writing has never quite managed to capture, perhaps…
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The Reel Argument: Carl Theodor Dreyer
By Bergotte There is a filmmaker most people have never seen whose work contains some of the most powerful images in the history of cinema, and his name is Carl Theodor Dreyer. He made fewer than a dozen surviving features across forty years, worked in almost complete opposition to every commercial instinct the film industry…
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The Human Condition According to Pushkin
By Bergotte To understand Russian literature is, in the end, to understand Pushkin — which is to say that it cannot be fully done from the outside. Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin is the writer whom every Russian author who followed him claimed as a father, a standard, and an impossibility: the source from which a whole…
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Poul Henningsen
Makers & Rooms — Essay I The Light He Couldn’t Stop Arguing About Poul Henningsen designed the most beloved lamp in the world. He also wrote cabaret songs, picked fights with the bourgeoisie, and fled to Sweden ahead of the Gestapo. The lamp was almost the least interesting thing about him. By Bergotte There is…
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The Cars
Essay · Music & Culture The Glamour of Disconnection The Cars made music about emotional unavailability and called it pop, which was either a very sophisticated joke or the most honest thing anyone did in the late 1970s, depending on how you felt about the decade. The answer is that it was both, and the…
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The Self That Must Be Chosen: Who We Are According to Søren Kierkegaard
He wrote under false names, spoke in riddles, and refused to give answers. He died at forty-two having produced, in a little over a decade, the most searching account of what it means to be a human being that Western philosophy has ever attempted. Kierkegaard did not want to make things easy for you. He…
