In his time, Bloom was a kingmaker among poets and fiction writers, who knew all too well that their places on the greasy pole of posterity would be somewhat determined by whether or not he saw fit to include them in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, his definitive list of lasting books that was a New York Times best-seller in 1994. John Updike, whose oeuvre was even more stupendous than Bloom’s, might have regretted calling Bloom’s writing “torturous” when he saw that his only canonical book, according to Bloom, was The Witches of Eastwick — and so much for his Rabbit tetralogy, hundreds and hundreds of other novels, short stories, poems, essays, and never mind his face on the cover of TIME magazine when Couples was published in 1968. Philip Roth, on the other hand, made a point of engaging Bloom in a friendly correspondence while the latter was working on his list for the Canon, and was rewarded with no fewer than six mentions. 

However, by the time Roth’s biographer (me) got in touch with Bloom via email — asking for an interview at Roth’s urging — the number had dwindled to two: “Philip and I have been out of touch for many years now,” Bloom replied to me in 2013. “I continue to regard American Pastoral and Sabbath’s Theater as canonical works of the American imagination. But I believe I have nothing personal to communicate besides my high critical regard for his work, and that is on record.” This was signed “With Regret.” I thought I sniffed a hint of pettishness in this, and was unsurprised to learn, while reading The Man Who Read Everything, that he had indeed taken Roth’s later indifference to heart and considered him “very self-centered.” 

Bloom himself was no slouch in the self-centered department, having beaten an uncommonly arduous path from his humble beginnings as a young Talmudist in The Bronx. “There aren’t any reviews of my Yeats, and I guess I’d better not expect any,” he wrote in 1970 to the poet A. R. Ammons, one of the eight recipients of Bloom’s letters who make up the eight sections of the book. “A number of people have told me it is just too difficult to read, which is discouraging. I’m fated to remain an unknown critic.” Anyone who’s plugged away in this line of work knows the same feeling of Sisyphean futility and, after all, Yeats was Bloom’s fifth cumbrous study of English Romanticism, the field he’d intended to till in those days. Eventually, though, all of Western literature became his bailiwick — a massiveness that he alone, perhaps, could undertake: a “monster” of reading, Bloom could swallow books like so many gumdrops and tell you whatever you needed to know about them. And given that he really couldn’t help himself — he lived to read and write or talk about whatever he read — his freakish gifts were lavishly, at last, rewarded in the marketplace: in 2002, he became the last academic in history to get a seven-figure advance for a book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.

Bloom’s latter-day notoriety — as a critic, I mean, not as a would-be lothario — was somewhat due to the main thesis of The Western Canon: namely, that some books are better than others, and a lot of the better kind are written by dead white males. (For what it’s worth, Bloom also believed that Elizabeth Bishop, say, was the best poet of her generation, and Anne Carson the best of hers.) “Shakespeare is God,” he declared, to the dismay of those who thought that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Kafka, et al., were to be mined for evidence of historical oppression against women, minorities, and other marginalized people, and that aesthetic merit was mostly a canard promoted by “hegemonic” oppressors. 

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Happily, at the height of his fame, Bloom could afford to address an audience of literate amateurs who simply wanted to know what they should read during their little spans on earth, versus English majors (a dwindling cohort) fixated on race, class, and gender. “What are now called ‘Departments of English,’” Bloom wrote in The Western Canon, “will be renamed departments of ‘Cultural Studies,’ where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies, and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens.” Even Bloom, of course, couldn’t have foreseen the further ravages of smart phones, AI, etc., on what used to be called The Examined Life (whereas Roth stopped writing novels, in part, because he thought reading literary fiction was about to become as “cultic” as reading Latin poetry). But in the meantime, Bloom made a point of distancing himself from the Yale English Department; his later title as Sterling Professor of the Humanities made him, as The New York Times put it, “a department unto himself.” 

In her introduction to The Man Who Read Everything, editor Heather Cass White points out that Bloom’s transcendent self-assurance was derived in part from his hero, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote in “Self-Reliance,” “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius.” Evidence of Bloom’s oracular certitude is found on every page of this book, whether he’s telling Ammons that John Ashbery’s first and fourth books of poetry are wonderful but his second and third not so much, or telling Ashbery himself that his poem “Collective Dawns” is “marvelous,” but “Wooden Buildings” is only, well, “good enough” — and so on. “Good enough” was about as damning as the gentle sage allowed himself to be. “The Wilson is good enough,” he remarked to Ursula K. Le Guin, who’d rashly mentioned that she was curling up in bed with Emily Wilson’s new Odyssey translation. “The [Robert] Fitzgerald catches the original somewhat better.” Of course, it went without saying that Bloom had read the original in Homeric Greek, along with all the reputable English versions thereof. 

When it came to his signature conviction, the so-called anxiety of influence — which, said The New York Times, “has something to upset everyone” — Bloom was prepared to go to the mat with even his most formidable detractors. Over time he would elaborate the idea in various ways, at forest-slaughtering length, but the gist was that a poet’s work is naturally influenced by the work of eminent precursors, and the anxious struggle to form one’s own vision — and thus ensure lasting fame — is Oedipal in nature and hence, implicitly, between men. “If you mean influence in the literal sense of the transmission of thought and imagery and the like from earlier poet to later one,” the great Northrop Frye replied in 1969, when Bloom first tried running the idea by his revered mentor, “I should think that this was simply something that happens, and might be a source either of anxiety or of release from it, depending on circumstance and temperament.” One senses a faint bemusement on Frye’s part, even a wish to change the subject, and when Bloom insisted to Frye that “influence anxiety was not an affect in a person, but the relation of one literary work to another,” Bloom’s “heroic precursor stopped listening,” as Bloom himself pointed out many years later (an anxious relation between works? I mean to say, what? Frye might have wondered).

And therein lay perhaps the main problem with Bloom as a writer and thinker: he was damnably hard to understand. “This is one of the most difficult books I have ever read,” a flummoxed C. S. Lewis wrote in 1962, when taxed to review the young Bloom’s The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Bloom himself was quite aware of the problem — “sometimes I wonder why I write such odd things” — but he, at least, knew what he meant to say, and by God he was going to say it, especially to those he considered peers. Explaining to his friend and Yale colleague John Hollander why he’d adopted “crossings” as a term for poetic “ratios, tropes, defenses” and whatnot, Bloom wrote: “I base it on Augustine’s calling post-lapsarian language the ‘region of unlikeness’ and on the Aristotelian-Ciceronian topica, ‘places’ not ‘commonplaces’ (cf. Curtius, etc.) they became or even memory-places (cf. Simonides) …” It goes on like that, and may be perfectly true for all I know, but not the sort of thing to spring on a lad with a morning head, as Bertie Wooster would have it. 

But of course, Bloom’s correspondents were largely intellectuals almost as fond of esoterica as he; indeed, Bloom might have met his match in the poet James Merrill, whose masterpiece, The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), was largely informed by 20 years of sessions at a Ouija board with his partner David Jackson, and whose narrators from the spirit world included W. H. Auden, no less. Reading Bloom’s Talmudic reflections on certain aspects of Merrill’s work — “I don’t think that an actual zelem (your astral body or other self) or an actual maggid (other self as ‘instructor’) makes for strong poetry” — I couldn’t help thinking Merrill had found a kindred soul, if a rather too bumptious one. When Bloom went so far as to suggest that Merrill plump for lowercase versus uppercase letters in some instances, Merrill replied a little sternly that “the Authors were in Eternity, and his role was faithfully to take dictation.” Fair enough. 

For the lay reader, it can get a little wearying, but the title reminds us that these are the Literary letters of Harold Bloom, and not what he might have written or said to certain of his comelier grad students. Still, I found myself wishing he’d go to Disney World or something, and almost wept with gratitude when he paused in his Laputan musings to complain about his diet (he struggled with his weight): “I’m trying to make it each 24 hours on a steak, three hard-boiled eggs, vitamin pills, water, and cigars.” Such a rare glimpse of the personal was for the benefit of arguably his dearest friend, Ammons, whom Bloom wrote avidly throughout his life. White, the editor, wisely chooses a single 18-month slice of their vast correspondence, shortly after their first meeting — when “their emotional and intellectual engagement was at its peak” — the better to conform to her overall method of arranging Bloom’s letters into roughly chronological chapters that each contain most or all of his correspondence with a given poet or colleague, usually because Bloom was in the process of writing a paper about that person’s work and wanted to air his thoughts and gather information. 

For the most part, Bloom used his superpowers for good rather than ill, exhorting his favorite poets to live up to their indubitable genius: “I don’t want you giving anyone, including yourself, the impression that you consider yourself anything less than a very great poet,” he wrote Alvin Feinman, whose first and only book of poetry Bloom had helped publish via Oxford University Press. While Bloom was certainly capable of taking even the greatest poets down a peg or two (“good enough”), one gets the impression that his hyperbolic praise was both heartfelt and an impulse to give pleasure to people whose efforts, let’s face it, are pretty thankless on the whole. “With Miss Bishop gone, you have for me no living peer,” he wrote Ashbery, “—Red [Robert Penn] Warren, Archie Ammons, Jimmy Merrill have written permanent poems, but I would say now that poetically we are in the age of Ashbery, as once it was of Hart Crane or of Stevens.” Bloom’s advocacy was perhaps a poet’s best shot at a kind of slender immortality, so one can imagine Ashbery’s almost broken gratitude (“I feel singularly honored …”), very much in keeping with the mutually fawning tone of these letters. 

Love of the work, for Bloom, usually meant love of the author, and no wonder he took it so hard when Roth (for one) stopped returning his letters. “I was deeply in love with Archie Ammons,” he told his friend’s biographer, Roger Gilbert, and we have no cause to doubt it. Bloom tended to sign letters to Ammons and others — once the initial formality had worn off — with “Love” and even “Love and Homage,” and he was generally effusive in his use of endearments. He and Hollander liked to address each other with some variant of “Foo Foo” (“Dearest Foofy”), while favorite students, male and female, were often called “child” and startled with a kiss on top of their heads. The younger poet Henri Cole, whom Bloom found especially promising, met Bloom in person exactly twice in his life; that first time, he’d arrived for Bloom’s 80th birthday and stuck out his hand, whereupon Bloom pulled him close and pressed Cole’s head to his chest. “Noble bard,” Bloom began a long answering-machine message that Cole transcribed for this book, “it is Harold Bloom, calling from New Haven at about twenty of one on … what’s today, child?” A page or so of warm, well-considered praise follows — “I love both you and your poetry …” — until the machine cuts Bloom off mid-paean. 

Of course, the line between darling man and lech is a dicey business, especially in academia, and Bloom seemed to become more and more heedless as his fame grew, even finding a little humor in his own raffishness — referring to himself as Bloomstaff, say, in tribute to one of his favorite Shakespearian rogues. In 1990, GQ published an article, “Bloom in Love,” that described in mortifying detail (a tandem bubble bath, etc.) the dalliances he’d allegedly pursued with students throughout his long, long marriage to the stoical Jeanne Gould. At the time, Bloom was still fairly bullet-proof and could afford to shrug off the exposé as “a disgusting piece of character assassination.” He was just as categorical in 2004, when the feminist author Naomi Wolf claimed that he’d groped her thigh 20 years earlier. The Yale Daily News described the “veritable media frenzy” that ensued, but Bloom got off easy; 10 or 15 years later he might have been burned in effigy, if not chased through the streets of New Haven by a mob bristling with torches and pitchforks. 

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And so a chastened Bloom became all the more devoted to the Life of the Mind. “Like our ancestors,” he’d written Hollander in 1975, “we must study, we must ponder, and then we do the best we can” (he was a great fan of italics) “when we write and teach.… We live in the mind — as [Wallace] Stevens said.” Such a life has its homely pleasures, but it’s a lonely business at the best of times and became even more so, for Bloom, as the people he considered “close friends” such as Ashbery, Ammons, and Merrill — whom, we know from this book, he hardly ever saw in person — died off one by one. 

He would never meet his final and most engaging correspondent in The Man Who Read Everything, Le Guin, who was six months older and just as lonely. “May we use first names?” she shyly inquired when they first got in touch. “I’d like that.” After a two-month flurry of delighted emails, Le Guin mentioned that she’d “run out of steam” after an hour and a half of teaching the day before; she died of a heart attack five days later, and Bloom’s own death came the following year. Let the happy few who read these letters remember him as the embodiment of an ardent brand of bookishness that has passed, and less so for his all-too-human failings, which are common enough (alas) in any age.

C.S. Lewis, the master of escapist fiction, was prophetic in warning against such noxious paternalism from authors. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” he wrote. “It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.” Let’s hope Barbie director Greta Gerwig, who has been tapped up to direct the next year’s Chronicles of Narnia series, is taking note.

But in the meantime, we have the books, the first of which, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published 75 years ago today. When I read this to my son, it transfixed him in a way that all those morally improving Disney and Pixar movies could not — and in a way that I recognized too from my own childhood. The Narnia books are weird and archaic and they are far from comforting. But they leave unanswerable questions and imaginative territory to roam for a lifetime.

What would compel a child to climb into a claustrophobic wardrobe, full of moth-eaten coats and spiders, as apt a symbol as any for the human psyche? C.S. Lewis knew all too well. There are real and terrible things to escape from. And the land of magic, mystery and hope that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy arrived in would soon reveal that it too was blighted. By facing up to this, conquering its climate of terror, the child would become an adult. If they didn’t pass into the dark and through it, they would remain infantilized.

This partly explains the backlash against Lewis. Two years ago, it was reported that the Government’s counter-terrorism unit, Prevent, had classified his works along with some by his friend J.R.R. Tolkien as potentially leading to “radicalisation”: the kind of wormtongue deception worthy of the villains of Narnia or Middle Earth. It demonstrates that, at its best, fantasy can be the mirror that shows us who we are and what we’ve become. But then, there is a long history of people taking leave of their senses when it comes to Narnia. The books have been banned in the US for being both too Christian and not Christian enough. One critic ranked the books (with delicious venom) as worse than 120 Days of Sodom or Mein Kampf. Being shot by all sides might indicate a writer is on the right track.

For his part, Lewis lambasted “those who do not wish children to be frightened […] Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” He knew of the existence of shadows from early in life. There is a spine-chilling passage in his memoir, Surprised by Joy, in which he recalls waking up one night with toothache when he was ten. He called out his mother’s name and she did not come. She was dying in another room. His father was never the same and sent Lewis off to a boarding school run by a deranged sadist. “With my mother’s death, all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.”

As a result, Lewis developed a fear and mistrust of the adult world in those years — and it was well-placed. Scarcely more than a boy, Lewis was sent to the trenches. He was seriously injured in the Battle of Arras (he would have shrapnel, from a shell that obliterated a colleague, embedded permanently in his body) and, like Tolkien, he watched many of his friends die. “One cannot help wondering why,” he wrote to his father.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe begins with war. The Pevensie children have been dispatched to the countryside, away from the Blitz and the apocalyptic madness of the grown-ups. They stay with a kindly professor in a house “full of unexpected places”. Yet the shadows have not gone. Lucy discovers a portal at the back of a wardrobe leading to another world. (Lewis dreamt this first glimpse of Narnia as a boy: a faun under a gas streetlamp in snowbound woods.) The children discover the land to be an ice-stricken police state, and they are called, reluctantly as in all heroic quests, to confront evil.

As I revisit it with my son, after more than 30 years since last reading it, the tale has an intriguingly archaic feel. A professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature, Lewis incorporated mythic and folkloric characters from various cultures — Greek, Celtic, Germanic — into his stories. At times, it’s akin to a bestiary: a hangover from a childhood spent dreaming of imaginary lands while stuck indoors. “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.” What brings the tale to life are the extremely vivid sketches of the children, their strengths, flaws and group dynamics, as well as clever inversions: the faun, for example, is more startled by the little girl than vice versa. It is also more dystopian than I remembered: the woodland spies, the ransacked homes and forced disappearances, the guilt and responsibility the children feel.

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The most disturbing scene, though, is when the villain, the White Witch, who has cast an endless winter on the land without hope of Christmas, comes upon a festive group of animals. They claim they’ve been visited by Father Christmas. She demands they recant, but a young squirrel insists it’s true. The White Witch waves her hand — “Oh don’t don’t don’t!” cries Edmund — and turns the merry party into statues. “It seemed so pitiful to think of those little stone figures sitting there all the silent days and all the dark nights, year after year, till the moss grew on them and at last even their faces crumbled away.”

The evil White Witch steals the show, of course. She promises the insecure, egocentric child regal status, but her abusive, narcissistic nature is soon evident. She convinces her victims it is they who bring wrath on themselves. She contaminates the minds of the young and naïve while masquerading as their benefactor. Lewis is clever in introducing her not as some tyrannical psychopath but a seducer that any of us could fall for. She appeals to the best in us — curiosity and desire for instance — and feeds off, warps and stunts these qualities. It is foolhardy to believe we would be immune to her charms.

C.S Lewis’s charms were quite another matter. On a pilgrimage to his haunts in Oxford, I met an older lady who had known him when she was a child. She twinkled at the mention of Narnia and was still clearly enchanted by his books. But when I asked her what Lewis was like. “Well… I thought he was a grumpy old sod.”

I laughed. I would have been disappointed with any other description. We know that Lewis loved a drink, could start an argument in an empty room and enjoyed doing so. He smoked like a train and cursed like a sailor. For a supposed conservative, he had anarchistic tendencies, as did Tolkien. In his wife’s eyes, Lewis was “a tough Ulsterman […] with the sort of views you expect of an Orangeman”. As a Republican kid growing up in Derry, I ought to have felt him to be an enemy. But few people ever gave me a more valuable gift than the maps at the start of the Narnia books. Similarly, I owed a debt to him: not just for the respite of escapism, but because it gave me a way of understanding the fortresses and threats around us.

In another of Lewis’s masterpieces, The Screwtape Letters, a demon counsels his nephew that only amateurs try to seduce people into being directly evil. The sophisticated malefactor makes them first believe they are unquestionably good or, in other words, superior. This is how the frost is born. The White Witch creates a sparkling winter wonderland that is really a bitterly frozen steppe where nothing but fear can flourish. For an eight-year-old, Narnia is a make-believe place. By middle age it’s recognizably real.

Most professional commentators are far more interested in the question of whether a US government department has been lying to congress than in whether aliens actually exist. In a recent column, the New York Times’s Ross Douthat questioned the credibility of a long-standing conspiracy, noting that the scope and depth of the secrets involved would be too vast to withhold. For most online commentators, meanwhile, this congressional hearing is simply entertainment. Even if either camp thinks it’s proper that the US government is looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life, neither seems inclined to ask: what if they find it? Those who ask “are there aliens?” rarely seem to ask “so what if there are aliens?”.

It’s easy to see why we might not take seriously the idea that alien spacecraft have crashed on Earth, not least because the Pentagon released its much-hyped and long-awaited report on UFOs last year, maintaining that there is no definitive evidence that aliens have set foot here. But if a government department really has been withholding information, we might question the validity of that report. Still, even the late-night radio hosts who speculate about various alien species — “grays”, “reptilians”  — are more interested in the question of whether aliens exist than how we should react if they do. Should we make plans? Should we think about it in the same way as, say, the possible deceleration of the pivotal North Atlantic current system that shapes our global climate? Should we be scared?

Unlike climate change, the possibility of an alien apocalypse doesn’t seem to inspire much fear. Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds caused a minor stir — nothing like the nationwide panic that some would later claim — and Ray Santilli’s 1995 film allegedly depicting an autopsy of an alien from the infamous 1947 Roswell crash invoked curiosity but was also debunked. Indeed, the ways in which our culture has imagined aliens are more likely to reveal human anxieties than genuine curiosity about what might exist beyond Earth. Popular dramas such as The X-Files, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival often revolve around conspiracies or hoaxes of human origin — until the revelation of extraterrestrial life serves as a deus ex machina, subsequently obscured or left unexplained.

These narratives are often less about the aliens themselves and more about illuminating societal fears, challenging authority and questioning institutional integrity. Even Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterful 1972 adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris — perhaps the most “realistic” depiction of humans reacting to an unusual planetary life form — doesn’t examine the long-term implications of our global society merging with that of another species. Introspection is easier than imagining something totally unprecedented.

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The trouble is, the more knowledgeable we’ve become as a species, the less humble we’ve become about our ignorance. We too often assume that things we haven’t yet found don’t exist, and don’t take seriously the alternative. Here, we might benefit from emulating the wisdom of Epicurean philosophers. Democritus, and Epicurus himself, considered the existence and even the potential habitation of other worlds a likely outcome of the random collision of the atoms that they believed had formed the universe. Metrodorus of Lampsacus, a disciple of Epicurus, compared the idea of our world being the only one to “a single ear of wheat growing on a vast plain“, emphasising the unlikelihood of such a scenario. And the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius proclaimed: “Nothing in the universe is unique and alone and therefore in other regions there must be other earths inhabited by different tribes of men and breeds of beasts.” Even though these ancient philosophers brought forth the concept of other worlds, they too did not directly grapple with the “so what?” aspect of the idea. Their wisdom primarily lay in recognising the limitlessness of the universe, acknowledging rather than truly grappling with the existence of the unknown.  

However, then as now, such claims failed to shake the foundations of the dominant philosophy. Unlike the Epicureans, Aristotle and his followers were fundamentally empirical in their approach, focusing on what could be observed, studied and understood through our senses. One of Aristotle’s central doctrines was the principle of noncontradiction; the existence of multiple worlds, especially inhabited ones, would have introduced paradoxes and ambiguities that his philosophy was not prepared to accept. Today, our natural inclinations lead us towards the Aristotelian perspective. We gravitate to the observable, the testable and the verifiable. Perhaps this is a constant throughout history, though — an immutable human instinct: this near-inability to engage with the truly abstract and unobservable, the preference to focus on the immediate and tangible.

It was not Christianity that robbed us of our humility in the face of other worlds. Whereas now, belief in aliens’ existence is seen as fringe, it used to be expostulated by the most elite thinkers, who were usually theological authorities. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century and the French priest Jean Buridan in the 14th century both addressed the potential existence of other worlds, suggesting that denying their existence would limit the omnipotence of God. Giordano Bruno, an Italian Dominican Friar in the 16th century, further expanded on this idea in a somewhat heretical vein, stating, “I can imagine an infinite number of worlds like the earth… half of infinity is infinity, so an infinite number of worlds will fall from grace and there will be an infinite number of crucifixions.”

In recent years, high-ranking members of the Catholic Church, including the directors of the Vatican Observatory, have grappled with the theological implications of extraterrestrial life, questioning how the concepts of sin and redemption would apply to them. In this, they are perhaps more prepared for the arrival of UFOs than most governments. Pope Francis has even stated that space aliens could seek baptism — a benevolent thought, to be sure, but an anthropocentric one. Human theology won’t neatly adapt to beings that are out of this world.

So, the concept of extraterrestrial life brings us face-to-face with an immense intellectual challenge. St. Anselm of Canterbury’s famous proof of God’s existence — the concept of a being “of which nothing greater can be thought” — has its bounds tied to human thought. What if these extraterrestrials exist in a realm that is beyond our cognitive reach, a realm where our laws of physics and logic hold no sway? Extraterrestrial life, should it exist, may be so fundamentally different from our life on Earth that we might not even recognise it as “life” at all. We may not be sure if it appears among us.

There is also a practical question to consider: would we even be able to interact meaningfully with extraterrestrial life? Would it even be possible to communicate with them? There might be no shared basis for understanding — a possibility that Stanislaw Lem and Andrei Tarkovsky considered in their presentation of the sentient planet in Solaris. The living place interacts with human explorers by materialising their memories and deepest psychology, creating “visitors”. These ineffable interactions are barely understood by humans, representing a form of communication so alien to our ways of knowing that it remains ultimately inexplicable.

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The appearance of UFOs or the confirmed existence of extraterrestrial life would likely push us into uncharted cognitive territory. Or, these beings could exist on such a scale and in such a manner that it might be completely incomprehensible to us — we couldn’t alter our worldviews because we wouldn’t even begin to know where to start.

Maybe that’s why, when we think about aliens, we think about hoaxes, created by humans, or stories of alien invasions, more often than not about human failure. Maybe that’s why it’s funny, listening to extraterrestrial life being forced into the technical, administrative language of the US government. Maybe the sheer abstraction and complexity of extraterrestrial life exceeds our cognitive abilities.

For now, we humour David Grusch, as he expostulates about a massive UFO cover-up — because we don’t know how to answer the question of: If he’s right, what then?

At the same time, I found myself watching the life of an entirely different head of state: a young, somewhat shy woman suddenly elevated to immense responsibilities and duties in her twenties, hemmed in by protocol, rigidified by discipline. The new president could barely get through the day without some provocation, insult, threat or lie. Elizabeth Windsor was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human — for the rest of her life.

The immense difficulty of this is proven by the failure of almost every other member of her family — including her husband — to pull it off. We know her son, King Charles III’s, views on a host of different subjects, many admirable, some cringe-inducing. We know so much of the psychological struggles of Diana; the reactionary outbursts of Philip; the trauma of Harry; the depravity of Andrew; the agonies of Margaret. We still know nothing like that about the Queen. Because whatever else her life was about, it was not about her.

Part of the hard-to-explain grief I feel is related to how staggeringly rare that level of self-restraint is today. Narcissism is everywhere. Every feeling we have is bound to be expressed. Self-revelation, transparency, authenticity — these are our values. The idea that we are firstly humans with duties to others that will require and demand the suppression of our own needs and feelings seems archaic. Elizabeth kept it alive simply by example.

With her death, it’s hard not to fear that so much she exemplified — restraint, duty, grace, reticence, persistence — are disappearing from the world. As long as she was there, they were at the centre of an idea of Britishness that helped define the culture at its best. Perhaps the most famous woman in the world, she remained a sphinx, hard to decipher, impossible to label. She was not particularly beautiful or dashing or inspiring. She said nothing surprising. She was simply the Queen. She showed up. She got on with it. She was there. She was always there.

Whatever else happened to the other royals, she stayed the same. And whatever else happened in Britain — from the end of Empire to Brexit — she stayed the same. This is an achievement of nearly inhuman proportions, requiring discipline beyond most mortals. Think of a year, 1992: one son, Andrew, divorced; a daughter-in-law, Sarah Ferguson, was seen cavorting nude in the tabloids; her daughter, Anne, separated; another son’s famously failed marriage, Charles’, dominated the headlines, and her house burned down. Here is how Her Majesty “vented”:

“1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘Annus Horribilis’.”

Dry, understated, with the only vivid phrase ascribed to a correspondent. Flawless.

She was an icon, but not an idol. An idol requires the vivid expression of virtues, personality, style. Diana was an idol — fusing a compelling and vulnerable temperament with Hollywood glamour. And Diana, of course, was in her time loved far more intensely than her mother-in-law; connected emotionally with ordinary people like a rockstar; only eventually to face the longterm consequences of that exposure and crumble under the murderous spotlight of it all.

Elizabeth never rode those tides of acclaim or celebrity. She never pressed the easy buttons of conventional popularity. She didn’t even become known for her caustic wit like the Queen Mother, or her compulsively social sorties like Margaret. The gays of Britain could turn both of these queens into camp divas. But not her. In private, as in public, she had the kind of integrity no one can mock successfully.

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Our Queen's sacrifice

By Helen Thompson

You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy — but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery — two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.

The Crown satisfies those needs, which keeps other more malign alternatives at bay. None has expressed this better than CS Lewis:

“Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honour millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness. However shitty the economy, or awful the prime minister, or ugly the discourse, the monarch is able to represent the nation all the time. In a living, breathing, mortal person.

The importance of this in a deeply polarised and ideological world, where fellow citizens have come to despise their opponents as enemies, is hard to measure. But it matters that divisive figures such as Boris Johnson or Margaret Thatcher were never required or expected to represent the entire nation. It matters that in times of profound acrimony, something unites. It matters that in a pandemic when the country was shut down, the Queen, too, followed the rules, even at her husband’s funeral, and was able to refer to a phrase — “we’ll meet again” — that instantly conjured the days of the Blitz, when she and the Royal Family stayed in London, even as Hitler’s bombs fell from the sky.

Suggested reading

Who can rule Britain now?

By Mary Harrington

Every Brit has a memory like this. She was part of every family’s consciousness, woven into the stories of our lives, representing a continuity and stability over decades of massive change and dislocation. No American will ever experience that kind of comfort, that very human form of patriotism across the decades in one’s own life and then the centuries before. When I grew up studying the Normans and the Plantagenets and the Tudors, they were not just artifacts of the distant past, but deeply linked to the present by the monarchy’s persistence and the nation’s thousand-year survival as a sovereign state — something no other European country can claim.

The Queen was crowned in the cathedral where kings and queens have been crowned for centuries, in the same ceremony, with the same liturgy. To have that kind of symbolic, sacred, mystical thread through time and space is something that is simply a gift from the past that the British people, in their collective wisdom, have refused to return.

A version of this piece first appeared on Andrew Sullivan’s Substack.

“I don’t like the question” Peterson always replies when put on the spot, acknowledging that he is “obsessed with religious matters”. Several millions of people can attest to that, having watched his fascinating “The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories” YouTube series, which focuses on the book of Genesis. But when it comes to God’s existence, Peterson doesn’t want to declare his hand. Why? “I don’t know, exactly” he replies. “I act as if God exists and I am terrified that He might.” Some think Peterson is being deliberately shifty.

As a result of the professor’s engagement with religion, a full-length study on the question of him and God has been published: Jordan Peterson, God and Christianity: The Search for a Meaningful Life. In it, Christopher Kaczor and Matthew R. Petrusek, a couple of American academics, generously acknowledge all that he has done to draw out the psychological insights of Biblical narratives, while seeking to encourage him over the line, into what they think of as full-blown belief. Both admire Peterson, but just can’t quite get over the fact that he is unwilling — publicly, at least — to make what they take to be the ultimate declaration of faith. His faith, they say, is the sort of thing you might have “in the parking lot, outside the church” – as if he is nearly there, but not quite. You can sense their frustration throughout: is “acting as if God exists” enough to be counted as a believing Christian? Close, they think. But not close enough.

“In the end, the difference between ‘acting as if God exists’, which Peterson says he does, and ‘believing in God and acting accordingly’, which Peterson says he is not ready to do, may seem inconsequential. Yet the difference between the two is as vast and relevant as the difference between reading a great love story and falling in love yourself.”

What is at stake here, though, is something more than wanting to sign Peterson up as a proper member of team Christianity. What is at stake is deciphering what we mean by really believing. And here, even as a priest, I am much more in the Peterson camp. Unlike the authors of this book, I am really not that bothered by Peterson’s apparently indeterminate status.

I remember a terrible moment on the first night at theological college in Oxford. I had unpacked my trunk ready for three years of training to be a priest. I lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, and a terrible thought struck me: did I really believe in all this stuff? Was I now writing the cheques of religious commitment that I didn’t have the intellectual recourses to cash? In other words: was I a fraud?

After a quarter of a century as a priest, I still don’t have a satisfactory answer to this question. And after a great deal of soul-searching on the matter, I have come to a similar conclusion to Peterson: there’s something wrong with the question.

My conversion to Christianity was both instantaneous, and drawn out. As an atheist philosophy student, I discovered a surprising love of the Biblical literature, and of those existentialist philosophers who took it seriously. Writers such as Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard brought it to life for me — much as they did for Peterson. Friends would describe Christianity as my funny sort of hobby; I thought of it as a kind of secular moral philosophy. Then, all of a sudden, I came to the realisation that I wasn’t on the outside of this system of thought looking in. I was on the inside looking out. Something huge had changed, but I was unable to say precisely what it was.

I think Wittgenstein best describes the nature of my conversion. In his Philosophical Investigations he has a little illustration (below) of what is known as a duck-rabbit.

He notes how it is possible to see these lines as the drawing of a rabbit. But then, suddenly, you see them as the drawing of a duck. What were ears become the duck’s bill. The image is not looking right but looking left. Everything about the image looks different. And yet nothing has changed. The lines haven’t moved.

My conversion was remarkably similar: nothing changed about the world; I still thought it contained the same stuff. But the way I looked at it had been turned on its head. This was no longer a tree, but an expression of God’s creation. The people in my life were no longer fleshy units of individual consciousness, but made in the image and likeness of God. Nothing changed, yet everything changed. I suspect that being “obsessed with religious matters” makes this sort of change. And you can build your life around it, as I have.

But hang on, an observer might say. Surely the lines have changed. After all, you now believe in God, so there must be an additional element to the picture. But it doesn’t work like that. Thomas Aquinas observed that if you decided to embark upon a crazy impossible project of listing all the things that existed in the world — shoes, cars, clouds, stars, atoms, etc — then God wouldn’t be on the list because God is not a created object, He is the creator itself. Which is remarkably close to saying that God does not exist. However, existence is not the right sort of thing to say about God. To talk of His existence is to relegate God to just one more thing about the universe – big and powerful, admittedly, but fundamentally, ontologically, just one more thing among others. And what the great doctors of the church repeatedly say about God is that He just isn’t like that.

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The world needs Jordan Peterson more than ever

By Douglas Murray

The authors of this new book contrast Peterson’s “acting as if God exists” faith with that of CS Lewis, for them a representative of the “really believing” kind of Christian. For them, Peterson’s “faith” is kind of second best.

What they don’t mention, however, is the fascinating exchange when the marsh-wiggle Puddleglum is captured by a witch in CS Lewis’s The Silver Chair and taken to her underground lair. Seeking to disabuse Puddleglum of the idea that he might survive imprisonment, she attempts to convince him that Narnia and Aslan do not exist. It is Lewis’s take on Plato’s parable of the cave.

Puddleglum doesn’t have half the intellectual resources of the nihilistic witch, but he makes a spirited defence that has her infuriated. Yes, he might be a dreamer. Yet his “made up” world feels a lot more important that her “real world”.

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all of those things. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a great deal more important than the real ones…I am going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I am going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

This might sound like Puddleglum doesn’t properly believe; something along the lines of: I will believe in God even if there isn’t any God. But in fact, as Rowan Williams put it, Puddleglum “isn’t saying it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. He’s saying I have no means of knowing whether this is or isn’t true…But I know there’s something here that I cannot let go of without letting go of myself.”

To be fair, its not as if the authors of the Peterson book think there is no value in this position — indeed, they include a nifty quote from Fr Richard John Neuhaus that makes another kind of defence of us Puddleglums: “If you would believe,” he said, “act as though you believe, leaving it to God to know whether you believe, for such leaving it to God is faith.” But whereas they think this is not quite up to scratch, I take it that this position is as authentic an expression of faith as one could hope to find.

Further reading

What Peterson shares with Pelagius

By Giles Fraser

That’s why I think Peterson’s faith is not in any way lacking some extra element that turns it into the real thing. Aquinas described the authentic religious inquiry as fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. In other words, it is not understanding that comes first. You don’t need to have a fully worked out philosophy of God before you can profess any sort of faith. The understanding bit is always a work in progress.

I am perfectly happy to say that I believe in God, not because I totally know what that means as a kind of intellectual assent (still less proof) to some proposition about the world, but rather because I say it as a kind of existential commitment. This is where I stand. This is how I see the world.

It seems to me perfectly obvious that Peterson is doing something very similar. When Jesus called the fishermen by the sea of Galilee he said “come follow me”. He didn’t offer proofs or even any sort of argument. He didn’t supply any sort of check-list of their metaphysical commitments. He just asked them to follow. In a more metaphysically sceptical world, they might well have explained their actions thus: “I act as if God exists and I am terrified that He might.”

This isn’t being shifty. This is precisely what faith looks like.

While reading Sohrab Ahmari’s The Unbroken Thread, I kept thinking of the quotation — which I only know from Postgate’s novel; I confess to not being familiar with Marx’s doubtless very exciting A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

Ahmari’s book is a collection of 12 chapter-length essays, each focused on a different aspect of traditional wisdom. Like me, he is an older millennial and an adult convert to Catholicism, although our journeys to the banks of the Tiber could hardly be more different. Mine was a comparatively gentle and unspectacular movement between Christian denominations, after an Anglican upbringing in quiet rural Kent. By contrast, Ahmari, now a New Yorker and a US citizen, grew up in post-revolutionary Iran, in a secular Muslim family, and became a Catholic in 2016 after moving to the US in the Nineties.

One thing we do have in common is that we are fathers to young sons, and worried about the kind of world in which our boys will grow up. Ahmari’s son Maximilian is named after the Polish priest-martyr Maximilian Kolbe, murdered in Auschwitz, and concern for his future animates the introduction to the book. Here Ahmari reveals his fear that Max will drift into the kind of disorderly, anodyne, atomised life in which so many modern Westerners find themselves, and goes on to frame The Unbroken Thread as a sort of guidebook. The great examples of the past can light our way through the gloomy swamp of liberal modernity.

Ahmari has made rather a name for himself in the USA as a determined critic of liberalism, by which he means a constellation of overlapping ideological commitments, united by the belief that whether in economic or social policy, the most important subject of political concern is the sovereign choice-making individual, determining what is best for himself by his own lights. As the American Supreme Court judge Anthony Kennedy phrased it, earning the ire of conservatives: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The Unbroken Thread is a critique of that idea.

Ahmari seeks to show that there are alternatives to the Kennedy view, and that these alternatives have enduring power and weight. The challenge for those who write about such matters is to find fresh ways to defend and illustrate the Great Tradition; he achieves this by blending references to conventional conservative heroes such as CS Lewis, Pope Benedict XVI and John Henry Newman with discussions of lesser-known or unexpected figures. I was fascinated to read about the husband-and-wife anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, who spent many years studying the religious rituals of African tribespeople and later joined the Catholic Church, having left behind their youthful Communism.

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In defence of moral panics

By Niall Gooch

In the chapter dealing with the virtue of filial piety, i.e. respect for parents and family and established communal customs, Ahmari turns not to the Romans, but to ancient China and Confucianism. He even has praise, albeit qualified, for the second-wave feminist Andrea Dworkin, who shared with social conservatives a hostility to pornography and prostitution, and a clear-eyed understanding of the need to control and regulate the male sex drive.

Ahmari wisely does not focus on specific hot-button issues, which can raise the argumentative temperature. He does not hide his views, but The Unbroken Thread is really about the high-level questions that are conceptually upstream of individual culture war battlefields. The existence and significance of God, the importance of keeping the Sabbath, duties to parents, the meaning of freedom and sex; Ahmari invites his readers to good-faith consideration of these questions that are too often crowded out in modern discourse.

Which brings me back to that quotation from Marx. Like many books of conservative cultural criticism, The Unbroken Thread is implicitly premised on the idea that if we can persuade people to adopt better ideas, we can improve things for the better. In the terms used by Marx, a change in consciousness can re-engineer social conditions and social relations. Ahmari is essentially appealing to individuals to rethink and re-imagine their lives. What conservatives also need, however — to put it as Marx did — is a change in social relations to change men’s consciousness.

It is undoubtedly true that, as the title of one famous conservative polemic noted, ideas have consequences. Nevertheless, you don’t have to be a Marxist to see that the technological and economic structures of a society can strongly determine the ways in which people understand the meaning and purposes of their lives. For instance, the aims, rhetoric and substance of modern British progressive activism are heavily influenced by events in the USA; this would not be the case to anything like the same degree without the internet, social media, smartphones and so on.

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How to resist the new totalitarianism

By Niall Gooch

Similarly, the explosion in gender fluidity over the last decade or so is indisputably the consequence of how the internet works. Not only does the web enable people who are physically remote from one another to form communities of interest or identity, thereby binding them more closely to those interests and identities, but social media gives us all of us a heightened sense of our lives as curated performance and presentation. WiFi and mobile internet, and the associated hardware, have compelled people to inhabit the world in a particular way, and there is unlikely to be a mass return to the old modes of analogue existence, even if we have excellent rational arguments against the new.

Or to take an example from The Unbroken Thread: it is easy to lament the decline in people caring for their infirm or aged parents, and ascribe this to the loss of Christian faith or heightened selfishness. Yet we must realise, too, that it is the material conditions of the modern world, its hypermobility and the nature of the economy, that make it possible and indeed necessary for people to live far away from their parents. Medical and scientific advances that have extended lifespans, and new geriatric treatments, mean that looking after frail elders at home is in many cases a much more demanding and longer-lasting task than it once was. The plausibility structures around the old-fashioned understanding of filial piety have been badly weakened, just as the Pill’s promise of “safe sex” helped to destroy the plausibility structures around the prohibition of pre-marital sex.

This is not meant as criticism of Ahmari. I am quite sure he would agree with me about the need to overhaul social relations alongside persuading individuals of the merits of traditionalism. Having spent his early life in Islamic Iran, he understands that civilizational questions matter, that the underlying material incentives and scaffolding of a society make a difference. He is closely associated with integralism, a political ideology in which the Catholic religion is privileged and protected by the powers of the government and in which Catholic teaching forms the basis for law-making. The recognition that political power can be used to reshape and adjust social norms and the basis of social relations is central to this worldview. And perhaps he would say that he is hoping that his book will persuade people with their hands on powerful political levers.

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Why utopias always fail

By Mary Harrington

Conservatives have done sterling work in tracing the roots of bad ideas, and have often presented compelling and powerful arguments for good ones. Yet people’s identity in any given society at any given time is not simply a matter of individual rational thought and the effective use of the “marketplace of ideas”. Rather it is shaped by all sorts of technological and material factors. Consider how the televising of British parliamentary proceedings has changed the way MPs behave, in the same way as the very existence of TV has changed politics. “The medium is the message”, in Marshall McLuhan’s words — new ways of communicating change human society, regardless of the content.

We cannot undo technological or material changes; the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, as the Persian poet Omar Khayyam said. What we can do is match well-written, thoughtful and true arguments like Ahmari’s with serious thinking about how to make the material incentives match them. Many on the contemporary Right, for example, are coming round to the idea that if we reduce house prices by relaxing supply constraints, we will incentivise earlier and larger family formation. This may not work, but in the current climate it is more likely to be effective than moral exhortation. After all, Marx was not too far wrong when he said that “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.