[...] “Is God Dead?” If the question, put this way, is less in vogue now, Camus still describes so well the way the world feels when it rubs up against our nostalgia for the old meanings: silent. And empty; the “God-shaped hole,” we called it in Sunday school, assuming this must be what the hearts of nonbelievers always felt like. In your case, I guess it would be a war-shaped hole. There are other names: closing time, the end of the party, the desert of the real. Because whatever the story was about — the God you’d get to be with later in heaven, the cause worth fighting for, your country, your art, your masculinity, your heroism (I don’t know what you did those seven times at war) — it always runs out.

YOU WANT A PHILOSOPHICAL PRINCIPLE to give you some motivation to get out of the bay in which you’re an old ship, rusting. You want the clarity, the rigor, and the strength of philosophy to give you a reason to do what you have to do next. But ever since I read your letter I have been thinking about poetry — specifically a poem by Mark Doty called “Visitation.” In the poem, a man hears that a young humpback whale is stuck in a nearby harbor. The man is depressed, grieving something or someone. What he is grieving is unnamed in the poem. The world is “dark upon dark, any sense / of spirit an embattled flame / sparked against wind-driven rain / till pain snuffed it out.” He assumes the whale is experiencing the same pain; it is stuck in the bay, helpless, its ability to navigate its way out confused by sonar or who knows what human technologies and environmental atrocities. [...]

. . . even I
couldn’t help but look
at the way this immense figure
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness
which is no burden to itself.

And the last lines, which I have been wanting to write to you since I read your letter:

What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?

I understand, as much as a coddled civilian can understand anything — my rocks are pebbles, kicked up the slightest slope — that it must feel the most compelling thing in the world to continue to choose violence, to your drug dealer, your friends, your mind, your own body. But sometimes we have to do things without knowing. With the body, at least for me, you have to take a leap, have faith that if you can hold on and make it one or two weeks without a constant hangover, you will know things you don’t know now. There is a feeling in the body that is just the feeling of physical well-being and it connects you to all humans and other animals and maybe even trees. The war will always be there, but you have a choice of what to give your attention to. The familiar story, the car crash, or the thing more radical and more frightening and wiser than strength: to grieve, to renounce the story and that paragraph you can’t get past, to make peace with your contingency and interchangeability so you can see the other side of it, to the connections that make it a joy, sometimes, to be alive.

[...] In those moments we can interrupt our speech and call attention to the word being used. It’s the birdsong. Or the appearance of a priest in a church when we’re only there to see the stained-glass windows. That moment in which we perceive another dimension to the thing we’re doing, the object we’re examining, the instruments we’re using. The value of error, this is precisely the value of error. Yes, because the birdsong in the middle of muddling through Kant is certainly an error, as much as when a flesh-and-blood priest appears right beside you as you’re going on about the Baroque. It skews our thought, distracts. And such is the magic of errors: we return from them changed. Like an errant trajectory, suddenly on the wrong street. [...]

And even in the realm of the aesthetic, your patience, you might wish to remind me, is for me a limit. With your patience in mind, I want to assure you that I haven’t digressed as far as I may seem to have, because a coordinate strategy, among the old philosophers, was to turn the problem on its head and argue that in most cases, a rational person doesn’t want free will, anyway. One doesn’t really want a free choice between taking Maple Avenue or Hapgood Drive; one wants to take whichever route is faster. One doesn’t want a free choice between a hempen or a flaxen rope; one wants to be told which is stronger and lighter. Free will, in this understanding, is a last resort — not a boon but a crisis. If a person can afford to, say, hire a staff of researchers to map out all his paths ahead of time and write memos on every crux he faces, thereby allowing him to restrict his exercise of free will to as few decisions as possible, his life will be greatly improved.

Before and during the festival, about fifty films are screened during the day for the press. I saw forty of them. I missed one because of a therapy appointment. (Even though I am a film critic, I hope to be able to have normal relationships someday.) I missed another because I had a hangover and couldn’t face the hour-long trip to Lincoln Center from my apartment in Brooklyn. Two I paid to see, and went on Sunday afternoons after buying tickets using the festival’s complicated and anxiety-inducing website, with its countdown clock.