Preface

Outside the church, as I listen to the voices sing a sacred hymn by Tchaikovsky, I hear something profoundly human—a tearing through the veil. These ghostly voices, composed individually, are then joined by the hand of the author and sent through fabric. They sing into a space—some place—and through the gaps they open, I glimpse that space for a moment.

I look up and see a gargoyle’s grimacing face—it’s caught in some sort of struggle to break free from the building from which it sprang. I suppose the artist who fashioned it struggled, too. He knew he could no more escape his constraints than a man could leap his own shadow.

I shut my eyes and imagine the artist also reaching outward into space, sculpting something that points further out than he can reach. He works on faith that there must be a space into which his work extends, yet that space is as distant as color is to the congenitally blind. Still, he reaches.

For the first twenty-five years of my life, I lived beneath the weight of shifting loyalties—imposed by shallow orders of piety, each wielding its own inhuman ideas about life’s purpose. Their rules and rituals promised clarity but delivered only constraint, pulling my gaze downward when I longed to look outward. So I ran. And as I ran, the horizon stretched endlessly before me—a line always just beyond reach, inviting but elusive. I was told to chart my way toward some final purpose, but all I could see were fragments of a journey dissolving into that infinite line.

What Heidegger and Deleuze sought to do—reducing reality to what is immediately before us, graspable in its readiness-to-hand—feels like a mirror of my old attempts to escape. I wanted to simplify life, to strip it down to what I could touch, define, and control. But the harder I tried to reduce the world to manageable pieces, the more the infinite loomed, pulling at the edges of my vision. The mundane particulars I tried to hold onto seemed only to remind me of what lay beyond them—something vast, something untouchable. The more I reached, the more I longed, and the more I saw how much remained unreached.