Two days ago, I braved icy winds and traveled by train and foot to the Music Box Theater in north Chicago, eager to watch Andrew Haigh’s new film, All of Us Strangers. It’s a bizarre, lyrical, and devastating story, impossible to categorize and easily one of my favorite films of the year. I expect I’ll be thinking about it for quite some time, but one line of dialogue in particular has stuck with me.
The film’s protagonist, Adam (played with astonishing vulnerability by Andrew Scott, the guy who acted Moriarty to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock) is a wounded, reclusive screenwriter struggling to process his upbringing in 1980s suburban London. At the beginning of the film, Adam meets a charming and lonesome stranger named Harry (played by Paul Mescal, who gave my favorite performance of 2022 in Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun) and visits his childhood home in a quest for inspiration. Then some really strange things start to happen. I won’t spoil the surprises, but I will say that Andrew Haigh’s film dives headfirst into mystery, blurring the line between reality and fantasy and grappling with some of life’s biggest questions: How can we cope with unimaginable loss? How can we confront the past without being consumed by it? How can we build a stable sense of identity in an ever-shifting world? Finally, how can we overcome our ever-present loneliness and find true, life-giving connection?
Thankfully, All of Us Strangers refuses to provide easy answers to these questions. But it does provide us with a sort of thesis statement – a line of dialogue tucked mid-way through the film. Lying beside Harry, pondering their budding romance and the fantastical circumstances he’s been swept into, Adam murmurs: “I want to go out. You and me, together, into the wild.”
If you’ve been following this blog for a while, then you know that 2023 was, for me, a year marked by change. I got married (*pumps fist*). My wife and I left our community and moved to a new city. Very soon, I’ll be starting a new job teaching English literature (*pumps fist again*). Most notably, I abandoned my religious tradition and came out publicly as an agnostic. This transition was both agonizing and incredibly disorienting, and it left me reeling with a host of unexpected questions. I’ve been able to process a lot of things (therapy has helped significantly), and I’m much more at peace with my situation than I was back in January of 2023. Yet, my struggle to rebuild from the wreckage of my former worldview persists. I may not be navigating otherworldly events like Andrew Scott’s character in All of Us Strangers, but Adam’s feelings of grief, isolation, and confusion resonated with me on a profound level. As I wrote in my post “The Child in the Library,” I created this blog to encourage wanderers with spiritual insight. I never expected to become a wanderer myself.
As I’ve reflected on the stories and songs that affected me most in 2023, I’ve noticed a through line running through many of them: attempts to make sense of mystery. Whether it was the existential crises at the heart of movies like Barbie, Past Lives, and Asteroid City; the unsettling and paradigm-shifting observations in books like Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking and Maria Popova’s Figuring; or the mingling of wonderment and bewilderment that colored albums like J Lind’s Alchemy and Gang of Youths’ Go Farther in Lightness, the tales that topped my year-end favorites list refused to shy away from life’s ambiguities. Themes of uncertainty and existential struggle were front-and-center for me this year. I don’t know about you, but judging from the issues that swirled through our newsfeeds in 2023 (gender debates, artificial intelligence, war in Europe and the Middle East, church corruption) and the movies that drew us to theaters (Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Anatomy of a Fall), these same themes are on many people’s minds. The stories we tell ourselves, it seems, reveal a lot about the questions we’re asking ourselves.
This year, as I analyze more books and movies, I’m ready to ask some of those big questions. Who are we? Why are we here? What is our place in the universe? How should we live? Spoiler alert: I don’t expect to figure everything (or even most things) out. This blog is simply a record of my own musing, meandering, and becoming. But I do believe wholeheartedly that there’s value in the search for truth – joy and beauty in connecting the dots that makes this life worth living. And, like Adam in All of Us Strangers, I want to invite you to come along for the ride – “into the wild.”
So, without further ado, here’s my super exciting plan for 2024 (drumroll, please)…
In selecting books, films, and music to review this year, I’m used three criteria: First, in keeping with my 2024 theme of uncharted territory, I’m prioritizing art created by women, people of color, and artists from countries outside the United States. Looking back on my lists of favorite stories, I’m aware that these demographics are underrepresented, and I want to do a better job of learning from people whose experiences and worldviews differ from my own. Storytelling generates empathy, and there’s no better way to explore the human condition than considering human stories in all their variety.
Second, I’m prioritizing stories that reflect on the meaning, beauty, and significance of everyday life. I’m not primarily interested in amusement (which, if you break it down to its linguistic building blocks, literally translates to “not thinking”). I’m looking for art that challenges me reexamine my surroundings instead of encouraging me to escape from them, that inspires me to live deeply and to love wholeheartedly. The films that I’ve chosen to watch, for example, aren’t new or particularly exciting. Yet, they’re renowned for their thematic and contemplative power. They’re the kind of tales that just might change the way you see, if you let them.
Third and finally, I’m prioritizing titles on my bookshelf. Like many readers, my pace of accumulating books usually far outstrips my pace of reading them (Used book stores are wonderful – and wonderfully addictive – places!). In the spirit of good ol’ Wendell Berry, who challenges readers to press into “the given life,” I’ve decided to explore the titles which have been sitting right under my nose – stories that were gifted to me, recommended to me, or had already caught my attention in one way or another. There’s a reason these pilgrims ended up at my door, and it’s high time I heard what they have to say.
I hope that you’ll join me as I embark on this new journey. If these posts inspire you to think in new ways, to take a closer look at this weird and wondrous planet, or just to discover some meaningful art, then my labor will have been well worth it! I think Marcel Proust was on to something when he wrote: “The only true voyage… would not be to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is.”
Words for Wayfarers 