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Nothing makes “the meaning of life” less persuasive than much talk about it. The same is true of hope for the new year. “You gotta have hope. Mustn’t sit around and mope. Nothing’s half as bad as it may appear. Wait’ll next year and hope.” So sang Peggy Lee, back when I was growing up. The sentiment is familiar, almost compulsory—cheerful, reassuring, and exhausting. Hope becomes a duty, something you are supposed to have rather than something to live with.

Virginia Woolf thought about life differently. She believed it isn’t made up only of events or achievements, but of brief “moments of being” that don’t announce themselves—flashes of awareness that shimmer and vanish, yet leave a trace. A sentence that names a feeling not quite articulated before. An insight that unsettles what once seemed settled. A question that stays alive days or even weeks later. These moments don’t arrive labeled as hope, but they change how we see.

Public life increasingly runs in the opposite direction. It is shaped less by what people hope to build together than by who they are against: red versus blue, “real America” versus its enemies, every election a last stand, every defeat a betrayal. Nothing is allowed to settle. The fight must always go on, because without the fight, there is nothing left to hold.

We see this whenever leaders keep conflict alive by pointing outward—toward a villain abroad (the latest, Venezuela’s Maduro), a traitor within, or a threat just vague enough to absorb blame. The names change. The effect doesn’t.

René Girard identified the pattern. When enemies are required to define who we are, common purpose becomes common hatred. Imitated desires ensure rivalry, and relief is found by assigning blame. Sometimes the target is a group—“godless liberals,” Trump supporters. Sometimes it is an abstraction that cannot answer back: the economy. In each case, a scapegoat absorbs the disorder, creating unity not through truth but through exclusion. Politics knows this rhythm well.

Friedrich Nietzsche named a similar dynamic ressentiment. Blame supplies meaning. Frustration no longer seeks remedy; it seeks an offender. “I am right” is no longer enough—it must become “you are wrong.” Morality becomes adversity. The weakness politics fears is renamed vulnerability in personal relationships—and treated as moral capital.

We see this logic at work in ordinary places: a school board meeting where every proposal sounds like an attack; a neighborhood forum that turns into a trial; an online exchange where no concession counts, only the next offense. Solving the problem matters less than naming the culprit. Even victories feel thin—each one merely reveals the next foe—until resolution itself begins to look suspect, or even a letdown. (Photo at right by Ewa Domańska)

Rivalry demands a victim, and ressentiment a target. Hostility becomes the point. Identity forms around opposition, and when one grievance fades, another takes its place. Without an enemy, the story collapses.

Earlier struggles for justice, however flawed, aimed at ends that could at least be named and settled: a law changed, a right secured, a barrier removed. Now facts, compromises, and even concessions rarely curb anger, because politics feeds on grievance rather than resolution.

The roots are as much psychological as political. Nietzsche saw how suffering that cannot be acted upon becomes someone else’s fault. Hurt hardens into judgment; disappointment turns into injustice. It can feel easier to be wronged than responsible. We imitate one another’s desires and then turn on one another when those desires collide. Small differences are exaggerated to keep opposition alive. (Photo of René Girard by Ewa Domańska)

Democracy has to offer other sources of commitment—ones that do not depend on having an enemy. People need things worth showing up for together: work worth doing, care given and received, shared projects that draw energy from devotion rather than grievance.

For us, that may begin—or begin again—modestly: staying at the table when it would be easier to walk away and feel justified. Doing the unglamorous work of keeping a school, a neighborhood, a church, a union, or a family from coming apart, even when no victory can be claimed and no one notices.

It is tempting to think moral seriousness must announce itself as a crisis. Moral life begins sooner than that. It is practiced without spectacle, sustained in situations with no spotlight and no applause: taking out the trash for an elderly neighbor, watching a friend’s kids, fixing a loose step, shoveling a driveway before work—the low hum of ordinary care.

These “moments of being” belong to no side. They offer no scapegoat, no enemy to drive out. There is nothing glamorous about them—only the steady practice of showing up.

The world does not move only through power or headlines. Sometimes it moves through memory, attention, and ordinary acts that never become slogans. The full circle isn’t flashy. It holds.

Notes and reading

• Venezuela – Maduro abducted. The familiar patterns discussed in this post apply: mimetic rivalry, ressentiment, and scapegoating.
  
  Sunday morning: While a U.S. citizen, I grew up in Venezuela, which became my home country—alma mia. The Hugo Chávez > Nicolás Maduro regime has been brutal and corrupt. So was the right-wing dictatorship that Venezuelans themselves had overthrown in 1958, to the dismay of the U.S., which had been receiving 90% of national oil revenues from the American oil companies that effectively owned the oil fields and have since been nationalized under incompetent management.
  
  What followed the earlier dictator’s demise was an attempt at democracy that descended into chaos: the very dynamic that had enabled authoritarianism to return under a different banner then inspired the rise of the left-wing regime just overthrown.
  Apparently, the U.S. president expects to “run the country” with the (former) dictator’s loyal Vice-President, not the Nobel Peace Prize-winning opposition leader, María Machado, whose electoral victory had been denied by Maduro and called “rigged.” The U.S. itself backed the extraction of Machado in December 2025, just four weeks ago, even though she had become a vocal supporter of our own president.
  — One response to Donald Trump could be, “Been there. Done that. It doesn’t work.”

Media commentary is now overwhelming. Among the strongest are Timothy Snyder, an American historian of Europe and a public intellectual in both the United States and Europe, and Joyce Vance, a former U.S. Attorney.

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The figure of the scapegoat extends beyond its biblical origins in Leviticus to many religious and cultural rituals of expulsion intended to contain disorder and restore unity. Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger and Freud’s Totem and Taboo remain classic studies of how pollution, exclusion, violence, and belonging intertwine in human communities. Earlier cultures marked the New Year by naming and containing scapegoating; we mark it by denying it—while practicing it endlessly.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (1989). First Essay, §§10–11.

René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (1977), esp. chs. 2–4; and The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (1986).

“low-humming rhythm of simplicity”—Rituparna Sengupta, “Each Leaf a Second,” World Literature Today (January/February 2026). Sengupta researches and writes on literature, cinema, and popular culture. O. P. Jindal Global University, India.

Moral progress is annoying – Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra, Aeon (June 2024). Affective friction: the misalignment between our internalized norm psychology and new or unfamiliar social norms. Kelly and Westra are philosophers at Purdue University who work on issues in moral and cognitive science. (Compare “cognitive dissonance”)

[Virginia Woolf—The phrase “moments of being” comes from her autobiographical writings. See Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (1976).]

More from the remarkable William C. Green:

Christmas, after all

Room for Love

About 2 + 2 = 5

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Winter is a great time for reading. Here’s our suggestion for 2026. The next “Another Look” book club event at Stanford will feature a Nobel prizewinner. You won’t want to miss it. (Did we mention that “Another Look” is the biggest book club in the world?)

On Wednesday, 18 February, 2026, Another Look will present Nobel prizewinning Patrick Modiano’s 2007 novella, In the Café of Lost Youth (New York Review Books). The event will take place, as always, at 7 p.m. at Levinthal Hall, 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus.

Panelists will include Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. 

They will be joined by Chloe Edmondson, a lecturer in Stanford’s Department of French and Italian. She is the France-Stanford Center Fellow for the Roxane Debuisson Collection on Paris History. You will remember her from our event Madame de LaFayette’s The Princesse de Clèves in 2019. Valerie Kinsey, a Stanford lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric Studies, will round out the panel.

The Nobel announcement recognized Modiano’s “consistent exploration of memory and the elusive nature of personal history, often set against the backdrop of occupied Paris.”

He has been praised for his “subtle, clear style and his ability to bring anonymous lives to light, making him a modern-day Proust in the eyes of some.”

Register on the link below:

https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-03yUMbsSWWwJdijPIQg3w

Walk-ins are welcome, but we encourage registration. Hope to see you soon!

From my mailbox: Dana Gioia, poet and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, sent me the latest fruits of his labors. Dana has long been a champion of the of the overlooked poet Weldon Kees (1914-1955). According to poet Donald Justice, “Kees is original in one of the few ways that matter: he speaks to us in a voice or, rathre, in a particular tone of voice that we have never heard before.” Dana has just published a catalogue of his own collection with commentary, including works of fiction and non-fiction, broadsides, journals, music and recordings, critical works, and more. Here is the preface:

I first discovered the poetry of Weldon Kees in 1976—fifty years ago—while working a summer job in Minneapolis. I came across a selection of his poems in a library anthology. I didn’t recognize his name. I might have skipped over the section had I not noticed in the brief headnote that he had died in San Francisco by leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge. As a Californian in exile, I found that grim and isolated fact intriguing.

I decided to read a poem or two. Instead, I read them all, with growing excitement and wonder. I recognized that I was reading a major poet. He was a head-spinning cocktail of contradictions—simultaneously satiric and terrifying, intimate and enigmatic. He used traditional forms with an experimental sensibility. He depicted apocalyptic outcomes with mordant humor. I had found the poet I had been searching for. Why had I never heard of him? Embarrassed by my ignorance, I decided to read everything I could find by and about him.

It was a Saturday afternoon. I had the rest of the weekend free. I drove to the main branch of the Minneapolis Public Library, heady with anticipation. I was eager to read all of his books. I also wanted to see what other readers thought about him. I knew my way around libraries—an important skill in those pre- internet days. Whatever books and commentary existed, I would find.

What I found after two days of searching was nothing. There was not a single book of any kind by or about Weldon Kees in the Minneapolis library system. His work, I also discovered, did not appear in standard anthologies. (I had read one of the only two anthologies that had ever featured a large se- lection of his poems.) There was no biography. There were no entries about him in the standard reference works. Nor were there chapters on him in the numerous critical books on contemporary poetry.

He went unmentioned in the biographies of his contemporaries. There had never even been a full-length essay published on his work.

By Sunday evening, I realized why I had never heard of Kees. Hardly noticed during his lifetime, in death he had been almost entirely forgotten. A suicide at forty-one, Kees had succeeded in his last endeavor—vanishing. His body had never been recovered. Kees had been washed away from posterity with- out rites or remembrance. All his work was out of print. Worse yet, most of it—the stories, novels, plays, and criticism—had never been collected. Some of it, such as his first novel, had been lost entirely. Only the poems, a small, brilliant body of work, survived precariously—without criticism or commentary, almost without readers.

I decided then I would write a long, comprehensive essay on his work. It was not the sort of thing I had done before. I could not begin, however, without knowing more. I did not own any of his books. I knew few facts about his life. I began to search, gather, and collect. I not only found books, journals, and eventually manuscripts; I found people who had known and worked with him. I also discovered I was not alone in my intense admiration.

Three years later I published my essay in a special issue of the Stanford literary magazine, Sequoia, edited by my brother [jazz scholar] Ted Gioia. The issue stirred up a surprising amount of interest. I was soon planning an edition of his short stories, which had never been published in book form. That task led me to new material and new people. I had not realized that Kees had been a true polyartist who had not only mastered fiction and poetry, but also painting, photography, filmmaking, and jazz. I kept working on new projects, and the collecting never stopped. His audience also grew, though not among academics. His admirers were writers, artists, printers, and musicians.

This catalogue documents some of what I found in my search for Weldon Kees. It is not a conventional bibliography. It describes a personal collection with commentary. It tries to tell the story of a writer through his books. It evokes Kees’ polymathic imagination from his art, music, and photography. It also reveals the existence of three of his large notebooks which document his prime years as a poet. I wrote this little book mostly for myself and a few friends. I hope it appeals to other readers, writers, and collectors. If this book is for you, you’ll know it.

Find some of Weldon Kees’s poems at the Poetry Foundation here.

From René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure

René Girard, photo by Ewa Domańska

Robert Harrison‘s radio show Entitled Opinions has devoted fans all over the world – from Australia to China, Mexico to Russia. One blogger called the intellectually powered interviews, initially broadcast from Stanford’s radio station KZSU (90.1 FM) and available for free download on iTunes. It’s been called “one of the most fascinating, engaging podcasts in any possible universe.” You can explore the range of his interviews over at his new website here: https://entitled-opinions.com/

“Entitled Opinions” was born before “podcast” was even a word. iTunes was born only three months earlier. It found an international audience quickly. Now the program has come of age – it’s twenty years old.

The Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature, who is also an acclaimed author and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, has recorded more than 300 conversations since 2005, featuring some of our era’s leading figures in literature, philosophy, science, and cultural history, including Richard Rorty, René Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Shirley Hazzard, Orhan Pamuk, Colm Tóibin, Marilynne Robinson, Paul Ehrlich, Michel Serres, Hayden White, and Abraham Verghese.

To celebrate, he’s recorded a retrospective podcast with Christy Wampole, one of his former students who was there with him from the beginning. She is now assistant professor of French at Princeton University.

You can listen to it below:

What did a fourth/fifth century saint from north Africa have to teach us about René Girard‘s mimetic theory? Philosophy professor Alexander Douglas of the University of St. Andrews has kindly allowed us to publish an excellent excerpt from his new and acclaimed book, Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self, Penguin). Here it is:

“Three quarters of what I say is in Saint Augustine,” René Girard said in an interview some years ago.1 To understand Girard’s view of the human predicament, we can look at the Confessions of this early saint. One story that Augustine tells of his youth, with much contrition, is about how he and his friends stole some pears:

“Close to our vineyard there was a pear tree laden with fruit. This fruit was not enticing, either in appearance or in flavour. We nasty lads went there to shake down the fruit and carry it off at dead of night, after prolonging our games out of doors until that late hour according to our abominable custom. We took enormous quantities, not to feast on ourselves but perhaps to throw to the pigs; we did eat a few, but that was not our motive: we derived pleasure from the deed simply because it was forbidden.”2

At first it seems odd for Augustine to make so much of what seems like a minor teenage prank. But the imagery – the fruit that is enticing because it is forbidden – makes it clear that Augustine is using this episode as an allegory for the Fall of humanity.3

What Augustine wants to do with this story is probe into the mystery of our fallen condition. He is troubled by the fact that “there was no motive for my malice except malice”; his petty crime “lacked even the sham, shadowy beauty with which even vice allures us.”4 The object was not to eat the pears, nor to upset the owner of the vineyard, nor even entertainment – the theft was not challenging enough to constitute an exciting heist. It was simply to demonstrate his ability to act however he willed. Responding to no reasons, done to no conceivable purpose, this wanton act was meant to express his radical freedom. To conjure an action out of nothing, for no reason at all – what could be more radically free?

However, as Augustine looks back on the act, he realizes that it was not as original as he thought. In two ways, it was imitative, not original. First, his urge to express his own radical freedom was less a self-expression than an imitation of God’s omnipotence: a crippled sort of freedom, attempting a shady parody of omnipotence by getting away with something forbidden.”5 Secondly, he engaged in the act only because his friends did it too: “as I recall my state of mind at the time, I would not have done it alone; I most certainly would not have done it alone.”6 Augustine struggles to work out the reason for this. It is not simply that he did it for the sake of camaraderie. Nor was it only to share a joke. It was simply that “to do it alone would have aroused no desire whatever in me, nor would I have done it.”7

The theory of mimetic desire is very close to the surface of what Augustine writes here. His desire to act was prompted, or at least enhanced, by the apparent desire of his friends. Yet they were in the same position – only wanting to do it because the others did. This might look like a circular explanation, but in fact it shows how desire can emerge from nearly nothing, creating the illusion of the spontaneous will. We are prone to desire what others around us appear to desire, and this appearance can be a matter of a misread signal, a rumor, an accident mistaken for a ploy.8 Once an imitator has taken on a desire from the apparent desire of a model, however, she immediately becomes a model to others, and the mimetic cycle begins. Desire really does emerge where there was none before. It is never conceived by a radically free subject from nothing. Instead, it can emerge from a mimetic cascade, seeded by misperception.

Augustine’s story brings out two crucial aspects of Girard’s theory of identity. The first is that we readily believe ourselves to be little centres of omnipotence: freely deciding what to do, breaking rules, overcoming constraints and resisting impulses. The second is that the more we entertain this myth, the more profoundly we are in fact influenced by the examples of others. The radical egoist is an avid imitator in denial. This combination of prideful egoism and unconscious mimesis is the formula for the fallen condition in Augustine, and in Girard.

1 René Girard, When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer, 133.

2 Augustine, Confessions, 1997, 2.9, 67-68.

3 Ibid., 68n32.

4 Ibid., 2.12, 70.

5 Ibid., 2.14, 71.

6 Ibid., 2.16, 72.

7 Ibid., 2.17, 73.

8 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Le Sacrifice et l’envie – le libéralisme aux prises avec la justice sociale, 268.