I Liked the Essay. Then I Found Out It Was AI
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Enchiridion of Epictetus
13 min read
The author directly quotes from this Stoic philosophical manual to support their argument about accepting the world as it is. Readers would benefit from understanding the full context of Stoic philosophy and this influential text's role in Western thought.
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Inklings
12 min read
The article features a pivotal quote from C.S. Lewis relaying a conversation with Tolkien. Understanding their literary friendship group at Oxford, which shaped 20th-century fantasy and Christian apologetics, provides crucial context for why this exchange between two of its central figures carries such weight.
I.
In a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves on June 22nd, 1930, C.S. Lewis wrote:
Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood — they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine today) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.
I was eating meat with vegetables and rice when I found this quote on my Twitter timeline, in one of those accounts that yearn for times past—medieval kings and chivalry guilds—and, as I looked down at my half empty plate I realized Lewis, and through him Tolkien, was absolutely correct: I don’t know where the tomatoes and carrots and mushrooms come from or whether the cow whose meat I was enjoying was born and raised in some farm in the Madrid countryside. Is the rice from China at all, or is that notion Western propaganda? The coffee I drank afterward was cultivated in Brazil and roasted in Portugal; at least that I know. But I could not pinpoint the origin of the other ingredients to save my life. So, I’m not merely uprooted, as Lewis says, but unaware of where I’ve been transplanted.
I’m tempted to discharge my responsibility to the usual suspects: capitalism and modernity. However, I will own it today: I lack the strength of the hills, and I recognize that I would be more sensitive to my world if the same atoms that made the ground I stand on also made up my body. (Alas, I don’t think I will ever see a nymph or a dryad: I’m not yet old enough to go around believing fairy tales anyway.)
But that’s not why that quote grabbed my
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