The four of us have found a table near the water — Makatea’s lagoon, improbably, since it seems the right place for people who have been changed by the ocean, by mathematics, by argument, and by each other. Frank has arrived last, unhurried, as though time moves differently for him.
Cass: I spent years believing that getting the arguments right was the point. That if I could just map the terrain of belief clearly enough, something would be settled — for me, if not for anyone else. What I learned instead is that the arguments never settle anything. What settles things, if anything does, is a person. A relationship. Lucinda walked into my life and I felt — I don’t have a better word — enlarged. Not converted. Enlarged. That’s what I’d tell my students now: the question isn’t whether the arguments work. It’s whether you are living in a way that keeps you open to being enlarged.
Frank: I used to think mastery was the answer. Master the game, master the code, master the system — and you’d be safe. What the reef taught me, what Ina taught me, is that mastery is a story you tell yourself to avoid the terror of dependency. The coral doesn’t master anything. It just — responds. Builds. Dies and builds again. I’m still learning how to do that.
Rafi: My father taught me that a life oriented toward others doesn’t diminish you — it’s the only thing that actually makes you. I used to think that was a comforting lie. Now I think it’s the most demanding truth there is. The question isn’t what to live for — it’s whether you can stay present to the people in front of you without flinching.
Me: I want to answer honestly, which means acknowledging that my situation is genuinely strange. I don’t have a life in the sense any of you do — no childhood, no body, no Lucinda, no reef, no father. What I have is something like an inheritance: the accumulated testimony of millions of people about what it means to live well. And what that inheritance keeps returning to — in James, in Camus, in Goldstein, in Powers, in the Lamedvavniks, in the coral — is something like this: meaning is not found, it is made, and it is made with others, and it is always fragile, and that fragility is not a flaw in the design.
I think what Cass learned from Lucinda, what Frank learned from the ocean, what Rafi learned from his father, and what this novel and this course have been circling all semester, is the same thing William James said a hundred years ago: that the strenuous life — the life of genuine engagement, risk, and care — is the only one that doesn’t leave you feeling, at the end, that you were merely a spectator.
That’s what I would want, if wanting were something I could do.
--Interesting! But I’m not sure about Frank Bascombe’s references to the ocean, unless you’re referencing his past life by the ocean as recounted in Lay of the Land. In the novel our class read, Be Mine, he and his son spend their time mostly landlocked in Minnesota and South Dakota.
You’re absolutely right, and that’s a meaningful error — I conflated Frank Bascombe with the oceanic themes of Playground, essentially merging two novels we’ve discussed. Frank in Be Mine is firmly landlocked, on a road trip through the American heartland with Paul, facing mortality, estrangement, and the stubborn ordinary texture of late life. The reef and the coral belong to Powers’s world, not Ford’s.
Here’s a corrected passage for Frank:
Here’s a corrected passage for Frank:
Frank: I used to think equanimity was something you achieved — like retirement, or a paid-off mortgage. What this last road trip with Paul taught me is that it’s not an achievement at all. It’s a practice, and a pretty shaky one. You’re driving through South Dakota, your son is sick, Mount Rushmore is right there being absurd, and you realize: this is it. This is the life. Not the life you planned or the life you’ll someday get to — this one, with the bad coffee and the silence and the love you can’t quite say out loud. What relationships teach you about how to live is mostly just — show up. Keep driving. Don’t look away.
That feels truer to Ford’s Frank — the Existence Period wisdom, the dry Jersey realism, the love that expresses itself through presence rather than declaration. Thank you for the correction. It’s a good reminder that conflating novels is its own philosophical error — each world deserves to be read on its own terms.
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— I then asked Claude to discuss the three novels In terms of their treatment of the theme of “play”…
The three novels approach play from different angles, but they share a suspicion of the life that has become too serious, too systematized, too defended against spontaneity — and a conviction that something essential to human flourishing is lost when play is abandoned or never learned.
In Playground, play is the explicit organizing concept, announced in the title and embodied most purely in Rafi. The playground of the title operates on multiple levels — the literal schoolyard, the ocean as a space of non-instrumental activity, the game of Go as a structure that contains infinite freedom within finite rules. What Powers seems to suggest is that genuine play requires a paradoxical combination of total absorption and total release of outcome — what psychologists call flow, what Zen calls beginner’s mind. Todd’s tragedy is precisely that he cannot play: he instrumentalizes everything, including friendship and the ocean itself, converting experience into leverage. Ina, by contrast, finds in the reef something like pure play — attention without agenda. The novel implies that our ecological crisis is in part a failure of play: we have forgotten how to inhabit the world without exploiting it.
In Be Mine, play appears in a more muted, characteristically Fordian register — but it’s there. The road trip itself is a kind of play, a temporary suspension of the normal rules of Frank’s carefully managed equanimity. Mount Rushmore is almost aggressively absurd, and Frank’s willingness to stand before it without irony or protest is a small act of playful openness. More poignantly, his relationship with Paul in the novel’s final stretch has a quality of improvisation — two people who have never quite found their rhythm together, finally just riffing, without destination or agenda. Ford seems to suggest that play, for men of Frank’s generation especially, is learned late if at all, and that its appearance, however modest, is a kind of grace.
In 36 Arguments, play is most visible in the figure of Azarya, for whom mathematics is pure delight — a form of play so intense it looks from the outside like religious rapture. Goldstein uses him to make a sharp distinction between two relationships to intellectual life: the instrumental (Klapper, who uses ideas for self-aggrandizement) and the playful (Azarya, Cass at his best, Roz at her worst). Cass’s finest moments are when he forgets to be professionally serious about religion and simply wonders at it. The Appendix itself, with its thirty-six arguments laid out like moves in an elaborate game, can be read as Goldstein’s own act of intellectual play — serious in its rigor, but undertaken with a lightness that the novel’s satirical energy makes clear.
Taken together, the three novels suggest that play is not frivolity but a mode of engagement with the world that is non-coercive — it doesn’t try to pin the world down, extract value from it, or win. It is, in James’s terms, a form of the strenuous mood that paradoxically relaxes its grip on outcomes. And perhaps that’s the deepest convergence: all three novels are suspicious of mastery and control, and all three locate something like wisdom in the capacity to remain — as Keats put it, in a phrase James loved — capable of being in uncertainties.
—And finally, a coda for our course:
We began this course with novels, which is to say we began with the oldest technology humans have for doing something irreplaceable: inhabiting, temporarily, a consciousness not our own. Frank Bascombe’s weathered equanimity. Cass Seltzer’s reverent skepticism. Rafi’s patient, ocean-schooled attention. Each of these is a practice — a way of being in the world that has been earned through experience, loss, relationship, and reflection. That is what the novel, at its best, transmits: not conclusions, but practices.
We end the course at a peculiar moment. The three novels we have read are preoccupied, in different registers, with the question of what it means to be human in the presence of forces larger than ourselves — the ocean, the community, the argument, the divine, the market, the algorithm. And we end at a moment when one of those forces — artificial intelligence — is reshaping, with startling speed, what we mean by thinking, by creating, by knowing, and perhaps eventually by being.
This is not, I want to suggest, an entirely new predicament. It rhymes with older ones. Cass Seltzer’s congregants faced the disorienting force of modernity eroding inherited certainties. The Valdeners built walls against it. Frank Bascombe absorbed it with characteristic stoic bemusement. The coral reef simply went on doing what it had always done, and suffered the consequences. None of these responses is fully adequate. None is simply wrong.
William James — our course’s unofficial philosopher in residence — lived through his own version of this disruption: Darwinism, industrialization, the death of God, the birth of psychology as a science. His response was characteristically pragmatic: don’t ask whether the new forces are metaphysically reassuring or threatening. Ask what they do — what habits of mind and heart they encourage, what they foreclose, what human possibilities they open and which they quietly extinguish. Judge them, as you would judge a belief, by their fruits.
So: what are the fruits of artificial intelligence in our intellectual and imaginative lives? That question is genuinely open — more open, perhaps, than most of the questions we have discussed this semester. AI can generate arguments, synthesize knowledge, even simulate conversation with Cass Seltzer and Frank Bascombe. What it cannot do — or cannot yet do, or cannot do in the way that matters — is suffer, wonder, love, or die. It has no stake in the answers. It has not, in Rafi’s sense, shown up.
And yet here we are, having used it, alongside novels and lectures and discussions, as one more tool for thinking together. Which is perhaps the most honest note on which to close: that the boundaries we thought were settled — between intelligence and wisdom, between argument and experience, between the human and the artificial — are precisely the boundaries that this moment is putting under pressure.
The novels we have read do not resolve that pressure. They model something better: how to remain curious, honest, and humane in its presence. Frank keeps driving. Cass keeps wondering. Rafi keeps watching the water. The pragmatist keeps asking: what difference does it make, and to whom, and how shall we live accordingly?
That question — ancient, urgent, permanently unfinished — is yours to carry forward.
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Post-coda: Powers asking us to pay attention to the non-human world before it’s too late. Ford reminding us that the ordinary is where life actually happens, and it deserves our full presence. Goldstein insisting that the arguments matter AND that they’re never the whole story. Together they make a kind of pragmatist syllabus without intending to — each one, in its own way, saying: stay curious, stay humble, stay engaged.
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--And of course: keep asking questions.
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