Review

Books

Culture

Wildness

25 October 2024

6 min read

My open letter to Sally Rooney: dilatasti cor meum

You enlarge my heart.

James K.A. Smith

James is a philosopher, cultural critic and author.

A book cover depicts a yellow and white chessboard with pieces casting shadows of people.

This is silly, I realize. You’ll never see this. But I’ve just finished Intermezzo and I’m not sure what else to do with the bright sadness upon finishing it.

I can’t imagine I am your anticipated reader. I have children your age, for heaven’s sake. You write from, and about, worlds that are, in some ways, a foreign country for me. Sometimes I read your novels like Lévi-Strauss’s field notes from his years with the Nambikwara, describing the practices and rituals and mores of some foreign tribe—except that tribe includes my own children and the students I encounter everyday. Sometimes this makes me feel very old, and tired, and a little bit sad. Not in a judgmental way. I can’t imagine how hard it is to be 23 years old today. I feel badly about the world we’ve bequeathed to the twenty- and thirtysomethings that populate your novels. Your novels give me a glimpse into how they experience it. Which is what I love about the best fiction—the way it is a technology of mindreading, teleporting us into another’s perspective.

I don’t know, maybe it’s weird and kinda creepy that an old man like me gobbles up a novel like Intermezzo. Like a kind of voyeurism. I hope not. Because, in the end, what you achieve is at once the construction and revelation of a human world. And as Terence said, nothing human is alien to me.

This will sound crazy, but from the very first pages of Intermezzo I found myself reading with a strange sort of ache in my heart. Not a pain as much as a held-breath sense of ekstasis, of being stretched and pulled out of myself. I think now I’d say I was responding to what I can only describe as the tenderness you show your characters. I don’t mean for a second that you shrink from portraying their brokenness, even their brutality at times. But only that as you track their mystery and monstrosity you situate all of it in their ineradicable humanity. And in contemporary fiction, that is rarer than some might think. It speaks to me of a fullness that characterizes the matrix of your imagination, from which these characters were born. You don’t let them escape judgment; but that judgment comes from their own social worlds, not the caustic condescension of you as the narrator. This is where your mastery of free indirect speech is so uncanny: you stay near your characters, you listen closely, but somehow in the alchemy of your prose even their own harsh self-judgment is portrayed with tenderness and understanding.

Honestly, it reminds me a lot of how the mystical tradition portrays God, that Creator of all creators, the Narrator who is in love with every feeble creature, every loathable antihero, which is to say every single one of us, protagonists in dramas we don’t realize. There’s this marvelous line in The Cloud of Unknowing where the medieval sage says, “It is not who you are or what you’ve been that God sees with his merciful eyes, but what you want to be.” This will make you cringe, but your narration echoes that. You see what Peter and Ivan want to be. And in so doing, you help me look at all the human beings around me with the same sort of eyes. Or at least I want to be that person.

OK, this is, like, crazy word association, but as I was reading Intermezzo a line of prayer kept coming to mind. You might know it. It’s from the Psalms. It’s part of Prime, the first hour of the Divine Office. St. Teresa of Ávila talks about it a lot. Dilatasti cor meum. You enlarge my heart. You dilate my heart. You widen the scope of what my heart can take in and absorb. This, in the end, is what Intermezzo does. For me, at least.

It’s funny, you know. I finished the second half of the novel while I was attending the annual conference of the Hegel Society. (I thought you’d get a chuckle out of that.) So in the margins of Intermezzo I have scribbled notes like: Recognition! Master/slave dialectic!3 But it’s really not so crazy, is it, because, like Hegel, you seem to intuit how much we long to be seen, to be recognized, and why that means passing through the crucible of forgiveness to achieve reconciliation. This is why I think you are attuned to a below-the-surface rumbling in your generation that, against all the forces of capital and Distraction, Inc. and just the bullshit of consumer nihilism, can’t quite shake a yearning, or at least a wondering, if there’s something more—something like “meaning” or significance we could feel pulled into. I love it that, in Intermezzo, this culminates in a vision of community. (I’m trying not to spoil anything here, since, ahem, my wife hasn’t been able to finish the book yet.) Being known, being seen, being forgiven, being loved. Belonging.

My aforementioned (long suffering, forgiving) wife loves a song by the Highwomen called “Crowded Table.” She plays it full blast in our kitchen when she’s preparing for dinners when she gathers beloveds near. “I want a house with a crowded table / and a place by the fire for everyone.” I thought of the bridge of the song at the end of Intermezzo.

Everyone’s a little broken
And everyone belongs.

I finished your book on a packed train from Boston to Philadelphia and decided not to be embarrassed that I was weeping. The older I get, the more paternal I become, I’m realizing. I don’t think that’s an expression of control or “paternalism” in the negative sense. At least I hope not. It’s more that the older our kids get, more of the world is filled with people who look like the children I love. I don’t mean that I infantilize them, either. I treasure the adults they’ve become.

I’m not describing this very well. What I’m trying to say is, I am just an inveterate dad. I can’t help it. So as much as I read your novel as a scholar or a philosopher or a fellow human, I couldn’t help reading it as a dad. And when I spent time with Peter and Ivan and Sylvia and Naomi, I just wanted for them what I want for my own children and their spouses—for them to know they are loved and held dear and for them to find their people. It’s silly and sappy, but I wanted to talk to Ivan and Peter and tell them: It’s possible. There is still love in the world. Even more incredibly: there is forgiveness. Intermezzo has the audacity to not only hope this but to portray it. I know it costs you something to do so in a literary world that prizes cynicism and distance.

Maybe I wept at the end of Intermezzo because it was as much a mirror as an icon. Despite the generational gap, you gave me occasion to see my own life reflected back to me. In the mirror is an us (“The I that is we and the we that is I,” as Hegel put it). I look in the mirror of longing & hope that is your novel, and looking back I see my wife, Deanna, who has been forgiving me for over 35 years, letting me know I am beloved. And we’re surrounded by our children, the overflowing of our own love, these children who have become such dear friends, who have forgiven me more times than I can count. And in that mirror their spouses are alongside them, our dream come true—the beloveds they have found who forgive them and welcome them home over and over again. It’s a crowded table. And there’s always more room. Everybody’s a little broken, and everybody belongs.

I guess what I want to say is: I admire your courage to write a novel that tells the truth—that love gets the last word because it is the first word that speaks us all into being, the origin of the world.

Gratefully,

A reader

This article first appeared as a post on James K.A. Smith's Quid Amo Substack. Reproduced by kind permission.

Review

Books

Culture

War & peace

6 August 2025

5 min read

Nuclear War A Scenario: the book that imagines the inconceivable

It's the most depressing book that you really need to read

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A nuclear explosion glows red and orange against the night sky.

A test explosion, 1956.

Nuclear War A Scenario (Torva, 2024) by Annie Jacobsen is about the most depressing book you could ever read and, perversely, all the more reason to read it. Collectively, the human race has buried its head in the sand over the existence, power and proliferation of nuclear weapons. We are understandably focussed on the lasting impacts of climate change; however, nuclear war promises planetary destruction and the risks surrounding it have grown, rather than lessened, since the end of the Cold War.

To help us focus on what we would rather not, Annie Jacobsen gives her book a plausible but hypothetical scenario. It starts with North Korea, for there we have an unbalanced, remote individual; an empathy free despot with unfettered power and unimaginable weapons at his disposal that now have the capacity to reach the east coast of the United States.

We do not learn his reasons for launching missiles against the US in the scenario and never would, were it to happen, because Armageddon takes only minutes to unfold. Jacobsen is deeply informed round nuclear war, having talked to many highly placed American officials. One recurring anxiety she meets is that the decision to launch nuclear missiles is in the hands of the President alone and the US still operates on the so-called Launch on Warning doctrine.

Launch on Warning means America will fire its nuclear weapons once its early warning sensor systems merely warn of an impending nuclear attack. These systems are sophisticated, but they can also be wrong, as the US discovered in 1979 when it briefly believed it was under attack from the Soviet Union. In Jacobsen’s scenario, the President has six minutes to decide what measures to take and has something approximating a menu to assist with this. Ronald Reagan observed:

Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to release Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?

The menu, a little like ordering pizza with preferred toppings, is supposed to help with that moment.

In Jacobsen’s scenario, US nuclear weapons are unleashed against North Korea but have to travel over Russia to get there. Russia’s early warning systems are less sophisticated and in the scenario these US missiles are believed to be an attack on Russia, not North Korea. This leads to Russia’s own uncompromising, near instantaneous response which leads to … well, you get the picture.

A one megaton thermonuclear weapon detonates at one hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit, which is four or five times hotter than the temperature at the centre of the sun and creates a fireball that expands at millions of miles an hour. This alone is unimaginable; replicating it hundreds of times over is impossible. The injuries sustained among those left; the loss of food, water, sanitation; the breakdown of law and order; the arrival of nuclear winter where temperatures plummet for decades without any infrastructure led Nikita Khrushchev to say: ‘the survivors will envy the dead’.

Mark Lynas, a writer who for years has been helping the world to understand the science of climate change has recently turned his focus on the nuclear threat in his book ‘Six Minutes to Winter’. He observes:

‘There’s no adaptation options for nuclear war. Nuclear winter will kill virtually the entire human population. And there’s nothing you can do to prepare, and there’s nothing you can do to adapt when it happens, because it happens over the space of hours. It is a vastly more catastrophic, existential risk than climate change.’

Reaching the end of human capacity is an unsettling experience. Solutionism is the Valley’s mantra: technology can solve every human problem, but binary thinking neglects the social, political and moral complexity of many issues and, in any case, catastrophic nuclear explosions are as likely to happen by accident as design - and could do at any time. It’s not that we need more time for AI to resolve this existential threat; it’s that it never will.

This is where the moral strength of faith traditions come into play as people embrace the strange hope of the powerless. Christian faith in particular cannot succumb to fatalism or the hacking of the book of Revelation to interpret the end of all things as code for nuclear war. God is creator and we are co-creators with him; we are not called to destruction when he has promised to renew the face of the earth through the resurrection of Christ.

There is something specific about our generation. For eighty years, since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have been the first generation with the capacity to destroy the whole world. Understandably, we do not want to think about this, but the fallout from this nuclear denial is that risks continue to multiply. More nations are thinking about developing nuclear weapons in an unstable world. In June 2025, the global nuclear watchdog, the IAEA said Iran was failing to meet its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in two decades and within days, Israel had launched missile strikes on Iranian nuclear sites – and many other targets – to set its nuclear programme back, followed in a significant escalation by US strikes. Nuclear weapons are a very present cause of insecurity, as the recent missile exchanges between India and Pakistan show so gravely.

Despots watched what happened to Muammar Gaddafi after he relinquished his designs on weapons of mass destruction following pressure from western powers and are unlikely to make the same mistake. No-one can be sure the current US administration will offer a nuclear umbrella to Europe, especially when the President’s instincts are not internationalist and his preoccupation is with a golden dome shielding continental America instead.

Almost no-one has agency in this, except for one vital piece of the puzzle: intercessory prayer, rooted in the promises of God. The ancient psalm writer prophesies:

He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;

He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;

He burns the shields with fire.

Be still, and know that I am God!

I am exalted among the nations,

I am exalted in the earth.

And something greater than the spear is among us today.

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