King Charles III’s visit to the United States, and particularly his address to Congress, was far more than a ceremonial occasion. It was a moment of quiet but consequential diplomacy—one that demonstrated the unique role a constitutional monarch can play in turbulent times. At a moment when democratic norms are under strain and the international order appears increasingly fractured, the King’s presence carried both symbolic weight and moral resonance.
One of the factors that made the visit so significant was his ability to remain above day‑to‑day politics while still engaging meaningfully with the most pressing issues of our time. As a constitutional monarch, King Charles does not speak as a partisan figure, nor does he represent the agenda of a particular government. Instead, he embodies continuity, institutional memory, and a tradition that transcends electoral cycles. That distance from partisan contest gives his words a different register. He speaks not to win arguments, but to remind audiences of enduring principles.
His congressional speech struck a careful balance between affirmation and gentle admonition. On the surface, it was rich in positive language—celebrating shared history, democratic traditions, and the longstanding partnership between the United Kingdom and the United States. Yet woven into that affirmation was a subtle but perceptible reminder of the principles that sustain that partnership. Without naming individuals or descending into overt criticism, the King delivered what might be described as a soft pushback against political tendencies that have unsettled alliances and strained international norms.
His historical allusions were especially powerful. By invoking Magna Carta as a pivotal document in the evolution of the rule of law, he did more than offer a ceremonial nod to British heritage. Magna Carta symbolizes limits on arbitrary power, the supremacy of law over personal rule, and the accountability of authority—principles foundational to both British and American constitutional traditions. In recalling this legacy before Congress, the King reaffirmed the sanctity of constitutional restraint and institutional balance. At a time when executive authority, democratic conduct, and respect for legal norms are subjects of intense debate, the reference carried unmistakable contemporary relevance. It was a reminder that democracy depends not on personalities, but on institutions.
Equally significant was his emphasis on the indispensability of the transatlantic alliance. By framing the relationship between Europe and the United States as one grounded in shared values rather than mere strategic convenience, the King underscored its civilizational importance. His reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reinforced that point. The conflict is not merely a regional crisis; it represents a broader challenge to sovereignty, democratic integrity, and the rules‑based international system. In highlighting these realities, the King suggested that the stakes for democratic cooperation have rarely been higher.
Throughout the speech, he stressed that democratic values and international order are being tested in the present moment. The alliance between Europe and the United States, he implied, has never been more crucial. If there was a message aimed at recent strains in transatlantic relations, it was delivered with tact and good humour rather than confrontation. The tone was measured, even warm—but the underlying appeal was serious: a call to renewed commitment to alliances, to institutional norms, and to the cooperative spirit that has long underpinned the postwar order.
In this sense, the King’s message functioned as a subtle nudge—a reminder of the “old order” not as nostalgia, but as a framework that has preserved peace and prosperity for decades. He did not lecture; he invoked history. He did not accuse; he appealed to shared heritage. That is the quiet power of constitutional monarchy: the ability to caution without condemning, to defend principles without descending into political rancour.
Ultimately, King Charles’s visit was important not because it produced immediate policy shifts, but because it reaffirmed moral and institutional foundations at a time when both feel fragile. In remaining above politics, he was able to speak to politics’ deeper meaning—the values, restraints, and alliances that make democratic governance possible.
In an era of polarization and geopolitical uncertainty, such reminders matter. They may be delivered softly, but their resonance can be profound.
Grief, Rituals and the Deepening of Time
Grief arrives quietly at first, like a shift in the air, and then all at once it changes the texture of our days. In the immediate aftermath of loss, the world feels strangely suspended: familiar routines lose their meaning, and time seems to move with a weight we cannot quite name. We search for something to hold onto, some structure that can steady us when our inner world has been overturned. It is often in these moments that ritual steps forward—not as an answer, but as a way of moving through the unanswerable.
When my mother died, her funeral was conducted with Chinese Taoist rites. The ritual performers wore long ceremonial gowns and chanted to the blare of trumpets and the shimmer of small percussion instruments. Their purpose was to guide the deceased beyond the suffering of death and into a higher realm of being in her next life. During those several hours in the quiet of the night, the rawness of my sorrow settled into a stillness of mind, a sense that I was, for the final time, saying goodbye to her. Rituals like these give form to emotions that would otherwise feel chaotic. They create a solemn space in which private sorrow becomes part of a shared act of remembrance, allowing grief to settle into something we can begin to carry.
Yet the power of ritual does not depend on believing in its cosmology. Even for those who no longer hold such metaphysical views, ritual still performs an essential task. It prepares the living for the next stage of their own life. It soothes the conscience: it reassures us that we have honoured the person properly, that nothing essential has been left undone. The ritual is not a conclusion to the relationship, but it offers a kind of conclusion to our sorrow, allowing us to continue living. Across cultures and faiths, mourning rites are never only about wishing the dead well in a metaphysical sense. They also exist to guide the living back into the flow of life without feeling that they are abandoning the person they loved.
This is why people often say that ritual “slows down time.” They do not mean that the hours literally stretch. My mother’s funeral lasted several hours, and I felt those hours exactly as they were. The slowing is not in the clock but in the mind. Ritual suspends the forward rush of daily life and holds us in a moment where nothing else is supposed to happen. Our attention narrows to the chanting, the incense, the solemnity of the space. The future falls away. Time becomes denser, more deliberate. It is not longer, but deeper.
Within this deepened time, another dimension of grief becomes perceptible: its cadence. There is a rhythm to grief that reveals itself only when we allow time to slow. At first the beat is heavy, irregular, almost unbearable. But as days pass, the cadence changes; sorrow loses its sharpness and becomes something more contemplative. Ritual helps us hear this rhythm. In the solemn choreography of the funeral, the chanting and gestures create a tempo that steadies the mind and gives shape to emotions that would otherwise overwhelm us. Through this cadence, grief becomes not only an expression of loss but a quiet inquiry into what it means to continue living.
As this rhythm unfolds, we begin to recognise that grief is not a single emotion but a shifting landscape. It moves through many shades: sorrow, guilt, fear, anger, longing. Its complexity resists simple narration. When we are in the midst of grief, we inevitably find ourselves reflecting on larger questions about our own life. In this sense, grief resembles a tragedy: for all its heaviness, it contains a process of catharsis, a slow purification of the self. As time passes, our sorrow becomes less raw, and our thoughts begin to transcend the immediate pain of personal loss. Grief then leads us toward broader reflections on the human condition.
In time, what remains is not the sharpness of loss but the quiet presence of memory. Grief does not disappear; it changes its shape. It becomes a companion that walks beside us rather than a weight that presses upon us. The rituals that once held our sorrow begin to fade into the background, but their work continues in subtler ways. They have given us a way to carry the dead forward without being held back by the pain of their absence.
We learn, slowly, that remembering is not the same as clinging, and continuing to live is not the same as leaving someone behind. The people we have lost remain with us in gestures, in habits, in the small instincts of daily life. They surface in moments of stillness, in unexpected recollections, in dreams, in the quiet knowledge that our lives have been shaped by theirs. This is the companionship that follows grief—not loud, not dramatic, but steady and enduring.
And so the cadence of mourning softens into something more spacious. We begin to move through the world again, not because the sorrow has vanished, but because it has settled into a place where it can live alongside everything else. In this way, grief becomes a form of love that has learned to breathe. It reminds us that to continue living is not a betrayal, but a way of honouring the life that touched ours so deeply.
Would the End of US Matter?
So here is a more unsettling question: if life is, at its core, absurd, would the extinction of humankind really deserve our grief? One might be tempted to say no. After all, we rarely mourn what we believe has no lasting purpose; we let it fade without ceremony. But the thought refuses to settle so easily. It lingers, pressing back against our instincts. And if such an end were to arrive—an Armageddon of our own making—it would be difficult to deny our role in it. After all, this anthropogenic age has not merely shaped the world; it has, in many ways, unravelled it.
Yet this reasoning falters the moment we seriously imagine the end.What would we actually mourn if humanity knew it was about to end?
It wouldn’t be just death. We already live with that certainty, quietly unfolding into our days. What unsettles us more deeply is something harder to name: the sudden collapse of continuity. We move through life with an unspoken assumption that the human story will go on—that there will always be a “later,” someone to remember, to reinterpret, to carry things forward. An imminent end shatters that expectation. It doesn’t just take away our future; it erases the very idea of a future.
When an individual dies, their story ends, but ours continues. We absorb the loss. We remember, retell, reshape. Humanity itself acts as the larger narrative that gives individual lives context. But if humanity ends, that narrative has nowhere to go. There is no one left to remember us, no audience for our meanings, no continuation in which our lives can echo. It is not only that we vanish, but that everything we’ve ever been loses its place.
Perhaps this is why it feels like a story cut off mid-sentence. We are creatures of arcs and resolutions, always in the middle of becoming, discovering, understanding. Extinction interrupts that motion completely. Every unanswered question remains unanswered forever. Every beginning is stripped of its potential to become something more. There is no conclusion—only an abrupt silence.
And then there is the scale of the loss. It is not personal grief, anchored in a face or a voice, but something far more diffuse and overwhelming: grief for everything at once. For the countless lives never lived, the ordinary moments that will never occur, the ideas that will never be thought. It is a loss without edges, too vast to hold.
In the end, what we mourn is not only ourselves, but the fragile thread that connects past, present, and future. If that thread snaps, the past is no more relevant, the future disappears, and the present becomes a final, unshared moment. The sorrow lies in realizing that the human story—so long imagined as ongoing—can, in fact, simply stop.
It is true that such an end feels too remote, almost abstract—too vast and too unlikely to press upon our daily concerns. We wake, we work, we plan as if the human story stretches safely beyond us. And yet, there is a reason we return to this question. To imagine the end of humanity is, in a way, to measure what we think matters about its continuation. It forces us to ask what, if anything, we believe is worth preserving—not just in our own lives, but in the fragile, ongoing thread of human existence. Even as a distant thought, it sharpens our sense of value, stripping away the trivial and leaving behind what we would not want to lose. Perhaps that is why it feels worth writing about: not because the end is near, but because the reflection reveals, with unusual clarity, what it means for us to be here at all.
Against the Tide: Why We Still Create
People have long sought a kind of immortality by leaving behind legacies—works of art, writing, institutions, traces of themselves meant to endure. This impulse stretches back across human history. Shakespeare, for instance, imagined that his poetry could grant a form of permanence, declaring, “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” Here, the poem itself becomes a vessel of immortality, preserving not only the beloved but, implicitly, the poet as well.
But why should this matter to us? It may benefit future generations, certainly, yet what good does it do for the one who creates it? We will not be around to witness its impact or take comfort in its survival. In that case, in what sense does the pursuit of immortality through legacy truly make sense for us at all?
Few philosophical questions are as old—or as persistent—as this one: why do we strive for a kind of immortality through our achievements? Art, writing, and other legacies seem to promise a life that stretches beyond our own, yet we will never be there to witness it. So what, exactly, are we gaining?
The answer may be less about the future and more about the present. We do not create for the sake of some distant recognition after death, but to make our lives feel coherent and worthwhile now. Human life is, in many ways, a quiet struggle against existential unease—a sense that everything is fleeting, unstable, and ultimately beyond our control. In response, we reach for meaning. We commit ourselves to projects, relationships, and creations that allow us to feel anchored.
In doing so, we construct what might be called a form of symbolic immortality. It is not that we literally continue on, but that our actions seem to resist the erasure that time threatens. The alternative—surrendering entirely to the chaos and impermanence of the world—is difficult to accept. Meaning, then, becomes less a luxury and more a necessity. It is what renders life not just bearable, but, in some fragile and deeply human way, lovable.
There is also the question of the self. We tend to think of ourselves as discrete individuals: bounded, self-contained, and ultimately extinguished at death. From that perspective, the idea of legacy can seem irrelevant. If consciousness ends, then nothing that follows can matter to us—at least not in any direct, experiential sense. This is a coherent and, in many ways, compelling view.
Yet it may rest on too narrow a notion of who we are. Our sense of self is rarely confined to the limits of our own bodies or lifespans. We are entangled with others—extended through our children, embedded in our communities, and shaped by the cultures that give us language, values, and form. In this broader frame, the self is not a fixed point but a continuum, something that exceeds the individual life.
Seen this way, the idea of living on in one’s work is not mere sentimentality. When a writer says, “I live in my work,” it is not meant literally. Rather, it gestures toward a different understanding of life—one in which a person’s thoughts, sensibilities, and ways of seeing continue to move through the world, carried by others. What persists is not the body or the private stream of consciousness, but something less tangible and yet still real: a pattern of life that outlasts the individual who first gave it shape.
Perhaps, then, the Epicurean view has the final word. The world matters to us only insofar as we are alive to experience it; beyond that boundary, meaning dissolves. As Epicurus famously put it, “Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not.” On this account, the idea of legacy cannot truly concern us once we are gone. Whatever follows our death unfolds without us, and to invest it with personal significance may seem like a subtle form of self-deception.
There is a hard clarity to this position. The dead do not witness, feel, or take pride in what they leave behind. No work, however enduring, can be experienced by the one who created it once their consciousness has ceased. In that sense, legacy belongs entirely to the living—to those who remember, interpret, and carry it forward—not to the one who is no longer there to claim it.
Perhaps, then, the point is not to solve the problem of death at all. Creating art, writing novels, founding institutions—these are not strategies for outwitting mortality, but ways of learning how to live with it. They do not grant us literal permanence; rather, they reshape our experience of finitude.
Legacy, in this sense, is not for the person we will no longer be, but for the one we are now. It offers a way to gather the scattered moments of a life into something that feels coherent, directed, and meaningful. In a world marked by constant change and uncertainty, the act of creating or building something enduring allows us to take hold of our existence, however briefly, and give it form.
What we seek, then, is not immortality in any strict sense, but a kind of steadiness within impermanence—a way of anchoring ourselves in the midst of flux. Legacy is less about surviving death than about making life, while it is ours, feel inhabitable and whole.
You know the waves will eventually wash ashore and carry everything away, and yet you still choose to build a sandcastle. Why devote yourself to something so obviously temporary? The example brings the question of legacy and immortality into sharp focus.
What matters is not the endurance of the sandcastle, but the act of building it. Its value lies entirely in the doing—in the shaping, the attention, the small satisfaction of creation. There is no real expectation that it will last, nor does its meaning depend on that. As a piece of art, it is complete in the moment of its existence, not in whatever remains of it afterward.
In this way, the sandcastle quietly challenges the very premise of immortality. It suggests that something need not endure to be worthwhile. Its brief presence is already enough to justify the effort, reminding us that meaning can reside fully in the act itself, rather than in any hope of permanence.
Travelling Light
I recently made the decision to move out of my home and into a long-stay hotel — and honestly, it wasn’t that big a deal. As a pensioner, I travel light these days, so I spent no more than half an hour stuffing everything I needed into a rucksack. Done. For most people, moving home is nothing short of an epic undertaking — the sorting, the packing, the endless decluttering. But not for me.
The idea didn’t come out of the blue. It had been quietly taking shape for years, rooted in a bigger question I’d been asking myself: how did I want to live out my retirement?
I can still pinpoint the exact moment it first stirred. It was eight years ago, on a Friday evening in July, when I said goodbye to my colleagues at a university in Macau where I’d been working for many years. I switched off my computer for the very last time, and pressed through the campus — past the glinting waterways and the green stretches of meadow shimmering in the summer sunset. It was a beautiful place, and I took my time leaving it.
Then I boarded the jetfoil back to Hong Kong — for the last time (I would still make trips back to Macau in the following years, but that’s a different story). As the ferry sailed out into a glowing but fast fading sunset, I sat with those fresh images of the campus still vivid in my mind, and something quietly shifted inside me. A chapter was closing, and a new one was waiting to be written.
When I arrived home in Hong Kong, I looked around the flat. Everything was familiar — perhaps too familiar. The sofa bed that my late mother had slept on until she moved out to a care home in her last years; the windows that framed the flux of the world for the past five decades. It all felt perfectly fine, and yet something nagged at me. I’d always assumed that retirement would simply mean returning home to resettle, to ease naturally into a quieter domestic life. But standing there, I wasn’t so sure anymore. I found myself wondering: ‘is this really how I want the next chapter to look?’
At first, I thought it might be about freedom. The romance of it — cutting loose, breaking free from routine. But that idea quickly fell apart under scrutiny. Freedom isn’t something you find by changing your location. If your heart is already free, it doesn’t much matter where you lay your head. I was just as free in my Hong Kong flat as I would ever be in any hotel room. So freedom wasn’t it.
What it was really about, I slowly came to realise, was the desire to travel light — not just in terms of luggage, but in life itself. And that began with taking a long, honest look at the things around me.
The flat was cluttered with years of accumulated living. Among the most meaningful objects were my mother’s personal effects — her clothes, her belongings, all the things she’d kept close when she was there. Letting go of them in the conventional sense felt unthinkable. But technology offered a quiet solution: I photographed everything and preserved it all in the digital world. It struck a balance between honouring the emotional weight of those memories and freeing myself from their physical presence. That was an important realisation — that keeping something in your heart doesn’t require keeping it in your home.
When the flat underwent a major renovation some years later, a great deal of old furniture was cleared out as a result and I took up lodging in a hotel in the meantime. When I moved back in, the place had been restored to its bare interiors, exuding the same sense of spaciousness as it did more than 50 years ago. With sunlight streaming in, sparkling off the freshly painted white walls and the shiny mosaic floor, it transported me back to being that child of ten in 1968 when I, upon opening its door, would enter a whole new world of light and roominess. The space now breathed in a way it hadn’t for decades. There was a kind of quiet clarity to it that I hadn’t expected to find so moving.
That experience of minimalism turned out to be more than just an aesthetic preference — it became a philosophy. A way of thinking about how to live. And it raised one final, liberating question: if I could feel this light, this unanchored, in my own renovated flat — why not take it one step further? Why not beat a path that would untie myself entirely from the idea of a fixed home, and simply see what that felt like?
And so a serviced apartment became the logical next step. Not a chase for something missing, not an escape from anything. Just a quiet, deliberate choice to live differently — to carry only what I needed, and leave the rest behind.
Beyond Consciousness — the Case for AI as a Creative Force
The definition of what it means for something to be “creative” often depends on perspective. Artificial intelligence has demonstrated its ability to compose music, write stories, and create visual art with such innovation and quality that its work can often be mistaken for that of a human. However, the process through which AI generates these creations is fundamentally different from human creativity. AI relies on identifying patterns within vast datasets and predicting what comes next, rather than drawing from personal experience or intention. It does not possess a mind of its own. For this reason, many argue that AI’s outputs, no matter how impressive, cannot truly be considered creative.
Those who assert that consciousness is a prerequisite for creativity often emphasize the role of subjective experience in the creative process. Why does a poet create the way they do? The focus on a particular theme, along with their selection of words and imagery, is part of a poet’s conscious effort to achieve specific effects or evoke a desired emotional response. These choices are guided by their individual experiences, intentions, and desires. From this perspective, AI falls short of qualifying as a true creator. It lacks consciousness, personal experience, and any innate desire to create. Consequently, critics argue that AI’s outputs, no matter how sophisticated or seemingly innovative, are merely the results of computational processes—imitative rather than original.
We judge creativity in a piece of work by evaluating whether it embodies the elements that define creativity. For something to be considered creative, it must be innovative and depart from conventional modes of representation. Creativity often surprises or even inspires awe, emerging in various forms—whether through combining familiar concepts in novel ways, pushing the boundaries of a particular field, or breaking completely from tradition to create something entirely new. Importantly, these judgments don’t require us to understand the inner life or consciousness of the creator. What matters is the experience the work offers us—the sense of originality and transformation it brings.
In this regard, AI is fully capable of producing creative work. Advanced language models, for example, can generate writing that rivals, and sometimes even surpasses, the creativity of the human mind. They can weave together ideas, experiment with language, and produce compositions that feel fresh and original, demonstrating that creative output doesn’t necessarily depend on consciousness.
Consciousness drives much of what humans do. It is the lens through which we understand our actions and the reasons behind them. Historically, creativity has been seen as a product of conscious effort—a uniquely human trait rooted in thought, intention, and personal experience. But with the advent of artificial intelligence, we are being challenged to rethink whether creativity must remain tied to the human mind. While human creativity is undeniably driven by consciousness, this alone does not automatically disqualify AI from being capable of creative expression.
When we admire a painting or listen to a piece of music, our primary interaction is with the work itself—its colours, composition, melody, or emotional resonance. Rarely do we stop to question the consciousness or inner life of its creator. What captivates us is the transformative and thought-provoking nature of the work, its originality, and its ability to elicit an emotional or intellectual response. In fact, our appreciation of creative works often begins and ends with the experience they provide. While understanding the creator’s intent or mental process may deepen our appreciation, it is not a necessary condition for judging a work as creative. In this sense, creativity can exist independently of conscious effort, as long as the output meets the criteria of being innovative, meaningful, and aesthetically or intellectually significant.
This shift in perspective invites us to see creativity not as something exclusively rooted in human consciousness, but as something that can emerge from other processes as well. AI, for instance, does not create out of personal intention or desire, but it is capable of producing outputs that demonstrate novelty and originality. If an AI-generated piece of art or writing can move us, surprise us, or provoke new ways of thinking, then it has fulfilled the same purpose as a human creation. Creativity, therefore, does not need to originate solely from human thought. It can be judged by the quality and impact of the work itself, regardless of how or by whom it was created.
We often associate creativity with human thought processes, assuming that only humans can truly create because only humans can think. This association has led us to reserve the concept of creativity exclusively for human efforts. However, AI challenges this assumption. While AI may not feel the urge to create or possess a conscious mind, its output can nonetheless be as creative as that of humans. An AI does not need to replicate the human experience of creativity in order to produce work that is innovative or transformative. By broadening our definition of creativity to focus on what rather than how, we can recognize that AI is not merely a tool, but a potential contributor to the evolving landscape of creative work.
In conclusion, creativity should not be limited to the confines of human consciousness or intent. While traditional notions of creativity have long been tied to subjective experience and conscious effort, the advent of artificial intelligence challenges us to rethink these assumptions. AI, though lacking personal desire or awareness, is capable of producing works that are innovative, transformative, and thought-provoking—qualities that define creativity itself. By shifting our focus from the creator to the output, we can recognize AI’s contributions as both valid and creative. As we move further into an era where technology and human ingenuity intersect, it is essential to embrace a broader and more inclusive understanding of creativity—one that acknowledges the potential of AI to expand the boundaries of what is possible in art, literature, and beyond.
Telling Stories to the Night
Amber light seeps into the dark, softening the edges of the things in the care home —chair, curtain, glass of water—until everything becomes mere smudges of shadows.
I take up my pen, as I often do at this hour, to write. Habit, almost: to trawl the day for small truths, to catch brief scraps of living in a net of words before they slip away. But tonight it’s different. Tonight I’m not trying to gather anything. I’m trying to reduce.
I’m writing a line—yes, only a line—here at the end of my dying days.
An epitaph. It’s a strange task, isn’t it? To leave behind a single line, and beyond that, cross into silence.
I’ve seen the world in constant motion. Monday follows Sunday, Tuesday follows Monday. It’s now September. Soon October. And things happen in between. I sought verbs to catch these moments the way I, once as a child, thought I could catch falling stars—by setting out a bucket of water and waiting for their reflections to settle there, trapped. So I believed verbs were the key to truth. The noun sits still, but the verb breathes.
What are you thinking, Bart? You’re so quiet? Margaret’s voice. I’ve been thinking about verbs, honey. Verbs? Then how would you think of me as a verb? She was laughing. You’re not serious. I am. Go on then—how would you animate me? If verbs capture the essence of life, as you say, how would you frame me in one? You bloom. Ah. And what about thirty years from now? Well? She looked at me. Such a tender look. Well, You’d still be blooming. Blooming still?
Where is she now? She may have faded long ago. Mother went twenty years past.
The trees outside green and brown—green and brown, green and brown—the way seasons verb themselves through wood. I thought verbs could best catch the fleeting, the fluorescent, the thing that flares and goes. And I came to believe that life, like everything else, was bracketed by verbs: to bud, to bloom, to fade, and all the others in between in infinite permutation. One summer night I trapped a moth in a box which I filled with plastic leaves and branches to emulate the woods through which it had flown. And I suppose I have done the same with life—trapped it in a box of verbs, hoping it might go on beating its wings there, believing the plastic leaves were real.
But now I see it as vanity. And yet I find glory in it too.
What is a story, after all? A net cast into the sea of chaos, hauling something back. I imposed order where there was none. Looking back at those protagonists I created—women, men, the dead, the living—they raged, they loved, they suffered. Hope existed alongside despair because I willed it so. I gave them motives. I gave them voices. Most important, I gave them a purpose for living. Never mind that they were fictional. The ghost said, “I said this because I was suffering.” Or he said, “I did that because it hurt so much I had no choice.” I soothed them by setting them at the beach where waves caressed them with whispers. I carved pattern from formlessness. From the raw, buzzing, inchoate mess of being, I extracted order. All this I did with words in those moments of quiet. All this I completed by giving them voices that could speak their emotions—their trepidations, their pangs of pain, their small bewildered joys. I turned the random falling of leaves into omen. I turned the conversation of two lovers into layers: silence and speech, the muted and the sounded, what was said and what could never be said.
Now death brings me an impossible task: to compress sixty years of stories into a single line. It asks me to reverse everything I ever did as a writer.Then, I expanded. I found words elastic, capable of stretching to hold whole lives. Now, I must pare it all down to a point of singularity—one sentence, maybe two. How can I compress sixty years into that? All those experiences that occurred between the greening and the yellowing of the trees outside. All those moments that seared themselves into memory. There is so much I want to say. How can any of it fit onto a cold stone?
Language is a sieve. We pour hot soup through it, and the froth filters away, the warmth escapes, the body of it slips through the mesh. What remains are only the solid bits—verbs, nouns. The bones of meaning. But the taste, the heat, the nourishment—the ineffable passes through and is lost
Once, Margaret and I stood on an island bluff, watching the sea foam against the rocks below. It was September. The wind came hard off the water, ruffling her hair across her face; she lifted her right hand to smooth it back and slipped off her glasses, as if to meet the moment unmediated. A grain of sand blew into my eye. We laughed, or perhaps we said something trivial about the cold. I no longer remember.
Years later, trying to set that afternoon down in a story, I found that what endured was not the warmth of the wind or the salt in the air, not the softness of her unguarded face, but only the scaffolding of action. Verbs threading through nouns: she smoothed her hair; she removed her glasses; the sea broke; the wind blew. The mesh had done its work. The immediacy had thinned to grammar. What remained were gestures without weather, movement without heat.
The rest—the living warmth of it—had already drained away.
Will anyone who reads it understand? I would be glad — truly glad — if even one person knew what it meant. I wanted to walk up to King’s Road and hold up my notebook of sprawling stories and say:
here, here is the key to truth.
But there is no answer. The passers-by stream across the road. The light turns and they cross in currents, scattering toward their separate destinations. Red again. They accumulate once more. The process repeats. Next turn.
Now I know. Story is a contrivance. Things and people in real life do not live in such a neat, formulaic fashion. They do not arrive at a satisfying dénouement. Their stories come to a sudden halt — no development, no arc. They merely stop. The thread snaps and the tension is gone. Their lives fan out along paths pre-determined for them. But in my story I must design a resolution: mostly happy, some tragic, though I feel obliged to ring a note of hope — for me, for my protagonists, for readers.
Disillusioned? And yet… and yet…
Oh, disillusioned? There was that mirror in the dining room, wasn’t there? Can language ever be as reflective as that glass was? I could have got Margaret to fetch it for me. Just imagine how one day I can still be around to do your chores. She said this, standing me in front of it. Bullshit! I laughed. I saw her last cleaning the mirror with a small towel. When was it? She hasn’t been around for — how long? Five years? No, no, it can’t be that short. I attended a concert at the Barbican five years ago. Mahler’s Ninth. It paused. It ended. Like all the others in the audience I left in silence — no ceremonial applause. I was alone. I held out my hand, instinctively wanting to hold hers. There was no hand. I was by myself. No, no, must be longer than five years. Ten? Ah. That should be it. She hasn’t been around for ten years. I have been greying. She had been getting weaker. She wore jeans. She was holding my hands. She stood on my left — or left on reflection, and actually she was to my right? Which one is really you, she asked, the reflection or the self outside the mirror? I really wish we could be in the glass world — a pause — forever. The last word delayed. No way, I said. We cannot arrest the flux except in language. She was dabbing her face, pressing close to the pane. Her pale face glowed as the autumn morning sun streamed in.
I’m struggling from my bed and shuffling across the room to reach the mirror, propped at an angle on my desk in this small room. My wrinkled paws. My trembling. No more reflections of the past — my vision is fading as the last ray of sun fades in this part of the day. Who am I if I have not been writing? A chance existence at this particular spot, this particular time. What if I had never existed? What if I had never written a single story? Would I be anything more than a bone on a beach, left to bleach under the sun? Perhaps deception is necessary — it is what underwrites my creativity. Without creativity, what is left? And perhaps our imagination is the only truth we have.
I am not a single one. I am the mélange of many. I am the boy who once dreamt of dissolving a star in a basin of water. I am the man who baulked at the faith Margaret tried to make me believe in. I am the old man who is afraid of the dark and thought language was a tool against death. I am all of them. They spoke through my writing — first one by one, then their voices folding into one another’s until they formed a chorus.
So I start to write. I will no longer be able to write in profusion. I will have to write only one line. Not a summation. Not a story — no more time for stories. Those I wanted to write about have all gone, and to write about them now would be to chase the phantoms of memory. I will write one line, only to acknowledge the inadequacy of the cold stone.
I will write this much: that I was here. That I tried to make sense of people and the mess of things by pinning them down with words. That I braided them into tales, knowing—always knowing—that each narrative would fall short of the crowded, stubborn complexity of the real.
I am tired. I am exhausted. I’m too tired even to hold my pen the way I used to, as if it could steady me. And now I’m tired of language itself: of its shine, its tricks, its habit of pretending it can contain what it only circles. I want to dissolve. Not to be understood, not even to be remembered—just to be gone from the burden of words.
Is there any way to dissolve into the worlds I made for my characters? To step through the paper and become only another figure in the distance—unwritten, unnamed, and therefore free? The strange thing is: I built those places, and still I don’t belong there. They were never meant to hold me. They were meant to hold everyone else. Yet I want them now the way a drowning man wants the imagined shore. But now they are but just mirages. And – listen. What’s that distant thud outside the window, an incessant and rhythmic hum?
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
Professor Gray was reading out those lines in that classroom. I was twenty then. I was in awe of his deep-throated voice, almost a croon. I understand now that he wasn’t so much performing as confessing. Years later, I learnt that he’d drunk himself to death. Perhaps in that distant afternoon when he intoned those lines, he had already heard what the sea was saying and simply had decided to let himself surrender to the ‘grey old mother’. I chose words instead. I’ve often wondered which of us was the braver.
I wish to stop being the “I” who writes and become the “we” who are silent and I would melt into their choruses.
But I still have one sentence left to write. I must make it count before I exit.
“The waves break,” I whisper. “They hiss into foam. And we are gone.”
No—not for the stone. That is for the dark.
“Here lies a man who told stories to the night.”
It isn’t enough. I know it the moment the ink settles. One line cannot be the seed of all truth. It cannot hold the whole weight of a life, or the hunger that drove it. And yet I have to treat it as everything now. I have to let it stand—one small shape pitched against the vast, formless outside.
All my life I cast language like a net, knowing it would come back torn, knowing the ineffable would slip through every knot. But the casting was the point—the throw, the reach, the brief arc of effort. If that is sublimation, then so be it. And what follows, when the arm finally gives out, is resignation.
The waves recede. They leave a thin line on the beach—temporary, precise, already fading.
That is enough.
That must be enough.
You Simply Are: Two Plum Blossoms and the Art of Immortality
Your peers blossom in a sunlit room,
By curtain, cabinet and New Year’s knot;
They wear the season’s warm and hopeful bloom,
Yet all that lives in time must live and rot.
No sooner do they flower than they fade—
For all that dwells in place must know an end,
And every gift that light and context made
Is but a loan that dying days must lend.
But you are shorn of window, clock and floor,
Against a formless neither-here-nor-there;
Your dark hands hold their pink blooms evermore,
Buds ever-opening, blossoms always fair.
No metaphor, no symbol * left to say—
You simply are, and cannot pass away.
*The plum blossom is celebrated for its resilience against the last onslaught of winter and for presaging the arrival of spring. Hence it is an auspicious plant for Lunar New Year, a symbol of endurance and renewal.
The Quiet Moment of Waiting
I’m standing in a clinic queue right now—one of the many lines I find myself in every day. You queue for banking, for the bus, at the grocery counter. For such an ordinary experience, I should just take it for granted, the way we take breathing or blinking for granted. But curiously, there’s a sense of something amiss. It feels, in its small way, like suffering. Not the dramatic kind—no one writes tragedies about waiting for your number to be called. But it’s a feeling that clings to the mind like a dull ache, a quiet wrongness you can’t quite name.
It’s a curious cycle. When I’m trapped in waiting, my mind drifts toward the question: what do all these waits actually mean? Perhaps you’ve wondered the same. We’re all waiting for something, always. Waiting for exam results. Waiting for the Chinese new year, when the lucky money comes again. Waiting to hear back after an interview. Waiting for the light to change while running late. Waiting for the bus that never seems to arrive on time.
These tiny waits accumulate into something larger. If we were to add them all up, we’d find that a surprising portion of life is spent in this strange suspension. Present in body, but not quite here. You are leaning forward into a future that hasn’t arrived yet, unable to settle into the moment you’re actually standing in.
What does waiting reveal about us? At its core, it is a confrontation between our desire to be agents of our own lives and the stubborn reality that we cannot bend time to our will. We cannot make the bus arrive faster. We cannot know the outcome of a job interview the moment we walk out the door.
There’s a small ritual of disappointment built into these situations. When you ask, half-hopefully, “When will I hear back?”—and they reply, “Possibly in a month”—something sinks. It’s too long. Too vague. We want certainty, and we want it now. Modern life, in particular, has trained us for immediacy. We refresh the page, check our phones, glance at the clock, as though our attention could somehow hurry things along. Beneath the surface, there’s always a low hum of irritation.
Why does waiting feel so unbearable? Perhaps because we’ve come to see it as wasted time—empty, unproductive, a gap between the moments that actually count. In an age that prizes busyness over stillness, doing over simply being, waiting becomes a kind of failure. It resists usefulness. It refuses to justify itself. And so we treat it as mere transition, something to endure on the way to somewhere else, rather than an experience worth inhabiting on its own terms.
Waiting is often dismissed as empty time, but the quiet suspense between one moment and the next carries its own quiet power. In those pauses—standing in line, anticipating a reply, watching the clock before a new beginning—we are suspended between what was and what will be. This in‑between space invites reflection, heightens awareness, and deepens our appreciation of what finally arrives. While impatience urges us to rush past these intervals, waiting subtly shapes our resilience, teaches us trust in unfolding processes, and reminds us that growth often happens in unseen transitions. The suspense of waiting is not wasted time; it is the threshold where anticipation matures into meaning.
I used to find waiting unsettling, an uncomfortable limbo I wanted to escape. But I’ve since learned to bend toward these pauses, even to welcome them. Waiting resists being “useful” in the conventional sense—if usefulness means actively doing, producing, advancing. Instead, the suspense of waiting invites us into a different kind of attention: a heightened awareness of the present moment itself. These pauses position us in a liminal space between what was and what is yet to come, offering us space to slow down and reflect. Often, the wait isn’t an obstacle delaying our progress but a preparation, priming us for what lies ahead rather than holding us back.
Consider how our lives unfold like stories, shaped by the drift and turn of happenstance. In any good story, the transitions between scenes are rarely empty—they’re filled with authorial asides, atmospheric shifts, internal reflections that enrich the narrative’s texture. These interludes aren’t filler; they’re intrinsic to the story’s meaning. Our waits function much the same way. They give us a window for our own reflections and awareness, a chance to observe rather than simply react. In those moments, you might feel something approaching authorship over your own experience—not because you control what happens next, but because you can step aside from the current, hold yourself at a remove, and simply witness. Here, in the pause, we’re granted permission to be rather than to do, to inhabit our existence rather than relentlessly propel it forward.
Perhaps waiting is, at heart, the experience of standing before a crossing. We wait in order to move into another stage. The traffic light changes, and we cross to the other side of the road. Our number appears on the screen, and it is our turn to see the doctor. Each wait, however brief or mundane, carries the quiet possibility of transition. What follows may become a consequential moment. In this way, waiting stitches together the twists and turns of our lives. If life itself is ritualistic in rhythm, then waiting is not incidental but intrinsic to its design. To cross a threshold is to risk change; once crossed, life may never be quite the same.
Though waiting often feels ordinary—almost woven invisibly into the fabric of daily routine—it matters precisely because it marks the space between “before” and “after.” If we extend this idea further, if we imagine the span of an entire lifetime as a kind of waiting, then the significance deepens. What then of the final crossing — the one we all must cross ? Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘Crossing the Bar’ captures this ultimate moment: the crossing from life into what lies beyond. This beautiful poem goes like this:
“Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.”
The poem frames death not as an abrupt end, but as a passage—like putting out to sea, borne by a quiet tide toward a hoped‑for meeting “face to face” with the Pilot. In this light, waiting becomes more than delay; it is preparation for crossing. Just as the poet envisions death as a serene transition into another stage of being, so every wait in our lives, small or great, stands as a passage. To wait is to stand at the edge of change—and to trust that on the other side, another chapter awaits.
So, even waiting here at this moment for my number to be called, I’m already crossing.
Unhousing Myself
I’ve been living in a hotel for a few months now, and I’m beginning to see it not as a temporary arrangement but as a possible long‑term way of life. At my age, why should I feel bound to the convention of maintaining a “home” in the traditional sense? If one can afford an extended hotel stay, perhaps it’s worth experimenting with a different mode of living altogether.
When you think about it, a home—despite all its sentimental associations—is also a kind of baggage. I don’t even mean this in a metaphysical way. Quite practically, a home demands upkeep. It requires time, money, and a constant low‑level vigilance: repairs, cleaning, utilities, clutter, the slow accumulation of things you don’t need but somehow keep. A hotel, by contrast, strips life back to essentials. Someone else handles the maintenance. You occupy space without owning it. You move lightly.
There’s also the emotional dimension. As we grow older, perhaps part of aging gracefully is learning to loosen our attachments rather than deepen them. A fixed home can anchor you, yes, but it can also tether you to past versions of yourself—memories, habits, identities that no longer fit. Letting go of that can be a quiet liberation. A hotel room, with its neutrality and impermanence, invites a different relationship to the world: one that is freer, less burdened by history, more open to change.
In that sense, choosing to live in a hotel isn’t an escape from life but a reconfiguration of it. It’s a way of saying: I don’t need walls filled with possessions to feel grounded. I can carry my sense of home within myself.
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