Paradox

I was first introduced to paradox under a different name: the Great Reversal. It was 2016. I was an NYU student, and after class I went to a Bible study at the Salvation Army in New York City. Louie Giglio was leading the meeting, and we were studying the book of Luke when he introduced the idea of the Great Reversal in the life of Jesus.

Jesus is born in a manger, among the lowest of the low, while simultaneously being understood as the divine creator. The infinite becomes finite. The highest enters through the lowest possible door. Divinity takes human form. That contradiction fascinated me. I have never really followed Louie Giglio's work beyond that Bible study, but I love him for giving me that idea. It was apparently the one lesson I needed from him, because I have been thinking about it ever since.

Two years later, during my senior year at NYU, I found Wit on HBO. Wit, starring Emma Thompson and adapted from Margaret Edson's play, follows Vivian Bearing, a formidable professor of literature undergoing experimental treatment for advanced cancer. Vivian has spent her academic career studying John Donne, whose poetry is filled with intellectual puzzles, contradictions, reversals, and impossible combinations.

Everything about the film struck me. The music. The writing. The coldness of the hospital against the intensity of Vivian's inner life. Even small details caught my attention. I watched it again and again—probably five, six, seven times. I kept thinking I might someday use it as inspiration for a piece of my own. I wanted to save it for something special. I am still saving it.

What mattered most was that Wit gave me another doorway into the same idea I had encountered two years earlier. The first doorway had been explicitly religious: Jesus and the Great Reversal. The second was literary and intellectual: John Donne, language, mortality, and the strange ability of two apparently opposing ideas to become more meaningful when they are held together instead of separated.

John Donne himself was certainly not a secular figure. But I was encountering his work now through theater, film, scholarship, medicine, and literature rather than through a Bible study. That distinction mattered to me. Between 2016 and 2018, during some of the most formative years of my life, I had been given the same intellectual device twice: once through faith, and once through art. I could not get it out of my head.

My family is religious, and my religious upbringing is important to the way I understand paradox. To me, Jesus is perhaps the greatest paradox in human history. His significance is inseparable from the seemingly impossible claims made about his existence: human and divine, servant and king, temporal and eternal. The contradiction is not an inconvenience to the story. The contradiction is the story.

After college, I moved into a studio apartment and began trying to write work of my own. I wanted to create something that could capture whatever it was about paradox that had fascinated me so completely. One of the first things I began writing was a paranormal romance. My premise was simple: a human falls in love with a divine being. At the time, I thought I was writing a love story. Looking back, I think I was still writing about the Great Reversal.

Over time, paradox became more than something I noticed in religion, literature, or art. It started to feel like a way of moving through life. Life itself can feel like a paradoxical game, almost like walking around with a metal detector. You move through ordinary experiences listening for that strange little signal that tells you two things that should not belong together are somehow occupying the same ground. Sometimes the contradiction is obvious. Sometimes you have to keep sweeping back and forth over the same patch before you hear it.

I like looking for the place where opposites touch: faith and doubt, comedy and tragedy, human and divine, beginning and ending. Maybe that is why I keep returning to paradox. The contradiction does not always need to be solved. Sometimes finding it is enough.

That instinct has followed me into my own work. I keep wanting to put two things together that supposedly do not belong together and see what happens. It remains one of my favorite artistic questions: not, which side is correct? But, what happens when both things are true?