Finitude

Seeing Patrick Stewart as Macbeth on Broadway in 2008 had this larger-than-life quality, of a figure transcending the stage and the ages. In the role of Jean-Luc Picard, Stewart has been with me ever since the early 1990s, as our highest aspiration of what humanity can become in the future, or as Leigh Philips put it, of a “radical enlightenment project married […] to humanist forgiveness”. As such, it was with great sadness that I learned that Stewart has died at the age of 86, as if we needed another reminder that even the most extraordinary lives are finite.

Yesterday, I spent four hours on the train across Sweden, reviewing a manuscript for the journal Cogent Arts & Humanities (how come I always review manuscripts in days while it seems to take months for everyone else #notbitter), before arriving to sunshine in Kalmar. And today has been a truly stunning autumn day as I have walked with my parents for hours across town, visiting the cemetery where my grandmother Alice rests, and now I am about to take the train down to Kristianstad to see Linnéa for the weekend. As is tradition, I was able to go for a fast morning run around Stensö, perhaps exhausting myself a little with an average heart rate of 170 bpm.