David Brooks (who is not the guy pictured above) writes columns for The New York Times. Brooks' column that was published in the Sunday edition of The Times, on December 28, 2025, was titled, "Let's Celebrate These Great 2025 Essays." Actually, that is the "hardcopy" version of the title. Online, which is where you'll find the column if you click the link I provided, the title is less "professorial" and more "political." Online, Brooks' column is titled this way: "Sick of Trump News? I’m Here for You."
Well, I am definitely "sick of Trump News," and I am happy to report that the Brooks' column does have a number of good suggestions for some other things to read about and ponder. Among those other things, Brooks is suggesting that we all read an essay by Christian Wiman, “The Tune of Things.” It is Wiman, not Brooks, who is the person pictured at the top of this blog posting. I knew nothing about Wiman until I read what Brooks had to say:
The Yale poet Christian Wiman is one of my favorite essayists. His essay “The Tune of Things” in Harper’s Magazine walks us through some spooky phenomena. “Trees can anticipate, cooperate and remember, in the ordinary sense of those terms,” he writes. He continues: “Some people revived from apparent death report confirmable details they could not possibly have observed, at times far from their bodies. Cut a flatworm’s head off and it will not only regrow a new one but remember things only the lopped-off head had learned.”
Across the essay he mentions some more: Ninety-five percent of the past century’s Nobel Prize-winning physicists believed in God. If no one is watching, a photon behaves as a wave, but if someone is watching, it behaves as a particle. When scientists in the Canary Islands shot one entangled photon, it behaved as a wave. Then they went to a different island and shot another entangled photon, and it behaved as a particle. When they returned to check on the first photon, they found it had gone back in time and acted as a particle.
Wiman is saying the world is a lot more mystical and more fluid than we think. When you acknowledge that fluidity, some of our inherited dualisms don’t make sense — between reason and imagination, mind and body, belief and unbelief, consciousness and unconsciousness, even past and future. The kind of thinking you need to understand the ineffable flow of spooky reality is not contained in the linear, logical, machinelike process we call rationalism. Perhaps the kind of thinking we need to understand a fluid world is radically different, a kind of thinking that artificial intelligence will never master.
Well, I am not advocating artificial intelligence, period, and I am quite prepared to contemplate a reality that is "spooky" in the extreme, though the use of the word "spooky" doesn't fully do justice to the immense beauty and grandeur of what I guess 95% of the past century's Nobel Prize-winning physicists would be happy to call "God's Creation."
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