This is the image that Joseph Roth painted in ‘Smoke Joins up the Towns’ (1926), one of the vignettes from the collection, The Hotel Years : Wanderings in Europe between the Wars . Most of the entries are backward-looking and elegiac, final portraits of a Europe that was vanishing in front of his eyes.

This time a slightly different collection, some quotes and references taken from my recent conversation with PC. While the discussion traversed a wide range of issues, the fragments and references below relate to the challenges of how to deal with, and respond to, institutions corrupting, eroding, changing, and transmogrifying.

Earlier this year, with support from the Toshiba International Foundation, I produced a series of conversations thinking through how technology interacts with and shapes our world. It was a meaningful process, resulting in a collection of fruitful dialogues, which can be accessed here. While that project has finished, my hope is to continue to share some occasional conversations around broader themes.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland A year ago I wrote a note considering the appearance of a new coronavirus variant, Omicron. I stressed the difficulties of making sense in real time and the need for greater intellectual humility.

Turning in circles, Kyoto as seasons shift, Robert Musil's untimely reflections a century later; these themes from an earlier note I found myself revisiting. Some of this was prompted by a conversation I’ll be sharing later this week, which tries to think through the present moment, partly in reference to parallels and thinkers from fin de siècle Europe.

Imagining the real. Really imagining. There and here, blending and blurring, all together. Hayao Miyazaki, Shuna’s Journey. Christopher de Bellaigue on the possibilities of ‘an unstoppable spiral of state violence and popular fury’ in Iran. Alexander Baunov on Russia’s objectives. 2022 is set to be ‘a fabulous year’ for some. Ali Ansari on ‘failures of imagination’ in Iran.

Recently I found myself at Suirakuen, a Japanese garden located in Fukushima prefecture, and as I took in the landscape, my mind inevitably started drawing connections with themes of decline and decay. It is that time of the year. In a prior note, I suggested that polycrisis is effectively something of a placeholder concept for trying to name and narrate being caught up in conditions of socio-political entropy.

This was Karl Jaspers considering the ‘new fact’ of atomic weapons in his 1958 book, The Atomic Bomb and the Future of Man . As the ‘new fact’ became old, and the Cold War finished with a whimper and not a bang, the nuclear threat faded from our collective view. At some point, most of us stopped asking these questions that so concerned Jaspers. Yet the problem never disappeared.

‘All alike burned in its fire’ - a line taken from the fragment below - captures something powerful about the impact of disasters, moments when worlds bend and break. How to make sense of the nonsensical? How to comprehend the incomprehensible? What to do when reality outstrips imagination? Robert McLiam Wilson on the trial for the 2016 truck attack in Nice, France.

Writing in 1891, Frederick Engels reflected on Karl Marx’s ‘remarkable gift’ for That is our challenge. One of the ways that Adam Tooze has sought to respond is through adopting the frame of polycrisis, which he has further outlined in a new FT piece and accompanying Chartbook entry. The concept intuitively fits. It captures something in the air.

The framing of these notes around the the idea of imperfection is very deliberate. Partly it is about the imperfection of the subject matter - humans and the shared worlds will build, bend, and break - but also the analysis provided, inevitably partial and incomplete. There is something remarkably freeing about being honest about the limits of knowledge and comprehension.