There are weeks that move forward. And there are weeks that rearrange you.
I’ve just returned from an extended business trip — the usual cadence of flights, negotiations, investor meetings, presentations. The professional rhythm of building, optimizing, solving, advancing. Midway through that movement, I stepped away for a day and a half. Sunshine. A quiet chair. A novel I had been meaning to read: David Szalay’s Booker Prize–winning Flesh.
At the same time, my daughter was giving birth to my first grandchild.
There were complications.
For a stretch of hours, the future was not guaranteed. Let me say clearly: mother and baby are fine. We are grateful beyond measure. But gratitude is sharpest when it has brushed against uncertainty. And in those hours, something subtle but unmistakable occurred: the hierarchy shifted.
The things that normally command attention — strategy, leverage, status, growth — went silent. They didn’t disappear; they simply lost their urgency. In their place stood something far more elemental: connection.
Afterwards, my son‑in‑law — strong, athletic, rarely given to abstraction — said quietly, “It does certainly change your perspectives on life.” He wasn’t being poetic. He was stating a fact. Proximity to fragility reorders value.
Around the same time, Flesh was working on me.
On its surface, Szalay’s novel traces the life of István, a Hungarian man who moves from modest beginnings into wealth, access, power — and eventually back toward something like solitude. It could be read as a rags‑to‑riches‑to‑rags narrative, but that reading is insufficient.
Flesh asks harder questions: What drives a life? What makes it worth living? What ultimately breaks it?
It is tempting to describe the novel as an exploration of masculinity: its silences, its codes, its contortions. That is certainly present. But Szalay is doing something more unsettling: he is exploring interiority, the inner life beneath performance.
Interiority is not simply emotion. It is the private psychological climate within a person: the thoughts unspoken, the contradictions unintegrated, the rationalizations constructed to make movement feel meaningful.
István moves constantly: economically, geographically, socially, romantically. Yet he struggles to articulate himself. His replies are minimal: “Yeah.” “Okay.” Action precedes reflection. Motion precedes emotion. He exists intensely in his body — desire, violence, sex, risk — yet remains curiously detached from the consequences of those movements. The body becomes both his vitality and his potential ruin. Szalay never condemns him, but he refuses to rescue him from himself.
The result is disquieting. István is not a villain. He is not even extraordinary. He is recognizable: shaped by appetite, ambition, contingency, buffeted by forces beyond his control. And in the end, the novel circles back: he finds himself living alone with his mother, externally resembling his beginnings but internally altered. Experience has marked him — edifying and tragic in equal measure.
That circularity lingers. Economic ascent does not guarantee existential coherence. Success does not ensure intimacy. Access does not resolve isolation.
Reading Flesh while watching medical uncertainty unfold in a hospital room created an uncomfortable symmetry.
In Szalay’s world, it takes proximity to death — the immediacy of war — to render existence vivid for István. In mine, it took childbirth complications. Different contexts. Same mechanism.
Mortality clarifies. It strips performance. It exposes what is primary.
In those hours of waiting, no one asked about net worth. No one referenced professional accomplishments. No one negotiated positioning. There was only a young woman in pain, a child entering the world, and the simple, fierce desire that they both be safe. And something in that simplicity indicts our normal preoccupations.
In the same week, I found myself in a distressing argument with someone important to me. The timing was almost ironic. I had been reflecting on fragility, perspective, the hierarchy of connection, and yet ego still surfaced. Insight did not automatically translate into restraint. Knowing what matters did not prevent sharpness.
Which was sobering.
Because literature can illuminate interiority. A crisis can clarify priorities. But application is daily work. The distance between knowing and embodying is where character is formed — or eroded.
It is easy to identify the antihero in fiction. It is harder to confront smaller versions of him within ourselves.
Szalay’s István drifts not because he is malicious but because he lacks integration. His inner life remains underdeveloped relative to his outer life. He acquires experience but struggles to metabolize it. That is not merely a literary problem. It is a modern one.
We are highly trained in external optimization — career advancement, financial accumulation, social positioning, performance metrics. But the cultivation of interior depth receives far less disciplined attention. And yet when cycles turn — and they always do — interior depth is what absorbs the shock.
If identity is built primarily on ascent, descent becomes destabilizing. If masculinity is defined by control, vulnerability feels annihilating. If desire substitutes for devotion, intimacy fragments.
The question is not whether motion will occur. It will. The question is whether interiority can keep pace with motion.
Perhaps that is the quiet warning embedded in Flesh. Not that ambition is futile. Not that desire is corrupt. But that movement without integration creates drift. That appetite without reflection becomes hollow. That ascent without humility risks isolation.
In the hospital room, nothing external could be leveraged. No negotiation could accelerate biology. No status could purchase certainty. What remained was relational exposure. And exposure reveals the hierarchy.
The best life is not the most optimized life. It is the most integrated one — a life in which ambition does not eclipse intimacy, performance does not substitute for presence, ego is recognized before it fractures connection, and perspective alters behaviour rather than merely rhetoric.
There is a temptation to romanticize fragility — to treat moments of crisis as moral instruction. But fragility does not automatically ennoble. It simply clarifies. It shows us what we would lose. And by showing us what we would lose, it reveals what we truly value.
That revelation is neutral. What we do with it determines whether we grow or simply resume momentum.
Szalay’s circular structure suggests that experience alone does not guarantee transformation. One may return to where one began — materially altered, psychologically marked — but not necessarily integrated. That possibility should trouble us.
Because life is cyclical. Fortunes reverse. Bodies age. Institutions shift. Influence wanes. Children become parents. The illusion of linear ascent is precisely that, an illusion.
If the hierarchy remains distorted, each cycle amplifies the distortion. If the hierarchy is reordered, each cycle deepens coherence.
My son‑in‑law’s sentence continues to echo: “It does certainly change your perspectives on life.” The question is not whether perspective shifts. It will. The question is whether perspective reorganizes action — whether it recalibrates ego, moderates conflict, reorders ambition, deepens interiority.
A Booker Prize–winning novel cannot fix a life. A hospital scare cannot permanently eliminate ego. A difficult argument cannot single‑handedly refine character. But together, they can interrupt drift. They can expose the gap between motion and meaning. They can ask — quietly but insistently — what drives your life, what makes it worth living, and what might break it.
In the end, cycles will continue. Rags to riches to rags. Strength to fragility to gratitude. Clarity to ego to repair.
What endures through those cycles is not the speed of ascent. It is the depth of integration. It is the cultivation of interior life equal to external achievement. It is the disciplined protection of connection in real time.
When perspective shifts — and it inevitably will — the hierarchy becomes visible. The only real question is whether we are willing to live according to it.
