I dreamt of Alasdair MacIntyre last night. He looked exactly like his Wikipedia photo, except that he was wearing the old blue jacket he always wore when I knew him, with a grey turtleneck underneath. I was sitting down, reading or writing something about Machiavelli: it was either a philosophy conference or a bus station, I’m not sure which.

He walked in, smiling this weird Mona Lisa smile. He seemed happy to see me, or maybe just happy to be back. My first impulse was to ask him what the Afterlife Dept was doing about the genocide in Gaza or ICE, but I didn’t. It somehow seemed inappropriate to ask, like those were my obsessions, not the afterlife’s. You might as well ask a retiree to solve problems at work. Gauche. I hugged him, something that neither of us would have done in real life. I was sort of shocked: bro was ripped. For a second I wondered what part of the afterlife they’d sent him to. Did Mac get misdirected to Hell and spend the last couple of months working out in the yard? Stuff you never expect. The dream ended there. He was inscrutably silent the whole time.