The Radiance

The narrator, who shares similarities with the author Akhtar, experiences a profound change after a severe accident. While recovering from a coma caused by a pickup truck hitting him during a bike ride, he notices the world appearing lit from within and bathed in silence. This new perception is accompanied by a loss of sexual function. The transformation deepens after his cousin Tanveer reveals a disturbing family secret about his father. These changes alter his perception of reality and his own mind, leading him to question his previous understanding of identity and consciousness.

The narrator reflects on his career as a writer, highlighting his preference for fantasy over factual reality. He admits that his attachment to illusion often delayed his acceptance of truth, which usually came through painful humiliations. His early experiences in theater taught him valuable lessons about audience feedback, as he learned to improve his work by responding to criticism, failed jokes, and audience reactions like walkouts. Despite the financial security offered by teaching jobs in academia, he chose to remain a freelance writer, believing that performing without a safety net was the only way to grow as an artist.

During the summer of 2014, when Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson (a suburb of St. Louis), the narrator took a teaching position at a university in St. Louis. He sublet an apartment near Dred Scott’s grave and taught playwriting to a small group of students in a dimly lit room. He found their responses overly managed and opaque compared to the clarifying disinterest of a paying audience. Without audience feedback, he realized how little he truly understood about his craft. He ended the workshop by urging his students to get their work in front of real audiences, emphasizing that art is a form of commerce and that audiences must feel owed pleasure for their payment.

A month after the transformative evening with his cousin, Lucie Neroponte, a friend and college professor, calls the narrator to offer him a teaching position. She explains that a creative writing section, originally taught by a memoirist who suffered a mental breakdown, needs a replacement. The narrator is surprised and initially embarrassed by the offer, as he had previously criticized teaching. Lucie reassures him that teaching can be rewarding, especially when working with exceptional students. She also jokes about the college president’s unconventional views, including his use of outdated terms like Moslem and his interest in Mozart.

Lucie describes the narrator as bored, but he feels the opposite. For three days after his cousin’s revelation, he experiences a state of luminous flawlessness, where everything appears perfect and unblemished, including his own mind. He begins to perceive his mind as a thing separate from his head, localizing it near his chest. This new perspective brings emotional changes such as greater patience, openness, and emotional availability. He wonders whether this shift indicates a different kind of mind or merely a displacement of the same mind, and whether the mind is no longer an enemy but something else entirely.

During his final year of college, the narrator encountered a paper by British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott titled The Mind and Its Relation to the Psyche-Soma. The paper includes a passage that intrigued him: "The mind tends to become localized by the individual in the head because it is an enemy, that is to say, for control of it." Winnicott’s idea that the mind is seen as an enemy and localized in the head resonated with the narrator, who had always associated his mind with his head. Decades later, after his transformative experience, he revisits Winnicott’s work to explore whether his new perception of the mind in his chest reflects a fundamental change or merely a shift in localization.

The narrator meets Mischa Morris, the college president, at an Italian restaurant across the river from campus. Morris is nearly ninety years old but appears younger, with thick white hair and a distinctive style. He is preparing a seminar on rescue operas, specifically Lodoïska by Cherubini, and mentions Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio. Morris reads a passage from the narrator’s own book and praises it, showing interest in his reliance on audience feedback. The narrator finds Morris’s unconventional views and mannerisms intriguing, despite Lucie’s warning about his outdated language and focus on Mozart.