“Surreal,” “weird,” “bizarre” are the “new normal,” itself now banal. “Crazy” is the daily news—ludicrous as ever. Conservatives claim they’ll set things straight, liberals whine.
So what else is new—what happened to the future? Thought leaders insist freezing the body at death buys time for immortality. No matter: death isn’t final; atoms and molecules reconfigure—or digitize. Physics is said to show we can be dead and alive at once, depending on how you look at it—already in parallel universes, with four or five dimensions. Billionaires fund plans for a colony on Mars with quantum life-support (“Athena”).
Back in our world, Strangely True is “strangely true.” Capital letters are shouting—or quaint—exclamations bark. Orwell’s doublethink (“2 + 2 = 5”) makes straight talk seem old-fashioned. Uncool. Capital-T Truth is cast as aggressive, white, “Eurocentric,” anthropocentric. Pronouns become weapons in the promise to restore masculinity.
And so it goes: when nothing is strange, everything is flat. Texting is the new literacy: LOL the period, u/ur the subject. Punk ends up on the runway while Starbucks serves avocado toast. The unconventional becomes conventional. Difference does not dominate; imitation does. As one poet puts it, “There is no elsewhere to underwrite our existence.”
Poet Philip Larkin wrote in “The Importance of Elsewhere”:
Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,
Strangeness made sense.
The salt rebuff of speech,
Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:
Once that was recognized, we were in touch …
An Englishman in Ireland finds a paradoxical sense of belonging in what is foreign. The “salt rebuff of speech” and the “draughty streets” mark him as different, yet through that difference, he feels welcome. Back in England, the customs are his own—and that’s the problem. The familiar closes in. With no elsewhere to steady him, he feels pressed to conform.
The poem suggests elsewhere is not optional but essential. Only against the unfamiliar do we catch a glimpse of who we are. The strange gives shape to the self; without it, identity sinks into habit. That’s why good writing—or any true art—throws us off balance. It prompts us to reexamine what we thought we knew.
We never see our own faces, only their reflection—backward. The most familiar sight is also the strangest. Our self is no different: only through strangeness do we know it.
Cultural critic Nadia Asparouhova, in Antimemetics, sharpens the point: some of the most consequential ideas are least likely to take hold. They lack the catchiness of memes, yet without them, we risk sameness that flattens thought. Had Isaac Newton written a memoir, it might have been called I Hope I Really Pissed You Off. Ignored, mocked, then celebrated—his story is the cliché of genius, practically a meme itself.
Strangeness is not only cultural or personal but intellectual. The insights that unsettle are the ones that get silenced. To welcome them is to resist the drift toward convention, where everything sounds the same. Life is strange. Once in a while, what resists the crowd still carries the day.
So strangely true can become Strangely True. Polarization runs wild when we deny the strangeness in ourselves and project it onto others. Strangeness isn’t going anywhere. It shows up wearing someone else’s face. What else is new?
G.K. Chesterton wrote about how “the whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” What we bring back is a transformed way of seeing. Without it, home is dull.
We don’t need to live in another universe, go to Mars, or visit Ireland. We are strange enough right where we are. Each of us is unique—and that is strangely true. Nobody is normal when everyone is different. Even at home, our differences mean we are never entirely alone.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes.” (Walt Whitman)
What is new is still coming. Sometimes it makes sense.
Notes and reading
Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (1964), 15–16. Includes “The Importance of Elsewhere,” where difference creates belonging.
Nadia Asparouhova, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading (2025). Writer on internet culture. Some of the most consequential ideas are hard to share.
Isaac Newton - Innovation and Controversy, Peter Rowlands (2018), 1.1. Newton ended up praised and pampered, but spent much of his time quarreling although no one could have tried harder to avoid argument.
G.K. Chesterton - “The Riddle of the Ivy,” Tremendous Trifles (2012 edition), 163. Chesterton explores philosophical principles in everyday life, using ordinary events to illustrate deeper matters.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, in Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (Library of America, 1996), 87.
Also:
René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes (2014). Paraphrase: imitation collapses difference; the strange is scapegoated, and rivalry resolved, sometimes in blood, rarely in peace.
Correction: The reflection in my last post originally appeared in the United Church of Christ’s Daily Devotional, a daily resource of prayer and reflection. I’m grateful to Mary Luti and the UCC for consent to share it here. Readers can learn more and subscribe (free).
Thank you for your writing. I feel you trying to expand perspective and hold a still point at the same time. This is difficult work. I appreciate that you are willing to bring to light different poles or opposites that need each other. If we go too far to one side or the other we end up hurting each other. Please keep writing! I appreciate you helping expand my perspective. Sending you much kindness.