HeyJaredVita Contemplativa
Premonitions and reckonings. Orpheus and Eros. An antidote to positivity.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 4
- Latest publication
- Sep 2, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 3, 2026
Latest issues
I Do Believe in America (opens the original)
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The Demoiselle's Oceansong (opens the original)
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I promise I’ll soon be back with regular programming — I’ve been somewhat buried under my writing (ironic, I know). By now it’s something of a Vita Contemplativa tradition, whenever I get especially waterlogged like this, to share a poem with you all, in the gap before I return. I hope this one doesn’t drive too many people away. Speaking of which, greetings and a big thank you to all the new subscribers who’ve been pouring in the past few weeks! If you haven’t already, you can read my recent re
Dry Dwellers of Eternity (opens the original)
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This piece was rejected (implicitly or explicitly) by ~10 magazines, so in the time I spent pitching it, the zeitgeist of the Backrooms surely passed it by. Yet the film remains a seriously strange success — and the idea of the Backrooms itself (as a creepypasta, and beyond) has yet to be written about in a way that really investigates its relationship to our diminishing, impoverished aesthetic world. This is my attempt. [N.B. Due to a few comments, I want to be clear this is an explanation as t
The Secret of the Universe (opens the original)
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My most recent post ended up being the most successful post I’ve ever made on Substack, attracting an alarming amount of eyeballs and subscribers. This worries me. I’m considering deleting Vita Contemplativa forever. But rather than being so drastic, I think perhaps I’ll just pose a few questions.What is the universe?What is the universe like? This is what the universe is like:The universe is perfectly simple and direct. The instrument the universe was written on plays mostly quarter notes, stru
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