September 27, 2026

	By Lauren Jackson

Good morning. Have you ever tried to describe a spiritual experience? If so, you’ve probably struggled to convey it — its force, its potency.

In today’s newsletter, I talk to one excellent writer who tried himself. His book blew me away.

Ayad Akhtar Erik Tanner for The New York Times

‘The Radiance’

The richness of spiritual experience often resists language. It’s a warning theologians and philosophers have long repeated: “To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote.

Ayad Akhtar, a novelist and playwright who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, ignored such advice. His new book, “The Radiance,” describes spiritual experience as it’s felt in the body — sublime illumination, startling awareness, technicolor revelation, perfect harmony, consuming despair. Akhtar charges right into the dark, mysterious continent of the soul.

The novel follows a writer and university lecturer, named after the author, who is hit by a truck while biking in upstate New York. As the character recovers, he begins to experience an enhanced world, one of possibility, connection and meaning. He feels inexplicable sensations in his arms, chest and internal organs. (His nerves are “consumed with silent smoldering.” He experiences “a rising shimmer” along his spine.) It’s unclear to the reader whether he is finding transcendence or going mad.

Akhtar also asks why we prize empirical knowledge over spiritual insight. This passage, in which one of the lecturer’s students questions him in his campus office, sums it up well:

“Do you believe in God?” Her tone shifted; earnestness glistened in her eyes. “It’s not that weird a question — is it?” she asked, lifting her hand up to her brow to shield her eyes from a burst of afternoon sun against the window behind me. “Maybe it is. I’m sorry.”

“No, no, it’s not. I mean, it might be a little above my pay grade, but … why are you asking?”

“Don’t you think it’s weird that we don’t ask it more? Why there’s something” — she touched the table again, then herself — “instead of nothing? … All these great books and art — what’s the point if we ignore the only question that matters?”

The novel squares its shoulders to that question. It is also one of the most ambitious attempts I have read at putting words to the inner life. So I spoke to Akhtar, 55, about the limits of language and what he learned writing this book.

“The Radiance” tackles many themes — the fine line between spiritual awakening and madness, campus politics and polarization. What, above all, would you say it’s about?

I was trying to find a language to articulate subjectivity. The experience of being a person in a body, with a mind, experiencing sensation and being sensitive to absorption in that experience. That seems to open up a different kind of intensity of experience. I read a lot of William James when I was writing the book, because he was engaged in a similar inquiry.

James said that experience defies expression, that “no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.” I’m curious what difficulties you ran into — technically, personally, professionally — as you tried to translate the ineffable into language.

I worried, obviously, that it would be unintelligible. The big thing that happened with this book on a technical level was that somehow the sentence changed for me. Sentence as a means of delivering a fixed meaning changed. Sentence seemed to become a way to open up a process of inquiry that could be continued into the next sentence. I remember reading about [John] Updike saying, every book teaches you how to write it. There was something about language and the way that language was operating for me that was new, and I was learning as I was doing it.

How long did it take you to write it? And what was your process?

About two years. I found myself writing in the present in a way that I maybe never had before. I would show up and think that I knew what I had to accomplish on a given day and I would start somewhere else entirely. Then find that somehow, in some other unexpected way, I had addressed the necessary stuff that I had to address. It was almost like the writing led me, and the writing also created its own openings.

That sounds to me almost spiritual, being guided by intuition. Did writing this book feel like a spiritual experience?

I paused to consider that word. It felt like an exercise in the unknown, which was an exercise of a certain kind of faith. And that faith was not faith with an object, but faith with a kind of living connection to an ongoing mystery.

Gale

The main character shares your name. Would you describe this book as autofiction?

I think this book is a kind of continued investigation. The entertainment model of consciousness, let’s call it — because that’s what the devices are training us to be attentive to: things that entertain us. There is something about the curation of the self or the presentation of the self that seems to be central to that orientation.

Folks read fiction these days and often ask you questions to try to figure out whether or not you are qualified to write the fiction you’re writing. So I wanted to just dispense with the category, because literature, whether it’s Nadezhda Mandelstam or Tolstoy, is actually a higher version of the truth. It’s not a documentary truth that we’re after.

Did you have an accident that inspired you to write this?

No. [The philosopher Michel de] Montaigne famously was thrown from a horse and ended up in a kind of three- to four-day beatitude after what he described as a near-death experience, but that may have been a ruptured spleen. And his life was changed by it. His perspective was changed by that. I needed a dramatic event that would create a rupture with daily reality and that was quick.

And do you feel like you’ve had some form of an inciting incident in your own life?

No question. It would be hard to write this book without some basis in experience. It would just be an exercise in fantasy. And honestly, I have to say, writing the book was its own version of the experience. All of it is kind of mixed up together — the fact, the fiction, the drawing on inspiration, the personal experience.

I want to talk about the fine line between spiritual experience and madness. Does the narrator cross that frontier at any point?

There’s this inherent tension between a triple-sourced objective reality and the subjective evidence of one’s own experience. I think about the “Phaedrus” by Plato, where Socrates talks about different kinds of divine madness. The poet exhibits a kind of divine madness, and so does the lover. I think the book in many ways is an exploration of a certain kind of madness, where inspiration and seeing connections and empathy and unitive experience are all not the norm. They’re a higher version of seeing, but they’re also a little crazy at the same time.

I spend a lot of time talking to people who are turning toward religion — like one of the characters in this book. Many of them say they struggle to navigate a world of fracturing and polarization, that they’re looking for answers, clarity, community, belief, belonging.

One of the hallmarks of our enlightenment-inflected, science-based civilization is a systematic narrowing of the band of accepted experiences as normal. The rhapsodic highs and the destructive lows are pathologized, or at least de-normalized.

So this young person who has a strong turn to religion in the book is trying to find enough space in herself where all of that can make sense. The modern university is not a place where that can happen. Maybe modernization is not a place where that can happen. Maybe only a cathedral, in her estimation, is a place that can have it.

This young woman asks her teacher about belief in God, and why the university seems to ignore “the only question that matters.” Is this the heart of what you’re trying to ask with this book?

In the modern university, those questions are off limits. In a post-religious secular model of knowledge, metaphysical issues are purely private issues. They may be of anthropological concern. They’re not a study of any personal concern.

This book feels like a criticism of that.

I would like to think that I didn’t write a tendentious book. But I am observing that higher education has seemed less and less a place to ask the biggest questions. The whole purpose of the Academy, when Plato started it, was the biggest questions.

The main character loses his libido, in an imposition of an asceticism that wasn’t chosen by him. I’m curious to understand more about how libido and love function in this book.

The book is structured around three visions of love. Eros, Storge, and Agape. Seeing others as objects of desire is a fundamentally different orientation than experiencing others as objects with their autonomy. The erotic impulse is somehow an interference.

Just as you experienced an expansion as a writer, I’m curious if you experienced an extension as a seeker in writing this book.

No question. I only wonder about that word seeking, because I’m not sure it reflects the radically empirical orientation that I have, which is that I’m not seeking something. I’m trying to be attentive to what is. The book is trying to find a language for something that’s already here.

Akhtar also wrote an excellent essay in The Atlantic about dreaming as spiritual experience. I recommend you read it. (There is a paywall.)

Reading list

I asked the author for a shortlist of books that he consulted while working on “The Radiance.”

Cambridge University Press

Martha Nussbaum, “The Fragility of Goodness”
Hildegard von Bingen, “Scivias”
Ibn Arabi, “The Meccan Revelations”
Kay Redfield Jamison, “Mind on Fire”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Scarlet Letter”
Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”
Henry Adams, “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres”

What I’m …

Fuzhen Temple in the Wudang Mountains. Achmad Ibrahim/Associated Press

Coveting: A visit to China’s sacred Wudang Mountains, which Taoist pilgrims are visiting. (The Seattle Times)

Visiting: Rome. I was deeply moved by “The Calling of Saint Matthew,” by Caravaggio. It was Pope Francis’s favorite painting, and I saw it after Laura Mullins, a Believing reader, told me to go on a “Caravaggio crawl” across Rome. I was struck by how each of the characters in the scene responds to the light source in the painting. Some shirk from it, some behold it. There’s a metaphor in that.

Laura also said: “A normal day for me includes believing, skepticism and atheism.” Same! See you next week.

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The editor of Believing is Jodi Rudoren. Harrison Hill is our photo editor.

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