The narrator of The Radiance shares Akhtar’s name and much of his life. After leaving New York for a small Hudson Valley town, he ends up getting hit by a pickup truck during a bike ride. When he awakens from the subsequent coma, something is different: things appear lit from within and bathed in silence; and he’s impotent. The luminous state has since deepened after an evening during which his cousin, Tanveer, disclosed a terrible family secret about his father. Lucie Neroponte, the friend who calls him in the passage below, teaches at a local college; an essay about the affair she had with her own professor when she was twenty made her name.
*
Like Lucie, I had qualms about teaching, though mine had nothing to do with eros. Rather, I worried that the security of a job in the academy might dull me as a writer. By my mid-twenties, I’d begun to see a pattern: an inclination toward fantasy over fact, a tendency to cling to illusion long past the point any evidence could justify. Reality always won—usually after the painful humiliations to which my delusions led. I was too compelled by the comforts of my imagination—which was, of course, why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. But those same attachments, I came to see, kept my work from feeling real.
Early experiences in the theater proved salubrious. Humiliation was a reliable corrective, and I found that the ruthless impersonality of a paying audience made the shame bearable. I learned from jokes that didn’t work and story threads that didn’t track. Mid-show walkouts and anemic applause hurt, yes, but not so much that I couldn’t learn to heed them. My skits and plays got better. I grew as a writer. As my peers took on teaching jobs with health care, pension plans, and just enough to live on, I was tempted to follow. But I worried about what I might lose in finding protection from the forced encounter with audiences. Plying my trade in front of paying crowds without a safety net, I concluded, was the only way forward.
It was a path that would be protracted and painful, and all the “usual words,” to quote James Baldwin, applied to my struggles too: “discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” I endured—and in my case, it was only by the grace of what I gleaned from audiences that I found my way. The value of crowdsourced wisdom, then, was the only lesson I felt qualified to share when I finally accepted an offer to teach young playwrights at a university in St. Louis.
It was the summer Michael Brown was shot; a few miles north of campus, Ferguson was ablaze. I sublet a place within walking distance of Dred Scott’s grave. Twice a week, I rode the bus to a dim room, barely larger than the table around which my students and I sat reading aloud from their work. I couldn’t get past how managed and opaque our responses were compared to the clarifying disinterest of a paying audience. Without the help of an audience, we all discovered how little I actually knew about what I did. When the workshop ended, my parting remarks were an apology by way of exhortation: My weaknesses as a teacher, I explained, were perhaps best seen as extensions of my strength as a writer: my trust in the public. I urged them to dispense with the class critiques and get their work in front of paying crowds. The paying part was essential. Our art was not a gift but a form of commerce. To know the audience’s truth, I told them, it had to feel owed pleasure for what it had paid. When I left St. Louis at the summer’s end, I didn’t see myself teaching again.
More than a half dozen years later, and just a month after that dark and miraculous evening with my cousin Tanveer, Lucie called to ask if I might be interested in teaching a newly orphaned section of creative writing at the college. I was surprised to hear myself tell her that I was—and embarrassed to admit it.
“Embarrassed? Why?”
“Who’d want to teach after listening to you talk about it?” I heard how harsh it sounded. “Sorry—that came out wrong.”
“No, I get it. I complain too much. But it’s the closest thing I’ve ever felt to a calling.” She paused. “A good student, a really good student, that’s still the best part. It happens. Not often, but it does. So don’t take me too seriously.”
“What’s the section?”
“Seminar in autofiction. Which is how you came up at lunch with the college president. But I’m sure you can teach whatever you want.” She said that the original instructor, a memoirist I admired, was in the hospital after what sounded like a mental breakdown. Lucie wasn’t supposed to know, which meant I wasn’t supposed to know either.
“I hope she’ll be okay,” I said.
“Did you read her last memoir? About her Hashimoto’s?”
“I thought it was great.”
“My guess? She’ll get a memoir out of this too.”
I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did.
Lucie went on: “So here they are, a week from winter break and no one to take over the section next semester. The president’s gotten involved. When I brought you up, he got excited. I told him I thought there was a chance you might consider it. You’ve seemed bored lately.”
“Bored?”
“Am I wrong? You’re still not writing.”
“I’m not.”
“And still dealing with some trouble…… down there?” In keeping Stanford apprised of my urological issue—no nerve damage; the doctor believed the problem was psychological—I hadn’t necessarily expected Lucie would be in the loop. “Okay, so maybe boredom’s not the right word. De-cathected?”
I could hear her smiling.
“I feel like this is confirmation I was right to be embarrassed,” I said.
“Why?”
“I’m so de-cathected I’ve got nothing better to do than take up the thing you complain about all the time.”
She laughed.
“If it gets you to try something new, it’s a good thing, right? Let me put you in touch with Mischa. Is that okay? He’s going to want to meet—get a feel for you.”
“College president?”
“And warn you not to fuck students.”
“Lucie. Jesus—”
“Which I know is unlikely—even if you were better cathected. But the only real problems Mischa’s had of late have come from semester replacements. An art teacher who unknowingly hooked up with a student on Grindr. And a Muslim biology prof who married one of the undergrads.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Apparently her parents proposed the match when she talked about how much she liked his class.”
“How do I get the rest of that story?”
“They both left school, so you probably won’t. I told Mischa you were a real Boy Scout, but I’m sure he’s still going to want to sound you out.”
“Bored Boy Scout.”
“Bored cisgender straight Muslim Boy Scout—if we’re being precise.”
“If that doesn’t scare him off.”
“On the contrary. He said he could really use a ‘Moslem’ in creative writing.”
“Moslem?”
“I know, I know. Still, he’s an interesting guy.”
“Still living in the nineteenth century. At least when it comes to Moslems.”
“Eighteenth. When it comes to most things.”
“I’m intrigued.”
“Just don’t ask him about Mozart. Unless you’re not in a hurry.”
*
Where Lucie spied boredom, my experience was something closer to the opposite. For three days after that evening with my cousin Tanveer, everything had been enveloped in a luminous, self-evident flawlessness. No things were wrong; each thing was right—even the blight on the dying ash trees by the pond, even the political tumult on the radio. The mind, too, was a thing, and no less unblemished than the purple finch I found perched atop the back of the porch Adirondack chair on most mornings as I made coffee. To see the mind as a thing was to feel the endless motion inside it—like the finch, who, perched and still, lived by the flutter of the heart racing in its breast. That I was not this endless movement through my mind had never been so clear to me, but I could see why I had confused myself with it all my life. Even this confusion, in its way, felt correct.
One more thing about the mind:
During my last year of coursework in college, I encountered a paper by British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, enigmatically titled “The Mind and Its Relation to the Psyche-Soma.” It contained a passage whose meaning neither I nor anyone else in class—including the professor—could convincingly decipher. And yet it compelled me, and I read and reread it until I could quote it verbatim:
The question has to be asked why the head should be the place inside which the mind tends to become localized by the individual, and I do not know the answer. I feel that an important point is the individual’s need to localize the mind because it is an enemy, that is to say, for control of it.
It was true. My mind had always felt synonymous with my head. And further: I’d always assumed “I” was that mind in that head. To me, these were one and the same. Why Winnicott found this localization strange—and why it led him to label the mind an enemy—was confounding. But rather than dismiss it as evocative nonsense, as some classmates did, I sensed in these two sentences a hidden promise that drew me back thirty years later, once the brightness of my post-Tanveer fever dream finally began to dim.
For even as that miraculous half-week faded, one thing lingered: the curious seeing with my chest, which soon deepened into a sense of an “I” residing not in my head but just above my sternum—in something like a lightless incandescence around the heart. This new center brought with it a suite of affects that apparently signaled boredom to Lucie but which I experienced as a new emotional register: greater pliancy, patience, openness to others, slowness with myself, an availability I feared might seem sentimental. I’d played no part in these changes. And I worried (not just medically) what other uncertainties they presaged. Rereading Winnicott, I found myself wondering: Did this new localization in the chest denote a different kind of mind than before? Or was it the same mind, displaced? Did it mean the mind was no longer an enemy—or merely one of a different sort?
*
Two days later, I drove north to meet Mischa Morris, the college president. At an Italian restaurant across the river from campus where he’d suggested we meet for a late lunch, a grizzled hostess—her hand already reaching for a menu—heard his name and shoved the card back into its bin as she told me gruffly to follow.
Through a long room lined with empty tables she led me, up a staircase, through another dining area where the furniture had been pushed to the walls, to a table hidden behind a five-panel screen, where Morris sat hunched over a musical score, frowning, his thick, white hair, unruly, swept to one side of a head that was much larger than the rest of his lean body. Lucie had mentioned he was almost ninety years old, but he didn’t look it. He was dressed exactly as I’d expected from his pictures online: a patterned silk cravat clashing cheerfully with a dark sport coat and a louder madras shirt. Seeing us arrive, he looked up, removed the readers perched at the end of his meaty nose, and smiled.
“Thank you, Hope,” he purled in a mellifluous baritone to the hostess.
Hope grunted and left us.
As I sat, Morris gathered his pages: “Apologies for the mess—I lost track of time, as I’m wont to do when preparing a concert.”
“What’s the piece?” I asked.
“Cherubini, Lodoïska. I’m teaching a seminar in the rescue operas. Lodoïska is the first that matters. After Seraglio, of course.”
“Sorry—I’m not great with opera. Not that I don’t love it. Seraglio is?”
“Abduction from the Seraglio,” he replied with a graceful flick of his hand, dismissing my apology. “Mozart’s first real public triumph. You remember the scene from Amadeus when the emperor tells him there are too many notes?”
“Of course.”
“A memorable scene, though probably apocryphal,” he said. I smiled, remembering Lucie’s warning to me about Morris and Mozart. “A wonderful opera, performed less often now, alas, for reasons—well.” He stopped himself. “You see, the Viennese were finally free of the Turks at their gates. The culture was awash with the usual Moslem tropes: the veil, the harems, and so on.” I saw him, I thought, register whatever passed across my face at hearing that word again. “But the opera’s final dramatic gesture is a powerful counter-stereotype; no cruel despotic Turk was the pasha to Mozart. But, as his act of mercy doesn’t come until act three, it might as well not come at all, given the moral impatience of today’s audiences. Which reminds me–” He reached into a bag on the chair beside him, pulled out a copy of a book I recognized as my own, and opened it to a marked page. “Mm-hmm. Yes, that’s it,” he said and began to read aloud:
Like everything else, art, too, was drowning in ubiquitous anger. Every word, every gesture read as a pledge of allegiance to some community or creed. The politics of representation were ascendant, increasingly confused with the poetics of narrative craft.
“Well put. So well put, indeed.” He looked at me as he shut the book and set it on the table. “My dear man, you seem startled.”
“Or not sure how to react to being read to from my own work.”
Again, that graceful, dismissive toss of his fingers—the gesture, I now realized, of a conductor: “You put the matter with admirable sang-froid. Your passage is about the theater, of course, but you could have been writing about opera, about music . . .”
“Tenor of the times.”
He paused again, wagging his index finger—not at me, I thought, but at some invisible interlocutor he’d placed in my general vicinity: “Not that some real good hasn’t come of the pressure to be more cautious of what we say, how we think.”
“Think? Really? That too?”
Morris went quiet.
From behind the screen, a stooping server emerged with a notepad.
“The food here is wonderful,” Morris said, shifting. “Better than it has any right to be, honestly. The cacio e pepe is not to be missed, if that is your sort of thing.”
“Cacio e pepe sounds great.”
“Yes?” He seemed delighted. “Francis, cacio e pepe for my guest.”
Francis nodded. “The usual piccata for you, Maestro?”
“But lighter on the salt today than usual, if you’d let Hannah know. And maybe a dash fewer capers?”
Francis made a note and disappeared.
I was eyeing the ribbed screen between us and the rest of the dining room. Morris explained it was a sound-absorbing barrier. The restaurant’s owner, an opera lover and friend, had created the quiet corner for him during the height of the pandemic. Morris hadn’t been able to work at home while the campus was closed, and even now, with things getting back to normal, he still worked better here than in his office, despite its “truly fabulous” view of the river. As he gathered his score and stuffed it into a large leather satchel, Morris inquired about my experience teaching.
I told him about the summer I spent as an uninspired instructor of playwriting in St. Louis, which happened to be where Morris was born, two streets over from the house where T. S. Eliot had grown up. Morris brushed away my self-doubts as a teacher, but showed keen interest when I spoke about my reliance on the audience. Once again, Mozart came up—this time in the form of a disquisition I considered relegating to a footnote here, given the digression it would pose to a narrative still wending toward the main event. But because my moved response to Morris’s fanciful speech would be the seed of a bond between us, one relevant (however humbly) to the story ahead, I’ve kept the detour—if somewhat pruned:
“It can be a dangerous thing,” Morris began, “depending too much on the audience; I’m sure I don’t have to tell you. Thirty-five—he was thirty-five when he died, divine Mozart. So sudden, so breathless a death: that brief coma—and then gone. How could it be? After seasons of impossible energy, scarcely interrupted by illness—and then this? Limping into the end, bereft of all will to live?
“Rheumatic fever ailed the body, or bloodletting, or what have you. Pick your biographer and you’ll have your illness. Fine. But what was the immaterial cause? Loss of love. So said Elias, and so say I. Loss of a woman’s love he could believe in, and loss of the love Vienna once had for his music. Because, mind you, there has perhaps never been an artist more aware of the supernal nature of his gifts. He knew. Mozart knew what he was passing down to us. But tomorrow had no meaning for him. Only distinction today. He’d stepped away from court patronage into a market not able to support him—leaving him to rely on fickle Vienna, where the truly unpardonable sins were a useful book, a sensible discussion, and a bad meal. Where a man of quality was judged on his knowledge of the best dogs at the baiting ring. These were the capricious, shallow people to whom divine Mozart turned for the sustenance he needed. For a time he had both, the adoration of the capital and Constanze’s fidelity. I’m saying nothing novel in linking the loss of her love with Vienna’s rejection, crowded houses for Zauberflöte notwithstanding. She confessed—once he was dead—that she’d always admired her husband’s talent more than his person.
“But here’s the rub. This is why I caution you, my new friend—and I do hope we’ll be friends. It’s dangerous to put too much faith in the audience; even Constanze’s view of her own husband’s immeasurable talent rose and fell with the regard of others. When they believed in him, she did too. When they moved on, her heart did the same. A broken heart! That was the fatal ailment, I say—and all of it from faith mislaid in an audience unworthy of him. Of course, it’s foolish to compare ourselves to Mozart—yet the greatest artists can be lessons to us all. And the lesson I draw from Mozart’s heartbroken, untimely death is this: Though we must live by the grace, as you called it, of the public, we cannot, and must not, let them define us.”
__________________________________
From The Radiance by Ayad Akhtar. Used with permission of the publisher, Summit Books. Copyright © 2026 by Ayad Akhtar.
