Reading Between the Lines

A thing of the past.

Agnes Martin, “Tremolo”, 1962.

Before we get to this week’s essay, two important notes:

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My Miseducation

I first learned of the phrase “reading between the lines” as a 6th grader. I was exhilarated by the idea that what a writer didn’t say—what he only implied, or the little Easter eggs he left for the reader—might matter even more than the words themselves. For the first time, writing became fun.

Within several months I was punished for essays that I’d written for that same teacher. He made me stay after school and write essays about my essays—because he suspected that I was writing about him…between the lines.

In my sophomore year of high school, I was suspended for something I didn’t do but had been made a convenient scapegoat for. (Now you see, reader, why I write about some of these things.)

There was not even a way for me to prove my innocence. While I didn’t officially get “kicked out” of that school (that makes for a slightly better story when I tell it in front of audiences…), I told my mom that I refused to walk back into a school that had unjustly punished me, and I demanded an apology from the principal. Of course, he wouldn’t give me one.

After a week of holding out, she finally let me transfer schools. So yes, he might as well have kicked me out.

This early experience not only shattered my illusions about education. I was the same eager learner, voracious reader, lover of writing, etc that I am today, just bored out of my mind. But I also began to believe that the world was not my friend.

In hindsight, this probably planted the seeds of what would be, years later, my Christian conversion: I saw that systems in this world, governed by sin, are designed to kill those who don’t perpetuate them. There’s more to say there than I can do justice to this evening.

But you may be able to imagine why, much later in life, I was drawn to what the political philosopher Leo Strauss called the exoteric and esoteric modes of writing. Exoteric meaning the surface-level teaching—the part meant for everyone to read and understand. Esoteric meaning the hidden teaching—the deeper meaning intended for the careful reader, tucked between the lines.

At the time, it was a revelation: some writers speak twice at once, and part of the craft is learning how to listen.

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While I’ve written some Straussian things, I don’t consider myself a Straussian. I’ve also seen some mind-bending, idiotic, ineffective, generally cracked conspiracy-theory-type stuff justified as “Straussian” readings of texts. Taken to its logical extreme, you can just imply that what a writer really meant was X, Y, Z.

I also know how out of control this stuff can get because I’ve seen people interpret my very own writing in the completely wrong way, divorced from my intent, implying that I ‘secretly’ wanted to say things which I certainly did not. That, in itself, should be a major warning flag against Straussian readings. (Of the 10 or so times this has been done to me, nine have been completely wrong.)

I’ve had to dig deeper to search for answers to both my writing and reading approach.

Between Strauss and Diogenes

The Straussian approach sits uneasily beside the ancient practice of parrhesia. If Straussian writing protects the truth by wrapping it in layers, parrhesia exposes the self by stripping those layers away. It is fearless speech: the willingness to speak plainly, to stake one’s person on the truth without the safety of indirection or the escape hatch of plausible deniability. Diogenes of Sinope, the contemporary of Plato who told Alexander the Great to “stand out of my light”, would be the quintessential example of this alternative.

So what falls between Strauss and Diogenes? Does virtue lie in the middle in this particular case?

For Aquinas, the virtue that falls between Strauss and Diogenes is veracity—the habit of speaking the truth in the right way, neither hiding it behind elaborate screens nor hurling it like a weapon. Veracity disciplines speech so that it is both honest and ordered toward the good.

But I believe we are facing a much deeper problem.

There are literally no lines to “read between” anymore. Straussianism is dead. Artificial Intelligence will kill it. It has access to more verbal context than we do. Save for those who resort to physical handshakes, winks, or hand-delivered letters, the A.I. will uncover the textual secrets.

And A.I. is changing the way we think about language altogether. There are literally no ‘lines’—the next character or word in a sequence is generated by tokens, not by interior intention.

A large language model doesn’t hunt for hidden meanings or authorial motives; it predicts the most statistically likely next token based on patterns across billions of words. Meaning, for the model, is not something concealed or revealed—it is something computed. And in a world where language becomes a probabilistic stream rather than a stable field of signals and silences, the old Straussian playbook loses its footing. There is no “between” for the model to read, because the text is no longer a fixed object. It is an ever-expanding sequence of tokens chosen to minimize surprise.

And what of Diogenes in this world? What of parrhesia? The issue here is that parrhesia is now most closely associated with being an edgelord—saying shocking things. It is the mantle worn by provocateurs who care little about truth and more about speech that will be noticed, people who want to speak or write in a way that will provide some titillating surge of energy to those in search of vitality.

It is a counterfeit parrhesia. But it is still superior to the machine. The edgelord, for all his faults, speaks from desire; the model speaks only from probability.