I. A Night Shift in Maine

A night in 1972. The Northeast of the United States, Maine, a small town near Bangor.

A twenty-five-year-old man named Stephen King had just finished his shift. He was wearing work clothes — blue overalls, washed out by the laundry. He had just done eight hours of work — at an industrial laundry, washing hospital sheets and restaurant tablecloths.

He drove home. Home was a trailer — the kind of cheap, movable, rectangular house common in working-class America. The trailer was in a trailer park, dozens of similar trailers around it. His wife Tabitha and their two small children were inside.

His wife also worked — day shift at a doughnut chain. The two of them rotated shifts because they could not afford childcare. What they earned together barely covered rent, food, and electricity. There were several days a month when they decided not to answer the phone — the phone company was calling about overdue bills.

They had no money to take their two kids to a doctor — when their daughter had an ear infection, they bought over-the-counter medicine and tried to suppress it.

Stephen King was teaching high school English by day — he had just finished his first year, salary $6,400 for the year. His night shift at the laundry was supplemental.

He came home. He did not go to sleep. He sat at the kitchen table inside the trailer — a plastic table, a few knife marks on its surface. He took out a few pages from a box — cheap manuscript paper he used. He sat down. He began to write.

He was writing a novel. The story was about a high school girl. The girl was abused by her mother and humiliated by her classmates. The girl discovered she had telekinesis — she could move things by thinking.

He wrote a few pages. He did not like what he had written. He thought the story would not work — no point, no direction, no market. He balled up the pages and threw them in the trash.

He went to sleep.

The next morning his wife Tabitha, cleaning the kitchen, opened the trash. She saw the balled-up pages. She took them out, smoothed them flat, read them.

After reading, she waited until Stephen King woke up. She said to him —

"You should keep writing this."

Stephen King did not believe her at the time. He had been writing stories for several years — he had sold a few short stories to the kind of low-end men's magazine left in barbershops, getting a few dozen dollars apiece — but no novel had been accepted. Several manuscripts piled up in the corner of the trailer. A few more rejections and he might give up writing.

But Tabitha said: keep writing.

He kept writing.

He used the few pages she had pulled from the trash as the beginning of that novel. He wrote a little each day. He still worked the night shift at the laundry. He still came home from teaching English. Tabitha still worked and looked after the children. The two of them rotated taking care of the kids.

Months later he finished.

Today many readers know that novel. It is called Carrie.

He sent it to several publishers in New York. Doubleday accepted. In early 1974 they sent King a contract — an advance of $2,500. This was more money than he had ever seen at one time (his teaching salary was $6,400 a year; the advance was several months' pay).

He signed the contract.

A few months later Doubleday sold the paperback rights — to a company called New American Library — for four hundred thousand dollars. By contract the author received half — two hundred thousand dollars.

This was 1974. Adjusted for today, about $1.3 million.

Stephen King no longer went to the laundry. He no longer taught high school English. The girl he had written, sitting in the trailer — that high school girl humiliated by her classmates — gave him and Tabitha and their two children a different kind of life.

That year he was twenty-six.

From then on he never stopped writing.

Today he is seventy-eight. He has written more than sixty novels and several hundred short stories. His books have sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide. He is the most-read American novelist of the past fifty years.

He still writes every day. He is still in Maine — though now in a house, not a trailer, that he later bought. But the way he gets up each morning is not essentially different from 1972 — he sits at a desk, he writes.

He is still alive. His work is ongoing. He is still making choices.

II. Carrie

What is special about Carrie. What kind of novel it is.

On its surface it is a supernatural horror story. A high school girl named Carrie White, whose mother is a religious extremist — her mother believes menstruation is God's curse on women, her mother shuts Carrie in a closet to make her pray, her mother does not let Carrie know what menstruation is, her mother beats Carrie.

Carrie reaches high school. In the showers after gym class she has her first period. She thinks she is dying. Her classmates, a group of girls, instead surround her laughing. They throw tampons at her, they film her, they shout "pig" at her in the hallways.

Carrie has no friends.

But she discovers she has an ability — she can move things with her thinking. At first the ability is small, only able to make a book turn its own pages, a mirror crack on its own. Later it grows large, large enough to make a car start by itself.

Then the school prom comes. A girl named Sue Snell, who wants to do something good for Carrie, persuades her boyfriend Tommy Ross to take Carrie. Carrie goes. That night she wears a dress her mother forbade her to wear. She dances with one of the most handsome boys in the high school. That night she has a few hours not being mocked, a few hours that are finally her own.

Then on the prom floor someone — a group of classmates — plays a "joke." They pour a bucket of pig blood over Carrie's head. The metal bucket, which had been holding the blood, falls — and strikes Tommy on the head. The edge of the bucket fractures his skull.

Carrie stands at the center of the prom. She is covered in blood. But everyone is laughing.

Carrie's last clear thought, before losing her mind, is that Tommy — the only one who was kind to her, who treated her with real warmth — has had his skull broken open and is dead.

She uses her telekinesis to lock the prom hall. She uses it to tear the wires open and let the leaking electricity meet the spilled water. She kills everyone at the prom — hundreds of high school students, teachers; her mother is also killed by her later. She herself dies too. Only Sue survives, because Sue had not been at the prom and had never bullied Carrie.

The story ends here.

Today this sounds like a simple horror story — a girl who was bullied takes telekinetic revenge.

But what Stephen King did is more complex than that.

Throughout the book Carrie appears as a person with a specific interior. She is not a monster, she is not evil. She is a girl whose mother abused her all her life, whose classmates humiliated her all her life, who never had a friend, who that night for the first time wore her own dress and danced, who that night for the first time believed she might have a future — and was then completely destroyed by a "joke" her classmates played.

After reading, the reader sympathizes with Carrie. Not with those she killed.

This was revolutionary in American popular fiction —

Stephen King made a person society overlooks the protagonist.

Not a hero. Not a famous person. Not a wealthy person. Not a beautiful person. A person treated by everyone around her as a tool, as a joke, as not existing.

King gave her the position of being told. The whole book is told from her viewpoint — her pain, her longing, the feeling on that night while dancing, the sensation in the moment of being soaked in pig blood, the unnamable in the moment of seeing Tommy's broken skull.

Popular horror fiction had not done this before. The tradition of horror was to tell from outside the victim — the reader following a normal person who meets something not normal, fearing along with that normal person. King turned the viewpoint around — the reader, from inside a person defined as "not normal," tells her story.

After reading, the reader cannot push Carrie away. After reading, Carrie's interior is real — the reader acknowledges that the girl mocked by her classmates has a specific interior as real as their own.

This is the central pattern of Stephen King's lifetime work —

Make a person society overlooks the protagonist; let the reader, from inside them, acknowledge their specificity.

Almost every novel King wrote in the next fifty years does this.

III. On Writing

The year 2000, the millennium. Stephen King was fifty-three.

He published a part-memoir, part-writing-guide called On Writing.

This book has been very widely read in America. Many people, including many who do not write horror, take it as one of the best books on writing.

What King says in this book at the core is this —

Writing is not art. Writing is craft.

He does not like the word "artist." He thinks the word is too self-centered, too self-aggrandizing. He says he prefers to think of himself as a craftsman, like a plumber, a carpenter, a repairman.

A plumber does not need to wait for inspiration. A plumber gets up each morning and goes to work, fixing pipes by his training. Whether he fixes well depends on his skill, his experience, his tools. He does not deify himself — he just fixes the pipes.

King says writing is the same.

He gets up each morning. He sits at the desk. He writes — two thousand words — and then he goes to do other things: read, walk, eat with his family, handle business. The next day he gets up again. Sits at the desk again. Writes another two thousand words.

He does not wait for inspiration. He does not wait for mood. He does not wait for "the right moment." He writes every day — on good days, also on bad days. Most of the two thousand words on a bad day are garbage — he will revise the next day. But he does not skip writing because the day is bad.

In the book he writes —

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of."

"The essence of writing is permission. Your deepest permission is permitting yourself to write bad things."

He also writes about the specific techniques of writing — verbs, adverbs, dialogue, rhythm. He gives every aspiring writer concrete advice — avoid the passive voice, avoid adverbs, let dialogue drive the plot.

But the core argument of the book is not technique. It is posture —

Don't deify what you do. Just do it every day.

This posture has its particular place in Round Six of this series —

The figures written in earlier essays — Hypatia at her lectern, Aquinas writing the Summa Theologiae, Schelling in German Idealism, Rilke listening for that voice — what they did was, in their own time or in the centuries afterwards, taken to be something great. How they themselves treated their own work was different. Aquinas said what he had written was "straw." Rilke felt the poems came through him into the world. But history situated their work as great.

Stephen King is different.

Stephen King's work, in much literary criticism, is not taken as great. He is a horror writer, in what is considered the field of "popular fiction." He has earned a great deal of money, but Harold Bloom, until his death in 2019, never took Stephen King seriously, like other high-end literary critics.

In life King experienced this dismissal. In 2003 he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation — an important award in American letters. Some high-end critics publicly protested — they felt giving this award to a popular novelist was an insult to literature.

King made a speech at the ceremony. He said he understood why some did not want him to receive this award — he knew that what he wrote was not the kind of literature high-end critics admired. But he said — what he wrote was real, what he wrote was something ordinary Americans could read, the people he wrote about were the people high-end literature usually overlooked.

In that speech he did not strike back at those who had protested. He kept writing.

To today, in 2026 — King is now seventy-eight — he still publishes a book each year.

He still gets up each morning, still writes two thousand words.

He has not changed.

IV. A Country Road in Maine

June 19, 1999. About 3:30 in the afternoon. A country road in western Maine.

Stephen King was fifty-one. He was walking — he walked every afternoon. He wore a T-shirt and shorts. He was on a marked walking lane along the road.

A white Dodge minivan came from the north. The driver was a local man named Bryan Smith.

Bryan Smith was not looking at the road in that moment. There was a Rottweiler on his back seat — the dog was trying to get into a cooler. Bryan Smith turned his head to look at the dog. He did not see what was ahead.

His van went off the road. Straight into the walking lane where King was walking.

King was thrown about fourteen feet. He landed in the brush at the side of the road.

He survived. But he was severely injured —

His right leg fractured in several places. Right hip fractured. Collarbone broken. Four ribs broken. Several places in the spine fractured. Right lung punctured. Scalp split.

He lay by the road waiting for the ambulance. He was conscious. He knew he was severely injured but he did not panic. Later, in On Writing (the book was published a few months later), he described that moment — lying there, he thought — I am a writer. I want to keep writing.

The ambulance came. He was taken to the nearest hospital — about an hour by car. That hospital did initial work on his leg. He was then airlifted to a larger hospital in Lewiston.

He stayed in hospital for several weeks. He had several surgeries — his right leg was fitted with metal rods and screws; he still walks a little differently today.

When he came out of hospital he could not walk; he needed a wheelchair. He spent more than a year in rehabilitation before he could walk again (with a cane).

What was he doing during the rehabilitation?

He was writing.

At the start of rehabilitation he could not sit up — he could not get to his desk. Tabitha set up a small table for him beside the bed — he could write sitting up, about an hour a day (at first even that hour hurt). He wrote On Writing — the second half of that book was written after the accident. He wrote about the accident in the book — describing, almost coolly, that he had nearly died.

He wrote —

"When I was lying by the road, I thought this might be the end of writing for me. Maybe I would die, maybe I would not be able to use my hands. But I did not die. I can use my hands. So I keep writing."

That year King's output was less than usual (he published only On Writing and a novella collection that year) — but he did not stop.

From 2000 he returned to his normal writing rhythm — two thousand words a day, as before.

Twenty-six years have passed since the accident. King kept writing for twenty-six years. His writing did not stop after the accident.

Bryan Smith — the driver who hit him — died of a drug overdose a year and a half later, alone in his own home. The death was ruled accidental, but some reports hint at possible suicide. Bryan Smith was forty-three when he died.

In life King paid to buy the van that had hit him. He bought it in order to have it crushed into scrap — he did not want it to keep existing in the world. His assistant drove the van to a scrap yard, where it was crushed into a pile of metal.

This was one of King's rare retaliatory gestures — but he did not retaliate against Bryan Smith himself. Bryan Smith was a poor, troubled, inattentive driver. King never spoke harshly of him. King said to himself — this was an accident.

Continue.

V. Ordinary People

To understand what King did, one has to look at who his characters are.

He does not write heroes. He does not write famous people. He does not write specially gifted, special people.

He writes —

Auto mechanics. Supermarket cashiers. Small-town doctors. Drunk fathers. Children with reading difficulties. Housewives. Retired police officers. School janitors. Babysitters. Truck drivers. Hotel doormen. Postal workers. Furnace repairmen.

These are people most literature does not look at. Literature usually writes about intellectuals, artists, the family tragedies of the wealthy, the alienation of urban elites. Most literature's viewpoint is from those educated to look at the world.

King's viewpoint is different. He looks at the world from the lower-middle of the kind of American small-town life he himself came from. The people he writes are the real people he could meet in a Maine small town — the people he worked with at the laundry, the people he spoke with at the gas station, the people he saw at the small-town grocery.

A few examples in his novels —

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (1982 novella):

The protagonist Andy Dufresne is wrongly sentenced to life imprisonment. He spends decades in Shawshank prison. But he does not give up. Each day, with a small hammer — only as wide as an umbrella — he digs into the wall behind his cell. He digs for nearly twenty years. In the end he climbs out through that hole and escapes.

The story is told from the viewpoint of another prisoner, Red. Red is an old prisoner, very familiar with the system, very skeptical of hope. Red tells Andy's story because Red was changed by Andy — Red went from someone who believed he would only die in prison to someone with hope.

This novella has no supernatural element. It is a story about the friendship between two ordinary people the world had thrown away. It is regarded as one of the best of all King's works.

The Green Mile (1995 novel):

The protagonist is a death-row guard in 1930s American South, named Paul Edgecombe. His work is to walk the condemned the last walk — from the cell to the electric chair. He does this work for decades.

The center of the story is a death-row prisoner named John Coffey — a huge, intellectually disabled African American man wrongly sentenced for the rape and murder of two little girls. John Coffey is innocent — he actually has the power to heal; he tried to save those two girls but failed. Paul Edgecombe discovers he is innocent. But the system cannot be changed — John Coffey will be executed.

The story is about a guard who has spent his working life used by society, who, near retirement, must carry out an execution he knows is wrong. He carried out John's execution. After he carried it out, he changed. He went on to live to over a hundred, carrying every day the weight of having done that thing.

This book does not make Paul Edgecombe a hero. He did not resist the system. He is an ordinary person; he did what he was required to do; but he also bore the weight of that thing his whole life. King lets the reader acknowledge that this kind of ordinary, limited person — who did what he was supposed to do but did not do more — also has a specific interior.

It (1986 novel):

Seven children in a 1950s American small town battle a supernatural monster. Each child has a specific family background — a child who stutters, an overweight child, a girl whose father abuses her, a Jewish child (a minority in 1950s American small towns), an African American child, a child trapped by social expectation, a child with asthma.

The seven children defeat the monster. Then they grow up. They each live their own lives — some succeeding, some not. Then the monster returns thirty years later. They must return to the small town and face it again.

This book is on the surface horror. At its center is the weight of childhood friendship in adult life — the mutual recognition among a group of ordinary, flawed, socially overlooked children.

—

All of King's novels do this.

A drunk father in King's pages is not only a man who drinks too much. He is a person with a specific interior, specific pain, specific love. A supermarket cashier is not only a low-wage worker. She is a person with a specific fate, specific dreams, specific tiredness.

King gives these people the position of being told — usually these people, in literature, only have the position of appearing as background.

This is what King has done all his life —

Leave a place for the others society overlooks.

Not at the philosophical level. Not at the abstract level. At the concrete, readable, hundreds-of-millions-of-readers level of fiction. A truck driver in Tennessee can read a King novel — what he reads are people he can recognize, people he knows, himself. A supermarket cashier in Ohio can read a King novel — the heroine she reads is a woman she can recognize.

King has done "leaving a place for the other" at the largest scale of readability. He does it not in philosophical discussion. He does it in popular culture. He does it in books read by hundreds of millions.

The scale of this work — letting popular culture acknowledge the dignity of ordinary people as other — is a particular practice unique in Round Six.

VI. Alive, Writing

1. Stephen King is seventy-eight.

He still lives in Maine. He and Tabitha have been married for fifty-four years — from 1971 to today. Their three children are grown. Both sons are also writers — Joe Hill (he uses this pen name so as not to rely on his father's) and Owen King.

King still writes every day.

He still publishes new books each year. In 2023 Holly was published — a detective novel. In 2024 You Like It Darker — a short-story collection.

He is also still on X — often about politics, about America's current condition. He is a direct person; he says what he thinks is right; he does not mind much who he upsets.

What he does is ongoing.

He is still making choices — the choices of each day. He is a person with hundreds of millions of readers — what he says, people hear. How he uses this position, he is still choosing. What he can do with it, he is still choosing.

He is still alive. His being has not closed — not because he is special. Because the being of any person still alive has not closed.

The 107 figures this series has written about so far are each already dead. They did concrete work in their lives. They died. Their being unfolds through those who came after.

King is different.

King is still alive.

His being alive places this series, at its closing, in a particular situation —

For a person still alive, we cannot tell what he did with his life.

We can tell what he did in this earlier part of his life. But his life is not over — he is still writing. Next year he might write the best book of his life so far, or he might write a mediocre one. Next year he might say something on X that changes everyone's view of him, or he might not. Next year he might make a decision that changes his form, or he might not.

We do not know.

He himself does not know.

Each day he gets up and makes choices — some choices about the specific content of his next book, some about how he treats a reader who comes to him for an autograph, some about how he treats his family, some about how he answers a hostile person on X.

These choices, added together, form his being. His being is shaped each day by his choices.

Only on the day he dies does his being begin to enter the next state — unfolding through those who come after.

But even then, his being has not closed, and will not close.

What this series has been discussing, and what this thought-framework has been discussing —

The construct does not close.

The construct of every person does not close. The construct of the dead unfolds through those who come after. The construct of the still-living is shaped each day by their own concrete actions. Both kinds of non-closing are real.

VII. Not on the Bridge

Stephen King is not on the bridge.

Not because he is not good enough. He is good enough.

Not because his work is not important enough. His work is far beyond important.

Not because he is not in the argument of this series. He has been in it all along.

Rather it is because —

He is still alive.

The bridge to the kingdom of ends is the place those already gone go. Each one who walks toward it, walks onto it — the choices they made in life are already made. Their forms have been filtered by time — when this series, in its previous 107 essays, wrote about them, we were using forms filtered by hundreds, even thousands of years.

The astrolabe in Hypatia's hand on the bridge — when she was destroyed in 415 there was no astrolabe in her hand. The astrolabe is the representative of the tools by which her work was identified by people across two thousand years. Aquinas with empty hands — because his stopping after eight million words and saying it was "straw" was identified by seven hundred years of readers as his core posture. Bergson on his cane — because of the picture of the day in January 1941 when he went to register in German-occupied Paris.

These forms have all been filtered by time. The dead no longer add new content to their own forms. The unfolding of the form continues (through those who come after) but the form's core has set.

King is different.

King each day is still adding new content to his own form. His writing today adds a stroke to his being. Some tweet of his tomorrow adds another. Some interview he gives next month adds yet another. This content added each day has not been filtered by time.

We cannot write him with the certainty with which we wrote the dead. We can tell what he did before he was seventy-eight — those are facts. But what he does after seventy-eight, we do not know. We do not have the standing to write that part in advance.

The bridge is not about our judgement of a person. The bridge is the picture in which the shape of a person's being is, after he has lived completely, brought into appearance by time.

King is still influencing the world. So we cannot give him a specific position on the bridge.

This has nothing to do with whether King's work is good.

This is the standard treatment of this series for everyone still exerting influence.

This series faced this question for the first time in the Girard essay — Peter Thiel. Thiel is alive; he is still making choices; his construct has not closed; outsiders have no standing to close it for him.

Here, with King, we say it again — anyone still exerting ongoing influence is also not yet on the bridge.

Not because they are not important. Because we do not make summaries on behalf of the still-living.

This principle is not only for King. It is for Thiel. For everyone this series has not written about but who is doing similar work and still alive. For every future reader of this essay.

The reader is also still able to decide each day whom to influence, and how.

The reader's construct also has not closed.

The reader is also each day making choices — each choice adds a stroke to his being.

The reader should also not be summed up by anyone on his behalf.

The reader's position is open — he can still choose which road to walk. He can choose to do, in himself, the work of "leaving a place for the other." He can choose not to. The reader's choice is not in our hands. The reader's choice is not even in his hands today — every person's life has many days, and in each there are many chances to choose.

King and the reader are equal in this respect —

both are persons still exerting ongoing influence, still making choices, with a construct not yet closed, who must not be summed up by anyone on their behalf.

This series takes King as the closing essay not because he is special (though he is special). It is because he is the best concrete example by which the reality of the category "those still alive" can come into appearance. When we read about King, we recognize that — King is a specific person, he is alive, he is making choices each day. We naturally extend this recognition to all those still alive — including ourselves.

So this essay is the closing.

But the way of closing is not to seal a circle.

The way of closing is to acknowledge that the circle can never be sealed — because there are people still alive, still making choices, with constructs not yet closed.

Including King. Including every future reader. Including the billions of others who will never read this essay.

Every person still alive can go to the kingdom of ends; can stand at that bridgehead. Every person still alive can still choose.

VIII. The Bridge: The 108th Seat

For the last time, walking up to the bridge.

The middle of the bridge, tonight, is denser than on any night before.

Hypatia is there. The astrolabe in her hand catches the moonlight. Aquinas stands on the other side, his hands empty. Bergson, on his cane, nods to each newcomer. Levinas stands — he recognizes nearly everyone; to each he gives a slight but certain gesture of recognition. Buber stands not far off, his robe stirring lightly in the wind. Cao Zhi holds his bamboo slips — the words he wrote on them are still being read after eighteen hundred years. Girard holds a book — the one he wrote on the scapegoat mechanism. Schelling holds the Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Eckhart, hands empty — what he gave the world was not a thing. Rilke, his head slightly tilted, listening. Nobel stands, the folded copy of his will in his pocket.

Eleven figures named.

The middle of the bridge is not only these eleven. The bridge holds people accumulated from generation to generation —

Those drawing equations, those watching corn, those writing poems, those reading star charts, those writing novels, those sketching diagrams, those crouching aside taking notes, those sitting and looking into the distance, those speaking quietly with their neighbors, those looking at the sky a while and then bending back down to their work, those in the moonlight using a small tool to mend a small thing, those telling a child a story, those handing a cup of tea to someone beside them, those stopping to wait for a cat to walk past, those smoothing the folds of their own robe, those — across centuries, across times — recognizing one another in a way no one has translated.

These people. A field of people. A field that cannot be counted.

Each of them did the same thing —

Took oneself as an end. And took others as ends.

Outside the bridge, on that road — one can see darkened sky, lightning.

There are people on that road, walking. The ones farthest along can no longer be seen. The man in the professor's robe — Heidegger — has walked far, almost out of sight.

The far end of the bridge.

That end, in every previous essay, was where "Kant stands"; "Kant has been looking into the distance"; "Kant is a little clearer than before."

To this essay, it is now seen clearly —

Kant is not alone.

There are others around him.

They are a group of people who, in history, have lived out the thing of "taking oneself as an end and taking others as ends." Some of them this series wrote about, some it did not (we wrote 107 specific people, in their specific ways of doing this thing). But all of them are people who have lived this thing out.

Beside Kant stands an old man. Bald. A flat nose — not a handsome face. He wears a coarse Greek cloak, with a rope of hemp as belt. He is barefoot. This is Socrates. At seventy he drank hemlock in Athens — he could have escaped, his friends urged him to escape, he did not. He said that if he escaped, he would have overturned everything he had said his life through.

Beside Socrates — a little further — is a man wearing a dark crown. He is sitting, not standing. He wears the dark Zhou-dynasty ceremonial robe, with long sleeves. His face has the tiredness of one long ignored, but no resentment. This is Confucius. He traveled among the states of his time for fourteen years; every ruler refused him. At sixty-eight he returned to his homeland of Lu and taught. His several dozen students wrote down what he said — those words are still read after twenty-five hundred years.

Not far off, a man sits on the ground — not in a chair, on the ground. He sits in lotus posture. He wears an ochre robe, the left shoulder bare. His eyes are half closed. This is the Buddha. Born a prince, he left the palace. He sat under a tree thinking for several years and saw it through — that all sentient beings have an existence like one's own. He spent forty-some years walking the roads of India telling people what he had seen.

A little further is a man in his thirties. He wears an undyed wool robe, barefoot. His hands — one can see scars on them, where nails had been. This is Jesus. In his life he said one sentence: "Love thy neighbor as thyself." He made that sentence the core of the law. In his life he was nailed to death for it.

A little further is a friar. He wears a coarse hempen robe — a kind of grey-brown undyed coarse hemp, a white cord tied at the waist. The robe has patches. He is barefoot. His face is thin, but his eyes hold a child-like light. This is Francis of Assisi. A thirteenth-century Italian, born to a wealthy merchant family, he renounced all property in his youth to live in deep poverty. He said the birds are also brothers, the wolf is also a brother — extending "the other" to the non-human.

On the other side of Kant is a small Indian old man. He wears only a single piece of hand-spun white cloth, wrapped at the waist. Bare-chested. A simple pair of glasses on his chest. In his hand he holds a wooden staff — his famous walking stick. This is Gandhi. He took non-violence as the political form of leaving a place for the other. He was killed by a Hindu extremist among his own people — because he insisted that Muslims also be seen as people.

Beside Gandhi is an African American man in a black suit — about thirty-some years old. Wearing a tie. A full face, deep-set eyes. This is Martin Luther King Jr. — Dr. King, not King the writer. He used non-violence in the twentieth-century American civil rights movement to see even his opponents as people. He was killed by a racist.

A little further is a small old woman in a white sari with a blue border. Her face has the lines left by decades of caring for the dying. Her hands are small. This is Mother Teresa. In her life she cared for the dying poor in the slums of Calcutta — she said every dying person has a right to die with dignity.

—

And there are others. Many, many others.

Many of whom we cannot name. Most have no name preserved by history. The mothers, across two thousand years, who cared for their own children and treated them as people. The teachers, across thousands of years, who taught and treated their students as people. All those, across history, in their own concrete situations, who took others as ends rather than as tools — farmers, craftsmen, merchants, servants, soldiers, workers, nurses, nuns, monks, fishermen.

They all stand around Kant.

Each in the clothes of his own time. Each with the tools of his own time. Each speaking the language of his own time. But between them no language is needed — they each know what the other has done.

Kant when he died in 1804 did not see them. In life he was alone. He himself said he was "an odd person who never leaves Königsberg." He thought he was writing an abstract argument.

He did not know that what he wrote had been lived out long before — many times, many generations, in the thousands of years before he wrote, and in the two hundred years after —

By many people.

Now around him are them.

He was never alone, and in the kingdom of ends he is even more not alone.

There is no rank among the group around him — no "closer to Kant" or "further from Kant." They are all in the same circle. Each has done the thing. Each has taken oneself as an end and taken others as ends.

The middle of the bridge — the 107 we have written and many many others. The far end — Kant and every historical practitioner.

Between the two areas is one moonlight illuminating two layers.

But —

Around Kant, there is one empty seat.

That seat is not in the middle of the bridge. It is not King's place.

That seat is at the deepest end. Within the circle around Kant.

The shape of that seat is a position without specific identity — not predetermining who, doing what work, of what age, in what language.

That seat is for anyone willing to do that thing.

It does not require a person to do something great. It does not require a person to be remembered. It does not require a person to write a book. The thing it requires is two —

The first is not easy: to take oneself as an end — not letting oneself be reduced to another's tool, acknowledging one's own concrete value as an existence. The second is harder but more important: and to take others as ends — not reducing another to one's own tool, acknowledging the concrete value of every other facing one as other.

Anyone willing to do these two things may stand in that seat.

No declaration is needed. No coronation. No one's permission.

What is needed is — to do these two things.

An ordinary person, in his own life, every time he chooses to take himself as an end — he does not let others arbitrarily dispose of his time, he does not let others define his value, he does not lower himself to a part in some system — he is doing this thing. Every time he chooses to take another as an end — he acknowledges that the specific person facing him is an existence with his own dignity, he does not reduce him to a tool useful or useless, he leaves a place for that person within his own limited capacity — he is doing this thing.

These two things, most of the time, are not great matters. They are small matters. Matters of one second. The one second of stopping to look at the face of a specific person. The one second of not interrupting the other speaking. The one second of acknowledging that the other's pain is real, not trying to fix it, only acknowledging it.

Each such small matter is the doing of those two things.

Each adds one more candidate to that empty seat.

Stephen King is not on the bridge now. He is still exerting influence. He is still in Maine. He is still writing. He still gets up each morning to do two thousand words. He is still choosing.

But King's work does not end at this moment. King's work is, over the past half-century, letting American popular culture acknowledge the dignity of ordinary people as other — that work continues to unfold through his hundreds of millions of readers. Every reader who reads his books and recognizes that the drunk father in them is not only a tool — that is one appearing of King's being. While King is alive these appearings continue. After King dies they will continue.

But King cannot receive his place in advance. Each day he is alive, he keeps working for that place. Any day he could choose to walk astray — he could say something cruel on X, he could refuse to see a specific person around him, he could become a person who takes himself as an end but does not take others as ends. Whether he does these things is not in our hands.

This is the same for each of us.

We have written to here, we have read to here. We get up each morning. In each specific hour we are making choices. Today we may do those two things. Tomorrow we may not. Our lives have many days yet, and on each many choices may yet be made.

That seat is always empty — because it is not for some specific person. It is for that act — the act of doing those two things itself. At any moment, any specific person doing that act is, in that one second, in that seat. The next second he may not be. The second after that he may be again.

That seat is fluid. But that seat is always there.

That seat is always waiting.

The group around Kant — Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha, Jesus, Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, together with all those not remembered — they stand there, not urging, not judging, not demanding.

They are simply there.

Their presence makes that seat real — it is not an abstract concept; it is a specific, stand-on-able position, in their company.

Outside the bridge, on that road toward the kingdom of means, the storm has not stopped, and will not stop.

In the middle of the bridge toward the kingdom of ends — many people, the moonlight is mild.

At Kant's end — many people, the wind is mild.

The figure who has always been looking into the distance — Kant — this time is not looking at any one of those we have written about, or those we have not.

He is looking into the distance.

He is waiting.

He is waiting for the next person who decides to walk over.

That person could be King. That person could be any one still alive. That person could be one not yet born until tomorrow. That person could be one who, in one second, has done those two things — that person, in that one second, is on the bridge.

The second after, that person may leave. The second after, that person may stay.

Kant does not urge.

Kant's gaze is mild. The wind too is mild.

The 108th Seat is always empty.^[1][2]

— (Human Total Construct · 108 Essays · Concluded) —

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives