Foundational Texts is a monthly essay series for 2026 looking at some of the culture that shaped me and how it still resonates today. This is the second of 12 installments, last month I wrote about the artist Jenny Holzer.

It is cold and it is wet and it is dark. Dark the way every cave is in your dreams, which is to say not dark at all but lit in blues and golds, the way it would never be in actuality but, for this story, it is. Because it is a good story, an adventure story, told through caves and traps and peril.

You are there with your friends, deep underground, under the town you were born in but not the town you'll grow up in because, tomorrow, you will be moving, all of you, because your parents didn't have the means to compete against the wealth and power that wants to turn your homes into rubble. That's why you're here, in the wet and the dark that isn't dark, and that's why you've almost died a half-dozen times due to the peril and the traps. You're here because you still have hope.

Hope has lead you here because you are a child and you still believe in miracles, still believe the impossible is possible, and so you have followed a map—a pirate map, the best kind—here, to this point, this cave, this very moment, and you are caked in mud and you are freezing cold and you are scared—but because you are on the verge of being an adult you will not say you are scared—and it is here, now, that you are faced with a choice.

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