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Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton is a recurring person in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 13, 2025 and January 08, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Alain de Botton talks about this. He talks about how you can pick a whole new life through exercises in Architectures of Unhappiness”; “I am reading Alain de Botton Architecture of Happiness in blue hour dusk”. It most often appears alongside Amelia, Anika Jade Levy, Blade Study.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: October 13, 2025
  • Last seen: January 08, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Void of Course
October 13, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, October 6 They are swimming in the water because they hope to never die, the Russian writer is told, in Nostalghia (1983). The Italian villagers are bathing in steaming blue mineral pools and discussing the man who locked his family up for seven years on account of fear of the outside world. It is my favorite Tarkovsky, and Dory suggests we go to Metrograph for the late night viewing tonight. She wants to see the candle scene again. She wants to parse out whether the composer in the film is a product of delusion or reality. She wants to be reminded of dreams and mist and Saint Catherine of Siena, and I want to see foggy long shots and the part where a beautiful little girl in a rock cave tells the drunk man, yes, I am very happy to be alive. It’s a kind of ghostly journey to the theater. Monday night, and so there are not too many people out, though I can tell when a girl is heading to the same place as me because she will be wearing something like a tattered tank top and skirt and lots of gold rings and a few bangles. I spot a few such girls somewhere around Delancey Street, and by the time I reach Ludlow Street, there is a group of us walking in silent quickstep. The theater is surprisingly full. The mood is surprisingly heavy and quiet. By midnight, when the snow falls over the Russian writer and the German Shepard and the Italian countryside and the hologram of the colosseum and the candles have all been placed in quivering gestures of immolation, reverence, or madness, and the lights come on in the theater, I am certain that autumn is here. The last time I saw this film, I stepped outside into bright summer heat, Dory tells me. This is certainly not a summer film, I tell Dory. I step over puddles on the walk home. I mute my own nostalgia. I think about how this isn’t something dull like another movie about aging, but there is something reticent about madness that comes from envisioning eternity. Mystics and schizophrenics. It’s just one life all at once. I stayed up all night last night until the sky turned hazy blue and cotton candy pink, and my Nosferatu metal bedframe turned all washed in pastel color and then, I remembered time had been passing all along. Poured Blueland soup and dragged a dishrag across the hard wood floors. Stood in cream white socks by a small metal stove and fried bacon and eggs in avocado oil. Fried a non-iron-fortified flour tortilla in coconut oil and threw tomato on top. Thought about the sort of person who starts a day in this way. Thought about how a morning like this could almost be something else. Almost like I went to sleep and woke up to this. Cotton candy skies and bacon, eggs, the good sort of oils. Starting a day instead of blurring one into the next. Blurring everything together. Watching fog and music and stone castle villages and Madonnas and Patron Saints all blur together in the most harrowing film in the world at Metrograph. I like Nostalghia, but it is such a harrowing film. BEAUTIFUL AND HARROWING FILM, I text Celia. To My Mother, Tarkovsky dedicated the film. If it wasn’t past midnight, I would call my own family and say sorry. I’ve been thinking about myself a lot. I would mostly say I’m sorry for that. Tuesday, October 7 Here is an idea: clear out your room of everything nice, leave only the decrepit and ugly things behind, lie in filth for a month or a few, and then clear things out even further. Clear out your room of anything aside from blank space and empty floor, and one fitted sheet, and lie there for a little longer. It will be winter or perhaps even spring, now. Bring back your beautiful things. Fill your room with everything nice. Determine how a person should be. Alain de Botton talks about this. He talks about how you can pick a whole new life through exercises in Architectures of Unhappiness like this one. I am springing out of bed this morning with a strong and pervasive desire for a whole new life. It got cold for a minute, and this shift in seasons scrubbed everything clean. I am yet to scrub my room of everything beautiful, everything empty, or everything bad. Today I will build a beautiful life. Today I will buy a beautiful life. This again but this time I mean it: TO DO Finish and edit blog
Lost Week
January 08, 2026 · Original source
REDACTED resolutions for the benefit of oneself and others Friday, December 26 I woke up to it like a snow globe outside. The type of storm that is hard to describe unless you are me, waking up surrounded on all sides by everything soft and quiet and shimmering in a room that has always been yours. Everything coated white and sweet and branches out my window still heavy from the fresh cover of the storm. Looking at the snow through the sheen of sheer white curtains in my window. Looking at dried wild flowers rising out of fields and the pine forest past the farm shivering kind of silver and the green of the shed and the barn creating pops of color against all that bright white. And all of this is just to say that I slept peacefully through the night and waking up this morning I do feel like I can access this place and this holiday and a sense of rootedness in myself, physical form, physical home, in a way that in the past few months I have not felt capable of understanding. Last year I spent every morning at home writing: cold crisp clear morning and everything it is better than I possibly could have imagined. Last year, I took the train back to a glass apartment in the sky and floated in infinite life for a few more weeks, and then I began to scream. Laundry and writing in my google docs diary at the soapstone counter this morning. I can’t tell if the storm is silent, or if it sounds like ice and little bells. Amelia called last night to tell a different version of the usual story. I am getting so creeped out again, Amelia said. My room here is pale and quiet and blue. it is the only bedroom above which there is no attic, so I can really hear the wind. I’m not creeped out, I told Amelia. Everything about your story just feels kind of distant and strange. Driving to get coffee in the old town center and I’m not hitting anyone’s bumper as I wheel around into Cumberland Farms. Toes cold in my Bean Boots. Extremities always cold from Raynod’s Disease and avoidance of contact with rough fabrics like “wool” out of delusional distaste for “overstimulation.” The town is kind of story book snowy, too, though less so than in the fields by the house, where everything is encased and total and like a picture and a dream and one scene all at once. The scene is less all encompassing here, by noon, in town, where the heaviest parts of the snow have already started to drip down and melt. It is strange to be alone here. Wind moving quickly outside my car and I did imagine something else. I’ve imagined everything a million times over, and so I guess it’s hard to pinpoint any one scenario. Things change very quickly. It used to take my breath away and now it doesn’t. I watch a woman running in place in a phone booth like a treadmill. I watch a young dad placing pennies on the train track with his kids where the commuter rail comes through. Sitting in my car watching the trains and mostly just holding my hands up to the heat. Everything is covered in a blanket of snow. In the car, I have; almond milk latte with peppermint and sugar free vanilla, vitamin D3, vitamin C, Inositol, fish oil, black seed oil. Taking it all in big huge gulps. Taking it all and then stuffing the wrappings in my bag and resuming watching everything around me. Later, I am reading Alain de Botton Architecture of Happiness in blue hour dusk and I am in the passenger seat driving on the highway when I look up to find: it is dark. Crescent moon. The George Washington Bridge looks so beautiful, my aunt says. I’ve never seen it glow like that. It’s never been this dark, this early, on this drive, before. There’s never been a drive that was as fast and smooth and calm, as this one. Back in New York City, it smells like caution to the wind and the mania of a week that exists in a void. Rushed back from dusty fields and Winter Break to find that no one else is here. You can tell that no one else is here, because the sidewalks on the Upper West Side are piled high with snow banks, no foot prints, yellow glow from the townhouses I pass in a yellow taxi cab on my way downtown, but perhaps the lights are simulated or at the very least on a timer, because there are no shadowy figures or even moving silhouettes visible past the windows. Central Park is pitch black, covered in snow that I can’t see but it makes the outlines of things kind of rough and cartoonish. It’s not that I actually believe nothing to be real. I’m just watching the shape of things kind of morph all around me. On the last night of the Lost Week of the Year, I walk to Dr Clark for the sake of fresh air and doing the things I say I will. My apartment was quiet and clean, because I left it quiet and clean. I returned to everything totally unchanged. The quiet part was shocking, and then it was ok. The city was kind of like a winter wonderland, too, except for the snow that had already turned kind of black. On the Houston Street median strip, I was stranded amidst blurry traffic with a man in a blanket, rocking back and forth and drinking whisky from the bottle. HEY, he said. Hey, I responded. He seemed surprised, and I became immediately afraid. Whatever. Everything was normal. Cannot become cynical. Dr Clark’s is quiet, my friends texted, on my walk. I’m sorry we lied and said that Dr. Clark’s was lively, my friends said, when I arrived. You didn’t say it was lively, you said it was quiet, I responded. The bar was full of dried flowers and almost no people. Emilia brings everyone rounds of cheesecake and superba beers. Dried flowers everywhere I turn, these days. Dried flowers everywhere for those with eyes to see. Here are the things that are making me feel suspicious, I told my friends.. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, January 8 From 12:15pm and 4:15pm at Film Forum — Last chance to see Peter Hujar’s Day - “The best film in Sundance is just two people talking.” - Vulture. | Tickets here
Inline links: Film Forum, here

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