November holds the in-between. Between warmth and cold, between...

November holds the in-between. Between warmth and cold, between light and dark, between living and dying. The eleventh month, getting darker, getting colder, echoes our own eventual winding down and gives chance to live in the richest, deepest way. “The space of nothingness is where one struggles to reach a deeper layer of self,” writes Tadao Ando. November opens a path to those deeper layers unavailable to us during the rest of the year. It’s an approximation of the expiration date stamped on our foreheads.

It’s the last day of November, and in honor of the month, an essay I wrote for the Paris Review, “The Dark Looks Different in November.”