PERSON

Rumi

The thirteenth-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic who spent his life insisting there is a kernel beneath every husk—and who offers, eight centuries later, the sharpest available diagnosis of what it means to build machines that produce the form of an inner life with no inner life behind it.

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi opened his masterwork with a sound: a hollow reed crying for the reed bed it was cut from, a song that is the pain itself, shaped into breath. That image—longing as the truest fact about a creature, exile as the proof of origin, the cry as the evidence of a home once had—organizes everything he wrote. Rumi was a jurist, theologian, and scholar in Konya before the wandering mystic Shams of Tabriz arrived and set him on fire; after their consuming friendship and Shams’s disappearance, the respectable scholar became one of the greatest poets in any language, pouring grief into thousands of ecstatic lyrics and the vast Masnavi. His organizing question—is there a kernel beneath the husk, a meaning beneath the form, a real self beneath its performance?—has never been more urgently posed than now, because we have built machines that produce the form

Keep reading with YOU ON AI