The Sandeltonian Warden

It begins, as these things always seem to, with my walking—I’d say “strolling,” but that suggests more leisure and less existential inertia—along the banks of the Charles on one of those Harvard-adjacent evenings where the air is thick with unresolved problem sets and the kind of humidity that makes even the trees look like they’re reconsidering their majors.

There’s a bench near Weeks Footbridge where, allegedly, Michael Sandel once held an impromptu Q&A with two freshmen and a golden retriever. The dog, rumor has it, nodded thoughtfully at the discussion of distributive justice, though honestly that may say more about the dog than the discourse. Anyway. I stopped there because it was late, because I was tired, and because I wanted—just briefly—to be someone who believed that public philosophy was a kind of civic campfire instead of a fluorescent-lit trap for the terminally earnest.

The marsh beyond the footbridge was doing its usual New England thing: reeds waving, fireflies flickering, mosquitos forming little Kantian swarms (categorical imperatives, but blood-sucking). And the fog—there’s always fog—seemed like a kind of accidental metaphor for everything I’ve ever half-understood.

This was when I saw him.

Or “him.”
Or the silhouette that suggested, in a frankly overdetermined way, the outline of someone who would absolutely ask you to define fairness before letting you cross a bridge.

Tall-ish, cardiganed, moving with that slow deliberateness common to professors and large sea mammals. I squinted, because obviously, and for one horrifying moment I thought it really was Sandel—just out for a nighttime constitutional, maybe to ponder whether late-stage capitalism was cheating on its homework.

But the longer I looked, the stranger the figure became. The cardigan seemed to ripple, like it had more fabric than geometry allowed. His shadow didn’t fall behind him but sort of… pooled. Like it was leaking.

Still, I walked closer, because this is the part where I make choices you will later mock me for.

He turned—or maybe the space around him turned—and his face came into view. The soft glow of moral inquiry hovered in his eyes, that same earnest luminescence of a man about to ask a question you didn’t know could ruin your life.

“Consider,” he began, his voice an acoustically impossible blend of seminar-room warmth and something older, deeper, tide-pulled.

And then—God help me—the marsh responded.

The reeds bent, not in wind but in acknowledgment.
The fireflies dimmed, like a thousand tiny students afraid to raise their hands.
The air tightened, thick with a pressure I recognized only from the moments before a Really Big Question on an exam you definitely didn’t study for.

His cardigan expanded—no, unfurled—revealing layers upon layers of knitted glyphs, patterns that pulsed with a meaning I felt but could not parse. Loops of yarn moved without wind, threading and unthreading themselves like an argument restructuring its premises.

“Suppose,” he intoned, and the ground shuddered.

Behind him, shapes rose from the fog—long, jointed, wrong. They twisted like logical implications forced into contradictory conclusions. Their surfaces glistened with a sheen that resembled office hours tears.

“Suppose,” he repeated, “merit were a fiction.”

The word fiction hit the air like a dropped stone. Ripples spread across the marsh, warping the reeds, the fireflies, even the moonlight. Something bubbled beneath the surface—something with the intellectual hunger of a thousand undergrads and the patience of no known god.

His eyes brightened, and I saw—reflected in those civic little orbs—an abyss of forums, debates, public lectures with no exits, no restroom breaks, no escape.

A tremor ran through me, through the earth, through my GPA.

The Warden leaned forward.
The marsh held its breath.
The fog coiled like a question mark made of old bones and cold breath.

“Tell me,” he whispered, “from what standpoint you speak.”

And all the universe—all of it—seemed to tilt toward me, waiting.

Waiting for my answer.
Waiting for my downfall.
Waiting for the final, terrible truth:

I did not have one.

The cardigan twitched.
The marsh writhed.
The moral geometry of the world inverted like a poorly constructed argument.

And from the depths came a low, hungry hum—
the sound of cosmic civic engagement awakening.

LLM