When I was a child
HEARING a recent talk about ghosts and the paranormal reminded me that I once had an invisible friend.
Our primary-school playing field was bordered by a woodland that we were forbidden to enter. I came to believe — and convinced my friends — that lurking in the overgrowth was a friendly ghost: a sage-like figure we could go to for advice and consolation. We would sneak into the trees to tell him about our days, convincing ourselves he was listening.
Various studies over the past few years have found a steep decline in the number of children who have invisible friends. Technology is, unsurprisingly, the reason most commonly referred to: screen time blocks the kind of boredom that necessitates conjuring up imaginary distractions, while AI increasingly fulfils the part of a personal companion or playmate.
This is tragic, not just because of what it tells us about children’s creativity and sociability in a digital age, but because invisible friends are ultimately something that we are supposed to grow out of.
Slowly but surely, AI is normalising new kinds of invisible friends in the form of chatbots that we can invent and manipulate (54 per cent of American adults now admit to having some kind of relationship with one).
The problem is that chatbots have no life of their own, leaving them little to do except flatter you (“That’s a great question!”) and affirm whatever opinion or desire you feed them. They seduce you with self-serving, therapeutic relationships in place of connection with real humans and their complications. I fear that this is not, civilisationally speaking, a good thing: there’s a reason we’re supposed to leave invisible friends in childhood.
Interlocking particles
ACCIDENTALLY stepping on a snail outside my front door one morning called to mind the stanza in Alexander Pope’s poem Essay on Man, in which he exclaims that the very smallest and lowliest parts of creation are no less vital to nature’s divine economy than the loftiest: to harm any level of life is to sever the “Vast chain of being, which from God began” — “From nature’s chain whatever link you strike, Tenth or ten thousandth, break the chain alike.” So I felt unusually guilty about crushing the snail.
This year, I read Arthur Lovejoy’s iconic work of intellectual history, The Great Chain of Being, which explores the cosmological optimism of thinkers such as Pope, and their belief in the perfect harmony of nature: a widespread attitude in 18th-century England that fell out of fashion with the more disenchanted mechanism of the 19th.
But recent popular science books, such as Sophie Pavelle’s To Have Or To Hold: Nature’s hidden relationships or Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life — both pointing to an understanding of nature as interconnected and imbued with purpose — might suggest that the great chain of being is making a comeback. Could there be a renewed appetite for a more teleological, classically religious idea of nature?
Music of the spheres
RELATEDLY, I am told that the King’s new Amazon Prime documentary on the environment will be landing in the new year. They were probably aiming to get it out this year, because 2025 marks the tenth anniversary of His Majesty’s book Harmony: A new way of looking at our world.
In celebration of this, the Temenos Academy (one of the educational charities of which the King is a patron) held a “harmony study day”, in which we discussed sacred geometry, Neoplatonism, and the architecture of Poundbury.
It will be interesting to see whether the documentary reflects the complexity of the King’s own philosophical views. In the book, he speaks of harmony, not just in the context of biodiversity, but also metaphysically, as a “universal grammar” underlying the art and architecture of all classical civilisations — a view, far more profound than anything that secular environmentalism can offer, to which we can hope the documentary does justice.
Lambeth walk
A YEAR ago, we moved to Kennington, just south of the river. The London Borough of Lambeth abounds with subversive history (the bulging skyscraper that stands opposite Blackfriars was once the site of the Blackfriars Rotunda, meeting-place of 18th-century freethinkers known as the “Rotunda Radicals”; and that is not to mention Blake and Bedlam).
Right on our doorstep is one of the finest examples of Georgian eccentricity: Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Opened by Jonathan Tyers in 1732, the gardens offered a spectacle of light displays, theatrical performances, and a Palladian rotunda known as the “temple of pleasure”. Since Vauxhall Bridge didn’t exist, the venue was accessible only by boat, turning it into a sort of secluded island for thrill-seekers.
Infamous for clandestine meet-ups, late night promenades down “Lovers’ Walk”, and prostitution, Vauxhall became a symbol of London’s new culture of decadence, sparking polemics against the corruption of public morals. Walking in the city’s streets, one critic observed in 1773, “You have the enchantments of Beauty, the Incantations of Pleasure, and the Lures of Vice, around you. You may have Intoxication in a Tavern — Love in an Alley — Musick in the Market-place — Coffee in every street — and Ox-cheek and Oysters in every Cellar . . . it is this luxury, that will prove the ruin of this island.”
Today, what remains of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens is a cut-through for stressed commuters and Lime bikes. But roads such as “Tyers Street”, and pathways that once formed part of Lovers’ Walk, are a reminder of its history and enchantments.
Time signature
AT THIS time of year, the music-streaming service Spotify reveals to its users which songs, artists, and genres they have listened to the most over the past 12 months: a sort of virtual early Christmas present called Spotify Wrapped.
This is one of Spotify’s various AI-enhanced features, which also include “daylists” — automated playlists for different times of day, based on the kind of music you tend to listen to then (personal examples include “wistful alternative folk Wednesday morning”, “cosmic rare groove Saturday afternoon”, and “dissociation floaty Monday night”).
It is, admittedly, incredible that AI can turn our listening habits into playlists perfectly attuned to our deepest personal associations and nostalgias. It strikes me as a perfect example of what the sociologist Colin Campbell, in his writings on the Romantic origins of modernity, called “fully autonomous emotional hedonism”: in place of collective forms of expression and catharsis (churchgoing and village fêtes; even pleasure gardens and nightclubs), we have increasingly individualised and now, through technology, hyper-personalised means of “emotional hedonism”.
It is hard not to love Spotify Wrapped — but it is certainly a sign of the times.
Esmé Partridge is a writer and researcher at Theos think tank.