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Short stories about life

Thirty lives, freely retold.

From Plato to Frida Kahlo, each story is a moment that taught them something about life.

Marcus Aurelius, AI image

Marcus Aurelius

Stoicism · 121-180 AD

You will learn to question your first reaction.

All 12 stories
Human-AI collaboration, AI images, Synthetic voice

Real lives, freely retold: the facts come from the sources, the scenes are imagined. Written in human-AI collaboration, read by a synthetic voice. The portraits are AI images.

The descent through time

The voices closest to us are at the top. The further you go, the older the question gets. The four oldest are waiting at the floor.

The Modern Voices

1900 to today

Close enough to touch. Their questions are still open.

Six people born in the twentieth century. They came through war, prison, illness and protest, and they wrote about it while it was still happening. That is why their answers still sound like they were meant for this week.

Voices from this era

The Age of Steam and Ink

1800 to 1900

Machines got faster and so did life. These eight wrote by hand and asked what a person is underneath.

Trains, factories and the first computer program. In one century a poet in her bedroom, a woman leading people out of slavery and a doctor mapping dreams were all working on the same problem. What is a person made of when the old certainties stop holding?

Voices from this era

Renaissance and Enlightenment

1450 to 1800

People started looking again and drew what they really saw. Then reason and feeling argued it out in the same rooms.

Three and a half centuries and the biggest shift in how Europe looked at the world. A painter took a body apart to learn how an arm moves. An astronomer pointed a new glass at the moon. All eight trained the same thing, attention.

Voices from this era

The Mystics

1000 to 1450

Silence, light, and a longing that outlives its language.

Four people from four traditions who never met. Two are German mystics, Hildegard von Bingen and Meister Eckhart. The other two are a Persian poet and a Japanese Zen master. They describe the same thing in different words, a stillness under the noise.

Voices from this era

Antiquity

before 1000

The oldest questions, asked first, and never finished.

The floor of the well. Four voices from China, India, Greece and Rome, spread over seven hundred years and half the planet. They had no idea the others existed. All four asked how to live with a mind that will not sit still.

Voices from this era

The floor. Thirty voices, five eras, roughly 2,500 years.