I’m sure you’ve noticed in the past four posts there has been a recurring theme. No matter how much I talk about werewolves, vampires, rockets, bridges, succubi, escape velocity, quantum mechanics, or the architecture of the soul, sooner or later there is going to be a topless woman standing somewhere in the middle of it all like the final answer to a question I have been asking my whole life. And I know exactly how this sounds.

There are people who want to pretend that everything noble about a man exists somewhere above his body, somewhere in the mind, somewhere in the stars, somewhere in philosophy or religion or ambition or pain. But I have never believed that, because somewhere along the line I learned that a perfect pair of breasts is not the opposite of all those things—it is the proof of them.

I can stand there staring at a woman and in one part of my mind I am still the boy from below sea level, standing at the edge of the Gulf, looking out at something bigger than himself. In another part I am every man who ever marched off to war, built a city, crossed a river, conquered his fears, wrote a poem, or looked up at the moon and decided to keep going another day.

People think men want sex. That is not wrong, but it is not complete. What I want, when I look at a woman like that, is stranger and harder to admit. I want softness in a world that often feels made of concrete and fluorescent lights. I want warmth in a life that can become all structure, all survival, all hard edges and clenched teeth. I want the feeling that somewhere in this cold universe there is still something alive enough to hold.

There is something about a beautiful woman that collapses every complicated theory back into one simple truth: I do not want to live in a machine. I do not want to become only mind, only work, only ambition, only strategy. I do not want to spend my whole life becoming more efficient while forgetting why I wanted to survive in the first place. A perfect pair of breasts says all of that in one glance.

They are ridiculous, sacred, comforting, and dangerous. They make philosophers into fools and fools into poets. They are the reason entire civilizations have risen, fallen, written sonnets, started bar fights, bought sports cars, and stared too long at women they had no business staring at.

And if I am being completely honest, there is also something defiant in it. The world wants me to become a machine, to become optimized, to become productive, detached, ironic, numb—to sit in a room under bad lighting and pretend I do not still have a heart that wants impossible things. Then a beautiful woman walks into the room and suddenly every cathedral, every rocket launch, every midnight drive, every song, every prayer, every old Southern summer comes roaring back into me at once.

Because underneath all the theories and all the armor, there is still a man standing in the middle of the universe thinking: My God. Look at her.