Teju Cole, the novelist and photography critic, collects essays that meditate on sustaining humanity in dark times. The pieces range across continents and subjects: the melancholy of Lagos, the politics of photography, encounters with artworks that disturb rather than comfort, and the writer's responsibility to witness injustice. Cole writes about Tomas Transtromer's poetry, the films of Ousmane Sembene, and the paintings of Jacob Lawrence, finding in each a model for art that engages history without becoming propaganda. Several essays explore Cole's practice as a photographer, examining how the camera mediates between observer and observed. He writes about the deaths of Black Americans at police hands, the persistence of colonialism in museum collections, and the ethics of looking at suffering. The title comes from Goya's darkest etchings, suggesting art made in awareness of catastrophe. Cole's prose style--lapidary, digressive, precise--enacts the careful attention he advocates. He refuses easy comfort: the essays acknowledge that art cannot fix injustice, that witness is insufficient, that beauty and horror coexist. But they also insist on the value of making and preserving culture, of paying attention to what we would rather not see. Cole writes as a Black man moving through a world shaped by slavery and its afterlives, finding in that position both burden and vantage.