A man's lonely life focused on the pursuit of reason and music leaves him questioning what more there may be in the lives of other people and of religion.

A research psychologist visits a peculiar asylum patient who recounts his life story. The patient warns the researcher about how obsession with the pursuit of knowledge can make one lose sight of their humanity until it is unsalvageable.

A man recalls his intimate friendship with his former English professor, who resolved to fuel his unsatisfied desire for playwriting during the time they were apart. In their reunion decades later, instead of the brilliant play he promised, the professor shows his former student a disturbing product of his mental instability.

A rambunctious teenager with an inquisitive mind causes much grief for all his New England family and neighbors when he visits them in the summer of 1914, on the eve of World War I.

In a future where technology has advanced to the point where humans can undergo "optimization" to rid themselves of emotions and increase their mental functions, one man decides to cling to his humanity in an effort to atone for his sins and appreciate the beauty of being human.

In modern day NYC, an unmarried, fifty-something-year-old lawyer takes a year off work to contemplate her fate and plunges into an obsession with the life of the 19th century writer George Eliot—and with recreating Eliot's lifelong love affair.

A man in a failing marriage embarks on yet another love affair with a married woman, teaching him about his own sexual escapist tendencies.

As she wanders in and out of forests to escape her past and the boy she feels guilty for wanting, a woman gives birth to and abandons a child she thinks of as the physical embodiment of her sin.

A teacher on the Lower East side meets a friendly man with a presence resembling a dead English poet.

Upon returning to Paris after a decade-long hiatus wandering the French countryside and writing an epic, a poet encounters an enigmatic young woman who believes he is a god and wants to be his disciple,