The summer I learned that a story could mean more than homework was the same summer I worked as a lifeguard and my parents threw me a surprise party at the pool while I was on duty. I was sixteen. It was the same summer I went hiking with Luke, who pulled impossible things out of his backpack each day as we went deeper into the mountains. He was the mountain man version of Mary Poppins. Day One: jars of delicious chili. Day Two: a hardcover dictionary (for Scrabble). Day Three: a watermelon. Day Four: a tattered copy of Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk.

Luke was in college, and to me, his mind was the brilliant brain-equivalent of his gigantic backpack of surprises. He pulled the book out while we were sipping mugs of hot orange Tang. (Don’t knock it until you try it, but only try it in the cold mountains after hiking all day). He began reading Dillard’s essay “Living like Weasels.” There was just the glow of a lantern, the quiet mountains around us in the dark, a weird orange warmth in my belly, and Luke reading, “A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks?”

I was all in.

The essay tells of Dillard’s brief encounter with a weasel in a copse of suburban wilderness near her home. Dillard describes a weasel’s general ruthlessness, its violent propensity, its instinct to attack or defend by biting throats. She sketches weasels as ten inch, furry ribboned, ground dwelling vampires with hyper-present zen focus. She recalls the tale of a man who once shot an eagle out of the sky and attached to that eagle’s neck, teeth still embedded, was the dry, white skull of a weasel. That image I have never forgotten—or more so, that same weasel set its metaphorical fangs in my imagination and did not let go.

When Luke finished the story, I knew something had happened. I knew I had gone somewhere and had returned. I had the weasel skull souvenir to prove it. I had the weasel skull’s memory. I had latched myself to the eagle’s throat and, yes, I had died, but for a while I had also soared. I had seen things with my weasel skull eyes that no ground dwelling weasel had ever dreamed of seeing. This was Dillard’s goal of course, her thesis, if you want to call it that. The world is always more if you can seize the moment—bite hard!

To a sixteen year old who spent his days spinning a lifeguard whistle and thinking about his ’96 Bronco, this was an awakening—a laughable one maybe, now, years later—but at the time, I was sincerely moved by the sudden understanding that the world was more than my limited experience. I am thankful for that understanding. I keep it in my weasel skull, which has since taken me to a few places I might not have travelled otherwise.

We have (and this is likely a tragedy) bodily limitations to our experiential input, i.e., I'll never truly feel the emotional travails and/or ecstasy of anyone other than myself. For me, reading is the closest possible thing to achieving this aforementioned (as of right now) impossibility. If we could step inside a stranger's head for a day (or, think: a millipede's, or whale's!) we'd be doing so much better than where we're at as a species. So, when I first started reading on my own, there was a legit, revelatory sensation that other people can hurt in the same, oddly specific way that I do. As I continued to read more in college, I began to transcend, even if temporarily, my own interiority's terrain (mostly made up of neurosis and super-perverted jokes) and gained access to this additional space, one made up of disparate scenarios/sensations outside of myself, and most certainly outside my daily life. What I learned is everyone, for the most part, struggles. Like truly struggles. When navigating the world (usually poorly), because of reading, I remember this. When I feel myself reddening over my roommates' gross-ass proclivities (there are many), or the apathy of mean-faced strangers (there are many), I remember this.

The story that most instilled (and jumpstarted) this sense of (hopefully) true empathy in me is actually a collection of stories: Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Though it's not exactly a landmark of LGBQT+ literature, as a tiny, much-bullied, twitchy (I have lots of facial ticks and neurological bummers from said bullying), queer person, I found solidarity with the many, quietly tortured outcasts in this book. Every chapter focuses, with absolute deftness, on the inner dissatisfaction of a different character. And here's the thing, in spite of how unique they all are (in age, disposition, gender, career, etc.), they all f'ing suffer, man. There's Wing Bindlebaum, a schoolteacher whose one source of veritable human connection is through completely innocuous touching (gentle hand to shoulder, or reassuring palm to back), who's wrongly accused of pedophilia (oof!). There's also Alice Hindman, a teenage girl who saves herself for some snot-nosed lump that skips town and leaves her to lie in bed, at night, to stare morosely at her bedroom wall.

In short, Winesburg did it for me. Like no book before it, it allowed me to expand into someone who's a bit more compassionate, while also letting me step outside my own temporal confines, too. (It was published in 1919.) Because that's the thing, it's so granular in its emotional specificity (the way the characters privately ruminate their lost opportunities, their scant-but-still-doable prospects for improved futures) you can't help but seep into the time and place in which it was written.

It's a beautiful book that stretched my brain and kneed me in my little heart.

Anyway, thanks for reading and letting me write this.

Let’s say I’m riding along with Chekhov's Marya in the cart on this April morning (it’s not that much of a stretch: I live in a frozen Midwestern town that could easily pass for Siberian countryside, and I’ve also taught for over a decade, which still earns barely enough for a bimonthly cart ride). We are experiencing the same well-worn paths of life, set against the outbreak of spring. But if I’m in the cart, I can’t help but smile into that radiant spring sun, inhale the organic funk of the mud, and tap my fingers along with the incessant, dripping spring thaw. Ah, to be alive!

“Marya,” I might say between tailbone-numbing drops of the cart axle, “don’t you just want to freeze—sorry, wrong word—don’t you want to just pause time right now, and absorb this day?”

I’m assuming she continues to stare, so bleak and so very Russian, out into the woods. It’s not her fault. She hasn’t read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

When you’ve spent time immersed in the blackened and dead world of the man and the boy, everyday sensory experience eventually becomes miraculous. Reading the book is paralyzing; the weeks after, haunting; but, finally and forever, permanently gratitude-inducing. I appreciate life exponentially more after The Road. Every salty, juicy bite of burger; every fresh foot of snow on the ground; every wide smile and open-throated laugh from the lady in the car next to you—The Road makes you feel the absence (the imminent absence) of these things. The charred world that has taken the man’s soul offers nothing but the burnt spindles of dead trees; it is absolutely relentless in its deprivation. What else but the cataclysm could make you appreciate warmth, love, and safety?

Post-apocalyptic novels are my favorite reads. But no matter how much I enjoy Station Eleven, Dog Stars, The Passage, or even that juggernaut The Stand, I have to admit that The Road reveals these books—and again, I say this as a fan—to be silly fantasy. McCarthy's world pulverizes theirs under its weight. It is the utter reality of life after the destruction of our world, and it conveys this with a relentless commitment that I can’t even begin to want to emulate. Where else could these descriptions of the same ashes, the same burned ruins, the same disfigured survivors be so gripping? It’s like Metallica’s Master of Puppets or Kareem’s sky hook: a single skill, performed perfectly, so faultless that it represents the best of its art form. McCarthy does not ask us to imagine this world—he forces us to stumble through it, to breathe the poisoned air, to shiver in the falling ash, to die under a filthy blanket.

Then, having been so deprived, how can we not smile when biting into a sweet, crunchy apple? How can we not sigh when we put our sandals in the cheap plastic pool on a scorching day? Apparently, Marya can, but since I read The Road, I cannot.