Remember: it can all be taken away at any moment.

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.