Philosophy

Take a Closer Look

Creativity, Philosophy / /

Look at your fish

In 1864, a young man named Samuel Scudder arrived at Harvard to interview with the celebrated biologist Louis Agassiz. He likely expected a conventional test—something meant to measure what he knew, or to probe his intellect.

Instead, Agassiz placed a preserved fish in front of him and gave a single instruction: “Look at your fish.” Then he walked out of the room.

As Ryan Holiday writes in Wisdom Takes Work, hours passed. Scudder fought boredom. He examined the fish from every angle he could think of. He handled it, turned it over, traced its contours, counted its scales. Maybe it was a test of patience. With nothing else to do, he drew it.

When Agassiz returned, he was unimpressed. He told Scudder that he hadn’t truly seen the fish yet and urged him to look again. Then he left.

This pattern continued for days.

Each time Agassiz returned, he asked what Scudder had observed. Each time, the answer fell short. Eventually, Scudder could only admit the truth: “I see how little I saw before.”

That admission marked a turning point. After another long stretch of uninterrupted looking, something finally clicked. Scudder began to notice the fish’s underlying order—its symmetry, the way its organs mirrored one another on both sides. When he offered this observation, Agassiz responded with enthusiasm: “Of course! Of course!” When Scudder asked what he should do next, Agassiz replied, “Look at your fish.”

In the end, Scudder discovered… well, nothing.

But as Scudder later explained, “it was a deeper lesson,” Ryan writes, “perhaps the most important one he ever got in his career as a scientist: the power of focus. The importance of intensely looking, with dedication and without interruption, at something as simple and ordinary as a fish in order to truly see it. It was, [Scudder said], ‘a lesson whose influence has extended to the details of every subsequent study; a legacy the Professor had left to me, as he has left it to many others, of inestimable value, which we could not buy, with which we cannot part.’”

David McCullough uses this story in his writing classes. “Seeing is so important in this work,” he said. “Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new. Seeing is as much the job of a historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me. That’s Dickens’ great admonition to all writers, ‘Make me see.’”

Nobody bothered to look closely enough

David McCullough recalls his own Agassiz Jr. moment while writing Mornings on Horseback. He was trying to understand what had caused Theodore Roosevelt’s severe asthma attacks as a boy—episodes so intense they sometimes left his family fearing for his life.

McCullough consulted physicians. One asked whether there had been a cat or dog in the house, or whether the attacks coincided with pollen season. A psychosomatic specialist wondered if they happened around emotionally charged events like birthdays and holidays.

Using young Theodore’s diary entries, McCullough made a calendar of what he did each day. “In pencil, I wrote where he was, who was with him, what was going on, and in red ink I put squares around the days of the asthma attacks. But a little like Scudder and the fish, I couldn’t see a pattern.”

Then one day, as he looked at the calendar on his desk, he noticed something: every asthma attack happened on a Sunday. McCullough asked himself what Sundays meant in Theodore’s childhood. And then the answer became clear. If Theodore had an asthma attack on Sunday, he didn’t have to do something he hated: go to church. Instead, he got to go to the country with his father—just the two of them. For young Theodore, this was heaven.

This didn’t mean that the asthma attacks were planned, but the anxiety brought on by the prospect of going to church likely triggered them. (A high price to pay, because the attacks were horrible.) Other things may have contributed to the attacks, but the Sunday pattern was too pronounced to be coincidental.

“The chances of finding a new piece are fairly remote—though I’ve never written a book where I didn’t find something new—but it’s more likely you see something that’s been around a long time that others haven’t seen. Sometimes it derives from your own nature, your own interests. More often, it’s just that nobody bothered to look closely enough.”

What had been there all along

DNA is the master cookbook of who we are and how we function. Its sibling, RNA, is the messenger. RNA tells our cells what to do.

In the early 1980s, scientists had discovered something crucial: RNA could replicate itself—by itself. “If some RNA molecules could store genetic information and also act as a catalyst to spur chemical reactions,” Walter Isaacson explains, “they might be more fundamental to the origins of life than DNA, which cannot naturally replicate themselves without the presence of proteins to serve as a catalyst.”

In 1998, biochemist Jennifer Doudna was on a mission: to show how, exactly, RNA could replicate itself. First she would need to know what an RNA model looked like. Back in the 1970s, researchers had mapped the structure of smaller, simpler RNA molecules. But when it came to larger RNAs, progress stalled. For nearly twenty years, scientists found it difficult to isolate them clearly enough to understand their structure. “Colleagues told Doudna that getting a good image of a large RNA molecule would, at that time, be a fool’s errand.”

But if she wanted “to understand the workings of a self-splicing piece of RNA, she would have to fully discern its structure, atom by atom”—something most scientists at the time believed would be too difficult, if not impossible, to do. “Hardly anyone was trying anymore,” famed biologist Jack Szostak recalls.

It took two years, but Doudna and her partner, Jamie Cate, did it. They produced a working model of the structure of an RNA molecule—work that would eventually lay the foundation for CRISPR, the most widely used gene-editing system today.

When they started, RNA was old news. But by giving it sustained, almost stubborn attention, they discovered something entirely new.

It hadn’t been impossible after all. It’s just that no one else bothered to look closely enough at what had been there all along.

These are the best books I read in 2025

Philosophy, Reading / /

I love to read.

What a beautiful gift—the ability to read. To be rewarded so vastly for a few hours of your time and attention.

It almost isn’t fair how easy it is! Open a book, let your eyes move over the lines, and bam—the world’s wisdom is yours.

What a beautiful gift a good book is.

The pages… the sentences…

The words.

One after another they chip away at our ignorance—our discontentment—and return us at once to stillness. We breathe a sigh of relief.

The stories.

One after another they pile up, pushing us away from the center of the universe, expanding our world as we’re brought down to size. We’re humbled and empowered. We become fearless.

How life-changing a good book can be. What a beautiful life we can build from them. (I keep a growing list of my favorites, which you can view and bookmark here.)

I read around 70 books this year, and many of them were among the best I’ve ever read. There were some that I couldn’t stop talking or thinking about, so I had to put them in a list and recommend them to you. These are the books that most changed the way I think, taught me something invaluable, and pushed me to be a better person. I have a feeling they’ll do the same for you.

An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork by Etty Hillesum
One of the best discoveries I made this year was the writings of Etty Hillesum. How had I never heard of her?

Etty was a Dutch Jew living in Amsterdam when she began her diary—at her therapist’s urging—nine months after the Nazis took over the Netherlands. She was 27 years old. Two years later, at age 29, she would be murdered in Auschwitz, along with her family.

This book is made up of those diary entries and letters. Within them, we witness a startling personal transformation that unfolds over just two years.

In the early pages, we meet a young woman in emotional chaos: boy-crazy, prone to self-indulgent daydreaming, keenly aware that she spends too much time gazing at herself in the mirror. But as time passes, something remarkable happens. She begins to transform—spiritually, emotionally, philosophically—all in the face of unthinkable horror.

It’s as if the bleaker her circumstances became, the stronger her spirit grew.

While stationed with her family at Camp Westerbork, Etty describes walking beside the barbed-wire fences and feeling… joy. She wasn’t delusional. She understood what would likely happen to her. Yet that awareness did not lead her to despair. In fact, the opposite occurred: she fell more deeply in love with life.

And here’s the thing—she could have gone into hiding. She chose not to.

Defying her friends’ pleas, Etty refused to hide from her persecutors. “She didn’t want to desert her parents, but more than that,” Carol Lee Flinders writes, “it just felt morally wrong to her that anyone would concentrate on personal survival who could be reaching out lovingly to others instead.”

Friends even recall failed attempts to “kidnap” Etty and put her into hiding. Convinced she didn’t fully understand the danger she was in, Klaas Smelik—the writer to whom she would later entrust her diaries—once grabbed her in an attempt to pull her to safety. She wriggled free, stepped back, and said, “You don’t understand me.” When he admitted that he didn’t, she replied: “I want to share the destiny of my people.”

In that moment, he knew there was no hope of “rescuing” her. She would not allow it. Besides, she argued, what did it matter if she went—or if someone else did?

And this was a woman who had everything going for her! She had family and friends, a law degree, ambition, curiosity, and a full, vibrant inner life.

Yet she would not run and hide—not when there were so many people right in front of her she could help.

I could go on and on. Whenever someone asks me if I’ve read anything good lately, this is the book I talk about. Do yourself a favor and read it!

(And if you want an even deeper dive into Etty Hillesum, I’ve read and recommended Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed by Patrick Woodhouse, Enduring Lives: Living Portraits of Women and Faith in Action by Carol Lee Flinders (the section on Etty), andThe Jungian Inspired Holocaust Writings of Etty Hillesum: To Write Is to Act by Barbara Morrill, and the textbook, Reading Etty Hillesum in Context.)

Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday
Not only is this one of the best books I’ve read this year, it’s one of the best books I’ve read, period. It’s also my favorite book in his virtue series.

This book is about the most important kind of knowledge there is: knowing what’s what. What’s worth pursuing. What we should avoid. What we can ignore. What we should never ignore.

Lots of people are smart—but how many have wisdom? Lots of people know facts, but how many can think with nuance? How many people really know themselves? (Self-awareness, he argues, is the rarest thing in the world.)

“Think of the people,” he writes, “who […] miss out on life because they are chasing immortal fame.” They convince themselves that their job is so important they don’t have time for contemplation, or even an hour with a good book. They check their work emails well after they’ve logged off for the day. They do things that could have gone without doing.

“Wisdom is knowing that what you do is important…but that it’s not that important.”

In doing all this, they miss the whole point of life: happiness. Not pleasure or comfort, but the deeper happiness that comes from doing the right thing, for the right reasons, in the right way, at the right time. The happiness that comes from truly knowing what’s what.

And this kind of wisdom takes constant effort. Famed basketball coach George Raveling, Holiday writes, “wakes up each morning, sits on the side of the bed, and gives himself two choices. ‘George,’ he says to himself, ‘you can either be happy or you can be very happy.’”

“Wisdom is happiness. Happiness is wisdom,” Ryan writes. “This is not a tautology. No one would be happy not fulfilling their potential, and yet, can one flourish without joy and happiness?”

This is another book I could go on and on about. It’s that good. Do yourself another favor and read it.

Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman
I didn’t think I would like this book. I assumed it would be another familiar argument about how we should stop chasing money and things and start caring more about making the world better.

And yes—it is that book. But it’s also so much more. It’s genuinely inspiring and eye-opening. Even my wife, Courtney—who typically blasts scream core while she cooks—turned the music off each evening so I could read it out loud until we finished it.

The thought experiment that made philosopher Peter Singer famous goes like this: suppose you’re on a walk and see a child drowning in a pond. You want to jump in and save the child, but then you remember you’re wearing a pair of brand-new, super expensive shoes. Jumping into the pond would ruin them. What do you do?

Obviously, you save the child. Pose this question to anyone and the answer is always the same. What kind of question is that, anyway?

But Singer argues we do the exact opposite all the time. The money we spend on things we don’t need could save so many children’s lives.

One of the stories I loved was that of businessman-turned-philanthropist Rob Mather. After finding the success of a corporate career deeply empty, he wanted to put his energy toward something that actually made a difference. But what? He wasn’t interested in a vague gesture or a symbolic cause—he wanted to take on a problem that was massive, yet solvable. He found malaria.

In 2005, malaria was killing 3,000 children every day. That’s the equivalent of seven jumbo jets full of children going down. It’s almost impossible to fathom. Could one person really do something about that?

As it turns out, malaria has a surprisingly simple and inexpensive solution: mosquito nets treated with insecticide. So Rob decided he would raise money to provide them.

But this raises an obvious question. If curbing such a deadly disease is really that straightforward, why hadn’t someone already done something about it?

That’s one of the many questions Bregman urges us to sit with. Even the tiniest effort on our part, he argues, can make an extraordinary difference. “You can be your average exec in your average company one day and then take the lead in fighting one of the world’s deadliest diseases the next.”

Mather went on to found the Against Malaria Foundation, which has now “raised more than 700 million dollars and distributed over 300 million mosquito nets to 600 million people.” Because of this, the daily death toll has dropped from the equivalent of seven jumbo jets to fewer than three.

In one village in Uganda’s West Nile region—where nearly half the population had suffered from malaria in the preceding months—Rob’s foundation distributed 50,000 mosquito nets. A man from the village later walked six miles to dictate a message through the Red Cross to Rob, letting him know that malaria no longer existed there. The disease had been completely eradicated in his village.

It’s such an inspiring and timely book. Courtney and I loved it.

More books that made this year of reading especially rich:

Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change by Ben Austen
This was so moving and well-written I remember holding it to my chest after reading certain passages.

Company K by William March
This is phenomenal and I wrote about one of my favorite stories from it here.

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick
This was essential to understanding Chat GPT and how to use it as a creativity partner.

Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo
I underlined or starred something on almost every page.

Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus
I read this to better understand Charlie Kirk and his motives for saying the things he said. (By the way, this is another benefit of reading good books: so you can hear messages like Charlie’s and not think they’re normal.)

Epictetus: The Complete Works Robin Waterfield
Literally incredible. It’s like a cleanser for your mind, washing away the mental weeds and tuning your thoughts to the sound of reason.

Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer
I finished this recently and Oh. My. Gosh. It is so, so good.

Narrowing down the above list was tough, so here are other books I read this year and loved:

Philosophy as a Way of Life by Piette Hadot, 1984 by George Orwell,The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson, Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed by Patrick Woodhouse, The Art of Slow Writing by Louise DeSalvo,Fahrenheit 182 by Mark Hoppus, Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul by Barry M. Andrews, Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Still Writing by Dani Shapiro, Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor,Writing My Wrongs by Shaka Senghor, The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey, How To Think Like Socrates by Donald J. Robertson, Enduring Lives: Living Portraits of Women and Faith in Action by Carol Lee Flinders, The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X, The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule, How To Be Caring by Shantideva, Lincoln on Leadership by Donald T. Phillips,The Courage To Create by Rollie May,History Matters by David McCullough, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback by Seth Wickersham, Socrates by Paul Johnson,With the Old Breed by E. B. Sledge,A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst, New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton, How To Be Caring by Shantideva, and Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer.

These ideas keep me grounded as the world speeds up

Creativity, Philosophy / /

Follow the trail long enough

Margaret Atwood doesn’t begin with a master plan.

She starts her novels with something small—an image, a voice, a scene—and lets the structure emerge as she writes.

She wrote two sections of her book Surfacing five years before writing the rest. To know everything in advance, she says, would be “too much like paint-by-numbers.”

Still, many writers, especially early on, try to leap ahead—writing too quickly, aiming for clarity too soon. But that’s a trap. “Rushing through writing is like rushing through life,” Louise DeSalvo has said.

Instead of sprinting to the finish, the best work often comes from moving slowly, clue by clue. “How long are we willing to wait to develop our most singular work?” DeSalvo asks. “Or rather, how long are we willing to work? Are we stopping short of when our work begins to sing its true song? . . . If it took Matisse seven years, or Eugenides nine, why do we expect important work from ourselves in, say, a year or even two?”

She recalls how her early drafts felt “constrained and safe.” Her characters were one-dimensional, the settings vague, the story overly linear. But she kept going. “Dissatisfied though I may be, it’s essential to continue working,” she writes, “for it’s only near the end of the process that I develop my singular voice.” She admits that it isn’t until her eleventh draft that she finally knows what she’s doing with a book.

It doesn’t have to be good right away. Just get started. Let the work simmer. Let it surprise you.

Because if we give ourselves time—if we follow the trail long enough—“we, too, might create a singular, authentic, powerful work of art.”

Well, sometimes that’s exactly the right method

Like Atwood, Thomas Edison didn’t start out with a grand plan.

Edison’s creation of the commercially viable lightbulb was the culmination of small discoveries. He followed those discoveries—trusting they would lead somewhere, even if he didn’t yet know where. As David McCullough often stressed, the people we read about in history had no idea how things would turn out. When we read history, we’re not reading people’s past so much as we’re reading what they were presently living.

In 1878, others were experimenting with incandescent light. “But [Edison],” Ryan Holiday writes, “was the only [person] willing to test six thousand different filaments—including one made from the beard hair of one of his men— inching closer each time to the one that would finally work.”

His success had little to do with intellect and everything to do with persistence.

“Nikola Tesla, who spent a frustrating year in Edison’s lab during the invention of the lightbulb, once sneered that if Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would ‘proceed at once’ to simply ‘examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.’ Well, sometimes that’s exactly the right method…”

While others despaired, Edison worked. He wouldn’t rush. He would trust the process. And he did it all without the hindsight of knowing how things would turn out.

No one will ask how long it took

George Pocock, the builder behind the world’s finest racing shells, was, as Daniel James Brown writes, “all but born with an oar in his hand.” Boatbuilding ran in his blood—both grandfathers were competitive boatbuilders, and his father built racing shells for Eton College. George carried that legacy forward, blending deep knowledge with an unmatched devotion to craftsmanship. At the peak of his career, he was supplying racing shells to nearly every elite crew program in the country—including the University of Washington, whose team shocked the world with their win at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

What set his shells apart was the patience and care he put into them. Pocock refused to rush, remembering his father’s words: “No one will ask you how long it took to build; they will only ask who built it.”

A student in a hurry learns the slowest

This is one of my favorite anecdotes in the phenomenal book Wisdom Takes Work:

“There is a story about a samurai warrior named Banzo, who sought an education in a hurry so that he could impress his father. Told by a great teacher that mastery would take ten years, he was aghast.

‘I can’t wait that long. What if I work extra hard?’

‘OK,’ the master said. ‘Thirty years.’

‘But I will do whatever it takes to make it go faster,’ Banzo pleaded.

‘In that case,’ the master said, ‘it shall take seventy years. A student in a hurry learns the slowest.’”

Do the work, and let destiny take care of the rest

Life, Philosophy / /

“There are a million different versions, this is mine.”

For the first few years of his career, White Lotus star Walton Goggins would walk into auditions asking himself, What do these people want from me? “And I can tell you it brought me a lot of pain. A lot of pain,” he says.

But everything changed when he flipped the question. Instead of trying to deliver what he thought they wanted, he started asking himself what he thought the role needed. He thought, “You know what? I’m just gonna come from my heart, and this is my version of it. There are a million different versions of it. And if this is not the version they’re buying, at least I can live with myself at the end of the day. And I can walk away without expecting this job, you know? And that’s really where I found my salvation.”

It’s one of the hardest things to do: to pour your heart into something without thinking about the outcome.

But it’s how the best work gets made.

One of the most brilliant physicists to ever live had his biggest breakthrough when he realized the same thing:

“I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.”

After four intense years working on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, Richard Feynman accepted a teaching position at Cornell. Top universities were competing for him, offering higher salaries and prestige. Albert Einstein himself wrote, inviting Feynman to join the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

But despite the remarkable offers, he couldn’t accept. The years at Los Alamos had drained him. He was exhausted, uninterested in research, and couldn’t write more than two sentences on a scientific problem without losing focus. “They expect me to accomplish something, and I can’t accomplish anything! I have no ideas…”

Then he had a thought. The expectations attached to these offers were absurd—impossible to live up to. And because they were impossible, he realized, he had no responsibility to live up to them!

“It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.”

At Cornell, he decided to return to what had always drawn him to physics in the first place: fun. From now on, he would only work on problems that entertained him. “Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything . . . I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”

Within a week, he was working on a “fun” project, one a colleague questioned for its lack of importance. “‘Hah!’ I say. ‘There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.’ His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind that I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.”

This project of “no importance” led him to win the Nobel Prize.

Literally, who cares?

Before she became a household name, Elizabeth Gilbert had no connections in the publishing world. She knew full well that her writing might never make money. “It might never work,” she remembers thinking. “It didn’t matter. No way was I going to give up on my work simply because it wasn’t ‘working.’ That wasn’t the point of it.”

She understood that the reward couldn’t be external—it had to come “from the private awareness I held that I had chosen a devotional path and I was being true to it.” It had to come from the heart. It had to be fun.

“You might spend your whole life following your curiosity and have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end—except one thing. You will have the satisfaction of knowing that you passed your entire existence in devotion to the noble human virtue of inquisitiveness. And that should be more than enough for anyone to say that they lived a rich and splendid life.”

That kind of devotion changes everything. Work of any kind can be discouraging when we’re thinking about the results. With creative work, the doubt can grow louder—the fear that we have nothing new to say, that everything’s been done before.

But as Elizabeth Gilbert says, who cares? Literally, who cares? There’s nothing new. What is new is yourperspective and passion and the stories you tell. There are a million different versions; this is yours.

She once said she can’t understand how people can create something beautiful and then hide it for fear of being criticized. “She advises writers to send their work to agents ‘as much as possible,’” Louise DeSalvo writes. “And when the rejection letters come back, to ‘take a deep breath and try again.’”

Because it’s the writer’s job to complete the work; it’s the agent’s and editor’s job to decide whether the work is good enough to be published.

It’s your job to give your version, to have fun, to pursue the thing that lights you up. It’s your job “to write your little heart out,” Gilbert insists, “and let destiny take care of the rest.”

This is something I try to always remember

Life, Philosophy / /

There’s a story about Socrates’ teenage son, Lamprocles, who complained bitterly that his mother—Socrates’ famously fiery wife—nagged him nonstop.

Socrates, ever the philosopher, gently questioned his son until he admitted she was a loving mother who had his best interests at heart. Even so, Lamprocles maintained he couldn’t stand the constant scolding.

Then Socrates asked a question that, according to cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist Donald J. Robertson, was nothing short of ingenious: “Do actors in tragedies take offense when other characters insult and verbally abuse them?” He notes that the insults hurled onstage were far worse than anything Lamprocles’ mother ever said.

The boy thought this was a silly question. It was obvious they didn’t take offense. The actors knew it was only a performance; no real harm was intended.

“That’s correct,” replied Socrates, “but didn’t you admit just a few moments earlier that you don’t believe your mother really means you any harm either?”

With a few well-placed questions, as Robertson writes in his wonderful book How to Think Like Socrates, “Socrates helped Lamprocles to examine his anger from a radically different perspective. When assumptions that fuel our anger begin to seem puzzling to us, our thinking can become more flexible, and we may begin to break free from the grip of unhealthy emotions.”

So, what if we got better at leaving things uncertain? What if we stopped rushing to judgment?

This kind of perspective shift is easier when the challenge is circumstantial. When plans fall through, when a door closes, when life doesn’t go as expected, we can take a breath and trust that time will reveal meaning. We remind ourselves that life often has its reasons.

But bringing that same calm to our relationships is harder. When someone’s words sting or their actions feel unjust, detachment doesn’t come naturally. We’re wired to take things personally, to collect evidence for our hurt, to seek justice.

And yet, as Socrates reminded his son, what we see on the surface is rarely the whole truth. We don’t know the full story playing out behind someone’s eyes. Pausing to hold space for that mystery softens us, makes us kinder. That softness is not weakness but wisdom. Clarity.

And clarity and kindness are inseparable.

It’s like that bit of Chinese wisdom: Clarity can be obtained only in a kind person. A person can be kind only with clarity.One helps the other.

One of the most haunting, beautiful stories I’ve ever read about appearance versus reality comes from William March’s masterful novel, Company K—a mosaic of war stories in which each chapter is a different soldier’s account of the front lines.

Private Allan Methot, once an aspiring poet, complained that the “spiritual isolation” of army life was unbearable. He couldn’t talk to anyone. No one could understand him. His fellow soldiers repulsed him—they seemed to care only about food, sleep, alcohol, and women.

As if that weren’t bad enough, he was assigned night watch duty with Private Danny O’Leary—whom he found hopelessly dull.

Methot wrote that O’Leary’s eyes were “unlit by intelligence” and that “he would stand there stupidly and stare at me, his heavy brows drawn together, his thick lips opened like an idiot’s.” Any attempt at conversation was futile. When Methot spoke to O’Leary, “he lowered his eyes, as if ashamed of me, and stared at the duckboards, fumbling at his rifle. . . .” When O’Leary finally spoke, it was to ask Methot when he thought they might get paid.

Methot laughed in contempt. How alone he was! It was as if he lived among aliens. His account ends in despair. He climbed out of the trench and walked slowly toward enemy lines, reciting poems aloud, waiting for the moment when a soldier’s boot would crush his “frail skull.”

And then, in the very next chapter, came Private Danny O’Leary’s letter to Methot.

In it, O’Leary wrote that Methot’s poems were the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. He thanked Methot for his friendship, saying that his faith in him had changed his life.

His letter is so devastatingly beautiful that it’s worth writing in full:

“I would like you so see me now, Allan Methot: I would like you to see what you have created!—For you did create me more completely than the drunken longshoreman from whose loins I once issued.

I was so gross, so stupid; and then you came along—How did you know? How could you look through layer upon layer until you saw the faint spark that was hidden in me? . . . Do you remember the nights on watch together when you recited Shelley and Wordsworth?—Your voice cadencing the words was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. I wanted to speak to you, to tell you that I understood, to let you know your faith in me would not be wasted, but I dared not.—I could not think of you as a human being like myself, or the other men of the company. . . . I thought of you as someone so much finer than we that I would stand dumb in your presence, wishing that a German would jump into the trench to kill you, so that I might put my body between you and the bullet. . . . I would stand there fumbling my rifle, hoping that you would speak the beautiful lines forever. . . . ‘I will learn to read!’ I thought. ‘When war is over, I will learn to read! . . .’

Where are you now, Allan? I want you to see me.—Your friendship was not wasted; your faith has been justified. . . . Where are you, great heart? . . . Why don’t you answer me?”

Whoa.

As I mentioned, this story really stuck with me. Whenever I talk with someone now—the cashier at the grocery store, a friend, my brother—I try to imagine the boundless intelligence and light behind their eyes. The infinite treasures and possibilities just below the surface.

The paradox is that what’s most mysterious—uncertain, unlabeled, unknown—is often what’s most real. It’s what most closely resembles life itself.

I try to remember that clarity is probably more about what I cannot see than what I can.

And somehow, that simple truth—that I know so little—makes me calmer, kinder, and happier.

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