The Words That Broke Me
Life Can Be Great Again
There’s a particular kind of crisis that has nothing to do with circumstances.
I was living in the French Alps when it happened. A little house on a mountain. The kind of place that should, by any reasonable measure, have made life feel extraordinary. The kind of place people spend years trying to get to.
I opened a book and read a short sentence in the introduction.
Man is a thinking monkey.
The writer meant it lightly. A cheerful shorthand for what we are: animals who evolved the capacity for complex thought, wandering a universe that didn’t arrange itself for our benefit and doesn’t much notice our presence. Nothing malicious. Just honest.
And something in me collapsed…