And this is a fundamental problem with writing nonfiction. People say, “How do you write a profile of someone? How do you capture them fully?” Well, you don’t. It’s artifice. There are small moments, little parts, that crystallize—but they are part of something larger that’s always changing and evolving. Even if you’re writing autobiography, you only capture a specimen of a larger self. You’re not ever going to comprehend a life fully on the page, because life keeps changing.

Anyway, I started writing instead of going to my regular classes. I was writing about Russia, because I’d spent that summer above the Arctic Circle studying trees and fish and pinecones and how the Russian weren’t doing a good job keeping things alive up there. It was surreal. Never dark. Lots of vodka. I fell in love with this American and we dated—whatever dating looks like up there—but I could never let him know how much I loved him. I was just dying inside. So I had to write about him to make him, maybe to make him less powerful but also to understand this madness I felt. And so I did. It was really love that made me write. I started reading Joyce and Woolf and Forester, and I felt like a perfectly normal human being when I was inside those books. There was this one professor, David Price, and he talked about literature beautifully. The characters were so real it was almost as if they were hanging out in the room with us. He gave us this short story called “The Ledge,” by Lawrence Sargent Hall. It’s not a very well-known piece, though it does appear in some anthologies, as well as The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. It’s about an old fisherman who leaves the warmth of his wife’s bed on Christmas Day to shoot sea ducks with his son. He promised his son they’d go hunting. In the end, when out collecting the dead ducks on the sand. The skiff drifts off to sea and they are trapped together, the water rising, and they are waiting for their death.

Again, I grew up in a place where nature was always encroaching on my life, was always infiltrating my feelings—either literally through the wilderness or intellectually through my father’s science lessons. And “The Ledge,” with its deadly, encroaching high tide, spoke to me profoundly. It helped me formulate questions about how the immensity and cruelty of the universe coexists with ordinary love, the everyday circumstances of human beings. The story leaves us with an image of this fisherman caught man pitilessly between these two worlds. It posed a question that became an obsession, and that followed me into my writing: what happens to your character when nature and humanity brutally encounter one another?

In the passage I chose, the father has already hoisted his son up onto his shoulders. The sea is rising. The dog is already dead. The skiff is gone. As the water’s rises over his boots, everything sort of bottoms out, and the landscape that he had perceived and believed to know and control, deteriorates. The image is baptismal, but it’s a baptism of death. Here’s what happens next:

The boy did for the fisherman the greatest thing that can be done. He may have been too young for perfect terror, but he was old enough to know there were things beyond the power of any man. All he could do he did, by trusting his father to do all he could, and asking nothing more. The fisherman, rocked to his soul by a sea, held his eyes shut upon the interminable night. “Is it time now?” The boy said The fisherman could hardly speak. “Not yet,” he said. “Not just yet.”

The fisherman has made the gravest mistake, the son maintains faith in his father. The choice to maintain this illusion of hope, which neither one really believes in—they both know they won’t be saved, is beautiful. We have to keep that love for other human beings alive at all times, even when the water is rising over our mouths and into our lungs and carrying us towards death.