George Saunders

Now, the mechanism by which he did that or the rationale is interesting.

But he knew that climate change was a thing, and he consciously or unconsciously denied it.

That's where he was out of sync with truth.

One of the books I had in mind while I was writing this was Death of Ivan Illich by Tolstoy.

And in that book, it's a much more modest sinner, and his sin is just that he lived his life by the credo that I just want to do what everybody else is doing.

I want to be normal.

So at the end of his life, he gets stomach cancer and it was based on a real thing that Tolstoy's neighbor supposedly screamed for four straight days at the end of his life.

And Tolstoy heard the story of like, wow, what would make you do that?

So in the book, the guy has this intense physical pain, of course, but Tolstoy has layered in this idea that Ivan is starting to realize that he wasted his life by this idea of being normal.

Yeah.

And there's a beautiful moment where after many, many days of saying, why am I suffering so much when I lived the perfect life?

He finally says kind of to God, all right, maybe I didn't.

Maybe I lived out of alignment with truth.

And at that point, he begins this rapid transformation.

Salvation in that moment is aligning yourself with what is actually true.

The truth is you lived your life in the wrong way.

And at some point he says, all right, I can't go back in time, but I can start now, essentially.

I can start being in alignment with truth.

I didn't live in the right way.

And you can feel the pain start to go out of him as soon.