“It’s not just that you went home and read Thomas Merton and reread a line you’d underlined in his book, Seeds of Contemplation, which stated in no uncertain terms that humility was the only antidote to despair—that you read it a few times and then went into a deep contemplation out on your back deck, smoking a cigar, wondering if there was a way to become humble before the preordained humiliation of a chemical addiction, wondering if the narrative thrown around about your brother would look just as absurd when folks in the future found out that it had nothing at all to do with with way compounds locked into receptors but originated with something else that was, at that time, out on the deck, out in the world, as mysterious to you as it was to everyone else.”
—“Two Ruminations on a Homeless Brother,” David Means