Do Not Hate Your Life

An old Greek story says the wisest thing a human can learn is that it would be better never to have been born. Thoreau read it, and Walden's final pages are his answer, an answer Nietzsche would later give a Latin name. This is the last episode, and it ends where the book does, on a story about a kitchen table that all New England knows: something asleep inside the wood for sixty years. Kaag has walked with this book most of his life, and what it finally asks of its readers is one command, right there in the title. The table explains the rest.