Two Minutes Dead

Four years ago Kaag's heart stopped on a treadmill, and for two minutes he was dead. The EMTs brought him back, and ever since, the most quoted sentence in Walden reads differently to him: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Thoreau wrote it as a dying man himself; the tuberculosis that killed him at forty-four was already keeping him company. The episode stays inside that one sentence, and it ends with the grief that taught him to write it. Kaag has been where it points. He can tell you what becomes clear there.