Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain is a mystical novel, a story in which illness becomes an occasion for a new attention to one’s life and loves.

I am still fascinated and humbled at the way people know what to do in the face of loss.

Rather than framing moral philosophy as just another form of epistemology (how can we know what to do?), Iris Murdoch was asking a more classical question: “How can we make ourselves morally better?” she asks. “These are the questions the philosopher should try to answer.”