I Will Ruin You

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I was steering my students through a discussion on morality and hope in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, getting bogged down in a debate over whether the reader needed to know what had brought about the apocalyptic conditions depicted in the book, when I happened to glance out the window and see, running across the staff parking lot, a young man wearing a vest that appeared to be loaded with sticks of dynamite.

“I just want to know what caused it,” Eldon Delton had said just moments earlier. He was one of the brightest eleventh-grade kids in the entire school, but definitely a literalist. This English class wasn’t his favorite — his passions were science and computers, and in all likelihood he’d one day be the next Bill Gates — because it was all subjective. There weren’t always right and wrong answers. You couldn’t break the story down into zeros and ones. The same book could be fantastic to one person and a pile of crap to another, and that didn’t sit well with Eldon. He liked absolutes.

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