Every one in a while, one comes upon a book that changes one’s life. Reading Proust a few years ago was one such experience for me. And earlier this year I had another, one that came from what at first glance seemed like a very unlikely source. When the world turned upside down with pandemic back in March, I wasn’t able to read or write. The idea of fiction—reading it, writing it—seemed impossible. Fiction, I suddenly understood, belonged to the realm of leisure. So when we went into lockdown and panic and uncertainty reigned, who could afford such leisure? Every book I turned to and tried to read (I had to do something in the evenings) seemed so utterly irrelevant, dissatisfying, even frivolous. So I turned to a book of non-fiction that had been sitting in my “to-read” pile, a book I’d ordered in 2018 after reading a good review of it in The Atlantic but never got beyond cracking back the cover: John Kaag’s Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are.