Finished Stephen King’s The Stand today and, even at 1152 pages, I was sad when I read the last sentence, as if a friend had left town for good. King’s tale of a plague-stricken America is a sprawling, flashy meditation on whether modern civilization is worth the effort—and if we’re brave enough to choose a different path. Most of all, it’s a story about broken people trying to keep their sanity in the face of the unthinkable, and it certainly resonates in 2020. Every chapter offers a cliffhanger, and it brought me back to teenage nights of staying awake into the small hours with a flashlight, promising myself just one more chapter. I’d nearly forgotten that reading can be so much fun.

A line keeps turning in my mind, an epitaph scrawled by a character on the wall of a prison cell:

I am not the potter, not the potter’s wheel, but the potter’s clay; is not the value of the shape attained as dependent upon the intrinsic worth of the clay as upon the wheel and the master’s skill?

I admire the implication of personal responsibility twinned with otherworldly detachment. Seems like a good strategy in these days of factions and anxiety. My knowledge of religion is patchy, but I wonder if King pulled this idea from an ancient text, perhaps the karmic wheels of Hinduism or some Neoplatonic notion of becoming a channel. The closest reference point I could find comes from the Old Testament:

The word came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will cause thee to hear my words.” Then I went down to the potter’s house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels. And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made it another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it. Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand.”

The Lord goes on to talk about punishing disobedient nations. But for a moment, the Bible seemed rather zen. And it’s depressing how many Christian websites want your credit card information.