Despair like Job’s may be understood, whatever causes it, as a falling out of wonder with the world, out of awe, a catastrophic failure of conviction about one’s own miraculous part in the larger scheme of things. Life loses shape and refuses form; the hearth that held you lets you slip. One is unhoused from one’s days and tortured by one’s nights. One is beyond one’s own or anyone’s reach. My version of Job’s lot has felt like profound disenchantment with myself and my work. Even the world of birds and ridgetops and rivers and trees lost its magic. Each morning I wake and my life is something less than a theoretical proposition. My unhearthing is a spiritual distemper; it is a loss of one’s grip on the meaning of a life, a nihilism to which, perhaps, those of us most dedicated to the making of meaning are most vulnerable. And it falls especially hard on those who never learned how to care for themselves, who never, early, learned to feel what they said they knew—that the nature of the universe is love, and that some of that love is meant for oneself, a birthright, and secure.