I finished The Dog Stars by Peter Heller yesterday and my heart hurts.
Nothing beautiful or literary about it. I don’t need to understand why, as I already know.
It just hurts.
Funny how some books seem to find a place inside you that was already tender and press on it.
This one found me there.
Peter Heller’s prose is stripped almost to the bone. There is no cushioning. Some of it is even unfinished thought, simply because the next thought comes so soon. The sentences move like someone who has learned there is no reason to waste breath. I was propelled forward through observation, action and memory, often before I had really finished absorbing the thing I had just read. There is so little excess in this consciousness and somehow that made everything heavier.
Hig, with his big beautiful heart, thinks like someone who has lived through too much loss to narrate everything anymore. What matters gets noticed and said. What doesn’t gets left behind. His world has become very physical: weather, distance, food, shelter, a plane in the sky, movement outside, life underneath the stars. And underneath all of it is this enormous capacity to love, which I think is what got me most. I recognize that capacity in myself, and in other people too. Some stubborn human tendency to attach ourselves to things even after we have learned how easily we can lose them.
Hig has lost almost everything and somehow isn’t detached from those things that matter. Or the things that cause him pain. He still attaches. To his dog. To a plane. To a place. To a friend. Even to possibility, I think. So even though he is deeply shaped by loss, he hasn’t disappeared inside it. Not yet anyway.
He’s aware he needs to keep making choices, and so he does. Sometimes terrible ones. Sometimes brave ones. Sometimes ones made entirely out of fear. All of them have consequences.
I understood that, perhaps more than I wanted to.
Ugh. The strange violence of choice when every available option means losing something. I think we’ve all felt this in different ways: with life decisions, people we love, family, work, home. Sometimes there is no choice that leaves everything intact, and the decision becomes less about finding the right answer than deciding what you are willing to lose.
Especially home.
Because what is home when everything that made it home is gone?
This is where Hig got to me too.
He isn’t searching for some lost version of home. He is making one. Slowly and practically, through the things that need doing and the things he continues to care about. The routines, the work, the dog, the plane, the land. The daily business of keeping something alive.
I felt this deeply here, and throughout The Odyssey. I keep coming back to this question of home in the books I read, although I think I used to imagine it very differently. I used to think of home as somewhere you eventually find, or return to, or recognize. Something outside yourself that provides the feeling of belonging.
The Wall brought me into something similar through a completely different kind of solitude. There, too, so much of life became the necessary things that needed doing. Food. Animals. Work. The next day. The intimate, almost unremarkable business of continuing to live.
And maybe that is part of what I am so interested in now.
What does it mean to build a life rather than simply find one?
I have spent more than enough time imagining what home really is or could be, and I think I’ve settled on it being something I construct inside myself. That feels very different to me from the idea of “finding yourself,” which has never really connected with me. I’m not sure I ever had a particularly solid sense of a self to find. This is me. These are my passions. This is my personality. This is who I am.
I think I’m building it now.
That sounds obvious when I write it down, but it doesn’t feel obvious to me. It feels like something I have only recently begun to understand.
And that is what I see in Hig. He is not untouched by what happened to him. He isn’t pretending the past didn’t exist, and he certainly hasn’t somehow transcended it. He carries it everywhere, along with his grief. But he also keeps making a world around himself. Participating in it, not just surviving it. Choosing what matters… attaching… caring. Taking risks. Becoming someone in the middle of all that has already happened to him.
I don’t really want to become the person I was before everything happened. I’m not particularly interested in “getting back to myself.” There may not even be a self back there that I want to return to.
I think I want to become whoever I am now. Home is definitely part of that becoming, something I’ll keep constructing as I go. Might make it easier to survive change because it isn’t dependent on everything around me remaining the same.
Maybe that is what I loved about Hig. He keeps choosing, knows that he must. He keeps loving and appreciating what is still here. He keeps moving through the world that remains, even though it isn’t the world he started with.
And the stars are still there. Jasper too.
Even after everything.
And then there is Cima.
I connected with her too, in a way I’ll keep to myself. Her grief feels different from Hig’s, but it has shaped her just as completely.
The loss of her twin brother, her partner, the complicated tenderness and damage of her relationship with her father, the years of not being touched or loved in the ways a body remembers wanting to be touched and loved. There is so much grief in her that has nowhere obvious to go, and yet she is still there, still capable of wanting, still capable of choosing and wanting, still capable of routines and carrying on, wherever that may lead her.
And how, because of that, the capacity for connection can remain.
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