What carrying the mail taught me is that modern life has made us strangely weak in many ways. Weak memories for space, for numbers, for language. Our bodies are capable of walking tens of miles every day, of memorizing every fold of huge territories, of tolerating great heat and great cold, yet in our modern life all these capabilities are latent. When I think about the way that carrying the mail changed me, I wonder how much of it was tapping into this different experience of being human.
