But of course we do teach other. A person might say: People with cognitive disabilities remind me that I am too impressed by the genetic lottery distribution of book-smart cleverness. But one might also say: People with very few material resources show me that I too often hoard ephemeral pleasures. People in recovery teach me that idolatry lurks everywhere. And we’d also have to say: People with twice as much courage as me — twice as much compassion, twice as much magnanimity — they teach me that virtue. The old idea from Iris Murdoch endures: the most important revelation that stories offer is that other people exist. Stories in fiction and stories unfolding right before our eyes. Other people exist! A miraculous banality, half comedy and half tragedy, and a truth that takes rituals and habits to take seriously. We calibrate our inflated sense of self by learning from others’ gifts and from their suffering, and perhaps we learn the most when those two are almost irreducibly mixed. We — we, all of us — teach each other, insofar as we have the capacity to really learn.

— Sara Hendren, object lessons, 2025