The Second Reflection

 

“Kill one person and it’s a tragedy; kill a million and it’s a statistic.”

I found myself thinking of this quote after our A Few Good Pages reading session last week. Some stories end in the reading circle, but many of them follow me home.

We had read The School (1974) by Donald Barthelme and The Wrong Seminar (2025) by Scott Monson. During the session, The Wrong Seminar stood out to me for its sharp humor and modern tone, yet it was The School that stayed on my mind the next day during a long drive.

At first, The School felt light and conversational, told in a casual voice with dark humor. It doesn’t really have a protagonist. The narrator, a teacher, speaks as if we’ve stepped into the middle of a conversation. The story feels intimate and detached at once. Its ending offers closure without clarity, leaving you wondering what it is really trying to say.

That same casual tone reflects the indifference in how the narrator talks about death, and it might have been contagious. In the moment, I found myself absorbing his calmness, even finding justifications for it. The teacher seems indifferent, almost playful, and that detachment shapes the story’s rhythm.

I remember thinking that the sudden shift from death to the children asking him about making love at the end was sweet, like a symbolic move from loss to renewal. Maybe the writer was suggesting that we should meet death with the same ease children do, that life naturally moves on. At first that idea felt comforting, but the more I thought about it, the more it disturbed me. The story seemed to treat death too lightly, as if it did not matter. I began to think about mass deaths and genocides, how they are often reduced to numbers and stripped of their weight and grief. That kind of indifference felt deeply wrong, even if it was meant ironically.

Later, the story began to feel like more than a simple classroom anecdote. It reminded me of emotional desensitization, the psychological idea that repeated exposure to tragedy makes us less emotionally responsive to it. In The School, each death builds on the previous one until death itself becomes ordinary. The repetition numbs both the children and the teacher, and what was once tragic becomes routine. The teacher even mentions the names of some students, as if to make it personal, yet the tone remains detached, almost mechanical.

The children ask the teacher casually where everything goes after it dies. The conversation suddenly takes an adult tone, a technique the writer uses to wake us up to something we don’t understand at first. His use of language, especially when he says “life is that which gives meaning to life,” breaks the flow and makes us pause, as if the story is holding up a mirror. Then comes the line, “But isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—.” It sounds like something an adult would say rather than a child, and it made us wonder why the writer included it. Maybe it was meant to sound absurd, or maybe to show how strange our attempts to explain death can be. The way the children then move straight into asking him about Helen felt intentional, as if life was already continuing.

I thought of personal losses and how difficult it has been to go through grief. On a philosophical level, I can understand that death is constant and ordinary in the grand design of life. But another truth resists that logic. We build connections with people, animals, and even plants, and when those bonds are severed, it hurts deeply. Grief is one of the hardest and most transformative experiences we face. To treat it lightly or normalize it feels false.

During the session, I said that children deal with death differently and move on faster. But the more I reflected, the more I realized that portraying them as indifferent is also dismissive. Children do grieve, even if they show it differently. They are often the most sensitive to loss and abandonment, and what they experience can shape them for life. The children in the story who faced repeated loss and adapted to it seemed to reflect a quiet desensitization, a loss of empathy.

It was also discussed in the circle that the appearance of the new gerbil at the end is an indicator of life going on. But when I reflected later, I also felt dread. I thought, here comes the new victim. The image suddenly felt darker, a reminder of entropy and how death is inevitable.

The Wrong Seminar was modern, sharp, and direct, a satire on self-help culture and the pressure to be an “example.” I loved its wit, its movement between emails and narrative, and how it mirrored today’s fast-paced language. On the darker side, even though it is humorous, it is also painful because it shows how easily the self-help industry can use people’s pain for profit. It reminded me of cults and how effortlessly people can get brainwashed when they are desperate for guidance or belonging.

Both stories explore different worlds but touch the same nerve: a quiet absence of empathy. In The School, it appears through emotional numbness toward death; in The Wrong Seminar, through the commercialization of pain. They both use humor to expose uncomfortable truths and revolve around teaching and learning, one in an actual classroom and the other in the performative classroom of self-help culture.

Structurally, they part ways. The School unfolds like a spontaneous conversation, natural and unfiltered, while The Wrong Seminar moves between narration and emails, echoing the rhythm and noise of the digital age. In The School, the teacher’s focus is on the world around him rather than himself, and the light turns toward him only at the very end. In The Wrong Seminar, the protagonist, Marcus, is at the center from the beginning, and his transformation drives the story forward.

Even their endings reflect that contrast. The School closes on an ambiguous note, strange and surreal, leaving us uncertain about what it all means. The Wrong Seminar, on the other hand, ends with a clear message and a sense of closure: do not fall into the trap of self-help commercialization and how easily it can turn pain into profit.

At the end, both stories left me thinking about scale and empathy. How vast the universe is, and yet how every small life matters. From one view, death is an ordinary event in the cycle of existence. From another, every life is precious and irreplaceable.