But also, like so much of the literature that classics-based education assigns to teenagers, it is about being middle-aged and feeling futile, about rethinking your past and realizing that you will also be among the dead under the snow sooner than you would like. (And politics, but I still don’t connect well with the Irish nationalism of the story.) Though I thought I had a sense of mortality by middle school, what I really had was an absence of a sense of my future which took a long time to get over and provided me with no way to get into “The Dead.”