Lucas speaks more freely than I anticipate. He tells me an unexpected story and I know he’s telling it to me precisely because we don’t know each other. I recognize this wish to reveal intimate secrets to a stranger, a wish that contains the unspoken understanding that we will have little contact with each other afterwards. The story is a parting gift not the beginning of a closeness.

The trauma of the tsunami rearranged his models. He was pushed into intimate contact with others’ minds as they suffered great loss and endured great pain. He sat with these people, talked with them, entered into their experiences. He got to know others in powerful new ways and became something of an Illuminator. When he entered into lives other than his own, his perspectives widened and deepened. He saw others differently, himself differently. He was humanized. He felt with more affection and saw the world with more wisdom. This is the effect that seeing others deeply tends to have on people. As the Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan has observed, what the eye sees more deeply the heart tends to love more tenderly.

As Maya Angelou once put it, “The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.

There’s one more thing that happens as I listen to life stories. I realize I’m not just listening to other people’s stories; I’m helping them create their stories. Very few of us sit down one day and write out the story of our lives and then go out and recite it when somebody asks. For most of us it’s only when somebody asks us to tell a story about ourselves that we have to step back and organize the events and turn them into a coherent narrative. When you ask somebody to tell part of their story, you’re giving them an occasion to take that step back. You’re giving them an opportunity to construct an account of themselves and maybe see themselves in a new way. None of us can have an identity unless it is affirmed and acknowledged by others. So as you are telling me your story, you’re seeing the ways I affirm you and the ways I do not. You’re sensing the parts of the story that work and those that do not. If you feed me empty slogans about yourself, I withdraw. But if you stand more transparently before me, showing both your warts and your gifts, you feel my respectful and friendly gaze upon you, and that brings forth growth. In every life there is a pattern, a story line running through it all. We find that story when somebody gives an opportunity to tell it.

But gradually, over two years of conversations, Deo’s story came out. “I don’t see any way of doing this without spending time with a person,” Kidder said. “If you spend time, what you want to know will creep out.” The key is to listen, to be attentive, to be patient and not interrupt. Kidder told me he likes the version of himself that comes out when he’s trying to learn about another. He’s humbler, not talking so much. Kidder didn’t merely interview Deo; he accompanied him to the places where his story played out. They went back and visited the spot where he slept in Central Park, the supermarket where he worked as a delivery boy. Their walks together were a way of planting themselves in the concrete details of Deo’s experience. Eventually, they went to Burundi, to trace his journey through the genocide.