From Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

I’ve always loved snakes. Love includes fear—for everyone, I think, but in the religious mind these emotions are married like grace and necessity, abundance and dearth. Sanctify the Lord of hosts himself, cries wise wild old Isaiah, and let him be your dread.

Recently I mentioned my lifelong fascination with snakes in the presence of my mother, who has perhaps the most saturated, unmediated, sorrowful, solitary, and relentlessly religious mind I know. She flinched and objected as if I’d…