The savage reckoning in Jack London’s To Build a Fire has made this famous short story a staple of high school and college reading lists for more than a century.

In just 7,000 words written in 1908, London describes a gold miner’s fatal misjudgment of freezing weather to illustrate the consequences of humanity’s self-delusion and mulish nonchalance in the face of what London biographer James L. Haley labeled nature’s “uncaring cosmic power.”

The sentences are short, the descriptions as crisp as the Yukon’s frigid air, and the still-relevant insights into human behavior punishing.

Here is how London first describes our doomed — and unnamed — traveler as he breaks off from the main Yukon trail in minus-50-degree weather.

“The trouble with him is that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.”

This lack of awareness, the reverence for facts without context, give the traveler a false sense of confidence and control.

“Fifty degrees below zero…did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold…Fifty degrees below…