“Was it the wine that helped a person appreciate things uncritically?”
Elif Batuman, Either/Or
Old times
ANNA: Perhaps she has all she wants.
DEELEY: She lacks curiosity.
ANNA: Perhaps she’s happy.”
“It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure — mysterious, unknown, useless as it is — is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilising to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgement when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.
“As we get older, we tend to place limits on how far we can go in life. Over the years we internalize the criticism and doubts of others. By accepting what we think to be the limits of our intelligence and creative powers, we create a self-fulfilling dynamic. They become our limits. You do not need to be so humble and self-effacing in this world. Such humility is not a virtue but is rather a value that people promote to help keep you down. Whatever you are doing now, you are in fact capable of much more, and by thinking that, you will create a very different dynamic.”
“It’s a psychological fact: pleasure helps your disposition. For more pure pleasure have a Camel.”
Camel Cigarettes, 1956
“Everybody tells you these are the best days of your life. So much pressure! They’re all wrong. Be where you are. Nobody else is really having more fun than you are. They’re all just pretending.”
“Penguin is one of the rare cases of successful branding for a publisher with a wide audience. One
of the reasons for this was the institution of design standards from an early stage, known as the Penguin Composition Rules, as well as the logo designed by Edward Young, which is still in use today with hardly any modification. Founded in 1935, Penguin also employed the typographer Jan Tschichold in the late 1940s, who further developed the cover designs and branding standards across all the different book series.”
How should one read a book?
“It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure — mysterious, unknown, useless as it is — is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilising to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgement when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.”
“Why should a woman be limited by anything or anybody? Why should a woman not be ambitious for literature? Ambitious for herself?”
“Sometimes, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves. Mexican essayist Octavio Paz describes eroticism as a thirst for otherness. So often, the most intoxicating other that people discover in the affair is not a new partner: it’s a new self.”
SØREN KIERKEGAARD
EITHER/OR
A Fragment of Life
I picked up a secondhand copy — $7.99 — and read the text on the back: “Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.”
My heart was pounding. There was a book about this?
“Whenever a woman comes into a room and people find out she has a significant other, it suddenly takes the sting out of her. She is no longer a threat. I don’t know why, but that’s how it is. Without that reassurance, people look at you like you’re some kind of rogue, capable of doing anything. Dangerous, unpredictable, and suspicious. Though it can be tiring, I think it’s the most powerful position to be in. I often find myself there.”
To Serbia with Love
“You know when you’re traveling with someone, and you realize too late that you’re with the wrong person? That they, for example, want to stay at cheapest place possible even though it’s far from the center of town and is surrounded on either side by gas stations? Or perhaps they insist on taking the cut-rate flight that leaves from an airport you’ve never heard of and lands in a cornfield fifty miles from the city you were hoping to visit.
My friend Patsy is not that person. We have similar ideas on how to get to where we’re going and where to stay once we arrive. We’re of like mind as well when it comes to the length of our visit. The rule is that you have to stay the night in a country in order to cross it off your list, so usually that’s our limit.”
Casino
“I shake my head and say, ‘Let’s just wait a bit.’ We sit
in the parking lot, watching people stream out of the casino and into the darkness, heading to their cars. They’re all bundled up against the cold, young people chattering, couples leaning against each other. It’s funny how they all seem thrilled and happy, their breath like flags in the dark. How you can’t even tell from looking at them whether they won or lost.”
Gospodar, Garth Greenwell
“It’s what I love most about the websites I visit, that
you can call out for anything you desire, however aberrant or unlikely, and nearly always there comes
an answer; it’s a large world, we’re never as solitary as we think, as unique or unprecedented, what we feel
has always already been felt, again and again, without beginning or end.”
“It’s her fault if the milk doesn’t come. Too much coffee. Not enough food. You need to figure out a way to minimize stress. Eat an energy bar. Eat these nuts. Eat an entire bar of chocolate while at the same time holding the device against your breasts. Take these special herbal pills. Eat lots of oatmeal. Figure out how to balance it all. Drink an entire liter of water in the hope of let-down. Meditate. Breathe deeply. You have eight more meetings today.”
“So have your characters misunderstand one another once in a while. Have them answer the unspoken question rather than the one asked out loud. Have them talk at cross-purposes. Have them hedge. Disagree. Lie. It will go a long way toward making them sound human.”
“Inner beauty can fade, too.”
Exuma
“She wasn’t even a good masturbator. Why wasn’t she a good masturbator? There was something symbolic about that, she thought, some gross deficit of self-awareness. ‘I’m working up to it,’ she kept saying.
’Down, baby,” Gina said. ‘Work down.’
“‘It’s ok to be mad,’ Charles said.
‘Mad about what?’
'Your life.’
“Have you ever tried to read a book or complete a task requiring focus after a bad fight with someone you love? It’s next to impossible. All the resulting negative thoughts consume your executive functions because your inner critic and its ranting have taken over corporate headquarters, raiding your neuronal resources. The problem for most of us, however, is that usually we’re engaged in activities with much higher stakes than retaining information in a book. We’re doing our jobs, pursuing our dreams, interacting with others, and being evaluated.”
“The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each our of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.”
“She said women were considered strong these days only if they didn’t talk about things they loved that didn’t love them, if they didn’t get hurt or allow themselves to be occasionally humiliated at their own hands when, really, strength was being unashamed to want what you want.”
Objects of Desire
“To become truly happy, she tells one of her friends, is to betray the unhappy person you used to be. The friend disagrees. No, the friend says, it is to liberate that person.”
No one person can see the whole of who you are, with Ayisha Malik
“A friend once asked me, ‘If you had the choice between marrying the love of your life and writing, what would you choose?’ And I said writing. I think maybe it is the love of my life, because what you get from it is an understanding of the human condition. As a writer, you’re also showing the readers parts of yourself. It’s only looking back that I see the purpose I’ve found in work might have been the love I was seeking.”
“At the same time, what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made manoeuvres that were very complex and hard to fathom, and I saw it was possible that the consequences of Morgan’s Falls had at no stage been within my control.”
“I could love him for a lifetime without even kissing him.”
Green Glass
“‘I’m just letting out my feelings.’ Fran tried a few times to set the combs rights. ‘I don’t know what else to do with them.’
‘Keep them in,’ Tom said. After a moment he added, looking at Fran’s stony profile, ‘That’s a joke.’
“His courage was almost appalling. ‘Would you like an adventure now,’ he said casually to John, ‘or would you like to have your tea first?’”
“We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.”
“Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, never as a means of evasion.”
“There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic current. Sometimes this current is so hot it all but boils and other times it’s barely lukewarm, hardly noticeable, but always the current is present, if only you plunge your hands just an inch or two further down in the water. This is regardless of the gender of the people involved, of their sexual orientations. This is the natural outcome of disclosure, for to disclose is to reveal, to bring out into the open what was previously hidden. And that unwrapping, the denuding, is always, inevitably sensual. Nothing binds two people like sharing a secret.”
“The artist choses his object as much as he is chosen by it. Art, in a sense, is a revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world. Consequently, its only aim is to give another form to a reality that it is nevertheless forced to preserve as the source of its emotion. In this regard, we are all realistic and no one is. Art is neither complete rejection nor complete acceptance of what is. It is simultaneously rejection and acceptance, and this is why it must be a perpetually renewed wrenching apart.”
“When she started off on her stories, what I listened to was the hum of her voice. It was a clear voice, as if it had been washed in a mountain stream, and she could do things with it that nobody else did. It turned into a low growl when she told stories with lions in them, it became rich and melodious when she sang, it rose and fell like a high-pitched songbird’s when she tried enticing me to finish my glass of milk, it reached the corners of rooms when she whispered.”
“But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany?
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
Days of Awe
“‘Everything you said is true. I suck at talking about things. And yes, for some strange reason I am deeply attracted to the pain of others. I can’t say more — except to agree with you.’”
Company Man
“‘I haven’t liked you since 2002,’ he hissed during a recent argument over which airport security line was moving the fastest.
This didn’t hurt me so much as confuse me. ‘What happened in 2002?’ I asked.”
Conversation with the Supplicant
“The young man standing opposite me smiled. Then he dropped on his knees and with a dreamy look on his face told me: ‘There has never been a time in which I have been convinced that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that then they were calm and beautiful. It must be so, for I hear often people talking about them as though they were.’”
“We know so little, which is why we make mistakes everyday”.
“‘True happiness lies in the capacity to conceive things not only as they are, but also as they are not.’”
“Fiction, as critic Laurence Gonzales says of rock music, ‘lets you wander around in someone else’s hell for a while and see how similar it is to your own.’”
From the Keeper of Sheep 13
“Lightly, lightly, very lightly
A wind, a very light one, passes
And goes away, still very lightly.
And I don’t know what I think
And have no wish to know.”
Middlemarch and Everybody
“What is universal and timeless in literature is need — we continue to need novelists who seem to know and feel, and who move between these two modes of operation with wondrous fluidity.”
“Moreover, you should take care not to sing, especially solo, if your voice is discordant and tuneless. Many people are thoughtless about this and, in fact, the most frequent offenders seem to be those who have the least gift for singing.”
“I suppose a part of me wished that when I put my key in the door, it would magically open into a different apartment, a different life, a place so bright with joy and excitement that I’d be temporarily blinded when I first saw it. I pictured what a documentary film crew would capture in my face as I glimpsed this whole new world before me, like in those home improvement shows Reva liked to watch when she came over. First, I’d cringe with surprise. But then, once my eyes adjusted to the light, they’d grow wide and glisten with awe. I’d drop the keys and the coffee and wander in, spinning around with my jaw hanging open, shocked at the transformation of my dim, gray apartment into a paradise of realized dreams.”
The End of the Affair
“Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan. Call me unimaginative, but I still can’t think of anyone I’d rather be with.”
“Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? […] Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
“Bicycling was held responsible for encouraging all manner of ‘masculine’ behaviours in women, such as smoking, drinking, swearing and (of course) promiscuity. The new woman also demanded entrance into traditionally male-dominated spaces, such as universities. When Cambridge University proposed granting women full admission to university in 1897, male students protested by dangling an effigy of a woman on a bicycle out of a window in Market Square. At the heart of the hostility toward women cycling was a thinly veiled fear that traditional gender roles were being rejected. As women discarded demure dress, laughed at absurd medical quackery and embraced the independence the bike offered, they cycled out of the domestic and into the public world.”
“Connell was so beautiful. It occurred to Marienne how much she wanted to see him having sex with someone; it didn’t have to be her, it could be anybody. It would be beautiful just to watch him. She knew these were the kind of thoughts that made her different from other people in school, and weirder.”
“Read Chekhov, read the stories straight through. Admit that you understand nothing of life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and look at the world.”
“There was something critically missing from the things around him. They were unfinished, whatever that means. They were unseen, whatever that means, shop windows, loading platforms, paint-sprayed walls. Maybe this is what things look like when there is no one here to see them.”
“And one way we pursue the goal of feeling intensely alive is by tempting death. We jump off cliffs to go hang gliding; we race cars at dangerous speeds; some apparently even indulge in the extreme sport of volcano surfing in which the death defier sails around the rim of a volcano on what is called an ash board. The payoff of these mortal risks is that they rivet us to the here and now. Facing death, we become supremely alive. Many Existentialist thinkers believe that squarely facing our mortality is the only sure way to become fully alive in the present, although I am pretty sure that Jean-Paul Sartre, with his thick glasses and frail physique, did not have volcano surfing in mind.”
“All humans have compulsive tendency to analyse and explain and look for meaning in their thoughts, but the less attention we pay our thoughts generally, my therapist has explained, the less likely they are to become problematic.”
“I was not the most perceptive guy on the block, especially in the matters involving Dan Cupid. In retrospect, the red flags existed every few feet, but nature provides us with a denial mechanism, else we couldn’t make it through the days, as Freud teaches us, as Nietzsche teaches us, as O’Neil teaches us, as T.S. Eliot teaches us.
Unfortunately, I was never a good student.”
“‘Everyone does that, Ava,’ she said. ‘You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special — which is fair, who doesn’t — but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad.’”
“It is because Dante is writing about her, and only because he is writing about her, that Beatrice is able to exist again, in the mind of writer and reader.”
“The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, cry for, people who do not, outside of the story, exist.
There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.”
“We are all innocent men. Our innocence is our crime.”
“It should be known that Akaky Akakievich expressed himself mostly with prepositions, adverbs, and finally such particles as have decidedly no meaning. If the matter was very difficult, he even had the habit of not finishing the phrase at all, so that very often he would begin his speech with the words ‘That, really, is altogether sort of…’ after which would come nothing, and he himself would forget it, thinking everything had been said.”
“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
All of them?
Sure, he says. Think about it. There’s escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.
I think they do, she says. I think the story about you telling me the story about wolves isn’t about wolves.”
To Alexander Chekhov, around February 1883, Moscow
“All you have to do is be more honest: throw yourself overboard wherever you can, don’t make yourself the hero of your own novel, get away from yourself at least for half an hour.”
The End
“Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.”
True detective
“My mother had a thing for detectives, be they old, blind, or paralyzed from the waist down — she just couldn’t get enough. My older sister shared her interest. Detective worship became something they practiced together, swapping plotlines the way other mothers and daughters exchanged recipes or grooming tips.”
“It was in my nature to absorb large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intellectual dominance.”
“After class, Maggie cornered me in the hall, pressed me up against a locker, and kissed me like it was something she had to do to stay alive.”
“We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.”
“There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. […] Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.”
The Late Show
“I hate the way the word out has been sexualized and forced into service for all things gay. When out is used as a verb I start to hyperventilate. If some people are ‘outed,’ are other people ‘inned’? Can we say that someone has been ‘besided’ or ‘overed’?”
October 10, 2001
Paris
“This afternoon we went to look at sofa beds at a store on the boulevard Raspail. I was just wondering if a certain model came in a smaller size when the saleswoman interrupted me and asked if I was English. I said that I was American and for the next twenty minutes she talked nonstop, the words gushing from her mouth like water from a fire hose. ‘You have to stop this bombing,’ she said, ‘because the people, they’ll get mad and we don’t know what they’re going to do next. They could corrupt our drinking water and then what? You open the tap and you die, or maybe they’ll blow up our nuclear power plants, and then what? It’s over, all of this, the whole world is over and, yes, what they did was terrible, but you’re only going to get them stirred up. They’re crazy, the Israelis are crazy, and when they’re done fighting, whoever wins is going to come after us. They’ll poison the earth and the water and there’ll be chaos and rioting and we’ll all die!’
I understood her fear, but is that really the way to sell a sofa bed?”
Remedy
“It is about wanting and need, wanting and need — a peculiar, desperate kind of need, needing to get what you never got, wanting it still, wanting it all the more, nonetheless. It is about a profound desire for connection. It is about how much we don’t know, how much we can’t say, what we don’t understand. It is about how unfamiliar even the familiar can become.
It is about holding one’s breath, holding the breath until you are blue in the face, holding the breath to threaten, to dare, to say if you do not give me what I want, I will stop breathing. It is about holding back, withholding. It is about being stuck. It is about panic. It is about realizing you are in over your head, something’s got to give. It is about things falling apart. It is about fracture.”
“I’m still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack. But then, it might not have been a question of right and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.”
“According to the life sciences, happiness and suffering are nothing but different balances of bodily sensations. We never react to events in the outside world, but only to sensations in our bodies. Nobody suffers because she lost her job, because she got divorced or because the government went to war. The only thing that makes people miserable is unpleasant sensations in their own bodies. Losing one’s job can certainly trigger depression, but depression itself is a kind of unpleasant bodily sensation. A thousand things make us angry, but anger is never an abstraction. It is always felt as a sensation of heat and tension in the body, which is what makes anger so infuriating. Not for nothing do we say that we ‘burn’ with anger.
Conversely, science says that nobody is ever made happy by getting a promotion, winning the lottery or even finding true love. People are made happy by one thing and one thing only — pleasant sensations in their bodies.”
To a young writer
“Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.”
“Read widely, and without apology.”
“Don’t expect to be treated justly by the world. Don’t even expect to be treated mercifully.”
“The emotion is a specific manner of apprehending the world.”
“I wanted to explain that I didn’t know how much I was allowed to feel about it, or how much of what I felt at the time I was still allowed to feel in retrospect.”
“I think philosophy becomes more interesting when it is cast into the form of a life. Likewise, I think personal experience is more interesting when thought about it philosophically.”
“I longed for nothing more intensely than to see Paul again, having for so many months been deprived of all contact with his mind and having almost suffocated among hundreds of other minds, which for the most part had nothing to offer. For let us not deceive ourselves: most of the minds we associate with are housed in heads that have little more to offer than overgrown potatoes, stuck on top of whining and tastelessly clad bodies and eking out a pathetic existence that does not even merit our pity.”
