The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. They should teach you this in school, but they don’t.

Unimaginative was the word Oscar Wilde used to describe people for whom weather is a topic of conversation. Of course, in his day, weather—English weather in particular—was boring. Not the far more erratic, often apocalyptic event people all over the world obsess about today.

There were days when I stayed out a long time—up to three or four hours. I made a loop. I went from park to park. That’s where the flowers were. Early on, before the playgrounds were closed, I took comfort in watching the young children, or even just hearing their trilling voices as I sat on a bench nearby. (Not reading, as I would have been doing in ordinary times. I had lost the ability to concentrate. It was only the news that gripped my attention, the one thing I wished I could ignore.)

Something is missing. Something has been lost. I believe this is at the heart of why I write.

But the feeling has survived and will not go away: I want to know why I feel as though I have been mourning all my life.

Like many women, she would always find it easier to feel for a male (except, of course, her husband, against whom she bore innumerable, lifelong, deadly grudges) than for any female. But what was it in her manner that suggested that I was somehow to blame?

Tenderness for a boy she’d never met, harshness toward her own daughter. Beholding me as if she were seeing something new in me. Something she did not like.

Steerforth is handsome, he is clever and rich, Steerforth is charming, romantic, and popular. Steerforth is selfish, he is dishonest, he is bad to Little Em’ly and mean to the poor. And do I think there are many people in the world like Steerforth? asks Mr. Rosenberg. Quite sure of the answer, I say there are not. Really? asks Mr. Rosenberg, giving me another chance. And when I nod he says, Then I think you are very naïve. The world is full of Steerforths, he says, looking straight into my eyes. I had been warned.

Anticipating the old rapture, I am crushed to feel—boredom. But that happens: writers who once meant everything don’t always thrill in the same way anymore.

No, I mean, why do you say spit and image? Because that’s the expression. Yes, I know. But nobody says that. Nobody says spit and image. Everyone says spitting image. Well, that’s wrong. It is not wrong. It’s a modernization, which is not wrong. Spit and image sounds wrong now. In fact, it sounds idiotic. Why don’t you catch up with the rest of us here in the modern age?

Why are you being so irritable? said Rose. Because someone I used to love very much lies in a cold dark hole in the ground and I’ll never see her again.

Most people probably would have trouble believing a wild octopus had interacted affectionately with a human had not proof been caught on film. I would have had trouble believing it. But then, our estimation of the capacity of nonhumans to think and feel has always been way off—as we are at long last coming to understand.

The first time I met people like Vetch was when I went away to college: young people born to privilege, raised in privilege, and forever railing against privilege.

that the reason love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.

Even if I did write about my own experiences, much of it would still be fiction: there is no narrative more prone to distortion than the memory of a love gone wrong.

The problem with any first sentence, said Joan Didion, is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

I once made the mistake of writing about a love too soon after it was over. Forgetting Chekhov’s advice that you should sit down to write only when you feel as cold as ice.

You can start with fiction or start with documentary, according to Jean-Luc Godard. Either way, you will inevitably find the other.

I like that Alan Bennett said, For a writer, nothing is ever quite as bad as it is for other people, because, however dreadful, it may be of use.

There will always be lacemakers. There will always be convents. But about you, my love, I will never feel as cold as ice.

The inability to let it go, the irrational guilt, the self-anger: I knew these signs. Wrong thinking. There are methods to stop it, psychologists say. And mental health requires that it be stopped. For the writer, a dilemma. For the writer, obsessive rumination is a must. Imagination must follow dark thoughts to dark places, you can’t ever just say, Stop, don’t go there. And isn’t that the job, to imagine the lives of others and what they are going through?

Catastrophizing. A tendency to believe that the worst possible outcome is the inevitable one. The kind of wrong thinking that can lead to anxiety and depression. With the world on fire and its systems collapsing, here, there, and everywhere—with hope after hope turning out to have been merely false hope—what use is this diagnosis anymore?

In the psychiatric report written at the time, which Didion shared, an evaluation revealed “her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. . . . In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure.” This would describe, more or less, the current view of most Americans I know. Though I would add: an overwhelming sense of shame. If it is true that an inability to deal with the future is a sign of mental disturbance, I don’t know anyone who is not now disturbed; who has not been disturbed for some time.

A genius at foretelling near-future events, Gibson had never imagined the United States would come to this. In interviews after the revised novel was published, he confessed to a creative block. When he looks at the future of civilization now, his prodigious visionary imagination fails. No way out of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into comes to him.

There was reason to work, and to work hard, because there was no better way to cope in troubled times. But this was not the same thing as hope.

How Nietzsche saw it: Of course hope is an evil. In reality it is the worst of all evils, he said, for it prolongs the torments of man. And of course this was part of the punishment the Father of Gods and Men had in mind.

I believe people are more good than bad. When Obama said this he was only repeating what many have said before. Another version: I believe there are more good people in the world than bad people. What does not follow, though, is that, thanks to the numbers, the good will prevail. What cannot be left out of account is that, under certain circumstances, the bad can get the good to act badly, and furthermore, in order to achieve certain goals—victory in wartime, for example—getting the good to act badly rises to the level of a necessity.

We did not know the full extent of his duplicity, we could not say for sure what about him and his past had been real and what had been a sham. We did not know the man’s true life—and if we didn’t know his life, how could we know his death? Whom, exactly, were we mourning?

Time passing was life passing, I thought. It was life that flowed swiftly along in one direction and could not be seized or stopped. And this was something that weighed on grown-ups, an inexorable force that they feared. My life, like everyone else’s, was passing, too—I got that. But I was still a child, I knew nothing of that fear.

I knew that if I tried to explain to them what had happened I would only sound weird. It wasn’t a scout thing. It was a thing that belonged to Introvert Me. Scout Me was Extrovert Me. I knew the distinction, if not yet the words.

But, to borrow from a certain critic, in almost every long book I read I see a short one shirking its job.

We are now a world that is defined by continuous disaster. And Beckett was right. Eloquence about disaster will not do.

Conclusion: Perhaps what is wanted in our own dark anti-truth times, with all our blatant hypocrisy and the growing use of story as a means to distort and obscure reality, is a literature of personal history and reflection: direct, authentic, scrupulous about fact.

The elderly man who lives alone upstairs has survived the virus and the lockdown. For months to come, he will be diligent about always wearing a mask. He will be among the first to get vaccinated. When, early one morning, he takes the gun from a safe in his apartment and shoots himself, I want to know: Did he plan it? Did he stay up all night, wavering? Or did he just wake up that day and think: Now.

“We were told it could take decades for us to achieve the life we dreamed of. What we weren’t told was that by the time we did, that life would soon disappear.”