The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

But why put it like that, wandering about, as if I were some dotty, driftless old lady.

Driftless?

And her daughter, I pointed out, was the spit and image of her mother.

Anyway, he spent the summer between his junior and senior years in a psychiatric hospital, somewhere in New Jersey.

But the closed ours.

Make society more equitable, liberals say, and sure, that sounds great. But bringing more people up to our affluent level is only going to destroy more ecosystems, kill off millions more plant and animal species, and make more and more of the earth uninhabitable. What really needs to be done is to get everyone living closer to poverty. But of course no one wants to hear

further irony: that desolate old corner of Brooklyn now holds some of the city’s most expensive real estate. But you knew I was going to say that.

You have to learn from experience what a character in a story by Edna O’Brien states: that the reason love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.

Before beginning, too many options. Then, in the next breath, none.

Writing.

Looking back some years later, she wrote, “An attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

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.

When we told this to our professor, and when we told him we thought Didion might have been played, he assured us that she was much too smart for that to have happened.

I hope she was.

Our worst fears would not come to pass, went the fantasy. Because once in office Trump would change. Like the Grinch who stole Christmas, like Ebenezer Scrooge, he would have somehow come to see the light.

I guess Nietzsche was right.

Everyone is going to have beautiful health insurance, such beautiful health insurance, you’re not going to believe it.”)

According to Flannery O’Connor, people without hope don’t write novels.

Her most ambitious novel yet. Written “to a rhythm not to a plot.” (And for which, like her friend T. S. Eliot, she drew inspiration from listening to late Beethoven.)

(Disconcerted as always to recall that the man who gave the world its most sublime novel was someone who, according to his biographer, enjoyed jerking off to the squeals of live rats being pierced with hat pins.)

Now that is strange.

Draw a mustache on the author photo. Would you have liked the book better if it had been written by a man?

A new survey of 1,500 college graduates reveals that journalism tops the list of the Ten Most Regretted Majors (87 percent).

Why? Did they try to make a living from it?