The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it. • Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale

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.

But now, in park after park, the sight of hydrangeas lifted me up, and I had to wonder how I could have failed to appreciate their great beauty before. (A friend who has had the same experience gives this explanation: It happened to me the year I retired. You reach a certain age, and it all kicks in: Social Security, Medicare, and a fondness for hydrangeas.)

During the time I was wandering about locked-down Manhattan, Colm Tóibín was wandering about Venice—the most beautiful city in the world now become the most beautiful ghost town—where this thought occurred to him: “One of the subjects to muse on as old age begins is how unfair life is.” Indeed. He got to be in Venice.

I can tell the story of my life in just four words. Good times, bad times.

In the second version, the gods fill a box with every pain and sickness and sorrow that could possibly befall a mortal. Then, without revealing its contents, they give the box to Pandora, forbidding her ever to open it. But when curiosity gets the better of her (as they knew it would, the goal being the revenge of Zeus for Prometheus’s beneficence toward men), she lifts the lid, loosing all the evils upon the world. By the time she slams the lid shut, one thing only remains, and that is hope. What? Meaning that, as part of Zeus’s punishment, hope would always be withheld? But what was hope doing in a box of evils to begin with? That hope remains has been a common reading of the myth: no matter what evils are visited upon us, no matter how much suffering we must endure, there is always the blessing and comfort of hope to help us through. But had those evils remained inside the box, they would have had no power to harm. Shouldn’t this mean that, in order to do its good work, hope would have to be let out, too? How Nietzsche saw it: Of course hope is an evil. In

And really, it was from her, wasn’t it, that I took in, early on, how much of life is shaped by sadness for what’s left behind.

Also Brian Moore’s idea that, while success makes you something that you weren’t before, failure makes you “a more intense distillation” of who you are.

“It is bound to be very imperfect,” Virginia Woolf told her diary as she began work on a new novel. Enthusiastic, nevertheless. •

even more than hope, humor helps us to endure.