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.

Something is missing. Something has been lost. I believe this is at the heart of why I write. For a while, during the same time I found myself unable to read, I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to write again—just one of the many uncertainties of that spring. (Not a writer I know who didn’t experience the same.) 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.

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.

A cure for many ills, it’s been called. For the alleviation of stress and anxiety; for comfort in mourning, sadness, and loss: find someone who needs your help.

Part of the charm came from paying close attention to something one had always been too distracted to notice before. Something ordinary. Something beautiful.

Not really friendship, but rather the elimination of a fear barrier, and a familiarity that allows for greater intimacy. (In a word, friendship, no?)

Gentleness is the most important thing that hours and hours in nature can teach, Foster says.

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.

I like how Lily Tomlin used to introduce one part of her act: The following skit is about my parents. I have changed their names to protect their identities.

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 only the excitement of my own mind turning over. I felt immensely proud.

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

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.

But if everyone except journalists stopped writing, we’d still have a vast treasure of fiction and poetry to fall back on. Silence all the journalists and we’d have the end of human rights.

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.

Elegy plus comedy, she says, is the only way to express how we live now. And just because something isn’t funny in real life doesn’t mean it can’t be written about as if it were. Funny might even be the best way to write about it.