The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

But she also thought she herself might have been to blame. That night she had asked him to tie her up, which he did. She had asked him to hit her, which he did. So he might have thought

Oh for the love of Pete.

I’m asking, said Rose, why is saying red a better way to say stop than stop?

I think Rose is right.

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.

Agreed.

If we’d paid more attention, from the beginning, how much might we have learned about what it means to be an animal, how to live in nature, with which human animals have so often been at such destructive odds.

Anthropomorphism: we should have made it our religion,

Ha!

(All animals mistrust man, observed Rousseau, and they are not wrong.)

Great quote. Must verify. So far, I haven't been able to verify this quotation and I've looked at Wikiquotes, Google, Google Books, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Rousseau.

I believe in human biophilia. I believe that an affinity with other living things, a desire to be near and connect with them, and a love of natural beauty are in our DNA. How to square this, though, with what anyone living in our day can see: the human drive to make the world increasingly ugly, and, in the end, to trash it.

It all reminded me of the jungle scenes of Henri Rousseau—and in fact the murals were the work of a professional artist who’d been commissioned to paint them.

Anyone who would commission a professional artist to paint murals for a parrot has more money than sense.

once, after dozing off in my comfy chair, I woke to find him addressing the air from his perch. No distinct words, but the rhythm and tone of his burbling were those of someone trying to work something out, not a math problem, but a dialectical argument of some intensity.

Isn't it more likely akin to the babble of very young children just learning to talk, rather than a dialectical argument? This is the sort of whimsy I find irritating in Nunez.

This place is so fucked up. I didn’t want to get into a conversation with him, but I was curious. What did he mean? I mean, just look at it, he said with a sweep of his arm. Creating a whole fake jungle for him when he shouldn’t be here in the first place.

Absolutely! I like this kid.

She didn’t take him out of the wild, I said. She got him from a breeder. He shot me a look of disdain.

He's right.

A captive-bred wild animal is still a wild animal, he said. And why do people breed parrots that they know are never going to live in the wild? And when they can’t be sure what kind of people those birds are going to end up with? To make money, that’s all. That’s the only reason. They’re the ones who should be in jail. There’s only one excuse for owning a wild bird, he said, and that’s if it’s a rescue. And there are plenty of those.

Yes.

I thought of the depressed family therapist I once heard say that he’d met far too many people who’d somehow failed to calculate that having a baby meant one day having an adult.

Our only hope is if everyone agrees right now to live the way millions of people all over the world have no choice but to live, which is consuming as little as possible.

He may be right but what a joyless existence.

I imagined this sort of ranting had played some part in his parents’ not being able to stand living with him.

Haha.

When Simone Weil, age thirty-four and afflicted with tuberculosis, starved to death after refusing to eat more than the rations allotted to French soldiers fighting in World War II, she wasn’t trying to die (she still had far too much work to do), she was trying to be a good person.

She was crazy. That's what extremism will do to you.

Gripe on an internet chat devoted to bulimia: tell us over and over that we’re ruining our health, ruining our looks, then show us image after image of longtime bulimic Princess Diana looking never less than perfect till the day she died.

Hm. Very few bulimics look like Princess Diana and even she looked gaunt at times and hardly attractive.

A misanthrope. A mansplainer. Possibly a budding ecoterrorist, I told friends during one of our Zoom cocktail hours. I just wish he would leave.

One can hardl blame her.

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.

Poor people would want to punch him.

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.

Nonsense. People like that need to grow up.

Wagner was said to have composed his opera Tristan und Isolde because he wished to write about a great love such as he himself had never experienced. Which for him meant a violent tragedy of epic proportions in which both lovers go through anguished suffering and end up dead.

Hilarious,

I don’t remember who said, Insomnia is the inability to forget.

Great line. It's certainly the inability to turn off the brain.

When you’re having trouble writing, get up, go out, take a walk in the street. You will discover that certain streets exist precisely for this purpose. Once, I saw a man—homeless by the look of him—digging through the trash. He pulled out a couple of sheets of newspaper, examined them, and threw them back. Fishing deeper, he hauled up a magazine, squinted at the cover, and threw it back. Shit, he said, walking away. There ain’t nothing to read in these fucking cans anymore.

Hahha.

like the student in my graduate fiction-writing class who said, I’ve read your novels and there’s one thing I have to ask: Do you make some of that stuff up?

More and more, I like the idea of a pen name. Sugared Nouns was the computer’s suggestion, after spell-checking my name.

One of my sister' s pupils thought her name (Susan Vermazen) was Silver Mason.

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.

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.

True. Think of the novel by Nora Ephron, Heartburn. Best revenge novel ever.

I wanted to write a comic novel, then realized I had my own life to hand. Sugared Nouns: My Life and Death as a Writer.

Wonderful!

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.

Nietzsche is a downer. He said a lot of cruel things. This may be the most cruel.

When we said we had never heard of any hippie giving acid to a little kid, and that we found her essay offensive, the way she made every hippie she met sound either depraved or mental or moronic, he shrugged. Maybe West Coast hippies are different, he said.

My sister was a teacher at a progressive school in Berkeley. One of her pupils gave up marijuana at the age of 8. So there's that. I never read Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and I didn't know Joan Didion was a conservative Republican. I was offended by Hair because of the way it portrayed my generation in the 60s.

Some argued that if people had the right to choose their gender, why not also the right to choose their race, or their ethnicity?

This defense was used byNkechi Amare Diallo (born Rachel Anne Dolezal), a former NAACP chapter president who pretended to be Black. I don't buy it.

By what algorithm had the internet reasoned that, among the books I might like, was It’s Not Easy Being a Bunny? It seems young P. J. Funnybunny doesn’t want to be a bunny anymore. So off he goes to live with various other animals, one after another, only to learn that being a bunny is the best thing for him to be after all.

See next note.

An object lesson about self-acceptance and how to be comfortable with who you are. Maybe it was partly the effect of the edible, but this kind of pedagogical thinking tends to confuse me. Wouldn’t at least some children conclude that, whatever they feel about being themselves, being a bunny would be better? I’m pretty sure that’s how I would have read the book as a kid.

God, she can be funny.

A schoolteacher once told me that she’d asked her third graders, If you could ask a dog one question, what would it be? And one boy said, Dog, when I grow up, what will I be?

He says, "Dog, what will I be when I grow up?" I think that's hilarious.

Does that mean a long novel is easier to write than a short one? Um, no. But, to borrow from a certain critic, in almost every long book I read I see a short one shirking its job.

Vgreat line.

When you tell someone you’re having trouble writing, why does no one ever say, So stop writing?

I have told myself that!

From the beginning, pandemic humor was prolific and a blessing; for even more than hope, humor helps us to endure.

Love it!

Years from now, the doctor said, I believe people will look back on all this and see it as yet another example of human barbarism. (Note the hopeful assumption that our descendants will be more humane than we are.)

Well, that's been our experience so far, as Steven Pinker notes.

There once was a poet who read to an audience a poem about a brother’s death. After the reading, a woman came up to the poet to say how meaningful the poem had been for her, for she, too, had lost a brother. When the poet told her that in fact he didn’t have a brother, the woman was outraged. He might as well have slapped her in the face.

He's a poet, lady, not a journalist.

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?

Maybe he just did not want a Covid death?

At some point early on I must have understood that all the great writers whom I so loved, all those white Europeans whose works I revered and hoped to emulate, I must have understood that they—either for reasons of my class, or gender, or mixed race, or for being a crass, shallow American—would have looked down on me. But I can’t remember this ever mattering to me. Now, in our brave new cultural world, I keep being told that it’s the only thing that should matter to me.

Right on.

Which three authors, dead or alive, would you invite to a literary dinner party? is a question often asked of authors interviewed for The New York Times Book Review. What Edmund White said James Merrill said about a young fan: “Why does he want to meet us in the flesh? Doesn’t he realize the best part of us is on the page and all he’ll be meeting is an empty hive?”

I have a different objection. Wby would I invite people, however talented, however much I admire their works, who might be bad company, either because being a good writer doesn't entail being a good guest, or because they didn't particularly like me? I wonder why no one says that in the NYT Book Review?