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.

Just want to say your novels, SN, so far have stayed w me

Never open a book with the weather is one of the first rules of writing. I have never understood why not.

“It was a dark and stormy night.” I have never understood why this phrase has been universally acknowledged to be the worst way

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.

“Too excitable” is how Sylvia Plath once saw a vase of “too red” ones. Like Rilke’s frightened flowers “rising up to say: Red.” To Elizabeth Bishop, the spots on the tips of the dogwood petals were like burns from a cigarette butt. Poets.

!

But though I’m not so keen about phlox, I can’t come up with a single really ugly flower name, can you? There are other plants, though, like weeds and herbs, with hideous names, like vetch.

Of course, I still saw plenty of dogs being walked. But it seemed to me there was something different about them. They knew something was up. The somber way they plodded along, brows furrowed, heads low. Now what have they gotten themselves into, those brows seemed to say.

During pandemic

I have heard that Chekhov wanted to write a novel that he was going to call Stories from the Lives of My Friends. Probably his friends did not want him to write it.

I want to know why I feel as though I have been mourning all my life.

Every story worth telling is a love story, said someone I used to love very much. But this is not that story.

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.

The world is full of Steerforths, he says, looking straight into my eyes. I had been warned.

I, a mere witness, never thought about love in the same way again. It was in all the songs, but here was proof that those songs were no exaggeration. A thing that could come on you and devour you like an illness.

knowing what I hadn’t known before: his son Charley’s doleful revelation that the child characters his father invented were at times much more real to him than his flesh-and-blood ones. His famous cruelty toward his wife, whom he continued to abuse even after he’d dumped her for a teenage actress. The world is full of Dickenses.

But, because lilac and lavender are also kinds of flowers, you can’t say, The hydrangea is lilac, or The hydrangea is lavender. It would be like saying, That cat is sick as a dog, or His eyes are his Achilles’ heel. (I did not make those up, I read them somewhere.)

What comes in late life to many writers, according to J. M. Coetzee: “an ideal of a simple, subdued, unornamented language and a concentration on questions of real import, even questions of life and death.”

her funeral would also be a reunion. As I suppose most funerals are.

They were the same sort of dreams she’d always had, that everyone has, mostly incoherent nonsense that, fascinating as it might seem to the dreamers themselves, when narrated at breakfast only bores anyone listening.

And now male writers bend over backward to emphasize the superiority of their female characters. I meet the same paragon in book after book: high IQ, great personality, firm moral purpose, dazzling wit. And the trick is to get it across that she’s also very attractive without ever appearing to be somehow disrespecting her. It would be funny if it weren’t so boring. But the truth is, no man today would ever attempt to create an Emma Bovary or an Anna Karenina.

I believe that, whatever else they are, men are brave. Don’t roll your eyes! I’m just saying that there’s a form of bravery particular to men, and however many exceptions there might be, it’s part of the male character to want to take care of those who are more vulnerable. And I have depended on that quality in men, and I have benefited from it. We all have. Would I feel as safe in the hands of a woman surgeon or a woman pilot as I would in the hands of a man? Absolutely. But I would hate to be in a situation of danger like a burning house or some natural disaster with no men around.

That’s the thing about men: they’re always forgetting, said Jasmine.

There’s a period of time, in middle age, that’s a real minefield, she told me. You’re not quite ready to give up, but your sexual radar can get a bit skewed, and you have to worry more and more about making a spectacle of yourself.

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.

Who's we?

I hate being old, said then eighty-five-year-old Valerie Taylor. But at least it means I was in the ocean when it was pristine. Now it’s like going to where there was a rainforest and seeing a field of corn. Here, as a curb against

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.

environmentalists and climate denialists, identifying conservation efforts with their leftist, pro-government enemy, will foment ecocide, taking out their hatred on nature itself.

the average living space per person was forty-eight square feet—less than one-third the size of a New York City parking space.

??? This can't be right. 12 maybe?

ten square meters

30 square feet? Pretty big rm

(What lockdown? went the viral tweet, describing it as rather “the middle class hiding while working-class people bring them things.”

Another version: white people hiding while Black and brown people bring them things.

Animals having fun can be a poignant spectacle—I suppose partly because it narrows the gap between us and them. And if you gave too much thought to what an animal might be feeling and how close to, even indistinguishable from, a human (say, your own) emotion that feeling might be, you could find yourself, well, melancholy.

I didn’t share the widespread resentment toward those who’d fled to their country homes, but I understood the common fantasy that the many now gone—along with the millions of missing tourists—would not return.

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?

And now there’s a fucking plethora of homeless African gray parrots. Most of them with decades of life still to live.

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. The ones I knew all ended up living much the same lifestyle as their parents:

The part of us that wants to be married and have a family is the part that wants to be normal, like other people, set on the path we were raised to believe was the right path—not just to happiness, but to respectability, acceptance, community. The part of us that wants love-potion-strength romance is the part that wants to go mad.

Of the men in my life, I did not love them all equally, and I sometimes wonder: Does the one I loved best know it was him? Or does each of them think he was the One?

We went to the same high school, which was nearly a hundred percent white.

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

writer’s block has always felt to me like a kind of insomnia.

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

Chekhov’s advice that you should sit down to write only when you feel as cold as ice.

Some writers use pen names so that they can be more truthful; others, so that they can tell more lies.

I have this fear. I am so myopic that, without glasses, the hand I see at the end of my arm is blurred. What if I were to find myself one day in some bad place—in a prison or some kind of detention camp, say, or forced to flee for my life—and then somehow I lost my glasses, or they got broken or taken away? What then? I mentioned this once to some guests at a party and everyone cracked up. As if anything like that could ever happen to you! But think of all the people in the world to whom this has already happened, including the many who thought it never could.

There’s no understanding people’s behavior these days. Don’t even try.

There’s something happening here went the song. Something really bad, even if its exact nature ain’t exactly clear. Then, as now, high anxiety, paranoia, apocalyptic fears.

But i never thought it was all bad in that song

the end of civilization was seen as most likely the outcome of nuclear warfare—or nuclear accident. Not climate change. Not pandemic.

Didion’s life when she, too, found herself blocked, “paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as ...

the Golden Age—the only humans that existed were men).

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?