The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

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.

“Box” is said to be a mistranslation. It really should be Pandora’s jar.

Not that there were ever anywhere near enough hippies to make a generation,

The Black journalist who reported how gleeful her mother was that Trump had won, because now white America will have to face who they really are.

For the first time, an American presidency would be assessed in terms of its threat to American citizens’ mental health.

I believe there are more good people in the world than bad people. What does not follow, though, is that, thanks to the numbers, the good will prevail.

under certain circumstances, the bad can get the good to act badly,

I read a lot of news, but other reading—reading for pleasure—had become too hard.

At night I woke frequently in some kind of swivet.

Swivet!

“Cave syndrome” as a response to the pandemic would soon be getting a lot of attention, but in fact I’d experienced it before, when it was called agoraphobia.

(Many birds make music, but what other animal has the kind of rhythm parrots do?)

a well-known writer who rolled her eyes at the way the internet was forever suggesting that her own novels might be of interest to her.

There is a foolproof cure for writer’s block, according to a teacher I know: start with the words I remember.

(I like this clarification by the narrator of a book by Stendhal: “It is not out of egotism that I say ‘I’; it is simply the quickest way to tell the story.”)

And it was a revelation how many of the true ones were about abuse.

Students' stories. Pam Houston says something similar

What writer wants to look back and think, I wrote too much?

?????

Hers was the abiding nostalgia of the immigrant, one who’d come of age in wartime and for whom leaving home had been experienced as a mortal injury.

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.

It was a thing that belonged to Introvert Me. Scout Me was Extrovert Me.

Good God, there’s even a badge for novel writing. “Purpose: When I’ve earned this badge, I’ll know what it takes to write a great novel and I’ll have written at least 20 pages of my own. Step 1: Deconstruct a novel. Step 2: Create great characters. Step 3: Develop a plot. Step 4: Write at least 20 pages. Step 5: Edit your pages.” Easy peasy.

Elsewhere, in other lands, in other tongues, it rained dog shit or cow piss, ropes, axes, crowbars, snakes, lizards, toads, frogs, shoemakers or shoemakers’ apprentices, old women, old women with clubs, old women with sticks, husbands. The last in particular puzzled me until I realized it wasn’t for something in abundance (as in the song “It’s Raining Men”), but for beatings (like those old women with their sticks and clubs).

And, after a long pause: I hope she has a good life. She deserves it. He swallowed then and I felt the pain in my own throat.

He said there was a chance that I’d find myself back there again—maybe even more than once—because I had a certain vulnerability, and that I should always be aware of that and try to avoid possible triggers. (How did I know that someday the bell jar wouldn’t descend again?)

Psych hospital

think it’s bad the way they always think alike. Or at least so they say. Like, if they weren’t in total lockstep the whole relationship would fall apart. Even my therapist says there’s something wrong with a couple that never fights.

My mother’s big thing is poetry, he said. She always says poetry is what helps her get through life. Though if you ask me, it’s only made her life harder.

why is everyone I know either on prescription meds or self-medicating with one legal or illegal substance or another? And I can’t remember when this wasn’t true.

Even his girlfriend, he said. Just because she was normal didn’t mean she didn’t need Xanax. And her doctor had started her on that back in high school.

(It made me wonder: Why had things changed so? Hitchhiking was still legal in most of the United States—why had it become so rare? Partly, I knew, because of law enforcement’s campaign to discourage it by broadcasting how dangerous it was, especially for women, though in fact it never was particularly dangerous, not even for women. At some point any American needing a ride began to look suspect: Why didn’t that person have a car? But what a great thing it would be to bring hitchhiking back. Fewer cars on the road: Who wouldn’t want that?

and California would always be worth the trip, no matter how long or tough, California of the magnificent mountains and beaches and mind-blowing Pacific sunsets and crazy, friendly, beautiful people. And now, said the professor, as if it wasn’t heartbreaking enough what overpopulation and overdevelopment had done, there were year-round wildfires and drought threatening utter devastation.

Faulkner’s supposition: every novelist was a writer who began by wanting to write poetry but failed, then tried to write short stories and failed, and so finally turned to writing novels.

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

Asked to name the most important life experience for artistic success, a Nobel laureate said, Failure.

“Most failures come too easily” was the unusual opinion of R. P. Blackmur. “A genuine failure comes hard and slow, and, as in a tragedy, is only fully realized at the end.”

With the lockdown, people started to think about what it meant that the work they did was deemed not essential.

For writers, the distinction was easy. Only journalists are essential.

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.

We are now a world that is defined by continuous disaster. And Beckett was right. Eloquence about disaster will not do.

fictional storytelling is coming across as beside the point. More and more writers are having difficulty quieting a voice that says, Why are you making things up?

is a literature of personal history and reflection: direct, authentic, scrupulous about fact.

If everyone on the planet had agreed to wear a mask and keep six feet apart from one another for a given period of time—and a short time at that—Covid wouldn’t have had a chance, she said. Now it’s too late, and it’s the most vulnerable among us who don’t have a chance. 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.

—irrational behavior is perfectly natural. And we’re used to dealing with denial, too, for the same reason. But what’s so ominous is seeing this behavior on a massive scale.

But I must say, I never thought I was living in a time so perverse, among so many people so deranged, that, faced with a choice of killing the virus or killing Dr. Fauci, they’d kill Dr. Fauci.

Her most ambitious novel yet. Written “to a rhythm not to a plot.”

The Waves

she had an even higher aspiration: to invent a new form. The essay-novel.

Tolstoy had already done

(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.)

Proust

Resigned to the fact that, whenever I write something about writing or being a writer, I am annoying the hell out of some people.

Asked which writers or what books I believe will still be read in a hundred years, I remember what Stephen Hawking said: Humanity has only about a hundred years left on Earth. In 2017, Stephen Hawking said that.

Far fewer years