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.

This morning an email from a stranger, a woman angry about something I wrote. It is trash, she says. Every word of it. Which could mean only one thing: I must be trash myself.

Thus from different points of the cosmos do good wishes and bad wishes blow my way. Love and hate.

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.

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?)

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.

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?

there is no narrative more prone to distortion than the memory of a love gone wrong.

When you can’t sleep, goes an old cure for insomnia, start telling yourself the story of your life.

For a writer, nothing is ever quite as bad as it is for other people, because, however dreadful, it may be of use.

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

Catastrophizing. A tendency to believe that the worst possible outcome is the inevitable one. The kind of wrong thinking that can lead to anxiety and depression. With the world on fire and its systems collapsing, here, there, and everywhere—with hope after hope turning out to have been merely false hope—what use is this diagnosis anymore?

“the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood”—a

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.

I would lie in bed, obsessing about my to-do list, watching helplessly as—thanks to the many obstacles my mind kept generating—it twisted into a list of the not-doable.

By day I may have been so forgetful that I couldn’t recall what I’d had for breakfast, but in the dark hours of the night I was a memory genius. I could recall every regrettable moment of my life. Every mistake I’d ever made, every humiliation, every failure, every sin, every harm I’d ever caused another person, deliberately or by accident, every bad or stupid thing I’d ever said or done.

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

I like Günter Grass’s definition of a writer as “a professional rememberer.”

It was a happy day, it was a sad day, it was a beginning, it was an end, it was a new world beckoning, it was an old world lost to time.

I remember, I remember. O beautiful refrain.

“I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”

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

“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.”

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.

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

What kind of singing do you believe matters most in our own dark times? And is there still a place for fiction?

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.

What the pandemic had taught her: in spite of the spectacular advances in science and technology that are one of the greatest benefits of living in our day, our ability to solve the existential problems now facing the world was something she no longer had faith in.

“We were told it could take decades for us to achieve the life we dreamed of. What we weren’t told was that by the time we did, that life would soon disappear.”