The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

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

Catastrophizing. A tendency to believe that the worst possible outcome is the inevitable one.

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. What cannot be left out of account is that, under certain circumstances, the bad can get the good to act badly, and furthermore, in order to achieve certain goals—victory in wartime, for example—getting the good to act badly rises to the level of a necessity.

“Has anyone else noticed how strange the world is becoming?” asked Salman Rushdie in a speech at the PEN America Literary Gala in 2004. We are now a world that is defined by continuous disaster. And Beckett was right. Eloquence about disaster will not do.