The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

How do you reveal yourself without asking for love or pity?

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.

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

Anthropomorphism: we should have made it our religion, I once heard an environmental activist say. Irrational, but then what religion is not. And consider how many more irrational beliefs people have always embraced.

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.

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.

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

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

The world was opening up to me. It was all a bit overwhelming.

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. My life, like everyone else’s, was passing, too—I got that. But I was still a child, I knew nothing of that fear. I knew only the excitement of my own mind turning over.

It scares me, he said, but the truth is I don’t really want anything—not badly, anyway, not anything that I could actually have. Like, it scares me how so much of the time I don’t seem to feel anything.