The People in the Trees

by Hanya Yanagihara

But when such a rhythm is suddenly interrupted, it is worse than unsettling, it is unmooring. It is how I have been feeling this past year and a half or so. In the mornings I wake and go through my day as always, but in the evenings I invariably delay bedtime, wander through my apartment, stare out into the night, wonder what it is I have forgotten. I tick down the dozens of tiny chores that I complete, thoughtlessly, in a typical day—letters opened and answered? deadlines met? doors locked?—until finally, regretfully, I climb into bed. It is only on the lip of sleep that I remember that the very pattern of my life has changed, and then I experience a brief moment of melancholy.

It had always been one of Norton’s fondest dreams—the dream, I think, of many brilliant and overextended men—that one month, or one year, he’d find himself in a warm place with absolutely no commitments. There would be no speeches to give, no articles to edit or write, no students to instruct, no children to look after, no research to conduct; only a blank, flat expanse of open time, which he would be free to clutter with whatever he wished.

But time, I’ve come to realize, is not for us to fill in such great, blank slabs: we speak of managing time, but it is the opposite—our lives are filled with busyness because those thin chinks of time are all we can truly master.2

For one, I am a quiet man. For another, I am not interested in telling my story anyway—after all, there are altogether too many stories nowadays.

Mostly, though, she was unknowable.

That night, she slipped under her quilt as quietly as she slid her feet into the pale, murmuring stream and closed her eyes, unaware and unafraid of where she might go next.

And yet my father, unambitious, placid, spectacularly unmotivated, somehow emerged utterly unharmed.

Growing up in our home, you would have assumed that fortune fell from the sky with a reassuring thump and that nothing, not even the prospect of amassing a great fortune, was worth aspiring to. My father did not in fact accumulate his money out of any sense of capitalist zeal—no, if it happened, it did, and the few times he made poor business decisions, he didn’t seem to mind that either. The entire situation enraged me, as indulged children yearn for nothing more than the romance of poverty. Often I found myself dreaming of parents who were hardworking immigrants, for whom I was the sole hope.

I was very moved by sentimental children’s stories such as The Silver Skates and rendered my own family as characters in a similar narrative. My father would be the lumpish stroke victim, helpless and slobbering, and Owen my crippled, idiot younger brother. I was the pioneer and the hero, ruthless and resourceful as well. Education would be my family’s sole hope. My academic success would be a necessity; I would become a doctor and yank us all out of despair and filth and into tight, square houses. In my fantasy, my hands, made magical by years of American education, would cure my poor father, who would immediately set to work despite my protestations. My mother, strong and determined, her beauty restored, would smile for the first time in years, and my brother, once proper schooling was paid for, would gain language, learn to move like an athlete. How I yearned for such motivation! But as it was, I had to defy the burdens not of poverty but of a contentedly and determinedly unkinetic father and a comfortable childhood—one I might have enjoyed were I not so set upon denying it.

Sybil had never known quite what to say to our mother, whom I believe she both pitied and envied—pitied because my mother seemed so content with the simple, unambitious life she led, and envied because she was content, because she did have the life she did.

I am living a strange kind of life, a life in which I have no one.

Life was elsewhere, and it was frightening and vast and mountainous and uncomfortable.

I grew to first accept and then long for that familiar ache, even though I knew that while experiencing it I was unable to accomplish, much less contemplate, anything else.

Though if I am to be honest, I suppose I should acknowledge too that I was even then so eager for a certain sort of greatness, the sort that seemed both possible and yet so distant, a blurry-edged dream on the periphery of my vision, that at the time it seemed easier to pretend to all and to myself that I did not care for a spectacular future at all, lest I come to think that my time in medical school—and my successes or failures there—might become a predictor for the rest of my life, something that might determine the chances of that shimmering image coalescing into something more vivid, or not.

But ambition is a difficult thing to quash completely, and so it is redirected—instead of working alone, you work in a room with others, but even as you do, you hope every day that you will be the one to make the key discovery, that you will be the one to find the answer, that you will present it, triumphant, to your director and that he will be generous and intellectually confident enough to give you your due credit. This is your hope, and it has motivated and kept alive men much more distinguished than I. But it is answered for only a very few of them, and they—the ones who one day are awarded their own labs, their own patented cell lines, their own papers—are the lucky ones.

Genius was no excuse for social ineptitude, the way it is today, when a certain refusal to acquire the most basic social skills or an inability to dress properly or feed oneself is generously perceived as evidence of one’s intellectual purity and commitment to the life of the mind.

lack of interest has a kind way of eliminating all potential nervousness.

The evening began with small talk, which I was unaccustomed to and for which I had no talent. When I realized I had to say nothing, only to smile and nod from time to time, I was relieved.

He had the ability to talk at length on interesting subjects while somehow rendering them not only intensely uninteresting but completely opaque.

How desperately I wanted to escape, how little I felt I belonged, how much I craved my freedom, how much I craved my fame.

I felt suddenly foolish, and childish, and embarrassed for myself. Why could I not see what was before me? What was the trick to understanding people that I alone seemed unable to possess?

Instead I stayed home and read, or looked at my atlas and made lists of places I wanted to see.

Indeed, you need never think about what the next year will bring, because for many years the path is laid before you, and it is only your duty to follow it.

i want a life like this, to be honest

I sat in my room like a hunk of wood, waiting for my future to resolve itself. It embarrasses me now, how inactive I was, how I allowed ignorance and naïveté to stymie me, but at the time it seemed a no more or less effective way of answering a future I could not even begin to imagine for myself.

I was not nervous; I was not anxious: I did my coursework and went home every afternoon feeling light and calm.

manifesting this

But although I had not enough experience in the world to prove this, I suspected even then that the strangest details were the most mundane, and that what we tell others to shock will only inure them to realizing what is truly remarkable. And in this perception I was not to be proven wrong.

But this regret too quickly dissipated, so eager was I to begin my new existence—it was easy then to believe that my life until this point had been only a long, tedious rehearsal, a thing to be impatiently endured and withstood: a simulacrum of a life, not a life itself.

When I woke, I couldn’t tell how late it was—if such a thing mattered here—although the gloom did seem deeper, more urgently alive.

he was the sort of person who never spoke unless he was certain; he was not interested in speculation or theoreticals; he never said anything unless he knew it to be true. Which is not to say he was incurious, or arrogant, or sloppy, or that he never doubted, or rethought things dozens, hundreds of times—nothing of the sort. But he did his wondering, his imagining, in silence; to engage someone in his uncertainties was, I think he felt, presumptuous, and perhaps even rude.

And yet he was uncertain; he didn’t know what he’d find.

Science itself is guesses: lucky guesses, intuitive guesses, researched guesses.

I suppose this sounds foolish now, unrealistic, but when you are young, planning seems less important, less essential, than it becomes when you have things to protect: money, research, a reputation.

I began to think I might be going a little—well, not crazy, I suppose, but that I might be losing touch, as they say now. And then I felt childish, and ashamed.

I would sometimes close my eyes and turn it over in my mind, savoring it like a candy.

The sensation was fleeting, but what I would remember is how quickly, like a breath, I moved from despair to resignation, how well equipped the human mind is to readjust to its realities, to soothe oneself of one’s deepest fears.

But pity for whom? I wondered, even in my dream. For me?

All along I had prided myself on my curiosity, what I considered the unslakability of my intellectual thirst. And yet, once placed in a situation in which almost everything was foreign, I did nothing, saw nothing.

The problem with being young and in a singular place is that one assumes that one will inevitably find oneself in an equally foreign and exotic location at some later point in life.

They may look different from place to place, but their fundamental behaviors are essentially identical: birds tweet and flap, animals prowl and bleat, fruits are insensate and inanimate, the sky fills and empties of clouds and stars, people wear clothes and kill and eat and die.

It is only the old who can look around them and marvel, for it is we who know how alike the world really is, how all of its problems and wonders have already been recognized and recorded.

In illogical situations, one clings to any idea that seems at all logical, even if it is only a scrim, translucent and flimsy, that shields the lack of serious planning behind it.

as if she had once, long ago, been taught how to behave as a human and was slowly, steadily forgetting.

he was tormented by his knowledge.

(Later, when I was older, I would remember with awe and envy another quality as well—her apparent lack of loneliness, how she seemed to need no one and nothing except food, how our company seemed not to disrupt the unchangeable patterns of her everyday existence.)

I found myself admiring the village, even its simplicity. Yes, it was a crude sort of life, but there was a cozy sense of bounty here, of everything having its place, of every need of life—food, shelter, weaponry—being well considered and provided for, of life stripped to its essence and yet comfortably fulfilled. How many societies can say this, that they have recognized all they need and have made provisions for it all? Here there was food and a source of water and the tools of self-defense, all of it not only available but of a surplus. This, I thought approvingly, was a place that had no needs, and therefore no wants.

when documenting a culture, one cannot simply leave out details that one finds distasteful or shocking or that do not fit into the tidy narrative one has constructed.

Not knowing was unbearable, but so was knowing.

I felt the unhappiness and loneliness of the past few days, the past four months, the past twenty-five years, press upon me like a great, bony mass.

But instead I found myself paralyzed with my own ambivalence.

And oh, I wanted it to be true, I wanted to be correct, I wanted to know that my discovery was real. And yet I also didn’t want it to be true—I didn’t want everything I had always thought upended, to have certainties and practicalities tossed away like molding fruits.