We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons (A Smart and Funny Essay Collection)

by Tim Kreider

It turned out I’d been asking the wrong question; it was never is she a woman or is he a man, but what is a friend.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

just showing up turns out to be one of the kindest, most selfless things you can do for someone.

oranges at the Canada/U.S. border rather than allow them to be confiscated.

You learn that your personality has a certain shape, with definite, inflexible bounds—bounds you find out about because you keep bonking into them headfirst when you try to change. (An acquaintance who used to grate on me won me over when I overheard her sigh, “D’ya ever wish you could just . . . trade in your whole personality for a new one?”) We are not infinitely malleable. Like it or not, you are a certain kind of person. Life is, in this respect, like that game in which you’re assigned an identity scrawled on a piece of paper that everyone else can see but you can’t, and you have to try to deduce from other people’s hints and snickers who you are. It doesn’t matter if you want to be Pierre Bonnard or Vasco da Gama if what’s written on your card is Barney Rubble. Eventually you give up and ask, Okay: so who am I?

Her favorite novel, Infinite Jest, was also one of mine.

“Your existence is a delight to us.”1)

Studies have confirmed what’s pretty obvious—having children makes people even unhappier. But what people want, above all else, is not to be happy; they want to devote themselves to something, to give themselves away.

We mistakenly imagine we want “happiness,” which we tend to picture in vague, soft-focus terms, when what we really crave is the harderedged quality of intensity.

We each have a handful of those moments, the ones we take out to treasure only rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: “I’m happy.” One of the last times this happened to me, inexplicably, I was driving on Maryland’s unsublime Route 40 with the window down, looking at a peeling Burger King billboard while Van Halen played on the radio. But that kind of intense and present happiness is famously ephemeral; as soon as you notice it you dispel it, the way you block yourself from remembering a word by trying to retrieve it. And any attempt to contrive this feeling through some replicable method—with drinking or drugs, sexual seduction, or buying new stuff, listening to the same old songs that reliably give us shivers—never quite recaptures the spontaneous, profligate joy of the real thing.

Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that any deliberate campaign to achieve it is so misguided, is that it isn’t an obtainable goal in itself but only an aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to—by which I don’t mean ethically correctly but fully, consciously engaged in the business of living.