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

by Tim Kreider

After my unsuccessful murder I wasn’t unhappy for an entire year.

Not for one passing moment did it occur to me to imagine that God Must Have Spared My Life for Some Purpose. Even if I’d been the type who was prone to such silly notions, I would’ve been rudely disabused of it by the heavy-handed coincidence of the Oklahoma City bombing occurring on the same day I spent in a coma. If there is some divine plan that requires my survival and the deaths of all those children in day care, I respectfully decline to participate. What I had been was not blessed or chosen but lucky. Not to turn up my nose at luck; it’s better to be lucky than just about anything else in life.

I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone. It’s a truism that this is why people enjoy thrill-seeking pastimes, ranging from harmless adrenaline fixes like horror movies and roller coasters to what are essentially suicide attempts with safety nets, like bungee jumping and skydiving. The trick is that to get the full effect you have to be genuinely uncertain that you’re going to survive. The best approximation would be to hire an incompetent, Clouseauesque hit man to assassinate you.

It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die,

You can’t feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever—or grieve forever, for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living.

Apparently I can only ever attain that God’s-eye view in the grip of the talons.

I’ve demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.

I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives.

Often you don’t know whether you’re the hero of a romantic comedy or the villain on a Lifetime special until the restraining order arrives.

The usual rationale for our nosy interest in the private disgraces of public figures is that they show poor judgment, but this is like charging kamikazes with poor navigation; these transgressions take place in a realm beyond judgment. The truth is, people are ravenous for sex, sociopaths for love.

I love it when passion rips open that dull nine-to-five façade and bares the writhing orgy of need underneath.

We may choose friendships based on common interests and complementary qualities, but our reasons for falling in love are altogether more irrational, projections of our most infantile wants and pathology. (Lovers know that it feels less as if they’ve chosen each other than as if they’ve both been chosen by something else.)

I have known some people who selected their mates on the same bases on which they chose friends: affinity, compatibility, common goals. I like to believe that these people are innocent of true passion, that they haven’t yet met the person for whom they would forfeit everything. What I fear they actually are is emotionally healthy.

With some people, it’s all a foregone conclusion once you get close enough to inhale the scent of their hair.

The trick, I suppose, is to find someone with a touch of the pathology you require, but not so much that it will destroy you. But, as with drinking just enough to feel mellow and well-disposed toward the world, but not so much that you end up vomiting in the street, this can take some trial and error to calibrate.

Greeks had several different words for the disparate phenomena that in English we indiscriminately lump together under the label love. Our inability to distinguish between, say, eros (sexual love) and storgé (the love that grows out of friendship) leads to more than semantic confusion. Careening through this world with such a crude taxonomical guide to human passion is as foolhardy as piloting a plane ignorant of the difference between stratus and cumulonimbus, knowing only the word cloud.

Maybe one reason artists seems so susceptible to love affairs is that being in love is one of the only times when life is anything like art—when we actually feel the way torch songs and arias sound, the way Gene Kelly looks singing in the rain. It might all have been worth it if I’d been the only one hurt.

Sometimes I’m afraid it may be as ephemeral as that temporary sanity that afflicts us for as long as forty-five seconds after orgasm.

Maybe we have a finite capacity for falling in love that gets depleted with age. Or maybe romantic love is an affliction of adolescence, like acne or a passionate ideological investment in pop songs.

The young and the drunk are both temporarily exempt from that oppressive sense of obligation that ruins so much of our lives, the nagging worry that we really ought to be doing something productive instead. It’s the illicit savor of time stolen, time knowingly and joyfully squandered. There’s more than one reason we call it being “

Because it turns out that you can blow life off for as long as you want, but you still have to take the finals.

There is no drinking as enjoyable as daytime drinking, when the sun is out, the bars are empty of dilettantes, and the afternoon stretches ahead of you like summer vacation.

Eventually a day comes when the lined, puffy, sagging face you see the mirror when you’re hung over does not go away, and you realize that it is now your actual face.

Lately, in these more temperate years, I’m reminded of Shakespeare’s Henry plays after Falstaff has died: Prince Hal, having spent his twenties as a drunken fuckup, puts riotous youth and disreputable friends behind and finds a place in life for dignity, honor, and achievement—but it also feels as if everything best and happiest and most human has gone out of the world. As if great things may lie ahead, but the good times are over.

If you were lucky, your transitional phase was just the normal postcollegiate drift, a breather in which to work a low-demand job and drink nightly while you tried to figure out What Next. If you were less lucky, it came after Life #1 had failed to work out.

One of the more insidious properties of secrets is that they impose secrecy on the people around them, suborning them all into silence.

And knowing things about someone is not the same as knowing him.

What someone’s lies reveal about them (aspirations to being an accomplished writer, fantasies of an exotic history and a cosmopolitan family) are always sadder than the fact of the lies themselves. These inventions illuminate the negative spaces of someone’s self-image, their vanity and insecurities and most childish wishes, as we can infer from warped starlight the presence of a far vaster mass of dark matter.

Each of us has a Soul Toupee. The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us.

Contemplating one’s own Soul Toupee is not an exercise for the fainthearted. Most of the time other people don’t even get why our Soul Toupee is any big deal or a cause of such evident deep shame to us but they can tell that it is because of our inept, transparent efforts to cover it up, which only call more attention to it and to our self-consciousness about it, and so they gently pretend not to notice it. Meanwhile we’re standing there with our little rigid spongelike square of hair pasted on our heads thinking: Heh—got ’em all fooled!

relationships have to grow to live.

This is one reason people need to believe in God—because we want someone to know us, truly, all the way through, even the worst of us.

I never said so, because I’m too polite (and because I imagine, like most atheists, that believers’ faith is far more fragile than it is), but I always privately thought that religion was like one of Skelly’s stories—an attempt to pretty up a cruddy and lusterless world.

This is one of the things we rely on our friends for: to think better of us than we think of ourselves. It makes us feel better, but it also makes us be better; we try to be the person they believe we are.

This is the most poisonous thing that secrets do to us—they isolate us from everyone around us and make us feel even lonelier than we already are.

When we die, all our secrets are loosed, like demons departing a body. Whatever subjective self we protected or kept hidden all our lives is gone; all that’s left of us is stories.

Nietzsche wrote, “One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.”8

Or, as The Dude put it: “You’re not wrong, Walter—you’re just an asshole.”9 Less quotable, and often overlooked, is Walter’s response: “Okay, then.” The Walters of the world don’t mind being assholes; what matters to them is being right.

Visionaries, prophets, and revolutionaries aren’t concerned with good manners, being nice, fitting in; what they’re concerned with, passionately, singly, often monomaniacally, is the truth. “It’s popular to think the world gets changed by delightful people,” as Rebecca Solnit says, “but agent...