Intermezzo

by Sally Rooney

To feel that his life has been preserved somewhere and not forgotten, gathered around him, packed protectively around him still.

He’s alone, she says. Aren’t we all? Though Ivan admittedly appears to be more alone than most. At that, almost spiritually alone, and perhaps best left that way.

People get to know each other, things happen, that’s life. The question for Ivan is how to become one of those people, how to live that kind of life.

The human mind, for all the credit he was just giving it a minute ago, is often repetitive, often trapped in a familiar cycle of unproductive thoughts, which in Ivan’s case are usually regretful in nature.

Nobody when they’re rejected believes it’s really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction – which even makes sense from the evolutionary perspective – is simply the strongest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.