A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.

“If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully. “Actually—maybe I am that kind of person after all. “Love, Harold.” __

You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent.

Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.

he would cry, or vomit, or pass out, or scream, or combust.

Real

the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.

Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn’t stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in fluorescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?

beyond his simply willing

I gues you could call him... Willem

He often felt he was made of something liquid, something that was being continually poured from bright-colored bottle to bright-colored bottle, with a little being lost or left behind with each transfer. But his friendship with Jude made him feel that there was something real and immutable about who he was, that despite his life of guises, there was something elemental about him, something that Jude saw even when he could not, as if Jude’s very witness of him made him real.

“If you want to be a personality, be a pop star,”

He was home, and home was Jude.

“Once you’ve touched a dick, you’re gay.” “Said with subtlety and grace, as always.”

“The transition to lesbiandom took much less time than I anticipated,”

he was worried because to be alive was to worry.

“Well, I go,” Jude said, “but then—then I sit outside in the car and read through the session, and then when the session’s over, I drive back to the office.”

Me core

Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?

As he gets older, he is given, increasingly, to thinking of his life as a series of retrospectives, assessing each season as it passes as if it’s a vintage of wine, dividing years he’s just lived into historical eras: The Ambitious Years. The Insecure Years. The Glory Years. The Delusional Years. The Hopeful Years. Jude had smiled when he told him this. “And what era are we in now?” he asked, and Willem had smiled back at him. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t come up with a name for it yet.”

Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It’s so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.

But he had forgotten, and he had done nothing. And then he remembered and he still did nothing.

He feels, as he increasingly does, that his life is something that has happened to him, rather than something he has had any role in creating.