The Nix

by Nathan Hill

two questions: Is he dead? And: Is there video?

Without her explanation, the narrative of the day forms when opinion and assumption combine with a few facts to create an ur-story that hardens in people’s minds:

maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly at your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.

so stressed out that his heart was doing funny things, a kind of jumpy-twitchy thing that felt like someone mechanically palpating his thoracic cavity from the inside.

Rather, she was exercising her First Amendment rights using symbolically flung gravel.

For example, Samuel’s typical order at a coffee shop is a cappuccino. With Periwinkle, he ordered a green tea. Because a cappuccino seemed like a cliché, and he thought a green tea would have a higher Periwinkle approval rating. Periwinkle, meanwhile, ordered a cappuccino.

A big front porch brings you out into the world, but a garage door shuts you off from it.

Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.

The Nix, she said, was a spirit of the water who flew up and down the coastline looking for children, especially adventurous children out walking alone.

When he told Faye about the Nix, he said the moral was: Don’t trust things that are too good to be true.

“The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.”

A McDonald’s slightly closer than the other McDonald’

Bullies do not back down.

it gets too big for you to carry anymore. And the longer you try to carry it, the bigger and heavier it gets. Sometimes it can get inside you and it gets bigger and bigger until it’s too much.

finding, in any consistent manner, good internet videos was a skill like panning for gold,

People said how brave he was. Everyone agreed. Like the more Clyde could dodge the pain, the more heroic he was.

Every life has a moment like this, a trauma that breaks you into brand-new pieces.

He pins his medals to his school jacket, then gives his jacket to Margaret, who walks around school clinking like a wind chime.

It didn’t feel like she was panicking; it felt more like she was being forcibly and methodically deactivated all over.

Moments when she failed in front of other people, or moments when she felt the potential to fail in front of people—these could trigger an attack. Not every time, but sometimes. Frequent enough that she had adopted a certain self-protective behavior: She became a person who never screwed up. A person who never failed at anything.

She blunted any possible criticism by being beyond reproach.

The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at.

We love people because they love us.

This is something you carry on the inside, in a cavity filled with every true thing about you so that there is nothing true left on the outside.

The things we love the most are the most disfiguring. Such is our greed for them.

if he was going to do something he was going to do it right, he would give one hundred and ten percent,

Patch Days were a unique horror because he was cut off from his source of wonder and beauty and surprise and was forced, sometimes for a whole day, to confront his normal everyday analog existence.

This was how they usually related to each other—through sports. It was the topic they fled to whenever conversation lulled or became dangerously personal or sad.

But such was the way with people—they loved the things that made them miserable.

She’d decided that about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later.

That by choosing a few very private concerns and pouring herself into them, she had never felt so expanded. That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her more capable of love and generosity

There is no greater ache than this: guilt and regret in equal measure.

The barometer for the health of the country seemed to be what middle-aged men thought about the behavior of college girls.

Faye’s opinion was that everyone should want to be liked—not out of vanity but because wanting to be liked provided an essential social lubricant.

He seemed surprised when she said so. “I thought you were liberated,” he said, by which he meant that she should indulge all his various wants and like it. Such were the expectations of the New Left.

What was printed became the truth.

It’s not that they avoid each other on purpose—it’s just how things worked out.

They are yelling “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” and stabbing their fists in the air at each syllable, just completely ignoring all the cars honking at them, not even moving for oncoming traffic, just daring these cars to run them down like bowling pins, which the uncles wish they’d do. The cars. Run the girls down.

It’s a chilling thought, that politicians have learned to manipulate the television medium better than the television professionals themselves.

And maybe that is the story. Not that thousands are protesting but that millions are not.

They say the police have removed their badges and hidden their faces because they know what they’re doing is illegal.

The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate.

Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.

“Packer has the same stuff inside him as anyone else who runs for president. Left or right, they’re all made of the same material. It’s just that he’s shaped like a missile instead of a chip.”

Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does.

It’s a terrible burden, being idealistic. It discolors everything you’ll do later. It will haunt you constantly for all time as you become the inevitably cynical person the world requires you to be.

He’d settled into the anger because the anger was so much easier than the work required to escape it.

Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar.

Understanding is always harder than plain hatred.

Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid.