The Idiot

by Elif Batuman

We learned about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which said that the language you spoke affected how you processed reality. We learned that it was wrong. Whorf, a fire inspector—they always called him a fire inspector—believed that Hopi people perceived time differently than we did, because their verbs didn’t have tenses. He said Hopis didn’t see two days as two different things, but rather as one thing that happened twice.

I thought that was the point of writing stories: to make up a chain of events that would somehow account for a certain mood—for how it came about and for what it led to.

love really was an obscure and unfathomable connection between individuals, and not an economic contest where everyone was matched up according to how quantifiably lovable they were?

I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time—the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.

“There is no suffering if you don’t want anything.”