The Idiot

by Elif Batuman

I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.

This was something I had never seen before.

The loss of that feeling was extremely painful. It would have been bad enough to be someplace where there were no orchestras, but it was even worse to know that there was one, and lots of people were in it—just not me. I dreamed about it almost every night.

The implication was that it was somehow naïve to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.

Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.

Hadn’t the Greeks come up with the ellipse from doing solid geometry, from slicing up imaginary cones, and then centuries later, the ellipse turned out to describe the exact shape of planetary orbits? Hadn’t ancient people invented trigonometry, centuries before anyone knew that sound waves were shaped like sine waves? Fibonacci came up with the Fibonacci sequence just from adding up numbers, and then its ratio turned out to be encoded in the seed spirals on a sunflower.

There was a ragged spot in his jeans just below the knee. It made a much stronger impression on me than the proof about angles.

It was like in Babylon, back when everyone spoke the same language.

Energy came from ticking—the capacity for rapid change. Immortality was sweeping.

Apparently she didn’t want to trivialize our relationship with spoken language. I

Today, though, it was hard to imagine boys sitting around on beanbags, listening to Joni Mitchell, holding necklaces against each other’s necks, and talking about Svetlana’s sister. Some part of me worried that this was why women would never amount to anything, that we were somehow holding ourselves back.

The eternal pauper in the great marketplace of ideas and of the world, I had nothing to teach anyone.

“That’s fine! They’re for sharing.” She beamed. Any token of friendship made her so happy.

I kept thinking about how, if someone said to pay thirty-five dollars, or to use a corkscrew, I didn’t try to outsmart them. How would I get anywhere in life? How could anyone ever be interested in me?

The number of people who want to understand what you’re like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat—it’s really limited.”

“It’s so hard to be sincere without sounding pretentious,” she said. “I mean, what are you supposed to do if you really happen to feel like you’ve swallowed the universe? Not say so?”

abandon your rebellion for cereal and your unchained magnetism for peace between men, so that your luminous something won’t be a hell but rather happiness, hope, contribution to the earth.

This discrepancy seemed to set up an unbridgeable gap between me and the rest of the world.

I was laughing, too, because the way he did it was contagious. Yeats? What was he talking about?

Why were we all so bad at writing stories? When would we get better?

“Why aren’t you holding hands when you love each other?” “Well,” Ivan said. “Because there’s a time and place for everything.”

The phone rang. I would die if it wasn’t him. That thought, I knew, was itself lethal. In the time it took to pick up the phone and say hello, I thought again and again: What is man that thou art mindful of him. What is man that thou art mindful of him. What is man.

What can you say about a man like that; he searched in life for his foothold and he found this one.”

All around us, women and teenagers were also eating Belgian waffles.

I hadn’t learned what I had wanted to about how language worked. I hadn’t learned anything at all.