The Idiot

by Elif Batuman

These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.

It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic. “Ethics” meant the golden rule, which was basically an aesthetic rule. That’s why it was called “golden,”

it was a curse, condemning you to the awareness that everything you said was potentially encroaching on someone else’s experience, that your own subjectivity was booby-trapped and set you up to have conflicting stories with others. It compromised and transformed everything you said.

Everything he said came from so thoroughly outside myself. I wouldn’t have been able to invent or guess any of it. He had told me a dream.

I liked the idea of watching Spanish movies in Spanish, of learning about a different world in the language it had been thought up in.

Whatever you write with so much care and intensity has an image of You in it. That’s why I fear the triviality of conversations. What if I want to get to You to the same degree as through these letters—and I find out that I can’t?

It felt insane to make a plan to do something after I was going to meet with Ivan—like making plans for after my own death.

All I had to do was write him an email, and then he walked around with me all day long. Who else in the world would do that?

“Do you think you’ll see Ivan tomorrow?” he asked. He might as well have been asking if the interdimensional portal would be open.

Memorization was so weird—the way it consisted of attaching one thing to another thing, with no way to root anything in place.

Even if each step followed from the previous one, you still had to memorize the first step, and also the rule for how steps followed from each other. It wasn’t as if there was only one way the world could have turned out. It wasn’t like strawberries had to grow from bushes. There were lots of ways things could have turned out, and you had to memorize the particular one that was real. Or . . . did you? Was there only one way the world could have turned out?

I wondered if Ivan was asleep. It was terrible to think that he was in this city, possibly very nearby, but I couldn’t see him or talk to him because he didn’t love me. I couldn’t be with him for one minute, not even for the weird leftover hours that nobody else wanted, like from one to three a.m. on a Wednesday. There it sat on the desk, a few feet over my head, reflecting a streetlamp: the Parisian telephone, one of millions, on which Ivan would not call me.

It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What’s the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too.

Ivan brushed against my ear with the back of his hand. I felt my body stiffen, I was filled with dread. And yet, I knew I wanted him to touch me—didn’t I? Wasn’t that my general policy?

“I have traveler’s checks.” “Traveler’s checks? Why do you have traveler’s checks?” I felt very miserable. Why did anyone have anything?

“We were each overwhelmed by the ecstasy of the other’s presence,” she said. “That’s a great sentence,” I said. “I admit I prepared it beforehand. I’ve been waiting for somebody I could use it on.” “Oh—I thought you made it up just for me.” “Well, probably I did, on some level. I can’t imagine who else I would say it to.

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.

I always felt like it was harder for you than for me.” “Why would it be harder for me?” “Because you’re alone.” It felt like being hit, like finding out that the worst thing I had ever thought was true.

I couldn’t challenge or contradict this view, even to myself, because I really didn’t know how to do anything real. I didn’t know how to move to a new city, or have sex, or have a real job, or make someone fall in love with me, or do any kind of study that wasn’t just a self-improvement project. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t think of anything I particularly wanted to study or to do. I still had the old idea of being a writer, but that was being, not doing. It didn’t say what you were supposed to do.