The Idiot

by Elif Batuman

The film professor had an even worse cold than I did. It felt magical, like a gift. We met in a basement room full of flickering blue screens. I told him about my mother, and we both sneezed continually. That was the only freshman seminar I got into.

She believed, and I did, too, that every story had a central meaning. You could get that meaning, or you could miss it completely.

The highest law, higher than Holy Scripture, was “the intuition of a native speaker,” a law you couldn’t find in any grammar book or program into any computer. Maybe that was what I wanted to learn.

walked home through the fresh snow. The clouds had cleared, revealing the stars. Light from even a nearby star was four years old by the time it reached your eyes. Where would I be in four years? Simple: where you are. In four years I’ll have reached you.