The Idiot

by Elif Batuman

The Boston T was completely different from the New York subway—the lines named after colors, the cars so clean and small, like toys. And yet it wasn’t a toy, grown men used it, with serious expressions on their faces. The Red Line went in two directions: Alewife and Braintree. Such names were unheard of in New Jersey, where everything was called Ridgefield, Glen Ridge, Ridgewood, or Woodbridge.

Turkish, for example, had a suffix, -miş, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn’t witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth.

When you heard -miş, you knew that you had been invoked in your absence—not just you but your hypocrisy, cowardice, and lack of generosity. Every time I heard it, I felt caught

“Pretty depressing, huh? Sometimes I think there could be two kinds of love. There could be one rare kind that just naturally exists between certain people. Then there’s the more common kind that’s constructed.”

Harvard Square looked both new and familiar. I felt like I would have been able to tell just from looking that this configuration of buildings and streets was familiar and meaningful to lots of people, not just me. It was weird to visit a suburb that nobody else ever visited or went to, and then to return to these widely known halls and buildings where famous statesmen and writers and scientists had been coming for hundreds of years.

Are most people able to face the past and have normal sex lives?” “Yes, as a matter of fact, I think they are,” she said. “Anyway, if anyone is, it should be me. Deep down I have a talent for well-being. I can feel it.” I nodded. I thought she had it, too, a talent for well-being.

I didn’t get a seat but I had enough room to take out my Walkman, and occasionally I could see between people’s heads out the window, and this made me cheerful. It was weird what was enough to make you feel good or bad, even though your basic life circumstances were the same.

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.

According to Nabokov, when ancient people first invented arithmetic, it was an artificial system designed to impose order on the world. Over the course of centuries, as the system grew more and more intricate, “mathematics transcended their initial condition and became as it were a natural part of the world to which they had been merely applied. . . . The whole world gradually turned out to be based on numbers, and nobody seems to have been surprised at the queer fact of the outer network becoming an inner skeleton.”

Yes

I read Ivan’s messages over and over, thinking about what they meant. I felt ashamed, but why? Why was it more honorable to reread and interpret a novel like Lost Illusions than to reread and interpret some email from Ivan? Was it because Ivan wasn’t as good a writer as Balzac? (But I thought Ivan was a good writer.) Was it because Balzac’s novels had been read and analyzed by hundreds of professors, so that reading and interpreting Balzac was like participating in a conversation with all these professors, and was therefore a higher and more meaningful activity than reading an email only I could see? But the fact that the email had been written specifically to me, in response to things I had said, made it literally a conversation, in the way that Balzac’s novels—written for a general audience, ultimately in order to turn a profit for the printing industry—were not; and so wasn’t what I was doing in a way more authentic, and more human?

“I took a brownie from your care package,” I said. “That’s fine! They’re for sharing.” She beamed. Any token of friendship made her so happy.

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.

He was happy that I hurt like that. And I knew I had felt the same happiness, anytime he mentioned feeling hurt by me.

you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.