The Idiot

by Elif Batuman

Svetlana had written about whether love was a game you could get infinitely good at, like in French novels—whether it was a matter of playing your cards right—or whether it existed between certain people in some kind of current and you just had to tap into it. “So you think it’s about playing your cards right?” I said. “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.”

It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions. Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too. It was just like Chekhov said, in “The Darling”: She saw objects round her and understood everything that was going on, but she could not form opinions about anything and did not know what to talk about. How awful it is not to have an opinion! You see a bottle, for example, standing there, or the rain falling, or a peasant going along in his cart, but what the bottle or rain or peasant are for, what sense they make, you can’t say and couldn’t say, even if they offered you a thousand rubles.

nobody ever said we were put on this earth for our own entertainment.