The Idiot

by Elif Batuman

A photograph on the box showed a man and a woman gazing into the distance, wearing matching plastic nose strips, a breeze ruffling the woman’s hair.

These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful.

I felt like part of something bigger than I was, where I was able to strive and at the same time to forget myself.

That was the best thing about college: it was so easy to leave.

“Isn’t that why you don’t cheat or steal—because it’s ugly?”

There could be one rare kind that just naturally exists between certain people. Then there’s the more common kind that’s constructed.”

How were you supposed to talk about people?

Everything was at once overwhelmingly the same and ever so slightly different.

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.

I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo’s tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.

This meant that the Disney portrayal of bullies wasn’t accurate, because the Disney bullies realized they were evil, prided themselves on it, and loved nobody.

I wanted to write back right away, but he had waited a whole day, so I knew I had to wait at least that long.

My sleep life went totally off course. I seemed always to be thinking about the wrong things. Every night I went to bed around midnight, closed my eyes, thought a lot of jumbled thoughts, turned the lights back on, and read until four.

Exams ended. It was time to forget all the phonetic symbols, Russian verbs, and nineteenth-century plots.

“No, nobody can understand him,” she said. They all started talking about how they would set off a smoke bomb in Daniel’s dorm on the night before the exam.

he would take a week to write to me, and then I would force myself to

wait a week before writing back.

In the morning when I saw Ivan’s name in the in-box I almost started to cry. It reminded me of a kind of torture I had read about where afterward the captors returned your senses to you one by one, and you felt so grateful that you told them everything.

Worse yet, I knew I had no one to blame but myself. If my mother told me not to do something, I didn’t do it.

Every five minutes I checked to see Ivan’s online status.

There were individual lines that made my heart soar, but underneath it the base, the floor, was sickening.

“I like someone who doesn’t like me,”

From what you’ve described, it sounds as if he barely exists at all. He’s just a voice from behind a computer.

you can have a completely idealized relationship.

You risk nothing.

Instead, because he exists as a series of messages, he’s always there, every time you turn on the computer. I bet you read those messages over and over, am I right?”

He laughed and laughed. I was laughing, too, because the way he did it was contagious.

When I climbed up into the bunk and lay down, the room started spinning. It got worse when I closed my eyes. I tried opening my eyes and sitting up. Then I was less dizzy. But what was I going to do—sit there like that all night?

One of the most remarkable things about the giant sculpted deep-fried onion was its powerful resemblance

to an artichoke.

The consumption of that baguette seemed to require some kind of ear muscles that I had lost during the two-million-year course of human evolution.

the presence of good people everywhere, the need to identify people who weren’t just good but who could make things happen,

The phone rang. I would die if it wasn’t him.

I saw Einstein. This reminded me to bring a hairbrush.

On a sandy beach, small children were wading around in yellow inflatable wings while their mothers sunbathed. It was weird to think this scene was part of their childhoods.

said it was like the first time you saw a fluffy dog after it was wet.

and all we ever did was mishear each other and say “What?” all the time.

Short aggressive men kept dancing up close to Lakshmi,

Some flight attendants came out and showed us how we could use our seat cushions to float around on the Atlantic Ocean.

he was in the background of everything I thought.

love really was an obscure and unfathomable connection between individuals, and not an economic contest where everyone was matched up according to how quantifiably lovable they were?

It felt like being hit, like finding out that the worst thing I had ever thought was true.

“What is ‘Tokyo ghetto pussy’?” asked another boy. A few of them nodded—they had all wondered this.

I knew there were a lot of flaws in this reasoning. But my body didn’t know.

What had men ever done, to deserve so much beauty and grace?

room—why was it so hard not to glance through an open door, even when you didn’t want to see inside?—and

It occurred to me that it might take more than a year—maybe as many as seven years—to learn to feel nineteen.