My Absolute Darling

by Gabriel Tallent

“Looking at something like that, good for your soul. You look and you think, goddamn. To study it is to approach truth. You’re living at the edge of the world and you think that teaches you something about life, to look out at it. And years go by, with you thinking that. You know what I mean?”

“Years go by, with you thinking that it’s a kind of important existential work you’re doing, to hold back the darkness in the act of beholding. Then one day, you realize that you don’t know what the hell you’re looking at. It’s irreducibly strange and it is unlike anything except itself and all that brooding was nothing but vanity, every thought you ever had missed the inexplicableness of the thing, its vastness and its uncaring. You’ve been looking at the ocean for years and you thought it meant something, but it meant nothing.”

Turtle wonders if there are things that she is blind to that other people can see, and what those things might be.

She leaves parts of herself unnamed and unexamined, and then he will name them, and she will see herself clearly in his words and hate herself.

They make up hoops for you to jump through and they want you to think that that’s the world; that the world is made up of hoops. But the world isn’t, and you must never, ever think it is.

you will only succeed if you fight like a fucking angel, fallen to fucking earth, with a heart absolute and full of conviction, without hesitation, doubt, or fear, no part of yourself divided against the other; in the end, that’s what life will ask of you. Not technical mastery, but ruthlessness, courage, and singularity of purpose.

It’s not for your aim. It’s for your

soul.

Here is the difference between me and Martin, she thinks, here is the difference—it is that I know the rain loosens the lines and I care, and Martin knows that the rain loosens the lines and he does not care, and I do not know why, I do not understand how you could not care, because it is important to do things right, and if that isn’t true, I don’t know what is.

“Marcus Aurelius says,” Jacob continues, “that ‘joy for humans lies in human actions: kindness to others, contempt of the senses, the interrogation of appearances, observation of nature and of events in nature.’

“It is all meaningless,” he says, and she does not know why it would mean anything, or why you would look for meaning in it, and she does not understand why you would want it to be anything other than what it is, or why you would want it to be about you. It is just there, and that has always been enough for her.

She thinks, you are bound to make mistakes, and if you are unwilling to make mistakes, you will forever be held hostage at the beginning of a thing, you have to stop being afraid, Turtle. You have

to get in the practice of being swift and deliberate, or one day, hesitation will fuck you.

“When a sweetpea knows something’s name, she thinks she knows everything about it, and she stops looking at it. But there is nothing in a name, and to say you know a thing’s name is to say that you know nothing, less than nothing.” He liked to say, “Don’t ever think the name is the

thing, because there is only the thing itself, and the names are just tricks, just tricks to help you remember them.”

was wrong about names, though. Or half wrong. They mean something. It meant something when he called her sweetpea. That meant the world to her.

Perhaps everything seeks its edge and flees its center and dies this way.

Marcus Aurelius says that we should not despise others for hurting us. He says we should recognize that they act out of ignorance—against their will, even—that you’ll both be dead before long, and that this person hasn’t really hurt you, because they haven’t diminished your ability to choose. And I think he’s right. You don’t have to hate him. But you might probably should really possibly think about leaving. By

“The problem is that we have no evidence that other people are conscious and alive, like us. We know that we are conscious because we have direct experience of our own thoughts, our emotions, the unquantifiable way that it feels to be alive, but we have no experience of others’ consciousness, and so—and so, we do not know for sure that they are alive, really alive, experiencing their life as we experience ours. Perhaps we are the only real person, surrounded by hollow shells who act like people, but who have no interior life as we do.