The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.

I have found that the more people say about you, for example those who spoke at the memorial—people who loved you, people who knew you well, people who are very good with words—the further you seem to slip away, the more like a hologram you become.

Woolf names Flaubert with Keats as men of genius who suffered fiercely because of the world’s indifference to them. But what do you suppose Flaubert would have made of her—he who said all female artists are sluts? Both created characters who take their own lives, as would Woolf herself.

She is the wife, she found the body. But here, as at the memorial, she has made every effort to look not just presentable, not just pulled together, but her best: face, dress, fingertips, roots—all meticulously attended to. It’s not criticism I feel, only awe.

For people who have themselves been victims of inequality and exploitation, like the people trapped in Lilya’s slum, there might be some understanding for the way they mistreat one another. There might even be forgiveness, she said. But the depraved behavior of all those privileged members of the prosperous Nordic welfare state—this is harder to accept.

Re: Story of Lilya from Lilya 4-ever

You had to have ambition, serious ambition, and if you wanted to do really good work you had to be driven. You had to want to surpass what others had done. You had to believe that what you were doing was incredibly serious and important. And all this seemed to me in conflict with learning to sit still. To let go.

Meanwhile I was still struggling with the novel. And then one day I said to myself, Say you don’t write this book. Weren’t there a zillion other people willing to bring novels into the world? Weren’t there, in fact, already too many novels? Did I honestly think mine would be missed? And could I justify doing something with my life, my one wild and precious life, that I knew, undone, would not be missed?

Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

Innocence is something we humans pass through and leave behind, unable to return.

Is this the madness at the heart of it? Do I believe that if I am good to him, if I act selflessly and make sacrifices for him, do I believe that if I love Apollo—beautiful, aging, melancholy Apollo—I will wake one morning to find him gone and you in his place, back from the land of the dead?

Nothing brings more anxiety than Rilke’s avowal that a person who feels he can live without writing shouldn’t be writing at all.

What exactly did Simone Weil mean when she said, When you have to make a decision in life, about what you should do, do what will cost you the most.

Do what is difficult because it is difficult. Do what will cost you the most. Who were these people?

What are we, Apollo and I, if not two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other?

whatever Tolstoy had to say about unhappy families, unhappy couples were all unhappy in the same way.

Tempted to put too much faith in the great male mind, remember this: It looked at cats and declared them gods. It looked at women and asked, Are they human? And, once that hard nut had been cracked: But do they have souls?

Doris Lessing, who thought imagination does the better job of getting at the truth.

Losing the memory of the experience itself to the memory of writing about it. Like people whose memories of places they’ve traveled to are in fact only memories of the pictures they took there. In the end, writing and photography probably destroy more of the past than they ever preserve of it.

What we miss—what we lose and what we mourn—isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.