The People in the Trees

by Hanya Yanagihara

Norton had always spoken of time as a sea, a mirrorlike, endless stretch of emptiness, and indeed this dream—“sea time,” he called it—became a sort of joke, a shorthand for talking about subjects he hoped one day to pursue but had no way of engaging in at the present moment.

Boredom—I’d always thought, really, that I would treasure a period of unceasing emptiness, that I would easily fill it. But time, I’ve come to realize, is not for us to fill in such great, blank slabs: we speak of managing time, but it is the opposite—our lives are filled with busyness because those thin chinks of time are all we can truly master.2

Life was elsewhere, and it was frightening and vast and mountainous and uncomfortable.

I suppose this sounds foolish now, unrealistic, but when you are young, planning seems less important, less essential, than it becomes when you have things to protect: money, research, a reputation.

The problem with being young and in a singular place is that one assumes that one will inevitably find oneself in an equally foreign and exotic location at some later point in life. But this is very rarely true.