How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

by Sheila Heti

“The only thing I ever understood is that everyone should make the big mistakes.”

So I thought about marriage day and night. And I went straight for it, like a cripple goes for a cane.

That’s the reason you always see women being so effusive with each other—crying out shrilly upon recognizing each other in the street. Women always have to confirm with each other, even after so many years: We are still all right.

I had spent the past few years putting off what I knew I had to do—leave the world for my room and emerge with the moon, something upon which the reflected light of my experience and knowledge could be seen: a true work of art, a real play.

Beauty is balance—yes! As much in a haircut, as in a work of art, as in a human being.

Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn’t take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.

This response is typical of all puers. Such people will suddenly tell you they have another plan, and they always do it the moment things start getting difficult. But it’s their everlasting switching that’s the dangerous thing, not what they choose.

But while others actually build a life in which things gain in meaning and significance, this is not true of the puer. Such a person inevitably looks back on life as it nears its end with a feeling of emptiness and sadness, aware of what they have built: nothing. In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful. And yet they started off believing themselves too special for this world!

The answer for them is to build on what they have begun and not abandon their plans as soon as things start getting difficult. They must work—without escaping into fantasies about being the person who worked.

they must choose work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and lived through the hard work and suffering that inevitably comes with the process.

The problem is the puer ever anticipates loss, disappointment, and suffering—which they foresee at the end of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once in order to protect themselves.

The world is full to brimming with its own shit. A little more from me won’t even make a difference—it’s only natural.

There is nothing but Sundays and three in the afternoons for me now—

Then love, which can’t be helped, slips into the death drive. The death drive seeks comfort and knowledge of the future. It wants the final answer and is afraid of life. It is weary of life. It is weary of self-containment, the continuation of its purpose, the channeling of the energies of the self. It wants to step into the oblivion of someone else, and its heart races at annihilation. It renounces and gives up renouncing equally. Cliffs are the friend of the death drive, particularly cliffs into another person. It wants a mutual plummeting into the center, one into the other, like a sixty-nine. It hopes to drive you off your course like a car plunging into the center of the earth. It strives for love, annihilation, comfort, and death. Now the future is clear! it cries. It wants to drag you down.

And blessed is the woman who can answer for herself, What about living? What is it about living that you want?

Even in the heavens there is no looking forward to or looking back from, just a pure white burning in the light.

Now we are at the point where all the cards have been laid and the story they chart can be read. We are worse off than we were at the beginning—but this could have been predicted from our starting point. In the beginning, the gods gave us liberty; in the end, we discovered cheating. Instead of developing the capacities within, we took two roads: the delusion and oblivion of drugs—which didn’t start off as cheating, but as access to the sublime; and treating ourselves as objects to be admired—the attempt to make the self into an object of need and desire by tending to the image of our selves. We have found that, in our freedom, we have wanted to be like coke to the coke addict, food to the starving person, and the middle of the night to thieves. Yet the three ways the art impulse can manifest itself are: as an object, like a painting; as a gesture; and as a reproduction, such as a book. When we try to turn ourselves into a beautiful object, it is because we mistakenly consider ourselves to be an object, when a human being is really the other two: a gesture, and a reproduction of the human type.

Listen to what Margaret Mead said: “The major task of every civilization is to get the fathers involved in the child-rearing process.”

Better to have your failure right in front of you than the fantasy in your head.

It took forty years for the Israelites to get from Egypt to the banks of the Jordan, a journey that should have taken days. It was no accident. That generation had to die. They could not enter the promised land. A generation born into slavery is not ready for the responsibilities of freedom.

There are few answers, I think, to many of our problems. 4. We just have to live through things.

that for all of our fears and all of our certainty, the bonds that unite us will remain a secret from us, always.

Once you have put a fence around something, you know it is something you value. Put a fence around what you want to make holy, and crown it with the seventh day. Crown it with rest. The fence and the rest make it holy.