How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

by Sheila Heti

If I had known, when I was a baby, that in America there was a baby who was throwing up her hands and saying, first words out of her mouth, Who cares? and that one day she’d be my best friend, I would have relaxed for the next twenty-three years, not a single care in the world.

When we are all in a culture together, we share a secret with each other, and this is true of every civilization down through time. Not even their art, not even their laws, their artifacts, their literature, their philosophies, their wars, their stone bowls can ever reveal that civilization’s secret. Even today, with all we’ve built that will outlast us, we will not leave behind the secret that binds us. In this way, we are like any family at the core of which there is a secret that, even if someone asked, no one in that family—not even the snitchy, untrustworthy types—could ever reveal. In this way, we are all like a family together in the present, and no future civilization will ever know our secret—the secret of our existence together—just as we do not know the secrets that lived and died with the past.

Once you have put a fence around everything you value, then you have the total circle of your heart.

long ago he realized his intelligence didn’t extend so far—to know what was good from what was best—so he taught himself to dig well, and did.