How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

by Sheila Heti

Sholem was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute whatever he wants, just whatever image he has in his mind. But that’s not freedom! That’s control, or power. Whereas I think Margaux understands freedom to be the freedom to take risks, the freedom to do something bad or to appear foolish. To not recognize that difference is a pretty big thing.”

Other people knew how to think, I thought, had opinions on things, a point of view. I did not.

I’m so happy with how we were making everyone jealous with how happy we were in the pool! MARGAUX What? That’s crazy! In my mind, we were making ourselves happy. I had no idea anyone was looking at us.

How could I castrate my mind—neuter it!—and build up a resistance to know what was mine from what was everyone else’s, and finally be in the world in my own way? That endless capacity for empathy—which you have to really kill in order to act freely, to know your own desires!

Had my every act, all along, just been guilt-drenched empathy for the perversions of the world?

hadn’t I always gone into the world making everyone and everything a lesson in how I should be?

What I had done in the night—it felt like the first choice I had ever made not in the hopes of being admired. I had not done it to please him. It was not to win someone’s regard. Then, from inside of me came a real happiness, a clarity and an opening up, like I was floating upward to the heavens.