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August 25 - September 3, 2024
out. And come to think of it, maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly at your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.
Periwinkle is like a flashlight aimed at all your shortcomings. He makes you think consciously of the image you are projecting of yourself. For example, Samuel’s typical order at a coffee shop is a cappuccino. With Periwinkle, he ordered a green tea. Because a cappuccino seemed like a cliché, and he thought a green tea would have a higher Periwinkle approval rating. Periwinkle, meanwhile, ordered a cappuccino.
There is no place less communal in America—no place less cooperative and brotherly, no place with fewer feelings of shared sacrifice—than a rush-hour freeway in Chicago.
He didn’t know it then, but this would become his template for beauty for the rest of his life. Any girl he ever met from now on would be compared, in his head, to this girl.
understand.” Or the particularly infuriating “I’ll tell you someday, when you’re older.” But occasionally some secret would crack free. So his mother was once a musician. He added it to the mental inventory: Things that Mom is. She’s a musician. What else? What other things didn’t he know about her? She had acres of secrets, it was obvious. He always felt there was something she wasn’t saying, something behind her bland partial attention. She often had that disassociated quality, like she was focusing on you with maybe one-third of herself, the rest devoted to whatever things she kept locked
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On the way home that night, he was surprised that everything looked exactly the same as it did before, with absolutely no signs that the world had fundamentally, radically changed.
said, “A game will always tell you how to win. Real life does not do this. I feel like I’ve lost at life and have no idea why.”
“I find this is also true in life. Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That’s it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.”
She doesn’t love him, or rather she doesn’t know if she loves him, or maybe she loves him but she’s not in love with him. She hates these distinctions, these tiny matters of vocabulary that, unfortunately, matter so much.
Henry doesn’t know the meaning of the flowers, the differences between red roses and white, between a lily and an iris. This is a language he does not speak. He does not know how to love Faye creatively, and so he does what everyone else in high school does: candles and chocolates and flowers. He treats love like a balloon, like it is all a very simple matter of accumulation, just adding more air. And so the flowers keep coming. And the dinners. And the love poems that appear in her locker from time to time, typewritten,
Love is like this, Faye thinks now. We love people because they love us. It’s narcissistic. It’s best to be perfectly clear about this and not let abstractions like fate and destiny muddle the issue.
“Some people,” you say, “go through life like a pebble falling into a pond. They barely make a splash. Bishop tore through life. We were all in his wake.”
She’d decided that about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later.
But then she grew up and bought a house and found a lover and got some dogs and stewarded her land and tried to fill her home with love and life and she realized her earlier error: that these things did not make you small. In fact, these things seemed to enlarge her. That by choosing a few very private concerns and pouring herself into them, she had never felt so expanded. That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her more capable of love and generosity and empathy and, yes, even peace and justice. It was the difference between loving something out of duty—because the movement
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She could not explain this to them, nor would they hear it. They still held to all the old principles: drugs, sex, resistance. Even as drugs began killing them one by one, and even as sex became dangerous, still this is where they turned for some kind of answer. They never saw how their resistance had begun to look comical. They were beaten by the cops and the public cheered. They thought they were changing the world and what they did was help get Nixon elected. They found Vietnam intolerable, but their answer was to become intolerable themselves.
if she was liked. She did not seem to spend any mental energy accommodating other people, accounting for their wishes, expectations, desires, their basic need for decorum and manners and etiquette. And Faye’s opinion was that everyone should want to be liked—not out of vanity but because wanting to be liked provided an essential social lubricant. In a world without a vengeful god, the desire to be liked and to fit in was the only check on human behavior, it seemed to Faye, who wasn’t sure if she believed in a vengeful god but knew for a fact that Alice and her cronies were atheists to the
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Why do the best things in life leave such deep scars?
“What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.”
“We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.”
Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar. This is more work, of course, than believing they are enemies. Understanding is always harder than plain hatred. But it expands your life. You will feel less alone.
our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.
But Faye’s opinion is that sometimes a crisis is not really a crisis at all—just a new beginning. Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid.