What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

The only moral, meaningful course for a civilization facing its own end: To learn how to ask forgiveness and to atone in some tiny measure for the devastating harm we had done to our human family and to our fellow creatures and to the beautiful earth. To love and forgive one another as best we could. And to learn how to say goodbye.

Pain was something that did terrify her. Pain was the thing that terrified her most. Because you can’t be self-possessed if you’re in agony, she said. In that kind of pain you can’t think straight, you’re a desperate animal, you can think of only one thing.

What are you going through? When Simone Weil said that being able to ask this question was what love of one’s neighbor truly meant, she was writing in her native French. And in French the great question sounds quite different: Quel est ton tourment?

well, you know what they say. Never return to a place where you were really happy, and in fact that’s a mistake I’ve already made once in my life, and then all my beautiful memories of the first time were tainted.

I know that what’s happened is this: her imagination has supplied her with a memory to help make a particular way of thinking about a traumatic situation more coherent.

“Smarter living.” There have been times in my life when focusing on things like cleaning the bathroom helped keep me sane. There have been times when everything seemed to hinge on whether or not I could get the smallest chore done. Times when nothing meant more than that moment in the day when I took my break from work, found a quiet place, and ate the sandwich and piece of fruit I’d packed that morning. A moment of peace. Anxiety and depression held at bay. I could do it, then. I could live another day.

Another time, another ex. Catching sight of him through the window of a pizzeria. Too busy with his phone to notice as I stood staring in, swept back to the years of passion and grief. The lost years, as I had come bitterly to lament them. Staring in, not caring that I’d attracted the curiosity of several diners, I want to know, why don’t I feel more. I want to know how, where once was everything, nothing could be.

A hand in your mind reaches out—

watching a person die with the intensity of falling in love. And you know, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that in some other language there’s a word for this—like the word for that particular kind of love that in the language spoken by the Bodo people is called onsra.