What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

What most people call cozy—gemütlich, hygge—others find stifling.

Before man, the forest; after him, the desert.

Our world and our civilization would not endure, the man said, because they could not survive the many forces we ourselves had set against it.

Now that I’ve got your attention, now that I’ve scared the bejesus out of you, let’s talk about what might be done. Otherwise, why talk to us at all, sir?

Threats to life and liberty—to anything worthy of the name civilization—were flourishing, the man said. In short supply, on the other hand, were the means to combat them.

An alien one day studying our collapse might well conclude: Freedom was too much for them. They would rather be slaves.

Only once did I catch a flicker of feeling: when he was talking about the animals, a slight catch in his throat. For humans, there seemed to be no pity in him.

in a ghastly reversal of the natural order, first the young would envy the old—a stage already in progress, according to him—then the living would envy the dead.

Self-care, relieving one’s own everyday anxieties, avoiding stress: these had become some of our society’s highest goals, he said—higher, apparently, than the salvation of society itself.

Mindful meditation might help a person face drowning with equanimity, but it would do absolutely nothing to right the Titanic, he said. It wasn’t individual efforts to achieve inner peace, it wasn’t a compassionate attitude toward others that might have led to timely preventative action, but rather a collective, fanatical, over-the-top obsession with impending doom.

He was saying that perhaps it was a mistake to bring human beings into a world that had such a strong possibility of becoming, in their lifetimes, a bleak and terrifying if not wholly unlivable place.

Every place I looked was too crowded or too noisy or seemed, for some other reason, uninviting. A feeling of loneliness and disappointment came over me.

The only thing harder than seeing yourself grow old is seeing the people you’ve loved grow old.

Flaubert said, To think is to suffer.

Imagine how many times the myth of the changeling has been justification for child abuse: corporal punishment, neglect, abandonment, infanticide even.

In the mother’s eyes, the father, insignificant enough to begin with, had diminished with time to practically nothing. For the daughter, absence had only made him loom ever larger, and in death he became a colossus.

Youth burdened with full knowledge of just how sad and painful aging is I would not call youth at all.

After all, my looks had had everything to do with why my husband married me, it was a big part of what he fell in love with, he and I both knew that, it would have been absurd to deny it. But the girl he fell in love with and married was now gone—and how was he to have known he’d be incapable of desiring the woman in her place?

Maybe I really am weird, like the girl said, or maybe I’m just a terrible, shallow person, but it often feels to me as though I had died, the once beautiful woman said. All those years ago I died, and I’ve been a ghost ever since.

Women’s stories are often sad stories.

Angela Carter’s assertion that, while behind every great man is a woman dedicated to his greatness, behind every great woman is a man dedicated to bringing her down.

George Balanchine said, If you put a group of men on the stage, you have a group of men, but if you put a group of women on the stage you have the whole world.

Call it beginner’s luck: my very first Rescue Me Day and I get adopted. The best thing would’ve been to be reunited with my mother, which was what I was hoping for. But if that was not to be, the next best thing was this lady. She is my second mother, said the beautiful bourbon-eyed silver-furred cat.

This kind of fear—the fear of being seen, or watched, or spied on—has begun to consume the woman more and more. Even worse: her fear of being tricked, or cheated.

Everyone gets these kinds of calls, but after you hit a certain age it’s like you become this gigantic target.

I realized that, even among themselves, with other grown-ups, including those closest to them, most of these people were not at all eager to talk about the past, especially the traumatic parts. Who wanted to remember? Who wanted to hear? Only those who are writers, it seems, get to say what happened.

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?

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.

No matter what, they want you to keep fighting. This is how we’ve been taught to see cancer: a fight between patient and disease. Which is to say between good and evil.

But why should cancer be some kind of test of a person’s mettle?

People ought to be able to understand that this is my way of fighting, she says. Cancer can’t get me if I get me first. And what’s the sense in waiting, she says, when I’m ready to go.

Death is not an artist. —Jules Renard

You know how people always say that to you when they see a flattering old photo: Is that you? And you wince, because they’ve just let you know how much you don’t look like that anymore, it might as well be somebody else. It’s humiliating. It shouldn’t be, but it really is humiliating.

We watched it sitting side by side on the sofa, choking and clutching at each other like two people hopelessly trying to save each other from drowning.

We watched Buster Keaton fall down, fall down, and fall down again, we watched the bed collapse under his passed-out drunk wife, and we laughed and laughed, choking and clutching at each other like two people hopelessly trying to save each other from drowning.

I’m sorry, he said. Is there anything I can do? Said it reflexively, as people always do, this formula that nobody really wants to hear, that comforts nobody. But it was not his fault that our language has been hollowed out, coarsened, and bled dry, leaving us always stupid and tongue-tied before emotion.

I don’t know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.

The truth is, every time I see a newborn now my heart sinks. I feel terribly angry but also terribly guilty all the time.

School, in general, made me feel loved.

Teaching is love.

There’s a certain kind of happiness, my friend said, that is open only to young children.

You want to forgive all, my friend said, and you should forgive all. But you discover that some things you can’t forgive, not even when you know you’re dying. And then that becomes its own open wound, she said: the inability to forgive.

You’d think it would be easier to leave life if you could convince yourself that everything was horrible and the future was totally bleak. But I can’t bear to think that I’ll be gone and the world won’t go on, infinitely rich, infinitely beautiful. Take that away and there’s no consolation.

(Who knows better than a child what it’s like to be at the mercy of hidden and arbitrary forces, and that anything can happen, no matter how strange, either for good or for ill.)

There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end

My friend was shrieking now. Oh, what is this, what the fuck is this. It was life, that’s what. Life going on, in spite of everything. Messy life. Unfair life. Life that must be dealt with. That I must deal with. For if I didn’t do it, who would?

while we might understand that there are many peoples speaking many different languages, we are fooled into thinking that everyone in our own tribe speaks the same language we do.

I note that no one ever seems to be afraid of going to Hell. Hell is other people, if you agree with Sartre. Evidently, to most, it’s for other people, never for yourself.

Dying is a role we play like any other role in life: this is a troubling thought. You are never your true self except when you’re alone—but who wants to be alone, dying?

Now, here was this woman who’d gone and done the difficult thing, my friend said to me. She had looked at the truth, and she had not flinched. She had spoken the unspeakable. She had named names. And here were all these people, gaslighting her. They weren’t being honest—not with her, not with themselves. Because they could not accept the truth, they had to bury it under a load of BS.