What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

But doesn’t love always feel just so: destined, no matter how unexpected, no matter how improbable.

I want to know what it will be like once all this (all this: the inexorable, the inexpressible) has become distant memory. I’ve always hated the way the most powerful experiences so often end up resembling dreams. I am talking about that taint of the surreal that besmears so much of our vision of the past. Why should so much that has happened feel as though it had not truly happened? Life is but a dream. Think: Could there be a crueler notion? Memory. We need another word to describe the way we see past events that are still alive in us, thought Graham Greene. Agreed. Agreeing here also with Kafka. And, at the same time, with Camus: The literal meaning of life is whatever you do that stops you from killing yourself.