What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, “What are you going through?”

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.

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

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

In our culture, what you look like is such an important part of who you are and how people treat you. Especially if you’re female. So if you’re good-looking, if you’re a good-looking girl or woman, you get used to a certain level of attention. You get used to admiration—not just from people you know but from strangers, from almost everyone. You get used to compliments, you get used to people wanting you around, wanting to give you things and to do things for you. You get used to inspiring love. If you’re really good-looking and you aren’t mentally ill or obnoxiously conceited or a total dimwit, you get so used to being popular, you get so used to love and admiration that you take it for granted, you don’t even know how privileged you are. Then one day it all disappears. Actually, it happens gradually. You begin to notice certain things. Heads no longer turn when you pass by, people you meet don’t always later remember your face. And this becomes your new life, your strange new life: an ordinary, undesirable person with a common, forgettable face.

No matter how much of a relief it might be not to have to deal with menstruation anymore, show me the woman who greets her first missed period with joy.

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.

I’d made a lot of lists since all this began, endless to-do lists—as Scott Fitzgerald once pointed out people are wont to do when they’re on the verge of a crack-up.

My way was to make a list then proceed to ignore it; instead of ever even looking at it again, I’d sit down and make a new one.