What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

it wasn’t emotion that had made her change the subject like that but rather worry that I might later complain. Depressing host talked too much about dead cat. The sort of comment you saw on the site all the time.

She is a familiar type: the glam academic, the intellectual vamp. Someone at pains for it to be known that, although smart and well educated, although a feminist and a woman in a position of power, the lady is no frump, no boring nerd, no sexless harridan.

At which I confess I rolled my eyes so hard that I had to toss my head to get them to come down again.

And what the movie makes clear is that, if there really was a Supreme Being who had to listen to people’s prayers all the time, he would go out of his mind.

Life is suffering, birth feeds death, to bring a person who has no say in the matter into this world is morally unjustifiable, goes the anti-natalist philosophy. That life might also bring an individual a great amount of pleasure changes nothing, the anti-natalists say. Unborn, the person would not have missed life’s pleasures. Born, he or she has no choice but to endure its multitude of physical and emotional pains, such as the pain that comes from aging or disease or dying. The possibility of a happier future, in which suffering would be vastly diminished, cannot be a justification for the suffering that exists today. And in any case, according to a leading contemporary anti-natalist, a happier future is an illusion. The main problem was, is, and ever will be human nature, the anti-natalist says. Everything could have been different, true. But that would have required us to be a different species. Humans don’t learn. They make the same terrible mistakes over and over, he says. “We’re asked to accept the unacceptable. It’s unacceptable that people, and other beings, have to go through what they go through, and there’s almost nothing that they can do about it.” When he’s asked whether or not he has any children, the anti-natalist won’t say.

She had looked at the truth, and she had not flinched.

What do you think is the meaning of your life? “Family.” “Love.” “Doing the right thing.” “Being a good person.” “Staying positive and following your dream.” The meaning of life is that it stops. Of course it would have been a writer who came up with the answer. Of course that writer would have been Kafka. But in your own words, the social worker says. Those are my words. I’m agreeing with Kafka. But the question is what is the meaning of your life. That it stops, my friend says. Just like Kafka said. (Brittle little laugh.)