What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

I don’t think anyone has the right to tell people there’s no hope.

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

She was just thinking, she said. Flaubert said, To think is to suffer. Is this the same as Aristotle’s To perceive is to suffer? Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. Alfred Hitchcock. Sufferin’ succotash. Sylvester the cat.

Had I turned into one of those pathetic people always trying to get others to like them when everyone knows that that’s just the sort of person other people never do like?

I think it’s largely true, what I once heard a famous playwright say, that there are no truly stupid human beings, no uninteresting human lives, and that you’d discover this if you were willing to sit and listen to people. But sometimes you had to be willing to sit for a very long time.

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?

I quit social media because I had to get away from all the noise.

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.

School, in general, made me feel loved. I can remember the feeling very clearly, she said, even if I couldn’t have put it into words. That somebody wanted to teach me things, that they cared about my penmanship, my stick-figure drawings, the rhymes in my poems. That was love. That was most surely love, she said. Teaching is love.

All these books about the horribleness of modern life, she said, a lot of them brilliant, I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me. But I don’t want to read any more about narcissism and alienation and the futility of relationships between the sexes. I don’t want to read any more about human, in particular male, hideousness. Whatever happened to Faulkner’s idea that a writer’s job was to lift people up?

Every now and then she would squeeze my hand without saying anything—without needing to say anything—but it was as if she had squeezed my heart.

We talk glibly about finding the right words, but about the most important things, those words we never find. We put the words down as they must be put down, one after the other, but that is not life, that is not death, one word after the other, no, that is not right at all. No matter how hard we try to put the most important things into words, it is always like toe-dancing in clogs.

Writing in the journal did not have the steadying or consoling power I’d hoped for. It did not soothe me. It frustrated me instead. It made me feel dumb. Dumb and hopeless. It filled me with anxiety: what a terrible writer I had become.

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?

I have tried. I have put down one word after the other. Knowing that every word could have been different. As my friend’s life, like any other life, could have been different. I have tried. Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice— What does it matter if I failed.