What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

What would life be like when the system ensured that the individual no longer even had the option to say no to being followed everywhere and constantly shouted at and poked like an animal in a cage.

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.

Later still, though, 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.

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.

“I just read a review of a book about some lab worker who purposely unleashes a pandemic flu virus in the hopes of killing enough humans to save the environment.”

But after a certain age, that feeling—that pure bliss—doesn’t happen, it can’t happen, because you never want just one thing anymore, once you reach puberty it’s no longer possible.

She had never got over it. A stain on her life that could never be washed out, she described it. A sorrow that could arise unexpectedly at any moment, and that did seem to arise at particularly happy or peaceful moments, she said—to ruin them.

There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end (Joyce).

Everything that a writer writes could just as easily have been different—but not until it’s been written. As a life could have been different, but not until it’s been lived. —Inger Christensen

Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does. Writers know this only too well, they know it better than anyone else, and that is why the good ones sweat and bleed over their sentences, the best ones break themselves into pieces over their sentences, because if there is any truth to be found they believe it will be found there. Those writers who believe that the way they write is more important than whatever they may write about—these are the only writers I want to read anymore, the only ones who can lift me up.

I once heard a journalist say that whenever he’s working on a piece, he knows his language probably isn’t clear when he finds himself repeatedly cleaning the computer screen. Bringing to mind Orwell’s ideal of prose as clean and clear as a windowpane.

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.

What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about, said Benjamin.