What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

What most people call cozy—gemütlich, hygge—others find stifling.

That look that comes to many older white men at a certain age: stark-white hair, beaky nose, thin lips, piercing gaze. Like raptors. Hardly inviting.

Cyberterrorism. Bioterrorism. The inevitable next great flu pandemic, for which we were, just as inevitably, unprepared. Incurable killer infections borne of our indiscriminate use of antibiotics. The rise of far-right regimes around the world. The normalization of propaganda and deceit as political strategy and basis for government policy. The inability to defeat global jihadism. Threats to life and liberty—to anything worthy of the name civilization—were flourishing,

And how sad, he said, to see so many among the most creative and best-educated classes, those from whom we might have hoped for inventive solutions, instead embracing personal therapies and pseudo-religious practices that promoted detachment, a focus on the moment, acceptance of one’s surroundings as they were, equanimity in the face of worldly cares.

Mindful meditation might help a person face drowning with equanimity, but it would do absolutely nothing to right the Titanic, he said.

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.

Patricia Highsmith once admitted that she liked criminals, finding this type of person extremely interesting and even admirable for their vitality, freedom of spirit, and refusal to bow down to anyone.

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

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.

All those years ago I died, and I’ve been a ghost ever since. I’ve been mourning my lost self ever since, and nothing, not even my love for my children and grandchildren, can make up for it.

I have learned that there exists a word, onsra, in Bodo, a language spoken by the Bodo people in parts of northeastern India, that is used to describe the poignant emotion a person experiences when that person realizes that the love they have been sharing with another is destined not to endure. This word, which has no equivalent in English, has been translated as “to love for the last time.”

I am fascinated by stories of women in love, especially when the love is in some way unconventional or especially difficult, hopeless even, or frankly insane.

Untold is a good word. Meaning, of course, not recounted or narrated. But also, too much or too many to say. The untold story of his youth. Untold suffering.

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.

Death happens to every one of us, yet it remains the most solitary of human experiences, one that separates rather than unites us. Othered. Who is more so than the dying? I should make a list, I thought.