Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing—to follow the right leads.

I recognized the professors’ characteristic delight at not imparting information.

Well, that’s just it, I thought: you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.

What kind of cretins cared more about hammering out a string of inheritance than about discovering universal truths? Historians, that was what kind. They would only be happy when they had translated every miraculous book into a product of its historical moment.