Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

“Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.”

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.

It wasn’t until high school, when I took my first creative writing class, that I began to sense trouble. I realized, with shock, that I wasn’t good at creative writing. I was good at grammar and arguing, at remembering things people said, and at making stressful situations seem funny. But it turned out these weren’t the skills you needed in order to invent quirky people and give them arcs of desire. I already had my hands full writing about the people I actually knew, and all the things they said. That was what I needed writing for. Now I had to invent extra people and think of things for them to say? It turned out that writing what you were already thinking about wasn’t creative, or even writing. It was “navel-gazing.” To be obsessed by your own life experience was childish, egotistical, unartistic, and worthy of contempt. I tried to get around the problem by ascribing my own thoughts and observations to a fictional character—one with a neutral, universal name, because I didn’t want to seem like I was constantly harping on being Turkish. I didn’t like books where the whole point seemed to be that the person was from some country, and they kept going on about the food. And yet, the things I was writing about somehow didn’t make sense unless the people were from another country, and I didn’t know enough about any other countries besides Turkey.

It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything blue got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

In the past, my goal in conversation had been to accurately represent the things that I thought, and to deploy these thoughts in relation to the things that other people said, while exercising caution to not betray ignorant or antisocial ideas, and the whole thing had been so much to think about that in the end I usually hadn’t said anything at all. Svetlana had pointed out that, if I actually listened to other people, instead of worrying so much about what I was going to say, I would notice that everyone was saying all kinds of antisocial, ignorant, or irrelevant things, which were often just a posture they were trying out, as opposed to a reflection of their essential personality, which was probably a thing that didn’t even exist. I hadn’t believed her, but she was right: nobody was actually answering anything anyone else had said, and people were constantly betraying antisocial ideas.

I had thought that an aesthetic life would be more like a string of adventures than like a coming-of-age novel, or the life-cycle of a frog, where there was a grand progression ending with “maturity” and the ability to procreate. But it was impossible to imagine an aesthetic life, or any life, without falling in love. Without love, knowledge itself became a hassle; became bullying and imposition. “My country.” “Learn about my country.” Being in love was the only thing that made you want to learn about a person’s country, or about anything else outside your experience. Falling in love was the essential feature of a novel. The Russian word for “novel,” roman, could also mean “love affair.” A “love affair” implied sex, at least the question of sex.

Sometimes it seemed to me that I looked interesting, mysterious, and sculptural. Other times I thought that I didn’t look like anything, that nothing matched together or corresponded to anything or had any kind of grace or proportion or meaning, that the posture was deformed and hateful, like a sign of laziness or obsequiousness or some other personality flaw.