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.

“This is a very surprising guess,” he said. “Greenland has the lowest population density of the world. Even the Sahara is more densely populated than Greenland. The probability that I am from Greenland is very small. If you have to guess someone’s nationality in the future, Greenland should probably be your last guess.”

“When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone”: I read that line in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and felt the sickening lurch of dishonor.

I thought of my own mother, who adored me, and who had also fallen in love with a man who had eventually married someone else. Why did that happen to people? Was anyone even studying this stuff? Was anyone doing anything to fix it?

I wondered if she was in love, and whether the guy was an idiot.

Part of the way of the world was that women had a tendency to go crazy. Men could bring out this tendency. But to blame the men was to take sides, to lose logic, to enter the craziness of the women—because the very content of the women’s craziness was, in large part, the blameworthiness of the men.

I wanted to talk to her more, to find out more about her, but the guy next to her kept interrupting with a point he was trying to make about the area that a cow would graze if it was tied to a “movable fence.”

When a song was about love, I felt the heavy gears start behind my eyes and in my sinuses. The songs that weren’t about love seemed deliberately cryptic—almost frightening.

On the way to the train station, my mother said that she wasn’t going to wash my sheets after I left. Sometimes, she said, she slept in my bed for one or two nights, because the bed still smelled like me. She smiled conspiratorially, and I felt my heart constrict.

Riley’s face lit up in a way I had only ever seen when cats were involved.

I felt irritated, understanding that it was girls’ responsibility to disinterestedly award ourselves to nice guys—to guys whom other guys agreed were nice, because our opinion couldn’t be trusted.

He said he had always been attracted to me in Constructed Worlds, a class that had literally no normal people in it.

Every home had its own sauna and, even though the national cuisine was based on hunting and fishing, it was still easier to be a vegan in Helsinki than it was at Harvard;

The houseplants were wearing crocheted outfits.

“He was a good kid,” Mesut said. “He did well. He could tell you were a good person, too. Good people always find each other.”

Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me—nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?

He stared into my eyes. “Who sent you here to drive me insane?”