Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

I didn’t like when people used “sweet” about non-sensory experiences. Why were we in my mouth all of a sudden? Nor did I believe poets when they went on about what a fun activity it was for them to call up old memories. It was like when old people said that all they had needed for entertainment was a stick and a piece of string, and it was their way of criticizing you for watching TV.

But Şahin’s friend walked right up to me, looked down at my face with a speculative, almost affectionate expression, and kissed me. It felt slow and easy and endless and immediate.

When he leaned in to kiss me, it was like sliding back into the water on one of those long days at the beach, where you just get out so you can go back in again.

“I like this fabric,” he said, fingering it for a moment before pulling my top over my head: something I hadn’t experienced since age six. How strange that this was like that—that the most adult thing was in some way like being a child.

What if the way Zoloft worked was just by dehydrating you?

In its simplest form, the aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy. This was what I had learned from books. There was a problem of application: what did you do if you were a young girl?

Without love, knowledge itself became a hassle; became bullying and imposition.

The moments, isolated at first, when I started to feel like I understood it—like I understood why it was desirable, how to appreciate it, and how to draw it out—reminded me of the first time I managed to follow a Shakespeare play, and understood not only what all those people were talking about, but why their mode of speech was considered admirable. How all the things that went unspoken in a real conversation—because they were secret, or because nobody had realized them, or put them into words—had been translated into a measured multi-syllabic torrent that unfurled so ceaselessly from the actors.

“Love is to get caught on something,” he said readily. “It’s to be unable to forget.”

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?

Whenever anything made me feel badly, my standard procedure was to recount it to myself as a story in which everyone was at least a little bit right, and some people were kind or humorous, and their kindness and humor redeemed everything, and recognizing it redeemed me.

I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.