Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

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.

The other subject we talked about was whether men were less affected by love than women—whether they suffered less from heartbreak. Even if suffering was, as Svetlana insisted, universally human, and thus also befell men, it seemed inarguable that men were better at compartmentalizing, and less easily distracted from their intellectual goals. Was this because their neurological hardwiring made them better at systems, while women were better at empathy—because men valued abilities and things, while women valued feelings and people? How could we learn to place less value on feelings and people?