Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

I immediately recognized how shameful, self-important, and obtuse it was for me, an American college student who hadn’t checked email for three months, to compare herself to a political prisoner who had spent seven years in a gulag. But it was too late—I had already thought of it.

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.

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

Nobody ever explained what was admirable about having the kids, or why it was the default course of action for every single human being. If you ever asked why any particular person had had a kid, or what good a particular kid was, people treated it as a blasphemy—as if you were saying they should be dead, or the kid should be dead. It was as if there was no way to ask what the plan had been, without implying that someone should be dead.

“As soon as she wanted to speak of it to another,” Kierkegaard wrote, “it was nothing.” The extent to which he left a girl with nothing was the very mark of his artistry. It meant having the self-control to not get her pregnant or abandon her at the altar. It meant no spectators, no proof.

It was a constant problem for Priya: men desperately, bald-facedly offering her things they didn’t have. That was what it was to be beautiful.

Only someone who was already old and famous could say something like that—that some randomly occurring garbage was the greatest art form. I couldn’t go around being like, “Here’s the sounds of Sixth Avenue. Oh, it doesn’t sound interesting to you? Try it for thirty-two minutes.” Nor did I want to.

he forgave her, in a way that was somehow intensely sexual, even though she was an attractive woman, and he looked like a pedantic thuggish elf. I was filled with the desire to say that to Ivan, and for him to forgive me.

guy. 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.

In fact I had been right: it did feel, by comparison, more bearable and legitimate. Yet to say that I was on any objective level enjoying myself would have been an overstatement.

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?