Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

Still, I found the idea of an aesthetic life to be tremendously compelling. It was the first time I had heard of an organizing principle or goal you could have for your life, other than making money and having kids. Nobody ever said that that was their organizing principle, but I had often noticed it, when I was growing up: the way adults acted as though trying to go anywhere or achieve anything was a frivolous dream, a luxury, compared to the real work of having kids and making money to pay for the kids.

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.

How was a therapist going to help me see things more clearly, when he didn’t know any of these people, and couldn’t know anything other than what was told to him, by me: a person who apparently didn’t see things clearly?

To think that not only Lucas himself, but also other people, had also had the experience of reading a book where the individual sentences had delightful rhythm and word choices, but some other part of it gave you a bad feeling. To think there was a name for that feeling of mixed gratitude and disappointment that I had dismissed as too private to name.

I had wanted to become a novelist before I even knew how to read, back when I could only consume books by having them read to me, and none of them seemed long enough. They left too many questions unanswered, too many ramifications unexplored. My parents told me that I was expecting too much from Frog and Toad Are Friends: it wasn’t a novel. In that way, I understood that a novel would explain all the things I still wanted to know, like why Toad was the way he was—why Toad was essentially unwell, and why Frog helped Toad, whether he really wanted Toad to get better, or whether he benefited in some way from Toad’s unwellness.

All I was ever trying to do when I wrote, I realized, was to show how much I saw and understood.

How unjust it was, when people treated the actual as limiting proof of the possible! I felt that this was what I was fighting against, and always had been: the tyranny of the particular, arbitrary way that things happened to have turned out.

“Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you’ll never get—you will get it someday.” I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. “Yes, you will get it,” she said, looking right at me, “but by that time, you won’t want it anymore. That’s how it happens.”

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?

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.

Love wasn’t a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had death in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.

“Teleological suspension of the ethical” meant that it was OK to murder your kid, if God told you to. It meant believing that God loved you, even if he acted like he didn’t; and believing that you loved your own kid, even if you acted like you didn’t. After all, if everyone’s behavior was visibly consistent with what their attitude was supposed to be, then faith would be unnecessary.

But when had I not had to dismiss some concern about the disjuncture between literature and the way I was living my life? In middle school I had been troubled by Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield, who didn’t care about grades, and who had the courage to run away. Would they have despised me?

Why were the women always in the kitchen, and what was it that Leonard had forfeited by being with them? Why was he a writer, and they weren’t, when they cared about the same things? Why wasn’t he better at cooking? Why was there something exciting about the brutishness of the men who only talked about sports and money?

In a lot of ways, being a writer was about endurance more than talent.

Writers, Leonard said, were not normal people. As a writer, you were never totally present. You were always thinking of how you would put a thing into words. You were constantly putting yourself on the line, and constantly being rejected. You betrayed the only people who really loved you.

It was only afterward, when I had taken a shower and was getting dressed, that a great column of malaise crashed over my head, causing me to understand that it was not possible to outrun a hangover.

Previously, I had believed that the sadness came first, and tears were a result, but the reality was clearly more complicated, because once the tears didn’t come, the sadness somehow bottomed out, became shallower. What if the way Zoloft worked was just by dehydrating you?

It was one of my core beliefs that real worth was independent of what some European or American people happened to have heard of. And yet . . . what was value, if it wasn’t conferred by some people? A daunting thought: How would I eventually root out from my mind all the beliefs that I hated?

They hadn’t known that their lives were actually the plot of The Portrait of a Lady or Eugene Onegin. If they had, they could have written the books themselves. Maybe that was their failure, or their misfortune: they hadn’t been able to recognize and write the books.

At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.