Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

and it was only in the villages that I had realized, with a certain shock, that, although Hungarianness was a big part of Ivan, Ivan himself was only a very small part of Hungary.

Someone whose only reason for not acting in an antisocial way was that they were scared of getting in trouble with God . . . where did you even start with such a person?

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.

What was the worst cruelty: personal or political? Svetlana thought political: denying a person’s personhood and turning them into a number. I thought it was just as bad to be tormented to death by a relative or a landlord as to be shot in a death camp.

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.

How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

“Well, Selin, I think that the problem-free grasp of idiomatic language isn’t what we go to Alanis Morissette for.”

Riley was a feminist, so I knew that the reason she spoke ironically about Diane wasn’t that she thought she was a slut. It was more complicated, and related to self-respect.

“I find most of the lesbians I know a bit intimidating,” she said, finally. “And I don’t really share their aesthetic sense—or they seem not to value aesthetics that much. I just don’t think I’d fit in. Especially since I’m always lusting after boys.”

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.

sometimes went with Svetlana to Pilates—even though the logistics of mat placement was deeply stressful, in a way that made me feel like I understood the primal conflicts for land that formed the basis of modern history.

In theory, of course, I knew that love could be reciprocated. It was a thing that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways.

didn’t see how obeying our nature was scientific, since it was also our nature to die from smallpox and to be unable to fly.

Of course, you couldn’t have a party without alcohol; I understood this now. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable. But wasn’t there any way around that? Juho was talking about different research into alcoholism that people were doing in Finland. Why was nobody researching the more direct issue of how to make people less intolerable?

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?

It was weird that there were only two options: yes or no. Which was active, which was passive?

It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes—so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books. At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.