Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

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

I can imagine him able to bring a girl to the point where he was sure she would sacrifice all, but when matters had come that far he left off without the slightest advance having been made on his part, and without a word having been let fall of love, let alone a declaration, a promise. Yet it would have happened, and the unhappy girl would retain the consciousness of it with double bitterness . . . she would constantly have to contend with the doubt that the whole thing might only have been imagination.

“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 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?

“Matches?” the storekeeper asked, showing no interest in my age. I felt wonder at the matchbook: an actual little book, with a staple. For free. The thing Prometheus had paid for with his liver.

There was something abstract and gentle about the experience of being ignored—a feeling of being spared, a known impossibility of anything happening—that was consonant with my understanding of love. 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.

“Shall we get out of here?” he said in a suave, euphemistic-sounding tone. I nodded. I always wanted to get out of here, and nobody ever asked.

Grammatically, the emphasis was less on doing the thing than on having done it.

It was like my brain knew to strive toward freedom, but my body had another plan.

Isabel herself felt afraid, recognizing how she had raised the stakes. Now she had to do something even more spectacular.

Was that what a novel was: a plane where you could finally juxtapose all the different people, mediating between them and weighing their views?