Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

if everyone’s behavior was visibly consistent with what their attitude was supposed to be, then faith would be unnecessary.

many people in Hungary, considered their culture to be uniquely “torn between East and West.” How many cultures didn’t think that? I had once heard a Japanese person say it about Japan.

Maybe there was a line where sex and total sadness touched—one

it was somehow impossible for me, personally—because of who I was.

I didn’t want to become a doctor, but sometimes I worried it was the only way to avoid being a patient.

I understood that it was possible to look like that—glaring and tousled, with your limbs all in some artful pile—and also be good at something.

But it turned out that feeling things—feeling so much—was even more embarrassing.

I was an only child, that I must be “spoiled rotten,” that I must love having my parents’ attention all to myself.

But she can’t unstir the milk in her tea,

Childhood was somehow the opposite

of intense.

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.

What was good about that: about a grandmother’s “love” for you and disregard of herself?

that. It was enough I had wasted the time once. I would never waste more time by writing about it.

Being left at night for a party was so much worse than being left in the daytime for work;

And yet, the second time had blocked out the first time, and I didn’t like to think that it hadn’t been the first time.

Later I saw a similar thought expressed in a Holocaust memoir, and felt better, and then felt worse.

There was something abstract and gentle about the experience of

being ignored—a

a feeling of being spared, a known impossibility of anyth...

“he did what came from his hand”: one of the many basic Turkish phrases that sounded, to me, like a world-weary witticism.

The extent to which Picasso idealized or disfigured the women in his paintings was a test: not just of their physical beauty, but in some way of their human worth.

I had a belief that I had always cried this much.

Adults would ask me what was the matter, and I would say I was “moved.”

I didn’t get it: why did we have to write stuff that was hard to read and didn’t have an ending, just because men were wrong?

the plan to “hurt myself” (though it was really the opposite; it was a plan to stop being hurt).

“Desire” seemed so metaphoric and wide-ranging, and an erection seemed so literal and specific.

To fake it would be to give in to the despair, and that was something she was never going to do.

Anyway, I never had been able to understand how girls like that cared so little about worrying their parents.

(So: it was important to spare people details.)

I had never before heard this man sound so interested in anything—especially when he said “some people actually lose weight.”

except the dog, which looked less like a dog than like a panicked homunculus that had been crammed into an ill-fitting shaggy suit.

Was this depressing, or was it fun?

It hadn’t occurred to me that she had missed me, too.

to choose was to be never secure, to be always in flux—to

to be, for a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir had shown, in a kind of nonexistence.

And the great advantage of an arranged marriage was that your husband was committing, not to you personally, but to the institution of marriage—to his whole family, as well as to yours.

whose personality was enchanting enough to keep a man interested for sixty years?

Now the Pilates instructor was talking about closing our rib cages. I often couldn’t tell if the things she said about ribs were literal or figurative.

This wasn’t a satisfying answer, since it involved imagining something that you apparently couldn’t understand until it happened to you.

understanding that it was girls’ responsibility to disinterestedly award ourselves to nice guys—to

because our opinion couldn’t be trusted.

Why were the women always in the kitchen, and what was it that Leonard had forfeited by being with them?

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

made me feel less sorry for him than I wanted to.

if I actually listened to other people, instead of worrying so much about what I was going to say, I

I started worrying that it was too easy, that I was being too passive and was failing to be interesting or express my personality. Magazines always said stuff like that: “Don’t just lie there.” I tried to think of different things I could do.

our zero date.

Special, caring guys, the kind who were