Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

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

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.

(What even differentiated a great and honorable war, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people, from a shameful genocide, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people?)

“the method of loci.” You pictured a route through a building, or among some buildings, and imagined yourself placing all the things you wanted to remember at different places—loci—along the route. Then, all you had to do to remember the things was to mentally retrace the route.

“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.”

“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.