Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

“Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.” My heart was pounding. There was a book about this?

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.

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?

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.

It made the college application process feel, in retrospect, somehow hurtful and insulting: all the essays and interviews and supplements and letters seemed to be about you, about your specialness—but actually it was all about shaking your parents down for 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?

the people who were the most into the literary magazine were the kind of guys who seemed unable to conceal their glee about all the famous writers who had been there a hundred years ago, or fifty years ago. It wasn’t that I had any particular problem with Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery, but I wasn’t about to join a club to chortle about them.

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.

I had a thought that was so surprising that I stopped in my tracks. Was it possible that Zoloft would cause me to like rap music?

All around us was blackness. When had I last seen so many stars? Was this depressing, or was it fun?

In the end, I thought the most likely explanation was that most of the people in the world just didn’t know they were allowed not to have kids. Either that, or they were too unimaginative to think of anything else to do, or too beaten-down to do whatever it was they thought of.

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