Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

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.

up. Wasn’t that what had happened to me? Hadn’t I been brought to the point where I would sacrifice everything—only for him to leave off without the slightest advance having been made? Wasn’t I always asking myself—hadn’t other people, including a psychologist at the student center, repeatedly asked me—whether the whole thing was in my 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.

just wonder how much of wanderlust is just regular lust,”

It was a constant problem for Priya: men desperately, bald-facedly offering her things they didn’t have. That was what it was to be beautiful.

In the Chance class, we read an interview with John Cage where he said that the most profound music to him now was the honking of cars on Sixth Avenue. This was because he no longer “needed” the structure and overbearingness of “what we call music.” “If something is boring after two minutes,” Cage wrote, “try it for four . . . then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two.” I sighed. Only someone who was already old and famous could say something like that—that some randomly occurring garbage was the greatest art form. I couldn’t go around being like, “Here’s the sounds of Sixth Avenue. Oh, it doesn’t sound interesting to you? Try it for thirty-two minutes.” Nor did I want to.

Childhood stolen at . . . twenty-three? How long had that person planned to, like, treasure her childhood?

“The skin over here is fine, but really just fair to middling. But here, close to the wrist—this is sublime.”

But I was in Russia because I had looked at the literatures of the world and made a choice. Nobody had especially wanted me to come—indeed, the customs officer who stamped my passport had left a distinct impression of wishing me to be elsewhere—yet here I was. It was like when Isabel managed not to marry the guy with the cotton mills, and it was her first taste of victory—because “she had done what she preferred.” Was this the decisive moment of my life? 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.