Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

Why were poems so expensive, when they had so few words?

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?

Definitely asking my therapist about this

All I was ever trying to do when I wrote, I realized, was to show how much I saw and understood.

The radio in the Quincy kitchen was playing the new Alanis Morissette single, “Head over Feet.” It was about having the maturity to want something good for you. I felt outraged. I had thought Alanis Morissette was there to remind us.

I love Selin so so much.

I sometimes went with Svetlana to 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.

In the past, my goal in conversation had been to accurately represent the things that I thought, and to deploy these thoughts in relation to the things that other people said, while exercising caution to not betray ignorant or antisocial ideas, and the whole thing had been so much to think about that in the end I usually hadn’t said anything at all.

The more I thought about it, the less I understood why the duration of my current condition—this indignity and stuckness, the feeling of being somehow tied to Ivan—should depend on my ability to find some doofus who would tell me I was special. I already knew I was special. So what did I need the doofus for?

He released my hand, so I could do it by myself, but it turned out I wasn’t doing it right. He demonstrated: more vigorous, more rhythmic, harder, slower. At first, I wanted to do a good job, but I soon grew demoralized. It felt like I was missing too much information. Couldn’t he do a better job himself? What was the point of delegating it to someone who would do a worse job? A twinge of pain shot through my palm. What if I got repetitive strain injury again, like with the gardening catalog?

Of course, you couldn’t have a party without alcohol; I understood this now. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable. But wasn’t there any way around that? Juho was talking about different research into alcoholism that people were doing in Finland. Why was nobody researching the more direct issue of how to make people less intolerable?