Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

But I had never doubted that, when I got back to school, I would find an email from him, explaining everything. It was not, after all, conceivable that there was no explanation, or that the explanation could come from anyone else, or that it could come in any way other than email, since that was how everything had always happened between us.

He hadn’t written anything to me at all since that day in the parking lot—since he had held me so close to him, and then gotten in his car and driven away.

“How was Hungary?” Lakshmi asked at lunch, with a conspiratorial sparkle. “Did anything happen?” Notwithstanding my strong feeling that a lot of things had happened, I answered the question truthfully in the sense that I knew Lakshmi intended it. Nothing had happened.

I daydreamed about Ivan all the time, imagining different conversations we might have, how he might look at me, touch my hair, kiss me. But I never thought about having sex. What I knew about “having sex” didn’t correspond to anything I wanted or had felt.

A strange thing: I had gone to Hungary in some way to understand Ivan better, because being Hungarian was such a big deal for him—and it was only in the villages that I had realized, with a certain shock, that, although Hungarianness was a big part of Ivan, Ivan himself was only a very small part of Hungary. On some level, I had always known that Hungary was a whole country, home to millions of people who had never met Ivan, and didn’t know or care about him. But apparently I hadn’t completely thought it through, because it still felt like a surprise.

Had that been when I lost the thread of the story I was telling myself—the thread of the story about my life?

She didn’t seem disturbed, as I would have been, by the idea that it was an experience designed for you, to make you feel a certain way.

I thought there was something wrong with the way the departments and majors were organized. Why were the different branches of literature categorized by geography and language, while sciences were categorized by the level of abstraction, or by the size of the object of study? Why wasn’t literature classified by word count? Why wasn’t science classified by country? Why did religion have its own department, instead of going into philosophy or anthropology? What made something a religion and not a philosophy? Why was the history of non-industrial people in anthropology, and not in history? Why were the most important subjects addressed only indirectly? Why was there no department of love? I knew, even before I asked her, that Svetlana would defend the system of departments—but how? They were so clearly arbitrary categories that some guy had thought of.

She said the course catalog was a relic of how human knowledge had been split into disciplines since Ancient Greece. You couldn’t actually separate the knowledge from the history of how it had been conceived and organized, so that was the most meaningful way to study it: divided into historically determined categories. I was impressed by how smart Svetlana was, but I didn’t agree.

“An incalculable amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance or danger represented by chance,” Carl Jung writes in his foreword to the I Ching. We will consider attempts by modern artists and thinkers to redirect this effort, to use chance as an artistic praxis, a conduit to the subconscious, an egress from the constraints of memory and imagination ….

I turned to the last page. It said: “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”

How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing—to follow the right leads.

Still, 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.

Nobody ever explained what was admirable about having the kids, or why it was the default course of action for every single human being. If you ever asked why any particular person had had a kid, or what good a particular kid was, people treated it as a blasphemy—as if you were saying they should be dead, or the kid should be dead. It was as if there was no way to ask what the plan had been, without implying that someone should be dead.

One day, early in our friendship, Svetlana had spontaneously told me that she thought I was trying to live an aesthetic life, and that it was a major difference between us, because she was trying to live an ethical life. I wasn’t sure why the two should be opposed, and worried for a moment that she thought that I thought that it was OK to cheat or steal. But she turned out to mean something else: that I took more ...

Soon, the “ethical and the aesthetic” was the framework we used to talk about the ways we were different. When it came to choosing friends, Svetlana liked to surround herself with dependable boring people who corroborated her in her way of being, while I was more interested in undependable people who generated different experiences or impressions. Svetlana liked taking introductions and survey classes, “mastering” basics before moving to the next level, getting straight A’s. I had a terror of being bored, so I preferred to take highly specific classes with interesting titles, even when I hadn’t taken the prerequisites and had no idea what ...

So, the ethical life was related to getting married. It was somehow implicit in my friendship with Svetlana that she wanted to be in “a stable relationship” and to someday have children, while I wanted to have interesting love experiences that I could write about. Svetlana didn’t seem to have enjoyed family life more than I had, but in her case it had made her want to have a do-over, to do well herself all the things that her parents had done badly. I, on the other hand, thought that my parents had been doomed; I didn’t see how I could do any better than they had.

It seemed possible that one or both of these books might change my life.

Telling jokes—like getting in arguments, or playing ping-pong—was one of the many seemingly casual and non-professional human activities that turned out, in college, to be a rigorous, technical discipline that some people studied day and night, and pursued to a competitive career path.

it seemed to me imperative to keep such people close to me, both to be cushioned against the vicissitudes of life, and to learn how they did it.

I didn’t like when people acted as if nothing we did was time-sensitive. “You have a lot of time, you don’t need to be in a hurry.” That’s what the deans said, when you tried to take five classes. Easy for them: they were already deans. Either that was something they wanted to be doing, in which case they could afford to relax; or it wasn’t what they had wanted to be doing, and now they were invested in preventing anyone else from accomplishing anything, either.

That had been the worst part of childhood: people telling you how lucky you were to live in a carefree time with no responsibilities.

In America, childhood was a time to play and be innocent, to not have to make money or do anything that counted for anything. When I was little, whenever I heard of children who were distinguishing themselves in any field of art or science or sports, I was filled with longing and a deep sense of failure.

“Please don’t leave me all alone.” Was that what I, too, was afraid of? And maybe not just me, but everyone?

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.

But I did not feel proud of myself. 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.

Wasn’t a theory of time more likely to be true if two people had come up with it independently? What kind of cretins cared more about hammering out a string of inheritance than about discovering universal truths? Historians, that was what kind. They would only be happy when they had translated every miraculous book into a product of its historical moment.

To me, it seemed frivolous to waste time celebrating the circumstances under which someone had discovered some phenomenon. Wasn’t it more important to try to apply the phenomenon to more different historical circumstances?

I listened carefully to everything they said, to try to figure out what made it interesting.

I realized that I envied her—because of her curiosity and fearlessness, and because Ivan had written a whole book about her. I wondered if anything I wrote would ever become a library book, with my name in gold letters.

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?

The emails Ivan and I had exchanged, which had felt like something new we had invented, now seemed to have been following some kind of playbook. The seducer explained the importance of alternating between anguished or ambiguous love letters and ironic in-person meetings. In person, you could never explicitly mention the letters, or say, “Did you get my letter,” but you had to always be alluding to them, reinforcing or undercutting their message. The reason he had such good techniques, the seducer explained, was because he had learned them from the best teachers: young girls themselves. The idea that Ivan could have written letters with other girls—that he could have done that whole thing before, multiple times, on purpose—was new, painful, and baffling.

Do you think he was specially created to destroy women? Like they send him to the West to meet women who might have become famous engineers or professors, but they don’t, because of him?” “That must be really comforting for Selin,” Svetlana said. “I’m going to become whatever I was going to become,” I said.

So I was part of a larger group of ex-girlfriends: girls who had never gotten, would never get, over him. Worse than that: I wasn’t even an ex-girlfriend. I didn’t have the dignity of having once been a girlfriend.

“She has, then, some conception of life’s pains, of its darker side,” the seducer wrote. But how did he know? Wasn’t it possible that none of it had really bothered her?

Isolation, though detrimental for a young man, was essential for a girl. This was because a girl should “not be interesting.” The seducer didn’t explain the connection between being isolated and being uninteresting, remarking only: “A young girl who wants to please by being interesting really only succeeds in pleasing herself.” All my effort to be interesting: was that, too, something I had to be ashamed of?

“Although she is quiet and modest, undemanding, there is an immense demand lying there unconsciously”: why was that line so exciting, and so troubling? The seducer went on to say that he couldn’t let Cordelia rest on him too heavily, like a burden. She had to be so light that he could take her on his arm. I immediately felt that I had rested on Ivan too heavily, like a burden.

How was it, then, that “The Seducer’s Diary” corresponded so closely to what felt like the most meaningful thing that had ever happened to me?

Was there a version of “The Seducer’s Diary” where they were equal—where he wasn’t tricking her into doing something she didn’t want? Or was that what seduction was?

“She probably can’t have a strong personality because of her appearance. I don’t mean only that she doesn’t need one. Whatever personality she did have would end up being incidental to her beauty, so it couldn’t be strong. I almost feel sorry for her, but I don’t, because she doesn’t seem sorry, and because she must go through life surrounded by a cushion of love. Everyone loves to be near beauty. Even Riley, who is so critical, isn’t immune to it.”

“Seeing someone” was how people talked about having a boyfriend—about having “a relationship” that wasn’t all in your head—about being healthy and self-respecting enough to be with someone who really cared about you.

I learned a lot from that, like how much it hurt to see how other people described you, and how things that you said about another person, especially your parents, seemed neutral when addressed to a third party, but lethal when you thought about your parents reading it.

All he wanted to talk about was my parents’ divorce. Like all adults, he thought everything was always about my parents—about how I was affected by them, or reacting to them. When I persisted in talking about Ivan, the psychologist said that I was in an imaginary relationship with an unavailable person, because I was afraid to be in a real relationship with an available person. This struck me as a statement devoid of meaning. What “available person” was he talking about? Where was that person?

Obviously I knew that my position was humiliating. I didn’t need some underachiever with a master’s degree to tell me how my problem was that nobody loved me the way he loved his defeated conformist-looking wife.

Whatever problems I had were of my own making—and that meant I was going to have to solve them myself.

Were we really more interesting than other people, or did we only seem that way to ourselves? I thought that we only seemed more interesting to ourselves. A corollary of this belief was that we had no particular responsibility to think about other people. They found themselves interesting, they could think about themselves. Svetlana thought that we really were more interesting, and thus had certain responsibilities.

Was an equal relationship possible, or did one person always like the other person more? Which of us, me or Svetlana, liked the other more? “I feel like it’s different at different times,” I said. Svetlana said she agreed.

What was the worst cruelty: personal or political? Svetlana thought political: denying a person’s personhood and turning them into a number. I thought it was just as bad to be tormented to death by a relative or a landlord as to be shot in a death camp.

Was that why Svetlana put up with Bill—why boors, in general, were widely tolerated and promoted to high social positions: because they accurately gauged and reflected “the way of the world”? Or did the boors determine the ways of the world, from the positions they were put into? Was there another way things could be? Or was it, to use one of the boors’ favorite phrases, cognitively hardwired?

The other subject we talked about was whether men were less affected by love than women—whether they suffered less from heartbreak. Even if suffering was, as Svetlana insisted, universally human, and thus also befell men, it seemed inarguable that men were better at compartmentalizing, and less easily distracted from their intellectual goals. Was this because their neurological hardwiring made them better at systems, while women were better at empathy—because men valued abilities and things, while women valued feelings and people? How could we learn to place less value on feelings and people?