Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

I immediately recognized how shameful, self-important, and obtuse it was for me, an American college student who hadn’t checked email for three months, to compare herself to a political prisoner who had spent seven years in a gulag. But it was too late—I had already thought of it.

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?

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,

Come back gimgals

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

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.

But she turned out to mean something else: that I took more risks than her and cared more than she did about “style,” while she cared more about history and traditions.

Soon, the “ethical and the aesthetic” was the framework we used to talk about the ways we were different.

“Ours is definitely my most stimulating friendship,” she had said, “but I might feel threatened to live with someone who doesn’t have a weaker personality than I do.”

Why, then, had she said that my personality was stronger? I decided that she was trying to be polite—to make me feel less badly that she didn’t want to live with me.

Bruh this literally the anxious spiral

Maybe you couldn’t really be benevolent unless you were up in everyone’s business.

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. But my mother viewed such prodigies with pity and sorrow: they hadn’t been allowed to be children.

In “We Masses Don’t Want Tofu,” “tofu” had been rhymed with “opposed to.”

I felt annoyed when people showed you a photograph of a urinal and tried to make you debate whether it was art. Nonetheless, I wanted to know whether a poem was good.

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.

Bob looked like he was in pain. “So you’re saying that Nurhan M. Karadağ and Nurhan M. Karadağ are two different people.” I felt sorry for him. Every time I saw this guy, I ruined his day.

Still, when Harvard said I wasn’t eligible for financial aid, and another university offered me a full scholarship, I thought I should go there. My mother became furious and said I was always sabotaging myself. She was proud of being able to borrow money at a loss from her own retirement fund, and give it to Harvard. I felt proud of her, too. 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.

I understood I had said the wrong thing.

Riley’s said: The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his chest, with an axe.

but it was somehow clear, even to me, that what we were hearing was fanciful, ahistorical, and not “rigorous.” I felt outraged. So one writer hadn’t read another writer: how was that proof that what they were saying wasn’t related? Wasn’t a theory of time more likely to be true if two people had come up with it independently?

In the end, Svetlana chose the major called History and Literature. But I didn’t care about history so I chose the major that was just called Literature.

Haha..ethical vs aesthetic

Kierkegaard himself had said of Either/Or that you had to either read the whole book, or just not read it at all. Kierkegaard was funny! Nonetheless, I too flipped forward to “The Seducer’s Diary.”

It started with a description of Johannes, the seducer—about how he was able, using his “mental gifts,” to make a girl fall in love with him, “without caring to possess her in any stricter sense”:

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.

Once, he had told me that strawberries grew on trees. I had contradicted him, citing my memory of an actual strawberry plant I had seen once—and yet, when he had held his ground, I had backed down: it hadn’t seemed important, and my memory itself hadn’t seemed to prove anything. “You’re easy to convince,” he had said. “I was wondering when you were going to stop me,” he had said, another time. “I was wondering how long you would let me keep going.”

She said it wasn’t a diet, because the idea wasn’t to diminish herself, but, rather, to reveal her real, stronger body.

In response to everything I had written, he had composed a poem. It was a truly awful poem—way worse than the ones in Real Change. “Let’s eat some dirty strawberries” rhymed with “This psychologist is smart, I’m just a mass of dishonesties.” “I don’t love you, you hate me.” “Come dance with me again.” “Writer queen whom I admire, fallen analyst”—I logged out, my heart pounding. He hadn’t refuted anything, or reassured me about anything. Was he saying I was right?

Everything went black. 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.

The way the guy was sort of bragging about being both a colleague and a servant of chance reminded me of that line in King Lear. It occurred to me to wonder whether nature was my goddess. Somehow I felt like she wasn’t.

On May 19, the seducer finally found out the girl’s name: Cordelia, “like the third of King Lear’s daughters.” (Wait—so King Lear was part of it?)

“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 can’t a night like that be longer?” the seducer wrote, in the final diary entry, after they spent their first and last night together. He left before she woke up—because of how disgusted he was by women’s tears and prayers, “which change everything yet are really of no consequence.” I thought about that a lot: about what she could have said that would have been of consequence.

Ahhhhhh

Sensing how hurt my mother would have been if she had heard those questions, I did my best to explain to the social worker how important secularism and science were in the Turkish national identity.

What was charisma: a content or a form? (We talked a lot about whether different things were a content or a form.)

We thought charisma was probably more like a form: less a matter of saying or doing particular charismatic things, than of saying or doing things in a charismatic way.

Were we really more interesting than other people, or did we only seem that way to ourselves?

Gimgals be like

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 dif...

Could friendships reach a stable point and stay there, or were they always either growing or shrinking? Svetla...

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 every smart person funny? I thought humorlessness was the essence of stupidity. Svetlana thought she knew some genuinely smart people who...

Everything about her apartment—the chunky ashtrays and stacked Cahiers du Cinéma, the low Japanese-looking double bed, the kitchen with its aperitif bottles and espresso machine—all conveyed a level and granularity of style that we could not aspire to, living, as we did, in dormitories full of institutionalized furniture and schoolbooks. “I find this apartment very intimidating,” Svetlana had said, voicing what we had both been thinking. “Jeanne is only twenty but she already has a taste.”

The Chance professor was wearing an expensive-looking shapeless dress with a collar that stood up like the mouth of a vase. I didn’t understand everything she was saying, but every now and then a sentence jumped out and seemed to sparkle midair.

“Evenings in bed I could not read more than a few words of it before my heartbeat got so strong I had to put the book down.” At that point in the lecture, I felt too excited to sit still, so I left, trying not to make any noise.

them. “Hey, KC,” I said. “Hey,” she said, barely looking up from her book. “So … who’s that in the sink?” “It’s a stingray.” Several questions came to my mind, like whose stingray it was, why it was in the sink, how KC had gotten into our apartment, and where Joanne was. On reflection, though, I realized none of these things was actually a problem for me, so I just went to the library. I

The crabs

I wished there was a class where they could teach you how to calculate the right time to die.

The ethics professor was smart. When anyone made a suggestion or asked a question, he half smiled and immediately rattled off all kinds of implications that a normal person wouldn’t have thought of if they had sat there for years. He was kind, too, never saying anything to make anyone feel dumb. The one time I asked a question, he jumped up and down, and even drew a picture. It was a relief that the person they sent to teach you ethics wasn’t some kind of asshole.

He had a familiar air of displaced embarrassment, an anxiety about speaking languages poorly, which one didn’t encounter in people who had done any of their schooling in the same country where most of their relatives lived.

It was from Lucas that I first heard the phrase “good on a sentence level.”

To think that not only Lucas himself, but also other people, had also had the experience of reading a book where the individual sentences had delightful rhythm and word choices, but some other part of it gave you a bad feeling. To think there was a name for that feeling of mixed gratitude and disappointment that I had dismissed as too private to name.

But my parents were the only ones I knew who never acted like I owed them money for being alive, or talked about kids being “spoiled” or “selfish,” or said that I had to be a doctor, or took other adults’ side over mine. I was so grateful that sometimes I sat in my room and cried.