Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

“So all the time you knew him, he was living with Eunice already,” Zita said, excitedly. I remembered the tidiness of Ivan’s dorm room, how he had talked about loaning it to a friend. I had never wondered why Ivan didn’t have more stuff lying around, or where he stayed when he let other people use his room.

UGGGGG

For some reason, the image that came to my mind was of Peter explaining to someone in a quiet, serious voice that Selin’s problems had been more serious than anyone had realized. No way, I thought. I was going to stick around and bury those people.

It turned out that Ukrainians, just like Turkish people, and Russians, and many people in Hungary, considered their culture to be uniquely “torn between East and West.” How many cultures didn’t think that? I had once heard a Japanese person say it about Japan.

by a Ukrainian ambassador. He never actually said anything—just invoked bilateral relations and geopolitical alignments, and made an occasional arch remark about “the clash of civilizations.” Was that what it was to be a diplomat? How did anyone survive it?

“Matches?” the storekeeper asked, showing no interest in my age. I felt wonder at the matchbook: an actual little book, with a staple. For free. The thing Prometheus had paid for with his liver.

Listening to my Walkman and smoking a cigarette by the river, I felt a kind of elevation in my chest, my eyes opened wider, I felt more alive.

There was something about crying so much, the way it made my body so limp and hot and shuddering, that made me feel closer to sex. Maybe there was a line where sex and total sadness touched—one of those surprising borders that turned out to exist, like the one between Italy and Slovenia. Music, too, was adjacent. It was like Trieste, which was Italian and Slovenian and also somehow Austrian.

Woah

Like sitting on a parapet with your eyes closed, feeling sunlight on your left eyelid and a breeze on your right forearm. Music was the only other thing that was layered like that, so that each new component changed the meaning of the whole. And so much building up and holding back—promising and withholding, and withholding, and withholding. You’re going to die without it. You’re never going to get it. You’re going to die. Here it is.

At first, I didn’t see the point of an orgasm. It seemed like an annoying abrupt spasm that interrupted things just when they were getting interesting. But gradually it started to take longer to get to, and to unfold into its own experience, and then it became this sought-after thing in the distance—like during the long periods in a symphony when nothing seemed to be happening, when it was just shifting textures, and then a glimmer of the soaring sought-after melody shone through—and the fact that you could glimpse it, even for a second, was a miracle that promised everything, that deferred everything to the future, and made living seem worthwhile.

The devastating line at the end of “The Seducer’s Diary”: “If I were a god I would do for her what Neptune did for a nymph: change her into a man.” Would Ivan do that for me? YOU HAVE TO DO THAT FOR ME. The thought made me come, sobbing.

“Patients often cannot give an ordered history of their lives,” Freud wrote. The word “patient” made my stomach clench. I didn’t want to become a doctor, but sometimes I worried it was the only way to avoid being a patient.

Judith wanted us to see the text as a “performance” in which Freud, the “author,” had to establish “authority,” by marginalizing interpretations different from his own.

But after I had listened to the album all the way through a few times, the janky grammar and word choices began to seem legitimate and necessary, and I understood that it was possible to look like that—glaring and tousled, with your limbs all in some artful pile—and also be good at something.

Fiona Apple’s album made me more immediately depressed than any other music I remembered hearing.

They had queued up her entrance—“L, you know you got the lyrics”—the way Pushkin queued up Tatiana’s letter, with the same pride and confidence. I recognized, in their solicitude, something that I had felt in emails with Ivan: the way he had made me feel my own competence, even saying once about the way that I wrote that I “had a style.” I felt that he was right, I did have a style,

I didn’t like when people used “sweet” about non-sensory experiences. Why were we in my mouth all of a sudden?

Something about the name “Proust” sounded fussy, and made me worry that he wouldn’t have liked me.

Why did the idea of the French countryside make me feel despairing? It looked OK in Van Gogh paintings. And that was where he had cut off his ear—so it had been intense. Ivan had asked me that once about New Jersey—whether it had been intense—making me realize that intensity was, indeed, what one valued in place. Childhood was somehow the opposite of intense.

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.

The guys I was in love with always ignored me, but were never unkind. There was something abstract and gentle about the experience of being ignored—a feeling of being spared, a known impossibility of anything happening—that was consonant with my understanding of love.

This is hell

Of a painting we only sort of liked, we would say, tolerantly, “He did his best”—literally, “he did what came from his hand”: one of the many basic Turkish phrases that sounded, to me, like a world-weary witticism.

What should a person’s attitude be toward Picasso? As a child, I had felt bullied by him. In photographs, bald, aggressive, bull-like yet boyish, he had reminded me of Jerry. It was the boyishness that was sinister. I felt he was trying to take something that rightly belonged to children—one of the few things we had—and keep it for himself.

then you had to like Picasso.

She is so inside the problems of a19 y/o

Jerry called me “the kid,” and said I was spoiled because I was allowed to read during dinner: a thing I only did when he was there, to avoid having to talk to him.

Once, when Matt was traveling with the Chorduroys and Svetlana and I were talking the way we used to, Svetlana surprised me by saying: “This is the kind of conversation we can’t have when Matt is around.” I felt unutterable relief—finally, she had noticed that Matt wasn’t fully capable of meaningful discourse!—followed by sinking horror: Svetlana had always known, and she didn’t care.

No gimgal ever shall

Lakshmi said that, according to French feminist theory, you couldn’t ignore the men, because their views on women were baked into culture at such a deep level. Just by using words, you were perpetuating their ideas, because they were the ones who had made up language. “So what are you supposed to do? Not use words?” “Well, they say that women have to make up their own language, and their own kind of writing, outside of the patriarchal hegemony.” I stared at her. “You’re joking.” “No, not at all. It’s called écriture féminine.”

supplanting the unified phallus with “the two lips which embrace continually of the female sex.” That was a quote from Luce Irigaray, who also noted that “collaboration” was etymologically related to “labia” and that women’s lips were “always touching each other in ‘collaboration.’”

“A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there’s no closure, it doesn’t stop, and it’s this that very often makes the feminine text difficult to read,”

Haha like sex

Ezra’s basketball friend, Wei, said that he had been teaching a section on the lambda calculus, and one freshman had hung around afterward, apparently yearning to get something off his chest, before finally blurting: “When do we learn about the lamb?” Wei spoke rarely, but always said something interesting.

Hahahha

“It could be Selin’s Finnish friend doing a thought experiment,” Riley said. That was what she always said now, whenever we weren’t sure if something was really happening.

“Better off dead”—as if the whole point wasn’t to opt out, once and for all, from the question of how to be well-off, or better-off. But I didn’t have a plan, I wasn’t going to do it: partly because it would be the same thing as murdering my mother, and her sister, and then what would happen to my cousin; and partly out of fear that I would fail, and then people would say it had been a “cry for help.” Which is exactly what it would be if I told this guy about it now.

Soooo theogic

The only part that was already exciting and satisfying was being able to see Matt’s desire—to have clear evidence of being so desired. “As a woman, you can hide your desire from another person, or be unaware of it yourself,” she said. I felt confused. Didn’t men also conceal their desires from themselves and others? “But it’s different for a guy,” she continued, “because his desire has such a visual and tangible reality.” Then I understood she was talking about an erection. “Desire” seemed so metaphoric and wide-ranging, and an erection seemed so literal and specific. Was that really what desire was: the thing that was signified by an erection?

Anything with “nation” or “generation” in the title already seemed to be hectoring a person—about how “we as a nation” didn’t, for example, “deal with our problems” anymore, choosing to just pop a pill. By “deal with our problems,” they meant, “suck it up.” I disliked people who said “suck it up.” On the other hand, I also disliked laziness, and it had been impressed upon me many times that we were on a slippery slope to a situation where everyone was in an incubator being drugged to not think for themselves, like in Brave New World.

The complaint itself was “stretched with adjectival filler.” Apparently, there was a link between the kind of self-indulgence that made people whine about their childhood, and the kind that made writers fail to “murder their darlings.” Both came from not having enough problems: from dragging around slights that had happened when you were two, and padding them with adjectives.

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?

But now she was looking at me with affection. “I missed this Selin,” she said. It hadn’t occurred to me that she had missed me, too.

The next time I ran into Jon, I made a point of looking at his eyes. He immediately looked back at me with eyes that were piercingly blue and seemed to be shooting light out of them. “Oh, sorry!” I said, and quickly looked away.

Oh, sorry!

Leonard couldn’t survive five minutes in there; he always ended up in the kitchen with the women. They were the ones talking about stuff he actually cared about: gossip, basically, about real or fictional people. Women were kind, so they never kicked him out, though he had no kitchen skills, beyond chopping things and opening jars. I, like all the girls and most of the boys in the class, smiled at this description—at how the women tolerated Leonard, despite his incompetence. But my smile felt a little mechanical. Why were the women always in the kitchen, and what was it that Leonard had forfeited by being with them? Why was he a writer, and they weren’t, when they cared about the same things? Why wasn’t he better at cooking? Why was there something exciting about the brutishness of the men who only talked about sports and money?

But he kept asking, ‘Why, why.’” She imitated an American intonation when she said “Why,” in a way that was funny to me, even though I also talked like that.

Yet there was something about Joey’s expression, its combination of sensitivity and hurt and lack of imagination, that made me feel less sorry for him than I wanted to.

That reminded me of a Woody Allen line, about how “the thing with feathers” turned out not to be Hope, but was actually his, Woody Allen’s, nephew. I didn’t have positive feelings about Woody Allen, whose movies so often included scenes of men my parents’ age having remedial conversations about “free will,” or dating catatonic-seeming teenagers. Yet I now found it humorous that his nephew, like both the avian and non-avian dinosaurs, had feathers. Was it the wine that helped a person appreciate things uncritically?

Şahin’s friend brought me another glass of wine. How easy and pleasant it was to stand there with them, saying whatever random, irrelevant stuff came to mind. The two guys looked amused, and occasionally contributed their own random, irrelevant observations—though their general attitude was one of being impressed that I could think of so many more of them. It was implicit that it was girls’ role to think of such things, and their role to view them as amusing. I felt that I understood for the first time, because I was able to participate in it, the persona inhabited by Priya and the beautiful nonsmoker.

With my other hand, barely daring to touch the back of his neck, I felt the place where his buzz cut started. It felt so tender and dear and alive—so full of life. What an amazing thing a neck was, the way all the blood in a human body had to pass through it, and how easy that made it to kill someone, and this easiness of killing a man also felt dear and close to my heart.

The cold was breathtaking. Şahin’s friend and I were walking toward the river. Our hands brushed against each other, and then he took my hand in his, which felt warm and smooth. Why wasn’t it possible to hold hands all the time? I suddenly remembered that, in grade school, Leora and I would routinely walk down the hallway holding hands. When had that stopped seeming normal?

When he leaned in to kiss me, it was like sliding back into the water on one of those long days at the beach, where you just get out so you can go back in again.

the gap between the signifier and signified. Where the term “hand job” sounded generic, mechanical, and tough, the act itself felt specific, organic, tender, and sort of gross. The skin was so soft and mobile. An eyeless creature

Crew boats sliced through the current like long stick-insects.

Previously, I had believed that the sadness came first, and tears were a result, but the reality was clearly more complicated, because once the tears didn’t come, the sadness somehow bottomed out, became shallower. What if the way Zoloft worked was just by dehydrating you?

In its simplest form, the aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy. This was what I had learned from books. There was a problem of application: what did you do if you were a young girl? Nadja had been a girl, and had tried to live an aesthetic life. That had involved her being seduced and abandoned and going crazy. But that had been then. What were you supposed to do now: seduce and abandon men? Was that what feminism had made possible? Something about the idea didn’t feel aesthetic. Just think of the angry, complaining men. Maybe you, too, were supposed to be seducing and abandoning young girls: was that what feminism had made possible? But what would you do with the young girls? And wouldn’t it put you in a losing competition against men? Maybe it was OK to just “ruin” men more broadly: not the way men ruined girls, by driving them out of society into convents or mental institutions, but, rather, by getting them to pay for things, as had happened even in the days of Kierkegaard.

Tom Waits had gotten more and more worked up, and was now just shouting random-sounding phrases: “Eight hundred pounds of nitro!” “I have a French companion!” “I’ll Be Gone” seemed in some way like an antidote to the feeling summed up by the new Cranberries single, “When You’re Gone”: its syrupy fifties doo-wop harmonies reproducing, again and again, the dreamy, layered awfulness of everything without you. How could I work it so that I would be gone?