Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

Just imagine being told that you weren’t a person, but a way you made other people behave.

hadn’t wanted Ivan to be a force of stability in my life.

Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you’ll never get—you will get it someday.”

And I would never not want it.

Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

the zoo in Belgrade

Was it supposed to be understood that she had been raped? It felt like that was often what was supposed to be understood in short stories.

Only someone who was already old and famous could say something like that—

struck me as so cosmically true that I couldn’t believe I had heard it correctly.

had to make parts of himself die in order to be in his relationship, because Jenna didn’t appreciate “his music and his spirituality.”

“A crush is about building up the self, and love is about giving from the self. For love, you have to have a self you’re secure with, to give to the other person.”

Didn’t the very essence of a fence reside in the fact that it was stationary?

felt no need to add any more sentient beings to our household.

Svetlana said she liked Tsvetaeva: objectively the cooler choice. I felt more similar to Akhmatova, so I defended her, but I wasn’t happy about it.

There was something so exciting about how submissively she said

it was wasteful for people with such good logic skills to spend so many years and so much energy learning to reconcile an old book with the way things were now. Couldn’t a person just write a new book?

obese Norwegian Forest Cat had sat, with near-lethal results, on her newborn baby.

in the end I gave up trying to explain anything.

attraction had a permeable border with repulsion.

I mistrusted the project of trying to generalize a set of rules that would work in all circumstances.

“I’m very smart, in my own way,” Zita said, “but I’m emotional more than intellectual. I care more about people and feelings than about ideas.

How many cultures didn’t think that? I had once heard a Japanese person say it about Japan.

author,” had to establish “authority,”

had some of the features of hip-hop that I usually found alienating, like a man saying “Uh, uh,” in the background.

It turned out that dreams were easy to interpret. They were all repressed desires. Did I secretly want to be back in high school?

Nothing happens that I don’t want to tell you.

Dont thibk this is relafabke

Nor did I believe poets when they went on about what a fun activity it was for them to call up old memories.

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

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.

But why did Proust have to keep thinking about it? Why couldn’t he write a book about something else?

How could I have forgotten that so completely? How could one person just replace another like that?

Later I saw a similar thought expressed in a Holocaust memoir, and felt better, and then felt worse.

I would side, under such circumstances, with Picasso, but I wasn’t happy about it.

made you feel proud of your open-mindedness and objectivity. You could note how he was an asshole, and hold it in part of your mind, and then, with the rest of your mind, appreciate how totally he had managed to express himself.

Would they get me? Did I want them to?

Then he would start kissing Svetlana’s neck, causing me to feel like I was violating their privacy and embodying some kind of sterile bitterness.

Svetlana surprised me by saying: “This is the kind of conversation we can’t have when Matt is around.”

Apparently, one question people asked about Orlan was whether she was really an artist, or just a mentally ill person being exploited by surgeons.

Just by using words, you were perpetuating their ideas, because they were the ones who had made up language.

women have to make up their own language, and their own kind of writing, outside of the patriarchal hegemony.”

I thought the most likely explanation was that most of the people in the world just didn’t know they were allowed not to have kids.

that I—my name, my appearance, my being—was part of what sustained that camaraderie?

proof that the story wasn’t endorsing his actions, any more than it was judging them.

Great literature didn’t judge. It described complex individuals who were neither good nor bad.

Indulging in empty sorriness-feeling without backing it up with action?

Was it the wine that helped a person appreciate things uncritically?

In the past, my goal in conversation had been to accurately represent the things that I thought,

Svetlana had pointed out that, if I actually listened to other people, instead of worrying so much about what I was going to say, I would notice that everyone was saying all kinds of antisocial, ignorant, or irrelevant things, which were often just a posture they were trying out, as opposed to a reflection of their essential personality, which was probably a thing that didn’t even exist.

Falling in love was the essential feature of a novel. The Russian word for “novel,” roman, could also mean “love affair.” A “love affair” implied sex, at least the question of sex.

why everything I did learn felt somehow incomplete and beside the point?