Either/Or

Why were the most important subjects addressed only indirectly? Why was there no department of love?

I had tried, on multiple occasions, to put in a tampon. Tampons were spoken of by older or more sophisticated girls as being somehow more liberated and feminist than maxi pads. "I just put one in and forget about it." I felt troubled by the implication that a person was constantly thinking about their maxi pad.

On another occasion, Berrak had hung wet sheets over the tops of he doors to dry. "Remind me why that's not a good thing to do?" I said thoughtfully, as though I had simply forgotten. My mother and aunts stared at me with identical sorrowful expressions. A door, it was pointed out to me, wasn't designed as a load-bearing element; that wasn't part of the great plan for doors, they weren't made for people to ride on, but simply to exist on their hinges, regulating access to rooms. When they had done that, they had done enough, without also carrying the weight of great dripping wet sheets. And what possible reason could there be, what possible benefit to be derived from rejecting the hallowed product of human ingenuity that was the clothesline?

It was a strange thing how people acted as if having a kid was the best thing that could happen to anyone, even though actual parens seemed to experience most of their children's actual childhoods as an annoyance, which they compensated for by bossing them around. People with kids had to go to work every day, at boring, reliable jobs. On the plus side, work was an acceptable way to escape your children, without seeming to want to. The children, having no such escape, lived through long stretches of boredom and powerlessness, punctuated by occasional treats that they overvalued and freaked out over because the rest of their lives were so empty.

Why was it important to keep doing that? Some people, usually men, talked about genetic programming, and said we couldn't deny nature. This was supposed to be scientific. I didn't see how obeying our nature was scientific, since it was also our nature to die from smallpox and to be unable to fly.

Religious people were the only ones who said openly that having kids was the purpose of life - something you did because God told you to, and because you had to outnumber people in other religions. That at least made sense, though it did seem sort of antisocial. But what if you weren't religious? I had heard some secularist people tallk about a civic duty to keep pace with the religious people - to outnumber them in elections. But weren't there more direct ways to affect the outcome of elections, other than physically birthing people who would vote the same way as you?

Nadja had the validity of constituting at least a tiny part of the way of the world. Part of the way of the world was that women had a tendency to go crazy. Men could bring out this tendency. But to blame the men was to take sides, to lose logic, to enter the craziness of the women—because the very content of the women's craziness was, in large part, the blameworthiness of men.

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 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?

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. In theory, of course, I knew that love could be reciprocated. It was a thing that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways.

every now and then a sentence jumped out and seemed to sparkle midair

If the little girl ever forgot those things, then she would have helped to murder her ancestors.

And yet... what was value, if it wasn't conferred by some people? A daunting thought: How would I eventually root out from my mind all the beliefs that I hated?

What was more alienating: the album art that wasn't targeting me, or the album art that clearly was…?

I had thought of it as "radio music." For many years, I hadn’t realized that it even came on records or tapes.

The essential qualities of radio music were: a tone of oracular truth; an appeal to "you'; an uncertainty as to whether you yourself were “you.”

After all, if everyone's behavior was visibly consistent with what their attitude was supposed to be, then faith would beunnecessary.

…where they were equal—where he wasn't tricking her into doing something she didn't want? Or was that what seduction was?

All it said was: "Does Kierkegaard mean us to prefer one of the alternatives? Or are we thrown back on the existentialist idea of radical choice?" That had probably been written bya professor. I recognized the professors' characteristic delight at not imparting information.

Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.

Isabel said that was "the supreme good fortune": to be in a better position for appreciating other people than they were for appreciating you.

I couldn't help thinking 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?

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.

“Go to hell," lo said.

Rudolf nodded. Then he picked up his raincoat, turned around, and went to hell.

Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do: give up on the bad boy you liked, and maturely, self-respectingly accept the attentions of a less charismatic guy who had proven his essential goodness by wanting to be with you? Wasn't that the plot of 40 percent of romantic comedies? Wasn't it what Alanis Morissette had finally done?

One way of looking at it was that now I had feelings about another guy who wanted nothing to do with me. It was, of course, an outcome I had anticipated; but insofar as I had given it any thought, I had seen it as an improvement on the status quo, reasoning that it would feel more bearable and legitimate if the guy was someone I'd actually had sex with. It had been a comfort to imagine a future in which I wasn't constantly thinking about lvan-even if it meant just subbing him out for a guy with a worse personality.

I could tell from how he hugged me that I could go home with him if I wanted to. I walked around the room, drinking warm beer from a Solo cup. Everyone was obsessively drinking this beer, which came out of a keg. I had never seen a keg before. It looked comically literal. I went back to where Ham was standing and stood close to him. Sure enough, within two minutes, he put his arm around me and asked if I wanted to leave. Had it always been this easy, and I just hadn’t noticed?

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