Either/Or

this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes—so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books. At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.

Moscow does not believe in tears.

Sevastopol does not believe in earwax.

Minsk does not believe in black bile.

The smells, the colors, the people’s flat and wary faces, were radically unfamiliar—as if the plastic and the cigarettes and the light bulbs and the clothes had a different chemical makeup, and the people had eaten different food, and their clothes had been made in different factories, and the distance that separated them from my own existence was determined not just spatially, by things like biogeography and regional trade blocs, but also somehow by time

On the roof of the hostel in Side, a German girl, having heard me speak Turkish, demanded to see me belly dance.
“I’m from New Jersey,” I said.
“Oh, forget it then,” she said, turning her back as fast as she could, like it might have been contagious.

Well, it made sense. If she could write a book, he would be out of a job. That’s why Madame Bovary had to be too dumb and banal to write Madame Bovary: so Flaubert could have a great humane moment where he said he was Madame Bovary. But I wasn’t dumb or banal, and I lived in the future. Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.

Conversely, to “pay the tourist price” wasn’t just to lose money, but to capitulate to panderers: to fail to support the truly deserving and authentic. The way you supported the deserving and authentic was apparently by paying them less.

It couldn’t have been depressing, because my mother had worked so hard to make it not be depressing. And yet—was it possible that how hard my mother worked was part of why it had been depressing?

Of course, you couldn’t have a party without alcohol; I understood this now. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable. But wasn’t there any way around that?

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.

Of her many books, I had read only her first novel, set in a former British colony, based on her own childhood, which had sounded so much more difficult than mine that I had felt guilty and ashamed.