Either Or Elif Batuman Quotes

It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get?

Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me- nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?

How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

I'm going to become whatever I was going to become.

I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.

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

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.

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, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing—to follow the right leads.

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.

When I woke up in the morning, there was a second or two when I felt light and free, unaware of any reason to feel upset. Then all my knowledge and memories rushed back and a weight descended on my sternum and the creaking started behind my eyes.

That had probably been written by a professor. I recognized the professor's characteristic delight at not imparting information.

I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.

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.

That had been the worst part of childhood: people telling you how lucky you were to live in a carefree time with no responsibilities

Someone whose only reason for not acting in an antisocial way was that they were scared of getting in trouble with God . . . where did you even start with such a person?

Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you’ll never get—you will get it someday.” I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. “Yes, you will get it,” she said, looking right at me, “but by that time, you won’t want it anymore. That’s how it happens.

I learned a lot from that, like how much it hurt to see how other people described you, and how things that you said about another person, especially your parents, seemed neutral when addressed to a third party, but lethal when you thought about your parents reading it.

All I was ever trying to do when I wrote, I realized, was to show how much I saw and understood.

So what do you think about love?' I asked Mesut in a casual tone. 'Love is to get caught on something,' he said readily. 'It's to be unable to forget.

Quality of life": as if we knew it, and could measure it. I wanted to know what it was: the quality of life.

What kind of cretins cared more about hammering out a string of inheritance than about discovering universal truths? Historians, that was what kind. They would only be happy when they had translated every miraculous book into a product of its historical moment.

Later we were at another party in a dorm. Why did all parties sound and smell the same, even though the component people were different? It was as if all the different individuals came together and formed the eternal entity Party Person.

Anyway, I didn’t want to be “nurtured” in an “environment” that was set up for me to “excel.” I wanted to do whatever was the most real and rigorous.

Of course, an ending was always sad, but to not end something that needed to end was even more sad.

Without meaning to, I looked into his eyes. What I saw, it was beyond my pay grade. I went out to get a taxi.

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

There was the ocean, like a recurring character you forgot about for long stretches.

Music was the only other thing that was layered like that, so much 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.

(What even differentiated a great and honorable war, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people, from a shameful genocide, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people?)

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 parents 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.

Now we already lived in different buildings, and soon we would live even farther away from each other, and she would be married, and I would never wait for her in her bedroom again. 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, and our most important job was to solve mysteries.

It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick facades glowed pink, and everything blue got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

If any poet tried to enter my personality like a vacant building...!

I thought we should be rewriting the categories and trying to think of a better organization than whichever one we happened to have inherited.

Please don't leave me all alone." Was that what I, too was afraid of? And maybe not just me, but everyone?

Near the beginning of “The Portrait of a Lady,” there was mention of an aunt who kept telling people that Isabel was writing a book. In fact, Henry James said, Isabel was not and never had been writing a book. She “had no desire to be an authoress,” “no talent for expression,” and “none of the consciousness of genius,” having only “a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior.” It was one of the few places where Henry James was mean about Isabel. 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.” 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.

What a beautiful girl you are,” he said, with a kind of ache or awe in his voice, that made me think about how someday I would be old or dead or both, and the transience of all things, of the car, the moonlight, the volcanic rock that was eroding and the stars that were shooting by, made the world seem at once more important and less important, until finally the concept of “important” itself faded away like an expiring firework that glittered against the sky.

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,” wrote Hélène Cixous, in a sentence that could definitely have been shorter.

Was 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.

Was 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 of the script.

In the past, my goal in conversation had been to accurately represent the things that I thought, and to deploy these thoughts in relation to the things that other people said, while exercising caution to not betray ignorant or antisocial ideas, and the whole thing had been so much to think about that in the end I usually hadn't said anything at all.

It was happening again now: some pieces of some larger story that I could barely make out were flying into new positions, and I was remembering things I had forgotten, and putting them together differently, and all while I was sitting still and not going anywhere or doing anything—though in another way I was hurtling north at five hundred miles an hour.

...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. Nobody ever explained what was admirable about having the kids, or why it was the default course of action for every single human being. If you ever asked why any particular person had had a kid, or what good a particular kid was, people treated it as a blasphemy-- as if you were saying they should be dead, or the kid should be dead. It was is there was no way to ask what the plan had been, without implying that someone should be dead.

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.

Wasn’t that how people in other countries viewed all American people—with their innocence, their Disney, their inability to drive stick shift? With the way they were protected—the way I was protected—from so much of the “reality” that happened elsewhere?

Love wasn’t a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had death in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.

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?

Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you'll never get--you will get it someday." I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. "Yes, you will get get it," she said, looking right at me, "but by that time, you won't want it anymore. That's how it happens.

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? Juho was talking about different research into alcoholism that people were doing in Finland. Why was nobody researching the more direct issue of how to make people less intolerable? “It might be a case of having to reduce a big problem we can’t solve to a smaller problem that we can solve,” Juho said.

That whole time, all of high school and also middle school, was something I didn’t like to think about. It had been like prison. I knew it was wrong to compare my experience at a prep school in New Jersey to that of a disadvantaged person in an actual prison. Still, I compared it. Enforced idleness, arbitrary punishment, being trapped for hours among people crazed by hormones and boredom. . . . Some rewards went to the domineering, others to the servile. You couldn’t not be in an unhealthy relationship to power.

I felt dissatisfied, as if I was failing to capitalize on some advantage I had from “being” Turkish—one that would compensate for the hassle of having a name and appearance that had always required explanation. It had, I realized, been a real disappointment to get to Turkey and to discover that my name and appearance still required constant explanation

What Svetlana felt for Scott, she said, wasn't a crush, but love. "A crush is about build- ing 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." I silently absorbed the implication that what I felt for Ivan was only a crush, because I didn't have a self I was secure with.

That's what can happen when you fetishize an aesthetic life. It can make you irresponsible and destructive.

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 need some underachiever with a master’s degree to tell me how my problem was that nobody loved me the way he loved his defeated conformist-looking wife. —

A young girl who wants to please by being interesting really only succeeds in pleasing herself.

Provai un senso di affinità e di ammirazione nei loro confronti per il modo in cui si chiamavano fuori da tutto quello che gli altri consideravano fico.

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.

Being left at night for a party was so much worse than being left in the daytime for work...

And yet, the second time had blocked out the first time, and I didn't like to think that it hadn't been the first time.

I don't see how obeying our nature was scientific, since it was also our nature to die from smallpox and to be unable to fly.

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.

Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you'll never get- you will get it someday. Yes, you will get it, but by that time, you won't want it anymore. That's how it happens.

This year, I had decided to get a job. The highest-paying student job, Dorm Crew, was presented as a fun team-building experience, except that instead of going to the wilderness, you cleaned other kids’ bathrooms.

Joanne had just biked fifty miles to Lowell, Massachusetts, and back. "Is there anything special in Lowell?" Riley asked. Joanne looked thoughtful. "There probably is," she said, hanging her bike on its special rack.

How was a therapist going to help me see things more clearly, when he didn’t know any of these people, and couldn’t know anything other than what was told to him, by me: a person who apparently didn’t see things clearly?

I hadn't expected Ivan to write back. It felt magical, like hearing from a dead person. I almost started to cry...I wondered if I should write back to him, but I decided to wait for him to call, as I was sure that he would.

È così ingiusto quando la gente considera la realtà dei fatti come una prova che limita la sfera del possibile! Sentivo che era proprio contro questo che lottavo, da sempre: la tirannia del corso particolare e arbitrario degli eventi.

On that journey, Pushkin returned to the lands he first visited at age twenty-one […] Everything was different now: “Whatever feelings I harbored then— no longer exist. They all either passed or changed.” Pushkin turned thirty on that second trip.

Why was it considered laudable, sociable, and funny to do this thing that made a person feel like they were dying, and did on occasion induce death? Of course, you couldn't have a party without alcohol. I understood this. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable. But wasn't there any way around that? Juho was talking about different research that people were doing into alcoholism in Finland. Why was nobody researching the more direct issue, of trying to make people less intolerable?

Love wasn't a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had death in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.

Why was it important to keep doing that? Some people, usually men, talked about genetic programming, and said we couldn't deny our 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 be unable to fly.

I recognized that the idea of being penetrated and dominated was exciting to me, too, though the mechanics, as well as the implications, were unclear and troubling. Also, why did we have to be excited by that? Why couldn’t we be excited about something else? But I knew I was being childish and unrealistic, and Svetlana was right. Love wasn’t a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had death in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.

It wasn’t until high school, when I took my first creative writing class, that I began to sense trouble. I realized, with shock, that I wasn’t good at creative writing. I was good at grammar and arguing, at remembering things people said, and at making stressful situations seem funny. But it turned out these weren’t the skills you needed in order to invent quirky people and give them arcs of desire. I already had my hands full writing about the people I actually knew, and all the things they said. That was what I needed writing for. Now I had to invent extra people and think of things for them to say?

Furthermore, whenever parents talked about “love,” some part of my brain switched off. They had their story, and they were sticking to it. The story was that they loved us with a love that we were incapable of understanding, and the reason things were the way they were was because they loved us so much.

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 room had a maximum occupancy of thirty, which might have been OK if everyone was just sitting there, but not if the idea was to make your body as long as possible and do sweeping motions with your limbs. Svetlana always made us get there early, to secure an advantageous position. Then the people who came later would try to crowd us out, inserting themselves between us, or directly in front of us, blocking our view—not apologetically, but with a self-righteous attitude. If you didn’t defend your space like Svetlana did, sitting up extra straight and doing elaborate stretches, you got hemmed in and couldn’t do the movements. People kept hitting you (or were you hitting them?) and giving you dirty looks.

On the other hand, 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?

I thought there was something wrong with the way 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 ?

I had thought that an aesthetic life would be more like a string of adventures than like a coming-of-age novel, or the life-cycle of a frog, where there was a grand progression ending with 'maturity' and the ability to procreate. But it was impossible to imagine an aesthetic life, or any life, without falling in love. Without love, knowledge itself became a hassle; became bullying and imposition. 'My country.' 'Learn about my country.' Being in love was the only thing that made you want to learn about a person's country, or about anything else outside your experience. 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.

That was what Russia had done: taken a fork in the road to a different future. For all my life there had been another world, and no one had come out, and no one had gone in--until one day the borders turned out to be fictitious, the insurmountable barrier became nothing but a pack of cards, so that now you could walk right through the looking glass, into the world of backward N's and R's.

It was usually the people I thought of as all-American who were like that—the white people, as my high school friend Clarissa called them. I had been surprised to learn that Clarissa, whose parents were from China, did not consider herself white. According to Clarissa, I wasn’t white, either. But I asked my mother, and my mother had said, sounding scandalized, that of course we were white.

Gavriil aggrottò la fronte. - È possibile, secondo voi, che sia stato sottoposto a un indottrinamento ideologico in ottemperanza al Patto di Varsavia? Pensate che sia stato formato allo scopo di distruggere le donne? Tipo che lo mandano in Occidente per familiarizzare con donne che sarebbero potute diventare ingegnere o docenti universitarie famose, e che invece per colpa sua non lo saranno mai?

The taxi driver already knew how to get to the bus station. Once you got there, it was basically people’s job to answer your questions about bus schedules. You didn’t have to explain anything, or account for anything, or manifest love. If anyone got annoyed at you, they couldn’t cry, or scream at you, or accuse you of offending them, and at any point you could just leave. It was totally different from being in your family.

The heavy gears creaked into motion behind my eyes and in my chest. I felt just like I had for the whole fall. I couldn't imagine how I had lived like that. At the same time, I felt so lucky to feel it again-to be here again. It was as if some portal had swung open. Weeping, a powerful physical process that was normally out of the question, became a constant possibility. This seemed to prove the material reality of thoughts and feelings.

Now we already lived in different buildings, and soon we would live even farther away from each other, and she would be married, and I would never wait for her in her bedroom again. 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, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing--to follow the right leads.

But sometimes something shone like a gold ring at the bottom of the stream, and a sentence came to me with perfect clarity. Like this one: "Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you'll never get - you will get it someday." I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. "Yes, you will get it," she said, looking right at me, "but by that time, you won't want it anymore. That's how it happens.

I told a story about how my dad had once worked in a lab at a VA hospital on the same floor with a guy who managed to get dogs addicted to cigarettes. There was a tracheostomy tube so the dogs had to inhale the smoke. At first the dogs hated smoking, but eventually they got addicted, and when the cigarettes were taken away, they howled, all day and all night. I didn’t realize until I got to the end that it was a really depressing story. There was a pause.

I felt my face contort with sorrow. I would never again climb into Mesut’s white Opel, we would never drive around the phallogocentric columns in which Byzantine people had hidden, we wouldn’t drink astringent wine on that roof, or go to the hotel and have sex for hours. Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me—nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?

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 Slovenia and also somehow Austrian. Music was the thing that made it the most clear what sex would be like. The feeling of different places being touched and resonating at the same time. 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.

In the end, 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. Either that, or they were too unimaginative to think of anything else to do, or too beaten-down to do whatever it was they thought of. That had been a big reason why I had wanted so much to get into Harvard: I’d been sure it would be full of fortunate, resourceful, courageous people who had some better-conceived plan for life that I could learn about.

Lakshmi’s father sometimes joked about women who married for love: how much they must value themselves, to think they were more attractive than the sum total of all other women—to think they were enough, without the institution of marriage, to keep a man faithful to them. He teased Lakshmi, asking if she thought of herself that way. I felt a wave of gratitude toward my parents, who would never have thought or said anything like that about me. On the other hand . . . that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

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.

Some key seemed to reside in the phrase “leaving the country.” “I’m leaving the country.” “I’ll have to leave the country.” Hadn’t international travel been, in some sense, the yardstick that Ivan used to measure human worth—even though, in most other ways, he had seemed to look down on rich people? Later, in Hungary, other people had asked the same question—“What other countries have you been to?”—in the same tone; implying that leaving the country wasn’t a sign of privilege, but a kind of accomplishment.

I had wanted to be become a novelist before I even knew how to read, back when I could only consume books by having them read to me, and none of them seemed long enough. They left too many questions unanswered, too many ramifications unexplored. My parents told me I was expecting too much from Frog and Toad are Friends: it wasn't a novel. In that way, I understood that a novel would explain all the things I still wanted to know, like why Toad was the way he was--why Toad is essentially unwell, and why Frog helped Toad, whether he really wanted Toad to get better, or whether he benefited in some way from Toad's unwellness.

It went on like that all day: the previous night replaying over and over, seeming to confer a kind of weighted legitimacy onto all the routine, boring parts of the day, making me feel like I was in a movie. Why was it that, when you got to a routine or boring scene in a movie, you didn’t panic or despair? In a movie, the number, duration, and meaning of scenes were determined in advance. You just had to wait it out. Theoretically, I supposed, this was true of real life—certainly, the number and duration of scenes weren’t infinite—but there was always the chance it would just end without anything meaningful happening at all.

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 parents 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.

I had always been in love with someone. It was the only thing that made it feasible to live that way, getting up at six and remaining conscious until late at night. It was like religion for medieval people. It gave you energy to face injustice, powerlessness, and drudgery. The guys I was in love with always ignored me, but were never unkind. There was something abstract and gentle about the feeling of being ignored, a feeling of being spared, an impossibility of anything happening, which was consonant with my understanding of love. In theory, of course, I knew love could be reciprocated. It was something that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways.

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. Either that, or they were too unimaginative to think of anything else to do, or too beaten-down to do whatever it was they thought of. That had been a big reason why I had wanted so much to get into Harvard: I'd been sure it would be full of fortunate, resourceful, courageous people who had some better-conceived plan for life that I could learn about. It was a great disappointment to find that, even at Harvard, most people's plan was to have children and amass money for them. You would be talking to someone who seemed like they viewed the world as a place of free movement and the exchange of ideas, and then it would turn out they were in a huge hurry to get everything interesting over with while they were young.

Pushkin said that some readers would condemn Tatiana–they would call her impulsive or unseemly. But those readers weren't being truthful. What they really meant was that Tatiana wasn't strategic. She didn't know how to play games. 'The coquette reasons cooly; Tatiana in dead earnest loves and unconditionally yields.' I loved Tatiana, because she didn't hide what she felt, and I loved Pushkin for calling out the kind of people who conflated discretion and virtue. You still met people like that: people who acted as if admitting to any feelings of love, before you had gotten a man to buy you stuff, was a violation–not of pragmatism, or even of etiquette, but of morality. It meant you didn't have self-control, you couldn't delay gratification, you had failed the stupid marshmallow test. Ugh. I refused to believe that dissimulation was more virtuous than honesty. If there were rewards you got from lying, I didn't want them.

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 in your life, other than making money and having kids. Nobody ever said 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. Nobody ever explained what was admirable about having the kids, or why it was the default course of action for every single human being. If you ever asked a why a particular person had had a kid, or what good a particular kid was, people treated it as blasphemy--as if you were saying they should be dead, or the kid should be dead. It was as if there was no way to ask what the plan had been, without implying that someone should be dead.