Either/Or by Elif Batuman was an excellent read, worthy of its own post of Kindle highlights. All bolding my own.
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.
“Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.” … One day, early in our friendship, Svetlana had spontaneously told me that she thought I was trying to live an aesthetic life, and that it was a major difference between us, because she was trying to live an ethical life. I wasn’t sure why the two should be opposed, and worried for a moment that she thought that I thought that it was OK to cheat or steal. But she turned out to mean something else: that I took more risks than her and cared more than she did about “style,” while she cared more about history and traditions. Soon, the “ethical and the aesthetic” was the framework we used to talk about the ways we were different. When it came to choosing friends, Svetlana liked to surround herself with dependable boring people who corroborated her in her way of being, while I was more interested in undependable people who generated different experiences or impressions.
he was able, using his “mental gifts,” to make a girl fall in love with him, “without caring to possess her in any stricter sense”: I can imagine him able to bring a girl to the point where he was sure she would sacrifice all, but when matters had come that far he left off without the slightest advance having been made on his part, and without a word having been let fall of love, let alone a declaration, a promise. Yet it would have happened, and the unhappy girl would retain the consciousness of it with double bitterness . . . she would constantly have to contend with the doubt that the whole thing might only have been imagination.
Was an equal relationship possible, or did one person always like the other person more?
Could friendships reach a stable point and stay there, or were they always either growing or shrinking?
Was every smart person funny? I thought humorlessness was the essence of stupidity. Svetlana thought she knew some genuinely smart people who happened not to be interested in whether things were funny. We agreed that Susan Sontag was not funny.
Everyone in the Turkish club seemed to have gone to the same famous high school in Istanbul. All they talked about, other than their high school, was where in Boston you could get some particular kind of cheese. (You could get it at the Armenian store in Watertown.)
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.
Ishiguro wrote first-person, but the narrator was always “unreliable,” i.e., crazy or ignorant, and different from the author. What discipline—what lack of pride! All I was ever trying to do when I wrote, I realized, was to show how much I saw and understood.
In Russian conversation class, Irina Nikolaevna spoke so quickly, using so many unknown words, that I rarely had any idea what she was saying. 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.”
What Svetlana felt for Scott, she said, wasn’t a crush, but love. “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.” 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.
Depositing a paycheck, I noticed, immediately produced some dissociation from whatever work you did: a job was a job.
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.
But Svetlana had taken a banana, and was holding it up now. “It’s literally the same thing,” she said. I eyed the banana, estimating its girth at about six times that of a tampon. And yet, Svetlana wasn’t the kind of person who used “literally” to mean “figuratively.” As usual, she seemed to know what I was thinking. “It turns out Matt has a really big one,” she said, in a tone of combined exasperation, humor, and pride.
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.
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.
Whenever Leonard went to people’s houses, the men would be in the living room, talking about football, or the stock market. 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.
Writers, Leonard said, were not normal people. As a writer, you were never totally present. You were always thinking of how you would put a thing into words.
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.
In its simplest form, the aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy.
Juho told me about how some people in Iceland treated hangovers by eating specially putrefied shark meat that had been buried for a long time in sand. “OK, I never want to talk or think about this ever again, but how long do they bury it?” “Well, a few months, I think.”
The preferred state was for me not to be fascinated. It was for me not to be thinking about the condom factory, wondering why they called it Trojan when the Trojan horse was a story about permeability, about how the Greeks swarmed out and foiled the Trojans, who had believed themselves to be protected
He tried not to show that he was upset when blood got on his skull pillow. There was something exciting about the specificity of his reaction—how precisely it delineated what he was like: considerate enough to try to hide that he was upset, but not considerate enough to try harder, or to not be upset.
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?
Heavyset, with glasses and pockmarked skin, Sean had a pleasantly conspiratorial, over-caffeinated demeanor, like a newspaper editor in a movie.
Nothing else had ever been like the sleeplessness of Ankara. Sleep evaded and evaded you, and by the time it came it wasn’t a blessing but a curse. Now, the more you slept, the more you were eating into the next day, destroying what was left of it with depressingness, sealing the doom of the next night. When I was little, I couldn’t understand what was happening—why we had to suffer like that. It was explained to me that this was a normal part of travel, called jet lag.