Saved

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.

At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game.

Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances.

To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others.

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

There comes a frustration when you know you're a unique human being who knows some things about the world, but somehow the writing isn't showing that. That's the most maddening thing. That’s the gateway to style, really—to say, "I'm going to accept all those things about me that I normally deny." The way to do that is to see when the prose lights up. If you're writing in a certain mode and the prose is boring, that means you're keeping yourself out of it somehow, whereas when the prose lights up and even you can't help but read your own prose, that means you're letting yourself in.

The working world expects so much of your soul. That’s where our lives are taking place, actually, in the pressure cooker that work makes on our grace.

"I want you to recreate your reading experience. When did you start to love or hate this piece of writing? Go down to the phrase level.” That's actually how it works. If you pick up a book in a bookstore, a book that's gotten a lot of great reviews, written by someone who's one year younger than you, god forbid—you read it, and instantly you're opining about it. That's a really valuable thing for a young writer: what do you really love about prose, and what do you hate about it? It’s maybe the one part of our lives where we get to be so opinionated without being obnoxious.

We have crazily refined micro-opinions about things. That, I think, is the hidden superpower. The pathway to the uniqueness we're talking about is turning down your inner nice guy who’s always trying to like everything. Turn that down, and when you read a bit of prose, watch that little needle flicker. That's where a person's uniqueness lies. If you then make a career of radically honoring those little preferences with every sentence, pretty soon the whole book has your stamp on it, which is ultimately what we're looking for. When I pick up your book, I want you to be there. I want you specifically to be there. And the way you get yourself in there is by those 10,000 micro-choices.

Science and technology are understood to be great because they get you a job, but this very essential human thing of asking, "What are we doing here, and how should I behave?"—that has somehow become considered a bit of an indulgence. And it isn't.

These Russians remind us that a really good story is eternal. That Tolstoy story in the book, “Master and Man,” is about power dynamics. You could easily make that story a commentary about racism, because whatever it is that's actually behind racism, which is power, is totally opened up in that story. I've been trying to think that whatever the pandemic is "teaching" me will come out eventually. It'll come out in some form. It won't be a story about face masks, but somehow it'll be there.

When any person walks into a grocery store, they're basically writing a novel. They see a woman with two little kids, and they make a story up about her, even if they don't realize it. It's called projection. A novel or a short story is not something foreign to us. We do it all the time. We generalize without very much information, and we make assumptions about the world, about, "This is how we stay alive." If we're good at it, we not only stay alive, but we stay alive compassionately, and we become better at being patient with other people. By imagining their circumstances, we make a more spacious universe. That's a skill you have to practice.

if we practice the opposite of it, which I’d argue we practice every time we're on social media about politics—then what we're doing is short-circuiting the process of generous projection. We're projecting hateful caricatures of each other. Obviously that has an effect on our neurology. It makes us more anxious, more nervous, more accusatory, quicker to act.

Now, that moment where I felt drawn to her was every bit as real as the moment where I felt aversion to her. That's a short story. That energy is short-story energy, which is, “I thought I knew her, and I thought I knew what I thought of her. But just by abiding there a little bit, I found out that I was capable of a little bit more.” That's essentially what reading is. It's not a complete antidote, but I think we all could all stand a little more of it. Sometimes you have to act. Sometimes you have to arrest people who go into the Capitol. That's a no-brainer. But even in that process, if you have some fellow feeling for them, you're going to do a better job.

I know I’m not alone. In fact, I think most women are like this. From my observer seat, women seem to generally be much more comfortable living life through anyone else’s lens but their own. Which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: seeing in third person unlocks a woman’s ability to appease, making for an excellent survival strategy.

I call this living life in third person. It’s mostly hardwiring that has the side effect of self-erasure. Modern feminist rhetoric would lead you to believe that this was programmed into us via the patriarchy and while I don’t doubt that’s one way this dynamic is amplified, I’m unconvinced that’s the root source of it. Women are simply much more inclined to strategies that guarantee safety than men.

Everyone has experienced some vague sense of “not right”ness that usually boils down to emotional needs not getting met: connection, acceptance, feeling seen, to name a few. If you’re anything like me, after a couple of times getting burned you learned to bury the desires instead of facing the pain of trying and failing to get them satiated.

I learned at a young age that I couldn’t depend on people to be there for me consistently, so, for efficiency purposes, it only made sense to turn off all parts of me that desired to depend on anyone but myself. I became a micromanager of my wants to mitigate the shame of having them. Granted this didn’t feel particularly fulfilling — but at least assuming such an active role made me feel like I had a choice in the matter.

I adopted a similar mindset when interrogating my feelings — constantly asking myself questions like: is this thought defensible? Are you sure? These are good questions to ask yourself in any scenario except the one where they’re not thoughts and instead feelings. Questioning and then discounting feelings prematurely tends to have the opposite effect of its hyper-rational intention — leaving a person in a loop of confusion, uncertainty, and unmet needs.

Living life in third person means the possibility space of things I allow myself to say and feel are constrained to the aesthetics of how I want to be perceived. At risk here is ownership of the little thing I call my life.

If you're pursuing the career path someone else has taken, you're going to be frustrated when you don't get the same opportunities they did.

I care about people more than I care about positions or beliefs, which I tend to consider a subservient class of psychological phenomena. That is to say: I think people wear beliefs like clothes; they wear what they have grown to consider sensible or attractive; they wear what they feel flatters them; they wear what keeps them dry and warm in inclement winter. They believe their opinions, tastes, philosophies are who they are, but they are mistaken. (Aging is largely learning what one is not, it seems to me).

Criticism must serve some function to justify the pain it causes: it must, say, avert a disastrous course of action being deliberated by a group, or help thwart the rise of a barbarous politician. But this rarely occurs. Most criticism, even of the most erudite sort, is, as we all know, wasted breath: preached to one’s own choir, comically or indignantly cruel to those one doesn’t respect, unlikely to change the behavior of anyone not already in agreement.On the other hand! There persists the idea that culture arises out of the scrum of colliding perspectives, and that it is therefore a moral duty to remonstrate against stupidity, performative emoting, deceitful art, destructively banal fiction, and so on. If one doesn’t speak up, one cannot lament the triumph of moral and imaginative vacuity.

One must believe, of course, that there are abstractions worth protecting, and therefore abstractions worth hurting others for, in order to criticize; and the endless repetitiveness of cultural history seems to devalue such abstractions as surely as bad art and cliche devalue words.

our truly quirky dimensions are never really grasped by these recommendation algorithms. They have all the dullness of a Demographics 101 curriculum; they sketch our personalities with the crudity of crime-scene chalk-outlines. They’re not wrong about us; but they’re woefully incomplete.

The metaphor suggests precisely what to do: If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence.

For me, it’s meant slowly — over the last few years — building up a big, rangy collection of RSS feeds, that let me check up on hundreds of electic blogs and publications and people. (I use Feedly.) I’ve also started using Fraidycat, a niftily quixotic feed-reader that lets you sort sources into buckets by “how often should I check this source”, which is a cool heuristic; some people/sites you want to check every day, and others, twice a year.

Other times I spend an hour or two simply prospecting — I pick a subject almost at random, then check to see if there’s a hobbyist or interest-group discussion-board devoted to it. (There usually is, running on free warez like phpBB). Then I’ll just trawl through the forum, to find out what does this community care about?