"The Woman Upstairs"

[fiefoe]

This is a cautionary tale about not keeping any emotional distance with one's crushes. Claire Messud's heroine starts and ends the novel by telling us how angry she is, but I'm not convinced that she would end up doing much with her anger. Behind her brave words, failure of imagination still lurks.

• an Underground Woman—aren’t we all, who have to cede and swerve and step aside, unacknowledged and unadmired and unthanked? Numerous in our twenties and thirties, we’re positively legion in our forties and fifties... We’re the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound.
• Life is about deciding what matters. It’s about the fantasy that determines the reality.
• He glows in my mind’s eye, eight years old and a canonical boy, a child from a fairy tale.
• I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you’re taught to eat your greens before you have dessert. But it turns out that’s a rule for girls and sissies, because the mountain of greens is of Everest proportions, and the bowl of ice cream at the far end of the table is melting a little more with each passing second. There will be ants on it soon. And then they’ll come and clear it away altogether. The hubris of it, thinking I could be a decent human being and a valuable member of family and society, and still create! Absurd. How strong did I think I was?
• while it is beautiful—grief, too, can be beautiful—this small triumph doesn’t have about it any aspect of beginning.
• elation!—it feels as though you’ve found the pot of gold, when you’d thought all the gilt was gone from this world forever.
• And the sick must husband their resources (even as they are resourceful for their husbands).
• I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life.
• How to live my own life, that is. I knew it wasn’t right that when asked how I was, I invariably spoke about my mother. Or my father.
• But you can’t succeed in life unless you get good at it: there’s no point writing the world’s best answer to the first question on the test, if you don’t then leave yourself enough time to write any answers at all to the other questions. You still fail the test. And I worry, in my bleaker hours, that this is what I’ve done. I answered the dutiful daughter question really well; I was aware of doing only a so-so job on the grown-up career front
• This was the miracle of my first Shahid year. Never, in all my life, had I thought, as I did then, This is the answer. Not once, but over and over in different configurations, the answer to not one but to every question seemed to come in the course of that year, like music. “On me your voice falls, as they say love should—like an enormous ‘yes.’ ” Philip Larkin on Sidney Bechet: a love poem that is not a love poem. And my love life that was not a love life, but something as consuming, as formidable, as whole.
• It occurred to me, not for the first time, that Lili’s world was not so different from my dioramas, or even from Sirena’s installations: you took a tiny portion of the earth and made it yours, but really what you wanted was for someone else... to come and see, to get it, and thereby, somehow, to get you; and all of this, surely, so that you might ultimately feel less alone on the planet.
• If I woke up every morning with such zeal, every leaf or cup or child’s hand meticulously outlined for me like a wonder of nature, bathed in superior light, it was because in my heart I held each day the possibility of a conversation, of adventure, with Sirena.
• Edie sacrificed herself to it. She existed only in the public gaze. Imagine that: a surface, so beautiful, from which all depth has been erased... She was the cool people’s Marilyn Monroe—smaller, faster, brighter, more immediately alive, and more efficiently dead, an anorexic slip of a life, with no more known interiority than a dachshund.
• the mystery of my life was how it could be so much like a highway through the Great Plains, miles and miles of straight and flat with barely even a tree. And now, not merely a tree, but an oasis.
• the high moon and the gnarled fairy-tale trees overhanging the road, I felt with him both safe and capable of adventure. When we came to the open field beyond which you see the sea for the first time, and it was lit by the pewter moonlight and by hundreds of fireflies, like dotted fairy lanterns
• (you know, don’t you, that there would have been children? Just as you know that eventually, inevitably, there would have been a divorce), and at least one of my life’s exam questions would have been properly answered. But there would have been no art, no oxygen
• I was self-conscious so many times over: to be the one to tell Sirena the news, as though Reza had been stricken on my watch (Margot was still in the room, her face fixed in a rictus of anxiety); to have them all hear me speak to her, since I didn’t know how to modulate my voice when I spoke to her any more than I did when I spoke of her;
• were becoming two-dimensional in the telling, and as though they were smaller as well as flatter, that they were just less for being spoken. What was missing was the intense emotion that I felt, which, like water or youth itself, buoyed these small insignificant encounters into all that they meant to me. There they were, shrinking before my eyes; shrinking into my words. Anything that can be said, can be said clearly. Anything that cannot be said clearly, cannot be said.
• I can imagine, now, what it cost her, to be our Aunt Baby, an over-aged infant to the last, instead of the grown-up named Cecily Mallon that she might have become. Knowing my own life and how little of what most matters in it is seen on the outside, how remotely my own outline resembles my reflection, I’m sorry to think that the real Aunt Baby is now lost forever.
• I derived a certain bitter thrill in thinking that I’d manage to the end on my own, a thrill of denial and austerity, a thrill not unlike a dieter’s pleasure at her gnawing stomach. I will be continent. I will continue. I will not spill into the lives of others, greedily sucking and wanting and needing. I will not. I will ask nothing, of anyone; I’ll just burn, from the inside out, self-immolating like those monks doused in gasoline.
• knowing, that is, that I was on fire and where I wanted to be and angry enough, for once, to be my own self,
• “But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you’ll never truly be at home again. What you’ve left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you’ve left behind at every stop.”
• This was a shame, really, in spite of his odd superfluity; because in the same way that three people only barely constitute a family, a meager and Spartan sort of family, so too three people barely constitute a dinner party. This is especially true when two are intimates and
• There’s a way of being in exile, for the educated of any non-European country, that can be very comfortable in its worldliness …” “The land of silly accents,”
• If you’re a Lebanese who comes here for university, to study, then you become immediately American. You’re accepted, which is wonderful, but you’re given an entirely new suit of clothes, a new outline, that has no context, and you must grow to fit it, or fit it to shape you, or whatever. You come with no baggage.”
• This was the trouble with places like Cambridge, Massachusetts: these people—these men—who thought they were God’s gift; and yet about whom there remained some aura, and the possibility, just faint, that they were God’s gift—it couldn’t be gainsaid.
• perhaps more accurately, that they allowed me to, in their wanting. My lifelong secret certainty of specialness, my precious, hidden specialness, was awakened and fed by them, grew insatiable for them, and feared them, too: feared the power they might wield over me, and simply on account of that fear, almost certainly would.
• briefly it’s as if the lid has come off the world, as if the world were a dollhouse, and you can glimpse what it would be like to see it whole, from above—a vertiginous magnificence. And then the lid falls and you fall and the reign of the ordinary resumes... if I tell you that I had this lid-lifting experience of the world not once but more times than I can properly count, like some extraordinary prolonged cranial multiple orgasm, an endless opening and titillation of my soul—then you will perhaps understand why, for years afterward, I thought that saying “yes” to the babysitting had without question been the right thing to do.
• When I was with Sirena, or Reza, or Skandar, the air moved differently between us; time passed differently; words or gestures meant more than themselves. If you’ve never had this experience—but who has not been visited by love, laughing?—then you can’t understand. And if you have, you don’t need me to say another word.
• Always, I have an engagement with Death—because my art isn’t, after all, about what is or what might be, but about what was. You could call each of my boxes a shrine.
• Sirena, on the other hand, is engaged with the life force. We all want that, really. It’s what attracts us: someone who opens doors to possibility, to the barely imagined. Someone who embraces the colors and textures, the tastes and transformations—someone who embraces, period. We’re all after what’s juicy, what breathes. If you’re really clever, like Sirena, then you create a persona—or maybe, more disturbingly, you become a person—who, while seeming impressively, convincingly to eschew fakery, is in fact giving people, very consciously, exactly what they want.
• if you’re wondering what could possibly be wrong with being a Purveyor of Dreams—I mean, you could say, isn’t that what Art is for?—you should keep in mind that the desire to be that, to do that—to be the fittest at artistic survival—requires ruthlessness. Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person. {Lucy Barton says the same.}
• a different kind of wonder, a modern Western wonder, that was Alice in Wonderland’s: a place where reason—and the ground—didn’t remain stable, where the imagination confused good and evil, friend and foe.
• One Wonderland was about trying to see things as they are, she said, about believing that such a thing as clarity was possible; and the other was about relativism, about seeing things from different perspectives, and also about being seen, and about how being seen differently also changes you. Both possibilities were amazing and frightening at the same time; but only one of them, she said, could lead to wisdom.