"The Idiot"

[fiefoe]

The initial attraction of Elif Batuman's novel is re-living being a college student in the mid-90s, when email was a new new thing. And all those Boston/Cambridge/Allston landmarks! ('I went to the Science Center. I couldn’t find the room, which was in the five hundreds. There was no fifth floor in the elevator—... Ira pressed the button for the third floor. It turned out you had to get out of the elevator and cross a metal walkway that stretched across an atrium. A big messy garden was hanging over the atrium, in a shallow tray held up by chains.') Maybe that's why once the action moved to Europe, I felt more removed from the story.

• Already I was the impetuous one in our friendship—the one who cared less about tradition and personal safety, who evaluted every situation from scratch, as if it had arisen for the first time—while Svetlana was the one who subscribed to rules and systems, who wrote things in the designated spaces, and saw herself as the inheritor of centuries of human history and responsibilities. Already we were comparing to see whose way of doing things was better. But it wasn’t a competition so much as an experiment, because neither of us was capable of acting differently, and each viewed the other with an admiration that was inseparable from pity.
• I was impressed that E. O. Wilson had been able to identify, in this world of seemingly infinite ants, his one million favorites.
• Because we hadn’t learned the verbs of motion, nobody said outright, “Ivan went to Siberia.” Instead, Ivan wrote, “When you receive this letter, I will be in Siberia.” The story had a stilted feel, and yet while you were reading you felt totally inside its world, a world where reality mirrored the grammar constraints, and what Slavic 101 couldn’t name didn’t exist. There was no “went” or “sent,” no intention or causality—just unexplained appearances and disappearances.
• That was the best thing about college: it was so easy to leave. You could be in the place where you lived, having an argument that you had basically started, and then you could just say, “See you later,” and go somewhere else.
• “And now this is going to sound terrible, but in a way I think I’m more complicated than they are. Some people are just more complicated than others. Don’t you think so?”
• It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic. “Ethics” meant the golden rule, which was basically an aesthetic rule. That’s why it was called “golden,” like the golden ratio. “Isn’t that why you don’t cheat or steal—because it’s ugly?” I said. Svetlana said she had never met anyone with such a strong aesthetic sensibility.
• Svetlana bought half a kilogram of loose tea and asked in exaggeratedly correct Russian if it was true that the store loaned videotapes. One of the clerks handed her a binder with a list of titles. Svetlana flipped through the plastic-encased pages way faster than I could follow, picking out a Soviet comedy about a car insurance agent. The skinny clerk went to get the tape. The fat clerk asked her to write her name and address in a register. {The Chinese equivalent was in Central Square.}
• It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions. Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too.
• what sense they make, you can’t say and couldn’t say, even if they offered you a thousand rubles. Every now and then, a book had something like that in it, and it was some comfort. But it wasn’t quite the same thing as having an opinion.
• From the top of the escalator, all of Filene’s was spread out below you, like some historical tapestry. Then you were in it. As far as the eye could see, shoppers were fighting over cashmere sweater sets, infants’ party dresses, and pleated chinos, with a primal hostility that seemed to threaten the very bourgeois values embodied by those garments. A heap of thermal long underwear resembled a pile of souls torn from their bodies. Women were clawing through the piled souls, periodically holding one up in the air so it hung there all limp and abandoned.
• This, too, I remembered: “What seems to have happened to the doll?” The inferential tense allowed the speaker to assume the wonder and ignorance that children live in—that state when every piece of knowledge is basically hearsay.
• There were things about -miş that I liked: it had a kind of built-in bewilderment, it was automatically funny. At the same time, it was a curse, condemning you to the awareness that everything you said was potentially encroaching on someone else’s experience, that your own subjectivity was booby-trapped and set you up to have conflicting stories with others.
• Eliot, Holyoke, Copley Square, Symphony, Wollaston, Hoosac Pier, Marblehead, Maverick, Fenway Park, Haymarket, Mattapan, Codman Yard, Wonderland, Providence, Beacon Hill, Watertown, Reservoir, Mystic Mall. Harvard Square looked both new and familiar. I felt like I would have been able to tell just from looking that this configuration of buildings and streets was familiar and meaningful to lots of people, not just me.
• Something went wrong with the chartered bus that was supposed to take us back to the airport, and it left us instead in the pink-tiled courtyard of a strange hotel, where Albinoni’s Adagio was playing on speakers, and something fell onto our arms, and we looked up and it was ashes. I was reading Camus’s The Plague—that was my beach reading—and it seemed to me that we would always be there, in the pink courtyard, unable to leave. I wanted to write a story that created just that mood—a pink hotel, Albinoni, ashes, and being unable to leave—in an exigent and dignified fashion.
• Evidently, they not only saw themselves as noble and good, but also wanted to love and be loved. Maybe not by anyone and everyone, the way I wanted to be loved. But, for the right person, they were prepared to form a relation based on mutual kindness. This meant that the Disney portrayal of bullies wasn’t accurate, because the Disney bullies realized they were evil, prided themselves on it, and loved nobody.
• I had never heard of any Ottoman invasion of Hungary. As a child, I had been told that the Turks and Hungarians were related, that the Huns were Turkic, that both peoples had migrated west from the Altai and spoke similar languages. I had an Uncle Attila—it was a common Turkish name. But in Ivan’s world, our ancestors had been enemies. I felt dizzy from the sense of intimacy and remoteness. Everything he said came from so thoroughly outside myself. I wouldn’t have been able to invent or guess any of it.
• Why did Nina have to look into Leonid’s eyes, instead of into the telescope? How did Leonid solve anything? Why did every story have to end with marriage? You expected that from Bleak House, or even from Crime and Punishment. But “Nina in Siberia” had seemed different. Of everything I had read that semester, it alone had seemed to speak to me directly, to promise to reveal something about the relationship between language and the world. For the mystery to be tied up so glibly, for everyone to be paired off and extinguished that way, felt like a terrible betrayal.
• Dear Selin, Ivan wrote. Would you trade wine and cheese for vodka and pickles? Why does a Greek hero have to fight his fate? Are dice a lethal weapon? Is there any way to escape the triviality-dungeon of conversations? Why did you stop coming to math?
• I logged on and typed finger varga. I had never before been able to bring myself to use the Unix command “finger,” because it sounded so disgusting, and also the thing it did was shameful—it showed you when and where another user had last logged in.
• Dear Selin, There is this text editor, emacs. To exit, you have to press Ctrl-x and then quickly Ctrl-c. If you accidentally get into it, you can’t get out until you learn Ctrl-x-ctrl-c. Of course, you can ask help—Ctrl-h, easy—and another Ctrl-h tells you how to use the help. But then help fills up your screen and stays there. You could search help for “kill buffer” to hide help, but first you have to search help for how to search help. Finally, your friend tells you to print help. Then you get a 10-page single-spaced printout with two columns labeled KEY—BINDING. On the left, you have the combination of keys (Ctrl-ctrl, etc.). On the right, the “bindings”: cut-kill-region, kill-sentence, even transpose-sexpr.
• You asked me a real question now and that is stepping over some boundary. He said he was glad, because he had wanted to talk to me in his own voice, but had been afraid to trivialize our conversation, for reasons that, written here, would themselves trivialize it. If he met me in the street now, he would say hi and keep going, because—it feels right this way (I refuted all my rational arguments), because spoken language is so demystified, so simplistic, a trap. I would have to just say some of the keys of the few available bindings . . .
• I don’t understand why it will trivialize these letters to say hi, or to actually talk to each other. You say you’re not in the mood for insignificant subtleties. But insignificant subtleties are the only difference between something special, and a huge pile of garbage floating through space.
• I think I’m falling in love with you. Every day it’s harder for me to see the common denominator, to understand what counts as a thing. All the categories that make up a dog—they go blurry and dissolve, I can’t tell what anything is anymore. Chills go up the backs of my arms and songs go around in my head.
• On the other hand, from the third that I do understand, I get more of You than I could ever get from anything down-to-earth and crystal-clear, like an explanation or an essay. Whatever you write with so much care and intensity has an image of You in it. That’s why I fear the triviality of conversations. What if I want to get to You to the same degree as through these letters—and I find out that I can’t?
• I have been through a lot of things in the past two years, and my thoughts about love have changed. I have a girlfriend whom I only sometimes love. I do think about you a lot. My love for you is for the person writing your letters. It took a lot of effort to assimilate the meaning of those sentences—to push them through my brain. I felt every level, graphemic, morphological, and semantic, and they all hurt.