"The Idiot"

[fiefoe]

Poor, confused Selin, who fell in love over emails, over words in fixed width fonts.
The author also narrated the audiobook. She has a gentle, quizzical voice that suits her sentences.

• shoe shopping was always sad—what was “Cinderella,” if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?
• He seems to be offering you just what you want: a noninterpersonal interpersonal relationship. With him, you don’t have to worry about whose side of the room the extension cord is on. But that’s because it isn’t a real intimate relationship. Real life is about discussing these things and coming to terms with them.
• “Linger” by the Cranberries was playing in the background. “You’ve got me wrapped around your finger,” the singer warbled over and over, in a girly, excessively beautiful voice. It felt ominous to me—the aestheticized girliness, infatuation, and weakness.
• and changed course slightly to give him a wider berth—just as Ivan did the opposite, slowing down right in front of the man, looking right at him, right into his eyes. “Books, really?” I was overcome by the sudden sense of Ivan’s freedom. I realized for the first time that if you were a guy, if you were some tall guy who looked like Ivan, you could pretty much stop to look at anything you wanted, whenever you felt like it. And because I was walking with him now, for just this moment, I had a special dispensation, I could look at whatever he was looking at, too.
• Moreover, my policy at the time was that, when confronted by two courses of action, one should always choose the less conservative and more generous. I thought this was tantamount to a moral obligation for anyone who had any advantages at all, and especially for anyone who wanted to be a writer.
• Svetlana was way better than I was at memorizing. She accepted it in her heart as something necessary. Growing up in America, I had been taught to despise memorization, which was known as “rote memorization,” or sometimes as “regurgitating facts.”
• By high school, I sensed that the teachers weren’t leveling with us. Our biology teacher would say: “I don’t want you to memorize and regurgitate, I want you to understand the elegant logic of each mechanism.” Nonetheless, on the test you had to draw a diagram of RNA transcription. When it came to science or history, reason got you only so far. Even if each step followed from the previous one, you still had to memorize the first step, and also the rule for how steps followed from each other.
• I said. “They form their—” “Their own type,” Lakshmi chimed in. It was one of her mannerisms; she guessed what you were going to say and then said it with you. It didn’t mean she agreed.
• Dance songs turned out to consist of one sentence repeated over and over. For example: “I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain.” Why would a desert miss rain? Why wasn’t it okay for a desert to be a desert, why couldn’t anything just be what it was, why did it always have to be missing something?
• “Well, obviously I hope I’m not being an asshole toward you. But I did worry that I’m leading you on, because of what you wrote to me when I was in California. When you wrote that letter to me—it was nice for me, I really liked it. I’m worried it’s just good for my ego.” Ivan, Ivan. He got up in the morning, put on some clothes he got from somewhere, drank his orange juice, and went out into the world of chalkboards and motorcycles. He could be really arrogant sometimes. His jeans were always too short, and he thought clowns had something complicated to teach us about human fallibility. And still no waking moment went by that I didn’t think of him—he was in the background of everything I thought. My own perceptions were no longer enough to constitute the physical world for me. Every sound, every syllable that reached me, I wanted to filter through his consciousness. At a word from him I would have followed him anywhere, right off the so-called Prudential Center. A thousand glowing seat belts appeared in the dark, and the floor began to shake.
• “Yeah,” I said. “She thinks really differently from me. She never sees anything as an isolated event—she always puts it into a framework. Anything you do is a symptom of your whole personality and a result of the history of Western civilization, or a metaphor for Western civilization, or something related to Western civilization. Whereas, to me, everything seems so much like an individual case, and I have a hard time thinking about Western civilization. Sometimes I’m really impressed by how she makes all the parts fit together. But other times it doesn’t seem true.”
• “If I were Picasso,” said Katalin, “I would love many women.” A less beautiful girl wouldn’t have said that, I thought. Beautiful people lived in a different world, had different relations with people. From the beginning they were raised for love.
• For the lesson on directions, I drew maps of American towns. Take a left onto Main Street, and then your second right onto Elm Street. The firehouse will be on your right. “On your right, Selin, or to your right?” “Either is fine.” “But which is more polite?”
• On Friday, I stood in front of the class singing “Hello, Goodbye” by the Beatles. It was like falling off a cliff: time stretched, there was so much time to think different thoughts. “You say yes, I say no,” I sang. “You say stop, and I say go, go, go.” I remembered a Turkish expression: “I say bayram haftası [holiday week], he says mangal tahtası [the wooden base of a brazier].”
• One afternoon in the library, I picked up Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to an Atom’ and started to read. There were words I didn’t know, but I didn’t slow down. I just guessed the meaning, or a meaning, and kept going, and I saw then that Ivan was right: it was exciting not to understand. What you did understand was exciting.
• I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.
• An amazing sight, someone you’re infatuated with trying to fish something out of a jeans pocket.
• Your atom, I think it will never go back to peace, to cereal or rocks or anything like that. Once it has been seduced there is no way back, the way is always ahead, and it is so much harder after the passage from innocence. But it does not work to pretend to be innocent anymore. That seduced atom has energies that seduce people, and those rarely get lost.
• I suppressed a sigh. Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book. I would rather have talked to Ivan, the love interest, but somehow I didn’t get to decide. At the same time, I also felt that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people.
• Light from even a nearby star was four years old by the time it reached your eyes. Where would I be in four years? Simple: where you are. In four years I'll have reached you.
• Why was "plain" a euphemism for "ugly," when the very hallmark of human beauty was its plainness, the symmetry and simplicity that always seemed so young and so innocent. It was impossible not to think that here beauty was one of the most important things about her - something having to do with who she really was.
• For you, language itself is a self-sufficient system.”
  “But it is a self-sufficient system.”
  “Do you see what you’re saying? This is how you get yourself involved with the devil incarnate. Ivan sensed this attitude in you. He’s cynical in the same way you are only more so, because of math. It’s like you said: math is a language that started out so abstract, more abstract than words, and then suddenly it turned out to be the most real, the most physical thing there was. With math they built the atomic bomb. Suddenly this abstract language is leaving third-degree burns on your skin. Now there’s this special language that can control everything, and manipulate everything, and if you’re the elite who speaks it—you can control everything.
  “Ivan wanted to try an experiment, a game. It would never have worked with someone different, on someone like me. But you, you’re so disconnected from truth, you were so ready to jump into a reality the two of you made up, just through language. Naturally, it made him want to see how far he could go. You went further and further—and then something went wrong. It couldn’t continue in the same way. It had to develop into something else—into sex, or something else. But for some reason, it didn’t. The experiment didn’t work. But by now you’re so, so far from all the landmarks. You’re just drifting in space.”