The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real world person called Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.
The way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn’t doubt was the real one, but which I couldn’t ‘speak to,’ to use a favorite phrase of his.
Here’s the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realizing their worth twenty years later. And then, twenty years after that, it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostalgia for a collective youth. Condemned cliques become halcyon “movements” annoying young men, august geniuses.
Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And.
She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world’s sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything.
It was like tag, but a girl was never “It,” only boys were “It,” girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors, at which point our knickers were pulled aside and a little hand shot into our vaginas, we were roughly, frantically tickled, and then the boy ran away, and the whole thing started up again from the top.
What was amazing about the apartments of long-standing adults was the accumulation of incidental texture. Not: I went and bought this lamp and this poster so I would have a lamp and a poster to furnish my life. But just stuff, so much stuff everywhere, somehow the consequence of a certain amount of time on earth.
Yet a world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses – a world consisting only of thrusting, vigorous men walking boldly out of frame – will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion.
Yes, yes, many months ago. But your mother is someone who will always be in my life. She’s not the kind of person who leaves your life when she’s in it. Anyway, when someone you care about gets ill, all the other business... it just goes.
But it’s my sense that no matter how many rooms you have, and however many books and movies and songs declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is “the family” is always an event of some violence. It’s only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.
A tap runs fast the first time you switch it on.
Poor Zora – she lived through footnotes.
I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.
She was never home. Irie was stuck between a rock and a hard place, like Ireland, like Israel, like India.
It’s a shadow life and after a while it gets to you. Nannies, assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers – women are used to it. Men have a lower tolerance.
I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.
I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.
You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly. When contempt kills you, it doesn’t have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It’s far more common, and therefore more lethal.
Experience rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. Writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pout it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance.
War transforms its participants. What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence. Strange inversions proliferate.