Innocence and experience

the aesthetic, the ethical, & Elif Batuman's "Either / Or"

Jun 16, 2023

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I. The ethical

Everyone has a choice: to live an ethical life or an aesthetic one. This opposition is the central question the protagonist Selin of Elif Batuman’s Either / Or wrestles with and where I’m first introduced to it. But the idea itself comes from Kierkegaard’s work of the same name. I pose this question at a picnic a few weekends ago, which kind of life do you believe you lead?

Like Selin, I find it’s a useful framework to find differences between myself and my friends. Without reading the Kierkegaard (I indirectly follow his instructions: ‘either read the entire book or just not at all’), or having finished the novel, I align myself with the aesthetic, as my friend does, which allows everything to happen to me. Beauty and terror. (I can get this way in group settings. Someone should stop me.)

In the car, we’re irritating the driver with our giggles and dirty jokes. I watch his back stiffen. We’re like college kids on the drunk bus circling campus and not caring if we get dropped off on the side of the road. When I gossip about a scandalous decision of a non-mutual friend, the other two friends quiet down. One of them looks out the window and says, well she’s certainly living the aesthetic life.

I finally finish Either / Or the night that I come down with strep throat. This feels like a too-on-the-nose coincidence—I was a sophomore the last (two) times I had strep throat, the same class year Selin is in the novel. Selin rolls her eyes at Andre Breton’s meditation on coincidences in Nadja. Other people’s coincidences, like other people’s dreams, aren’t very interesting. Boring or not, they start to pile up.

That I return to my own college campus on the weekend I finish the book too feels on the nose. That I am also there for a wedding—marriage being one of the requirements Kierkegaard cites for one to live ethically—while I am both single and more devoted to aesthetic pursuits than I was in college seems as if I planned it. Several people ask if I’m escaping the wildfire smoke when I tell them I’m going out of town. No. It was a coincidence, but I’m not complaining. Every time I leave, I face the same mixed feelings. What will I miss rams against what will be a relief to get away from for a few days. Often those two things overlap. I teeth over my coincidences, blindly believing these constitute something like meaning, believing whatever punishment I receive is some long overdue act of justice finally carried out.

I found myself saying about someone recently, he just does whatever he wants. And then I found myself wondering why I couldn’t do exactly the same.

Ivan, Selin’s agonizing crush, emails her that he doesn’t understand her at all. He asks, Why can’t you do anything like a normal person? How could you be so graceful in writing and clumsy in life?

This struck me with something I might want someone to say about me. But I also understand this remark was not meant to be flattering. Over the past few months, I have had several people tell me they can understand me completely. The way I react, my motivations. How I think. They can anticipate what I’ll do before I do it. Unsettling. I wondered if it’s because I post so many of my unformed thoughts in this newsletter. Or am I generally that open and predictable? Ben once asked me, why is everyone confusing? Well, you’re not. Most of the time.

I guess I was disappointed. Everyone wants to be some great mystery. Maybe I was even a little embarrassed. I should shut up more often. At least virtually. The truth is I’ve never been great at playing aloof. Especially not when I want to be friends with someone. Once, after asking someone for their phone number outright, I was told that I had a beautiful, rare soul. I laughed. Why? Apparently, because I wasn’t afraid to put myself out there. Most people would play it cooler. I’ve never had much patience for mystery.

As I sit in the airport, trying to read while the PA announcements bleed over the music in my headphones, I send Charlotte a picture of a passage in the book. The boarding process begins as the message status bar slowly progresses.

“Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you’ll never get—you will get it someday.” I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. “Yes, you will get it,” she said, looking right at me, “but by that time, you won’t want it anymore. That’s how it happens.”

It’s hard for Selin to imagine ever not wanting what she currently wants. It’s hard for me too. I squirm in my small plane seat, restless with everything I don’t have. I know there will come a day when I don’t want these things, and I know too the bittersweet conclusion will be likely just then that I get them. I begin to lose sight of them looking down over the shrinking city as the plane ascends. I’ve already lost them. I’ll submit myself to this: either you get everything you want or nothing at all.

In the car on the way to the airport, I tell my mother that I need to stop questioning why people do things I don’t always like. That’s not the point. They aren’t right or wrong for doing them, and whether they do those things or not is out of my control. No action is unambiguously correct. So in that way, an ethical life is impossible. As much as I would like to, I can’t surrender my life to God because I simply want too much. All I can do is understand the feeling which comes from such events. The more I repeat this, the more I might come to believe that the aesthetic life is actually possible.

II. The aesthetic

I cut off three inches of my hair. Take about fifty selfies on the train. I opt for walking most days. (I ask someone new I meet if there’s a woman version of a flaneur. He gives me a disappointed look. Flaneur, he informs me.) Slick with sweat, I show up everywhere. The smell of honeysuckle slows me down while walking to East Williamsburg. I pick a branch as a peace offering and give it to a friend before we share a lazy hour on a rooftop drinking dark red rosé. On a weeknight, I dance until two to Phoenix looped in with Adam Curtis voiceover and Cardi B. I’m back, I’m back, I’m back, I tell Mitchell. I have a new feeling. It’s summer. I suddenly know what to do with myself.

The bottom line to everything: a matter of taste. The jealousy Selin experiences when her friends begin to couple up mirrors my own, her nausea at recognizing herself as the seduced in The Seducer’s Diary my own nausea in recognizing myself in Selin’s cluelessness. Her identification that a friend having a partner constituted having style and taste. Living the aesthetic life.

One morning I wake up to an article in my inbox about wanting a boyfriend. It’s too visceral to read when prematurely awake, thanks to my upstairs neighbor throwing a tantrum as retaliation for my complaints about him smoking indoors. I toss my phone off the bed. Selin has leaped from the pages once again.

Once I brattily declared I didn’t have a type to be a contrarian when several men discussed their types. The thing is I do. Or, at least my history of crushes is a yearbook of dark-haired, lanky men who seem to forget I exist for periods at a time. My friend and I texted a few weeks back about his own type has come back to haunt him. This was before I read the section of Either / Or in which Selin is accused of fetishizing Eastern Europeans. Fair assumption, he admitted. I told him his type seemed to be neurotics. He didn’t argue with this. To make him feel better, I responded: can’t wait to ruin another brunette man’s life when he realizes I only liked him because he fit my aesthetic.

Love has a permeable border with repulsion. Selin discovers the great secret we all harbor in our guts. Hate and love the strange bedfellows no one can kick out. When I’ve had feelings for someone, I find myself repeating something along the lines of: I can’t tell if I’m in love with them or if I think they’re the worst person in the world. Both can be true.

It is an aesthetic choice to devote your life to romance despite its ability to ravage. As opposed to marriage, which I still find romantic, but almost romantic because it’s about the most practical application of love. I cry at every wedding. I’m moved by commitment. Maybe it’s my Virgo rising. My fussy heart yearns for the practical. And yet I can’t fight my fantasies either. Why do I get scared and run off at the first glimpse of normalcy? Selin again: To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.

I meet up with Kate in Chapel Hill. We overlapped by one year in undergrad. Our friendship is a coincidence of sorts. She was likely wiser than I was at her age. She definitely is now. We grab a few drinks before deciding to take a midnight walk through campus with our dates. Within a few minutes, I’ve removed my wedding heels to keep up. The night is not too humid, a rarity in usually blazing Southern summers. Watch out, I warn the two men, you might see the ghosts of Kate and Evana scattered around campus.

I’m carrying one ghost trapped between three hundred pages in my tote bag. One throws up into her hands on Halloween dressed as Margot Tennebaum. Another hurries past me across the quad, wild-eyed with a dorm-room haircut, barefoot in the dark. There’s a Phoebe Bridgers lyric I rolled my eyes at the first time I heard it. I used to fetishize myself. As I tell Mitchell about a magnolia tree on campus under which I was kissed, I revoke the right to use the past tense.

The Idiot ends with Selin claiming she hasn’t learned anything. I graduated college five years ago. I sat on a football field as ushers rushed around providing water bottles. It was the hottest day of the year. My parents skipped the big ceremony because they attended a dozen little ones before that. I was hungover, sweating through my cap and gown. I couldn’t focus on what the speaker promised my future held. All I could think was how little I had to show for four years. My thesis was terrible. My friends were about to move to different parts of the country. My stomach roiled. Someone passed out a few rows behind us. What was I taking with me? Thousands of pages of books I’d read, but I couldn’t recall a single one.

Selin is disappointed to discover Kierkegaard’s presentation of the aesthetic life mostly has to do with men sleeping with then abandoning young women like herself. Maybe it was OK to just “ruin” men more broadly, Selin says. She means financially. As a means to travel and write books, and live the aesthetic life. I can’t say the thought hasn’t crossed my own mind.

Instead, she’s motivated to carry out a different fate than the women who are casualties of the men who lead aesthetic lives. Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself. So she goes out in the world to figure out how.

The question comes up all too frequently. No one’s asking my new party question. I’m asking for the question to be asked because I’m the one who brings it up. The question, of course, is: What will your novel be about? Don’t ask me. I’m the last person to know. I continue to talk about my novel though it’s not even close to having a birthday. It’s not even in the womb. Like Selin, I’m preoccupied by the idea that I must live novelistically. Every experience could constitute to a greater arc. Or it could be where the story really begins. Either way. And preoccupied by something else, something perhaps more troubling—there’s only one character I know how to write.